Tech News: NASA Delays Artemis I Launch

S failed to get down to the proper temperature. The Artemist project is NASA's plan to return astronauts to the Moon and to set up stuff like lunar bases, including a lunar space station, with the idea that those assets in the future will support missions to Mars. Anyway, I mentioned last week that NASA had pushed the launch to this path as Saturday, and if it didn't happen on Saturday,

they would have another chance today Tuesday. Well, the launch didn't happen on Saturday, and it's not gonna happen today either. The culprit responsible for the scrub this time was a quote unquote large hydrogen leak. That's according to mission manager Michael Seraphin. And these sorts of things happen. NASA's history is filled with scrubbed launches and engineering issues. From one point of view, this is a good thing because NASA detected an issue and stopped it before it could escalate

into something like an accident. Now, keep in mind this particular mission, the Artemist one, has no crew on it. There are no human beings aboard the spacecraft. But obviously you never want there to be an accident. There's always a risk not just two equipment, but to human life. Anyway, that didn't happen. However, the scrub also comes as a big disappointment because the s l S has been in

development for a really long time. It was originally part of the now shelved constellation programs, so it's been a long time coming. The idea originally was that the s l S would have been in service for quite some time by now, so obviously each delay comes as a

setback and a disappointment. Now, I mentioned last week that NASA often faces challenges when it comes to tackling huge projects due to the fact that the agency has to depend upon the government for funding, and then when there are shifts in the government due to you know, elections changing things up, well what once seemed like a solid plan can disappear. Thus the Constellation program, although that program had so many problems with it due to lots of

different factors. Anyway, NASA has to address the problems with the s l S and the agency essentially has to options. Time is running out, however, so option one is to try and do the repairs on the launch pad itself. Now, that would require NASA to also construct an environmental enclosure around the launch vehicle while they do this work. But on the pad, NASA can actually test the system at cryogenic temperature, so the temperatures that the engines would be

operating at during a launch. They can lower those temperatures down for those kind of tests on the pad. However, time for doing that is starting to run out, like there is a deadline for that because there are other launches that have to happen, so the pad has to be cleared and prepared for the next set of launches. So the other option is to transport the Space Launch System back to the Vehicle Assembly Building or v a

B and to do repairs there. However, in the v A B they cannot lower the SLS down to cryogenic temperatures to do their tests. They can't do that inside the v A B, which means that any tests they do are going to be done at ambient temperatures and could potentially miss issues that will emerge under actual operating conditions.

And if NASA does use the v A B, then the s l S will have to stay put for a while because there won't be enough time to bring it back out before the next launch, which is a scheduled trip to the International Space Station, and that would mean that the earliest that the s l S would be able to try again would be in October. Space is hard y'all tomorrow, which is Wednesday, September seven, for those of you from the future who, for some reason I have decided to listen to an old tech news episode.

Apple is holding its September event where we expect to see unveilings of the iPhone fourteen, the Pro and Pro Max models. The Pro Max might actually get a name change and be called the Pro Plus. They're likely to receive the most attention. The base model probably won't be talked about nearly as my much. Now watch me eat those words. After tomorrow, we'll see. But rumor has it that Apple is adding in some new privacy and security

features around the camera and phone in particular. Now, if I had to guess, I would say that this is in part a reaction to malware like Pegasus, which the Israeli company ns A Group developed and then sold to

various clients, including authoritarian governments. So the Pegasus malware exploited a vulnerability long since patch now, but a vulnerability in Apple's I Message app where if you knew the phone number of your intended target, you could send them a message, and that message, just by hitting the target phone would turn that phone into a surveillance device that you could then control. That would give you the chance to listen in on the phone's microphone and whatever the camera could

see and spy on your target. So my guess is the Apples created some features that will indicate when the camera and microphone are in use, so the owners will be aware when their phones are you know, snooping on them, or when an app is making use of a camera or the microphone. And it might not be obvious in the app itself, but users need to know that they

might be on camera or on mike. Analysts expect that the Pro and the Pro Max or Pro Plus models will likely sport Apple's new A sixteen processor, and that the base I Phone fourteen will stick with the A fifteen processor that's used in the last generation of the iPhone. We'll probably also see some new Apple Watch models, maybe some new air pods. As for what else we'll see, well, there are a lot of rumors, but nothing really confirmed.

