The Top Tech Stories of 2018

some of the big stories. I am not going month by month. Sometimes I do that. Sometimes I will look over a year and go through it chronologically. Instead, I decided to kind of group things thematically. So this first section, I'm going to focus on some of the biggest news stories um especially around the big, big companies that we are all familiar you're with, And I can't think of any place more appropriate to start than how Facebook's eighteen unfolded.

It was a particularly tumultuous year for Facebook, and then I have a feeling that twenty nineteen is not going to be a whole lot easier. Anyway. I've covered a lot of the stories about this in episodes of tech Stuff over but I want to sum up some of the things that the company has experienced over these last

twelve months, because they've been pretty spectacular. In March, the Guardian and The New York Times published pieces that exposed the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and that was the scandal in which it was revealed a political marketing and consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica, based in the UK, had apparently taken advantage of a design flaw that had existed in Facebook several

years ago. Is way back in when this design flaw, or this this policy, it wasn't even a design flaw so much as it was just sort of a lack of accountability was in place back then. If you were creating apps for Facebook, you could build into your app a point where the person installing the app would essentially give permission for you to view all sorts of information not just about the person who was installing the app,

but possibly access to all of their friends. So think of it like if you befriend someone on Facebook and they're friends with somebody else, but you were not friends with that third person. You might be able to follow the links back and take a look at that third person's profile and if they haven't said it to private. If they have public information, you can find out a lot about this stranger, this person you only uh, you don't know that one. You just happen to have a

common friend. Well, the app in question, which was called you know, a Digital Life app that what it was doing the same thing, and Cambridge Analytica was able to harvest data from this app. They leveraged it. It's actually called This is Your Digital Life. That was the name

of the app, and it was a survey. And not only that, but it was a survey where you could be paid for filling up the survey, so people had an incentive to participate in it, and it generated this enormous amount of data that originally Facebook assumed was going to be around fifty million people or so that would

be affected. As it turned out it would be more than eighty seven million people would They would revise this estimation later on, And so that was a pretty ugly scandal, mostly about user privacy and security and also a little bit about election interference, although really it was privacy and security over everything else at that point. The reports prompted the Federal Trade Commission in the United States to open

an investigation into Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg would eventually appear in front of Congress a couple of times to answer quest gens about this scandal, and one of the things that came out of those hearings was the possibility that perhaps social platforms like Facebook should fall under some sort of official regulation policy, that the government should be able to

regulate these sort of things. Also, while this story exploded in I should point out this was not the first time that journalists had discovered evidence of something hinky going on. There are articles way back in about it, but it

wasn't until eighteen that it really got traction. That was when a former Cambridge Analytica employee came forward and gave a lot more information about what was going on inside the company, and that's when it really blew the doors open coming into Facebook was already neck deep in scandal since before the election. The company has had to deal with fake accounts that were taking advantage of how Facebook

works to to post propaganda masquerading is real news. They were they understood how Facebook's algorithm would favor certain types of content over others, largely through engagement. If you get a post that has a lot of likes, there are a lot of comments, a lot of people are sharing it. That post ends up showing up more frequently in various people's news feeds because Facebook's algorithm assumes, oh, this post must be important because a lot of people are active

on it. Therefore, I'm going to show it to more people because I'm sure more people will be interested in it. This is from a very high level perspective. Well, knowing that that's how Facebook's algorithm works means that you could engineer content specifically to try and bring about the situation that leads to the sort of viral uh uh posts

you know, shared across millions of different profiles. And as it turns out, the goal was not just to get shared, but to try and influence the outcome of the election. So Facebook was already dealing with that, and that story continued to unfold throughout. Less scandalous, but still an important story is how Facebook would change its algorithms so that Facebook pages, that is, the pages that are run by like organizations, businesses, personalities, not not someone's personal page but

a page representing something are getting less engagement. Now, this is Facebook's attempt to make the experience of using Facebook more centered around your family and friends that you're seeing more of their posts and fewer posts from businesses and organizations that are trying to connect with a community or a group of customers or whatever. So you can understand

where Facebook's coming from. However, for any business that was at least partly dependent upon Facebook to create a connection with customers or a community, it became a huge problem. Suddenly their engagement starts to drop down, their businesses start to lose momentum, and they're scrambling to find an alternative. Now you could say this is yet another point of evidence that strengthens that argument of don't put all your

