Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio. And how the tag are you. It's time for the tech news for Tuesday, March twenty ninth, two thousand, twenty two, and let's start with a doozy. Yesterday, Wired published an article by Will Night titled the Supply Chain Crisis is
about to get a lot worse. And it's a well researched and well written article, and I recommend that y'all all check it out because I'm just going to touch on part of what the article focused on, Namely, we continue to see massive disruptions in the supply chain due to a bunch of different things all happening at the same time. Now, one is obviously the ongoing COVID Night
Team Pen Dimmick and China's official policy regarding outbreaks. So, in an attempt to mitigate the spread of COVID in China, the government has a policy to essentially shut down regions where outbreaks are detected. And because we've seen more virulent strains of COVID emerge over time, this has meant that various parts of China have had to lock down repeatedly. Now, obviously that disrupts everything from manufacturing to shipping, and parts
of China have adjusted this policy a little bit. They've they've more localized lockdowns, so that reduces the broader impacts. Instead of shutting down an entire region, they might shut down a smaller area within that region. But obviously this is still an issue. And another factor is the ongoing war in Ukraine. Russia's actions have led to much of the world imposing sanctions on the country, and that includes
shipping goods through Russia. So routes that would have gone over land through Russia UH now have to take alternate pathways. And meanwhile, the shipping centers around the world are dealing with congestion. Supply chains are kind of like when you drive on the highway and you know, you just sometimes for no apparent reason, hit bumper to bumper traffic and you're just crawling along and then eventually the traffic just kinds of opens up and you can't even see what
caused the slowdown in the first place. Well, you know, that's the same sort of thing that can happen in supply chains, although it can happen at much worse degrees because supply chains are so complicated and so dependent upon all the different links in that chain, so when something
goes wrong, you get as you would suspect a chain reaction. Anyway, the article and Wired warns that the war in Ukraine is likely to contribute to really tough supply chain issues that we might not even see for a few more weeks, and that this will likely have further consequences, ranging from shortages and certain types of goods to price hikes and and this actually goes well beyond just the realm of
technology and into other industries like food supplies. UH For example, the article mentions that we might see the price of tomatoes escalate because a lot of tomato farmers might switch over to grain because grain requires less fertilizer, and fertilizer a lot of it comes from Russia. So you start to see how these little links of the chain can
have massive consequences. Further down the line, speaking of complications of supply chains, Testla's giga factory in Shanghai had to shut down temporarily in response to one of those COVID lockdowns that I just mentioned. So according to Reuters, the facility will only be down for four days, so it could be a lot worse. But obviously any downtime in a manufacturing facility is going to impact business. Now how
much of an impact. Well, in one, that Shanghai factory produced about half of all of Tesla's vehicles worldwide, So when fifty of your output is coming from one facility and that facility gets shut down, that's a potentially pretty big impact. Uh. Anyway that it seems like Tesla's launch of its Berlin Giga factory, which happened earlier this month, was happening just in time. Now I should also add, it's not like Berlin could immediately step in and take
over the slack from China. Uh, that's not how this would work. I mean, obviously you're talking about totally different part of the world, you're talking about totally different shipping, you're talking about different markets. And also the Berlin facility reportedly is not going to be scaling up to full production for several months. It might not be till the end of this year before we start seeing it approach the full production capabilities. Now, if you've been listening to
my tech news episodes. You know that Apple has been hit with repeated fines from Dutch regulators to the tune of five million euros per week, and that was going to be to a maximum of fifty million euros over the course of ten weeks. Well, we just hit week ten and Apple still has not complied with regulator demands, at least not to their satisfaction. Now, at the heart of this issue is how Apple requires app developers to use Apple's in house payment system for in app purchases
on iOS apps. And we're specifically talking about dating apps in this particular case. It's true across the board, but the regulators are really concerned with dating applications. So Dutch regulators determined that Apple's practice is anti competitive and they demanded that the company allow app developers to use alternative payment processing methods in their apps. Apple's failure to do
that is what resulted in fines. Now, Apple did propose a solution, but it did not satisfy the regulators, and for good reason. Apple's solution was to allow developers to use a different payment system, but Apple would still get a twenty seven percent cut of every transaction. Now, as it stands, Apple takes out of in app transactions, at
