TechStuff Remembers 2014, Part One

the year two thousand fourteen. Some of the big stories that happened, stuff that I didn't cover in the Predictions episode because we didn't know it's going to happen, and then it happened. That's kind of the way that tends to work. I think your crystal ball is faulty. Yeah, it turns out that I was actually just staring into a magic eight ball, and uh, that was it. I think the problem is that you're not actually using crystal You're you've been peering into a plutonium core. That would

also explained the laws and teeth. So at any rate, let's talk about some of the big stories in two thousand and fourteen, some of the stuff that happened throughout the year. Now we're just going to be kind of covering some interesting things, not and not everything obviously the highlights in the low lights. Yeah, nothing, nothing like every story what happened in it would take us way too long,

you know. I think has been a really interesting year for tech and one of the most interesting things about it to me is that it seems like this has really been the year of the hack. That is absolutely the way I would put it. Yeah, I mean there have been big hacks and security breaches in the past.

There were so many of them and with such far ranging impact that I think it was the year where the average person out there, the person who doesn't really follow technology news, is really starting to understand that a lot of the conflicts that are looming large in our

future gonna be technology and cybersecurity related conflicts. Yeah. You know, we've heard stories in the past, everything from uh discovery of code in infrastructure things like utility infrastructure that that showed that there was possible Chinese incursions into our infrastructure. You know, those stories have come and gone, and but

this year really has displayed it. I mean, there's been a lot that have directly impacted consumers of course, in there was the target um hack, the one that stole a whole bunch of credit card information as well as other stuff from Target, and the fallout of that continued into But there are a lot of other stories we're gonna touch on, some of them that involve hackers hitting

different sites. Yeah. Well, in fact, maybe we should just go through all the stories of their chronologically, because it looks like in your notes, Jonathan, the very first thing you have is about a hack. No, it is, in fact, that was that hackers who posted data about Snapchat users claim they did so to show that Snapchat security wasn't sufficient. In January of this, Yeries, it was. This is the

first story we have. So this the hack itself had happened towards the tail end of but this was where we started getting information about what the hackers say their motivation happened to be. So, you know, there are different types of hackers, and I've talked about this before. There are hackers who what they're interested in is just learning how a system works and then how to modify that system.

Has nothing to do with breaching security, right, It's just learning how something works being able to build it yourself. Maybe modify it, maybe make it do something it wasn't intended to do, but it has nothing necessarily nefarious about it. Then you've got things like white hack hat hackers versus

black hat hackers. White hat hackers are the ones who work with companies to test their security, and they'll try to breach that security and then explain to the company how they were able to do it so that they

can patch that vulnerar ability. Black hat had hackers are the ones that are trying to do it for some sort of gain, either an ideological gain where they are bringing down a company or organization that has a philosophy that doesn't agree with their own philosophy, or monetary gain where they're stealing stuff, either to directly benefit themselves or

to sell off to other people. So in this case, the hackers were saying, we were just trying to prove that this company that says it has your privacy at heart doesn't really protect your privacy. That's all we were trying to do. But the way they did it was perhaps a little more on the black hat side than the white hack It's not like they alerted Snapchat and said, hey, by the way, we discovered this vulnerability, you need to address it instead. They they actually attacked. So all related

to the fact that Snapchat. I think it was Snapchat that they were claiming that they delete all of your messages,

but they actually don't. Yeah, there were a lot of issues with that Snapchat because again, yet, like you were pointing out, snapchat is all about sending someone a message that's supposed to have kind of a self destruct element to it, so that that's supposed to be ephemeral and not leave a trail for future generations to come discover what you know, Grandma and Grandpa were sending to each other on their phones, right, And it doesn't necessarily have

to be you know, salacious. It often is, but it doesn't have to be. It could just be I don't want this to live anywhere because it's just a goofy picture and I just thought it was funny and that's all. But yeah, it turned out that they're they're promises of things being deleted exactly when you expected them to be

were not completely true. The next story in January is that the US Appeals Court struck down the FCCS two thousand eleven regulations that demanded Internet providers treat all traffic equally because the court said the FCC lacked the authority to enact the regulations in the first place. It sounds like this is going to lead to some more net

neutrality squabbles. Yeah, this was a big, big deal, I mean, and a lot of people were pointing out that this was a potential issue at the very beginning, saying it's not that I like people were saying, I don't disagree that we need to have net neutrality rules in place. The problem is that the FCC is trying to uh to exert authority over something it doesn't have authority over, and it was because of the classification of Internet communications. Will come back to the story towards the end of

two thousand and fourteen. But yeah, that was a big, big news item early on. Also in January, Lenovo bought Motorola Mobility from Google for three billion dollars, and meanwhile Google bought Nest for three point two billion. Nest is the company that made yeah, also did smoke detectors, which in fourteen it ended up having to recall because of some issues. Wait, no, okay, one sentence explanation. How is the next thermostat actually special? Well, it It learns your behaviors.

