Tech News: X Gon' Take It Away From Ya

that day. In fact, Musk shows up for multiple reasons today. So the Wall Street Journal reports that X dot com formerly known as Twitter, is allegedly adding a new requirement for brand accounts on X. So companies that have maintained an account on X will have to meet a new requirement, and that is to spend a minimum of one thousand dollars per month on advertising or else they'll lose their

verification status. Once again, we see that verification is not verification on X. Or maybe you could argue it does verify you. It verifies that you paid for a checkmark. Now, I will note there are exceptions. There are some people who had truly massive followings on Twitter, and they were gifted their checkmarks back after initially having them stripped away, and most of those accounts will very quickly tell you, in no uncertain language that they did not pay to

get the check mark back anyway. According to Musk, this is really about protecting those brands, that the one thousand dollars per month fee is high enough to prevent rap scallions from creating accounts posing as a brand, and so it cuts down on scammers who weren't really a thing before you could just pay for a check mark anyway.

Skeptics argue that Musk's company is scrambling for revenue, having lost a significant amount, like fifty percent of the advertising dollars that were coming into the company over the last several months, and that this play is similar to making users pay a subscription fee for that check mark, plus you know, some other features that come with it, and that it's really just a way to slow down losses.

It'll be interesting to see which brands continue to stick around on X. Some of them are big enough where one thousand dollars a month isn't really that big of a commitment, but others are smaller and that you know, that's a significant investment, and I think a lot of brand managers are going to start asking themselves if there's even enough value associated with being on X to go to the trouble or if they should just you know, ditch and go to threads or some other platform instead

speaking of X. You won't be speaking of X in Indonesia, or at least you wouldn't have been. Earlier this week, Al Jazeera reported that on Tuesday, Indonesia more or less accidentally blocked Musk's platform because of the domain name x dot com because in Indonesia they associated that domain with sites that would host adult material and Indonesia has strict

laws against pornography. The Ministry of Communication and Informatics reached out to x dot com to confirm that it is in fact meant solely to host Twitter and not a platform for pornographic material. But this meant that twenty four million people living in Indonesia were unable to access x slash Twitter that day unless they were using like a

VPN or something I guess. Not long ago, I talked about how the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration or NHTSA here in the United States is investigating a car crash that happened back in twenty eighteen actually, and one of the cars involved in that was a Tesla vehicle that allegedly was in advanced driver assist mode autopilot or full

self driving mode in other words. Now, according to CNBC, California's Attorney General's Office has launched its investigation into Tesla, and this investigation is looking into both the issue of safety with Tesla's autopilot system, as well as seeking comment from Tesla owners about whether or not they feel they were the target of false advertising when it came to Tesla's driver assist features. This might also include Tesla customers who paid into the full self driving system, which is

still an advanced driver assist feature. It's not, as the name seems to suggest, an actually fully autonomous method of operating your vehicle. So this is still very early on in the Attorney General's office investigation into Tesla. It's early enough that CNBC wasn't able to get any confirmation from the the office that it's actually engaged in such an investigation. They did, however, talk with people who say they had been in contact with the Attorney General's Office and answered

some questions about their experience with Tesla. It is too early to assume any kind of outcome here or what the office might demand of Tesla. Shouldn't find evidence of false advertising or other issues. So it's just the earliest days of this investigation and it may end up not turning into anything. We'll just have to wait and see. In certain sections of the Chinese city Chingdu, there are

no Tesla's allowed right now now. The reason for this is that the city is hosting the World University Games this week, and Chinese President Shi Jinping will visit the city as part of the opening celebration, which is tomorrow. The concern is that Tesla vehicles, which rely on optical camera systems for the purposes of things like that collision detection, could end up operating as a surveillance threat, so police have been told to turn away drivers in Tesla's if

they should approach certain venues now. Elon Musk in the past has said that Tesla obeys whatever local data laws are in place in all the regions where Tesla's are on the roads, but it sounds like Chinese authorities don't want to take any chances, and have subsequently demanded that cameras on wheels not be allowed near the places Shi Jenping will visit. I suspect we won't see any official outcry from Tesla the company because the Chinese market is a critical one for Tesla, so it would shock me

if the company made any noise about this. What do the following companies have in common? BMW, Honda, General Motors, Yundi, Mercedes, Benz, Kia and Stalantis. That last one might not sound familiar to you, but they own a whole bunch of car companies. And if you in fact said, oh, those are all automakers, you get partial credit. But beyond that, if you had said, those are seven companies that are aiming to build out an EV charging network to rival that of Tesla's in

