Tech News: The Supreme Court Nopes Out on Judging Section 230

hearing a couple of legal cases that involve Section two thirty. Now, in case you're not familiar with that, Section two thirty is part of Title forty seven of the United States Code. It's part of the Communications Decency Act of nineteen ninety six. But we're not going to jump all the way into

all that because it really gets in the weeds. What Section two thirty is about is accountability, specifically when it comes to stuff that's been posted online, namely that a platform isn't responsible for the material posted to that platform. Just as he wouldn't blame a street corner if someone standing on the street corner were to incite a riot, It's not the street corner's fault. It's the person who

did the inciting. So two thirty extends a similar protection to online platforms, and it allows users to post content, whether it's text or audio or video or whatever. And it also gives the platforms the authority to moderate content as they see fit. This is what lets platforms create content moderation policies and then enforce those and it protects

such platforms from legal attacks for enforcing their policies. There's also some stuff there about making a reasonable attempt to remove illegal content, like if a platform fails to do that, then it doesn't receive full protection because it is seen as sort of a facilitator. But as long as a platform demonstrates that it does make a reasonable attempt to remove such content, it receives this protection. Now, this seemingly simple idea has been in the background of some extremely

complicated and emotionally charged issues. It has prompted both the left and the right political forces in the United States to criticize and question the policy. Now, sometimes it's because a platform fails to remove content that appears to lead to harm against people. Sometimes it's that there's this perception that platforms are purposefully censoring a specific population, namely conservative voices. That's one of the frequent narratives we hear in this space.

One of the two cases before the Supreme Court deals with a really terrible situation, one in which a woman died during an ISIS attack, and are Ely says that attack happened partly because YouTube allowed videos that incited violence to stay on its platform. Moreover, that the YouTube algorithm was serving up these videos, which was then essentially inciting violence.

So that's sort of the approach this is taking as trying not to say that YouTube is responsible for the content, but that YouTube is responsible for promoting the content through this algorithm, and that therefore the platform should be held

responsible when violence actually happened in the real world. Now, clearly this is an emotionally charged case, but as the arguments preceded, the justices on the Supreme Court seemed to come to the conclusion that they just don't know enough about the Internet to really come to a decision on this, Like they don't have a full understanding of what the consequences could be for deciding upon this case, or even if this is a matter that should be decided by

the judicial arm of the US government at all. This could perhaps be something that Congress, the legislative branch of the US government, should tackle instead. Now I have to applaud the justices who seem to realize that any dismantling of Section two thirty would fundamentally change how the Internet works and really cause catastrophic damage, or at least consequences

that they could not anticipate. I imagine most platforms would be forced to essentially shut down rather than take on the huge burden of either being strict gatekeepers of content, meaning they would not allow anything to publish on their platform until it had been thoroughly reviewed and sanitized and made sure that it doesn't fall into any categories that would cause problems, which is not realistic, especially when you're looking at big platforms like YouTube gets like five hundred

hours worth of content uploaded to it every single minute. It is impossible for humans to review that much content and be certain that every single second of every video

that is passed does not cause any issues. Alternatively, the other approach that the other side has said, not really in as many words, but effectively is to allow a fire hose of everything to publish on these platforms, regardless of whether or not the content was harmful, because that's the only way you can get around any kind of accusation of censorship, right, the only way to prove you are not censoring content is to allow all content on

the platform, and clearly that is not a good approach either. It's a no win situation because while you do have general agreement that Section two thirty creates problems, there's a fun to mental disagreement on why people think it causes problems. They think it causes two very different problems. Therefore, either solution would be the opposite of what the other side

wants and it would be a disaster. Also, a lot of the justices were said to be bored and didn't really engage with the case, which probably is because they're not exactly the online generation. Thank goodness, they serve for their lifetime. Anyway, Section two thirty seems safe for the moment, at least from the Supreme Court. To quote the band of troubadours called Stained. It's been a while since we've talked about Elon Musk and his exploits, but we've got

a few short stories that relate to him today. One is that Musk continues to fire people over at Twitter, after having already laid off around two thirds of the total workforce since he took control of the company. Most recently, people in engineering and sales departments found themselves let go, while Musk continues to demand for some massive changes to Twitter systems. Most recently, he set a very aggressive goal

to overhaul how Twitter serves ads to users. Currently, Twitter relies on profile data and user behaviors to determine which ads to serve to specific people. Must wants to change that to be more like how search engines serve up ads, and make it more keyword based rather than behavior based.

