Tech News: Nuclear Sabotage and Pizza Robots

as a platform. She was fired from Facebook allegedly due to poor performance, though Young says that it was because she was spending so much time trying to show how organized groups were creating propaganda campaigns on Facebook, so she wasn't able to spend as much time on her normal duties. However you want to frame that that was why she

was fired. And she wrote a farewell post, which is common practice at Facebook, and it was nearly eight thousand words long, which is not common practice at Facebook, and it was sort of to make her case. She created a separate website as well and published her farewell post there because the original one was on an internal Facebook forum. She wanted to make sure it existed in a separate location because she suspected that perhaps the company would delete

her post. It did, in fact deleted the post, at least temporarily, and then allegedly Facebook pressured the hosting service that Jong was using for her website to take that post offline too, which is a big yikes from me.

But now Jong is coming forward and supplying various news organizations with information about how state backed efforts pushing propaganda were relying on Facebook and how Facebook leadership kind of allowed it to have open and did not make any significant moves to stop it until it became, you know, kind of politically necessary. Her argument is that these actions or in actions from you know, Facebook management, strengthened authoritarianism

in multiple parts of the globe. Jong says that the incident that kind of started this all off and alerted her to the problem was with Facebook pages that were supporting the President of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernandez. She said that over the course of six months, his posts had received more than fifty nine thousand likes, but upon closer inspection, she saw that nearly eighty percent of those likes were from accounts that didn't represent real people. Instead, somebody presumably

on her. Nandez's team had created hundreds of Facebook page accounts. So Facebook pages are meant for organizations and businesses, right, They don't represent a person so much as an entity, and a single administrator was overseeing hundreds of these pages and use them to boost likes on posts because Facebook pages can interact with posts the same way that normal

Facebook accounts can. And then they also would post things that were praising her Nandez on that Facebook page and have other Facebook pages within that big network boost that particular post, giving it lots of likes and thus elevating it. And the effect was kind of a rising tide. It lifts all disinformation as Facebook's algorithm concludes that this is material that's driving engagement. You see a lot of likes

and shares and stuff that shows engagement. Now, granted that engagement is coming from a bunch of Facebook pages that are run by the same person, but on surface, it looks like it's leget That meant that Facebook would then serve that up to an even wider audience. While she initially faced relucts from Facebook's management regarding taking any action towards this, ultimately the company would remove lots of accounts and admitted that Joan was correct to push for it.

But despite that progress, she discovered that she often encountered opposition or at the very least, apathy when it came to addressing similar problems in lots of other countries. She saw that this was not unique to Honduras. It was happening in lots of places, particularly places with more authoritarian leaders in power. So she found instances in which these various regimes were using Facebook pages to heap criticism and abuse on political opponents, not just boost their own message,

but to degrade anyone who opposed them. She advocated a change in the company's rules to close this sort of loophole that Facebook pages created for these different people. And as it stands, you can still make as many Facebook pages as you'll like, and they still interact with other posts, just like a normal Facebook account would. She noted that for poorer countries with smaller numbers of Facebook users, she rarely got very much support in doing anything about the problem.

She said it was pretty clear that if the country were wealthy, then the company was more likely to do something about it. If the country had a larger number of people using Facebook, then it was more likely to do something about it, but it wasn't the same across the board. I really recommend reading the article. It is titled How Facebook let Fake Engagement Distort Global Politics? A whistleblowers account. It's by Julia Carey Wong, and like I said,

it's at the Guardian. It's a very good read. I've only given a tiny summation of some of the stuff that's in that article, and it is fascinating and infuriating. In similar news, the Guardian also reports that Facebook, after a great deal of pressure and more than a year of delays, removed more than sixteen thousand groups that were

posting fake reviews for products and services. Essentially, what it sounds like is that these groups were outright buying positive reviews for their own products and sometimes buying negative reviews for competitors, so paying someone to leave various reviews to try and boost numbers. It's pretty schevy stuff. This all came out of the UK. I mean that should be obviously with the Guardian, but the UK's Competition and Market authority pushed Facebook to act on this way back in January.

