Tech News: Think Before You Tweet

the cards for me yesterday. So I appreciate your patients. I apologize for the delay. Let's get on with the news. We've got a lot to talk about. One of the big tech related stories that broke this week was about how the Facebook oversight board upheld the company's decision to ban the account of Donald Trump, former President of the

United States. For those blissfully unaware of all this, I'll try to sum up on January six one, though honestly it feels like it was a lifetime ago now, insurrectionists stormed the US capital in an attempt to overthrow the

U S election. Trump's behavior and words served as a motivator for this group, and Trump was often walking a very thin tight rope of plausible deniability while simultaneously encouraging his base, some of whom clearly intended to harm members of Congress, and so Facebook made the decision to suspend Trump's account to reduce the platforms he could use to stir up anger and incite potential violence. The ban has

stayed in place since then. Facebook caught a lot of flak from some groups for instituting this ban, though the company stated that it was in response to Trump violating terms of service on Facebook's platform. Twitter likewise had a lot of anger directed towards it for a similar ban.

In an effort to distance itself from the decision and to kind of take the heat off of itself, Facebook formed and oversight board intended to review incidents like Trump's ban and to determine whether the company acted appropriately or not. But now Facebook is going to have to hitch up its breeches and make another decision. The board came back

and said, well, here's your problem. You were justified and banning Trump for Violet in terms of service, But while y'all did was this fuzzy, indefinite ban, which is an issue you're all gonna have to either lift that ban, make the band permanent, or decide exactly how long the band can last. I don't know why the oversight board has the same accent that I do naturally, but it's just that's how it is in my head. So, in other words, Facebook can't just have a band of indeterminate

length on Trump. The parameters need to be defined. Mind. The board even pointed out that Facebook was trying to pass the buck here. Now clearly the company would prefer that some other entity swoop in and make this decision on behalf of Facebook that way Facebook and say, hey, folks, listen, we know, we totally know we're with you, but we had to go this way because so and so told us to. Except in this case, the so and so said, no, dice, Mr, you made this bed, you lie in it, or rather

they said quote. The board declines Facebook's request and insists that Facebook apply and justify a defined penalty end quote. So yeah, I was paraphrasing. Meanwhile, there are plenty of critics who say that the oversight board itself is just a bad approach, and there should be a truly independent review board that's in place to look at issues like Trump's ban. I think this is a case where Facebook

would be really torn about the idea of regulation. On the one hand, regulation would take some of the heat off the company when things like this pop up. On the other hand, it could force you know, the company to act more frequently in cases that involve influential users and other entities on the platform when they say controversial or perhaps you know, stuff that outright violates terms of service.

As I've said many times, Facebook's revenue comes from advertising, and it makes more money the longer people are actively on the platform, so it wants to keep people there as much as possible. That means there's a real incentive for Facebook to allow controversial, influential people to be active on Facebook because they drive a lot of engagement, and engagement means more ads get served, and that means Facebook

makes more money. So I imagine the company is not super jazzed about being more proactive in dealing with influential people who violate terms of service. Moving on, mining frequently has a negative environmental impact, and for that reason, some regions have put in a lot of restrictions around mining.

But what if the mining was virtual, Well, the state legislature of New York is considering a bill that would put a three year ban on bitcoin mining in the state while the state conducts an environmental study looking at the impact of bitcoin mining. So let's do a quick refresher on what bitcoin mining is. So it's all about a proof of work approach to blockchain, and I'll dive in just a little bit. There is a network of

computers that are connected into the bitcoin system. This system keeps track of every single transaction that's made with bitcoin all over the world, and every computer that's connected to this system can see the shared ledger of all transactions. These transactions get packed into blocks, and then once a block of transactions gets validated by this system, that block joins a chain of past transaction blocks that stretches all

the way back to the very origins of bitcoin. Each block that follows builds upon the blocks that were behind. That also means there's no way to go in and alter a past block, which would mean that you know someone's potentially trying to erase or duplicate a transaction. You can't do that because if you make a change to a past block, it affects every single block that followed. It further down the chain up to the most recent one. That means everyone would notice the change because everyone can

see the entire chain of transactions. The process of validating these transactions includes mining, and essentially mining involves very fast computers trying to guess an extremely large number. Now, how difficult that number is to guess depends upon the amount of processing power that's being thrown at the bitcoin mining system. The goal is to stick to a ten minute cycle as closely as possible, and so the system actually dynamically

shifts the difficulty of this problem. This guessing problem based on how much processing power is being thrown at the system at that time. The computer that guess is correctly gets rewarded a certain number of bitcoins six point two five right now, and each bitcoin is worth more than