North America, well then you get full marks. Because these companies, which you could argue, really drag their collective feet. While Elon Musk was directing Tesla to build out supercharger stations all over the place, are now trying to push back against Tesla's dominance in the space. So right now, Tesla has approximately twenty two thousand supercharger stalls in North America. This is according to Business Insider, that puts them by far in the lead for EV charging stations. They have

completely eclipsed everyone else. But this coalition of automakers hopes to build out more than thirty thousand charging stations. And if you're wondering who currently holds number two in North America for EV charging stations, that would actually be Volkswagen backed company Electrify America. But they just have three, five and ninety two. That is a far cry behind the twenty two thousand now. Obviously, the need for charging stations are one of the big reasons why EV adoption is

facing an uphill battle. Right, you have to have confidence among consumers that they can actually recharge their cars and not get stranded somewhere. And so this is a real need. But you might ask, well, why are automakers rushing forward now? I mean, this need has existed ever since people started to talk about electric vehicles again. Well, there are a

couple of big reasons why it's happening now. One is that evs are going to become increasingly common in North America moving forward because a lot of automakers are moving away from internal combustion engine vehicles. There's this global migration away from those and for the purposes of manufacturing it makes sense, and also, I mean it's cheaper to manufacture evs than it is internal combustion engine vehicles. They are

simpler in design. Another reason is that the automakers would rather be able to create their own charging standard than to allow Tesla to dictate that standard, because if Tesla's technology becomes the universal charging technology, that would mean automakers would have to pay a license fee to Tesla in order to make use of that tech, and that would be great news for Tesla to rake in money for licensing out its technology to other companies, but generally speaking,

companies would rather not have to do that if they can find a workaround. So it sounds like the group wants to build out charging stations that lift some of the ideas that Tesla incorporates in its technology. For example, to pay for charging, you would just plug in your vehicle, and when you do that, the vehicle communicates with the charging station, identifies itself, Your account automatically gets deducted whatever the charge was for the juicing up your vehicle, and

you go on your way. You don't have to take out a credit card or anything. That's a great feature and it's one that I think these automakers are looking to incorporate in their own solutions, so you could say that they're going to be copying a lot of Tesla's features, maybe not in operation, but in effect. My guess is that's what we're going to see. Now, we're not done

with Tesla just yet. Reuter's reports that the company overpromised how far its vehicles could drive on a single charge, and, in an effort to avoid festen up to that issue, would cancel appointments of drivers who were concerned that their car wasn't performing up to standard. So, as a driver, you would get behind the wheel of your Tesla, started up, and you would see an estimate of how far you could go on the current battery charge of your vehicle.

No pun intended. The drivers saw that their actual driving range was lower than what the estimate was, and then it was frequently, i mean like always lower. So naturally some of the drivers sought an appointment with a Tesla service center to see what was up, just assuming, oh, something is wrong with my vehicle, because I'm never able to achieve the driving range that is estimated when I

get in my vehicle. So, according to Reuter's, Tesla had a team in place dedicated to canceling those types of service appointments, because ultimately the only thing that was going wrong was that the algorithm estimating the driving range was way too optimistic. I suppose they could have tried to fix the algorithm, but then the driver would likely notice that their car now was estimating lower ranges than before, and that if you're a driver, you would say, well,

they fixed the wrong dang part of the car. They should have made the car be able to do what it said it could do, not change what it said it could do to something less Reuters couldn't find information on when, or what, how or how all that algorithm could have changed over the years, but Business Insider offered up the encouragement that Tesla vehicle driving performance has actually improved significantly over the years, so chances are you don't

encounter the same issue now. But doesn't change the fact that, if this investigation is accurate, Tesla arguably engaged in false advertising for years. Okay, we've got a lot more news stories to go. It was a busy week. We're going to take a quick break. We'll be right back. We're back.

