Tech News: A Corrupted File Grounded All US Aircraft Yesterday

So the f a A overseas flight operations here in the United States, and if it can't operate, ain't no flying being done. The corrupted file was in the f a a's Notice to Air Missions system a k A n O T A M, which I like to think is no TAM instead of not AM, but I don't honestly know. The purpose of a system is to send alerts to pilots to let them know about potential issues like hazards that they could encounter along their planned flight route.

And as you can imagine, that information is really important. It can help pilots reroute to avoid problems that otherwise could really be serious. And so the entire fleet of commercial planes across the United States had to hold off until the problem could be fixed. Making matters worse, the corrupted file was also found in the backup systems, so there was no way to just switch to a secondary

system because those also had the corrupted files in them. Fortunately, the f a A was able to fix the issue and get operations moving again before I got too late in the day, but thousands of flights were delayed and hundreds were canceled. The f a A is going to investigate the incident, as is the Department of Transportation, but officials say that as of right now, there's no evidence that this was at all related to any kind of cyber attack or anything like that. It was probably a

much more mundane issue. It does, however, point to how a an error like this can bring an entire uh sector of the travel industry to a halt. And you know, that's that's a sobering thought to think that that's really all that stands between operations and a lack thereof UH. So, Yeah, it's uh. There's clearly a need to find out what caused this issue in order to prevent such things from happening again in the future. Now for a quick update

on the f t X situation. Now in case you don't remember, f t X was the second largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world before the whole thing went belly up due to some creative bookkeeping. That's a nice way to say that. Apparently f t X was secretly sending customer funds to cover investments made by a sister company called Alimated Research. The organization is going through bankruptcy and liquidation right now as it tries to recapture as much

money as possible to return to creditors and stakeholders. According to f t x as lawyers, they've recovered more than five billion dollars so far in liquid and digital assets. The company still laims to recapture money on four point six billion dollars worth of less liquid assets. That means there's gonna have to be some steps made in order to convert these assets into cash, and there's no guarantee that the amount secured is going to be the same

as that four point six billion dollar valuation. Now this is impressive news, but it still means that individual investors are looking at getting only thirteen cents for every dollar they invested, which is a huge loss. Amazon appealed to the National Labor Relations Board or in l RB to overturn a unionization vote at the JFK eight warehouse facility on Staten Island, New York. Unsurprisingly, the n l RB

denied this appeal they cited with the workers. In fact, this is so unsurprising that critics are suggesting that what Amazon is doing is just going through this process mainly to delay negotiations between the company and the newly formed worker union. Amazon plans to appeal again to the n l RBS National Board in Washington, assuming the n l r B will uphold the vote again and there's no

reason to assume otherwise. The next step would be to take the matter to federal court, and it sounds like Amazon is determined to make this process as arduous as possible, maybe hope that a federal judge would overrule the vote to unionize. And it's really hard to predict whether or not that would actually work out. Because the US has a bumpy history with unions and workers rights, there's been a general push back against tech companies over recent years.

Some of that pushes actually bipartisan. Both conservatives and liberals have been pushing back, but the motivations are frequently very different. But the US also had a long stretch of the government being less than supportive when it comes to workers versus the giant tech companies they work for. Salaried Microsoft workers have a new benefit called discretionary time off. And this isn't being snarky, this is, honest to goodness, a

real benefit. So essentially, salaried employees are now able to take unlimited time off. Folks who currently have unused vacation days under the old system will receive a payout later this year, and even brand new salaried employees will be able to take advantage of this flexible time of policy once it goes into effect on January. Hourly workers will not receive this benefit, but according to Microsoft, the reason

for that isn't that the company values them less. Instead, it's that the various federal and state wage and our laws prevent the company from extending this benefit to hourly employees, who are guaranteed certain minimums by law. Also, if Microsoft salaried employees work outside the US, their vacation policy will remain unchanged due to similar such laws and regulations that apply to them wherever they happen to be working. But yeah, if you are a salary to Microsoft employee in the

United States. Soon you're gonna have unlimited time off, which sounds so nice. Of course, some folks are likely going to have jobs where they can't just take off time willy nilly because of deadlines and such. I know that's hard for a lot of my coworkers and myself, like it's hard for us to take a day off work because for those of us who publish every day, those deadlines still exist. But me, I never work a day in my life because my job is what I love.

