Tech News: Nintendo Gets Direct and Peloton Cycles In Place

been dealing with COVID. Despite taking every precaution and avoiding tons of fun stuff, I still got the darned thing. And I'm feeling a little better. So that's that's the personal news. Just wanted to get that all the way. Hopefully that means I'm on the other side of it. Um And that in a couple of days I can emerge from isolation and become a butterfly. I'm pretty sure that's how that works. I gotta be honest, I haven't

read up on it. But let's go with some tech news, and we'll start off with something fun for a change, because I know, I know the news can be pretty brutal, and I thought, why don't we do something fun and not just bury it. So Nintendo held one of its

Nintendo Direct events yesterday and announced several upcoming titles. Sadly, there was no mention of either a Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild follow up, nor was there any talk of a Metroid Prime sequel, but the company did share a trailer for Splatoon three, which is another sequel to the surprise hit franchise, in which you play as part squid, part kid, and all paintball maniac um. Actually

really fun game, so I'm glad to see that. If you are a fan of soccer, or as it is known pretty much everywhere else but my home country, football, and you happen to love mar EO, you might be excited to learn more about Mario Striker's Battle League. It's the first Mario Striker's game in fifteen years and will feature five on five soccer matches, complete with special moves that you're not likely to see in games like FIFA.

A trailer for Kirby and the Forgotten Land showed off the cotton candy ghost like critters tendency to gobble stuff up, including cars and vending machines, which was adorable and disturbing. As always, Nintendo also announced that Portal and Portal to two very good puzzle games that have amazing songs by Jonathan Colton, and them are both coming to the Switch at long last, though we don't know exactly when. They

didn't give a date for that. Also, No Man's Sky, the game that lots of folks felt initially kind of overpromised and underdelivered, is also coming to the Switch. I also want to point out that since it's launch, Hello Games, the developer behind No Man's Sky, has released lots of updates that drastically add to the game's content. So while the initial response to No Man Sky was a bit

like oh, it has since improved. There were several other announcements to that were done yesterday, so if you want to learn more, you should track down the video. It's available on YouTube on Nintendo's channel. It's also available through like every video game outlet will have a version of it, as well as like probably commentary on on what was announced, so check that out if you are a big fan of Nintendo. Now a quick update to our update to

the Peloton story. So on Tuesday, I talked about how the beleaguered company famous for its connected stationary exercise bikes and treadmills, is going through what David Bowie would call cha cha changes. John Foley, the co founder and now former CEO of the company, has stepped into the role of executive Chairman of the board then, just to be clear fully, and his close colleagues control about eight percent of the board's voting power, so it's not like he's

gone and forgotten. He's very much capable of being hands on here. Barry McCarthy, who came over from Spotify as Spotify's Chief financial Officer or CFO, is the new CEO of Peloton, and the company made an announcement that it would lay off around employees, or about twenty of its workforce.

And now we've got a few more details. One is that to help take the sting out of those folks getting their walking papers, Peloton graciously through in a free year subscription to you guessed it, Peloton all to the employees who had been let go. And that's a big old yikes, Like, can you imagine working for a company that says, hey, we gotta fire you, but here's a

coupon so you can buy some of our stuff. Because remember, the subscription is really most useful if you happen to also own one of the really expensive Peloton bikes or treadmills. Now you could just follow the online exercise routines on your own device like a tablet, and use some ordinary

exercise bike or treadmill like a plebu. It wouldn't be connected to the rest of the class in that sense, so you wouldn't have the ability to tag in with all the you know, competitive information, nor would you have the dynamic response capabilities of some of the more advanced Peloton equipment. So it's definitely not the full experience if you do it that way, But it would also mean that if you wanted to have the full experience, you would have to PLoP down several thousand dollars to buy

the equipment to do it. So not the best way to send off people who have just been let go, and as you can imagine, a lot of affected employees were a bit miffed about this. So when the company held an all hands meeting to introduce Barry McCarthy to Peloton, a whole bunch of former employees decided that they wanted to be part of that meeting too, and they were not terribly chipper about it. And this mess was probably upsetting to pretty much everyone involved. I'm sure McCarthy was