eggs in one basket. In other words, if you are a business, don't count on someone else's platform to be your platform for success, whether that happens to be Facebook or YouTube or anything else. You should build a presence that is independent of those so that when these other platforms change, you are not thrown into the lurch as a result because you put it all in on that one. But on the other hand, Facebook was still taking money from businesses to promote pages even when the impressions were

on the decline, so that was a problem. Then there are the properties that Facebook owns, and the story is going around with oos like WhatsApp. WhatsApp is the messaging service that Facebook purchased way back in It was a big story then because of how much money Facebook paid for it, and people in the United States are not

terribly familiar with WhatsApp. There are people in the US who use it, some of you out there may be using it, and you might be US citizens, particularly people who travel internationally, they tend to use it, but really it's much more popular outside the US than it is in the US. Anyway, in news broke out that people in Brazil were using WhatsApp to spread misinformation and polarized messaging in the lead up to a contentious election in Brazil,

which sounds pretty familiar. I mean, essentially the same thing was happening in the United States two years previously with Facebook in general and Twitter and several other social platforms. So that was another terrible story that's still unfolding as we record this podcast. Then there's also the story about Instagram and its founders, and Instagram founders Kevin Systrom and

Mike Kreeger both resigned from Facebook. The reasons were not spelled out plainly, why they decided to leave, but the general consensus is that they were becoming exasperated by the way Facebook was interfering with how Instagram was running, and they were taking features that Instagram was developing specifically for Instagram and then using those to incorporate them into Facebook

or Facebook Messenger. Now. On Facebook first acquired Instagram, the thought was that they were not going to interfere at all. They were going to allow Instagram to continue to operate independently, and it sounds like that didn't happen. So the founders

decided that they wanted to get out. And a lot more happened with Facebook, but those were the really big points I wanted to touch on, and I don't want to make this just an episode about what Facebook went through in twenty team, so I'm going to move on to some other stories. Um. There were other companies that also had to weather controversy. In Twitter had its share and continues to from troll accounts, fake accounts, bought accounts.

Jack Dorsey would attend a congressional hearing about whether regulation and moderation of online content was something that needed more attention. Topics ranged from the fake accounts to Russian interference in US political events, and whether or not Twitter was suppressing conservative voices online. Dorsey would also come under scrutiny in December for personal reasons. He went to Myanmar and he

tweeted about it, and he called it a beautiful country. Meanwhile, at the same time, there is a global uh campaign. United Nations is focusing on Myanmar because it's military is carrying out a campaign of genocide against a minority Muslim population within the country. So there's Dorsey saying Myanmar, it's a beautiful country. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is looking at Myanmar and these atrocities that are taking place, and so people said, at best, Dorsey's tweets were tone deaf.

His response was that he needed to learn more about Myanmar, probably before posting about it. Meanwhile, Evan Williams, who is a co founder of Twitter, was quietly selling off a lot of his ownership of Twitter throughout the second half of ten and it would amount to nearly half of

his ownership steak. So essentially, you know, he has all these different shares in Twitter, he sells off almost half of them by the second half of which has led to some speculation that perhaps Twitter has officially passed its peak, and it's now on the decline, and eventually it will head towards obsolescence. That's one interpretation. Another is just that he might want to versify his portfolio, so you could say financial coverage is even more vague than tech coverage

HAZA for that. Then there's Google, and that company has also had its own share of issues to deal with throughout It too came under scrutiny and the various congressional hearings. Google was invited to participate, but declined to send anyone to meet with Congress, while Facebook and Twitter would send their top brass to d C. In December, Google CEO Sundar Picha, I did meet with Congress, and this was

to talk about political bias and search results. If you followed those hearings, you might have been rolling your eyes pretty hard because it got a little silly. Representatives of Congress were asking if Google was shaping the public perception of various topics through search results. In other words, they were maybe guiding search results in order to send a specific message to people when they started searching for things.

