Tech Stories of 2019 - The Bummer Episode

away from the studio. But I'm back today, and it's that time of year when I take a look back at the previous twelve months and consider some of the biggest text stories to come out over the course of the year. Now, this year, twenty nineteen, it was a pretty darn packed one when it comes to news, and things changed so quickly, and there are so many high level stories that it can actually be pretty easy to

good stuff that happened earlier in the year. So I'm gonna walk us through some of the big themes of the year and some of the stories that center on those themes. And there are so many things to talk about that I'm actually gonna have to do two episodes about it. I originally was going to really try and cram it into one, but that just wasn't very practical. I would just be rattling off headlines, and what good

is that. So this one's going to be filled with a lot of stories about mistakes and things going wrong in the world of tech. So I'm calling this episode the Bummers of twenty nineteen. But um, here's the bad news. There were a lot of bummer stories, So some of those are gonna probably spill into the next episode two, but I'll do my best to to to lighten the

mood of it in the next one occasionally. Now, one of the big themes has actually become a pretty common one over the last several years is the theme of data breaches. Like I have previously called earlier years like the Year of the Data Breach, but I think the

same thing can be said of twenty nineteen. So a couple of years ago, the credit reporting company Equifax dealt with a massive data breach that resulted in a host of investigations in the United States both the state and federal levels, and the company ultimately agreed to pay out somewhere between five and seven hundred million dollars as a result in fines. They were also giving people the opportunity to lay a claim for at least some sort of

compensation for this data breach. People were invited to apply for a payout of one hundred twenty five dollars, not exactly a princely sum when you consider having your personal information rated due to insufficient protections on a corporate level.

In September two tho nineteen, Equifax announced that people claiming a payout would need to provide proof that they had also enrolled in a credit monitoring service by October, because that would show that the people had concern about their own credit rating and their own personal information, that they weren't just looking for money to get money, but that they actually were actively trying to keep track of this stuff, or else the claim could be denied, and the FTC

had previously already warned that due to the number of claims, people were likely to get far less than a hundred twenty five dollars because there was only a pool of around thirty one million dollars that had been set aside for these payouts. You know that five d seventy five to seven million dollars that wasn't set aside for payouts.

Only thirty one million was set aside for payouts. And I know it's crazy to say only thirty one million, but when you look at the scale of this data breach, you realize that that means if everyone who was affected lays claim to a payout, you don't get very much. But this whole mess has prompted more conversations about data

secure and corporate accountability, which is a good thing. It's sad that it comes at the expense of this terrible mistake, but at least people are talking more seriously about this. Hopefully something will actually happen because of it. Now, we've seen lots of these stories over the last several years, and they really do show no sign of slowing down right now, which is unfortunate. In twenty nineteen, there were

some truly notable examples across different industries. I pulled data from Norton, the information security company to look at some of the big ones. One of those would be Capital One, the financial company, reported that hackers were able to access a large amount of data, affecting one hundred six million records in the company's files. Most of those records were

for a credit card applications rather than established accounts. So it wasn't like the hackers necessarily got a lot of credit card info, but they got a lot of application information. And when you think about the info you need to provide hide when you apply for a credit card, it includes stuff like, you know, personal information that is really

important to you. And it might be mundane stuff like your name, which, hey, you know, no big deal, someone knows your name, okay, But it might include your email, which again maybe that's more frustrating or or irritating. But then there's also your physical address, which gets a little more spooky scary, your credit score, your income, maybe your Social Security number, essentially all the stuff it would take for someone to steal your identity and sell it off

on the dark web, which is not very cool. Capital one hacker named Page Thompson targeted a third party cloud computing company that Capital One had relied upon to host the credit application services. She exploited a vulnerability in a web at firewall to get illegal access to the data. She was arrested for the data intrusion, and then she

was held in a men's detention center. Uh, she's transgender, and this gets into a whole thing with criminal justice systems and the treatment of people who are transgender, which honestly goes way beyond the scope of this podcast. But I'll just say that when I read that she was held in a men's detention center, that really upset me. Now, I don't disagree with her being detained she broke the law, or allegedly broke the law. She denies this. I more

