Tech News: GameStop Stocks and Much Ado About Nothing

a bad news one. So that's a nice change. Reuters reported on Wednesday, January, so yesterday, if you're listening to this episode, the day it comes out that police agencies in the United States, Canada, and six European countries completed an inter national operation to bring down a malware bought net network called Emo TET. Germany's federal police agency had named Emo TET as quote the most dangerous malware globally end quote, which is saying something considering some of the

contenders that are out there. Emma TET is a type of malware called a trojan, which, like the trojan horse of legend, serves as a delivery mechanism for some other type of code, typically malicious code. So Emo TET is the nasty piece of software that creates the opportunity for other potentially nastier pieces of software to infiltrate a system. So it could help deliver code that encrypts everything on

a computer, which would lead you towards ransomware. Or it could be used to allow hackers to install monitoring software to keep an eye on everything going on in a system, or even giving administrative level access to various computers and so on. The main way this malware spread was through email attachments, so it used the old, tried and true fishing technique, which is still around for a reason people

still fall for it. It first appeared back in and it has gone through various cycles of activity and inactivity in the Emo tet activity on the Internet dropped in February, but it surged again in July. Now, according to authorities in the Ukraine, imotet was responsible for about two point

five billion dollars in damages globally. The police takedown included a raid on a physical location within the Ukraine in which hackers had servers that were doing a lot of the heavy lifting for you know, maintaining and administering the botan net. The police released photos of bank cards and cash, which I find particularly wild, as I usually imagine most of the crime involving digital transfers of funds rather than you know, the physical manifestation of money. But I guess

my imagination is far too limited. At the time I'm recording this, there were no reports about any arrests. That doesn't mean that arrests didn't happen. I just didn't have any news about them as I was recording this. Now, the takedown is certainly a disruption for this particular type of malware botan net operation, but we should keep in mind there are lots of other ones out there. There are hacker groups that are independent, and then there are

some that are state sponsored. But this is definitely good news that one of the more dangerous networks appears to be offline. Now. Next, I wanted to follow up on a story I talked about briefly involving game Stop and their stocks. Now, if you listen to recent news episodes, you heard me talk about game Stop and use that as a way to explain the process of short selling.

That's where an investor borrows stock that doesn't along to that investor and then sells that stock for market price and then hope that the price of the stock falls so that the investor can then buy back those borrowed shares and pocket the difference because the investor is obligated to return the borrowed shares. The goal is for you to buy back those borrowed shares when they're cheaper, and then you know, you get to keep whatever the difference

was between the cell price and the buy price. Well, we knew that a subreddit called Wall Street Bets was driving the price of game Stop stock up after a company called Citron and another one called Melvin Capital had recommended that the stock be used as a short sell. In fact, those companies were short selling game Stop stock and they were anticipating that there was going to be a drop in stock price. Now, in my last piece on this, the price of game Stop stock is so

hard to say that. By the way, anyway, that stock had climbed seventy in a day, it climbed another after that. In fact, over the course of two weeks, the stock price has increased dramatically, and that definitely puts the squeeze on anyone who's trying to short sell the stock, because now buying back those borrowed shares will cost more money than the investor would get from selling them at the earlier market price. It means that when that price goes up,

you lose money. If you were quote unquote selling stock at ten dollars and then the stock goes to twenty and you have to buy back that stock, well now you're paying twice as much, right, So when stock prices go up, short selling becomes a loss for the investor. Now some investors will double down. They will start short

selling even harder. They will start selling more stock that they don't own, with the hope that the new higher price of stock is going to take a turn and start dropping again, and thus they'll be able to cover their original short sell and perhaps make money in the long term by jumping on it again. But this activity of of buying and selling it ends up pushing the stock price even further hop so it becomes a vicious cycle that becomes known as a stock squeeze or a

short squeeze. Really well, back in January twelve, game stop stocks we're selling at nineteen dollars and cents per share, and I mentioned that they've increased dramatically, So what does that actually mean well, by January the stock price was at three hundred fifty dollars per share. So now let's talk about market capitalization. Now, essentially, we take the number of shares that the company issues out and we multiply that number of shares by the share price to figure