H One question is, are we finally going to get a look at the mixed reality headset that Apple has been working on, also known as Apple's second worst kept secret, the first being Apple's electric vehicle project. If we do, that would surprise me. There is at least one analyst who thinks that Apple might have a mixed reality headset on the market by early next year, and if that's true, then maybe we will get a glimpse of it tomorrow.

I am not holding my breath. I I mean they could make that a one more thing and and make it a big, big splash more. They might save that for its own dedicated event where they can just have an entire presentation around mixed reality. I honestly don't know which way they'll go. The folks at Apple are artists when it comes to PR so we'll just have to wait and see what happens tomorrow. And if there's no information about mixed reality, we know we're gonna have to

wait a while. Also an Apple news, Brazil's government has ordered Apple to stop selling iPhones without a battery charger in the country, and the government says that Apple's practice of not including a battery charger hurts consumers because then they have to go out and buy a charger in addition to their phone. Now, Apple says it made the move to stop including chargers because you know chargers, First of all, they're interchangeable, at least for Apple iPhones anyway,

so really you just need one. Right you buy an iPhone, you can use that same charger for the next iPhone you buy two years later, So even if you buy an iPhone every couple of generations, you can keep using

the old charger. Now in the EU, this goes even further because the EU is requiring phone manufacturers to all adopt the USB C charging port as a standard, which includes telling Apple the future iPhones and the EU are supposed to include such a port, and the goal there is to reduce compatibility issues and waste, because then you just have to buy one charger for whatever phone you use, and that same charger will work on any phone you buy from that point forward until standards change again where

we have to upgrade Brazil. Meanwhile, it's claiming that there's no evidence that not including a charger has any significance when it comes to environmental impact. In other words, Apples not saving the world by not including a battery charger with their iPhones, and that Apple will have to include

them if it wants to sell iPhones in Brazil. Also in Brazil, an advocacy group called some of Us That's s U m of US says that meta slash Facebook has been boosting rhetoric and information from Bolsonaro in his bid to hold on to the presidency. Bolsonaro has been pulling poorly as of late, and some of Us says that he has turned to using social media platforms to push a narrative claiming that the integrity of the vote

in Brazil is in question. Essentially, Bolsonaro is laying groundwork to question any election results that are not in his favor. The group claims that Meta has allowed Bulsonaro and his campaign to leverage Facebook to spread this misinformation freely, with no signs of con tent moderation or steps to label

such posts as containing misinformation. While we've seen Meta make at least some moves to address misinformation campaigns here in the United States, it has long been said that the company fails to take such steps in non English speaking countries, so places like Brazil receive even less protection against misinformation campaigns than we do here in the States. The group published a report that does not mince words. It is titled Stop the Steel two point oh, How Meta is

subverting Brazilian democracy. The group is calling on Meta to invest in content moderation, to ensure that all political ads meet both Meta's criteria and they don't break Brazilian laws, and to do a better job at assessing and then addressing threats to human rights that are coming from Facebook profiles and groups, also allowing third parties to come in and evaluate Facebook's own investigation and mitigation actions to see if the company is actually following through on reps have

repeatedly claimed, in an effort to be more transparent, all right We've got several more stories, but before we get to that, let's take a quick break. Next up, we've got kind of a whirlwind news item. Alright, So, earlier this week, some cybersecurity analysts spread word that there was evidence of a data breach over at TikTok, and that hackers might have accessed a ton of user information in

the process, as well as TikTok's own source code. In fact, some reports said as many as two billion different data records could have been stolen, and early on some analysts were urging users to update their passwords and also to enable multi factor authentication in order to protect their accounts. As I always say, it's a good idea to enable multi factor authentication. If you have that option, you should do it. It is a great way to provide extra

protection for your online accounts. I know it can be a hassle when you're logging in, you're like, I need to put in a code. I get that, but it

is incredibly helpful for keeping your stuff protected anyway. A Twitter user with the account named blue Hornet, who is reportedly with a hacker group calling themselves Against the West, claimed that the data was found on an Ali baba Cloud account with only a week password protecting it, that they were able to find this password through uh a wee chat messaging exchange and all this other stuff, and that obviously launched an understandable tirade against TikTok from folks