object that it wasn't in a more appropriate setting. Anyway, She's awaiting trial for the case. That trial is scheduled right now for March twenty. She has pled not guilty to the charges. Another company to experience a data breach was door Dash, the food delivery service. The company experienced the breach in May, but didn't disclose it until September twenty nineteen. A third party access the information of nearly

five million drivers and customers without permission. The information they were able to access included personal information, including the last few digits of credit card and bank account numbers, but not the whole number. It was just that last little string. It also included the hashed passwords of many account holders, so it's always good to change your password if you make use of services that later reveal that they've been hacked,

it's always a good idea to change that information. And also, well, I'll get to it, but don't use the same password everywhere. It's a little spoiler alert for a future discussion. So early in the year, the service Evite had a data breach that affected one hundred million records, again exposing customer information like names, addresses, phone numbers, and the password that they used for the account. And again the exposure of passwords drives home that importance right use unique passwords with

different services. That way, if one service is compromised, you don't have to worry about the hackers accessing everything else you use using the same password. If you're using one password for everything, then you're essentially opening up the door. As soon as one breach is effective, all of your services have been breached. So don't use the same password for everything. Use a password vault, UH, use stuff like two factor authentication. All of that will help minimize your risk.

It doesn't eliminate it, but it minimizes it. And if you find out one of the services you use was compromised, change all that log and information right away. Now. The medical industry also saw its share of data breaches the American Medical Collection Agency, which is a company that collects overdue payments for various medical labs. So essentially, these are the folks who come after you if you haven't paid

certain medical bills. They also had a breach. Hackers access more than twenty million records, and the information included not just personal information, but even stuff like credit card information. The actual breach began back in the summer of eighteen, but the vulnerability remain unpatched until Arch twenty nineteen. In June of this year, the company filed for bankruptcy protection. So you know, things are just going great for them.

And close to home, Georgia Tech suffered a data breach when some third party gained access to a university owned database. The database had tons of personal information on current and former students, as well as staff and faculty at the college, including things like social security numbers. In total, one point to six five million people were affected by that data breach. The college is reaching out to offer credit monitoring and identity theft protection services for those affected by it, but

still yikes. The U. S Government also was not immune to data breaches. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA had a data breach, not because some hacker broke into the system, but because the agency accidentally released files containing sensitive information, such as the personal info of more than two million people. So ad trombone noise insert here now. According to the US Inspector General, FEMA violated the Privacy Act of nineteen seventy four by releasing this data to

a third party contractor. The contractor was in charge of securing temporary lodging for people who are affected by emergencies and disasters, so like a fire or a flood. But the data FEMA provided was far more extensive than what was actually needed for this contractor to do its job, and so that data included stuff like banking information and bank transit numbers and stuff like that, stuff that did

not need to be shared. Now, considering that this breach affected people who are already dealing with emergency situations that were bad enough to necessitate a relocation, that's a that's a big, big ouch. Making matters worse is that even some of the companies that are dedicated towards security and privacy have had data breaches in twenty nineteen. Take nord VPN for example. That was a service that I've used

in the past. A VPN is a virtual private network, and the purpose of a VPN is to allow a user to log into a remote server and then use various internet services so that they can't be traced back to the end user. Now, at first glance, that might sound like it's shady, but it's actually a really useful service. If you're concerned about your own data security, you can use a VPN when you're in areas where you can't be certain of the security of the network, and that

helps improve your own security. But then this year, word came out that nord vpn had an internal private key exposed back in which created the possibility for hackers to create a server and host it on the nord vpn service as if it were a valid Nord VPN server. Now, that would mean that an end user who was relying on nord vpn might end up logging into one of the hackers computers thinking it was a secure VPN server, and the hacker we get to see all the traffic

coming through that computer. Nord vpn has stated that since the breach, the company has patched this problem and that the company doesn't keep a log of any user activity, So hackers would only capture any traffic that happened on their own server during that breach. They wouldn't have gotten traffic information from any other servers on the nord VPN network.

