The Top Tech Stories of 2020 - April through July

about the same amount of news. However, if you listen to the late last episode, you also know that I stuck with stories that played out through twenty twenty, so maybe that will help us out. I guess we'll see. I know that that's going to be at least three episodes. Spoiler, we don't finish it out today, but let's jump back into April twenty. In a tip of cool Year, I would start off talking about April by mentioning the various pranks and jokes that brands pulled or tried to pull.

Something that exasperates many of my peers who cover technology, but I kind of like a good silly joke as long as it's not you know, mean spirited or just an outright lie posing as the truth in an effort to actually trick people. But the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement really changed things in the United States. Many states or cities had issued lockdown restrictions, and a

lot of brands chose to give April first twenty a pass. Personally, I would have preferred twice as many jokes and no pandemic. But the balls in your court, grouchy tech journalists, those jokes don't seem so bad now, do they. In our previous episode, I talked about how Zoom had a huge year due to more people moving their work and personal connections online. In April, we would see some concerns about

zooms security. The company's privacy protections were brought into question, and we started seeing a trend of zoom bombing, in which people who were not invited to a Zoom session We're showing up, often because someone had shared the link for that meeting in a way that wasn't secure, and it would prompt Zoom to institute more accessible password protection options uh into an encryption and other methods to make sure that the people who are joining a session were

the ones who are meant to, not just people who happen to have a link to the online session. Now, granted these are all options. You don't have to have password protection on your Zoom meeting, so it's still are there still are possibilities for people to to barge in on a meeting they aren't really welcome to, but there are now more options to allow you to have more control over that. We also began to see various coronavirus tracking apps in development. The apps had a couple of

real big jol leunges. So the idea is that these apps can track where you go, and if you should happen to be near someone else who happens to have the app and who has indicated that they have been exposed to COVID, then you would get a notification saying, hey, you came into contact with someone who has already indicated that they may have been exposed. If used properly, you

can help mitigate the spread of the disease. But there's also a genuine concern for privacy and a general fear that such an app would violate the privacy of the people using it, or that the companies that are making the apps could then later on use that information in ways that we don't necessarily approve of. And if this were just a disease and people were just treating it as a disease, maybe all of these concerns are things that we could overlook. But we have to remember that

there are other factors at play here. One of those is that some people hold up pretty racist and xenophobic opinion about the origins of the disease. There were so many stories of people with Chinese heritage being harassed because of that perception, and people can be pretty awful if they choose to be, so there are a lot of things to balance out when it comes to tracking coronavirus.

On top of that, the apps tend to be voluntary, which means each person has to choose to download and install it, and some people are just unwilling to do that. And then there's the fact that you would need to update the app to reflect a diagnosis. It's an imperfect solution, and in places like Europe, there were a lot of long discussions about how to balance out these various concerns. As it stands, there are lots of different apps, most of them focus on relatively small regions, but much of

the world is not covered by them. I mean I live in Georgia, which is the home for the Center for Disease Control, and we don't have an app for our state as of yet. We also started seeing cases of people damaging five G towers in April of twenty twenty.

As I mentioned in my episode about five gen myths, some people somehow corroborated these towers with the creation or spread of coronavirus, as if somehow, then, for some reason, the telecommunications companies were broadcasting a virus which is just impossible. I mean, a virus that can affect humans. I guess you could broadcast a computer virus. That's a different kettle of fish. The pandemic also delayed one of the more

anticipated criminal trials in recent tech history. Elizabeth Holmes, founder of medical startup Theoris, was to have her trial begin in twenty but the pandemic became a factor and the court would order the trial to be delayed until the spring of For those who don't know who Elizabeth Holmes is or what her company, Theopness did, here's a super brief rundown Holmes, who idolized Silicon Valley leaders like Steve jobs created a company that had the goal of developing

a medical device. The device, which was projected to be about the size of your typical desktop printer, would be able to take a very small blood sample, the tiniest little droplet, and run hundreds of different analytical tests on that sample. Within a short time, perhaps an hour or two. The device would produce a report about that sample, giving the user information about their health, diagnosing any diseases or conditions,

and in theory, empowering the user. And The idea was to democratize medicine in a way that would give users more information about their own health and a better way to interact with their primary care physician and the general medical establishment. Some doctors worried that this would cause people to misinterpret results, but it turns out they didn't really have much to fear because the device never worked properly, at least not to the extent that the company wanted

it to. It turned out the actual process was way more are complicated than Holmes had first imagined, and her team of engineers were tackling problem after problem in order to try and make it work. In the meantime, The allegations against Holmes state that she and her fellow executives purposefully misled investors, including using equipment from established blood testing companies to run blood tests while claiming that a themised

