Tech News: The FCC Will Vote in Favor of Net Neutrality. Again.

twenty twenty four. Had to think about that for a minute, but starting off, Microsoft released a warning that says we should all expect China to try and disrupt elections in several countries, including the United States, which I guess is news, though at this point I think a lot of folks just assumed that was going to be on China's to

do list anyway. Microsoft also warned that North Korea could be involved in this sort of effort as well, although from what I gather, the two countries would largely be working independently toward a similar goal. Microsoft's stated that China went the very least lean heavily on AI generated content that's intended to shape public opinion to favor political outcomes

that would align with China's own goals. In fact, the country's already been doing this, and Microsoft said that right now such content hasn't proven to be really that effective in moving the needle of public opinion, but it is important to pay attention to it because with every failure comes the chance to learn from the stakes and to get better. So it could just be a matter of time before AI generated propaganda really does help push public

opinion in a specific direction. Microsoft says that various social accounts linked to China have been posting AI generated content with a call to action. So essentially, the posts push conspiratorial language and then follow that up with what do you think? And that call to engagement could both serve to elevate the visibility of the post as well as just you know, actually ask for feedback to judge how

well their propaganda is working. Oh Brave new world. Here in the United States, the concept of net neutrality has had a pretty rocky go of it. The idea is a little bit complex, but one way to look at it is that all parties involved in facilitating information moving across the Internet would allow that data to travel freely without interference, without regard of where it came from, where it's going to, or what kind of device is accessing it.

So in a world with net neutrality, you would not allow an Internet carrier to throttle some types of data while allowing others to go on a fast track. You wouldn't leverage your position to favor certain partners or even your own services and content over that of your competitors, so everyone would have a level playing field. The United States Federal Communications Commission attempted to codify net neutrality during the Obama administration, and in fact did so briefly, but

those decisions were overturned by the FCC of the Trump administration. Now, during the Biden administration, the FCC plans to vote to restore those net neutrality rules, or at least some of them.

That vote will officially happen on April twenty fifth, and tech Dirt points out that the new rules are going to have some exceptions and loopholes in them thanks to a lot of lobbying, and links to a post by Barbara Van Shuick, a law professor at Stanford that explains it greater detail the differences of the new set of rules compared to the previous attempt to really codify net neutrality. So I might do a full episode about this because

it is a topic that's fairly complicated. In Google News, the company has said that it will destroy data records that number in the billions with a B and you might wonder, well, what do these records involved, And it's the kind of sort of information about what people were doing when they were browsing the Internet while in incognito mode, you know, that mode that at least implies that your activities on your browser are you know, protected in private.

So Google is doing this as part of a settlement that still must be approved, and it's for this big old lawsuit. And the lawsuit accused Google of implying that incognito mode would give Chrome users privacy as they skulked around on the web doing whatever it was they were doing. But all the while Google was actually tracking data and being able to identify the user, meaning that incognito is not that incognito. You know, you can't go incognito if

everybody recognizes you. This is the big complaint I have about James Bond films, because he's a spy, but he goes around introducing himself as James Bond. But I suppose that doesn't really fit in a tech podcast anyway. It's really a good reminder that the stuff you do on the Internet isn't necessarily as private as you thought it was, and that's just something to keep in mind, not to prevent you from using the Internet, but being aware of it is a good thing. Amazon has booted its cashierless

grocery store strategy at least a little bit. They have opted to go with a different approach for their larger supermarkets. So the company introduced this technology a few years ago, and the idea, in case you're not familiar with it, is that you would go into an Amazon store, like an Amazon Ghost store or an Amazon Fresh grocery store.

Then you would do your normal shopping and you would fill up your shopping cart, and then you could just leave the store and Amazon would automatically bill you for

the stuff that was in your cart. But the company says that customers didn't really gel with this technology, particularly for like grocery store big shopping days, because that involved not just you know, like prepackaged foods, that's one thing, but also stuff like produce, where typically you would need to weigh the produce in order to get a price on what it was you were buying. And the company says that the technology might be a better fit for

small stores rather than a full supermarket. CNN states that Amazon is looking at some alternatives for the larger Amazon Fresh stores in the United States, such as using the dash cart. So this is a shopping cart that customers can use to scan items that they are purchasing, so they can purchase the items by scanning them and putting

