Tech News: How do you Google is Google Down when Google is Down?

briefly around the world. Apparently a software update did not go as bland and took Google offline, and that prompted a lot of buzz online. The company restored services pretty quickly, but you know, the outage was enough to launch a billion jokes about how you're supposed to Google, why Google is down? If Google is down, and I'm sure for people who go to Google to type out, you know, the full U r L for a website inside the

search field, that was quite distressing. Now jokes aside the outage as brief as it was, actually served as another reminder of how intrinsic Google has become to the web experience for many of us out there. And that's kind of another way of saying that maybe we should be really careful when we're putting our eggs in various baskets. We might have put way too many in Google's might have is that's that's too weak. We have put too

many eggs in Google's baskets. See also Meta but also in Google news, the company is in a patent dispute battle with the speaker company so Nos. Now, these patent lawsuits are pretty common in the tech industry. I recently talked about how Apple and Ericsson are in a global struggle over patent um and that's a five G patent in that case, and the two companies are trying to hash out a licensing agreement. You know, Apple doesn't want to pay so much and Ericson wants them to pay more.

So that's going on. Well in this case with Google and with so Nos, Google is saying that so Nos has violated seven patents relating to Google's smart speaker technology or smart assistant technology. At the heart of the matter is so Nos launching its own voice activated smart assistant. You see, Google worked with so nos on smart speakers to incorporate the Google Assistant feature in the so nos products.

And I have to be careful how I say this stuff, because I actually have one of those speakers in this room, and if I say one of the activation phrases, then it'll start talking to me. Anyway, Google is essentially saying, we worked hard to incorporate our smart assistant with your products, and you paid very close attention to that, and then you copied our work to launch your own competing smart assistant product, and since we hold patents on that technology,

we're going to sue you. Now, if for some reason you've been paying really close attention to patent disputes in tech for a couple of years, you might actually remember that in twenty twenty, we saw kind of the flip of this. So NOS sued Google for a similar reason. So NOS was saying that Google had copied so Nose technology when Google was developing its own line of smart speakers. Oh,

how the turns have tabled. Google lost that court case and had to change the design of its speakers in order to avoid facing potential bands around the world or else, you know, licensed the technology from so NOS. A SONOS rep by the way, has remained somewhat defiant in the face of this new lawsuit from Google, saying that SONS has prevailed in every court case so far but that's largely referring to the cases where so Nose had sued Google.

In this case, Google is suing so nos So. The shoes you see are on other feet now, so we'll have to see how this plays out. Also, I knew this is serious business and we're talking about millions or billions of dollars at play here, but I can't help but get the feeling that these these enormous corporations are essentially angry toddlers on a playground squabbling with one another when we cover these kinds of stories. In India, the

government has suspended mobile internet service in two regions. Manipur, which is in the northeast of India borders Myanmar, was scheduled to have internet service shut down for five days. The government was doing that because of expectation of quote, tribal protests end quote. The other region where we've seen internet service interrupted is Kashmir, which is in the north of India, very far away from Manipur. Kashmir borders Pakistan, Afghanistan,

and China. Kashmir is also home to a population of of Muslims, Kashmiri Muslims. Now that's relevant because of the observation of Maharam, which is and by the way, my apologies for my pronunciation. I'm sure I'm butchering it, but that is a time of warning, and the suspension of the Internet service coincides with a Muslim holy observation, which seems significant to me. Digital rights and human rights groups have long protested the Indian government's practice of shutting down communications.

The government defends these decisions. The government says that this is a measure they take in order to ensure public order, uh to to quiet unrest in other words, But the rights groups point out that these kinds of moves cut off entire populations from the rest of the world. And it's certainly the case that India is very quick to jump on the let's shut it all down course of action.

And we've also seen the Indian government laid down a lot of pressure on companies to do stuff like crack down on the population's ability to communicate during times of unrest, while simultaneously allowing government officials unfettered access to platforms, even if those officials are actively spreading this information. So yeah, this is a complicated matter. Last week, Amazon announced its intention to purchase another company and this one has privacy

advocates very much concerned. The company would be I Robot. That's the company that brought us the roomba. You know, the robot that sucks. I mean it's it's a robot vacuum. Anyway, the deal is valued at one point seven billion dollars. And you might wonder why privacy advocates are worried in the first place. Well, it's because the roomba, in an effort to do the best vacuum job, it can effectively

maps out your home as it moves around. It figures out where the doors are, where the furniture is, where the walls are, all that kind of stuff. So, in other words, Amazon already wants to hear what you have to say by giving you or convincing you to buy their smart speakers. They want to know what you're watching using like an Amazon Fire device or Amazon Prime Video.