This has been met with some resistance and criticism, though mainly from former Twitter employees, because I imagine if you are a current Twitter employee, you're doing your best to keep your head down so that you don't become another layoff statistic once Must goes on another round of firing people.

Whether Twitter can make a keyword based system work better for ad relevance remains to be seen, but there's no denying that the company has been in really rough shape from an ad standpoint, because a lot of the big advertisers that used to spend a lot of money on Twitter have kind of bailed on the platform since Musk took over two days ago. Musk tweeted out that the Twitter algorithm will be made open source next week end. Quote.

Musk has said repeatedly in the past that he felt the Twitter recommendation algorithm could be improved drastically if it were made open source, and that would mean that developers all around the world would be able to contribute edits and changes and improvements and detect weaknesses and vulnerabilities as

a community instead of keeping everything behind Twitter's closed doors. Moreover, adopting an open source approach could take some serious heat off Twitter, because, like I mentioned earlier, there's this general perception among the politically conservative here in the United States that online platforms have an inherent bias against conservative messages

and points of view. That platforms like Twitter penalize such messages by restricting their promotion so that fewer people will see those tweets, or in some cases, they could potentially be prevented from being seen at all. The conservatives, are

you saying they're the target of shadow banning? That's a policy where a platform allows the user to post as much as they want, like the user is not told that they're being prevented from saying anything, but the platform suppresses the spread of those messages so that fewer people can see and therefore engage with the material. Going open source would mean that anyone could look at the recommendation algorithm and determine what, if any bias is built into it.

So there are a few reasons why Twitter would want to go this route. One last Musk story. He also announced this week that Tesla, another one of his companies, will be opening and Engineering HQ in Palo Alto, California. The office space will occupy a building that was formerly used by Hewitt Packard and Elon. Musk has a rather

contentious relationship with the state of California. In twenty it seems like he was actually going to make Texas the center of Musk World, because SpaceX is centered out of there. The giga factory he was building was in Texas. He moved to Texas, and part of the reason for this might have been the fact that Musk was really upset with California's shelter in place mandate during the height of

the COVID nineteen pandemic. He did not appreciate the fact that he was being told he couldn't force his employees to go into work. But when Musk did relocate to Texas. Tesla kept its corporate HQ in California, and now there will be an engineering HQ there as well. All right, we're gonna take a quick break. When we come back,

we've got some more news stories to cover. The Seattle Times reports that Mark Zuckerberg, after indicating that Meta was not likely to hold off additional layoffs, is now looking at holding additional layoffs. The news outlet says that HR and legal teams are drawing up plans for a reorg that will likely include significant downsizing. I'm sure Meta will position this as becoming more efficient. That's been the message

for twenty twenty three. This is the year of efficiency, and thus this is going to be about reducing redundancy and further cutting back after Zuckerberg himself indicated that the company employed too many people for the amount of work that was needed to be done. The Seattle Times also reported that unnamed sources within Meta believe that some employees are likely going to quit after having their jobs dramatically change.

And I infer that to mean that Meta purposefully is making at least some employees unhappy so that they choose to leave on their own terms. Because if someone quits on you, you don't necessarily owe them a severance package. So if you make the environment pleasant enough and you convince them to leave on their own, you don't have

to lay them off. Now, maybe I'm being too cynical, but according to the rumors, part of the big change that's coming up is that some leaders within Meta are going to find themselves in redefined jobs where they won't have any direct reports, which means they will no longer be leaders because there won't be anyone for them to lead. So maybe this is the group of people that insiders think are going to be encouraged to quit the company.