them in their shopping cart. And they can also interact with other elements of their account, like they can have their shopping list active with their cart so that the cart is guiding them to the items that are on their list. They can have alerts as to sales that are going on, that kind of thing. On a related note, The Information published an article that says the automated technology

wasn't as automated as Amazon implied. So, according to the piece, around one thousand workers in India reviewed up to seventy percent of the purchases made through the just walk out technology that's what was called and this was back in twenty twenty two. So when seventy percent of your transactions are actually going under human review to make sure that you know you're getting charged for the right stuff, then it's not really just walk out, like, at least not

on Amazon side. Now, Amazon has disputed this. They said that no, no, no, that seventy percent is not reflective of reality, that it was a much lower percentage of transactions that required human review, and in fact, the staff was really there to help train the AI to get better, so it's like, you know, guided training. According to Amazon, that's a pretty big discrepancy between seventy percent of all transactions and just a few.

I don't know where the truth is, but it is true that that technology is no longer going to be used in the fresh stores in the United States. It will still be used in some of the smaller stores. It has also kind of coincided with some other companies saying that maybe going the cashierless way isn't the best approach because people make mistakes or some people are just plain dishonest, and that there's been a lot of loss associated, perhaps more loss than what you would see if you,

I don't know, hired people to do the job. So just a fun little thing about how technology doesn't always replace people at a level that makes sense. A couple of companies had a really rough day this week on April third, on Wednesday, maybe it was delayed April Fool's Prank or something. But Meta's WhatsApp service was unavailable for many users this past Wednesday. But by many, we have to really contextualize that we're talking about in the tens

of thousands. Now, granted that's a lot of people. Tens of thousands of people is a lot, but WhatsApp boasts around two billion users, so in the grand scheme of things, it was hardly even a blip. Now, Meta resolved the issue, and I have no clue what it was that went wrong. The company didn't really say. And meanwhile, Apple service is on that same day, April, including its streaming platforms, so like Apple TV and Apple Music, its podcast app was affected.

The App store itself was affected by another outage. Now, this issue lasted a bit more than an hour for users in countries like the United States, the United Kingdom, India, and China, and whatever the cause of that issue, Apple was able to restore services just a little bit later. So again, maybe just a delayed prank, Maybe it was Grimlins, Maybe it was just two similar events that just happened to happen at the same time by coincidence. It's probably that last one. Okay, I got a few more news

stories for y'all. But before we get to that, let's take a quick break so forward here in the United States, is the most recent automaker to announce that it is shifting its stra toward electric vehicles. It is pushing back when it's going to produce all electric models of cars. The plan was that twenty twenty five was going to be the big year where Ford was going to bring out all these all electric vehicles, you know, like cars, trucks,

and SUVs. And instead they're going to focus on hybrids at least in the short term and push back the electric vehicle approach for a few more years. And several other car manufacturers have made similar decisions in the not too distant past, and it's kind of created this slow down in the conversion to electric vehicles. Now, the companies have cited a general slow adoption rate among consumers for evs, so they're saying consumers don't want electric vehicles, or at

least not enough of them. There's just been a very slow uptake on electric vehicles. I think that part of that is probably price. I think a big part of that might be recent economic issues that have played a huge part in the decision making process of buying a new car, are you know, we were dealing with really high inflation rates that made stuff like loans and financing kind of scary, Like when you're paying more in your interest than you are for the vehicle, that's an issue, right.

And then there was also inflation and that ended up creating a real sticker shock situation too. You'd go in and the car at the beginning would just be priced at a really high level, and you know, that's hard to deal with. So I am not fully convinced that the general public is just reluctant to adopt evs. I think it's more likely a more complicated situation that a lot of the public can't afford a new car in general, but specifically an EV which still they tend to be

pretty expensive. However, I'm no expert. I cannot pretend to say like I have the insight here and it's one hundred percent accurate. This is just sort of my perception, and it could very well be that I'm totally off base, And surely these car manufacturers have very intelligent people working on these things, so so I don't know. Maybe it is that the public in general is still a little

wary about evs. I can understand why. I mean, there's this perception that you know, you're going to have a limited range as far as you can drive, and that kind of thing. I don't think that this means that the entire plan to shift toward electric vehicles has taken a totally wrong turn. This just might be one of those cases where you know, you're on a car trip and your dad says he knows a short cut, and then next thing, you know, here four hours late to

