Tech News: Lost in the Amazon

stepping down as CEO of Amazon later this year. The announcement came out on Tuesday, which I think was pretty rude, as I had already recorded and published the news episode for that day by the time the press release came out. Not a lot of consideration there for me. Jeff. This comes after a banner year for Amazon, at least the corporate coffer part of it. While millions of folks were struggling to find out how to work and parent and

all that stuff during a pandemic. Amazon passed the one trillion dollar market cap, and it's well in its way to to trillion at this point. Heck, Amazon made one hundred billion dollars in one quarter. That means three months. Bezos will not be leaving the company entirely he'll actually be playing a pretty firm hand with Amazon as the

executive chairman of the board of directors. As for his replacement, that will be Andy Jesse, who heads up the Amazon Web Services Division a k a a w S. And while I think most folks probably think of Amazon as an online retail company, you know where you go to buy everything from books to boats, more than half of Amazon's operating income actually comes from a WS. The division is responsible for enormous server farms that provide hosting services

for cloud based applications web companies. You might remember a recent news item that AWS booted the social network Parlor or parlay from its servers for failing to moderate content on the platform, which was a violation of Amazon's policies. Jesse will take over for Bezos later this year. According to Bezos, he will quote focus my energies and attention

on new products and early initiatives end quote. In addition to that work, Bezos also will spend more time with several of his other companies, such as his private space company Blue Origin, and I guess maybe figuring out what he's gonna do with that more than five billion dollars he has in wealth. Now, based on this reporting, you might think that I envy Jeff Bezos, and you would be right. But he's a business genius and I'm not. So I also understand that I'm just not the type

of person to a mass that kind of wealth. Also, as we'll be talking about in a little bit, I probably don't have the stomach to do some of the things that billionaires do in order to become billionaires. And now for a few more Amazon stories, we could think of this as being lost in the Amazon. So next up our plans that Amazon has for a new glass tower high rise building in Arlington, Virginia. This would be

part of Amazon's HQ two headquarters project. You might remember that several years ago all of the United States was in a bidding war to become the place for Amazon's headquarters, and a lot of people, myself included, assumed that Amazon was just playing the long game, trying to you know, put some leverage on the choices that were already at the top of its list to get them to give them, you know, much better tax and syntoms and stuff. This

is the outcome of that. So the design of this tower calls for it to be three fifty feet or around a hundred six meters tall, and around this tower will be three twenty two story buildings that will also be part of the HQ two campus now. According to a press release, the tower is meant to connect people with nature and have a vertical forest arranged in a couple of spiraling walkways that go from the base all

the way to the top of the tower. There will be some public spaces incorporated, though not throughout the whole structure, and Amazon plans to offer public tours of the building, which will be called the Helix. Now. That sounds like a setting in an Assassin's Creed game to me, but Amazon says the inspiration for the design comes from the helix shape found and everything from conk shells to DNA.

Inside the space will be a massive meeting area capable of holding people, and there will be an artist in residence program there. And spiraling around that exterior is that green space allowing people to kind of stroll up a wooded spiral walkway. Looks like it might be stairs all the way up, so it might be a little rough if you aren't like used to climbing a lot of steps,

and you can go all the way to the tippy top. Apparently, my favorite description of the artist rendering for the helix comes courtesy of Jacob Krastanaki's of The Verge, who calls it a quote glass poop emoji covered in trees end quote. Also, I should point out that as of this recording, this whole thing is just a proposal for Amazon to move forward. They will need to get clearance from Arlington City government

before they can break any ground on the structure. In a previous news update, I talked about how workers at an Amazon warehouse and Bessemer, Alabama, which I just want to call Bessame, was that they were attempting to unionize and if they manage that, they will be the first of Amazon's US based warehouses to do it. The company

isn't exactly backing down from this development, however. The Seattle Times reports that Amazon has funded a pr campaign against the unionization efforts that employees are pursuing with the retail, wholesale and department store union. According to the papers sources, Amazon employees have been ordered to attend mandatory meetings in which managers present quote anti union propaganda thinly veiled as

factual information end quote. These meetings are pretty small. There are about fifteen employees per meeting and they last about half an hour. While I'm sure the meetings aren't much fun, I also imagine managers must have a pretty tough message to sell. After all, if you work for a company that makes one hundred billion dollars in just three months, I figure you might start asking yourself questions like, Hey,

couldn't you afford better compensation and benefits for us? According to the Seattle Times piece, Amazon hasn't had to worry about unions a lot due to the fact that the company pays a little bit better than most competing retail and warehouse based jobs, and to the employee turnover is so high that there aren't a lot of people who are in a position for long enough for any real

momentum to build. But the pandemic really change things. Not only did it spur on more consumer activity well a lot more folks buying stuff online, and also more cloud based activity, with more businesses having to move to the cloud to conduct business, but it also brought to light work conditions in these warehouses that included a higher risk of spreading COVID nineteen. In addition, the black Lives Matter movement has played a part. Many of the employees at

