Tech News: Twitter Shareholders Vote on Acquisition Today

currently trying to back out of. And you might be surprised to learn that this vote has not yet happened, and that technically shareholders could reject the deal on the face of it and then this whole thing just goes away. But that is not likely to happen because Musk's agreed upon deal means he would pay fifty four dollars twenty cents a share, and that's pretty darn good for shareholders

right now. The closing price for Twitter from yesterday was forty one cents, so twenty is a step up there, right. You would get more than ten dollars per share over the current going price for shares. That's a pretty nice way to cash out of an investment. Anyway, Early indicators suggest that investors are likely to approve the deal by a comfortable wide margin, so this matter would then continue

unabated towards being decided in court. As must argues that the deal has been altered, while Twitter says prey, I do not alter it. Further attention mac os and iOS device owners, at least for you know, relatively current devices. H Apple has pushed out a security update to patch a zero day vulnerability. This is the eighth time this year that Apple has UH patched such a vulnerability, a different one in each case, not like it was the same one, but it's happened eight times this year. More.

Apple says this particular vulnerability might have already been actively exploited in various places, and that the vulnerability allows apps that to contain specific malicious code that will allow hackers to quote execute arbitrary code with kernel privileges end quote. That's a pretty severe security vulnerability, so it's a good

idea to update your devices. The company has not elaborated on the scope or severity of these UH supposed attacks, but kernel level access is serious business, and like I said, it's the eighth time this year that Apple has had to address a vulnerability like this. That just goes to show how different the world is from when I was a kid, because back when I was a kid, Apple computers were thought to be essentially malware proof, that the design of Apple was just superior to DOSS and later

to Windows based PCs. Though some would argue that Apple was mostly enjoying security through obscurity, which just means that because Apple had a smaller slice of market share, the people who are making malware would focus instead on DOS and Windows machines because that's where most of the targets were. You don't spend a ton of time to attack a very small population if you can make a lot more

impact with a bigger one. Anyway, it's actually a good reminder that no system out there is bulletproof and that keeping up to date with security patches is a good idea.

So update those devices. Yesterday morning, Blue Origin, the private space company that Amazon's Jeff Bezos co founded, had a bit of a whoopsie, And by that I mean there was a booster failure in the Blue Origin launch vehicle, which was carrying an unmanned crew capsule up in a flight out in order to deliver some payloads to outer space, and this failure prompt did the launch vehicle to engage

the capsule escape system. As that name says. This system separates the capsule from the launch vehicle in the event of a failure, so that these two spacecraft can get as much distance as possible between them to best protect the capsule and potentially the folks who might be inside such a capsule. This one, again didn't have any one in it. The capsule performed just as it was supposed to. It parachuted safely to the ground, so that whole system

worked as intended. That's actually great news, Like you want that to happen if you have this kind of mishap. So yeah, these capsule escape systems are the kind of things you never want to need to use, but you sure as heck wanted to be there and to be reliable if that need should arise. The launch vehicle crashed back down to Earth, but reportedly caused no property damage or injuries. It crashed within the designated hazard aarry. Uh, so that too happened as it was supposed to in

the event of a mishap. You know that the mishap was not something that they were hoping for, obviously, but everything happened the way it's supposed to end those events. However, now the US Federal Aviation Administration or f a A must do a compulsory investigation into the incident to determine what, if any effect there was on public safety. And this is standard operating procedure in the wake of an incident like this, So this isn't like the f a A

coming down hard on Blue Origin. Now, assuming the f a A finds no negative impacts to public safety, Blue Origin will then be cleared to pursue future flights. Until then, things are on hold. There were some losses that we should mention, however. The spacecraft was carrying multiple payloads for various scientific research projects, including several from elementary and high school students and a couple from NASA. I'm not sure

where all these payloads were located. Did Some of them may have been in the capsule and they could be safe and perhaps even reused for a future launch. I don't know, but at least two of them were attached to the exterior of the booster, and presumably those are shot at this point. This is a good reminder that space is hard y'all. I mean, there's a reason we refer to stuff as it ain't rocket science when we're talking about degrees of difficulty, because rocket science is right

up there with brain surgery. The Wall Street Journal reports that research documents from inside Meta indicate that the company's push to mimic TikTok have not met with much success. So while back Meta introduced reels on Instagram, and these are short form videos and are a pretty obvious attempt to imitate TikTok's format. And it's no secret that Meta viewsed TikTok as the competition, particularly when it comes to attracting younger users. Now, when faced with resistance, Meta typically

does one of two things. It will either buy up whatever company was competing with it for user attention. This is actually what happened with Instagram back in the day. Meta back then just Facebook purchased Instagram, partly because Instagram was succeeding in gaining user eyeballs, which meant that fewer people were looking at Facebook. So then Facebook bought Instagram.

