Tech News: Netflix Targets Shared Passwords

and early November. Subscribers at that tier will get access to most, but not all, of netflix is streaming content. They will be able to view it at a maximum resolution of seven, which is at the base level of high definition. Subscribers will get ADS obviously, and in return, their subscription will cost just x dollars nine nine cents per month. Also, they will only be allowed to watch Netflix on one supported device at a time, so there's

no simultaneous viewing option there. If someone else in the house wants to watch Netflix, tough luck, they have to get their own account. The other tiers of service will include Basic that has no ADS, so there's Basic with ads and Basic without ads. Basic without ads has the same sort of limitations as Basic. When it comes to resolution, however, it should have access to the full Netflix catalog, so you won't have the same limitation there. It will cost

nine dollars nine cents per month. Then you've got Standard tier, this is at fifteen dollars for nine cents per month. At that one you actually get a resolution of up to ten eighty So full HD also allows up to two devices to access the service at the same time. Then you've got Premium that's nineteen nine per month and that allows for streaming an ultra h D and it can support up to four devices with simultaneous viewing. In addition to that, this week, Netflix announced that in early

it will roll out a program to address password sharing. Now, the company has been piloting this already in various Latin America countries for several months. The ideas that Netflix will identify households that have shared user names and passwords with other people outside that household, and then they will give those people and a chance to add sub accounts to their subscription. So each sub account will require an additional monthly fee, which is likely to be somewhere between three

dollars fifty cents and four dollars per month. Netflix has not actually shared that yet. Folks who have been using someone else's password uh and who have established a profile will still have that profile maintained. Their watch history will still be there under this plan. So if you are someone who's been piggybacking on someone else's account and you've created your own viewing profile in their account, that will still be preserved, assuming that the primary account holder agrees

to pay this extra amount. Otherwise it's gonna get shut down. So Netflix is kind of giving people an option to subscribe in a much lower amount if they're piggybacking onto someone else's account. This is all part of the company's strategy to address problems that it encountered earlier this year, when the company revealed in an earnings call that had lost more subscribers than it had added for the first

time in Netflix's history. The stock price for Netflix plummeted after that announcement, and we've seen ripples go throughout the entire streaming ecosystem, not just Netflix, but well beyond, and I think part of that stems from Netflix's own kind of a stumble earlier this year. So Netflix is now pushing back. It's recently announced it added more subscribe brs and the stock price jumped again. And now has these additional revenue sources ready to launch, and I suspect Netflix

will adjust its production strategy moving forward as well. The company had already dissolved several production departments. I would not be surprised to see Netflix take a more conservative approach to producing exclusive content in the future. We've already seen David zaslav Over at Warner Brothers Discovery make announcements that indicate that company is definitely taking a more conservative approach and reserving higher production value stuff for venues like movie theaters.

So this might be part of the transition into the new era of streaming services where Netflix no longer can command the entire landscape and has too many competitors, and once you grow to a certain amount, you can't really grow much more like you hit you hit uh saturation at that point. Uber has announced that the company has formed an advertising department and that before too long, Uber users will have the pleasure of encountering ads at pretty much every stage of using Uber, as well as Uber

eats yea. So here's the skinny Uber plans. What are called journey ads for passengers, and these ads will take into account at least some of the personal data of users who are making use of Uber in order to target them with advertising, because we all know targeted advertising

is way more valuable than just blanket ads. So presumably this is going to include geolocation data so that you get geo relevant ads beamed at you when you're using Uber, and that can get into some really tricky territory that I'll talk about in a second. But the idea is that let's say you hail a ride and you are going to I don't know, an entertainment destination, and you will get ads through that whole process of using Uber. You'll get them while you wait for your ride, You'll

get them as you ride to your destination. We have

seen Lift start to outfit cars with tablets. It's very likely the Uber is doing the same thing, so that you will have screens around you, and it means you don't really have the option to, you know, not watch the ad, because of course, if you have it on your phone, you can just make your phone go dark and not pay attention to the ad that way, though, I mean I always monitor my ride because I don't know there's a little bit of paranoia in me to make sure that the driver is not, you know, taking

