TechStuff Reviews 2016 Part One

really heavily front loaded. So instead of just saying, hey, the story began in say, February, and then in September this happened, and then in December this happened. For for big stories, I'm doing it all at the front. So the second half is a little more sparse. I don't go back and recover stories I had already talked about. Also, let's get out there was kind of crappy for lots of reasons, and I'm going to talk about some of them,

and yeah, you can't get it around it. I mean, you just gotta accept it and move on, I guess. So we're gonna start in January with what set the tone for the rest of the year. I am, of course talking about c e S. And this is where my producer Dylan gets to feel a sense of dread creep into his very bones, because he will be going to c e S ten along with several of us

here at How Stuff Works. So Dylan, I'm sorry, you're gonna have to hear this man he's he's just grinning at me, but but his eyes are dead, all right. So it was my eighth time attending c e S and it was a bit different. Three other people from How Stuff Works went with me, and I got to see ce S through their eyes, and they were excited and impressed by something that I had really begun to feel like it was old and stale and and therefore

it was something to dread. It was actually a little fun to see it through the eyes of people who had never been there and then just kind of slowly shake your head and just say, these children, but what was going on there? While VR was a big hit at c e S and at that time, the Oculus, the HTC Vibe, and the PlayStation VR had yet to make their debut, everyone was anticipating that the year was going to be the year for virtual reality, but more

on that a little bit later. We also saw a lot of drones, including ones that have ultra high definition camera systems, and that blew my mind because just a few years ago, buying just an ultra high definition camera would cost somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty dollars, and now today, for less than a grand, you can buy a remote controlled drone that flies through the air and has a u h D camera on it, which is crazy to me. It also really shows how electronics can

can drop dramatically in cost. Also, drones can drop dramatically from the air when I have the controls in my hands. That's a different story. Over in the auto world, it was all about AI and connected cars. Nearly every auto maker at CS had something to show off in those arenas, and uh I was at CS covering a lot of stuff,

including Toyota's press event. Full disclosure, Toyota is the sponsor of the show I host called Forward Thinking, and their big announcement revolved around the company's billion dollar investment into research and development of AI, and I think we're gonna hear a lot more about that in seventeen, so stay tuned to Forward Thinking to find out more about that in the near future. Over at Intel, the emphasis was on small processors that can track various points of data

and other products. So Intel makes the chips that go into other things, and they they explored this with a lot of different applications. One was a an electronic bracelet you would wear that would allow you to interact with giant display and control elements on the display by waving your hand around. Another was a mountain bike, and the processors had things like accelerometers and and gyroscopes that could track movement and orientation and give real time feedback to

another device. So you could have a smartphone open with the appropriate app and get real time information about the forces that were being uh felt by a rider on one of these bicycles, and uh so you do like a crazy you know, flip or or some other trick on these bikes and you would get the real time data feedback, which was kind of neat to actually see

this working in real time. One item over at Intel was the Segue Advanced Personal Robot, which was a project that was formed from a partnership between Segue, Intel and a company called shoo Me, and it's part Segue device you know, like the personalized mobile devices and part Butler, so you could write it around kind of like a hoverboard.

I know those are terrible names for those things because they don't hover, but you know what I'm talking about those electronic scooters that are kind of like skateboards in a way. Uh. They were all really popular for a while until they started catching fire. But anyway, this one was like a hoverboard, but you could also attach a screen to it, and the screen would have like a little simple face and turn it into an assistant robot. It's really cute. It could respond to commands and talk

to you, and it was adorable. Didn't get a chance to write on it, though. Actually I think I'd feel a little conflicted stepping on something that was that adorable and then commanding it to take me places. Uh. I don't know how. I probably have a complicated relationship with that kind of technology. Another thing that our team in particular was interested in was a new Super eight camera

from Kodak. In fact, two of the guys who went with me are from the video team, and both of them, as soon as they saw it, thought we have to shoot a video about this thing because it reminded us all of our childhood and how we got into film when we were kids, and it shoots both on film

and digital form formats, which is really neat. Also, this gave me the opportunity to eat some crow because my friend i As and I had done an episode of Tech Stuff where we talked about obsolete technology, and one of the things we talked about was eight millimeter film. And there I was at c e S looking at a brand new super eight camera. So that was awkward but super cool. I really liked the design of it.