Amazon's Bessemer where house are black. Employees, will vote on whether to unionize later this month. That voting process actually extends all the way through March, and employees should expect to see a lot more anti union rhetoric from Amazon in the meantime. And we're not quite out of the Amazon yet. The company will pay a settlement of sixty one point seven million dollars over allegations brought against it

by the US Federal Trade Commission, or f TC. The reason well, according to the FTC, Amazon didn't pay its Flex delivery driver force the full amount of tips that were received from customers. Flex drivers, by the way, our delivery personnel who pick up shifts on demand to deliver stuff like Amazon Fresh or Whole Foods orders, as well as help with particularly heavy delivery days. And who boy, this thing, I mean, it really makes my blood boil.

I'm in a position in which I can afford to tip delivery personnel, and because I did penn upon them so much, and because these workers are in a much more risky position than I am, I feel like tipping is away from me to support them and to thank them for doing a tough and demanding job. So to hear about companies pocketing money from tips from customers, money that customers expect will go to the delivery employee, not you know, the machine that is profiting from that employee's work, Well,

that just burns my biscuits, y'all. Now, granted, I'm talking about kind of the situation that we're in right now, but these allegations are actually from before the pandemic. In sixteen, the FTC says that Amazon made a policy change. Drivers had been earning between eighteen to twenty an hour plus tips.

Amazon pushed them to a lower hourly rate, and, according to the FTC, quote intentionally failed end quote to tell drivers about the change and then use the tips from customers to pad out the difference between the new lower hourly rate and the old higher hourly rate, the one that people were promised. So, in other words, Amazon, according to the FTC, was using tips to subsidize what had been the promised hourly rate before they changed it, which

is pretty dang scummy. Amazon of course, disagrees with the FDC's conclusions, stating that there was never any intentional miscommunication and then the company added quote additional clarity in two thousand nineteen end quote and just to be clear, while I am dunking on Amazon right now. Other companies have similarly used tips to subsidize worker wages in the past. Door Dash did that up to two thousand nineteen, at which point the CEO of the company said that door

Dash would stop doing that. Instacart also had a similar approach until the company was called out on it. So if you are someone who tips still have refolks, and if you use delivery folks and you can afford to tip, you probably should be doing that. It's good to also do a bit of research on the various companies to make sure that those tips are actually going to the people who are doing the work, not subsidizing a company's payroll.

Let's move over to Google. For the first time, Google revealed how much revenue it generated through its cloud services business. The division brought in thirteen point oh six billion dollars in twenty twenty. However, it also reported an operating loss of five point six one billion dollars, so it costs more than they made that those losses don't indicate a floundering business. Rather Google has been pouring a lot of money into expanding its cloud services division, including hiring on

more sales personnel. As I mentioned earlier, cloud services are a big business. I mean, they represent more than half of Amazon's revenue for twenty twenty, and Google is pressure to diversify as its chief source of revenue is through online advertising. That's a sector that was hit very hard in twenty twenty as companies across various industries began to scale back marketing efforts during the pandemic. I'm sure we'll see a lot more about Google being a cloud services

company moving forward. And rounding out this first segment of our news episode is the story of India issuing a warning to Twitter. Now, the heart of the matter is

the issue of ongoing protests among farmers in India. That whole political situation is incredibly complicated, and I am no expert on Indian politics or agricultural policies, but basically, if I'm interpreting it correctly, I believe the main concern is that a trio of farm acts that were passed by the Indian government in September twenty twenty might set the stage for big corporations to dominate the farming into street in India and muscle out all the independent farmers. That

appears to be the interpretation now. While the majority Indian government has kind of dismissed such concerns, calling this misinformation or a misunderstanding, members of the opposition have voiced concerns and farmers in India have organized some pretty massive and

sometimes violent protests. Part of the government's response to the protests has been to pressure Twitter to block high profile accounts in India that support the protests, as well as you know, restrict certain hashtags that allow people to easily

share online ideas about protests. Initially, Twitter did block requested profiles, but then a few hours later they lifted the ban, and the Indian government says that Twitter is acting like some sort of social arbiter that's acting like it's above the law, and so India is threatening legal action against Twitter. Some internet advocacy groups are pushing back against the Indian government, such as Rahman Chimah, who works for the advocacy group

