The Tech of 2014 to 2018

to the emergence of Cambridge ANALYTICAM. And in this episode, we'll keep on marching down the path of time to see how tech has evolved and shaped our world in the years since. Now, if you listen to the last episode, you'll remember then two thousand thirteen, Steve Balmer, who was at that point the CEO of Microsoft, had announced his retirement. He would actually remain CEO until February of two thousand teen, and that's when he would hand over the reins to

Satya Nadela. Nadela, who had been the executive vice president of Microsoft's Cloud and Enterprise Group, had been working for Microsoft since two so this was definitely a case of a company promoting from within. Microsoft had been around nearly forty years, and Nadela would mark only the third CEO in the company's history. Nadella's first year wasn't exactly smooth,

partly due to his own actions. While at a conference named after tech pioneer Grace Hopper, who many people referred to as the person who invented the term computer bug, Nadela made some comments that women in the tech industry should rely on good karma rather than asking for a pay raise, essentially saying if you were if your work

is good, it'll come back to you now. As you might imagine, the response to this rather tone deaf statement wasn't terribly positive of and he would subsequently apologize for those comments, and he would later explain that he was applying a personal philosophy that he followed that doing good work leads to rewards to a broad environment, but he did not take into account stuff like systemic bias, in which an entire population of employees contends with lower salaries

among other problems, just as a matter of course, that if you don't address that part, then this whole do good work and you'll get rewarded thing ends up being lips service. Nadela committed to continuing existing policies and enacting new ones to help overcome this systemic bias in general, including launching programs that would help expand diversity within Microsoft. Now.

On top of that scandal, Nadela also had to helm Microsoft through some pretty tough layoffs throughout two thousand fourteen. In July, he announced that the company would eliminate eighteen thousand jobs. Yikes. Many of those, about twelve thousand, five hundred of them, in fact, were employees who had previously worked at Nokia. And here's the really rough thing. Microsoft

had just acquired Nokia in April two thousand fourteen. This was all in an effort to create mobile devices, mainly smartphones that could compete against Google, Android devices and the Apple iPhone, and spoiler alert, this would not really pan out so well. Microsoft would ultimately get out of the smartphone market entirely, though it stuck around longer than a

lot of people thought was necessary. On the US government level, the FCC was forced to go back to the drawing board in an effort to establish rules about the concept of net neutrality. If they had been able to look into the future, maybe they wouldn't have even bothered this. A little commentary will come back by the end of this episode, but essentially, the idea behind net neutrality is

that all data should be equal on the Internet. So no service provider, that is, the company that actually allows you to connect to the Internet, none of those should be able to give preferential treatment to some data at the expense of others, particularly for services or data provided

by the I s P itself or against competing services. So, in other words, if you have an I s P, that I s P should not be able to prioritize its own properties at the expense of others in an effort to get you to subscribe to more of their stuff. And also, net neutrality states that you should be able to access your data on whatever Internet capable device you're using, so that a company would not be able to restrict your access to certain content just because you were using

a device that was made by a competitor. For example, the FCC had established regulations in two thousand eleven that would require Internet providers to treat all traffic equally, but the U S courts ultimately ruled that the FCC didn't actually have the authority to enforce those rules, which means the rules were meaningless. Right if you can't enforce them,

then the rules might as well not exist. So the FCC changed tactics and began to argue that broadband should be reclassified as a regulated utility, which FCC does have the authority to oversee. Now, we'll revisit this issue again later, because who boy, has it been a mess now? Over in the European Union, a ruling made things pretty complicated for a companies like Google. The EU passed a rule that informally is referred to as the right to be forgotten.

That is, people should have some option to remove their name and details from search results to protect their privacy, or to remove reference to something that really no longer applies to them. For example, let's say that I grew up in the era of the Internet, and as a dumb teenager, I did some stupid act that got me in legal trouble. Nothing too serious, but bad and off to bring my judgment into question, and as a result, someone wrote about it and perhaps my identity is known

as a result of that. Then, as an adult who has grown up and supposedly matured, I would never do such a thing again. But I still have this thing that's in my past, that's in my record that people can see, that follows me around everywhere. Then I might find harmful and I might want to find a way to wipe that off the Internet, because that's not really who I am anymore. That was the whole purpose of this rule, But critics of the rule pointed out that

this could allow someone to whitewash their own background. They could erase records that have real meaning and are of public importance. They could, in theory, demand that links leading to factually correct articles about them be removed from search results. So let's say you're a local business owner and you want to run for a publicly elected office, but you also have some dark skeletons in your closet, like illegal

