TechStuff Update Grab Bag

you try to do an evergreen style show like tech Stuff. Ideally, an episode of tech Stuff goes out and you should be able to listen to it today, next week, two years from now. But sometimes stories will update, you know, they'll they'll continue more things will happen between the time I record a show and even when it goes live

some times. So this episode is all about giving updates to various stories I've mentioned in previous episodes of tech Stuff, but mostly these are updates that are too short to merit a full episode on their own. So let's get started. And I've done several episodes on the concept of net neutrality, including ones about the FCC reclassifying the Internet service providers as common carriers, and the various campaigns for and against

the whole idea of mandating net neutrality. So if you aren't familiar with the concept neutrality, it encompasses several things, but one of the things it says is that all traffic on the Internet should be treated equally, whether that is data that belongs originally to the Internet service provider let's say that they also own some other services, or

it's to a competitor. All that data should be able to travel across the Internet without any sort of interference or preferential treatment or uh negative treatment in the case of a competitor's services. It should all just go no matter what device you have connected to the Internet, and no matter what service you connect to, it should be

treated equally well. In early June two thousand eighteen, the f c C repealed the previously established net neutrality rules, and those rules included restrictions on Internet service providers, such as being able to give preferential treatment to certain types of web traffic over others, or charging more for different

types of content. So, in other words, these rules were meant to keep I s p s from being able to serve up their own services on a fast track while potentially slowing down or charging more or both for competing services. So as an example, imagine you have an Internet service provider, let's call it Bombast, and it has its own streaming video service, and you can watch certain

films and certain television shows using that service. The I s P might make the service free to anyone who is a subscriber to that Internet service providers, so you're already a bomb Bast customer. You get those services for free. And not only that, but they serve those videos on a fast track, right They're using a lot of bandwidth to get that stuff to you, and that way, on your side, there's no buffering, there's no delays. It's a

it's a good user experience. However, that same I s P then puts the brakes on competing services like Netflix, so that you, as a Bombast customer, have a less user friendly experience. When you try to use Netflix, everything takes forever to load. You might even have to pay extra just to be able to access the Netflix service. Under the previous net neutrality rules, that would be a

big no no, but now those rules are gone. Several states in the United States have introduced bills that are intended to act as a type of net neutrality on the state level, but that's kind of a haphazard way to go about it because not every state is proposing such legislation. A little more than half of the states and the u US have some form of legislation either passed or in the process, and there's no guarantee that the bills that have been proposed will be passed in

all the states that have taken up the SLACK. Meanwhile, the US Senate voted to reverse the f c C repeal, and it passed in the Senate. However, in the United States we have not just the Senate, we also have the House of Representatives, and in the House, the measure

did not see the same momentum. They needed two representatives to agree to vote on that bill just to just to have a vote for it, and every Democrat representative signed the petition for this, but it was still more than forty signatures short of getting the measure to the voting floor, at least as of the recording of this podcast. So net neutrality currently in the United States is a

a dead concept. At the federal level, the f c C is now pushing that over to the Federal Trade Commission and saying this belongs to them, not to us. They'll make sure that no anti competitive monopolistic behaviors happened across the internet. Meanwhile, critics of this say that fat chance like that this was our best way of making certain that users had a fair shake. So there's a lot of rhetoric on both sides of this issue, and

it continues to be a big issue in the US. Recently, I also did some episodes giving an update on what Microsoft has been up to since. One of the things I mentioned was a dual touchscreen device called Andromeda. Well, on July two, two eighteen, I saw an article stating that the dual panel mobile device running the Andromeda OS has been put on hold. So again, just after I published this Microsoft update, they go and do this. But

what's really going on? Well, one thing I did not mention in the update episodes for Microsoft is that back in two thousand fifteen, Microsoft was calling Windows ten the lab version of Windows. Now. That was not to say that the company would release Windows ten then brush its

