Tech News: The Epic Apple vs Epic Fight Continues

recap the story so far. Apple has a policy that any APP that allows in APP purchases must use apple's own payment system, and that means that apple gets a slice of the PIE, which, ironically, is not apple pie, but instead key line pie epic games. The producers of fortnite sidestepped this process by suggesting two players on I os devices that they use a little work around that would allow the players to purchase credits directly from epic games and outside the Apple System, and then use those

in the IOS game. That would give epic the entire Pie, slice of key line. Apple responded swiftly by removing fortnite from the APP store and prevented anyone from download to get further, although folks who had already had it were just fine, and it kind of escalated from there. What followed was a lawsuit in which epic argued that Apple's approaches anti competitive, that locking developers into this ecosystem was

inherently unfair. And this is something, by the way, that we're seeing play out in courts all over the world right now, with different people coming forward, to different companies coming forward to say apple's approaches inherently unfair. Now, the initial courts decision was a bit of a muddled affair. Neither epic nor apple was entirely happy about it, so

both sides appealed the decision. Now, interestingly, apple one more than it lost, because the court decided that apple doesn't constitute a monopoly, at least not in this case, and that's kind of understandable in the sense that fortnite can be played on just about any platform, possibly even your refrigerators. So it's hard to point at this and have a

court understand that this potentially constitutes anti competitive behavior. However, the court did rule that apple cannot prevent APPs from offering links to alternative payment systems in their APPs, and apple really didn't like that. They don't want that to happen because the company has really been transforming into more of a services oriented company after being a hardware focused company for decades. This brings us to what's going on now.

An appeals court is preparing to hear arguments from all sides about the original decision, and the Department of Justice and the State of California have both secured a little bit of time to present some arguments to the court. Now, the D O J is not allowed to take sides per se, but the agency hopes to prove that the lower court's decisions about apple not being a monopoly were shortsighted that apple had in fact violated antitrust laws such

as the Sherman Act. The D O J says that the lower courts interpretation sets a disastrous precedent that weakens antitrust law, particularly in the digital landscape, and that this needs to be corrected so that the US government has the ability to enforce antitrust laws and prevent any company

from becoming an unimpeachable monopoly. Complicating matters is that the D O J is ramping up its own antitrust lawsuit against Apple, so it will be important for the lawyers to present their case in a way that doesn't come across as biased. The State of California, meanwhile, is going to present arguments on how the court should treat the state's Consumer Protection Law, called the unfair competition law, within

the context of this lawsuit. The Washington Post reports that US Customs has been maintaining a database filled with travelers electronic data, some of which dates back fifteen years now. It has long been an issue that people entering the US, including US citizens returning to America, have sometimes been prompted to hand over customs access to their electronic devices. Now U S courts have, for some reason deemed this as

being acceptable. Honestly, I think this very much ranks as unreasonable search and seizure, which is something the constitution is supposed to protect us against. Anyway, there's no legal reason anyone should have to hand over their log and credentials to their devices, and finding out that customs has been downloading and storing this information for more than a decade is a huge red flag. What's worse, the Post reports that essentially any employee of the agency can access any

of that data. So imagine for a moment that you are returning to the United States and that you are coerced into handing your phone over to customs agents and you are further prompted to unlock your phone and then they download everything that's on your phone, all without due cause. You haven't done anything wrong, or at the very least you haven't done anything to warrant this kind of a search.

And now they have all of the Dat on your phone, all your contacts, all your calendar appointments, all of your location history, your browsing history, your photos, your documents, everything that was on that device has been downloaded and anyone within the agency has the capability of potentially accessing it. That is unthinkable, right? I mean it doesn't take much imagination to come up with dozens of terrible scenarios where this could become a problem. Like blackmail alone is a

terrible possibility. More than that, other agencies like the FBI can request and get access to this kind of database and it starts to sound a lot like a dystopian authoritarian state. U S Senator Ron Widen sent a letter to the agency last week raising concerns about this practice and saying it amounts to unfair search and seizure on