Um So, for example, they showed that if you searched the word idiot, and you did an image search, it would bring up pictures of Donald Trump, and they said, is this your commentary? Are you calling the President of the United States an idiot? Now? PA's response was said that these search results were a reflection of the public discourse. This is reflecting what's going on in the world. It's

giving people what they're asking for. It is not an attempt to guide the discourse, but rather, here's what people are saying. So it's not that a person is an idiot, it's that people are writing about someone they call that person an idiot. Then that's what's going to come up in search results, not that Google says that person is an idiot. And the hearing really punctuated what we really

already knew. That's the most politicians are totally ignorant of how the Internet in general works and how search in particular works. We did get some punctuation about this where at one point a representative said, if you search the news items for a specific person and you get a bunch of negative stories, it's because that person has done things that have been reported on in a negative way.

But if you went out and did lots of wonderful things that got lots of positive coverage, then the news stories that would pop up would reflect that it's not that Google is shaping this message, but rather the people themselves are shaping it, and that if you want to have less bad news written about you, don't go out

and do bad things. Seems like a pretty solid idea, assuming, of course, that the search engine results are accurate and they're fair and unbiased, and that they're not, say, censoring any articles or stories that would otherwise be positive. This applies to politicians of all political points of view. By the way, I don't mean to say that one political party is guilty of being terrible, terrible, terrible people and the other ones a bunch of saints. I don't believe

that for a second. There are people who have great scruples and they they adhere to their own code of ethics, they are not hypocrites, and they should have really great stories written about them and and their their efforts, whether they happen to be conservative or liberal. And then there are others, both on the conservative and the liberal side, who do dumb things and are hypocrites, and they were gonna have bad stories written about them, and they should.

So that's kind of what Google was saying is that don't shoot the messenger. We're just giving you what exists. We're not making it, we're just serving it up. Another scandal that Google had to handle in two thousand eighteen. Didn't mean for that. The rhyme was Project Maven, and I talked about that earlier this year in an their episode. So this was a project with the Pentagon, still is

a project. It's still undergoing over and between Google and the Pentagon, but to create algorithms that can improve computer vision processes, which ultimately could be used to identify and target individuals. If it were used in a weaponized form, the military could choose to go down that path. Now. Google insisted that when it signed on to do Project Maven, this was in the understanding that it was a non

weaponized program. They were helping with computer vision, but it was not meant to be used in any kind of weaponized way. But people said that's pretty naive because there's nothing stopping anyone from adapting those protocols and using them in something like a personalized missile that specifically is looking for a particular individual and honing in on that person um, whether directly or through satellite coordination or whatever it may be.

Google eventually was as mount was facing so much pressure both from outside the company and within the company itself. Google employees started to sign petition saying that the company should extract itself from this deal. They said, well, we can't extract ourselves, but we will not renew this contract when it comes up in two thousand nineteen. So the contract will expire next year and Google executives have said

they are not going to pursue a renewal. There was also a lot of disturbing allegations about sexual harassment and discrimination. This was true throughout all of tech, but it was particularly highlighted over at Google. So in February there was a Google programmer named Loretta Lee who filed claims against Google, and our allegations were numerous. There's a lot of things that Loretta Lee said had happened at Google that are very, very upsetting. It's it's a terrible account that no one

should be subjected to. And at the time, Google had a policy of mandatory arbitration within the company. This is something that a lot of tech companies were putting in place. That meant that all of the conflict had to be handled within the company. This would prevent employees from being

able to take the matter to the courts. It had to be handled inside of Google, and employees would sign agreements essentially when they would get employed with Google that said they were agreeing to this, they would give up the right to sue in court. They would have to go through this mandatory arbitration process, which could limit the amount of money a victim could get if they were

proven to be telling the truth. And not only that, but there was this perception that if the company was handling it, they were more likely to just kind of smooth things over as best they could and ignore that it was happening. They wouldn't if someone who was being accused was also thought of as being a high performer, then it would largely go ignored. Which is a terrible thing. Right.

If if there's somebody who's who's sexually harassing people in a company, whether it's a man or it's a woman, whether the people they are harassing our men or women, whatever it may be, that should not be tolerated. And the problem was that using this mandatory arbitraction approach, if executives said, well, yeah, I mean it shouldn't be tolerated. However, one Ever, since they've been in charge, that department has

been performing at an incredible level. Then there seemed to be this at least perceived habit of not paying the appropriate amount of attention and care to those those cases. So Google employees began to protest this. There was a walkout. All the women employees at Google, or a large majority of them agreed to walk out in protest of this policy and just the general way that Google is handling

these sexual harassment cases. Uh. Several men also stood with the women in solidarity and saying that they supported this, and ultimately Google has reversed that policy. There is no longer mandatory arbitration. Arbitration is optional, but employees are allowed to pursue these cases in court. It is not retroactive, so any case that's in arbitration remains there for now.