out what the market cap is. So for game Stop, as of the time I'm recording this, that market cap is at around twenty six bill in dollars. That is bonkers. And you might ask what has game Stop done to

merit this jump and value, and the answer is nothing. Really, this price inflation is due to a lot of perception and market activity among stockholders and was exacerbated when the short sellers were trying to buy up more stock or sell more stock, short sell more stock in an effort to make up for the losses they were already experiencing,

and the cycle was getting worse and worse. The stock market has actually halted trading on game Stop shares numerous times over the last week due to that high volatility in trading. That's a protective measure that's necessary because sometimes a really volatile stock can set off a kind of chain reaction in the market, and then you've got real chaos on your hands, and it's hard to see how

this will all end well in the long run. It seems that eventually the market value for game Stop will have to readjust to better reflect the actual value of the company, and you would expect to see that the

market share price fall as a result of that. And for those of you who don't know what game Stop is in the first place, it's a video game retail company as and this is a company best known for having brick and mortar stores in the real world where you can go and buy video games and video game systems, or even sell back your old copies of games to

the game Stop. You would think that would the double wamy of the pandemic keeping most people at home and away from stores, and the general rise of digital downloads as opposed to buying physical copies, It would mean that a company like game Stop wouldn't be seeing such a huge surge and stock market price, which is why I get the feeling that eventually this will all have to settle down. At least I hope it settles rather than crashes. Now.

I should also stress I am no market expert. Maybe this higher stock price will stick around and become stable. I doubt it, but I fully admit this is not my area of expertise by a long shot, or else

I would probably be a millionaire by now. Now. One of the big stories in the second half of twenty was all about how former President Trump was pressuring Chinese company byte Dance to sell off its video streaming platform TikTok to an American company or companies or else face the apparently unenforceable threat that the service would be taken

down in the United States. In fact, the reason that that sale has yet to take place is because the government really didn't follow through on the threats that was making. And I think I think a lot of people over at byte Dance slash TikTok are just saying, well, until they actually show us they really mean business, I guess we just keep doing what we're doing. Now. It remains to be seen what the Biden administration is going to do with regard to TikTok. It's possible they don't do

anything at all. But meanwhile, over in India, things are definitely changing. The Indian government banned TikTok along with fifty eight other apps that are linked to China. Now that followed a military confrontation between India and China in the Galawan Valley back in the summer of twenty twenty, and this week by Dance announced it was shutting down nearly all of its operations in India and laying off almost

every employee there as well. One unnamed source told the website in Tracker that as many as eighteen hundred people would lose their jobs and the company would retain around maybe two fifty employees in India. Some of the other apps affected by this band include the mobile version of

Player Unknowns Battlegrounds and the messaging service we Chat. In terrifying news, The Guardian reports that a US government appointed panel that included tech executives have made the recommendation that the United States pursue the development of military AI applications, including weapons powered by artificial intelligence. Leading that panel was

Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google. I guess it kind of is fitting to say that before he was CEO of Google, the company had kind of an unofficial motto of don't be evil, and that's not the motto anymore. I'm not saying the two are connected, but I'm not not saying the two are connected anyway. The logic of this, if you can call it, that, is that the AI would, if designed properly, make fewer mistakes than people. And you know that if designed properly, is an enormous qualification there.

I mean, if we have seen stories about how image recognition software can sometimes get things really wrong at times that can go from embarrassing to outright offensive, you know that kind of opens up your eyes When that happens. You might be dealing with some harsh criticism, and maybe it might lead to a deeper discussion about topics like bias and transparency and artificial intelligence. But when we're talking military applications, it's obviously a more immediate issue of life

or death type of scenarios. A former Deputy Secretary of Defense named Robert Work said that quote, it is a moral imperative to at least pursue this hypothesis end quote, which might come as news to the hundreds of computer scientists who have previously spoken out about this very concept. In fact, there is a coalition of organizations that have signed documents calling for a ban on any uses of artificial intelligence with regard to warfare. UH it often gets

