Tech News: Is TikTok's Fate Sealed?

his life and contributions. But he is someone that I have talked about a lot in past episodes of tech Stuff because he's a pretty important person in the world of tech. He's the man who first observed that semiconductor fabrication companies had followed a particular trajectory, namely that the companies were cramming twice as many components onto a square

inch of silicon every two years or so. So if you were able to put ten thousand components on a square inch of silicon in year one, two years later, by year three, you're cramming twenty thousand on there by year five. That would go up to forty thousand and

so on, and it gets real big, real fast. Now, this observation came to be known as Moore's law, which is funny because you know, he was making an observation and saying that you could predict what would happen based on this observation, But he wasn't saying that there was some fundamental law that drove this. His initial observations were really more about economic factors that would fund that kind of innovation and make it necessary in order to be competitive.

But later interpretations of his observation would kind of boil down to a predict that computing processing power doubles every two years or so. But Moore's law was just one of his big contributions. Another huge one is that he was a co founder of Intel. So we'll do a full episode about him and his contributions soon, and in

the meantime, Fair Winds and following sees Gordon Moore. Markets Insider reports that, according to analyst Dan Ives, TikTok has a ninety percent chance of being banned in the US if things continue as they are now. This follows shall she Chew, which is TikTok's CEO appearing before Congress. Now, as I mentioned last week, I was writing and recording during his testimony, so I had to follow up on what was going on, and I couldn't watch very much

of it, y'all because it was not pretty. There was some real ethnocentric xenophobic behavior on display in Congress, some of it really really ugly, and there were a lot of assumptions about choose heritage. It seemed like everybody was assuming he's Chinese. He's not. He comes from Singapore, not China. There was also a lot of railroading where like no one was asking a question at one point, like they were essentially making accusations and statements but not asking anything.

And it's kind of like counterproductive. I mean, if someone's there to provide testimony, you're supposed to ask them questions so that they can answer, then you follow up. And it looked like a lot of them, the people in Congress were kind of using it to grandstand, and you know, a lot of TikTok folks, like a lot of users took the ball and ran with it by creating a bunch of satirical videos pointing out how Congress was behaving.

Of course, TikTok users have their own bias obviously, so according to Ives the analyst, TikTok has a couple of options if it wants to avoid being obliterated, and it's pretty much what we heard a few years back when

former President Donald Trump started to go after TikTok. The company can either hold an initial public offering or IPO and go public and in the process presumably break its connection with byte Dance, though you would have to take some real steps to make sure that happened, or it could be sold off to some other company, you know, not a Chinese company. Now. Honestly, I don't know how to feel about all this. On the one hand, China very much is focused on digital espionage. Like that's not

a controversial thing to say. China's actively pursuing digital espionage in multiple venues. I don't know that TikTok's one of them necessarily, it wouldn't surprise me if it were. But you know, it's there's no denying China's in that business. But then so is everybody else, including the United States.

It's not like China's the outlier here. You can also argue that even the private and public companies here in the US and the tech sector are, when you get down to it, focused on digital espionage with regard to users. They are in the business of buying and selling personal information about people like us. No one is clean on this. In other words, like you can't just single out TikTok and say you are bad because you're collecting information, because

that's the truth across the board. You could say everyone's bad and that would be true. But yeah, singling out TikTok for that specific purpose doesn't hold a lot of water. Now, the national security component does complicate things further, but it also creates an opening for xenophobic ideologies to take hold, which gets pretty ugly. Like there are elements of the rhetoric that we're starting to sound a bit like McCarthyism

from back in the nineteen fifties. If you don't know what that is, you need to look up the Red Scare and educate yourself. And you know, some of the concerns might be based in reality, but they can become exaggerated and also conflated with other things, and it just can get very very ugly, very very quickly. So the whole thing is a huge mess. And I sure as heck,

do not know what the best way forward is. I just feel pretty comfortable saying whatever the best way happens to be, that ain't the way we're going right now. Joseph Cox of Motherboard has a piece about the FBI's contract with a company called Team Simru or perhaps Simru it's see why Mru, I'm not sure how to pronounce it. And the contract is to acquire what is called NetFlow data. This is kind of like a big picture of view

of information that's moving across networks like the Internet. You can see which servers are connecting to one another, transmitting information from endpoint to endpoint. So Team Simru is able to get this data by doing deals with Internet service providers. Team Simru offers ISPs threat detection services and in return, the ISPs trade this data, which Team Simru then sells