me out to the back country to off me or something. So yeah, it looks like you're gonna be seeing ads no matter what you do, and the ads are going to come from a single source per transaction, which I think is actually interesting. You're not gonna get, you know, like an ad for toilet paper one second and then car insurance the next. Rather the ad should in theory be targeted at you and presumably will take into account

either your destination or your starting point or both. So if you're using Uber to say, go to the theater district, maybe you start to get ads for a local restaurant or something like that. Similarly, Uber eats will be able to display ads pretty much through the whole process of

using that app as well, including promoting certain restaurants above others. Uh. I always look for that when I use a delivery service, because I would rather get the highest rated options like customer ratings, rather than an option that paid to be promoted over everybody else. Anyway, I mentioned the geolocation data earlier being an issue, and here's a very real and

scary example that could happen. Women who want to use a ride haling app to go to a reproductive healthcare clinic are likely going to desire and expect a level of privacy, and specifically in the wake of the Supreme Court striking down the protections of Row versus Wade, keeping the information private is important to women's health and security, and we've got states that have threatened to prosecute women even if they go outside the state in order to say,

seek an abortion. So having a service that is using geolocation data in such a way as to target people potentially could have other consequences down the line. Now, for its part, Uber claims that it aggregates information that doesn't get as granular as specific individuals, but there's still a massive concern about this kind of process and what it

means to privacy and security. Uber reps have said that as the program rolls out, it could make the cost of Uber less expensive because it will now be subsidized by ads, but so far, no one has actually mentioned any sort of ballpark estimate about you know, how much of a discount folks should expect. So, yeah, I'm seeing a lot of negative reaction to this announcement, which I totally understand and I don't disagree with I also feel a key about this, but we'll have to see what

what what it's like once it actually manifests. This next story should go into our Spooky Episodes series. The f a A as the Federal Aviation Administration here in the United States, is looking into a case of GPS interference that affected the Dallas Fort Worth Airport earlier this week. The interference affected about forty miles of airspace that we're close to d f W. That's Dallas Fort worths Airport. While GPS navigation isn't critical for air travel, it is

a tool that pilots rely on pretty regularly. Without GPS, pilots have to use older methods and navigation, and these older methods still work and everything. They're just us convenient. So as a result, GPS interference can lead to delays and flight cancelations and that kind of thing. So this is a fairly big deal. It can impact air travel. It's just it's not it's not like a life endangerment

kind of thing. Moreover, as of this recording, no one's really sure what actually caused this GPS interference in the first place. Now, sometimes military exercises can affect GPS, but these usually last a fairly short while, and no one's really come forward to say that's what happened in this case. And this case lasted from Monday afternoon from around one pm local time to Tuesday night around eleven pm local time,

so more than a full day. Now, it's possible the interference was accidental, but it's also possible that this was a purposeful act. GPS jamming is a real thing, but with a distinct lack of evidence, there's no sense in jumping to any conclusions. Yet, a similar situation happened in Denver at the beginning of two and I wouldn't call this like an alarming trend of jamming attacks or anything

like that, or just mysterious interference. I wouldn't call it a trend at all, but it does indicate that more investigations are needed to determine what is causing these events, Is there a common cause, are they very different incidents, and how might we prevent future ones from happening, particularly since we are so you know, at least used to having GPS as an option, if not dependent upon it. Once again, just to reiterate, worst case scenario. Aircraft really

just switched to a different navigation method. So I don't want to give anyone anxiety if they've got an upcoming, you know, air trip. It's not like it's not that big a deal, and most it would cause an inconvenience. All right, we've got more news to cover, but first let's take a quick break. Before the break, we were talking about air travel. We get a little bit more to talk about here, at least if you are in a very exclusive tax bracket. Starlink, the satellite internet provider

arm of SpaceX, has announced Starlink Aviation this week. Now, this is a service that Starlink is going to offer to private aircraft, So we're talking about stuff like private jets owned by disgustingly rich people and that kind of thing. Starlink is promising speeds of up to three fifty megabits per second. That's really impressive for air travel. Business Insider, by the way, erroneously reported this as three hundred fifty

megabytes per second. That's not the same thing. The literal jet setters out there are gonna have to cough up some serious dough in order to use this technology. Starlink announced it will cost a hundred fifty thousand dollars to install the Starlink receiver and aircraft. It's not, you know, a satellite dish the way a terrestrial consumer would have.