stuff that people wrote about in the past. You could manned any references to your past activities be removed from search results, making it harder for the voting public to know about the kind of terrible, nefarious person you actually are when they go to vote. Now, as it stands, the rule would require people to submit requests to Google to have their search results removed from general search, and Google would review the request before acting on it, and

so it's a pretty messy subject. Speaking of messy subjects, two thousand fourteen was also when more hacking stories made the news. Many people, including prominent celebrities, found their private stuff that was stored in iCloud on public display. Apple was quick to say that I cloud itself had not been breached. This wasn't an example of hackers getting access

to Apple's servers. Rather, the people who were hacked were hacked because their passwords and their security questions were compromised, probably through guesswork and brute force attacks. Apple promised to boost security in the wake of the hacks, but yeah, this was pretty ugly stuff. On a much larger scale, Sony Pictures was hit with a massive hack attack, which included everything from employee compensation records and benefits data to

unreleased movies. Suspicion turned to North Korea, with a possible motivation for the hacks being the upcoming release of a film titled The Interview, which was a comedy in which two characters are charged with assassinating North Korea's leader Kim

Jong Un. Chinese e commerce company Ali Baba held its i p O on the New York Stock Exchange in September of two thousand fourteen, reaching a stock price of two dollars and seventy cents per share, which was more than thirty five percent higher than it's already pretty hefty sixty eight dollars per share opening price. It was the biggest I p O in tech up to that point and helped show how the Chinese market was becoming an

increasingly powerful player in the tech space. Apple announced Apple Pay, the company's mobile payment technology that has found its way into multiple Apple products. To use it, you can tap an NFC enabled device against a compatible payment terminal, and after authorizing the payment on the device, you could be on your way. Apple also announced, but did not launch, the Apple Watch in two thousand fourteen, and would enter into the wearables market in the hopes of succeeding where

many other companies had struggled. One other thing about the Apple Pay thing that I just think is funny. When I was on a trip to San Francisco, Tari was there. We went past a girl scout group that was selling cookies and they accepted Apple Pay, and I thought, well, of course they do. It's San Francisco. Facebook shocked the tech world with a sixteen billion dollar acquisition. This was

the messaging service WhatsApp. Since then, it's become clear that the intent was team merge the features of Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram together, but that has come under recent scrutiny as various government officials around the world have speculated that breaking up Facebook might be a good idea, that perhaps the company has gotten too big, too powerful, and people

were too dependent upon it. Uh And also that's just anti competitive in general, so there's been some moves to perhaps forced the company to break into separate companies again. But yes, this was the massive acquisition Facebook made with WhatsApp, and that was the first time a lot of people, including myself, had heard of the app, despite the fact that it was a very very popular and still is a very popular text messaging service used by millions of

people around the world. I just hadn't heard of it because I was ignorant. And two thousand fourteen would be a bad year for Uber, but by far not the worst year for Uber. The company did get hold of an enormous amount of cash in the form of investments, but it also faced increasing resistance and multiple markets around the world as governments and taxi cab unions pushed back.

In addition, some pretty unethical corporate behavior became public knowledge in two thousand fourteen, including the revelation that Uber corporate employees could access writer logs without any type of consent, opening up the possibility of extortion or blackmail. This wouldn't be the low point for Uber, as we will see

later on. Hewitt Packard would announce in October two fourteen that the company was going to split up, spinning off the PC and printer operations from the corporate enterprise side of the business, and Google acquired smart demstat company Nest for three point to billion dollars, bolstering Google's smart home technology strategy. Nest would operate as an independent company just a year later, but would then rejoin Google into the in eighteen. Two thousand fourteen was a busy year, all right,

Let's get on to now. One big thing to happen in was a confusing series of corporate maneuvers over at the aforementioned Google Now. The end result was that the company formed a new umbrella corporation called Alphabet, which would be at the top of the hierarchy of companies that would include stuff like Google, and YouTube, and later on Weymo,

the automated driving company, as well as others. The logic behind the move was that this would allow each individual company in the family to operate independently of all the others, giving each company the ability to make moves without having to coordinate everything with everyone else. So you wouldn't have one leader at the top of all of these having to consider all these very different initiatives. Each one would have its own leader and thus would be able to

move more nimbly. Larry Page moved up as CEO of Alphabet and Sundar Pichai would take over as CEO of Google, which at this point was a little more stripped down but still an enormous company. So uh, Apple would officially launch the Apple Watch. It received mixed reviews. A lot of folks said that it was clearly the best smart watch on the market. Others said, yes, it is, but the bar is pretty darn low, so that's not a

