Tech News: Twitter Refuses to Hand Over Data to US Government

so and I've tested negative for COVID, thank goodness. So it looks like it was, you know, just a like a little bug that I caught, and I'm on the better side of it. Now, let's get too news that you really care about and not just me grousing about

feeling nikky, okay. According to Rolling Stone magazine, the committee that's investigating the January sixth insurrection here in the United States wants to get access to internal Twitter communications, including messages sent on Slack between Twitter employees, in an effort to determine what Twitter was doing to moderate discourse on the platform as it was leading up to the violence

that happened on January six. Twitter so far has refused to comply with that request, at least to the Investigating Committee's satisfaction. Anyway. Twitter representatives say that the company has

already shared some information with this committee. There's been a growing awareness that employees at several social networking sites were aware of and concerned about the growing momentum that was indicating that something was going to go down on January six, So presumably the Investigative Committee wants to see to what extent Twitter employees were concerned and what the company's response

to those concerns were like. Was the company dismissing this because they didn't want to rock the boat or anything like that. Uh committee also suspects that participants in the insurrection we're using Twitter to coordinate with one another, and that perhaps the platform was then a facilitator for the events, although not necessarily an active or willing participant, but you know, it helped enable that, and that perhaps it could have and should have done more to alert authorities about specific

plans of action. Twitter has argued that it has a responsibility to protect its employees and that the government demanding access to internal documents could be a violation of the First Amendment. For those of you who are not in the United States. The first Amendment to the U. S Constitution is the one that guarantees the right of freedom

of speech, as well as freedom assembly, and religion. In related news, the U S State of Connecticut has budgeted to create a special position dedicated to fighting back against quote misinformation narratives about voting end quote. So the job title is Election Information Security Officer, and the budget also includes money that is dedicated to educating various communication platforms, both in old media and new media, on how to

recognize and respond to misinformation campaigns, specifically targeting elections. Other states in the US have similar departments like this in place. Already. Misinformation has become a massive problem in general in the United States UH, and elections, of course, are particularly targeted. It's not exclusive, though, We've seen misinformation campaigns about COVID and vaccinations, for example. On a personal note, I wouldn't even know how or where to start in order to

fight back against misinformation. It's so prevalent and so invasive, and it involves so many different tactics. I hope that the efforts in Connecticut and elsewhere are effective. I want to see UH platforms that have trustworthy information on them and people who know that the election process is being done fair and square and not being you know, fed lies that. That's just otherwise, because once you start undermining

confidence in the system, the system itself breaks down. That's how democracy dies, Really, democracy dies when the people no longer have faith that the system is doing what it's supposed to. Uh, it doesn't even you know, it doesn't have to be real. Like the system can be working just fine, but if people lose faith in it, and it doesn't matter if the system is working or not, the lack of confidence of the people is what will

kill democracy. Sticking with the United States, a collaborative effort involving the FBI, the I R S, and the Department of Justice took down four domains on the web that hosted a marketplace called ss N d o B. That marketplace was essentially a clearing house of stolen personal information,

including social security numbers and credit card number. The social security numbers explains the s s in bit of the name s s in d o B. The database held information on more than twenty million Americans, and it's been active for several years, perhaps getting started as early as though, as you might have guessed, folks who run illegal operations

aren't super big on documenting their history of it. The market was known to have pulled in millions of dollars in revenue, a lot of it in cryptocurrency, and I haven't seen any information about whether law enforcement has identified the folks who are actually behind the database, So I'm not sure how this will go beyond just shutting down

the service. Presumably you would have to go further, or else those who are responsible might just create a new database on another domain and thus only experience a short interruption of services. So I'll keep an eye on this story as it develops. Business Insider reports that Netflix might

be making a move to acquire Roku. While Roku was one of the early companies in the streaming business and has a big reputation in creating really good hardware for streaming, like streaming sticks and such, it has been in a slump lately. About a year ago, the stock price for Roku was higher than what it is today, So that's a massive slide obviously, and Business Insiders says that Roku employees have been told that they are not allowed to

sell their stock right now. Companies typically will do this when something big is happening behind the scenes. It's usually an effort to prevent employees from engaging and stuff like insider trading. That's when you take advantage of information about a publicly traded company that the general public doesn't have

access to. Right So, if you know, for example, that company A is going to buy a company B, and that hasn't been announced to the general public, it would be illegal for you to try and use that information to your advantage because it's an unfair advantage. It sinside or trading. Anyway, If you're wondering what, you know, why does Netflix want Roku in the first place, one big thought is that it isn't so much the hardware side.

