More Top Tech Stories of 2019

But don't blame me. I didn't make the news. Also, I should point out that, of course I'm just giving kind of a high level overview of stuff that happened in twenty nineteen, because to cover everything that happened in tech would be beyond even my impressive capabilities. And I should also add that I've got some updates to stuff what happened in the last episode, because, as it turns out, when I recorded part one and when I'm recording part two,

time past and stuff continue to develop. That's how news works, and I resent it. But one story I do need to follow up on broke between that time and that was that Dennis Muhlenberg, the CEO of Boeing, resigned from Boeing as the company was dealing with the consequences of the seven thirty seven max fleet being grounded, among other problems at the company. Generally speaking, analyst said that his stepping down was sort of a necessary part of Boweing

regaining confidence among customers and shareholders. Not that all blame should be put on the CEOs shoulders, but that this was one of those steps a company has to take in order to convince people, hey, we are really taking this seriously and we need to make some changes. Now. The next two stories that I want to talk about are related, and they are both extremely dark and upsetting, but I also feel they are important to acknowledge and consider. And for some of you you might feel as though

I'm going to get really preachy about this. I am not going to apologize for that in this case. Now, the first dark story is about March fifteen, two thousand nineteen. That was when a gunman carried out attacks on two different mosques in christ Church, New Zealand, killing fifty one people and injuring another forty nine. Now, the reason the story gets included in tech news is that the gunman streamed the attack on the first mosque over on Facebook Live.

Other people grabbed the video feed, and then they began to post it elsewhere, which ensured that even as platforms were removing it, others were hosting it. The New Zealand government classified the video as objectionable, which is a legal classification in New Zealand. It meant that distributing, copying, or exhibiting the video would be against the law, but the

video was already out on the internet. Now most platforms have created digital fingerprints of the video in order to detect future uploads, thus blocking it automatically and then removing

them very quickly. The gunman, identified as Britain Tarrant, had been active in far right organizations and white supremacy groups online and off, and there's been a rise in activity in online communities of such radical groups, raising warnings of extremists using the Internet to recruit others and reinforce some truly awful beliefs. And this brings me to story number two, which is that these groups have made use of some notable online communities to encourage one another and create a

space for extremism. One of those online communities, and perhaps the most infamous, is eight kun formerly known as eight chan. The history of eight chan dates back to when Frederick Brennan created it, as an alternative to an earlier online message board community called four chan. Now, Brennan felt four chan was becoming too restrictive, which is a sentence that's hard to even believe if you're at all familiar with

four chan. The only rule on a chan was that you weren't supposed to post or link to any content that would be illegal in the United States. Brennan ended his association with the site in two thousand eighteen. In two thousand nineteen, in the wake of shootings in christ Church, New Zealand, also in Poway, California, and El Paso, Texas, and also links back to eight chan showing how the perpetrators of those three different shootings had used eight chan

to publish their own manifestos. Brennan, the founder of the site, was one of the voices calling for the site to get shut down. That actually did happen in August two thousand nineteen, but the site since returned as a con as of November two thousand nineteen. And there is a pretty complicated situation going on here. On the one hand, the founders of the Internet and of the Worldwide Web envisioned a platform that would support freedom of speech and

the exchange of ideas. On the other hand, many people, particularly those from already vulnerable communities, are put in danger as extremism is on the rise. The safe haven for those who espouse these extremist, radical, racist, and misogynist and violent beliefs as contributing to an increasingly toxic subculture. In addition,

several tech companies have enabled this subculture. It hasn't necessarily been a conscious decision, but the principles of running a business in which your goal is to return value to shareholders isn't always in alignment with doing what's actually best for the general population. In fact, those two things can often come into conflict with one another. In some cases, like eight Kun, this is far more apparent, but it's also the case with stuff like more public platforms such

as Twitter and Facebook. Those companies struggle with how to deal with a particularly thorny subject to varying degrees of success, most of which satisfy very few people. I wish I had a solution to this very large problem, but I believe such a solution has to go much deeper than taking a website offline or removing an option for people to voice these hateful philosophies. That's part of it, but it doesn't address the deeper underlying problems that feed into

that toxicity to begin with. So all I can really do is appeal to you guys to exercise compassion and critical thinking. Those two things are absolutely necessary in my view. All Right, the darkest of the dark stuff in this episode is over, so let's move on. One thing that happened in twenty nineteen might set us on a path

for widespread use of drones to deliver packages. In the spring of twenty nineteen, the Federal Aviation Administration or f A a certified Wing that's the drone delivery startup company that's owned by the Google parent company alphabet UH. They certified them to operate as an air carrier. This regulatory step allows Wing to make commercial deliveries in the United States. The company had already been conducting tests in Australia in

anticipation of receiving government approval in the United States. And there's still many questions that need to be answered, and we're likely to see very limited roll out of drone delivery services in specific regions as companies and local governments kind of hash out the best way to move forward now. Personally, I'm curious to see if drone delivery will prove to be a more efficient means of delivering packages on a

