Tech News: Mt. Kilimanjaro Gets WiFi

mid term election. That means that the president is not up for re election, but a lot of folks in Congress and in local positions around the US are It also means that there is a heightened concern about the spread of misinformation online. And you know, that's been an issue for years, but it really came under the spotlight in and it has stayed in the spotlight ever since,

hogging center stage. Now to that end, in twenty twenty, Facebook, the platform and actually the company itself, because the company had not yet changed its name to Meta in anyway, it took the significant step of banning new political ads from being published in the week leading up to the election. Now Meta is going to do the same thing for the US mid terms this year. And if you listened to Tuesday's episode this week, you know that there was a watchdog group that called out Meta for failing to

follow its own content moderation policies on Facebook. In Brazil, the group had submitted several ads purposefully containing misinformation within them, and Facebook accepted all of those ads. Now, it's true that in English speaking countries, Facebook's content moderation is, you know, slightly less incompetent. But rather than deal with the flood of possible attack ads and misinformation campaigns, Facebook is gonna wash its hands of the whole business, at least for

the week leading up to the election itself. It remains to be seen if Facebook will copy exactly what it did in because while the plan was just to have a temporary band that lasted a week, Facebook actually kept that ban on political ads in place all the way for six months. Pretty sure that's not gonna happen this year, but maybe it will. TikTok is taking a similar approach

when it comes to political content. Now, the company has a band that restricts influencers from posting paid political content. That's pretty much been the case from day one. The company has never accepted political ads. But it does start to get tricky when you understand that TikTok influencers aren't necessarily looking to TikTok as their payday. They take sponsorship

deals instead. And one of these days I really need to do a full episode on how various influencers make their money, because it varies from platform to platform, and it's never as straightforward as you might imagine. Anyway, TikTok isn't banning political content outright. You can still post a video where you express your political beliefs or where you critique a politician or policy or whatever, so long as

you don't break the other rules. For instance, if your video spreads misinformation, or it's meant to incite violence, or it turns out that you were paid to put that specific viewpoint up online, all of that is right out. The video is likely going to get deleted or at least heavily restricted, and there's a chance that the account holder, the person who made the video, might find themselves without

an account before too long. TikTok says it will make available information to creators so that they understand the rules. You know, it's making sure that people know what they're getting into, especially people who might be new to TikTok, and you know they're they're taking sponsorship deals maybe they aren't aware of the ban on political content when it

comes to sponsorship and paid content. I don't know if the steps that Facebook and TikTok are taking are going to have a significant impact on the spread of misinformation online. I do think they are steps in the right direction, but I imagine that all this really will do is make those who are are determined to spread misinformation to just find new ways to do it. Amazon is reportedly testing a short form video feature in its app that's

sort of similar to TikTok. That's how I'm seeing it reported, though I I don't. I don't draw it as close a connection as others do. So instead of it being a platform for dances and pranks and sketches and dubious life hacks and that kind of thing the way TikTok is, Amazon's version is meant to let users post short videos detailing, you know, like a review or a demonstration of a

product that's found on Amazon's store. So let's say you pop onto Amazon in order to buy yourself a brand new sewing machine, and when it arrives, maybe you shoot a quick unboxing video, or maybe you show how to set it up for its first use, particularly if the one you butt has poor and auctions. I've had that happen with stuff I've bought, where you know, I spent way more time trying to figure out how to just set it up than necessary because the instructions were terrible.

Or maybe you shoot a video to demonstrate how the device works as you actually finish a project on it. That's the kind of stuff that Amazon is looking into. The feature right now is called Inspire, and Amazon is testing it out, but there's no guarantee that the company will actually integrate it into the app for everyone and

roll it out. It might be that tests show that users aren't crazy about it or just never use it, but it is interesting to see how other big companies are testing the waters and trying to tap into the appeal of TikTok like presentations. Tech Crunch has made available a tool designed to see if your Android device is listed on a database indicating that spyware is installed on that device. All right, I'm going to back up a

little bit. So earlier this year, tech Crunch received a large amount of data that came from US spyware groups internal servers, and the information contains a list of all the Android devices that have been infected by the Truth Spy spyware and its network of spyware that includes other lots of other spyware apps, tons of them. And these apps sit quietly on Android phones and they do stuff

like log activity and track the device. And obviously there are a lot of nefarious reasons someone might be using spyware. I can't think of any like legit reasons for using it, but there are a lot of bad ones. And one uh that tech Crunch pointed out that is particularly scary and of real concern is that a stalker might attempt to infect a target's phone with spywear in order to keep tabs on that target. That is terrifying, y'all, and it's all too real. We have seen instances of this.