So if you like to have your house nice and cool in the evening and warm and toasty in the morning, it learns that and then starts to preset things so you don't have to ever program it to do so. It just learns what you want and can even do things like when it realizes there's no one in the house, it can start to turn things off so that way you're not wasting energy heating a house that has no one in it. And the final story of January two thou fourteen was that the Apple Mac turned thirty. What

year were you born, Joe? Oh? The old okay, so that mac is older than you are. Uh, the Apple Mac? I remember the I remember in night when the commercial for the Apple Mac came out. That was the Orwellian one. You probably have seen it even yea and chatters the screen right Whose faces it up on the screen? Is it like John Hurd or somebody? Uh yeah, something like that.

You know, although it was John Hurt, it might not actually be a famous persons say if it was John Hurt, that John Hurt hasn't has has remained old man age since nineteen four and hasn't changed since it's not that he stayed young, he's just stayed just as old. Actually, you know, I think I'm thinking of him as the big totalitarian face on the screen in uh oh, what's the movie? Oh all right, yeah, John Hurt. I think

you're right. And I have never seen the Vendetta. It's kind of odd, right, because I mean, that's well, it's got a from what I recall, it's got John Hurt talking into a big screen and you know, spittles coming out of his mouth. He looks very angry about something. He's being the big brother type character. Yeah. Well, in February two thousand and fourteen, that was when we got a big news item where Microsoft finally announced its new CEO. So Balmer had stepped down as CEO. No, yeah, that

spoiler alert. Balmber stepped down the CEO Developers, Developers, I'm gone. And then Satya Nadela became the new CEO of Microsoft, and he was a veteran of the company. He had been there for twenty two years. Bill Gates meanwhile transition from chairman of the Microsoft Board to the role of technology advisor. UH. Microsoft's competitor Sony announced five thousand job cuts and that they were going to split the TV division into a wholly owned subsidiary and to sell off

its PC business. So this was a big news and not the last time we'll talk about Sony in this podcast. Obviously, anyone who's aware of current news knows that we're gonna have to come back around to Sony by the end um Also in that month, February, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory an nounced they had produced fusion power using high powered lasers. And only that, but they got more energy out of the fusion fuel than was put into the

fusion fuel. That's a big deal. Well, that would certainly be the goal if you're going to try to generate municipal energy of fusion exactly. And that was a tough goal, right. It was one of those things where we can achieve fusion, but we're pouring so much energy to make the reaction

happen that we're on a losing end of the proposition. Now, one thing to keep in mind, this does not mean that we're suddenly gonna have fusion power plants everywhere, because the laser only reached about one percent of the fuel. So this is still a long way from becoming a new way of generating electricity. You got more energy out of it, but you were only able to consume a tiny portion of the actual fuel. So it's not an efficient system yet, but it's very encouraging. Now in March

two fourteen, we get some another hacking story. Uh, Mount Cox U g X. You know why it's called Mount Cox, right, you know what the story is behind that? So Mount Cox. If you were to spell out the first three letters, you've got MT for Mount and then big upper case G for Cox. Magic the Gathering. I know, I thought you would enjoy that, Joe. It's so magical. So wait, hold on, what does that have to do with bitcoin? Well,

it's it was. It was the world's largest bitcoin exchange. Now, no, no, no, I mean, what does Magic the Gathering have to do with it? You can buy a crap ton of Magic the Gathering Cards with some bitcoin. My friend, Um, are you going to tell me that Magic the Gathering Cards are going to be the successor to Bitcoin is the next cryptocurrency? I would say that there was definitely a bartering system with Magic the Gathering Cards for a good

long while before bitcoin came around. But obviously Magic the gathering is not a digital format. Hold on, you were going to tell me an event what happened to Mount goss. It's got hacked, dude, another hack. Yeah, in this case, this was a true hack. This was not a d

d O S attack. This was the real deal. And the exchange completely collapsed because seven hundred fifty thousand bitcoin belonging to mountdocs customers, as well as a hundred thousand bitcoins belonging to the exchange itself, we're stolen in that. I may be misremembering, but I thought that the idea

of bitcoin was sold as an unhackable solution. You are correct, sir. Uh. The idea was that it was it had security measures in place that would prevent you from being able to do something like spend the same bitcoin more than once, because that's obviously a concern with any digital format. Obviously, if I give you a digital file, let's say it's music file, and you think this the song is pretty awesome,

I'd like to share this with all my friends. You could copy it as many times as you wanted and send as many copies as you wanted to everyone, or you could upload a copy and everyone else could end up grabbing that copy from the cloud, and they all have a copy of that song. What happens when your money is in this format? But bitcoin is supposed to be made in such a way that it's impossible to steal.

