Tech News: Facebook is so Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades

like telecommunications companies or internet service providers or social media platforms, etcetera. Uh, specifically data about and belonging to other politicians. A lot of folks reached out to me and made some really good points, you know, kind of in opposition to what

I was saying. I spent a lot of time thinking about my perspective and I tried to really critically analyze it, and just as a reminder, I said that generally I am against the idea of politicians doing this because I feel it can lead to a situation in which whatever political party happens to be in power can use that kind of leverage to disempower the other party, and that

is fundamentally antithetical to the democratic process. However, I also have to acknowledge that if there is a criminal investigation and if there's a sufficient evidence to support a subpoena, you know, you can't just make a subpoena, you have to file for one and get a court appointed subpoena.

If that is the case, then investigators should exercise that to look at data and see what it holds with regard to a crime, and that telecommunications companies and I s p s and whatnot should obey subpoenas if those subpoenas are legally valid. I'm still wary of this sort of approach snowballing beyond situations that appear to be justified, Like we were talking about the January six insurrection. That's

a very high stakes, specific situation. But as we all know, justifications can get pretty loosey goosey as time goes on. So like once you start to chip away it's stuff you've got to be super careful or or you know, the whole damn breaks and you get flooded. But under very controlled circumstances, I think seeking out that information can be valid if if all those processes are followed. I just worry that we'll lose a grip on those controls.

By the way, just full disclosure. It is not easy for me to amend my thoughts because, like a lot of folks, when I form an opinion, I'm loath to change it. But critical thinking says I need to resist that urge, and sometimes I actually managed to do that, probably not nearly as frequently as I should, but I wanted to get that all the way first. Now, let's go on to the news in Israel. Hacker using the handle Sung Council, and I apologize. I'm sure I've mispronounced

that claims to have stolen personal information from seven million Israeli's. Now, if like me, you wondered how many people live in Israel, a quick search tells you it's a little more than nine million. It's like almost nine and a half million. But if this claim is true, then that means the hacker got access to the personal information of nearly everyone in Israel. The hacker says that they targeted a website

called City for You. That's c I t Y the number for and the letter you, and Israel uses that as sort of a payment processing utility, so folks can pay stuff like fines or bills and their taxes through this site. The hacker has shared images of documents that they claimed to have stolen from this website and included documentation with like personal details like like I D Cards and tax bill. Is that kind of thing? The hacker says that they want to sell this data off to

interest ad buyers on the black market. Uh. The National Cyber Directorate meanwhile, says that they don't think this is a legit claim. They say that they believe these documents that the hacker has released actually come from an older document leak, and that it's unlikely the hacker has actually stolen that much data. But that's all the information I

have as of right now. Several news outlets report that Los Angeles police officers have been directed to ask people to hand over social media details and have been doing so for years, and that includes stuff like the handles that people use online, and that was whenever the police stopped anyone, even if that person wasn't a suspect of

any sort of crime. So a cops stops someone in l A and then asks them to reveal their social media handles, which seems weird right, also a little invasive, and the only reason we even know about This officially is because a nonprofit New York University agency called the Brennan Center for Justice filed a request under California's Public Records Act and wanted to learn how the l a p D uses social media as a means to monitor

and conduct surveillance on people. The l a p D declined to acquiesce to that request, so the agency brought the matter to the California Superior Court, at which point the l a p D said it's a fair cup and handed over the information, which included around six thousand

pages of documentation. And this practice appears to have been in place for several years, like I mentioned, with cops regularly collecting social media information presumably for the purposes of surveillance, and again that was for everyone, whether or not they were suspected of being involved in a crime. The documentation also showed that the l a p D had been monitoring specific hashtags for activity on social media, such as

black Lives Matter. Once again we see how the combination of our social interactions online and a surveillance state can converge into a pretty nasty horror show of a scenario. Anyway, fun times when it comes to talking about misinformation and disinformation online. I usually end up talking about Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, but US Senator Elizabeth Warren has issue with

