Tech News: Riots and Coups and Facebook, Oh My!

Facebook policies. In October twenty, Facebook said it would no longer sell ad space to parties that promoted misleading information about vaccines. Then in December, Facebook upped the anti by saying it would remove posts the elevated claims that had been debunked by the World Health Organization or w HO. But Monday's announcement broadens this approach behind vaccines for COVID

nineteen and encompasses all vaccines period. While Facebook used to flag misleading posts and then just down rank them, you know, not remove them, but reduce their rank, that would just mean that they were less likely to show up in users feeds. Now the company will actually remove posts promoting false claims about vaccinations. Facebook worked with the World Health Organization and other governmental agencies to create something like a

database of false or misleading claims. According to a Facebook post on the matter, the company's stance on vaccines falls under multiple user policies. For example, content that would promote events intended to spread COVID nineteen on purpose, presumably in the belief that catching it is better than being vaccinated against it, would fall under the coordinating Harm policy. Because it turns out Facebook is against coordinating harm, which frankly

is news to me. So I suppose other things that would fall into this category would include, uh, Facebook pages dedicated for big public events in places that have a quarantine or lockdown in place, you know, That would presumably fall under the coordinating harm policy. Meanwhile, under the Regulated Goods policy, Facebook says it will prohibit posts that are attempting to sell quote medical and respiratory face masks and

COVID nineteen test kits end quote. Apparently there are a lot of parties out there selling stuff that's like a counterfeit type of of medical mask or tests that haven't actually been cleared by any regulatory agency, that kind of thing, And it's a real bear to wade through. The legit versus the illegitimate one, so Facebook saying, all right, we're

just not going to run those ads. Under the hate speech policy, Facebook will remove content that suggests people who share a protected characteristic are in some way, you know, responsible for the virus, or they are spreading the virus and so on. But this doesn't include national origin as an outright band because Facebook states that it wants to allow for posts about health statistics that are not hate speech.

Rather they are giving important information such as x percent of Americans have caught COVID nineteen since the beginning of the pandemic, something like that, And you wouldn't want to put a full ban on uh nation of origin because

the information could be really useful. And there's a whole list of prohibited content that falls under Facebook's Community Standards barrier, and that includes a ton of stuff, including more broadly debunked claims about vaccines in general, such as the claim that they cause autism, despite the fact that you know that claim has been thoroughly rejected and the researchers who first proposed the link between vaccines and autism we're later

found to have essentially fabricated the whole thing, but the idea has still stuck around and a lot of people latch onto it. Facebook will now remove those posts when they catch them, though I should add the language indicates that this general policy really is only in effect for as long as there is a COVID nineteen public health emergency, so there's no telling if the company is going to ease off on these restrictions later on down the road.

According to Facebook, the reason behind these changes comes from the Facebook Oversight Board, which is the independent group that would recently formed to review Facebook's content moderation policies. And while we're talking about Facebook, Forbes published an article that put claims made by the company's chief operating officer under the microscope. The CEO of Facebook is Cheryl Sandberg, and the specific claims were regarding the siege on the US capital.

On January six, Sandberg had said quote, I think these events were largely organized on platforms that don't have our abilities to stop hate, and don't have our standards and don't have our transparency end quote. Which yikes. Okay, as you guys probably have gathered, because I am not subtle about it, I'm pretty critical of Facebook and how it enforces or until recently, I guess it would be better

to say, failed to enforce its policies. Forbes looked over documents from the U s Department of Justice regarding the charges against two hundred twenty three people connected to the riots now part of the nation that they looked at. Part of the information in those documents includes cases in which they identified posts on social media that account for some of the evidence against the respective individuals with regard to planning and you know, the various threats that were made.