big thing now. Generally speaking, the watch has a devoted following among Apple fans, but it hasn't really moved on to become a bigger success among a broader audience. That's often looked at as something of a disappointment in tech journalism circles. I'm not as sure that the owners find it as disappointing, but reviewers kind of did. Microsoft launched Windows ten in now this was a really big reversal from Windows eight, and it also skipped right the heck

over Windows nine. There's no Windows nine goes from Windows eight to Windows ten, seeing how is how the iPhone is going to do the exact same thing just a little bit later. It starts to make you wonder if the number nine holds any sort of dark significance in the world of technology, like you just don't want to have version nine, or maybe it's just people want to create the perception of a fresh start and the number

ten gives you a fresh start that one zero. It makes you think of it being a big leap forward as opposed to a nine. In some cases it was meant to mark not the tenth version of a property, but rather the anniversary of a product launch. But whatever, I hate it because it makes tracking versions a pain. It just when you look over the history and you're skipping over numbers, you start to think, did I miss something? So I hate it. It's dumb. So we're gonna call

Windows ten Windows nine. Now everybody write it down the year's and it's Windows nine. Anyway, Windows ten launched and in general people liked it way more than Windows eight. However, it didn't have a perfect launch. There were reports coming out that the OS incorporated elements of data tracking, and it had some troubling implications regarding user privacy. As a result, eventually Microsoft was able to smooth this over, but initially

those were big concerns. In the US, the Federal Aviation Administration or f a A released its set of guidelines and rules for drone operation in the US airspace. So generally speaking, the rules are not that much different from the ones that govern stuff like the operation of model aircraft, though they do require operators to get a permit if the drone they are piloting is over a certain size.

Amazon launched its Echo smart speaker. In it incorporates a personal digital assistant and not surprisingly deep integration and Amazon's e commerce services. It introduced us to Alexa, the digital voice that can do all sorts of stuff, though you might have to ask her to do it for five times if you have a particularly strong Southern accent. I based that off listening to my mom tried to interact with a LEXA, I love you, mom. Both SpaceX and Blue Origin were able to launch and return to Earth

a reusable rocket that year. In Blue Origin actually did it first, and then SpaceX followed suit a few weeks later. The achievement was a significant step in the effort to reduce the cost of getting stuff out into space. By using the same launch vehicle for multiple launches, the price

tag drops significantly. Now. It's still not exactly cheap, mind you, but it lowers the price tag enough to allow parties that had previously never been able to launch a payload into space potentially piggyback on a launch, which is pretty cool. Over at Twitter, Dick Costolo, the CEO back at that point, was forced to essentially step out of that role, and Jack Dorsey, the co founder of Twitter, became the interim

CEO and then full time CEO of the company. One of his first big moves was to oversee an eight percent cut of the workforce, staying that it was a tough move, he viewed it as absolutely necessary for the company's success. Oh and hey, in Twitter got rid of favorites in which you would mark tweets you liked with a star, and they replaced it with likes and which

you marked tweets you like with a heart. Not. At the time, this was considered a big deal and some people really hated it, And now I think most people don't even remember when it was different, which kind of sums up a lot about Internet culture in general. We all have memories like a goldfish when it comes to these things. All right, well, I have a little bit more about a lot of stuff happened in these years,

must have been making up for that recession. But I'll get to it in just a second after we take this quick break. Okay, some more stuff From two thousand fifteen, Volkswagen had to deal within an enormous scandal. It was discovered that the company had installed devices in diesel vehicles

being sold in the United States. The purpose for these devices was to detect when the vehicle was going through emissions testing, something that many places in the United States require in order for a vehicle to be registered in that region. So during testing, the device would cause the vehicle to underperform, which would reduce the emissions the vehicle

would give off in the process. Once the cars systems detected that the test was over, it would switch itself off and the car would go into full performance mode. But that also meant the car was emitting more pollution. So, in other words, Volkswagen had installed gadgets that allowed its cars to cheat on official tests, and as you can imagine, that's a big no no and it cost the company

dearly HP. After announcing the intent to split its company into two businesses, went forward with that plan, and in the process the company eliminated thirty three thousand jobs. Yikes. Meg Whitman would remain CEO of the enterprise unit of the company. The other side, the PC and UH and consumer facing approach would go to someone else. Now. Tesla introduced the autopilot feature in its vehicles in two thousand fifteen.