American citizens. Whether anything will actually be done about this policy or if some court case finally escalates the issue so that the Supreme Court weighs in, hopefully to curtail the practices again. Seems like a pretty clear cut violation of the fourth amendment to the Constitution. All of that remains to be seen. A couple of weeks ago, I talked about how twitter had cleaned house by deleting a

bunch of body accounts. They're all pushing propaganda, and while that in itself isn't that unusual, in this particular case the propaganda promoted the United States and its policies in places like Russia and China. Now we often hear about coordinating the campaigns meant spread misinformation within the United States, and often these campaigns originate out of countries like China and Russia, but it's kind of odd to hear about

the opposite. And now the Pentagon has ordered a review of information warfare operations that rely upon social network platforms like twitter and Meta across all military branches. So the Under Secretary for policy at the Department of Defense, the guy named Colin Call, has told all the branches of the military that have these kind of operations that they have to provide a full report on the scope, scale and techniques of those programs by next month, at least

according to The Washington Post. I think the concern here is that it's really bad optics for the US to engage in similar tactics that Russia and China are using while at the same time the US government has slammed social networks for allowing these kind of things to proliferate here in the United States. Ends up looking more than a little bit hypocritical. Now, maybe the military opts relying on these approaches would argue that the narrative they are

pushing isn't misinformation. Sure, it puts the US and its policies in a positive light, but maybe they argued, this isn't lying, it's just it's just giving part of the story that they otherwise don't get. However, I suspect folks in Russia and China would say pretty much the same thing about what's going on here and anyway, it'll be

interesting to see what comes of this. Now propaganda has long been a well used and reliable tool around the world to spread specific messages and points of view, so I wonder if we're going to see the government create kind of a framework within which it might be okay to use that capability within the digital world. If not, one makes the digital world different from, say, dropping physical pamphlets from an aircraft onto areas in an effort to

spread similar messages? That's something the United States has done frequently throughout its history, sending messages to citizens in places where they can't get access to information in other ways. We've made use of those tactics in the past. So it kind of raises the question if that sort of thing is wrong in the digital space, why? Like, what is it that makes it different? These are complicated questions and I don't pretend to have the answers. I do

find it fascinating, however. Something else that is, I hesitate to use Laura, fascinating but certainly captivating, is an article

that I read in Rolling Stone magazine. It is titled How many women were abused to make that Tesla, and the article goes into detail about the work culture at Tesla, the electric vehicle company, as well as Elon Musk's personal history with, quote unquote, fratish behaviors from the article, and also how seven women have brought lawsuits against Tesla alleging sexual harassment the story even goes beyond Tesla and mentions how spacex engineer Ashley Kozak wrote about similar issues over

at SPACEX, another Elon Musk company. I recommend this article. I will warn you it has a lot of extremely upsetting information and allegations in it, but if those allegations are true, it really paints the corporate culture of Tesla and other musk companies in a really terrible light, akin to the kind of stories we heard coming out of gaming companies like activision blizzard and before that UBI soft and before that the stuff we heard coming out of Uber.

For many people out there, news that companies in the tech sector have a particularly ugly problem with Misogyny and sexual harassment is going to come as no surprise. Right this is old news, in fact. I'm sure there are listeners of this show who have either experienced or witnessed something on those lines at companies in the tech sector.

But pieces like this indicate that companies really do need to work harder at stamping out these kinds of culture and that shareholders should demand more from the companies that they invest in. I mean, it's a bad investment ultimately, because sooner or later the cards come crashing down. You would rather invest in a company that has a supportive and healthy culture and not one that's predatory. I'm sure, or at least I'm sure for listeners of this podcast.

They're probably people out there who really don't care as long as they get a return on the investment, but they wouldn't listen to this show. Right. Okay, we've got some more news stories to get to. Before we get to that, let's take a quick break. We're back over in the European Union, courts upheld a ruling that says Google must pay a truly annoyed or miss fine of about four point one to billion dollars. Now, to be fair,

that's actually a reduction of the original find. The original find from the first court case was closer to four point three billion dollars. So Google got a deal, they got a break. It's just four point one two billion.

