Redditors Select John Oliver as Symbol of Revolution

article is worth a read. Now, it's not exactly surprising, because if you've been following the news, open AI's CEO Sam Altman has been proactive in engaging with politicians around the world, ostensibly to help create sensible regulations for the burgeoning AI industry. But, as it turns out, and again this is not really a surprise, Altman's work has mostly focused on how to create regulations that have a minimal

impact on open AI's business. In other words, I think Altman recognized that regulations are unavoidable, so the next best thing is to have a hand in creating those regulations so that open ai can still pursue business with as few barriers in its way as possible. Now, you might remember that the EU created different designations for AI, ranging from minimal risk or no risk at all all the way up to unacceptable risk. Anything that's deemed an unacceptable

risk would be unlawful into EU. Again, that makes sense. Unacceptable suggests that right. Anyway, the original draft of EU's regulations would possibly put generative AI products like open AI's GPT three language model and chat GPT the chat pot into the high ra category at least for specific applications, and high risk is the rank just below unacceptable, and it would have meant that open ai would have to

adhere to more strict regulations and rules. But last year open Ai sent a seven page white paper to the EU and also lobbied extensively to have the rules tweaked so that open AI's products don't count toward high risk applications. Instead, open ai and a few other large established companies would have products that would be kind of classified as foundation, you know, like these are the pillars of AI than

they are above reproach. Which that's me being a little snarky, but because we've seen multiple times now how chatbots like chat GPT can cause real problems. Anyway, the lobbying actually worked. The amended regulation language carves out space for open ai and some other companies like at. Critics say that open ai has essentially neutered the legislation and that the company is being a bit two faced, that it's calling for regulation on the one hand and secretly negotiating for a

favorable deal in the background. On a related note, tech Crunch's Ingrid London reports that a consumer group called the European Consumer Organization aka BUC. That initialism reflects the original French name of the organization, which no, I am not going to attempt to say, because I you know, I feel like I get enough abuse already. Anyway, the BUC is calling upon European Union regulators to actively investigate what risks Generative Ai actually poses to EU citizens, and y'all,

I think that sounds perfectly reasonable. I mean, as it stands, the appearance is that lawmakers are relying heavily on companies like open ai, saying that they pinky promise not to do anything harmful and that their tools have appropriate protections in place already, so there's no need for further regulation. But a thorough investigation could put those claims to the test and then either confirm that those claims are true

or prove them to be meritless. I think either way, you need to have that understanding before you actually start to create regulations. The BUC also submitted a report titled Ghost in the Machine addressing the consumer harms of generative AI, and as the name of the report spells out, the buc's position is pretty clear, generative AI does represent potential harm to citizens. Now, interestingly, the report is mostly about stuff like ensuring fair competition in the marketplace and limiting

the spread of disinformation and ensuring accessibility. So, in other words, it's not like it's an alarm report. Right, This isn't a paper that's saying AI is going to destroy us all it's going to end too in a post apocalyptic scenario. That's not what this report says. So it's not that sort of inflammatory language that we frequently find in the media and in some reports here in the United States.

So it's really more about how AI could potentially create problems for citizens and thus needs to be investigated more thoroughly before the EU passes actual regulations, Like how can you regulate something if you don't fully understand what it may or may not be able to do? And I think that's a pretty reasonable conclusion, particularly since it's not unusual to see leaders struggle with the implications of technologies

that they don't fully understand or have experience using. Apple has joined Google in sending out a message to employees saying it's a no no to use AI chatbots like chat, GPT and Google Bard for internal company purposes. So Apple employees are not to rely on those bots to help them do work, whether it might be organized notes into a presentation or maybe help a developer build out code.

So you may recall that Google also told its employees the same thing earlier, and that involved the odd situation of Google saying, hey, you know that tool that we're creating and we're trying to sell to businesses so that they can use it for business reasons. Yeah, don't use that for our business. It kind of makes me think of my aunt who covered all her furniture and plastic because it was quote unquote for company that never seemed to visit. It wasn't furniture that was meant for sitting

on anyway. I would point to big companies making these sweeping rules as proof that perhaps regulators need to approach their work carefully. Because if the big companies are shying away from the tech, including the big companies that are making the tech in the first place, that should really