The feature has been the news several times since then due to crashes, including crashes with fatalities that happened while Tesla cars were allegedly in autopilot mode. Now, the company has repeatedly stated that this feature is not meant to be an autonomous car mode and it requires drivers to acknowledge as much before they can enact the feature, But many people, including myself, still criticized the company for calling

the darned thing autopilot in the first place. Now, not to go off on too much of a tangent, but I think the company bears at least a little response stability for setting unrealistic expectations with that name, though I also agree that ultimately the majority of accountability should fall on the shoulders of the drivers, not on just Tesla.

Over on the data security side, one of the big stories of that prompted more than a little schadenfreude affected the site Ashley Madison, which is a sort of dating website for people who want to have extramarital affairs. The hackers demanded that the site's owner, Avid Life Media, shut down the website or else they were going to release

the data to the world. Well, the site stayed up, and the info got leaked onto the dark web, where it quickly circulated and people hurriedly did searches to make sure they weren't showing up on any lists. Two thousand fifteen was also when so called hoverboards, which is a terrible name for what's essentially a variant of a motorized scooter, started bursting into flames. Do you remember when that happened? Airline said you can't take them on board because they

were catching on fire so much. Yikes. Okay, finally let's move on into twenty six and twenty sixteen, we had to say goodbye to something beloved. I am, of course, referring to the three and a half millimeter headphone jack, the wired headphone jack on phones. The iPhone seven got rid of it, and so did a lot of other smartphones. The industry was pushing a move towards bluetooth headphones or this was even worse, the use of a dongle adapter so you could plug your old wired headsets into new

smartphone devices. And there were a lot of jokes about the word dongle back in two thousand sixteen, because we are all very mature. Over at Samsung, there was smoke, and where there's smoke, there's fire, you know. Well, in this case, the Galaxy Note seven, a flagship smartphone from Samsung, began to have a pretty disastrous year as reports surfaced of Notes seven handsets exploding into flames. At fault were the batteries that prompted a global recall of the device.

Airlines made announcements the passengers with a Note seven would have to surrender their phone before being allowed on a plane. It was really bad press, a huge mess, so Samsung recalled them and replaced the faulty batteries with new ones that didn't seem to do much better than the original ones. There were more reports of accidents flooding the news, and eventually Samsung was forced to discontinue the handset entirely. Yeah.

In early twenty sixteen, a Google engineer named Anthony Lewandowski left the company and he went on to found a new self driving car company called Auto O T t O. Lewandowski had previously founded other companies related to autonomous cars that had later been acquired by Google. That would actually lead to some people questioning the ethic behind those moves. Some people said that it seemed like he was specifically creating companies with the intent for Google to acquire them later,

so essentially printing his own money. That was the implication that some people had made against him. In late twenty sixteen, Uber acquired Auto and Lewandowski would move on over to Uber and become the head of their attempts to develop self driving cars. Now. The following year, Google mostly in the form of Weymo that was the self driving startup under Google's parent company, Alphabet. It didn't really exist when

Lewandowski was there. The division that would become Weymo existed, but Weymo as a thing didn't exist till a little bit later. But Weymo would allege that Lewandowski had downloaded nearly ten gigs of confidential information, including trade secrets, from Google before he left the company. Lewandowski, when met with questions about this at a trial, exercised his Fifth Amendment rights. The Fifth Amendment protects US citizens from having to increase

emanate themselves in a court of law. Uber would subsequently fire Lewandowski for not cooperating with the investigation. Google and Uber would have ultimately settled the lawsuit in two thousand eighteen, and Lewandowski would go on to found another self driving

car company. Google would bring another charge against Lewandowski personally for theft of trade secrets, and after being indicted, the board of directors of his new startup, called Pronto, announced that Lewandowski was no longer CEO and appointed a new leader in his place. Lewandowski has pled not guilty to the charges, and his trial has not yet happened as

of the recording of this podcast. Apple also had a face off with the U. S Department of Justice in two thousand sixteen, and the crux of the matter was a mass shooting that happened in late The perpetrators of the shooting had an Apple iPhone five C in their possession, and the FBI wanted Apple to unlock the phone and

decrypt its contents. Apple said no way. Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, said that if they complied with the FBI's orders, it would set a dangerous precedent, and that if the company acquiesced in the United States, it might be forced to do the same thing in other countries, including countries that have more authoritarian governments and fewer guaranteed

human rights for citizens. Ultimately, the FBI gained access to the phone using a third party contractor to break through the security, and the entire matter was dropped without a final resolution. Something else that had its roots in two thousand fifteen, but really played out over the course of two thousand sixteen was the precipitous fall of the medical startup company Paronus. The expose of Faroness began in October

