Tech News: US Senate Grills Big Tech CEOs

and it was a pretty sobering experience. The committee brought forward families who had experienced tragedies in which children died after they encountered various harmful people or situations or material on these various platforms. The CEOs expressed their sympathy to

the families. Mark Zuckerberg even gave a somewhat emotional apology, but the politicians found the response lackluster, as did many of the parents, who said that the apologies kind of rang hollow because there didn't seem to be any indication that these companies were going to do anything different. The companies, of course, said that they had been implementing various new

policies to protect children. You know, Meta has recently done that, and so have some of the other platforms, But the senators demanded to know why Section two thirty, which is the US law that provides something of illegal shield platforms, should protect these companies from being sued by the families. Now, just as a reminder, these CEOs didn't draft section two thirty. In fact, section two thirty was drafted before any of

these companies existed. The drafting was done by actual politicians, and Section two thirty is not a blanket, get out of court free card for platforms. So essentially, Section two thirty says that a platform cannot be held responsible for the material that's posted to that platform by users or other parties. So if a user posts something illegal onto

a platform, that's the user's fault, not the platform's fault. Specifically, section two thirty says, quote no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider end quote. But this protection itself has limits. If a platform is violating federal criminal law, then it can

be held accountable. So if someone posts illegal material and the platform is alerted to this, it's the platform's responsibility to remove that material. This includes stuff like intellectual property violations. Right, so if you were to post something that you don't have ownership of and the platform allowed it to stay up,

the platform could be held account. This is why YouTube is so aggressive when removing videos that get a copyright removal request, because it's safer to take something down that might be a copyright violation or it might not, rather than to just leave it up long enough to determine if it actually counts as a copyright violation. Anyway, politicians on both sides of the aisle have issues with Section two thirty, despite you know, not seeming to really understand

what section two thirty is all about. Complicating matters is that these social platforms use algorithms to serve content up to users. So if it were just a case of users seeing the stuff that they personally followed, it might

be a different story. But some legislators argue that because sites like Facebook or TikTok use an algorithm to determine what a user actually sees on their timeline, then those platforms are acting more like publishers because they are curating material effectively and honestly This is an argument that I at least think there's some merit to it. It's it's

hard to argue against it. I guess you could say that these platforms don't actually know what their algorithms are going to recommend to users, because it's completely dependent upon what those users have interacted with and expressed interest in in the past. So it's not like the platforms are aware of what the algorithms are doing and the whole process is automated. But at the same time, the platform itself is determining what someone sees versus all the stuff

that's actually available. So it's a tricky situation. Anyway, a lot of Senators weren't impressed with the CEOs and promised to pass laws that would weaken Section two thirty and place heavy requirements on the platforms to protect children. There are critics of some of these laws. There's actually multiple laws that are in various stages in the Senate and

the House right now. There are critics who say that these laws compromise privacy and security, and they can infringe upon the First Amendment, and that many of them could be difficult, if not in possible, to enforce, and worse yet, they could potentially pose a danger to people in the LGBTQ community, because not everyone agrees as to what counts as being harmful forward children, and some see just the existence of say, transgender people as a danger, like just

the fact that they exist, that's dangerous. So that in turn is a slippery slope. So, as I said, it's a complicated issue. Speaking of Zuckerberg, he gave some insight into Meta's AI strategy during an earnings call yesterday. He claimed that the amount of publicly shared information on the company's platforms represents a larger data set than what most AI companies use when training AI, which is kind of funny because you know, like Facebook, you Meta with Facebook

and Instagram and stuff. They do not want anyone crawling their sites. They don't want any of that. That's they say, that's against their terms of service. You cannot create bots to crawl these sites to gather up information. They can do it, though, but no one else can. And so they're saying, hey, we have this huge repository of publicly

shared pictures and videos and other stuff. It's way bigger than what anyone else has, So we could train up a very intelligent AI as a result of that, and Zuckerberg actually mentioned that general intelligence remains a goal of general intelligence in the form of AI. I don't mean that Zuckerberg is seeking general intelligence. They're too any jokes there. So general intelligence would be AI that would work in a way that's at least similar to how human intelligence works, right.

