Tech News: Trade Wars and Classic Blunders

disappearance of Jack Ma. And that's a billionaire co founder of the Chinese company Ali Baba, which is an e commerce, retail, internet, you name it, tech company. And he made a speech in October of twenty twenty criticizing industry regulators in China as well as the financial industry in that country, and

then regulators went kind of nuclear on the company. The company had been in preparation of launching its initial public offering, or i p O when it becomes a publicly traded company, but regulators canceled the scheduled i p O for Ali Baba, and then they mandated that the company had to go through some major restructuring and it is now under antitrust investigation in China. Ma has not been heard from since that October speech now he may be laying low in

China to avoid further retaliation. China's Communist Party might be reeling ma in a bit to restrict him a little more. He had been enjoying a lot of leniency due to the importance of his business and how it helped elevate industry in China in general. But his absence has led to a lot of speculation. There are people who wonder if he's just laying low like like a lot of analysts have suspected to potentially more sinister outcomes, like he

might be in custody now. We just don't know. And this kind of illustrates the difficult situation in China for companies in general, not just Chinese ones, but American ones that are operating within China. The Communist Party has a delicate balance between the power it wants to retain and the moves it needs to make in order to build China's economy and make it an even more powerful world power.

That is something that the Communist Party has been struggling with for a while, and we have seen multiple instances of the Communist Party becoming more involved directly with company procedures, and it's a general rule of thumb that if you operate a business, particularly a large one in China, you are required to have a member of the Communist Party on the board of directors. There has to be a

presence of the Communist Party in that company. So while Ma had enjoyed a great deal of freedom for quite some time, that looks like it has at least come to a temporary end, and we will continue to update the story as we learn more over the year. Sticking with China, there is more to talk about with the trade war. That's one thing that's been consistent during President

Trump's term in office is that ongoing trade war with China. Recently, the President signed an executive order that bands transactions with a group of Chinese apps, among them we Chat Pay and Ali Pay. And that last one is a digital wallet app that's part of the Ali Baba Empire, being, you know, the company that Jack Ma is associated with. So this new executive order is kind of similar to a previous executive order Trump signed earlier in twenty twenty.

That band deals with the wee chat messaging app as well as the social media video platform TikTok. Now. The order calls for this new band to go into effect forty five days after it was signed, but that actually means that the start date would be after the day that President elect Joe Biden takes office, which is January twenty. So it remains to be seen if this new band actually has any impact. It could be that Biden reverses

it or just doesn't enforce it. And the TikTok and we chat stories are also still playing out the ones from earlier in twenty like that was over the summer of the U S government had been pushing very hard for an American company to take over the operations of TikTok from TikTok's parent company, Bite Dance, which is in China, but that hasn't actually happened yet. Oracle and Walmart were set to take over some, but not all, of the

stock in TikTok. It would give them quite a bit of influence over TikTok, but not necessarily full control of the company. However, that process stalled out in November twenty twenty, largely because the US government failed to do anything to enforce the executive order. But then I guess the US

government has had a lot on its mind lately. One thing that did happen that relates back to this trade war is that the New York Stock Exchange announced that, in accordance with a Trump executive order, it will delist three Chinese telecommunications companies from the Stock Exchange starting on January eleven, two thousand twenty one. And those three companies

are China Mobile, China Unicom, and China Telecom. Now I need to kind of hedge this a bit because at the time of this recording, that's what the New York Stock Exchange says it's going to do. However, last week, the last week of December twenty twenty, that same entity, the New York Stock Exchange, said they were going to bar those three companies. Then they reversed course and said, you know what, we thought it over and no, we're

not going to bar them. And now they say, you know what, we are going to bar them after all. So by the time you hear this, things might have changed.

