Tech News: TikTok's Time May Be Running Out

twenty three. Let's get started. C e S, formerly known as the Consumer Electronics Show, kicks off in Las Vegas, Nevada this week. That, of course, is the really big trade show, the biggest one in the United States for the consumer electronics industry and related industries. I'm sure I'll have a lot more to say about what's going on at c e S later in the week or maybe

early next week as everything starts to break. But as it stands, tech outlets have been reporting in some of the pre show announcements, including how Samsung and l G are really facing off against one another in the oh LED television department, with Samsung using its q d O LED technology. The q D stands for quantum dots. It sounds like the main selling point this year is a focus no pun intended on increased brightness of these screens.

That addresses one of the issues with oh LED television's, namely that while they can create a superior picture compared to l E ED t vs and superior color representation, they also tend to be more dim and that means to get the most out of them, you really need to watch them in a darker room that the screen doesn't show up well if the room is a bright one.

So the press releases from l G and Samsung make it sound like the televisions that will be shown off this year at CEES have around double the brightness of older sets, so that's good. I've also seen several articles about displays like computer displays, including some about gargantuan displays like in the fifty seven inch range I think I saw for one of them. I can't even imagine having

a computer screen that's that big. But like I said, this is just the very beginning of c E S. I'm sure we're going to have a lot more to talk about later in the week. Some of the stuff I talked about in our retrospective episodes about the big text stories of two are obviously going to continue into this year, which you know, I'm sure all of y'all

knew already. One of those themes that we really heard about last year is this increased regulatory scrutiny that various governments around the world are directing at social net work and social media platforms. Here in the United States, we've seen a couple of proposed pieces of legislation that aimed to restrict big tech in general and social platforms in particular, but they mostly fell short. In recent years, at least the more extreme versions of those proposed pieces of legislation

have fallen short. That could change this year. Politicians on both the conservative and liberal sides of the political spectrum have expressed concern about the influence of tech companies. It is interesting because the two sides tend to disagree on all the particulars, but they largely agree that the influence of these companies is concerning. Whether that concern is going to translate into legislation that has enough support to pass, remains to be seen, and then has enough authority behind

it to be enforceable. That's another matter too. But as Senator Amy Klobachar has pointed out, the tech industry has influential lobbyists who can sway political opinion, which is a very polite way of saying Big Text's got a lot of money, and it uses that money to purchase political leverage. One platform that's bound to have a rough start to

three here in the United States is TikTok. So late last year, the US House of Representatives issued a ban on TikTok on house managed mobile devices, which honestly just makes sense to me. Other federal and state agencies and government offices have issued similar bands, So there are a lot of places in the United States attached to local or federal government they have said you cannot put TikTok on a government owned device or a government issued device.

The main concern here is that TikTok's parent company, Byte Dance, is a Chinese company, and that as such it technically has an obligation to support the Chinese Communist Party. Now, whether that means TikTok is playing the part of spy and is siphoning up tons of US data to send

to Chinese analysts, that's a matter of debate. TikTok reps have repeatedly denied such allegations, but the concern is still there, and sometimes concern is all it takes in matters like these, a lack of hard evidence is rarely enough to stop

bands and such. Brendan Carr, a commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission, or FCC here in the United States, has pointed to how India's government previously banned TikTok a couple of years ago, and he says that's an example of how this could be achieved in a place like the

United States. Car's main concerns have really been about the potential for espionage, but other folks in the US government have also issued their own concerns about how TikTok influences young users and how it's algorithm can promote harmful or misleading messages. So, in other words, there are a lot of reasons that different folks in authority here in the United States want to ban TikTok, and this might be

the year when we see movement on that front. If that does happen, I imagine it's going to upset a whole lot of young folks in the United States. For one thing, how are we going to learn what the latest dances are? While we're talking about social platforms, let's

spend a short time talking about Twitter. Now. There's been a lot going on over at Twitter over the last few weeks, and I haven't really been doing tech news episodes for the last couple of weeks, so I'm sure I'll be talking a lot more about the company, you know, as long as it remains a company, which at this point, who knows how long that will be. But anyway, one thing that I did mention late last year was that

Twitter had apparently stopped paying its bills. That includes paying vendors such as a couple of charter flights that Elon Musk took in November that I've yet to be paid. But another overdue bill is the rent. According to court documents, the company Columbia Right, which owns the building where Twitter has its San Francisco headquarters, is more than a hundred

thirty thousand dollars in unpaid rent from Twitter. Now, whether this is a sign that Twitter is in real trouble because it's stopped paying the bills, or maybe it's the people who would normally be in charge of tracking and taking care of these things are no longer with the company. I cannot say I will say this is not a good sign, but my guess is y'all are way ahead of me on that one. Switching gears pun intended to vehicles.

