Tech News: Happy Pi Day! Let's Catch Up

All Right, Today, we're going to be looking at a lot of updates to stories that we've been following for a while. I should probably start by saying that the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank or SVB and the US government's response to guaranteed depositors access to their funds continues to arguably be the biggest story right now at the moment. There are countless articles and explainers on it, including yesterday's episode of this very podcast. So if you want to

know more, you can listen to yesterday's episode. I talk all about the bank and what led to the collapse. I will say that it was pretty interesting to see a bunch of important folks in tech and investment cry out for a bailout when some of these folks are the same who will typically criticize those kinds of decisions. I guess when it's your money, it's important enough for a bailout, but if it's someone else's money, they should

have known better. Anyway, I'm grateful that the relief provided by the government means that folks who work for companies that banked with SVB can continue to be paid, because goodness knows, none of this is their fault. Also to those same tech billionaires who helped fuel the panic that led to the collapse in the first place, you're all idiots. I know that's just an opinion, but at this point I feel like I could say, like it's a fact they fueled the crisis that they were scared of, Like

they are the reason why it happened. Their attempts to avoid the problem created the problem. All right, enough of that. Earlier today, news broke that Meta plans another round of layoffs, this time affecting around ten thousand staff. Last year, Meta laid off eleven thousand employees. These new layoffs are going

to stretch over the next few months. Mark Zuckerberg explained that the company is restructuring and will be quote focused on flattening our organs, canceling lower priority projects, and reducing our hiring rates end quote. The earlier round of layoffs last year already took a big swing at reducing the vertical dimensions of Meta's hierarchy, you know, flattening it out. So it sounds to me like this move is really

going to affect middle management a lot. Zuckerberg also wore that he suspects the economic conditions that we're in right now could continue for several years. Apparently, one area of Zuckerberg is still gung ho on supporting would be any area relating to the Metaverse initiative, including augmented and virtual reality projects. And maybe those projects really will pay off

in the long run. And maybe I'm just a negative nancy about this whole thing, but if you've been listening to tech stuff, you know I've been worried about it. I've been worried about the potential for success down the road, and also worried about it creating an even deeper and

wider digital divide than what already exists. To put a cherry on top of all this, After this announcement with public, Meta's stock price rose by around five percent and here's where you can just insert a random rant by yours truly about how layoffs often make investors happy because they look at it as reduced costs and thus more profit. But I know I'm a broken record, so we'll just

keep ongoing. Sticking with Meta, the company has warned the Canadian government that should the government pass the proposed Online News Act, Meta will block links to news sites on Instagram and Facebook in Canada. So this is similar to a situation that unfolded in Australia. And what we have here is a pretty complicated situation, all right. So let's start with this proposed law. It would allow media companies to negotiate with platforms like Facebook to secure a revenue

sharing agreement for links to news sources on Facebook. So when links to news sources appear on Facebook, the revenue that Facebook generates from people scrolling through all of that would be shared some percentage of that would be shared with the media companies. The media companies are arguing that their work is showing up on Facebook, which means the content is being seen by Facebook users and presumably adding

value to their Facebook experience. But the media companies aren't seeing any rev share for their content being shown on Facebook's platform. And yes, if someone does click through the link and goes to the article, well then the media company gets the page impression that way, right, like they

get the little counter goes up by one. But the media companies are saying that they're providing value to platforms like Facebook, but they're not getting the rev share back in return, so that Meta is profiting off of the media companies without giving anything back. And Meta's argument is, hey, we don't post those links. That's not us. Those are posted by our users, and we can't be held accountable for what our users post. So as long as those

posts don't violate any of our policies, it's allowed. That's on the user. And essentially Meta is saying that the company is exploiting these news sources at all because they're not the ones posting them. On top of all this, we have the very real problem of funding for journalism.

That there's a lack of funding, and that lack of funding means that in the absence of good journalism, we end up with bad, cheaper journalism, and that in turn means people are less informed overall, and they're more likely to encounter misinformation and bias and propaganda and that collectively this represents a decline in the public good. So, like I said, this is a complicated situation. I honestly don't

know what the right approach is now. Down in Australia, META eventually agreed with a final version of a similar law. Results there have been mixed. I wouldn't say that it was a huge success on either side, and META seems determined to fight similar legislation in Canada and here in the United States. So we'll have to see where this goes. And again, I don't know what the right way forward is here. This one is really complicated. Okay, pop quiz time.