But clearly since I reporting on it, and we're now in April of one, you could say that Facebook failed to act in a timely manner. The CMA released a statement that said, quote after we intervened again, the company made significant changes, but it is disappointing it has taken them over a year to fix these issues. End quote. I might have to do a full episode of out fake reviews and followers and such in a future tech Stuff,

so stay tuned for that. You know. Back in two the Natan's nuclear reactor facility in Iran was hit with a specific type of malware called stucks net. We actually did a tech Stuff episode about it. So this malware had a very specific goal. It was to change the rotational speeds of centrifuges at the nuclear power plant, and

the purpose of those centrifuges was to refine uranium. Refined uranium is the fuel for nuclear power plants, but if you refine it enough, you could potentially use that uranium to make a nuclear weapon. And it turned out that the CIA and Israel had collaborated on creating and deploying this malware, finding a way to get installed in the facility despite the fact that the facility had an air gap, that is the facilities, critical systems did not connect out

to the internet. Stucks net would spread far beyond Iran though. It kind of just that dormant everywhere else because it had that specific purpose, and it set the Iranian nuclear program back a few years. Okay, but what does this have to do with today? Well, if you flash forward, it sounds like Israel has had a hand in another

tech attack designed to disrupt the Natan's nuclear reactor. This time, the Iranians report that someone carried out a cyber attack that sent the Natan's facility into a blackout, and it's a move that the Iranian officials say also caused extensive damage to the electricity grid. As I record this, Israel hasn't denied involvement in what Iranians are calling sabotage. Israel and Iran have been hostile to one another for a very long time, with both countries striking out against the

other for several years. Speaking of nuclear power, the Natan's plant, like all practical nuclear plants that are commercial facilities today, runs on nuclear fission. That is the process that we rely on to generate electricity. Boils down to heavy atoms get split apart and they release a lot of energy,

which is then used to generate electricity. I won't go into the full detail that it's an episode all by itself, but there are scientists working hard to create practical nuclear fusion reactors which would take to light atoms like as in lighter ones on the lighter into the elemental table and then fuse those two light atoms together, which also

releases a lot of energy. And what's more, you're not talking about the dangerous radiation that you would get with fusion reactors, Like the material you're using isn't radioactive in that sense, then you're not generating radioactive waste. It could lead to some transformational changes in the way that countries meet their energy requirements. With working fusion reactors, a country could conceivably go entirely independent for its energy needs, which

in turn really boosts national security. You're not dependent upon on some other nation for say oil. But fusion reactors require a lot of energy just to get started, and you're typically talking about pumping in energy that is equivalent to millions of degrees of heat. And that means that while scientists have created fusion reactors that can produce energy from fusion reactions, the big barrier is that it took as much or nearly as much energy to start the

reaction as you get out of that reaction. Now, that sort of ratio clearly doesn't work, and it doesn't work if you want to produce electricity at any real scale. If you're pouring in as much energy as you're getting out, then you're not really achieving anything. But a company called t A E Technologies says that it anticipates a working commercial fusion reactor by the end of the decade. That

is exciting stuff. And yeah, it's still several years away, but considering the amount of energy and computing power needed

to get this just right, it's still really impressive. My hope is that T A E. Technologies is absolutely right about this, and that by we see fusion reactors transform how we get our electricity, it could really make an enormous contribution to countries that are trying to leave fossil fuels behind, and it could power all those companies that it plans to go carbon neutral or carbon negative in the near future. Microsoft is buying a company called Nuance,

which is in the AI and speech recognition industry. Nuance produces a type of software called Dragon, which uses machine learning to tweak itself as it interacts with a particular speaker as a person who is speaking. So, in other words, this is a speech recognition approach that improves the more someone works with it. The system comes to recognize that

person's accent, their speech patterns, pronunciation, etcetera. Apple's serri relies in part on the Dragon software, though to what degree remains Apple's secret sauce or secret Apple sauce, Secret Apple Sauce. I'm getting off track, sorry. Microsoft is paying nearly twenty billion dollars princely some for Nuance. The only acquisition Microsoft has paid more for was linked In back in that set them back around twenty six billion bucks or so.

