Tech News: It's Not Easy Being Green

obligatory updates about Twitter out of the way. First. Elon Musk has said that banned accounts, such as the one belonging to former US President Donald Trump, will remain off Twitter until the company has established a clear process for evaluating and potentially reinstating accounts. That means it's unlikely that the former president will be able to hop back onto

Twitter before the US midterm elections, which happened on November eight. Next, Musk is running damage control while trying to reassure advertise users that Twitter will not descend into total chaos and that companies should totally feel good about advertising there. This argument was probably not helped by the fact that in the wake of Musk taking over Twitter, the use of racist language and hate speech increased by nearly five times the frequency of their use prior to the takeover. That's

according to researchers from Montclair State University. The ad world is already seeing a slowdown across the industry due to economic issues. This is not just something that's affecting Twitter, but some advertising companies have been advising their clients to perhaps pause their spending on Twitter while they wait for

a clear content policy from the new CEO. As for what's happening within the company itself, Bloomberg reports that Musk is looking to cut roughly half of all staff, which is still less than what we had previously heard with the the term bandied about late last month. But good gravy, that is a lot of people. Okay, that gets us up to speed with what's going on there. Let's put Twitter in the rear view mirror and keep on going.

The Register reports that Microsoft is considering a strategy to offer PCs through subscriptions and ads rather than your traditional upfront purchase price. So, in other words, if you're in the market for a PC and Microsoft does this, you could get a computer for like a low monthly subscription

and or agreeing to have ads served to you. Jeff Bert, the reporter who wrote the article on the Register, reminds us that this is just something that is being considered and that we may actually never see ads subsidized PCs from Microsoft. But considering the PC market in general has seen a sharp decline in sales recently, I would not be surprised to learn that companies are looking at alternatives in an effort to remain profitable. Such a PC would

likely lean heavily on cloud based services and apps. That means it might not necessarily be particularly beefy. So for the gamers out there, I suspect this offer would not really mean anything because it's not likely to be the sort of PC that you would want to run games off of. But if you want a productivity PC, this might end up being away that you can get access to one without having to pay hundreds of bucks to buy one. If, as I said, Microsoft moves forward, we'll

have to wait and see. The PC market is not the only one in the tech industry that is seeing tough times ahead. Qualcom, which is a microchip provider. It makes the processors that power tons of smartphones, including iPhones and Android phones, is predicting that phone sales are going to slow down significantly due to the uncertain economic climate. Folks are understandably looking to spend less money as inflation rises in various parts of the world, which makes sense.

You want to make sure you're holding back money so you can pay for necessities right, And as a result, we're seeing fewer folks rush out to buy new tech gadgets like computers and smartphones. Previously, Qualcom had predicted that smartphone sales were going to decline in the single digit percentage range, so anywhere between one and nine, but now Qualcom has adjusted this prediction to say that it will

be more likely a low double digit percentage decline. The uncertain economic climate is not the only factor at play here. Another is that the supply chain issues, which were such a huge challenge over the last couple of years, are finally clearing up in some sectors. But this has actually led to increased inventory, so you've got more supply and

declining demand. Qualcom predicts this decline demand will extend through the rest of the year, and that they are currently around eight to ten weeks worth of elevated inventory among various carriers out there, So keep an eye out for smartphone deals in case you're actually in the market to get a new phone before the end of this year. It is possible that we might see some enticing sales around the holidays as companies attempt to offload some of

this inventory. It's not a guarantee, but it is a possibility. And if you are someone who needs to get a new phone and who has money set a site to do that, be on the lookout for those potential deals. They may very well be around the corner. No guarantee, but I'd be shocked if we didn't see some massive sales around the Black Friday event. You know, a wise frog once said, it's not easy being green, but it's also not easy to be radiant Orchid or tangerine tango

or specter a yellow. Those are names of colors designed by Pantone. And you know it's not easy because if you use Adobe's Creative Suite programs, you now have to pay extra to Pantone in order to use those or any other colors that they've created. Recently, Adobe users have discovered that in order to use certain colors, they have to agree to a fifteen dollar per month subscription to Pantoe in order to access those. This is due to a change in the licensing agreement between Adobe and Pantone.

