Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and I love all things tech. And this is the tech news for Tuesday, March second, twenty twenty one. China joins the list of countries experimenting with a national digital currency. It is the first major world power to do so, and it's doing it in kind of an interesting way.
According to The New York Times, Chinese citizen Annabel Huang won a lottery held through the app we Chat. She was one of several thousand people to win this way, and her prize was two hundred digital yuan, which is worth around thirty U S dollars. She then said she went to a convenience store to purchase some snacks with her virtual prize money and to spend the currency, she pulled up an app on her phone which displayed a QR code. The store scanned the code, and then the
transaction followed. She said the experience was similar to other payment apps that already exist, though not quite as seamless as those older ones that have been on the market for a while. It's good she went ahead and spent it, because this experiment is a limited time offer type deal, and winners who fail to spend their two hundred yuan before the experiment ends will find that the digital money
has vanished in a puff of ones and zeros. While The New York Times notes that several countries have explored the use of digital currencies in the wake of cryptocurrencies becoming popular, you know, particularly bitcoin, it's really good to remember that digital currency and bitcoin are not synonymous. They're not exactly the same thing. Bitcoin is not backed by any sort of central authority. In fact, that's one of
the major selling points for the currency. And for another, Bitcoin is really more like a commodity than a currency. It's value fluctuates so much that it makes it difficult to use if you plan to actually, you know, purchase stuff with it. I've said it before. It's hard to convince yourself to hand over a dollar bill if you suspect that tomorrow that dollar bill will hold ten times the value that it holds today. If you just hold onto that dollar bill, your wealth increases. But really, digital
currencies are exactly what they sound like. They are a virtual version of the cash you would otherwise carry around. Digital currency could play a big part in transactions from the future, but it can also lead to yet more data tracking and analysis. The possibility that China would use digital currency to keep tabs on big trends as dawn ting and the thought of it getting more granular than that is downright scary. And that's another way a nationally
backed digital currency is very different from bitcoin. Another big selling point for bitcoin is that if you were to use it in a transaction, it would be largely anonymous. Oh and the digital Yuan doesn't rely on blockchain either. That's another central component of bitcoin. So if you do find yourself in a conversation about digital currencies sometimes that happens to me, it's helpful to remember that it's not
synonymous with the old bitcoin example. In related news, there's already a scam aiming to trick Chinese citizens who are hoping to use the digital Yuan. The scam claims to be the quote Central Banks International Wallet end quote, and it also claims to give citizens the chance to access quote a secret c B d C promotion fund end quote worth nearly two hundred million dollars using an app.
The people behind the scam are collecting personal information, including bank account info, from their targets, and they promise a two percent return on deposits made through the app, which makes it sound to me like this is essentially a Ponzi scheme, or they might just be taking all the money, which means it's not a Ponzi scheme. It's just playing theft. Not that a Ponzi scheme isn't theft. It is as well,
it's just that it's more cleverly disguised theft. In the end, these efforts follow the very well worn footsteps of older scams. The scammers target people by focusing on something new and not fully understood, and they capitalize on that unfamiliarity, and they bait the hook with promises of big returns on investment. Then they scamper off with other people's money, same as it ever was. Gab, a social network that caters to users who fall on the right wing of the political spectrum,
has been hacked. Wired reports that a activist with the handle Jack Sparrow that's a J A x P A r oh very cute, you filthy pirate anyway, Jack Sparrow has breached gabs servers and made off with more than seventy gigabytes of information, including personal information about the platform's user base. The activists shared this info with a whistle
blower organization called the Distributed Denial of Secrets. Now, this is the first time I've heard about this particular group, and the fact that they take their name from d DOS attacks is something. According to de DOS Secrets, I guess the data includes information that users might have expected to be safe and sound, including private messages between users. Initially, GAB officials said that they had no actual evidence to support that an attack even happened, but over time that
has changed. Now the CEO of GAB, Andrew Torba, describes the attack as having been conducted by quote mentally ill end quote hackers. Yikes, it's quite the judgment call. DIDAS Secrets says that it does have some passwords that are in plain text, but the organization has not tested them, so it hasn't looked to see if those passwords actually work, and they also say they have not attempted to decrypt the hashed passwords that were part of the data dump.
Emma Best, co founder of dedas Secrets, does say, however, that the data collected could be a quote goldmine of research for people looking at militia's neo Nazis, the far right, Q and non and everything surrounding January six end quote that's in reference to the riots at the US Capital.
This reminds me a bit of the news we got leading up to Parlor or Parley if you prefer, are getting the boot from Amazon Web Services, when analysts were scrubbing through data on Parlor and finding all sorts of personal information that I at least assume most users thought was secure. Sticking with politics and technology, Senator Amy Klobuchar gave a speech at a Verge Live event on Monday.
Many of her points were about how the government could and should get involved in the tech sector, ranging from the disproportionate power wielded by a small group of ginormous tech companies to the challenges of protecting user information. She pointed out how tech companies play a role in creating spaces that have enormous impact, and not always in a
good way. For example, she pointed out that online platforms can exacerbate problems like radicalization, and thus making the companies accountable for how online activities can escalate into real world harm is something she supports now. She did not overtly call for government action to break up the big companies like Facebook, Google, and is on an Apple, but if I were to harbor a guess, I would say she probably considers that an option that's still on the table.