It definitely had that retro look and yet included a lot of modern conveniences that you would find in digital cameras these days. So it was neat. Uh. But that's enough about ce S. There was tons of other stuff going on. Those were the things we were specifically looking at, but we also saw a lot of focus on wearables, on health tech, on mental health tech, a lot of technology meant to help you try and relax or relieve

stress or anxiety. Lots of stuff in that realm. I'm betting we're gonna see a lot more of that this

coming year. But January seen also saw some rough news for Twitter, which would pretty much follow throughout the rest of the year for that company, top executives began to jump ship and Twitter stock price struggled throughout twenty sixteen and rallied briefly when there was talk of Twitter looking for a buyer, but then no one stepped forward to buy it, and the stock price began to struggle again. So it's been pretty rough. We don't know what Twitter's

long term prospects are at this point. It's crazy because it's still a huge platform that a lot of people use and a lot of people depend upon it in order to maintain their brand. But at the same time, it's still not really a revenue generator, so it may be that it's living on borrowed time. We'll see. Also in January, Uber, which is always a controversial company, saw resistance in several markets as it tried to expand services into various countries. For example, in France, cab drivers began

to set fire to tires in protest. So yeah, Uber definitely has seen a lot of resistance, particularly among cab driving unions and companies in various regions where it's tried to move in. And uh, I mean, it's it's the sign of progress. You could argue it may not be progress for the cab drivers, but for consumers who want to have that choice. UH, it frequently is viewed as progress and an early example of a problem that would pop up throughout the year. Hackers managed to take down

power plants in the Ukraine through malware. That particular threat was relatively easy to thwart. It wasn't something that was catastrophic, but it certainly got people's attention. The idea that malware could affect critical infrastructure. I mean, it's something we've known about, but to see it actually happened was pretty sobering. Also in January, Time Warner suffered one of the earliest security breaches of UH. You might remember I think I called

the Year of security breaches. Well seen gave it a run for the money. According to a Reuter's report, up to three twenty thousand Time Warner customers had their email passwords stolen in an attack. Lenovo in January officially ditched the Motorola name. Lenovo had acquired Motorola Mobile from Google. It kept the brand name motto for high end phones, along with that bat wing m logo that Motorola made famous, but Motorola as a mobile brand is a no more.

Early rumors in January stated that the next iPhone would not have a headphone jack, and as we learned later on the year, those turned out to be absolutely true. But I'll talk about the iPhone more in the next episode, since that did not debut until late Nielsen put out it's twenty fifteen year in report on digital music, and it showed that sales of digital music were down, but streaming service subscriptions were way up, and more people were

using streaming services to access music than ever before. This would continue to be a big story in twos and on January, Oh man, I'm gonna have to do this so many times. In this episode January tenth, David Bowie passed away. So you might wonder why I talk about

David Bowie when I'm talking about technology. Well, he his influence in popular music is tangential to technology, but he was also heavily influenced by and subsequently became an influencer of science fiction, which in turn has a very close

relationship with technology. So seeing the news about him passing away so shortly after his final album came out was really sobering and would become one of many stories of beloved figures in pop culture as well as technology who we lost in So let's move on to February, which, at least, if nothing else, has the benefit of being

the shortest month in the tech world. Was a buzz in February about startups competing to bring Elon Musk's hyper loop proposal, which he first unveiled back in a Reality Now. One of those companies was called hyper Loop Technologies and later hyper Loop One, and that became ground zero for serious drama among its co founders. One of those co founders, formerly named Kevin Brogan now known as Brogan Bam Brogan and no, that's not a joke, would be forced out

of the company. He was essentially ousted from the company he co founded, and he would later on sue that company. The company would then counter sue Brogan bam Brogan, saying that he was passing off untruths that he was slandering the company. Uh. For one thing, Bam Brogan said that another executive at the company had at one point attempted to intimidate him by laying a noose on his desk. Doesn't sound like a very healthy corporate culture if true. Uh.

Eventually those lawsuits were settled out of court. So look forward to a future tech Stuff episode where I'm going to look at that whole story in much greater detail in the future. I think it's too crazy not to. It's something that I really want to explore. Also in February, Nature dot Com ran an article stating that the semiconductor industry would formally announce it would no longer strive to

keep up with Moore's Law. Now. I know most of you know this, but just in case some of you aren't unfamiliar, Moore's Laws really about an observation that a man named Gordon Moore made. He's a co founder of Intel. He made it several decades ago about the tendency for the number of discrete components on a semiconductor chip to double every two years or so. And by discrete components,

we're really talking about transistors. Now. The important thing to remember about this, as always, is that this was more or less observation about the financial viability of adding more transistors to a semiconductor. It wasn't that there was some magical law dictating this, but rather that the economy of scale and the improvement in UH in manufacturing technologies would allow for this to happen, and that there would be a demand for more powerful semiconductors and microprocessors um and

as a result, uh, well not as a result. But it turns out this has been a true observation and a lot of companies have been striving to keep it true over the years, and we've sort of fudged with the definition a bit. Looking at it more as every two years microprocessors essentially double in processing power, maybe not necessarily in components or transistors, but in the ability to

actually process information. According to this report, however, the semiconductor industry is essentially ready to give up on that, saying it is no longer feasible to try and keep Moore's law active. And this is because of two different things. One of the factors that is a problem when you're talking about sustaining More's law is that the smaller the

components get, the more they're affected by quantum mechanics. One of the aspects of quantum mechanics is something called electron tunneling, and you can really think of it in this way. Electrons have a probability to exist in any given location around uh, kind of like a cloud. Think of it like, you can't really dictate exactly where the electron is going to be. It's gonna be within a cloud, and there's a probability for it to be anywhere inside that cloud.