And if you're not in design, you might think, what's the big deal here? They are colors owned by some company. Just use some other color. But Pantone has established itself as sort of an industry standard for design when it comes to color. The color matching in Pantone means you know exactly what you're getting when you use those colors. Of course, those colors might appear differently to the end user depending upon how they're viewing them, like print versus

their screen versus a pristinely calibrated screen, etcetera. If a designer has not coughed up this subscription fee, they will encounter the color black rather than you know, poppy red or vibrant green, or whatever Pantone color was supposed to

be there. This also applies to past designs. So if you are a designer and you use the Adobe Suite and you created stuff in the past and you have not yet subscribed to this, if you go back and open up any of your old designs that had Pantone colors in it, you're going to see that those colors have been replaced with black, and you'll get a message saying that you need to subscribe to Pantone in order

to get access to those colors. Again. On top of all this, it sounds like pantone solution, which is to download a plug in extension that will supposedly work with the Adobe Suite, hasn't had a success rate when it

comes to designers actually installing that plug in. Some people are reporting that they have gone through the whole process of subscribing and getting the plug in and installing it and yet have not been able to access the plugins features, so they haven't been able to get access to those colors. After all, users have let their displeasure be known by review bombing the plug in, which currently has a rating of around one and a half stars, which is a

big old yikes. The Guardian reports that TikTok, which recently updated its privacy policy, has revealed that staff around the world can have access to user data, including within the European Union. That is a big issue due to the eu s stance on citizen privacy and how data should be handled. The g d p R has extensive rules about the fact that EU citizen data is supposed to

be kind of contained within the EU itself. You're not supposed to have that data go outside the EU without express permissions granted, and the thought of people in other parts of the world into scriminately being able to access personal information about EU citizens runs counter to those rules, and according to The Guardian, even staff in China would be able to look at user data in the EU. That's something that we've seen kind of echoed here in

the US. We've seen policy makers and analysts raise red flags that TikTok's parent company, which is byte Dance, a Chinese company, could potentially end up sharing information by choice or otherwise with the Chinese government. This is something that TikTok reps have denied multiple times, but it remains a concern in the US and in other places. This is likely to feed into investigations in the EU by the

Irish Data Protection Commission. That's an agency that has had multiple tech companies in their sites to hold them accountable for their data practices with regard to EU citizen private information. So not the end of the story by any means, but it's another another sign of how this interconnected world starts to run into some really challenging problems when you're

coming into realms like protecting user privacy and security. How do you ensure that when you're talking about a global system, but you don't have a global society, right, We have a very fractured society around the world. So, yeah, interesting story. When we come back, we'll talk about a similar story unfolding here in the United States, also involving TikTok. Right

after this break, we're back. So over here in the United States, FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr has said that the government should probably just outright ban TikTok from operating within the United States. Card told reporters that he saw very little chance for any sort of suitable arrangement to be made regarding TikTok and the US government specifically with the

focus on national security concerns. He expressed pessimism that any deal would be ironclad enough to prevent TikTok from sharing data with bite Dance, and as such, there will be no real way forward to really protect US data other than just banning TikTok outright in the United States, which is a pretty jarring thing to consider. I cannot remember a time when the US government told a US based company, we cannot let you exist here. I mean, apart from

companies that ended up being total scams. Right, total scams you get because that is a deception played upon the US population. The government may well get involved in those cases, but for ones where it's not a scam but there is a national security element to it, that's kind of an outlier. TikTok, just to remind you again, it is a subsidiary of the Chinese company Byte Dance, but TikTok

itself is US based, so it is a complicated matter. Um. TikTok has obviously tried to settle these concerns in various ways. This summer, it migrated all of US user data to servers that are on Oracles systems, so those servers are not Chinese based servers, and TikTok was really hoping that that would help take some of the heat off the company as various policy makers began to question whether or

not the company represents a threat to national security. All that being said, FCC Commissioner car has expressed his own opinion. He does not factor into the negotiations between TikTok and the US government, so it's not his decision to make. He's just saying, I can't it imagine a deal that would be sufficient to protect U S citizens. And really the only way forward I see if you want to

protect citizens is to ban TikTok. That you know. Obviously, that does not mean the US government will ban TikTok. In fact, I think that's an a very small possibility. Maybe it'll happen. Uh, it's hard for me to say. I mean, I have no insight on this other than it feels to me like that's unlikely. But even if the government does do that, you know, I will cover the story, although you'll probably be aware of it already because there'll be kids all over the place saying things

like why dance if nobody is watching. Back in October, pro Publica published the results of an investigation into a Texas based services company on the matter of price fixing. I actually thought about covering the story when it first broke, but thought it was a little too regional. It's not really,

but yeah, let's let's get into it. So the company is called real Page and one of the services that it offers to property managers you know, landlords, is called yield Star, and this is software is designed to suggest optimal rental prices for property managers. The ideas that the software can help a landlord set a proper rental price for any given property, whether it's an apartment or a home or whatever. It takes all these different factors into account.

