Tech News: Zuckerberg Gets Sued

them are pretty short. Let's jump to it. And in a news item that prompted me to actually double check the date on the article, the Attorney General for Washington, D C. Carl Racine, has sued Mark Zuckerberg because of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. All right, let's do a quick

overview of what Cambridge Analytica was really all about. First, you start off with a guy, a researcher and professor named Alexander Cogan, who created an app for the Facebook platform that was called This is Your Digital Life and it was a personality quiz. So Cogan was conducting research into social relationships in general, and he offered a small payment for folks to take the test, and more than two fifty thousand people installed the app and took that test,

and that generated a whole lot of information. But Beyond that, the app was also able to access the data of the friends of the people who took the quiz. Now, if you're not familiar, Facebook lets you create profile settings that can limit who can see what is on your profile. You could have a public profile, which means anyone can see everything that you've posted on there, or you can have a profile that's restricted just to the people who

are on your friends list. Well, Facebook's app interface would allow app developers to view profiles as if they were friends with all those people. So, in other words, let's say you activate an app like this on your Facebook profile. Now that app can view your friends profiles as if the app were you. That was a huge problem because your friends never had an opportunity to consent or deny consent to the app gathering their personal information. They they

never even saw anything about it. You as a user, saw an agreement and you could agree to it, but your friends never did so. As a result, the app sucked up data from millions of users. Uh. Initially the belief was around eighty million, and then later the investigation

said it was closer to thirty million people. Still huge number considering that around I think two seventy thousand people took the test, as so the vast majority of people who had their information pulled into this database never even took the quiz anyway. Cogan's research company partnered with the parent company of an analysis slash campaign strategy company, and that was Cambridge Analytica. That that being the strategy company.

Cambridge Analytica ended up getting access to all this data that was pulled from this quiz, and Cambridge Analytica claimed that the data provided valuable information for political campaigns, that using the data from this quiz would mean that political candidates could target prospective voters with incredible accuracy, that campaigns could be really effective because they could tailor the campaign

to trigger specific responses from those people. It turned out that a lot of those claims were more hype than substance anyway. All this happened around two thousand fourteen into two thousand sixteen, but the world at large remained ignorant about it until two thousand eighteen, when various expose a pieces brought the matter to global attention. It was clear that Facebook, Cogan, and Cambridge Analytica had all been involved in some questionable activity, uh to the extent that those

activities were criminal. Remains sort of an open question now, Racine. The Attorney General of Washington, d C. Previously sued Facebook, the company which is of course now known as Meta, and later in that process he wanted to add Zuckerberg as a defendant in the case, but the judge ruled that it was too late in the proceedings for the Attorney General to do that, and that Meta case is

still ongoing. So meanwhile, the Attorney General has now named Zuckerberg in a new lawsuit about this, and the Attorney General argues that Zuckerberg bears responsibility for sharing user data without those users consent, and further that he withheld information about the subject rather than divulging the info in a timely manner. Essentially, this accounted to a data breach and he had a responsibility to report that, but he did not do it. The Attorney General says Zuckerberg has violated

the Consumer Protection Procedures Act. Now, some of y'all might remember that Zuckerberg previously had to testify before Congress about the matter of Cambridge Analytica, so I'm sure this lawsuit will bring up all sorts of bad memories for Old Mark. Last week, I talked about how the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals lifted an injunction that was against Texas's controversial bill that allows social network users to suthe the social

networks themselves if they get banned. If the users argue that they were banned because of their political views and that this was infringing on their free speech, that means that that law is now in effect in Texas. Meanwhile, over in Florida, a somewhat similar bill has received the opposite treatment. The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld in order to block a Florida law that would have otherwise allowed politicians to sue platforms for banning them or

for moderating their content. So if a political candidate we're posting something that was demonstrably false and the platform then labeled it as misinformation, they would be able to sue the platform under this law. That law got blocked. So here we've got to somewhat similar laws and two dissimilar outcomes,