Seventy three of those documents name Facebook as one of the social platforms upon which an associated suspect posted material relating to the assembly in d C and the riot at the Capitol, which puts Facebook in the lead for platforms that were cited by the d o J as

having hosted material related to the riots. In a distant second place is YouTube, which had twenty four appearances in these documents, and Instagram takes up spot number three, with twenty of the documents citing Instagram posts, and since Facebook owns Instagram, you could arguably add those twenty two Facebook's account, although to be fair, some of these documents probably referenced more than one social network, So while Facebook appeared seventy

three times, and Instagram appeared twenty times. Some of those may have been in the same documents, there might be some overlap. There's what I'm saying as for Parlor or Parley, you know, the free speech social network that largely catered to extremists and the far right, that one the d

o J only cited in eight documents. Now, that does not necessarily mean that everyone involved in the riots used Facebook primarily, and hardly anyone used Parlor, But it also seems to undercut Cheryl Sandberg's claims that Facebook was somehow in a better position compared to these other platforms. It's true that Facebook had been working to remove groups, you know, hate groups and and posts that violated its policies against

militarized social movements. But it's also true that the platform was still hosting a lot of communication and organization related to the riots on January six. So I'm not saying that Facebook is more responsible than these other platforms, or that the vast majority of planning happened on Facebook. Rather, I'm saying that Sandberg's claims that somehow Facebook is elevated above these other platforms just doesn't hold water when we're looking at the evidence that the d o J has

been bringing together. In other news, zd net reports that Microsoft is going to add a new type of threat alert for its Defender product for Office three sixty five,

and the alert is for nation state cyber attacks. So if Microsoft detects that a nation state backed hacking group is targeting a particular companies, employees, or its systems, it can send up the alert through Defender for Office three sixty Microsoft has already been kind of doing this on a more granular approach, since if the company detected that a nation state backed attack was targeting one of Microsoft's customers, then Microsoft would send an email to that specific person,

alerting them of the attack and providing advice on how they should secure their account. Now, according to Microsoft, it was sending out around ten thousand alerts per year since. But there is a problem with this approach, and that's the fact that not everyone stays up to date on their emails. You know, I'm kind of guilty of that.

I get a lot of emails every single day, and I'm frequently busy researching or recording, so I'll miss a lot of messages or you know, read them in batches at the end of the day, and considering that a nation state backed hacking attack is what I would call a super high priority and urgent matter, people like me

can be a real problem. And so this new feature will allow Microsoft to send out an alert through the Office three sixty five dashboard, which should pop up on the screens of various system administrators and I T personnel, who can then take steps to address problems, including proactively changing the settings on affected accounts and then contacting the affected employees. So then no time is wasted in responding

to the threat. It would be better for an employee to get locked out of their account by their system administrator than to have it, you know, compromised by a nation state backed hacker. And I really wanted to include this news item today, not because I want to advertise for Microsoft, but rather point out how the rise of nation based hacker groups has really become a serious and persistent threat around the world. And just to be clear,

tons of countries do these kind of cyber attacks. Here in the United States, we typically hear about groups that are backed by China and Russia in North Korea, but keep in mind that the United States has engaged in this kind of cyber warfare too. Cyber warfare is real, and it is quietly raging online all the time, and we typically only become aware of it when someone discovers, you know, a big flaw in security, such as the

solar Winds hack. So it's a pretty scary world out there and wild to think that there needs to be an official alert built into an Office three product to let you know about a nation state based hacking attack on your company. That's I mean, it's this is like like spy movie type stuff. Bloomberg reported that Twitter is looking at some potential ways to generate revenue for the

company in addition to its normal route. Right now, Twitter's main source of revenue is through advertisements, such as promoted posts. So if you've ever been on Twitter and you thought, huh, I don't remember following Taco Bell. Did I follow Taco Bell? Did I get loopy last night and follow Taco Bell, Well there's a chance you never followed Taco Bell, but rather Taco Bell had paid for a promoted post and

Twitter then posted that to your feed. And while Twitter had a rocky road early in the pandemic, as companies began to kind of cut back on their advertising, budgets. It did bounce back. Recently, Twitter announced that second one billion dollar quarter. That's one billion dollars in revenue, I

should add, not profit. And there are questions about whether that trend will continue, you know, because after all, most recently Twitter purged tons of accounts from its platform due to the aforementioned riots at the US Capital, among other things.

