Tech News: The News Out of CES 2023

is currently underway in Las Vegas, Nevada. To cover everything would actually take hours of coverage, and trust me, if you're curious about it, you can actually find tons of outlets giving exhaustive reporting from the show. But we can chat about a few of the interesting announcements so far.

And I do this knowing that a ton of stuff is going to be announced today as well, So really it'll be next week when we can take a look back and say, what were the most interesting things that actually might be a full episode of tech Stuff, because chances are there will be more than what we would want to put into just a news episode, So let's

get to it. Last night, Sony held it's c e S press conference, and I've been to a couple of these, the Sony events sometimes they can be a little weird, like there was the time I was there and Seth Rogan came out to halfheartedly talk up the company as part of this promotional tour for green Hornet. It did not look like he wanted to be there, and by the end none of us wanted to be there either. That was awkward. But this one this year was a

little more straightforward. The company for once did not promote its lineup of television's TVs just weren't part of this press event. Instead, there was a large focus on PlayStation VR gaming in general, and also a partnership with Honda. So here are a few different things that we learned

in the course of this event. Sony executive Jim Ryan said that gamers should be able to get a PlayStation five without nearly as much of a hassle as they did since it launched in twenty indicating that the days of shortages are mostly at an end and that is really nice. If you have been trying to get a PS five, it sounds like either now or in the near future, that will be easy enough to do if

you've got, you know, the cash for it. Of course, now we're in a period of economic uncertainty, and you might want to hold onto that cash in case you need it for something else, but that's another matter. Anyway.

This should also inspire game developers to start making true next generation titles rather than games that span two different generations of consoles, because as it stands right now, a lot of the titles that have come out have been PS four slash PS five titles, and in order to do that, it means you're kind of pulling your punches right. You're not swinging as hard as you could for the PS five type stuff. You're not taking full advantage of

the PS five skip abilities typically. Well, now that might start to change as the console has become more available and more people buy them and you have a larger user base. Considering that the PS five is a couple of years old now, it was a pretty slow start for the console. Not entirely Sony's fault. There were a lot of mitigating factors like semiconductor shortages and such, and a pandemic, so not I can't really blame the company,

but it has been a frustrating couple of years. If you are a gamer and have consistently found shortages in the various you know vendors where you would buy a new console. Sony also announced Project Leonardo. This is a new controller for the PS five that the company designed with accessibility in mind. So it is a highly customizable controller so that players who might have limited mobility or dexterity can tune this controller so that they can participate

more easily in gaming. They can do things like map buttons with each other and all sorts of stuff that really can streamline the use of the controller for people who have these these issues, and I think that's super cool.

We've been seeing a rise in attention to accessibility over the last couple of years in gaming, and it's it's really great to see because the industry had largely paid very little attention to such things in the past, Like you might have a mode for people who have color blindness, but beyond that, there were a lot of games that just didn't have many, if any accessibility features, and we're starting to see that change. That's great and good job

Sony for doing this. Also, the video that they showed off with various gamers talking about how accessibility is important to them personally as a gamer, is really sweet. It's worth watching. The other cool announcement that Sony had was the unveiling of the FILA, which is a new brand of electric cars. It's spelled A F E E l A. This is the partnership between Sony and Honda. So the company showed off a prototype and announced that the plan is to have production cars ready for the United States

by twenty six. Sony said the three main themes for this vehicle brand our autonomy, augmentation, and affinity. So I guess it's a triple A vehicle, which you know, Sony triple A studio. There you go. It sounds like these vehicles while have features that are on you know, lockdown unless owners opt into subscription services. That's been a pretty

contentious practice recently. It's a little frustrating to purchase a vehicle that's technically capable of doing certain things, but you aren't able to actually tap into those features unless you first pay a monthly fee on top of everything else. That has not gone over well recently, but it looks like more and more car companies are are at least

experimenting with that that business model. It sounds like the car will be absolute at least stacked with various sensors and other tech meant for driver assist or autonomous driving features. And also it will have, as you would expect a

lot of entertainment features coming from Sony. Considering how autonomous driving has started to hit the steep part of the evolution curve towards full realization, it will be interesting to see how advanced their autonomous features will be by the time it comes to market, and you know whether or not it will be builled as more of a driver assist feature or truly driverless vehicle technology, and you know, how are they going to market that to customers, because

