Tech News: Tesla - The Good, The Bad, and the On Fire

Tesla The Good, the Bad, and the on Fire. We're gonna get right to it with a trio of Tesla stories and we're gonna start off with the first one being a positive story involving Tesla autopilot. Now, we typically hear about autopilot when something goes wrong, sometimes tragically wrong, but this is different. In Norway, a Tesla owner was driving their car apparently well under the influence of alcohol.

Now that bit is awful. It never should have happened. Obviously, no one should ever drive under the influence, but that's what was going on with this case, apparently, and the driver allegedly passed out behind the wheel of their car. And obviously this could have led to tragedy, but the

Testla system. The autopilot system detected that the driver was unresponsive, and it thus went into what it was supposed to do, so at that point, the system kept the car traveling smoothly within the lanes of the road until it could come to a safe spot on the side of the road and come to a stop. The driver was later found unconscious behind the wheel of the vehicle and received

medical treatment. That driver also denied two authorities that they had been operating the vehicle while intoxicated, but that story was somewhat undermined by the fact that other motor had apparently captured video of this driver unconscious behind the wheel of the car. The authorities subsequently put a temporary suspension on that driver's license and filed a criminal complaint against them.

So this is a case of Tesla's autopilot, which I should remind you is not technically a fully self driving system, but rather a driving assist system that was working just

as it was intended. The autopilot checks for driver responsiveness to make sure that you are attentive and that you are prepared to take over driving, and in cases where that isn't happening, it will prompt the driver to take control of the vehicle, essentially alerting you so that like if you dozed off, you wake up and you can put your hands in the wheel and that way you can't just you know, engage the autopilot system and read a book or go to sleep or watch the next

episode of ted Lasso or whatever. You have to be an active driver, and if you ignore the alerts, then the car does what we saw in this case, it will come to a stop on the side of the road. So, thanks to autopilot, a possible catastrophic car wreck did not happen. Though again, we do need to remember we're still a long way away from a fully autonomous consumer vehicle, and if we need another reminder, we can move on to our next story about Tesla. This one's also about autopilot,

but it's less good. It's not terrible, it's just not good. And this story actually comes from last week, but I only just saw it today, so I thought I would include it in our Tesla trio of news stories. A Twitter user named Jordans Nelson posted a video that showed that the Tesla they were in mistakenly identified the moon as a yellow traffic light, and thus the autopilot system was that was guiding the car, told the car to slow down in anticipation of a red light, that there

will be a red light, so let's slow down. This can happen on any stretch of road in which the car is facing a low yellow moon, even if you happen to be, say on a highway. You could see how that could be something of an issue if you were engaging autopilot at that time. And in this case, the autopilot mode was actually Tesla's full self driving feature FSD. That's what Tesla calls it, which I would argue is another somewhat confusing name. I've often said I don't like

the name autopilot. I think it gives the wrong implication as to what that system actually does. Well, I feel the same about the full self driving feature because Tesla has fully admitted that none of its vehicles qualifies being truly autonomous vehicles, and so even in FSD mode, the vehicle needs to operate under human supervision. So yeah, that name doesn't really work. But then I guess calling it almost full self driving doesn't have quite the same ring

to it. Now, that moon issue that Jordan Nelson ran into is not likely to happen all the time. Obviously, it would only happen if the moon were particularly yellowish that night and low in the sky enough so that it would look kind of like the height of a traffic light. The car would obviously have to be facing that direction as well. But this does illustrate how the challenges of developing autonomous cars can include stuff that we

humans just wouldn't take into account. Right, humans wouldn't mistake a yellow moon for a yellow traffic light. Of course, in the future, we might have some infrastructure like traffic lights that maybe contained a little transmitter that can communicate directly with compatible vehicles, and thus cars on the road would quote unquote no if a light were about to change, because they'd be in communication with the infrastructure. However, if that is ever to happen, it's pretty darn far off.