It's impossible to to spend more than one bitcoin. Are it's impossible to spend the same bitcoin more than once at a time, I mean, unless it eventually made its way back to you. But it's a little complex the way the bitcoin transactions work at any rate. Um. The people behind bitcoin were saying this was due to faulty security at Mount Cox. It had nothing to do with the format of the bitcoins themselves. They were it was like saying, you can't fault a dollar for being stolen

from a bank. Like if if if thieves come into a bank and they breach a bank security, it's not the fault of the currency within it. Well then, I mean that doesn't really matter to the average person using bitcoin. Stuff can still be hacked. Yeah, that was the problem. Was that the issue. The bottom issue is that this exchange still collapsed, and another one, a smaller one called flex Coin, just a week later also went billy up after after being targeted and thieves attacked them and stole

bitcoins from them. So for a while people were wondering if this was going to be the beginning of the end of the cryptocurrency, but it's stuck around, So spoiler alert for later in the year. Also in March, Edwards Snowdon addressed the south By Southwest Interactive Conference via streaming because he's still a wanted man UH to talk about the need for better encryption systems in the era of digital surveillance. Yeah, he's saying, hey, look, here's the deal.

People are spying on you one way or the other. Maybe it's a company, maybe it's a government, maybe it's hackers, but people are looking at your stuff. They might not be actively looking at your stuff. They might be gathering your stuff and then one day down the road they might look at exactly. It could be one of those things where someone gets this notion to search for a particular search term and it pulls up all interactions between people who use that search term in some way. Maybe

you're one of those people. So maybe what we need to do is really look at some good ways to encrypt communications so only the person who who only the

people communicating are the ones who have access to that info. Um, so it was a very interesting thing that he was actually virtually At south By Southwest also in March, IBM showed off the power of artificial intelligence at south By Southwest using a food truck in which the cooks prepared food based off recipes made by an artificially intelligent program. Huh yeah, users would put in did not read about

this at the time. It's kind of silly, but users would put in a few preferences about what they liked as food. The program would then essentially had a database of recipes and based upon your preferences, would suggest, uh, something interesting based on that, and then the cooks, the human cooks inside the food truck, would actually make your meals. So it's not like a robot was cooking your food. It was just choosing what it was you were going to eat, and obviously couldn't be I would love to

see all the ways that went wrong. Yeah, I don't know, I don't know how el why did you put cinnamon sticks on this piech Yeah? All right? Uh. There was certainly not an unlimited choice. Obviously, they were limited to whatever things they could prepare in that food truck. But it was an interesting approach um and you know, just showing that Watson can win at Jeopardy as well as

cook you a decent meal. Uh. The United States government in March asked the Internet Corporation for assigned names numbers that's called I CAN to come up with a transition plan for the US to relinquish control of the Internet. So this was essentially saying, when I say control of the Internet, I really mean, uh, the whole naming convention being in charge of all that kind of stuff that all fell under the purview of the US. Does that

originally go back to DARPA? Yeah, yeah, I mean I know the Internet does, but the naming conventions, well, well yeah, because it was the it was the founders of Essentially, it was the people working on our ponnet who came up with the protocols that the Internet would end up following, and it was through their work that, uh, the rules were set like this is how we named things, and uh it kind of evolved from there. So it's more like the roots of this can be traced back to DARPA.

Maybe not direct, not a direct line in the sense of it was exactly the same way, but yes, it certainly does go back there. Uh. And in March that's when Sony announced Project Morpheus, which is a VR headset kind of a competitor to the Oculus Rift, although the Oculus Rift has been uh is being developed just for computer systems, not for consoles, whereas the Morpheus would presumably work with the PlayStation. Now, wait a minute, did Sony

by the Oculus Rift? No? Facebook did. Facebook. That's right. Facebook bought Oculus, which was a big you know, that's a big head scratcher for a lot of people saying, well, this is kind of weird, and uh, it was one of those things that experienced three hundred and sixty degrees of annoying people on your news feed. It was also what caused uh the mo Yang found a Remojang founder, Notch, the guy who created Minecraft, to say, well, that means Minecraft is not coming to the Oculus Rift because he

didn't like Facebook at all. He later said that maybe he was being a little reactionary, but he was just like, I don't like Facebook's privacy policies, I don't like how they make you know, they make people their product, and I'm not not crazy about developing Minecraft for them. So not that not that that matters, but we'll get to that. So we've we've got another next generation VR headset in the works. Yeah, yeah, and uh, have you has anybody tried these out yet? I haven't read I've tried the

Oculus No, no, no, I mean the Morpheus. Oh no, it hasn't it's still I think in the pro type stage. It hasn't been released yet. Have you tried a VR headset, like a recent one, not a recent one. I tried one in the nineties, which when they were pretty funny. Yeah, the the polygon pterodactyls and stuff. Yeah, and I I did that too. I tried an Oculus Rift the first time. I've got a friend who works for Google and he

had an Oculus Rift developer kit. So I went over to his house and tried it out and was almost immediately completely disoriented and feeling sick to my stife. So I said, all right, I'm done with this. He's like,

don't you want to try? And this was this was the programming gaming was literally you're walking around a villa and like it's like a it's like a virtual villa in Italy, So so you think, like then there's nothing going on, It's just you're just just walking through a villa, like there's no mafia hits going on in the lawn, nothing like that. And um and so I did that, and just that alone was enough to make me feel a little like I'm feeling a little swimmy lucy goosey weird.

