Tech News: The Rise of the Robocall

for the news for Tuesday, February twenty one. Let's get to it, and we will begin with an update on the Solar Winds hack, a massive supply chain hack that's had a critically dangerous effect on numerous companies and governmental agencies, with the potential for a lot more damage further down the road. Solar Winds makes I T system management software, so you know, the type of stuff that network administrators might use to monitor and control really complicated computer networks.

Hackers likely backed by Russia, compromised a piece of software called Ryan on the Solar Winds side of everything, and they inserted malware into the software code for the Orion product. So when solar Winds pushed out updates to Orion, Solar Winds customers who accepted those updates because solar Winds as a trusted partner, they unknowingly infected their own systems with

a trojan type of malware. That attack hit thousands of customers but the hackers actually only followed up with a few dozen of them to further infiltrate and spy on targets that ranged from Microsoft to the United States Department of Homeland Security. Now, Microsoft says that after analyzing the code found in Orion, researchers reckon that maybe as many as a thousand or more developers had worked on that malicious code, which itself consisted of four thousand, thirty two

lines of code. Now more than a thousand developers, that is a truly huge endeavor, something far beyond independent hacking groups. Microsoft president Brad Smith indicated that this sort of attack was new to the United States, but Russia had previously employed a similar approach in cyber attacks on systems located inside the Ukraine. If you want to learn more about the Solar Winds hack, I had a an episode with hacker extraordinaire Shannon Morrise she joined tech Stuff. The episode

is titled the Solar Winds Hack. It published on February one, and Shannon and I explored the scope of the Solar Winds attack and what it all actually means. Spoiler alert, It's not good. And now let's switch to a collection of stories that I like to call eat the Rich. And we've got some more updates on that story of Wall Street Bets and the game Stop stock, this time looking at how the United States government is getting involved, so quick refresher. Some hedge funds decided to short sell

shares a game Stop. That's when you borrow shares of stock, you sell them at whatever the current market value is for that stock. Then you buy back those borrowed shares so you can return them to the original owner. And what your hope is is that the price of the shares will drop so that you make money on the deal. So let's say you sell some borrowed stock for twenty bucks a pop, and you buy it back when it's

at ten dollars a share. You just made ten dollars a share as you return the stock to the person you borrowed it from. But a group of independent investors day traders, communicating on forums like Reddit and a subreddit called Wall Street Bets, decided to foil this plan by buying up game Stop shares and encouraging others to do so. Now that pushed the price of the game Stop shares up,

not down. Then you had hedge funds freaking out because they were going to be obligated to buy back those shares they have to in order to return them, and now they would have to pay more money than they made when they sold off those borrowed shares, and the Wall Street bets folks kept buying up more stock as soon as it would become available, which pushed the price even higher, creating a short squeeze. It hit a high

of around four three dollars per share. Uh this was well above the twenty dollars a share that it was at before all this happened, and that share price has actually settled off quite a bit. Right now, as a record this it's around fifty two dollars per share, but that's still more than twice what it was when all this started. And the U S House of Representatives wants to talk to a few people about everything that's been

going on. Among those people are Steve Hoffman, the CEO of Reddit, and Vlad Tinev, the co CEO of robin Hood that's an app that allows its customers, it's users to buy stocks through the app. And also they want to talk to Keith gil who has the online moniker of Roaring Kitty he's been invested heavily in game stuff since back in twenty nineteen, an he posted about it frequently. The Senate also wants to get involved. They want to determine if there was any manipulation of the stock market

going on here. But on the surface, that doesn't seem to be the case, at least not for the price to go up. Sure, there were independent investors all working together to buy up shares of stock, but that in itself isn't manipulation. In fact, the Wall Street Bets Crew maintains that hedge funds that short cell companies frequently engage in activities that are specifically meant to devalue that company's share price. That seems to fall more under the manipulation umbrella.