a bit taken aback. The former employees were obviously very upset, and Peloton's current employees, I mean, that can't be great for morale to see a bunch of your former colleagues coming in and just like you know, lambasting the company and complaining and criticizing it. Not that a lot of I mean, there are plenty of people who still work

at Peloton who also criticized the company. And meanwhile, investors who were already concerned about Peloton, some of them feel like the changes aren't actually addressing the underlying problems with a company. For example, black Well's Capital published a sixty five slide presentation criticizing Peloton and its attempts to right the ship, and some analysts argue that McCarthy, being a former CFO with no CEO experience, is the wrong leader

for the job. There are a lot of folks wondering is this just Peloton trying to tread water until they can figure out which, if any suitor they want to go with in terms of like a acquisition, because there are companies like Amazon and Apple that are rumored to kind of be circling the waters. But yeah, that's where we are right now. You're probably aware, especially if you've been listening to my shows, that online services track a

lot of your personal information. Facebook is probably the platform I think about most often in that context, but a study released by the marketing company You Are l Genius says that two other apps are really gobbling up information about you. One of those is YouTube, which is no

shock there, and the other is TikTok. So with YouTube, we know that a lot of the this data tracking is revolving around how YouTube relies on data to both serve targeted ads to you and also to recommend more videos that are likely to keep you on the platform longer.

And this is because, and I know I sound like a broken record here, the two goals of these kinds of platforms is to try and serve as many ads to the viewer as that viewer will tolerate, and to keep the viewer there for as long as you can so that you know, in turn you can ultimately serve them more ads. But then what about TikTok. Well, according

to the study, TikTok is a bit of a different story. TikTok, which is owned by a parent company, byte Dance, and that's a Chinese company is mostly letting third party data trackers collect all that juicy information about users. Uh. The study identified fourteen trackers with TikTok, and thirteen of them

were third party trackers. Now, that in turn means that we don't actually have very much information on what trackers are actually using TikTok in order to collect data, or what those companies are doing with the information that they're collecting. And that's probably not going to help TikTok fight against the perception that the company could potentially be collecting information on say, US citizens and then sending that information back

to China. That's a narrative that TikTok has had to fight against for a few years now, and it really came to prominence when former US President Donald Trump tried to either force TikTok to shut down in the United States or to have an American company come and buy the service from byte Dance. Now, neither of those things actually happened, and the story gets a little bit worse. According to that marketing company, UH that you are l genius.

TikTok's data tracking apparently persists even if a user goes into settings to opt out of tracking. Anyway, it's just something for you to think about, for you to talk fans out there. Your information is valuable and TikTok and lots of third parties are profiting off of it in some way. And again, if you want to interact with the Internet in any meaningful way, it typically means that

you're also having to give up information about yourself. So it's really up to each person to decide how comfortable they are with that personally. I had TikTok for a couple of months last year before I decided to uninstall it because I'm past my expiration date for that kind of stuff. So it wasn't really so much about the dad tracking. It was just about me being old. All right, this old guy needs to take a quick break, but

we'll be right back. Apple reported recently to the US Securities and Exchange Commission that the company has ended partnerships with twelve smelting or refining companies out of concern that the companies operate in areas that have armed conflicts going on in them, thus making these conflict materials. So you may have heard terms like blood diamonds or conflict diamonds or conflict minerals or conflict medals. All that gets to

what we're talking about here. So a lot of these kinds of operations take place in regions that are, to put it, mildly unstable politically, and there's a real concern that funding these operations ends up creating brutal conditions for the people who have to work there. Uh. There are stories about folks being forced to work in say mining operations or smelting or refining operations, and that essentially they

become slave labor for very powerful company leaders. Those leaders might even employ armed forces, like armed guards to oversee the operations. And Apple has made a commitment to avoid contributing to these situations whenever it can detect them, which is different from saying that it can confidently say it doesn't support them at all, but rather if if evidence comes up that that is going on, the company has