Reuter's reports that last year electric vehicles accounted for nearly eighty percent of all new car sales in Norway. Now that country has set an aggressive deadline of when it will no longer allow new internal combustion engine vehicles to be sold within the country. Leaning the way in those cars sales was Tesla, one of the other Elon Musk companies. Norway has created tax incentives to encourage citizens to migrate to electric vehicles, but now there are some in government

who want to strict some of those benefits. Namely, the concern is that people are taking advantage of tax breaks to buy luxury vehicles, which wasn't really the intent. The intent was to promote electric vehicles, not the purchase of luxury goods. So there's a concern that rich people are jumping on tax breaks in order to buy that sweet new ride when the tax incentives were intended for the

average citizen. So there are some proposals to limit the tax breaks so that they don't apply to luxury cars but rather more like day to day electric vehicles that presumably are closer to being within the average citizens economic reach. As you can imagine, the e V luxury car companies

are not in favor of that move. Still, it's interesting to see such a huge push to electric vehicles, and I think a lot of nations can learn lessons from Norway's experience, both what to do and what not to do, or at least how to do it a slightly different way. In South Korea, the gun immense antitrust regulatory body is finding Tesla two point eight billion one that's about two point two million dollars. So why are they doing this

well for allegedly engaging in false advertising. But in this case, the matter is not related to autopilot or full self driving mode, both of which have come under fire from other regulatory agencies in places like the United States in the past. Instead, the claim is that Tesla gave false information about its cars driving range and how quickly they recharge, as well as how much money the average driver in

South Korea could expect to save in fuel costs. Notably, Tesla changed the wording on its advertising in South Korea last February, after the regulatory agency had launched an investigation into the matter. So this fine comes at the end of almost a year long investigation. Tesla has been taking a bit of a beating in recent weeks, with its stock price dropping considerably. Yesterday I checked and it was

that around a hundred twenty dollars per share. But as a cord this it is just under one dollars per year. That's an amazing drop from where it was at the beginning of two. Okay, we're gonna take a quick break. When we come back, we've got some more tech stories. We're back, and we're back with Tesla because Tesla's also involved in a news story out of Germany. On December twenty nine, German police attempted to pull over a man behind the wheel of a Tesla as the tesla hurtled

down the Autobahn. I guess hurdled as being dramatic. It was going down the Autobahn at around seventy miles per hour, but the driver did not pull over, and so the police engaged in a pursuit and they pulled up alongside the tesla, and that's when they saw that the driver was not a driver at all. The driver was a man behind the wheel, apparently asleep. His hands were not on the steering wheel at all, and the Tesla vehicle was an autopile it mode. So about fifteen minutes into

this police chase, the man woke up. Then he pulled off the side of the autoban. Police found that he had attached a weight to his steering wheel in order to fool the Tesla into thinking that his hands were still on the wheel. So police suspected that he was under the influence of intoxicants, which ones I do not know. But this isn't really Tesla's fault. I cannot blame the company in this case. It instead shows how people can misuse technology or find workarounds for systems that are meant

to prevent dangerous or irresponsible use. So in this case, the step of attaching a weight to the steering wheel to fool the card to thinking that the driver's hands were still on the wheel so that he could nod off behind it, that's not Tesla's fault. They didn't make this man do that. I can't even blame them for

facilitating it. But it does show how uh feel we're in this dangerous time between a the the driver assist features being so sophisticated as to at least give us the false sense of security that we can take our hands off the wheel and the point where we get to a truly autonomous vehicle that can handle such things without it being a danger to the people in the

vehicle or others. Now, to combine our stories that we've covered already in this episode around TikTok and our focus on cars, one potentially harmful thing that can proliferate on TikTok are dangerous trends. We've seen several of those over the recent past, and this one involves grand theft Auto, not the computer slash video game, but you know, like

the actual crime of grand theft Auto. TikTok videos have started to show how certain Kia and Juande vehicles that were manufactured between te have a USB port hidden beneath their ignition covers, and that by moving the cover and then using a USB device with the proper programming on it would be thief can start up these kinds of vehicles and drive off with it with no keys needed. Apparently, this trend on TikTok has fueled a string of car thefts on Staten Island in New York, where nearly five

cars were stolen recently using this method. According to the NYPD that's the New York Police Department, this marks an eighty six percent increase in car theft on Staten Island. That's a big old yikes. The NYPD has warned residents who own Hyundai or key Of vehicles that were made between one to lock their cars and maybe invest in a steering wheel locking mechanism to discourage would be thieves.