The other thing it will try to do if it can't buy its competition is it will try to make its own version of whatever is pulling people's eyeballs away from meta platforms like Facebook or the aforementioned Instagram, and I think pretty much everyone sees right through these efforts. I don't think anyone is fooled by this, but it looks like, despite Meta's push of the reels project, the short video format is not taking off on meta platforms.

The documents indicate that a lot of these reels videos lack any significant engagement, and that people were spending one tenth the amount of time looking at and engaging with reels as the typical TikTok user spends on TikTok one tenth the time, and also that influencers haven't really embraced reels to the extent that Meta was hoping and you know,

needing for it to make an impact. Plus, Meta has been integrating reels into both Instagram and Facebook more intrusively in an effort to kind of force the format to take hold, and users have not reacted positively. A lot of people have complained that reels are taking up too much of their feeds, both on Instagram and on Facebook. And finally, a ton of the stuff posted on reels obviously was created for other platforms first then ported over to Reels, which is prompting some users to just go

to the source of the original video, most frequently TikTok. Anyway, Meta is clearly aware of all this, as the documents show. Representatives claimed that the information that the Wall Street Journal reported on is out of date and that reels is doing quite well, thank you very much. In any way, even if it's not doing well, it's it's doing better and it's getting better all the time. So thank you for your interest. But we're fine here, We're all fine.

I might be paraphrasing and editorializing more than just a little with my interpretation of the response to this report, but it will be interesting to see how that adjusts its strategy at all going forward regarding Reels and the threat of TikTok. Meta has also spun off its pie Torch project into a new organization called the pie Torch Foundation, which will operate independently of Meta itself and as part of the nonprofit Lennox Foundation. So you might wonder what

the heck is pie Torch. Well, the name comes from the programming language Python and languages Torch library. That library is mostly focused on machine learning processes and to get into all of this would get really technical and just full disclosure, I would need to read up on a lot of stuff just to have a decent grasp about it so that I could communicate it properly. So I'm just gonna go super high level in this news item

in an effort not to present misinformation. But high Torch serves as a kind of scaffolding for machine learning projects, and it frees up engineers and computer scientists to focus on specific implementations rather than having to reinvent the basic

tools of machine learning for every application. I think of it kind of as similar to creating a game engine that can serve as sort of the core uh engine of lots of different video games, each of which have very different styles of play and stories and all that kind of thing. And there's some pretty famous product still there that make use of the PyTorch frameworks, such as Testla's autopilot system, But really it's a framework that's applicable

to all sorts of machine learning implementations. And the new governing board for PyTorch will still include reps from Meta, but it's also going to include reps from companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and in Video, among others. So the whole idea here is to create more separation between Pyetorch and Meta in order to avoid any conflicts of interest that could otherwise arise if Meta were still sort of the steward of

this project. And that all makes sense to me. I'll try to research PyTorch some more in order to do a full episode about it in the future, but that might take a while because this is seriously technical stuff, particularly for someone who does not have a background in programming. All right, we've got more stories to come, but first

let's take a quick break. We're act. Fast Company reports that a survey created by a team and mass Challenge reached out to more than five tech leaders across the space, you know, from startups to established companies, in order to get a grip on where industry leadership is headed as a whole. And it's not all great news, tech folks. It looks like a lot of those tech leaders really want to follow the examples made by companies like Apple

and push for a return to the office. Now, that's a pretty tough sell to employees who have proven that they can be productive while working remotely and who show a distinct reluctance being pushed back into office environments, pointing out lots of issues with that, including the fact that without that requirement, they can work from wherever they live and they don't have to live and say more expensive parts of the country where a company's HQ might be located,

they don't have to deal with, you know, commuting back and forth. They don't and have to deal with added budgets for meals in expensive places. Uh, And that there are a lot of benefits to it, and that the company's benefit as well. But a lot of leaders are still pushing for returning to the office. Ah. Now I should add not all the tech leaders indicated that this was their plan. It's not like eight percent we're saying

they wanted to do that. But according to the survey, the more established companies were more likely to say that they wanted to return to the office only. I mean, that's more than half, but it's not all of them obviously, But yeah, those were the companies that were more likely to say they want to go back to the office.