If that cloud were to overlap a gate like a transistor gate, then that means there is a probability, however small, that the electron could be on the opposite side of the gate that it's supposed to be on. And if there is a probability, that means sometimes it happens that way.

So when you make these components smaller and smaller and smaller, it becomes more challenging to figure out the materials you need and the architecture you need to prevent electron tunneling from becoming a big problem, because if you can't control the flow of electrons, you can't really have logic gates. Otherwise you're gonna have errors passed through and then you just keep having mistakes pop up and your programs won't run.

The other issue is that the more components you cram onto a chip, the more heat it generates, and in general, heat and electronics don't work so well together, so trying to manage heat becomes a bigger and bigger challenge. Anyway, it looks like we're getting towards the end of Moore's law using conventional semiconductor chips. That doesn't mean we won't come up with some alternative, but it may mean that we'll see progress slow in the short term as we

start to explore other ways of increasing that processing power. Now, one of the biggest stories of in tech began in February. That's when the FBI and Apple got into a real tiff with one another. In February, a court case made headlines when the FBI pursued an order against Apple to force the company to deactivate a feature on the iPhone five C, and the key point was the FBI wanted to be able to deactivate the feature that would erase

and an encryption key after ten failed password attempts. In other words, you lock your iPhone, use a password to

unlock it. If someone else gets hold of your phone and tries brute force attacks to unlock your phone after ten failed attempts, the key that would decrypt all the information on your phone would delete itself, and then you would have an even harder time being able to decrypt that information like you could you might be able to finally get access to it, but it would all be gibberish, and then you would have to go through the process

of trying to decrypt the information. Now, the phone in question belonged to a couple that committed the December two thousand and fifteen attack in San Bernardino, California, which resulted in fourteen deaths and twenty two serious injuries. So there was a very emotional case and very politically charged, and it also brought up serious questions about security, privacy and the boundaries of law. Apple resisted the FBI's requests, and later in March, the FBI claimed it had found another

way to reach the security without Apple's participation. The Washington Post would later report in April that professional hackers had sold a zero day exploit to the FBI in order to unlock the phone. But for that month and a half in February and and March, everyone chimed in on the case, including representatives from Google and Microsoft and Bill Gates himself. Now, some of them felt the FBI's request constitute a back door into a secure system, which is

a terrible idea. It's always a terrible idea because if you create a backdoor into a secure system, you've created a potential vulnerability that others can exploit. Other people, however, felt that the FBI's request was specific for one particular phone and that nothing more would come of it, and so therefore it would have made more sense for Apple to acquiesce to the FBI's demands. Uh. But it ended up being a moot point because the FBI eventually was

able to access the phone without Apple's participation. Also in February, HTC would open up pre orders for the Vibe headset. It's a virtual reality headset and had the goal of shipping headsets out starting April one, and the headsets cost seven, which does not include the beefy computer you would need to run the software the HTC Vibe uses at a

decent clip. But the Vibe is pretty cool and he uses external sensors called lighthouses to provide additional tracking and orientation station data, which means you can actually move around inside a physical space while the the things you see and here would be within a virtual space. And that's pretty neat. I actually like it a lot. I got to try it out not too long ago, and I really like the htc vive experience in UH In February, Joshua Browder would launch a bot that can contest parking

tickets in the United Kingdom. So Browner has created a few algorithms that work really well within structured environments, things where you have a limited number of choices and there are you know, different pathways. You can almost think of it as choose your own adventure, and online forms like the ones you would use to contest a parking ticket

in the UK fit that bill. So the AI can actually argue on behalf of the person ticketed, and they actually has a decent chance of success for contesting tickets assuming that you have a valid case. So essentially, people who would receive a parking ticket that they felt was

unfair could go through use this AI. The AI would fill out all of the paperwork necessary based on a few questions that would ask the person to fill in a little bit of information and then it would take care of all the forms, send the forms to the appropriate office, and often that was enough to get the ticket thrown out. So pretty cool use of AI, and it shows that if you have a very structured system,

AI can navigate it pretty well. The more unstructured the system is the more challenging it is for AI to be able to complete a task successfully. But something like a government bureaucracy is, by its very nature very a structured, so it turned out to be a good use for