to clients like the FBI. Apparently. Now. The reason this is important is it marks a kind of loophole that the FBI has leaned on in order to get an eye on data transmissions without first going through the legal process to do so lawfully. Right, instead of getting a warrant, a digital warrant, they just buy the data outright. Now, NetFlow is not quite the same thing as spying on

the actual information being exchanged itself. It can, however, include a lot of stuff like what you are l you're visiting, so you know which websites people are going to during a given Internet session, and NetFlow can definitely provide clues as to potential illegal activity, so you might be able to find which servers are associated with a hacker group, for example. But the issue is that metadata can tell

us a lot about a person by itself. Like you might think the information within a conversation is important, and it is, but the metadata about that conversation can give you a lot of clues all on its own. Now, I've mentioned this before, but there have been a lot of demonstrations showing that with just a few data points you can really narrow down the specific Internet users identity

with incredible accuracy and precision. So this practice of just buying information from companies like team cymru it gets into some really dangerous surveillance state territory. Here, if you'd like to learn more, you can visit vice dot com and just read the article. Here is the FBI's contract to

buy mass Internet data. The facial recognition company clear View, which built out an enormous database of images using questionable means, mainly scraping social network platforms to gather digital photos without first getting the consent of users of those platforms, says that it has facilitated almost a million searchers or US police. This is according to the company itself that has made that claim. They revealed this startling information and a piece

for the BBC. Clearview has received some high profile criticism in the United States, and several cities here in the US outright banned their police forces from using the service. They say do not make use of clear Views services. Now, as I've mentioned several times in the past, facial recognition technology is far from perfect and frequently encounters issues when identifying people of color in particular, and ultimately, these are the same people who received dispropor or sets, scrutiny and

abuse from law enforcement. Making matters worse is that it's very difficult to say which police departments have been frequent customers for clear View, because there are very few laws and regulations that require police to disclose that kind of information. So this lack of transparency creates a further gap of distrust between police and citizens, and scraping social media for data like this typically goes against the terms of services

for those social networks. Facebook has come down hard on companies that have tried to scrape Facebook in order to gather data. Also academic researchers. Facebook's really gone hard against academic researchers doing that. So essentially, companies like Meta slash Facebook don't like anyone else being able to do what they are very very definitely doing themselves. I mean it's

I don't have information on it. I cannot say with evidence that they do, but it would shock me if they are not making use of that technology that they don't want anyone else to be able to use on their platforms. Okay, with that cheerful note, let's take a quick break. We'll come back with some more tech news. Okay,

we're back. So this past weekend, an organization called the Military Cyber Professional Association, or MCPA, petitioned lawmakers to create a new branch of the US military that would focus solely on digital and cyber threats. The group, which consists of folks who have worked in digital security within the military, some of them current military officials, some of them former ones.

They say that one of the largest challenges that the United States faces with digital warfare in mind is that up to now, each branch of the military has its own independent methodology to fight cyber threats, and there is a unified office that can take some actions, but it's not a full branch of the military. So the MCPA is saying this creates gaps in US defenses and that if we are to actually have a real strong national security approach to cybersecurity, there needs to be a military

branch specifically dedicated to cyber warfare and defense. This branch could establish best practices, it could spearhead projects to protect the United States, and it would be a fully funded branch of the military, as opposed to something that could see its funding ebb and flow based upon the individual branches of the military that already exist. We've already established a new branch of the military here in the United States in the recent past, the Space Force being the

most recent branch. So if this did happen, I mean there is precedents, recent precedents. Before Space Force, it was like seventy two years since the last time the US had created a branch of the military. But Hey, we're on a roll now, right, I mean two, that's a streak. We can start creating branches for everything. Whether or not anyone actually makes a move on this to turn this

proposal into something more actionable remains to be seen. There does not appear to currently be a lot of behind this in Congress or in the executive branch, so we may not see any movement on this in the near future.

It may take a while. I do think that it's not a bad idea to establish such a branch, to have something that is well funded and can attract talent and maintain and keep that talent in order to fight off things like the various hacker groups that are constantly poking at vulnerabilities within the United States to find a way to get a foothold. I think it's important to establish a defense against that, and the longer we wait, the harder it will be to do it effectively. So personally,

I think it's not a bad idea. I'm not a huge fan of creating more military necessarily, but this is the way the future is going, and with the increase in things like ai USE, it's going to be a necessity, and I would rather see us be proactive than reactive. I mean, we're already going to be at least a little reactive, but you know, we could argue we're proactive.

