Tech News: Could the US Government Take Control of TikTok?

in the United Kingdom or the UK. Okay, sorry but I don't know what happened to me there kind of short circuited anyway. One of the objections that the CMA has had to this deal is a concern that it could potentially give Microsoft almost monopolistic command of the cloud gaming industry, and thus the deal would then be anti competitive. To amend this, Microsoft has now restructured its deal to quote acquire a narrower set of rights end quote. This

is according to Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft. The big piece of this deal or this restructuring, is that Microsoft is handing off the cloud streaming rights for all current Activision Blizzard games, as well as all new Activision Blizzard games for the next fifteen years to another company. Those rights will actually be held in perpetuity, which means the entity that has secured these rights will always have the rights for those specific titles now presumably in sixteen years.

Microsoft would then get the exclusive rights to all Activision Blizzard games and the cloud streaming space moving forward. Anyway, the other entity happens to be Ubisoft. That's a games publisher. It's known for series like Assassin's Creed and numerous titles in the Tom Clancy universe. This new deal would mean that Microsoft would not have the authority to release any Activision Blizzard titles on Xbox Cloud Gaming as an exclusive.

Those rights would go to Ubisoft, so theoretically that should quell the CMA's concerns. The CMA has launched a new investigation into this restructured deal, and the deadline they have to make a decision on whether or not they'll authorize the deal is October eighteenth. That also happens to be when Microsoft would need for this deal to close before

having to negotiate another extension with Activision Blizzard. So originally Microsoft and Activision Blizzard had play and for this deal to already be closed, but because that didn't happen, they had to extend the deal once already. So if it comes up to October eighteenth, then the decision still hasn't

been made. Microsoft and Activision Blizzard would have to come together again and decide whether they wanted to try and extend the deal or extend the period before the deal would close yet again in an effort to secure those rights. We'll have to wait and see if this restructured deal satisfies regulators. I have really complex feelings about this deal. So on the one hand, as I have said many times on this show, consolidation and markets rarely leads to

better outcomes for customers in the long run. But on the other hand, Activision Blizzard is a company that has a really rough history with regard to corporate culture and how leaders have treated employees, to put it lightly, so there's a hope that a change in ownership would lead to better conditions for employees. And that's that's not nothing. So yeah, I have complicated thoughts on this, but for

now that's where the deal is. If I had to place a bet, I would say that this new restructured approach should end up working because it seems to address the concerns the CMA had. But then the CMA hasn't really reversed its decision on anything for the past several years, so we'll have to see. Sticking with Microsoft, the company

is killing off the Connect. But wait, I hear some of you say, I thought they already did that years ago, and you and I would be in the same boat because I remember Microsoft discontinuing the Connect way back in twenty seventeen. So for those of y'all out there who have no idea what I'm talking about, the original Connect was a peripheral for the Xbox three P sixty game console.

It uses depth sensing cameras to detect the environment and to interpret physical gestures as commands, which could be used in applications and games. It also had stuff like microphones to pick up voice commands that kind of thing. Microsoft updated the Connect with the launch of the Xbox One, but there was a general kind of lack of interest

from both developers and gamers. It was sort of a chicken and egg problem, right, Like, developers didn't have a lot of incentive to make stuff for the Connect because there didn't seem to be a large audience for it. Meanwhile, the audience didn't have very many games they could purchase because developers weren't actually making a whole lot of stuff for it, and some of the stuff that was made was some of the most widely panned video games out there.

So yeah, it kind of led Microsoft to just shelve the whole thing in twenty seventeen. Now, what I did not realize was that Microsoft actually brought the Connect back in two thousand nineteen, but it wasn't for gamers this time. Instead, this version was the Azure Connect Developer Kit. So it's a tech kit for folks who are working in fields

like robotics and computer vision and artificial intelligence. So one of the fascinating things about areas of computer research is that often researchers will take advantage of hardware that was intended for some other use, like a video game peripheral, and then repurpose that technology for research. This actually happens

a lot in areas like mixed reality and artificial intelligence research. Anyway, Microsoft saw the opportunity to make a little money by creating these kits and marketing them to like research groups and such, but now Microsoft has discontinued the Azure Connect Developer Kit as well, so existing kits will continue to work. According to Microsoft, they're not going to turn off support for the stuff that's already out there. The company has also said it will continue to sell these kits through