large enough scale to make sense. I mean, I can see how it could be incredibly useful in scenarios where getting to a location is challenging and the need to deliver something important like medication is really urgent, but I'm not entirely convinced yet that it would make sense from

a more general use standpoint. However, I also haven't run the figures, nor do I know how much it costs to operate delivery services as they stand right now, So it's entirely possible that this is a viable alternative to

more traditional delivery services. I just don't know enough to comment on it firmly, But it's hard for me to believe that, on the face of it, that it would be more cost effective and efficient unless you just had truly enormous fleets, in which case then you have the technological and administrative difficulties that come with managing that large

of a fleet. So I just don't know. Sticking with government approval, because there are a lot of stories that fall into that category this year, the Federal Communications Commission in the United States, or the FCC, approved the merger of telecommunications companies T Mobile and Sprint. Now. According to analysts, the chief purpose of this merger is to enhance T mobiles five G technology rollout to give it a stronger position in the United States as a As you know,

five G networks are starting to come online. Just a few years ago, according to reports from a consulting firm called McKenzie, T Mobile was eyeing a merger was Sprint, but for a different reason. It was in an effort to become more competitive against A T and T and Verizon, which are the other two major cellular phone carriers in the United States. While the FCC has given its approval, that's just one regulatory hurdle that telecommunications companies have to

overcome before they can merge. Regulatory agencies at both the state and federal levels are still considering this plan, and they may place restrictions or limitations on any merger, or they might deny it outright. T Mobile has reportedly been renegotiating the deal in the meantime, and the old reports from two thousand and fifteen, the ones that stated tea Mobile was first looking at Sprint for a possible merger, said that t Mobile also entertain the notion of allowing Comcast,

the mega cable corporation, to acquire Team Bowl. There may well be some serious offers for acquisitions like that in the near future of either te Mobile or Sprint, or emerged version of the two from such a cable company, whether it's Comcast or a different one. Speaking of corporate maneuvers, one drama that finally finished playing out in nineteen really kind of fizzled out and sputtered a bit was the tale of Amazon's HQ two in New York City. So

let's backtrack a bit. The company initially announced it was looking into expanding its corporate headquarters, which are based out of Seattle, Washington, into a different city. In two thousand eighteen. They famously held a Request for Proposals in asking for cities that were eager to host this new headquarters to

present their their proposals their deals. That in turn prompted a series of stories about incredibly generous tax breaks and other incentives, as well as some fairly absurd publicity stunts that stretched throughout most of until in November of that year, Amazon announced it had settled on two locations that would share the duty of being HQ two. One is in Arlington, Virginia,

and the other was in New York City, New York. Now, there was some pretty hefty criticism early on from various sources that alleged Amazon had chosen these two locations from the beginning, that had these in mind when they even

asked for the proposals in the first place. One of the pieces of supposed evidence that they used to support this claim is that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos apparently had homes near those two proposed locations, and that the whole selection process was therefore nothing more than an effort to create a competitive environment so that both New York and Arlington would continuously improve their deals so Amazon we get the sweetest tax break, but that presumably the plan all

along was to move into those two locations. Whether that's true or not, we get to two thousand nineteen, and early in twenty nineteen, New York City residents voiced some rather critical opinions about their new proposed neighbor. Journalists reported that the proposed HQ two site in New York City would take up land that had previously been intended for the use of six thousand homes, including a significant number

of low income homes. Alexandria Accacio Cortez, a US representative from New York, voiced concern that the incentives offered to Amazon would hurt the city both in the near and the long term, that it would undermine efforts to fund government improvements to critical infrastructure in the city because of

these enormous tax breaks. You know, if Amazon is not paying taxes, that revenue is not coming from them, the financial burden falls on everyone else in New York and frequently that means that programs have to get reduced or cut so that you can, you know, make your money stretch out further. In February two thou nineteen, Amazon announced it was canceling its plan to build out its location

in New York City. Amazon does lease out some office space, a significant amount of office space in New York, but it no longer plans to have a second corporate headquarters there. And since we're talking about Amazon, let's move on to one of the properties that Amazon owns, and that would be the Ring Company. That's the company that produces surveillance cameras and and surveillance doorbells, you know doorbells that have

the cameras and communication systems. Well, in twenty nineteen, there were a few stories of hackers who had gained access to users Ring equipment, whether it was the surveillance cameras or the Ring doorbells. Some hackers did this in an effort to expose vulnerability, so they were doing it to say, hey, we need to fix this because it's a problem. But others did it specifically to her asks or exploit people, and those stories were alarming and continue to be alarming.

Some of them involve kids, and it's incredibly disturbing, and they've led to at least one class action lawsuit against Amazon. The allegation is that Ring isn't doing enough to ensure customers privacy and security are maintained, which is particularly a problem for a company that markets equipment that's meant to enhance security, not exploit vulnerabilities. Now I haven't seen all the details about how the Ring systems were actually hacked.