But this, this is just another example of a systemic problem not just of Google, but in the tech industry that is slowly changing as more scrutiny is applied to these companies and and the the culture is changing to say that this is not appropriate and not acceptable. That is changing, uh, but it is a slow process. I mean, we're talking about a system that's been generations in the making. So, uh, that was the other big story of Google. Now I've

got all those big scandals out of the way. Hopefully that means that we're going to be able to move on to happier stories. Spoiler alert, not all of them are happy. But before I get into those, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. In two thousand eighteen, I also did an episode about the General Data Protection Regulation Rules or g d p R those took effect in These are rules that apply to online companies that serve people within the European Union. Whether the company is

located in the EU or not doesn't matter. It matters if the people using the company's services or products are in the EU, and the rules are meant to protect data and privacy. They call for responsible, transparent, and easily understandable policies from these online companies, whether it's a store or social media platform, whatever it may be. Now, there are a lot of rules, and I did a full episode on this, so I'm not going to go over them.

But the important thing to remember is that the companies that are working in the EU, whether they're located there or not have to adhere to these rules or they can face penalties. And the scope of the penalties depend upon the severity of the violation, but it can be up to twenty million euros or four of all the total sales of a company from the year before, whichever amount is greater. So there's some serious penalties there. So

companies are paying attention. In fact, some companies have even temporarily at least closed up shop, you know, turned off those European Union facing websites at least until they can and they can, you know, conform to the regulations. And now here's some big business news elements of tech in twenty team. First, A T and T initially got approval for its eighty five billion dollar acquisition deal for Time Warner.

I'm going to talk a little bit more about that in some upcoming episodes of Tech Stuff that I've already recorded but have not aired. But as I record this episode, that approval is actually under appeal and another court is considering whether or not to allow the process to continue. If it does continue, it's another consolidation of communications and entertainment companies. Not everyone thinks that's a great thing, but it could be a big benefit to both of those

individual companies. We'll have to wait and see. By the time you hear this episode, all of that may have already been resolved. Disney got approval for its acquisition of twenty first Century Fox, both from the United States government and from shareholders, and the company had announced that intent way back in two thousand seventeen. The acquisition will be

complete on January one, two thousand nineteen. T Mobile and Sprint are looking to merge into a single company that got announced in April, and if everything goes as they expect it to, the process will be complete by April two thousand nineteen. Not at the time I'm recording this. Analysts predict that regulators are probably going to allow this

merger to go forward. They might require that the companies divest themselves of certain businesses in order to prevent the possibility of having a monopoly, but otherwise they think it's going to happen. And there are a ton of other stories that fall into this category. IBM announced it would sell off Lotus notes to an Indian firm called hc

L for one point eight billion dollars. Of course, IBM had purchased Lotus for three point five billion dollars back in IBM also announced a thirty four billion dollar acquisition plan for red Hat, which is a software company that specializes in enterprise products. It's also the largest software acquisition ever. And this isn't an acquisition, but Dell Computers is currently scheduled to return to the stock market as a publicly traded company on December. I'm recording this on December twelve,

so that's in the future for me. Also saw some game studios close up shop, so that's sad, not just for gamers, but obviously for the people who worked for those companies. So here's a list of some of the companies that closed up shop in tween in the video game industry. Boss Key, which was founded by a Cliff Blazinski. It was the producer of the game Lawbreakers. That One closed, Telltale Games That One hurt a lot. It's they're the creators of the Walking Dead series as well as the