and continued throughout the following year. Paronus launched with the promise that it was going to develop an amazing piece of technology capable of testing a single drop of blood for dozens of different diseases and conditions, reducing the need for blood tests and creating unprecedented access to medical data. You could have one of these devices sitting on a desktop at home and do a blood test all on your own, just check if you wanted to. That was

the promise. There were a lot of claims that Saronus was using smoke and mirrors to make it seem like the company was making progress when in fact development was hitting some major roadblocks, and there Anos founder Elizabeth Holmes found herself in the center of a massive investigation that is still heading towards criminal proceedings as of the recording of this episode. And it was also two thousand sixteen when Yahoo disclosed the data breach that had happened back

in two thousand and fourteen. They actually disclosed two of them. The first time they disclosed one, they said that it affected around half a billion accounts, and then a little bit later in twenty sixteen, they said, whoops, there was also another one in that one affected at least one billion accounts. This was also right around the time that

Verizon was looking to acquire Yahoo. Uh. The acquisition would still go through, but it did so at a pretty hefty price drop, and that happened in Merissa Meyer, the CEO of Yahoo, would find herself out of a job not long after the acquisition. We also watched a bizarre series of allegations over at a company called hyper Loop One. That company had emerged as one of many with the intended goal of bringing Elon Musk's vision of high speed

transportation to life. This one was not directly affiliated with Elon Musk himself. The company had built and demonstrated technology that would be a foundational part of operations earlier in But then there was a big executive kerfuffle that mainly involved the CEO, Shervin Pishavar and the chief technology officer Brogan bam Brogan. Both parties alleged wrongdoing conducted by the other and it got really ugly and weird, and ultimately

the whole matter would be settled out of court. Bam Brogan would go on to co found another maglev train company called Arrivo, which would eventually fold due to lack of funds. Hyper Loop one would go on to become Virgin hyper Loop one in two thousand seventeen, after announcing

a partnership with the Virgin Group, Richard Branson's company. We also got to say hello to three different consumer VR headsets in you had the Oculus Rift, the PlayStation VR, and the HTC Vibe that all came out that year in the hopes that this time virtual reality would become you know, real reality, meaning that it would become a

viable consumer industry. While new VR hardware is still coming out today and new experiences arrive every year, the tech hasn't really caught on with the mainstream general public, and part of the reason might be the relatively high price tag. Not only are the headsets expensive, but in many cases they require a PC with some fairly hefty specs in order to run smoothly. They also require a dedicated space, particularly the headsets that allow for full movement within an area.

You've got to have the space available to actually use it. So it's asking a lot of consumers to adopt the technology, and so far we've only seen limited interest in the space. The people who love it really love it, but it remains a pretty hard sell. To the general consumer. And one thing we had to say goodbye to in two thousand sixteen was Vine, the service that lets users record

and upload six second videos to the Internet. Twitter had acquired the service in two thousand twelve, not long after it launched, but decided to sunset it in oh and was an election year in the United States, and you might have heard about how data was weaponized during that whole circus from misleading news propagating on platforms like Twitter and Facebook. That's a big thing. The whole fake news stuff to hack into the Democratic National Committee servers and beyond.

It was and is a huge deal. And this isn't restricted to just the United States, of course, but the effects here in the States are still being revealed as

of this recording as we head into yet another election year. Now, this entire part of our recent history is one that is far too complicated and emotionally charged for me to go into in this episode, but it remains one of the most important stories in our recent history, and perhaps one of the biggest consequences is that for many people it has undermined their confidence in the democratic process, which

is a devastating outcome. We've seen companies like Google, Twitter, and Facebook all struggle with how to deal with misinformation campaigns. But that's something that continues to evolve as a record these shows, and probably will continue to evolve for quite some time to come. Now, I would say that also made it pretty obvious how powerful a tool social media can be, as well as how easily it can be manipulated.

Facebook in particular. Now I've said this on other episodes, but Facebook's business model is dependent upon people spending time scrolling through Facebook and thus being served ads. The best way to get people to stay on your site is to present engaging material. This doesn't have to be positive material, it doesn't have to be true. It just has to be stuff that gets people engaged, and that can be liking the post or sharing it or commenting on it

or whatever. So inflammatory stuff actually does really well over at Facebook because it prompts a great deal of engagement. Again, it doesn't have to be positive engagement. It just has to get people using the site because that's when they're

looking at advertising. So if you know that little bit of information, then you have all you need to devise a misinformation campaign that will get a lot of play on Facebook because you can create something that isn't true, that's inflammatory, and you can be pretty sure that Facebook as a platform will help promote it because once it starts getting interaction, once people engage with it, Facebook will want to promote it to more people to drive more engagement.

