Tech News: E3 and Nuclear Weapons

E three started out as a trade show event when the video game industry was actually finding it really difficult to get mainstream media attention at more generalized trade shows like ce S. There are a lot of stories about game companies being sent out to be intense in the parking lots outside of the convention centers, you know, where there was very little foot track fake. So the industry

as a whole came together. Uh actually the whole story pind E three is really fastinating, But it all came together in order for video games to get a more prominent place within the media landscape. These days, however, that's not so much of a problem, right The video game industry is a multibillion dollar industry with huge companies that

can easily grab headlines, whether there's a trade show or not. However, E three still stands as a time when various video game publishers and developers can get together to make announcements and show off progress that has been made on anticipated titles. Now, I've done lots of episodes in the past about whether or not the three is still relevant, and I think you know that depends on what you believe the three's purpose is. That determines whether you think it's still relevant

or not. But this year, we've already seen a lot of announcements from particular companies that should have some gamers

excited it. And I'm just going to cover this from a very high level because trust me, there is more than enough content on the internet right now about E three, and if you are interested, you should seek out the various video presentations because that's way better than some guy in an audio podcast saying and then you see this picture of a bunny rabbit, but it's a bunny rabbit with a flamethrower like that just you know has a

limited appeal. And a little bit before E three officially started, Microsoft announced that the Xbox Game Pass service is expanding to a variety of different devices, including streaming plugin gadgets, you know, kind of like the old rocou sticks and stuff that you can connect directly to compatible television's iPhones that's going to stream to iPhones now and smart TVs that will have the x Cloud version of the game

Pass service built into the televisions themselves. It will be one of those options you can pick from and you just connect to controller to your television. Game Pass is a subscription service, and it lets subscribers play a rotating list of game titles from various publishers, a lot of which are part of Microsoft's growing video game empire, Bethesda

being one of the crown jewels in that empire. The basic service costs nine dollars n cents per month here in the United States, but the ultimate tier, which includes both game Pass and Xbox Live Gold plus x Cloud game streaming service, is fourteen dollars cents per month, and it gets a little bit more complicated than that. There are other features, but we're gonna leave it at that because this is not a you know, this is not

the Xbox game Pass podcast. But at E three, Microsoft unveiled a ton of announced games and new games, many of which will be available through Game Pass on day one, and clearly this is a huge drive to grab subscribers who, for fifteen dollars a month will have access to a selection of games that individually might retail for sixty to eighty dollars a pop. Now, the plan is to bring at least one first party game to game Pass every quarter, according to Microsoft, and out of the thirty games that

Microsoft featured in its presentation, more than twenty five of them will be available on game Pass, most of them available on the day of launch, and that includes titles like Halo Infinite or Yakuza Like a Dragon, or Bethesda's new science fiction game star Field, which um looks interesting. I don't know what to think about that one yet. Also, the Xbox port of the popular game Hades will be available, Psycho Nuts too will be available, and many many more.

Oh and Microsoft also showed off a teaser video for a new Xbox branded mini fridge, because of course they did. The fridge looks a lot like an Xbox Series X console.

It's cute. Sony hasn't really been part of E three for a few years now, choosing to have its own event, and Nintendo is holding its Nintendo Direct event later today, so I don't have anything to report on that front yet, and so it really does feel like E three has kind of become the Microsoft show, though there are plenty of companies like actual game companies like Ubisoft and Square Enix and Gearbox that are showing off stuff too for

multiple platforms, not just Windows or Xbox. However, that's enough for video game news. Like I said, the web is jam packed with E three videos and commentary. So I'm gonna leave off here and move on to other tech news. And how about some scary news. First, a nuclear weapons contractor company called soul Orients is at the focus of

a cyber attack. A ransomware group calling itself REvil r e v i L claims responsibility and says that the group stole data during the attack and it's going to auction off that information to the highest bidder on the

black market. Uh. The same group has claimed responsibility for other ransomware attacks in the in the recent past, and according to Reveal, the data they took from soul Orients include stuff like employee data like salary information and personal information like social security numbers and stuff about the employees of the company. Now that could represent not just a threat to each employees privacy, you know, the typical identification

you know, i D stealing threat. It's also a potential security threat both for those individuals and for the country and and the company as well because of the nature of the work, right. I mean, if it's a foreign entity. Let's say it's a foreign government that decides it wants to have the information of people who work for a nuclear weapons contractor, you can see how that could quickly

become a pretty nasty threat to those people's security. Now, according to the company, the attack did not appear to compromise any classified information or security related info regarding their clients or their business dealings. I would say that the