reduced to no killer robots, that kind of thing. The general concern is that applying AI to war will set off a type of arms race, and that further, any poorly made AI would be inherently dangerous. I mean, for that matter, a well designed AI would be dangerous, because I mean, that's its job. But it doesn't take much imagination to conjure up scenarios in which an AI system could make a call that a human being would never do,

potentially setting off a catastrophic series of events. For example, just as a hypothesis, if an AI decided that losing an entire city was an acceptable loss, it might move forward with that decision that could lead to the deaths of millions of people. Now that's definitely on the bad

end of the spectrum of possibilities. You could also argue it's possible that AI systems could prevail in situations where humans would fail, that an AI would act faster and with a better result than humans would, and that lives would be saved in that example. But it is a sobering thought, and in the end, the panel's recommendations, which

will be finalized the spring, are not binding. It's not like whatever the panel finds the government will immediately implement, and I expect we're going to see a lot more people speaking out against the idea. And we've chatted a bit about the trend of employees at tech companies forming unions to help create more leverage when negotiating with executive leadership. A lot of the news episodes have talked about Google's ongoing battle with the Alphabet Workers Union or a w

you another thing that's very hard to say. But meanwhile, over at Amazon, we're seeing something play out that seems pretty familiar to anyone who was following the stories around the United States elections last year. Amazon workers planning to unionize a warehouse in Alabama have to vote on whether or not that happens. It's a union election, and essentially now the people trying to form the union want to

hold this vote through mail in ballots. I mean, we're in the middle of a pandemic, so going to a physical location in order to cast your vote is frowned upon, generally speaking. But Amazon is pushing back on this. They're attempting to force the workers to participate in an in person vote instead, perhaps due to the fact that it might be a way to discourage people from voting. I mean, that's that's my just hypothesizing. I don't have anything to

back that up. It could be other reasons. Amazon says that the reason is because, at least according to company representatives, that the mail in process would take too long and that would require too many resources. Uh. The National Labor Relations Board had previously said that employees should be allowed to vote by mail in ballot. Amazon is appealing that decision.

But assuming that the n l RB does not roll back that decision, and there should be a union election on February eight for that warehouse, and if the workers do vote to unionize, it would mark the first Amazon warehouse in the United States to do that. I'm sure much of the tech sector has its eyes on Alabama, as between Amazon and Google, we could end up seeing a general move toward unionization in the tech space. I've got a lot more to cover in today's episode, but

first let's take a quick break. The Iranian government has issued a new social networking ban, this one targeting Signal, the messaging app. Now you might remember from recent episodes that Signal was having a bit of a growth spurt because people who had been using WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook had started to abandon WhatsApp and they were turning to companies like Signal and Telegram instead. Well, Iran has already banned Telegram, and now Signal has followed suit.

At the heart of the issue of people leaving WhatsApp is a recent announcement that Facebook would be gathering some meta data around how users were interacting with WhatsApp and then putting that metadata to use over on Facebook proper, and that raised a lot of privacy concerns that led to people kind of abandoning ship. Well, the Iranian government does doesn't seem too thrilled with Signals product, which includes

encrypted communication services. As such, the government dropped all Signal traffic on the country's internal networks, and the government has also ordered Iranian app stores to drop Signal from their virtual shelves. As I said, Telegram had already been banned in Iran. It's still in use in Iran. You just can't download it legally there, but there are people who

are still using it in order to communicate. And in fact, when it comes to social apps that allow for messaging, the only two big ones that have not yet been banned by Iran our WhatsApp, and Instagram, both of which are owned by Facebook. Maza A Lamardani, a researcher with article nineteen, speculates that this is probably because the Iranian government wants to put bands in place on social services before those services grow large enough for it to cause

a noticeable uproar within the country. Generally speaking, the Iranian government tends to not like it if people can talk without them being able to see what they're talking about, as the Iranian government can fall a little bit on the paranoid side of the scale. NBC reports that a survey conducted by the National Association for Business Economics found that around eleven percent of respondents, which were mainly you know, business leaders, expected to see a future in which all