We've seen it not just with things like apps and and using spywear, We've seen it with using things like air tags. Right. So tech Crunch has now create a tool that makes it possible for Android device owners to check and see if their own device shows up in that list that tech Crunch received, which led up to all the devices that had been infected by these various kinds of spyware up to June of two. So the tool is located at tech crunch dot com slash pages

Slash the Truth Spy Dash Investigation. Now, if you go there and you want to check on your device to make sure it's not in this list, there will be a few steps you have to take, but the page actually walks you through all of that. So I suggest if you have an Android device that you go through the trouble of doing this, particularly if you suspect that

there could be spyware on your device. Now, if you find that your device is a match in that system, which I would say is kind of a worst case scenario, the page also has links to guide you through the steps of removing spywear from your device. Now that crunch

does issue a warning that I want to repeat. If you think that someone is using your device to spy on you and you're in a stalker situation, you need to be very careful moving forward because removing the spyware is likely to alert whomever put it on your device that you're onto them and that you're doing this. So just things to keep in mind to try and remain safe. And this is also a reminder that you should always

be careful with your devices. I'm not victim blaming here, because it is not always possible to avoid getting hit by stuff like this. We have seen really, really inventive attacks where the target of the attack had had little

to no chance of avoiding it. So this is not blaming, but just saying that taking precautions and following best practices when it comes to browsing on your device or downloading and installing apps, you know, doing your homework to make sure you're being as or full as you can be, that can really improve your chances of staying safe. But again, no shade thrown on people who are affected by this stuff. It can be easy to fall victim to it, and sometimes,

like I said, unavoidable. Reuter's reports that major financial institutions like banks are cracking down on the types of messaging and communication apps that employees are allowed to use while they conduct business. And here's the thing. I often bristle at the thought of a company, organization, or boss restricting what employees can do and how they do it, and

in this instance actually have to side with the organizations. See, these financial institutions are responsible for moving huge amounts of money around. Moreover, they are often responsible for transactions that can indicate massive important things going on in business that might not yet be public knowledge, and that opens up opportunities for stuff like insider trading or just getting head

start on everybody else on something. And because of that, the financial industry traditionally keeps a very close watch on employee activities in order to remain compliant, so failing to do so could bring regulators down on the financial institution with hefty fines to follow. Should it turn out that a lack of supervision led to employees of using their

position and knowledge and breaking rules, then enter the pandemic. Suddenly, these institutions needed to pivot, just like everybody else did, so that their employees could work remotely and business would not be disrupted, and some employees began using all sorts of different services to communicate with their clients. Some of those services include features meant to ensure secure in private communications. That's not a bad thing. Secure and private communications are

a good thing in most cases. I'm talking about stuff like end to end encryption or the communications services that don't keep a log of past communication sations so there's not a record. But that is a legal nightmare for financial companies. They need to be able to present these communications in the wake of an investigation. They need to be able to know what happened, who knew about it,

who were who was making decisions. And if you have these kinds of communications channels that aren't keeping track of that stuff, you have no proof and you're not compliant. So right now, financial institutions around the world are one they're setting aside large amounts of money to pay incoming fines because of these types of communications that are going on. So the companies they're there's they're not even saying it's not our fault. They're saying, yeah, we're saying aside money

because we know that these are violations. And meanwhile, they're trying to require employees to only use tools that can record an archive communications in order to meet compliance with various laws. So this is an interesting example of a scenario where the very features I usually think of as being important for personal communication are ones that are absolutely inappropriate it for this particular use case. All right, we've got some more news items to go over, but before

we do that, let's take a quick break. We're back in Saudi Arabia. The courts have sentenced a woman named Salma al Shahab to thirty four years in prison. So what was Salma's crime, Well, she had been retweeting activists who were calling for women's rights in Saudi Arabia and for the release of certain political prisoners within the country.

Salma had been attending university in the UK in pursuit of a PhD, and upon returning to Saudi Arabia for a vacation, she was detained and arrested, then tried and convicted on charges that she was aiming to quote disturb public order and destabilize the security and stability of the state end quote. This is absolutely horrifying, and to test a full stop on top of that, the Saudi regime owns a significant chunk of Twitter itself through what is

called the Public Investment Fund. That's an interesting name for a fund that represents sovereign wealth and not you know, public wealth. So this puts Twitter in an awkward position to write because this is the platform where the supposed infraction happen. And meanwhile, the entity that has has incarcerated this woman has ownership partial ownership of that platform. Not great.