That seems to be able to think for itself. It's a kind of strong AI. So this kind of work AI research and development, it's really expensive. And Zuckerberg's team hinted that Meta could increase spending by as much as nine billion dollars this year compared to last year, and that this could just be the beginning of additional expenditures and research into development, which sounds to me a lot like hol Zuckerberg warned that Meta would be spending increasing

amounts to build out the metaverse. For the record, they gave the metaverse very brief mention in their earnings called document. They called it their metaverse efforts had put it under new business initiatives. I don't know how much momentum their metaverse efforts still have. Like to me, it feels like the whole metaverse craze has already significantly died down right, like that was the huge thing more than a year ago, and now people are not nearly as enthusiastic about it.

But maybe I'm just not listening to the right corners. Maybe the Web three enthusiasts and the metaverse enthusiasts are still going whole hog and I'm just not seeing. One big news story that happened earlier this week is that Amazon called off its planned acquisition of the company I Robot, which is best known as the maker of the Roomba vacuum robot. This actually surprised me, but that's because I thought that this deal had already gone through. I thought

Amazon had already acquired I Robot. I was just under the impression that they had already completed this. The two companies originally agreed to this deal back in the summer of twenty twenty two, so yeah, I just figured like within a year and a half that they had closed the deal. But no, they faced a lot of regulator opposition, including here in the United States, and ultimately Amazon said

that they just didn't see a way forward. So Amazon said, you know what, We're going to pay the ninety five million dollar fee that's going to cost us to walk away from this deal, and they did, and that's really bad news for iRobot. So once upon a time, the Rumba was like the dominant product in robot vacuums. In fact, it was, to all intents and purposes, like the only

name in the space. But it didn't last because obviously other companies were going to build competing products, and some of those products lost less, sometimes significantly less than the Rumba. They also weren't necessarily as good as the Rumba, but for a lot of consumers out there, cheaper is more important than performance, so I robots It's market share decline year over year as more and more of these products

came out. The Amazon acquisition would have given I robot the financial security to really stay in business and to really invest in innovation. But with the deal falling through, there's a big question mark hanging over I Robot and whether or not it can even continue to function, at

least in the long term. Already, the company has announced it will hold layoffs that will affect around three hundred and fifty employees, and I Robots CEO Colin Engel is also stepping down, as he said that he and the board both felt that the company really needed a leader

with quote unquote turnaround experience. I feel really badly for everyone affected by these layoffs, and I hope that I Robot make a recovery because the company has been responsible for numerous innovations in the robotic space, you know, the robotic vacuum space in particular, like there have been a lot of innovations that I Robot has driven that then got adopted by the larger industry, and without I Robot there to actually forge that path, we may see a

real decrease in innovation in that space. After a Tesla shareholder brought a lawsuit against Tesla five years ago, a judge in the state of Delaware has ruled that Elon Musk is not, in fact entitled to a compensation package with a value of upwards of fifty five billion dollars. He's not going to get that, and like I said, it only took five years of languishing through the court system,

because justice is swift here in the United States. So the lawsuit argued that the board of directors was misusing company funds by enriching Elon Musk when that money probably should have gone somewhere else. Either reinvesting in the company

or distributed among shareholders whatever. The plaintiff argued that the directors were not really independent of Musk, Essentially they were his friends and cronies, and that he was using his connections as personal connections among some of the board members to get this incredibly favorable compensation deal, and that the lawsuit also argued that Musk himself was effectively creating his own compensation package, like Musk was the one who drew it up and then got the board to sign off

on it, and gosh, I bet we all wish we could do that, right. Ap News also has a really helpful graphic to assist in understanding exactly how much money fifty five billion dollars is for one thing. It illustrates that you could spend a dollar for every second of every day and it would take you oney seven hundred and forty four years to spend all that cash. Crazy, right, No one needs that much money. Nobody needs that much money.