Because here's the thing. While that technology isn't necessarily that complicated or futuristic, it's something that we could probably do today. The scale of rolling it out practically of actually installing it would be enormous even for just a single city, let alone the entire world. But a feller can dream canny and now our third Tesla story rounding them out. Last Friday, Tesla had a true disaster on its figurative hands. A Tesla Mega Pact battery, which is a thirteen ton

lithium battery, caught fire. Now, the Mega Pac is meant to store electricity for utility scale projects. Like imagine you've got some sort of huge work site and you need to supply electricity there. Or maybe you've got, you know, some form of electrical generation facility and you need a place to store excess electricity. That's sort of the kind of thing we're talking about. This isn't a car battery

or anything like that. It's order of magnitude larger than that. Anyway, one of these things caught fire on Friday in Australia and it took four days, thirty fire trucks and one hundred fifty firefighters to extinguish that fire. Now, if you remember back when Samsung had issues with the Samsung Galaxy Note seven battery which exploded in several different instances, you remember how that issue was incredibly serious. Right, the reaction

is violent, it's it can be deadly. Uh, it also can release a lot of toxic fumes, and that threat was serious enough to prompt airlines to prevent passengers from carrying a Note seven on board the aircraft. They were essentially told they had to hand in their phones and which would not be allowed on the plane, or they themselves would not be allowed to get on the flight. Well, this is kind of like that, only instead of being a battery that fits inside handheld smartphone, it's a thirteen

ton monstrosity. The battery itself was inside a shipping container, which was likely a good thing because it probably helped prevent the fire from spreading to other megapact batteries at that site, because if there's anything worse than one thirteen ton battery catching on fire, it's a bunch of them doing it. Australian authorities say the fire was brought under control on Monday, so that's a good thing. But yeah, it's a scary story and a reminder that batteries with

volatile components are a bit dangerous. If the battery should be damaged in a way that the path for the electrons to travel from the negative terminal to the positive terminal opens up, you know, without having to be connected to some sort of circuit, well then the battery is going to discharge rapidly, right, the electrons are just going to rush from one part of the battery to another. This will end up causing the battery to start to heat and then overheat, and that can lead to issues

like a fire or explosion. Now I'm not certain if that's what led to the fire in this particular case, but just based on how batteries work, I figure it's a decent bet. Right. If you create a shortcut or a short circuit between terminals, then this is the sort

of thing that can happen. Moving on from Tesla, a cybersecurity firm called threat Fabric reports that the company's researchers have found instances of Android apps downloaded from the Google Play Store that are attempting to steal banking log in information. This malware, which the firm has called Volter, which is like Vulture but without E at the end, essentially takes a screenshot when someone uses a bank app to log in. So you launch your bank application and the malware notices this.

It attacts the data entry form format and it uses the screenshot coupled with a key logger, so a program that records key strokes in order to get the user name and password uh for whatever that that application is, and as I said, it's mainly banking applications. Then the malware uses the phone itself to send that data off to whichever computer the hackers are using to gather log

in information. The researchers found that most instances of this did seem to target banking information, but some were also apparently logging stuff like social media account logins and so far and looks at this malware is mainly concentrated in

Europe and Australia. The Cybersecurity company suggests that Android users install anti virus apps to try and detect if you happen to have any malware on your phone, because it can be a little tricky to figure it out if it's on there just by yourself until it's too late.

I would also recommend having a really good password vault that allows you to have a secure place to store passwords where it can automatically insert the password into whichever you know log inform you need, which means there are no key strokes for it to log right if it's an automated process where you need a master password to log into your account, or if it has biometrics like an ice scan or something that can be more secure,

assuming that obviously they're not key logging your password account, which could be devastating. If they add access to all your passwords, that's even worse. So I think that a password vault and anti virus app is those are two good things to have on an Android phone. Um keeping in mind nowhere can also affect iOS devices. It's just that with Google it has been more of an issue more frequently, partly because the Android operating system is on way more phones around the world than iOS is, so

it's a target rich environment. We have lots more stories to go, but before we get to any of those, let's take a quick break. I got a question for you, dear listener. This is back into the news, and my question to you is how much are your biometrics worth to you? How much would a company need to pay you in order to, say, register your fingerprints or your

retinal scan or maybe a palm print. If your answer is ten bucks, well I have some great news for you, at least if you happen to live somewhere close to

one of Amazon's checkout free stores. So the company is offering a ten dollar credit to customers who allow their palms to be scanned by the company and then linked to their Amazon accounts, and the idea being that then the customers could walk into one of these Amazon stores, they pick up whatever it is they want, and as they're leaving, they just scan their palm and that links to their Amazon account and payment is automatically transferred to Amazon.