employees would return to offices. So, in other words, eleven of those surveys said, yeah, I think we're going to get to a point where everyone will be back in the office, which means everybody else was saying, I'm not

so sure about that. In fact, more than half of them said that they had already allowed for most or all staff to work remotely during the pandemic, and the general consensus is that at least for the short term, most companies are seeing a future in which a significant percentage of the workforce will continue to work from home rather than commute to an office, or they might move to a model and which people do come in for some days during the week and they work from home

on other days, which is what I was doing before the pandemic switched me over to working from home almost entirely exclusively. I am not surprised by the results of this survey. I am curious how it will affect office spaces moving forward. Uh. For some companies, the office is a bit of prestige, right. It's something that can be used to impress partners and clients or potential higher ers.

But an empty office doesn't give off quite the same vibe, and office space can be really expensive to maintain, particularly in fashionable parts of town. So I imagine some businesses will examine various scenarios, including some that see them downsizing the actual office space used in an effort to cut

costs and conserve resources. You know, if they say, well, we've got a hundred people who work out of this office, but only twenty of them come in, there's no reason why we need to support a space that can hold a hundred people. Let's scale back now. Perhaps when enough people have been vaccinated, we'll start to see a change. So it may be that a lot of companies just

say let's just tread water until the vaccinations roll out. However, we need to remember that COVID is not going away even after vaccinations, and that we're likely looking at a reality in which we will need to get vaccinated against COVID on a regular basis as the virus evolves. So, in other words, there's no real resetting back to the normal that existed pre COVID. Now. I don't know how this is all going to turn out, and I'm sure there will be a lot of negative consequences no matter

how it unfolds. I also know that working from home isn't easy for everyone. In fact, on a personal note, it's changed me quite a bit. I used to be extremely extroverted, but now I actually get antsy if I happen to see a group of people, and even if I play a video game with a crowd and it it makes me feel anxious. But that's enough about me. However, related to that story is what's going on over in

the San Francisco Bay Area. In California. Now that has long been the epicenter of the tech world, or at least the tech world in the United States, so you know, the US slice of the tech world. Anyway, there are a few things to know about San Francisco in general. One, the real estate market there is truly outrageous, like Jim

and the Halla Graham's truly truly truly outrageous. For example, according to Town and Country, an empty lot measuring less than half an acre in size, meaning there's no house there, there's nothing there but an empty lot, that would set you back five point four million dollars in Palo Alto, California. Now, Palo Alto is closer to San Jose than it is to San Francisco, but it is in the general Bay area. The average rent in San Francisco for a one bedroom

apartment in the city itself is about thirty dollars per month. Now, it's not the most expensive place in the world, but it is. You know, it's expensive to live there. And in a world where you can do your work from home and not commute to an office, it opens up the possibilities to you know, live somewhere else, somewhere that isn't nearly as expensive. Axios published an article citing that

nearly nine thousand households have left the San Francisco area recently. Now, some of that might be due to COVID directly, but a lot of it seems to be more about the cost of living versus the actual living conditions of the area. The tech sector attracts a lot of talent to it, and in general, the tech sector pays talent pretty well, and that drove up the real estate prices in the Bay Area over a couple of decades. And that also pushed people who were not fortunate to have a high

paying tech gig further out of the city. They had to commute much further to their jobs. So people working in industries that, you know, it wasn't like a high paying developer job or something, might have to commute more than an hour each way because they couldn't afford to live in the same region where they worked. Now we're starting to see some of the tech companies themselves consider a move away from the Bay Area, and some of the places that companies are looking at include Miami, Florida,

in Austin, Texas. And it's really too early to see what the effect of all this is going to be. But it's certain that the disruptive sector known as tech is going to disrupt the Bay Area even more. Sticking with that Bay Area tech sector, let's talk a bit about Facebook, the media platform that is frequently part of the headlines. MSN reported on the amount of money that tech lobbyists spent in twenty twenty in the United States