And part of it was because the control scheme right, like I could move my head and that would change my perspective, but I still had to use a controller to move around, and it was that disconnect that was causing some issues. Maybe if you had it with a one of those in place treadmills, the gaming treadmill, sure that might that might have helped a little bit. But it was funny because he said, don't you want to try the space ship game that I have that you

can run. I'm like, no, do you want your computer to be covered and my lunch? Because that's what's gonna happen if we try that. So but moving on, We've got another hacker story for April two thousand fourteen. That's when the heart bleed bug is discovered in certain versions of the open s s L software, which is a secure socket layer software. It's meant to provide that secure or what you assume is a secure connection between your browser and some other websites. So things like banking sites

use this. Lots of sites use this. I mean you know, if you see like HTTPS, that's a type of the secure software. Not everyone uses the specific type to to do that, but it is one of the very popular ones. They discovered that in one version of it, there was this bug that could potentially allow attackers to access information that could include sensitive material. It all was information that was stored in UM random access memory, so it wasn't everything.

It was just a certain number of characters in the way it worked was that, uh, if I send you let's let's say that that we're gonna represent Joe, you and I what happened with his heart lead bug. Okay, I'm so I'm going to send out a message just to make sure you are listening to me, and you have to repeat back that message to me in order to prove that you are listening to me, and then everything's cool and we can keep on going. So when I send out that message to you, it is a

certain number of characters long. Let's say it's twenty characters long. So you get it and you see this twenty characters long. So you know that's how long the message has to be. So you repeat the message, it's twenty characters long, send it back to me. Now, let's say I send you a message and it's twenty characters long, but the package says it's actually five characters long. Now, you, being a dumb dumb can't tell the difference between twenty and five hundred.

You you see the twenty characters that are the beginning of this supposed character message. But now there's all this empty space, So panicking, you just grab whatever happens to be nearby and you shove it at the end of the message. This is whatever happens to me in your random acis memory. It's like short term memory for people. Now, if we're talking about a service like a bank transaction, that information might include my password because I had to

enter it to get into the system. So you sent in plain text back to me a message that has twenty characters of whatever it was I I sent, plus all this other information. So it meant that a hacker, if that got in the middle of this, could end up getting sensitive information like login information or other account information. Obviously a huge vulnerability, but somewhat relying on the luck of the draw. Yeah, well it did in the end of me and that almost everybody on the internet had

changed some password. Yeah, and well, the scary thing was that people were saying, it doesn't you know, you gotta wait until the service upgrades their version of open SSL, because if you just change your password before they've upgraded, the same thing can keep on happening to you. So it was it was truly scary. This is another one of those things that really drove it home to the consumer,

at least people who are paying attention. It was truly scary because there wasn't a lot we as consumers could do. We had to depend upon other companies to do the right thing first, and then we could you know, end up changing our passwords as a result. Right, and things like this matter, I think because it's um it's something

that the consumer cannot be blamed for. It's not something where it's just that the end user is not, you know, following best practices designing week passwords or something like this. You can be doing everything right and still have all of your information threatened. Yeah, it's one of the most frustrating parts about this kind of security vulnerability. It's that you know, we already know there are all these things that people don't do on on average, like they are

not keeping enough strong passwords. But then they could look at these stories and say, look, it doesn't even matter if I do everything right. It is a little frustrating. Also in April, one week after assuming the position of CEO of Mozilla, Brendan I stepped down because they've been revealed that he had donated money to a California ballot measure that was anti gay marriage. And Mozilla's corporate values

are focused on equal rights and free speech. So the corporate philosophy of the company and the personal philosophy of the new CEO we're not at all in alignment. And there was an intense amount of pressure and so as a result, one week after becoming CEO, he stepped down, Which you know that that that's an interesting story. Mozilla had a rough year overall in two thousand and fourteen, but uh, that one really opened up my eyes when it happened. And uh, the next one is probably the

most dramatic story of the year. Beyond these hacking stories, this is the one that took place in a desert Alamo Alamo, Alama Gordo. I can say it eventually, Alama Gordo, New Mexico. It's when excavators we're digging and they discovered aliens. No, well, cartridge is of of of a game about an alien. You're talking about et for the the extraterrestrial for the Yes, I am yeah. This was the long held story, the belief that that that these cartridges had been taken out