Bloomberg reports that the US Federal Trade Commission is preparing an enormous antitrust lawsuit against Amazon, and that the FTC may even seek to break Amazon up a bit in a corporate restructuring, and Amazon would have to spin off parts of its business that would be huge. It's something that we really haven't seen in the tech sector for decades.

Like the last time I remember them attempting to do this was with Microsoft in the nineties, and ultimately that decision was reversed, but initially that was going to happen to Microsoft. So at the heart of the matter with this particular case is Amazon's policies that appear to reward merchants who rely on Amazon tools and then restrict merchants

who do not. That can mean that a merchant that plays ball with Amazon will find itself popping up in relevant searches more often or appearing as a suggested product. You know, when you buy something or you've got something in your cart and you see a message that says people who bought this also bought this other kind of stuff that kind of thing, And merchants who do not use Amazon tools and services that are optional will find

that their products get buried deep in search results. That's what the allegation is, and customers are not likely to see the results at all, so they don't buy those products, and the merchants who either can't afford or don't want to use Amazon services end up being punished as a result.

So the FTC says, one, this is happening, and two this practice is clearly anti competitive because Amazon owns the marketplace, it dictates the terms, It awards advantages to people who pay those optional Amazon services, and denies those advantages to merchants who do not. I will keep an eye on this.

Bloomberg reports that the FTC's plan is to bring this litigation against Amazon in August, and if that happens, it might well warrant a full Tech Stuff episode to kind of talk about this and previous antitrust suits that were brought against tech companies, and maybe even talk about why there was a very long gap between the efforts in

the nineties and what we're seeing play out today. One story I did not cover on Tuesday, honestly because I just needed more time to read up on it to get it my head wrapped around it was that Google has introduced a new specification called the Web Environment Integrity spec so this specification would create an application programming interface or API. The purpose of this API is that websites could enable it to inform them if the browser and the device running the browser is trusted by a third

party that would be called the a tester. So in other words, the website could say, hey, is this person or thing that's visiting my site? Is that trustworthy or not? And this third party would say either yes or no. The idea here is this would help websites differentiate real traffic, you know, like traffic coming from actual human beings on actual consumer devices or whatever, or if the traffic was

coming through some automated system like a bot. That One of the use cases they mentioned would be to determine if an interaction with an AD was one that was taken by a real world, hure human being or if someone just program bots to do it and artificially run up the ads click through. But critics are calling this approach akin to putting DRM on the web. DRM, in case you're not familiar, stands for digital Rights management. If you've got any sort of negative associations with that term,

it is totally understandable. DRM not always but frequently makes it harder for legitimate consumers to actually enjoy the products they legitimately bought, and it only stands as a minor inconvenience to people who are determined to steal stuff because

invariably they find a way to break the erm. So, in other words, most of the time, maybe just much of the time, let's be kind, much of the time, it fails to solve the problem it was designed to stop, i e. Piracy And meanwhile, it makes the normal experience worse for everyone who's playing by the rules, which is doubly bad, right, and yet it's still a thing anyway.

A big concern about Google's approach is that this could mean and a tester, the third party that tells you whether or not something is trustworthy or not, could arbitrarily decide that a particular browser or platform is untrustworthy and just blacklist it. And if that a tester is like Google, because Google suggested that Google Play would serve as the a tester for Android platforms, well that means Google effectively

becomes a gatekeeper. And if you are a developer who has created an alternative browser, it may mean that you no longer have a business because no one can use your tool to access anything, at least not on an Android device because the third party a tester, has determined that your tool is not trustworthy. So if Google decides a particular browser is untrust trustworthy, can effectively block them from accessing the web. That seems more than a little

like overreach. If you ask me now, Similarly, you would assume that Google would name like Microsoft to be the gatekeeper or the a tester for Windows based machines, and Apple would undoubtedly be the gatekeeper for iOS and macOS devices. Considering the conversation these days often circles around the problem of a centralized web that is the realm of just a few powerful tech companies, this seems like a supremely bad move. It's like a direct strike against the open web.

