Tech News: Coups and CES

before they published. That gives my super producer TORII, enough time to edit and publish these episodes, which explains why when I recorded last Thursday's episode, I didn't have any mention of the assault on the United States Capital at all, because as I was recording that episode, that had not yet happened. In fact, it was right after I had finished recording and I was starting to go back and listen to that recording that the news was starting to

break about that situation. And so today's episode has some of the fallout from that from the tech perspective. So since our last news episode, there's been a ton of developments in the United States involving social media. The President of the United States and a platform called Parlor. Twitter, Twitch, Facebook, and Instagram have all banned Trump from posting to their platforms.

YouTube has been removing videos. Reddit shut down a subreddit called our slash Donald Trump for violating policies that involve the restrictions against promoting hate speech or encouraging violence. And TikTok has been removing videos that relate to the riots on Capitol Hill, leading to some people joking that TikTok

band Donald Trump before Trump could ban TikTok. Each of these platforms have done this because of the content and tone of the President's messaging leading up to and including the day of riots, saying that he is continuing to encourage seditious acts. There are critics of the platforms on

both sides of the ideological spectrum. You've got people arguing that the platforms are trampling on the First Amendment, which seems pretty simple to dismiss as these platforms are all extensions of the private sector and the First Amendment protects citizens from government censorship. There have been multiple references to Orwell and Orwellian practices, which is particularly rich and suggests to me that a lot of people invoking the name

or Well have never actually read or Well. There have also been many criticisms about the power that these tech companies have, which interestingly is also a talking point on the opposite end of the ideal logical spectrum, though that point extends to corporations as a whole, and how over the last couple of decades the United States government has granted corporations more power year by year, enabling them to

have enormous political influence in the process. And then on the more liberal side of things, you've got critics saying that these platforms are moving to ban Trump, but they've proven that they could have done that if they had wanted to at any point before now, which leads to questions about why it took so long after there were numerous examples of violations of policies over the last few years, in other words, that the president had clearly violated policies

of these different platforms policies that if someone that was not the president had done this, they would have found themselves facing consequences. So essentially, these critics are saying that now that we're two weeks out from Biden's inauguration, sooner than that, really one week out now, that's when the platforms have finally deemed it possible to remove Trump from them. So no one's really happy about how this was done.

But some people view it as necessity to reduce the chance for further chaos, and other people see it as an attack on freedoms and a sign of too much political power. And these two lines of thought don't necessarily fall equally into the camps of democrat and republican. It is a complicated and messy situation. Meanwhile, let's talk about Parlor, which bills itself as a free speech social network. Now, this social network receives a lot of funding from conservative

hedge fund manager Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebecca. Mercer was a big investor in Cambridge Analytica back in the day and is a notable financial supporter of various right wing organizations. Parlor itself is associated with conservatives in general, and while the company says it is new role, the fact is that the vast majority of activity on Parlor falls on the conservative and frequently the far right wing

side of the political spectrum. Parlor is also where a lot of the people involved in the riots on Capitol Hill have accounts, and it's a place that has been used to organize activities like that. As such, people concerned with Parlor's role in facilitating violence and assaults on the foundations of democracy began to pressure Google and Apple to

remove Parlor from their respective app stores. The two companies ultimately complied, removing access to those apps, and then Amazon announced it was booting Parlor from their web services platform by eleven nine pm Pacific time on Sunday, January tent which, as I record, this was yesterday, So it is no longer on those servers. A company representative route to Parlor, stating quote, Recently, we've seen a steady increase in this violent content on your website, all of which violates our terms.

It's clear that Parlor does not have an effective process to comply with the a WS terms of service end quote. That's an Amazon Web Services That's what aw S means. So this means that the actual servers that Parlor used to host their network are now no longer available to Parlor, effectively d platforming the platform. The admins of Parlor initially said that the plan was to relaunch Parlor on another web service, but that the platform might be down for

about a week as a result. They also said that the plan was to rebuild Parlor from scratch, but that seems unrealistic to me. Rebuilding would take a lot longer than just a week from a coding perspective. Moreover, subsequent reports indicate that the founders aren't having much luck when it comes to finding a new home for the platform,

and even the company's own legal team quit again. This brought out First Amendment defenders, but opponents pointed out that speech that incites violence or encourages sedition or treason are not protected by the First Amendment, as the saying goes, the right to swing your fist ends where the other man's nose begins. These recent developments have elevated conversations that have been going on for years about the role of

social networks and their responsibility to moderate. In the United States, Section to thirty gives platforms an effective immunity against legal action for the content that users post to those platforms. Some have said that it prevents those platforms from moderating discussions, which is actually the opposite of the intent of that piece of legislation. It was meant to encourage platforms to moderate content on them, also without fear of legal action

for doing so so. If a platform were to, say, remove all posts that referenced violence, the platform would not be held legally liable if someone felt that the platform

was overstepping its bounds. However, rather than seeing these platforms take a more active role in moderating content, the opposite has largely been the case, and in fact, platforms have found it profitable to do so because the inflammatory content drives a lot of engagement, and that ultimately boils down to people spending more time on these platforms and thus earning those platforms more money as a result thanks to advertising.