to the desert and unceremoniously dumped. Now, I think it was not just this game, right, There were a lot of poorly performing games that were taken out there and dumped because they just thought, we're never going to sell all. Yeah. No, this was This was the the days of the crash of three of video games, the home gaming um market, when everyone suddenly realized home gaming is never gonna be big. That was well, the problem was it got too big

too fast, right. The The issue was that they had all these games that didn't have to go through any kind of quality check before they hit stores, and the market was flooded with a lot of crappy games, some of which came from big name companies Because of one reason or another. The guy who created the guy who programmed. ET the Extraterrestrial also created one of the most um

uh well criticized games for the ad yards, Revenge. Uh. And it turns out that he was you know, they gave him a very short timeline and a lot of money, and he says, all right, and so he made He made a game that the game he could make in that small amount of time. And as a result, uh. It is largely pointed at as one of the reasons for the video game crash. Truly, you want to get

more are specific. The problem was way more widespread than one bad title, or even two if you point to pac Man, which was another one that everyone cited as being a reason for the crash. But they were good examples of the problems that existed that caused the crash to happen. Quick question, Yeah, did you ever actually play a T I owned E T D Extraterrestrial For of course I did. Well, well, there was no hard but yes I did beat it. Uh did you get all

the DLC Joe? You might have an unrealistic view of what the video game market was like back in Uh No, there was no downloadable content. Okay, well, what's the next item? So also in April, the FCC announced it was developing new rules for the Internet now that you know their last ones again and struck down. But these rules would essentially say that carriers could charge content providers for premium speeds. Now that neutrality advocates were protesting those rules because they

were say, and here's the problem. You've got carriers service carriers that are also content providers, and that's a conflict of interest. If if you are providing content as well as the service to deliver that content, then what stops you from giving your content preferential treatment and slowing down everybody else? So anyone who's your customer is clearly going

to go with your content because they can't get anyone else's. Like, that's a That's one of the big arguments about that neutrality is that without it, you have the cards stacked against you, especially for service carriers that also have either relationships with content providers or they themselves are a content provider. They opened up everybody watching Comcast Tube instead of YouTube. Yeah, no, that was that's legitimately, or Comcast instead of Netflix or

Hulu whatever. Um, yeah, that's a big issue. And in fact, uh recently it was revealed that there were some lots of people left comments on this, like they have CC opened it up to comments on the internet. Um, and we'll talk a little bit about that a little bit later.

But recently it was revealed that more than three thousand comments against this proposal were mysteriously lost or not counted, and that a huge number that some argue we're generated from special interest groups that were pro let's tear the Internet and charge these different ways on accounts that had just been created and it was their only post essentially that kind of thing. Um. But anyway, that we'll we'll talk a little bit more about that in a bit.

Moving on to may Target CEO Greg Steinhoffel's that stepped down in response to the two thousand thirteen data security breached. The compromise the personal information of seventy million customers. So yeah, another, I mean, it was it was a half year after that had happened, the it was the damages were still rolling out, and so he he accepted responsibility stepped down. Um. This again is one of those things where in hindsight, it's very easy to say, well, clearly their security was

not not sufficient at the time. It's a lot harder to say no, oh, well, we need to we need to shore this up because we're vulnerable. Unless you are actively using white hat hackers to test your security and everything is being really put to a rigorous test, it's hard to say how unless you're just being incredibly lax. And I don't know that anyone was arguing that. But still real world repercussions for that, beyond the the seventy

million customers who had their data stolen. Also in May, a European court ruled that Google must delete personal data when asked, and by personal data, they specifically meant links to other existing sites in the Internet, because Google doesn't own the pages that it links to in most cases, it just it's a search engine. It pulls up links

in response to a query. So the argument here was that, in fact, it was brought up by a guy who when you searched his name, uh, I think it was like an old court case from the nineties was popping up as the top result, and I think it was something about him not making a payment or something along those lines. And he said, this happened a very long time ago, it's completely resolved, it has no bearing on

my life anymore. And yet if people search my name, this is what pops up, so it can still negatively impact me, even though I've resolved this many years ago. So this is this brought up this concept, the right to be forgotten, the right to have things in your past you fade away if you if you have done your work in paying off whatever that thing was. Let's say that you know you had to go to jail or something, but you did, you served out your sentence,

You did everything you were supposed to do. You come out reformed, you are trying to start a new life, and yet if people search your name, that's the thing that pops up. It's obviously going to continue to impact you. So there's something to be said about that. The problem is that the European court system said, well, Google, you now, if you ever get a notice saying I want this removed from your search results, you have to respond to it, which opens up the doors for a couple of things. One,