which is fun times right. Anyway, the Court of Appeals in the Florida case found that the Florida law was unconstitutional because social network companies have protection under the First Amendment that means the social networks can create and enforced content moderation rules, and moreover, the government cannot restrict the company's content moderation practices because if the government did that, that would be the same as the government censoring a company,

and that is not constitutional. It seems as though the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals has not come to the same bizarre conclusion as the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, in which one judge stated that platforms like Twitter and Facebook are quote unquote Internet provide leaders and thus should

be treated as common carriers. That is patently absurd, especially since I s p s, the actual companies that provide Internet access, have had their common carrier status stripped away during the Trump administration, and so it goes quality assurance. Employees at Raven Software, which is a subsidiary of Activision Blizzard,

have now officially formed their union. The employees began their attempts to organize last year and recently held their union vote, which passed, and that makes their union, the Game Workers Alliance, the second official union in the video games industry here in the United States. It's a significant achievement, in no small part because Activision Blizzard reportedly took several steps to

discourage the unionization attempt. Those steps included splitting up the QUA team and placing them in different departments in order to kind of keep them from organizing, allegedly, or arguing that any union vote should really fall on the entire staff of Raven Software, not just the q A department. The q A department is twenty something people, whereas the entire staff is like three hundred and fifty, so people have argued that that attempt was really to try and

dilute the q A department's ability to unionize. Despite all those efforts, the employees did form their union, and they sent a statement to the verge and said it's their hope that they inspire further employee organization efforts within the video game industry. Meanwhile, it's Sony's u S division of PlayStation. Former employee m m Ayo has filed a lawsuit against her former employer, and this is the second time that

she has done this. Judge dismissed her earlier complaints, saying that the scope of her complaint was far too wide that she needed to restate her complaint in a way that was more narrow and focused. So this new lawsuit has done that, and it alleges that women working for Sony PlayStation within the state of California have been the subject of sexual discrimination and systemic sexism. So we will have to see how that lawsuit unrolls as time goes on.

I've done several stories about various tech companies running into friction as they tried to create policies that require employees to come back into the office. Recently, Apple postponed its plans to require corporate employees to come into the office three days a week. They currently have are required to come in two days a week, and the company cited concerns about rising COVID nine team cases as the reason

for postponing that plan. Meanwhile, over at Google, employees who are in the Google Maps division are circulating a petition asking the company to extend work from home benefits. Google currently plans to require those employees to come back into the office five days a week starting in early June. The employees objections include concerns about how much it costs to live near Google offices and how much inflation and

supply issues have caused gas prices to skyrocket. So, in other words, these employees are saying it's too expensive to work for Google if they are required to come into the office five days week, And yeah, that's not how employment is supposed to work. When it's too expensive for you to work somewhere, things are broken anyway. According to the New York Times, some sixt of Google Maps employees have already signed the petition. Whether that makes a difference

remains to be seen. Okay, we've got a bunch more stories to get through. Let's take a quick break. We're back and it's time to talk about TikTok. Now, for a while, there was no real easy way for creators on TikTok to monetize their work and their popularity. So you have folks who are getting really well known on TikTok super fast, but they didn't have an easy way to leverage that into making money. Like, yeah, they were getting a lot of notoriety, but notoriety don't pay the rent. Anyway.

They started to figure out ways to kind of indirectly

make money. Creators could try and lure followers to other platforms where they could get support, whether it's Patreon or something else, or they could try and land sponsor deals, and they could get paid by sponsors for creating special content on TikTok, which TikTok would later help support, and then later still TikTok added a tip feature that lets users leave a tip for their favorite creators, And now TikTok is introducing a subscription service to some of the

more popular creators on the platform. Users will be able to pay a subscription to access live stream sessions from those creators, so it's kind of a way of getting some exclusive content. And the whole system right now is invitation only, so we're gonna likely see a gradual rollout before it becomes you know, platform wide, and at the time of this recording, I don't have any info on what kind of subscription tiers we might be looking at, you know, how expensive they are and whether there are

multiple levels. But in addition to that initiative, TikTok had also earlier announced that it is going to have an ad revenue sharing program with creators. So while early on the most you could hope for from being popular on TikTok was to be famous, now we can add the sibling getting rich to that. Nicks at least for some creators more power to y'all, I can never do what y'all do. I If I were to really adopt TikTok um, I have no doubt it would be a infrequently viewed,