And so there has been an incentive for platforms to kind of let things be until the situation boils over because it was more profitable that way. Once things escalate beyond a certain point, the risks of housing the material end up being greater than the reward of hosting it, and that's when we see platfor worms leap to action. Now that's not to say that all social network leaders

feel no responsibility for what happens on the platforms. It's more of a commentary on how the whole business is a moral in nature, not immoral necessarily, but a moral and moving forward with Democrats in control of both Houses

of Congress plus the White House, after January twenty. There's a growing expectation that the US government will be taking a harder look at big tech with regulations and reform in mind, which could include a renewed push to break up some of those big companies that the government deems to be either a monopoly or at the very least practice anti competitive strategies. That's one extreme we can see.

It's also possible that we'll see the government create incentives or find ways to pressure social networking companies to take a more active and transparent approach to moderating content on the networks themselves. This is something that the platforms have

said might be a necessity, including Mark Zuckerberg. There's also the possibility that Section to thirty will come under fire again, which is interesting because it's a piece of legislation that gets targeted both by conservatives and by certain Democrats, but

for very different reasons. Representatives from organizations like Tech Freedom argue that removing or changing Section to thirty will not solve the problem, and that any approach will require a great deal of thought and care behind it, or else it will be doomed to fail. Removing to thirty would then be nothing more than a symbolic gesture, and further, it could hurt smaller platforms and thus make the anti

competitive problem in tech even worse. So the message here seems to be think carefully about the solution and don't make it something that makes the problem even worse than it already is, or just doesn't even address the problem

in the first place. While there are ongoing investigations into the security failures that allowed dozens of rioters to roam the halls of the US Capital, there's a parallel effort to address the information security problems that arose as a result of unauthorized people having access to numerous computers and

systems in the capital during the incident. The physical access to facilities and equipment means there's a possibility one or more people not only accessed information they should not have, but potentially they could have bugged offices, copied data, stolen computers. In fact, we know for a fact that some computers have been stolen or at least have been reported as being stolen, or maybe stolen other equipment. They could have

injected malware into computer systems or more. With this sort of intrusion, you have to move forward assuming the worst that is that everything has been compromised. Otherwise you leave yourself vulnerable to the worst. It's pretty much the worst case scenario for computer security. That being said, effectively, each member of Congress has their own information system, which means there is some decentralization at play here. They're not all

just automatically linked together. They're all kind of their own little silos, but they are connected to so in other words, if someone does gain access to one specific account, they do not necessarily have access to all other accounts across Congress. That's a small comfort, but since we don't yet know the extent to which systems were compromised, it's also a bit of a moot point. And depending on the level of access people were able to get, the damage they

could do could still be considerable. And there's the possibility that foreign agents could have played a part in the riots on January six as well, as has been widely reported though far too late. The planning that led to these riots was largely done on platforms like Parlor and Reddit, and while there appears to have been no centralized leadership, the various smaller groups that made up the whole each

shared plans extensively within their respective groups. So any foreign agency that was paying more attention than the media was could have followed along and played a part as well and taken the opportunity of access to compromise cybersecurity in the nation's capital. It will likely take many days to assess the full level of damage, and even then we likely won't know the whole story, and maybe we never will. Well, that's enough doom and gloom from the rioting at the

nation's capital. I think when we come back, we're going to take a look at a totally different topic what c e S twenty twenty one is shaping up to be this week. But first let's take a quick break. So before the break, I mentioned it is c e S week. Now I talked about this last week. It is a very different show than what we would normally see.

C e S is the Consumer Electronics Show. It's an enormous industry trade show that has had at least one big event in a physical location every year since nineteen

sixty seven until now. In fact, since it has been held exclusively at Las Vegas in January, well, COVID has forced c e S to go virtual like lots of other events in the world, and The shift and venue is just one of the changes that we're seeing this week in c e S had more than four thousand exhibitors officially at the event, and that doesn't count the number of companies that set up shop in hotel suites but are not in an official part of the show.