Google will never not be doing that. That will be the only thing Google does, like there will be a department dedicated to it because it's just a huge undertaking. I'd imagine most of these requests also will be without merit. That's the other issue. That's the other one is that if the request is for someone who doesn't want a negative thing, that is possibly still very much relevant to

show up. What what's the criteria? How can let's say a company that's being criticized for some sort of perceived or otherwise malfeasance, like, how can how can they you know, how can Google determine whether or not a request as legitimate or if it is something that's just trying to whitewash the background. That also seems like you'd have people who would be very against this because they might own the content. So you could have somebody petition Google to

undercut tremendously their traffic. Yeah, which then impacts the bottom line of whatever that site is. So, if you're let's say you're a whistleblower site and you know you are, you're providing an actual valuable service. You're not You're not trying to publish things that are unfounded. You're doing your due diligence as a journalist to make sure that the things you cover are as reliable as you can possibly

be expected to prove before publishing. And then you get the links removed, and then that could mean that people one they don't see it, So there's important information that's not getting out there, and too, you are no longer able to make a living, and now you know you're you're effectively being censored at that point. So this is still an issue that's going on right now where they have not really resolved the problems around the demand. So

everyone has some valid arguments. The question is what's the implementation going to be so that it doesn't cause more harm than good. Yeah, it's tough. I kind of think we're just kinda I mean, it's not nice, but we are past the age where we can expect things to be forgotten. We're an unfortunate transitional generation who did not grow up with the expectation that everything we did would always be remembered. But that's kind of the reality now.

Although you could argue also that that we're very fickle as well, and things that probably should stick with us longer can very easily get dropped in favor of other things. That's some common terry about like some hacks, some reveals, some leaks of information that were big, big deals that then got eclipsed by other stories later on. That has nothing to do with any active censorship or anything it's just human nature, the way we can very quickly, uh

change our focus from one thing to another. Now that doesn't mean that in posterity, like we won't like years down the road, say look we need to really look at this. That's still a possibility. But in the twenty four hour news cycle world, we very quickly leap from one big story to another. So sometimes the best way to make people forget is just done. But don't bring it up. Just let it go and it will be forgotten. Well, it's been a full story since I talked about hacking,

so let's talk about hacking. Hack eBay announced it was hacked and that users should change their passwords. In May. Yeah, yeah, also May, Google unveiled a prototype driverless car that essentially just has a start button and a stop button for controls, with a top speed of twenty five miles hour. There was like a little bit, I think a few more than a hundred prototypes that they were going to build from scratch. Like these were not converted vehicles, these were

little tiny smart car looking things. And uh, yeah, you I guess you pair it with a Google device like an Android phone, and you tell it where you want it to go. And it takes you there at a top speed of twenty Pretty awesome. Yeah, but no break, no accelerator, no steering wheel, You completely hand over control to the car. Wow. Well that's so that kind of contradicts something I know I've heard you say before, which is that you think cars like this are always going

to have manual override. I think, I think when they come to market, because obviously these are prototype cars that are being tested internally, when I think when they come to market, they'll have to I think that, uh, and I have to for two reasons. One, I think that consumers are and demanded, They're only gonna be there's gonna be a very small population of consumers who are going to feel comfortable completely handing over control of a vehicle

to a computer. And then two, I think legally, I think I think legislation will be passed where it will still require manual control to be a possibility. I don't think you will ever get to a point, at least not probably not within my lifetime where um cars can be sold that do not have a manual option at all. So, but that's a guess. So I got a couple of Apple stories, right, Yeah, one at the end of May.

That's when Apple bought Beats Electronics for three billion dollars. Well, I guess they decided that was a correct amount of money to pay. Yeah, I mean that's about the price of what like three of their headphones. So right, Um, did your headphones ever worked? Joe? You gotta beat right to full. But beat beats may be beautiful, but my beats there are no beats. That's terrible. See, mine works so well that I've been We we got a whole bunch in our office when our office moved to where

it currently is but won't be for much longer. We moved into a big, open office environment, which meant that we're all sitting right, you know, elbow to elbow with each other, and so we all got The company bought us Beats headphones to kind of help us have our own like little sound space and hatchets to keep in our death stowers. Yeah, which is very worrisome because I sit right next to Robert Lamb and he's hatchett happy. But at any rate, Uh, my beats were great. I'm

sorry that cheers never did. What color did you end up picking? I got red color of cash. Well, moving to June two thousand and fourteen and another Apple story. Apple Actually a couple of things that happened in June. But Apple introduced Swift, which is a new programming language for iOS and O s X development. UM, I should say OS ten development, not OSX, but yeah, it's it was a new era of programming here. And this was the time June's win. Apple holds the developers conference and

Google holds the io event. So I didn't write down all the news that came out from that because a lot of it doesn't have a direct impact on listeners necessarily, at least not yet. And they tend to, you know, we tend to look at the product releases more than just the corporate announcements of here's some new, you know, developers stuff. Um. Also in June, the FCC opened up the discussion. This is when they specifically asked for public comment,

and John Oliver did the segment about net neutrality. It was fantastic, wasn't it. He mean, he does a really good job of laying out what the issue is and why people should care about it. I love John Oliver's segments, UM, and he urged people to leave comments on the FCC site more than people did, so some that had actually brought the site down for a little bit. Uh And that was just the beginning. There were there'd be hundreds of thousands of comments left over the next couple of months.