Also on the table or talks about robin Hood, which famously put a freeze on how many shares of game Stop users could actually purchase, and in some cases they just stopped anyone from being able to buy game Stop shares at all through robin Hood. The House will examine if robin Hood broke any federal regulations in the process

of that. As numerous media outlets have shared a major hedge fund owns a significant stake in Robin Hood and the Wall Street Bets Crew has maintained that the app is kind of part of a system that rewards the wealthy at the expense of everybody else. The U S. Senate is also looking into the current state of the stock market in general, and the hearing in the House of Representatives should take place on February eighteenth, starting at noon Eastern time. They'll also be streaming it live just

in case you know you're interested in tuning in. Researchers with the Duke University School of Business published a report that an elite group of companies are responsible for more than half of all the revenue generated from the ocean economy. So we're talking about around a hundred companies responsible for one point one trillion dollars in revenues, or about six of all revenue from ocean based economic activities. This is based off data that's actually a couple of years old,

so it might even be more dramatic than that. In now, if you're like me, you might have had a pretty rough reaction to that news. I mean, that's an enormous amount of influence with a very small number of organizations. But luckily for me, the researchers provide a voice of cautious optimism about all this. One of the authors of the study has said, quote, one of our biggest challenges is to sustain healthy ocean ecosystems as economic use increases

and climate impacts accelerate. This study confirms that a relatively small number of companies will be central to this challenge and have a real opportunity for leadership end quote. So with that perspective, you could argue that it's actually easier to convince a relatively small number of companies to make some big changes that could have enormous benefits for millions.

Then it would be a lot easier to do that than to try and convince a ton of smaller companies that each have a smaller amount of influence and thus have a small stake in a very big pool, as it were. Companies in the study included oil and gas companies that conduct you know, offshore mining operations, seafood production and processing, shipping, cruise tourism, offshore wind companies, and more.

The lion share of that one point one trillion dollars of revenue actually falls, into surprise, surprise, the oil and gas company slice of the pie. These companies had a combined revenue of eight hundred thirty billion dollars or of the whole thing. Yoza. Now, will these companies make the major changes to address sustainability challenges? Well, if shareholders demand it and pressure the companies to do so, or if the leadership of those companies takes these issues like ocean

sustainability and climate change really seriously. Perhaps I withhold judgment only because I've seen a lot of companies act in short term self interest over long term viability. But I

hope the attitude of the researchers us reflect reality. All right, how about instead of wealthy corporations, I talked about wealthy criminals, And yes there is some overlap in that ven diagram, but I am focusing on people who are engaged in illegal activities and then turning to stuff like cryptocurrency in an effort to launder money so that you know, they can actually use the money they stole. That's the whole

purpose of money laundering. You take illegally obtained money, whether it was stolen or it came from illegal transactions, you know, like drug sales, that kind of stuff or whatever, and you take that money, you mix it with cash from an otherwise legitimate enterprise in order to hide the ill gotten gains. Now, this gets pretty tricky if you're talking about truly large amounts of money, because regulators noticed that

kind of stuff. If a humble business, let's say it's literally a launderer, were to brake in, you know, a hundred times more revenue than that normally would, that might raise some eyebrows. But anyway, an analysis company called chain Analysis published a report recently saying that fifty five percent of all the money laundering happening with cryptocurrency can be

traced to just two D seventy block chain addresses. Beyond this core group of two D seventy blockchain addresses, you've got another fifteen hundred addresses or so that is responsible

for sevent of all money laundering in the cryptocurrency world. Now, this kind of concentration of laundering could pose a big problem for the batties out there, because with a bottleneck and cryptocurrency processing, law enforcement agencies around the world can narrow their focus on some of the most active addresses to identify and go after groups of criminals, and if cryptocurrency exchanges detect that, they could be targeted for investigations,

they might actually take more proactive steps to enforce anti money laundering policies against users and shut down criminal activity ahead of official legal action. One of the things you learned when you start looking into big money criminal enterprises is that crime does pay, but it can sometimes be

really hard to cash out without getting caught. Over at the New York Times, journalist Cade Mets has written an incredible piece about a movement that has really taken hold in the tech space, particularly among leaders in Silicon Valley. The pieces titled Silicon Valleys Safe Space, and it's about a blog that was called slate Star codex. Gets explains that a psychiatrist named Scott Siskin who used the pseudonym Scott Alexander, created the blog and used it to write

