Tech News: Internet Down

you because she loves you so much. That might not be true, but there are definitely some hand gestures. Anyway, let's get to the tech news for Thursday, July twenty two, two thousand, twenty one. Earlier today, you might have had some problems using certain websites or web based services. For example, Delta Airlines customers found they couldn't use online check in for a while. Amazon customers were having trouble connecting to that site. Gamers saw the PlayStation network and Steam were

down as well. So what the heck happened? Well, it appears that fault lies with part of acamize system. Now acam I is a c d N. Also, I could be mispronouncing it. It's a K A m AI, but it's a c d N that's a content delivery network. So as that name implies a com I is in the business of facilitating the movement of data across networks to customers. C d n's address an issue that we just can't otherwise get around, and that's the fact that the further you are away from a computer like a server.

Let's say that you're trying to connect to a specific website. Well, the further away you are from that that server, the longer it's going to take for signals to pass between you and that server. And if the service you're trying to access is one that requires fast response, like maybe it's a streaming video game or something, that could be

a problem. So if you want to access a specific companies services and that company happens to be located in Washington State, but you live in the state of Florida, which is all the way on the opposite side of you know, America, then you might have some delays. If your computer and the company's servers had to communicate across the entire country, you'd run into lag and that's where

c d ends come in. They are essentially huge server farms located in specific geographic areas, and they function as a faster way to deliver Internet content. They're kind of like um mirrors of existing content. So instead of having to transmit you know, that episode of Modern Love across the entire United States, a c d N with the Modern Love content can step in closer to home. C

d n s can also provide other services. They can act as a layer of protection against malicious attacks from hackers, liked DOS attacks, distributed denial of service attacks, and most of the time everything's just working fine and people are able to access services like Netflix or PlayStation games or whatever without a problem. But sometimes stuff goes wrong, and

that's what happened today. Akama says that it was an emerging issue with its Edge DNS service, but as I'm recording this, it appears that the company's engineers have resolved the problem. It's just a reminder that there's always a point of failure in a given system, and sometimes that point of failure can be one that affects a lot of other systems. However, I have to take my hat off to those engineers who fix the problem relatively quickly.

That's really impressive. You know, it really stinks when these things happen, but it's it's incredible to see how quickly people can respond and get things back on track, because I mean, that's a big issue. Now. In an early episode, I mentioned that President Biden here in the United States issued an executive order that urged the Federal Trade Commission, or FTC, to look into the issue of the right

to repair. Just in case you're not familiar with that term, that refers to stripping away the layers that companies will put in place that can discourage or outright prevent users from making their own repairs or going to an independent repair service, and instead they might put in layers that force those users to go to a corporate approved service company. And this can apply to everything from basic consumer electronics all the way up to things like giant tractors for agriculture.

And this is a really big deal for people who either don't want to be tied down to a specific ecosystem or those who might not have easy access to corporate approved services or both. The FTC now says that the organization will step up law enforcement actions against companies that are engaged in quote illegal repair restrictions end quote.

According to the site x d A. Now what constitutes illegal repair restrictions, Well, if it's part of an anti competitive strategy, it could violate the Sherman Act that deals with the issues of monopolies and anti competitiveness. And there are other laws that can play a role as well, And I may have to do a full episode about that at some point, because frankly, I am not that well read up on these laws, because let's get real, until really recently, no one was looking into enforcing those laws,

so they weren't really playing a part. But I think that this is really encouraging. As the FDC points out, the denial of the right to repair leads to a lot of wastefulness, uh, And that can go from anything from the amount of time it takes for you to actually go to a company approved maintenance area to just throwing something away and buying a new one because you can't be bothered to take it to get repaired. None of those are really good things, So I think this

might be a good move in general. In a different earlier episode, I talked a bit about the backlash against audacity that's the free to download audio recording and editing software that folks like yours truly use when recording podcasts from home. It's what I'm actually using right now instead of using our studios recording system because Tari won't let me do that anyway. Uh oh, look she's blowing more kisses.