So that means it's a good idea to diversify. If your growth isn't going on the up and up, like if you're not expanding the number of users to your service, then you have to figure out how you're going to generate revenue beyond just advertising, because advertisers are more interested in seeing those numbers go up. So in this case, Twitter is reportedly considering introducing some features that users can

access if they cough up the dough. One possible change is that Twitter will start charging for tweet Deck, which is an alternative way to view tweets. Uh. It's it's its own little kind of dashboard. For one thing, you get all the tweets in reverse chronological order, so there's no confusing little segments of stuff like labeled. You might have missed this. That's nestled in the middle of more

recent tweets. I know that whenever I use Twitter directly, I will run into tweets that were posted, like, you know, eighteen hours ago, and I'll think, wow, that's a big gap. That's because Twitter has kind of aggregated those, thinking, hey, maybe you want to see these. I prefer it in reverse chronological order. Tweet deck does that. If you manage multiple Twitter accounts, you can set up tweet deck to actually show all those various feeds side by side, including

things like replies and direct messages. So I use tweet deck to manage Twitter accounts for myself, for tech stuff and for large nerdron collider. So one option Twitter is reportedly considering is making the service a subscription based service. Another feature that could be a paid option is an undo send button. I'm not sure how it's different from a delete tweet option unless it actively removes the tweet

from displaying in various feeds in real time. Because sometimes if you send out a tweet and you delete it and somebody else has an older, unrefreshed Twitter feed up, they can see that undeleted tweet. Maybe this deals with that. I don't know, and another pitch would allow accounts to offer up exclusive content to people who tip the accounts, sort of like a tiered subscription that you would find

on platforms like YouTube. Twitter responded to a request from Bloomberg to clarify the strategies, and the company essentially said that any plans right now are in the very early stages of discussion. Nothing is said in stone, and you shouldn't really expect to see anything implemented this year. Now. I say all that knowing that Twitter is going to hold its quarterly earnings called later the day. This goes out on Tuesday, the ninth of February, so it's possible

that I'll have some updates for Thursday's episode. We'll see. And one big story that I've yet to touch on tech stuff is uh the ongoing political upheaval in Myanmar. Now, this country in Southeast Asia was formerly a British colony. For several decades, it existed under military rule. It transitioned to a civilian based government, used to be known as

Burma in the United States. It frequently is referred to still as Burma, and until very recently, the leader of the country was on San su Ki, who won a

re election campaign in a landslide. She she was originally elected in one reelection this past year, and the military's justification for taking over the government hinged on charges of nationwide voter fraud, and those are charges that have no evidence behind them, which sounds a bit familiar and indicative of a general trend in world politics that we've seen in many places not too long ago. And this isn't the first time that sue Ki has seen this kind

of resistance. She had served around fifteen years in detention as punishment for efforts to organize a democratic government in the country. She also received the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts in nineteen one. Now, the reason I bring up the story here is that the military has been

steadily cracking down on Internet platforms within the country. One of the big changes between the last era of military regimes and this current one is the proliferation of the Internet and affordable technology that citizens can use to access the Internet. This ends up giving people a lot of options when it comes to doing stuff like organizing protests and sharing information, something the military has been keen to squash. As such, the military has moved to cut off citizens

access to the Internet. The BBC reported over the weekend that nationwide connectivity fell to sixteen percent of what it normally would be. The military also moved to block citizen access to platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Some citizens switched to using virtual private networks or VPNs in order to get around those blocks, and that prompted the military to go for the more brute force approach of essentially

shutting down internet service entirely within the country. Essentially, the military are taking the philosophy of the founders of the Internet and trying to do the opposite in order to restrict speech and organization. Citizen in the country continue to speak out against the coup, organizing in the streets. Apparently, the three finger salute from Hunger Games has become a

widely adopted symbol representing a rejection of authoritarianism. There's a growing international pressure against the military to reverse course and acknowledge the democratically elected leaders. And this story is ongoing, so I'm sure we'll have more updates in future episodes. Okay, we've got a lot more news to cover, but before we get to that, let's take a quick break. We're back.

The New York Times published a piece about the gig economy in general, and Uber, Lift and Airbnb in particular. Over the course of twenty twenty. Clearly, the pandemic has had a major effect on these companies and their employees or contract workers as the case may be, and their customers.