we've seen with Tesla that if you don't haven't truly nailed it down, you can run into some legal problems down the line. In other ce S news, alien Ware announced it has a new five hundred Hurts desktop gaming monitor coming out. This will make Dell Slash alien where the first company to offer such a thing for actual purchase. Now, there have been prototypes of five Hurts monitors from companies like a sous in the past, but they weren't ready

for the consumer market. Now. In case you're not familiar with refresh rates, that refers to the number of times per second the display you're watching will refresh the image that's on the screen. Five hurts means that the screen is doing that five hundred times per second, which is a lot. Now, granted, this monitor is just one part of the equation needed to provide that experience. You also need a graphics processing unit or GPU that can deliver

that signal to the monitor properly. You also need games that are compatible with it, so if you have any one component falling short on this, you don't get that super fast refresh rate. Really, when we start talking about specs at this level, I think the only people who really need to be focused on it are the elite of the elite, like gamers who are at the top of their industry. They would probably want something like this

where every micro second of advantage matters. For other people like shlubs like myself, it would be a total waste of money for me to get this kind of monitor. I would not be able to take advantage of whatever the monitor was able to do for me, except maybe I would actually recognize that I was totally dead meat even earlier in a deathmatch. Anyway, Alien Wears monitor will show up a little later this quarter, and as of yet,

Dell has not announced any price attached to it. Phillips Hugh is giving you lightbulb owners a chance to synchronize their lights with their entertainment, assuming that the lightbulb owners also own a Samsung television from twenty two or later. So to do so, the Hugh slash Samsung TV owner will have to purchase a Samsung TV app for the cool price the princely sum having used that phrase in

a long time of one dollars. Then they will be able to sink their lights to their television and the next time they watch an explodee bang bang, shoot him up kind of movie, the lights can time with like muzzle flashes and explosions and mood lighting. Now, to me, this sounds interesting as a concept, but I have a feeling that if I actually used this kind of feature I would quickly get very tired of it in practice. But you have to keep in mind I am also

old and I am grouchy. Plus it's hard for me to justify spending a hundred thirty bucks to make my lights flash with my television. But for certain home theater enthusiasts, I'm sure this will be a super cool compliment to their setup. It's not for me, but you know, other

people might absolutely love this feature. At c E S A. M D held a keynote event and Panos pan A of Microsoft appeared as part of that event, and he declared that artificial intelligence will be a major component in future Windows builds and that it will quote reinvent everything on Windows quite literally end quote. What that actually means

in practice is more of a mystery. He did indicate that AI might help with certain tasks to make them more energy efficient, so they would consume less battery power, like being able to keep a camera in focus effectively. Uh, might end up being more power efficient. And yeah, that's not super sexy or anything like that, but it is a very practical application of the technology, and I think

that's pretty cool. I realized that, you know, it's not like, oh, this is gonna help you get better at call of duty or something like that, or it's going to give you more of an augmented approach when you are composing emails or writing reports or anything like that. Oh, that would be neat too, But even this kind of stuff where it's just managing things in the background so that you get the most out of your battery power you're also consuming less energy overall. I think that's really a

great idea. Fans of Night Rider might be interested in a prototype from BMW called the I Vision D. That's d e E, which according to BMW stands for Digital Emotional Experience. This concept car is an electric vehicle that has a voice activated digital assistant, So when you talk to your car, this one can talk back to you. So that way, if you say something like come on, baby, you can do it while you're trying to accelerate up

to highway speed. As you see a semi truck getting very large in your rear view mirror, it can say, well, jeez, I'll help you, are right, Probably not in that voice. Apparently, the grill on the front of the car has lights that change in color and can even form different quote unquote expressions, which is I guess where the emotional stuff

comes from from that emotional experience name. Anyway, this is a concept car that means we're likely only going to see elements of the design potentially make it into future production vehicles, but we won't see this actual car become, you know, like a street vehicle. And finally, in our c E S News, Luminar a company that makes lidar hardware, has purchased a lidar data company called Civil Maps. So

this was announced at a ce S press event. So the long term plan is for Luminar to leverage the data from Civil Maps as the company works to advance autonomous vehicle technology. So lightar is kind of like radar, except obviously uses lasers instead of radio waves to send signals out and then it kind of listens for the echoes. Those echos can tell a lightar system the distance to an obstacle, as well as information like how quickly the object may be moving toward or away from you, how

big it is, that kind of thing. So the idea is that Luminar is is getting access to a ton of information that can help the company build out products that further advance the goal of autonomous vehicle technology. Famously, Tesla had dismissed lidar as a technology and and moved more toward optical cameras instead of lighter But where it is that Tesla has been internally testing lighter systems even though publicly they had kind of poo pooed the whole technology.

