Tech News: A Spooky Halloween Tech News Episode

Turns out there was a scheduling delay, and so now you get an episode from me after all. So let's dive into the spooky world of tech news, and you might hear me make some spooky sounds throughout the show that I assure you it's not that I'm hand It's just that the kidney stone I'm dealing with still isn't done yet. Anyway, the back half of twenty twenty three is hitting me hard, y'all. But never mind that you're not here to hear me grouse and moan about my health.

You're here to hear me grouse and moan about tech. Let's get to it. First. Up this week, US President Joe Biden issued an executive order that deals with the big topic in tech of twenty twenty three, that of artificial intelligence, and they had a particular focus on generative AI, which I'll just remind you. Generative AI is one subset

of the overall discipline of artificial intelligence. And if you're not from America, or maybe you are from America but you've never really looked into it and you don't know what an executive order is, it is one of the president's powers of office. The president has the authority to issue directives without having to go through Congress or any other branch of the govern as long as those directives

relate to how the federal government works. So the US president could issue an executive order to manage federal resources. But the president could not issue an executive order to force South Dakota to change its name to Frank or whatever, because that's not in the power of the federal government. This executive order in particular, creates requirements, mostly among federal agencies when it comes to entering into contracts with AI

companies and AI services. So the order restricts those contracts to companies that comply with regulations, and those regulations include things like testing requirements for their AI models, transparency when it comes to developing the tools, and various restrictions on what generative AI is and is not allowed to do so. For example, if the generative AI can be convinced to design weapons, that's right out. You know, a federal agency is not allowed to enter into a contract with a

company that does that. So these requirements don't hit the AI companies directly, right they're hitting the federal agencies. But if you assume that those companies want to do business with the federal government, which is a very lucrative business to get into, it thus creates an incentive for those AI companies to comply with the rules. Now, there are some aspects to the executive Order that more directly target

AI companies. For example, should a company engage in training AI systems that could potentially create a threat to national security, well, those companies are going to need to send a little heads up to the federal government first, which is not a bad idea, though I would submit that sometimes we don't realize something is a threat until you know it's

threatened US or worse. The order also recommends, but does not necessarily require, that generative AI companies use a label or a watermark for all AI created material, whether that's audio, video, or images or whatever. The order also places the onus of creating more structured regulations on various other agencies within the US government. And speaking of regulations, a couple of

AI luminaries have recently spoken out against regulations. Business Insider reports that Jan Lucun, one of the leading researchers in artificial intelligence, has argued that the various doomsday scenarios being bandied about regarding AI aren't really realistic. Rather, he says, spreading these stories is a tactic that's used by a few large companies that are working in AI today. And you might say, well, why would they do that, why

would they say AI is a potential threat to humanity's existence. Well, these same companies are actually taking a very active role to work with governments around the world to develop AI regular not because the companies actually believe these regulations are

going to prevent harm. Instead, they're trying to create regulations that will allow big established companies to be insulated against smaller startups because the smaller startups are going to find it hard or maybe even impossible to work within the framework of regulations. So, according to Lucun, this is a

way to stifle competition and innovation. Sam Altman, the CEO of open Ai, comes to mind when you hear about this argument when it's put this way, because Altman has taken an active role to work with governments in the US and the UK and elsewhere in an effort to frame regulations around AI. Now. To take the other side, Altman would argue that his goal is to set up rules that make sense and that will protect people against

bad AI design and bad AI implementations. But critics like Lacun say this is really more of a self serve motivation, and it prompts Altman to work so closely with governments in an effort to suppress potential competitors and give open aye an unfair market advantage. He is, not, by the way, the only AI bigwig to suggest that this is a thing.

Andrew ng, who founded Google Brain and who teaches at Stanford University and in fact taught Sam Altman, has also argued that the push for regulations, particularly the push from large AI companies, suggests more of a move to squash competition and innovation than to actually create a safe environment. Now Ing told Financial Worldview that he believes regulations are important. He's not saying don't have regulations at all, but he is saying that bad regulations are worse than no regulations

at all. So it goes bad regulations at the bottom, no regulations, and then good regulations. If things are left to the companies that are going to be regulated, then and we should expect nothing less than rules that are going to benefit them to the detriment of everyone else, whether that's a competitor or a consumer, which kind of makes sense to me. And in the war between artists and AI, a US district judge named William Oric has dismissed most of a lawsuit that three artists brought against