And if you listened to Tuesday's episode of Tech Stuff, you heard me talk about how a UK judge denied a US request to extradite Julian Assange to stand trial for multiple charges, including a computer intrusion charge and several allegations in an indict men charges them, not allegations that are related to the US Espionage Act of nineteen seventeen. Julian Assange, in case you don't know, is often credited as the founder and leader of Wiki Leaks, the organization

dedicated to publishing leaked reports from companies and governments. Usually it's stuff that people don't want other folks to see. And Assange had sought asylum at the Ecuador embassy in London, but the embassy revoked his asylum privileges and UK officials arrested him. And they arrested him because he had jumped bail for a charge that stemmed out of a two thousand twelve case from Sweden. Will the judge who denied that extradition claim, has also denied Assange's request for bail

as the court awaits a U S appeal. The US has two weeks to file an appeal since the judge had denied the extradition request, and the reasoning behind this denial of bail is that the judge has declared that Assange represents a flight risk and considering the fact that the reason why he got arrested by UK officials is that he had previously jumped bail and sought asylum at the Ecuador embassy. I guess you could say there's some

good reason for that logic. And while we're on the subject of legal issues, do you know those terms of service that come along with pretty much everything you sign up for these days? You know, I'm talking about the ones that are like twenty pages long and hardly anyone ever bothers to read them. Some people do, but most of us, and I include myself in this group, we just kind of scroll all the way down past them so that we can get to the next page and

sign up for whatever it is we're interested in. Well, a court in Massachusetts recently told Uber that Uber cannot rely on its own approach with terms of service to force a case that involves discrimination into arbitration. So here's what happened. And Uber user named Christopher Cauters filed this case. And Cauders is blind and he has a guide dog, and on at least three occasions when he was using Uber to hail a ride, he was denied by drivers to get into the car because he had a dog.

And the lawsuit states he's being discriminated against and Originally Uber pushed back on Deskin. He put they pushed it to go into arbitration, and they had two big arguments. One is that Uber drivers aren't employees of Uber. This was the whole crux of the Proposition twenty two argument out in California. The goal to make sure that these drivers are thought of as contract workers not as full time employees. That relieves Uber of a lot of accountability

and responsibility with them being contract workers. And the second big argument Uber was making was that Cauters had agreed to the terms of service. But here's the thing. To sign up for Uber, Cauters never had to agree to any terms of service. There were links to the terms of service, and they were mentioned on a couple of pages, but there was never a requirement that he actually visit a page that had the terms of service on it. There was never a box he had to click to

say I agree to these terms of service. So the court has ruled that Uber cannot hold Cauters accountable for a contract that he never signed. Now, this does not mean that Cauters will necessarily win his case in the future, but it does mean Uber cannot get out of going to court over the matter, and it might serve as a lesson for other services out there to make sure that when they presented terms of service that there is a way of tracking that people have actually read it

or at least agreed to it. That's why you see that little box typically in the bottom that says agree before you can go any further in the process. It relieves those companies of that burden of responsibility. They can say, hey, you agreed to those terms. Here's the proof. Uber did not have that in this case, and that's where the problem lies. There's a lot more to be said about terms of service in general and how enforceable they are

and how legally binding they are. There are a lot of terms of service out there that are questionably legal, but that's a matter for a full episode of tech stuff that I'll probably tackle future. I have a lot more news to cover, but before we get into any more, let's take a quick break. Well, we're at the beginning of twenty one and next week we see the official kickoff of c e S one. Now. C e S

is the big consumer electronics showcase. It's a industry trade show and companies from all over the world would typically gather in Las Vegas, Nevada for a week in January in order to show off what they have to offer

for the following year. And you have all these different industry professionals come to c e S. There are of course the media people like me who go to cover everything, but there are buyers, retailers, all sorts of folks going to see what sort of things are going to be on offer that year, to get customers excited and engaged so that they go and spend all their money buying electronics. Well,

this year, with the pandemic, it's going all virtual. This was a decision that the the organization that throws c e S had made back in and I think it was the right call. Will likely have lots of stories to talk about next week as the show actually unfolds. But one thing that we know for sure already is that five G is going to play a big part of the various announcements at this event. It would played a big part in we expected to be even more prevalent at one and five G just as a refresher

refers to the next generation of wireless data technologies. And there is a ton of confusion and misinformation about five G and largely that's fueled by some misleading marketing claims as well as some crazy conspiracy theories that we will cover in a minute. Five G comes in a couple of different flavors depending upon which band of the frequency

spectrum you're talking about. Because five G actually covers three different general speaking bands of frequencies, you could get, you know, good data transfer rates that are faster than what we would typically see with four G, or you might hit

data speeds equivalent to a fiber connection. We're talking super fast data transfer rates, but that super fast connection depends upon frequencies that don't have a lot of penetration power, meaning they can't go through walls very effectively, and they don't go very far from the source, so you have to be close to the antennas that are transmitting those signals in order for you to take advantage of it.