Uber and Lift have never had a profitable year, though the typical response to that criticism has been that they're you know, both companies have invested more in growth year over year, which made costs outpaced revenue, but both have had I p o s or you know, initial public offerings. They're both publicly traded companies, which typically brings along with it a certain general expectation that the companies will become

profitable and represent a return on investment for shareholders. And of course was a much different year than any of us had planned thanks to the pandemic. Usage of ride hailing services and Airbnb dropped significantly in the spring. It recovered a bit and then had a second dip in the fall, though not as drastic as it could have been, and the gig workers have had a lot of concerns during that whole time. There's a higher risk for them to get sick as they can encounter a lot of

people on a single shift. And what's more so, gig workers intentionally sought out gigs around larger public events, you know, potential super spreader events. Because people needed transportation, a lot of gig workers stopped working those types of jobs completely. Others would swap over to stuff like driving deliveries rather than passengers, and you know, Uber really did a major shift towards delivery. In with that change came lower paychecks

and lower risk of getting sick. According to Lift and its ten largest markets, the drivers who you know kept picking up passengers were working at a fairly steady pace through most of the year because there were a reduced number of drivers out there, which meant there was a smaller supply, so a smaller demand was okay, But in other places, drivers spent a lot of time just waiting idly in their cars for potential fares. And apparently tipping

was down in as well. Oh and drivers often had to supplement masks and cleaning products that were supplied by their companies, and they had to add in stuff that they bought with their own money because it wasn't enough to cover their their work, which represented another cost for the driver. Both Uber and Left will be announcing their financial results for twenty twenty later this week, and we'll learn more about how these companies have been doing. Currently.

Both Uber and Left have stocks priced in the fifty to sixty dollar range, which is a pretty drastic increase from the lows that their stocks hit in. And now for a couple of Tesla stories. First up as a story in the Wall Street Journal. Their reports. China has criticized Tesla for the build quality of the US built vehicles the Tesla has been trying to sell in China.

China's State Administration for Market Regulation has rebuked Tesla for inconsistent build quality, which is something that the company has faced over here in the United States on occasion. Is inconsistent build quality. The company has issued a few recalls on US built models, like the Model S and the Model X. One of those recalls was about the touch screen that was incorporated into the dashboard of these vehicles, and another recall was for an issue with the suspension

systems of the vehicles. Interestingly, the Tesla vehicles that are actually built in the company's Giga factory in Shanghai are clear of these problems or appear to be so. This seems to be an issue specifically with the American made Tesla vehicles. Tesla apparently greased a lot of wheels to

open up operations in China. It received funding from Chinese banks, which are stayed owned and operated, and it also sidesteps some regulations that normally it would have to go through in order to get you know, approval in China, and it was all in an effort to get the production even faster. So it's kind of rough to get all these sorts of favors from a foreign country and then

turn round and kind of mess up. It's too early to say if there will be further consequences, but they could escalate up to and including an import ban on US built Tesla vehicles. So it's not, as the kids say, a good look. And our second Tesla story is that the company is really into bitcoin, like really into it, as in making a one and a half billion dollar

investment into the cryptocurrency kind of into it. And in its tin K report to the SEC, we learned that the company apparently plans to accept bitcoin as a form of payment in the future to some degree. Now, personally I find this whole thing ridiculous, but I find almost everything about bitcoin to be ridiculous. As I have pointed out on numerous occasions in my old grouchy Man voice, bitcoin's value fluctuates so much that it's hard for me

to see it as a valid currency. I mean, yes, people have used bitcoin to make transactions, particularly for stuff that they would rather not have on the books anywhere else. But on January twenty one, the value of a single bitcoin was thirty thousand, four hundred seventeen u s. Dollars.