I think it is likely that we will eventually see regulators oppose this approach. I think that's most likely to happen first in places like the EU the European Union, because they are very quick to spot and oppose things that are anti competitive or monopolistic. Switching gears, Meta has had a great week financially. The company showed that it had increased ad engagement and sales figures dramatically beating industry estimates, and they leaned heavily on AI tools to do so.

So this is like a double win for Meta, right one they're able to show how well their business worked, and two they were able to demonstrate the effectiveness of AI in this particular application. The improved performance led to a surge in the company's stock price, and just like that, Meta saw sixty billion dollars tagged on top of its

market value. World's turn on such things. Meta also showed that it had improved ad engagement and sales on its Reels product within Instagram, which of course is another big deal, and investors are very much encouraged and advertisers are flocking to Meta. I meanwhile, you know x dot Com over there is saying brands need to cough up a grand a month to stay checked on the site. It's like

night and day these companies. Anyway, while Meta the company is doing great, I think it is really important for users to remember that this increase in performance ultimately comes back to the fact that Meta is very good at collecting your data. It's very good at sussing out what you like and what you want and then serving that up to you. By sharing the information with advertisers. Just something to always keep in mind, you know, because we

are the product here. So while if you're an investor in Meta, you're probably happy to hear that the company had such a great turnout this week, but if you're a user, you need to remember, like there's a there's a dark side to all of this. Here's another story about anti competitiveness. This time we've got three big tech companies that are banding together to compete against two other big tech companies. In fact, the story involves the big

five tech companies. It involves Google and Apple, who are kind of in the dominant positions on one side, and the combined might of Meta, Microsoft and Amazon on the other. And what is the battleground? Map apps digital maps, So currently on Apple and Google dominate the digital map space, right Like, if you're using an iOS device, chances are you're probably using Apple Maps. If you're on Android, you're

probably using Google Maps. If you're on Apple and you're fed up with Apple Maps, you may be using Google Maps. Although that's unfair. Apple Maps was very bad when it first launched, but they fix that and in some cases, Apple Maps gives much better directions than Google Maps. I've had that happen a couple of times where my partner their map would end up bringing us to a location much more efficiently than my Android Google Maps navigation would

take us. So it goes both ways anyway. App developers that want map functionality in their apps frequently they have to pay one or the other, or maybe even both Google and Apple to access their map data to help populate the app that the developer is creating. Meanwhile, these other three big companies are saying, why can't we get

some of the money. So these three companies in partnership with tom Tom are releasing data that app developers can use to build out their own map functions, and that way they could bypass the need to pay Google or Apple for that information. Now, these groups are not building their own map app. We're not getting a third contender

against Google and Apple Maps. Instead, what they're doing is they're giving developers the opportunity to access this mountain of underlying data, and it's up to the developers to build the map software that they want and the experience they have in mind. Personally, I think it's a good move. Competition is important, Competition inspires innovation. Competition can keep prices lower. It'll be interesting to see if this initiative actually challenges

the existing duopoly in the digital map space. However, Okay, I've got, oh my gosh, so many more stories. We're going to do one more before we do a break. I'm calling an audible y'all, cause gosh, there's so many stories. So in Hollywood, strikes continue with the Writer's Guild of America and sag AFTRA unions. One of the many issues that these two unions are facing in Hollywood centers around artificial intelligence and its place in Hollywood and if it

even should have a place. If it does, where should the restrictions be. Meanwhile, Netflix pulled focus when Netflix's search for an AI product manager became public knowledge. So, according to Netflix's you Know job opening, they're offering up to nine hundred thousand dollars per year as a salary for a suitably qualified person to be an AI product manager. Meanwhile, sag AFTRA argues that nearly ninety percent of working actors earn less than two twenty six thousand dollars a year.