I mean, Roku does make great streaming platforms, but we're seeing more and more televisions come with that kind of stuff you know, uh natively installed in them. So as time goes on, things like streaming sticks become less relevant. It maybe the Netflix really wants Roku because Roku has advertising on it. So Earlier this year, Netflix announced that it was looking into new revenue sources after the company

had its first big setback. It had a decrease in the overall subscriber number and then investor confidence in the company just took a nose dive. With that it took was one setback and people were out. So one of the revenue sources that Netflix has been looking at is advertising, namely that Netflix would introduce a lower cost subscription tier, and that that subscription would be subsidized by including ads

in the streamed content. Roku already has an advertising model built out, and in fact, the ads contribute significantly more revenue than hardware sales have, so this might be a case of Netflix purchasing a solution to save itself the trouble of building out one of its own. Now, to be clear, neither Netflix nor Roku have commented on this rumored deal, so it may not even be a thing.

An ongoing trend we've been seeing around the world is a move to transition from internal combustion engine vehicles or i c E vehicles to electric vehicles or e vs. The EU Parliament yesterday voted to require automakers to cut c O two emissions by by now. Effectively that means

banning the manufacturing of any vehicle running on gasoline or diesel. Now, this is not the same as saying that I see vehicles would be illegal, but rather that all vehicles made from twive on should not be vehicles that emit CEO two. This move has to still be approved by the individual EU nations, so it's not a done deal yet. There has been some resistance to this push, with Germany's automotive industry lobby v d A arguing that the mandate would

quote unquote hurt innovation. Hurt innovation to me typically is is like a smoke screen. I see a lot of companies talk about things hurting innovation, which usually just means this will hurt our revenue and not necessarily it will hurt innovation. In fact, a lot of times you could argue that the status quo is what is hurting innovation. That's some commentary from yours, truly, I'll just get back

to the news now. And it might be that German automakers are really objecting to this largely because they have not been as a gre se in developing alternatives to ice vehicles as automakers from other parts of the world, so in other words, they're behind when it comes to this, and that perhaps that might be part of the reason

for the objection. The v d A also argued that the EU lacks sufficient infrastructure to support fleets of e vs. Now, again, to me, that sounds kind of like a cop out, because we are talking about the timeline that's more than a decade out from today. You know, we have thirteen years to to get this sussed out. Now, what I will say is that as it stands, the world is not yet producing enough EV batteries to meet the needs of replacing all new vehicles with e V. S uh.

That's a challenge that we're going to have to overcome or we'll need to see some serious movement on other types of vehicles, such as hydrogen powered ones, you know, fuel cell vehicles, that sort of thing. But that's where it stands right now. The EU nations are now poised to determine whether or not they will adopt this approach to ban the sale of new I C E vehicles starting by when we come back, we'll have a few stories about Tesla and then a couple of others as well,

So let's take a break for these messages. Earlier this week I did an Elon update. Now I'm not gonna do another one, but I do have a few stories that do relate to Tesla, which of course does relate to Elon Musk. First up is that Reuter's reports Tesla will be holding a hiring event in China. Now, if you remember, on Tuesday's episode, I talked about how Elon Musk indicated there would be a hiring freeze at Tesla.