least from developers of a certain size. Considering the fact that any payment processing company will also take a cut, that means that if you were to go outside of Apple and use someone else to process your payments, you would probably be surrendering more than thirty percent of each transaction in total once you added up both the contributions to Apple and to your preferred payment service. So it would be more expensive to go outside of Apple because
Apple is demanding this cut on top of everything. Now, the regulators called bull crap on apple solution, saying it was transparently anti competitive. I think it's pretty hard to argue against that. And now that the regulators have gone through the full ten weeks and fifty million euros of fines, they say they are reviewing Apple's most recent proposed changes to see if those are in fact compliant with the original order. If they are not, the reg lators say
they could impose quote possibly higher penalties end quote on Apple. Now, I've seen several analysts suggest that Apple is actually just seeking to push this matter into a court in an effort to get a judgment that will release the company from these requirements. In the first place, you know, kind of hopeful that they might successfully argue in a court of law that their practice is not anti competitive and that then they wouldn't have to worry about complying or
paying fines at all. But obviously we've heard nothing from Apple itself confirming this suspicion. One Apple related rumor that the company is UH is having right now is that it's cutting back on producing new iPhone SE units. UH. The new iPhone SE became available on March eighteen, So you might wonder, well, why would the company cut production on a product that has been out for less than
a fortnight. Well, it appears that there is a double whammy at play here, that there is lower than expected demand end for this particular phone, and on top of that, there are those massive supply chain and certainties that we've been talking about in this episode. So this could be
Apple cutting losses before they are too keenly felt. Now I need to add that this all comes from a media outlet called mackay Asia, and that outlet is citing unidentified sources, so they're not naming their sources, which is not unusual, but it also is something that we have to keep in mind that when you have unnamed sources, you have to consider the possibility that the information is
not reliable. In fact, a couple of air Pods suppliers, so not Apple itself, but companies that work with Apple. They reached out to mac rumors dot com, which is where I encountered this story, and they refuted the claims that were made in Ncay Asia. So it's possible that this is not a real story. But according to those Nicay Asia reports, Apple has told manufacturer is to cut way back on units, reducing them by as much as
three million fewer phones per month. Now, originally Apple projected it would ship between twenty five to thirty million of these phones worldwide this year, but according to the report, it now estimates it will be closer to fifteen to twenty million units, so see a significant drop. Now. Obviously, the story is uncertain and we'll have to follow up later to see how it pans out, whether or not in the ca Asia was accurate in its reporting or
if this was fabricated. But if it is real, it could be another indicator of how the global supply chain crisis is impacting the the industry of consumer technology and obviously We're seeing that impact in lots of different things today, like everything that involves the semiconductor is pretty much affected by it and will potentially continue to be so for
maybe more than a year. I don't I mean, I don't have any insight into that, but just the way things start going right now, it is certainly complicated matters. We have some more news stories to go over before we get to that. Let's take a quick break. We're back and Sony has overhauled its PlayStation Plus and PlayStation Now subscription services for a launch in the near future in June of this year, and that launch will combine
those services into a new set of PlayStation Plus offerings. So, in case you were not familiar with these features, PlayStation Now has been a subscription service that let's subscribers access games for the PS four, PS three, and PS two platforms over the cloud. Uh Here in the United States, the service was priced at nine dollars nine cents per month or twenty four ninety nine for three months or
for a full year. PlayStation Plus was a different service and is a different service, and it allows subscribers to access premium options such as the ability to play multiplayer games online. So without PlayStation Plus, you can't play any multiplayer games online. You can only play local games on your machine. That way, uh you also get a chance
to download free games. Each month, Sony chooses a couple of titles and offers them up for free for PlayStation Plus users, and starting in June, both of these suites of services PlayStation now in PlayStation Plus will combine into Vultron or PlayStation Plus that's the name they decided to
stick with. So at the base level, there are three tiers to this and then the lowest tier is the PlayStation Plus Essential which will be nine per month, and it's pretty much the exact same thing that PlayStation Plus is right now, so that means it will give users access to online multiplayer games and they'll be able to download the free games that are offered by Sony each month.