They wouldn't be able to look at historic data because the company doesn't keep any Still, that might come as a little comfort to a community of users who presumably have subscribed to the service out of a desire to maintain privacy and security. Now, these stories are pretty discouraging, and to be honest, it's just the tip of a

huge iceberg. According to a report from Javelin Strategy and Research, there were five thousand, one hundred eighty three reported data breaches in the first nine months of two thousand nineteen alone. Now keep in mind those are reported data breaches. There are likely many more that have either gone discovered or unreported. Now those breaches represent nearly eight billion records exposed. The rate shows a thirty three increase in breaches compared to

two thousand eighteen. Most of those breaches happened to companies with fewer than one employees, so these weren't like the big big news items like Capital One or door Dash. There were some good news items in the report. However, not everything was dour. Credit Card security has improved thanks to chip technology, so there was actually a decline in credit card frauds. That's something to be thankful for. Now.

It can be a hassle just to practice good secure internet habits, as I've covered in previous episodes of tech Stuff. As users, we all have a responsibility to protect our data as best we can, But if we want to do useful stuff with that data, ultimately we eventually have to hand it over to other entities, and when these other entities have data breaches, it's also a breach of trust. If we don't trust in the systems, things fall apart. Now, I think it highly unlikely that we're going to see

fewer attempts at data breaches as time goes on. It only makes sense we're gonna keep seeing them and probably see efforts increase over time. So hopefully we'll have more success stories revolving around foiling a data breach. But the world of information security is typically a see saw type of thing. The hackers get better at cracking systems and exploiting vulnerabilities, companies get better at patching the holes, but then the hackers look for different holes, and the entire

cycle repeats itself. Meanwhile, people like you and me get caught up with our data potentially at risk, which is kind of gross. Well, let's stick with some more bummers. Um I figured if I frontload the episodes with bummers, then I can make some space in the back half for some more fun stuff. But first, let's talk about financial performance. So two thousand nineteen saw some pretty rough quarters for a you companies. One of those was Uber.

Now I mentioned this in an earlier episode this year about fake it until you Make it, but Uber leads the way among ride hailing companies in a category you don't want to appear in, which is the most money lost per quarter. Now, to be clear, all ride hailing companies are losing money. None of them are profitable. No one has figured out how to make a business model that has a profitable side as of yet. But Uber

is losing money on a scale that's pretty monumental. During the second quarter of twenty nineteen, the company posted revenues of three billion dollars, which, come on, that's that's a lot of chadder, But they posted losses of five billion dollars. Wolf Uber CEO stated that a large part of those losses came from the I P O process that Uber

went through the initial public offering. The company had bought back shares that belonged to employees, which posted in the company records as an expense, but that was a one time expen Uber won't be buying back shares again in the future. Still, analysts say that even taking into account the stock compensation cost, Uber would have lost more than a billion dollars. And that's just one quarter. That's not all of twenty nineteen, So if my math is right,

there are four quarters every year. So the question is, can Uber find a way to be profitable in the right hailing and related businesses or will it have to bank on investors bailing the company out again. I'm worried we're looking at another bubble that's just about to burst.

But I hold out hope that companies like Uber Left and other right hailing services are able to turn things around preferably while also treating their employees well and ensuring the safety of their customers, which are also ongoing issues with many of these right hailing companies. More to say about that in just a moment, but first let's take

a quick break now. Speaking of safety and right inhaling, it's also important to hold up Lift to the magnifying glass and not give that company a free pass while raking Uber over the coals. Numerous women have come forward in lawsuits against Lift, stating that they were the victims of assault. They also say the company did nothing to prevent those assaults, and they didn't do enough to ensure

passengers safety. And on top of all that, they say that Lift ignored complaints filed after the assaults took place and then downplayed the events to the media. One lawyer states that there's evidence that Lift purposefully withheld cooperation from law enforcement officers who are investigating these claims. Now Lift is not the only right hailing company to come under scrutiny due to safety concerns and reports of assault, and there are also cases in which drivers have been assaulted

by passengers. This is an ongoing story, and there are a lot of discussions about measures that could help protect passengers and drivers alike. But the rollout is likely to be re regional and staggered over weeks or months, so it's not exactly the super fast response you would hope for. Necessarily, all right, let's keep that bummer train of moving. In January two thousand, nineteen, the utility company Pacific Gas and