That's a lot, right, Well, this morning it was just above forty three thousand dollars, and as a record this episode in the night of February eight, the current value for a bitcoin is forty six thousand, four hundred twenty seven dollars and fifty cents. So in two weeks, the value of a single bitcoin increased by more than sixteen thousand dollars, and it increased by nearly three thousand dollars

just over a few hours for one bitcoin. So let's say that you've got some bitcoins, maybe you invested in them and purchased them, maybe you mind them. It doesn't really matter or how likely are you to spend a bitcoin if you know that in two weeks, the bitcoin you spend might have increased in value by more than fifteen thousand dollars. I mean, you would have already spent the bitcoin, so none of that value would come back

to you. You would have spent that money already. It would be out of your wallet and in someone else's and that person would see the money they received from you increase in value dramatically. Now that doesn't seem like it's a very viable currency to me. I would be terrified to spend money, thinking what if I held onto this for two weeks and it increased in value, you know, by sixteen thousand dollars, I would never spend it. So maybe you could think of it more as an investment,

but you know, not really currency anyway. Tesla essentially acknowledged that the company is diversifying its investments with money that you know, they don't need for their regular operating expenses, and bitcoin represents one of those investments. Now, this next story isn't a Tesla story, but it does involve Elon Musk, who is currently the richest person in the world. He's putting money, a hundred million dollars of it, toward a

prize pool for a special contest. No, he is not inviting five children to a Tesla factory to get gobbled up by various machinery until he takes one of them on a glass elevator ride, though I do continue to pitch that movie instead. The contest is for teams to propose carbon removal solutions to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and then to lock it up in some form to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases that are out there and help fight climate change. The

prize pool totals one million dollars. But this isn't a winner takes all kind of game. There will be a fifty million dollar grand prize, and second and third place we'll get twenty million and ten million dollars respectively. The remaining twenty million bucks will be divvied up between small teams to help fund their solutions. It's incantive to get people thinking about ways to combat climate change and hopefully come up with some practical solutions that can be actually

implemented and make a real world difference. It's part of the X Prize series of events. X Prize is itself a nonprofit organization and X Prize events have covered tons of different challenges, from space exploration to building more efficient automobiles to improving literacy among adults. Generally speaking, the contests tackle really big problems that require a lot of innovative solutions.

And to learn more about x Prize, specifically the carbon removal one, but other ones as well, uh, you can go to x prize dot org. Just know that when we're talking carbon removal, we're talking big picture because the goal is to come up with solutions that can remove

carbon on the gigaton scale that's a billion tons. And the last little bit for this new segment, Bloomberg reports that Dan Richio, who used to lead Apple's hardware division, has moved over to Apple's mostly secret department that oversees the company's work in augmented and virtual reality technologies. And

just for a quick refresh. Virtual reality is when you're using technology to create a simulated reality, so the stuff that you can see and hear, and sometimes even touch and smell is all created by technology to create the sensation that you are in a different kind of environment.

Augmented reality is when you use technology to create a digital enhancement to the real world around you, and you might access this using a headset where you can see the real world around you, but there's a year old display that is on top of your view of reality. You might just use a smartphone, so you hold up the smartphone and you're looking at the world through the smartphones camera with a digital overlay added. Or it might even be something like headphones where you get digital information

through audio cues. But the whole idea is that the technology identifies your location and your orientation, so in other words, where you happen to be and what you happen to be facing, and then provides information on top of that environment around you. The information might be for entertainment, I mean you might just be looking at people and seeing

bunny ears pop up on everyone's head. Or it might be informative, like giving you digital instructions overlaid on top of your view of say and otherwise incomprehensible pile of furniture pieces from Ikea. The rumors about Apple mostly suggests that the company would first build out a really premium and really expensive VR set up before moving into the augmented reality technology G for a consumer space. And I can kind of understand that VR is a small market

but it's a market. It has actually had some success, though I would call it modest success are at least in a robust implementation has seen less success, with companies like Magic Leaps still struggling, and the Microsoft Hollow lens restricted more for developers and enterprise customers, and the whole mixed reality thing that Microsoft was behind kind of just faded away. So a R is gonna probably be in

a holding pattern for a little while. But when we're talking VR and we're saying expensive, how much do we mean by that? Well, the website the Information estimates that a VR set from Apple might have a price tag somewhere in the neighborhood of three thousand dollars. Yikes. I mean, you could build a really good gaming rig for three grand, you know, not a like bleeding Edge it'll rip the skin off your face kind of gaming rig, but still