AI around that time. In February, consumer advocacy groups, advertisers, and content companies began to butt heads over online advertising and ad blockers, and since then we've seen cases of advocacy groups arguing that anti ad blocking strategies amount to an invasion of privacy, meaning that if a web browser or a website rather is telling you, hey, I see that you're using ad blocking software, then the advocacy groups argue that's an invasion of privacy on the part of

the person browsing that web page. Uh. Content creators, on the other hand, say well, we have to make money or else we can't create content. If we don't make money, then we can't afford to pay people to make the content, we can't afford to pay people to host the content, and the content goes away. So it's a complicated issue, and there are a lot of people who have valid points on both sides. Um and a lot of people are making very emotional arguments in order to try and

support their side of it um. But as for my own personal opinion, it's complicated. I work in a in an industry where I want to make a living, which means I want to have revenue coming in so that I can, you know, get get paid. So on certain levels, I definitely think online advertising is necessary. I think there are good ways and bad ways to implement it, and I've seen plenty of bad ways, and I much prefer the non intrusive good ways. But it is a complicated landscape.

At the end of February, Microsoft began taking pre orders for the Hollow Lens, it's augmented reality headset. Now these were for developer editions of the headset, so they weren't meant to be a consumer product, which is a good thing because they cost three thousand dollars a pop, expensive for an augmented reality headset. But again it was more meant as a developer tool, not as something for the average consumer, and in fact, we may never see a

consumer version of the Hollow Lens ever offered. It may be that the augmented reality applications that the Hollow Lens can support will end up finding their way into other products, but not specifically a consumer version of the hollow lens. That's a possibility. All Right, We've got a lot more to talk about with two thousand and sixteen, but before we jump into that, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. Alright, we're back, and that means we're

moving into March two thousand and sixteen. That's when south By Southwest happened and how Stuff Works was there. We ended up having several panels at south By Southwest. We hosted several events in a house that was rented by the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, and it was a pretty interesting experience. We also got to see a lot of cool companies talk about really cutting edge ideas, particularly in areas like artificial intelligence and autonomous cars and lots of

other uh tangential technological areas. Shortly after south By Southwest ended, the city of Austin made some demands of Uber and Left, specifically about background checks and some other issues that affect drivers now. Uber and Left weren't really keen on those demands, and as a result, there was kind of a stalemate between the companies and Austin, and eventually the company said all right, we're leaving and gave their drivers about forty

eight hours notice before they left town. UH So, Uber and Lift, we're both left without support in the city of Austin, Texas. A lot of people say this was a move specifically to a pressure on the state of Texas as a whole to create a rules and regulations that that governed the entire state, rather than having to go through this and do it for city by city or region by region, which would be complicated for a company that spans multiple states to have to manage. UH.

But it made a lot of people really upset. I listened to podcasts from folks who record out in Austin, Texas, and while they saw both sides of the issue, the personal impact on their lives was very apparent. Near the end of March, the Oculus Rift was released with a US price tag of six hundred dollars, which, again, like the HTC Vibe, doesn't include the beefy computer. You actually need to run the VR software at a level that's acceptable.

A new VR system with headset is closer to about one thousand, nine hundred dollars as a as a starting point, So about PC with the six D dollar headset. Uh, there are those who argue you could get away with a less expensive PC. You don't necessarily need the cutting edge GPUs to run VR, but many people advocate for close to cutting edge technology so that you don't run into any choppiness or problems when it's rendering to the

virtual reality headset. And Uh that high price and a limited game library would keep VR and kind of a niche market for most often. Same thing is true for HTC VIVE. I mean, these systems are expensive, and I don't think that the killer app has been created yet for virtual reality. Not something that's going to convince people that it is a must have piece of technology in their homes. Maybe we'll see that in Seen, but it

hasn't happened yet. In When He's Sixteen. Also in March, Ray Tomlinson, who is credited as the inventor of email passed Away. It was Tomlinson who decided that email addresses would consist of a person's name or handle, and then the name of the machine that they were using, and that the two would be separated from each other with the AT symbol. Tomlinson said it was the only preposition

on the keyboard, so that's kind of interesting. In March, Deep Minds Alpha Go AI would end up going up against Go Champion player Human Go Champion player Lee C Doll in a series of five games, and the AI won four out of the five matches. So Go was one of those holdout games in which humans were still better than machines at least championship level. Humans were better than machines. But it's no Go, no Mo. Machines are beating us at everything, Dylan smirked, in case you could

hear it. The FCC created new rules in March limiting the data Internet service providers can use for marketing purposes. The telecom companies objected to that ruling, of course, and said that that would limit their ability way beyond what other companies could do. So what they were saying the I s p s were saying, hey, brow web web services.