The next tier up is PlayStation Plus Extra that will be fourteen per month and will include up to four hundred PS five and PS four games that subscribers can download, so they'll have access to a library of up to four hundred games that they can then download as part of their subscription. Then there's the PlayStation Plus Premium level that will be seventeen dollars and nine nine cents per month.
That will include additional access to three hundred forty more games, including some PS three titles, PS two titles, and PS one titles via cloud streaming. Plus you get all the stuff from the previous tiers. Now, I don't play as much on my consoles these days, but I do think that this is, you know, a good strategy. It's one that puts Sony on better footing against Microsoft and the Xbox Games Pass, which is you know, Microsoft version of
this kind of strategy. However, Jim Ryan, the CEO of Sony's PlayStation division, did dump a little ice water on this announcement. Bryan said that Sony is not planning on including first party titles in this Plus service, at least not at the titles launch at any rate. So, unlike Microsoft, which has been including big name exclusive titles on Game Pass at launch, PlayStation Plus will not be following suit.
Ryan says that interrupts the quote unquote virtuous cycle of Sony's process and developing titles, and that doing so would undermine that process and that the company wouldn't recapture the costs that it's pouring into developing those titles. In other words, Sony saying we don't want to cannibalize our own internal systems,
so we're not going to do that. I'm sure we'll be a disappointment to a lot of people who are hoping that this would be akin to the Xbox Game Pass and give Sony players access to those first party titles day and date. But um, you know, it still sounds like a pretty incredible offering to me. Again, I'm not like, I'm not the big console gamer these days, but I think if I were really actively using my PlayStation, I think I'd be aiming for that PlayStation plus premium.
I mean, it's eighteen bucks a month, but at the same time, you just look at how much you have to access and that's pretty incredible. Also, eighteen dollars a month is a lot less than buying a game a month. You're talking about sixty dollars plus in that regard. In other gaming news, Bungee has filed a lawsuit against ten John does As in ten unidentified defendants, and Bungee says that these people weaponize YouTube's Digital Millennium Copyright Act or d m C a process. Now there's a lot to
unpack here, So let's take a step by step. First of all, you've got the d m c A. This puts hefty requirements on platforms to take quick action when those platforms are alerted to an instance of someone violating copyright law. So in YouTube case, when it receives a demand to remove content from its platform due to a d m c A violation, that is, someone has said, hey, this person has uploaded content they don't own. I own
that content, take it down. Typically YouTube responds to sweet and takes down the content, or else it runs the risk of being held liable for failure to act with regard to the d m c A. As such, YouTube tends to be pretty darn quick on the draw with d m c A takedown notices, and potentially too quick
on the draw, at least according to Bungee. Now see Bungee also issues d m c A takedown notices because sometimes people might upload stuff like say the soundtrack to a Bungee title to YouTube without Bungees authorization, or they might upload lengthy cut scenes that and not include any other content. So in other words, there's no like user generated content. It's just Bungees cut scenes uploaded complete to YouTube.