about the alleged poor security, Like if this story is true, then you know it is. It is almost criminal how poor the scurity was to protect all this user information. However, TikTok reps said they took a look at the code that was posted to various hacker forums and said the code in question is completely unrelated to TikTok's back in source code, So they're implying that the hackers are I think the technical term is lying out of their behinds

about hacking into TikTok's systems. And some early investigations into the posted data seemed to indicate that at least some of it was either public facing information meaning you don't need to hack anything because it's literally public info, or it could have been test data used for production purposes

and reflected no real data. So in other words, when TikTok is building out something in its service, it has to use test data to make sure that you know, the something works properly, but that test data doesn't reflect any real person's information. It would be like if you had to create an account called Joe public just to test some features on an online tool you had created. Well, Joe public is not a real person in this case.

I mean, there probably is someone out there called Joe public who has parents who I think their sense of humor is more important than their child's mental health. But anyway, the whole point is that test data is not real information about people. Right. So in short, if the hackers really did access information, they could be in possession of around two billion data records, which is, you know, a lot plus the alleged source code for TikTok. That's one possibility.

Or it could be that the hackers have cobbled together or copied some data records that are publicly available, or they represent meaningless test data, and that there was no actual exposure of real private information. We will have to keep our eyes on this to see how it unfolds, because I mean, I honestly don't know whether TikTok was act or not. Um you know, again, the company says no,

we were not. There's no evidence of that. Everything that's been posted isn't from our systems, and the hackers are claiming we toats did it um. It's not like I feel inclined to just automatically believe either groups, So I'm gonna wait for more evidence to come out. In a TikTok related news story, Byte Dance is shutting down some of its gaming sectors inside the company. So Byte Dances the parent company, the Chinese parent company that owns TikTok Um.

Of course, I should add that TikTok has long maintained that it operates practically independently of Byte Dance, that there is little connective tissue between the two. That's something that often comes up when there are discussions about whether or

not TikTok represents a potential danger to things like national security. Anyway, Byte Dance also, you know, poured millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars into developing video game UH divisions within the company to help create games that could maybe leverage the hundreds of millions of users of TikTok and make more money off of them. Essentially, it is what

we're getting down to. However, in China, the Chinese government has been taking an increasingly strict response to the video game industry and to video games in particular, uh reviewing games for any material that could be considered objectionable by the Chinese government standards, which would obviously be required to have all of that stripped or else that game would never make it to the markets in China, at least

not legally. And a lot of companies in China that had been focusing on video games are now looking to kind of spread out from the Chinese market or to abandon the sector entirely because that intense amount of scrutiny has made it very difficult to do business in China.

So we've seen the company ten Cent, which is famous for having a stake in numerous video game companies around the world, really pushed to increase that steak in companies like Ubisoft that are centered outside of China, potentially because that's an avenue for them to make revenue without having to,

you know, cow tow to the Chinese government's demands. Um. Yeah, So doing business in China has always been kind of a risky proposition because the government is so extremely hands on when it comes to the business sector, and we're starting to see now companies realize that, especially once they reached a certain size, that continuing to do business in

specific areas within China is untenable. China has also accused the United States of conducting quote tens of thousands end quote of fiber attacks against Chinese companies and institutions, including a university, which you know could be true because cyber warfare is definitely a thing, and China definitely knows the thing and two about it, as there are reportedly several large, well funded hacker groups operating in and around China and

with Chinese support, although the government staunchly denies that's the case, but no one believes them. China has said that the n s A, the National Security Agency, has infiltrated computer systems belonging to the Northwestern Polytechnical University of Chian. The n s A has not responded, at least not publicly, to this accusation. Now, could it be an accurate accusation? Um? Yeah, I don't see why not. I mean n s A did a heck of a job planting surveillance on US

based communication systems. We all heard about that, how we were all being spied upon by the n s A. Thanks to them planting essentially snoops at every major connection point within the communications infrastructure of the United States. I can only imagine what the n s A would do in order to devote some of that expertise to our conducting espionage on China. Still, we should always be skeptical of any communications from China. You know, you can't just

take that on face value. So while there's nothing in this story that immediately makes me say, well, that's impossible or that's a lie, there's also nothing solid in the story that would make me say China is telling the truth. Uh, I just don't know enough in this case. But it's