There are different ways to gain access to connected systems on a network. Sometimes you can find a vulnerability in an endpoint, such as an actual device connected to the network. So in those cases you would say, all right, the hacker managed to hack into the network via this RING device. That very well maybe the case maybe they were able to brute force a password through that and the got

access that way. But other times hackers might find a way to compromise the network itself and then they can access the various components connected to that network as if they were, in fact the legitimate administrator of the network. In the case of Ring, it sounds to me as though they found it through password vulnerabilities. The lawsuit states that Ring should have required users to create more robust passwords and to require two factor authentication to prevent abuse.

And just in case you're not familiar with the concept, two factor authentication is a subset of what is called multi factor authentication, which just means that you're using two or more factors, which really just means two to three factors to authenticate your identity. And those factors are categories of stuff, right. Those categories are what you know. This would be something like a password or a pin, so it would be something that you have knowledge of and

you provide when you're accessing a system. The second factor is what you have, like what you physically have on you that could be a mobile device, So it could be that you provide your password or pen and then it sends a code to your mobile device, which you also have to enter, or you might have a token that you have to use in some way to access the system. And then the third factor is what you are,

and this would refer to things like biometric data. Maybe it's a retinal scan or fingerprint scan or voice scan. Multi factor authentication requires you present at least two of those three factors, possibly one of all three. It all depends on the implementation. So you might enter a password, then you receive your code, you enter the code, and

then you get access. But that proves you both know the password and you also have possession of an authorized mobile device, which limits the possibility that an unauthorized person is going to gain access to that system. Now, this touches on an issue that I think is really important and is growing more important as the Internet of Things gets bigger. And I'm sure you've heard the saying that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

In network security, there are many potential weak links. You could have a badly designed piece of hardware or software that has vulnerabilities in it, and that offers an in road for an intrusion into a network. You can also have users who practice really poor security habits, like they choose common passwords like a common dictionary word as a password. That's a terrible, terrible habit and no one should do it. Or they're using the same password for multiple services, also

a terrible idea. But this raises a question who should be accountable for data security? After all, users should be employing strong, unique passwords as a matter of habit. And if you heard about someone's house being robbed because they forgot to lock the door, I don't think your first instinct would be to sue the lock company for letting it happen. I think end users are at least partly accountable for good data security. However, that being said, I

also think that companies have a responsibility. They need to create rules that require strong passwords and multi factor authentication by default. They need to essentially force users to be more careful. They enable users to practice good security, and by enable users, I really mean limit the options that users have that that result in poor security. I think it's the user's responsibility to be more secure and the

company's responsibility to enable it. But that's just me. Now, when we come back, we'll look at some more stories from twenty nineteen. Here's a story that started making the news just before twenty nineteen wrapped up. I mean I learned about it shortly before coming into the studio. So Devin Wilson, or at Atomic Thumbs on Twitter, criticize the company so Nos for what he saw as a particularly egregious example of trying to control the aftermarket on electronics now.

Sons is primarily known for making speaker systems, particularly smart speakers, and like a lot of tech companies, it depends heavily on creating incentives for established Sons customers to upgrade and update their equipment. You know, if everyone just went out and bought the latest Sons speaker and they thought, oh, this works great and had no reason to upgrade, the company would have a very rough year. So they have to create incentives for people to keep buying their stuff.

In that way. Sonas is strategy is really similar to that of things like smartphone handset manufacturers. It's the Apple iPhone model. In other words, each subsequent generation of devices incorporates features that older devices cannot support, whether that lack of support comes from technical limitations of the hardware or managerial decisions. Is a moot point as a pose, I mean it could come down to executives say, just don't let this run on older stuff, not that the older

stuff is inherently incapable of running. It doesn't matter. The end result is the same. So NOS has a trade up program that gives existing so nos users a thirty credit toward a new so nos device if those users activate what is called recycle mode on their older so nos device. Now, recycle mode starts a countdown clock. It's a twenty one day countdown, and at the end of that SONS puts the device on a blacklist so that it is bricked, meaning you can't use it at all.

It will not work, it is ineffective, and it also means that you can't give it away or sell it, or at least you can't do so ethically because you'd just be handing over what amounts to being a giant paperweight with a lot of circuit boards and wires in it.

So really the only options are to try and hack the speakers, which isn't really an option most people would feel comfortable trying to tackle and would probably have limited use anyway, or you could send the speaker to an e waste recycling facility, or you just throw the darn thing away. That's not a great option. It adds e waste. E waste is bad stuff, and recycling, while better than throwing stuff out, isn't as environmentally friendly as reusing stuff.

