Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the
tech are you. It's time for the tech news for the week ending on Friday, October eighteenth, twenty twenty four, and over at X the platform formerly known as Twitter, I think I'll always call it that, maybe just offspite anyway, there was another change in how the platform works, and it appears to have prompted yet another exodus among a subset of users. So this time it all has to
do with the block feature. Now, in ye olden days, if you chose to block someone on Twitter, not only would they no longer be able to comment on, or quote or repost any of your tweets, I wouldn't be able to see any of those tweets in the first place. So to the blocked person, you would seem to have disappeared off the platform. But earlier this week, for reasons I don't fully understand, X revealed that it was going
to change the block feature. And the block feature will still block someone from commenting on or retweeting your posts, but they will be able to read everything that you have tweeted. So now, if I were still on X Slash Twitter and you were irritating me and I blocked you, you would still be able to see everything I posted, you just couldn't comment or retweet it. Now a lot of people have balked at this since it has been revealed, and they pointed out that this can create really dangerous
situations for some users. Let's say that someone's getting stalked and blocking accounts was one way to limit their visibility to the stalker. Well, now the stalker could continue to read updates and potentially escalate matters, make things worse because the other person's now not aware of what's going on. They're just posting, but they don't realize that the person that they thought was blocked from seeing them can actually
read everything. As Matt Binder of Mashable noted, it appears that some folks on X have felt the need to stretch their metaphorical legs and seek greener pastures or perhaps bluer skies because X competitor blue Sky announced that in the twenty four hours following X's announced changes to the block feature, blue Sky saw half a million users join the service now. Blue Sky is behind both X and metas threads, platforms and users, and all of those platforms
are similar. They're kind of like that microblogging sort of thing. There's also Mastodon out there. I wouldn't be surprised if Mastadon also saw a surge of new folks signing on these days. I'm only kinda sorta on Threads. Even that is a bit much for me. There are issues with Threads. I have that the same as my issues with like Facebook and really Meta in general. So I don't feel great about posting there, but I have done it a
couple of times. It does help scratch the itch that Twitter used to satisfy for me back in the day. But it's not great. Maybe I should switch just a Blue skyer Maston, or just accept the fact that that part of my life is over anyway. I don't understand why X made this choice to change the block feature. But I should also mention that Meta's Threads announced a change to its service that's being rolled out gradually, which is that users will be able to turn on a
feature called activity Status. Now I say turn on, it may be that the status is turned on by default and you have to go in to opt out of it. But activity status tells you which users are currently online. So if this is on, if it's active for you, and it's on, it's not active for me yet I checked before I recorded today. But if it's on, then for other people that it's on, you'll see a little green dot on their profile icon that indicates that they're
online at that moment. And if the green dot's not there, it either means that they aren't online or they have turned off the activity status feature. To me, it sounds like this is a bad idea too, Like I don't know anyone who is begging for this. Maybe it's just
that I use threads in a different way. I always viewed threads just as I viewed Twitter as kind of an asynchronous communications tool where you post, but you're not expecting an immediate response, right, They'll respond when they get a chance to respond, that's it, and then you respond when you have a chance. It's not happening in real time. But Meta appears to be kind of trying to move threads into that space a little bit. And I don't know, maybe that is something that a lot of people have
been asking for. But if you're like me, and you aren't keen on everybody being aware of when you're on the service, You'll probably want to turn the activity status to off if you are in fact using once it is rolled out. That is, so I'll be curious to see how this rollout happens. Like I said, I don't have it yet, so I don't know if this is opt out or opt in. I would much prefer it to be opt in and have it off by default, but I suspect that will not be how it turns out.
We'll have to see. Sarah Perez of tech Crunch has an article this week titled Elon Musk's X is changing its privacy policy to allow third parties to train AI on your posts. So maybe some of those folks headed to Blue Sky are more concerned about their posts being used to fuel our future robotic overlords and less concerned
about the block feature. I don't know. Perez notes that X changed its privacy policy and it now includes the option for third party collaborators to slurp up all that tasted tasting data that you have generated over the years, so that the next generation of trollbot or whatever can lean on the collective wisdom of X, and I do use all of those terms sarcastically. Users will apparently be
able to opt out of this feature. The new section of the policy states, quote, depending on your settings or if you decide to share your data, we may share or disclose your information with third parties if you do not opt out. In some instances, the recipients of the information may use it for their own independent purposes in addition to those stated in excess privacy policy, including for example, to train their artificial intelligence models, whether generative or otherwise
end quote. Perez notes that as of the writing of this article, there was no clear setting that would relate to this policy, so if you went into your settings, you wouldn't see something that was clearly marked as allowing you to opt out of this third party collaborator stuff. But the policy itself won't go into effect until November fifteenth, so it is possible that that setting will arrive before
or when that happens. Getting back to Meta, the company has apparently been making some staff cuts, and they sound like they're not quite as sweeping as earlier rounds of layoffs with the company, where like more than ten thousand people were like go at a time. Alex Heath and Jay Peters of the Verge report that the layoffs have affected multiple divisions within Meta, including Instagram, Wattsapp, and the
company's all Things Metaverse department Reality Labs. As Maxwell Zeph of tech Crunch has put it, the layoffs meant are meant to quote reallocate resources within the company end quote. So that's your standard reorganization slash restructuring language you hear from corporate entities. Sometimes these moves reflect an organization realizing that it has overstaffed certain departments and so operations have become inefficient and wasteful, so the layoffs are an effort
to realign that. In other cases, it's more like company leaders have decided they want to try and accomplish more with less and say like, let's try and do the same thing we're doing now, but with fewer people, so are not spending as much money. It's hard to say
what this particular instance really qualifies. As Zeph at tech Crunch also mentioned that the company declined to answer questions regarding how many employees in total were let go, but the layoffs definitely included some prominent folks who have taken the social media to make it known that they are currently in the job market. So I'm sure the cuts are deeply felt within the departments where they happened. It's just unclear as to how extensive those cuts actually have been.