about a lot of big topics. As Gets says, quote, the blog explored everything from science and medicine to philosophy and politics to the rise of artificial intelligence end quote. Now I recommend reading the whole piece over on the New York Times. Uh They it's really well done, and I just want to give a kind of general overview without diving too much into the piece. Much of it focused on a school of thought that many of the leaders in Silicon Valley have been, you know, following or

subscribed to. It's called rationalism, which sounds you know reasonable, right, I mean rationals in the name. Ideally, the philosophy examines issues with a sort of scientific approach. The goal is to gain an understanding of issues and solutions using a rational line of thinking. But there's a tone that starts to pop up in rationalism that I personally find rather troubling, and it's a tendency to overlook consequences of certain actions

or policies. I detect a tendency for privileged people to ignore the effects of their rationalism on those who are not part of that privileged class. Free speech is frequently cited as a critical element of rationalism, but there also seems to be a fail eire to address a problem I see, which is that those who have the strongest platform from which to speak freely are those who already

enjoy a great deal of privilege. In other words, if you aren't one of the lucky few who are privileged, then freedom of speech doesn't mean as much because you aren't given the same platform that allows you to, you know, get your message to be heard. You aren't elevated, and your volume isn't amplified the way the folks who do belong to that class experience. Now you can probably tell I'm not totally on board with rationalism. I respect a lot of what it's about in theory, but I also

have fundamental problems with it in practice. And it's kind of why when I talk about critical thinking, I tend to pair it with compassion when I advocate it to you guys, my listeners. I find that compassion without critical thinking that's terrible at least some bad decisions that leads to magical reasoning. If you don't allow critical thinking and you just follow compassion, you're gonna make some bad choices.

But I find that critical thinking without compassion leads to decisions that can have really negative consequences for a lot of people. And Gets does a pretty good job of handling this matter with a very objective point of view, particularly considering that Gets himself became the target of harassment

as a result of this journalistic endeavor he pursued. So if you find my own perspective frustrating because of my own point of view, you should really read the original piece because there's a lot in there, including the way that various leaders have treated the concept of artificial intelligence, and our AI really does post some significant challenges from an ethical and existential point of view, So highly recommend

you check it out. Okay, we have some more stories to get to, but first let's take a quick break. We're back. The Anti Defamation League released a study last week. They found videos on YouTube that promote extremist views like you know, white supremacy are still not only found on YouTube, but also the site's algorithm is still recommending those videos. Uh, if you happen to have watched other extremist videos, so

if you watch one, you're likely to be recommended others. Now, this falls into a general problem of algorithms that potentially could be exacerbating radicalization. The purpose of the algorithm ultimately is just to keep people on the platform for as long as possible, because more time on the platform means more advertising dollars going to that company, so you want to maximize the amount of time people are spending there.

So if you click on a video on YouTube, the algorithm will take into account which video you chose and then pull up videos with related material In them and serve them up to you. Now. Many years ago, the comedian Patton Oswald had a bit about the DVR device

TiVo and how he was having problems with it. According to the bit, he said he decided to watch some Westerns, and TiVo then interpreted that to mean that what Patton really liked were horses, and so suddenly TiVo was automatically recording programs that had anything to do with horses and presenting those two patent as, Hey, you liked you like that other horse thing, watch this horse thing. Well, that's

kind of what YouTube's algorithm does. If you watch videos about people rescuing animals, you're going to get a lot more of those videos recommended to you. I know, because that's what dominates my YouTube recommendations. But when it comes to indoctrine Nation into extremist views, this algorithmic approach can be a huge problem. It's like YouTube is doing the recruitment on behalf of these extremist groups population recommendations with

propaganda that persuades more people toward harmful extremist ideas. And also terms like extremism and radicalism are a little too vague. I think you can have an extreme view and it's not necessarily harmful, but we're generally talking about philosophies like white supremacy that is undeniably harmful. The study found that YouTube's algorithm was likely to serve up more videos designed to appeal to these sorts of world views if you

had watched a video already. Now that being said, you are not likely to stumble across one of these videos and your recommendations without doing some of that work on your own. Google has really been working to limit hate speech on the YouTube platform. That is helping out a bit. In fact, according to Google, it's reduced the consumption of those types of videos by as much as eighty percent.