hands off and walk away whistling merrily. Instead, Windows was meant to evolve almost like it's a service on demand, so not your your traditional operating system, where you would pay for an update, or you would get a regular update. It's the foundation. Windows ten is a foundation for the service of an operating system, and Microsoft would continue to support it and update it with new features as time

goes on, but there would be no Windows eleven. There would just be updates to Windows ten that would roll on out to users. One of those updates, which is scheduled for the fall of two thousand eighteen, is code named Redstone five. And what was supposed to happen was that the Andromeda operating system, the mobile version of Windows that was going to run on this upcoming dual touchscreen foldable mobile device, it would be included in that update

to Windows ten. So you would have of this interoperability between the full build of Windows for desktops and bcs and laptops that kind of thing, and the mobile version that would exist on the Andromeda device. The Andromeda phone, or mobile device I should call it, was rumored to have cellular technology built into it, but not necessarily in a way that was made to make it a competitor with iOS or androids. So in other words, calling it

a mobile device is more accurate than a phone. It might have had cellular technology built into it, but it was really meant to increase the devices functionality, allowing you to connect to the Internet, whether you had WiFi access or not, so could you make calls on it. You might be able to use a service like Skype, which Microsoft owns, and make a call through that, but it wasn't necessarily meant to act as a smartphone. It was more like a device that could also make calls. But

as it turns out, it's all a moot point. In the spring, Microsoft shook up the mobile division with another reorganization ation, and the company reevaluated its strategy. The elements of Andromeda OS either did not align with this new strategy or they weren't ready to go, but either way, they are not going to be part of the red Stone five update, and the development has been shelved, possibly forever, and some folks like zd Nets Mary Joe Folly have

pointed out this might not be a bad idea. The Andromeda was rumored to only be able to run Microsoft Store apps, which limited its utility considerably. Fully cites sources that say Microsoft may still try to develop a multi screen device running a build of Windows in the future, but then it might more closely resemble a laptop inform

factor rather than a handheld device. Back on May twenty second, two thousand eighteen, I published an episode about Project Maven, which focused on incorporating elements of artificial intelligence in a drone program for the military. Google had been involved in that project and faced criticis them both from within and from outside the company about its involvement. On June one, two thousand eighteen, several headlines reported Google would not renew

the project, may even contract, according to Google employees. The CEO of Google Cloud, Diane Green, addressed the company and announced that once the current contract is over, Google will not seek a renewal, and as a reminder, Google had maintained that its work on the project focused solely on non aggressive technologies and open source software, but emails from within Google showed that executives were really eager to land

lucrative contracts with the Pentagon to provide services like machine learning, which could then be used to support surveillance efforts. Presumably that same technology might in the future be used to create autonomous or semi autonomous weapons platforms. So while Google might have the plausible deniability of saying our work was just to help with identifying places and people and activity. It wasn't meant to be used in and direct combat applications.

You could argue, well, with some small adaptation, you could make that technology uh more of a weapons platform. So it's to me it's one of those kind of weak arguments at some moonpoint, though Google has now backed away from that contract. The dramatic Bitcoin roller coaster story continues today in the cryptocurrency hit an all time high of nearly twenty thousand dollars per bitcoin. That was toward the end of seventeen. Now, remember bitcoin is a digital currency

that can be divided up into much smaller subunits. After reaching those incredible highs, the currency has slumped quite a bit. At the end of June two eighteen, the value dipped below six thousand dollars per bitcoin, which is still you know, pretty pretty high, but it's a huge drop from that twenty grand it enjoyed back in December twenty seventeen. And as I researched these updates, Bitcoin is in another bit

of an upswing. It's recovered to above six thousand dollars again, like it dropped down to about five thousand, eight hundred. Now it's back above six thousand, but cryptocurrencies in general have had a really rough time of it. Recently, the Japanese government passed some strict laws to try and eliminate the use of cryptocurrencies and money laundering exploits, and some high profile digital currency exchanges have been hacked recently. These