By the way, that's the threshold an actor must meet if they are to receive medical benefits from the union, right, they have to get twenty six thousand dollars from acting. Actually, I think it's twenty six four hundred and seventy. You have to make at least that much just from acting

in order to qualify for medical benefits. So you might supplement your acting with other jobs and you might make more than twenty six thousand, but the union only counts it if it is derived from your work as an actor. So the argument here is that the vast majority of actors are being exploited. And meanwhile, here's Netflix putting out an ad for an AI expert who will be making

nearly a million dollars a year. So the narrative emerging from this labor strike has largely been on the side of writers and actors, as they point out that there's

not actually a shortage of money in Hollywood. Rather, studios are attempting to withhold as much money for things like executive compensation and for shareholder return, while the people who are responsible for actually making the stuff that Hollywood profits off of are left out of the conversation, or worse, their work is actively being threatened by a predatory use of artificial intelligence. Okay, one more, the US Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC, has some new rules that are

bound to hit publicly traded companies hard. These rules state that if a company detects a cybersecurity breach that could affect the company's bottom line, it has four days to

publicly disclose that breach. Now, you're probably aware that many times a company will detect a breach, but then keep that information under wraps for weeks or sometimes months, or maybe even up to a year, as people within the company determine how best to respond and to try and limit the amount of damage that could be done to the company by revealing it. The SEC has taken a stance that this approach hurts investors. That's the primary concern

for the SEC. I mean, it also hurts consumers. But they're saying no, investors deserve to know this because that has a direct effect on their investment. So the only exceptions the SEC will consider to this four day rule are cases where revealing the breach could impact national security or public safety, or if a company could successfully argue that the breach did not affect the company's bottom line. And to be clear that for daytimer only starts ticking

once a company has made that determination. So if a company you know, takes it's real sweet time to determine if that breach actually is going to have a bottom line effect. That four days doesn't start until you know, the conclusion is arrived at, which seems like it's a possible loophole to me. But anyway, if it's a publicly traded company, it is obligated to come forward within four days. Obviously, private companies are exempt from this. They have their own

private shareholders, they are not beholden to these rules. The adoption of these rules came down to a three to two vote. The SEC is made up of five people on the board, and it split right down party lines. You had three Democratic appointees and two Republican appointees. The three Democrats voted in favor of the two Republicans voted against. And there are arguments both for and against these rules, and maybe one day I'll do a full episode to

talk about those. It does get more involved and complicated than we can chat about here. Okay, I still have several news stories to get through, so let's take another break and then we'll get back and get through this epic news episode. We're back so Reuter's reports that Google's sister company, Weimo, the autonomous vehicle company, has parked to use a pun and at least temporarily its efforts to

create self driving trucking technology. Instead, Weimo will focus on ride haaling services, you know, essentially an alternative to things like Uber and Lyft. I'm honestly really surprised by this. I had assumed that the trucking application would be the one more likely to steal focus. I mean, it seems like that would be a more achievable goal to me.

But perhaps I'm just way off base here. The company is forming a strategic partnership with Diamler Truck North America, so Diamler's going to take over the trucking operations aspect. Weimo will attempt to dominate the autonomous ride hailing services industry in cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles out

in California, as well as Phoenix in Arizona. Some scientists at the Quantum Energy Research Center in South Korea, as well as a researcher at the College of William and Mary in Virginia in the United States, have claimed that they made a monumental breakthrough which is putting it lightly. They say they've created a material that can achieve super conductivity at room temperatures and room pressure air pressure. So let's break this down. So you can pass electricity through

an electrical conductor. Right, conductors can allow electricity to pass through them, whereas an insulator resists electricity passing through it. But under most circumstances, the amount of electricity you put into a conductor is going to be more than the amount of electricity you'll measure at the other end of the conductor. You're going to lose some energy in the process because some of the electricity gets lost in the