But if you actually do seek out the videos, then you can find them, and you might find that YouTube's starts recommending more of them to you, and that remains a problem. I hope to do a more thorough episode on this general topic in the future, and I have a special guest in mind who might help me talk

about it, So stay tuned for that. Parlor or parlay if you prefer, has returned, the social network ostensibly dedicated to free speech, but effectively the place of refuge for the far right of the political spectrum Online was homeless for a while. That was after Amazon Web Services booted the company from their servers. But now the site has a new host, a company called Epic E p i K that's also known as a harbor for other far right websites and services that have had a trouble, you know,

finding a home elsewhere. While those who have existing Parlor accounts can access the site, the messages that once populated the forums before Amazon evicted them, those are not yet back, so those who are already members can go there. They can start you know, posting in forums again, but they can't access older threads. Parlor in general has had a

lot of changes. Researchers were able to scrape tons of data off of Parlor before it was banished, and there is no shortage of critics who will say that the company has proven to be extremely careless with user information, so a lot of people say that Parlor is is

kind of a doxing tool all by itself. The former CEO, John Matt's has said that Rebecca Mercer, who provided much of the funds to launch Parlor, fired him earlier this month, and Mark Mechler, best known for co founding the Tea Party is now serving as interim CEO while the company seeks out a permanent one. It's too early to say if users are going to return to the site in droves or if they will have migrated to other services. And I guess now it's time for me to talk

about Clubhouse. And I'm sure most of you have heard about it, and a lot of you may have even used it. Me not so much, not cool like that. But Clubhouse is an app that launched last March. It's an app that was created by Paul Davison and Rowan Seth after they tried to make a podcasting app, and it's really blowing up now after lots of early influencers and celebrities embraced the platform. Now I'm still the ground

old man who hasn't joined in. But the app creates audio chat rooms, which just makes me think of the old party lines you used to see advertised about all sorts of stuff back in the nineties. And you use the app to log into, you know, various chat rooms. You can bounce around if you want, and you're able to converse over voice with other users about all sorts

of things. And some of those users include famous people like people like Lindsay Lohan and Elon Musk, and the topics of conversation could be really broad, with some rooms dedicated to celebrity gossip, some might be dedicated to quantum physics. It's pretty wild stuff. It's an invitation only platform, and I've never received an invite, which is not a complaint. It's probably for the best. I mean, I record so

many podcasts a week. I suspect most people here as much from me as they would like, and in many cases, I'm sure it's more than that. Also, there's no Android version of the app yet, but it is on the way, according to the company. However, since it is invite only, that means that clubhouse has a sort of air of exclusivity around it, which automatically makes it more attractive for

some people. Plus, in the middle of a pandemic where most of us are stuck at home, it represents a way to chat with other people safely and about all sorts of interesting or mundane topics. Everyone wants to be in the club they can't get in. I guess I don't know at all. All sounds kind of stressful to me, Honestly, I think I mostly end up just being quiet there, believe it or not, So an invitation is wasted on me. If you have an invitation, give it to someone you

think would get the most out of it. I guess that is what I'm saying. The fact you can just go in there and talk with folks has already led China to say, hey, we don't want that here, because the Chinese government cracks down hard on any form of communication that is outside of its own authority. And Clubhouse is also already at the center of other conversations about exclusion, harassment, misinformation, you know, the sort of stuff that we see on

all social networks. Really, I'm not think saying it's it should come as a surprise that it's over at Clubhouse too. It's it's an issue that has been a problematic for every platform. Now, there have been some pretty nasty stories about bullying over at Clubhouse, but I think every social platform faces these issues. It's really how they respond to those problems that's worth talking about. And Clubhouse is still in the process of formulating its strategy for that, like