October or until they're all gone, whichever comes first. For developers who are hoping to take advantage of the Connect's capabilities. Microsoft also has some suggested alternatives through its various partners, so you can research that if you're into it. If you can't get hold of one of these kits and you're in the field. But yeah, the long and winding road for the Connect has come to an end again. Forbes received a copy of a draft agreement from twenty

twenty two. This is between TikTok and the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States or SCIPHIUS. That gives insight into the negotiations between TikTok and the US government. So for those of you not up to speed, one of the few unifying concepts among politicians in both major political parties is a concern about TikTok in general, and

with regard to national security in particular. Lots of government bodies, ranging from local governments to federal organizations, have banned TikTok from government owned devices some regions, some states in the US really one has banned TikTok outright. Others are considering similar bands. And this mostly has to do with the fact that TikTok's parent company, Byteedance, is a Chinese company and by extension, a potential conspirator with the Chinese government,

specifically the Chinese Communist Party. So there's a long time fear that TikTok could be acting as a funnel and be directing information to Chinese agents who could be using it as intelligence for all sorts of things, from gaining information about US companies and US government agencies and institutions, to developing new ways to manipulate the American public through

misinformation and disinformation campaigns. This leaked agreement from twenty twenty two, which came from some unnamed sources, has some fairly dramatic stuff in it. So, for example, the terms of this agreement would give the US government the authority to perform reviews of TikTok's facilities and equipment, including their servers, at

pretty much any time without any warning. The government would also have the power to veto changes in TikTok's terms of service here in the United States if the government had decided that those changes in terms of service were potentially harmful to national security or American citizens. The government would even have a say on the types of executives that TikTok could hire, at least for certain positions. They would also be able to demand that TikTok temporarily suspends

service in the United States. So this is pretty extreme stuff. It is beyond rare to see any kind of document that would allow this level of involvement from the US government into a company's operations. That's just not typically how things are done here in the United States. So a lot of that document appears to aim at severing byte

Dance's connection to TikTok. Not completely, not forcing byte Dance to release TikTok, to spin it off, or to sell it off, but it does essentially remove any decision making processes between byte Dance and TikTok, or at least really neuters them quite a bit. As Forbes writer Emily Baker White points out, this agreement potentially hands the United States government the exact same power that US politicians are worried that the Chinese could abuse or perhaps are already abusing.

Now that shouldn't comfort anybody, because various agencies in the United States have shown a distinct lack of restraint when it comes to surveillance in spying upon American citizens, So it should be a concern that the US government would get that power. It's really trading one government that we're worried would conduct surveillance on US citizens to another. It just happens to also be the US government. In fact, in my opinion, anyone having this capability is concerning to me.

It doesn't matter if it's the Chinese government or the US government or the company itself. Doesn't matter to me if the company is public versus private. I just think it's bad news. No matter who is in charge. If they're able to get access to that amount of information, it doesn't turn out well. So, in other words, it doesn't really matter who's in charge in the sense of the danger is present no matter who's holding the reins. It's just the question of how is it going to

potentially be abused anyway. Again, this was a draft agreement. Negotiations are ongoing between TikTok and the United States. It's just wild to say terms like these laid out in a document between the US government and a company. All Right, we're going to take a quick break to thank our sponsors, and we'll be back with more news. We're back so late.

Last week, DC District Court Judge Beryl A. Howell ruled that only human beings can hold a copyright, which means any art, any creative work that AI generates is not eligible for copyright. The ruling stemmed from a court case in which a man named Stephen Taller attempted to argue that he should be allowed to own a copyright of an AI generated piece as though it were a work for higher piece. So Taller had created this AI tool.