Web sites like Google or Amazon can gather a lot of information about people through their behaviors, So why are we being punished when companies like Google and Amazon aren't being punished? And the f c C said, well, that's because we don't govern what companies like Google and Amazon do. They're overseen by the Federal Trade commission the f TC, but we oversee what you do. We're the f c C,

so sorry. Sony would announce that the PlayStation VR would launch in October with the price tag of three dollars. If you wanted to also supplement that with the other materials needed to make a full system, you would need a ps camera and move controllers, which we mean you had to pay a little bit more. I think they had a bundle for five dollars for to move controllers, the camera, and the PSVR headset, and in addition to that,

of course, you would also need a PlayStation four. However, have a lot of people saying that PlayStation was ahead of the game because even though the specs for the ps VR are not as powerful as those on the HTC Vibe or the Oculus Rift, lots of people already own a PlayStation four, and since that's all you need on the computing end to run the headset, it gave those consumers an advantage they didn't have to go out and buy a new gaming rig in order to run

VR programs. But on the flip side, people argued while the experiences wouldn't be necessarily as uh as innovative or immersive as what you would see on Oculus or Vive. Turns out, everybody was kind of a a loser this year in Steen when it comes to VR, no one was able to really make great sales in including the ps VR, so it's been a rough year for virtual reality.

Towards the end of the month, Oculus Rift headsets began to actually ship to consumers, but there were some manufacturing problems and some component shortages which meant a lot of people had to wait a really long time to get their promised gear. And more on that in a little bit. Uh. One of my favorite stories from Sten happened in March. That's when Microsoft launched a chat bought aimed Tay. Do you remember Tay, Dylan? You remember Tay, right, Dylan's nodding.

Tay was not long for this world unfortunately. Uh. Tay was kind of kind of presented in the way of like a like a teenage female PERSONA and Ta could communicate on various social media platforms like Twitter and a couple of others. Within twenty four hours, Microsoft would take Tay offline because Tay or in a little cray cray. Part of the problem was that you could tell Tay to parrot what you said, so you can get Tay to repeat what you said, and Tay would end up

adding little, little quirky elements to whatever you said. But that meant that they ended up making some really awful, awful statements, things that were racist or sexist or just playing ugly, and then Tay would eventually start to incorporate those into other responses is and became an incredibly absurd internet troll within twenty four hours, and Microsoft pulled the plug on Ta. There's a valuable lesson teaching us that people are terrible and you should never give them anything.

Pebble would announce that it would lay off forty employees in March. That's a big deal for Pebble because that was about of its staff. And spoiler alert for December. I'm gonna go ahead and tell you the Pebble story for so this is what I mean by front loading this episode. At the end of the year, Fitbit announced it would acquire Pebble's software assets, so Pebble owners were told that over time there'd be less and less support

for their devices. If you had ordered a Pebble two or any other Pebble device after this, moment then they were Pebbles going to refund your money. Um you Otherwise if you if you had bought something before December seven, you could get a refund, but army after December seven you could get a refund, but not before. Uh. Yeah, rough time for Pebble. So Fitbit was acquiring Pebble because

Pebbles company just couldn't support itself through sales anymore. Their sales were not strong enough for them to be a viable company. So uh. They were also having an issue trying to move smart watches, which was a crowded market in and it's not good when you have a crowded market and you pair that with consumer apathy. There's just not a lot of compelling reasons to go out and buy a smart watch. If you want one, you probably

went out and bought one. But there's probably not a lot of reasons out there that would convince someone, oh, I need one of these if they didn't already want it. And I say this as someone who owns a Pebble, I I'm sad to see this news. On top of that, Fitbit has had a really rough year. They have consistently seen their stock price dropped throughout the year they had a high of around fifty dollars a share and now

it's somewhere close to eight dollars a share. So it's been rough And in fact, some people argue that Fitbit acquiring Pebbles software assets is really the sign of two sinking ships lashing themselves together and then sinking slightly slower. Um. That's some of the more cynical people in the tech world.

Others say, well, maybe this is the right fit. Maybe Fitbit using Pebble software can create really compelling wearables that are able to turn the prospects around and maybe make a compelling case for people who haven't bought a wearable device to go out and do so. But it was a really rough time for both companies. Uh, not a great year for either Fitbit or Pebble. Maybe twin seventeen

will be different, although it's it's an odd world. I mean, the the CEO, the founder of Pebble will not be going with Pebble employees who are moving over to Fitbit. He will instead be going over to an incubator company to work on other startups. So um, rough end, especially for someone like me who really believed in the company and purchased a smart watch. I bought a Pebble shortly

after the Kickstarter campaign had ended. I pre ordered one after seeing one in person at c ES a couple of years ago, and the company was kind enough to send me a red Kickstarter edition Pebble watch. Um, so, I guess that's a collector's item. Now. Moving into April, April first rolled around, and boy, oh boy, we saw lots of gags, pranks, jokes, and attempts at humor and

people either loved it or they hated it. I know it's a lot of tech journalists despise April Fool's Day, largely because you can't really trust any news that gets published on April Fool's Day, and tech journalists hate that. I think that if you can make a fun joke, it's great and it shows some lightheartedness. And no, not all the jokes are a big hit. Some of them