If you've ever heard reduce, reuse, recycle, well it's in that order of preference. You want to reduce the amount of waste you generate. You want to reuse stuff as much as you can. The stuff you can't reuse, you recycle. The stuff you can't reuse or recycle, then you can throw away. But even that is, you know, not great. So Wilson's point was that so NOSES program actually incentivizes

creating e waste. It encourages people to break their old device in order to get this thirty percent credit towards their next purchase, and it makes those old devices useless to anyone. And sure, they these people might go and recycle their old Sons speakers, but it's not as good an option as to keep the equipment in working order so that someone else can actually make use of it, rather than for it to just go to waste. Critics have said, this really isn't about reducing waste, it's about

so Nos limiting the viability of a secondary market. Because Sonas doesn't make money off of someone selling off an old pair of speakers or anything like that. The company has a financial incentive to discourage aftermarket resales and to create pathways for people to buy directly from Sons or

or from retailers who are carrying so Nos speakers. So the criticism states that this is a devious way for Sons to play the environmentally conscious card, you know, to make it look like they're being eco friendly, while actually they're taking aim at a market that can undercut their own and revenues, that being the resale market. You know, we've seen this with other properties as well, other types

of gadgets and electronics as well as video games. This idea of getting rid of that resale market in order to create the incentive for people to go out and buy new copies as opposed to used copies or used devices in this case. All right, well, how about we do some Apple news. A big piece of news regarding Apple broke in late June two thousand nineteen, when Jonathan I've, better known as Sir Johnny I've announced he was leaving the company. He had been with Apple for nearly three decades,

working primarily in design. He joined the company back in nineteen nine six when it wasn't a bit of a pickle. That was a year before the ousted Steve Jobs would return to the company. He was one of the influential designers who defined Apple's iPhone approach, setting the stage for

the company's meteoric rise in success. He announced he would be heading up a new design company called Love From and that he would still work with Apple on projects, just from an independent business owner standpoint as opposed to an Apple executive. I've played an intrinsic role in designing some of Apple's defining products over the last twenty years, so it will be interesting to see how the company

moves forward. I've and Jobs together were often cited as the visionaries who kind of set Apple on its course, and people have been asking what Apple's up to ever since Jobs passed away. So with Ive's departure, I'm wondering how that's going to affect the company as well. Apple wasn't just dealing with the departure of one of its more famous employees. However, the company also had some other

snags in twenty nineteen due to product issues. At the beginning of the year, Benjamin Mayo of the Apple news and rumors site nine to five Mac broke a big story about a vulnerability in the company's FaceTime app. So, for those who aren't familiar, FaceTime is a video chat app. It's so you can video calls on iOS devices. Uh though I should add that at least one Apple user had tried to warn the company more than a week

before the story broke. They had found this independently, so it was a known issue, arguably not just to the Apple community but to Apple itself before the story broke

in nine to five Mac. Anyway, Mayo found that if you used FaceTime to make a call between any devices running iOS version twelve point one or later, and then you added your own number into the call, as if you were conferencing in yourself the person making the call, you would be able to hear the audio from the receiver's phone before the receiver had chosen to accept the

call in the first place. So all you would have to do is put in someone's number, have it start to dial a FaceTime call conference in yourself, and you could listen in on the other phones microphone. You could even use some options to act debate the camera on the phone. And it wasn't just phones, it was also you know, other mobile devices, but also max because the mac os supported FaceTime as well, so if you did this, you could presumably use someone's Mac computer to spy on

their home. Uh And because this would only work as long as the other device was ringing, and FaceTime times out after a certain amount of ringing, that ringing actually

lasts a lot longer on mac Os. A call can end up going much longer in the in the calling phase for mac Os because the thought is not everyone is at their computer all the time, so you might be across the house when the call comes in, you might not hear it at first, so they have a longer calling session that will last until there's an automatic cut off, which means you could presumably spy longer until someone noticed that there was a FaceTime call coming in.

So this was a huge law on the software and the vulnerability would be patched. But initially Apple's response was just to suspend the group FaceTime feature so that you couldn't conference anyone in at all. You could only do person to person calls, you couldn't do conference calls. And then in February twenty nineteen, the company pushed out the patch that sealed up those vulnerabilities and re enabled group

FaceTime features. Another problem Apple faced was the release of iOS version thirteen and the release of Mac OS ten point one five a k A. Catalina. Critics found problems with both, identifying numerous bugs that prompted some tech reporters to advise people, especially for people looking at buying a new iPhone, to wait for patches before updating to the

latest OS version or buying a new phone. Even Apple announced iOS thirteen point one a patch to thirteen point oh before thirteen point oh had even shut, which indicated that the initial rule east wasn't really ready for implementation. So why was iOS thirteen so buggy? Or maybe I should say why is it because not all those bugs

have been fixed? Well? Some people have suggested that Apple was being overly aggressive when adding in new features to the operating system, and that feature creep might have been

an issue. David Shaer, and Apple software engineer theorized that perhaps teams working on certain features, were reluctant to admit when they were falling behind on deadlines, and that rather than cutting back on features, rather than saying let's not do this because it's taking too much time and we need to ship, things were kept in the mix far longer than they needed to be, and Share also listed several other possible contributing factors. It's all in the post

on tidbits dot Com. I recommend checking that out if you want to learn more. The piece is titled six reasons why iOS thirteen and Catalina are so Buggy, and he goes into much greater detail there now. In late December, Apple pushed out an update for its mobile operating system, and this one's called iOS thirteen point three, which might make you think it's the third update to iOS to this version, but it's not the third update. It's actually