Instagram has instituted some features to help protect users, particularly teens, from sextortion attempts, as reported by Ayisha Malik of tech Crunch. Now, previously, it was possible for someone to use screen capture tools to copy images that were sent through direct messages. While the sender would receive a notification that the image they had sent had been saved, they couldn't really do anything
about it. And if the recipient of the message chose to blackmail the sender, you know, threatening to share the images that were sent to them unless the sender followed you know, instructions, well that's where the sextortion stuff comes in, which is pretty damn horrifying. Manipulating someone in order to give them to send compromising images and then threatening them by saying you're going to share those potentially with like friends and family or whatever unless they do whatever it
is you tell them to do. It's disgusting anyway. Now Instagram prevents screen captures of those kinds of images that are sent as a view once or allow replay messages. If it's sent through dms like that, you can no longer take screen captures. Plus they'll only display on the mobile version of the app. You cannot access these through a desktop version of Instagram. They will not display the
images at all in an effort to prevent abuse. This new process complements Instagram's recent rollout of teen accounts, which includes a suite of features meant to give younger users more protection while they're on the program. Meta has a lot of ground to make up in this area because the company has long been criticized for failing to ensure the safety of younger users while simultaneously trying to court
them over to use the platform. That was a big part of the whistleblower bruhaha from a couple of years ago was that the revelation was one Meta at the time it was Facebook. Facebook was well aware of the potential harm it could cause, and two, while it did very little to address that harm, it was actively trying to get more young people to join the platform. So yeah, this is an important step, but clearly it's just one
small step on a longer journey. Okay, we've got more journey ahead of us too, but before we get to that, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsors. We're back. Meda's Oversight Board, which I'll remind you, is an organization that's independent of Meta. It advises Meta on content moderation decisions. It is now seeking public comments regard immigration related content
that potentially could be harmful to immigrants. The board has expressed concern that Meta's current policy only shields vulnerable populations like immigrants, migrants, and asylum seekers from the most harmful forms of hate speech, but it leaves those people open to perhaps less overt, but no less dangerous attacks. And they have shown two examples of posts containing hate speech or things that are bordering on hate speech that Meta did not remove even after human review of those items
were brought to the company's attention. So One of them happened in Poland and contained a derogatory term for black people. The other one happened in Germany and featured a picture of a white, blonde haired, blue eyed woman holding up her hand, and there was a message saying outsiders should stop coming into Germany. It got more explicit and hateful from there, but I don't want to even repeat it
because it's gross. Anyway, Metta left both of those messages up even after human review, and it seems pretty clear to me that the messages included speech that was meant to incite people and to be expressed at the harm of vulnerable populations, and that therefore it probably should have been taken down. And the board suggested that Meta reverse its decision and take those messages down, but Meta declined.