information that stolen was pretty bad enough already. But the general belief is that Revel, like many ransomware groups, is based out of Russia, which is why a lot of countries have recently been pressuring Russia to crack down on these groups, something that the country seems slightly less you know,

enthusiastic about doing. The U. S. Supreme Court recently declined to hear a case involving LinkedIn and a company called hick Labs that's h i Q and the heart of the matter here is that hick Labs scraped data off of linked In profiles in order to build out a database of its own, and that information on LinkedIn is publicly accessible. That means it's not behind any sort of

password protection or anything. So you could, in theory, achieve the same result by just manually going to linked In and viewing profile after profile and just copying information down that way. Obviously that would take forever to do, but

you could do it. There's nothing stopping you. Microsoft, however, sued hick Labs and claimed that the company violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act or c f a A. Now that is a law that I'm going to have to cover in a future episode of Tech Stuff to actually talk about that law, what it was intended to do, and how it has been used since it's uh, it's passing because it's a pretty contentious piece of legislation. Some people refer to it as the worst law in tech law. Anyway,

the lawsuit went through the court system. It went all the way up to the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and that court found in favor of hick Labs and said that the c f a A does not apply to publicly accessible data on the Internet. In other words, you can't say that this was fraud or anything like that. They were just copying information that was available for anyone

to see just by going to the site. Microsoft then pushed for this case to go to the Supreme Court, but as I mentioned at the beginning, the court has declined to acquiesce to Microsoft's request. Instead, the Supreme Court has said that the Appeals Court will have to hear the case again in light of a different court case that relates to this. So I'll probably touch back on this because it is interesting. I also do need to do an episode about c F A A, so that

will come up sometime in the future. Also in the future, more rowboats or robo boats, if you prefer. The U. S. Navy is slowly building out what it calls its ghost Fleet Overlord program, which sounds like it came straight out of a Tom Clancy novel, but I assure you this is real. The fleet refers to ships that can operate autonomously, and there are at least four such ships in San

Diego's harbor right now. There's the Nomad and the Ranger, which both took a long distance journey to get to San Diego, and most of that journey was taken under autonomous power, with with a human pilot's taking over for

things like passing through the Panama Canal. And then there's also the Sea Hunter and the Seahawk, and these vessels are all taking part in various trials where the Navy is testing out the feasibility of pairing autonomous vessels with ships that have traditional human crews on them and to see how they all work together in various scenarios, essentially like you know, kind of a war games type of thing.

They also include aerial drones in this approach, and a submarine that can launch smaller unmanned submersibles through the submarine's torpedo tubes, which really sounds like science fiction and a little bit scary because whenever the topic of autonomous weaponry comes up, I get a bit uncomfortable. I'm not crazy about autonomous weapons. The tests, however, are still just that this is not an indication that robo warfares around the corner.

In fact, the Navy says that actual deployment of unmanned systems is likely at least a decade of off a group of big tech companies, including Intel, Autodesk, sales Force, Alphabet that's Google's parent company, Amazon, and Facebook are petitioning the Securities and Exchange Commission or SEC, to require companies

to publish a climate change performance report. So these big companies are arguing that there needs to be some more accountability within industries and that the SEC needs to make certain that companies are following through on their their plans to reduce carbon emissions and to curtail other activities that are potentially harmful to the environment. And you might wonder why these big tech companies are pushing for the SEC

to do this, Like what's in it for them? I mean, most companies are not big fans of regulation, so asking for more government intervention in these matters to require companies to produce reports seems counterintuitive. However, it may be that this is both too you know, actually make moves to reduce harm with regard to climate change. In other words, it might be a sincere effort to try and do

something about the climate crisis. And it may also be about, you know, making certain that other companies are not breaking the rules and getting an unfair market advantage because unlike these companies, Uh, the little ones that are breaking the rules aren't actually taking the more expensive route of being accountable. They're taking the shortcut, the carbon rich shortcut, and thus getting an unfair advantage. But that's just a guess on

my part. I don't know for sure. In Pakistan, the Punjab government has announced a plan that is downright astonishing and it all has to do with COVID vaccinations. So various companies and governments around the world have created different incentives to encourage more people to go and get vaccinated. Um and as someone who lives in a state that still has an embarrassingly low number of vaccinated adults, I can understand that move. But Pakistan is going a step further.