Grandma's house because the shortcut wasn't that effective. Maybe that's what's happening here. Metaphorically, in what was a really expected announcement, this didn't come as a surprise Disney CEO Bob Iger, who, by the way, recently posted a victory against a proxy battle among activist shareholders. He said that the company is going to start to crack down on password sharing among Disney Plus customers starting this June. The rules have already

been in place. It's not like they're putting in new rules. They're just really kind of being more proactive about it later this summer. And of course we've seen lots of other streaming services approach the same challenge, right because it turns out that creating a profitable streaming service that can sustain efforts to produce original content is tricky. Right, You've just got subscribers coming in. You could base your performance on growth, but eventually you're going to max out that growth.

You're gonna plateau. So how do you make enough money where you can continue to create the content that people want and still make a profit. So Netflix famously pushed back against password sharing not too long ago and saw some positive results in fact, despite the fact that a lot of people complained about the whole practice. Iiger says that one part of the plan is to create a

paid sharing option. So essentially, customers who want to share a password with another household will get a little alert popping up, and there will be a subscription tier priced exactly for that kind of thing. So it costs more than just your typical subscription for that level because it'll be a shared level. Otherwise, Disney expects you to keep your own password in your own grubby little hands and

let other households go and get their own passwords. So technically, Disney, like I said, has had these rules in place for a while now. But in June, you know, people that Disney suspects are actually using a shared password will get a little pop up message suggesting that, you know, they sign up for their own subscription, or maybe Mickey Mouse will come on over to their house and bust their kneecaps. Not literally, I'm paraphrasing. Disney did not actually say that.

That's me taking some poetic license. The French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission has produced the Azult MRI machine or izult. I don't know how to pronounce it. I don't I don't speak French. This MRI machine is a real whopper, so your typical hospital MRI machine, the magnetic resonance imaging. It's able to create a magnetic field that has a strength of between one and a half to three teslas. In this case, we're not talking about the

electric vehicle. We're talking about unit of measurement, but the one that I'm talking about here, the new one, which has been in practice for a while but has just recently been used on human subjects. This sucker bumps up the power of that magnetic field to eleven point seven teslas, so significantly more powerful than what you're going to find in your typical hospital and this isn't just like a

home improvement moment of more power. The benefit of such a machine is that it can produce images with a much higher resolution in a fraction of the time it would take your standard machine. Like you might have to lie motionless in a device for two hours to get the same sort of image that this thing can produce in just four minutes. And since you have to stay perfectly still during an MRI scan, four minutes is a

much less taxing request than two hours. Now from what I understand, the new MRI machine also has a larger opening that the patient's would go into. That means it should be a less daunting experience for those who have, you know, kind of claustrophobic issues. To operate the machines, engineers actually have to use liquid helium to cool some of the components down so that they reach superconductor status.

And when you're talking about a machine that's as large and complicated and challenging to operate as this is, it means it's not really likely to replace the mr eyemachines that are currently around the world, but this could be really handy for researchers, you know, scientists and doctors, who want to use it when they want to look into different brain conditions and diseases in order to learn more about how they advance and hopefully help inspire new treatments

and cures, which is super cool. Finally, I've got a couple of article recommendations for you all this week. One is a piece in The New York Times by Kevin Bruce titled did One Guy Just Stop a Huge cyber Attack? It tells the story of a German born programmer named Andres Freund who spotted a back door in some software and through his actions, was able to address it before nefarious hackers could make use of that access to wreak havoc.

So that's a good piece to read. I also recommend a piece in Fortune by Sage Lazaro titled Musicians are up in Arms about Generative AI and stability. AI's new music generators show why they are right to be. Both of these stories touch on things that are ongoing conversations

in tech. You know, cybersecurity is always part of the conversation, and then this concept of how AI could threaten various occupations, you know, and art, that sort of thing, how its impact on art could be really negative I'm sure we're going to have lots more conversations about that, because not a day goes by that I don't see another article about how AI is going to impact the job market.

Then it's concerning in a lot of ways. I think a lot of companies could potentially make bad decisions with AI and then learn the hard way that those bad decisions were bad, and they can then get back on track. But it would be really nice if we could just like avoid the pitfall stage and just kind of sidestep around the issue. But I don't know how realistic that is. However, I hope all of you out there listening are well, and I will talk to you again really soon. Tech

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