the eighth update since iOS thirteen was first announced. Many of the updates were in the iOS thirteen point one and iOS thirteen point two designations. Oh and by the time you hear this, iOS thirteen point three point one might be available. It's currently in beta. As a record

this episode. Gordon Kelly of Forbes suggests that if you have a device running an earlier version of iOS thirteen, you should absolutely update to thirteen point three, but if you're still running iOS twelve, you might actually still want to wait a little bit longer before you upgrade. He does say that things are starting to look promising, that the initial months following the release of iOS thirteen were pretty bad. He would give a categorical skip this update

until it's fixed recommendation. That recommendation is slowly starting to soften as these numerous patches are addressing some of the more serious bugs and vulnerabilities that people have found in iOS thirteen. But this has not been an illustrious launch for Apple. Bugs and operating system updates are really nothing new. I mean, it happens all the time. No one's perfect, and operating systems are large and complicated pieces of software.

But it does create a bit of an image problem, particularly if you're a company like Apple that has built itself on a reputation that its devices just work, and it also complicates a discussion that relates back to data security. Generally speaking, it's a good idea to keep as up to date with operating system and security patches as you possibly can. So if there's an update, generally speaking, it's

good to install right away. Now, eventually you might find that your particular device can't support whatever the latest and greatest version of the operating system is. That does happen where the hardware itself cannot physically support the software, but keeping up to date reduces the opportunities that hackers can take to exploit vulnerabilities. However, when the operating system itself is a buggy mess and the updates aren't much better, it's not as clear cut a case that updating is

your best option. It may be that, yeah, you can update, and that will technically patch some things, but could open up either brand new vulnerabilities or might just make stuff not work anymore. That's not great either. All right, let's pop on over to Microsoft, Apple's old rival and sometimes savior. If you've listened to old episodes of tech Stuff, you know what I'm referring to. Now. I don't have a

whole lot to say about Microsoft in twenty nineteen. The company has moved much of its operations into cloud based services, but it did launch a product in late twenty nineteen has folks like me a little excited. It's the hollow lens too. Now, the hollow lens is an augmented reality platform, and augmented reality involves overlaying digital information on top of the real world around us in some way. Now, you

typically can achieve this through one of several approaches. You could have special glasses that act as a projection screen to display information in front of you as you look around, so that you have digital information that you're looking at, but you can also look through that and see the real world beyond it. You could even have headphones that feeds you information by audio that enhance your experience of moving through a physical environment. That's the type of augmented reality.

It's maybe not as flashy as the first type, but it's still very legitimate. You could have an app on a smartphone that can recognize certain images and display data on top of a video view of the world. So in this case, you're looking at the world through your smartphone screen, which then can overlay digital information on top of that video view. But it's as if you're looking at the real world around you if you just kind

of ignore the fact that you're really looking at a monitor. Alright, So the hullo lens and its sequel hollow Lens to the augment in ing or if you prefer hollow lens to electric boogaloo. It's a head mounted display and the first generation of the hollow lens received a very limited release because it wasn't intended as a consumer electronics product. It wasn't meant to go to the average person. It was more of a first step into a new market

for Microsoft. The company launched the Hollow Lens two in November two thou nineteen with a price tag of three thousand, five hundred dollars. So it's still far from being priced as a basic component of home computing. Right. No one, h not, not your average person is going to go out and adopt the hollow lens too. At I will not be buying a hollow lens too. I just can't justify that expense for something you know that would interesting

but have limited utility in my life. However, you could say that this is slowly moving this technology into the consumer space. Now, the new version of the hollow lens has an improved field of view, so users will have a less restricted view of the world around them. To me, the headset looks kind of like imagine you've got a pair of safety goggles. And then above the safety goggles that you look through, so those are clear, you're looking

at the world around you. Above that, you've got a device that has a camera system mounted inside of it, and that part is actually attached to like a headband, so you're wearing that on your forehead. And then below that is where the safety goggles are. That's kind of what it looks like. I'm doing a poor job describing it, but it's hard to do in an audio format. But the cameras that face out from this device capture the

scene around you, right. It takes in that information and interprets it through the computational system inside the device, which the determines what data to display on your your lenses when you're looking at something in particular. So as an example, let's say you're looking at an electrical panel, then the data that pops up might tell you what each element on that electrical panel relates back to, So it's kind of like a labeling system in that case. That's just

one use case for this kind of technology. The company also tweaked the gesture control interface that the hollow lens uses. UH. This was to improve on responsiveness and to cut down on false positives. So gestures obviously would be an important way to control this kind of technology. You might use voice control as well. Google Glass did that, but it seems weird because that sounds like you're talking to yourself. I can see that from personal experience, because I got

to play with Google Glass for a while. But the gesture controls, they did something that I thought was pretty clever. So for example, they built in a system where you would hold out your hand and you would look down at your hand and you and by moving your head a little bit, you could position an icon so that it appears to be projected onto the palm of your hand. Then you could touch that icon with the fingers of your other hand to activate it and launch whatever the