You know, market factors for that specific region, what are other landlords charging that kind of thing, and you get daily updates with suggestions about where to set rental prices. And Pro Publica alleges that because you have so relatively few property managers out there, this software leads to situations where you effectively have price fixing and collusion between landlords,

even though they're not directly talking to one another. By the ample fact that they're all relying upon this kind of software, it is the software that is effectively handling all the collusion. So Pro publica as investigation also revealed that like in parts of Seattle, for example, seventy of all rental housing is overseen by just ten property managers. So you have just ten entities overseeing seventy of the

rental properties in this one place. So if these ten property managers are using this software, then the vast majority of rental properties are going to have their prices determined by this software that's looking to maximize revenue for the landlords.

I mean, that's why landlords want to use the software in the first place, right, They want to be able to determine how much can I charge in rent for this property that will maximize my own personal revenue, Which makes sense, that's the whole nature of being a landlord. But if this software is doing it for all of different property managers within a region, they can start hiking

up that price and there's a lack of competition. You're not going to be told, hey, you need to set your price at this level, because it will definitely still make you a profit, but it will undercut your competition and more people will be drawn to your properties instead. It's more like, here's how much everyone's charging, so here's

how much you can charge. And ultimately it's the end customer, you know, the renters who are hurt by this lack of competition, they don't have alternatives they can go to where they're not spending more than what the market would typically bear to rent their properties. So now U S. Senator Shared Brown is calling for an FTC review into

the matter after Pro Publica published this investigation. This kind of collusion has happened in the past, but in this case It's really interesting because it's the software that's facilitating the whole thing. Uh it, it really gives the participating landlords and out right it's not they can say, hey, we weren't trying to collude, we weren't trying to fix prices. We were using a tool to help determine how to

run our business. Anyway. Yeah, it'll be interesting to see if this will lead to a full FTC investigation in what that outcome could be, because it could mean that we see a real strict kind of limitation put on this type of software in general, the type that's meant to maximize revenue for for certain types of services, because it could lead to that anti competitive situation. Finally, Meta, in its ongoing quest to make the future of the Internet happen even if nobody wants it, announced that it

is testing a new feature on Instagram. That feature lets a quote small group of creators in the US end quote meant in f T s, and then users can purchase the n f T S. So it's an n f T marketplace that's integrated into Instagram that they're testing. The n f T marketplace is going to be on top of the polygon blockchain. Polygon is just one of many block chains out there, and that would be the

foundation for this particular n f T marketplace. So you could, you know, trade on the Instagram platform or directly onto the Polygon blockchain. Users will be able to display their n f T s on Instagram, So I guess that's a that's an attractive feature. Now, I admit I am not the audience for this. Heck, I'm not even on Instagram anymore, so I definitely not the person this is targeted to. I still find the idea of buying n

f T s to be questionable at best. Um and creating a culture where displaying n f T purchases rubs me the wrong way. It kind of starts to get into this kind of concern ubicuous consumption idea. Listen, I grew up in the eighties. I just I find all that ikey at this point. So all of that kind of strikes me the wrong way. At this stage. However, I can understand the idea as being a way to

support maybe a specific artist. Right. So let's say that there's a cartoonist who has an Instagram account, and this cartoonist has decided to mint n f T s of their work based off their work. So you purchase an n f T to show your support for that artist. You really like that artist, You buy an n f T to support that person, and so that's the nature of that transaction. And then you also have the opportunity to display your n f T on Instagram, which could

act as a kind of promotion for that artist. You're you're saying, I support this person, I think they're worthy of support. You should check them out when you think of it that way. I can groove on that, but I find the whole n f T approach to be questionable at best. I have proven myself to be completely out of touch on these sorts of things. So I'm just gonna stop talking now and I'll wait to fade

into oblivion while I do that. If you would like to get in touch with me and let me know about things I should talk about in future episodes, you can do so by downloading the I Heart radio app, navigate over to the tech stuff page, and you can use the little microphone icon to record a message up to thirty seconds in length. Let me know what you would like to hear. I look forward to hearing from you. Or you can pop on over to Twitter while it's

still a thing and send me a message there. The handle for the show is tech Stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again, really SI. Tech Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite. It's only