So you're gaming the system, all right. Now, when we come back, we'll talk about two thousand seventeen and two thousand eighteen, and then I'm gonna go take a nap,

all right. So two thousand seventeen, what a year. It was the year when Facebook would be in the news repeatedly as a company and leadership team were put under scrutiny, particularly within the context of promoting the misinformation I was just talking about, particularly stories have been seeded on Facebook from a collection of accounts that were traced back to

Russian sources. But hey, I just talked about all that before the break, and I'm gonna be talking about Facebook even more for two thousand eighteen, so I'm not gonna rehash it all here except to say the company continued to squirm under scrutiny while simultaneously may king bucket loads of cash, like crazy amounts of money, y'all. And remember how I said that two thousand fourteen was a rough year for Uber. Well, that was a cake walk compared

to two thousand seventeen. The year started out rough. US President Donald Trump announced a travel ban at New York's John F. Kennedy Airport, a move that many companies and unions, including the New York City Taxi Union, protested, but Uber continued to operate at the airport, even turning off surge pricing to undercut all competition, which led to people accusing Uber of trying to profit off of the situation at the expense of taxi cab companies, and it led to

a movement called hashtag delete Uber. It's also when former Uber employees Susan Fowler went public with her allegations of sexual harassment and other misconduct at Uber's corporate level. Following the publication of her account, were several other stories that pointed to a truly awful culture at the ride hailing company, indicating some pretty deep trends of sexism and a tolerance

for inappropriate and sometimes criminal behavior. Apparently, if you were viewed as a top performer in the company, you were given a great deal of leeway as far as your behavior was concerned. It was, without a question gross. However, it was also one of the big launching points for the hashtag me too movement, and which many people spoke out against sexism, sexual harassment, racism, and related issues in

the workplace. Now, I would argue that gamer Gate sort of set the stage for this, but I believe Fowler's post really got things moving, and while the need to movement goes well beyond technology, it was particularly visible in the tech world, which has long been dominated by mostly

men for decades. I was around this time in early seventeen that alphabet Google's parent comp He began to go after Uber, stating that the former Googler Anthony Lewandowski had stolen trade secrets before making his way over to Uber the year earlier. Then, there was a video of Uber CEO Travis Kalenik berating again Uber driver that went viral in February seventeen, and that prompted the CEO to say he would quote fundamentally change as a leader and grow

up end quote. Several Uber executives were either fired or opted to leave the company as investigators looked into Fowler's claims, indicating that there was indeed a pretty terrible culture at the company and that it extended all the way up the executive ranks. The senior vice president of Engineering, a guy named Amit Singhal, was told to resign after about a month on the job because it turned out he had a sexual harassment allegation against him from a previous

employer that he had not divulged. The Uber VP of Product and Growth, a guy named Ed Baker, resigned now. He said he resigned because he wanted to focus on the public sector, but there were other people in the company who claimed he had engaged in inappropriate behavior while at Uber. The president of Uber, Jeff Jones, resigned in March of stating he had differences over the approach to

leadership at the company. By May, Uber fired Lewandowski for not cooperating with that investigation, stemming from allegations that Lewandowski had stolen terabytes of confidential information from Google. In June, the company would fire twenty people at various levels within Uber as a result of an internal investigation into Fowler's claims that showed that she was being truthful. And it didn't stop there. There were more resignations, including CEO Travis Kalenik,

whom I venture to say was not helping matters. He was essentially forced to resign his position and eventually was forced out the board of directors as well. The company announced a new commitment to addressing its problems, acknowledging that there were in fact problems in the process, but obviously more happened in twenty seventeen than just Uber's super crazy bad year. Amazon acquired high end grocery store chain Whole Foods for fourteen billion dollars. For example, Apple launched the

iPhone ten, the tenth anniversary iPhone. They skipped right over iPhone nine, just as Windows has skipped over Windows nine and driving me a little closer to the edge because my brain works in a very numeric way, and that's on me and I'll stop now. We also had a lot of efforts to codify net neutrality in the United States that were reversed in seventeen. A Jitpi, the FCC chairman during the Trump era, led the effort in reversing the regulations that the FCC under the previous US administration