Access Now. Chima says that the Indian government needs to explain how their actions against Twitter are not a violation of India's own constitution. This is a very big story that is very much still playing out right now, and I'm sure I will be following up on this again in the future. Well, that wraps up our first round of news. When we come back, we'll talk a little bit about some other stuff, including an update on the good old solar Winds hack. But first let's take a

quick break. We're back, and as I said before the break, we're going to start this segment with some updates on the solar wind hack. Now, as a quick refresher, solar wind is a software vendor that makes products for big companies and government agencies. The software is mostly geared around

stuff like I T resource management, monitoring network systems. Hackers, likely backed by Russia, compromised a software product called Orion and inserted some malware that allowed the hackers to get access to compromise systems, that is, you know, the customers using Orian software. So when solar Winds pushed out updates to Orion and customers installed those updates, the malware essentially

went along for the ride. Now we've heard that security analysts have identified three previously undisclosed vulnerabilities in solar Winds products. Two of those are also in Orion and one is in a separate piece of software. These vulnerabilities could allow hackers to get access to secured credentials in networks or worse, and Solar Winds has already addressed the vulnerabilities. They have

patched them out, and they've issued a patch. They've sent it out, which means that analysts are suggesting that network administrators install these patch is right away. Of course, this gets to the really insidious nature of the supply chain hack, as Shannon Morrise pointed out when she was on the show earlier this week, because you're you're talking about an attack that takes advantage of a trusted partner that ends

up undermining the trust. So now the analysts are saying, hey, you know that thing you did that burns you, well, you kind of want to do it again because this will solve some problems. But you know a lot of

people have been burned already. It's a scary thing. In the USA USA section of our news, Bloomberg reports that the United States has dropped off the top ten list of the Bloomberg Innovation Index, which quote analyzes dozens of criteria using seven equally weighted metrics, including research and development, spending, manufacturing capability, and concentration of high tech public companies end quote.

South Korea is at the top of the list, taking the title away from Germany, which has fallen to fourth place. In places two and three, you've got Singapore in Switzerland respectively. Now, granted, this is one index. This is one way of looking at innovation, and it's from one media outlet. So depending upon your point of view, you either think, yeah, this is right on the money, or you might think this

is a load of ludicrous, meaningless analysis. Somewhere in that is the truth, and I can't tell you where it is. I'm just reporting it. So before anyone writes to me, just remember I'm the messenger here. But another news Bibo is coming back in some form. Do you remember Bibo? You might not. Uh. It was really popular in the UK and in a few other places. It came out of the United States, but it didn't get a whole

lot of traction here compared to some other places. Bibo was a social network site founded by a husband and wife team of Michael and show Chee Birch in two thousand five in San Francisco, California, and it had the motto blog early blog often you know Bibo. The profiles were kind of modular in nature. You had a module where you could add friends. You had one that would let you receive and send messages with those friends. But you can also switch things up. You could put in

modules to include photos or videos and other stuff. It was like a more customizable Facebook or MySpace page. Bibo also allowed users to link their social accounts from other services to Bibo, so that Bibo would become a type of aggregator. So if Bibo were around today in that form, imagine that instead of having to find out what your buddy Susan is doing on Instagram and then over on Twitter and so on, you would just go to Susan's