sort of events have really hurt cryptocurrencies in general. Just like all currencies, their value rests partly on perception. If we believe them to have value, they have value. And if everyone just woke up one morning and said, wait a minute, that's actually worthless, it would in fact be worthless because no one would accept the currency for anything. So it's only our our belief that it it's worth anything that makes it worth anything. Now this is true

for any currency. It's you have the the assurance of most currencies that have a bank or from behind them that they are backing the value of that. But ultimately it's just that we all agree that it's worth something. If we all woke up and said, you know what, this paper money really isn't you can't really do anything with it. It's not really it doesn't have any real worth to it, then the currency could collapse if everybody

did it. Now, the funny thing is that as I researched this, I'm aware that this story could actually be totally different by the time the updates go live, which is how crazy and volatile Bitcoin tans to be. And it also means that I may have to do an update to my updates episode. The irony is not lost upon me. While I wallow in some self pity as I think about this, Let's take a quick break to

thank our sponsor. Back at the beginning of two thousand eighteen, I did three episodes about YouTube's history, and that also deserves a bit of an update now. Just as I was king on the YouTube episodes, the company was getting ready to roll out some major changes to its partner platform. YouTube partner program is it's the platform that creators can use to monetize their videos, and essentially it allows channel owners to elect to have ads served against their videos.

YouTube gets a cut and the video owner gets the rest. So if you have a really popular channel with videos that get a lot of views, you can stand to make some decent money from advertising. But in the spring of YouTube was trying to deal with a really controversial problem some users had been uploading videos that featured hateful content. There could be racist content, misogynists content, other forms of hate speech, and some of those users were YouTube partners.

They had a large following, and they had ads served up against their videos, and advertisers were not too keen to have their brands associated with someone who was spouting

off hateful garbage. So youtubes Are sponse was to create a new algorithm that attempted to flag videos that might have problematic content in them and then demonetize those videos, essentially flip the switch off so that ads would no longer be served against those videos, and no matter how many views such a video would get, it would never earn any money for the creator. Now, I personally do not have a problem with YouTube demonetizing videos that advocate

for violence or spout off hateful things. YouTube is a company. They have the right to do that, and I don't see a problem with cutting off this, especially considering that the business side of it is that YouTube has to work with the advertisers too, and not a lot of advertisers are too eager to have their brand associated with that kind of stuff. However, the algorithm affected a much broader spectrum of videos, including educational videos, advocacy videos, news

oriented videos covering topics racism in a newsworthy way. Some of these videos were getting tagged as being inappropriate, even when there was no real inappropriate content in them. Creators began to refer to it as the apocalypse. YouTube had swung hard in an effort to keep major advertisers on the platform because there were a lot of big ones that were threatening to leave. The alternative was losing some of those valuable clients, and we're talking big companies like

auto companies and major retailers. However, in the process of trying to mollify these major companies, the creators who are actually making the content that ads were getting served up against,

we're hurting. So YouTube adjusted the algorithm in the fall of seventeen to try and correct some of these problems, kind of a course correction, and the company noted that no fix was ever going to be perfect, and there would be some instances that would have to be handled on a case by case basis where someone might see that a video they've uploaded has suddenly been flagged as being demonetized, and you would have to take it up to YouTube and say, I really don't think that this

should count, and here are my reasons why, and could you give me an explanation as to why my video has been demonetizeding what I can do to fix this. Of course, the problem is during this time you're not making any money off views. They're coming to that video and you might eventually get monetized again. Let's say that YouTube says, oh, you're right, that was completely on us. The algorithm was over zealous. Let's fix this. It is monetized. We flipped the switch. You're good to go. Yeah, you're

good to go from that point forward. But all views that had happened before then don't count because no ads were served against your video at that time. And the way videos tend to work, I mean, there are long tail videos that will get views months and months and months after they go live. I had a video go viral nine months after it was published on YouTube. So there are those cases. But a lot of videos it's the first couple of days, maybe the first week, where