getting moderators and that kind of thing. I imagine all that is going to have to change soon. It's gonna have to be less loosey goosey, but I'm sure I'll also do a full episode about Clubhouse in the future, so it tuned for that as well. Several financial institutions are now joining initiatives in which they will share intellectual property in the form of patents, all in an effort

to avoid patent trolls. This stems from a recent lawsuit in which a company called U S a A filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Wells Fargo, and one the case, they received a reward of more than three million dollars for a pair of cases. Actually, at the heart of the matter was an innovation in which bank customers can deposit checks by taking the photo of the check with their phone and then using their banking app to transfer money to their accounts, something that a lot of banks

do these days. Now, the whole story behind that is actually pretty complicated. There was a company called in fact, there is a company called me Tech, which Wells Fargo uses for its mobile deposits, and USA A both holding patents related to mobile deposits. So you had Metech with some patents, U S a A with other patents. They got into a big legal battle, they sell it out of court, they retain the rights of their patents, and

now usa A is going after other financial institutions. So the repercussions have encouraged a lot of financial institutions to enter into a sort of open source agreement to share i P in an effort to protect themselves against patent infringement cases. The biggest concern our patent assertion entities. These would be patentrols. These are companies that make money by acquiring patents and then they assert those patents against companies

that are allegedly infringing those patents. Just a quick reminder, a patent protects an invention of some sort. That invention can actually be a process, not necessarily a thing. For the duration of the patent, the holder is the sole

owner of that particular implementation of technology. If you want to use that tech that approach, you either have to figure out how to build something else that achieves the same end result but doesn't use the same process as the patented technology, or you have to strike up some sort of deal with the patent holder and thus license the technology. But patent trolls don't tend to offer licenses. First,

They get litigious. They aim for big rewards or court settlements, and that tends to scare everybody else, and it gives the patent holder a lot of leverage when they do, you know, try to negotiate licensing agreements. Meanwhile, critics point out that these patent holders aren't doing anything useful with the patents at all. You know, they're not making anything, they're not using the patent. They're just relying on it

as a cudgel. They're hoarding patents and waiting for the opportunity to go after someone who appears to be using the technology without authorization. And back in the day, the company I worked for, how Stuff Works, was targeted by a patentrol that claimed to hold a patent that covered all of podcasting. Now, that particular case never really went anywhere for lots of reasons, but that's a story for another day. Hey, when was the last time you answered

a phone call from an unknown number? For me? That would probably be something along the lines of five years ago. And as it turns out, it's probably a good thing. And I'm not alone in my decision to let my phone just ring to voicemail. According to Hya, a cloud services company that caters to customers like a T and T and Samsung. Robo call scams are kind of at a peak. The company commissioned a survey, and that survey found that three out of four respondents say they were

targeted by at least one phone scammer over the last year. Now, these are the types of phishing attempts that are looking for personally identifiable information like social Security numbers, bank accounts, that kind of thing. Maybe you're one of those people. You might get a call from someone claiming to represent the I R S and that you need to talk to them or face possible fines or worse. That's actually

a pretty common one. And I know I've received a couple of robo call messages in that Vein the as, at least in the old days, they couldn't really detect when voicemail was picking up as opposed to a human, So I would get these prerecorded messages and it would always start, you know, like halfway through, because it was already going through my outgoing message. It didn't pause and

wait for the beep. So, according to this survey, those who fall for the scam lose on average around a hundred eighty dollars, but some can lose a lot more than that. Meanwhile, because we're in that whole pandemic thing, people have been using voice communication a lot more recently, and so personal and business calls have nearly tripled in volume. Meanwhile, the survey respondents say that if it's an unknown number, they don't answer it, which makes it harder for a

legitimate communication to go through. So if a company does need to make contact with a customer, it can be impossible to get that person to pick up. Of course, if they just leave a legitimate message, that can help a lot. Now, I don't know about you, but while I might get three or four, or sometimes six or seven calls in a day, it's very rare that any of those will actually leave a message. Now, you might wonder if anyone is actually working on this problem on

behalf of consumers, And the short answer is yes. But the longer answer is it's a complicated problem. It's not super easy to solve. In the United States, phone companies are supposed to create a new approach to color i D by June this year and cut back on the practice of spoofing. That's when a caller can use a false color I d to try and make a connection. Like they're not using their own phone number, they have spoofed a different phone number that stands in its place.