And now they want to know where you put the ottoman in your living room by using your room but to spy on you, he got a guy on the inside. Now what would Amazon do with this kind of information. Well, Amazon is constantly making new products that are meant to interact on a smart level. And if the company knows how you've laid out your house, it can market more effectively to you, or sell that information to a third

party that's interested in it. It can suggest stuff for you to upgrade your home, and in turn will gather even more data for Amazon. And it starts to look dystopian, pritty darn quickly. Now, I should add the Amazon has simply announced the intention to acquire Robot. The process still has to go through regulatory approval, and there's some expectation that the United States Federal Trade Commission, or FTC, is going to push back against this planned deal. The FDC

has recently taken a more aggressive stance against big tech acquisitions. Uh, you know. Recently, the FTC indicated its opposing Meta's planned purchase of the company Supernatural, which makes fitness games for virtual reality setups. So geeg Wire quotes a lawyer named Ethan Glass who says he figures there's a chance that the FTC will conduct a quote unquote deep investigation of the deal and a twenty five percent chance that the

FTC will challenge the acquisition outright. As it stands, Amazon hopes to have this deal complete by August four, three at the latest and has committed to paying I Robot more than ninety million dollars if regulators deny the acquisition. The Wall Street Journal has an article pointing out that an antitrust bill that's been taking shape in Congress is in danger of being abandoned. All right, So Congress is

about to go into recess. So it's kind of like when you went to recess in elementary school, except instead of running outside to go play on the swings, Congress ambles outside and accepts numerous, numerous and enormous contra usitions from lobbying groups. Pardon my cynicism, but it's been a bad year anyway. It seems pretty clear that Congress will not speed up work on the antitrust bill before recessing. They are not going to hold a vote, and then

Congress will reconvene later the in the fall. But there's a limited number of days left for Congress to be in session. So there's this narrowing window of opportunity to get the antitrust bill in motion before it's kind of dead in the water. Now. The reason I'm even talking about antitrust bill on this show is that if passed, it would have massive consequences in the tech industry, particularly

for the biggest companies in that industry. Uh. This is the law that would prevent tech companies from giving their own products and services preferential treatment over competitors. That would force Amazon to make some pretty big changes because the company has frequently been accused of promoting its own products

over others in search results. Big tech companies have been spending millions of dollar is on ads trashing this bill, and so far the Senate has failed to schedule a vote on the matter, despite claims that there is bipartisan support for the measure. The tech companies have a list of warnings for anyone who supports the measure, claiming it will put the economy and danger, it will open up

security vulnerabilities, and much more. Many analysts say that these warnings are at best weak arguments and at worst outright misinformation, but the bill supporters have felt the need to respond to those arguments in an effort to just keep the whole thing alive. Personally, I hope this does get scheduled for the fall session and that we do see a vote,

but I'm not betting on it. Well, there's been a growing awareness to the influence of big companies in general and big tech companies in particular, it could be really hard to reverse all the momentum that's built up over the years. We've got more news stories to cover, but first, let's take this quick break. Last Friday, Meta introduced the Blender Bought three chat bought and asked users to have

conversations with it. Now. The idea is that through conversations, Blender Bought three will learn how to interact with people more naturally and would be able to employ, or at least appear to employ, stuff like empathy and understanding. And it will also very quickly start claiming that Trump is still president of the United States and also make anti Semitic remarks and promote conspiracy theories because we can't have

nice things. So within forty eight hours of it being unleashed upon Facebook users, the bot began saying stuff like Mark Zuckerberg is not to be trusted and that he's creepy. Okay, so not everything it's said is wrong, uh so, but it's kind of funny that Meta's own butt is saying things that are very critical of Meta slash Facebook slash

Mark Zuckerberg. Journalists tested the chat bought, and they found that if they asked about Joe Biden, sometimes they were informed that Biden is a former vice president and that he ran for office in for president in but that he ultimately lost. Sometimes how about that? Huh? Now. When Meta first announced the bot last week, a representative claimed that the team behind the bot had quote conducted large scale studies, co organized workshops, and developed new techniques to

create safeguards end quote. But it's really a different kettle of fish when the chat bot actually goes live. And I have some sympathy for that team, because creating a tool that's designed to learn as the tool is being used, brings along with it major risks. Even folks who don't actually believe conspiracy theories might mess with a bot just for funzies. You know, there's a type of juvenile glee

that comes along with being sassy to a robot. So, yeah, it's a butt, but it doesn't have feelings, right, You can't hurt its feelings, So you can act like a jerk to this butt, and there are no consequences, right, Like, you're not actually hurting anyone, so you're not gonna feel guilty about it or shame about what you've done, except that the body is learning and that these interactions will go on to inform future interactions. And that's where things