in an effort to influence politics. Here, Facebook, to no huge surprise, was the top spender in a lot of them now. According to the report, Facebook spent nearly twenty million dollars on lobbying, which represented an increase of nearly eighteen percent over how much it's spent in twenty nineteen. Google, by contrast, actually cut spending by thirty six percent in twenty,

down to a measly seven and a half million dollars. Overall, the top five tech companies, which also includes Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft, spent less on lobbying efforts in twenty than they did in twenty nineteen. So Facebook is more of an exception in this case, since Facebook actually increased its spending, and out of those five companies I just mentioned, only Microsoft has recently been left out of antitrust investigations into whether or not those other companies represent a monopoly. The

investigations conclude that, yeah, they kind of do. So hey, Microsoft dodged a bullet on that one. But then let's remember that Microsoft itself has been the subject of antitrust investigations in the past. With the change in administrations here in the United States, it will be interesting to see how things progress on this front. Will various state and federal agencies pushed to break up some of these companies,

will the unionization efforts create complications for them? I have no clue, but I'll be keeping an eye out on this and of course reporting it to you guys. And another Facebook story, this one really a grim one, centers on material posted on Facebook that denies or distorts information about the Holocaust, like claiming that the Holocaust was a hoax.

You know that never happened. The Anti Defamation League has long pressured Facebook to take a more active role in banning posts that claimed that the Holocaust was a hoax, and while the company had been urged by various groups and individuals to take action for years against that kind of material, it was only back in October of twenty twenty that the company actually said it was going to

do it. In a blog post by Monica Bickert, who is the vice president of Content Policy at Facebook, the company laid out that the official hate speech policy for Facebook would now include any content that quote denies or distorts the Holocaust end quote. But now, several months later, in one the a d L found that such contents still pops up on face Book and stays there, including Facebook groups dedicated to claiming that the Holocaust was a hoax.

The organization thus awarded Facebook the grade of D a failing grade, for its efforts to moderate such content. This kind of reinforces the idea that it is relatively easy to create an algorithm that's designed to boost content that shows signs of a lot of air quotes engagement, but it is a lot harder to find ways to moderate

content to remove stuff like hate speech and misinformation. That is a huge problem because in the meantime, Facebook continues to be a misinformation distribution machine with incredible reach, and it was you know, had had an economic incentive to be like that, because again, engagement means spending more time on the platform. Spending more time on the platform means

being served more ads and ads our health. Facebook makes the vast majority of its revenue, so it had an incentive to keep people there, And if people are staying there because of bad stuff, then there wasn't a whole lot of incentive to remove the bad stuff until public pressure reaches a point where it's undeniable. That's kind of where we are, and even now Facebook is still failing,

at least according to the Anti Defamation League. Well, we have a couple more stories for this episode, but before I get to that, let's take another quick break. We're back and some of you listeners might not be aware that back in the old days, I wrote for a site called how Stuff Works dot com. That's how tech Stuff got started as a podcast offshoot of the website.

Just like other shows like Stuff You Should Know and Stuff You Missed in History Class, if the show has the words stuff in the title, there's a chance, not a guarantee, but a chance that it branched off from

How Stuff Works. Anyway, one of the articles I wrote for that site was about Project Loon, which was an effort from Google to create a network of high altitude balloons carrying equipment that would provide Internet connectivity as a sort of floating infrastructure, and it was an innovative approach to extending Internet connectivity to remote areas that otherwise might go without. So, for example, think of like a little town in Africa that's many, many many miles away from

the nearest big city. It might not have any Internet connectivity, and it would be incredibly difficult and expensive to build out the infrastructure to connect it to that big city. But if you float the Internet above this this community, you could potentially provide it network connectivity. But we learned last week that Google is deflating the program, so to speak, ending the nine year long experiment. Now the technology worked.