Now all of this actually stems from a case that was originally filed back in two thousand and fifteen, in which the European Commission ruled that Google was engaged in anti competitive practices with the android operating system, essentially saying Google had actively taken advantage of its enormous installed base

in Europe. Something like of EU citizens have an android device, and they forced every android device out there to have apps like chrome and search pre installed on them, and that this ended up giving Google and unfair advantage in those areas, because competing search and browsers were, uh, not

pre installed. The original decision was handed down in two thousand eighteen, so the case began in t the decision in the fine came in because, you know, justice moved swiftly, and yeah, that meant that the original case took like three years to resolve, but Google then appealed the decision. It took another four years for the appeal to work its way through the system and for courts to find that Google still guilty and still needs to pay a fine,

although it's slightly lower than what it was originally. And that's where we are now. So does this mean that Google is going to have to cough up more than four billion bucks? Not necessarily. Google can appeal this decision as well, which would push the matter up to the highest court in the EU, where perhaps it could get a front decision or maybe the fine would be further reduced.

Will have to wait and see. Mozilla, conducted a study on Youtube and found that the platforms tools for telling Youtube that you don't like a particular video or you don't want to have similar content show up in your recommendations. They don't work very well, those tools. And this is interesting because I have noticed something similar in my own use of Youtube, particularly recently. But you know, anecdotal evidence

isn't real evidence. So I never brought it up on the show because I thought, well, this is just my experience. What if it's an outlier? But in my case I was watching a lot of video essays about different types of things, including a ton about pop culture, and it was really just, you know, critiques about different things like movies or series, and really well thought out and well

researched arguments. But I noticed that some of the video essays that were creeping into my recommendations weren't real video essays. They were really just thinly veiled manifestos for right wing talking points. Now, I am not a right wing person by a long stretch. I'm sure this comes as no surprise to anyone who's listening to me. This is not

me judging that point of view. Rather, it's just me saying that's not my worldview or my philosophy, and in most cases my opinions are almost the opposite of the stuff that was showing up in these videos that were posing as critiques on pop culture. So I started tagging those videos as don't recommend this channel to me because I didn't want to see them anymore. They weren't interesting to me, I didn't agree with the point of view. I just found them frustrating. But then I would get

nearly identical videos. Now it might be a different channel and a different host, but the videos contained the same talking points, the same tactics of presenting right wing ideology discusised as a video essay on pop culture, and I just felt like I was constantly trying to knock down one recommendation and I would just get a different one that was essentially the same thing the next day. Well, according to Mozilla, my experience is by no means unique.

The organization used a tool to measure how effective youtube's features are. The tool Mozilla used could track when viewers were clicking on dislike, not interested, don't recommend channel and remove from history to see how much of an effect that had on the recommendations engine. Would it prevent similar videos from popping up in the recommendations engine, or would it not? And it found that hitting dislike would reduce only twelve percent of bad recommendations in the future, meaning

that you would still get those kinds of videos. If you clicked not interested, it was worse. It only prevented eleven of similar material popping up and recommendations. If you chose don't recommend channel, it was a little bit better, but only up to forte so you're still less than fifty of of reduction of those kinds of videos popping up in your recommendations, and removing videos from history prevented

only of bad recommendations in the future. If you're wondering how they came up with those numbers, they had a control group that did not hit any of those dislike features at all, and so what they were doing was seeing how many similar videos were popping up in the recommendations of someone who wasn't taking these measures versus people

who were, and that's how they got those reductions. Now, Youtube reps say that the recommendation engine doesn't automatically prevent all similar material from popping up, largely to avoid creating echo chambers, and that makes sense. I can agree with that. Right, you don't want tools to end up funneling people into very narrow points of view and then attentially escalating that

and creating extremists. That makes sense, but at least in my case, it wasn't like I was getting videos that had well reasoned arguments made in good faith in an attempt to convince me that the point of view represented in the video was a valid one. Instead, I was getting videos that were reinforcing concepts that I fundamentally disagree with, and they weren't supporting those concepts. It's not like they were creating an argument to support the ideology. It was

just a repetition of those talking points anyway. The study seems to show that Youtube does not prioritize user feedback, which could explain why some people have a frustrating experience when they're on the platform, me included. Both Uber and rock star have been hit by hackers, possibly the same one, and in Uber's case, the company has issued multiple statements in the wake of the attack. They said that the attack gained access to Uber's systems by compromising an Uber

e x t contractors account. Uber was able to detect this intrusion. That's being kind, because they left messages, but uber responded by locking out the account and a few other accounts that could have been compromised, but they didn't. They weren't able to do this until after the attacker had already gained access to numerous tools, which included them gaining access to, and then posting within, the company's slack channel.