And that's it. That's the payment. You just, you know, you Jedi style, waive your palm and say these are the eight apples I'm looking for or whatever, and you can go on your married little way. Uh. As you might imagine, this move has prompted a rather divisive response, and there are some people who just shrug their shoulders and say, this is just tech creating a convenient method

for transactions, and that's kind of cool. And I like the idea of being able to do this without having to fumble for a credit card or put in some sort of code for a transaction. This makes it even more convenient and futuristic. It isn't the future awesome. Then there are some people who take kind of a middle ground approach and they say, well, yeah, it's more convenient, but it's also another way for Amazon to tie purchases

to a specific person. I would argue that the company could pretty much do it anyway, because presumably all purchases would be linked to an Amazon account in the first place. Though I guess you could have a household has a shared Amazon account and thus you can't really target the specific person in that case. So anyway, by linking purchases to an individual, Amazon could potentially target ads more precisely to that person. And then it gets to be a

little kind of big Brother creepy invasive. And then you have the more extreme privacy advocates. And I use extreme not to you know, downplay them, but rather just to say they take privacy far more seriously than most people do. They are obviously deeply concerned as Amazon has had a pretty shaky record with biometrics, including facial recognition technology, and that that that ten dollar credit makes it sound like the company is paying people to, in the words of

Albert fox Cohn, a privacy advocate, sell their bodies. That doesn't sound great. Con also pointed out that with many aspects of your life, you can make changes if you need to get like a fresh start. Let's say something terrible happens. You know, maybe you made a terrible mistake and then you had to go to jail for it. Maybe you were, you know, mistakenly identified for something. Maybe you just maybe you just need to start over because

of your life experiences. So you could move across country, you could change your name, legally, you could try and start out fresh, but biometrics stick with you and could potentially link you back to a time that you would rather leave behind. And I figure that I am actually falling somewhere in that middle camp where I'm not sold on the convenience over privacy feature, but I'm also not quite so dystopian in my mindset as some privacy advocates are.

And I want to just point out again that that's just me, and that could be a failing on my heart. I might be giving this far too much credit, and that maybe I do need to be as paranoid or as passionate is probably a better word for as some of these privacy advocates are. So I'm not saying they're wrong. I'm just saying that's not where I'm at at the moment. Moving on, the United States Air Force, specifically, the Special Operations Command commissioned a study from the RAND Corporation to

look into the issue of disinformation campaigns online. As Popular Science reports, disinformation is a deliberate attempt to mislead a target, like a target audience, by feeding that target a false narrative of some sort, so it is purposeful. Misinformation is

something that could be passed on by accident. You know, maybe you omit certain facts and not necessarily on purpose, or maybe you just get something wrong in the communication of it and it becomes misinformation, whereas disinformation is done on purpose with the intent to mislead. Well. The report gives a pretty dismal assessment of the U. S government's response to disinformation campaigns, calling it dubiously effective and fractured

and uncoordinated. So the takeaway is that the entities behind these disinformation campaigns, such as various Russian operatives and Russian troll farms, they tend to be at least they tend to operate in a way that that makes them seem highly organized and accurate in their targeting, whereas the response

to these attacks is slipshod and inconsistent. The report also found something that I think a lot of people are probably at least you know, unconsciously aware of which is that these disinformation campaigns don't necessarily invent issues out of whole cloth. It's not like they create a story and push it out there and just hope it takes hold. Instead, they usually leverage existing gaps that are in philosophies within