certainly is plausible. It doesn't mean that it's actually true. However, again, cyber warfare is a real thing, and you know, we often hear stories about how hackers working on behalf of China or North Korea or Russia, we're infiltrating various systems in the United States. I can guarantee you that the same sort of of ops are happening within the US

against targets like China, Russia, and North Korea. Um, we don't tend to hear about them, but you know that has to be happening, because for it not to be happening is just naive. Okay, we've got a couple more news stories to cover before we finish this episode out, so let's take another quick break. We're back. The Data Protection Commission or DPC in Ireland has levied more than

four hundred million dollars in fines against Meta. The DPC says that Meta mishandled personal data belonging to teen Instagram users, failing to comply with the data privacy standards of the EU. Specifically, the investigation looked into how privacy settings would change if a teenage user switched from a personal account to a

business account. So Instagram's business accounts provide users with more analytics than they would get if they were just using a regular personal Instagram accounts, so sometimes influencers or people who want to be influencers will switch to a business account for that reason. But a business account would make contact information publicly available, and if the user was under the age of eighteen, that would be a problem because it violates privacy laws under g d p R in

the EU. The DPC also says that Meta made some accounts public by default, even if the accounts were being held by underage users. Now, Meta, for its part, says that in addressed the public by default problem a year ago. This entire investigation has taken a couple of years in total, so it actually spans from before Meta made those changes.

The company also plans to appeal this fine. The US Federal Trade Commission, or FTC, is investigating Amazon's planned acquisition of a couple of companies, namely i Robot, which is the maker of the popular roomba vacuum cleaner, and a healthcare company called one Medical. Now the purpose of the investigation is to determine if Amazon's purchases of these companies represent anti competitive behavior that Amazon would be uh significantly

reducing competition in these various markets. So part of the concern is that not long after Amazon announced it was acquiring one Medical, which was back in July of this year, Amazon then said it was going to shut down its own virtual health service. Now, the FTC might see this as Amazon admitting that it wasn't able to compete in the healthcare space, so rather than support their own in house department, they just bought the competition, which would be

anti competitive behavior. It's also something that we've seen lots of like it's only been recently that we've started to see the FTC kind of opposed this kind of of strategy. I'm reminded of the eighties and nineties in the UH the cable industry, like the actual cable company industry here in the United States, Buying up all your competitors was the name of the game. I mean, that's how that's how Comcast got as big as it was. It wasn't that the company was building out new networks. It was

just buying up regional networks wherever it could. And those were in the days where the FTC really just didn't care about that. So things have changed, It's what I'm saying. Anyway, these investigations may not stop either acquisition in the long run, will have to see. They will likely impact the timing of these deals. They may take longer to complete because

of these investigations. Then again, there has been this increased focus on the rise of monopolies in recent years and a general view that big tech companies are a kind of consolidating power to a point where they are dominant in their respective wedge of the tech sector. Like it would be hard to argue that Google is not the dominant player in search for example, So maybe the FTC will actually block this acquisition or these acquisitions from happening.

Will have to wait and see. Last week, Snap, the company behind Snapchat, shuttered a messaging app called zen Le. Now Snap purchase zen Lee back in for more than two million bucks, so it's quite the investment. But now Snap is on shaky financial ground and the company is cutting way back on expenses, and that include holding lots of layoffs around folks, or about twenty percent of the overall workforce to be precise. Zen Ley appears to be a casualty of those cutbacks. The entire team found out

about this last week. News first leaked on Twitter before snaps CEOs sent the zen Ley staff a letter about shutting down the service. And that is always a bad look, y'all. I mean, you never want to learn about layoffs from a public source like Twitter before leaders actually address it to the people who are going to be directly affected. That's just nasty. Now, apparently there was no chance that Snap was going to sell zen Ly off to some interested buyer like In other words, there is no hope

for Zinly. Much like the Bad Girl film that will never be commercially released. Zen Ley would never be sold by Snap, not because Snap doesn't want the money. It's because Zenly relies on I P that is critical to Snap, and that means that Snap is not going to sell Zenlely because it's not willing to share this intellectual property

with some other party that isn't Snap. Now, this stinks, and it points to something really ugly in the tech sector in particular, that there's often this push to create a tool or a company that's enticing enough to convince some other larger company to come along and swoop it

up for a pretty penny. Like we've seen this with lots of company strategies like their their plan isn't to grow into a viable, revenue generating business, but rather to be seen as so attractive by a larger entity like Amazon or Google or Meta that one of those companies are going to come along and by the startup that that is like go to strategy and startups, not all

of them, but a lot of them. But that means that when things like this happen where a company gets bought but then later abandoned, then the thing that everyone spent their time, talent and effort on building has gone away, and it feels like all of that was put to waste. See also about three quarters of the projects that Google has overseen over the years. On October one, Massa Yasu