they get the majority of their views. So if it takes too long to monetize a video again, that's lost revenue. Anyway. Now we're back up to January of two thousand eighteen. That was when I was actually publishing the episodes about YouTube up to that time. To qualify for the Partner platform, your YouTube channel would need to have accrued at least ten thousand views across however many videos you had. If you had one video that did great and you had

ten thousand views on it, that counted. If you had a thousand videos and each one got ten views, that gonna do, although you would still be under review about whether or not you joined the partner platform, but the overhaul ended up changing all of that. Anyway. Now, to be a partner on YouTube, you have to have at least one thousand subscribers to your channel, and you have to have at least four thousand hours of watch time

over a twelve month period across all your videos. That's somewhat problematic because if you're a creator who specializes in short form videos, you might end up having lots of views but still end up on the short end of total accumulated view time. Because let's say that I make a crazy popular video series, but each of those videos is about three minutes long, and let's say that I'm doing it maybe once a week, I have to go for a long time and hope for really really big

audience reach. To reach that four thousand hours of total view time, people have to watch tons of my videos. I might have to step up production and start publishing much more frequently to get to that four thousand hours of total view time within twelve months. So if I make really good longer form content, I could hit that

number with fewer actual viewers. Right. If each of my videos is like an hour long and it's really really good, people tend to watch for the majority of the video, I'll hit that four thousand hour number way faster now. YouTube says that if you're uploading videos four or five times a week and you have about a thousand subscribers, it shouldn't be too hard to hit that four thousand

hours of you content, but your mileage may vary. For those who have actually met those requirements, some of them have found the new approval process to take a really

long time. In April two thousand eighteen, the CEO of YouTube said that the company would launch a pilot program in which creators could provide more feedback about video content in an effort to help YouTube find appropriate advertiser matches and potentially sidestep false positive or flip flopping issues where an ad gets monetized and then demonetized and back again multiple times. So, in other words, let's say that you're making a comedy series, and let's say it's a little raunchy,

not outside of YouTube's rules and regulations. You're you're still well within that, but maybe it's a little bit more on the rowdy side than your typical video might be. That might mean that certain advertisers wouldn't want to be associated with you, but other advertisers might be perfectly fine. And this process would allow you a way to tell YouTube, here's what my video series has in it. Here are

the potentially problematic points. Uh So, can you find advertisers that are okay to work with my particular content, and then YouTube will match the two up. This benefits everybody. It benefits the advertiser, it benefits the creator, and ultimately it benefits YouTube. YouTube only is making money when those ads are being served against other content. Uh on the setting aside subscriber models and all that kind of stuff. So, in other words, this is supposed to be the solution

for everybody. The problem is it hasn't yet been really formulated. In June, YouTube rolled out some more features, such as channel membership model. Uh. This is where creators who are partners can create a membership channel and charge users four dollars a month to access special members only content, including video streams and emojis. If this sounds familiar, it's because

it's pretty much what Twitched us with live streaming. With Twitch, you can be a subscriber and you can get uh special material through your subscription and creators when ten thousand subscribers can sell merchandise directly from their channels through a company called t Spring. But t Spring also takes a pretty healthy cut of all sales, so you only get a portion of those sales, which makes sense. I mean,

it's t Spring that's supplying the actual material. But still, um so, some people say that these these moves on YouTube's part to try and create new revenue streams for content creators is still not really on the right track. One last bit about the YouTube updates. YouTube recently posted an apology on Twitter to the l g B t Q community regarding how it's algorithm unfairly demonetized people in

that community. You know, creators in the l g B t q community who had uploaded videos to their YouTube channels start seeing their videos demonetized at a much high or rate um even though they were treating the subject matter with respect. They were not being racist or misogynistic or using hate speech. They were treating real issues, and they were seeing their videos get demonetized. And I said, well,