Electric or pg n E, declared bankruptcy. Now, this company serves customers along the West Coast, and in twenty seventeen, it was found guilty of starting a series of wildfires in California, which then put the company thirty billion dollars in debt. That's billion with a b P. G n E emerged from bankruptcy in September twenty nineteen after agreeing

on an eleven billion dollar settlement with insurance companies. Now, this is the same utility company that would shut down power to California residents in a series of planned blackouts during a particularly windy season in order to avoid a similar situation and which perhaps a broken power line might start a wildfire. The blackouts affected more than half a

million people in the San Francisco region. So that was not a great story, and the tech sector obviously covered it quite a bit, with so many tech companies located in the Bay Area. Now, at least seven coal mining companies in the United States have declared bankruptcy in twenty nineteen, which marked the first year in which more US citizens got electricity from renewable sources than from coal powered plants.

At least thirty three oil and gas producers have gone bankrupt as well, and the Zoo might imagine this has made lots of folks in the coal and oil industries upset. And while I definitely don't want to see people face hardship as companies closed down, I don't want to see people out of work. I also think the move away from fossil fuels is a necessity. So it's my hope that employees of these companies can find work in the renewable energy sector. I think it's imperative we rid ourselves

of our dependence upon fossil fuels. But we also have to make sure that the people who were employed by that into tree can find good work elsewhere and they're not just left in the lurch. We have to make sure that whatever plans we have to transition away from fossil fuels also take into account the people whose livelihoods

depend upon those industries. Now, speaking of going elsewhere, what do you do when your company is in financial crisis and the company's main product is renting out office space to tech startups. That's the question that we Work has been trying to answer for much of twenty nineteen. So we Work was launched back in. The company leases out office space to tenants and markets around the globe, So essentially at leases out space and buildings and then sublets

that space to smaller companies. And in that regard, it's not really a tech company in of itself, but it's clients are in largely the startup tech space. It's kind of the market that we Work targets. Specifically, we Work offices tend to have amenities that you might find in a art up that has a lot of venture capital and angel investors behind it. So, you know, a lot of tech journals have covered the company's rather tumultuous twenty nineteen.

We Work initially planned to hold an initial public offering in September twenty nineteen, when it would become a publicly traded company on the stock market. Only things did not go quite as planned. First, something that would have made my eyebrows go up was that the founder or co founder, Adam Newman, liquidated around seven hundred million dollars worth of

we Work stock before it went into its initial public offering. Now, that does not necessarily mean that Newman lacked confidence about how the stock market would treat his company, but a lot of folks tend to interpret those types of moves as kind of a message that the founder doesn't think things are gonna go well, so they're cashing out before

the value of their stock tanks. Now, when the I p O paperwork became public in August twenty nineteen, journalists pointed out that the company had been experiencing some pretty massive losses, not unlike the right hailing businesses I talked about earlier in this episode, there were questions about whether or not we Work would ever be profitable, so also like the right hailing services. In fact, I think there

are a lot of parallels between the two. There's also a report that in some we Work offices the company had included stuff like these little phone cubbies or phone booths that had equipment in them that was emitting for malde hyde fumes, which isn't a great thing either. We Work ended up scuttling its plans for an I p O and postponed those plans UH to late twenty nineteen, which, as far as this recording is concerned, UH still hasn't happened those those I p O plans. Newman actually would

step down as CEO shortly thereafter. He reportedly got a one point seven billion dollar buyout from soft Bank, which effectively controls we Work. Now, we Work began to all off some other companies it had acquired over recent years, and it also laid off about twenty percent of its workforce. Reporters noted that the company had also started to explore ways it might back out of some leases in various regions,

while simultaneously announcing plans about opening news space in different cities. Also, just here's a personal note to soft Bank. You can pay me a billion dollars and I won't even settle you with a company that has no known pathway to profitability.

