Tech News: Robots Can Be Scary

which app do you think is the most invasive? TikTok? Nope, not that one. YouTube, Nope, Facebook, you're getting warmer. But according to the cloud storage company p Cloud, the actual answer is Instagram, So we're still in the Facebook family. That makes sense, right, that tracks The company came to this conclusion after reviewing updated app privacy labels. See not

that long ago. Apple updated its privacy policy and it now requires companies to more thoroughly list out the ways in which those companies collect and use data through these apps. And this is one of the reasons why it took Google a long time to update the company's apps on iOS. Because it should come as a surprise to no one that Google is collecting a lot of user information. Well, the same appears to be true of Instagram, only more so.

According to p Cloud, Instagram collects nearly eighty percent of users personal data, including stuff like search history, location, financial information like what bank do you use, where do you shop that kind of thing, plus who your contacts are, and Instagram shares that information with various third parties who presumably are paying a decent price for that level of access. Now, this is how companies like Facebook, which by the way, was in second place behind Instagram, It's how they can

market you to various advertisers. The more these companies know about each user, the more they can target that user with specific ads. They can match that user up with advertisers, and being able to go to advertisers with the message that hey, our app is going to put your ads in front of the people who are most likely to

act on those ads. That's a powerful selling point. We are well beyond the old days where you might, as part of your marketing strategy, really rely on putting up a billboard in a prominent location in town and hope you get as many eyeballs as possible. Now we have companies identifying which eyeballs are the most valuable to any

given client, and then sending those ads that way. Now, what's the moral of this story, Well, it's that we should all be aware of how apps are collecting our information, how we are providing data to these apps. If we're okay with that, no worries, right, I mean, it's this

is a personal thing. But if we're not okay with that, we need to consider if those apps are really something we want to use, because there's not really an easy way for us to go in and cherry pick which points of data can and cannot be used by any given app. I mean, just doing that alone would become

a full time job. Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I have Instagram on my phone, So I say this as someone who is both aware that the app is collecting a lot of data and still is using that app. I'm one of those people. But I am also very very boring. So my hope is that Facebook is not getting very much money at all for my information, because come on, I'm lame. According to the Korea Herald, the giant tech company l G is now considering just shutting

down its smartphone division entirely. You might remember that. Earlier this year, LG announced that it was looking into the possibility of selling off its smartphone division to some other company and just getting out of the smartphone game. Now apparently no suitable parties have made an offer to LGS liking, so the company may just shut down that division entirely and then try to cut its losses. And LG has

been experiencing losses through its smartphone division. While LG is the third largest smartphone maker behind Apple and Samsung, at least according to market share that is from a counterpoint research. Depending on which analysts you look at, you get different numbers for these things. Anyway, despite being a big are in the smartphone space, the division has been operating at

a loss for several years in a row. In fact, according to the website gives China, l G has lost four point four three billion dollars total and has had a loss at the end of every single one of the past twenty three consecutive quarters. This is a pretty

big deal. LG had even made a pretty big splash this year earlier at CS with the reveal of the rollable smartphone, a smartphone that can actually change screen sizes dynamically because it uses a flexible oh LED display that can unroll as it expands, and it also shows that the smartphone business is a really tough one to be in.

Development costs are really high. It's a huge challenge to stand out when you've got so many different smartphone companies and models that are all on the market, you know, and they're all competing for the same customers, and the challenge to price units so that they are competitive in such a dense field. So not a huge surprise. It is sort of the end of an era with LG getting out because LG has played such a big part

in smartphones. Atlas VPN released a report stating that in twenty twenty, there was a one thousand, nine two percent increase in development of malware aimed at the Mac operating system. Now, percentages are tricky things, right, because it doesn't actually tell

you the total numbers. If only one instance of Mac OS malware had happened in twenty nineteen, that would just mean that there were one thousand, ninety two of them in twenty twenty, and that number is dwarfed by the number of incidents you would expect for Windows based operating systems, But in this case, the report found evidence of six hundred seventy four thousand, two hundred seventy three news samples

of malware for the MA cos. Still that's nothing. I mean, half a million is a lot, so it's not nothing, But it's not the same as what you see for Windows. That's orders of magnitude bigger with Windows. So I just want to be clear because I don't want people saying my anti Mac bias is coming into play. The same group that is Atlas VbN found ninety one oh five

million new Windows malware samples. Now that means that Windows would rack up as many examples of malware new malware in just three days as Mac had for the entire year of twenty Still, this is a reminder that Mac computers are not magically immune to malware. I'm not actually sure what the perception is these days, but when I got started in podcasting, there was this kind of general belief among the public that Mac computers were effectively malware proof.