this is kind of discrimination. And not only that, but some of their content got paired with ads that actually ran with homophobic language, ads that were viewing that were essentially from from organizations that view uh homosexuality as a sin or as something that is immoral. And so this

was like a real slap in the face. Not only were a lot of these videos getting demonetized, the ones that weren't demonetized were getting paired with ads that outright said the person who created the content was bad in some way. The tweet said the company had taken action on those ads and would tighten enforcement on its policies, which I'm sure a lot of people appreciate, but it's still, you know, it's it's not a great thing to have to apologize for back in two thousand fourteen, So it's

going back quite a ways. I did a couple of episodes about the automotive company Tesla, and a lot has happened since two thousand fourteen. I could probably do a full update episode, but I want to concentrate on just a couple of little things. Uh. In fact, one of the things that happened since then was some various incidents involving Tesla's driver assist features, which the company referred to as autopilot, a term that I really didn't care for,

but I did a full episode about that. Scott Benjamin joined me in two thousand and sixteen to talk about that. But so rather focus on those tragic stories, I thought, I mentioned that just a few days before I came in to record this episode, Tesla hit a milestone it had been striving towards, and that was to produce at least five thousand Model three Tesla electric cars in a

week in its manufacturing facilities. The Model three is Tesla's sports sedan that's supposed to be in the more affordable range, but affordable is means different things to different people. The prices on the low end started thirty six thousand dollars. The company unveiled the Model three in two thousand sixteen, and they were taking pre orders and reservations for the

vehicle for quite some time. At one point the company had more than five hundred thousand pre orders five hundred eighteen thousand, I believe for the Model three, but over time they lost thousands. They were down to four hundred twenty thousand reservations. In June two thousand eighteen, Elon Musk had claimed the company would hit ten thousand cars produced per week at some point in twenty eighteen, which I guess could still happen. But they just hit five thousand,

and it's July eighteen now. But the five thousand vehicle per week milestone still is a really big one, even though Wall Street wasn't as impressed. Not to be fair, the expectation was that by the end of the quarter that ended in June eighteen, Tesla would have delivered fifty one thousand vehicles across all of its models for that fiscal year, but the ACTU number was forty thousand, seven

hundred forty so more than ten thousand vehicles short. The company's share prices fell nearly four percent after the quarterly report was posted, and on another note, as of July two, two thousand eighteen, Tesla has delivered twenty eight thousand, three eighty six Model three cars to customers who had put down a reservation, so only about four hundred thousand ago, I guess. In February eighteen, I did a couple of episodes about Uber, and I've got some updates about that

company as well. One of those updates is that Uber is once again allowed to operate in London. You may remember that London had passed a ban on Uber, but a judge in the UK overturned the band, but with

several conditions. Uber now has a fifteen month license to operate within the City of London, but the company must submit to an independent review looking into policies, procedures and safety records every six months, and the company must notify UK government officials of any major che changes in processes or policies. In New York City, the Taxi and Limousine Commission proposed new rules regarding how much Uber drivers get to take home. The take home pay that is not

not passengers. They're not allowed to take any passengers to their home. That's that's kind of against the rules now. The study commission by this group stated that Uber driver salaries have remained low despite what it called the rapid growth of the industry, and the rules, if adopted, would require Uber to step in and make up shortcomings and driver earnings. So the threshold is seventeen dollars twenty two cents per hour. If a driver were to average that

over the course of a week, everything's fine. But if that if it were to drop below that average in the course of a week, Uber would have to come in and pay to make up the shortfall. Of course, that only applies to times when someone would actually be working on the clock for Uber, it's not just the week in general. And the study said that Uber could lower the amount they take from passenger fairs. In other words, the company could take a smaller percentage to help make

this possible. And according to the study, the media net hourly earnings in New York was fourteen dollars and cents, which is nearly three dollars per hour below the amount the new rules would call for. Nationwide, the company's drivers make an average of eleven dollars and seventy seven cents per hour once you deduct Uber's cut and car expenses. And by the way, I'm saying Uber, but this actually

applies to all ride hailing services. It's not just Uber, it's also lift in others um In New York City, by the way, this Taxi and Limousine Commission can actually adopt these rules without any involvement from either the City Council or the mayor because it's New York City and the Taxi and Limo Commission is a powerful entity there. The city is meanwhile considering options to regulate car hailing services.