pathetic display of me trying to be relevant. And um, I think there's plenty of that on TikTok already, so there's no need for me to jump in on that. Amazon continues to sunset features on older Kendall models. The company sent out an email to folks who own older Kindle devices like the second generation Kindle, the fourth and

fifth generation Kindles, and a couple of other models. The message indicates that these Kindle devices will soon no longer be able to purchase or borrow titles directly from the device, so you won't be able to buy a new book from the Kindle itself. Instead, those owners will have to go to the Amazon web page. You know, use like a computer or smartphone to go there. You can purchase things on the web page and then use the web page to share that content to your devices, so it

adds some extra steps and becomes less convenient now. The likely reason behind this is that older Kindle models are running on systems like essentially operating systems that Amazon can't update anymore because the the hardware of those older Kindle models aren't really able to support later versions of that system,

so features are getting left behind. Previous the Amazon Kindle owners who had purchased units with three G connectivity found their devices severely restricted because tell, the communications companies have been shutting down their old three G networks, so there's nothing to connect to. You know, if there's no infrastructure

to support connectivity, there's no connectivity. Really, these stories illustrate how the stuff we buy has a limited lifespan that is not necessarily related to how well the hardware works over time. Like everything on the device might still be in perfect working order, but the back end no longer supports that device. Uh, it's because the rest of the system is evolving, whereas that device is stuck in that

form factor. We've seen this in tons of technology. In fact, like this is old news, right, because there's a long running joke in the computer world that you go, you buy a PC, you bring it home, and by the time you get out of the box, it's already obsolete.

That joke has been around forever. But this is the sort of thing we can expect happen as we rely on more products that lean on cloud services, and in fact, it's one of the reasons that folks can get a little antsy about buying into a new product because the product might work fine, but if that back end system that provides the features shuts down or changes in some way, you could be left with a useless pile of electronics that technically still works but can't connect to anything. So

it's a risk, and it's a tradeoff. So the risk, of course is that your device may no longer work, but the other benefit to it is that, you know, we end up getting devices that end up having far more capabilities then they're on board electronics would allow all on their own, So it's a given take. As the world pivots to lean more heavily on renewable energy sources and battery technology, we've seen some pretty big obstacles pop

up recently. I've mentioned before how the electric vehicle industry is under intense pressure because more and more countries are setting a deadline for migrating away from internal combustion engine vehicles. But at the same time, we are producing far too few batteries in order to support a total switch to e vs, like, if we wanted to produce as many electric vehicles as would be necessary to replace all internal combustion engine vehicles, we couldn't do it because we don't

have enough battery production to cover that well. The International Energy Agency reports that the price for raw materials that are being used in stuff like batteries and renewable energy technology has really gone up recently, and it's due to a lot of different factors. You've got you know, COVID issues, You've got supply chain problems, and you've got Russia's war

in Ukraine. Russia currently is the source for a massive amount of material that's used in various renewable energy technologies, and the war has cut off access too much of that supply. As a result, the price of those materials has increased dramatically. Lithium alone jumped up seven eight percent in cost from Anuary to March. Many people have pointed out that this is really a huge wake up call. The underlines a fairly obvious conclusion, and that conclusion is

don't put all your eggs in one basket. I mean, we have an old folks saying that really nails this home right. So in other words, it is critical to diversify where you get your materials from, as depending too heavily on a single source spells doom when something interrupts that supply. Over the last several years, we've seen the cost of renewable energy come down because manufacturing facilities have created more efficient processes and started to produce at larger scales.