If you take into account all the companies across all categories like including brand new startups, the percentage drops to of tech leaders saying they want to push to return to the office, so it seems like the younger startups

are more inclined to allow for remote work. Further, the survey indicates that a lot of leaders see the economic whatever this is we're in, but it's definitely maybe not a recession, probably is likely going to help them out in this effort because with that kind of threat looming over employees heads. This, this threat of economic recession, folks might be less likely to put up a fuss about

coming back into the office. So, in other words, it's easier to coerce employees when they're scared that they could be put out of a job in a tough job market. However, the survey also found that it's not actually that tough of a job market for tech employees. Yes, the larger companies like Apple, Meta, Google, and more are cutting way back on expenses, which includes cutting back on hiring and in some cases even holding layoffs, but across the industry

as a whole, that's not necessarily the case. Many companies are actively hiring because they have experienced massive talent loss in the wake of the Great Resignation, which is still an ongoing thing. So it may be that high profile companies are scaling back, but lots of other tech companies are not, and so it may turn out that leaders who are hoping to kind of lean on the economic hard times as a way to you know, influence employees

might see that plan backfire on them. Also, you because discussing power dynamics in the workplace, particularly when it's contextualized as how bosses can exert more control on their underlings, is just playing gross. Anyway, the survey had some interesting things to say, and I recommend seeking it out to get an idea of what tech leaders are thinking. Currently.

Google has shelved its pixel Book product line. The company had a team working on the next generation of the pixel Book, which is a Chrome Os powered laptop, but now Google has dissolved that team and reassigned everyone too different projects. Google, it appears, is getting out of the

laptop business now. I am not surprised by this. Hardware is a pretty competitive field, and besides, always felt like Google was really only into hardware because it was a way to convince other hardware manufacturers to produce products that work with Google and offer laptops and other devices that run on Google's operating systems like Android and Chromos, like you know, Google was pulling out all the stops to offer sleek hardware in order to convince these companies to

join the club. And at that point, Google could then extricate itself from the hardware business and really just focus on providing the operating systems and software back end stuff. So this move does not come as a huge surprise to me, particularly in an era where Google is one of those big companies looking to cut expenses and move away from parts of the business that aren't as profitable as others. Now, that's a shame that the next pixel

Book will likely never see the light of day. I'm pretty sure it must have been pretty close to being ready for the market because they were supposed to debut next year. But I'm glad to hear that the folks working on pixel Book weren't like booted from Google and instead of going to work on other projects. A related Google story, or at least related to Google, is Loon. That's the project that had its start in Google's top secret X division, which the company uses to pursue moonshot

R and D efforts, and Loon spun off from Google. Really, you know, from Google's parents, Shell company Alphabet to become its own company, and the goal of Loon was to provide Internet connectivity via high flying balloons outfited with a sort of mesh network, and to beam that connectivity back to the ground so that really remote locations such as isolated communities in Africa, for example, would still have Internet connectivity.

These are places that are in such locations that it would be very difficult to lay out physical wire like physical cable to reach, so this was seen as a potential alternative to that. However, it ultimately didn't work out as a viable business and Loon ultimately shut down and Alphabet has then moved the assets of Loon to a startup called Aleria. So does that mean that loons balloons

are going to return. Well, According to the Verge, no, Allria is looking to solve Internet connectivity issues, but instead of using high altitude balloons, Allria is using laser beams shot through the air for real, y'all. So the concept is to have base stations and endpoints and the laser beams will carry information back and forth. So you've got your freaking laser beams carrying info. Now you might wonder what the heck does a company that's going to be

using laser beams need with loons old assets. One of the tools that the Loon project used is called space time, and not the community space time, it's a different space time. But this tool would predict where loon balloons would shift in the atmosphere in order to balance you know, loads,

network loads, so that connectivity wouldn't be compromised. So this was a very complicated predictive software model, and Aliria is looking to use that same model to help predict things like when a base station would need to hand off connectivity too, something that's in a dynamic situation, like a plane that's flying overhead and you know how to predict where that plane is going to go, or a boat

traveling through the water, that kind of stuff. That's the sort of application that this tool might be put toward in order to maintain connectivity. It's pretty nifty. Okay, We've got a few more stories to go before we get to those. Let's take another quick break. We're back now.