the company's mid Journey, Deviant Art, and Stability AI. In fact, out of those three, only the part of the lawsuit directly involving Stability AI is still alive in the court system. The judge ruled that the accusations as laid out in the lawsuit were quote defective in numerous respects end quote regarding mid Journey and Deviant Art, and so those elements are now essentially dead in the water until they perhaps

get reasserted in a updated filing. So at the center of this whole legal mess is a concern among artists that generative AI companies are making broad and unrestricted use of artist works without the artist's permission or compensation, and that as a result, these generative AI models are able to lift elements of artists' styles and essentially the AI can compete against the very artists whose work the model

was used to train on in the first place. As for why Stability AI is still in the mix here, it mostly has to do with how mid Journey and dev and Art have used Stability AI's generative tool called Stable Diffusion, and the judge says, well, the artists weren't able to really show that those companies were using this knowingly in an effort to harm artists, or were doing it in a way that where they were disregarding the harm being done to artists, and that really just falls

to Stability AI, which created the tool in the first place. The artists accusations showed that, at least according to a search tool meant to match artists against work that generative AI models have supposedly used during training, the Stability AI tool had made unauthorized use of art to train up Stable Diffusion. So out of the three artists, only one

of them is still part of this lawsuit. The other two dropped out because they did not actually obtain a copyright for their works, so there was no legal protection to be violated in the first place. But one of the three did. She's still in the mix. So she said, my name has popped up in the search engine, showing that this model used my work to train itself. Now that in itself is not definitive proof, right, just because

she shows up on the search engine. But the judge rule that it was sufficient to allow the case to continue through to the discovery phase. Now I should add this is not the only case brought against Stability AI

and how it trains stable diffusion. Getty Images sued the company both in the UK and in the United States, arguing that Stability AI used stock images from Getty's enormous database to train its model, and that the company quote removed or altered end quote Getty's copyright management information in the process. Just yesterday, Stability's AI legal team asked a London judge to throw out the UK case. I've not heard how that has panned out. But also these cases

have been going on for a while. While this is an update, you know, they date back to early twenty twenty three and even late twenty twenty two, so it's not like this just popped out of nowhere. This is an ongoing battle in legal systems around the world. Justice moves ever swiftly. Okay, we've got more stories to cover, and they don't even have to do with artificial intelligence. So we're going to take a quick break and when we come back, I'll talk about some more tech news.

We're back, and now I'm done talking about AI at least for the moment, which means it's time to talk about X. You know, the platform formerly known as Twitter. Only one story though, so let's just get through it. And the big news this week is that X is going to offer restricted stock units or RSUs to its employees. Now, keep in mind X is a private company. At the moment, there is no publicly traded stock market that it's on, so you can't look to see what stocks are trading

at right now. It's privately held. So in order to be able to issue restricted stock units to employees, first the company has to determine how much it's actually worth. And this gets a little more loosey goosey than you would find with a publicly traded company. Like with a publicly traded company, you take the number of shares that exist in that company, and you multiply that by the price per share, and you get a rough estimation of

the valuation of that company. So X had to go through a different process, but in internal documents it had listed its valuation at around nineteen billion dollars. Now keep in mind, when Elon Musk agreed to purchase Twitter, he did so at a share price that would be set at fifty four dollars twenty cents per share, which meant that at the time of purchase, Twitter would be worth forty four billion dollars. So he spent forty four billion, and now the platform has a current valuation of nineteen

billion dollars. That's a fifty six percent drop in valuation over the course of a year. Now keep in mind that's just one assessment. Other assessments are actually different. For example, Fidelity figure that the drop is closer to sixty five

percent of value YELSA. Now I admit when I first read about this, I didn't see that there was a bright side, but tech Crunch's Amanda Silberling points out that sometimes a lower valuation isn't necessarily a bad thing for the company or its employees, because the employees stand to gain those stocks or stock options, and it could mean that they could get a lot more of them as

part of their compensation package. This can also become a very powerful tool to recruit new talent into the company, and as long as the company does better and starts to improve in value, employees will see a huge gain as a result of having those stocks, assuming that they execute their stock options. Obviously, X still needs to regain a lot of lost ground, right A fifty six percent drop invaluation is not a great thing to communicate out to the world. Doing that is going to create much