It's a bargain. Just show me the money now. Not to get too sidetracked by all this, but I feel like we Work and the ride hailing services really fall into that fake it until you make it category I covered on a recent episode of Tech Stuff, you know, the one where I ranted for like forty five minutes. I find it perplexing that the motivating factor for investment isn't profitability but just company growth, as in, a company doesn't need to show it can be profitable if it

can continue to expand rapidly. But in my mind, that just means that now instead of a small, unprofitable company, you've got a large, more complex, unprofitable company. And I suppose the hope is that you will eventually quote unquote make it up in volume, meaning that whenever you achieve

some predetermined magical scale, your operations will become profitable. But from my perspective, it seems that that very rarely happens, and that you're more likely to find yourself pouring money into a sinking ship, and then people like Newman get the benefit of a lifeboat that's loaded down with cash. Anyway, I'm not an expert in corporate finance, so it's entirely possible that I'm overlooking something obvious. It's just to me,

this model doesn't make much sense. I get the desire to grow year over year, although I'm not crazy about it, but without the profitability part in there, and growth is unsustained, bowl you'll eventually collapse in on yourself because no one's gonna keep giving you money just to grow. All right, how about we chat a bit about everyone's favorite social media platform that continues to play an increasingly pivotal role

in how we access information and misinformation. So it's time to check in on what Facebook was up to in twenty nineteen. And boy howdy, there was a lot going on. I'm not even going to cover all of it, because you could do a full episode on just the shenanigans Facebook got up to in nineteen, But anyway, let's look

at some of the big ones. For one thing, the company received a hefty fine for the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which Facebook's app permissions allowed a data collection company to access not just the information of people who downloaded the app or who installed the app, but also the data of all of their contacts on Facebook who did

not opt in. The fine was five billion dollars of princely some no doubt about it, But there are critics who said that's not nearly severe enough of a penalty considering the scope of the betrayal of trust and user information.

After all, Facebook as a company earned twenty two billion dollars in revenue in so yeah, five billions a lot of cash, But when you're looking at numbers like twenty two billion dollars in revenue, a five billion dollar fine might not be enough to make Facebook actually take greater steps towards ensuring user security. In June two thousand nineteen,

Facebook announced the launch of Libra, the cryptocurrency project. Facebook also announced the Libra Association, a consortium of twenty eight companies that would form the initial group responsible for bringing this cryptocurrency into reality, with a promise that more companies

would soon follow to join the consortium. So think of it as a digital currency, not too different from something like bitcoin, although the Libra cryptocurrency would be based on real world assets and not just its own own uh

sense of value among the community. However, this announcement Facebook made was met with scrutiny, particularly on the part of various governmental agencies around the world, and to be fair, it's more accurate to say Facebook is the leading voice in this project UH and is not the only entity behind it, but for the purposes of most reporting, people

tend to simplify it by saying Facebook now. Governments began to call for regulations and rules to guide any sort of cryptocurrency effort, particularly in the wake of some high profile missteps by Facebook, like the aforementioned Cambridge Analytica scandal. By October twenty nineteen, more than of those original companies

had walked away from the Libra consortium. The first to leave was PayPal, and in an interview with Forbes, PayPal CEO Dan Shulman said that when they were able to see how far the project needed to go before it could roll out, and they heard that with the amount of work that PayPal needed to do to meet its own internal goals that were not related to Libra, they said, oh, well, just it makes sense for us to be part of

the consortium. We needed to focus on us first. Now, whether that was the same justification for the other companies that bailed on the Libra association, I can't say, but companies like Visa, Stripe, MasterCard, and eBay also left the association. With the increased interest among various governments to create rules to minimize the risk of something like a new cryptocurrency, it seems like Libra has a long way to go before it becomes a practical currency, if it ever does.

Another big Facebook story revolves around these social media platforms role in disseminating information and misinformation. This was a big theme throughout twenty nineteen, Mark Zuckerberg stated before the US government that he feels Facebook shouldn't play a role in fact checking stuff like political ads. So if a politician wanted to post an ad to face Book that contained incorrect or outright false information, they could do that and

Facebook would not intervene. As the company continues to deal with accusations that it is profiting from efforts of political manipulation and deception, this has been an area of focus for a lot of folks. Moreover, Facebook's algorithm favors posts that drive a lot of engagement, so likes, shares comments that kind of thing. Now, in turn, that generates more screen time for Facebook and us more revenue for the company.