So interesting there. All right, we're gonna take a quick break. When we come back, we'll have some other tech news. All right, we're back and we're moving away from c e S. We've got a few stories we need to talk about. First up, New York City's Education Department has issued a ban on chat GPT. That's the AI powered chat bot that I've been talking about a lot recently.

Yesterday's episode was partly about chat GPT, and this chat bought generates responses to queries in real time, and it creates them, you know, at the time of the query. It's not like they have a whole bunch of responses to stuff and just serves it up. It actually makes the response in time of your question. And the responses

are frequently very compelling and authoritative in style. So they're presented in such a way where it feels like you're getting a reliable source of information, right like if you were to open up an encyclopedia, you would get something similar. This has been causing some concern in the education field. Teachers have been worried about students using the tool to generate stuff like essays, which means that students would be plagiarizing chat GPT and cheating on their homework. Or their exams.

To that end, the New York City Education Department will ban the use of chat GPT on Education Department networks and devices, so you won't be able to access it on school networks, and any school issue device will block it. Schools that want to access chat GPT for the purposes of teaching AI classes like saying, Hey, here's an example of an AI powered chat bot. We're gonna learn how it works. Um, what's limitations are that kind of thing? They will be able to do that if they first

request special permission from the Education Department. Honestly, based on how chat GPT has limited ability to provide good answers. Uh, The answers it gives appear good like appears like authoritative on the surface, but frequently the answers themselves are somewhat lacking. The real worry is that students are just going to cheat themselves out of an education, and in the process they'll get bad grades because the stuff they hand in

won't be very good. So it's kind of a lose lose situation for students who depend on chat GPT for help. But chat GPT is not the only tech boogeyman out there.

There's also TikTok, which continues to be the target of criticism, particularly in the United States among authorities, and recently, Anton Deborah, a cybersecurity expert, gave an interview with Futurity about the app, and Deborah said that TikTok could amount to a threat on national security, which echoes things we've heard out of the f c C and out of other government agencies

and and UH and representatives. So Deborah argues that TikTok has the capacity to gather information on individuals in the US on a grand scale. And you might think, well, yeah, but if I have TikTok, I mean, what the heck does the Chinese government want with my personal information? Like who am I to them? There'll be no reason for them to do that. So really I'm not concerned about it because why would I be a target? Especially like you look at TikTok and you see things like like

various trends, some of which are somewhat dangerous. You see you know, people say ng or lip syncing, you see people dancing, you see people doing live hacks or like recipes that kind of stuff. You think about, what's the harm here? What use is this? But the Borrow points out that the kind of data that TikTok could be

gathering might be used as a first step. That the next step could be that TikTok starts to look for people who might say work in companies or offices of interest, Like what if someone happens to work as a defense contractor, or they work in a company that's important for US infrastructure, or they work in a government office that kind of thing. This could then be used as sort of a launching

ground for a deeper dive into that person's information. So TikTok might not be the front door into a wealth of protected data that the Chinese government could then exploit, but it might be the first indication that this is a person we should look at more closely, because if we can compromise them, we get access to stuff we want. So it could serve as a very large net to

catch tons of stuff. That stuff could then be put through a sieve to filter out and everything that's irrelevant and then just really allow the Chinese government to focus in almost like a spear fishing attack. And while you might not have any direct connection with something that the Chinese government is actively interested in, there's a chance someone in your life could and that you could then be the connective tissue that allows for this exploitation to begin.