What does Microsoft plan to do with Nuance? Well, I imagine we'll see some tight integrations of Dragon software with other Microsoft products such as Office three. Perhaps will see more speech to text applications. If those are good enough, maybe I'll just dictate my notes to my computer instead of you know, typing them all out. But then I'll have to say the same stuff twice, with the second time being you know, on Mike for recording. Maybe I

should think that through again. But seriously, this could be an evolutionary step in accessibility, and it could really bolster the features found in other Microsoft products. So I'm very curious to see how it gets integrated moving forward. Mark German of Bloomberg reports that Apple is working on a smart speaker product that will have an iPad as a display. So I guess it's a home pod with a view.

Home Pod, in case you don't know, is Apple's smart speaker they launched that they have since discontinued the original home pod, that the HomePod many still exists, I think. The German says that at least one of the concepts for the new speaker included away for the screen the little iPad on it to rotate around the top of the speaker so that the screen can always face you.

So they imagine around speaker with a screen attached to it, and as you move from one side of the room to the other, the screen actually rotates around the speaker to always face you. Um. Sounds kind of creepy. Really, also sounds very similar to the Amazon Echo show Tin, which I admit was a product that I didn't even know existed until I was looking into this. German says the Apples also working on a sort of Apple TV slash soundbar type device that also has a camera incorporated

in it. So it makes me think of a kind of a combination of things. Parts streaming media service, kind of like a Roku, part sound system, so like your traditional sound bar, and part video interface like the old Microsoft Connect. Though reportedly this camera would be used for stuff like making video calls, but not you know, gest your controls necessarily. I'm not super deep in the Apple ecosystem, so while I think these technologies are kind of cool, I'm not sure that I have a place for them

in my life. But they do sound really neat. What I'm really waiting on to learn more about is Apple's augmented reality technology that's been in development for a while. I'm waiting to see more about that. That's what has me excited. If you're keeping track of all the services and apps that Google has introduced and then subsequently abandoned,

get ready to add another one. The company has confirmed it will shut down the Shopping app on iOS and Android devices by eight June, with much of that functionality closing down in the weeks leading up to that. If you've never used the Shopping app, it's an app that tells you where you can shop for specific products. The app leveraged Google's search to come through online stores and pulling up results that hopefully are relevant to whatever it

is you're searching for. Google will continue to support the Google Shopping website, which you know does the same thing, and you could just access that using a browser on your smartphone and bypass the app entirely. We're also likely to see the shopping features included into other Google products, So if you were to just search for a specific item on a Google phone, for example, you might get a shopping link pop up as one of your potential

you know, search results in that respect. But yeah, iOS and Android shopping app from Google is going out of business. If you live in Houston, Texas, and if you order a pizza from Dominoes, there's a chance your pizza will arrive at your front door courtesy of a robot. Domino's has partnered with a startup company called neuro in u r O to test this out in a pilot or I guess technically a pilot less program. The robot looks kind of like a manature van or bus. It is autonomous.

It's called R two, which is cute. It has cameras, radar, and thermal imaging to help detect its environment and let it get around, and the robots precious cargo is protected by an electronic lock which can be disengaged if you type in the proper pen which is good because I know that here in America robots traveling by themselves don't always do so well. Rest in peace, Hitchbot gone, but not forgotten. And this is not going to be a citywide program either. It's not like if you live in

Houston you're going to be able to access this. It's actually a very small experiment. Only the Domino's p It's a joint in Woodland Heights on Houston Avenue is participating in this experiment so far. And even then, the robot will only be delivering during certain times on certain days.

But on those days and during those times, residents of Woodland Heights and Houston might be able to get up piping hot zo delivered courtesy of a robot that almost certainly doesn't wish to conquer the planet, assuming of course, that the annoid hasn't found a way to compromise the robot. And that wraps up the news for Tuesday A one. If you have suggestions or topics I should cover in Tech Stuff, let me know. Reach out via Twitter. The handle for the show is Text Stuff hs W and

now I'll talk to you again really soon. Text 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. Th