Amazon's role in the matter as well. Warren says that her staff, while searching for materials about COVID nineteen and vaccines on Amazon, received results that included books dedicated to spreading falsehoods about those issues, and Warren wrote, quote, as cases of COVID nineteen continue to rise, Amazon is feeding misinformation loops through its search and best seller algorithms, potentially leading countless Americans to risk their health and the health

of their neighbors based on misleading and inaccurate information that they discover on Amazon's website end quote. Warren's office is asking Amazon to view its recommendation algorithm and to weed out dangerous misinformation. The company has yet to reply as of the recording of this podcast. Microsoft, in a move that I think is pretty wise, has decided to postpone indefinitely a return to the Microsoft headquarters in Washington State.

This postponement also applies to Microsoft's other offices around the United States, and the reason, of course, is the ongoing pandemic and the dangers of COVID nineteen Originally, the company had planned for employees to come back to the office by October four, but now there is no return date in place, which is probably for the best because things are changing so quickly, it really saves time having to

push those return dates around. In fact, company executives have said that the uncertainty around COVID nineteen is precisely why they won't set a new target return date. Further, they said that when that time does come, when they do feel confident that they can go back to the office, employees will have a month long transition period to readjust for that reality. Now we've seen several tech companies shift

their expected return dates. Google, Apple, Facebook, and others all planned to return earlier, you know, this year and into the fall, but now most of them have pushed that back to twenty twenty two. One other bit of Microsoft related news, the company has announced that it is updating it's Microsoft Teams product, which is a virtual meeting software solution, and the update will incorporate Teams features into car Play.

That's the Apple standard that let's say Vehicles Entertainment System act as the user interface for an iOS device, So you pair your iPhone with your car's entertainment system. Then you can control your iPhone through the car system. Now, this means that if you do have an iOS device with Microsoft Teams installed on it, and if you're connected via car Play to your car, you'll be able to join in Microsoft Teams meetings from the comfort of your car seat, uh in a very sameless way. You can

even use Siri to do it. This feature only supports audio mode, so folks will not see video of you as you do mad drifts around the street corners with the fam. Microsoft also announced several other updates Teams that do not involve vehicles, such as additional features the team's mobile app to make it easier to access chat and the Microsoft white Board. Today, Facebook and ray Ban introduced

some smart glasses called ray Ban Stories. They cost two hundred and nine dollars eight princely some so what do they do? While? They've got to five megapixel cameras built into the frames, one at either corner on the outside the eyes. They have speakers built into the stems on the frames so you can listen to audio from a connected device. They've got a physical button that you can use to take photos or record videos, or you can

use voice commands to activate the cameras. They do not have any sort of in lens display, so these glasses are not capable of providing any sort of augmented reality experience. Nor can you see the photos that you've just taken with the glasses themselves. To do that, you will need to use a connected phone and open up an app called Facebook View, which is kind of like a simple

photo camera roll app. And these don't sound that different from the Snapchat glasses we saw a while back, but I do have to admit that these glasses look like you know, sunglasses. They don't look clunky or anything like that. So if you have a need for glasses that will let you take photos without using your hands, I guess these could fit the bill for a lot of us.

I'm not sure there's a strong use case. Maybe if I were wearing these and going kayaking or something, I could use the glasses to take photos and I could leave my phone behind so I don't have to worry about,

you know, dunking it in the water. Although the glasses are also not waterproof, They're not meant to get wet, but the glasses can hold up to around five those or are somewhere around ten to twelve thirty second video clips before you would need to offload them from the glasses into some other device, and they connect via WiFi to authorized devices and then they synchronize using that Facebook