committed to severing those relationships. The only specific country that Apple referenced in this recent report is the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which has had a long history of oppressive mining and refining operations and also a long history of political instability. The company explained that the twelve refiners and smelters that cut ties with either did not meet standards or refused to participate in a third party audit

of their operations. We often see issues like this arise in the tech sector, where much of the raw materials that we depend upon for our technology comes to us courtesy of oppressive working conditions in remote regions around the world. And back in two I actually did an episode of Tech Stuff with my former co host Chris Pallette where we talked about rare earth metals. I think it might be time to do an update on that, just to see where we stand today and why things are the

way they are. The State of California's Department of Fair Employment and Housing has filed a racial discrimination complaint against electric car company Tesla. This complaint alleges that Tesla racially

segregates workforces in its California factory and Fremont. Further, the complaint accuses the Fremont factory of having a truly toxic work environment that includes racial discrimination and abuses, with employees reporting that they have been the subject of verbal attacks, including racial slurs, and that they are regularly discriminated against when it comes to job assignments, compensation, promotion, and discipline.

The agency goes on to make more specific and deeply upsetting accusations regarding working conditions in the factory, and this isn't by any means the first we've heard of these accusations, and there have also been related cases. For example, last December, six women filed a lawsuit against Tesla, alleging that the factory workplace is a dangerous place for women and that

the factory has a culture of sexual harassment. The company released a statement saying that quote Tesla has always taken disciplinary action and terminated employees for professional misconduct, including those who utter racial slurs or harass others in various ways

end quote. Tesla also has recently issued a recall for more than half a million vehicles, specifically some model S, Model X, and Model Y Tesla's from twenty two model years, as well as some Model three vehicles from twenty seventeen

to twenty twenty two model years. So what's going on? Well, the issue is that the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration or nht s A, has, after more than a year's worth of discussions, determined that Tesla's boom box feature could obscure important sounds that would otherwise alert people about the presence of an electric vehicle coming down the road.

So by that I mean here in the United States, electric vehicle manufacturing companies have to create a method for electric cars to make an audible sound while they are moving at speeds up to thirty kilometers per hour or eighteen point six miles per hour. And the reason for that is because electric vehicles can operate much more quietly than gasoline or diesel powered vehicles, and the sound can alert pedestrians, cyclists, and the visually impaired that there is

a car coming. But in December twenty Tesla launched the boom box function, which lets Tesla drivers pump sound from their car based entertainment system through the speakers that otherwise the car uses as its pedestrian warning system. So, in other words, the speakers that would otherwise indicate, hey, there's an electric car coming, would now be saying, you know, who let the dogs out? And the nht s A said, yeah, no, you need to keep that system dedicated to making an

identifiable noise so that folks know a car is coming. Meanwhile, I'm thinking, how obnoxious can Tesla be. I mean, I don't mind if a jerk face is listening to awful music and the privacy of their own car, but once they start pumping it out at the rest of us, that is an awful feature. Anyway, Tesla is pushing on an update to these vehicles that will disable boom box mode while the cars are in motion or in neutral, so I guess it will only work if the car is in park. So I guess you could use it

for like a block party or something. I don't know, but boy howdy, this just reinforces my perception that Tesla is the dude bro of car companies. Many years ago, I appeared as an extra in a science fiction horror film called The Signal. And just so you know, there's more than one movie that has The Signal and its title, you would need to find the one that has Justin Welburn in it to see the one that I'm in.

And also you wouldn't see me because I'm on screen for less than a second, and it's also in a big chaotic crowd scene. And also it's just the back of my head. So the movie's worth watching, you just won't see me in it. Anyway. The premise of that film is that there's this mysterious signal that gets broadcast over pretty much every communication channel, and that once humans are exposed to it, they go a bit mental. They

either become incredibly violent or terrified. Well, our next story involves a radio broadcast that had a negative effect, but not on people. In this case, however, it did affect infotainment systems. K U O W ninety point nine, which is an NPR station in the Seattle area, broadcast the signal that ended up breaking the infotainment system for some