be a red flag. And it's doubly awkward because open ai launched an iOS app based version of chat GPT recently, and since I've dogged on chat bots for three stories in a row, I want to say I don't think this technology is inherently bad or that it doesn't serve

a purpose. I just don't think it has proven to be trustworthy, and considering the data harvesting practices of companies, I also question whether using it for sensitive business purposes or any sensitive purpose for that matter, is a good idea. While I can agree with Apple leadership on the whole generative AI thing, I do have to call them out for continuing to try and trademark the image of an actual Apple. And you might be thinking, huh, you know

apples existed a long time before Apple the company did. Otherwise, why would you name the company Apple if there weren't apples already? And apples are grown all over the world and taking a photo of an Apple shouldn't be a big deal, So how could Apple the Company trade mark an image of Apple the fruit, and I guess the answer to that is they could repeatedly try to do this.

Mashables Cecily Maron has a piece on this that goes over Apple's quest to trademark a black and white image of a Granny Smith Apple in various countries, including in Switzerland, and Malron points out that if Apple succeeds in doing this, the company could conceivably force any other organization that happens to have an Apple and its logo to change, which, y'all, this just seems outright bizarre to me. It's also only

slightly tech related, so we're gonna move on now. Last week I talked about how thousands of communities on Reddit also known as subreddits, had gone dark in protest of how Reddit changed its API policy and how those changes are effectively forcing developers of several popular Reddit apps to

shut those apps down. So basically, Reddit has set a very high fee for apps that reference the platform a lot, and the really popular apps reference Reddit on such a scale that the fee would equal several million dollars a year, which these developers can't pay, and so the apps have gone dark. Well, that protest, which was to last two days of these various subredts going dark has now continued

for at least thousands of subreddit communities. This, in part is a response to how Reddit's leadership has chosen to respond to the protests, and by that I mean they have. The leadership has largely dismissed the protests as being nothing

more than an inconvenience. Now, a hacker criminal group known both as Alpha, but instead of a A at the end, it's a V, but it's ALPHV, also known as black Cat, is saying that Reddit leadership needs to pay a four and a half million dollar ransom fee as well as ditch the changes to its API policy, or the group is going to release internal data to the tune of eighty gigabytes of him. Now, we already know this group was successful in breaching company systems because Reddit actually confirmed

the breach back in February. What black Cat did not do, which is what most ransomware groups will do, they did not encrypt Reddit's databases. Typically, that's what ransomware groups do, right, They lock down databases by encrypting them, and they say, we'll give you the decryption key, but first you have to pay a ransom. Well, they didn't do that. In this case, all they did was they accessed a bunch of systems and apparently stole around eighty gigabytes worth of information.

Now this group is saying, hey, Reddit, pay up and change your ways, or else your data goes public. Reddit's probably not going to comply with this demand, and you could chalk this up to a hacker group taking advantage of our recent community flare up to grab some publicity for itself, rather than an earnest attempt to blackmail the company.

The protests on Reddit continue in the meantime, and they've taken a rather absurd and mean centric approach, which, considering we're talking about Internet culture, is par for the course. While more than half of the previously dark subredits have returned, the outrage on Reddit has not gone away, and in some of those returned subreddits, a particular British comedian and TV host has taken a prominent role in the protests, and initially did so without his own involvement or consent.

So I'm talking about John Oliver. Redditors on various subredits are flooding pages with photoshopped images of John Oliver, and other redditors are upvoting those images, which effectively drowns out anything that you know isn't John Oliver and would otherwise be relevant to the subreddit community. John Oliver himself approves of the move. He even posted along Twitter thread filled with selfies of himself to serve as fodder for the

photoshopped memes. Reddit leaders have allegedly contacted some of the more popular subredits that remained dark and threatened to remove the moderators of those communities and force those communities to reopen. So this protest move seems like it's the next step

to keep the subreddits from serving a useful purpose. Yes, they can reopen, but the users can flood it with just garbage in an effort to continue to protest, and presumably that would also end up discouraging advertisers from doing business with the platform, which ultimately is a pressure point that could work on Reddit management. Okay, we've got some more tech news to cover, but before we get to that,

let's take a quick break. We're back so here in the United States, the Senate has reintroduced a bill called the Platform Accountability and Transparency Act or PATA PATA. The bill was originally drafted in twenty twenty one. Initially, it was introduced in twenty twenty two, but didn't for seed