the United States, and then they exacerbate those gaps. So, for example, before the pandemic even happened, there was already a community of people who were distrustful of vaccines, the anti vaxers. And they're not just in the United States, obviously, there are anti vaxers everywhere. And much of that initial distrust here in the United States hinged upon published works

in respected journals. But later those works got retracted because people discovered that the actual results that were reported had been falsified, that the papers that had been published themselves were disinformation. And yet that distrust remained, you know, the distrust towards vaccinations remained within that community, even though the supposed evidence that supported that narrative had been proven to

be false. Like, they had already bought into the idea and it didn't matter that the foundation for that idea turned out to be false. Well, disinformation campaigns pounced on that existing undercurrent of anti vax fear and fed into it, creating doubts about the COVID Night teen vaccines, spreading fear and uncertainty and doubt. The Good Old Food Brand evaluated the Air Forces very young fourteen F Information Operations Division, something that has really just recently come into its own.

In fact, the first trainees of that division graduated very late last year. And according to Rand, that division is a good idea, it's a nice step. However, the people and it still lacked the training to really recognize and react to modern disinformation campaigns, and they also lack the

resources needed to make any sort of real difference. In fact, they were saying they might identify disin fformation campaign, but they don't have the resources to actually, you know, act on that and to make aware all the other divisions to be able to counteract those disinformation campaigns. So you would just have a division saying, yeah, we know about it, but we can't really do anything about it. That's not great.

And while that assessment was specifically aimed at the Air Force and disinformation campaigns that could impact say, military operations, I'm pretty confident to say the same as true across the board for disinformation campaigns in general, we are as a rule sorely underprepared and under provisioned to deal with them.

And that's why they can be incredibly effective because we don't have the resources to deal with them, and people who buy into these disinformation campaigns can become evangelists and effectively they become unwitting agents of the disinformation campaign itself and spread it further. Disinformation really in itself is like a virus, and there is no real vaccine for it apart from critical thinking skills, so as always I advocate

to you to exercise critical thinking and compassion. Moving on, ours Technica has a great article titled big tech companies are at war with employees over remote work, and it touches on things that we've talked about in other tech news episodes, like how Apple's CEO Tim Cook would really very much like to get all Apple employees back into Apple offices for at least three days a week soon, like in September, so that you know that super high

tech and incredibly expensive Apple campus isn't left empty all the time. Cook's memo to employees feels a bit out of touch to me and honestly, not just to me. The Verge reported that an employee survey revealed that the vast majority of Apple employees felt the memo was out of touch. But Cook isn't the only tech leader pushing to get folks back into offices. Google had plans to do the same, as did Lift and other big tech companies. The Delta variant of COVID has changed things, delaying those

plans in several cases. But as the RS Technica piece points out, the pandemic may have simply rushed what was an already growing movement within the corporate world in general, the tech world in particular, that for at least several types of jobs, remote work is totally feasible and just as effective, sometimes more effective than going to the office, And for people working for companies in the Bay Area, it opened up the possibility of relocating to a part

of the country that isn't as insanely expensive to live in as the Bay Area. So the idea of getting a Bay Area tech salary but living in a place with a lower cost of living is really attractive to a lot of people. And plus you take out the commuting and the other aspects of living in an expensive city, and you start to see a lot of pros and only a very few cons. Heck, there's also this general move in the corporate world to the open floor plan.

I don't know about any of y'all who have worked in offices with open plans, but I can tell you that in my office it is not a popular thing, at least not among the editorial team. It turns out editors and writers like having a bit of space that kind of shuts out the world around them so they can focus on their jobs. I suspect a lot of

other people feel the same way on their jobs. So there's this escalating tension between companies pushing to get back to this corporate norm that feels a bit oppressive and a bit you know again, big brother ish, like, like they only feel comfortable if they can see what everyone's doing all the time. And then you have the folks who would really rather work remotely if it's all the same to you. And for some companies that does seem