Bibo page. Then you could see all of her activities aggregated there, assuming that Susan had set up a profile that way, of course. And it was a pretty nifty little site, but a O L must have thought it was super duper nifty, as a O L shelled out eight hundred fifty million dollars to acquire it in two

thousand eight. This, by the way, has often been cited as one of the worst acquisitions of all time, not because Bibo wasn't good, but because A o L didn't really have any idea of what to do with it and they spent way too much money on it. The CEO who was responsible for that decision wasn't around for very long, and the Bibo acquisition is one of the

reasons for their hasty departure. But A O L would unload Bibo in for ten million dollars, which really doesn't make that hundred fifty million dollar acquisition look pretty dumb in you know, retrospect. But a couple of years after that, the company that bought Bibo from A O L itself had to file for bankruptcy, and that husband and wife team who started at all were able to acquire Bibo for one million dollars, so they sold it for fifty million. They bought it back for one million. Talk about a

short sell. That's amazing. Now, they tried to switch things up again. They changed it into more of an e sports streaming service. But then Amazon comes along, and Amazon owns Twitch, and Amazon says, hey, we want that technology, so they purchased the tech of Bibo for twenty five million dollars. So now you've got this husband and wife team who were able to sell at least the technology

of their company for a big profit twice well. While the tech went to Amazon, the couple retained the rights to the name Bibo, and now we know that Bibo is on the way back. Michael Burch says it will be a live social networking tool which will tell you which of your friends are currently online and allow for more real time interactions between people, as opposed to the more asynchronous approach of things like Facebook. Michael Birch has said he's the only one coding the project right now,

which is both cool and bonkers. He hopes to start sending out invites to a select group of people to test it out by the end of the month, with a full launch that would follow later in if things are going well. So can Bibo make it in a world dominated by Facebook? Or is it just doomed to be a curiosity? I really hope it can make it, assuming Birch is able to do some really important stuff like make sure he can protect user data and all that kind of thing. But who knows, maybe he'll get

a chance to sell Bibo for a third time. Our next story is about gravitational wave detectors. Now gravity is one of the four fundamental forces of our universe, the four that we know about anyway, the other three being the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, and the electromagnetic force. The force of gravity is the attraction between two objects that have mass or energy. The magnitude of that attractive force depends upon the relative mass and proximity

of the two objects. The bigger they are and the closer they are together, the stronger the attraction of gravity is between them, and it is the weakest of the fundamental forces. There are gravitational waves moving through the universe all the time, but detecting them on Earth is hard because they are very weak, and we're talking about waves that measure about Adam's nucleus in amplitude, So measuring that is hard, and it falls into a realm of quantum

physics that gets real whibbly wobbly. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle plays a role. I think I'm not really sure that was an uncertainty joke. It it actually does play a part. So the uncertainty principle tells us that for certain sets of measurements, we can't know everything. For example, the classic one is a particle's momentum and its position. The more we know about one of those, the less we can

know about the other. So the more we know about its position, the less we know about its momentum, and vice versa. Now, because of this fundamental quantum effect that I frankly do not really understand, there is a sort of background noise that gravitational waves can get lost in. So it's only when a wave has enough oo finite that we can differentiate the wave from sort of background

quantum static. But physicists now say they've developed a method that is six times more sensitive to gravitational waves while still obeying the uncertainty principle. The method sacrifices the measure of brightness of lasers in order to get a more precise measurement than the researchers say, Well, the brightness of the lasers is kind of not important to us at all, so it's okay for us to sacrifice that. Now, I'm going to be straight with you, All of this goes

way over my head. I just love that scientists can look at fundamental limitations of our universe, you know, stuff you cannot escape, and they figure out to do of an approach that works within those limitations, which is really cool, and all of this will be put to use so that extremely smart people can learn more about how our

universe works. And I can't wait to learn more myself, probably learning that I am incapable of understanding anything, but I can tell it's really neat And moving from the cosmological to the extremely terrestrial, TikTok announced that it has a new warning message to put in front of videos that could contain misinformation. Now, obviously, misinformation has been a big topic of discussion recently, from the U S Election

to the pandemic. We've seen people make use of online platforms to spread lies and misleading information that can have devastating consequences. And likewise, we've seen companies like Twitter, Facebook, and Google react to this in different ways and at different speeds. They haven't necessarily been quick to action. Now, TikTok will include a warning message saying caution video flagged

for unverified content. These are for videos that contain information that has not been verified by fact checkers who work for TikTok. So if a fact checker watches a video that contains information and that fact checker is not able to verify the information, they can flag it and this

warning will appear before that video. Now, what we don't know is how many people TikTok employees to be fact checkers, or how many videos they look at in an average day, or what percentage uh those videos represent if you compare it against all videos uploaded to TikTok. I mean, my guess is that they're going to be focusing on videos

that have tags that are part of sensitive topics. You know, like if there's a tag that indicates it something about an election or or COVID or something like that, that that's going to be the video that gets tagged in order for a fact checker to watch it. Because when your app has more than eight hundred million users, you just can't keep up with everything. Besides, most of the