That's what I keep telling myself. That's what I keep telling myself. Okay, I've got another AI story to share with y'all. The Bite reported yesterday that c net, a tech news and review outlet which has employed several of my friends throughout the years, has been using AI on the q T to generate certain articles. Now, they're not using it to generate breaking news articles or product reviews

or anything like that. Instead, they're using it for more evergreen articles in the c net financial pages that aim to explain things like c d S as in certificate of deposit not compact disc In other words, these are

articles meant to inform people about money matters well. The bite found that several articles, more than seventy of them, had this generic byline of c net money staff, and if you clicked on that byline you would see the phrase this article was generated using automation technology, which I'm gonna I'm gonna chastise c NET. That's passive voice. Really, it should read automation technology generated this article. Anyway, it

was a bit of a surprise. The note on the byline also explains that each automated article went through edits and fact checking to make sure it was accurate, so it kind of sounds like this was an experiment. Seen it had not issued any sort of press release about using AI to generate articles, which makes this discovery a little bit awkward. Though again Seen it did include this information in the byline info on purpose, so anyone could have come across this. It wasn't exactly, you know, hidden

beyond discovery. It wasn't in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying beware of the leopard. Obviously, this sort of thing will spark conversations about relying upon AI instead of, say, paying an actual human being to write the article. But then again, this article kind of falls into uh, let me just call it boring topics. These articles can be tedious and unfulfilling to write. Trust me. I used to write those kinds of articles occasionally for

How Stuff Works. Now, a lot of the articles I wrote for How Stuff Works were great. It was very engaging. I was excited to get the assignment. But there was a point where I had to write about seven articles related to towing, as in towing something behind a vehicle. And you might think, Wow, that sounds dull as heck, and you'd be right. I hated doing it. In those cases, Having an AI system that could generate the initial article and then have a human editor to fact check and

make edits might have been a welcome edition. Like if they had offered that, like, hey, would you rather we take these articles off your assignment and give them to a I, I would have said yes please. So this kind of falls into one of the three d s that AI is supposed to help out with. Those d s are dirty, dangerous, and dull. So these are jobs that humans can do and have done, but they aren't necessarily rewarding jobs, and in some cases they could be

outright harmful. So is there danger in assigning those kinds of articles to AI. Well, maybe not, but then our company is going to stop with the dull articles or will they just use AI to generate articles for more interesting and rewarding work. And if the AI underperforms compared to human writers and journalists and editors, what harm would

that do to the general public? These are some big questions anyway, According to Engadget, c net subsequently removed the c net Money staff bio page, so you can no longer see that phrasing I mentioned earlier, but it had not commented on actual use of AI as of the recording of this episode. By the time you hear it. That might be different. But um, in fact, it may have happened by the time I started recording, but while I before I started, it had not there not been

any comment. Okay, we're gonna take a quick break. When we come back, we'll have some more news items we're back. Meta sent out an email to folks who own an original Oculus Quest headset that's the first generation of the Quest headsets, and they explained that the company is no longer going to send feature updates to the original Quest. Also, those Quest headsets will lose the ability to interact with