So you're only likely to find that super fast five G connection and really dense areas where companies can put up a lot of different five G antennas around the space. So you might have a little pockets of super fast service, but it's not likely to extend throughout entire cities, and it would be very difficult for you to get it even for your home, unless you were to mount an antenna on the outside of your house. It's pointed right

at one of these five G towers. The five G signals at lower frequencies will still deliver speeds better than what we've seen with LTE, and those signals will travel further than the high frequency ones, but we won't see the results we hear about from marketing materials. It won't be you'll be able to download a four K film in a matter of minutes kind of speed. Anyway, at c E S, we expect to see a lot of

devices with built in five G capabilities. Samsung is expected to launch at least one true five G phone while c E S is going on, although technically that will be an event that's running concurrently with c E S but isn't officially part of c E S. That's something that we frequently see at CES as well, companies holding their own little events, sometimes just adjacent to where ce S is happening. Uh, that's not unusual. It's one way for companies to try and stand out from all the

other news that's coming out. So we'll cover more of that next week. Now, longtime Tech stuff listeners know that I advocate for critical thinking, and this next story is an illustration of why that's important. A software engineer named Mario Fusco blew the lid off of a really dumb conspiracy theory involving a diagram of an electric circuit. Now, according to this diagram, the actual lagabel on the diagram the circuit was a quote COVID nineteen five g chip

end quote. So the suggestion was that this was some sort of nano chip microprocessor that is somehow housed within a dose of COVID nineteen vaccine, so that if you were to go and get the vaccinated against COVID nineteen, you would be injected with a substance that would include this microchip, and somehow this microchip would directly interface with your brain, with your nervous system, and it would allow

somebody else to control you. And I don't think I really need to say this to you guys, but that is impossible and it's dumb. There is no means for this to magically integrate with anyone's nervous system. There's no conspiracy to control people through vaccines, and likewise, five gen networks have nothing to do with controlling you other than the fact that it's a communications network which allows for

the transfer of data. So if you do want to get super lucy goosey, you could talk about how such a network can facilitate the ability for companies to keep track of what we're doing when we do it. But in that case, no one's controlling us. We are voluntarily giving up information about who we are and what we do and what we're interested in. We do that just by carrying our phones wherever we go. That's us being complicit. There's no need for this kind of conspiracy for folks

to get a look at what we're doing. Moreover, the FUSCO pointed out that the circuit that was in that picture, it was a real circuit, wasn't a COVID nineteen five g chyp No. That circuit was a drawing of circuit found in the boss metal zone empty two guitar pedal.

So this is a guitar effects pedal, one that you would plug into an amplifier in your in your power chain, so that when you're playing guitar you can really have all these different effects on it, in this case metal effect, So you wouldn't be able to control people, but you might be able to shred on guitar. Moving on, but sticking with phones for a bit, we're gonna talk about Verizon deciding to hold off on shutting down its three

G networks. The Verizon first started rolling out four G LTE service way back in two thousand twelve, but it continued to support legacy cellular networks in the three G range because there were a lot of people who had three G phones that would not be compatible with four G. The company had previously announced plans to shut down those three G networks by the end of twenty nineteen, but then Verizon pushed that back to twenty twenty, and now the company says it's holding off on any plans to

shut down the three G network, probably out of a concern that a lot of the company's customers are still relying on older three G devices that again are not

compatible with later generations of cellular networks. Verizon stopped activating new three G devices on their network way back in eighteen and an effort to kind of sunset the technology, but there must still be a significant number of customers that are on three G handsets, Otherwise Verizon wouldn't delay shutting down the network because it costs money to maintain these networks, and that means that Verizon wants to shut it down if there's no reason to keep it going,

then you can consolidate and save cash not having to maintain these older pieces of technology. It's really likely that Verizon is going to spend much of its marketing budget on convincing customers to upgrade two more current handsets this year. Maybe we'll see some interesting deals in order to create an incentive for customers to move from one hand set to another. That might be the case because Verizon stands to save a lot of money by shutting down that

that old network. Speaking of data and networks, Comcast, the mega corporation that is, among other things, and internet service provider, has come under fire from politicians in Massachusetts. Back in mass again, uh, the company has recently extended their one point to terabyte data cap to customers in Massachusetts. The company has similarly done this to customers and lots of other states, including the one I live in. That data cap has been a thing for a long time here

in Georgia. And if you go over this data cap, if you consume more than one point to terabytes of data in a month, you face overage fees. And the politicians in Massachusetts objected to that. They said that in a pandemic where you've got people working from home, it is far more common for folks to exceed that data cap.

