Tech News: Tesla Gets Downsized

at least as measured by revenue. We're talking about United Health, and that company's CEO, Andrew Whitty, faced some pretty tough questions from US senators this week due to hackers stealing a quote unquote substantial amount of sensitive medical data belonging to anywhere from one third to half of all Americans, which is a big o' yaalza. Okay. So United Health is obviously a huge player in health insurance, the hugest

you could argue. And on top of that, back in early twenty twenty three, United Health acquired another health company.

It's a company that was called Change Healthcare. Now, this company specialized in payment platforms for health services and in fact handled payments for like fifty percent of all medical payments in the United States, but apparently Change Healthcare's computer systems weren't really hardened properly against hacker intrusions, and sure enough, some folks from the infamous hacker group Alpha, which is the same group that helped infiltrate MGM resorts last year,

they managed to use some stolen credentials to access a Change Healthcare server in February of this year. And then

that we go from there. So they apparently took a crap ton of data and whity claimed that the server had been scheduled to be upgraded to bring it security up to par, that this wasn't really United Health's fault, This was an issue with Change Healthcare, you know, the company that now was part of United Health, and that this group of servers were meant to be upgraded so that they would be brought on par with United Health

security practices. And you know that might be true, but we all know you're only as secure as your weakest link, which makes me wonder why United Health didn't hold off on integrating the Change Healthcare servers into their overall system until after these security upgrades took place. I mean, that to me would make sense right, like, you don't want to incorporate that and bring it under the umbrella of everything else. Even if it only affected change healthcare systems,

that would have been enough. But to potentially get access to other things is even worse. So this is not as bad as what would follow. In my opinion, maybe it is as bad. This is equally as bad, I'll say, because United Health went ahead and paid the ransom twenty two million dollars worth of cryptocurrency. Now, I know I'm a broken record about this, but paying ransoms is a bad idea. It reinforces that this kind of attack is profitable,

that it works if you pay them. That just sends the message of hey, this is a way to get stink and rich. This means that we're just going to see more of these attacks in the future. It just encourages future attacks. It doesn't help. And worse than that, as United Health is now discovering, paying the ransom doesn't necessarily mean that the attackers are going to play ball

and make good on their promises. So lawmakers grilled Witty about the potential disruptions in American health care that can result due to this attack, not to mention the implications of all that data that was stolen. You know, you got to remember this is the same governmental body that recently came down hard on TikTok for potentially siphoning American data to China. Now, when you think about the stuff that's on TikTok, you're like, Okay, well that could be

like location data things like that. But most of the content on TikTok and stuff like Prank's stunts and dances, so at least on a surface level, it seems pretty harmless. But now we're talking about a case where sensitive medical data had been stolen, So you figure this has got to be a much bigger deal, right, This is way worse than potentially a siphon line of data to China. You got to have your priorities. Something tells me that Whitty is going to end up just being fine by

the end of the day. I mean, he's the CEO of one of the largest companies in the world by revenue. But hey, I'm willing for the Senate to prove me wrong. Now. In the ongoing tale of consolidating media companies, Sony Pictures Entertainment has made a move to acquire Paramount Global for the princely sum of twenty six billion dollars cash. That's billion with a B. Sony is doing this in partnership with Apollo Global Management, which is a retirement solutions and

asset management company. Honestly, when I read a description like that for what a company does, it's so vague. It makes me think of a friend of mine who used to say his family was in quote unquote waste management business, and he would actually do the air quotes while saying it. So a shout out to you, Frankie big House. Interestingly, Paramount is already in acquisition talks with another media company

called sky Dance. As I understand it, the date for that agreement, whether it goes forward or not, ends today. Sky Dance, in the Grand Scheme of Things, is a relatively upstart media company. It traces its history back to two thousand and six. Sky Dance in Paramount and I have been in partnership on and off for many years. They've worked together quite a bit. But anyway, Paramountain has

been going through quite the shakeup recently. Earlier this week, the media conglomerate said goodbye to its now former CEO, Bob Bakish and replaced him with a triumvirate of executives that includes George Cheeks, who's president and CEO of CBS, Chris McCarthy who's the head of MTV and Showtime and several other networks, and Brian Robbins, the studio chief of Paramount Pictures. Now, the industry as a whole, of traditional

media has clearly really been struggling. You know. Cord cutters have been ditching cable packages and streaming services are trying to find a way to stand out from the crowd while also creating a profitable business, which is really hard in that space. I wouldn't necessarily call either Paramount or

Sony a sinking ship. I think that's overstating things. But considering the volatility that's in the media landscape right now, this feels kind of like a bunch of big boats that are caught in very rough seas hoping that by lashing themselves together they might weather the storm more effectively. Plus, we can't let Disney own everything. Right over at Tesla, Elon Musk has been making some brutal cuts in personnel.