a really good one for three thousand dollars. Now, maybe Apple is building out a better VR implementation than anyone else has ever managed. That is possible, but the company has had some missteps in the past as well, So nothing is certain except that you'll definitely be paying the Apple tax if you want to buy one, because nobody gets out of that. We have a few more stories to cover in this episode. Before I get to those,

let's take another quick break. You know, if I weren't making podcasts, I would be pitching big budget blockbusters to Hollywood types. You heard me do one with Elon Musk's contest. If you listen to large nerd Dron Collider, you know I do it every week, and I would make really groundbreaking stuff. For example, here's one for you for free. I got this idea. There's a robot from the future and it comes back to present day because it has

one mission to make a really good salad. That's my way of introducing this next story, which is that door Dash is set to acquire a company called chow Botics, which tech Crunch describes as quote a Bay Area based robotics company best known for its salad making robot end quote. That robot, by the way, is named Sally, so in my movie Pitch, Arnold Schwarzenegger would clearly be playing Sally,

the salad making robot. Chow Botics first got its start in and according to tech Crunch, it has raised more than twenty million dollars so far. The salad making robot looks kind of like a vending machine and also kind of like one of those claw games that you see in arcades, except instead of being filled with garfield plush toys, it's filled with these columns of containers that are filled with leafy greens or other veggies and stuff like salad

dressings and croutons and cheese. The earlier incarnation of the robot had a touch screen ordering interface, so you'd walk up to the device and you could pick from a selection of salads or you could, you know, customize your own and choose which elements would go into your mix,

and you'd make your choices. Then the robot would spin a carousel of containers, each filled with stuff like spinach or kale or carrots or whatever, and it would dispense the stuff into a bowl and it would measure it by weight, so you get a consistent salad from serving to serving, and you just put the bowl into a little outlet for the robot and it would shoot the

salad into your bowl. With the pandemic, robots like Sally clearly had an advantage over other options like salad bars or people prepping salads for you, and chalbotics also introduced an interface that would work with an app so that you could actually order your salad with your phone instead of having to touch the touch screen on the robot,

which is pretty clever. Now, how that company is going to fit into door dashes strategy isn't totally clear yet, but I imagine it's going to be along the lines of door Dash offering up its own products to consumers in addition to those found in local restaurants. So when you open up door Dash, you might order a salad from door Dashes army of merciless killer salad robots for a slightly lower price than you would spend if you were to get it from kill Me maybe or whatever,

you know, some salad place. I got some more bad news for Google Stadia owners, which includes myself. I mean, for one thing, there's a general feeling that this service might not be around for much longer. Google already killed off it's internal Stadia development division, the people who were working on, uh, the exclusive games for Google Stadia. Now, as far as I know, no one actually working on the division has been you know, targeted for early retirement

or anything. But now we hear that the developer for the indie game Terra Area has decided that his company is going to cancel all plans to port that game over to Google Stadia and wherefore should it be thus well. Ours Technica reports that this move was in response to YouTube banning Andrew Spinx's channel, and Spinx is the lead developer for Terrarium, and YouTube banned the Relogic Game Developer channel for a terms of service violation. But it gets worse.

The Terra Area Twitter account elaborate that first their YouTube channel was banned despite the fact that no one had actually added anything to that channel for several months, so there was nothing new there to be objectionable, and the email message that they received said that there was some sort of undefined terms of service violation, and the email itself even said that it was probably an error on Google's part and that they should not get any strikes

against the channel because of that. But then, just three days later quote the entire Google account, YouTube, Gmail, all Google apps, even every purchase made over fifteen years on the Google Play Store was disabled with no warning or recourse. This account links into many business functions and as such

the impact to us is quite substantial. End Quote yikes Spins took Twitter to air his grievances and formally canceled the port of Terraria for Google Stadium, which, honestly, given the extent of the issues with having a total ban on all Google services, I wouldn't call that an extreme reaction.