greater gains for the employees who exercise their stock options. However, so it could be a really good thing. And you know, never say never. I'm not going to say that X's is just death to be doomed. It just has to prove it can reverse the trend it's been on over the last year. Now. Personally, I think that would be a whole lot easier if Elon Musk took a big old step back from the driver's seat. I mean, sure, he put in a different CEO, so technically he's not

the CEO of the company anymore. But the general impression I get in the tech world is that it's really still Elon Musk calling the shots over there. And maybe that's unrealistic. Maybe that's not the case, but it certainly seems to be that, at least from the outside, and I don't think that's been doing the company any favors. Another long ongoing story around the world is how various countries are beginning to treat apps and tech that is

created out of countries like China. So in a recent example, the government of Canada decided yesterday to issue a ban on the messaging app we Chat on all government issued mobile devices. The Canadian government also included a Russian app in that ban as well, or really a Russian suite, the Kasperski antivirus program specifically. Now, this is out of a concern that the governments of China and Russia could potentially either directly or indirectly use those kinds of apps

to spy on Canadian government officials and Canadian systems. The government did say that there was no evidence that any such thing had happened so far, so this would really be more of a proactive move, as the CIO for Canada has identified those two apps as having unacceptable risks

associated with them. Chinese representatives condemned the move. They said that it was really done more as a political gesture without any real justifiable foundation, and Kasperski responded with surprise and disappointment, saying that the lack of evidence indicates that the ban is a response to a geopolitical perceived threat rather than a real one, and claims no one from Canada's government ever reached out to Kasperski to work things

out before issuing the ban. Now, I will say that at least with Kasperski, it has a somewhat shady reputation in the cybersecurity community, not that their tools don't work, but that there is this fear of a potential connection

between Kasperski and various Russian intelligence agencies. Kasperski has been rather compliant with Russian government on several things that have led to people saying it may not be a good idea to use Kaspersky products in things like government settings because of the potential that someone could use that for surveillance purposes. Canada is not the only country to have concerns about this product. The US issued a similar ban

Back in twenty seventeen. Germany's Federal Office for Information Security issued a strong recommendation to its staff not to use Kasperski antivirus products out of concern, you know, regarding the company's potential connections to the Russian government. So this is not an unprecedented event. Now, for those of you who like those stories where the little guy stands up to

the fat cat, I got one for you now. In this case, the little guy is a software firm in the UK called Threads Software Limited, and the fat cat is Meta, formerly known as Facebook. And yes, this all has to do with the name Threads, which Meta has used for its microblogging service, you know, the Twitter slash x killer platform that saw rapid adoption and then not long after that rapid disengagement or what I call oh

I forgot I even installed that itis. The software company sent a letter to Meta and said that it will go to the courts and ask for an injunction against Meta if the company doesn't stop using the name Threads. Now. To be clear, Threads Software Limited or actually a precursor to that company called JPY Limited, applied for and received a trademark for the brand name Threads more than a decade ago, and that was well before Meta announced any

intention of creating a microblogging competitor to Twitter. Now that being said, this is not the first threads product from Meta. Back in twenty nineteen, Meta, which at that time was still called Facebook, introduced a feature in Instagram and it was called Threads. I'm not sure if the thread Software Limited company actually pushed back against Meta when that happened. That's important because holding a trademark requires a company to

defend that trademark. If Meta can show that that Threads Software Limited did not attempt to defend its trademark when Meta first introduced the Threads product in Instagram in twenty nineteen, then that could really weaken the case against Meta. I don't know. Maybe they did pushback. I couldn't find information on that when I was reading up on the story. If I'd done some more digging, I probably could have,

but I was running out of time. Also, there are a lot of other products out there that have the name thread or threads, and they have not really seen a lot of pushback from this company. From what I can tell, which is another potential strike against them. Now, all that being said, Meta supposedly did reach out to thread Software Limited in an attempt to purchase the domain threads dot app, but the company gave Meta the cold

shoulder for every single request. It does, however, indicate that Meta was aware that was going to use a brand name that was already in use. So it is a complicated thing. And who knows which way the courts will go. I mean a lot of courts might already be I hate to use the word biased, maybe predisposed to laying judgments against Meta because Meta has not done itself any

favors of the last decade. It has operated in a way that has almost dared governments and courts to take action against it, which could potentially spell over in decisions. We're all human beings, even judges and lawyers, So who knows. But yeah, that's what's going on in that world. In India, Apple has sent an urgent alert to several politicians in