I am not sure what if anything can be done on behalf of Salma, who clearly doesn't deserve being imprisoned at all, let alone for thirty or four years for just retweeting social messages on Twitter. In India, government officials are considering rules that would require Apple to abandon its proprietary charging ports on devices like air pods and iPhones and switched to the Universal Standard of SBC. Now should these officials decide that, Apple might have to make the

switch as early as four in India. This follows a similar decision that we talked about in a previous text, stuff that happened in the European Union, which also seeks to simplify the market and to make it easier for consumers to swap out charging chords without worrying if this cord matches that device or not. I suspect Apple will

migrate to USBC for those devices, at least for certain models. Uh, It's aready done so for things like Mac computers, and largely I think this is going to happen because while Apple was once primarily known as a hardware company during the Steve Jobs era, now we're in the Tim Cook era, and Apple has been repositioning itself to be more of a services company. I think Cook is less resistant to

conforming to industry standards than Jobs was. Jobs was kind of like my way or no way at all, and Tim Cook is more like, let's do whatever it takes in or to continue to be able to provide services. Bloomberg reports that the upcoming AD supported tier of Netflix

might have a few other restrictions for subscribers. The company had announced plans to introduce a lower cost AD supported tier in an effort to gain back some of the subscribers it has previously lost and presumably put the company back on track for growth, but we don't yet know the subscription price for that AD supported tier anyway, Bloomberg reports that Netflix might turn off a feature that current subscribers have, that being the ability to download content to

mobile devices in order to be able to watch that content offline, for example, when you're on an airplane. And this actually makes sense to me. For Netflix, you know, it's in a position where it needs to prove to advertisers that the ads on its platform will have value, and the company needs to be able to show that the ads are actually being played and watched, and you can't really do that if the content is downloaded. For

offline viewing. Also, Bloomberg reports that user will not be able to skip ads, and again that makes sense from Netflix's perspective. If users can just skip the ads, then why wouldn't everyone just downgrade to the cheapest ads supported option, you know, the and then just fast forward through all the ads. So Netflix has yet to comment on Bloomberg's report, and it's possible that these sorts of decisions haven't been

finalized yet. And hey, I know what you're thinking. Yeah, I'd love to scale Mount Kilimanjaro, but then I wouldn't be able to play today's wordle and I need an internet connection. Well, have I got good news for you, because the mountain has now got high speed WiFi on it. The Guardian has a pretty cheeky article about this news.

The article is titled Kilimanjaro gets high speed Internet so climbers can tweet or instagram ascent And sure you could do that, but honestly, I feel like Tanzania has installed high speed internet service on kilimanjar Oh not so that influencers can post videos while they look for the most

picturesque background. So it seems like their lives are perfect and without problems or limitations, but rather to make certain that there's a communications network in place to aid with navigation and to help in the event of an emergency. Having that safety net there could spell the difference between a successful rescue attempt and tragedy. I do think there will be plenty of people who will say, awesome, now

I can live tweet my climbing experience. But I'm okay with that if it also means someone who got in over their head has an opportunity to make it back to safety. And yesterday's Tech Stuff Tidbits episode, which ended up being nearly fifty minutes long, I talked about how VR has some barriers to entry that could serve as a hurdle for companies like Meta that they have to get over in order to bring the Metaverse to life.

One thing I didn't mention is the unveiling of the latest version of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's Metaverse avatar, which subsequently got a ton of news coverage in jokes about the avatar looking like a soulless creature and other people saying that's a fitting representation for Mark Zuckerberg, and I

am not here to make jokes like that. Instead, I'll say I think this is an indication that Zuckerberg is trying to address some of those hurdles that I mentioned in yesterday's episode, because a big one is the cost of VR gear, and if VR is to be an important component in the metaverse, which I should add is not a foregone conclusion, it's just one of the more commonly referenced manifestations of the metaverse is that it's a

VR experience. Well, that would mean that companies like Meta will want to make sure that the gear required isn't so expensive that it prices most people out of it. The metaverse is only going to be insanely profitable to Meta if the company can get a metric buttload of users to join it. So one way to ensure that the gear won't be too expensive is to make certain that the experience itself doesn't require top of the line

gear to render and process the experience. It's make it so that lower cost or in other words, cheap equipment can work just fine on the platform. To do that, you have to make some pretty big compromises in graphical quality. Enter the avatar, which to me looks like an Xbox three sixty era Avatar or maybe Nintendo Me avatar style. It's hardly a compelling virtual representation of a real person.