That's what Deborah is saying, and I can see his point. I it's hard to disagree with that from you know, the perspective. Is this possible, Yes, it is possible. We actually don't know for sure that by Dance is doing anything like this with TikTok data by Dance being a Chinese company, but it is possible. And we do know that the company has engaged in some spying on journalists and the like in the past in a report that

definitely didn't do TikTok any favors. So whether this is like a clear and present danger kind of situation, I can't say, but it's definitely something we have to at least be wary of. Meta is also having a pretty rough twenty three already. Yesterday, regulators in the European Union issued a four hundred fourteen million dollar fine on Meta for forcing users to accept personalized targeted ads whether they wanted to opt in or not. That's a big old deal in the EU, where the g d p R

laws protect citizen data. So generally speaking, the g d P R is meant to give EU citizens the power of when, where and how they shared their personal information with companies. That seems like a pretty darn reasonable thing to me. I mean, because this is information that belongs to and pertains to a person, So should that not be the default domain of that person and not some corporation? Like it's it's like this stuff belongs to you. Some

corporation can't just come and take it. They have to be able to negotiate with you about whether or not you allow them to use the information. That's the g d p R kind of domain. Well, the regulators say that Meta was collecting and exploiting EU citizen data for the purposes of targeted advertising, and the users essentially had no option but to allow it or else they couldn't use meta platforms at all. That Meta's terms of service

essentially said, hey, it's my way or the highway. If you want to use meta platforms, then that means you are, by default, uh, acknowledging and and allowing this kind of data collection and exploitation. The EU is saying that's not good enough. If you want to operate here, you have

to change. There's essentially saying you've got to come up with an alternative where people can still use your platform but opt out of any sort of targeted advertising or else you are not going to be allowed to operate within the EU. And now Meta has three months to come up with a plan on how the company will comply with this EU ruling. This is a pretty big

blow to Meta. You know, you gotta keep in mind Meta relies on advertising revenue for the bulk of the money that the company makes, and of course Meta has already seen some hits to its revenue due to Apple's policy changes that let iOS users opt out of certain types of tracking. Uh, it'll be interesting to see how this will affect Meta. Investor confidence in the company has had some really rough earnings calls where investors have been

frustrated that the company's revenues are are in a shaky's ground. Essentially, they haven't exactly plummeted, but they have taken ahead. And meanwhile, the company has been, you know, famously spending billions of dollars trying to develop the metaverse, which is still something that a lot of skeptics, including myself, have questioned whether or not that's really ever going to be a major thing I certainly don't believe it's going to be the

future of the Internet or of online connectivity. But again, I could just be very shortsighted. Uh. So well, I guess we'll have to wait and see. Anyway, bad start there. Okay, We've got a few more news stories that I want to cover before we wrap up. But before we do that, let's take another quick break. Okay. Uh, these next couple of stories are pretty big bummers because it's about people

losing their jobs. Last year, we saw a lot of tech companies make some pretty tough decisions to reduce headcount. Uh and that has continued into three So now Amazon corporate employees received some pretty bad news. The company now plays to lay off more than eighteen thousand corporate workers. So previously the reports were that Amazon was looking to cut around ten thousand jobs. Now it's eighteen thousand. That's a pretty big jump. Now that cut represents only five

percent of Amazon's corporate workforce. That alone is pretty astonishing. You know, you sit there and think, oh wow, eighteen thousand, and that's just five When you look at company wide numbers, it really gets mind blowing, at least for me, because Amazon employe is around one and a half million people across all its divisions. Because you've got to keep in mind the corporate workforce doesn't include stuff like warehouse personnel,

right or delivery drivers. Previously, Amazon had focused cutbacks in divisions that were not particularly profitable. That included some hardware divisions within Amazon itself. We heard that the and I apologize for using the name, actually I won't use the name Amazon's voice activated assistant product, you know, the name That division was massively cut back earlier, or at least that's what we heard, because the company had been struggling to find a way to make that division a revenue

generator and it just wasn't getting there. So another big part of the problem, and this is common through a lot of companies, including the one we're going to talk about next, is that Amazon hired a ton of employees in the early days of the pandemic because online shopping went bananas. You know, no one could go anywhere, so

everyone was jumping online for everything. We saw this time and time again in so many different areas within online connectivity, whether it was in gaming or shopping or other types of services, and as a result, companies like Amazon had to hire tons of people in order to meet the