It's going to have a different form factor. And on top of that hundred fifty dollar installation cost, there's going to be a monthly service fee that will range between twelve thousand, five hundred to twenty five thousand dollars. That's per month, So potentially three months of service could set someone back seventy five dollars, which is way more than what a lot of my friends make in a year.

What a country anyway. Starlink says the service will launch in mid twenty twenty three, and that those with private jets who are interested in reserving a system will need to PLoP down a five thousand dollar deposit in order to get a reservation. I will not be one of those. I don't have a private jet. I'm not in that tax bracket. The state of Illinois here in the US has hit telecommunications and media conglomerate A T and T

with a twenty three million dollar fine. Why because an investigation uncovered that a lobbyist working on behalf of A T and T had bribed the ally of a state lawmaker to try and sway a policy vote in A T and T s favor. A T and T is no stranger to political lobbying. In fact, much of the internet landscape and telecommunication landscape from a legal perspective is the way it is because of companies like A T

and T using their lobbying pressure to guide policy. It's, you know, one of the reasons why net neutrality is in the state that it's in. A T and T is also no stranger to getting fined, having previously been hit with punishments for doing stuff like creating a rather dubious definition of unlimited data like calling it unlimited when it was in fact limited, or launching programs that reportedly

took advantage of the hearing impaired. That's awesome. Tech Dirt has a partial rundown on the various offenses A T and T has committed, as well as more details about

this recent fine from Illinois. It's in an article titled A T and T hit with twenty three million dollar fine for bribing Illinois lawmaker, and as Carl Bode of tech Dirt pointed out, we've seen a gradual shift in the United States when it comes to how the government and regulators are dealing with big tech companies, particularly telecommunications companies. There's there's been a response long long overdue in my mind,

two anti competitive practices within the various industries. So we're starting to see a shift, uh and more attention and pressure put to these companies as they had been used to kind of running rampant for for a couple of decades. This next news item is disturbing. So I want to give a quick trigger warning to folks out there who are sensitive to stories about police misconduct, blackmail, and exploitation. This one has all of those. You might want to

skip this news item, all right, So here goes. A former police officer named Brian Wilson in Louisville recently pled guilty to charges that he had misused a tool called Accurant, which is from Lexus Nexus Risk Solutions. So Accurran is meant for investigative purposes and it can help draw connections between people that otherwise you might not be able to determine.

So let's use an example, like a hypothetical example. Let's say that the police had identified a suspect that they believed to be involved in a crime organization, but they don't know who this person's contacts are. They don't know the identities of anyone else. They just have this suspicion. So they might use a tool like Accurant to find out who the suspect is regularly in contact with on

the Internet in order to help the investigation. Like, one of the things we have learned recently is that you don't even need access to the content of messaging between people to start drawing conclusions. Just knowing that two specific people are in contact with each other might be enough for you to start looking into a person's behaviors. So

that's a quote unquote legitimate use of this technology. Now, x cop Wilson used the same technology to identify and target women who were sharing explicit content online with other people. Wilson then engaged the services of a hacker and gave that hacker some of this information in order to get

access to that kind of content. Wilson then would reach out to these targeted women and threatened to share the pirated content with the targets family and friends and employers unless the target iterrated more explicit material for Wilson so a real scumbag. It was horrifying and disgusting. And yes, I know I'm editorializing, but I feel pretty confident in saying that. Anyway, Wilson did send explicit materials to people, uh, you know, maybe to show that he was following through

in his threats, maybe to gloat. And he was caught, and he was charged, and as I said, he pled guilty to those charges. Yesterday, a court sentenced him to thirty months in prison, followed by three years of supervision and one hours of community service. Interestingly, the prosecution had argued that because he had agreed to plead guilty, he should receive the shortest sentence possible because he could have

been facing as much as fifteen years in prison. But instead he gets thirty months for targeting women, coercing them to share explicit material or otherwise have their lives completely upended because he would share the stuff they had been sending in private with no intent to release it publicly with their loved ones. Great. Oh, Also, he participated in

something called slushy Gate, which is incredibly entertaining. So that was this fun activity in which cops would hurl cups of beverages like slushies at people as they drove by, you know, real serve and protect kind of stuff. I'm sorry, this news makes me furious. It gets me so mad. But let's get back to the tech angle, because this is tech stuff. I know you didn't tune in to hear Jonathan go nuts about law enforcement behaving so reprehensively.