The balloons could send down signals that communities could tap into. The high altitudes were above really gusty winds, so it was possible to maintain a connection to specific regions. You knew what was going to happen with the balloons, so if you just had enough coverage, then you could maintain that connectivity. But the company could not find a way to make the business work from a revenue perspective. So in other words, it was just costing too much to

deploy and maintain than could be balanced. Out through revenue, and so we see the loons sink back down to Earth and we're really seeing a different approach satellite services. Starlink, the project associated with Elon Musk, is such a service. The idea is to send up thousands of tiny satellites in a relatively low orbit that can act as kind

of like a mesh networking system of their own. They would be at far too low and altitude to maintain a geosynchronous orbit, that is, an orbit where the satellite maintains its spot relative to the position on the Earth. So since the satellites wouldn't be in the exact same spot in the sky, you need a lot of them

in order to keep coverage consistent. Otherwise you would lose your Internet connection every time the satellite moved out of range, and then you would have to wait for it to go all the way around the planet and swing back

overhead again. The Starlink service is aiming to have more than forty thousand satellites in orbit in order to provide a global Internet connectivity service, which, hey, that's cool, but it does also represent another concern for scientists and astronauts who worry about stuff like space debris and it also represents a potential issue for astronomers, as reflections both of light and potentially of radio waves can make it harder

to observe cosmological goings on down here on Earth. So scientists also point out that the efforts to blanket the sky, eyes and satellites comes not from some sort of altruistic desire to supply Internet to everybody. It's not like, look under your seat, you get an Internet, and you get an Internet now. It's rather because these companies are viewing this as a potentially profitable business. So in other words, they are arguing that the media should not frame these

efforts as being noble. Necessarily on the business side of things, there are skeptics who wonder if this approach will ever be profitable. Getting stuff into space is expensive, after all, and while it's useful to have persistent Internet connectivity, there are some inherent downsides to using satellite technology. One big

one is the problem with latency. Satellites. Even those in a low orbit are very far away, so it takes time for information to travel from the satellite to either the backbone of the Internet or you're in device, so you're kind of playing a game of phone tag. Let's say you've got a laptop that connects to a router

that then connects up to the satellite link. So you are on a website, you click on a link, your command goes out through your satellite dish beams up to a satellite in orbit, which then has to relay that command back down on Earth at a receiving station, which then sends that signal out over the Internet to its destination, you know, whatever website you were trying to visit, And then that whole response has to take the same journey, but in reverse, and that tends to create a pretty

noticeable delay between when you do something and when you see the results. So if companies can't make satellites work from a revenue perspective, they could go the same way that Project Loon went, but then we also have the added problem of a bunch of junk in low Earth orbit. Next, Carl Pay made a name for himself as one of the co founders for the Chinese consumer electronics company one plus back in mean and you might wonder what he's up to today, and the answer is nothing. That is,

he founded nothing. I mean, he has founded a company that has the name nothing, which makes me think that if you were an employee of that company, you would automatically have a fun, quirky thing to say at cocktail parties. You know, if we still had cocktail parties, it would be the kind of joke that makes the other person kind of give a humorless smile and return before they silently wander off to see if maybe someone's laid out

some new snacks on the table or something. And now you have an insight as to what it's like when I go to parties. Anyway, this company nothing will apparently be making something. Exactly what that something is is a mystery. For now. We know that the product or products they plan to introduce perhaps this year, fall into the general category of smart devices, but that's a pretty big category all on its own these days. I mean, it could be anything from a phone to a coffee maker, or

a doorbell or toast or who knows. But the philosophy of the company is one that probably feels familiar to science fiction fans, the idea that technology should be so advanced that just kind of fades into the background of our environments and our reality, so using it should be just as intuitive as if it were nothing like. It's

right up there with breathing or blinking. By the way, don't think about breathing or blinking, because then you're gonna start doing it manually and that will drive you crazy. We do know that the products will eventually be across numerous subcategories, and that the goal is to create a cohesive ecosystem within which these devices will operate. And we also know that the plan is to focus more on the hardware side of things than on the software side.