And meanwhile, this is going to change the hierarchy where Zuckerberg will presumably have more direct oversight over company operations. So we'll see. On the legal front, Meta had a setback this week when a judge refused to throw out a jury's decision to hit Meta with one hundred and seventy five million dollars and damages for patent infringement. This case was brought by an app developer called Voxer Incorporated, and it concerns a technology that's used in live streaming services.

The jury previously found that Meta had committed patent infringement and found in favor of Foxer. Netta then asked the judge to throw out the verdict, saying the jury was misled, the evidence was not sufficient to draw that conclusion, and besides, Voxer was mean to them on the playground. All right, That last point was a bit of embellishment from yours truly, But Meta reps did say that Voxer's lawyer made quote unquote inappropriate comments about the company. I don't know how inappropriate.

The comments were. A lot of people say some really bad stuff about Meta, and I think a lot of it is entirely appropriate, but maybe from a legal perspective it's a very different story. Meta still has the option to appeal this decision to a higher court, so we'll see if the company decides to do that or if it will cough up the money and just pay the damages. Don't know yet now Quasi related to Meta, The founders of Instagram, who left Meta years ago, have released their

aipowered news gathering app Artifact to the general public. It was previously in a beta rollout, and basically this is an app that gathers news headlines that the app thinks you would be interested in reading, and the way it works is you download the app they have it for iOS and Android, and you start off by selecting a few topic categories that you personally find interesting. This is

not a comprehensive list. Also, the taxonomy of the categories is a little bit strange, Like when I signed up, I saw a climate change which was listed under technology, but there was another area where it was like global or international news. I thought it was weird that climate change was not under there. But the ideas that you tell the app what subjects you're interested in, and the app will curate articles across various publications. This, by the way,

also includes any publications you subscribe to. Part of the process is you indicate which news outlets you might have a subscription to, like if it's New York Times or something, and you can then have your log in so that you're able to read those materials as well. Then, as you use the app and you read articles that the app has gathered for you, it gathers more information about what you gravitate toward and what you are really interested

in based upon what you're actually reading. So theoretically, the more you use the app, the better the app gets it figuring out what you are really interested in, so over time you get a personally curated news feed. I only just downloaded it, and I haven't really played with it very much, so I do not know how effective it is yet, and I've seen some reviews that have criticized the user interface, but personally I think it's fine.

It's not great, but it's fine. It does seem like a decent use of AI, though hopefully it will not be a use that over time filters out all news that would challenge a person's views, because that would just create an aipowered echo chamber effect, and we've got enough

of those already. Activision Blizzard, the game company that is kind of in a limbo space regarding Microsoft's attempts to acquire it, announced that late last year a hacker got access to Activisions systems through the old standby tricking an Activision employee with a classic phishing attack. Now, I've said over and over people traditionally are the weakest link in

network security. There's not any need for a hacker to sit down in the dark at a computer terminal, their face highlighted by the glow of the display and then try typing in three different password guesses before getting entry into their targeted system. Instead, you just hit some employees with phishing schemes, and chances are you're going to get a bite somewhere that will give you a foot in

the door. Anyway. The surprising thing here is that apparently Activision's employees were not made aware of the attack before the announcement to the general public, which is a heck of a way to find out that someone got unauthorized access to your company systems, and it also doesn't speak

very well of Activision's process to try and avoid future attacks. Typically, in the wake of something like this, a company will put employees on high alert, and often they'll even make employees take a security course to better familiarize themselves with phishing attacks and the appropriate response to them. I can say that here at iHeart, we have a security team that even puts us to the test occasionally, because they'll craft a bogus email from a bogus address and then

they'll look to see who, if anyone bites. So it's all meant to increase awareness and to improve security. So it's odd that Activision has allegedly taken a more passive approach and didn't even alert employees to the attack in

the first place until it became public info. The company has said no sensitive data was accessed or stolen during this breach, but according to Gizmoto, there's a secure group called vx Underground that claims the hacker made off with some internal Activision documents that included sensitive employee data, including personal information as well as like salary info and stuff.