So the cost of renewable energy has declined over time. But there is concerned that these rising costs in raw materials is going to slow or perhaps even reverse that trend in the not too distant future. Perhaps next Sunday a d Airbnb has become the latest US company to pull out of China. Uh And I know it's weird to include Airbnb in a tech podcast, but it is one of those companies that often gets treated like a tech company, seeing as how the interface for Airbnb is

Internet dependent. Anyway, Airbnb's reason for pulling up stakes is a little bit different from companies like LinkedIn and Yahoo. Those companies primarily left over concerns about how the Chinese government was demanding access to user information. In Airbnb's case, it appears that the main motivator for leaving China was because of a rise in so called super apps, which

provide multiple services to users. They can range from stuff like online shopping services, to ride hailing services to yeah booking a place to stay, so more Chinese citizens have been relying on these kind of catch all apps rather than on those that focus on a single service. Airbnb will continue to provide Chinese citizens who travel abroad access to booking places when they are staying outside of China, but you'll no longer be able to pop on Airbnb to find a place to crash the next time you

had to Shanghai. Speaking of China, the country has an app called wi Bo, which is sort of like Twitter. It's spelled w e i b O, and I apologize if I am completely mispronouncing it. I very likely am. But that app recently banned an account belonging to James Liang. He is a co founder of a company called trip dot com, which is a travel services company in China, and according to Wibo, Liang had violated quote relevant laws and regulations end quote. Wibo did not go into more

detail about exactly what Liang's violations were. The current hypothesis is that Wibo band Liang because Leang had posted criticism of China's zero tolerance policy when it comes to COVID outbreaks. Now, as you probably know, the practice in China is to lock down a region anytime a COVID outbreak is detected within that region, which shuts down everything for a couple of weeks at a time usually, and it grinds all

activity to a halt. And we've seen stories of companies like Tesla trying to work around this by encouraging employees to essentially move into the manufacturing facilities so that they literally live where they work. Anyway, Lang argued that the practice of shutting down regions is causing enormous economic disruption and that it's becoming increasingly difficult to recover from that disruption, and that seems to have been enough to get him banned from Wi Bo. Now, on the one hand, I

do feel China's response has been way too strict. It's it's gone over the top. On the other hand, I worry that the workarounds are putting people in danger simply to avoid disruptions in business. So companies like Tesla and others that are trying to get around these issues, I worry that it's disregarding people's health just for the sake of keeping things going. Goodness knows, you know, I really hate seeing people in my own country behave like there

is no pandemic. There never was a pandemic. Shut up, you mask wearing freak. You're the problem. I'm not the problem. I do not like that attitude. I suspect there's probably a pathway that's somewhere in between these various extremes that could potentially be the most responsible, keeping the most people healthy while creating the smallest amount of economic disruption. But what the heck do I know? I'm a podcaster. All Right, we have a few more stories to wrap up before

we get to that. Let's take another quick break. Okay. I do have a positive story about China that I definitely wanted to share, and that is the country plans to launch a space telescope named shun Chian, which means to study the heavens in three and shun Chian will be a lot like the Hubble space telescope, but with

a significantly larger field of view. According to one source I was reading, it will be three fifty times the field of view of the Hubble telescope, and this space telescope will be used to expand our understanding on big questions like why is the universe expanding at an accelerated rate? Like we understand that it's expanding, but why is that expansion accelerating. It's also going to be used to try and help get more information on really tricky things like

dark energy and dark matter. China plans to insert the telescope into a similar orbit with the Tiangong Space Station, which would allow the station and telescope to doc with one another in the event that the telescope requires service, which is a good plan. You might remember that the Hubble initially had a flaw in it that affected image resolution and required NASA to send up some service crews

in Space Shuttle missions to address that problem. Starlink, the satellite internet service provider from space Sex, has introduced a new subscription model for those who want to travel around

and bring their Starlink antenna with them. Currently, subscribers pay a hundred ten bucks per month to subscribe to starlink, and a few Starlink users discovered that when they initially signed up for service, they had to uh specify an address they could actually bring their Starlink antenna with them, set it up wherever they stop, and still access service while they are traveling. And so folks began to do that,

they were traveling around and bringing connectivity with them. Well, SpaceX took a look at that and thought, hey, I'd like to make money off of that. So now the company is going to offer a more expensive plan that outright supports this type of use. For one five bucks a month. Starlink customers can take their set up with them, making it a portable connectivity solution as long as they're

traveling within areas that Starlink provides service. The company is not going to support and activity on the move, so you are not meant to, you know, set up your star Link at the back of a van or something and try and get uh Internet connectivity while you're driving down the streets, so you're really meant to set it up wherever you stop and then pack it up when

you're ready to move on. I'm wondering how many folks out there have adopted a nomadic lifestyle and how that's worked out for them, and also how much money they had before they jumped on that, because while the idea sounds really interesting to me, whenever I actually start to think about it, I come to the conclusion that I just don't make enough money to make that kind of thing work out, at least not without becoming a drifter.