View app I was talking about. So from the description I read, it sounds like you could use them to take photos without being directly connected to some other device. That makes them different from some other gadgets that I've used, where they were kind of conduits for your smartphone. Uh. They sound interesting, but I don't think I'll be putting them on my holiday wish list. We've got some more stories to cover, but before we get to that, let's

take a quick break. We're back and we're going to talk some more about Facebook and organization in the UK called Global Witnesses accusing Facebook of being negligent when it comes to making certain that's advertising platform is not using discriminatory targeting of advertising to users. Now, that's essentially to say that Facebook was not stopping companies from breaking equality laws by specifically targeting some subgroups while specifically excluding others,

particularly in the job category. The group did an experiment to see what kind of advertisements might be shown to different types of people, and in that experiment they found that for certain categories of products or services, nearly all the ads would be shown to one gender or the other. So, for example, if it was an ad for a mechanic, it was almost a guarantee that that ad would only be displayed to a male Facebook user. If it were a nursery nurse, it would almost be guaranteed it would

only be shown to a female Facebook user. In another experiment, the group sent two job ads to Facebook, with one of the ads saying Facebook should not show that ad to women, and the other saying that Facebook should not show that add to anyone older than Facebook did approve both of those ads. However, it also sent back a little message to the group to Global Witness, saying, Hey, you need to acknowledge that you promise you won't discriminate

against these groups by taking this little box. However, if Facebook actually was only showing the ad to, you know, the people that were designated by Global Witness, then it sounds to me like you can't avoid discrimination. Like just the very nature of the fact that you have limited the ad so that you know certain groups can't see it. That seems at least that it's facilitating discrimination. Now, whether

this escalates to UK government action remains to be seen. Meanwhile, the Australian government continues to make decisions that I think are ill advised. I talked about the Surveillance Bill earlier this week that would allow law enforcement to potentially alter a person's online posts without their consent. But now I want to talk about something else. A decision that was made by the Australian High Court that's kind of like

the U. S. Supreme Court. That court found that Facebook users can be held liable for content posted by people who are commenting on their posts. So if you were to post something on Facebook, let's say it's even something that's just a goofy meme, it's totally harmless, and then someone else leaves a comment that includes like a threat or libelous content, then you could be held responsible for the post of that person because, according to the court,

you're effectively a publisher from that moment forward. Your original post is a publication platform, so someone leaving a comment is being published through you, and as a publisher, you can be held liable for the stuff they post without your control. At least, if I'm understanding this, correctly. That's how it goes now. To be fair, this whole thing was really more about news media outlets and their Facebook pages posting content and then not modoring the moments that

were left under that content. But the implications extend well beyond those companies, Like you could see how this could quickly become a true nightmare in other news, Twitter is starting a rollout of a new feature called Communities. I say it's new, but it sounds like this particular feature has actually languished in development at Twitter for half a decade. The ideas that you can create a community of users focused on a particular subject, like I don't know, the

Marvel Cinematic Universe. Okay, you've got a Marvel Cinematic Universe Twitter community as so you can apply to Twitter to create the community. You can't just make it yourself, at

least not right now. And then once it's created, folks can join that community, and then you can tweet to that community in particular, and you spare everyone else who follows you all of your endless theories about how Mephisto is most definitely going to end up being the one who is responsible for all the bad stuff going on

in the m c U these days. Now, I actually applied to create a community around tech so that I can send tech related takes there and anyone who follows me just for my dad jokes or pictures of my dog, Tiblet can be spared. All the talk about the Hoosts and Watsons galore. I'm not sure if this feature is

actually gonna drive more engagement on Twitter. That's something that the company has really been concerned with, because, you know, Twitter adoption has really leveled off, so in order for the company to show value, it needs to drive more engagement. Twitter has previously launched features that didn't catch on in the platform later abandoned them. So we'll have to see and I'll let you know if they approve my request

to create that community. And finally, some quick stories to end out today's episode, The James Webb Space Telescope has a new launch date. If all goes well, the telescope should finally let slip the bonds of Earth on December. The telescope has had a long and sometimes rough journey

over the years to get to this point. The launch has had several delays over that time, and the James Webb Space telescope is in many ways the spiritual successor to the Hubble telescope and has the potential to allow us to learn more about how our galaxy works. It's a super interesting piece of technology. And heck, I even have a tattoo because of this telescope. I even got that tattoo while on camera for an episode of the

show Forward Thinking that I used to host. So there's a there's a video of me getting tattooed with a tattoo that's inspired by the James Webbs James web Space telescope. Anyway, I really hope it all works out and that we see the telescope triumphantly take its place in orbit. Later this year, in Iceland, an enormous facility called Orca has come online. And Orca's purpose is to capture carbon dioxide from the air and lock it into mineral form. So

it's a carbon capture and sequestration facility. In other words. Now, before you start to think that we've got the climate issue solved thanks to this technology, let's talk limitations. This is the largest carbon capture facility in the world up to this point, and according to the companies that are behind it, it will be able to capture around four thousand tons of carbon dioxide out of the air each year.

