Tech News: Beavers Hate the Internet

outside of the developers own apps. What the A T T function does is give users a notification about how an app wants to access their data, including whether they want to collect data that is generated in between different apps, and it gives users the opportunity to opt out of that. And businesses like Facebook do not like this because they suspect and probably correct e, that most people are going to decline to share such data. That's not fair, yells Facebook,

you're hurting small businesses. Ah yes, Facebook, champion of small business. All Right, I'm gonna drop the sarcasm and just say outright that if Facebook is upset about a feature that's meant to give users more transparency as to how their data is being collected and used, it's not because it will quote hurt small businesses end quote. It's because Facebook profits off of user data, and any restriction to access of user data represents a decrease in revenue for Facebook. Anyway,

Apple isn't backing down, though. I will say a t T was ready months ago, but Apple actually held off implementing it in order to get developer feedback and build in some other options that would protect user data while still giving companies marketing data. I'm signing with Apple on this one, and that I think giving people the option to either be part of a data collection system or to be excluded from it, that's a good thing for

the individual consumer. Not that I think Apple is necessarily being angelic here, that the company is taking a stance that I can agree with. It also seems to be in line with previous conversations Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg

reportedly had with one another. Uh. There's a story that Zuckerberg asked Cook about his advice of what Zuckerberg should do in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal over at Facebook, and Cook said that Facebook should just delete all user data that was generated by third parties, and Zuckerberg totally thought that was unreasonable. Um. Again, I side with Cook on this one, But then Apple's business is

fundamentally different from Facebook's business. A Taiwanese publication claims that Apple is behind schedule with regard to testing out it's augmented reality glasses. According to reports, those glasses look a lot like you know, high end sunglasses, but with thicker frames to house all the electronics. The lenses themselves would act as displays and allow you to see augmented reality

views of the world around you. If Apple can get this right, they could represent a truly revolutionary a R device. They could you know, step away from the dorky awkwardness of products like Google Glass. And I say that as someone who used to own a pair of Google Glass. The original schedule, according to these reports, would have had Apple in the second phase of testing at this point,

but that appears to have not happened yet. I should add all of these reports are coming from non Apple sources, and the company itself has remained pretty quiet about this whole project. Apple would likely need to hold another phase of testing after the second one, before going through you know, more refined testing to tweak things and get it just right, and then move toward volume production to make them at scale. The original plan, according to these various third party sources.

Was to get into volume production by the beginning of twenty twenty two, but now that might not be very likely. We might see Apple announced this project at some point this year, but we shouldn't expect to actually get our hands on a pair of these until mid twenty twenty two at the earliest, and it might be significantly later than that. Then again, it's always possible that these sources are off and maybe we'll get one more thing by

the end of one That would be spectacular. I imagine these things are also going to be really expensive once they launch. And one bit of good news for Apple, the company has announced it will be opening up an East Coast campus in North Carolina within the raw A. Durham Research Triangle Park area. This is a part of North Carolina that has a very high density of tech companies doing some pretty amazing R and D in fields like qualtum computing, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and lots of

stuff that requires people way smarter than I am. Apple says it's going to invest more than a billion dollars into creating this campus and that they will employ at least three thousand people there. That's a big office Anyway, I'm excited to see what sort of facility they create. Maybe I'll even be able to visit it one day. I mean, North Carolina is like next door to me,

kind of switching from Apple to fellow goliath Google. There is a battle raging between Google and Roku, the company that makes online video streaming devices like the Roku stick. Roku sent a message out to customers on Monday saying that the live TV service part of YouTube TV might be shut down on Roku and possibly removed entirely. So

why is that Moroku's saying we're not doing it? According to Roku, Google has been engaging in some anti competitive demands and that Google has been looking to implement practices that would quote manipulate your search results, impact the usage of your data, and ultimately cost you more end quote. A Roku rep also said Google might remove consumer access to YouTube TV on Roku because Google has been demanding

these processes and Roku has been resisting those demands. It's all a bit vague, and as I record this, I don't have many more details. It sounds kind of like the next generation version of carriage disputes, and these are disagreements and negotiations that happened between platforms like a cable service provider and content providers like channels. So, like I said,

you would occasionally see this with cable TV packages. If you've ever been a customer of a specific cable company and you wondered why a particular channel, or maybe even a group of channels just mysteriously vanished from your service, it's likely due to a carriage disagreement. We're seeing similar issues now in the world of streaming, but it obviously is taking a slightly different tack than the cable version and sticking with the online entertainment world. Engagement in that

world is currency. Creators who can show that they get great engagement numbers, can secure sponsorships, and they can make lucrative deals. They can get contract work. Heck, drive enough engagement and you don't have to hustle. Instead, you have to manage the influx of collaboration and sponsorship requests, and you get to decide who you're going to work with and who you're not. But what happens if it turns out that those engagement numbers of yours are based on

a lie, Well, that's not so good. And sure enough it is a problem. Just as people would pay money in order to get tons of followers on Twitter and raise their online social standing, there have been those who have been doing that on Twitch to boost viewer numbers, and recently Twitch struck back. The Amazon owned company has banned more than seven and a half million bot accounts

that Twitch says we're contributing to fake engagement. In other words, these were bots that exist solely for the purpose of making Twitch streamers seem more popular than they really are. The accounts didn't belong to real people, according to Twitch, They're all just sort of empty shells. And now Twitch is using a machine learning process to discover fake accounts and then banned them, cutting way back on those fake

engagement numbers. Now related to this issue are other issues where people have used fake accounts to harass streamers, not to boost their numbers, but to give them grief. They might direct accounts to join a particular person stream and then use those accounts to flood that streamer's chat with abut and those streamers who weren't trying to boost their own numbers, they had nothing, you know, connected to all

those bots suddenly coming on. They might have their reputations tarnished in the process because their numbers take this huge jump that they can't easily explain. It makes them look like they were the ones trying to buy views. So from hustlers taking shortcuts to abusers leveraging tech to intimidate or harass other streamers, these boats are pretty lousy, and I'm glad Twitch is making moves to get them off the platform. Hey have you ever wanted to go to Mars?