I'm sure they were thinking, if only we could give preferential treatment to traffic going to the right right like you know, in a year, this wouldn't have been a problem. Uh. Well, also in June, despite facing resistance and lots of markets, something that's still going on today, the car service Uber was valued at seventeen billion dollars, part of the sharing economy. Uh. Then we also in June had the computer chat program that emulated a thirteen year old boy from the Ukraine.

What was his name, Eugene Goostman. I believe so. I think you're right it was, but it was supposed to be a thirteen year old boy from the Ukraine. It was actually a software artificial intelligence program fooling one third of the judges at the Allen Touring Festival, which led lots of people to say it past the touring test, although others were quick to criticize that that claim, saying

that it caused people to set their expectations lower. Than perhaps otherwise because it was had a lot of qualifiers, right. I on one hand, I think, obviously this is very smart piece of software. But on the other hand, I what I read about it suggested it's kind of tricks ee like it it uses some very clever tricks on the part of the designers, but it's not really It was tricks that actually helped them avoid the necessity to create really super robust AI. Well. Yeah, because it's a

non native English speaker communicating in English. Yeah, at the age of their team, meaning that there is a limited experience of the world, didn't get all kinds of cultural references and stuff right. So by by limiting the references that it would understand and the context that it could understand, Uh, they end up set the questioner's expectations lower, and therefore

the bar is lower. Uh. This is different than if you had an artificially intelligent program that was supposed to be a native speaker in whatever language you're using and to be relatively aware of most things. You're at the same sort of stuff the average person of that culture would be aware of, and to have a conversation, a

meaningful conversation with that. It also raised a lot of interesting discussion about alternatives to the Turing test, Right, you know, this idea that the Turing test is not necessarily a great test for artificial intelligence. We did a podcast about that over it Forward Thinking. Yeah, you should definitely go check that out if you're interested in this subject. That Forward Thinking episode was a lot of fun. Uh, And all of our podcasts are are gathered at f W

thinking dot com. So if you like that kind of discussion, definitely go check that out because that was a blast to talk about. Also, in June, Amazon introduced the fire Phone, which was which I kind of pretend I care about. Yeah, well, you'd you'd be joining the millions of people who did not flock to the Amazon Fire Phone. I think I just failed at pretending. You know. It was one of those that like the idea is interesting. It's it really is supposed to appeal to the Amazon Prime members, people

who buy a lot of stuff on Amazon. The process of buying things would have been a lot smoother on this phone than on other devices. It had a lot of interesting innovations as far as like um, so much easier to just pour the money out of your wallet. That's pretty much what every mobile device is all about Joe. Uh. But yeah, this this one was supposed to also have like a lot of cool features in it that would allow for um better depth sensing with the camera, that

kind of thing. But yeah, it just never really made a big impression. Also, just an interesting little note, Harley Davidson introduced a prototype electric motorcycle, which kind of I guess defeats the purpose of buying a Harley if you can't revet and make that really obnoxious noise. I say this as someone who really would love to own a Harley Davidson. That's true. I did not know that about you. There's a world we have seen you in black leather jackets.

But I also believe you don't drive vehicles. I don't drive. No, I don't drive cars. I don't drive cars. But you would drive a motorcycle, absolutely, I would. What a strange person. You can have a way more situational awareness and not on a motorcycle than you can in the car. But but you do have to worry a lot more about

your safety. You have to, as as motorcyclist will say, you have to imagine that you are invisible, so you have to be hyper aware of the cars around you obviously, but but there's a World War two era Harley Davidson that I absolutely would love to own. And I wrote the article on how stuff Works dot Com on how

choppers work, and that was fantastic. I loved it. UM Anyway, last story for June often we found out that in two thousand twelve, Facebook changed how the news feed displayed to UM users as part of the psychological experiment, and people got upset about it. You remember that story. Did you hear anything about it? Yeah, this idea that they wanted to see what the psychological impact was if they if they tweaked the news feed so that certain types

of stories would show more than other types. Can they make you more depressed? Yeah? And people got really mad that they became unwitting getting pigs to uh this this psychological state that happened two years previously. I was hoping that my news feed would make me depressed in random ways. Yeah, you were directing this. I thought you were just I thought all my friends were emo, and it turns out

you were just making me think that. Well, I mean it, anytime Facebook makes any sort of change, it's guaranteed to upset people. But this in particular with people not feeling like they were uninformed, that they were unwilling participants really got to it psychologically. There was some big tech company news in July. Wasn't oh gosh, so remember Only had announced earlier in the year that they were going to cut five thousand jobs, and everyone's like, oh, well, that's