She's just so loving to a all right, anyway. A while back, there was this company called Muse or the Muse Group now that acquired Audacity and then released a version with some new privacy policies that raised a lot of eyebrows because those policies included data collection, uh policies and meaning data collected from users, and we're talking about a lot of data that could potentially be used with

conjunction with with law enforcement. So it raised a lot of big questions about privacy and legality, and it led to a backlash in which some Audacity users were proposing that they develop a forked version of Audacity, to go back to an earlier version of Audacity and develop for that as an independent program in order to avoid the issues that they were seeing based on this updated privacy policy from the quote unquote real Audacity. That is not

a great thing for the new owners to hear. I mean, if customers are saying they're gonna go and make their own version of your product just to avoid your policies, that's tough. Now Audacity has a new new privacy policy and it removes the sections that were causing the concern. So in a message to users, Audacity said the following quote phrasing has been adjusted to remove ambiguity or aid in transparency, in particular that we do not collect any

additional information for law enforcement or any other purpose. We have explained the purpose of the two networking features, error reporting and update checking. We have removed the provision that discourages children under thirteen years old from using Audacity. We have taken steps to ensure that we never store a full IP address we now truncated before hashing or discarded entirely, and have reflected this change in the privacy policy document.

We have made some changes to how we process error reports to ensure that we never store any potentially identifiable information. Further, they explained that any version of Audacity from three point zero point two or earlier has no networking capability at all, meaning there's no way for the company to collect any data from people who are using those versions of audacity. Whether all this is going to be enough to calm the critics remains to be seen, but it feels like

it's at least the right thing to do. We've got some more news to report on, but before I get to that, let's take a quick break. We're back. The state of California has filed a lawsuit against the video game developer and publisher Activision Blizzard, alleging that the company has a culture of harassment that makes the company a

hostile work environment, particularly for women. In fact, the lawsuit alleges that there is a quote pervasive frat boy end quote culture there, and y'all, that phrasing definitely conjures up some negative images in my mind. But then you have to understand I went to college at the University of Georgia in the mid to late nineties, and the frats there were literally the worst. Like they made the news,

that's how bad they were. Anyway, The allegations include lots of really despicable charges, everything from women being groped and otherwise assaulted, to women receiving far less pay for doing the same jobs as men, to one case where apparently an executive reportedly delegated his work to a female direct report so that he could play call of duty. Gross. Now I should add that the company says these charges are actually relating to the past, and that the Activision

Blizzard company of today does not reflect this image. In other words, they're saying, yeah, things used to be bad, but we have taken great strides to fix them, and we take this seriously. In fact, the company representatives have said that every charge is taken seriously and the company

has made substantive moves to really change corporate culture. Now, I am sure that a more complete story will come out in court, assuming that this actually goes that far, and maybe we will hear whether or not the representatives are accurate right whether or not this this toxic culture still exists. It appears to at least have existed. But the question is is that how things are now. I

honestly don't know what to believe. I don't know anyone at that company, so I have no idea if it has changed significantly or if it's still a hostile work environment. But I will keep an eye on this story as it develops. One technology that tends to come up and conversation about the future is weather control. I mean, I know that Cobra Commander was really obsessed with it. But when we get to the realities of tech and the weather, our understanding of how we can affect whether it gets

a little bit wibbly wobbly. For years, people have attempted to seed clouds to induce rain over drought, and the question then pops up does that actually work? Which is actually kind of hard to say because it's difficult to test these things because it either rains or it doesn't rain after you seed the clouds. And if it does rain, then can you be sure that it would not have rained if you hadn't seeded the clouds? Like was the cloud seeding the thing that actually made it rain or

was it going to rain anyway? Now, long term studies suggest that cloud seating is effective, like there there have been studies of snow packs over the course of several years that suggests that there is greater precipitation in years when cloud seeding was actually performed. But it's just, you know, it's one of those things it's very hard to see. In the short term. However, the United Arab Emirates is using a slightly different approach to the typical cloud seeding approach.