are dorky or corny, and I think those are fine too. Uh. Some of them are misjudged and those are more problematic, And in fact, we saw one of those in Google included a feature called Google's Send with in Gmail, and that ended up being backfiring in a big way. The send with button would send a message and include an animated gift of a minion from the Despicable Me franchise

dropping a microphone. But some people were hitting send with without realizing that it wasn't truly a replacement for the send button, and so then you had folks sending messages that really did not need to have an animated character

dropping a microphone attached to them. Imagine sending something of sensitive nature to somebody, or you're consoling a friend who is having a particularly rough time for one reason or another, having a mic drop moment probably was not the most appropriate of actions, and in fact, Google removed the feature and even wrote that they must have they accidentally pranked themselves in The HTC Vibe was released as promised in early April, and uh so it started to to make

some sales and started to arrive at uh the homes of folks who preordered it. Meanwhile, the Oculus was still having issues with their their supply chain, so they were still very slowly trickling out to the folks who had ordered it. US Senators Richard Burr and Diane Feinstein drafted a bill that would force tech companies to build in systems allowing them to decrypt information on their own devices

that allow for encryption. So, in other words, this would require smartphone companies that have encryption built into their phones to have a back door for law enforcement to decrypt a phone if necessary. Uh I mentioned earlier that backdoors are a terrible idea. I wanna double down on that right here. Back Doors are a terrible idea. You might as well not have encryption at all if you are

building in back doors, because you've created a vulnerability. There's a bright, shiny target for every single hacker out there to exploit. And at that point, you don't need encryption because if you if you have a lock on your door, but you give everyone in the world a copy of the key, what's the point of the lock. So um, I understand that there is a political motivation to reducing the impact of encryption, but it's I think it's misplaced by may. This particular bill, this this version of that

bill had fizzled out. It did not get passed into law, but in September burn Feinstein began crafting an updated version with a narrower scope and refined language that was a little sneaky in my opinion, Ultimately, it still requires companies to have what amounts to a backdoor to bypass encryption,

and I still think that's completely misguided. Uh. It was such a huge story throughout that you can really think of that year as being the one in which lots of lawmakers were looking for ways to make encryption effectively illegal or at least unnecessary or irrelevant. And uh, it's something that we continue to see happen right now. All right, we've had another one of those dates, folks. On April one, that's when we lost Prince. So, like David Bowie, Prince

was a huge influence in popular music. He was also he had a very complicated relationship with technology and the internet, in particular, in two thousand seven, he became the first artist to release an album exclusively online. However, he also was famous for battling lots of online platforms like YouTube and others, uh, specifically for sharing music what he felt was robbing him and robbing other artists of their livelihood.

He didn't want users to have the ability to upload videos that featured music without an artist's permission, which is understandable, but it meant that he took very powerful movements like he made made it his mission to make sure his music was not easily available online. He fought it tooth and nail um. All that being said, the tech world very much mourned his passing once news broke out about it. Very complicated personally. Also, in declared the Internet to be dead,

but I think that's largely misinterpreted. I don't think Prince was actually saying the Internet itself was a dead medium, but rather for artists who want to make a living using the Internet, as that means was not really a viable approach. I think that's really what he was intending by that statement. That's my own interpretation. However, in late April, we learned that Google was creating a startup incubator in

house to help retain employees. Google had seen employees leave the company in order to pursue their own ideas and their create their own companies, sort of leaving with their

own personal projects. You know. Google gives every employee, or at least used to, of their time to develop projects that aren't directly related to their normal work, and by creating the startup incubator, it was sort of an attempt to keep those folks in the Google family rather than encourage them to go out and strike out on their own,

and thus Google is bereft of their talent. Uh. Also in April, music streaming service Title land and ex landed an exclusive deal would Beyonce to feature her album Lemonade for one weekend before became available on iTunes and Amazon. This was another big story throughout not Beyonce's Lemonade in particular, although that did make quite the stir when it came out, but rather the way that streaming music services were trying

to differentiate themselves, largely through exclusive deals with artists. UH. These exclusive deals tend to last a certain amount of time and then the exclusivity ends. But Title is not the only one that did it. Apple Music has done it several times in sixteen, and we would see revenue from streaming services out performing revenue from digital downloads for the first time ever. So, in other words, more people are subscribing to music streaming services paying for a subscription

to streaming music services than they are purchasing music online. UH. So iTunes is seeing much lower numbers for people buying music, but higher numbers for people using Apple Music and subscribing to that service. I also saw a really interesting article um that claimed at least that artists aren't really suffering because of this, that the numbers generated through streaming are pretty much the same as what they would be for

digital sales of that same music. So even though there's some artists like Taylor Swift who have famously said that streaming is robbing artists of revenue and that it's a terrible thing, the numbers appear to not support that argument. They they seem to say, it's it's the same amount of money. It's a different delivery system, but artists, or at least music labels should be making the same amount. Now, if an artist is making less because of their agreement