As for vehicles made after, those actually include anti theft systems in the vehicles that will lock down a car if it's being tampered with. If you have an Apple dice like an iPhone or Mac and you feel like it needs new battery, then I sugge us you get that handled sooner rather than later. That's because nine to five Mac reports that in the small print of Apple's repair pages, the company has revealed that beginning on March one,

the price of new batteries is going to go up. Now, how much it increases depends upon the specific device, So a new battery for a MacBook Air, for example, will be a hundred fifty nine dollars, which is a thirty dollar hike over the earlier on nine dollar price tag. Owners of MacBook pros and these standard MacBooks are looking at a fifty dollar price hike, which brings those batteries up to two nine dollars. For iPhones, it's a little bit more modest. It's a twenty dollar price hike for

all models before the iPhone fourteen. And you might wonder if these price hikes are away for Apple to kind of twist the knife, because the company very reluctantly opened up a bit and began to allow customers to handle d I o Y repairs if they wanted to. But that is very much not the way Apple prefers to handle things. It prefers to have a closed garden approach where the company is the only source for products and service.

They eventually bent on the service part. But it's possible the Apple might be finding ways to discourage people from doing d I Y repairs by making it more expensive to do than if you were to just go to the Apple store. I don't know if that's the case, but there are people speculating about this. But yes, if you do need to refresh your battery on any Apple device you happen to own. I gently suggest you do

it before March one. The Associated Press reports that police and Louisiana relied on facial recognition technology that ultimately lead to the wrong man being arrested and detained here in Georgia. That man is randall right, He's a resident of Decab County. That's my stomping grounds, and local police here in Decab County arrested right on November twenty. He connected him with a string of robberies in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana of luxury goods.

And this came as a surprise to Ride because he says he's never been to Louisiana and he didn't even know what a parish was. And it turns out that the facial recognition software got the wrong guy. Ride is a black man, and facial recognition tech is notoriously unreliable in accurately identifying people of color. This is not news.

We have known that there were these problems for a while now, and yet we still have law enforcement regularly relying upon this technology while pursuing suspects, which can lead to innocent civilians being harassed and detained, and honestly, I don't think you can really come to any other conclusion but that the use of such technology is inherently racist, systemically racist practice. It disproportionately impacts innocent people of color.

And while it may be that the company is making facial recognition tech aren't intending to put bias into their products, that's exactly what has happened, So whether they intend to or not is beside the point. It's happened. Anyway. Ride was in jail from November twenty to December one. Whether this is going to renew a discussion about restricting facial recognition technology in the area of law enforcement remains to be seen, but personally I think we need to ban

it for that specific use case. Finally, China's government appears to be easing off on the restrictions that has long been in place for the video games industry within China. A couple of years ago, we saw the government start to crack down on video games, claiming that games were harming children. It was a spiritual opiate that was addicting them to the act of playing games that would discourage them from doing other stuff like helping their family or

contributing to the state or what have you. Part of those restrictions included what amounted to a ban on new video game licenses. So in China, a video game company first has to secure a license for every single title it wants to sell and market within China. So these are government issued and they can be denied. Well in you know, last year, there was effectively a ban on all new licenses, so it didn't matter what title you had, you could not get the authority to actually sell it

in China. However, now the government is releasing more games licenses. So the question is have video games turned over a new leaf? Are they no longer the spiritual opium that government was so concerned about. Not really, It's more that the policy decisions really they hurt the video game industry

quite a bit. And now it seems that the government is reviewing the video games industry and starting to look at that as a lucrative market and within the business world in China, and that they are hurting this market and that's the real problem. Now, the state owned press has claimed that the problem of youth becoming addicted to

video games has been basically solved. I'm not sure how other than there being some restrictions on how long and how frequently young kids are allowed to play like online games. But yeah, I think the wallet started hurting and China was like, oh, maybe we should back off. Maybe that's more important than our stance on whether or not this is discouraging people from being contributors to the state. Anyway, that's it for the tech news that I have for

you today, Tuesday, January three three. Later this week, we're sure we're going to get a lot of c e S updates and anything else in tech that Merit's real discussion. I hope you're all well, hope you had a great holiday season. I'm glad that we're back, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Y tech 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. H