The reason I am covering this story is because it is another example of a long list of examples of how authority figures have misused technology that was intended for official investigations. This is by far not the first time this has happened. There have been numerous incidents. Let me talk about two that were discovered in so in the

state of Minnesota ran an audit on their systems. They found out that more than half, more than half of the eleven thousand law enforcement officials at the state level had misused their data reserves from driver information. They were using it to look up stuff like former romantic partners

and that kind of thing. We also saw the same thing in two thousand thirteen with the n s A because an internal watchdog within the n s A, the National Security Agency, revealed that several agents had used the n s as extensive surveillance systems to spy on ex spouses and that kind of thing. Now, in my mind, this is a really good argument against allowing these kinds of systems to be used by authorities in the first place,

or the very least. It's a great argument for instituting stricter controls that limit the use and hope of these tools and hold people who abuse them accountable and have like actionable punishments that directly relate to that and go beyond just cyber stalking accusations, which is what Wilson was initially was ultimately charged and pled guilty to with cyber stalking. So that's why I wanted to cover it in tech stuff, because it is a gross overreach of authority to use

these kind of tools in this way. Okay, let's move on to something else. This is actually not upsetting at all. It's kind of interesting. A couple of legislators in New Jersey are introducing a proposal to ban car companies from offering certain subscription services. This relates to other stories that we've talked about on this show this year involving car companies that lock certain features like heated seats behind a subscription.

So this proposed bill would ban any service that quote utilizes components and hardware already installed on the motor vehicle at the time of purchase end quote. So in other words, if the car is capable of doing the thing, you cannot lock the thing behind a subscription. Now, there is an important exception to this. The bill makes an allowance for features that have an ongoing cost associated with the features.

So if the car manufacturer has to pay to maintain this feature, like let's say it's a navigation tool, and the company behind it obviously has to spend money to keep that navigation tool up to date to deal with things like when there are changes in roads and that sort of stuff. Well, those sort of features can be locked behind a subscription because there's this ongoing cost for

the company. Now you might think, ha, well, that probably means that if this bill does become a law, car companies will argue that any subscription feature they offer has an ongoing cost associated with it, even if it's something like heated seats, And technically a lot of them probably do have at least a minimal ongoing cost for stuff like firmware updates, right, So wouldn't they just use that

to try and bypass the law and ignore it. And you know what, I think you're probably around the money there. I'm pretty sure that that is something that will happen if this bill does become law. But you know, it's just a proposal right now. Maybe the language will actually change, and maybe if it's adopted, it will have more specificity built in to prevent edge cases where car companies try to argue that a tiny occasional cost amounts to them

getting the exception to this law. At the very least, it sounds like legislators are listening and looking out for the consumers. So I find that to be, uh, you know good. I'm glad to see that. I'm glad to see lawmakers look out for consumers as opposed to the companies that that cater to consumers. But you know, again, it's just a proposal. We'll have to see if this comes a lot. And again it's only for New Jersey.

This isn't for the full United States, but it could set a precedent that we see other states follow in the future. We'll just have to keep our eyes on it, all right. We've got a few more stories to cover before we do that. Let's go and take another break. We're back. As I mentioned on Tuesday, YEA, formally, Kanye West is purchasing Parlor, the right wing conservative messaging service. Technically it's a free speech messaging service, but it was

largely adopted by right wing conservatives already. That acquisition process has had a bit of a rocky aren't. Because Parlor's PR team was super happy about this purchase, and so they decided to send out an email to a shortlist of v I P account holders announcing years purchase of the platform. But there was a little problem because they had accidentally, I assume, put everyone's email in the C C field, not the B C C field, so not

the blind copy field. But that meant everyone on that list who received the email could see the email addresses of everyone else who got that email, So effectively, these folks, who again represent the most prominent of Parlor's account holders, were dockxed by Parlor. Now, granted, in most cases we're talking about movers and shakers on the conservative side, and a lot of them likely already had at least some of those contacts, so it's not like it was the worst of the worst, but that v i P list