Zoe Schiffer over at Platformer has a great article titled the Secret list of Twitter VIPs getting boosted over everyone else, which obviously reveals how some of Twitter's internal documents show that the platform is being, let's say, inconsistent with how it applies the rules. I'm sure this comes as a

massive shock to everyone, all right. So the heart of the matter comes from Elon Musk saying that to hold onto that blue verified check mark that some users have, they're going to have to pony up the eight bucks a month subscription fee to Twitter Blue. Or actually it's more than that, if you're talking about a brand and

like a company as opposed to an individual. Elon Musk says that this is really about treating everyone equally, that people shouldn't be elevated over others with that blue check mark. But already that's just a fricking lie, right, because if it were about treating everyone equally, either you get rid of the blue check mark entirely so no one has it, or everybody gets the blue check mark, which is the same thing as nobody having it, but you wouldn't have

to pay for it. That's not about treating people equally. You're talking about a paid for version and a non paid for version. That's not equal. Besides, the blue check mark was never intended to be a status symbol. That's why it turned into what it was meant to be. Was a way for Twitter to show that it had verified the identity of that Twitter account, and that Twitter could vouch that that account actually did represent the person

or brand that it was connected to. So if you saw I don't know Nicholas Holt on Twitter and there's a blue check mark, you know, oh, that actually does belong to the actor Nicholas Holt, or probably to his PR personnel who handle his social media accounts, but you would know that that's the official one and it's not just someone claiming to be that. That was the reason for the verified check mark. It was to verify the

person was who they said they were. But of course the checkmark did become a sort of social capital kind of thing, like people were like, I'm important enough to have a check mark, and that this somehow raised them in social status above everyone else on Twitter, where social status means really nothing, I would argue. I mean, I say that as someone who got a blue check mark anyway. Now the new version is weird because what the blue check mark means is that the person's willing to pay

a fee to keep that blue check mark. I don't know when that actually comes into play. I haven't even seen a message saying hey, you're gonna need to pay a subscription to keep your blue check mark. It may have come through and I just ignored it because I don't pop on Twitter that much anymore. So it's entirely

possible that's just on me, not on Twitter. Anyway. It turns out that this version, the new version, that Elon Musk is talking about, is even less fair than what we had heard before, because while he's saying, hey, you're gonna have to pay if you want that blue check mark, there are around thirty five VIP users of Twitter who not only are secure with their status, they actually get

a boost from Twitter. They get higher visibility than everybody else does so that they appear in more Twitter timelines. Now it will come as no surprise that Elon Musk is in there. We've talked about in the past, how Elon Musk has his Twitter feed boosted above other stuff so that he shows up in more feeds. But others are also on that list, and it ranges from ultra conservative commentator Ben Shapiro to the progressive politician Alexandria Okazia Cortez.

And then there's a few celebrities thrown in there. There's some athletes in there, there's other politicians in there. It's a real animal farm situation. You know, all Twitter users are equal, but some are more equal than others. Probably not a big surprise to most of you out there. It wasn't a big surprise to me. But again, just more evidence that things at Twitter are our topsy turvy.

And hey, if your account doesn't have that paid for blue check mark, it sounds like your tweets ain't ever gonna show up as a recommended tweet in the four you page of Twitter. So if you go to Twitter, you'll see there's like a four you thing, And the stuff in the four you section is curated for you. It's supposed to be stuff that the algorithm serves to you that you are likely to find interesting or engaging.

That's the purpose. Actual practice varies because goodness knows. The last time I checked it out, I was like, none of this feels like it's for me, but whatever. So anyway, if you don't have a blue check mark, if you haven't paid that subscription fee, then your tweets aren't going to be showing up in anyone's for you page. So I guess this is an incentive to try and get more people to pay for that check mark so that they get increased visibility on the platform. This change will

take effect on April fifteenth, according to Elon Musk. Not only that, but only the paid for accounts will be able to vote in Twitter polls. Now. Musk says this is to fight off the issue with AI bots, which is funny because I thought his whole plan was to eliminate bots from the platform. I remember distinctly him talking about this in the lead up to him purchasing Twitter, that this was a big part of what his plan was. But I guess now he's saying, Nope, you can't do that.