to have sunk in. At Twitter, the remote work policy has effectively become at least semi permanent, setting Twitter apart from some of the other big tech companies. It's also kind of funny to see these tech companies that base part of their reputations on innovation as being beholden to this older idea of what work should be. Anyway, as Samuel Acson of Ours Technica points out, we're likely at the beginning of a pretty big shift in work cultures

in general and in the tech sector in particular. I've got a few more tech stories to come up, but before we get into that, let's take another quick break. Now, if you've been listening to my tech news episodes, you might remember one that I talked about last month, I think, in which the video game publisher Electronic Arts was hit with a hacker intrusion in which the hackers were able

to steal a good amount of digital information. Um. By a good amount, I mean nearly a terrabyte of data, like more than seven fifty gigabytes of information, and that included, as it turns out, the source code for the company's FIFA twenty one soccer game or football if you prefer. FIFA is the most popular sports video game franchise in the world, so it represents a really important cornerstone for e A. Now, the hackers said that they would sell back this information to e A to the tune of

twenty eight million dollars. But e A did what I frequently say is the best course of action. It did not pay up. E A did not play ball with the FIFA thiefs, and when that happened, the hackers ended up dumping their stolen data on the dark web. It sounds like they were first trying to sell that off to any buyers, but they couldn't find any because that source code actually isn't that much use unless you want to try and run your own illegal FIFA servers. Potentially

that has pretty lim an appeal. There's not there's not like a lot of profit out of it. E A has said that while that source code was grabbed, the hackers actually didn't access any databases containing customer information, which you know, would have potentially been far more valuable as uh for to a thief than the source code would be.

So player information was still safe, and the company also updated its security systems and practices in the wake of the attack, which that attack involved both some techno wizardry as well as some good old fashioned social engineering. That's when you trick someone into helping you infiltrate a system. Something that can often surprisingly be pretty easy to do. Now I may have to do another episode about Electronic Arts, because I mean that company has had a rough history.

In fact, there have been years where that company was voted as the worst company to work for. But this is a case where I would say that the company did the right thing. Sticking with games, let's talk for a moment about what's happening with ten Cent. That's a Chinese holding company that owns a bunch of stuff, including a major stake in several video game companies and studios

around the world, not just in China. Well back in China, the Chinese media referred to video games in general as sort of a spiritual opium and suggested that obsessing obsessively playing games was ruining the children of China, with ten cents game Honor of Kings getting special attention in the article. Ten Cent then saw its stock prices take a beating plunging as a result of this scathing attack. In fact, the company lost around sixty billion dollars in valuation because

of the drop in stock price. The company says it will now limit minors access to its video game and there's no doubt that video games, especially mobile games set up a challenge and reward cycle that encourages continued play. I mean, that's like a basic element of game design for these kinds of games. Games that monetize through in game purchases only succeed if players want to spend more time in that game and get access to more in game features or content, and so spend money to do so.

So there definitely is something to the fact the games have an addictive quality to them, so the report is not completely off base. However, it's also interesting for me because seeing the Chinese media take aim at a Chinese business is sometimes a little unusual because both the media and the businesses in China have strong links back to the Chinese Communist government. The Communist government is essentially integrated

into every major system in China. Then again, this could just be an issue in which the reporting is just sincere. It could just be a sincere reporting on that social problem, or it could also be an issue in which the Chinese government is a little bit concerned that some of these huge companies are getting powerful enough to have their own authority that in some ways can rival that of

the Chinese governments itself. Maybe it's a combination of a lot of these things, but it's kind of fascinating to me. And what's also interesting is that the kerfuffle meant that for a brief period, Tensent actually found itself knocked off the most valuable company in Asia, though it did regain that throne. Meanwhile, in space, last week there was an

accident that affected the International Space Station. A Russian module called Knocka docked with the station last week, and a few hours after it had docked with the station, it started to fire its thrusters accidentally. It was unplanned, and that caused the space station to start to move out of alignment and lead to a loss of quote unquote attitude control. Now, in my household, a loss of attitude control means that get really sassy, but in space this