Itto will be retiring from Sony. Itto is the hardware chief for the PlayStation division within Sony and has overseen the engineering of the PS four and the PS VR headset and the PS five during his time in that role. Now he's retiring because he's reached the age for retirement. So this this isn't coming as a surprise. There's no drama attached. This is not he underperformed or anything like that.

It's literally it's his time to retire. Lynn Tao, who has served as the s VP of Finance, Corporate Development, and Strategy at Sony Interactive Entertainment, is going to officially take over his role. Now. Is it possible that Sony is looking to ramp up development on the next generation of PlayStation designs now that they're going to have a new hardware chief in place, like that seems like a great time to really start focusing on that. Well, it's possible.

But even if that is the case, and I'm not saying it is it's just possible. But even if it is what's happening, we're not likely to see anything new in the PlayStation world for several more years because these development cycles can take half a decade or longer. Besides, you still can't get a current generation PlayStation five most

days due to inventory shortages. And finally, LG is joining Samsung by incorporating a feature that will let LG television owners of more recent models anyway purchase and view an f T artwork on their TV sets. So Samsung has done this, now LG is doing us. Now. There's not much to look at yet. According to the Virgins Emma Roth, who reported on this, she actually downloaded and installed the

app on her TV and checked it out. And the idea is that folks who have an LG television capable of running web os five point oh or higher, we'll be able to install an app that lets them brows, purchase and display n f T artwork. The n f T s in this case aren't on a blockchain. Instead, they are on what is called a hash graph, which sounds to me like you're trying to put line charts on a potato. But no hash graph is a distributed

consensus platform. So in other words, it's a platform in which users, or rather their machines that are connected to the network, come to an agreement when it comes to stuff like the order in which transactions were made. So a ridiculously oversimplified explanation would be that the network has

to come together and decide that yes. In fact, su Zy did purchase the twenty two Chiron Bugatti before Tommy bought a mint edition collection of the full set of Pokemon cards, So in that way, it is kind of similar to blockchain, but it works through a different mechanism. Another way you can think of this is that blockchain and the hash graph work to create the same result,

but they do it through a different methodology. Anyway, I don't want to put words in Mr Roth's mouth, but the article seems to at least be indifferent towards this new feature, which could largely be due to the fact that there just isn't much on there yet. But I want to say I feel pretty much the same way.

It is very hard for me to imagine a world where folks are buying digital art to display on their television's as if their TVs were framed fine art you know, essentially turning this digital art to the equivalent of a screen saver. Now, maybe I'm just too shortsighted and and too old fashioned, and I'm just I just don't get it. Maybe I'm completely wrong about this, but yet to me, it kind of feels like when all the TV manufacturers

were pushing three D on us. It's not that we wanted three D, but the company's needed to have new features to tout in order to sell new TVs to us. It's not enough to say this television this year is just like the one last year and it's just as good, so by the new one like that, that doesn't get customers. You have to have something new and exciting incorporated into

the television. Sometimes those are really awesome features, and a lot of times it just ends up being like meaningless bells and whistles that don't really add to the experience. This feels more like the latter to me. But again, to be fair, I am notoriously anti n f T at least in the way that they're being treated right now, and so I admit I have a bias against this sort of thing, and I could be completely off base. That's it for the tech News for Tuesday, September six,

two twenty two. Hope you are all well. If you'd like to get in touch with me, you can do that in a couple of different ways. One way is to download the i Heart Radio app, navigate over to the tech Stuff podcast. Just do a search and in a little search bar will bring you right over to it. You'll see there's a little microphone icon there. If you click on that, you can leave a voice message up to thirty seconds in length and let me know what you think, maybe any show ideas you would like me

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