when in July Microsoft announced plans to layoff eighteen thousand employees. Yeah. It was the largest number of layoffs in company history for a single layoff at any rate. Uh. And Nadella, the CEO, said that the plan was to streamline the engineering, operations and management processes and reduce the levels of management to quote accelerate the flow of information and decision making end quote. And most of those jobs were in the Nokia division they had Microsoft had acquired Nokia, and now

they were getting rid of a lot of middle management largely. So, Yeah, it was not not a great not a great day to be at Microsoft. I think, I'm sure, I'm sure anyone working there on that day was very much on on the edge of their seat. And not all those layoffs happened at once, obviously they rolled out over time. Uh. Then there was this new story that that ended up getting passed around became a little viral that I thought was hilarious, largely because I knew the people involved. So

I've got a friend. Her name is Veronica. Veronica has a husband named Ryan, and Veronica had gotten on the phone with Comcast, a Comcast representative, and she wanted to cancel her her service with Comcast. Hold on, let me transfer you to somebody else. Yeah, it wasn't even that.

It wasn't even that. It got worse than that. Yeah, she she handed After she got frustrated, Ryan, her husband, took over the phone call and at that point started to record the conversation he had with the Comcast representative, and which and which the Comcast representative took every opportunity to try and stop them from canceling their service, and um, it ended up getting pretty absurd. It was hard to believe it was real. Yeah, I think a lot of

people were saying, like, this is stage. It's got to be it's got to be some sort of because every single time the guy would just say, oh, I want to proceed, can we just please in my service, he would come back at him with something else, like, you know, can't you just tell me why yeah, you know it was. It was like a really needy breakup. Yeah right right,

I swear it could change. So this ended up leading to Comcast uh delivering an apology to Ryan and Veronica um saying that that was not the way customer representatives

were supposed to respond to calls. Then later there were other customer representatives, mostly anonymous ones, claiming that no, they're pretty much, you know, encouraged to take every opportunity to discourage you from ending your service, Like that guy was doing an awesome job, right like that guy, Like that guy was essentially doing what he had been told to do, or all the incentives point you toward doing like you would get incentive of that would be based on uh,

customer retention, that kind of thing. And so anyway, it became this whole story about corporate culture and the way that companies handle customers. And it was interesting to me just because I knew the people who were involved, and I was actually chatted with Veronica about it later and she's like, yeah, I didn't expect that end up snowballing

the way it did. Any rate. Also, in July, four Square would split into two services, one that would remain named four Square and one that was called Swarm and the check in ability where you would go to a place and you know, you normally would go to four square and check in. That went with Swarm, which left a lot of people asking what the heck is four square? Now? Uh, I'm gonna say that I always thought what the heck is four square? Now? I mean, I understand what it does,

I just don't get it. Yeah, I don't understand that. I totally I totally understand your confusion. I loved four square for two reasons. I love the idea of that one other friends who used four square would be able to see if I was nearby, and maybe we could end up hanging out. Never worked out, but that says

more about me than four square. Uh. The other was that four square you know some places that that would allow you to check or some places that had a presence on four square would have specials, like special deals like check in three times, get a free appetizer at this restaurant, that kind of thing. And my wife and I go to enough of the same places where that ended up being something cool and we like doing it. But neither my wife nor I used Swarm. We both

I tried it. She didn't even bother She just deleted four square and was done. I tried it and then deleted it. I didn't did no one. Not enough people were using it for me to care at the time. It may be different now, um, and four square became more of a recommendation engine, like you are in this neighborhood, maybe you would like to have coffee here, that kind of thing. But I don't know how their numbers are doing right now, but I do know the initial response

was negative. I think four squares should have done a thing where only four people can check in at a time, and then there's a line of other people waiting, and one of them is king and manufactured exclusivity has become an incredibly popular tool. So you joke, but that could probably work, Jonathan. I just realized we've been talking for more than fifty minutes and we've only made it halfway through. Yeah. Yeah, who would have thought that boilaying a whole year down

to an hour would be a hard thing to do? Uh? You know if you make a good point, though, Joe, if we were to continue on this pace, obviously, this would be one the longest episode text Up has ever done, so I'm sure you've had some long ones. Yeah, but I think we should just make the second half of

the year another podcast. That sounds good to me. So we are going to wrap up here and in our next episode we'll pick up in August two thousan fourteen and talk about what happened during the second half of the year. So, guys, if you have any suggestions for at your topics for tech stuff, let me know. Send me an email that addresses tech stuff at how stuff works dot com, or drop me a line on Facebook,

Twitter or Tumbler to handle it. All three of those is tech Stuff H s W. And we'll finish out two thousand and fourteen really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics because it has stuff works dot com