In general, traffic has gotten really bad because there are a lot more people who have started driving for those services. It's actually put more cars on the streets, and there's an ongoing concern that driving for the services doesn't really

amount to a living, livable wage. And because a lot of the people who are driving for these services come from low income families, it can actually tramp them in a terrible situation in which they have car payments and car insurance and they're struggling to meet these extra expenses they normally wouldn't have because they're not taking home as much pay as they were originally not maybe promises the wrong word, but lead to believe they could earn, so

ends up being like working for the company store, right, Like everything you earn has to be spent at the company store to buy the stuff you need to keep a living, and because of the prices in the company store, you're never going to earn enough to get free. Same sort of thing here, except in this case, it's not the company store, it's car payments and insurance. Well, I've got some more updates to give you about stuff that's happened since I've had episodes go live. But before I

do that, let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. Okay, I could probably do a full episode with an update on what Facebook has been doing since two thousand eleven, because that's when Chris Poulette and I originally published the Facebook Story, which I think was a one episode thing too, so it's it's a pretty high view of what Facebook

has been doing. But I did do a follow up episode about Facebook's I p O in two thousand twelve, and I've done numerous episodes where I've talked about Facebook. But I'll probably have to do more episodes about the whole company in the near future, give it the full treatment that I tend to do for companies these days. But for the time being, one story I have to talk about is Mark Zuckerberg's appearances before the US government.

So Facebook was already under scrutiny after reports and service that Russian individuals or companies have been funding targeted political advertising aimed to influence the US presidential election back in sixteen, and that Facebook had become a platform on which propaganda and fake news was spreading rapidly. It was just becoming

a tool to radicalize people and to mislead people. And then came Cambridge Analytica, and I'll have to do a full episode about Cambridge Analytica at some point to really go into all the detail about that company. It's become such a huge news item in twenty eighteen. But in short, it was a British company that specialized in the collection

and mining of data, specifically for political consulting gigs. It, by the way, has filed for insolvency, which is why I now use the past tense to refer to it. Though the guy who was the director of the company is also the head of eight or so other companies that all are registered to the same physical address. So just because the name Cambridge Analytica is technically quote unquote gone,

doesn't mean the game is over anyway. During the election season, the Trump campaign hired Cambridge Analytica as a consulting firm for their campaign. The firm managed to get hold of the private information of more than eighty million Facebook users. The firm claimed it could use this data to identify user political preferences and then target those users to influence voting,

right to to kind of guide people. The firm worked with a professor at Cambridge University to develop an app that Facebook users were encouraged to download, and that app, or really to just install on Facebook, not even fully download, but that app would scrape user Facebook profiles for information

about them and all of their friends. And the US Congress ended up calling Zuckerberg in to explain themselves and the company in an effort to find out just what sort of information was used and what Facebook's policies were regarding user privacy and security. So Zuckerberg was under questioning for five hours over in Congress, and he didn't shy

away from taking responsibility. At one point he said, quote, we didn't take a broad enough view of our responsibility and that was a big mistake and it was my mistake, and I'm sorry. I started Facebook, I run it, and I'm responsible for what happens here. End quote. He said the company failed to handle the Cambridge Analytica problem correctly.