I didn't realize that was a thing until I started going to c e S. And now we get invites to go to different hotel suites to check out technology, and I realized, Oh, the reason you did this is because renting out a hotel suite is cheaper than establishing show floor space at CEES. Plus you're not competing against everybody else in the immediate area for attention. However, in one the list of exhibitors is less than half of what it was last year. It is one thousand, nine

D sixty seven. Some big companies, including companies like Ford and Toyota, aren't participating this year. And while ce S isn't exactly a car trade show, we usually see a pretty big representation of car company technology on display during the event, and it shouldn't come as a big surprise that a lot of the technology we expect to see this week and beyond into the rest of one will

play into how co it has affected our lives. Companies will be introducing technologies designed to promote safety and wellness in office spaces. So we're anticipating a time when people will be able to work together in the same physical location in relative safety across more of the world. And there's likely going to be a lot more technology that

supports those who will be working from home. As kind of an ongoing arrangement, We've heard from a lot of companies over the course of twenty twenty last year that moving forward they are going to allow more of their employees to work from home, you know, just as a matter of course, even after we reach something like herd

immunity with COVID. One of the things that happens at c S is that the Consumer Technology Association brings together a panel of judges to pour over thousands of products and select some that are standouts in their respective categories. The judges come from various sectors and include executives from companies like Intel, Spotify, Comcast, Amazon, Apple, Google, and more.

Oh and that more includes some really interesting outliers Like this year, one of the judges is a representative from Cirque to Sola Entertainment Group, which famously had a financial collapse last year. Somehow my invitation to be part of this must have been lost in the mail. But I'm just joking because I'm neither qualified to really judge this sort of stuff, nor do I relish the thought of having to examine countless examples of technology and then start

assigning scores to them. Anyway, we already know the winners for this year's ce S Best of Innovation. Now. The honorees in total include two products from companies. Obviously, I am not going to list them all. That would be ludicrous, So I'm just gonna give you a a couple that that stood out to me. A Canadian company called E two I p E twip, I don't know, anyway, they submitted a product called Engineered electro Magnetic Surfaces that I

think is really cool. Now, these are sheets of plastic that are very very thin, and they're semi transparent, and the sheets can reflect, redirect, or block specific radio frequency waves. So you can engineer this stuff to allow certain radio frequency waves to pass through and to block other ones and so on. The applications for such material are numerous, so you could use it to help focus signals like

five G radio frequency signals to a particular location. So let's say that you wanted to have a five G wireless connection to your home. You want to set up an antenna pick up five G transmission signals and use that for your home network. You've got a router and the five G signals come in to the router and

then you can connect your local network that way. Well, we know that the ultra fast version of five G has a very limited range, so you need to be close to these antenna and it also has a limited ability to penetrate walls. So even if you are close, you wouldn't be able to pick this up with a router antenna inside your home because the signals themselves wouldn't

get into your home in the first place. So you might need something akin to a satellite dish that uses this engineered material to help direct signals to the antenna. So in other words, it's capturing and redirecting more of those five G signals to get a nice strong connection, and that way you could end up having a five G connectivity to the outside world, and then your local network connects by a five G that'd be super cool.

Or imagine using this material to help shield a location from outside signals, to make sure that external signals can't get into to a facility. If you need to create a cyber secure location. Let's say you've got an air gap, so you don't want to connect to the internet at large, but you still want to have an internal network complete with wireless components. So inside the building you're able to connect to WiFi, but it's only for the internal network.

You would want to have something like this to block external signals from potentially interfering or snooping on you. There are a lot of other potential uses for this material as well. I just thought it was super cool. Another product that One and Innovation award is the bio Button. It is a wearable device about the size of a half dollar coin US half dollar. It monitors various bio markers like respiratory rate, heart rate, and body temperature, with

a specific purpose for screening for COVID nineteen. I don't know how you wear it. I looked at pictures of this, but I didn't see any description of how it's actually warrnt. I imagine it has to be worn against the skin. If it's monitoring your temperature. Otherwise how would it know. But you pair it with a smartphone app and you receive notifications based on those bio markers, such as a clear or no clear notification before you start your day.