This presents a really interesting dilemma, I think because I don't know about you, but when I imagine the concept of the metaverse, my imagination conjures up this virtual environment where people can have any sort of avatar they want, and these avatars tend to look really cool and really impressive. Uh, they're high resolution and well animated, and in fact, a well designed avatar becomes something of a status symbol within

the metaverse. Then that only works if the environment supports that kind of a presentation, right, you need to be able to actually have that on there. But if instead the metaverse needs to aim for the lowest common denominator in order to attract the largest number of people so that the cheapest equipment can run the darn thing, then paradoxically, I think a lot of folks won't want to join

because it won't look cool enough. It'll look kind of cheap, so they won't have that temptation of joining there, Like, that's not cool. I don't want to do that. So then you're stuck. You either design something that looks amazing, but in turn requires equipment that's so expensive that most people can't afford to participate, or you go super simple, but then no one feels tempted to join it in

the first place. Now, I should add, we're still a very long way out from the true realization of the metaverse, and in the meantime, I expect we're going to continue to see advancements in technology that might be able to address these problems sufficiently so that they're a non issue when the ding dang darn thing is actually ready for prime time. All right, I have one more news item after this that I want to cover, but before we

get to that, let's take another break. Let's talk about the final news item for today, because it's a fun one, I think, anyway, and it comes from a story from the Verge uh and it's it's a story that really tickled me. But it's also a story that's long since been moot because this is a story about the deep past of computer history, back in the Windows XP days. Arguably some places are still in the Windows XP days. I find it insane that there are people who are

still running on Windows XP machines. I get that there are certain conditions that that mean that people just that's all they have access to. But you know that that's a truly defunct operating system. Although I mean, I gotta admit I was a big Window is XP fan back in the day. Okay, getting back to the story. So the story goes that this unnamed laptop manufacturer began to

get complaints about computers crashing under very specific circumstances. Those circumstances involved someone playing the music video for Janet Jackson's hit Rhythm Nation. In fact, sometimes it wasn't even the laptop itself that was playing it when the crash happened. It just happened to be close to another device that was playing the music video, and then the other the

laptop from this unnamed manufacturer would crash. Uh. And I don't know, maybe you're just saying that the laptop hated Rhythm Nation because everybody is a critic, am alright, But what the heck was actually going on? Well, according to Raymond Chen, who is a software engineer with Microsoft, the problem was that the music video contained within it a sound effect that had a specific frequency in it, and that frequency just happened to be the resonant frequency for

the laptops hard drive. So the sound effect would introduce vibrations into the hard drive and that would lead to a system crash. And you might wonder, well, how the heck did the laptop manufacturer deal with that problem? And yeah, this specific music video would set off that laptop, but then so would any other source of sound that contained that frequency, right, it would introduce these vibrations into the

hard disk drive, and then the laptop would crash. So, according to Chen, this manufacturer issued essentially a hatch update that would prevent the computers speakers from playing that specific frequency at all. So, in other words, if you were to play Rhythm Nation, that sound effect would lack that specific frequency. I don't know if the entire sound effect would go silent, or if just that one frequency from

the sound effect would no longer be audible. You might not even be able to tell the difference, you know, on casual listen. I don't know, but I assume if some other machine we're playing that music video, the laptop could still potentially crash. Though I also think things like speaker quality would determine that, because you're talking about producing a frequency with the proper amplitude for it to really

be an issue for the the affected laptops. Anyway, I thought the story was really amusing, but it's also a great reminder that it's cool to learn about physics. Resonant frequencies are important for a lot of different stuff. Nicola Tesla was obsessed with the idea of resonant frequencies. Musical instruments are obviously dependent upon things like resonant frequencies, but

these things can also lead to dangerous situations. I mean, if you are able to resonate adjust the right frequency, you could potentially dis roy stuff as large as suspension bridges. The idea being here that this is a frequency that resonates with whatever the material is and causes it to vibrate, and it can be kind of like being on a swing set and having someone push you at just the right moment and getting you to hire and higher arcs. Sort of like that, and just imagine that you get

to a point where things begin to break. This is the classic example of this is where you hit the resonant frequency for a crystal container and shatter it as a result. Or maybe you might use resonantive frequencies purposefully in an attempt to conduct industrial sabotage and a nuclear facility by manipulating centrifuges rotational speeds and try and make them destroy themselves. Cough stucks net cough. Science is both cool and kind of scary. All right. That's it for

today's tech Stuff news episode. Hope you enjoyed it. If you have suggestions for things I should cover and future episodes of tech Stuff, please reach out to me. There are a couple of different ways of doing that. You can download the i Heart Radio app and navigate to the tech Stuff page. There is a little microphone icon there. If you click on that, you can leave a voice

message up to thirty seconds in length. Let me know if you would like me to use the voice message in an episode, and maybe we'll have you lead into one, or if you prefer, you can always reach out to me on Twitter. The handle for the show is tech Stuff h s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.