to getting a vote, and now it's back again. So the purpose of this bill is not one that I would jump on the way or jump against, I guess the way I would with a lot of bills that involve the web, because often I see proposed legislation that I think is terribly misguided. This one I don't feel that way anyway. The purpose of it is to require social media companies to be more transparent with their advertising libraries, as well as give information on things like their recommendation

algorithms and how those work. So if you've ever wondered, well, how the heck did this particular thing go viral? Like it's obviously really really popular, But why did this one go viral but this other similar piece of content that one just went unnoticed? What's the difference? That's the kind of question this bill aims to help answer by requiring platforms to divulge how certain types of content get boosts from algorithms, and thus that content gets served up to

more people and has a better chance of going viral. Now, obviously, just serving that content up to people isn't enough. You have to actually get people to engage with the material, and that's when true virality happens. But obviously, if more people are able to see a particular piece of content, especially early early on, then the more likely it is

to go viral. The bill would also require platforms to be transparent about content moderation policies and practices, And on top of that, journalists and researchers who use publicly available data from these platforms would also receive legal protections which would limit their liability as long as they followed specific

privacy and security requirements. So, in other words, as long as you're handling the data properly and you're not allowing it to just disseminate without control, then you should be protected from legal action based upon whatever your research or or journalist investigation uncovers. One element that previously had been in the bill has now gone missing. So once upon a time, there was a section in this proposed bill that would have removed section two thirty protections for platforms

if they refuse to comply with legal data requests. So, if you'll recall, Section two thirty grants platforms online platforms legal protections from being held liable for the stuff that

users post to those platforms. So here's an example. If dishonest John posts something illegal to Facebook, it's not Facebook that's legally accountable for that material, assuming that Facebook is also following the rules and making a reasonable effort to remove illegal stuff from its platform when it gets notified about it. The earlier version of this bill said that platforms could lose Section two thirty protections if they did

not comply with awful data requests. However, now that's out of the bill, so the teeth have been taken out of that, which probably is a good thing because there have been a lot of attacks on section two thirty, some of which I think aren't really you know, relevant, and this could have been used as sort of a backdoor approach to getting rid of section two thirty. I'm not going to argue that section two thirty should never

go away. Maybe it should, but it needs to be done in a way that doesn't involve finding a loophole, right. You need to find a way to address that and discuss what are the merits, where's it failing if it is failing, and how should that be addressed Rather than just say, ah, I created a shortcut, so we can work away around it anyway. The bill has bipartisan support in the Senate, but it still has to go to

a vote. If it does pass a vote, the House of Representatives would then have to discuss it and make any changes to the language of the bill they wanted and then vote on that. And if that vote passed, then it would go back to the Senate and they would look at any of the changes and they would vote again, and then eventually it would go to the

President to be signed into law. So there's still a long way to go toward making social networks more transparent and accountable, and there's no guarantee that it will actually become a law, but it's on its way. Also here in the United States, the Federal Communications Commission or FCC, would really like to know more about data caps, specifically why we have data caps. Data caps, of course, being a limit to the amount of data you can download

in a given amount of time. So a lot of providers will have a plan in place where you can access a certain amount of data, and then once you hit that limit, you might be throttled or charged more to access more information. On top of that, so the FCC is not saying that data caps are unnecessary. In fact, that's the whole point of the FCC asking questions in the first place. They're not coming at this with a

decision already in mind. The agency wants to understand data caps both from the perspective of providers as well as consumers. So are data caps necessary and if they are, what purpose do they serve? Do they have an unfair impact on consumers? There's no denying that data consumption rates have blown up over the last decade. In fact, the pandemic really did a number on data use because millions of people were forced to work remotely. So the FCC is

aiming to understand data cap practices better. Do they serve a purpose beyond just driving revenue for providers, Then the FCC can make rules to ensure that data caps don't prevent accessibility to consumers and that they don't create unf market conditions that discourage competition. So it's too early to say yay, data caps are on the way out. They may not be. There may very well be legitimate purposes for them beyond we make money this way, right, So

we'll see how this unfolds. All right now, let's go back over to the European Union. You might remember that the EU created rules that will require companies to adopt the USBC standard in devices like smartphones and tablets and you know, other things like laptops as well, and that this decision is forcing companies like Apple to make significant