Maybe this is just something that you use to do a quick scan as opposed to consistent monitoring, But that wasn't the implication I got when I was reading over the material. Anyway, this sort of approach could be critical to preventing further spread of the illness, with some big qualifiers there, because this approach is dependent upon detecting symptomatic cases of COVID nineteen. But we also know it's possible to be asymptomatic as well as contagious, and this device

wouldn't be much help for those cases. I mean, it is looking for symptoms of COVID. If you're asymptomatic by definition, you don't have those, so it's not like it's a failsafe device that is completely dependable. Is one more measure to use in the efforts to prevent the transmission of COVID nineteam, but shouldn't be seen as the big solution. And the last one I want to highlight for This

episode comes out of IBM. They received a Best of Innovation award for the Mayflower Autonomous Ship or m AS design. This ship will be fully autonomous. It will be guided by artificial intelligence from start to finish whenever it takes its trip. It's supposed to go on its maiden voyage in the spring of this year, where it will set forth from Plymouth, England and travel to Plymouth, Massachusetts, under its own power, under its own guidance, and thus echoing

the famous Pilgrim's journey. It is meant to self navigate and self operate, and it could be a very valuable technology in the future to allow for stuff like cargo transportation without putting crews and risk of various hazards like storms or even pirates. Really. In addition, scientists will be able to learn more about the oceans by looking at data that the ship gathers as it navigates through environments that would be too dangerous for humans. The m AS

itself is more of a prototype ship. It looks fairly futuristic and nifty, with lots of solar panels on it and stuff. It does not look like a cargo vessel in other words, and it's not meant to be. Should this technology prove viable, I expect we would see more industrial versions that would look a lot less science fiction in a lot more functional. But I will be following this story with interest to see how it develops. I think that autonomous shipping is definitely a big area of

development that will see over the next few years. Uh. Kind of along the same lines that we've heard about how autonomous driving is really going to make an enormous impact in the truck industry. There are a lot of other products that received awards. These were just a few I found interesting. Let's close out with a couple of other brief c e S notes, but we'll cover more of c e S in Thursday's episode. So another c E S news, l G showed off it's TV lineup

at its press conference. The smart TV line uses the web OS operating system, and the new smart TVs will have Google Stadia and in video g force now built into them. Both of these are cloud gaming services. They're very different. In Video g force Now is all about being able to access games that exist in your libraries with other services like Steam, whereas Google Stadia is more of a walled Garden, where you own the access to

games within Stadia itself. To learn more about Google Stadia, make sure you check out tomorrow's episode of Tech Stuff because that's when I'll do a deep dive on that cloud gaming service. Also, Samsung showed off some new robots

designed to help around the house. The butt Handy is a robot that looks like a pedestal on top of a robotic vacuum and has an articulated arm attached that pedestal, and Samsung showed off a video of it doing stuff like pouring a glass of wine from a bottle and loading a dishwasher, which come on, I mean a dishwasher is already a labor saving device, but loading a dishwasher anyway. Samsung showed all these off, along with a three other types of robots as press conference, so once again we

see another push for consumer robots. I haven't seen a lot of adoption of consumer robots outside of robotic vacuums and then a few other specialized robots like gutter cleaners and pool cleaning robots. Beyond that, I haven't seen a whole lot of movement in the industry to actually go that consumer route. But maybe maybe we'll see a change. I don't know. And to close out this section, Phillips

showed off a smart toothbrush. Now, we've seen a lot of different advanced toothbrushes over the last few years, including some that track how you're brushing and giving you tips on what you should do in order to get a better coverage of your mouth. This one is supposed to use artificial intelligence to monitor your oral hygiene and automatically adjust its vibration frequency based on how you brush your teeth.

So you know, if you're brushing your teeth extra hard or very gently, then the vibration should kind of, you know, pick up where you left off or adjust based on how you are brushing your teeth. So the idea is that your teeth are always getting the cleaning action that they need. I don't know how much it will cost. It as part of the Sonic Care line of toothbrushes. Full disclosure, I have a Sonic Care toothbrush. Bought it myself. This is not a ad. I wasn't paid to do it.

They didn't send me one. Um, so I've definitely used their products before. I do not know, like the standard Sonic here was already fairly expensive. I don't know how expensive this is gonna be or whether that will be a barrier to entry. We'll see. But some people just love having smart everything. I don't think that's necessarily smart, ironically, but you know, for some people, that's just the way

they go. We have some more stories to wrap up this episode, but before we get to that, we're going to take another break. Like I said in the last section, I'll talk more about c e S on Thursday's episode. I'm sure once we have more things that have been released by then. As I mentioned before, on recording this on Monday, January eleven, the day before it publishes, so I only have a limited amount of information I can cover at the moment. Last week, however, I talked about

how employees at Google are moving to unionize. Well. According to the Telegraph, some staffers at Google have been told by executives that they need to take training in how to moderate internal email discussions, including flagging those discussions whenever