So the company has a financial incentive to give a platform for stuff that gets people riled up, which in turn contributes to things like political extremism, which I'll talk more about in our next episode. It's a pretty ugly situation, and Zuckerberg so far seems to be intent on absolving himself of any responsibility for creating a platform that can be gamed in this way, and the platform itself benefits

from this. I can't stress that enough. Facebook makes money by having these sorts of posts on it because it generates a lot of activity, and that activity translates into more screen time, which translates into more money for Facebook, so they have a financial incentive to keep things going

the way they are. Towards the end of twenty nineteen, the Federal Trade Commission in the United States began to take a closer look at Facebook's proposed plan to integrating its various properties together, uh those being Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram. So while Facebook is trying to do this, it is also under investigation by the US government in

an antitrust case. A tighter integration between the different platforms would make it more difficult to separate down the line, and it's possible that the US government will demand Facebook to break up its various properties and spin them off as independent companies. So there's a chance that by the time you hear this, the FTC will have filed an injunction against Facebook from integrating these services further. And the

hits just keep on coming. Between when I started making notes for this episode and when I actually sat down in the studio to record it right now, you had another story about Facebook broke in mid December Facebook sent a letter to the United States Senate. The letter revealed that the company could locate users even if they had

opted out of being tracked with location data. Now, I would argue that this isn't as big a news story as it was made out to be because Facebook stated that they could use meta data, such as tagged photos that indicated a location and time, as well as who was in the tagged photo. But that seems pretty intuitive

to me. If I go to a party and I take a photo of you, you're at the party two, and then I post from the party and I tagged the location of the party and I tag you, then Facebook has data on where I am, where you are, what time we were there, and all of that that. It's all there in Facebook's data even if we don't have location information turned on regularly. Other ways Facebook could make guesses as to where people are depend less on direct user input and more and stuff like I P addresses,

which aren't as exact. They can give you a general idea, but they're not full proof. Now, Facebook defended its policies by stating that it could detect suspicious logins using this approach, such as if a person in one part of the country were to suddenly appear as though they were trying to log into Facebook, but from an IP address located

on the other side of the world. That would indicate that maybe somebody else had gotten hold of some log in information and they were trying to steal someone's Facebook account. Of course, stuff like VPNs could also create this scenario. You could be using a VPN to log into Facebook from the other side of the world for various reasons, and that could raise a false flag. But I do see what Facebook was trying to say. Now, one last

Facebook story before I take another break. In mid November, a thief stole several hard drives from the car of a Facebook employee, and those hard drives included unencrypted payroll data for thousands of Facebook employees. The data covered about twenty nine thousand people who are working for Facebook, so some of those folks presumably no longer work for the company. Now, in this case, we're talking about physical hardware taken from a car, so this was not a data breach in

the traditional sense. Now I'm surprised the data was unencrypted. I would imagine that in most cases you would want to encrypt that information, even on just a physical hard drive, but presumably it wasn't because no one ever assumed the hard drives would leave the possession of Facebook. Still, yikes, we got a few more bummers to go, but before

we do, let's take another quick break. So a big story to play out over the course of twenty nineteen was the world's response to the Chinese telecom company Huawei, which I've also covered in a previous episode of tech Stuff. The company isn't that old, but it already stands to be one of the major players in rolling out the technology that will enable five G wireless connectivity around the world.

In fact, with the outstanding orders the company already has in Europe, it leads the pack in terms of five G equipment sales. This is despite some hefty restrictions placed upon Huawei, mostly from the United States. In mid December twenty nineteen, it was revealed that Chinese officials had leveraged tremendous pressure on European countries to sign contracts to purchase five G equipment from Huawei or face consequences such as

canceled trade agreements. You know, wider trade agreements throughout China. Now at the heart of the dispute is a concern that Huawei has close ties with the Chinese government and that as a provider of telecommunications equipment, it's possible the company could potentially build in back doors and other features that would allow China to access vital communications channels across

the globe. In fact, such back doors had previously been found, although they could have been vulnerabilities not intentionally placed there, but still it raises some eyebrows. Huawei argues that it's actually a private company and it doesn't have any direction from the Chinese government, and that such fears are unfounded.