Mazda vehicles. The affected cars, which included Mazda's with model years from TOEV, would get stuck to that radio station, which is very clever in pr nice way to absolutely dominate the market. I'm kidding, it was not on purpose. Uh. The infotainment screens would then go dead and the whole system would try and go into reboot mode over and over and over again. So it's start the cycle of

trying to reboot but never actually boot. To make matters worse, the fix was to replace these systems Connectivity Master Unit or CMU, and that is expensive, likes and more to the point, right now, it's practically impossible to find them because we have an ongoing chip shortage. So you might wonder what the heck actually happened. How did a radio

broadcast brick an infotainment system. Well, it turns out the radio station was sending out image files via radio waves, and typically an infotainment system with a screen would handle this right. You would get the incoming signal and the screen would display whatever the image was. So you can do this with advertising all that kind of stuff for

station identification, whatever it might be. But in this case, the image files that MPR was sending out they lacked a file extension, and apparently the Mazda infotainment systems from those model years just can't handle that, and the systems became corrupted. Yells them now. I again, I'm not blaming

MPR for this at all. This is a fault with those infotainment systems right this it's it's kind of crazy to think about that a simply a file that's lacking an extension would be enough to completely shut down the system, and there is no easy fix to this. It pretty much means that affected Mazda owners have to take their vehicles into a Mazda dealership and work with them to solve the issue by submitting a good will request to the warranty department in order to get the ball rolling.

So bad news for MASDA owners in Seattle. UM, I guess it can be confident that they're not listening to this show on the radio right now, if they if they're affected. Okay, well, we have a few more stories to cover, but before we get to that, let's take another quick break. Okay, time to wrap up the stories for today. One of those is that SpaceX recently lost around forty of its Starlink satellites due to a solar storm. Now, let's break that down so we can understand what we're

talking about. First. What is starlink. Starlink is space X

is satellite based Internet provider service. The idea being that you launched thousands of these tiny satellites into orbit enough so that there's consistent coverage over the service areas at any given time of day, and customers down on the ground will use satellite dishes that will tune in and then track satellites, uh switching between satellites when when they're starting to pass out of view, and maintain a satellite based Internet connection, which is obviously slower or at least

less responsive, is a lot more latency than you would get with say, fiber, but in a lot of rural areas it's the only real method you can get to get Internet. Heck, I have a little house where that's the case, and I just don't have Internet. They're not by choice, but by the fact that I don't have any options really. So the company has already launched thousands of small satellites into low Earth orbit to provide coverage for customers, and right now there are very few customers.

It's more or less in a limited rollout. Solar storms, then, are events in which we get a burst of radiation and sometimes particles that are sent out from the Sun. So these can sometimes but not always, include coronal mass ejections or c m s. But in any event, a solar storm means that the Earth gets hit by a burst of energy and sometimes particles, and fortunately our magneto sphere and our atmosphere do a pretty good job of shielding us down here on the surface unless it's like

really intense, and then we can get things like blackouts and stuff. Most of the time we're okay, though, but for stuff in space it's a different matter. They're outside of those protective barriers for the most part, and the energy can overwhelm electrical systems in space or pose as a potential health hazard to astronauts who might get dangerous doses of radiation like gamma radiation and stuff. So that's

something that we've always been concerned with. But in this case, the solar storm appears to have increased atmospheric drag, and you might think, hey, space don't got no atmosphere, and yeah, in deep space, that's true. There's no atmosphere here on Earth. Once you get above a hundred kilometers in altitude or sixty two miles up, you reach a point where the atmosphere is typically too thin for any aerodynamic lift among

other things. There are other markers for that altitude as well. However, that doesn't mean that the atmosphere just stops above a hundred kilometers. There still is atmosphere further out, though obviously it gets progressively thinner. There's more space between molecules as you continue to go higher an altitude. The operational altitude for Starling satellites is at five fifty kilometers or three d forty miles out from the Earth, but even at

that altitude there is still atmospheric drag. In fact, SpaceX depends upon atmospheric drag because the idea is that these satellites will have a limited shelf life and they will eventually break down and stop operating. So they're at an orbit where atmospheric drag will cause the orbit to decay. The satellite will slow down and start to fall back to Earth eventually, not immediately, but over the course of years. And these satellites are small enough that they will just