He then subsequently clarified that he really meant hiring freeze on the salaried employee or corporate side, not on the hourly employee side, which usually means folks who work in manufact training plants, like you know, floor workers at factories. Reuters states that this hiring event will concentrate mainly on engineers and managers, so it certainly sounds like salary jobs

to me, but I don't know anyway. Just interesting to see that while Elon Musk is saying that the company is putting a freeze, uh, it doesn't appear to really

be that, at least not globally. Meanwhile, in Germany, the trade union i G Metal has responded to a leaked internal email from Elon Musk that essentially told all Tesla employees would have to work in the office for at least forty hours a week before they could do any remote work at all, Like he essentially said, if you want to work from home, you can after you put in forty hours of work at the office. So this union has said, essentially, and I'm paraphrasing here, hey buddy,

here in Germany, it doesn't work that way. An employer can't just you know, act like a dictator to their employees. So Musk has been pretty clearly anti union over the years. I imagine this is not something he wants to hear. And considering that numerous studies have suggested that there's no drop in productivity with remote work situations, I feel pretty confident that a lot of Tesla employees see his demands

as being unreasonable. Now, there are people who believe that the whole thing is kind of a work in the parlance of the squared circle, that is, of professional wrestling uh, and that Musk's approach is really just an effort to convince at least some people at Tesla to pack their bags and leave, because that's one way you can reduce overhead without having to worry about paying out severance packages. If people quit, then you don't know him severance. That

pretty cynical observation doesn't necessarily mean it's inaccurate. I can't say one way or the other. And meanwhile, here in the United States, Tesla's legal team has accused the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing or d f e H, of skipping some key steps before that organization filed a lawsuit against Tesla alleging racial bias and discrimination within the company,

specifically within the Fremont, California factory. So this all stems from accusations that a former Tesla employee faced numerous incidents of racial abuse while working at Tesla, and the d f e H sued Tesla, But Tesla's legal team says that the d f e H failed to take some required steps that would normally include an attempt to mediate a dispute before it would actually go to court. The Tesla team then filed a petition with the Office of

Administrative Law in California over the matter. And while it seems as though Tesla's objections have at least some merit, because the d f e H is supposed to follow certain protocols that it appears to have skipped, UH, it might end up all being moot anyway, because technically the legal team would have needed to file this petition before the legal case began, So in other words, it might just be too late for this to matter. We'll have to wait and see. Blizzard has been having a pretty

rough go of it recently. It's part of the massive company Activision Blizzard, which itself is mired in controversy, ranging from claims that the company harbored a toxic culture, claims that I should say I seem to be largely substantiated, to the company's attempts to discourage employees from being able to organize into unions. But the problems I really want to talk about with regard to Blizzard have to do with the actual games that the company is releasing and

the response to those games. The games have been getting pounded by user ratings on Metacritic. So the most recent game, dia Blow Immortal, is a mobile game, and it's obviously an entry in the dia Blow franchise, a long popular franchise. That game currently has a user rating on Metacritic of just zero point five out of ten. Now, to be clear, the critic review score, at least for the iOS version, is sitting at seventy five out of one hundred, so

not great, but not awful either. However, that user score of zero point five that is harsh as all. Heck, so why are the reviews so low? Well, it really comes down to micro transactions, and we've seen micro transactions worm into lots of different games over the last several years. They represent a way for a game to continue generating revenue indefinitely. You can even have free to play games that are only supported by micro transactions, but we've seen

more and more. Even Triple A titles include micro transaction. So you go out and you shell out, you know, sixties seventy bucks for a game, and then you are faced with all these other micro transactions as you continue to play. Some games like Fortnite have thrived on micro transactions and have done really well, and when they're implemented properly, they typically can be seen as you know, harmless, maybe a little irritating, but you know, not not really a problem.

For example, when all the things that you can buy are purely cosmetic, but otherwise they have no impact in how the game plays out, most gamers are gonna begrudgingly accept that because at least it's not impacting the actual game experience. But in cases where the micro transactions can

give players an advantage. Things get pretty ugly, and it appears that in the end game, really post game part of Diablo Immortal, where you've pretty much done all the content of the game and then you start to focus on things like player versus player interactions, the person who is more willing to cough up cash for certain items is the one who is most likely to win those encounters. It becomes a pay to win scenario in other words, and gamers really really hate that. So the zero point

five score reflects this. Now, I should also point out Metacritic doesn't have a system in place to determine if a person is leaving a review has even actually played the game, so it's entirely possible that some or maybe even many of the negative reviews are from disgruntled gamers who haven't even touched the title anyway. This is the third Blizzard game in a row to receive a sub