Are you just dying to go there? Well you might want to give Elon Musk a call. Then, the SpaceX founder said in an interview that people going to Mars might not come back alive and that quote a bunch of people will probably die in the beginning end quote. So if you're looking for a one way ticket now, I should say that. On the one hand, I credit Musk's blind honesty here. Space is incredibly dangerous. I have said many times that space is trying to kill you,

and Mars isn't much friendlier. The planet's atmosphere is far too thin, with too little oxygen for people to breathe, so you would have to wear a space suit or otherwise be in a pressurized craft. The thin atmosphere coupled with a lack of magneto sphere, means that Mars offers no real protection against stuff like cosmic radiation, and exposure to cosmic radiation is not great. Most proposals I've seen for colonies on Mars include building structures underground to take

advantage of the soil's protection. Cosmic radiation is not good at penetrating soil, so you know, put a meter or three of ground between you and the cosmos isn't a bad idea. We might be able to harvest water on Mars and thus be able to both supply water and potentially oxygen to people, as well as create rocket fuel, but there are unanswered questions as to whether we'd be

able to actually grow anything in Martian soil yet. And the trip to Mars requires months of travel, and once you're there, you gotta wait around two years of Earth time before Earth and Mars are lined up so that you can make a trip back home. That also means you have to figure out how you're going to make that trip back home, so you have to use a spacecraft that can land and then take off again from Mars. You could presumably take stuff with you to make this easier.

But obviously everything you end up taking is going to require a much larger effort back here on Earth and or descended to Mars in the first place. And all of this is really theoretical right now, Obviously we haven't sent anyone to Mars. But Musk is right, the project of going to Mars is incredibly dangerous with really high risks. Ideally, whomever undertakes this challenge will do so with enough support to stand a good chance of making it to Mars

and back again alive. Like that. That is the goal, right, You shouldn't just dismiss it. So I don't disagree with Musk's assessment that it is incredibly dangerous. However, I do feel the way you phrased it seems to be dismissive of human life, which I do have a problem with. And you know what else, I have a problem with

some mammals. You see, Residents of Tumbler Bridge, British Columbia, experienced a series of Internet outages early Saturday morning this past weekend, and the reason was pretty much exactly what you would expect. Beavers. Yep, it was a beaver problem, as some of those furry critters chewed through fiber cable at a couple of different points, severing the connection to

the Internet at large. The cable had been buried three ft underground and it also was coated with a conduit that was four and a half inches thick to protect it. But that beaver, it didn't care and went to town on that cable. It dug it up and chewed through. It turns out the beaver was upset at how Bitcoin took a tumble last week. Just kidding, The beaver just didn't like the way the Falcon and the Winter Soldier ended, and it was very upset. It's gonna have to wait

weeks for Loki to come out on Disney Plus. Now I'm still kidding. The beaver, as far as I know, has never actually been online, so this was not some form of, you know, technological commentary. It did, however, use some of the stuff it chewed through to be part of its dam, so it made better use of the Internet than a lot of us do. And finally, in our news that has no relevance to Jonathan whatsoever segment Amazon is opening up a quote high tech hair salon

end quote in London. Now, I have not had to see a barber since nine that's the last time I had hair. So for all I know, hair salons now have robots and food and pill form and flying hairdressers. But according to the BBC, this high tech sal on will have magic mirrors. Okay, well they're not magic, but they are mirrors that incorporate augmented reality features in them that will allow customers to see how certain hairstyles and colors would look on them before they commit to anything.

So they'll see their reflection in the mirror, but their hairstyle will be a digital overlay and they can figure out which one they prefer, So a customer could sit down in the chair and flip through different options on the mirror to find one that suits them. And I think that's pretty cool, and it would mean that people like me would avoid the embarrassment that comes with agreeing to a stylist feathering your hair when you don't happen to know what that actually means. And it was the

eighties and shut up. The hair salon will also offer various beauty products, each one coupled with a QR code, so customers can just scan the code on their phones and then purchase those beauty products. Through trumpet Please Amazon, big surprise there. The whole thing is an experi perament that Amazon says isn't an indicator of the future. The company says it doesn't have plans to expand this further.

There are other hairdressers in London who have already expressed criticism for Amazon's move, pointing out that the salon industry as a whole was hit really hard because of the pandemic, like lots of those places went out of business and had no way of coming back, and people lost their livelihoods. And meanwhile, Amazon has been breaking in enormous amounts of revenue all through the pandemic. It does feel a little bit like the big, mega corporation is making huge moves

on smaller businesses. But you could also say that's Amazon's corporate history from the beginning when you really break it all down. And that wraps up the news for today, Tuesday, April twenty one. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover on tech Stuff, let me know over on Twitter. The handle there is text Stuff h s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. 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.