You may have seen some recent news about China installing a test stretch of conductor rail technology along one amounts to a little less than five miles of highway seven point eight kilometers to be more precise, and then testing mag lev cars on this lane of traffic. And you might wonder what the heck all of this is about, And a lot of it is about China taking sometimes drastically impractical approaches towards solving traffic issues. Well, anyway, let's

let's get to this specific implementation. So maglev stands for magnetic levitation in case you're not familiar, and this tech is well understood, it's not like this is breakthrough technology. They didn't build a hover car that could work on any platform. This is a specific use case where you know, we've got mag lev train systems in operation today in various parts of the world. It's not like this is,

you know, brand new. But the basic idea is that you use the physical fact that if you have two magnets and you bring the north poles of each of those magnets closer together, you'll feel them repel each other to the point where if you take your hand off one, it will get pushed away by these magnetic fields like repels like in other words, So if you have an array of magnets, whether they're permanent or electro magnet and in a track and a different array of magnets in

a vehicle, and you've arranged it so that the same poles of the magnets face one another, so the north poles face each other, for example. Then what you'll get as a vehicle that will float over the surface of the track itself because the magnetic fields are repelling one another.

Then using something like a linear motor, you can create propulsion and send this vehicle flying down the track, like literally flying in this case, or at least levitating, and that means you have reduced resistance, like you have reduced friction, so you can have a much faster moving vehicle. And um, yeah,

it's it's perfectly promulent technology. Now, normally we are talking about like a railroad track kind of thing where there's a guided track, but in this case, we're talking about lane on a highway that's acting kind of like a track, and a car that has been retrofitted with magnets. So this wasn't a car specifically built for this purpose, but rather had been retrofitted with magnets so that it could

levitate over this this lane of of highway. And there are videos of cars driving onto this stretch of road and then kind of lifting off a few inches. The liftoff isn't a very smooth motion in the videos, which is kind of scary, and they float. It looks kind of like an unsteady live in my view. I mean, I could be wrong, but the video I saw it did not look super smooth. But then they could come back down on their wheels and continue this way. And

why would you do this? Well, for one thing, with a computer controlled highway system, you could propel vehicles well beyond their normal top speeds, drastically reducing travel times. Now, you'd have to be really careful with that system so as not to accelerate a vehicle too quickly and then hurt people who are insite it. And also the stopping is really important. You can't stop them too fast because all that momentum will transfer to the passengers inside the car.

And if you're going at a top speed of like a hundred forty miles per hour and you come to a sudden stop, the people in that car will still be moving forward at a hundred forty miles per hour, and even if they're you know, safety strapped in, that's gonna hurt. Like it could be kept strophic, so all this has to be handled very carefully and in a

controlled environment. You also, like, wouldn't want a car to be traveling a hundred forty miles per hour down this maglev track and then come to the end of the track and touch down on its wheels and go from a hundred forty miles per hour to rapidly decelerating while it's on its wheels. You can easily lose control in that situation, so there are a lot of safety concerns here. Um. I don't think this is a very viable way to

transport people quickly. Um. I think you would have to have an intelligent highway system in there, and as I talked about in a recent tech Stuff episode, those are complicated and not necessarily practical. I think it makes way more sense to build out more trains rather than try to outfit highways with like floating lanes. But we'll see. Maybe I'll be proven wrong, But UM yeah, I don't. I don't see this as being a very effective way to move of people more quickly from point to point.