As QZ dot COM's William Gavin puts it, the cuts have affected quote almost every corner of the company, from senior level executives to summer interns just weeks away from employment. In the quote that's from an article that's titled not even Tesla interns are saved from elon Musk's cost cutting. The cuts are in line with Musk's announcement that the company would downsize by around ten percent, and that in itself reportedly is a much smaller cut, like half of

what Musk initially wanted to do. One department that was absolutely eliminated by these cuts is Tesla's supercharger division. That alone is a group that had five hundred people in it. This is the department that created the standards for charging Tesla's They secured build out for hundreds of charging stations. They worked with other auto manufacturers to get them to adopt Tesla's charging methodology as something kind of like an

industry standard. Not only did Tesla shut down that whole department, it has also backed out of agreements to build charging stations and crucial areas such as New York City. To completely eliminate the supercharger group seems a bit perplexing. Tesla arguably had a dominant position in charging technologies and could have leveraged that moving forward. It could have been a really big cornerstone of Tesla's business. So why make such drastic cuts. Well, Tesla as a whole has seen a

pretty dramatic decline in sales numbers recently, and cynically. There's also the matter of Elon Musk's pay package. That's a forty seven billion dollar compensation package on the line, and Musk could be looking at making these cuts until you know, like Tesla is bleeding from a thousand cuts in an effort to secure that MOO law shareholders will actually get to vote on that later this year, and I can

kind of understand that motivation. He essentially lit a pile of forty four billion dollars of cash on fire after he bought Twitter and then did his best to reduce its value to nothing, so he needs to refresh the cash pile somehow. Plus judges keep having this nasty habit of striking down his compensation package and denying him billions of dollars. Anyway, I'm not going to spend any time

worrying about Elon Musk's financial future. I'm wishing all the folks who are affected by these recent cuts the absolute best of luck in finding gainful and satisfying employment elsewhere. Okay, we've got several other news stories to get through before we get to that. Let's take a quick break. We're back, and you know. Tesla is not the only big tech company cutting jobs this week. CNBC reports that Google is laying off hundreds of core employees from around two hundred.

It sounds like and for some of these roles, Google will shift responsibilities to new team members, except these team members will be in places like Mexico and India. This falls in line with earlier cuts across Alphabets companies. Just a reminder, Alphabets, the holding company that sits above Google, as well as other companies like YouTube and Google. Management has messaged that quote announcements of this sort may leave many of you feeling uncertain or frustrated end quote, which

is both an understatement and definitely true. But management has also said these changes are supposed to be aligned with the company's mission and goals. And I suppose if the mission is to shift work to labor forces that work for much lower salaries. This is true because labor is far less expensive in Mexico and India than in the United states, Google is giving affected employees the chance to apply for other jobs within the company or to use

outplacement services. So you know, I guess that's something. Speaking of Google, one of the company's massive anti trust lawsuits, and yes there's more than one, is wrapping up with closing arguments today. It's the second day of closing arguments. It's the conclusion of this long trial. This particular lawsuit revolves around Google Search and the various ways Google has maneuvered to get Search featured as the default search engine

on as many platforms as is possible. So the US Department of Justice argues that Google used its considerable advantage to restrain other competitors from serving as actual competition, thus a monopolistic move. One example is how Google secures contracts with handset manufacturers to make Google Search the default search engine on the device. Now, Google's counter argument is that it's possible to change default settings, So this really isn't

the big deal everyone says it is. But then if it's not a big deal, why would Google spend billions of dollars to secure these agreements? And it does spend billions, and The New York Times revealed that in twenty twenty one alone, Google forked over around eighteen billion dollars to Apple in return for being the default search engine on

iOS devices. That's a lot of money. And while Google has claimed that the reason why other companies agreed to have Google as the default is that Google Search is the best search engine out there, they're saying, hey, we're not being unfair, we just happened to make the best product.

The counter to this is that even if there were a search engine out there that would be as good as Google, the use of that alternative is unlikely because Google is offering these massive deals, right, these huge billion dollar deals to have Google as the default search engine. So if you had one that was as good or maybe even superior to Google Search, companies still wouldn't go

with that because it doesn't come along with billions of dollars. Now, by the time you hear this episode, the arguments may have concluded and the judge will decide if the accusations have merit, and if that happens, then a separate case will be launched to decide what repercussions are to follow. So we will continue with this later on. Plus, hey, we still have another anti trust lawsuit to talk about

in the future switching to telecommunications companies. The US Federal Communications Commission, or FCC, has handed down large fines to four big telecom companies, specifically Verizon, AT and T, Sprint and T Mobile, the big four in the United States. So why are these companies facing huge fines while they are alleged to have illegally shared geolocation data of their users, their customers, essentially to third parties without first getting the