had established. So essentially he was saying, yeah, all those efforts that the FCC made to regulate the road band industry, We're reversing that, and uh, actually the following year, in ten, net neutrality would be declared dead. So there's that. A type of ransomware called Wanna cry went viral in seventeen. The malware would infect machines and lock them from being used by their rightful owners, and those owners would be met with a demand to pay a ransom or else

lose their data forever. A twenty two year old security researcher named Marcus Hutchins found and implemented at kill switch that prevented Wanna Cry from being even worse than it already was. Hutchins himself would be subsequently arrested by US law enforcement and charged with numerous accounts of crimes that included wire fraud and distributing a device meant to intercept electronic communications. This was not related to want to Cry,

but to earlier malware. He would plead guilty to those charges and would be sentenced to time served plus a year of supervised uh you know, not really captivity, but supervised activity and then before you be released. And that sentencing happened in July of two thousand nineteen, so it'll be middle of when that is up, all right, So we're in the home stretch. Let's talk abouteen. And remember again, I'm not covering twenty nineteen. I just did that ding

dang durn thing a couple of episodes ago. But I will wrap up with a couple of thoughts about the decade. So was when Cambridge an Oalytica that whole scandal became public knowledge. It was revealed that through a loophole and Facebook's API, a developer was able to collect information on eighty seven million Facebook accounts without the user's permission. It marked yet another really rough year for Facebook's leadership team, which was compelled to testify to the United States government

a couple of times. Now, all that being said, the company continued to be massively profitable, So while the testimony was certainly uncomfortable, the financial results weren't exactly hurting the executive team. Night they might be under some pretty intense questioning in front of Congress, but then they could comfort themselves with a nice, snugly, enormous yacht or mansion or whatever. So in two thousand eighteen, Apple became the first U

S company to hit a market capitalization of one trillion dollars. However, this only lasted about a month before the value of the company dropped down to a measly seven billion losers. And yes, that was me being facetious. That was also the year we learned about two massive vulnerabilities in CPUs. I probably need to do a full episode about this

at some point to explain exactly what's going on. But the vulnerabilities are called specter and meltdown, And ultimately it means that these chips that are built on this architecture, and that's almost all of them, almost all modern chips have a tendency to leak valuable information. Um, it's just it's just an inherent vulnerability in the chip design and it's terrible. But I'll probably have to do a full episode to explain exactly how that works. Amazon opened its

first automated supermarket in two thousand eighteen. It's called Amazon Go. And the ideas you walk in, you pick up whatever stuff you want, and you walk out, and Amazon tracks where you are in the store, It tracks what you grab, it checks how much of it you take, and whether or not you leave the store with it ideally anyway, and then it builds you. Hopefully it does so correctly.

I know at least one person who had an experience where he picked something up, put it back down, walked out of the store uh with other stuff, but was also charged from the thing he picked up but did not actually take. So it's not full proof, but it's interesting. Also, Amazon announced it would open up It's HQ two in two cities, one near Alexandria, Virginia and the other one in New York City. Only if you listen to my two thousand nineteen episodes, you know how that all turned out.

We also started seeing online platforms react to the pressure they were feeling in the wake of various misinformation campaigns and fake news scandals. One of those reactions was to remove many of the platforms used by Alex Jones, a guy who has championed various fringe theories for years and tends to be pretty hateful in his delivery. From his podcasts getting pulled to his accounts on various platforms getting banned,

he found himself largely silenced on mainstream channels. Now that being said, I'm not sure that I've seen similar movements for you know, lesser known personalities, So part of me wonders if this particular initiative was mostly meant to placate people who were worried about rhetoric on these platforms. In other words, we silenced someone who is really notable in the field, So maybe you won't notice if we don't silence all these other hundreds of lesser known accounts. That's

I don't know. Maybe I'm just too cynical. The U. S. Supreme Court voted five to four in that law enforcement of shows must secure a warrant before they are allowed to obtain location data from mobile carriers. The court recognized that location data gives a really deep insight into a person and their activities, and that it could be a major invasion of privacy and therefore uh it falls under

the Unreasonable Search and Seizure Amendment. Over at Google, more than four thousand employees signed a petition asking the company to end its participation in a Pentagon project called Project Maven. The purpose of Maven was to develop drone platforms that, with the addition of image recognition capabilities, could identify specific

humans from a really good distance away. And while Mayven itself wasn't directly connected to weaponization, employees at Google felt that it would not take much of a stretch to incorporate that sort of technology on a weaponized platform, which means you could have a future of flying robotic assassins. Now Understandably, these Google employees felt that this approach conflicted with the no longer official Google motto of don't be evil.