Those are cases where Bungee will issue a takedown notice through the d m c A, and Bungee follows protocol. It fills out a d m c A order. Uh, there's like an online form you've got to fill out that then submits that to YouTube, and then YouTube then goes and takes down the offending content and it typically issues a strike against the responsible channel. However, and here's
the problem. It turns out that apparently anyone can do this on behalf of anyone else, Like anyone could go and create a Gmail account because you have to have one of those in order to do this, and go to YouTube and fill out an online form claiming to be the owner of intellectual property that's in a video and demand that YouTube take the video down, and YouTube
will do it. In other words, YouTube is so responsive to d m c A takedown notices that it will act first without verifying that the party that's making this
demand actually owns the I P and question. So apparently these ten unknown individuals created fake Gmail accounts, are real Gmail accounts but under fake identities, and issued d m c A notices against channels that had destiny to content on them, and they were posing as Bungee, the owners of the I P. And further, Bungee believes that these ten unauthorized individuals did this in retaliation for having their own content removed from actual Bungee listed d m c
A takedowns. So, in other words, the way it went down was like, this Channel A puts up a video that contains Bungee I P, and they don't actually provide enough user content to warrant putting that stuff up. In other words, they're violating Bungee's own policies. So they might be posting cut scenes but not provide any sort of commentary or gameplay outside of that, or maybe they're just posting the music without any of their own content, so
it's not legitimate in Bungee's eyes. So then Bungee issues the d m c A takedown YouTube acts. Then the channel owner who had this stuff up, stung by Bungee's takedown, starts lashing out at other channels that are actually playing by the rules, meaning that these are channels that have sufficient creator content in them so they're not violating Bungee's policies.
So these these channels then get take down notices. Against them, and at first they might think Bungee's targeted me for no reason, like I was playing by the rules and Bungee took my stuff down, But in fact, Bungee never did this. It wasn't Bungee. It was one of these other you know, wounded members. And the company says that these ten people have caused damage to Bungee's reputation and
committed for all essentially by posing as Bungee representatives. And also they said, hey, we just want to take time to mention that YouTube has terrible processes for d m c A takedowns that allow this kind of thing to happen, and that it could happen across the board, across any i P, like anyone who has an AX to grind against a content creator could but potentially create an account, file a d m c A takedown and get a
video taken off of YouTube. And then you know, they did it completely illegally, right, they did it without actually owning the i P. But YouTube goes ahead and acts anyway because YouTube doesn't want to get held accountable for not acting, and obviously that would be a terrible way
to harass someone. Chances are it would get reversed. But just getting the video taken down means that if someone's dependent upon videos to you know, make their living, a video getting taken down as an enormous financial consequence on
that person. So yeah, it's it's a nasty situation. However, Bungee has not named YouTube or the parent company Alphabet as a defendant in this case, but they are seeking to get the legal grounds that will allow them to compel YouTube to share information about the ten John Does who are behind the takedowns. YouTube has shut down those accounts or has started to reverse those uh those d m c A takedowns, but YouTube has not shared information that might give a clue as to the identity of
those ten people. And so now Bungee is looking to get the legal uh foundation to require YouTube to share that because YouTube won't share that information unless there's essentially
a court order to do so. Now, I wanted to cover the story to illustrate how intellectual property law can get really really messy in the tech sector, although I can also get messy and other sectors too, So this is one of those things that a lot of advocates have been warning against UM suggesting that intellectual property law as it stands is kind of broken, and the way that various platforms attempt to deal with IP law is broken as well. All Right, we've got some more news
stories to get through. Before we get to those, let's take another quick break. Tech Crunch is reporting that TikTok is testing a feature that will allow users to look back over their watch history, which will make it much
easier to locate a specific video they've seen. See in this day and age where our attention spans and memory or toast, we need a feature like watch history to be able to hunt down that one short video where someone is lip sinking over that same audio you've seen used in countless other videos, but this video has a