But it hasn't stopped countries like the United States from eyeing Huawei with suspicion, And to be fair, China is putting some pressure on various countries that are you know, conflicted about using Huawei, and that seems to send a message that China's kind of deeply integrated with the company's you know, day to day operations. Although Huawei says, no, no, no, this is just a government looking out for a company that exists within its borders. That's it. It's not a

sign that it's a Chinese government operation. So it's a complicated thing, and it all depends upon whose perspective you believe. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle. Speaking of China, the country's conflicts with Hong Kong have spilled over into

the tech space in various ways. A large number of Hong Kong citizens mobilized against the Chinese government, initially protesting a policy that would allow for extradition of Hong Kong citizens accused of certain crimes and they would be extradited to mainland China. Now, given China's reputation when it comes to justice, the too long didn't read version of that is, it's a very bad reputation. Many Hong Kong citizens protested

against this policy. They stated that it was undermining the independence of Hong Kong, which was something China had previously promised it wouldn't mess around with. While China would ultimately withdraw the extradition bill, this was really the push that got the ball rolling, and protests continue to this day because they extend beyond that. You could think of that as the straw that broke the camel's back. Now the tech angle of all of this, there's the video game

company Blizzard that I recently covered on tech stuff. While they make a digital card battle game called Hearthstone, and during a Hearthstone tournament in Taiwan, a Hong Kong player named why Chung or blitz Chung that's his gamer handle, showed support for Hong Kong protesters on camera during an

interview Blizzard band blitz Chung from the tournament. The Blizzard also banned the UH the people who were conducting the interview, even though they were doing their best to try and avoid appearing like they were enabling this UH and that band of blitz Chung would prevent him from playing in any grand Master tournament for a year, and he would have to forfeit the prize money he had accumulated up

to that point in the tournament. When pressed to explain why they leveled such a harsh ban, Blizzards stated that blitz Chung had violated a policy that prohibited players from doing anything that would tarnish the company's image or within the public. Now, that raised a pretty strong counter objection among the gaming community at large. Many people hypothesized that blizzards response was largely motivated by the fact that ten Cent, a Chinese company, owns a stake of ownership in Activision.

Blizzard they don't own the company outright, they just own a percentage. There was also speculation that Blizzard didn't want to endanger operations within the Chinese market. The Chinese market represents billions of dollars of potential revenue, so they didn't want to put that at risk. Critics also pointed out that Blizzards punishments toward other gamers around the world in response to vulgarity, you know, clear cut cases where someone has violated that policy. They were rarely as severe as

what blitz Chung experienced. Blizzards subsequently walked back the punishment a little bit. They returned the prize winnings to blitz Chung, but they kept a ban in place for half a year rather than a full year. Interestingly, Chinese companies, namely Tencent, have partial ownership in other video game companies, not just Blizzard, and some of these companies also produce games that have a tournament circuit, and in some of those cases, there seems to be no restriction on what players can say

about the situation in Hong Kong. So that raises questions about whether Blizzard was being proactively responsive for fear of upsetting the Apple cart or if possibly other companies have seen the backlash that Blizzard faced and they're setting themselves apart by taking a different approach. Oh and I should also backtrack just a little bit. So remember how I mentioned Whahwei is a leading company when it comes to

five G technologies. Well, that reminds me I should quickly address that a T and T and the company's attempt to leverage the concept of five G and how that got a lot of scorn in the tech community. Okay, so part of this story hinges on the fact that five G isn't just a single technology or anything like that. You can't just say five G relates to this specific implementation. It's really more of a family of technologies and implementations

that enable wireless data throughput at really impressive levels. And we typically describe it as speed, but the data is not actually moving faster than it was before. It's just that more data can travel all at once through a channel.

So instead of thinking of it as like a one lane road where you can just somehow defy the laws of physics and drive faster than the speed of light, it's more like you have an ultra wide highway where all the cars can travel at the speed of light simul taneously, so you get more cars, more data, but they're not traveling faster than they were before. There's just more of them. The rollout of five G is taking time because it requires new infrastructure. You can't just send

an update out to existing antenna's out there. You actually have to go install new ones and make them in a different density than older generations of wireless technology. You also need to have phones and other devices that can actually receive five G signals to take advantage of it. They can't just do that with their standard stuff, so it requires a whole lot of hardware upgrades across the board. Now, A T and T decided to kind of, you know,

leap frog all of that. The company made a change and they pushed out an update that would replace the LTE indicator on certain A T and T smartphones with a symbol saying five G E, and the E stands for evolution, so is a five G evolution network device. Now.