At least a dozen or so employees resigned over the whole thing, refusing to work for a company that participated in the project. Google said that once the contract was up, it would not seek to renew, but it would try and find someone else to take over that contract. It does, however, continue to pursue and work with the Department of Defense on other projects. Google also showed off a project of

its own called Duplex that it's IO Developer conference. The AI program called up a restaurant and made a dinner reservation automatically over the phone, all without the person on the other end at the restaurant realizing that they were talking to an AI BT So that was kind of creepy. This was also the year that Google employees around the world staged a walk out to protest the way the

company was handling sexual harassment claims. This was in part prompted by reports that Andy Rubin, the guy who created Android and who been forced to resign due to sexual harassment allegations, had left the company with a ninety million dollar severance package. Yeah. Tragedy struck in Tempe, Arizona, in March two thousand eighteen, when an autonomous Uber test vehicle

collided with a pedestrian. A video analysis of the incident seemed to indicate that the accident was preventable, and the incident raised serious questions about the viability of autonomous cars moving forward. Over in Europe, Visa experienced a major outage that lasted eight hours due to a hardware failure that in turn led to a run on a t m S for cash. So that kind of shows you how delicate our technological society can be. You can have a

single point of failure end up causing massive problems. Physicists and science communicator Stephen Hawking passed away on March fourteen, two thousand eighteen. He was seventy six years old, and his work aimed to expand our understanding of the universe. UH the sort of science communicator that I found particularly interesting. Over in the European Union, the General Data Protection Regulation

Rules went into effect. These rules limit how companies can gather and use personal information, and places requirements on companies to make sure that users are aware of how and when their data is collected. Has prompted some pretty massive changes in how companies do business all over Europe as a result. Then we get to SpaceX SpaceX conducting a

test of its Falcon heavy launch vehicle. How by launching a payload that included a Tesla roadster that belonged to Elon Musk, they got pushed into an orbit around the Sun, because why not, right, Also, Samsung would show off its foldable phone concept, a concept that would become a massive headache in twenty nineteen. But I talked about that in the last episodes, And let's wrap up with a couple

of observations about the decade in general. Now, one thing that I noticed while looking back on this was the evolution of the Internet of things, because ten years ago it was sort of just a concept, almost like a buzzword, closer to that than to reality. But over the course

of ten years we saw that change. You back in two thousand nine, you know, you're talking about routers, computers, and maybe some smartphones connected to the Internet, and today they're looking at things like standalone sensors, home security systems, maybe even a homemade dog feeding device, all connected to the Internet, and we're just in the early stages of

this era. For better or for worse, the evolution has taught us many lessons, including that the data we generate throughout the day can be used for us or against us, and we need to pay close attention to things like data security as we connect more devices to the Internet at large, unless we're just willing to have all of our details, of all of our lives on display for everyone, all the time for any purpose, which I don't think

is necessarily the best course of action. We also saw how automated cars went from being a cool idea to something being tested in the real world to something that, if implemented poorly, can result in tragedy. And perhaps the biggest lesson there is that we need to do a lot more testing and tweaking before we see a wider implementation of the technology, and perhaps we shouldn't take the fail fast, you know approach when it comes to autonomous cars.

We really can't afford to. We also saw how data security, privacy, and misinformation are all kind of linked together, and they're complicated, and we have to pay much closer attention to make sure that we stay safe and relatively sure that the information that we are encountering is correct and true. It puts a lot more accountability on us as consumers to make sure that we're seeking out information from the right sources.

It puts a lot more pressure on platforms like Facebook and Twitter and Google to make sure that they're not enabling the spread of misinformation and making the world a worse place. My goal has always been leave the world a little better than the way it was when you showed up. Uh. It is becoming increasingly difficult to do that because there's only so much I can do and there's a lot of bad stuff happening out there. However, I do still think that with the right approach, we

can make a positive change. I am still an optimist. I'm just an optimist who acknowledges that we have big, big challenges ahead of us in order to make things work out. But I think we can do it. I mean, we've sent people to the moon. We've done the impossible before, so let's do it again. It might take ten years to get into a better place, but I'm willing to

put in the work if you are. If you guys have suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, knowing that I already covered twenty nine, don't send me messages about that. Those are two episodes back. Go check those out. They're a bummer, but they're there. If you have other suggestions, though, reach out tell me about them. You can do so on Facebook or Twitter. The handle for both of those is tech stuff hs W and uh I'll talk to you again really soon. Yeah. Text Stuff is a production

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