The US Environmental Protection Agency says that's approximately equal to the amount of carbon emissions generated by eight seventy cars running on internal combustion engines, presumably in a year. Well, that's fewer than a thousand cars. There are millions of cars out there, not to mention airplanes, coal plants, oil refineries,

and other sources of carbon dioxide emissions. This is why it's good to remember that carbon capture, while it can be a critical component of mitigating the problems of climate change, is only part of that solution. We cannot look at carbon capture as absolving us of the responsibility to cut back on carbon emissions. Unfortunately, that's how the practice often gets marketed. I see a lot of companies saying, hey, look,

we don't need to cut back. We'll just catch the carbon dioxide using this facility, and we'll just keep on doing stuff the way we always have. Maybe we'll even crank up the carbon emissions. Now, the truth of the matter is, we just can't do that. We cannot keep up with that kind of approach. Finally, the Stanford Computational imaging lab or at least a paper describing a really cool technology. Cool and a little creepy. They developed a new non line of sight imaging tech and that's kind

of what it sounds like. It's technology that can take images of stuff that isn't in the actual line of sight of the imaging technology or you know, like the lens. And you may have heard about cameras that can quote unquote see around corners. Well, that's a subset of this type of technology, and the way it works is not that different from echolocation. A camera will include a light emitter and it shoots out light, perhaps outside of the

visible spectrum, that goes out ahead of the camera. So let's say you're going down a hallway and the hallway has a ninety degree corner in it, so it turns off to the left and you're using this, uh this device, and some light is coming out of the end of the device. It hits the corner that you're facing, bounces off the corner, it goes off to the left side.

Some of that light could encounter an object, let's say it's the Bobba duke, and then some of that light bounces off the Bobba duke, and it goes back around the corner and hits your sensor on your device, and the camera picks up this returning light and says, hey, there's something around that corner and you should probably definitely not go that way now. Again. It's it's a lot like you know echolocation or laser range finders or speed

tracking devices. Well, the Stanford Group developed a tech that they call keyhole imaging because you could, in theory, set up a device to shine a laser beam through a keyhole or a crack in a wall to hit a single point on the opposite side of a closed door,

So like on the wall opposite of the door. So just imagine you're kneeling at a door it's got a keyhole in it, one of those classic ones, and you stick this device and it's got its a little laser pointer, and it shoots the laser across the room and it

hits the wall on the other side. Well, some of the photons and that laser beam are going to be bouncing off of all the different stuff that's in that room, and some of those bouncing photons will actually make their way back to a sensor paired with the laser and by measuring the time of travel for those photons, software can figure out if stuff is actually moving around on the other side of that door. Now I should add

that moving around part is important. The researchers have noted that this method, which uses less surface area than the older non light on site imaging technologies, is really limited in the amount of information it can gather. If the room is static, if nothing is moving there, you really can't get a bead on what's inside the room. But if there is stuff moving around, with enough time, you can gather data to gain an idea of what it is that's moving around in there, as well as the

trajectory of its pathway. So this tech could be useful in everything from military applications to integrations with car navigation and driver assist systems. And it's just kind of neat when you think that this tech, which sounds like it belongs in a Mission Impossible movie, could get all that information just by shining a laser light through a small hole in an otherwise sealed off room. And that's it

for this episode of tech Stuff. If you have any stories you would want me to cover, or any technologies you would like me to cover in future episodes reach out to me. The best way to do that right now, before I get that community going anyway, is just to use the regular old Twitter handle for the show, which is text Stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon Y. Text Stuff is an I

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