The U A E is going to zap clouds with electricity to see if that makes it rain. So they're gonna be using drones to do this, and the idea is to actually create an electric charge on droplets of water that encourages the droplets to bind together. And as these droplets bind together, they're gonna they're gonna grow larger, They're gonna grow heavier and potentially heavy enough to fall his rain. Assuming this all works, which actually sounds pretty plausible to me at least, so I'll be very eager

to see how this turns out. Though I should say I am a bit disappointed because I originally imagined that these drones were gonna fly up there and threatened clouds with electric shocks unless they would go ahead and rain and to ns out, that's not how that works, so that's a bummer. Finally, if you've listened to tech stuff for a while, you have certainly heard me talk about an electric vehicle company called Faraday Future, and not for

necessarily positive reasons. I first learned about this company when I saw a concept model of an electric sports car at C E s way back in t and that concept looked super cool. It was one of those like, you know, gasp moments when you're walking the floor. It was extremely popular. Lots of people taking video and pictures of that thing. The company was this upstart ev producer that was taking shape in California and Nevada, and then news about weird stuff relating to this company began to

pop up. The company founder had a different company back in China, that's where he's from, and that company was apparently in die or straits. It was starting to fail, and the Chinese government was extremely eager to have this founder come back to China and settle up with his creditors. The founder was extremely eager to not do that thing, because you know, answering for issues in China can sometimes be a pretty serious thing. So he also allegedly spent a lot of the company money as if it was

his own personal bank account. There were a lot of at least perceived possible misuses of corporate funds. Things were not really looking on the up and up, in other words, so there were a lot of questions about whether Faraday would ever be able to produce a consumer vehicle. Because spoiler alert. So far it has not, and it all got very dramatic. And now it's time to add another bit of drama to this story because now Faraday Future

is a publicly traded company. The same organization SHAN that was teetering on the brink of implosion is now publicly traded. So you would be well justified in asking how the heck could this happen? How could it go from almost falling apart to becoming a publicly traded company. H And by the way, that move of becoming publicly traded added like a billion dollars to the company's coffers, so that is incredibly significant. Well, it's because of a little thing called a SPACK or sp A C. And by a

little thing, I mean a big thing. So a SPACK is a special purpose acquisition company. And this is kind of a work around for companies that want to go public but would otherwise have trouble with an initial public offering or i p O. And we've seen lots of stories about companies that had to back off and rethink their approach to an i p O, you know, like Uber companies that at one point we're really bullish about having an I P O. And then something happens and

it kind of throws a monkey wrench into the works. Well, here's how a spack works. You get some investors and they create a company that does nothing. It's it's like like the old joke on Seinfeld. I mean, it literally is a company that does nothing except exist to pool resources.

So the company that does nothing, you know, goes public and then this newly publicly traded company uses the assets that it has that otherwise are doing nothing to acquire the target company, you know, the one that would not be able to hold an I p O on its own. So Faraday Future never would have gotten an i p O off the ground, not not with the way the company has been mismanaged and miss run for the last

several years. But by creating essentially a shell company that then can be publicly traded and use that company to purchase Faraday futures, that suddenly means that Faraday Future, by extension, is publicly traded. Kind of seems like a like almost like a bait and switch, but it's totally illegal. It's something that can actually happen without any you know, legal implications whatsoever. Now along the way through this process, as this spack acquired Faraday Future and made it a publicly

traded company. The founder of Faraday Future effectively surrendered control. So today things are very different from how they were in years past. But does this mean that Faraday Future is on track to actually produce electric vehicles after years of languishing in a melodramatic mess of financial shenanigans. Well, the plan is to get things up and running so that the company can release an suv electric vehicle sometime by the end of next year. We'll see if that happened.

I think some skepticism is warranted, but I would actually love to see the company deliver upon that initial promise I first encountered back in two thousand sixteen at c E S. I don't want to see a company fail. It's just, you know, my skepticism is up only because really, if you look into the history of Faraday Future, and I've got I've got an episode about it, a couple of them, you start to see where there's enough history of shenanigans going on there to make anyone feel a

little cautious. But that is it for this episode of tech Stuff. That is the news for Thursday, July twenty two one. I hope you are all well. If you have any suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, please reach out to me. The best way to do that is over on Twitter. The handle we use for the show is tech Stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon. M

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