form of heat. This is why you have to have all those cooling systems and things like super powerful gaming computers, because they end up losing a lot of energy in the form of heat, and you got to dissipate that heat. Because of the wise things go wrong, but it ultimately means you have an inefficiency in your system due to this loss of energy in the form of heat. But a superconductor is a material that, under the right conditions,

can conduct electricity with zero loss. There's no electrical resistance, there's no loss in energy. You get the same electricity coming out as you got putting into it. But to achieve this, typically you need to do stuff like super cool the conductor down to a wicked cold temperature, like getting close to absolute zero. That's how cold you need to get. And or you may need to use really incredible pressure in an effort to create a super conductive material.

So this is difficult, it is dangerous, it is expensive. But if someone were to create a material that was a perfect conductor at room temperature and room pressure, that would be beyond astonishing. That is what this team is claiming to have done. They say they've made this new material.

They took stuff like lead and sulfur and phosphorus and oxygen, and they baked it all together at super high temperatures and ended up with this dark gray solid material that they claim can perform as a superconductor at temperatures as high as eighty six degrees fahrenheit or thirty celsius, which is unthinkable. Now their work has yet to be accepted by a peer reviewed journal. There are plenty of scientists who are skeptical of these results for very valid reasons.

There have been previous reports of similar achievements from others, and it always has turned out to have been a mistake or a hoax, and not something that anyone else could replace Kate. So we need to wait for independent teams to either verify or refute these results, to essentially try and do the exact same thing this team says they did and see if they get the same results before we can draw any kind of scientific conclusion about this.

It is way too early to get excited about this possibility. The team will have a very high threshold of proof they have to meet before the scientific community will accept this. So it's probably not true because it is just it's such a huge leap. But if it were true, it would lead to massive advancements and lots of areas of engineering and science. So I am very skeptical, but man,

I hope it's true. Like I don't think it is, but I hope it is, because that again would mean that you could do things like create superconductors to power things like particle accelerators without the need for these massive cooling systems to keep all the powerful magnets you need at the correct temperature in order to operate the particle accelerator. That suddenly makes particle accelerators cheaper to build, which means you can make more powerful ones and learn way more

about the universe. Like you see how it could be incredible if it is true. I just doubt it is. I hope I'm wrong. I hope other independent teams end up replicating those responses or results, and that we see that the research team was right on the money. That would be amazing. Now I've said this many times on this show, but space is hard. Also, it's trying to

kill you. So it should come as little surprised that Boeing, which has been working on the Starliner spacecraft, which is a capsule size spacecraft, smaller than the Orion but bigger than the Apollo capsule of the old Space Race days, Boeing has lost a lot of money developing the star Liner because of lots of unforeseen problems they've run intwo

so far on this project. Like we're talking one point one billion dollars worth of losses now, in case you weren't familiar, Boeing's star Liner is one of two space capsules the NASA had tapped as being a way to transport astronauts to and from the space station, as well as other platforms that would be in lowerth orbit. So the two were Boeing's Starliner, which has yet to become a thing, and SpaceX's Dragon two capsule. So Boeing had

to scrap a test launch recently. It was supposed to be a launched this month with two astronauts aboard a Starliner capsule, but Boeing discovered that one of the components in the capsule is flammable, which is bad, and in that case it's a kind of tape that can be removed from the capsule, but it was a potential fire hazard, So that was one reason why it had to be scrapped. And the other is that they found that the links that connect the capsule's parachute to the capsule itself do

not meet NASA's safety standards. These seem like valid reasons to cancel a test flight. The fact that NASA was getting this close to a launch date before Boeing revealed these problems has raised some red flags. So now the Space Agency is taking a much closer look at the star Liners designed to see what, if any other problems might be present. So this might mean that we might have to wait until twenty twenty four. Star Liners first

test with astronauts aboard a capsule. Meanwhile, SpaceX has taken up the slack. Speaking of space, NASA announced a partnership with the Department of Defense here in the United States to launch a nuclear powered rocket by twenty twenty seven. Now, to be clear, the launch vehicle would use conventional chemically fueled boosters to lift off of Earth. You wouldn't have a nuclear reactor generating the thrust force to launch into orbit.