fifty dollars apiece. And since there is a chance to mind bitcoins every ten minutes, and each successful mining operation nets you more than six bitcoins, it can be really profitable to own the computer that makes the right guess. But these guesses require computers that are ridiculously powerful and fast. Bitcoin miners will set up networks of computer systems just dedicated to this, using multiple GPUs. GPUs work really well because they lean heavily on parallel processing, so they are

particularly well suited for bitcoin mining. And there is a huge incentive to build out these really powerful computer systems to do this, which is expensive, but obviously the payoff is huge. So if you make the investment and it works, then it pays for itself very very quickly. I mean every ten minutes you have another chance to net another six plus bitcoins. However, running these things requires a lot of electricity, and this is where we get to the

environmental impact. If the source of electricity is a power plant that's powered by fossil fuels, the mining operation is contributing to carbon emissions and other types of pollution and climate change. In upstate New York, bitcoin miners have been using converted fossil fuel power stations to set up shop.

The price of electricity is really low there. That helps cap the costs of operation because running these systems means you're not just using up electricity, You've gotta pay for that electricity too, So you want to have the lowest amount of cost per electrical unit in order for you to be able to run the business profitably. The weather and Upstate New York also plays a factor. It's a

little cooler than in other parts of the country. That reduces the costs of keeping all those processors cool enough so that they don't overheat. Now the state is potentially banning mining operations for three years in order to make sure that the environmental impact isn't more harmful than good. And honestly, I think this points at how the proof of work approach, that's what I described earlier, it's flawed.

If the cryptocurrency becomes the center of speculation like Bitcoin did, and it has an incredibly inflated value, then you'll see the sort of rush to corner of the market on it, and you get these unintended consequences. There are other methods that blockchains can use besides proof of work, but they too can have their own drawbacks. I'll have to do a full episode on it in the future to kind of just gcribe the different methodologies and the pros and

cons of each one. And now for our segment called News that Continues to Baffle, Jonathan IBM announced it has created a silicon chip that has two nanometer architecture, meaning the components on this chip measure just two nanometers in size on an individual basis. Uh. The nanometer, by the way, is one billionth of a meter. Recently, Apple introduced the in one chip and its new Imax. These have a five nanometer architecture. Other companies are relying on chips that

have a seven nanometer architecture. Intel is still using architecture that's got ten or fourteen nanometer components on it. So what's the big deal with all this. Well, smaller components means that potentially you can cram more of those components onto a single chip. So if you've got a chip that measures I don't know, a centimeter per side, well, then you could fit way more to nanometer scale com opponents on that than you could with fourteen nanometer scale components.

And more components potentially means more powerful and more power efficient chips. Now, it's not quite as simple as shove more transistors on there. Uh. The way you lay out the transistors matters a lot. In fact, it matters so much that Intel, while having those larger components than its competitors, is really able to pack those components in at a density that allows for a lot of power output. But another big element, as I said here, is efficiency, as

in power efficiency. IBM says these chips will allow for greater power efficiency, which means longer battery life. But the thing that blows my mind is that when you get down to this super tiny scale you have to deal with some fundamentally puzzling problems. You're getting down to the level of quantum effects, which we don't experience in our day to day lives, right, you just don't. You've got to get down super super tiny before you start to

observe quantum effects. And one of those quantum effects is called tunneling. And this is a doozy all right, I'm going to give you a very high level view of this. So circuits, when you really get down to it, our channels for electricity, and electricity generally speaking, is the flow of electrons. Well, it turns out that we really can't say exactly where an electron is at any given moment. It's more like we can have a general idea of

where that electron might be. You can think of it as a hazy field, and the electron could be anywhere in that field. There's certain probabilities that it's at any one position within that general field. All right, So let's

say we've got this field and it's moving down the hallway. Now, the walls on either side of this hallway are pretty thick, so the field can't overlap into the space beyond those walls, so the electron can only be somewhere within the field that's inside hall But then the field gets to the end of the hallway and there's a closed door at the end. This door is not as thick as the walls in the hallway, and so once the field gets close enough, some of the field actually overlaps to the

other side of the door. This means there is a small probability that the electron is actually on the opposite side of the doorway, and as long as something is possible, it means that sometimes it actually happens. So that means sometimes that electron is on the opposite side of the doorway, as if it had tunneled through the door or if the door had opened. Neither of those things actually happened. The door remain closed, the electron did not physically tunnel

through the door. It's just that it was possible to be on the other side, so sometimes it is. Now this is really hard for us to grasp because nothing in our experience behaves this way. But when you start making chips that are down at this scale, you have to factor these kind of things in with that design. For a long time, physicists were leaning toward the end of Moore's law, or at least the end of seeing smaller components on chips because of these fundamental quantum effects.