can get really nasty really quickly. And I'm not sure what the solution is here, unless it's just to create bots that are not capable of learning through interactions, because there are always going to be people, some of them obviously horrible and some of them not, who will corrupt that kind of a thing, maybe out of mischief, maybe out of malice. Here's the thing, doesn't really matter what the motivation was, because the end result is similar in

any case. So yeah, funny, funny ha ha. But it also it really points out how kind of nasty we all are online, or at least how nasty we can be. Uh yeah, so on the service level, funny as you dig down ugly. Microsoft has issued a warning that Windows machines that have the latest supported processors could be susceptible

to data damage. This warning applies to machines running Windows eleven or Windows Server twenty twenty two, and again affects those that are running on the latest processors, and the data damage in this case is a risk of data loss. Now, this whole thing gets super technical. So I suggest for those of you who have these kinds of machines, or perhaps oversee i T operations in a big organization, to

look into it further. Microsoft is urging users to install a Windows eleven or Windows Server twenty twenty two preview update which was released on June twenty three, or a security update that was released on July twelve, in order to work around this problem. Here in the United States, the Senate recently voted in favor of the Reduction Act of twenty twenty two, which now goes to the House for a vote before it would then go to the

President to be signed into law. The Act contains a lot of stuff meant to tackle inflation, but also other issues like climate change. To that end, one element in the bill allows for a tax credit for the purchase of new electric vehicles, but there are some parameters and restrictions involved, and as ours Technical points out, one of those restrictions might actually mean that no one will be able to take advantage of that tax credit for a while.

See the credit has some usual stuff in it, like there's a limit on the price tag for new vehicles that are eligible for this tax cut or this tax credit. I guess I should say, so if an electric vehicle sedan cost dollars or less, then that would qualify. But if let's say you're out there to buy an electric vehicle, but you want to buy the luxury one, that tax credit is not gonna apply because the price tag is

going to be too high. They're gonna say like, well, yeah, you don't need the tax credit, you're buying a luxury vehicle. This is where people who are buying, you know, a a a sedan meant to get the family around that kind of thing. Beyond that, the bill says that the tax credit will only apply if the batteries in the

electric vehicle were mostly made in North America. That includes a requirement that the materials that were extracted and processed to make the batteries were done so in North America or in a country that has a free trade agreement with the United States. So that's where the hurdle is.

Right now, China serves as the world's source for stuff like lithium, so it's possible that every electric vehicle that is available in the United States this year will not meet the criteria necessary to qualify for that tax credit. Now on the other hand, the US government is pushing really hard to encourage more domestic production, and that's good

for a lot of reasons. Places like China have horrendous human rights records, They have practiced mining and processing techniques that are caused massive environmental damage, and trade with China also represents a vulnerability in the event of a trade dispute like we saw with the trade war under President Trump. Moving production to the United States, where there are more strict protections in place, both for employees and the environment,

has clear benefits. It's an increased cost, you know, economically, but in all other aspects it's kind of like a boost. It also improves national security because you're no longer dependent upon a foreign source for that material. But we are not there yet, like we are nowhere close to being

able to produce stuff at scale. So citizens are going to potentially find it really frustrating that there's a law that theoretically would reward them for making the switch from internal combustion engine vehicles to electric ones, but technically they can't take advantage of it because of supply chain and production issues. Fun times. On the subject of electric vehicles, let's talk about Tesla for a second, the Department of Motor Vehicles in the state of California has a bone

to pick with Tesla. The DMV says that Tesla has misrepresented features like autopilot and full self driving mode. The DMV is saying Tesla's systems, which are really under the category of automated driver assist features, come across in Tesla's you know wording as being more of a fully automated solution, and that the company has made what amounts to deceitful claims as to what the vehicles are actually capable of doing.

The d MV has four complaints. Two of them are just the names autopilot and full self driving and those of you all who have been listening to my show for a while, No, I also take issue with those terms because I feel that they said an expectation that's unrealistic and in some cases incredibly dangerous. Elon Musk, by the way, has dismissed this sort of concern. He says, what's the idiot just takes a name for, you know, saying what it does, And I guess, like, okay, but

you're marketing that, like that's the whole marketing push. You're you're you're trying to send a concept and a message to people. You can't have it both ways. I mean, I get the whole Shakespeare Watson, a name that arose by any other name would smell as sweet. I understand, But I don't know. If you have a system that's not really autopilot and you call it autopilot, I think I think there's a complaint there, But that's that's me,

that's not a court. Maybe a court will find it differently. Anyway. The d m V has two other complaints, not just the names of these things, and those complaints have more to do with how Tesla markets it's full self driving capability feature. Like one of the two complaints is about how there's a statement on Tesla's website that a driver essentially has to quote get in and tell the car where to go end quote. The d m VS claim is that that's inaccurate and it further represents a deceptive