And I'm not cool enough to be a drifter. And Video announced that is shifting toward liquid cooled graphics cards for data centers. So, in a data center, you've got hundreds or maybe even thousands of computers and they're all

packed close together. These machines generate a lot of heat, particularly when they're working hard on processor intensive operations like really intense AI processes and electronics in general do not perform well in heat, so that means data centers have to rely heavily on cooling systems, typically air cooling systems, to bring operational temperatures down so that machines don't start failing left and right now. That in turn costs money

and takes up a lot of space. So in Video's plan is to use water cooling technology, which is more energy efficient and takes up less space than air cooling tech, for their graphics cards for these data centers. The ideas that the data centers won't have to use quite as much energy to air cool the computers, though of course in videos, approach really just covers the graphics cards and not CPUs or other types of processors. Still, the move could end up saving energy and money, which are pretty

good goals to shoot for. Finally, Superman will have to find another place to change when in New York City as he goes from mild mannered reporter to a man who can leap tall buildings in a single bound. And that's because New York has removed the lasked of its public pay phones this week. We are at the end of an era. Now, some of y'all might be asking, what the heck is a public pay phone? Well, young Padawan. In the old days before cell phones, cities would install

public payphones as a type of convenience. You can walk right on up to one of these payphones, some of which were housed in booths, complete with a door that you could close to black out the sounds of the city and prevent nosey types from listening in. On your telephone call, you'd plunk in some coins and a coin

slot and you would make your call. Long distance calls cost more, and you would have to plunk in more coins if your call ran along an operator would tell you that you need to add more coins if you wanted to continue the conversation, or you could call collect as we used to say, and the person on the other end of the line could choose to accept the charges and talk to you, or deny the charges, and you would be left there forlorn in a payphone with

a dead receiver in your hand. Also, Superman could change in phone booths. Uh, I should mention, however, the pay phones that New York removed weren't actual phone booth payphones, so my Superman joke doesn't really work anyway, but I kind of wanted to include it. Back on track. Now that we are in an era where pretty much everyone has at least a cell phone, if not a smartphone,

public payphones have become largely obsolete. New York has been replacing them with kiosks that include stuff like ports where you can charge your own phone, WiFi signals so you can connect via the kiosk, and an interface that lets you make calls over the kiosk itself free of charge. It's a very different world these days. Also slight tangent.

This end of an era makes me a little sad because I remember an a r G in an alternate reality game in which players who solved clues would discover coordinates that would lead to a public payphone, and a phone call would come in on that public payphone at a particular time, So you would be prompted to go to this pay phone at a certain time so that

you could receive a call. So you would go to that location, you'd stand by the phone, and sure enough it would ring and you would answer it and you would end up speaking with a character within the A r G. That kind of thing was super cool to me. I actually helped solve some of the clues that led to some of the phones, though I was never able to get to one of the phones at the specific time,

which I really regret. I did listen to some of the recordings of the calls, and some of them were truly delightful and weird and um some of them cringe e, but lots of fun. Anyway, that approach has become less viable as more locations have eliminated public pay phones, so you're not likely to run into that kind of thing these days. Obviously, you could still have a r G S where you get calls on your own personal device, but that just you know, it doesn't get you out

in the world. It doesn't make you feel more immersed the way this particular approach did. I just thought it was really cool idea. Anyway, that's it. That's the news for Tuesday, May twenty four, two thousand, twenty two. Hope you all are well. If you have any suggestions you would like for future episodes of tech Stuff, or any questions or anything like that, you have two ways to

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