also includes you know, some news outlets. There were some celebrities on there too. I imagine those celebrities were not thrilled to see their personal email addresses unveiled to a larger group without their consent. Now, to be clear, this is definitely nothing close to being a terrible data breach, but it is another embarrassing incident in Parlor's journey, and

the company has already been the target of hackers. Hackers had famously scraped everything from Parlor prior to it getting temporarily shut down last year, so so Parlor is no stranger to this kind of thing. Back in two thousand nine, the company Live Nation, known for putting on concert events,

acquired Ticketmaster, the famous ticket broker. At the time, critics were worried that this merger could potentially lead to a monopolistic and anti competitive approach where this new entity, known as Live Nation Entertainment could potentially use its influence to muscle out other ticket brokers and also force venues to only work with Ticketmaster in return for having access to

talent that were signed exclusively to Live Nation. And what you know it, that's what's happened repeatedly Since the merger, there have been a few different calls to break apart these two entities to unwind the merger. The most recent comes from the American Economic Liberties Project, which today called upon the Department of Justice to do that to unwind

the merger. The organization argues that Live Nation has engaged in price gouging as well as forcing venues to accept unfavorable conditions or else be deprived of sought after live talent. And again, this is not a new accusation. Just google Live Nation, ticket Master anti trust and you're gonna see a whole bunch of articles coming from different years showing the same argument again and again, including some that were

spearheaded by lawmakers. Now, the difference now is that we're starting to see the US government take a stronger stance against anti competitive practices, so it's possible this will see more results than previous efforts did. Also, just in the interest of full disclosure, I should point out I work for I heart Media. Obviously, I heart Media is also in the live events business. Live Nation is a competitor. I am in no way speaking on behalf of I

heart Media on this. I'm just sharing the news. I will say I will never forget when I was looking into buying tickets for a show at a local vinee here in Atlanta, and I had to go to Ticketmaster. It was the only place where I could buy a ticket, and I saw that the convenience fee was ten dollars more than the ticket price itself. So like ticket prices twenty bucks and the convenience fee was thirty. That was

enough to convince me not to go. I was like, I'm not gonna pay this exorbitant convenience feat supposed who is a convenient for anyway? Anecdotal evidence saying evidence, I'm just grouchy. Next up, I want to mention an interesting court case in Japan. So the court has awarded five fifty thousand yen, which is about three thousand, seven hundred dollars to a journalist named Shilro Ito. Uh. The man who's paying those damages is Mio Saguita, a lawmaker in Japan.

So what did Seguita do well? He liked several tweets that were criticizing and targeting and abusing Ito. So more trigger warning here, we're gonna get into to some me too stuff, So you can skip forward if that's going to cause you distress. Itto had previously come forward with an accusation of rape against a bureau chief of Tokyo Broadcasting System Television. So remember Eto herself as a journalist.

She says, this leader, this, this executive in Tokyo Broadcasting System Television had had raped her in and she became one of the key figures of the Me too movement in Japan. And as as a consequence, she also became the target of a lot of online abuse, which we have seen before. Right, Women who actually come forward and explain what what kind of terrible things they've experienced then get targeted for more abuse. Uh, and you wonder why

more people don't come forward. Anyway, Saquita had liked several of the tweets that were abusive towards Itto, so he had gone through and clicked like on several of these, and Itto's team successfully positioned that as contributing to her distress. So, in other words, you have this lawmaker, this person in a position of authority behaving in this way. And Itto says, when I know that someone who's a leader is out there actively aiking tweets that are targeting me, that is

obviously a source of mental distress. Now it's means now that in Japan, at least, the act of liking a tweet can in itself be an offense if that tweet is also in an effort to harm, to fame or otherwise attacks someone else. Now, to be clear, my sympathies are with Eto' I'm with her on this side as far as you know, thinking that she is. She deserves dignity, respect,

She does not deserve to be targeted. But I'm not sure about this court decision because liking a tweet does not always mean you actually, you know, like the tweet. It might be a way to bookmark something. The language behind how we flag messages can itself become a problem. Liking or hearting something seems to indicate approval, but it's

not necesscesarily the case. Now for this particular court case, it looks like that was accurate, Like this was a sign of someone aligned with attacking Eto, and that's pretty darn despicable. But it does sound to me like this court's decision sets a dangerous precedent there. There needs to be a high bar to prove that the act of liking a tweet actually indicates aligning with it also, I mean it's I just don't see where this goes from here.