with their music label, that's a different issue. That's not so much the delivery system that's allows the contract towards the Into April, the Supreme Court approved a change to the federal rule of criminal procedure, and it would allow the FBI to get permission to search computers and drives remotely. In other words, it gave the FBI greater authority to hack into machines. And the logic behind this decision was that a suspect might be within one jurisdiction, but because

of the nature of the Internet. The suspect might be using machines that are in totally different jurisdictions or entirely different countries in some cases, and it would be impossible for some law enforcement to get access to those machines because they're outside of the jurisdiction. So the only alternative is to hack into the service and look for evidence

that way. But the a c l U and companies like Google argued against it, saying it amounts to unreasonable search and seizure because it affects not only a suspect, but also innocent people as well, or or not the suspect could be innocent. It affects people not related to the to the the investigation. And uh so this is a complicated matter that I'm sure we will see pop up again in all Right, we're getting close to the end. We have one more month to get through. There's a

lot of information in it. But before I jump into May, let's take another break to thank our sponsor. All Right, home stretch. May. On May seven, a man named Joshua Brown died in a car accident. He was driving a Tesla Models and reportedly the autopilot driver assist system was engaged and also reportedly he was traveling at nine miles over the speed limit for the highway he was on. The car he was in collided with the side of

a tractor trailer. Now, initial reports suggested the autopilot system was unable to distinguish the trailer from the bright sky that was present that day, and the car failed to break as it should have because it didn't recognize that there was an obstacle in the way. The radar and the cameras didn't pick anything up. Other accidents, including another fatal one, would follow later in the year that involved

or allegedly involved Tesla autopilot being in play. Now, Tesla's autopilot feature is meant to be a driver augmented experience, a driver assist feature, not a replacement for drivers, and to enable it, drivers have to acknowledge they understand this. They read a warning message saying as much. But this was a rough rough year for Tesla because of that.

Later in May, a University of Michigan survey revealed that the vast majority of people don't really want a driverless car or want to ride in a driverless car that doesn't have at least some sort of manual override system. Many said they were afraid to be in a self driving car at all, said they'd rather have control themselves, manual control and and no self driving car elements included. Now, personally, I hate the idea of having manual override controls in

an autonomous car. And I've said this before because it amounts to the same thing as someone saying in the passenger seat and reaching over and grabbing your steering wheel or stomping on your foot to hit the accelerator or the break. Uh, it's not safe. It's much more safe to have a fully autonomous car, assuming that the system has been designed properly. Obviously, you make a really crappy

autonomous car, then it's not safe. But if you're following the best practices, it's much more safe to give troll to the vehicle and not struggle with it. But I also say that as someone who doesn't drive, so perhaps I'm heavily biased. In fact, I am heavily biased. I mean,

there's no no perhaps about it. Another big story in May um a crazy story, was that there was an Australian businessman named Craig Wright who came forward and claimed he was Satoshi Nakamoto a k a. The creator of bitcoin, and well, the media essentially said, say, what can you prove it? And Craig Wright said, boy, how do I can prove it? Here's some cryptography for you. And then

the cryptography community said this is really lousy. And then eventually Craig Wright removed the posts he had that quote unquote contained the proof of his identity. A London Review of Books investigation concluded that Right was making a baseless claim and went so far as to suggest perhaps the motivation for claiming to be Nakamoto was that he was trying to make money through selling patents related to bitcoin in order to cover other debts that he had amassed

through various business ventures. Uh. It was not a pretty story at all, but kind of crazy. Also in May, Oculus announced that it had it was going to create a limited number of Oculus Rift headsets for sale at brick and mortar Best Buy stores. They were gonna make just a limited number available for physical purchase at these stores, and that drove some preorder customers absolutely bonkers because they still had not received their sets that they had pre ordered.

Oculus solution to this problem was to say, hey, if you go and buy it at the best Buy, we will preserve the preorder perks that come along with the preorder set, so you'll you'll still get the perks that you should have, but you can go and get your set this way rather than wait for it. That did not go over very well. Uh. I think describing the Oculus Riffs launch as rocky or problematic is probably being generous.

It did not. It did not go very smoothly. Um, and not all of that was necessarily Oculus's fault, but it did not reflect well in the company when these sort of things happened. Also in May, Radiohead fans began to scratch their heads because the band was doing some odd stuff. The entire Twitter and Facebook history of the band got deleted and their web page was replaced with a blank white page. Now all of that ended up being part of a campaign to promote a new album,

but at the time people were wondering exactly what was up. Also, a ten year old kid in Finland earned ten thousand dollars because he found a flaw in Instagram's app, and that flaw would allow him to delete any comments left on Instagram. He alerted Facebook. He said, hey, I found this this flaw, you need to fix it, and Facebook said thanks and then paid him ten grand for the discovery.