rabbit in it or whatever. I don't know. I don't use TikTok, but this has been a feature that a lot of people have been asking for for a long time, because otherwise watch history is kind of lost to the ether, and you have to do a lot of searching and TikTok to rediscover something if you want to share it with others. I mean, there are exceptions if you if you favorite a video, but if you haven't favored it, it's a pain in the took us to try and
track it down. Now, TikTok hasn't actually rolled this out yet, and there's no telling what the feature is going to look like or how it will perform if and when the service enables it, but it could be coming in
the near future. Here in the United States, House Democrats are pushing for the US to adopt a digital currency that would behave the same way that cash does, except you know, digitally, so in a bill called the Electronic Currency and Secure Hardware or e Cash Act, the politicians are calling for the U. S. Treasury Department to take care of this project, and the goal would be to create a secure means of supporting digital cash transactions that do not depend upon a blockchain or a shared ledger
or any sort of tracking system. So, in other words, you should be able to transfer digital cash the same way as you could physical cash. So if I walked up to you and I handed you a five dollar bill, that's between you and me. You know, there's no other record of that transaction. And so the goal here would be to make a digital solution that could follow a
similar pathway. That could be pretty tricky to do because keeping transactions private while also providing security and protecting against stuff like digital counterfeiting and theft is a challenge, but if successful, people in the US would have the option to send money to each other while bypassing other services that typically take a transaction fee in the process. Plus those services can keep track of transactions and use that
data for other purposes. The bill has a long way to go before it can become a law, and chances are there will be some resistance, probably considerable resistance in some fields to this measure. So there's no guarantee that will actually see this enacted, but still very interesting. If you've ever been fired or laid off, you know that that experience usually bites. While China business seems to have come up with a new way to deliver the news that's sure to make employees who get their walk in
papers feel good about it. Yep. Apparently a few companies in China have sent out congratulations letters to employees that are getting laid off and contextualizing the experience as quote unquote graduating from the company. So it's like, hey, great job, you did so well, We're firing you. Now go out there and fly little butterflies. One note allegedly from Chinese e commerce company j D dot Com specifically said quote happy graduation, congratulations for having graduated from j D dot com,
thank you for the companionship. End quote. Now, through my notably American lens, from that perspective, that sounds like the nastiest passive, aggressive way to let someone know that they've been fired that I've ever seen, like downright insulting. But according to Business Insider, this and similar messages from other companies are really being created with the intention of trying to take the sting out of things, as the Chinese
tech sector is in general cutting way back. So the Chinese government has been cracking down on the tech sector over in China for the last couple of years, particularly recently, and has introduced a lot of new regulations and restrictions, possibly in an effort to prevent these companies from challenging the authority of the Chinese government itself, but ostensibly it's
done in the name of protecting Chinese citizens. The companies, in an effort to cut back on losses, have been laying off thousands of employees, so these messages may have been a sincere effort to kind of spend the layoffs as a positive thing and to avoid alienating future potential employees from turning away from the tech sector. I am curious how this is going over in China, because I can tell you for a fact, it would not fly over here. And now let's wrap up with a trio
of stories about artificial intelligence. The Register reports that a pair of researchers from Stanford have identified more than one thousand profiles on LinkedIn that are fake profiles, complete with AI generated profile pictures. The researchers recognize signs of AI created faces, including how the AI position the computer generated face within the frame, with the eyes being in the dead center, and some blurring that of the finer features
like like individual strands of hair. And apparently some companies are leaning on these fake accounts in an effort to reach out to people and sell products to them. So one of the researchers reported that they initially got tipped off to this when they personally received a message from such an account offering to sell a software package to them. So the researcher felt something was off and then followed the message back to the account and that kind of
started this whole you know, casual investigation into it. Now the researchers pointed out that in this case, at least, the use of AI generated accounts wasn't part of some sinister misinformation campaign per se, but more about trying to increase sales by adding a personal touch. But it does raise questions about whether or not that practice is actually ethical. Should it be reasonable to expect that any interaction on social media is between you and a real human person.