This is really damaging to Activision as well. It's not the sort of thing the company wants to see, especially when you also take into account all the attempts at Activision for employees to unionize, because one of the big big things in union organization is often discussions about how companies try to make it against corporate policy to do things like talk about compensation, because if you start talking about compensation within a company, people will know how they

stack up to others, and they can see where disparities are, and that's something that unions aim to eliminate to level out that and remove disparity. So yeah, not the sort of thing that Activision Blizzard wants to see happen ever, but particularly salary information while they're also trying to dissuade organization efforts, the EU continues to force Apple's hand, at

least that's what it seems like. Previously, the EU ruled that all smartphones and similar gadgets must have a USBC charging port, effectively making USBC the universal charging standard in the EU, and that's probably going to force these companies to do the same globally, because otherwise you have to have two different production chains for products meant for the

EU versus anywhere else. Companies like Apple have long relied on proprietary hardware for charging, which helps Apple control that supply, so Apple can either sell its own version directly to consumers and make a lot of profit that way, or Apple can require third parties to pay hefty licensing fees to Apple before they can sell their own version of the technology. But because of the EU law, future Apple smartphones will need to have USBC port at least in Europe.

But now the rumor is that iOS seventeen, which is due to launch next year, will allow something that Apple has long resisted on iOS devices, which is sideloading. Sideloading is when a user can choose to download apps from places other than the official platform app store, Ever since Apple first launched the iOS app Store, which was, you know, like almost a year after the iPhone came out, it has restricted Apple users from downloading apps from anywhere else.

Unless you were to do some alterations to your iPhone, you could not load apps anywhere except from the iOS app Store. This is also part of what gives Apple the power to take a healthy cut out of in app transactions. This is one of the reasons why the EU has pressured Apple to allow alternative because if Apple controls the policy for apps that are found in the iOS store, and Apple prevents anyone from going outside the store to get an app, it forces developers to play

by Apple's rules they don't have any alternatives. Apple has long maintained that restricting apps to the official store means that each app that goes into the store has actually gone through a review process, and that this helps Apple make sure that the app is safe for users, and that without this step, users will run the risk of

downloading malicious apps. So they have long maintained that the whole reason this policy is in place is to protect people from malicious applications, and there's no doubt that there

will be an increased risk for malicious apps with sideloading. However, I think it's more than fair to say that Apple is far more concerned that alternatives to the App Store will reduce Apple's power over developers, and it will reduce the power over the apps that can appear on iOS devices, and that there's a chance that revenues could take a really serious hit, or at least not increase at the same rate that they had before. And as we all know,

it's not enough to make a lot of money. You got to make more money than you did last quarter. That's really the secret sauce. Okay, I've got a couple more stories to finish up with, but before we get to that, let's take another quick break. Okay, when we left off, we talked about the EU and Apple. Well, the EU is also following the lead of several US government agencies and that it has asked all staff of the EU governing body, so government EU staff to uninstalled

TikTok from the corporate owned devices. So anything that's owned by the EU Executive branch should not have TikTok installed on it. If you work for the EU and you have a device that was issued to you by your employer, you cannot have TikTok on it. If you do, you should remove it now. Again, just like in the United States, I think this is a totally reasonable request. If it is a corporate owned device, you shouldn't be putting TikTok on it. Unless for some reason, your job in this

corporation relates directly to TikTok, then it makes sense. But I mean, if it's for personal use, do not allow that on those official devices. This move, by the way, does not prevent those employees from having TikTok on their personal devices. They can still have them on their own personal phones, just not their work phones. And why Well, there's this concern that TikTok could be gathering data about

users and their employers and other sensitive information. And since TikTok is the subsidiary of a Chinese company, there are national security concerns. But even if we ignore the Chinese part. You know, TikTok has repeatedly said that that is not a real concern, that China does not have access to all this data, that it is a US centric company. Those are the arguments TikTok has made in the US. Well, this is the EU, so you're still talking about a

company that's based outside of the EU. And while the United States isn't antagonistic to the EU, the fact is the EU has long pushed to protect its citizens data from being harvested and exploited outside of the European Union, so it stands the reason it would move to protect the government data as well. Again, I don't think this