changes in order to stay in the European market. Namely, Apple would have to either ditch the lightning port entirely and switch it out to USBC, or include USBC along with lightning ports on its devices, which would obviously add bulk to those gadgets. And now the EU Parliament has voted to require manufacturers to make it possible to easily

place batteries on those types of devices for consumers. So, in other words, if you went out and bought yourself a smartphone, you as a consumer should be able to open up a back little section on that phone, pull out a battery and put in a new one. This would be huge and a huge change. Being able to pop up in your iPhone swap out the battery not only can give you extended use, but obviously you can replace the battery if your original one no longer holds

a full charge. With these rules, in place. By necessity, companies would have to change the design of gadgets so that you could actually access the battery in the first place. And again, companies like Apple use a lot of proprietary fasteners that require special tools if you want to get

into an iPhone's guts. Apple has made a lot of allowances and has made a lot of concessions to regulators by making these tools more readily available to independent repair people, but still not something that the average person can easily do. And Apple typically isn't keen on just letting anyone be able to pop open an Apple device, partly to discourage hackers from making Apple products do stuff that they weren't intended to do, because Apple has always been about control

of the experience of using their products. And also it's partly or perhaps even mostly in an effort to create a closed ecosystem where Apple determines who can access a device, and this is a way of generating revenue, right because if you prevent just anyone from being able to open the device, then they have to go to specific repair shops and repair people, and those often end up being licensed by Apple, which means that Apple gets money from this,

and it becomes a way to keep generating revenue by preventing just anyone from being able to open it up and mess around. Now, this new law goes into effect in twenty twenty seven, which makes sense like it's it's there's a reason it's that far out. It has they have to give manufacturers time to design products that will

comply with these rules. And this rule may not be, you know, the most wonderful thing in the world for all gadget lovers out there, because it may mean that we start to see gadgets get a little chonky again, because a big reason for preventing people from accessing the innerds of these devices is that, forim, factors have become so small and so slim that it requires manufacturers to design components that cram together in such a way that

you can't really separate them. Like the battery ends up being literally built into the phone, which means it's impossible to remove the battery without breaking the phone. So this could mean that the smartphones of the future, at least in Europe, get a bit more hefty, but the trade off would be you'd be able to pop out the battery and swap it for a new one anytime you like. So we'll have to see how this impacts the design of gadgets that are sold in the European Union. Okay,

we're going to take another quick break. When we come back. I got about four more stories to cover. All right, we're back again. When HDTVs first began to take off in the consumer market, you really had two major technologies that were in competition. You had LCD screens and you had plasma televisions, and each of them had their own pros and cons. Plasma televisions were really great with resolution

and color, especially on mid sized television screens. However, they were also not as bright, and they also had the possibility of screen burn in, which was another kind of negative for plasma screens. They also were more expensive to manufacture than LCD screens, and by extension, they were much more expensive to purchase for consumers. Those costs got bigger as the screens themselves got bigger and they consumed more

energy than LCDs. So while plasma screens had their fans like people who just passionately loved the quality of plasma over LCD, by twenty thirteen the plasma had kind of faded away. The Phillips stopped making them in twenty thirteen and they pretty much died as a result. So while LCDs enjoyed a decade more in the spotlight, they are now also kind of going off to live on the farm and pet the rabbits, if you know what I'm saying.

So technologies like LED and LED or O lead screens are dominant, and LCD research and development is yesterday's news. According to industry insiders. They're saying, like, yeah, the LCD has pretty much gone as far as it can, like that technology is sort of maxed out, and thus there's no real reason to pour money in R and D, and instead you would be researching other technologies. However, I don't want to actually say that LCD stuff is literally

going away, like it's dying off like plasma did. I'm having a bit of fun with this, but it's not quite to that level. LCD will likely still be part of LCD LED TVs. It's just that those televisions are going to be the lower end televisions because they'll they'll max out in resolution and quality, but they'll still represent sort of the bargain end of high definition televisions, and that the future of ultra high resolution television really rests

on the metaphorical shoulders of o LED tech. So thanks for all your hard work, LCD. Enjoy your retirement now. Today I learned about muons, which I previously believe to be the sound that was made by cows. Sorry, it was Father's Day this past weekend and in the United States here, and I think I've got some residual Dad jokes stuck to me. But no, muons are not the sound made by cow ons. Mooons are subatomic particles. They are similar to electrons, but they weigh a lot more

than electrons do. And the mooons that visit our little planet come from interactions between cosmic rays hitting little particles way up in our atmosphere, and thousands of them hit every square meter of the Earth every minute. The particles themselves zip along at pretty dang incredible speed. They're not quite moving at the speed of light. You know, you can't really hit speed of light with if you've got mass. That's one of the tricky things about the speed of light.