It's flashy, but I mean it's no back to the future too, And uh yeah, I think it. I don't know. Maybe I'll be proven wrong. I would like to be proven wrong. So here's hoping that any future developments are safe and effective. Over in the video game world, the few fans of the game Babylon's Fall have received some bad news. This title launched about half a year ago, and it's an online RPG dungeon crawling type of title, so as a persistent online factor in it, and the

game got terrible reviews when it first came out. The player population dropped pretty drastically after launch. Not very many people are actively playing it at any given time, and because it is an online game and that requires ongoing support from Square Knicks and Platinum Games, the powers that be determined that it makes very little sense to pour resources into supporting a game that has so few players

in it. So in another six months, so a year after the game launched, the game's gonna get shut down. And Babylon's Fall was another attempt at creating a games as a service title in which you make money, not just from the initial sale of the title, though I will add Babylon's Fall was a full price game. It was like sixty dollars at launch, but then also through generating revenue through ongoing in game purchases, and we've seen a lot of games attempt to do this with varying

degrees of success. Some titles, like Grand Theft Auto Online, have proven to be incredibly profitable, Others, like Babylon's Fall, The game comes out feeling like it's an incomplete game and that maybe you need to pay more money in order to access the fun bits of the game. That is not a great strategy. People object to that right the idea of oh, I bought this game, but it's only fun if I even more money. That not a

good not a good look anyway. While it seems most players either bounced off Babylon's Fall ages ago or they never picked up the title to start, the remaining players on the game are gonna have to resign themselves too soon, having an inert title in their library that they cannot play once support ends. That's one of the big downsides of having games that rely in part or in the hole on ongoing online connectivity with a publisher or a developer, because you might not be done playing the game, but

if they're done supporting it it won't matter. Then you won't really have any options. Finally, Nintendo held one of its Nintendo Direct Events this morning, and I have a few tidbits I can share because putting this episode took longer than I anticipated, and the actual Nintendo Direct event happened while I was still writing the episode, so I

can talk about some of the stuff they announced. They revealed that the next game in the Legend of Zelda series, the follow up to Breath of the Wild, finally has a title. It is going to be called The Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom, and it debuts on the Switch in May of twenty three. There's a new Pickman game coming to the Switch, Pickman four. We're getting a sequel to the game Octopath Traveler, which is a two D RPG that gamers really liked that will come

out on February. Uh. The original Octopath Traveler was set in kind of a fantasy medieval setting. This one looks like they've advanced the timeline a bit and it has a steam punk spin on the aesthetic, so it'll be interesting to see like how much time has supposedly passed between the two games. Phoenix Labs is bringing us a game called Faith Farm that's f a e and that

reminds me a lot of Star Do Valley. The gameplay elements, the actual aesthetic, and the the three D world isn't a different presentation than Star Do Valley, but the activities of the game, like you you get to do stuff like farm crops and go fishing and collect resources. It looks very Star Do Valley to me. It also has multiplayer coop as well. Looks pretty cute. I think it's the kind of game that I would like to zin out to. I still play Star New Valley to this day.

It is like one of my go to games when I want to kind of relax and just do crazy maximized efficient setups for my farm like character has more than twenty million dollars at this point. I don't even know why I keep playing, other than I do find it relaxing anyway. Other announcements Nintendo made is that there's

gonna be a new Fire Emblement game. They're gonna be some updates to Platoon three already, which is pretty exciting, including an in game event that's going to span from September through September, and that there is an upcoming port of the beloved James Bond themed in sixty four classic

title Golden I double O seven. It will include online multiplayer. Uh, this title is one of those that I absolutely loved in the olden sixty four days, and it's coming both to the Switch and to the Xbox family of consoles through Game Pass. And now I just need a port of the classic wrestling games that were on the N sixty four because I maintain that the N sixty four wrestling titles were some of the best pro wrestling titles

on any console ever. Gosh darn it. Yeah, the graphic fidelity can't even hold a candle to the stuff that came out the following generation, let alone what we can do today. But the game play and the depth of your your character creation system and all the different moves that you could use to to kit out your character, that has never been equaled, in my opinion, since the

N sixty four days. But hey, if you know a truly amazing, entertaining video game wrestling title, shout it out to me, because I really like those games, and I've been kind of disappointed with a lot of the titles I've played in the last few years. But that's you know, that's beside the point. If you want to reach out to me for any reason, whether it's to give me suggestions for wrestling games or topics for future tech Stuff episodes. There are a couple of different ways to do it.

One is to download the I Heart Radio app. It is free to download and use. Just navigate over to the tech Stuff part of the app and use the little microphone icon. You can record a voice message up to thirty seconds in linked for me, or you can reach out on Twitter. The handle for the show is tech Stuff HSW and I'll talk to you again really soon.

Tech 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.