disintegrate upon re entry. Nothing should survive re entry at all, so there shouldn't be any danger of it like colliding with anything here on Earth, and that way, these satellites won't just sit there up in space cluttering it up forever. However, in this case, forty out of forty nine satellites that were recently launched and were on their way to their operational orbit experienced increased drag that slowed them down enough to cause them to re enter earlier than desired, so

they went coutput. Speaking of SpaceX and Starlink, NASA submitted a statement to the Federal Communications Commission, or f c C here in the United States, saying that the agency is a little bit concerned about Starlink's future plans, which

include launching thirty thousand satellites into low Earth orbit. Starlink had received the go ahead for twelve thousand satellites in its initial run, but now it's looking at second generation of satellites, you know, like thirty thousand of them, and NASA has cited concerns that putting so many small satellites into low Earth orbit could cause complications for future space missions, as they could potentially increase quote the frequency of conjunction

events end quote. That is, they could be in the way and at best that could cause a mission delay as launch determines, oh, we can't launch because this is going to put the payload in the path of one of these satellites. At worst, it could mean that you are creating the potential for collisions and those can be catastrophic. Now, these Starlet Link satellites are pretty small, but you gotta remember everything up in orbit is moving wicked fast, and momentum is a heck of a thing. Momentum is not

just your mass, it's also acceleration. And if you're accelerating super fast, then even if it's small, it's going to cause a massive amount of of impact because of that conservation of momentum. Anyway, several astrophysicists have been expressing concerns about plans like starlink, because you know, it's not just

SpaceX that's doing this. I don't want to suggest that there are other companies that are also looking into launching thousands of satellites in order to create these sorts of services, and that could potentially make it harder for earthbound astronomers

to get any work done without interference. One astrophysicist, Jonathan McDowell, has recommended that maybe we take things a little bit slowly and see how we can work with a few thousand operating satellites and find out how that affects astronomical observations before we open the floodgates to tens of thousands of them. And we're gonna stay with space for our final story. Last month, a representative from exo Analytic Solutions

detected something kind of interesting out there in space. So exo Analytic is a private company here in the United States that uses optic telescopes around the world to track the position of various satellites in orbit, which, as I was just indicating, that's important if you want to say avoid collisions and delays and stuff. Anyway, the rep explained that in January of this year, a satellite called s J one, which is a Chinese satellite, mosey don up

to another Chinese satellite called Compass G two. Now Compass G two has been in orbit since two thousand nine, and it was intended to be part of a navigation system, but it stopped working not long after it had been launched and has just been dead weight or dead weightless,

which that dead joke does almost works but doesn't quite whatever. Anyway, s J twenty one approached this dead satellite, apparently connected to it, and then the two moved off together, and then the dead satellite was tossed toward a different orbit three kilometers away, an orbit that's out of the way of other stuff. I've seen it referred to as a

graveyard orbit. It. So the conclusion this rep from Exo Analytics made, and which I should add this is a conclusion that has not been verified by China, but then that's no surprise. The conclusion is that the s J twenty one satellite was acting as a space tugboat pulling the dead satellite away before the SJ one satellite then would return to its operational orbit, which is a geo

stationary orbit above the Congo Basin. Now a lot of countries are creating special spacecraft that are intended to do something similar to this. Uh. The idea being that they could be used to cut way back on the space junk that's in orbit and continuously poses a threat to

space operations and astronomy and such. And of course there's also some concern that countries that are developing this tech could lead to weaponizing it, where a space capable country launches a spacecraft like this to not move one of their satellites out of the way, but to target and enemies satellite infrastructure. So imagine using something like this to go after the communications satellites that supports, say the United States.

So far, countries do not seem to be, at least outwardly pursuing this as a legit strategy, but I thought it was neat anyway. That is the news for Thursday, February twenty twenty two. I hope you are all well. If you have suggestions for topics that I should cover in future, episodes of tech Stuff, please reach out. The best way to do that is on Twitter. The handle for the show is tech Stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again, Really Sick. 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.