She did expressly call for more transparency in the tech world and more work to diversify the workforces in the tech sector and to remove discriminatory practices that pop up with alarming frequency in Silicon Valley. As for my personal take on all this, well, I have to say I just don't have enough information to make a truly educated
opinion about breaking up companies. I do think that Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, I think they have way too much power and that even small mistakes on their part can have devastating consequences for end users. But I'm not certain that breaking up the companies would lead to, you know, a better outcome. In other words, I don't know that it would actually solve the underlying issues that are actually causing the harm. I do completely agree that companies do need to be
more transparent and less you know, gross. We've seen so many stories from Uber to Ubisoft and even companies that don't begin with you that end up shining a light on some of the uglier elements in the tech sector. It would be nice to clean those up and make it a healthier industry, not just for consumers, but for the people who are working in it. Speaking of health, the Verge reports that every Apple store location in the
United States has now reopened. Apple closed stores nationwide on March, so it's been nearly a full year of being closed for some stores. The company had been opening locations on a case by case basis over time, and the last of Apple's US retail stores reopened this week in Texas. That means you can at least arrange in store pickups for Apple items again, and in some cases you can even do in store shopping. But before you do, let
me just point out a couple of things first. When Apple did close stores last March, the seven day average of new COVID cases was two seventy three cases in the United States. That's across the country. This week, according to the c d C, that number is sixty six thousand three new cases over the last seven days. That is, you might say things are way worse right now than they were when Apple stores first shut down Now. Apple
does have lots of safety measures in place. Customers must wear a mask, and there is a strict occupancy limit for stores. All that being said, I would strongly suggest that if you don't have to go to a store,
take that option. I understand that some people do need to go in, and of course the employees have to go in, but to keep people as safe as possible, I stress that it is best for only those who absolutely have to go in to do so, and everyone else should stay safe for themselves, their loved ones, and
really everybody else too. We often talk about SpaceX on tech stuff, but rarely do I spend as much time talking about Blue Origin, the private space company that Jeff Bezos founded, And maybe they wish I wouldn't because I have some bad news. The company has been hard at work designing a reusable rocket, you know, similar to the Falcon heavy rockets from SpaceX. Reusable rockets really cut down on the incredibly high costs of launching stuff and people
out into space. Blue Origins rockets are to be called New Glen. The company announced the plans for the rockets in sixteen, with the goal of getting them ready for testing by twenty twenty, Bob Smith, who became CEO of Blue Origin in assessed that the rockets would not be ready by He projected that at best they would be
ready for launch by twenty twenty two. Bezos heartily disagreed, saying the company should stay the course for a launch date, but that obviously didn't happen, and now the company projects that at the earliest we could expect to see a test launched by end of twenty two. Ours Technica has a fantastic piece on this, including interviews with people who were involved in the development of New Glenn. The piece by Eric Burger is titled Blue Origins Massive New Glenn
Rocket is delayed for years? What went wrong? Rather than summarize Burger's work, I urge all of y'all to go and check out the article. It's really well done. And hey, do you know of TikTok but you're too old to figure it out? Well, me too, And don't worry because we old folks now have our own TikTok from Google. Thanks Google, Please stop tragging everything I do. I'm just kidding. I've got an Android phone. I know you can't help it.
This is my way of segueing into a story that YouTube is rolling out a new feature called YouTube Shorts. It lets users create very very short videos and share them. And this just makes me laugh because when YouTube first launched, most of us could only upload videos that were a few minutes long. Anything longer than ten or later on fifteen minutes was too long unless you were a trusted partner,
and there were very few of those. Now, over time, YouTube began to lift that restriction, and consequently, YouTube's algorithm tends to favor longer videos because they do keep people on the platform for longer. And as we all know, time is money for these companies, meaning the more time you spend on those platforms, the more money they make. But now we see the flip side of that. The short videos are going to pop up in the mobile apps section of the YouTube app. And I just checked
my app and I don't have it yet. And gosh, I'm a YouTube Premium subscriber and an Android phone user YouTube. I'm not getting any younger, and I need to start uploading videos of me doing trendy dances really really badly. And anyway, a co into ours Technica, the new app doesn't really compare that well against TikTok, particularly when it comes to editing options. I'll be sure to report back once I can try it out for myself. In the meantime,
I'll work on practicing my isolation dance moves. And finally, the City of Minneapolis has backpedaled on a plan that would have used social media influencers paid by the city to share city approved messaging during the trial of Derek Chauvin. Chauvin is one of the police officers charged in the
death of George Floyd. According to the city, the purpose of the plan was to use influencers to send messages targeting specific communities, such as the black community, in an effort to quote address slash, dispel incorrect information end quote. They were to be paid two thousand dollars for the job. The announcement caused concern, and I think that's understandable after all.
For one thing, the term influencer carries a bit of baggage with it, right, I mean, you're influencing how people think and be have, And when you've got a high profile case that contributed to a major social movement, that being Black Lives Matter, it's a pretty delicate situation. City reps said that The intent was to get messages out to the public in quick, accessible and reliable ways, but due to the concern over the proposal, it's not going
to happen now. And that's all the news for Tuesday, March one, or at least all the news that I could write up in time for this episode to go live. If you have any suggestions for topics I should cover on tech Stuff, whether it's a company, a trend, whatever it may be in tech, let me know. Reach out on Twitter to handle is text stuff hs W, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is
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