So good for that kid, Ice creams on him. IBM opened up it's quantum computing platform to researchers in May of twenty sixteen, saying that if you want to run quantum computing experiments on our equipment, you can. You can use the online portal and do that. They just had to request an invite to create experiments to run on quantum logic gates, which is pretty cool. We still don't

know what the full potential for quantum computing is. We know that it could absolutely transform cryptography and encryption and and related fields, but beyond that, it's uh. There's still a lot of questions about what quantum computing will be

great for. The Wall Street Journal would publish an article that said LIFT and GM had entered a partnership to start testing autonomous Chevy Bolt cars as a cab service, aiming for a a soft launch in and Google published a blog post explaining that researchers had been feeding romance novels along with other materials, to artificial intelligence to help its ability to understand conversational language. And lots of bodices began ripping all over the place in AI Land. Actually, uh,

it makes sense when you really look into it. First of all, it wasn't just romance novels, but that's how it was widely reported because it was the the most amusing part of the story. The real way to think about this is that we humans tend to have lots of different ways to say the same thing. Like you can use different turns of phrase or figures of speech in order to express the same idea a hundred different ways,

and this is difficult for computers to parse. So by feeding romance novels, which are largely formulaic, to AI, it kind of shows that there are lots of different ways to say basically the same thing. If most romance novels follow a particular formula, but they each contain their own specific language, as created by the author, then you know their own way of expressing these same basic ideas. It's a good way to teach computers, Hey, there's all these

different ways to get across the same basic notion. So it made sense if you looked at it from a little further back than just saying, hey, they're reading a lot of Harlequin romance books. And around that same time, a former Facebook employee made big waves out in the tech world by saying that Facebook as a rule was suppressing conservative news stories from the Trending news section on Facebook,

which is partly curated by Facebook employees. Now. Facebook denied the allegations, saying the company worked very hard to avoid bias or prioritization of any news or philosophy over any other. But that definitely made headlines for quite some time in in May sixteen. Also in that time, Amazon Video Direct launched and that allows professional content creators to use Amazon as a video platform, and one of the launch partners

was a scrappy little company called how Stuff Works. So if you go to Amazon Video and you search for how Stuff Works, you'll find videos that have me and my co workers in them. Kind of neat. You should do that thing. If you have Amazon Video, you go check it out. I'm on brain stuff. Instagram updated its logo and people went nuts and ridiculed it, and now I bet you can't even remember what the old logo

looked like. So there. Disney would close down its video game division in May, including the Disney Infinity line of games. And collectibles. The company decided instead that it would license intellectual property out to other video game developers and then they would just avoid building stuff in house Mouse House. Now, towards the end of May, Google would have its big event and start announcing stuff like crazy, including the Google

Home device. Google Home is Google's take on a smart speaker with a personal digital audio assistant similar to Amazon's Echo, and the company also introduced a messaging service called l O, a l l O that incorporates the personal digit assistant the audio assistant, just like Google Home does. So you could have a text message with somebody else, a real, live human being, and Aloe could help. Let's say that you start having a discussion with someone about a place

you want to go and eat. Aloe might end up pulling up open table so that you can make a reservation. That sort of thing. It's a little creepy, can feel a little invasive, maybe if you aren't really in the mind to have a digital assistant kind of button and say, hey, I see you're talking about this thing. Let me help you out with that. But fortunately, this is a dedicated app. It's not like it's built into all of Google services, so you can just not download it and use it

if you'd rather avoid that sort of stuff. Google would also show off day Dream. It's a it's a virtual reality platform, so that makes that VR crowded space even more crowded. And Google debuted Magenta, which is an AI program that explores deep learning to create art in a real trippy way. Pretty cool and weird. Um not something I would typically associate with engineers. Towards the end of a the Pittsburgh Tribune confirmed that Uber had begun testing

autonomous cars in Pittsburgh. Now, in those cases, you still had someone writing in the driver's seat. They weren't completely without a driver, but the driver. The driver was meant to be passive unless absolutely necessary. And Uber has made no secret that it intends to adopt autonomous car technology as soon as that technology is mature and legal. And that's tough because if you're a company and your employees are largely drivers, and you're telling them, hey, your job

is limited, You've you've got a limited time span. Eventually we're gonna replace you with a robot. It's got to hurt employee morale, I would think. And that is it for the first half of a little less than first half, So join me next week for the exciting conclusion to when I look at these stories from June through as much of December as we are through by the time I record it, and we'll talk about more interesting stories, triumphs,

tragedies and everything in between. If you guys have any suggestions for future episodes, or if there's a story that I skipped over that you think I really should have talked about, write me let me know. The email address is tech stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you can drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter, or the handle at both of those is tech Stuff H s W. And I'll talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is that how stuff works dot com. Eight