But once you got far enough out, then the spacecraft would utilize what is essentially a nuclear reactor to generate heat. This heat would then in turn superheat a liquid hydrogen into a gas, so the gas would expand dramatically as it heats up, and then by passing through a nozzle, the gas would propel the spacecraft for it would provide the thrust. Then you got nuclear propulsion. Doing this, however,

is going to be tricky. First of all, you got to work with some very strict rules about nuclear reactors. So any spacecraft that's going to have essentially a nuclear reactor on board it is going to have to meet those safety requirements. You also have to figure out how to make it super duper duper duper safe. So that if the launch were to go wrong, you don't end up dropping like a nuclear reactor on Florida or something.

There are other challenges that are less doomsdayish. For example, eventually a nuclear powered rocket would run out of propellant, right if you're using liquid hydrogen as you're propellant. Well, first you're gonna have to keep that stuff at twenty kelvin, which is not that much higher than absolute zero, because above that hydrogen will boil from liquid form into a gas. So you have to manage that. You have to manage the temperature of the propellant or else you're going to

be losing propellant. And then once you're out of propellant, well, the engine's not really doing anything. I mean, the nuclear reactor will be hot, but there's no propellant heat up, so it's not going to generate additional thrust. So you just have a nuclear reactor in space at that point. It would require refueling the propellant if it were to keep going. I'm sure engineers will encounter plenty of other

challenges as they work to meet this goal. By twenty twenty seven, SETI aka the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, announced that researchers have uncovered a new method to separate signal from noise. So when it comes to searching for extra terrestrial intelligence, we mostly focus on detecting radio waves, but any radio waves from extraterrestrials would be pretty faint by the time they reached us, assuming that these extraterrestrials are a very far way away, which seems to be a

pretty safe assumption. Meanwhile, we are pumping all sorts of radio waves out of Earth, so you have to tune out all the stuff we earthlings generate that's interference in this case, and then you can look for signs of you know, I don't know, alien television programs or whatever. But it becomes a real challenge. So the researchers say that this new approach looks for repeated patterns in a

saygals amplitude, which is called scintillation. They're looking for scintillation, and they propose that they can use scintillation to filter out human generated signals, because human generated signals do not scintillate, So you get rid of all the stuff that isn't scintillating and focus on the stuff that is. And by definition, those signals have to come from beyond Earth, because we don't generate those kinds of signals, so it must have

come from somewhere else. Now that being said, that does not necessarily mean it will end up coming from intelligent life outside of Earth. There's a lot of stuff in space that generates radio waves, and not all of it is sentient or intelligent. It's just that's one of the byproducts of the different celestial bodies out there. However, this approach would definitely cut back on the problem of radio interference, So if the truth is out there, this approach will

make it a little less difficult to detect. And finally, I have an ar article recommendation for you. David Pierce wrote a piece for The Verge titled The Little Search Engine That Couldn't. This tells the story of some former Google programmers who left Google and created an alternative search engine called Neva n Eeva, and reportedly it's faster than Google Search. It also is ad free. So why have so few people heard about this, let alone used it.

The article is well worth a read, and as always, I have no connection to the Verge and I do not know David Pierce, although I did once sit next to David Hyde Pierce the actor at a restaurant, but that's a different person. I don't even know why I brought it up anyway. That article again, it's on the Verge and it's called The Little Search Engine That Couldn't. And that's it for the Tech News for Thursday, July twenty seventh, twenty twenty three. Man, this was an epic

news episode, tons of news. I was thinking that it would be fairly light. I usually think Thursdays will be lighter than Tuesdays, but man, we just got a ton of stuff in the second half of the week. I hope you are all well, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.