But they are super duper fast, and they're teeny teeny tiny, and they can penetrate solid stuff like the ground by a lot like miles. Now, scientists in Japan have created Muon detectors that collectively can serve as a kind of underground GPS. Researchers at the University of Tokyo showed that using Muon detectors, they could calculate a receiver's position in

the basement of a six story building. So the thought is this technology could potentially be used in areas where other means of navigation like GPS would be useless because signals would not be able to penetrate the correct depth. In order to be useful, the tech could be used to monitor underground volcanic activity, or to plot a path for an unmanned underground vehicle, that kind of stuff, and

it would rely on naturally occurring muons. Like I said, you know, thousands of these are hitting every square meter, like ten thousand every minute hitting a square meter. So the tech really is all about coordinating the efforts of various receiving stations for the purposes of mapping and navigation. I can't pretend to understand the subtleties of how all this works, but I do plan to look into it a lot more and do a full episode about it

in the future. I just don't want to say anything else here where, I just end up making an assumption that's completely off basin incorrect. So in the meantime, you should know that while cowons do not make muons, a quark is the sound made by a dirk. Space dot Com reports that scientists at the Large Hadron Collider are zeroing in on the answer to one of the most perplexing questions in cosmic history. Why do we live in

a universe made of matter instead of antimatter? Now keep in mind we humans gave matter and antimatter their names, so really you could say, why has our universe made up of this stuff rather than this other stuff which also existed? So when matter and antimatter encounter one another,

they annihilate each other. So if there had been equal amounts of matter and antimatter created at the beginning of the universe, the whole universe should have poofed out of existence in a big old explosion of energy and radiation. But for some reason, matter one out. Why though, why was the creation asymmetrical? Because based on our understanding of the standard model of physics, it should have been symmetrical.

The scientists have been conducting research in this area creating antimatter and labs at the Large Hadron Collider and trying to get a better understanding of why this imbalance existed and what that means with regard to our understanding of cosmology and physics in general. It's pretty cool stuff and if you want to learn more, I recommend reading the article Large Hadron Collider may be closing in on the

Universe's missing antimatter by Keith Cooper at space dot Com. Finally, Suzuki Motor Corporation and SkyDrive, a startup company in Japan that's in the flying car biz, jointly announced intentions to produce flying cars starting next year like the spring of twenty twenty four. SkyDrive is going to use Suzuki's manufacturing

facilities to assemble the flying cars. These flying cars look a little bit like oversized quad copter drones, except instead of having like a quad copter, it's called that because you have four sets of rotors, one on the end of each arm, So you've got a central unit and four arms that go off at in different angles, and there's a set of rotors at the end of each one. This one would actually have three sets of rotors and like a triangular formation at the end of each arm,

so you'd have twelve sets total instead of just four. Anyway, it sounds like the goal is to have some flying cars available in time for the twenty twenty five World Exposition, which taking place in Osaka, Japan. As for how they would be used, like, what would be the practical purpose of these flying cars? Your guess is as good as mine.

The most frequent suggestion I have seen for flying cars is that they might be used to transport people from one area to an airport or back from an airport to that area, which sounds kind of like a park and fly situation. Like based on that description, I think you would have to drive to a facility that has a landing pad, and then you would board a flying car, get whisked away to the airport, and then you would go through the joy that is navigating through an airport.

I remain somewhat skeptical that that's actually a good use of technology and resources, but that might be because I also live in a city where it's not that hard to get to and from the major airport. So maybe if I lived in Los Angeles or Manhattan or Tokyo, maybe I would feel differently, but as it stands, I'm not sure that it's a viable business model. But I don't know. Maybe I'll be proven wrong. And that wraps up the tech news for Tuesday, June twentieth, twenty twenty three.

I hope you are all well. Just ahead up. I will be out next week taking a vacation. My plan right now is to have some reruns run next week, but I'll be back the following week with brand new episodes, So just one to make you aware of that heading into it. I'll probably mention it again at the end of the other episodes this week, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production.

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