Meta's social VR applications. You won't be able to create or join a party for group VR sessions using an original quest uh. They will still be able to access other types of apps and such, and you'll be able to play games and everything on them, but a lot of the functionality that fleshed out the Quest will no longer operate. What's more, Meta plans to end security patches

and bug fixes for the Quest next year. Now, the Quest came out four years ago, and this, my friends, concerns me a bit, and that's because it points out

another potential downside er Meta's whole Metaverse vision. So if the Metaverse does require some sort of mixed reality peripheral in order to access it, not only well people have to cough up the money to buy the hardware, they also may see that the hardware could drift out of being supported after a while, and that means that the customer will have to buy new hardware to continue to access the Metaverse. In some ways, this isn't that different

from other computational devices, right. I mean, to play the latest games at the highest settings, gamers have to rebuild or purchase new rigs on a fairly regular basis, or they get left behind. Uh. Same with phones, like after a few years, the companies that make smartphones have developed the OS to a point where older models can't run the latest versions of the O S. This just kind

of happens. But if you're talking about accessing a persistent online world that presumably is the next incarnation of what it is to be online, then having to buy new equipment because the company stops supporting the stuff you already own really stinks. And it stinks because the Internet is a critical component to interacting with the modern world, and it already represents a huge gap between the halves and

the half nots. There is a large digital gap, and there are populations of people who are disproportionately harmed by the fact that they don't have regular access to the Internet. Once you start throwing in expensive hardware that goes out of date every few years, that will make that gap grow wider, and the effects could be devastating. Anyway, I guess Quest owners should just go out and purchase a Quest to don't buy a Quest pro though every review I have read says pretty much they are not worth

the very high price tag, So buyer beware. Glass Door, ampany that allows employees to rate their employers, releases a report every year on the one best places to work based upon those employee reviews, and for the first time in ages, Meta, as in the former Facebook and Apple have dropped off of this list. Now, I suppose this isn't that surprising, considering that both companies took hard stances on pushing people back into the office as early as

they could. Apple kept putting that date back because there were a lot there's a lot of employee resistance, but it was still very much firm that no, we want you in this office. Gosh darn it, this is like the most expensive office we've ever built, and we need people inside it, and you're gonna go. And of course Meta has had multiple controversies and scandals, plus a CEO who outright said there were people at the company who probably shouldn't be there. That's not great for employee morale.

Layoffs have had an effect at Facebook slash Meta, But according to Glassdoor economists Annual Jao, we shouldn't think of this as Apple and Meta becoming terrible places to work, that that's not necessarily the case. Instead, he says, this year's list was really competitive, So maybe you could look at it as saying, it's not so much that folks hate working at Apple and Meta, it's just that people who are working at other companies love their employers more.

So that's a silver lining. I guess Ours Technica has a powerful article that I urge you to read. It is a good one. It is titled Iran to use facial recognition to identify women without hitge jobs. Now, as the headline points out, the Iranian government enforces strict dress requirements and modesty codes, which include the requirement for women

to wear a h job in public. That's a head covering that's worn by some Muslim women, and while the practice has its roots in religious observance, many women have argued that the government requirement is really the Iranian government attempting to suppress and control women within the country and to take away their agency. Last September, a young woman named Massa Amini was arrested and reportedly beaten for quote unquote improperly wearing her h jab. It apparently wasn't tight

enough to her head to satisfy police. She died in police custody a few days later, and that sparked massive protests across Iran. Now there's a concern that Iranian police are using facial recognition technology to not only spot women who are violating this very strict dress code, but to identify those women. And according to the article, there are eyewitnesses who have said that police sometimes show up days later at a person's house in order to arrest them.

And that does imply that they're relying upon some form of methodology to identify people days after an alleged violation. Whether or not that's facial recognition, uh that that's up for debate, because it could be other methods, But there seems to be a pretty strong implication that facial recognition is playing an increasingly prominent role in police activity. Now, I've spoken in the past about how official use of

facial recognition technology is bad, it's immoral. Now mostly in those cases what I was talking about, I was talking about bias that could be in models and that can lead to misidentification cases and wrongful imprisonment and upending innocent person's life based off faulty technology that should not be used in this kind of application. But in an extreme case like the one that we're talking about, with Iran. I think it's beyond question that facial recognition technology is

facilitating human rights violations. Last year, I did a loose history of social networks, and I mentioned towards the end of that series the rise of some politically far right platforms like Parlor, and I briefly talked about how Parlor has had a rocky existence, to put it lightly, and how late last year Yea formerly Kanye West, was in