He also said that you could give one hundred and sixty three bucks to every single person in the United States, Like, that's just it's just way too much money for any one person to have. I don't care who you are anyway, Musk as is his custom, went to X to vent his spleen and said, never incorporate your company in the state of Delaware. I recommend incorporating Nevada or Texas if

you prefer shareholders to decide matters. Ironically, it was a shareholder who helped decide this matter, because it was a shareholder who brought the lawsuit forward in the first place. But yeah, I'm not surprised he's upset. Fifty five billion dollars is like when you think you're gonna get it and it turns out you're not. And also when, like a couple of years ago, you spent forty four billion dollars to buy a company that you are steadily running

into the ground. I mean, this is a lot to take in, you know, speaking of a lot to take in, We've got more news to cover, but before we get to that, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsors. Okay, we're back. So this week, Apple's Vision Pro mixed reality headset finally launched. As a reminder, this is the headset with a starting price point of three thy four hundred and ninety nine dollars and according to various sources, Apple has sold more than two hundred thousand units so far.

I should point out that the company first made the headsets available for pre order back in January, and the majority of those sales were made in the first couple of days that pre orders were open. After that they trailed off significantly. But it's also two hundred thousand units. That's also more than what analysts predict Apple actually has available like manufactured, so some folks are going to be waiting a little bit longer to get their new, very

expensive toy. Brian Heater of tech Crunch has some articles about his experiences using the vision Pro. I recommend checking those out. He mentions that he felt some motion sickness on that first day, but he also admitted he's using this device a lot because that's his job, right to really put it through the paces and then report back on it. You know, you might only be able to use it for two and a half hours because that's how long the battery lasts, and then you have to

recharge it. But he's been using it over and over and over again. But he also makes a really good point. He says the average vision Pro owner is also likely to go ham at least initially upon purchasing their mixed reality headset, because if you've spent three four hundred and ninety nine bucks at minimum on something, you want to get your money's worth. Anyway, I still think Apple's product is really a niche one. Two hundred thousand units is a lot, right that we should not dismiss selling two

hundred thousand of these things. But two hundred thousand units is a fraction of what you would see with say a new iPhone launch, for example. And while all the reviews I've read praise the headsets, pass through video quality and the image quality, I'm still not seeing a whole lot of conversation about like any real killer apps. Now. Maybe that will come in time, or maybe developers are going to hold back and wait for a larger user base before they invest the resources in developing apps for

this thing. And if that's the case, we could really have a vicious cycle thing going on, sort of catch twenty two, where developers won't make apps until they are more users, but users aren't going to buy the product until there are more apps running on it. That's a possibility. I don't know. Maybe I'm ultimately wrong, Maybe this will become the next like common household technology. But I don't think that's possible at that price point, but who knows.

I've been wrong so many times before. The US Federal Communications Commission or FCC, would very much like Congress to make it illegal for anyone to use AI generated voices for the purposes of robocalls, pretty please. Apparently someone used an AI impersonation of Joe Biden's voice to make robocalls in the state of New Hampshire to tar voters, presumably to attempt to suppress the vote by telling people not

to bother voting. This spurred the FCC into action. And we've all known for a while now that AI impersonations, you know, deep fakes and that sort of thing could play a big part in the creation and spread of misinformation. And that's the FCC's main concern and why the agency wants to make this practice illegal. They can't do that themselves, obviously, they're not a lawmaking body, but they can recommend that.

To con Chris, the FCC proposes expanding the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, which originally was drafted in the nineties, and to expand that so it will protect against this AI generated voice robocall practice, and I'm all for it, because we're speeding down the road toward a pretty darn chaotic destination. Anything we can do to mitigate that would be really nice,

in my opinion. Christopher Ray, the director of the US Federal Bureau of Investmentation, is warning anybody who will listen that the dangers of Chinese hackers and their ability to disrupt critical US infrastructure such as electrical grids, is reaching an alarming height. It has been no secret that for years now, state backed hackers have worked to infiltrate these systems.