And there was, you know, some truth to that, but not because the Mac operating system was just magically better than Windows. It had more to do with opportunity. Because if you are someone who's developing malware you probably want that malware to hit as many targets as possible, and the market share of Windows versus Mac os machines was really out of whack. It just made more sense to develop malware targeting PCs because there were way more PC

users out there. But we've seen a rise in instances of Mac based malware over the past few years and it's a solid reminder that there is no bulletproof operating system out there, and no matter what type of machine we used to access files and the Internet, we need

to be wary of malware. And now we transition to a segment I like to call robots are scary and they can be over In the UK, the Defense Secretary Ben Wallace said that Britain's mill terry will be able to achieve a greater effect with fewer actual soldiers in the future thanks to technology, and part of that involves drones now. The established strength of the UK Army in the mid two thousands was set at eighty two thousand troops.

UH This includes all people who have received basic training and then a secondary specialized training to focus on a particular role or area of expertise. Today, the army has seventy six thousand, five hundred personnel, including seventy six thousand, three hundred fifty soldiers. Wallace's plans would reduce this number

to seventy two five hundred by five. At the same time, the defense budget in the UK is to increase by twenty four billion pounds over the next four years, So the question is where is that money going if the army is actually scaling back on the number of soldiers that will be part of the army. Well, big part of it is automated systems and drones, including replacing existing

Reaper drones with Protector drones. That is a little bit confusing to some folks, I'm sure, because both the Reaper and the Protector are themselves variants of the Predator B class drone. Other big expenses include establishing a national cyber force, building out a digital backbone for the purposes of rapid data sharing, and the development of a future combat air system.

Technology is going to play a much bigger role, and in theory it will reduce the need to have as many human soldiers as are currently in service in the UK, so at least some of that responsibility will fall to technology and the operators who are in charge of it,

including the drones, which, by the way, are pretty terrifying things. Meanwhile, on this side of the pond, Ben Callos, a New York City Council member, has raised concerns about the New York Police Force using robots to respond to a hostage

situation that took place in the Bronx. The robot in question was a Diggi Dog from Boston Dynamics, and according to Ours Technica, Callos reacted with horror seeing this robot in use, which then prompted him to propose a ban on police forces from owning or operating robots that are armed with weaponry. But I do want to be clear that the Digi Doog robot wasn't armed. It was only equipped with surveillance cameras which gave police a view into an area that was considered too dangerous for a human

officer to enter. But it wasn't like Diggi Dog was packing heat or anything. Even so, without weapons, the Digi Dog still has its critics. The American Civil Liberties Union has asked why the Digi Dog didn't show up on a police list of surveillance devices that they use. That's a problem because New York recently passed a law that states law enforcement agencies have to divulge that kind of information.

Groups like the A c L You are concerned that there aren't proper privacy protections in place that would prevent police from abusing the surveillance power on citizens. I did not realize how many words start with P in that sentence. Uh,

there were until I actually said it out loud. But there have been a lot of people, myself included, who have been warning against the use of armed robots because going down that pathway could lead to another type of arms race, and that's one that will undoubtedly lead to tragic consequences, whether by intent or accident. Callis himself isn't totally anti robot. He said that utility robots like the

digit dog are not really what he's concerned about. Despite that initial, you know, reaction of horror, I guess, nor would he want to see bomb disposal robots get banned either, But he is concerned about there being a slippery slope.

The ARS Technica piece at atually quotes the director of the Ethics and Emerging Sciences Group at California Polytechnic, and he points out that what is a non lethal robot today could be tweaked and modified and become a lethal robot in the future, and we've already seen what happens when we militarized police forces. To learn more about this, I highly recommend reading the full article on Ours Technica. It is titled New York lawmaker wants to ban police

use of armed robots. It's by Sydney Fussele, who writes for Wired dot com. So, like I said, I found the article over at ours Technica. It is extremely well written and well researched, So go check that out. And now let's move to some varying degrees of weird stories. Our first one is that the final bid for Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey's first tweet has been made. The transaction has happened. Specifically, this was a bid for the n f T or on fungible token version of that tweet. Now.