Hardly a low profile move. It's not the kind of thing you do if you're trying to be super sneaky and really embed yourself within a targets system. This is something you do in order to make a point or to needle a target or whatever. Now Uber is investigating if there was any material impact to the company. So they're looking into what, if any, information the attacker actually

accessed duringing this incident and maybe potentially downloaded. During the incident, some of Uber's customer support features were disabled, but beyond that, it sounds like the disruption wasn't that noticeable outside the company. Though, again, until Uber has a better idea of what information the attacker might have accessed and potentially copied, it's really hard

to judge how bad this attack was. I mean, the attack itself was bad, because getting that level of access is not great, but how damaging it was remains to be seen. Uber is working with the Department of Justice and the FBI in an investigation into this and, as it stands, the chief suspect for the attack was the hacking group lapsus L A. P S U dollar sign, which has been on quite the run this year, having been named responsible for hacks into companies like Cisco and

Microsoft and OCTA, among others. I mean these are companies that are own for helping create a more secure environment and they were targets of hacks by the same hacker group. So yeah, they mean serious business. Okay, we've got a few more news items to talk about, but before we get into that, let's take one more quick break. All right, y'all, by the time you hear this episode in video, will have held an event to announce the next generation of

its gpus, or graphics processors. The code name for the new processor architecture is love lace, which is after Ada lovelace, the enchantress of numbers. So we expect that these new processors are going to have a new kind of architecture to make them more power efficient more powerful. That kind of thing. Analysts expect that in video will announce a new forty series of cards, like an r t x forty eight. The current, you know, flagship gpus are the

R T X thirty eight and the thirty nine. So we might be getting two different forty eighties and a fort by by the rumor mill. By the time you hear this, you'll know because the event will have happened. You can just google it with ethereum. Shifting to proof of steak and an increased availability for graphics cards in general. Maybe this will mean that the most powerful cards in the market will actually be something that gamers can more easily get their hands on, if they have the cash.

That is. These cards frequently cost well over a thousand dollars. Some of them creep up to around two thousand dollars. So it's not the type of component for a budget Gamer, because that's just the graphics card. That doesn't include any of the rest of the computer. But maybe this will also mean prices for the last generation of cards will go down a little, because I would still love to get my hands on a thirty eight. I. The computer I use for gaming doesn't have anywhere close to the

of that thirty eight card. Anyway, I might do a follow up on Thursday if the company reveals anything particularly interesting the demand for university lester over in the UK conducted a study in which researchers found that young children are losing the equivalent of a full night's sleep each week. So they're losing the equivalent of one night's sleep per week because they're staying up to be on social media

on their various electronic devices. The study found that around twelve point five of all ten year olds wake up in the middle of the night in order to check notifications,

which is a big old yikes for me. You know, one of the big reasons I got off social media was because I found myself bowing to the whims of notifications, and over the last couple of years I've really made an effort to reduce the number of notifications I get, whether it's personal or, much to my coworkers Chagrin, work related. That's because I recognized that it was starting to harm me to have notifications pop up all the time. It

was hurting my productivity, my creativity, my mental health. So I made a real effort to reduce the notifications, which means I'm a little more slow to respond to things than some of my coworkers, but you know, it's better to be a little slow rather than to just have a complete mental breakdown and no longer be able to respond at all. Now, young kids, they are not necessarily going to be cognizant of the effects of these sort of behaviors, of staying up and losing the equivalent of

a night's sleep each week. And younger children need more sleep. They need it in order to recuperate. They need it so that they can learn more effectively and grow in a healthy way. So interrupting that process is not great. Now, I am not a parent. It is not my business to tell other people how to take care of their kids because I don't have kids and uh, far be

it from me to give parenting advice. But maybe, if you have kids, consider limiting screen time and maybe even putting away devices at night so that those devices aren't accessible until perhaps the next day. So just make that a regular part of the routine. That's what I would suggest.