It's kind of crazy. E A has announced it will be shutting down the online servers for several titles over the coming months. That means any online component for these games will become inaccessible. Titles include Dragon Age Origins, a couple of Army of Two games, a couple of Command and Conquer games, Mercenaries to NBA jam On Fire Edition,

and Mirror's Edge, among others. The shutdowns will happen throughout the rest of this year and into early three, So if you're a fan of playing online on any of those titles, you should get your kicks in while you can, because soon those options will go dark. And considering that a few those titles have achievements that are tied with online play, that might come as a blow to anyone who obsesses over getting in games, because once those servers

go down, those achievements are gonna be untouchable. Now, as we've said before on this show, this is a massive downside to modern games this online component, because for some titles, online features may only make up a small percentage of the overall games value, and if they go away, maybe you don't even notice. But for other games, the online stuff is where the game really lives, and once the company shuts down servers, that part of the game dies.

Now it'll get worse if and when companies shut down servers that are just meant for authentication. There are a lot of single player games out there that require a persistent Internet connection so that you can verify that the copy of the game you own is legitimate. Hopefully, should companies decide to sunset those servers, that will first push out updates that eliminate that online requirement, or else it's

possible that those video game titles would become unplayable. So you might have a legitimate copy of a game that is a single player game, there's no online component to it really whatsoever. But because a company shuts down its server, you no longer can access that game, which seems patently unfair. Finally, a group of quantum engineers and physicists say they've discovered

a really interesting way to keep quantum computer systems stable. Now, I've talked about quantum computers several times in the past. You know how these delicate machines have the potential two say totally eradicate modern encryption methods, among other things. But one thing that holds back quantum computers is that they are not very stable by nature. They are extremely unstable, so it can be difficult to keep a quantum computer working to keep it coherent for more than a couple

of seconds. It takes very little to interfere with a quantum system, and if it does happen, then the system decoheres and becomes, you know, essentially useless. So these researchers were using a pulse laser to beam light at a quantum computer to try and keep the system stable for the length of a full experiment. Now, that experiment only lasted about five seconds, but considering earlier attempts had only kept the system stable for one and a half seconds,

this was a huge challenge. Now they discovered that a pulse pattern actually could make it happen. It wasn't just any pulse pattern, it was the Fibonacci sequence. In this sequence, each successive number in the sequence is the sum of the two preceding numbers. So you would start with a one, your next number is also a one because you have to add the two preceding numbers, which are one. In zero. Your next number is a two because it's one plus one.

Then it's a three two plus one, then five, then eight, then thirteen, and so on. Now, as these numbers get larger, the quotient between each hair of numbers, that is the amount that you get when you divide the larger of the two numbers by the smaller one, is approximately one point six one eight. We often refer to that as the golden ratio. We see a lot of structures in nature that adhere to this ratio, like the spirals of seeds in a sunflower have a one point six one

eight ratio of alder spiral two inner spiral. If you take the number of female honey bees and you compare the number of male honey honey bees and your typical hive, you get one point six one eight. There's one point six one eight female honeybees to every male honey bee. So this number, this ratio shows up again and again. It almost feels like finding a cheap code for the universe.

And the fact that this Fibonacci sequence seems to stabilize quantum computer systems really adds to the mystery of the Fibonacci sequence. I mean, maybe we are living in a simulation and the Fibonacci sequence is just the result of some sloppy coding. Who knows anyway, that's the tech news for today, Thursday, October two thousand twenty two. Hope you

are all well. If you would like to suggest topics for future episodes of tech Stuff, you can reach out to me by downloading the I Heart Radio app, which is free to download and use. Navigate over to tech Stuff by using the little search bar, and there's a little microphone icon on there. You can click on that and leave a message up to thirty seconds in length let me know if you want me to use in a future episode, or you can reach out on Twitter.

The handle we use for the show is tech Stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon y. Tech Stuff is an I heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.