But that's about all we know, which you know, I guess ain't nothing. Virgin hyper Loop, which is just one of the company's trying to make hyper loop or hyper loop like train systems a reality, released a concept video of what it might be like to go through a hyper loop terminal board a pod, which is, you know, the hyper loop version of a train car, and traveled to a destination. The video was about two and a half minutes long, and I have to admit it's kind

of cool. The video shows a scenario which you're on a pod that gets up to more than six centred miles per hour as it travels through tunnels that have had nearly all the air removed from them, so that reduces air resistance to near zero. The video shows pods that have a sort of train truck or bogey on the top of the pods, so you know, uh, a structure that fits against a track, and the track is

in the ceiling of the tunnel. Now that's a shift from the original hyper loop design, which suggested using air bearings kind of like an air hockey table, but with the pod push out compressed air to float above the floor of the tunnel. However, that particular approach was found to be impractical, so Virgin hyper loop is going with

a more tried and true method of magnetic levitation. The whole thing looked really clean and sleek and futuristic, kind of like you're commuting inside of an Apple commercial or something. I'm still a little skeptical about hyper loop. I'm not skeptical about the technology, mind you, but the practicality of building out the systems and operating them profitably. If traveling by hyperloop costs the same or more as a plane ticket,

that would be a big barrier. A study out of Ohio suggested that at least for a system in the Midwest that would connect Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Columbus. The ticket prices might be about the same as it would cost if you were to drive from one location to another,

and that would be pretty incredible. But building out hyper loop infrastructure is going to be monumentally expensive and complicated because it involves not just construction and technology, but also getting the various clearances from federal, state, and local governments to do it. But hey, just because it's not easy doesn't mean it's impossible. And my hope is that we will see hyper loop systems connecting various regional cities and

that my skepticism ends up being misplaced. That's what I hope. I don't feel like that's going to work out, but I'm hoping I'm wrong because I would personally love for there to be a hyper loop connecting, say Atlanta with Orlando, Florida. In the official Google blog, we saw a post about how covid continues to dominate our world that's not news, and that it can be really challenging to navigate all the various information sources to find out important information like

where you can actually go to get vaccinated. To that end, Google CEO said that the company is focusing on providing timely and accurate information about vaccines catered to a person's location, and he wrote that within a few weeks we should see that Google Maps in places like Arizona, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas will allow you to search for locations that offer the vaccine, and that the results will also have accompanying information about whether you would need a referral or

an appointment. Maybe it's a drive through location, all that kind of stuff, everything you need to know before you actually go. Now, as someone who had spent a lot of time researching this kind of information for my parents, who thankfully on their own, were able to get appointments, I definitely have an appreciation for tools that make this easier. I mean, I do this stuff for a living, and

even for me, it was a little too complicated. And finally, Twitter is giving a gift to the world of academia and overdue gift, and that gift is free access to the full history of all public conversation on Twitter. Now. Previously, researchers who wanted to use that information had to pay a premium to get the full record. Now they can just apply to Twitter's research track for approval, and if they're accepted, they will be able to access the full

history of all public tweets. Now, why would anyone want to do that? While they might want to research big trends and behaviors, you know, kind of track when certain things started to appear on Twitter, When did they peak, when did they settle off? How did that relate to things that were going in the real world. So a lot of things that might be related to sociology and psychology,

that kind of stuff. And while it might sound scary to hear that suddenly someone's got access to everything that's ever been posted on Twitter, keep in mind that's not quite accurate. It only covers public tweets, so any protected tweets are not included in this. And it should also remind us that when we post something to a public forum,

the important thing to remember is that it is public. So, hey, if you're having second thoughts about tweeting that joke that you thought was funny but other people might find it offensive, you know, maybe just don't do it. Now. That's advice for everyone, including myself. I've certainly been guilty of rattling off a tweet. At the time, I was like, ha, ha ha, aren't I so clever? And then like five minutes later, I realized, oh, you know, sometimes it's better to be

quiet or kind than clever. In fact, frequently it's better to be quiet or kind than clever, something I'm working on personally, as being clever was a big part of my personal identity for a long time, but now I don't. I don't think it's necessarily the best treat for me. Anyway. That's enough self reflection from Jonathan for this episode. If you guys have suggestions for topics that I should cover in episodes of tech Stuff, you should reach out to me.

The best place to do that is on Twitter. The handle for the show is tex Stuff hs W, and I will talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.