I have an episode coming up explaining what n f t s are and how they work. That's going to be later this week, but for the purposes of this story, it's safe to boil it down and just say this is a way to certify a digital thing as being unique anyway. In this case, the n f t was Dorsey's first tweet, which reads just setting up my Twitter. Dorsey posted that back on March twenty one, two thousand six.

Back then Twitter had no vowels. I mean, the service would let you use vowels, but the the company didn't use vowels in the name, so it was spelled t W T t R. The winning bid came from Senna Estav, the CEO at Bridge Oracle and stiv Or Stav. His winning bid was for two million, nine hundred fifteen thousand, eight hundred thirty five dollars and forty seven cents, which is not a round number and I don't know if

that number has any special significance. He paid for the tweet using Ether cryptocurrency, and Dorsey took the money, converted it to bitcoin, and then donated it to give directly a charitable organization that gives money directly to those who needed That two million and such and such dollars ended up being just under fifty one bitcoin. The actual value was fifty point eight seven five one six six nine bitcoin,

because that's how bitcoin works. Five of the bid actually went to the platform sent that's c E n T. That is the platform that hosted the auction pretty wild. Also wild is that the actor William Shatner, perhaps best known as the original Captain James T. Kirk in the Star Trek franchise, has turned ninety years old, and he has also spawned an AI version of himself with the

help of a company called story File. Now, according to the CEO of story File, there will be a video version of William Shatner that will not be a deep fake. It will not be an avatar. In her words, it will be the real Shatner. What that actually means, I guess is up to interpretation. But the idea is that this video version of Shatner will be able to interact with people and respond to people, just as William Shatner himself would if he were, you know, doing like a

video conference with you. So, in other words, it should be a digital copy of William Shatner, though I have questions about how faithfully the video will recreate the experience of actually interacting with the star. Shatner said he wanted to create a way that would allow his family and

friends to interact with him for all time. The video version should be up and running by May of this year, and I really, really hope that if you ask it very trivial questions about Star Trek, it will prompt the video Shatner to respond in the same way that the real Shatner did in an old Saturday Night Live sketch in which he appeared as uh if you were a guest at a science fiction convention and he fields increasingly weird questions from a big group of nerdy Star Trek

fans until he just explodes and yells, get a life, will you people? That's what I want from my Shatner interaction. I'll be disappointed if I don't get it. And our final story for today's episode comes as a huge personal challenge for me, but I will do my best to keep things at the standards that we expect for tech stuff. In San Francisco, a couple who founded a company called you Biome have now been indicted on multiple fraud charges by the federal government. You Biome was in the how

do I put this uh fecal matter testing business? Now. The pitch was that this startup company would take your sample and then they would run tests on it and determine like your gut health and give recommendations on how to improve your general well being. The only problem, according to the charges anyway, is that their methods were totally untested and without evidence, and there was no proof that

they were even at all effective. In the meantime, the company developed so called clinical tests that they urged medical professionals to give to patients, but these tests, again according to the charges, also lacked any sort of actual validation or accreditation. The whole purpose of the tests was just to create a way for you biom to seek reimbursements

from health insurance companies. So essentially, again according to the charges, this was about committing a type of insurance fraud if in fact the tests had no validity and had no you know, medical necessity. The story is very similar to that of thora nos in that the pitch for it sounds plausible, right a company that you know analyzes poop to determine gut health. That seems like that would be

achievable in a startup kind of company. But according to the charges, the couple fooled an awful lot of people in the process of trying to get this business going. It sounds like a really crappy situation to me. No Beans A dun Winton did the thing I said I wasn't gonna do anyway. But they also gained praise from various parties, including Gwyneth Paltrow's lifestyle company Goop, which I mean for Goop to praise Poop not a big surprise

if you follow Goop. The story of you Bioms should mind everyone that hype can be exciting, but it can also be really hazardous, not just to your investment, but potentially to your health. If you're counting on something that doesn't actually have any medical validity to it, you could be making really bad decisions. So before you Biom began to fall apart back in twenty nineteen, and it reached a valuation of more than half a billion dollars. That

is terrible. It tells us that there is there's something seriously broken in the investment tech sector. It's really just enough for you to give them all the stink. I Well, that wraps up all the stories for Tuesday March, or at least all the stories I wanted to talk about. We'll be covering more tech news later in the week. If you have any suggestions for topics I should cover in episodes of Tech Stuff, let me know. Reach out

to me on Twitter. The handle for the show is text of H s W and I'll talk to You again really soon. Y. Text 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.