practice under California law. Now, the DMV does acknowledge something that I have also pointed out in the past. If you bother to read Tesla's pages about these features. As you read, you will find disclaimers that these features are not fully autonomous systems, and that a driver's supervision is always necessary. That language is in there. However, the d m V says, the fact that Tesla includes those disclaimers doesn't erase these other statements that seem to be to

the contrary. So instead, what the DMV is saying is that Tesla is just contradicting itself, which creates confusion and ultimately is a deceptive practice and potentially dangerous. So DMV is saying Tesla is trying to have its cake and eat it too, right, It's trying to use wording that in one way seems like really appealing marketing to customers and then also include a disclaim Ahimer that says no,

but for reals, it's not what we just said. It was in an effort to avoid accountability in the event of something going wrong. We'll have to see how this develops. Okay, we've got a couple more stories in just a moment, but first let's take another quick break. Okay, we're gonna close out with just a couple of quick stories. One

is to stick with vehicles again. The Automotive News reports that more than a hundred eight vehicles will be dropped from production schedules around the world due to the ongoing semiconductor chips shortage, and more than one hundred thousand of those will be cut from manufacturing facilities here in North America. We just don't have enough microchips to build modern cars, or at least as many as we had planned. Your typical modern vehicle can have a few thousand micro ups

in it. I think the average is somewhere around three thousand, and they control everything from your entertainment system to fuel injection and beyond. While the computerization of vehicles has provided a lot of new functionality and safety features and really good stuff, the semiconductor shortage has highlighted just how dependent

we have become on microchip technology. Auto Forecast Solutions says that already in North America, facilities have had to cut more than one million vehicles from production this year, So that one hundred thousand plus is for the rest of the year. So, I mean, you know, what's another hundred thousand if you've already had to cut a million. But yeah, this continues to be an enormous challenge for the automotive industry and for customers. As for when we will actually

emerge from this semiconductor shortage crisis. That is hard to say. There have been some analysts who thought that we would be out of it already, that we would be well pasted it. There's say that it will happen sometime next year. Uh, and there are quite a few that say they don't expect it to improve until or later. In the meantime, expect to see more shortages at dealerships and high prices

for the limited supply of vehicles that are already out there. Um, I don't think we're gonna be able to see a sustainable market for used vehicles right now. You can occasionally find used vehicles marked at a price that's higher than they were when you drove them off the lot. That

never happens. It's crazy because you know, I think everyone knows that when you get into a brand new car and you drive it off the lot, the value depreciates by an enormous, enormous percent, Like it's ridiculous how many thousands of dollars are marked off the value of the car just because you've owned it for you know, a second. Now we're seeing that change quite a bit because of the semiconductor shortage, where you can have a used vehicle Earth more than what it was when you purchased it.

Not in every case, but it has happened and it's kind of crazy. Finally, we've talked quite a bit this year about Netflix and the company's attempts to find ways to grow in the wake of subscriber losses or at least two stem subscriber losses. We've seen subscribers leave the uh the service for the first time, like more people leaving than new people coming in, and it has really rocked the company. Well, one area that Netflix has experimented

with is with games. And I'm sure a lot of you are out out there are aware of this, but some of you might not be. If you are a Netflix subscriber and you have an iOS or Android device that has the Netflix app on it, you have access to twenty four games right now. There's another twenty six planned to be added to the service, and you can

play them. If you're a subscriber to Netflix, you can use your your phone and access these games, and they're supposed to be least premium games, but according to ap Topia, less than one percent of all Netflix subscribers have actually done that. So if the company was hoping that games would convince users to stick with Netflix. It looks like there's some bad news out there, at least as far

as the game's ability to retain customers is concerned. But hey, if you weren't aware that Netflix has games, now you are. Maybe you can open up your Netflix app on your iOS or Android device and check it out and see if maybe there's a game there that you like to play. Who knows, Uh, I haven't done that. I'm a Netflix subscriber, So maybe after this episode, I'll, out of curiosity check it out. Maybe there'll be a game that will finally pull me away from Marvel Puzzle Quest because that's the

only game I play on my phone. Um, got to catch them all. All right, that's it for this episode for the TECHNIQUS for Tuesday, August two. Hope you are all well. If you would like to get in touch with me about a topic you'd like me to cover in a future episode of Text Stuff, you can do that in one of a couple of ways. One is to download the I Heart Radio app. It's free to download. You can navigate over to tech Stuff. There's little microphone icon you click on that you can leave a voice

message up to thirty seconds in length. The other way is to send me a message on Twitter. The handle for the show is tech Stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech 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.