Critics said that A T and T was purposefully confusing the market, that it was positioning these phones as if they were already taking advantage of true five G networks, and we're operating on actual five G technology, when in fact they were actually relying on the older lt E

four G technology. Making matters more confusing was that A T and T was actually rolling out legit five G infrastructure, but it was only available in limited areas, and sometimes that would just be a small area within an actual city.

For example, according to analytics company open Signal, the A T and T five G E service did not outperform either T Mobile or Verizons LTE service, and so the general conclusion was that A T and T was trying to take advantage of an emerging technology to make it seem like their product, which according to tests wasn't superior to the competition, was somehow more capable. It was dirty

pool wool, as go maz Adams would say. Now I should also add that while it looks to me like A T and T deliberately tried to fool folks with this whole five G evolution network approach, the situation does actually get pretty complicated because the generations of wireless connectivity are kind of lucy goosey. You can't point to say three G and give a set of firm specifications on how much data could be sent over a network per

unit of time. The technologies within a generation evolve over the course of that generation, and if a company can upgrade hardware to take advantage of those evolutions, it can see improved data rate. So, in other words, not all four G networks or devices are equal. Some are capable of much better data transfer rates than others. It's even possible to have a really good network and a device

on an earlier generation outperform a later generation. Example, so it's possible for you to have a really good four G network and device outperform a five G device on

a five G network. Possibly it's that the Venn diagram is narrow, but it can happen, so it's not as simple as saying five G is faster than four G. It's definitely true that the potential of five G far outpaces that of four G. In other words, the best implementation of five G is always going to be better than the best implementation of four G as far as data throughput is concerned. But potential and reality are two different things, so it all depends on how it's implemented

in the area that you are in. And yes, I find this all to be incredibly frustrating because as a consumer. I just want my stuff to work really well and for it to be really fast, and it's not always an easy thing to determine. I'll wrap up with a couple of short stories. One is the saga of these seven thirty seven Macs, which I covered in a recent

tech Stuff episode. After two strop it crashes, governments around the world ordered that Boeing's seven thirty seven Max aircraft be grounded, pending a full investigation into what went wrong and any adjustments that need to be made. Boeing subsequently made changes to the aircraft's systems. The particular system at fault was meant to be a safety feature, a system that would kick in to counter this seven thirty seven

Max's tendency to tilt its nose upward. The problem was that the safety feature could override pilot commands, and if you had a single sensor failure sending incorrect information to the safety system, that's what could cause tragedy. Now, as of this recording, the fleet of aircraft is still grounded and Boeing has suspended manufacturing any more of them for the time being. The last story I wanted to mention quickly is a follow up on a company that I've

covered in a past episode of Tech Stuff. That company is, or rather was, movie Pass. So movie Pass aimed to create a subscription based service in which stomers could purchase a monthly pass to see first run movies in various movie theaters. But movie theater chains weren't super keen on this idea. Movie Pass had many notable ups and downs, most of which I covered in my episode on the company, but somehow managed to hang on longer than anyone really

thought was possible. This was despite the company having to walk back it's unlimited movie Pass for a much more modest offering, which I imagine must have led to a pretty large number of customers canceling their subscriptions when suddenly their unlimited movie Pass became no, you can see three movies or you can get discounts on tickets. And thus movie Pass had to secure loans from various sources just

to stay in business. Now, eventually the credits had to roll on this company, and in September twenty nine, team that's what happened. Movie Pass CEO Mitch Lowe released a statement that the company would cease operations immediately, and uh it, did you know? Movie Pass had failed to turn a

profit and the opposition it faced was considerable. While the company tried lots of different approaches to right itself, those choices ultimately either didn't work or actively worked against the company, alienating the users and inviting various lawsuits to come in. And it was pretty ugly stuff, all right. That wraps up this episode, but in our next episode, I'll continue to look back on technology in twenty nineteen. There's still a lot of bummers left on that list, including some

they go beyond bummer too outright disastrous. But there are a few cool things in there too, so we'll get to those as well. So if you guys have suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, reach out to me. The best place to do so's on social media over on Twitter and on Facebook. You can find us at text stuff, H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is a production of I

Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.