one point oh score from users on Metacritic. It's not a great reputation to have, and again, it mostly doesn't seem to be targeted at the quality of the game itself, but more due to other things like micro transaction policies. You know that feeling that you get when something you own, like a car, gets scuffed up for the first time. I imagine that's how some folks at NASA feel about

the James Webb Space Telescope. The telescope, which occupies an orbit on the side of the Earth opposite the Sun, has been hit with some micro meteoroids, and that was to be expected. I mean, it's space. Micro Meteoroids are out there. It was going to happen. In fact, NASA knew that it would happen, designed the James Webb Space Telescope to be robust enough to handle that. But one of those impacts appears to be larger than what NASA

was anticipating. Uh. Now that that impact hasn't ruined the technology of the telescope or anything like that, but these impacts do degrade the telescope's performance, and so the more it gets hit by them, the less well it will perform. NASA stresses that right now it's not that big of a deal. The telescope is still an incredibly powerful piece

of technology. It's going to do some amazing science. However, it is a reminder that space is a dangerous environment, and as I've said many times, in the past, it's trying to kill you. NASA has also indicated that during more predictable events, such as a meteor shower, engineers can actually reposition the telescope so that it can be more protective of its optical systems. It's just that in this case,

this collision wasn't predictable, so it was unavoidable. Um, so hopefully we don't see too many of these, especially early on. I mean, we've just started using the James Webb Space Telescope. It hasn't even really gotten into some serious serious research yet, so we definitely don't want to, you know, pull the car out of the dealership lot, take a right turn, and then immediately scrape up against a fire hydrant. That's what this kind of feels like. Okay, that bizarre analogy aside.

Let's take another quick break and when we come back, we've got a couple more stories. I want to talk about. Toyota and it's subsidiary company, Woven Planet, demonstrated a prototype hydrogen cartridge that could be used in conjunction with fuel cells in the future. So this kind of goes back to what I was saying earlier about electric vehicles. You know, that seems to be the way that the world is moving, that that's going to be the next incarnation of the

personal vehicle will be an electric vehicle. But some companies like Toyota have been pushing really hard for a while for fuel cell vehicles, which are very similar to electric vehicles but with some key differences, the main one being that you do have to refuel them, but in this

case hydrogen rather than say gasoline or diesel. So this cartridge is uh cylindrical, and it has a handle on one end, and it measures sixteen inches or four d millimeters in length and seven inches or a hundred eighty millimeters in diameter, and when it's full, it's filled with hydrogen. The cartridge weighs about eleven pounds or five kilograms, and the amount of hydrogen in one of these cartridges can supply about three point three kill what hours of energy.

The cartridges are one way to really simplify the process of refueling fuel cells. So just in case you're not familiar with how fuel cells work, they are kind of like batteries that a battery contains all the electrochemical components it needs to generate electricity, and then a lot of you know, the rechargeable ones, you just end up putting electricity back into the battery and it reverses that that

chemical reaction so that it can happen again. So with fuel cells, you have to supply the fuel to the cell. The fuel undergoes this electro chemical reaction and in that process releases electrons, but afterwards you can't reverse that process, at least not within the fuel cell itself. So with hydrogen fuel cells, this reaction happens between hydrogen gas and oxygen. So I won't go into all the details of how it works, but what you get out of it is heat, electricity,

and water. Those are your byproducts. You know, water vapor typically because you're using operating temperatures that are high enough to evaporate water. But that's it. You don't have any carbon emissions or anything else. If you're assuming you're using pure hydrogen and pure oxygen in a you know, hydrogen

fuel cell. So this cartridge approach reminds me kind of the way propane tanks work, where you can, you know, get a propane tank for something like a gas grill, So you go out and purchase a new propane tank, or you could take a propane tank to a facility to refill it with more propane. I feel like that's

kind of where Toyota and Woven Planet are going. They're also looking at a strategy that could include a delivery service as well, so presumably you could order a new cartridge when you start running low on hydrogen and they would bring it out to you, which is kind of a cool idea too. Toyota envisions hydrogen playing a huge role in our energy needs in the future, not just for our vehicles, but the power of things like homes and businesses as well. There's still a lot of challenges