And considering the difficult financial situation a lot of people are finding themselves in, you know, people have lower incomes, are already struggling to be able to meet the cost of broadband. This is the worse time to have that kind of policy in place. And the politicians further argued that according to Comcast executives themselves, the company had no trouble meeting the increased demands of service during the pandemic. So they said, you've already argued that the data cap

is not necessary. If there's a greater demand and you're meeting it, then why is the data cap there. Is it just there to demand more money? And if so, that's not super cool. So Comcast is currently on the defensive in Massachusetts. We'll have to see how that shakes out. I don't expect my own data cap to go anywhere anytime soon. And to round out this bit of news, Vota Phone has a subsidiary in Italy called Ho Mobile,

and it confirmed. Ho Mobile confirmed that it was the target of a severe data breach that compromised the consumer data and the company is now offer to swap out the SIM cards in the phones of all those who are affected by the data breach, and that would be two point five million handsets. According to zd net, people first begin to learn about this breach in late They didn't notice it by looking at the data centers for

Home Mobile. No one at Home Mobile, as far as I can tell, was aware that this was going on. The thing that tipped people off was that someone noticed that the company's internal data was up for sale on the dark web. Yikes. Well, we have a few more news stories that we want to close out this day with,

but first let's take another quick break. We're back, and our first story is that David Recording, best known for his work in open source and open Eye d Technologies, will be the White House Director of Technology under President elect Joe Biden's administration, and Recorded is wicked smart. He received an award for his work and open source and became the youngest recipient of that award in that awards history,

and he has led many initiatives over the years. Open Source, for those who do not know, is a philosophy of design where the source code for whatever it is you're building is open for other people to see. They can take it, they can manipulate it, they can make their own versions of it, they can help add to it, they can help improve it and test it. The idea being that if you have an open source project, then

the entire world can be your collaborator. And this is a different philosophy from the way a lot of companies developed their software because with a lot of companies they go a proprietary approach is by nature a closed garden. They don't want their competitors seeing what they're doing. But that means that those projects can only be as good as the people who have been hired by that company, whereas an open source project has the benefit of being

open to everybody. I'm oversimplifying. There are different types of open source, but the idea being that with this approach, you're getting the best ideas no matter where they happen to be. You don't have to worry about having the smartest person in the room. You have the smartest people in the world who can all potentially contribute anyway. Recording worked extensively with Facebook on open source initiatives. There he

was a software engineer with Facebook. He has also served as an advisor and technical officer in various government positions. Before I recommend checking out one of his talks. There are a lot of them on YouTube, but be warned if you're not, you know, fair really well versed in open source technology in general, a lot of it might go right over your head. I mean it went right over my head. And I've written and talked about this stuff a lot, but Recording is the real deal when

it comes to expertise in this area. And he has said that the United States and the world face enormous challenges from the pandemic to cybersecurity threats and beyond, but that he has confidence in our ability to rise and meet those challenges, which is just nice to hear, and

I sure hope it's true. Sticking with Facebook, back in fourteen, Facebook made a nineteen billion dollar acquisition when it bought the messaging service What's App, and that was a shock to a lot of Americans, including myself, because a lot of us were unfamiliar with What's App has a huge user base outside of the United States, but had a relatively small reach inside the US well. Recently, Facebook update did the privacy policy on WhatsApp, and that has raised

some eyebrows in the tech community. The new policy takes effect on February eight one, and it gives the app permission to share user information from within the app to Facebook. That includes stuff like information about the device that was used to access the app, so in other words, your phone, uh the IP address, service related information, interaction information, and more. WhatsApp users will not be given the choice on whether or not to accept those terms because it's all mandatory.

If you plan to keep using WhatsApp, you have to just accept the fact that this is going to happen. The only way for it to not happen is for you to not use WhatsApp. Facebook says it plans to use the information to improve user experience, but I expect we'll see people raise privacy concerns in response to this move.