He said Facebook was told that Cambridge Analytica had deleted the data it had collected, and that Facebook failed to follow up to make certain that that was actually the case, and that was a big mistake. He also said the company was hiring a special counsel to investigate all apps that have access to large amounts of user data to make certain that those two were not violating Facebook's policies. So, in other words, he was saying the company would now

actually enforce the rules they had created. They had created these rules, which sounded good, the idea being that if you create an app for Facebook, you're only supposed to ask for the information you actually need in order for your app to work, and you're not supposed to do anything nefarious with that data. Anything you do plan to use with that data you're supposed to communicate to the end user. So at least in theory, the end user has the opportunity to say I'm not really cool with

that and and back out. Although very few of us tend to read all of that stuff, and that's that's kind of on us. Anyway. Facebook wasn't really enforcing those rules to any great extent. They were just kind of codifying the rules so that Facebook could say, well, you know, that's our rules. Say this, but unless you actually enforce rules,

they don't really mean much anyway. At one point, Senator Dick Durbin actually asked Zuckerberg if Zuckerberg would be willing to share the name of the hotel he stayed at the night before or who he had messaged earlier that week, and Zuckerberg said he would rather not do that publicly, and Senator Dick Durbin said, quote, I think that maybe what this is all about your right to privacy, the limits of your right to privacy, and how much you give away in modern America in the name of connecting

people around the world end quote. So, in other words, stating, if you're not willing to give up this basic information, and you realize the value of that information, and you realize the impact that information could have if it got out to other people, why are you allowing your platform to do this on a broad scale to billions of people, or at least a billion people, since that's how many people Facebook has these days, well, the story continues to

unfold as of the time I'm researching the show. The Washington Post recently said that five people familiar with the matter told journalists that the Department of Justice, the FBI, the U S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Federal Trade Commission we're all investigating the Cambridge analytic a matter and Facebook's actions and statements over the last several years.

The agencies are trying to figure out how much Facebook employees knew about what was going on, and how truthful the communication from Facebook to the authorities has been up to this point, and if things have not all been on the up and up, I expect we're gonna see some massive fines. In fact, Facebook could face billions of dollars in fines if these agencies find that the company was culpable in any way to what went on with Cambridge Analytica. Now unrelated to all of that mess, but

still a Facebook story. Is when I wanted to touch on, Facebook had been pursuing a project called the Aquila Program. The goal of that program was to use solar powered, high altitude drones that would act as a backbone for wireless internet connectivity in places that have limited or no access to the Internet. So I think of things like the continent of Africa and imagine these drones flying way, way, way up in the atmosphere, and they're powered by the sun.

They have batteries so that they can continue to fly at night, they recharged during the day, and they are able to broadcast uh WiFi signals across to each other using mostly stuff like lasers actually, and then beam that information down to ground stations, giving people on the ground Internet access. It's a pretty cool idea, but it is no more. The Facebook had only managed to do two test flights of its drone technology. The first one ended

in a crash, so not a successful test. The second one had a modest success, but still performed below expectations, so Facebook decided to shelve it. Google actually had a similar drone program it was working on. It also has shuttered that effort, but Project Loon, which uses high altitude balloons rather than drones, is still in development over at Google. Well that's just a quick series of updates about various

stories in the tech world. There are clearly tons more I could have touched on, but I can only do so many per episode, so I'll probably do more of these in the future, where I will do like a grab bag of updates about various things going on in the tech world that maybe again don't marrit a full episode.

Cambridge Analytica will definitely get a full episode, a full treatment from the entire story, probably a little bit later once more of these investigations have been wrapped up, so I can have kind of a beginning, middle and into that. But expect that in the future. And if you guys have any suggestions for other topics I should cover on tech stuff, whether it's a company, a technology, an issue in tech. Maybe there's someone you want me to interview or have on as a guest, make certain to let

me know. Send me a message the email addresses tech stuff at how stuff works dot com, or drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter. They handle with both of those. Is tech stuff H s W. Don't forget to follow us on Instagram and I'll talk to you again really soon from more on this and thousands of other topics. Is that how stuff Works dot com. M