The AI tool in turn generated some art, and Taller says, well, we should treat that as if the tool is my employee, and I hired this employee to create the art for me, and I own the copyright on the art. This is not an unusual thing when we talk about human beings, right, Like, there are corporations that own the copyright on material that was created by the corporation's employees or contractors. So while the employee or contractor is the person who actually created

the thing. The corporation is the entity that owns the copyright. Great example, this show. I don't own the copyright to this show. I do all the research, I do all the writing, I do all the recording. I do not own the copyright. That's a company thing, and it's not unusual for that case. So Taller was arguing the same consideration should be granted to him. He should be able to hold the copyright on AI generated art. Judge Howell has rejected this argument and said that quote human authorship

is a bedrock requirement of copyright end quote. Taller plans to appeal this case, and I'm sure there are a lot of companies watching this closely. The entire Hollywood establishment is probably pretty concerned. There's been a great interest in using AI in creative endeavors out of Hollywood. But while Hollywood executives might salivate over the possible costs that they cut by using AI instead of human beings, the threat of being unable to secure IP ownership would likely outweigh

everything else. Right, the studios would be like, well, if we don't own the stuff, that's worse. So when you're looking at greed motivators, I think that the ownership outweighs

cutting costs by using AI instead of human beings. Honestly, I'm kind of curious how my old employer, HowStuffWorks dot Com is looking at this, because they famously, as or at least famously on this show, switched over to AI generated articles, and as such, if that means that how Stuffworks cannot own a copyright over that material, that I think is a big risk for the company, And right now in US law it appears that that's the case, that you cannot copyright something that was generated by AI,

so definitely complicates matters for companies like that. Anyway, the whole issue is far from closed. I imagine it's going to take a good amount of time to hash out how copyright applies or does not apply to works that AI either created outright or helped to create. This is going to be probably something that's going to eventually lead to new legislation, but right now, at least according to Judge Howell, current legislation has no place for it, and

thus copyright does not apply. Mashable has a piece in which a third party researcher named Travis Brown analyzed Elon Musk's followers on x the platform formerly known as Twitter. Musk has the most followed account on the platform. He's got more followers than anyone else. On x he has around one hundred and fifty three million followers. So Mashable was kind of curious about how many of those accounts represented real people, or at least, you know, active users.

And while Brown's work cannot give a definitive answer on how many followers might be bots, some of the findings do suggest that a whole dang bunch of Musk's followers, at the very least, are not hardcore users of the platform. For example, more than seventy two percent of all of Musk's followers that's around one hundred twelve million accounts have fewer than ten followers themselves, and more than sixty five

million of those accounts have zero followers. So forty two percent of all the followers that Musk has have no followers themselves. Now, that does not mean that all or even most of those accounts are bots, but it's not a good sign, right like. It suggests that perhaps these accounts are are inactive or unseen like, So it seems like Musk's following is largely inflated, but that's not all. On top of that, around forty one percent of all of his followers, or around sixty two and a half

million of them, have no posts at all. None of them like, this's just an empty, empty little account. Now, Mashable points out, this might not mean that they have never posted a message. It is possible that they did once upon a time, but then subsequently deleted their history of messages. So that's a possibility. And some of them could just be lurking, right. They're not there to generate content,

They're there to consume content. More than one hundred million of his followers have fewer than ten posts on their account. About a quarter of all the accounts that are following Musk have the default user profile image. More than forty percent of his followers have a user handle that contains

four or more numbers in it. Again, when you start thinking about things like the generic or the default icon for your profile image, or having lots of numbers in the name, those are things that often suggest a bot account as opposed to a real person. Only zero point three percent of his followers are ex premium subscribers, so while the findings cannot definitively say that the bulk of

musks following made up of inactive or fake accounts. The circumstantial evidence suggests that maybe he's not the most popular person on Twitter. I mean X after all. Speaking of X, Over the weekend, the platform experienced a problem that affected posts made before December twenty fourteen. This problem affected messages that contained either an image or it contained a URL that Twitter had auto shortened so that it would take

up fewer characters. Remember, there was a limit to one hundred and forty and then later two hundred eighty characters on Twitter for a long time, So this meant that, at least temporarily, it looked like a ton of material had been lost, all of these images and all these messages that had contained a link in them. That prompted a lot of folks to worry that the loss could be permanent. But X's support department sent a message stating

that a bug had made this info inaccessible. They did not give details on what that bug was, and that all the information was actually safe. Nothing got deleted, it just wasn't able to display on X for the moment, and that the support department had fixed this issue, but it would take some time for those older messages to essentially repopulate, but according to the support staff, it should all be back within a few days, so that's good. Now.