stuff on TikTok doesn't really merit fact checking. You don't really need to watch the video to see if someone's doing that flossing dance properly or any of the other you know, seven dances that are done on TikTok. I I don't have TikTok. I'm throwing a lot of shade for an old man. I'm just yelling at clouds here. I apologize However, one thing I hope the fact checkers can determine is exactly when the weller men will come to bring us sugar and tea and rum, because I've

been waiting and that guy has not shown up. And before we go to another break, I've got an update on the ongoing battle between Epic Games and Apple. Now, in case you didn't know, Epic Games makes, among other things, the game Fortnite, which I kind of just referenced, and Fortnite used to be available on iOS platforms like the iPhone and iPad, and it's also available on tons of

other platforms. But Epic was not really happy with Apple's policy of taking a thirty cut off of all in app purchases made on apps that are on the the Apple products the Apple platforms. When I say all in app purchases, that's with an asterisk because it actually depends upon the nature of the purchase. But if it's an in app purchase for something that makes a change to the app itself, like a cosmetic change or anything like that, Apple gets cut. Well. Epic wasn't too keen on the

idea of Apple taking money from Epics sales. They didn't know how they could you know, get the full amount of those purchases. And they weren't really keen on the idea either of hiking purchases hiking the price up for iPhone users because they figured that would be a loss

in revenue. So they found kind of a cheeky work around and they allowed users to buy in app purchases, but they were able to do it outside the app itself, thus sidestepping Apple, and Apple said dirty pool old man and kicked Fortnite off the app store, and they moved to do more than that, including preventing Epic from doing any other work within iOS, which was bad news not just for Epic but many other game developers because one of the other things that Epic overseas is the Unreal Engine,

which is a game engine used by lots of different game companies to build their games within Now, with the ban in place, Epic wouldn't be able to update the iOS version of Unreal, and there would be a big ripple effect. Any game that relied on Unreal would be affected anyway. What followed were various lawsuits and the latest development is that a judge has ordered that Apple CEO Tim Cook has to attend a seven hour deposition related

to epics case against Apple. Now, in Apple's favor is the act that the company has an established policy that developers agreed to if they want to make products for

Apple platforms. But Apple is also one of the US companies frequently scrutinized for anti competitive practices, and Epic might try to make the case that because Apple does not allow users to download apps anywhere other than on the official app store, they're running what is essentially a monopoly because you can't go outside Apple to get an app to run on your iOS device. So the deposition gives EPICS legal team the chance to kind of fish around a bit to see if they can find any pathway

that would be likely to illegal victory. This is still a pretty early step in the whole litigation process, and we've got a long way to go, So before we try and go down that path, let's take another quick break and we're back. You know, when I was looking at news items to include in today's episode, one that caught my eye was from Science Daily and it had the headline quote load reducing backpack powers electronics by harvesting energy from walking end quote, which is neat and it

really is neat. I'm not throwing shade on this. I think it's really cool. I mean the design reduces the amount of strain a person will feel while carrying a packed backpack, and it has the ability to send some power to various bits of electronic gear. It could be really useful for everyone from hikers to soldiers. So how does it manage this? Well, first, let's consider the load

bearing part. So imagine that the part of the backpack that's actually against your back is more like a track, kind of like a rail track, and the backpack itself is able to move up and down a little bit on this track. So the container part of the backpack is sort of like a train on a rail system, and it's held in place with elastic like connectors, so

they act like shock absorbers. So the backpack can move up and down against this track, but it's very gentle in the way it moves, and it's sort of like a steadicam where if you've ever used a steadicam or seen one used, you can move around and the camera is able to maintain its relative position over a fixed point. The system reduces the amount of strain the where would feel, and according to the researchers, it makes loads feel about

twenty lighter than what they really are. Now. As for the energy harvesting part, that comes courtesy of triboelectric nanogenerators or t e n G devices. Now, essentially these change kinetic energy into electrical energy, which isn't that unusual. I mean, think of something like a dynamo which mechanically rotates magnets to induce current to flow through a conductor. The researchers include Jeong Lin, Wong Ching and others, and they've been

working on this for a while. They've got a working prototype, but there's no telling if we will ever see a consumer product using this technology. However, it's still really interesting stuff. One news item I missed out in Tuesday's episode is that Iron Man is trying to save the world again. That's a really dumb way for me to say that. Robert Downey Jr. Who you know isn't Iron Man but who is one cool dude, launched a venture fund with