the Indian Parliament. The alert warned the recipients that their respective iPhones were potentially targeted by a state sponsored attack, like an attack with a high level of sophistication and a high requirement for you know, resources, So something that would typically only happen from a hacker group that had

the backing of some sort of government somewhere in the world. Now, notably, all the people who have come forward so far saying that they received this alert belong to the opposition party in India's parliament. Now, Apple has not identified which state may be behind these attacks, and in fact, Apple has also said it's possible the alerts could be a false alarm. They have not issued that many alerts around the world, and they said, you know, this could be something where

we are being extra defensive, but there's no actual threat. There. At least a few of the people who receive the message suspect that India's conservative government is actually behind the operation, that this is an effort to maintain and extend control of the nation in general and to suppress opposition politicians. I've talked a lot about how India's government takes a really aggressive stance with tech companies when it comes to things like allowing people to use various platforms to criticize

the government. So the implication that opposition leaders could be the target of the actual Indian government fits that narrative, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's true. It could be, but without evidence, you can't really draw a conclusion. Various representatives of the majority have argued that those who are contacted are overreacting, that they're jumping to conclusions that cannot be supported by evidence, and they're just reaching for reasons

to be outraged at the government. So they're essentially saying we're being unfairly targeted by these criticisms. I'm sure more well unfold, but it'll be interesting to see how Apple navigates this because obviously it's a pretty thorny political situation, so we'll have to wait and see. Okay, I've got some more tech news items to cover before we conclude this episode, but first let's take another quick break. Are you ready for some football and by that I mean

American football? And also were you ready for it last Sunday? And if you were, did you find yourself frustrated when using YouTube in order to watch football? All right, let me back up a bit. So YouTube secured a contract to carry the NFL Sunday ticket product that originally was

with DirectTV. Now it's an add on to the YouTube TV service NFL Sunday Ticket gives subscribers the ability to tune into the various NFL games, the American football games of the National Football League that are playing on any given Sunday during football season, regardless of where you happen to live. It is a very expensive add on. It starts at three hundred and forty nine dollars per year,

and remember football season doesn't go all year long. This is also on top of the YouTube TV subscription, which is more than seventy dollars per month, so that starts to add up real quick. You sports fans have to pay a whole bunch of moulah to watch your stuff. I feel like I shouldn't complain about all the different

streaming services I subscribe to at this point, because yikes. Anyway, for the first seven weeks of this current season, YouTube's version of the NFL Sunday Tickets seem to be working just fine. But this past Sunday users encountered issues with lag and buffering times, and for some of the games, those issues lasted well into the second half of the game. Understandably, a lot of customers are upset. I mean, if you're paying a premium price for a service, you expect premium

quality in that service. And yeah, we all understand that technical errors can happen, and that systems can and do breakdown. That's just a fact of life. But when you're charging three three hundred and fifty dollars a season just to be able to let people see games on their television or computer screen, not even go to a game, but just see it at home, there is a certain expectation

that the service is gonna work as advertised. YouTube posted a message indicating that the company was aware of the problem and was working on it, but as I was writing this episode, it didn't have any further details about what actually caused the problem that might be public by the time you hear this, but I hadn't seen it when I was actually putting the episode together. The game company Ubisoft is ending online service for ten of the

company's titles. That includes Assassin's Creed two, Assassin's Creed Brotherhood, and Assassin's Creed Revelations, all three of which were very popular titles. This means that the online features for those and the seven other games that they announced are just not going to work anymore. Those services will no longer be active, and that includes stuff like online multiplayer obviously, as well as Ubisoft Connect rewards. Those are kind of

like achievements on Xbox or trophies on PlayStation. Steam also has achievements like this. Fortunately, this is not a case where the online component means the games become totally unplayable. As far as I can tell, gamers should still be able to run these games on the hardware that can run them because these are older games and still be able to play the single player experience. They just won't

be able to access those online features. But this is one of the big reasons I personally do not like game companies tying their single player games to some sort of online service. Usually it's an online service that's meant to verify that the gamer is using a legitimate copy of the game and not a pirated copy. And that's because if a company decommissions the online component, then the game can become unplayable, even if you still have equipment

that could technically run the game. So I hate when game companies tie their titles to some online service that doesn't really add to the game itself. It only exists to verify the copy of the game, because if that service goes offline and they don't offer some sort of patch, then the game you purchased is just it's just dead code. Anyway, kind of sad to see that that support go away.