Like I remember reading articles from like a decade ago about discovering Chinese code embedded into US infrastructure systems, proving that there were these kind of markers where Chinese hackers had managed to get access to these things, and there have been fears that this work could lead to massive cyber attacks in the future. Let's say that there's some sort of event that ends up escalating and then China orders to kind of take advantage of all this infiltration.

That's scary, Like you could have entire sections of the electrical grid shut down or overwhelmed and have it break. So what's new here? If all this stuff has been going on for a while. Why is Ray speaking of now, Well, there's not that much that's new. But Christopher Ray's statements were made largely in frustration over the fact that despite these things not actually being breaking news, despite the fact that we have known about this stuff, we haven't done

enough about it. So he's calling for action. He's pointing out how Chinese backed hacker groups have already caused massive problems, like in the private sector. We've seen that over the last few years. Plus. We're in an election year here in the United States. It feels like we're always in an election year. This time like it just it doesn't matter what year it is, it feels like it's an election year. But that becomes a huge incentive for a disruption.

We have seen Chinese and Russian backed groups attempt to influence US politics through hacking and misinformation campaigns. So I guess we'll see if anyone listens to him and actually mounts a decent response to this warning. An Australian company called Morse Micro has demonstrated a Wi Fi protocol that they call Wi Fi Halo and it's HaLow. This uses lower frequency radio signals to transmit Wi Fi over greater distances.

So these radio signals have longer wave links, lower frequencies than what you would typically see with like your usual Wi Fi transmitters, and the range they're getting is pretty impressive. We're talking like three kilometers or around one point eight miles, which is good, Like that's a good distance to be

able to transmit Wi Fi signals. And they say their goal is to develop this technology so that it can facilitate communications for stuff like Internet of Things applications, because it wouldn't really be suitable for a high throughput application. These transmission speeds are down to around one megabit per second. You could have some grainy video for example, but that's probably the extent of it. But as a solution for IoT, you know, Internet of things, it could be a really

helpful technology. You wouldn't need as great a density of transmitters because of this extended range. The longer radio waves also have far better penetration for solid surfaces like walls, so you know, with high frequency, low wavelength a small wavelength Wi Fi signals, walls are a big obstacle, right if you have those ultra high frequency Wi Fi solutions, they don't penetrate walls very well, so you lose signal as soon as there's any kind of barrier between you

and the transmitter. But these it penetrates really well, so you can be inside a building and still have access to these signals. As a bonus, the technology has lower power requirements than higher frequency Wi Fi solutions, so it's a pretty interesting approach. But it remains to be seen if it will receive widespread adoption because there are already a lot of different protocols for wireless data transmissions out there, and some of them have even greater range than Halo does,

but they also have lower throughput. Right they can only transmit data at a lower rate. But I figure the more the merrier if it means we can find an ideal balance between transmission rain and transmission speeds. Negotiations broke down between TikTok and the music label Universal Music Group, and the two parties were unable to agree on a new licensing agreement. The previous one expired earlier this week on Wednesday, so as a consequence, UMG demanded that TikTok

remove any UMG published tracks from the platform. And there's some really big artists who are on the UMG label, including one one of the biggest in the world, Taylor Swift. I'm sure TikTok fans are going to shake it off, shake it off, but they're not going to do it with the help of her music because it's being removed

from TikTok. UMG officials said that TikTok's proposed compensation rate was far below industry standards, and that the platform also has tons of AI generated recordings that infringe upon artists

and music companies intellectual property. That's a big problem. It's one of those problems we've been talking about for a while now about how AI generated material can serve as not just a threat from a competition standpoint, but a threat in that it can be, you know, using an artist's work to generate new work without compensating the original artists. And that's a problem. So TikTok fired back, you know, UMG said, hey, you're not paying enough. You pay less

than other platforms do. TikTok says UMG just wanted more money for the label itself, and that any argument that this is harming artists is disingenuous because UMG wasn't planning on sharing that money with artists anyway, it was just going to go to the company. Now, let me be clear, all companies are greedy, full stop. TikTok is greedy. UMG is also greedy. There are no good guys on the corporate side here. Maybe the artists you could argue are

good guys. Wasn't it easier in your firefly catching days? That's a that's a shout out to all you swifties out there. So yeah, this is not an unusual thing to see happen, and I'm sure that a lot of TikTok users are frustrated by it. But it all comes down to the argument of who's who gets that money, and sad thing is it's almost never the artists, and that's the worst of it, right, It just comes down to which company ends up holding on to that money.