Let's move on to space. NASA has a proved the preliminary design for the sphere X space telescope, which will be a satellite telescope that aims to study cosmic stuff like the origins of galaxies than the Big Bang itself. The space telescope will weigh one point two tons, but um only here on Earth, because in space it will

be in you know, microgravity, so that's different. It will analyze light in the near infrared spectrum and will be capable of detecting the different frequencies within that spectrum, which in turn will tell very smart scientists more about what stuff out in space is actually made out of. One thing the scientists are going to be looking for is evidence of inflation. Now, that's not the inflation we deal

with in our currency. In this case, inflation is talking about an instant, a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a second, like a billionth of a billionth of a second, when space itself experienced exponential expansion. Imagine that you've got a golf ball and before you can even blink, that golf ball turns into a ball the size of Yankee Stadium. That's the sort of thing we're talking about. But even that scale doesn't even come close

to what happened in inflation. Now, there is broad acceptance that cosmic inflation was part of how our universe came to be, But there's a lot that we don't actually know about cosmic inflation or why it happened or why it stopped happening, or if it happened, we think it did, but we need to learn more. So this telescope could help us learn more about the fundamental laws that govern the creation of our universe, which is pretty darn nifty.

And it also reminds me that, barring any more delays, we should also see the James web Space Telescope finally launched into orbit in October this year. I sure hope that happens. Heck, I've got a tattoo because of the James Webb Space Telescope. In fact, there's a video of me talking about the James Webb Telescope while I got the tattoo, and it's over on the Forward Thinking YouTube channel, so you can search for that if you want to see me getting tattooed on video while I talk about telescopes.

Slightly related to space travel is supersonic travel. Supersonic aircraft are those that, by definition, fly faster than the speed of sound. As such, they create a sonic boom that travels with them as they move. At those speeds, the aircraft builds up shock waves as it travels faster than sound, and these waves call cause a build up and then a release of pressure air pressure which then causes that boom, and the Concorde was an example of one of these.

It was a supersonic aircraft, but the Concorde has long been out of service. It turned out that it was not economically viable in the long run. But now the f a A, the Federal Aviation Administration, has set new rules to allow companies to test supersonic aircraft in the United States, and numerous companies, including startups, are looking to bring them back to the skies. Supersonic travel can cover

great distances in relatively very little time. For example, a Concorde aircraft made the flight from London to New York in less than three hours back in ninet. That's a trip that usually takes between seven to eight hours or

sometimes longer, depending upon conditions. So companies have been designing aircraft to do supersonic travel and bring it back for a while, and they've focused on ways to minimize the effects of sonic booms, which is an important consideration because that effect is disruptive and it tends to lead to restrictions regarding where such aircraft are allowed to go supersonic, like typically you're only allowed to do it over the oceans because otherwise you're going to be causing a boom

that travels with you. So if you fly over communities, everyone here's the boom. Now, perhaps in a few years will have new airlines with supersonic service offered to various locations. I don't know where we're going in the future, but we're going to get there faster. And finally, video game analyst Dr Circon Toto predicts that at some point Nintendo will introduce a new, souped up version of the Switch

console capable of pushing out four K resolution video. Dr Toto had previously predicted Nintendo would launch such a console in twenty but that did not happen, though perhaps the pandemic had something to do with that. Dr Toto guesses that such a console would have a three dollar price point. Now, again, that's all conjecture, everything from Nintendo actually doing it to the price would be if Nintendo does it. Nintendo hasn't

said anything about any of this. Now. I suspect that if the company does have such a console planned, we're not going to hear anything official until probably spring or maybe early summer, because that's the time of year when video game companies in general start to ramp up and start to market heavily their new products in preparation for the following holiday seasons, to get people excited and to start the process for people to think ahead about, Oh, I'm going to get that for so and so for

the holidays. The Switch continues to perform well in the market. Nintendo has sold more than sixty eight million units around the world as of November of and it can still be hard to find them in stock, So maybe don't hold your breath for a Switch pro. Even if Nintendo does follow through, it might be really, really hard to get hold of one. And that wraps up this news round up for Thursday, January seven, twenty one. Tomorrow we

will have a classic episode of tech Stuff. Join us next week for more tech Stuff episodes, tech Stuff news episodes, and more me because he can't get enough Kenya, but don't worry, I'll talk to you again really soon. Y 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,