It does make sense, like there is a limited amount of resources that a company has to put towards supporting games, and it doesn't really make sense to just continually support online components in perpetuity to a diminishing audience, right, That doesn't make good business sense, So I get it from that perspective. You might remember that a few weeks back, I talked about how NASA had retrieved a capsule from

the Osiris REX mission. That's the mission that visited an asteroid called Binu, and the spacecraft up collecting soil and rock samples from Benu and then swung by Earth jettison this capsule, and the capsule landed here on Earth and NASA retrieved it. That's good news, but there's also some bad news. The bad news is, so far the scientists haven't been able to open the capsule. They have collected more than seventy grams worth of dust and rocks from

the outside of the container. But because that dust and those rocks were on the outside of the container. That means that they've had contact with and thus contamination from our dirty, dirty Earth dirt. So you can't really make specific scientific conclusions about stuff from outer space if it's already been contaminated here on Earth. You don't know what elements were just present in the space stuff versus what

was transferred through that contact. So the real treasure is inside the case where those samples have not been contaminated

by Earth. So the goal is to preserve that status and retrieve the samples, then run tests, and that way you can at least be pretty sure that the conclusions you draw are are firm, that they're well grounded, because you know, if you were to say, find organic material inside the dust or rocks, then you could say, well, we took all the controls necessary to prevent contamination from Earth. We found this stuff here that's really interesting and it

raises a lot more questions. You can't really do that if you're not able to maintain that integrity. Unfortunately, two of the fasteners on this capsule, they're more than thirty fasteners in total, but two of them are firmly shut and cannot be removed with the tools that NASA had previously approved for the retrieval operation, So that means that we have to wait while researchers work on the problem and figure out an alternative to accessing the material inside

the capsule, one that will maintain that integrity. It doesn't mean that they won't come up with it. In fact, I'm sure they will come up with it, but it will delay things a little bit because they have to make sure that they're still keeping things as secure as they possibly can. So we do still expect to get into that capsule and to eventually be able to check out those space rocks. It's just going to take a little bit longer to come up with a way to

do it that keeps them preserved properly. Now that's it for the stories, but I do have one press release and one article to recommend for y'all for further reading today. So on the press release side, the US Securities Exchange Commission stated that it has filed fraud charges against the company Solar Winds, as well as the company's chief information

security officer. Now you might remember that Solar Winds is the company that was behind the Orion software that thousands of large companies and government agencies use and that hackers were able to compromise the Orian software and through updates that were pushed out by Solar Winds itself, they were subsequently able to infect target computer systems, thousands of them. It was one of the largest known cybersecurity breaches of all time, and it raised awareness of a type of

malware strategy called a supply chain attack. Anyway, the fraud charges are complicated, and I'm sure it'll necessitate like a full episode on the topic to give a full update, but for the time being, I recommend y'all read up on that press release. You can find it at SEC dot gov and look for the press release about Solar Winds.

As for an article recommendation, Lindsey Clark of The Register has a piece titled tech still cling to sexist stereotypes forgetting female pioneers who coded their path Now, I cannot say that this story surprises me, which makes me sad. I wish I could say it surprised me and still made me sad, but I wasn't surprised, and that was

really sad. It's a reminder that the tech industry in general, and really the whole tech bro culture in particular, is often an unwelcome or downright hostile environment for women and really for anyone who doesn't identify as male, and it reminds us that we wouldn't be where we are today in the tech world without contributions of people who do not identify as male, of women, and of non binary

people who have made incredible contributions to tech. Some of the greatest innovators in tech who built the foundations of computer science were women, Grace Hopper and even further back, a Lovelace, for goodness sakes, people who were true visionaries when it comes to technology. And yet we still have this environment that denigrates women and dismisses their contributions and achievements. It's unfortunate and sadly, again not surprising, but I do

recommend reading that article again. That's in the Register. It's called tech Bros still cling to sexist stereotypes. You can check that out. That's it for today. I wish you all a happy Halloween. I hope you are you encounter endless treats and very few tricks, and I hope you're also all doing well. And I'll talk to you again really soon. Y tech stuff is an iHeart radio production.

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