So if you've ever received a bunch of calls from a phone number that's similar to your own, you know, same area code, maybe the same first three digits of the actual number, then you've likely seen spoofing in action. That's a common tactic among robo callers. Now, I'll probably do a full episode about spoofing and what steps companies might take cut back on it, but that will be for the future, which is where you and I will

spend the rest of our lives. Before we get to the future, though, we need to take another quick break. Let's talk about some of the dangers of relying on cloud based services. Now, sometimes the cloud providing those services can go down and then you're at a loss. And this is one of those scary things that c t

o s have to consider. Do you keep all your systems on premises or on prem as the cool C suite folks say, or do you offload some or maybe all of those services to cloud based platforms and then you rely on other companies to provide a more robust and redundant system that you can rely upon. Now, ideally, cloud services should be just as if not more reliable, than on pre m systems, but sometimes stuff goes wrong. Last Friday, stuff went wrong for Notion. That's a company

that provides cloud based project management services. The company offers up a suite of tools for all sorts of things from managing product development, to product launches, to marketing campaigns and beyond. Except on Friday, for several hours, the whole thing went down for everybody, which means four million users were not able to access it. So what was going on? Well, according to the company, there was a quote very unusual DNS issue that occurred at the registry operator level end.

Quote that might be a little difficult to parse, so let's break it down. D n S stands for Domain Name system, which you can think of as sort of the directory for the Internet. It's the distributed decentralized record that explains what all those different machines connected to the inner net are and where they can be found. Notion site, which is Notion dot s O, has name dot Com as the registrars, so that's the company that registered the name to Notion. However, Name dot Com works with another

company called hexo Net. Hexo Net manages all companies all websites that use the dot s O domain, and hexo net had received word that some nefarious Notion users were creating pages in Notion that were an effort to fish sensitive information off of unsuspecting targets, so they were essentially using Notion as a platform for a delivery system for phishing attacks. Hexo Net contacted name dot com about this, but Name dot Com was unable to confirm the reports

with direct evidence. Hexo Net then placed a temporary freeze on notions domain in order to sort out the mess, which meant that all of Notion went offline for rebudy.

Hex on Net lifted that freeze later on Friday, But the problems with phishing scams and Notion aren't new, and as of this recording, the company hasn't really laid out plans externally anyway on how they're going to push back against those fishing attacks, which could mean that this event could repeat itself in the future, which is not a strong way to sell a project management platform if you're saying it might be offline occasionally as these sort of

things happen, and now la la Google has a lot to answer for in France. Okay, I'm sorry. I can't promise that's going to be the last of the accent, and I know it's terrible, but a French court has ordered Google to pay a fine of one point three million dollars or one point one million euros because the company's search engine gave misleading rankings about French hotels. And that's about the most French thing I think I've ever heard. You mess with French hospitality. You get the taroll by

the orne. Okay, now now I'm really done. I know you've all just sort of cringed yourselves out of existence. I apologize. So that was a mixed metaphor I was giving.

It was also a terrible pronunciation of French vocabulary. But apparently Google was using one source for ranking hotels in addition to a couple of secondary sources, but they didn't meet up to the high standards of French sensibilities and hotel owners complained to the government, which then investigated the matter and found Google to be deficient and how it was ranking results Gail Domage. So now Google has to pay this fine and presumably come about ranking these hotels

in a totally different way. It's such a weird thing to to see and it's something that would only really happen in the European Union. On Monday of this week, the CEO of Jagua, the British car company, announced a new plan for Jaguars that's the way we Americans say it started. In twenty five, the company's cars will ditch the internal combustion engine. Yep. All the Jaguars of the future will all be electric, either with batteries or with