I realized that that may not be easy in a lot of households, particularly if the kids are already accustomed to always having their devices on them, but Um, yeah, I mean, you know, you want your kid to grow up healthy, so it's probably a good idea to to limit that screen time. Probably a good idea for me to do it to myself even more than I already have. NASA will be testing the launch vehicle for the Artemis

one mission and tomorrow running a cryogenic demonstration. So in this demonstration they aren't going to be firing up the engines, there's not gonna be any sort of countdown or anything like that. This test is to see if the team has managed to fix the issues that led to a hydrogen leak, which in turn forced NASA to delay the launch earlier this month. So, as a reminder, the artemist program is aimed at going back to the moon and artemist one is to be an unscrewed mission, meaning there's

no crew aboard. I know when I say uncrewed it sounds like I'm saying it's not a crude mission in the sense of it's, you know, it's egalitarian and refined. That's not what I mean, though. I'm sure everyone's on their best behavior. But now, in this particular one, the Orion capsule, which would normally hold astronauts, will instead be carrying some mannequins as well as the snoopy doll, and then it will fly off to do an orbit of the moon before returning to Earth to touch down own

in the Pacific Ocean. But, as I mentioned, while the original launch was planned for earlier this month, a hydrogen leak to one of the four engines in the in the launch vehicle, one of the fourth thrusters uh, forced NASA to delay things. Engineers have since made repairs to the system. They found a possible cause of the leak as they discovered an indentation on part of the disconnect line and they think maybe that was the problem and

they repaired that. So on Wednesday's test tomorrow, the launch team will use a slower process to feed liquid hydrogen to the engines to cool them down to operational levels, and they'll do that in the hopes that this kinder, gentler approach will let engines reach the proper temperature while

putting less strain on the system as a whole. If that works out, NASA could plan a new artemis one launch for as earliest September, with October second listed as a backup date should whether or some other event delay things. This is, of course, assuming that space force gives them the go ahead to do this, because they do have to get space forces permission to launch due to the fact that this is out of the the original schedule,

but here's hoping it all works out. Finally, two years ago the Chinese Lunar Exploration Program launched a spacecraft called the Chong Five. The name Chang references a Chinese moon goddess, and my apologies for my pronunciation, but that spacecraft included an orbiter which would stay in lunar orbit around the Moon, and it also had a lander that had a second spacecraft called in a cinder connected to it. So this

disconnected from the orbiter. The lander then touched down on the moon, with the ascender put perched on top of the lander. The Lander collected samples from the Moon's surface and then transported those samples to the ascender, which then launched off the lander, blew up to meet the orbiter and rendezvous with it. Transferred the sample to the orbiter and then the ascender was de orbited it. It landed

back on the Moon's surface. It just said my job is done and it detached, went back and landed on the moon. The orbiter meanwhile left Lunar Orbit, returned to Earth and brought the samples back. So China became the third country in the world to retrieve samples from the lunar surface, the first being America the second one being Russia. Well now, two years later, Chinese scientists say that within that sample was a very small crystal that contains helium three.

Now this is not totally unexpected, because scientists have long hypothesized that there are large helium three deposits on the moon. But you might wonder, well, why is this even important? Well, helium three could potentially be the fuel used by future fusion reactors. A huge advantage of helium three is that the fusion process would not produce any radioactive particles, but

it would produce a lot of electricity energy. However, helium three is pretty darn scarce here on earth, so it could mean that the moon becomes a major source of fuel for the future. All of that is still pretty far off, because the tech for creating sustainable fusion reactions remains elusive in general and for helium three in particular. But if we were able to solve those issues, it would mean that the moon would become a really valuable

resource for our energy needs here on earth. In fact, it could become a battle ground as various nations try to establish a presence on the moon for the purposes of mining resources that could fuel stuff here on earth or beyond. Sounds a lot like a hindland short story. Those always turn out great. All right, that's the news for Tuesday September two. Y'All, I should also report that I will be on vacation next week and so I

will likely be putting up some reruns. Maybe I can record a couple of updates if I have enough time to do so, two older episodes. I'm going to do a quick look and see if there are anything that I can maybe do some short updates for and and give you some new content. But yeah, I'll be gone for a week and then I will return and I will be re energized. Maybe it'll all depend on whether we get hit by hurricanes while I'm on vacation. We'll see. But if you have any suggestions to send me, then

there are a couple of ways of doing so. One is to download the I heart radio APP, which is free to download and use. You can navigate over to the tech stuff part of the APP. There's a little microphone that you can click and you can leave up to thirty second message for me and let me know what you would like to hear on future episodes. Or you can reach out on twitter. The handle for the show is tech stuff, H S W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Yeah, tech stuff is an

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