is unreasonable. I don't know how I feel about a wider ban on TikTok in general, but I certainly think it's a reasonable expectation for corporate or government owned devices in the world of crypto. The Securities and Exchange Commission in the United States has moved to block binance dot us from acquiring Voyager. That's a crypto lender that filed for bankruptcy last July. It was one of several high profile cryptocurrency businesses that failed last year. It happened before

the huge FTX breakdown. So why is the SEC concerned about binance dot us buying out the assets of a crypto lender Voyager. Well, one is that the SEC worries that the acquisition would quote violate laws on the unregistered offer and sales of securities end quote. This is according to a report from Reuters. Adding to that complexity is that the US government has been looking into Binance. Now that's not Binance dot Us. It is Binance, the largest

cryptocurrency exchange in the world. This was the one that initially said it was going to bail out FTX and then backed off on that. Instead, we're talking about Binance dot Us, which is claimed to be a quote unquote independent partner of Binance. But it's also really complicated, and I cannot even begin to unravel the legal and structural

contexts of Binance dot Us in comparison to Binance. I do not know to what extent the two are dependent upon one another, and that's by on purpose, like it's meant to be difficult to tell, because like Binance, the overall company is an offshore company for the purposes of mostly avoiding regulation. So that part of it. The fact that Binance dot Us has some connection to Binance to some degree, but it's unknown to how to what extent,

says Mains. The SEC says, Look, we don't even know what this connection is, and therefore we cannot allow this to go through because it's very possible that the acquisition would violate multiple laws, and due to the obtuse nature of finance dot US, it's impossible for us to say, so we can't allow it to go forward. Now. I don't know if that's just going to be the end of it, or if this is just part of the journey, or how this will be resolved, but I wanted to

talk about it because that ambiguity. I don't think it's a bug. I think it's a feature. And it may very well be that this is yet one more step where we see governments start to chip away at one of the foundational elements in the crypto world, which is this idea of these financial systems that are not regulated and not overseen by government agencies. Turns out that sometimes

that's going to end up rubbing government agencies the wrong way. Also, when you have incredibly massive failures like with FTX, it starts to bring into question if these systems themselves are trustworthy without oversight. And I don't know the answer to that, y'all, because it's not like every government is squeaky clean either. It's it just seems like when you start getting a lot of money grouped together in a place, whomever is set to be in charge of overseeing that ends up

having lots of conflicts arise. It's almost like it just kind of naturally happens, and it doesn't matter whether we call it a government or not. I don't know. I know that I don't have that problem. I'm not overburdened with the problem of too much money. I'm willing to give it a shot and find out if I'm the exception to the rule though. So yeah, this again goes out to all the billionaires out there. If you want to test me, feel free to send me, you know,

a few hundred million. You know you won't even miss it. I'd be willing to bite the bullet on that one. Finally, Reuter's also reports that Mercedes Benz is going to begin to offer a quote supercomputer like performance end quote in its cars moving forward, complete with advanced self driving capabilities. Reuters reports that customers will have to pay extra for those options, and that they will enable level three autonomous

driving operations. Level three is a big step right. The stuff we've mostly seen here in the United States hovers in the level two area. Level two means that you still have to have a human operator who is effectively considered the driver and that all the other systems are

assisting the driver. Level three is at the lowest level, where the computer system is there to be the driver as opposed to the human, though you still need to have a human in the driver's seat who is able to take over, and the autonomous features will only work under specific conditions. Outside of those conditions, it has to be under human control. However, all that being said, Mercedes Benz is going to be offering this stuff moving forward.

It sounds like the computer experience is a big part of the marketing for Mercedes Benz, that that's going to be kind of the focus of the cool features that will be included in these vehicles. They also announced a partnership with Google that will incorporate Google's navigation systems into

their vehicles. That includes things not just as you know, turn left in one hundred feet, but also things like real time traffic updates so that you can have your vehicle reroute if say there's an accident that happened, you know, ten miles up the highway or something, and can reroute around those sort of things without having to have human input. So that's kind of interesting. And that's all the news stories I have today. Thursday, February twenty twenty twenty three.

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