This is one of the downsides to Google's approach to having a single sign in account system for all Google services, because a single band can potentially affect everything else, which, as ours technic up points out, creates a disproportionate kind of punishment. And when you're being punished for something that is likely not your fault, it's just an accident, that's

extra harsh. In happier news, at least for TikTok fans, the app has secured a music license for Universal Music Group's entire catalog of music from around the world and for those who have never used TikTok except maybe to sing along to see shanties, which is how I use it.

A very popular use of the app is creating lip SYNCD videos to various clips of audio, which frequently includes music, and those licenses are important because it grants users permission to make videos of themselves, you know, dancing or lip syncing or singing along with copyrighted music without fear of having their videos flagged or their accounts banned for unauthorized use of copyrighted material, or at least that's how it's

supposed to work. In the first six months of twenty TikTok received more than ten thousand, six hundred copyright takedown requests, and earlier in Universal was one of the music publishing companies threatening to sue TikTok for copyright infringement, arguing that the company lacked the proper licenses to allow its users to create the kinds of videos that they were making.

The music companies argued that without the agreements in place, the artists who create the songs that fans love don't get paid for the use of their music, and yeah, that is a raw deal. But I do want to point out that when it comes to altruistic philosophies, music publishing companies rarely rank really high on my list of

candidates for most thoughtful of the year. Anyway, it looks like Universal and TikTok negotiated to a common ground, which probably means TikTok is shelling out big oh buckos the Universal in order to make the music available to TikTok creators. TikTok has reached similar agreements with Sony Music and Warner Music Group, as well as lots of independent labels. Now does this mean you can upload a video to TikTok and use the music from TikTok's database without ever worrying

about a takedown? Notice? Maybe it sometimes happens anyway, which has to be frustrating to creators. Meanwhile, old timers like yours truly say stuff like where reminds me are the old days of YouTube? Shutter down? Let me tell you about them? So no one ever settles down and everyone leaves me. Finally, entrepreneur Mark Cuban is co founding a

new podcast platform called Fireside. Apparently, the idea behind this venture is to create a platform in which creators can record and or broadcast conversations, monetize them, and use analytics tools to see how different content performs on the platform. It's supposed to be a curated platform as well, so it's not like an open mic night at the local CD comedy club. I think the sales pitch here is that it takes a lot of stuff for probe podcasters to do their jobs. And it takes all those duties

and aggregates it into a cohesive service. So rather than a podcaster having to do marketing, analysis and sales all on their own, you know, landing sponsors for their shows and that kind of thing, this platform would handle that

stuff for them, at least to some degree. Now I don't know how much control the creators on the platform are going to have, So for example, with my show, I typically get to have a say with regard to which sponsors are allowed to advertise on tech stuff, and I generally avoid sponsors that I don't feel are a good fit for the show are or maybe they're in the type of business that I'm not a fan of.

So for example, if an ad for any alternative medicine company plays on my show, you can be pretty certain that I did not get the chance to shoot that one down, because I would never have something like that run during one of my episodes. But I don't know if people working on Fireside are going to be given that level of authority to make those kind of decisions. And just to be clear, they're actually already is a

company called Fireside that is in the podcast business. It's a company that hosts podcasts and provides analytics for those podcasts, which frankly surprises me that no one over on the New Fireside project thought to check out that you know, the name was available, because I mean, it's one thing to take a company name that's already in use. It's another thing to take a name that's already in use in the exact same industry that you are getting into.

That's just bad form. According to the Verge, Fireside that is, the New One has already reached out to some established podcasters to talk about being part of the founding group of creators on the platform. I am not one of them. I'm not saying I'm hurt, but I'm not not saying it either. And that wraps up this episode of tech Stuff News. I know I got a little loopie there, but it is ten fifteen PM as I record this, So my day has been a long one. Give me

some slack, but don't put me on slack. I just I can't. I can't do another project management tool right now. I just can't. All right, guys, if you have any suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, whether it's a topic about a company, a technology, a person in tech, a trend in tech. Maybe you just want to know how something works let me know. The best way to reach out is over on Twitter. The handle I use for the show is text stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon Y. Text Stuff

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