hydrogen fuel cell technology. And a fuel cell is a lot like a battery and that it generates electricity through an electrochemical process, but unlike a battery, you have to actually refuel a fuel cell. You have to fill it up. Eventually it runs out of hydrogen and you've got to top it off. On the bright side, the emissions from a fuel cell vehicle are primarily heat and water, which is a nice change of pace from carbon spewing internal combustion engines. The Jaguar land Rover is to have six

new battery electric vehicles by twenty six. Gone will be engines that require either gasoline or diesel, and the company itself plans to be carbon neutral by twenty thirty nine. It will also mean making some big changes at the

company's various manufacturing facilities. Now, Jaguar says it's not gonna shut down their factory in Birmingham, England, but things are going to change substantially there after that facility finishes building out the models that they're making for this year, because they are not going to do that next year, but presumably that facility will be doing something else that supports Jaguar's new vision. Sticking with electric vehicles, Tesla is in

the news again. You might remember last week when they talked about how China is ordering Tesla to shape up after quality control issues were found with the American built Tesla vehicles that were imported into China, whereas the Chinese built ones seem to be okay. Well. Now Germany is ordering Tesla to recall more than twelve thousand Model X cars because of a problem with loose trim. The country's motor vehicle regulatory agency, called the k b A, says

that the molding on the trim can become loose. That means cars might have trim breakoff while they're in motion. That represents a has heard on the road, and the recall is for cars that were manufactured between and twenty six. Tesla had already recalled some nine thousand Model X vehicles in the US for a roof trim issue. No word if it's the exact same thing, and in January, the NHTSA urged Tesla to recall more than one thousand vehicles because of a problem with the touch screen interface that

access the screen for the rear facing camera. It's also the way you control important stuff like if you want to defug the windshield, so it could pose as a safety hazard if that fails as well. According to The Verge, Microsoft is quietly testing its x Cloud service through a web browser. With x Cloud, people who have an Xbox Game Pass are able to access their games in that pass through a browser. Now playing a cloud based version of the game through the browser itself, that's sort of cool.

You would need an Xbox controller connected to whatever device was running the web browser, and then you're off to the races, particularly if you're playing Fortza. That's a race card joke. The Verge reports that as it stands, it looks like the service is going to be limited to browsers that are built off of Chromium, so that includes

Microsoft Edge and you know, Google Chrome. There are apps on Android that already allow Android users to access the x cloud services, but this would allow you to do it straight through a browser, not with a specific OS.

The Independent reports that Facebook is working on a smart watch with the goal of launching it in two Now, as you might suspect, such a watch would lean heavily on integrated services from Facebook properties like Instagram, What's Happened, you know, Facebook, There's also evidence that it will have some fitness tracking capabilities and integration with some big fitness

companies like Peloton. Now the design incorporates a cellular transceiver, so assuming that's in this smart watch, you would be able to use the watch to send and receive messages without necessarily having to pair it with a phone or

anything like that. Now, considering Facebook's reputation with user privacy and leveraging user information to serve ads to those people, I would personally be a little bit reluctant to strap on a smart watch that's monitoring stuff like my heart rate and my sleeping patterns, because next thing you know, I'd be getting ads for exercise equipment and lavender scented masks and stuff. I mean, at least I would if I were still using Facebook. But you get what I mean.

Can Facebook create a must have piece of technology? Well, the company has tried in the past. Things have not really worked out so well. The Facebook phone is one of the legendary flops in the tech world, and smart watches have frequently fallen short of expectations. So we'll have to wait and see. And that wraps up the news for Tuesday, February one. I hope you guys are doing well. You'll get another typical episode of tech Stuff tomorrow. I

hope you guys are looking forward to That should be interesting. Uh. They will definitely keep you awake because it's gonna be about coffee makers. That's a that's a little teaser for what to expect. Well, if you have any suggestions for future topics of tech Stuff, you can let me know by contacting me on Twitter. The handle is text stuff h s W and I'll talk to you again really soon.

Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,