The most we learned that Mercedes Benz suffered a big old it whoopsie this week. It's actually a whoopsie that happened something like four months ago and lasted that whole time. Like it was, it was essentially an ongoing issue. So at the heart of the matter is a gethub token.

There was a developer at Mercedes who apparently accidentally published this token on some publicly viewable source, and that meant anyone who went to that source and saw it could potentially use that token to access all sorts of very secret proprietary data, including stuff like designs for vehicles and source code for software. The fact that this system didn't

have multi factor authentication enabled really blows my mind. I mean, typically you would want this kind of critical information, like it's essentially your trade secrets, to be locked securely and have multi factor authentication there to protect it. And you know, token access is part of that strategy, but it shouldn't be the start and end of it anyway. Mercedes has not yet said if any third parties were able to access the various databases that the token would have granted

access to. Apparently, like this database that you could access would have included keys to other repositories, including on Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. So it's like, yeah, you've got the keys to this and only that, but inside there are all the other keys. Truly terrible stuff. There's some who wonder if Mercedes would even be able to detect if anyone outside the company had accessed the information

in the first place. This is wild stuff. And if you're wondering how bad is this from a kind of a how important could that data be? Stance, I would put it at a solid nine out of ten, maybe even a ten, Like this is real bad. The only reason that it's not easily a ten le the gate is just that we don't know if anyone else accessed it. If they did, then that's a ten out of ten. Like it's as bad as it gets. Hopefully, for the company's sake, no one noticed the issue and exploited it.

But that's kind of like the weakest form of security you could possibly have is just hoping that no one noticed. It's like security through obscurity, not a great, great strategy, really bad, And I bet that software developer is having a really stressful week, is my guess. My heart goes out because if it were truly an accident, that's just I mean, it's a terrible accident, but it's not like

someone was being malicious or whatever. Okay, we've got a couple more stories to get through before I can do that. Let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. We're back. Spotify podcast strategy has long included a reliance on exclusive shows that would only publish on the Spotify platform, and I should mention right now, I guess that Spotify clearly is a competitor to iHeart podcasts. We all work in

the same space. But the days of Spotify's exclusivity appear to be coming to an end, at least for all but one of Spotify's shows. Anyway, the platform had actually gone down to just two exclusive shows. It had already opened up other shows for wider distribution, and the two shows that remained exclusive were The Joe Rogan Experience and another one called Call Her Daddy. But now Call Her

Daddy can distribute on other audio platforms. Spotify is holding on to exclusive rights for the video version of the show, so it's not like going to be seeing that on YouTube. It's just going to be exclusive to Spotify, so that will remain on Spotify's platform, but the audio version will

be available wherever you get your podcasts. So now the Joe Rogan Experience is the only exclusive audio podcast remaining on Spotify, and people are wondering how long that will stay true, you know, will the Joe Rogan Experience follow in the footsteps of these other shows and then shift to wider distribution, because once that contract comes up, then they're going to have to decide how are they're going

to move forward with renewing it. Spotify has already spent tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars on these exclusive agreements, most of it to the Joe Rogan experience, Like the rumor is that the deal for his exclusive contract with Spotify was somewhere in the one hundred million dollar range. Holy cats. My guess is that Spotify has not seen a great return on investment for most of its exclusive shows, which explains why they shifted to wider distribution.

And that makes sense, right, Like, if you're exclusive, then the very nature of exclusivity, you have limited the reach of your podcast because not everyone is going to use your platform. A lot of people might, but not everyone will. And we all know that for the majority of podcasts out there, the source of revenue for these podcasts is ads. I mean, we just had an ad break on this show. That's how we are able to pay for the production of these shows and to pay people who work on them.