Wolf among us um. They've done a Game of Thrones game, They've done a Minecraft story based game, that done Borderland story based game. They shut down in September ten. It was an incredibly messy and ugly process. Employees were let go without severance or prior warning. Um it was largely viewed as being very poorly handled. Carbine Studios closed up as well. They produced only on game. It was a multi player game called wild Star UM. That one also

shut down in September two eighteen. Also in September two thou eighteen, Man, that was a bad month. Capcom closed its Capcom Vancouver studio. That team oversaw the Dead Rising series of games, and war Gaming Seattle closed in May two th eighteen. They made Dungeon Siege and Supreme Commander. Now that that's terrible news, but it's not to say that video games as a whole are in trouble. The

industry has tripled in size over the last decade. Developing video games, particularly if you're talking about large prestige titles like Red Dead. Redemption to for example, costs millions of dollars, and it requires hundreds of people, maybe up to a thousand for some of these big games, and it also

can include some really brutal work. Weeksen was also a year in which the world took a closer look at the working conditions that game developers experience, particular and crunch time while developing a title, and the industry is slowly changing in response to some really tough criticisms, things like there's gotta be a better work life balance, that people should not be expected to work a hundred hour weeks,

that kind of stuff. We don't appear to have reached the tipping point quite yet, for the point where a triple A title game costs so much to make that you're never going to recover those costs and sales. We haven't reached that point, but it's getting pretty tight. Probably means that I wouldn't be surprised to see game prices start to climb again in the near future. We already see more expensive ones for like collectors, editions and stuff like that, but I think it's going to get more

expensive pretty soon. Super Smash Brothers Ultimate was the best selling game on Amazon in two thousand eighteen, followed by Super Mario Party and then Red Dead Redemption too for the PS four. Now, to be fair, these facts and figures, they take into account games by platform, not by title, because if you look at titles, you would say Red Dead Redemption two is in the lead across all platforms when you when you add them all up, that's when you only look at it um by platform that Super

Smash Brothers Ultimate becomes the best selling game. There was no shortage of games that received critical acclaim in twenty eighteen. There were a ton of them, Assassin's Creed Odyssey, the Tetris Effect, Forts Horizon for God of War. Lots of them were lauded for their art style, their gameplay, the stories win applicable um. Also, Fortnite's Battle Royal Mode became

a huge hit in ten. A lot of people said it was essentially a copy, a complete lift of Player Unknowns Battle Grounds game style, although there are differences with Fortnite, but they said that you know the game is centially lifted the style from from Battlegrounds. To be fair, battle Grounds is not the first Battle Royal game that's ever come out either, But I see where they accusations come from.

But the game became so popular that now there are organizations popping up that are supposed to help wean kids off of playing the darn thing. Not all games got universal acclaim, however. Fall Out seventy six, the online multiplayer game from the THEESDA and the Fallout series, was greeted with at best if you're being super generous A mixed response. I would actually say those more of a negative response. In fact, it was almost overwhelmingly negative. There are a

lot of legitimate complaints leveled at that game. There are a lot of things I cannot just say no that doesn't exist, No there. That game does have real problems. However, I still have fun when I log in now. I can't deny the game has major issues though I'm having fun because of the setting and the game world. But I definitely can completely understand the complaints people have about it. I can't deny them. There was another game called Sea if Thieves, still as a game called See If Thieves,

another online game. They got a lot of early enthusiasm. It's a game where you play as a member of a crew on a pirate ship. You and some friends can join up and grab a ship and go out and plunder. But a lot of people felt that there was a lack of content that was very repetitive. After you've done a few missions, you pretty much have played the whole game. It's just doing it over and over again.

The game did continue to add more stuff throughout the year, whether it was enough to satisfy the typical pirate remained a matter of individual preference. I got a little bit more to say about Before I get into that, Let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. Back in January, we learned about vulnerabilities that are baked into modern micro processors. This is another huge story. It's an ongoing problem in

tech now. Those vulnerabilities that were built in microprocessors weren't done so on purpose, and we call them meltdown and specter. I think did an episode about this. But generally speaking, the vulnerabilities allow a malicious application to spy on other applications. The way it does this is different depending upon the vulnerability it's exploiting, but generally speaking, it's this idea of a malicious program sapping information away, largely based on the

information gathered by other programs. And this can be on a computer, it can be on a mobile device. All of these things are running microprocessors that have architecture that's vulnerable to this stuff. So conceptually, applications are supposed to be isolated from each other, supposed to be siloed and protected. That way, it would prevent people from doing this very thing.