So I always find it astounding when engineers figure out ways to work around it. And to be clear, I don't know what IBM has done in order to kind of avoid these issues, because once you get down to one to three nanometers, tunneling is something that I just don't know how you avoid it. So I'm very curious to learn more about this particular process. Twitter has created a new feature that asks if you really seriously want to send that mean spirited tweet out into the world.

The feature scans the words you use in a tweet, and if those words are quote unquote mean, then Twitter will send a prompt you asking if you really want to send that tweet out, and you've got three options. You can go ahead and tweet it, you can edit the message, or you can just delete it. Now I know that in the past I have shot off a tweet in anger and then regretted it, and a lot of other folks have done way worse than that. Sometimes nothing comes of it and you just look a little petty,

or in my case, a lot petty. But other times, sending off a mean spirited tweet brings along with it some serious consequences that can have a huge impact in a person's life. I'm sure you can all think of a few cases in which someone tweeted something that they either thought was justified or funny or whatever, and it ended up causing them serious problems. People have lost jobs

over this stuff. So Twitter now has this feature to help people take a moment to consider what they're saying and how they're saying it before they commit to it. And I like this. Twitter has always been a tool that allows people to shoot off thoughts without any real delay, and that's not always a good thing. I've joked in the past that I kind of want to Twitter like service where I can type and angry messages and hit send, but the messages don't actually go anywhere. It's just a

way to vent without actually making things worse. This is kind of like that, though, of course you do still have the option to go through with it and tweet

out that awful thing you typed. I'm not sure how extensive Twitter's filter is or what criteria it uses to scan for quote unquote mean language, but the company has been testing the feature out with a limited number of users for more than a year and says that it saw thirty four percent of users revising messages after receiving a prompt, and that as a whole, they saw fewer offensive messages in general, like people began to adjust the way that they would word things after receiving prompts a

few times. I think that's a step in the right direction, and it may mean in the future will really know who the jerks are on Twitter. Those are the folks who still send out mean spirited messages despite having this prompt. They could also be bots, but at least know who the jerks and the bots are, so I'm all for it. One of the revelations out of the ongoing legal battles between game developer Epic and Apple is that Microsoft has never made a profit off their hardware sales for the Xbox. Now.

This doesn't come as a shock, but it is confirmation of what was a widely held belief in the industry. Lori Right, the VP of Business Development at Xbox, was called as an witness for Epic, and the fact that the company loses money on every Xbox sold is kind of a crucial part to epics argument. So let's break this down. So Microsoft sells the Xbox at cost or

at a loss, making no money on hardware sales. To turn Xbox into a revenue generator, the company has to make up for that loss in other ways, and one way is to develop games and sell them for the console. Another way is to offer services through the console that require a subscription h this is why the Xbox Game Pass is really important and product for Microsoft. And another way is to take a cut of in game transactions for certain titles like Epics Fortnite. So when players make

an in game purchase in Fortnite, Xbox takes at cut. Well, Apple does the same thing. And yet what started off this whole legal battle was Epic trying to sidestep Apple by offering users a work around to make in game purchases on iOS versions of Fortnite without going through Apple's system, which meant Apple would not get the thirty percent cut of those transactions. So why did Epic try to sidestep

this with Apple but not with Microsoft. Well, according to Epic, the big difference here is that Microsoft's revenue depends upon these sorts of transactions because the company is not making money off hardware, whereas Apple isn't taking a loss on hardware. When Apple sells an iPhone, it does so at a profit, and so argues Epic, Microsoft has a justific cation for

taking a cut, but Apple does not. Anyway, the interesting thing here is getting confirmation that so far Microsoft has never profited from the sale of Xbox consoles, though that could eventually change with the latest generation of hardware. Also this week, SpaceX had a successful test of a Starship prototype vehicle. The starship is shaped like a rocket and

launches vertically from the ground. During descent, the starship maintains a horizontal orientation for most of the journey back to the surface, but engages its rocket engines to flip the spacecraft back into a vertical position before its final descent legs so it can land vertically on a landing pad.

SpaceX has held a few tests of this type of spacecraft, but all the earlier tests ended with those test vehicles being destroyed, or, as the New York Times tweeted, quote SpaceX successfully landed a prototype of a spacecraft it hopes to one day sent to the Moon and Mars. It's the first time the vehicle didn't explode. End quote. I had detect some shade in that tweet. I wonder if the New York Times got that prompt before they sent it. HM. Well, that wraps up the news for Thursday, May six one.

I hope you are all well. I am very much well on the way to being fully minded, so I appreciate that. If you have any suggestions for topics I should cover on tech Stuff, send them my way on Twitter. The handle for the show 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.