What do the United States, Taiwan, India, Canada, the European Union and the Netherlands, which I understand is in the EU, but this is a little bit different. What do they all have in common? Well, all of these countries and the EU have banned TikTok to some extent on the

grounds of national security concerns. Most of those countries and organizations have restricted the band to government owned devices, so that just means that government employees are not allowed to install TikTok on their work device, but they could still put it on their personal device if they wanted to.

India did go a little harder on this, but then India has also been banning China based apps for a while and has had border disputes with China in the recent past, so you know, you can see where that would be a more extreme stance than in other countries. Well. Now, the regional government of New South Wales in Australia may soon be joining this list of government agencies that ban

the use of TikTok on government owned devices. The Guardian reports that while there is a policy that requires government employees to clear any app with their superiors before they can install it on a government owned device, there is no policy specifically about TikTok, but this could potentially change

at the moment. Each department within the New South Wales government has the authority to decide its own policies, so it's kind of a department by department basis, but there could potentially be a government wide band that would trickle down to every single department. That as a possibility. Apparently, New South Wales is also looking at the overall Government of Australia for some guidance on this as well, so we'll have to see if New South Wales joins the list.

Ours Technica, which is one of my favorite websites. I mean, I'm being serious here. It is fantastic stick. It has a great piece titled why Sony says it can't trust Microsoft's Call of Duty offer? One word Bethesda. So this all has to do with the planned acquisition of Activision Blizzard by the aforementioned Microsoft. You might remember that Microsoft announced this planned deal last year and that the companies

had hoped to complete the acquisition by this summer. Activision Blizzard produces several popular video game franchises, including Call of Duty, and this has prompted Sony to protest vociferously to this acquisition, and Sony has been lobbying regulators in the EU to block the acquisition from happening, saying that it would be a reduction in competition and create an unfair monopoly situation

with Microsoft. Now currently, regulators in the EU are considering Microsoft's appeal that's designed to try and rescue this deal. The decision on that is supposed to be made by late April. Microsoft says that it has extended an offer a guarantee that Microsoft will produce Call of Duty for Sony's own consoles and release the title on the same day and date as when it will come out for Microsoft's consoles as well as PCs, so another word saying Sony will get the equal access to the titles. There

would be nothing different about them. They won't be inferior. They'll come out the same day. We will put this agreement in writing and we will guarantee it for ten years.

Sony's argument is that Microsoft has already shown its hand with Bethesda, which is another game producer that Microsoft previously acquired, and Sony's pointing out that Microsoft has announced that of coming Bethesda titles like Starfield and the next Elder Scrolls game are going to be exclusive to PC's and Xbox consoles, that Sony console owners will not get access to these games, and that this shows how Microsoft you can't take them

at their word. Microsoft is like, hey, we never once said that we were not going to do that with Bethesda. We never made a promise. The EU regulators kind of assumed that that was what Microsoft was going to do, that it was going to have these out for all the platforms, but Microsoft never actually said that. They're like, but this time we are saying that, so you can't say that we were dishonest because we never made a claim otherwise. And in this case, we are putting down

and writing this agreement. So it's a pretty complicated and highly charged conversation going on, and I recommend you go check out the piece in Ours Technica if you want to learn more. Again, it's really well done. It's called why Sony says it can't trust Microsoft's call of duty? Offer one word, Bethesda. Okay, we're going to take a quick break. When we come back, we've got some more news to talk about, all right. Next up, Insider reports that the law firm Edelson has filed a class action

lawsuit against the AI company Do Not Pay. Now, y'all might remember that Do Not Pays CEO Joshua Browder has made some big claims slash publicity stunts relating to his company's AI system, which is meant to assist people in doing stuff like drafting legal documents and fight parking tickets. In this kind of thing, it's been around since like twenty fifteen. The class action lawsuit alleges that Do not Pay is performing legal duties without first securing a law

degree or a license. Further, that the tool is not subjected to any supervision by a real lawyer, and that the whole thing has not ever been barred in any jurisdiction. Barred in this case doesn't mean prevented. It means the service has not asked the bar to serve as legal counsel in any jurisdiction. This is something lawyers have to do. Just because you're a lawyer in one jurisdiction doesn't mean that you can practice law in another one. You have

to pass the bar in that jurisdiction. So, as a result, the law firm Edelson is saying do not Pay is practicing law without a license. Browler says his company will fight the lawsuit, and that the whole reason he believes in the company in the first place is that he sees lawyers as manipulating and monopolizing the legal system to