app is. And that's kind of neat. It adds a sort of tactle response to the gesture control that otherwise was lacking. Now I haven't been able to try a hollow lens of either generation yet, but I hope I can at some point. I love the potential of augmented reality, and I think really clever implementations have enormous possibilities in the future. But I think it was probably gonna be several more years before we see this as a common

technology for the everyday person. However, for certain industries I suspect it will play a much larger role moving forward. We've already seen it being used in the medical field, and engineering will probably see it move beyond that slowly, and then gradually we'll see it possibly enter into the

mainstream market if there's a compelling enough use case. If it's more of a curiosity, I would argue Google Glass kind of fell into that category, then it probably won't receive much traction, kind of like how virtual reality has been struggling again. All right, when we come back, we'll talk about some more stories, including touching on what a little company that rhymes with Schmoogle has been up to. Okay,

let's talk Google. So, like Facebook, Google came under intense scrutiny throughout two thousand nineteen, whether it was about user privacy or allegations that the company was covering up really terrible behavior and turning a blind eye despite employee protests, or allegations that the company's search results were purposefully promoting certain material, specifically sites that were in alignment with Google's own perceived agenda perceived by the public guy should say

at the expense of other materials. So, in other words, that Google was promoting things that fell in line with what Google wanted and suppressing anything that Google didn't like. That was the charge. The company had to weather a lot of strife in twenty nineteen, and to be clear, at least some of that strife was brought on by the company itself. One big change for the company actually requires us to take a step back and look up a level higher than Google itself. At Google's parent company,

which I mentioned earlier, is Alphabet Now. In early December nineteen, Larry Page, a co founder of Google, announced that he was stepping down as the CEO of Alphabet. Sunday, the CEO of Google itself, would become the new CEO of Alphabet, while simultaneously remaining CEO of Google. Sarah A. Brenn, another co founder, had stepped down as Alphabet's president, but both Page and Brand said they were going to remain on

the board of directors for or the company. Paige and Brand said that their decisions reflected a need for Google's management structure to streamline, but it also came into time when the company was dealing with big problems from within and without. There was the scrutiny that I mentioned earlier, in which government agencies and advocacy groups were criticizing Google's policies and talking about its power in the marketplace, and there were also allegations that the company had engaged in

some retaliation against a few employees. Now to understand that last bit, we have to look back a little further than the beginning of twenty nineteen. So in twenty eighteen, internal issues within Google became big news as thousands of employees protested issues ranging from sexual harassment problems in the workplace to quote, unethical business decisions that create a workplace

that is harmful to us and our colleagues end quote. Now, that last quote actually comes from four former Google employees who posted a piece on Medium after they were fired.

This was around Thanksgiving twenty nineteen. The four employees had been leading efforts to unionize at Google to organize employees, and it was a move that did not look good on Google's part, and it certainly appears at a casual glance at least, that Google executives were trying to squash employees from being able to organize in a union or

other organizational structure. The company's official response to inquiries about the firing was that the employees had allegedly violated Google's security policies, an allegation that the four former employees deny. The story is still playing out as I record this episode, and it does tap into another upsetting trend in business

in general and the text fear in particular. It has become pretty common practice for a lot of companies to require employees to sign an agreement that limits the rights an employee has when they want to address problems in the workplace. Companies enact these policies so that they can limit their own liability and limit the impact those types

of problems can have on business. The agreements typically force employees to try and work through issues through internal systems at the company, like going through human resources, and it really places restrictions on other options, such as pursuing a legal case against the company, like you could get severely

punished for going outside the company and seeking outside help. Now, assuming the HR department is on the side of the employees, you could maybe argue that this policy isn't too restrictive. It might be you might not feel great about it. But if you think, oh, well, HR is gonna be on the employees side, maybe you're going to say, well,

I'm willing to endure it. But at least in some cases, particularly with Google, it's appeared that the HR department was really more on the side of the corporation on the employees. That they had a tendency to shut down complaints or to try to mitigate the fallout of complaints by kind of shifting people around without removing or punishing anyone who was the focal point of an allegation, and so they weren't really addressing the underlying issues, which left the affected

employees with very few options. And it's pretty ugly stuff. So that's one of the things that I think a lot of employees around the world really, but particularly in the tech space, have started to kind of act out against. And we're not done with Google yet. The company launched its gaming service, Google Stadia in two thousand nineteen. That service allows users to access games via streaming, so you're actually running the game on one of Google's servers and

you're playing it via your local connection. According to Google, you can stream games up to four K resolution and sixty frames per second, assuming that your Internet connection and your hardware can support that. The service launched with some stupality problems and with a pretty limited library of games, and so far it hasn't really taken off, despite the fact that it removes the need for buying a high end gaming rig or even a gaming console to access

current generation games. Now. To be fair, Google is not the only company that has tried this model with only limited success. There are lots of companies that have tried a similar approach and also have had some issues getting anywhere with it. Meanwhile, over at YouTube, which again is part of Google, it's part of that alphabet company, other problems were plaguing Googlers. So in September of twenty nineteen, YouTube changed its policy for verified creators. Verified creators are