Wouldn't it be more ethical to make AI outreach more transparent so that the person being contacted is not working under the assumption that the entity on the other end of that direct message is in fact a human. Oh brave new world to have such fake people in it. Eric Schmidt, whom you might remember was once the CEO of Google, has a foundation and this foundation has been donating heavily to the US government's Office of Science and
Technology Policy, and this has raised some red flags. Why well, it's because Schmidt invests heavily in several companies that are related to AI products and services, and the government office, the Office of Science and Technology Policy, is in charge
of formulating policies that relate to AI. So, in other words, at least at a casual glance, it appears that Schmidt is funding the very office that creates regulations that in turn will affect Schmidt's various investments, and that sure does come across as if he might be greasing the wheels. Politico has a full report on the matter, and it ain't pretty well. I definitely want to see government departments that are in charge of determining tech policy fully funded.
It's pretty obvious to me that this funding should not be coming from the tech sector directly. That is a pretty clear conflict of interest. So yaza on that one. And finally, we've got a story of an AI system beating humans at a game. And we've seen this in games like Go and chess, but now we've also seen it in Bridge, as in the card game at a special tournament in Paris, France. Now I am not a bridge player, and I admit that the rules and scoring
for Bridge get pretty darn complicated. I watched a video on it and by the end I thought I would rather describe quantum computing to somebody. So I'm gonna be pretty general with this news story, because otherwise, if I try and get specific, I'm just gonna mess it up and all the bridge players out there are gonna call
me out on it um. Also, I should add that the way this tournament worked included leaving out the bidding part of a bridge game, and as I understand it, the bidding part of a bridge game and the formation of a contract that's a huge part of bridge strategy. So that's a notable absence there. However, Bridge also represents a game where a player only has partial knowledge of
the game's status. Now, in most other games where AI has wiped the floor with us humans, it's been a case where both players have full knowledge of the game status throughout the game. Like in chess, you can see where all your pieces and where all your opponents pieces are in a standard game, and so you're both working with full information about the status of the game all the way through. Bridge is different. So Bridge is a card game that's played with four players, and players who
sit across from one another form a team. So you have a North South team and an East West team. And in this tournament, a group of human champions were put up against some robot Bridge players, and the robots had performed well in robot competitions, but when compared to human champions, they were still kind of beginners. So the humans played their own hand and their partners dummy hand, which is a thing in bridge and I'm not going to try to explain the whole thing because I barely
understand it. But what that means is that the human knows the contents of their own hand, and everyone at the table knows the dummy hand because the dummy hand is played face up, so all the cards are played face up on the table for one of the two
sets of partners. So that means the human champion in this case has the most information in the game because they know their own cards, they know their partners cards the dummy hand, in other words, and that means that by extension, they can also know what cards their opponents hold,
though they don't know which opponent holds which card. Right Like, if they look at their hand and say I don't have the Queen of Spades and the dummy hand doesn't have the Queen of Spades, that means one of the two people I'm playing against definitely has the Queen of Spades. They can make that conclusion, they just don't know which
person has it. Anyway, the humans had to play a series of eight hundred deals in sets of ten, so eight sets total, and in the end, the score reflected how many tricks the human player won against the robot opponents. None of this, by the way, includes the AII mentioned. This was just the baseline, so it was seeing how many times did the human win over the robot players. Then the AI system called Nook did the exact same
thing that the humans did. From why I understand it played the same hands against the same robot opponents, so Nook was essentially just trying to do the same thing that the human champions did. And then what they did was they they compared the performance of Nook against the performance of the human champions, and it turned out that Nook had a higher success rate uh in sixties seven of the eighties sets, it scored better than the human champion did, which means it had an eight three victory
rate over the human champions when competing against these robot opponents. Notably, Nook didn't go head to head against humans in this tournament, so this wasn't humans versus Nook. It was humans versus robots, the Nook versus robots and then seeing which one did the best. So clearly we are not quite at the point where we can definitively say that AI can play
bridge better than the best humans can. That would require a system that can engage in the whole game of bridge, which includes things like bidding and deception before that can ever happen. But it's still pretty neat. And that's it for the tech news for Tuesday, March two. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, please reach out to me. The handle on Twitter is tech Stuff h s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an
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