benefit themselves rather than their clients. Essentially, that lawyers exist to make lawyers rich, and that your average citizen ends up being the victim of this legal system, and that do not Pay was meant to provide an alternative to securing a lawyer. But then the law firm is saying, well, that may be true, but you know, you still have to play by the rules, and you're not, so we'll

see where this goes from here. A ransomware group called alphv, which uses malware that's called black Cat, claims that it has compromised Amazon's ring as the doorbell security camera system. It's been controversial because of reports that Amazon was sharing video from customer ring cameras to law enforcement without the

input of customers. They're a whole thing about that, but anyway, Amazon itself says that it doesn't have any evidence of a data breach in its systems, that this ransomware group did not breach Amazon systems, but that they did attack a third party vendor and further indicated that this vendor does not actually have access to customer records. So apparently there was a successful ransomware attack. It was to a third party vendor relating to Amazon's Ring product, but according

to Amazon, it's not Amazon itself. It is not quite clear what information the hackers were able to access. They are threatening to leak that data should there demands not being met. This is where I remind everyone it's always a bad idea to pay off ransomware hackers because paying a ransom proofs that the attack is profitable. It encourages

future attacks against you and others because it worked. Plus there's never a guarantee that the attackers are actually going to abandon plans to exploit compromise data down the road. They might just engage in some double dipping as it were. Also, always practice good security protocol most of the time. Not all the time, but most of the time. These attacks come as the result of someone handing over access because of a phishing attack or social engineering, So just practice

good security. That cuts back on a lot of these attacks, not all of them. Some hackers are more clever and find different ways to intrude on systems, but it will cut back on a lot of them. India's IT Ministry has proposed rules that will require smartphone companies and carriers to make it possible for users to uninstall any preinstalled apps on a smartphone, and then new smartphones will have to be submitted to a government standards agency to make

sure that they meet whatever those security standards are. So the reason the ministry gives for this move is related to national security. So the argument is that if phone manufacturers like Apple make it impossible to uninstall certain apps, maybe even just a small number of them. Well, those apps become prime targets for hackers because the hackers know that everyone who has, say an iPhone, is definitely going to have the phone app on that iPhone because it's

you can't uninstall it. So if you know that everybody who has that kind of phone is going to have the specific app that gives you a target to aim for, you try and find a vulnerability in that app that you can exploit and potentially access any phone that has that app on it. So the I Ministry solution is to make every app uninstallable so that users could choose a different app that has the exact same functionality to

handle those services. This would be a pretty big move and it would potentially mean that, you know, in the future, India iPhone owners could do something unprecedented that replace the phone app with a third party option, not just adding an option, but removing the native Apple phone capabilities. Should these rules go into affect, India will give manufacturers a

year to comply. Reportedly, the meetings that were held about these rules included representatives from the major manufacturing companies, including Apple, So yeah, really interesting to see where this goes from here. Finally, there's some hubbub surrounding a Samsun feature introduced in the Galaxy S twenty Ultra smartphone. It's also in the S

twenty one. The feature is called space Zoom, and the way Samsung claims it works is that you take your smartphone right, and you point that son of a gun at that thar moon and you take a photo using the space Zoom feature, which Samsung casually calls the one

hundred x space zoom. So presumably this means you could take a photo at one hundred times magnification and then this app this feature, the space Zoom feature, according to Samsung, captures a whole bunch of photos in quick succession, so it takes a ton of pictures of the Moon in just a split second, right, and then it uses AI to take the best features of each photo and stitch together a high quality image of the Moon so that you get a much higher resolution picture of it. You

can see things like craters and stuff. So while the preview image might just look okay, the final photo could be pretty stunning, which is really cool, right, except there are folks claiming that this is not what Samsung is

actually doing. They claim instead that Samsung is using neural links and massive database of photos of the Moon that we're taken by high resolution telescopes, like a whole database of high resolution moon photography, and they're using that as reference material, and that the AI is not combining a bunch of photos that you took. Instead, what it's doing is it's applying textures and sharpening features on the image you took using AI, using the pre existing high definition

photographs as reference material. So the argument is that Samsung is using false advertising when it comes to how this feature actually works. So instead of it being this cool kind of in camera system that's paired with AI to create the best possible photo, it's more like it's a photoshop by AI feature. So yeah, clever Samsung. All right, that wraps up this episode of stuff. Hope you are all well. If you have suggestions for future topics, reach

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