talks to purchase the company. Yea had been singing, hanging out with Candice Owens, a conservative author and talking cat who happens to be married to George Farmer, who is the CEO of you Guessed It Parlor, And so there are all these stories going around that maybe Owens was kind of trying to convince Yea to bail out Parlor and purchase it for himself after Yea had been kind of pushed off of other social platforms for repeatedly violating

their policies, and Parlor itself had been on unsteady financial ground and kind of needed someone to sweep in and and purchase the company. It had been d platform following the January six insurrection. Anyway, the whole deal ended up falling through after Yea praised Adolph Hitler, though Parlor said the termination of the deal actually came from a mutual decision and did not cite that particular incident. But it's

kind of hard to overlook. In the wake of the deal falling through, Parlor has apparently been laying off employees and waves, and according to the Verge, at this point, Parlor is down to just twenty or so employees total.

Most of the executive team has gone, the staff are gone, a lot of the users have gone either to Twitter now that Elon Musk is running things, or to Donald Trump's Truth social platform, So we might be looking at the end of the line for Parlor, although the company, now rebranded as Parliament Technologies, claims to have big plans for the future. Okay, I've got a couple more stories I want to cover before we get to those, let's

take another quick break. We're back, and I was talking about Parlor earlier and mentioned Twitter, and speaking of Twitter, the New York Times reports that Twitter has a new revenue generation scheme potentially in the works, which would be auctioning off unused Twitter handles. So apparently Twitter has around a billion and a half user names representing inactive accounts. So these are accounts where no one has logged in for ages or posted anything in a really long time.

Some of those user names could be really well known. They might be famous handles, or they might be handles that represent famous folks or brands, and so why not auction those off? You know, makes the money. That's a terrible idea. And here's why. Some of those names presumably include folks or brands that later received verification from Twitter to show that they were the real deal, and then

for whatever reason, those accounts became inactive. If Twitter auctions off those handles, and if then Twitter allows people to essentially buy a verification checkmark in return from monthly subscription, well doesn't that mean a person could effectively pose as someone else? You know, they could impersonate another entity and this would all be facilitated by Twitter's own practices. Now,

I don't think that's actually gonna happen. I I think even Elon Musk would say that those handles, the ones that represent like real people and brands, will get struck from the auction. They will just be sunset it and discontinued, because otherwise Twitter would be inviting a whole lot of

grief from various companies and notable people. Now, I'm sure in a one and a half billion long list of handles, they've got to be some that folks actually would want, simply because the handle is what they were hoping for in the first place. For example, maybe I would want the Twitter handle at Jonathan, but I couldn't get that because it was already taken by the time I signed up for Twitter, which is why I went for John Strickland instead. I honestly don't remember if I even tried

at Jonathan. I'm sure it was taken, but I don't think I tried it. Maybe I did, it was, you know, so many years ago. I don't have any memory. But if the at Jonathan handle represents an inactive account, then I could have a chance to bid on that handle

for myself. Critics have pointed out one really big issue that still exists with this, even if we set aside the idea that Twitter with sunset handles for celebrities and brands, and that is some of those accounts probably represent people who have passed away, and those people have Twitter pages that may serve as a kind of memorial to them, So would it be right to wipe out those accounts just to sell off handles. I mean, isn't that kind

of erasing this person's online history? And for some people like that might be one of the few pieces they have left to remember a loved one. So yeah, there are other issues on top of the whole impersonation and problem. Video game company Ubisoft continues to be in crisis mode. Ubisoft is the game company responsible for franchises like Far Cry,