Normally I would put this next story at the very end of the episode because it involves a bit of absurdity, but this story also relates to Tesla, one of Elon Musk's other companies, so I am putting it here instead. This story came out last week, but I totally missed it. Tesla has created kind of a goofy product to promote the upcoming Cybertruck electric vehicle. This product is a cat bed, and the cat bed's frame is made out of cardboard.

The cardboard folds into this angular shape that's meant to remind you of the weird truck bed of the cyber Truck. The wild thing is that the design of this cat bed looks almost exactly like one of a cat lounger created by a company called Hulu Mao that was released way back in twenty seventeen. I mean, if you were to put these two products side by side, and you were to cover up the brand names that are printed on the cardboard, I don't think you would be able

to tell which one was which at a casual glance. However, the creator of the Hulu Mau version said that he did not file for a patent on the design of that cat lounger. He was actually advised that it would have been too complicated and expensive to pursue one as sort of a small business pursuit. This is out of Taiwan, by the way, so technically the creator doesn't have IP

rights that he can exercise against Tesla. He says that he doesn't really have any legal means to go after the company because he doesn't hold a patent on the original design. But it clearly is like it looks like a direct copy to me, or at least a very very very close copy. Maybe not maybe direct as being too extreme, but from my limited perceptible abilities, I would

say that they're almost identical. The creator of the original version said it would be really cool for Tesla to, you know, compensate Hulumal for the use of that design, and I agree that would be very cool, but I'll also be absolutely shocked if that happens. Okay, let's move on to a different tech billionaire with grandiose ambitions. We're talking about Jeff Bezos and his space company Blue Origins

in this section. So Fortune reports that back on June fourth, the International Space Station detected a huge methane emission while passing over West Texas, which is where Blue Origin will conduct lots of work. So analysts estimated that the release of gas was at a rate of one and a half metric tons per hour, and they don't know how long the event lasted. And that makes sense because the International Space Station orbits the entire planet in about an hour and a half, so it's not above any one

point on Earth for a very long time. So what was the source of methane? Well, again, Bezos's private space company, Blue Origin. It's actually working on a rocket that runs on liquefied natural gas, which is almost entirely methane. And so the thought was that this emission came from a time when the company was perhaps transferring methane from a supplier to the company's storage tanks and a bunch got

released in the process. The state of Texas doesn't have limits on methane emissions, and it also does not require companies to disclose when they release methane into the atmosphere. So Blue Origin has very little reason to disclose this kind of stuff. There's no reason to bring attention to it,

right because there's no legal requirement to do. So. What is certain is that while it's pretty scary to think of Blue Origin emitting enormous amounts of methane into the atmosphere, and it's enough for an instrument that's in orbit around the planet to pick up on those emissions, it's still actually a very tiny amount compared to actual natural gas

industry companies. So yes, we could fixate on this, and honestly, I think it is a problem that needs to be addressed, but it's something that needs to be prioritized after we address the larger issue of natural gas companies releasing far more methane into the atmosphere. Prioritize. Don't say one versus another, just say, Okay, we'll get to that after we get to this other thing first. But we are going to have to start actually making movement on that. Okay, We're

gonna take another quick break when we come back. I've got a few more stories to cover. We're back, Okay, we're going back to space. We were just talking about Blue Origins and methane. Let's talk now about Russia. So this past weekend, the Russian space program experienced a setback when the Luna twenty five spacecraft, which was intended to land on the Moon this week, instead malfunctioned and ultimately

crashed into the Moon. This was to be Russia's first Moon mission since nineteen seventy six, that's when the Luna twenty four landed on the Moon and actually returned moon rocks to Earth. But since then, Russia has not been able to land another spacecraft on the Moon. In fact, nobody has except China. Roz Cosmos, which is the Russian space program, says a full investigation is going to look into this to find out where things went wrong, like

what was the cause of this malfunction. The Luna twenty five had entered into the orbit of the Moon already, and the operation that took place on Saturday was meant to maneuver the spacecraft into a pre landing orbit, and if everything had gone properly, the actual touchdown on the Moon's surface would have happened yesterday. Considering the agency has faced funding challenges over the last several years, this most recent setback is really bad news. For Russia's space program.