This isn't a get vaccinated and you might win a prize. This is get vaccinated or we shut off your phone. According to zd net, the Punjab government will block mobile sim cards that belong to people who refuse to get vaccinated. So if you don't get your jabs, you don't have a working mobile phone. Now, on the one hand, I feel like everyone who can get vaccinated should get vaccinated. But on the other hand, cutting off mobile phones is

a pretty tough penalty. Particularly in a world where many of us use our phones as our primary means to connect to the internet and thus to interact with basic stuff in our lives. So I personally lean towards this

being a little too extreme for my tastes. But on the other hand, I can't deny that vaccinations are absolutely critical and that a lower vaccination turnout means there are more opportunities for COVID to spread and you take and potentially get worse, which could set the whole world back to square one or even further back when it comes to fighting the disease. So I didn't know how to feel about this one. I do know that if any politician tried to do something similar here in the United States,

there would be riots. According to the e f F fifteen universities have formed a consortium that is, in effect a patent troll. So what is a patent troll? Well, first, let's talk about patents. A patent is sort of like a copyright for an invention. So if you invent something new, you can apply for a patent and a patent office will review your application and then decide whether or not your invention meets the requirements for a patent. So, in other words, is it actually a new invention, could it

potentially actually work? Does it rely upon any existing technologies? And if so, did you credit those technologies in your application? But assuming that your application does meet all the requirements, you can get a patent and that protects your invention and design for a certain amount of time. And during that time, no one else can legally produce your invention unless they first get your permission, which is typically through

a license deal. You are allowed to exploit your invention however you like, so you can go and make you know, products based off your invention if you if you like, or you can again license it out to other people or both. A patent troll is an entity that scoops up patents. It doesn't necessarily make patents itself, although it might, but it may go around and purchase patents from other companies. And often these are low value patents, ones that haven't

really been you know, exercised very much. Uh, And they're not they're not doing it for the purposes of creating anything with the patents, like, they're not going to make any products or services based off of it. Instead, they seek out companies that are making stuff that potentially could infringe upon one of those patents that the troll owns. So patentrols will buy up as many of these low

value patents as possible. On cast of wide net and threatened litigation against companies that the trolls claim are relying on technology that is covered by the trolls patents. Litigation is expensive. I mean, even if you win the lawsuit, it's expensive. So a lot of companies will just pay a licensing fee. Meanwhile, the troll isn't actually doing anything useful with those patents, and it's generally thought of as

a pretty skiezy thing to do. According to the e f F, this new company is going to follow a very similar approach, and the group of universities includes Harvard, Cornell, Columbia University, cal Tech, Yale, Princeton, and the University of Pennsylvania, among several others. Finally, Airbus is now working on hydrogen fuel tanks for a planned new type of airliner called the Zero E. The E stands for emissions, so hydrogen can be used as a fuel in a couple of

different ways. You could create fuel cells, which are sort of like batteries, except that you have to replenish the fuel in them. So typically you're talking about oxygen on one side of the fuel cell and hydrogen on the other, and there's like a semi permeable membrane between the two that allows ions to flow through from one direction to the other, but electrons have to flow through a different pathway,

and thus you harness the electrons for you know, electricity. However, those would not really be strong enough to power like an airliner, so air Bus is looking at hydrogen as more of a traditional fuel, the kind that could be used in combustion engines. Hydrogen is the most plentiful element in our galaxy, but that doesn't make it super easy

to get hold of. Hydrogen bonds readily with other stuff like carbon compounds, and that means that getting hold of hydrogen usually requires you to pour some energy into the effort first, So you have to make sure that you know the amount of hydrogen you're getting out is going to represent more of an energy storage than however, however much energy you needed to get hold of it in the first place. Moreover, hydrogen has some other challenge, and

just for one thing. To make efficient use of hydrogen, air Bus needs to have it in liquid form in order to you know, hold enough of it to fuel a plane. Now, that requires keeping hydrogen at the temperature of minus four eighteen degrees fahrenheit, which is pretty chilly, much colder than any airplane air conditioner I've ever felt, thankfully, And hydrogen is also very, very flammable, so those storage tanks need to be strong and capable of withstanding temperature

fluctuations and temperature cycles and that kind of thing. But this is all in an effort to reduce carbon emissions, because burning hydrogen doesn't generate carbon emissions the way gasoline does, or jet fuel for that matter, and reducing carbon emissions is something the airline industry is really looking at carefully because it's no secret that your typical flight has a

pretty awful carbon footprint associated with it. So getting that reduced is a big, big incentive for airline companies that are in a world that is increasingly moving towards a carbon neutral approach to doing business. And that's it for the tech news for Tuesday, June one. We'll have some more tech news on Thursday, and in the meantime, if you have any suggestions for topics I should cover, like the cf A A let me know over on Twitter. The handle for the show is tech 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 my Heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.