an interesting thing. So these are creators who had earned a verified check mark and that indicated that essentially up until recently, that they had attracted at least one hundred thousand subscribers. I happen to be one of these verified uh creators, but more on that in the minute, because it's an interesting case. So in the past, YouTube had issued verified check marks two accounts that had reached that

one hundred thousand subscriber mark or more. That's all you really had to do in order to get the verified check Now they decided to change that so that not only would you need the one hundred thousand subscribers, you also need to have your account be active, meaning you have to be uploading content on a semi regular basis, and it doesn't need to be you know, had had been quiet without an upload for ages. Also, the accounts

needed to be authentic. In other words, the account need to be linked back to a real creator, brand, or entity that YouTube could verify was in charge of creating that content. This meant that a lot of the people who had the little check mark didn't necessarily meet those requirements. So then YouTube revoked the verified badge for thousands of creators, and that created an uproar. I happened to be one of the creators who lost my badge I lost. I

got an email it said you're verified badges going away. Now. In my case, I wasn't fussed about it. I'll explain that again in just a minute. So YouTube's motivation was to clarify what a verification check mark actually meant, because one confusion was that people thought that a check mark meant that YouTube was endorsing the content of that creator, that somehow YouTube was saying, yes, we approve of this. This is what that check mark means. But it wasn't

meant to be that. It was meant to be an indicator that the associated account was authentic and not some sort of impersonation account. And this is a legit issue over on YouTube because a lot of creators, really popular creators, see their work get lifted and reposted under other accounts. So you might create a really awesome video and maybe it gets a little bit of notice, so somebody else captures that video, they use a program to download it, then they re upload it under their own account, and

they try to get that one to take off. It's even possible for a copy to outperform the original, and that means that the person who originally put in the work to making that thing be what it is doesn't get the benefit of it. They aren't able to monetize the appearance on the other channel. You can put down takedown strikes and stuff like that, but it means having to constantly, you know, search the internet, search YouTube for

copies of your work. So YouTube wanted to create a system that would make a more straightforward approach to verification, in the sense that if you saw the check mark, you knew this person was a legit, that the content coming from that person's channel was in fact coming from that creator. And uh so they put that change and

they revoked all those check marks. People went nuts, and so YouTube walked it back a week later, and a week later it gave everybody their verified check marks back, including me, which again in my case, I don't think it was necessary. So let me explain about my check mark. So a few years ago, I was hosting a video series called forward Thinking This is for Work, and the channel for forward Thinking was linked to my personal YouTube

channel for reasons I don't remember at this point. I think it was so that I could go in and make changes if I needed to, even though typically we would have other people handle all of that. For some reason, they trusted me and they linked the channel to my personal YouTube account. The result was I got a check mark because the Forward Thinking series had a pretty good subscriber base, like two fifty thousand subscribers, so it met

the criteria and it got the check mark. King to me, now, this is despite the fact that on my channel, I very rarely post anything. I've only got a few videos up on my personal channel, and when I do put a video up, I get only a few views. You know, it's typically like, hey, my mom watches my stuff, which is totally fine. I'm I was doing it for fun. I wasn't trying to do it as a YouTuber, right, So in my case, when my check mark went away, I thought, you know, that's totally fair. I'm an outlier

and I don't meet this requirement. I definitely don't deserve the check mark. It's okay that it's gone, But there are lots of creators out there who did deserve the check mark and they saw it go away. So for them, I'm glad that it came back, because that thing can

really help you. That check mark means that you have a little bit more clout when it comes to stuff like looking for sponsorships, maybe getting advertisers to support your channel, monetizing your work so that you can get compensated for it. That's important. Now my case, again, I was doing it for fun. I never expected it to be anything beyond that for my own personal channel, so I didn't worry

about it. Forward thinking was a different story, but that was also a project that had a company backing it, so that was a totally different case. So yeah, I'm glad that it got fixed and moving forward, YouTube is being much more picky about who gets a verification check mark, but they're not wholesale eliminating all the previously awarded check marks.

But another controversy that's also playing out on YouTube is one that's going to roll into and beyond, and it all has to do with a law from the nineteen nineties intended to protect children, and that law is a

US law. It's called Children's Online Privacy Protection Act or Kappa CEO p p A. It was again first established as law, and in twenty nineteen, the Federal Trade Commission, also known as the FTC, brought a suit again YouTube and alleged that YouTube had been illegally collecting the personal information of children without their parents consent, that kids were watching videos on YouTube, that what they were watching was being tracked by YouTube, and that this was creating a

digital fingerprint that advertisers were using to target advertising towards those children, and the children being too young to consent to this meant that this whole practice under Kappa was illegal, and specifically that the company was using this quote in the form of persistent identifiers that are used to track

users across the Internet end quote. So in other words, this would be the sort of thing where if you were watching a bunch of videos about elephants and then you happened to navigate over to say Amazon, you might see a bunch of suggestions that relate in some way

to elephants. And the concern was that this was going to be targeting kids, and there was no way for kids to give legal consent to allow that to happen, and that data has value in it, and children's privacy and security also has value to them, so that was the problem. Well, YouTube would settle this lawsuit out of court. They paid a hundred seventy million dollars in fines, which really sounds like a lot, but for YouTube, it's nothing. And if that's where it all ended, we would just

wrap up the story and beyond with it. But in addition to the fine, the company had to agree to create a system that is compliant with Kappa. So this would mean that any creator who was making child directed content, meaning content meant to be viewed by children would be affected by this. They would have to be Kappa compliant.