Russia is a country that notoriously values results, and when there's a failure to produce results, often there's a retraction of support, let's say. And plus Russia's having lots of political issues at the moment, to put it lightly, so it may be that the space program will not have priority of attention for the moment. So we'll have to see.

But yeah, bad timing, bad news for Russia. But tomorrow, if everything goes as planned, a lunar lander will set down on the Moon's surface, but it won't be coming from Russia. Instead, it will come from India. So back in twenty nineteen, India attempted to land a spacecraft on the Moon, but that mission ultimately was a failure. This new one is the latest attempt to land a spacecraft

on the Moon. It would include a lander and a rover, so if it succeeds, India will then join China as being one of only two countries to have landed a spacecraft on the Moon in forty seven years. That's how far back you have to go before you start finding other countries having landed stuff on the Moon. Russia In the United States, this lander has already sent back images of the far side of the Moon. This is where I remind you that the far side of the moon

is the side that's permanently facing away from Earth. It is not the same thing as saying the dark side of the moon, because the moon does have day and night cycles, so all of the Moon will see light and darkness over the course of time. So dark side of the moon is a thing, but it's a temporary thing. Far side of the moon is the permanent thing. Apologies to pink Floyd. We should actually know by tomorrow morning. The scheduled landing time is eight thirty four am Eastern.

That's assuming that nothing causes any delays. But then we should know about whether or not the mission was a success. Should it be a success, then that means the lander and the rover will touch down the Moon's surface and they will have one lunar day to explore the moon, soay is about fourteen days here on Earth. After that, darkness will fall become lunar night. The machines will drain out of energy and they will likely be unresponsive when the dawn comes half a month later. So here's hoping

that the mission is a success. It's always good to further science, no matter who is in the driver's seat, so to speak, assuming that science isn't being used to, you know, oppressor or hurt people. All right, I have one final story before we get to some article recommendations, and that story is to give a twenty one coin salute to Charles Martinet. For more than twenty five years, mister Martinez has been the voice of the beloved Nintendo

video game character Mario, sometimes known as Mario Mario. So if you have ever attempted and it's Anne Ma in your life, you were doing an impression of mister Martinee. While he will no longer be voicing the character in Nintendo games, including in the most recent one that's coming out soon, he is still with Nintendo. He's actually been named the Mario Ambassador. I don't know what being Mario Ambassador actually means. I mean, maybe he will represent video

game stereotypes at the United Nations or something. I don't know, but it's clear that his performance was really iconic, Like people associate that performance with the character, so much so that there was a bit of backlash when it was revealed that Chris Pratt would be voicing the character in the most recent animated Mario film. So yeah, thank you, mister Martinee for your performances. I am glad that you

are still going to be a Mario ambassador. He's always seemed to be a really enthusiastic and cool do like. All the stories I've read about him have been really positive ones. So great work, and I hope that Mario ambassadorship suits you. Well. Okay, I've got some article recommendations for y'all before we sign off. There have been a ton of interesting think pieces in the tech space recently that aren't really news. They're more like analysis or opinion

pieces about what's going on in tech. So first up is Matthew King's piece for The New Republic. His article is titled Big Tech's waste solutions are a scam. So this piece addresses an issue that's incredibly important in tech, and it works to demystify what these quote unquote solutions actually accomplish, which, spoiler alert, is mostly about how they let companies justify processes that generate a lot of waste as opposed to actually getting to the source of the

problem itself. It's not exactly a pick me up, but I think it's an important article to read. Next up, we've got John Timmer's article political polarization toned down through anonymous online chats. This is in Ours Technica. This piece has some stuff in it that might surprise you. It certainly surprised me, and it suggests that the echo chamber effect is a really powerful and really pervasive one. It's

actually really hard to avoid. Finally, Leaf Weatherbeat at The Daily Beast has an article titled Tesla Syndrome explains why tech is making us miserable. This piece mostly focuses on how innovation often means you're adding features that aren't really solving any problems, and in fact can actually make tech worse, like less easy or useful. As always, I don't have any connection with any of these writers or the outlets that they write for. I just found these particular pieces

to be interting. Thought you would too if you like this show, so you can go check those out. I think they're all worth reading. And that's it. I hope you are all well, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.