But these vulnerability would allow programmers to build apps that could get around this isolation and gather data from other apps, including stuff like passwords and even more critical information than that. In some cases. There are a lot of talks about patches that might address these vulnerabilities, but some analysts say

that's not going to be enough. What really needs to happen is an entirely new microprocessor design, something that needs to happen for different microprocessors in order to address this vulnerability, which is pretty tough to do, might be necessary. However, Also in January, Tim Cook of Apple apologize for not being transparent about Apple's policy to throttle older model phones. In other words, they would run more slowly than they

had before. Now. Supposedly this was to increase the use time per battery charge on older phones, the idea being that later versions of operating systems would put greater demands on a phone's battery, and so without throttling it, the older phones would just drain their batteries super fast. But some people said this feels more like it's a tactic to convince people to upgrade to a newer phone. Like my old phones running slow, I must need to get a new one, And the fact that Apple was not

transparent about this. They weren't even admitting that they were doing it at first. That seems to lend credence to that second theory, the idea that they were doing this in an effort to try and up sell an upgraded phone. So that's an issue. Um. That was a pretty ugly story early on in the year, and I talked about this in my suite of episodes about autonomous cars recently. But back in March two thousand eighteen, that were a pair of really bad accidents that brought the whole concept

of autonomous cars back into the headlines. First, there was a self driving Uber vehicle that struck and killed a pedestrian in Arizona. That accident prompted Uber to curtail all autonomous car tests in their various cities, at least temporarily, and to completely withdraw from Arizona with their driverless program. But also in March, a Tesla Model X was put in autopilot mode and it crashed at a high speed with a concrete highway divider. The driver died in the accident.

Tesla released information stating that the driver was not paying attention to the road despite the car providing multiple warnings, and this wasn't the first time that a Tesla autopilot accident that ended in a fatality had happened. But I do have to point out, to be fair to Tesla, that it's very clear that the autopilot is not meant

to be a truly driverless type of technology. In fact, Tesla requires that drivers read and acknowledge or at least acknowledge a warning saying as much, and they're supposed to keep their hands on the wheel at all times and be paying attention attention to the road even when the are is in control. So there's at least some truth to Tesla saying that this is not really our fault

because they're not following the actual policy. Um, it's it's hard to argue against that, although you could argue, well, this autonomous technology is obviously not advanced enough to avoid these kind of accidents, so that's very worrisome as well. Elon Musk got into all sorts of hot water in two thousand eighteen. Man, that guy, what a year he had. For one thing, he tweeted out messages that said he

intended to take Tesla private, and he was. He had secured funding and it was at a price of four dollars per share, which he apparently later said was a joke about um, you know and marijuana. Funny joke. Here's the problem. It's illegal to share misleading information to shareholders, and it wasn't clear that funding had been secured, so

the Department of Justice said that's not cool. Then the SEC announced in September that it was going to sue Elon Musk over this matter, that he was sharing misleading information, that shareholders could see that and have the wrong idea about what was about to happen with their investment, and that that caused problems. And eventually that lawsuit was settled out of court. Elon Musk and Tesla agreed to pay

a total of forty million dollars in fines. Musk would later say that he quote did not respect the SEC end quote. I think that was already apparent, but anyway. Musk also was the center of some other stories. In twenty eighteen, he sat down for an interview with Joe Rogan for his show, and while on camera for that show, he took a puff off of some marijuana, and folks plumb done lost their minds about it. There were questions as to whether he might have violated his own company's

cause duct policy. There were discussions about the public perception of marijuana use, which is admittedly complicated and weird, has a lot of historical taboo stuff tied to it. Personally, I find his marijuana use way less concerning than his disregard for the legality of spreading misinformation from a position of power. I think that's the thing I would worry about more. But I also say that, you know, because

I think that has the greater capacity to have greater harm. Uh. And I also say this as someone who's a total square. You're not gonna catch me smoking marijuana because I'm boring. I have no interest in it. But I also don't see it as being as big a deal as this other issue that tweeting out about the taking Tesla private. I think that one causes the greater harm. He also insulted a British cave diver who is helping rescue some young boys who are trapped in a flooded cave. You

might remember that story from and Uh. He indicated a couple of times during the year that he was working such long hours and getting so little sleep that he was starting to make pretty bad goofs, you know, like consulting someone who is risking his own life to try and save other people. For example. I also did an episode about tunneling machines and must Boring Company and how that was in the news as he was trying to work out plans to create underground tunnels for a new