They would have to make sure that they were running a channel that was not gathering information about the uh the children watching it, that they were not building in targeted advertising, that they had to self identify as being a creator it was creating child directed content. You had to actually go into your little profile and click and say whether or not your channel was meant for kids or not. But this raises questions like what exactly is

child directed? And it has a lot of creators nervous right now because there are creators who do, for example, unboxing videos, and some of them are clearly meant for kids. Some of them are hosted by kids and clearly meant for kids, but there are others where it may not be for kids. It maybe for people who really are into collecting toys that are from their favorite you know, franchises, for example, so toy unboxing would likely be in the spotlight.

Creators who use video games are likewise concerned. There are people who are using video games to tell stories that are people use let's plays or play throughs, but they're not necessarily meant for kids. There's also people who are working in animation, and that animation may not be meant for kids, but the general perception is that cartoons are children and they're concerned that they will be interpreted as being child directed when they don't intend to be, and

that they will be affected by this. There's a lot of fear that this is going to have an effect on monetization, so that people might not be able to get paid for what they're making, which means they'll probably stop making it. I mean, you've got to make your living. Uh. They may move on to a different platform than YouTube, or they may just stop entirely. Every single violation of Kappa can be fined up to a maximum of forty

two dollars. Now, keep in mind some of these channels have hundreds or thousands of videos up online, so if they were identified as being child directed and that their material wasn't Kappa compliant, they could get that maximum fine for every single video that seemed to be that was

on their channel. So the cost could be staggering. So it's possible we'll see entire channels go dark with PAS videos hidden away or deleted, all out of fear that a mislite labeling situation could result in massive fines, and there's still a lot of uncertainty around this issue, and we're not entirely sure how it's all going to play out now. As for me, well, I'm in favor of rules that protect kids from having their data harvested without consent.

I mean, I don't like that idea at all about kids getting tracked and targeted and advertising that's you know, before they're able to even work with the idea of what that means. They're particularly uh, you know, vulnerable to it. It's one thing to be an adult and to understand, at least on a basic level, what is going on when we use the internet. It's another matter entirely for children. However, the application of those rules can be pretty chaotic and disruptive,

particularly to people who are well intentioned. They are not trying to create child directed content, but they're worried about their material being misrepresented or misunderstood as child directed, and therefore every thing is put in danger. That's not great either, and channels that are clearly not meant for kids could get caught up in the crosshairs through no fault of their own. So this is a situation worthy of attention. Because it stands to affect hundreds of creators on YouTube

who are not trying to make stuff for kids. Then you've got people who like their main audience are kids, and they're not making stuff for kids. Just so happens that their audience is mostly kids. That's an issue all on its own, and one that I don't have any solutions for. If you're making stuff that you know you didn't intend to appeal to children, but children think it's fantastic, where does that put you because you weren't targeting them,

but that's your audience. That's tough. Now. There are a lot of other stories I didn't get to like, for example, the Testlas Cybertruck debut and how awkward it was when they had the debut and they hit it with a sledgehammer and then they threw some stuff at the windows and the windows started cracking. That was pretty a pretty rough showing. And the cybertruck itself is is really funky. It's a very odd design, kind of reminds me of a Lamborghini Kuntash or an old DeLorean in a way.

Or I didn't talk about how the Samsung Galaxy folds mobile device, the foldable smartphone how that launch didn't go so well. You could say that the fold cracked under pressure. I didn't talk about the launch of Star Wars Galaxy's Edge at Disneyland and Disney World. That was a big deal,

not just in tech obviously, but in theme parks. Uh. There were the seemingly endless supply of movie and television streaming services that either launched in twenty nineteen or were announced in twenty nineteen, stuff like Disney Plus and the upcoming HBO streaming service, Apple Plus launched just tons of them. Now there was Baby Yoda. But I think it's a good time to wrap up this episode. Let's set our sights on twenty Yeah, you know what, Let's all get

twenty twenty vision in the year with a pun. I guess technically I'm starting the year with a pun because I think this episode goes live on January one. Anyway, that was twenty nineteen in a nutshell. I've got a lot of plans for I'm looking forward to sharing with you more wonderful stories about technology, interesting stuff about how tech works, how it affects us, how we affect it, how things change over time, and how that change can

be messy. But sometimes once you get through the messy parts, you can get something really incredible. So we're gonna look at those stories as well as well as the times where things just didn't go right. We'll be covering more of those as well. If you guys have suggestions for future topics I should cover in technology, let me know. The Facebook and Twitter handle are both tech stuff hs W. It's best to reach out to me there and I We'll talk to you again really soon. Hext Stuff is

a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.