that are standing in the way of that future. Hydrogen is the most plentiful element in our universe, which is great, but it also tends to bond with lots of other elements, which is less great because in order for us to get at pure hydrogen, we typically first have to break the molecular bonds that hold the hydrogen onto the other stuff. And if the energy we're spending to get at the hydrogen is more than what we're going to get out of using the hydrogen as a fuel source, that's a

net loss and energy. So you have to be really smart in the way you do this. For example, one way that you can get hydrogen is you can take water and you can run a an electrical current through the water, and that electrical current will break down the molecular bond between hydrogen and oxygen and it will release both as gases. So it's essentially the opposite approach as

to what a fuel cell does. And instead of releasing electricity, it absorbs electricity in order for this to happen, and you have to have a smart way of doing that or else the question is, well, you know, why are we throwing in these extra stops. For example, if we were using solar energy to create the electrical current in order to generate hydrogen from water, someone might ask, well, why aren't we just using the electricity from the solar

power directly? Why are we doing this middleman approach where we're trying to generate hydrogen out of all this, And that's a question you have to be able to answer. You have to be able to say, all right, in the long run, this makes more sense from an economy standpoint, And by economy I don't just mean by financial cost but energy economy. These are those those kind of questions that if you're able to answer them sufficiently, then you can actually pursue this sort of future. Toyota has really

been all in on this for years. I used to do a show that was sponsored by Toyota, and fuel cell vehicles was one of the really big pushes back then, and that was almost a decade ago. So, um, it's still not really I mean, there are a few of sell vehicles out there, it's not like it's just in the pro type stage. There actually are fuel cell vehicles out on the road, but it's not nearly as commonplace as I think Toyota was hoping for by this time.

We'll have to see. I think steps like this are important toward getting to a hydrogen based UH energy economy, but I don't know yet that that is definitely where we're gonna go. It seems to me like the electric vehicle approach UH and and relying more on renewable energy sources, perhaps relying on fusion, if we can get that to work out. Um, that appears to be the path that

we're taking right now, but who's to say. Finally, Google Maps now has an air quality layer overlay that you can use in the Android and iOS versions of the app. This is really useful if you live in a place where air quality can be dangerous, particularly for people who might have issues like ab SMA or other respiratory problems. So this map will show you what areas within your region have the cleanest air. And they determine this by using numerous sensors that use lasers to measure the amount

of particulates in the atmosphere. Essentially, they're shining lasers out into the environment and then counting how many particulates passed through the pathway of that laser. So lower numbers are better because lower numbers indicate fewer particulates. So I decided to check it out on my phone to look at my area. The closest sensor to where I live here in Atlanta was at twenty three, which is in the

good range. There was another one a little bit further out, closer to the middle of the city that was around forty. That's still in the good range. The zero to fifty is good, fifty range is moderate. There was one spot in the Atlanta area I saw that was at moderate, and above that you started getting into more dangerous territory. With the air quality index on the app, maxing out at four hundred. Actually looked at Los Angeles, which has

lots of these sensors, not a big surprise. The state of California has taken a pretty aggressive stance and trying to improve air quality in that state. So l A has lots of sensors, a lot more densely packed sensors than I found in Atlanta, and and even in l A, I only found a couple of areas where the numbers were up in the above one hundred range, which is where you start to get into um areas that it could be potentially dangerous for those who have respiratory issues. Anyway,

it's pretty cool. If you have Google Maps on an Android or iOS device, I suggested check it out. It's just one of the little layers you can choose and you can kind of see what the air quality is like around where you live, assuming that you know they have some sensors deployed in that area. That's it for this Tech News episode of tech Stuff. Hope you enjoyed it. If you have any suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes or anything else you want to shout

out to me, let me know best way of doing that. Well, there are a couple of ways, really. One is you can use the i heart Radio apps read to download. You can just go straight to the tech Stuff podcast page within that app and use the talk back feature. It's a little microphone icon you click on that leave a message up to thirty seconds in length and I'll hear it, or you can let me know on Twitter. The handle for the show is text stuff h s W and I'll talk to you again really soon Y.

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