the intent to provide investments into sustainability startup companies. Now, this is an extension of the Footprint Coalition that Robert Downey Jr. Launched a couple of years ago, and it's classified as a rolling fund, which was a new term to me, but it's actually pretty simple to understand. These funds raise money on a quarterly basis and they invest it as they go, which is why they are called

rolling funds. This one will allow for up to two thousand investors at a commitment of five thousand dollars per quarter. Now a twenty grand commitment for a year is still a huge deal, but it's a much lower threshold than most investment organizations which are working in the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. Our DJ has said that it opens up the fund to quote real people end quote and that and this is my favorite quote. It's a little bit more slam Dance than sun Dance. I

kind of dig it. The plan is for the fund to invest in ten companies, with six of those companies being in early stages of startup and the other four in later stages of startup, and woven with the investments will be a sort of narrative building element, a media savvy element there really aims to bring more attention to sustainability and ways that people can participate to make it a collaborative effort. Which sounds pretty neat. I like this idea of bringing the power to the people. I think

that's cool. Next up, Gearbox Software, known for games like the Borderlands franchise, has a new owner. The Embracer Group, which owns several other game companies like th HQ. Nordic has acquired Gearbox for the princely sum of one point three billion dollars. Actually it's more like one point three seven eight billions, almost one point four now. According to Gearbox Software founder and CEO Randy Pitchford, who I think it's safe to say is a controversial figure, operations won't

really change at the company of Gearbox. There are still plans on further Borderlands games being developed in partnership would take two take two as a company that publishes the

Borderlands games that Gearbox develops. So now Borderlands and other games like Duke Nukem and Homeland will join stuff that Embracer already owns, like the Saints Row franchise, or Dead Island or Time Splitters even and Pitchford says that this really means that Gearbox will be able to expand and hire more talent and develop new games on top of

continuing popular franchises. The Global Wealth company Morgan Stanley published a report that says the United States is likely to move away from coal fired power plants by twenty thirty three, with most power generation coming from renewable energy sources instead of coal. Among those sources, wind would make up the

largest percentage. Morgan Stanley predicts it will get up to as much as of all power sources for the US by But for all that to work, we're going to need to see a lot of faster growth in wind and solar power infrastructures. And we can't forget the challenge of job creation. We need to offset the job losses from mining operations, for example, so those jobs will exist, but we'll also need to invest in training and opportunities to make sure people aren't left him That's one of

the biggest concerns about moving away from fossil fuels. I mean, yes, you've got the fossil fuel companies that lobby like crazy and pour a lot of money into politics in order to try and shape policy. But you also have very real people who have jobs in those industries, and unless we give them a way to segue into a new career, they get left behind and that is. That's a tough

thing to really wrap your head around. And finally, in the rumors that just will not die department, we've got Apple cars, and I think the two things people predict Apple will eventually get around to making will be a car and a television. And as it stands, Apple has partnered with other companies to incorporate some Apple technology into stuff like car infotainment systems, but we haven't actually seen

a real, honest to goodness Apple mobile yet. Well. A recent report states that Apple is investing around three point six billion dollars in Kia Motors as quote part of a planned manufacturing partnership between the two companies end quote. Now, that could mean that Apple might rely on Kia's manufacturing facility here in Georgia to build what I can only

assume will eventually be called the I Car. Even if all of this is on track and we are going to get an Apple branded car, we're gonna have to wait a few years to see a car roll off the production line. So don't you know, hold your breath for it. We're talking probably at the earliest my guests would be probably closer to but it would be kind of interesting for Tim Cook to be on a stage at a keynote and say one more thing and then you see the Apple car and then he gets it

and drives off. That would be a pretty cool mic drop moment. And that set for this episode of tech Stuff and the news of the week. Make sure you check out our other episodes of tech Stuff because I do episodes on Mondays and Wednesdays where I cover specific topics in depth, and then on Friday's we get to listen to a classic episode from the archives. I've got more than episodes. Chances are you have not heard all of them, and most of them are worth listening to.

I admit in a couple of them my puns get out of hand. If you have any suggestions for future topics I should cover in episodes of tech Stuff, let me know. The best way to reach me is over on Twitter. The handle for the show is text Stuff H S W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text 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 shows. Eight