method of urban transportation. UM planning on building it out under Los Angeles, for example, but he's hit some obstacles and the tunneling machines can't just dig through these. This is obstacles, like government saying we got to work out some very important details. You have to secure a lot of permissions before you can dig under any cities. And so now while the technological side might be solved, there's the red tape to get through. And that red tape

has good purpose. I don't mean to dismiss it. And the Google Io event in the spring of Google's CEO showed off a new application called dup Lex, which is an AI assistant that can actually make phone calls on behalf of the user, and it can make arrangements like reserving a car or a hotel room, and it sounds eerily human. It even incorporates stuff like ums and us in the speech, and it left some folks wondering, at what point will we be unable to tell if we're

talking to a robot and not a human. News flash, We're already there, at least for some limited applications. In October, we found out that a vulnerability in Google Plus meant that developers were able to get access to users private data, and that the vulnerability had likely been present for maybe as long as three years. Google found out about this vulnerability in March, but they kept it quiet until October, and that made critics concerned about the lack of transparency.

So Google announced it was going to shut down Google Plus in August nineteen. That's when a little end and then in December of another vulnerability was to scovered similar to that, exposing the data of fifty million or so people. So Google has now moved the sunset date for Google Plus to April nineteen. And I remember when that platform launched. It's kind of weird to see it from from birth

to death. Magic Leap, the augmented reality company that had been operating in secrecy for a couple of years but was really driving up anticipation about augmented reality. Finally showed off a headset. It's called the Magic Leap one. This is a developer kit. It's not met for the average consumer, but for people who are going to make applications for it. It costs two thousand two so definitely not priced in

the realm of consumer technology. They look like some high tech goggles, and some of the reviews I've seen say it is really impressive, but it still falls short of the expectations that were created by Magic Leap itself, as well as the media coverage around it that led up to the release. But still it's pretty encouraging as far as advances in a argo. Switching over to cryptocurrency for

a second, Bitcoin's value went into decline throughout seventeen. The currency had hit a value of nearly twenty thousand dollars per bitcoin at princely some By early January that had dropped to just shy of fifteen thousand dollars per bitcoin. By the time you hear this, they will be very different. Right now, as I record this episode, the value is down to three thousand, four hundred dollars or so per bitcoin.

So the question is is it going to continue to dip down or is it toward the bottom of its trough and now it's going to go through another upswing. And I guess I'll have to make a prediction in our Predictions episode for twenty nineteen about that for much of cities in North America waited anxiously to find out

where Amazon was going to put its second headquarters. And it announced that it was going to choose such a location in late seen and opened up the opportunity for various cities in metropolitan areas to send in a proposal.

And then, after months of speculation, Amazon announced that it was going to select an area in northern Virginia very close to Washington, d C. And a section of Queens in New York City, splitting the second headquarters into two locations, which coincidentally happened to be in places where Jeff Bezos

already owns homes. I'm equally convinced the whole thing was a sincere attempt to find suitable locations for Amazon's headquarters, and not just an enormous manipulative attempt to get the sweetest deals at two locations that the company had already decided upon before making the announcement. But then you guys heard me talk about that in the previous episodes, so I'm going to drop it finally in a story that

is extremely close to home. I Heart Media, the company that was once known as Clear Channel, acquired Stuff Media, LLC, the company I work for. The acquisition was complete by eight fall, and as I record this, I Heart Media is preparing to emerge from bankruptcy and there are a lot of rumors flying around about what might happen next, and I have no idea what it might be now

and have an inside line to any of that. I am excited to find out what happens in twenty nineteen, and that wraps up this retrospective look at There are tons of stories that didn't cover. Obviously, a lot happened in I'm pretty sure that eighteen was four times longer than any year that came before it. I think somewhere we added extra months in there because it felt like it lasted an eternity. I have no idea what twenty nineteen has in store that I'm going to make some guesses. Anyway.

You'll have to hear about that in my Predictions episode. That's it for this time. In our next episode, I will go over how my predictions for this past year went. Spoiler alert, I did pretty well that you'll hear more about that in the next one. If you guys have suggestions for future episodes, send me an email. The address is tech stuff at how stuff works dot com, or drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter. I have the handle tech stuff hs W. Go to tech stuff

podcast dot com. That's our website where you can learn more about the show, and you also have a link to our merchandise store. Remember every purchase you make there goes to help our show, and we greatly appreciate it. 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.