is way more serious than that. Apparently, the space station ended up spinning one and a half times five forty degrees and it stopped rotating upside down. Now, of course, in a microgravity environment, up and down are meaningless without a frame of reference. So the astronauts aboard the space station were initially unaware of this issue because the movement was actually really gradual. It's not like they were just

spinning around like in that film Gravity. NASA reports that the station is now back in its correct alignment, having undergone a one eighty degree forward flip. And you thought the Olympics were just limited to here on Earth now, all kidding aside, This whole thing sounds pretty intense and terrifying, But the astronauts aboard the station and the people here on Earth were able to handle the emergency and return

things to their normal operating parameters. And I find that just really in orational, like really phenomenal stuff to show what can happen when people banned together in the face of an emergency and apply human ingenuity to fix the problem. In fact, reading up on the full account, it gets really crazy. The module fired thrusters as if it were attempting to maneuver away from the station, even though it

was physically docked to the station. And again this was apparently some sort of automatic error, and only Russian's mission control was able to actually send a command to stop the thrusters. But the space station wasn't in range of Russian mission control. You know, the station orbits the Earth, and at that point in the orbit, it wasn't close enough to Russia for a message to go out, it

wasn't in line of sight. It would actually take another hour before the station would potentially be reachable by Russian mission control, So the crew ended up using a second Russian module as well as a cargo ship, and fired the thrusters aboard both of those UH elements in order to try and counter the thruster effect of Naka's malfunctioning thrusters. Fifteen minutes after it started the knocka module settled the

heck down. At the time I'm recording this, no one seems to know what caused it to start or what made it stop. And I'm sure that had to be a pretty tense day aboard the space station. And finally, I'll end this episode by talking about something that is not nearly as traumatic, and that's the news we have about the next flagship phones from Google. These are the Pixel six and the Pixel six Pro, both of which Google previewed yesterday on August two. With a limited preview.

The company did not give a full rundown of all the specs on both phones, did spend a good amount of time talking about the new system on a chip or s o C called the Tensor S oc. This chip includes multiple element it's not just a CPU. That's why you get the system on a chip nomenclature, which essentially means that it has all the necessary components to allow it to act as a computer. It's all present on a single chip, so like CPU, GPU, memory, all

that stuff. According to the Verge, the new phones definitely have a higher tier fuel to them than previous Pixel phones. That probably means they will be muccio expensive when they come out later this year, but we do not know the pricing as of yet. As the Verge piece points out, it will probably be north of a thousand dollars for just the base model. The Pixel six Pro is slightly

larger than the Pixel six the former. The Pro has a screen that measures six point seven inches and the regular Pixel six has a screen that measures six point four inches. The Pro also has a higher refresh rate of its screen. It has hurt refresh rate that means the screen refreshes times a second. The regular old Pixel six has a refresh rate of ninety hurts, so it doesn't have quite the same rate. The Pro also has

three cameras. The Pixel six has just two, and the pros extra camera is at telephoto camera, so you can get those long distance shots. The new phones will also incorporate AI features in some ways that I don't fully

grock yet. I know that some of it relates to photos, which is good, Like if you have a telephoto lens on a phone, having AI to help counter stuff like jitter is really good because otherwise, uh, you would get a lot of very fuzzy images if you were trying to take long distance photos and you you could not correct for just the general motion that most of us have when we're holding stuff. Anyway, as I said, this

was more of a preview than anything else. We're likely to hear a lot more about these phones as we get closer. Talked Ober, and I'm debating on whether I actually stick with the Pixel I have an earlier Pixel phone. I think it's a Pixel four, or whether I change teams because I am due to upgrade my phone. It's it's a four and so I skipped the five. But I want to make sure that the PIXEL features are actually gonna be worth whatever that premium price turns out

to be. I don't want to be beholden to a flagship phone just because it's a flagship phone. If I don't feel like I'm getting value for whatever the prices, so I'm gonna wait a little bit longer to learn more details before I make a decision on that. And that is the news for Tuesday, auguste. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover on tech Stuff, reach out to me. The best place to do that is on Twitter and the handle we use is text stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon.

Text Stuff is an I heart rate Dio production. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H