And this is a good time to remind you that this oversight board, while it can make content moderation guidelines for Meta, Meta is in no way obligated to actually follow those guidelines. It's non binding. But now the board is looking for public comment about these issues, potentially in order to pressure Meta to make these changes. Because it's one thing for Meta to kind of ignore its oversight board. It's another thing if there's a big public campaign pressuring
Meta to take more action. That's bad for optics, and I think Meta is far more sensitive to that than it is to the guidelines of its own oversight board. But that's my own personal opinion and we're not done yet with Meta. So Reuter's reports that Facebook and Blumhouse Productions have created a project in which some filmmakers, including Casey Affleck, the Spurlock Sisters, and Aniche Chiganti. Aniche's piece
is already up. I watched it, and Aniche showed how he used the tool to change the background or elements of videos he shot when he was a child, and it was kind of interesting, Like there was one where it shows someone walking down their street in California that was supposed to be set in Manhattan, so he had the AI tool changed the background to look like Manhattan. It did not look like Manhattan. It did look like a big city, but it looked a little weird. I mean,
it's like AI generative stuff. But his whole point was that this was a way to augment the filmmaking experience, and that he stresses in it, I still needed to make the movie. I still needed to write everything, that this wasn't a tool that replaced all that it was a tool that augmented it. I remain somewhat unconvinced, not that it could be a tool used to augment I think it could be. I think generative AI could be used in ways to augment work that is not necessarily
harmful to creatives. The problem I see is that a lot of the companies, the production companies that are ultimately in charge of paying for creatives, that they would just go and use generative AI as a shortcut and skip the whole artistic process because we've seen that. We have frankly, we have seen companies fire creative departments and rely on generative AI to varying degrees of failure. Really it's not really success. They're pretty awful at this stage. But anyway,
that's what's going on. It's the movie gen tool or project. It'll be curious. I'll be curious to see what Casey Affleck and the Spurlock sisters create. I haven't seen their output yet, seen a Niche Chaganti's, but it is interesting and I'm sure it will propel the conversation forward. I remain somewhat skeptical, largely because I mean, any project that is heavily supported by Meta, there's obviously a narrative that's
trying to be promoted there. Caid Mets, Mike Isaac, and Aaron Griffith have a piece in The New York Times with the headline Microsoft and Open AI's close partnership shows signs of fraying. It's well worth reading if you can get hold of it. The article explains that there are some interesting clauses in the agreement between the two companies that suggests the relationship isn't as cozy as was previously thought.
Considering Microsoft has dedicated more than ten billion with a B dollars of investment into open ai so far, I mean that's a huge amount of money. So the article details how open ai has grown kind of frustrated over stuff like access to money and access to compute power, because, as I've mentioned before, ai is incredibly expensive, both from a purely financial standpoint and energy requirements in order to
power all that compute that you need. And you have companies like open ai that are trying to scale up and ramp up ever more ambitious project that's kind of require even more computational power, and yeah, that's incredibly expensive. One of the things that blew my mind in this article is that there are estimates that by twenty twenty nine, the annual computational bill for open ai is going to be somewhere like thirty seven and a half billion dollars
per year. Like, think how much money you have to make. If your expenses are thirty seven point five billion dollars, open ai isn't making enough money to cover its expenses now they're look they were looking at spending around more than five billion dollars for compute power this year. So no wonder. There are a lot of analysts out there predicting that open ai was going to go bankrupt before the end of the year, except that they then got a big influx of cash from another investment round. Yeah,
it's pretty crazy. Also, open ai apparently has a clause that says if Microsoft gets to artificial General Intelligence or AGI, then it severs the partnership between the two. And meanwhile, Microsoft is apparently worried that it's depending too heavily upon open ai and so wants to diversify its approach to artificial intelligence beyond open Ai. It's a really complicated thing, so I recommend reading that article. It's very informative. Okay.
Couple of space stories. NASA's Artemis project to return to the Moon continues to hit some snags. A lot of outlets, including Ours Technica, have plenty of articles listing numerous reasons why we're not likely to see the Artemis two mission happen next year, as it was scheduled to happen, but work continues to prepare for our return to the lunar surface, and one such element is the development of new spacesuits. And this week Axiom Space and Prada, as in the
luxury fashion company, unveiled a new spacesuit design. Now it's not exactly chic, but then aesthetics aren't really as important as you know, not dying, and as I've mentioned many times on this and other space is trying to kill you. So the suits have thermal protection built in that the companies say will keep astronauts safe from the dangers of extreme cold temperatures even at the South Lunar Pole in
shadowed regions, for up to two hours at a time. Now, I'm not sure when this design is going to get fitted to an actual astronaut for use in space, but it's pretty cool to see the next evolution of spacesuits. Finally, if you are aware of this news, I'm not surprised
it was spectacular. SpaceX accomplished an incredible achievement when a super heavy Falcon booster returned to its launch site after propelling a payload high into the atmosphere, and as it did so, an enormous mechanical claw on the tower caught the booster as it returned under precise control. As Elon Musk wrote on x the tower caught the rocket and yeah, seeing the video of this is spectacular. It's hard for me to fathom how complicated this was from an engineering standpoint.
Having such precise control of a descent and the perfect timing for the tower to grasp the booster with its claws, which are called chopsticks, that is just amazing stuff, really worth watching. And before I leave, one more reading recommendation for all of y'all. Lilahmcclellan has a piece on Fortune dot com that's titled twenty three and Me's entire board resigned on the same day founder and Vodjitski still thinks
the startup is saveable. And it's a really thoughtful and I think balanced analysis of the troubled company's challenges in recent years and a complicated portrait of an assertive and controversial founder. It's well worth a read. It covers a lot of territory. That's it for this week. I hope all of you out there are doing well, and I'll talk to you again, really soon. Tech Stuff is an
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