It's impossible. So the bots are going to ruin everything like the ding dang poles unless we make it a paid for service. So this could also maybe have something to do with the fact that, you know, a few months ago, he ran a poll asking if he should step down from Twitter, and the majority voted yes, and then, you know, one of his followers later suggested that maybe only people who are subscribe to Twitter Blue should be able to vote in those kinds of polls, and he

was like, huh, interesting, world may never care. I mean, the world may never know whatever. CNBC reports that Twitter also applied for a subpoena against gethub, the collaborative developer platform, because someone using the handle free speech Enthusiast shared what appeared to be segments of Twitter's own source code. Get Hub complied with the court order and remove the code,

so it's no longer up there. Interestingly, Musk himself had previously said he would make the source code for Twitter's recommendation algorithm and open source code in an attempt to suss out if there is any actual bias or preference. You know, there are a lot of allegations that Twitter downplay conservative messaging and prevents it from getting as large an audience as other messages, so making it open source would allow people to comb through the code and see

is in fact bias there. Also to find any mistakes in the algorithm, or a way to create the algorithm so that it is more effective in what it's supposed to do. And the whole idea is that this is going to create better transparency and fairness moving forward. But

you know, it hasn't happened yet. And as we just said, Twitter moved to strike source code off of GitHub, though I don't know necessarily that the source code in question related to the recommendation algorithm, the stuff that was on GitHub, and obviously it should be done on Twitter zone terms. I do believe that. I'm just I don't know when we're going to see that code actually become open source. Okay, I've got a few more news stories in the tech world to cover before we wrap this up, so let's

take another quick break and we'll be right back. The chief technology officer of Nvidia, guy named Michael Kagan, recently dismissed cryptocurrencies, saying they don't quote bring anything useful for society end quote. This is according to an article in the Guardian. This is interesting. It was not that long ago that Nvidio was selling truckloads of GPUs to the

crypto mining community. It was really big business, so much so that it actually became very difficult for anyone else to find a new GPU, and if you did find one, chances are the price was marked up so high that it would be difficult to justify buying one. The aftermarket on these things was insane. You had people either buying them up to use as crypto mining rigs, or buying them up and then selling them at an insane markup

to gamers. But then Ethereum, the cryptocurrency that had fueled this GPU frenzy, finally made the trend transition from proof of work to proof of steak operations. So with proof of work, you need a lot of computing processing power to be a successful miner in the system and to be awarded new crypto tokens by participating in that system.

But with proof of steak, you just have to have a big old pile of cryptocins already, and then you stake some portion of those crypto coins in the system, and the more you stake, the more likely you are going to make even more money. Well, once it made that transition, you suddenly didn't need all those GPUs to just churn away at all hours of day and night, so really overnight the demand for GPUs plummeted because now cryptomners had no use for them, and not every cryptocin

has moved off of proof of work. There are cryptocurrencies out there that still depend on proof of work, like Bitcoin being the big one. Bitcoin is such a big fish that GPUs don't have enough output. They They're processing power is nowhere close to being competitive for bitcoin mining, so you wouldn't buy a GPU if you wanted to

try and be a bitcoin miner. And then for smaller crypto tokens, you know, less valuable ones, GPUs are overkill because you'd spend more on electricity bills than you would make through mining, so it doesn't make sense to use GPUs for that. So in other words, what I'm saying is it sounds like a little bit of suspicious timing for Kagan to say that that cryptocurrency offers nothing useful to society. It certainly offers nothing really useful for Nvidia

right now, but like, why are you saying nothing? Like it's nothing useful to society at this point. Now. I don't mean to say that I disagree with them. I actually am you know, very hard on cryptocurrencies. If you've been listening to this show. You know that, But I do feel like if ethereum, we're still proof of work. If it hadn't made that transition, I dealt Kagan would have said this, that's what I'm saying. Maybe he would have.

Maybe I'm being too cynical, but it seems to be one of those things where, like, you know, there's a nasty break up, one person breaks up with the other and the other person's like, well, I never loved you anyway. That's kind of what it feels like to me. Maybe I'm being too harsh here, But what does Kagan say is useful to society? Well, that would be AI. And there's here's a big shock AI. A lot of those applications lean hard on parallel processing, which happens to be

something that GPUs are really good at. So the thing that no longer needs GPUs is useless to society, but the thing that really does need GPUs is going to be super useful. GOT it doesn't seem like there's any bias going on there at all. Huh. Reuters reports that the United States Commodity Trading Commission or CFTC, has sued Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange. They also sued Binance's founder,

Chong pen Xao Akacz. According to Reuters, the charge is that Binance illegally quote offered and executed commodity derivatives transactions on behalf of US persons end quote. Essentially, the CFTC says that Binance was operating in such a way as to avoid compliance with US laws securities laws in particular, and Binance says that it has worked hard to make sure that it doesn't have US users on its platform.