they might contain sensitive material. Now there's no smoking gun here, but the fear is that Google is attempting to head off the efforts to unionize, that they're keeping an eye on things with a goal of counteracting the unionization of Google, which you know, it's kind of a bad look. I also mentioned last week that Facebook changed the terms of service of WhatsApp, the messaging service that Facebook owns, and that is going to facilitate the sharing of information from

the messaging platform to Facebook as a whole. In other words, Facebook would be able to mind WhatsApp for data that could be used mostly in advertising. Well now an antitrust board in Turkey has launched an investigation into Facebook because of those new terms, and just a reminder, anyone who uses WhatsApp has no choice but to agree to those terms or stop using the service. There's no opt in feature. The antitrust board also said it was ordering that Facebook

stopped from implementing those terms. This is a complicated issue because a lot of privacy advocates have expressed concerns about Facebook's changes. However, Turkey also has a history of suppressing social networks as a way of stifling voices that are not in alignment with the Turkish government. So it's not a simple black and white matter here. It's it's pretty complicated.

Tim berners Lee, who developed the first web page and thus is seen as the father of the Worldwide Web, advocates for a fundamental change in how the online world handles personal information rather than personal data accumulating and what he calls silos, which are essentially, you know, databases owned by some of the tech world's largest companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, etcetera. He advocates for pods p o ds that stands for

personal Online Data stores. These would be individualized stores of data unique to each person and owned by that person. So you would own the collection of data about you, and that would include information about stuff like your online purchases, which websites you visit, the social networking platforms you belong to.

All of that kind of stuff, the stuff that gets bought and sold today, All of that would actually belong to you, And if a company wanted to access that information, the company would first need to get your consent to get that particular bit of data, and they would also be restricted to access only the data relevant to whatever the request is. Kind of similar to the way that app permissions are supposed to work on smartphones. You know,

a smartphone. When you activate an app, if it needs to access something like your camera or microphone, it asks you for permission for that, but it can't also then get permission to access other stuff that it does not expressly tell you about. It's restricted to just the things that asks you for. That's sort of the same kind

of concept. Berners Lee has co founded a company called interrupt I n R U p T meant to promote adoption of this idea, but it faces an enormous challenge in that huge companies have already developed these silos and they depend heavily on them. I may need to do a full episode on this idea and the technology behind it if you want to learn more. However, I recommend the New York Times article titled he created the Web, Now He's out to remake the digital world. It blushed

on January t one. And remember quimby, the short form video platform optimized for mobile devices that launched in April of and shut down just last December. Well, Roku, the company that's behind various streaming set top devices and smart TV interfaces, has arranged to acquire all of Quimby's content library. Roku will host the content, which includes more than seventy shows,

on its own ad supported channel, which is otherwise free. Personally, I'm thankful that the content is going to live on and have a chance to find an audience even after Quimby's collapse. While I never thought Quimby really had a strong business case even before the pandemic, I didn't want to see content creators have the rug pulled out from

under them. So it will be interesting to see if Roku not just supports these shows but then extends them, you know, whether or not some of these shows get further seasons in the future, picking up where Quimby left off, perhaps with some restructuring to bring the content closer in alignment to the running time that people are more used to, because the average Quimby video was between eight and ten minutes long, and longer form stuff was divided up into

lots of eight to ten minute chapters, you could say, so glad to see that that content is back in some form. A lot of very talented people were working on Quimby content, and then it wasn't their fault that the platform failed. In fact, I would say that really the the selling point of the platform itself was a

little questionable. Again, uh, you understand it. The idea was that people are spending a lot more time looking at you know, entertainment on their phones, at least when the world's not having them all locked at home, and thus creating a short form, high production, value service kind of made sense. But in a pandemic world where nobody leaves their house, uh, and everyone's able to watch stuff on

entertainment systems, it's a lot harder to sell Quimby. So glad that the content sticking around, curious to see if it will have a life beyond that initial outburst of creativity. But yeah, that's where Quimby is now. It's found a home on Roku. And that wraps up this news episode of Tech Stuff. We will continue covering the stories on Thursday. That will include an update on what's going on at CES, as well as I'm sure updates on the unfolding political

situation with technologies role. Uh. There's already ongoing stories that I didn't include here that we're breaking as I was recording, about various big tech companies deciding to halt political spending at least in the short term, and specifically toward politicians who were seen to undermine the democratic process. So that's something that is unfolding as I record this, and of course by the time you hear it on Tuesday, that will have progressed further, so I'll give an update on

Thursday about those stories. But we'll also cover other stuff, so I look forward to chatting with you. Tomorrow's episode of tech Stuff is all about Google Stadius, so I hope you enjoy that. If you want to reach out to me, the best place to do it is on Twitter. The handle for the show is text Stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text

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