It's through ad revenue. So if you are limiting who can actually listen to your show, you're limiting how much ad revenue you can generate. So it makes sense to shift to wider distribution for these other shows, and it makes sense that they probably weren't making enough money to pay off those exclusivity agreements. The question is will the Joe Rogan Experience follow suit or will that be seen as such an important feather in the cap of Spotify that they will hold on to it to retain exclusivity.

Here at iHeart Podcasts, we tend to favor wide distribution from the get go. We maybe looked at possible exclusive podcasts, but as far as I'm aware, we never did that because we want folks to find our shows wherever they happen to get their podcasts right, we don't want to dictate how people have to listen to our shows. We want them to be able to access it however they prefer.

It's kind of like how Netflix became known for making sure that they developed an app for every single screen that's out there, with the exception of the Apple Vision pro because they specifically did not make an app for that anyway. Could it be that we will see Spotify totally abandon exclusivity at least for audio, or will the company continue to spend ass of truckloads of money to keep Joe Rogan. I do not know the answer to

that last story. Here is that a hacker made use of ours Technica as part of a malware campaign in a way that was very clever and unfortunately also difficult to detect and stop. So here's how ours Technica's Dan Gooden explained what happened. Quote. A benign image of a pizza was uploaded to a third party website and was then linked with a URL pasted into the about page of a registered RS user. Buried in that URL was a string of characters that appeared to be random, but

were actually a payload end quote. So the picture itself was nothing like. The picture could have been of anything. It didn't have to be of pizza, it could have been any kind of web asset. It was really just something that the hacker could use that they anchored this URL on in this about page of this RS Technica user, and the URL had this long string that would not impede the web page from loading, like you would still

get the webpage to load without an error. But that URL, that string that was appended to the URL was actually a set of instructions for malware that was already on victimized machines. So, in other words, the payload on ours Technica did not contain malware itself. It contained a set of orders. So the way this works is step one, you infect a whole bunch of computers with malware through whatever means you have at your disposal. In this case, it was through infected USB drives, so you get people

to connect USB drives to different computers. This injects malware into the computer system. That malware is then installed essentially into those target computer systems, and it's just a waiting further orders. Now Step two is you hide the orders for that malware at the end of an otherwise benign looking URL, and you find someplace on the web where

you can plant this URL. Really, you're just looking for a host, and it doesn't matter which one you'd choose, So in this case it was this about page for a user on ours TECHNICAP Step three, the instructions dependent that URL are telling the infected machines what to do. They're actually seeking out those instructions. They receive the instructions and then they execute them. So the malware on these

machines jumps into action and then step four profit. In the case of this particular instance, the malware was part of a cryptocurrency mining scheme, So chances are anyone visiting ours tetnco is actually fine because the first stage of the malware again had to be injected through these USB drives.

So unless you had grabbed one of those USB drives and then thoughtlessly plug it into your computer and infected your computer with malware, you're fine because visiting the urs Technica site, even visiting that particular page, would not have delivered any malware to your machine. It was only the instructions for malware that already existed on machines. But this does illustrate how hackers can hide malware instructions in plain sight and it can be incredibly difficult to detect them.

All Right, that's it for the news. I do have one recommended article to read if you have a subscription to the Wall Street Journal. Rolf Winkler has a piece titled twenty three and Me's Fall from six billion dollars to nearly zero dollars. It includes quotes from CEO and Wojiski regarding her strategy to recover from the massive dip the company has faced in the wake of a devastating

data breach, and it's a really interesting read. I know not everyone has access to the Wall Street Journal, but if you do, that article is reading to just kind of get a handle on Woojiski. Who I mean, I don't know. She's got so much money that I I don't think I can I can relate to her on any on any human level. It's just it's beyond me.

But it is interesting to see kind of what do you do when your company has gone from an incredibly high valuation of like six billion dollars to almost nothing like the twenty three and meters stock price now is under a dollar. It is under threat of being delisted from the Nasdaq. It's a dire situation, so interesting article worth a read. In the meantime, I hope all of you are well and I will talk to you again

really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeart Radio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast Guests, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.