So even if it were doing the things that the CFTC says it's doing, it doesn't apply because it didn't involve any US transactions in the first place. There is a US based version of Binance, and the relationship between that entity and the main Binances it's kind of like

one of those Facebook relationship statuses. Know It's complicated. CNBC reports that the giant Chinese e commerce company Ali Baba is splitting into six business groups, and that these groups, with the exception of one of them, could potentially spin off to become their own independent company. Each group will have its own CEO and its own board of directors, and the groups include a cloud intelligence group, which current Ali Baba CEO Daniel Joan will oversee a Talbau Tamaal

Commerce group which will focus on online shopping platforms. This one will continue to operate as a subsidiary of Ali Baba even if the other businesses spin off successfully. There's there's a smart logistics company or business group, a global digital commerce business group, a digital media and entertainment group,

and a local services group. Now the reason for this is probably due to the fact that Ali Baba lost around six hundred billion dollars in value over recent months, and so this is an attempt to reorganize and allow each business group to focus on what it does without having to rely on the company as a whole to support each business decision. So we'll see whether or not this ends up having a net positive effect on the company.

Lift is getting a new CEO. According to CNBC, Logan Green, the current CEO and a co founder of the company, will step down on April seventeenth. David Risher, who formerly worked at Amazon as an executive, will take over as CEO of Lift. In addition, another co founder, John Zimmer, who was serving as president of Lift, will be stepping down and the Chairman of the board. Sean Agaroal will step down as chairman but will remain on the board

of directors. Logan Green, the current CEO who's stepping down, will take his place as chairman. So why the change, Well, kind of like Ali Baba, Lift has been in a really rough spot over the last year. Stock prices dropped by around seventy percent year over year, So my guess is that this is a big reorg push to try and turn the company around and get those share prices up and make stockholders happy. Amazon meanwhile, failed to get

a massive lawsuit thrown out of court last week. A class action lawsuit alleges that Amazon engaged in anti competitive practices that artificially drove prices higher through other retailers who depend upon the Amazon platform. Namely, that Amazon had a policy that prevents retailers from offering lower prices for goods sold outside of Amazon if they also wanted to sell those products on the Amazon platform. So it's that kind

of price fixing, is what the argument is here. The judge hearing the arguments rejected Amazon's objections to the case, so it can move forward through the court system. If Amazon ultimately loses this case, it could face damages in the billions of dollars, up to a potential one hundred seventy two billion. Now that I expect it would ever get to that. I think if Amazon lawyers suspected that they would be unable to win the case, it would go to a settlement. It would shock me if it

was otherwise. But still pretty massive deal there. And finally, we've seen dozens of big companies announced massive layoffs for the past few months, and Disney is no exception. Bob Iger who quickly returned to Disney to replace Bob Chapeck as CEO, and keep in mind Chapec was Bob Iger's replacement. A few years ago, Iger said that Disney would be

downsizing to the tune of around seven thousand employees. Now it sounds like the company's Metaverse team, which had around fifty people in it, are among those who saw their jobs eliminated. Now, I'm not sure that this is a commentary on the Metaverse as a whole. You could see this as Disney looking at something that at best is going to take several years to become a thing and saying, you know what, we need to focus our resources onto.

Here and now, and we can worry about the future once we have stabilized, or you could look at it as Disney losing confidence that the metaverse is ever going to be anything more than a curiosity. Either way, it really stinks for so many people to get hit with job cuts. When it's happening across so many companies, particularly in the tech sector, you really start to worry for folks and hope that they can find a job that

makes good use of their skills and their knowledge and experience. Plus, you know, it would be nice if it was a job that they also liked. I guess, you know, you can't ask for too much, I suppose, But yeah, I don't know if this means that the metaverse is on hold. I suspect that what we're seeing right now means that it's going to take even longer for whatever the metaverse is going to be for it to emerge, and it may end up having a big effect on how the

metaverse emerges. It may mean that we get a very different kind of metaverse at some point in the future then we would if the economy hadn't gone into this

economic uncertainty that we're in right now. So hard to say, I know again, just like cryptocurrency, I've been very skeptical about the metaverse, but that's largely because I see it as this poorly defined concept that a lot of companies are trying to rush into to either claim a space in when there's no real space there, or they're doing their darnedest to be the entity that defines what the metaverse is, which rarely ends up benefiting everybody. It largely

benefits whoever planted their flag in the first place. So I'm still very skeptical about the whole thing. Also, I'm getting older, Like we got to establish that every time, right, I'm getting older, and as a person who's getting older, I'm running into the risk of being unable to see the potential benefits of emerging technologies. So I fully admit

that that's entirely possible. It could very well be that, you know, in twenty years time, everyone will be looking back on the metaversus being the truly revolutionary wave that transformed the world for the better, and everybody's super happy about it, and I'll just be the grouchy old man in the shit in the woods who yells at passing clouds. Entirely possible. I admit it. All right. That's it for this episode of tech Stuff. Hope you are all well. If you would like to reach out to me, do

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