consent of those customers. More specifically, the charges that the carriers sold geolocation data to aggregator companies, and these aggregators then turned around and sold the information to other third party data brokers. And according to the FCC, the telecoms were trying to pass the buck as far as gaining consent from users is concerned. Their strategy was to essentially shift that responsibility further downstream to the data aggregators, which

you know didn't get that consent. The individual fines ranged from twelve million that's for Sprint they pay the least up to eighty million, which is for TE Mobile. And now we get into the actually crime does pay quite well. In fact, part of our news stories. First up, we have the crime of tax evasion and mail fraud. The accused is Roger Vere. He has the charming nickname of Bitcoin Jesus, and as that name implies, Ver holds quite

a lot of bitcoin. Back in twenty fourteen, Ver renounced his US citizenship to become a citizen of Saint Kitts and Nevis. However, at the time when he did this, at least according to the indictment, he happened to hold more than one hundred and thirty thousand bitcoins and yet did not report this to the United States before ditching

the country for the Tropics. And the US government really likes to take its share of tax and Ver's share reportedly is somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty million dollars. So Spanish authorities arrested Verre on behalf of the United States last weekend while Ver was in Spain, and now the US wants to extradite him back to the United States and hold him accountable for skipping town without paying the fees. First, Honestly, I think Ver's going to be

just fine. I mean, at least assuming he still has that significant cash of bitcoins, because if you take it by today's value. You're talking about more than seven billion dollars worth of money or wealth if you prefer, then so fifty million, while a not inconsiderable sum, is barely a drop in the bucket compared to the overall wealth this guy has. Here's another crime that seemed to pay well, at least up to a point. Story. It's a story

about owner oxoy. He lives in Miami, Florida, and now he has been sentenced for his crime of passing off shoddy technology as genuine networking gear from the company Cisco. So Cisco has a valuable brand, right like they have a reputation for their work their products. So Oxoi was arrested way back in twenty twenty two for running a

scam that had lasted for several years. He would buy up cheap components from places like China, cram these components into cases that look like legitimate Cisco hardware, and then sell this junk off to various customers for way more than what he paid, though presumably under the market price for actual legitimate Cisco hardware. And he did this from twenty fourteen to twenty twenty two. He made hundreds of

millions of dollars in the process. Among his clientele was the US military, and that's really where he stuck his nose in it, because once his crimes were discovered, the US government really began to close in on him, though

they did take their time anyway. The whole drama has now played out because Oxoy faces six and a half years in prison, one hundred million dollars in fines to Cisco, and an under termined amount that will be paid to the various customers he hoodwinked with shoddy imitations of Cisco hardware. But hey, he had a pretty good run on the

flip side of crime. Let's talk about how Microsoft has made it clear that police departments are not to use products relying on Azure Open Eye services for the purposes of facial recognition technology. So essentially, Microsoft is saying it doesn't want to be a party to that kind of thing and added languages in its terms and services that make it clear that police forces around the world are not authorized to leverage AI technologies running on Azure services

for the purposes of facial recognition. That's interesting to me in a couple of ways. We all probably know that facial recognition technologies as a whole have a lot of problems, including false positives for people who belong to certain ethnic groups, typically non white ethnic groups, and that facial recognition technology therefore contributes to a real social problem of authorities unfairly

and unjustifiably placing hard chips on these populations. But this also means Microsoft is kind of tacitly implying that there's a real weakness in a technology that the company is simultaneously spending billions of dollars developing, which is kind of like saying, hey, AI is the future, but uh, you know, don't use it for real important stuff because bad things can happen. It seems like mixed messages, is what I'm saying.

But anyway, you could argue this is the responsible thing to do, or you could be more cynical and probably more realistic and say that Microsoft adding this language and is really just an effort for the company to follow the old CYA strategy. You know, if the company says police are not supposed to use this for facial recognition, then it's not Microsoft's fault if and when some police force does exactly that, because they can say we told them not to and I've got some reading recommendations for

you all before I sign off. First up is Sharon Harding's piece for Ours Technica titled all the Ways Streaming Services are aggravating their sscribers this Week. Obviously, the piece highlights some frustrating decisions that the operators of various streaming services have made that seem designed to alienate their customers, while more traditional forms of media continue to circle the drain fun times. Secondly, I recommend the piece by Andrew

Griffin of The Independent. It is titled humans Now share the Web equally with bots, report warrens amid fears of the dead Internet now. I mentioned in a recent Tech Stuff that a report from a cybersecurity firm says that around forty nine point six percent of all traffic on the Internet in twenty twenty three came from bots. So this article explores what that actually means, including the so called dead Internet theory, which I may have to do

a full episode on in the near future. And it just is this idea about the Internet becoming this weird place where bots are creating and trafficking and consuming all the information across the system, and it becomes increasingly useless for actual human people. That's it for me for this week. I hope you are all well, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production.

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