demand that customers were putting on the company. However, now a lot of people have backed off of online shopping that it's not nearly as big a thing now because you've seen a lot of restrictions lifted around the world, so people are going back into actual physical stores again as opposed to ordering everything online. So now the company has more people than it really needs in order to meet customer demand, and so they're going to start laying

off thousands more employees. Reportedly. Employees who will be affected by this will receive information about the layoffs later the month. I mean, obviously they're aware it's going to happen, but you know, they'll find out by the end of January whether or not they are one of the folks affected by the layoffs. So I just want to wish everyone good luck that one. If you're working for the corporate Amazon offices, I hope you're not affected by this, at

least not directly. And if you are, I hope you are landing on your feet as quickly as is possible, because I've been in that situation and it stinks. So here's hoping. Meanwhile, sales force a software as a service company, you know, like this cloud based software company also plans to reduce its workforce. It's going to be reducing it by ten percent. It will also have to close some offices.

So like Amazon, Salesforce went on a hiring spree in the early days of the pandemic because companies were scrambling to find various tools that will allow them to pivot

to remote work strategies. Like if you remember March of you just had tons of companies that were really in a rush to figure out how to make it possible to continue business as usual when people could no longer come into an office, and companies like Salesforce that offer this software as a service product, well, they were doing business like gangbusters because everybody was in need of those

sorts of solutions. However, now again that we've kind of passed through the lockdown phase of the pandemic, assuming we don't have another terrible outbreak, which is a dangerous assumption to make. But you know, now that we're through that, companies have adopted new strategies. Some have really adopted remote work and they've developed their own tools or they've adopted tools that allow for that and they're good or in some cases they're compelling employees to return to the office.

Hello Twitter. So sales for Force has found itself overstaffed because they just don't have the business to support the number of people they have. Now on top of that, Salesforce has really seen a reduced demand and its services overall, and it's another example of the tough environment we're seeing in the wake of the pandemic, as well as the

ongoing economic uncertainty that's also playing a huge part. Right You have companies that are very budget conscious right now because there are all these worries that the economic situation is going to affect consumer spending. That you have businesses that are tightening the belt in anticipation of that, and part of that tends to be, hey, what can we afford to get rid of? And software as a service

can sometimes fall into that category. If it's not a critical component of a business, then they might just do without for at least the foreseeable future. So that is also affecting Salesforce. And finally, late last month, The Guardian, a UK based news organization, found itself the victim of a ransomware attack. The attack has essentially shut down the

Guardians office in London. So the office's WiFi is inaccessible, it's been locked down and according to reports, you can't even get the cash registers to work in the building's cafeteria at this point. So The Guardian has subsequently shut down its offices to all but essential staff at least until January, and it attempts to regain access to its systems. As you can imagine, the attack has severely impacted the ability of The Guardian to stay on top of publishing news.

It sounds like it took a herculean effort on the part of staff to get the print version of the newspaper out to vendors on time in the days following the attack, Like they pretty much almost literally stopped the presses. But I don't even want to manag gen the kind of hoops people had to jump through in order to get that to work. It isn't a phenomenal display of dedication. The company has also had to scramble to find alternatives

that will allow it to cover stuff like payroll. You know, these are the sort of things that you don't necessarily think about immediately when you hear about stuff like ransomware. You might think of proprietary information or really important files. But that can also include, you know, systems that are highly automated, stuff like payroll, and when that's affected and

people aren't getting paid, that's a huge impact. Right anyway, Ransomware attacks can be absolutely brutal, and there is often a strong incentive to give into the demands and pay the ransom. But security experts say that's always a bad idea because when you pay a ransom, you prove that ransomware tactics are an effective way to make money, which

means you're encouraging future attacks. It's only by denying those ransoms and finding a way through the problem or around the problem in order to continue on where the attackers have less and less incentive to go through the trouble of launching an attack, because if they're not getting anything out of it, they're wasting their time. So that's why paying the ransom is always a bad idea. All right, that's it. That's the news I have for you today.

There's a lot more out there that I'm sure we'll cover, but a lot of it is developing news. So I didn't want to record something that would already be out of date by the time you listen to it. But next week I'm sure we will be catching up on some other stuff in the meantime. If you have suggestions for me, there are a couple of ways you can let me know. One is to download the I Heart Radio app. It's free to download. It's free to use. You can navigate over to tech Stuff using a little

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