Assassin's Creed, and various Tom Clancy franchises, among others. And you might remember from a couple of years ago that Ubisoft fell under scrutiny for having a toxic work environment and allegedly scuzz ball leaders who were predatory towards employees. It was really bad stuff that later kind of got drowned out by Activision Blizzard when Activision Blizzard said, hey,

hold my beer. Anyway, Ubisoft has had a series of financial setbacks, and last June Ubisoft canceled four titles that were in development that included a couple of Tom Clancy titles. Then Ubisoft saw some of its releases fall far short of projected sales, so they did poorly in the market, and now the company has announced it has canceled three

more titles that were in development. They did not specify what those titles were, and that on top of that, Skull and Bones, the long delayed Pirate Combat game, is getting another delay, which I think would make this the sixth time that game has been delayed. Who was supposed to launch in early March, so in a couple of months, but now it's going to come sometime in the twenty three to twenty twenty four fiscal year ubisas fiscal years begin in April, so it is possible that the delay

could just be a month or so. The company plans to reduce costs by around two hundred million euro which is around two d sixteen million US dollars over the next two years, and that will likely include stuff like layoffs and selling off certain assets. So yeah, it's not it's not out of the troubled waters yet, it's still got a ways to go. Now for a couple of

out of this world stories. First up, Russia announced yesterday that next month it's going to send up an empty spaceship to the International Space Station in order for two cosmonauts and an astronaut to return to Earth. They were supposed to take a Soayu's MS twenty two crew capsule last month because it was already attached the I S S, but a very tiny space rock hit the capsule and

apparently caused a radiator coolant leak. So there's a concern that the capsule could overheat upon re entry due to that coolant leak, and so they needed to look at an alternative plan. So the rock was said to be just a millimeter in diameter and that's all it takes. It's one of the many reasons why it's a space is trying to kill you, because there's not a lot up there, but the stuff that is up there is

dangerous anyway. Russia plans to send up the new Soya's capsule designated MS twenty three two International Space Station on February that will bring the two cosmonauts and astronaut back home. It's being called a replacement so Ya's rather than a rescue soyas as everyone who is aboard the International Space Station is safe and sound. It's just that their ride home for three of these folks got a flat and now a buddy's gonna send over a different GELOPI to

take those folks home or something. Anyway, best wishes for the crew and that the replacement mission goes off without a hitch. Finally, the James Webb Space Telescope has made its first new exo planet discovery. Now that's just one of the things that scientists are using the telescope to do is to look for exo planets, and this one is a beautiful little piece of real estate. That's a

quick forty one light year jaunt away. It's got the charming name of LHS for seven five B. So if you get to LHS for seven five C, you have gone too far. Just make a left at the shell station. The planet is relatively close to its home star, and by relatively close, I mean very very close. That star is very tiny. It's very dim, as in, it doesn't give off much light. I'm not saying star isn't very intelligent,

unlike a lot of other stars I can think of. Anyway, The planet is so close to its star that a year on LHS four seven five B lasts just two Earth days. So every two days on Earth is a year on LHS for seven five B. And you thought two was over really quickly. All jokes aside, the discovery is an exciting one as it points to a great future of using the telescope to identify more exoplanets. Beyond that, the telescope could be useful in detecting atmosphere. Beyond that,

it gets a little tricky. Just detecting atmosphere is hard because you actually are looking for indirect evidence that an atmosphere exists by looking for things like shimmer when you're observing the planet now, it may eventually help us identify plants that could potentially support life on them. So that's

really exciting too. All of this being said, even this powerful telescope has its limits, and if planets fall out outside certain parameters, we might not be able to tell very much beyond yeah, we think there's a planet there. But still, it's a very exciting time for astronomy. And that's it for the tech News for Thursday, January two, twenty three. I hope you are all well. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, reach out to me. One way is

to download the I Heart radio app. It's free to download, free to use. Navigate the Tech Stuff by putting that name in the little search engine. It will take you to the page. There's a little microphone icon. If you click on that, you can leave a voice message up to thirty seconds in link for me, or if you prefer, you can handle over to Twitter and send me a tweet. The handle for the show is tech stuff hsw That one will not be auctioned off because it remains somewhat active.

I tweet on it occasionally. Uh. But yes, you can send me messages through that and I see all of those and I will talk to you again. Release soon. Y text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.