device was actually doing all the work. The house of cards came crashing down, but not before investors had poured more than seven hundred million dollars into it. Holmes is now charged with numerous counts of fraud, and we'll have to wait to see how that all turns out. One of the big early stories tied in with the coronavirus was how ill prepared hospitals were to meet the challenge of early serious cases. We saw some people try to help in novel ways, such as using three D printers

to create airflow splitters for ventilators. So ventilators take over the process of breathing for patients, and they are expensive pieces of machinery and there's a limited number of them. So the thought was that by using splitters, you could divert air from one ventilator to multiple patients, like two patients, and that way you wouldn't have to have just one ventilator per patient, and thus you could stretch the limited resources you have further. And I think it was a

fairly clever move. But I also have very strong feelings about how the United States government completely failed to meet the challenge of COVID on a national scale. But i'll spare you that rant. I'm sure you're all familiar and tired of hearing those kind of things already. But on a related note, in April, Elon Musk said he had sent ventilators to hospitals in California to help alleviate the resource scarcity. Musk had sent valuable equipment, but they weren't

technically ventilators. There were machines that aid in breathing assistance, but there are stepped down from ventilators themselves, which, as I said, handle breathing entirely for a patient. This I think was largely a case of bad communication, by which I mean Musk really did help these hospitals, just not in the way that was initially reported. So I don't want to throw shade on Musk for this, as he was doing something that actually was incredible and the hospitals

did have need of that equipment. But that being said, Musk also used his position and platform to argue against stuff like stay at home orders. He was defiant of them. He said that Tesla would continue to operate even in the face of stay at home orders, and he helps spread misinformation about the coronavirus. So while he did help some hospitals by sending them equipment, he also lent credence to false narratives about COVID And I think the scales mostly way on the You done did bad on this one,

and I almost forgot. On April six, twenty Quimby, the short form high production video streaming service, officially launched. Led by dream war its founder Jeffrey Katzenberg and former HP CEO Meg Whitman. The service could not have come out at a worse time. It was geared towards mobile users, the idea being that people like to consume media on their phones well they're waiting for stuff like when they're on a bus or on a subway, or when they're

in line for something. But of course, the service launched just as a pandemic was forcing most of us to stay at home. Even without the pandemic, a new video service was going to have a really tough fight to be competitive, But the use case for Quimby was pretty much wiped out before it could even get started. It launched a lot of exclusive programming and gave a lot of creative folks and outlet, but it couldn't tough it out and it would shut down late in so R

I p Quimby if you want to learn more. I did do a couple of episodes about Quimby earlier this year. I did one a few months after it had launched, and then I did another one after the announcement that Quimby was going to shut down in December. There are a few other stories that happened in April, but they mostly involved how the heck do we do what we

do when there's a pandemic going on? And I think we've heard, you know enough of those to kind of know that these stories are largely the same as companies big and small. We're grappling with the challenges of a

world being thrown into chaos thanks to a virus. Two other stories I think I should mention, though, are that Nintendo revealed in April that hackers compromised one sixty thousand accounts on the Nintendo network, and they stole funds from account holders in the process by using any stored funds that were in the those accounts to do stuff like by Fortnite's virtual currency, which, as we learned in a

previous episode, would not be subjected to federal taxes. The hackers exploited the older Nintendo Network I D system, which was used for the older three DS and we U consoles. The company offered to fund money to those affected and urged users to change their passwords. Later on, Nintendo would reveal the hat compromised more accounts than they first realized,

nearly twice as many in fact. The other little story that from April was that Apple introduced the iPhone SE, the budget model entry into the iPhone line, and it looked a lot like the older iPhone eight which came out back in And while it is a budget model, that doesn't mean it's actually cheap. The baseline iPhone SE marketed for three dollars. Still, compared to top of the line phones in the iPhone line, that's definitely on the less expensive side. Now we're up to May, Airbnb announced

it would lay off a quarter of its employees. The travel industry in general was hit super hard by the pandemic, from hotels to airlines, to ride share companies and more. We'd see a lot of other companies follow suit, either laying off employees or ending contract worker agreements, all in an effort to scale back and tighten the belt to outlast the pandemic. So here are a few companies that

laid off people. In Cisco laid off around thirty five hundred employees, Comcast laid off another thirty dred A. T and T was right behind with thirty four hundred. Salesforce laid off a thousand people. Microsoft laid off nine hundred sixty employees, PayPal laid off a hundred employees, and all of those companies managed to remain profitable during COVID. So

that's a pretty tough pill to swallow. Right, that these companies were making these big cuts in an effort to remain profitable during a pandemic benefits the shareholders, but not the employees. Meanwhile, those workers are left to struggle and find new employment in an environment that's really, really hard. I mean, it is difficult to to overstate how hard it is to get a new gig in the midst of a pandemic. And I'm sure some of you out there either may have dealt with this personally or know

someone who is dealing with it. And you know, this is tough. And then there are the companies that made big cuts but we're still unprofitable during COVID. The Walt Disney Company is a big one. Now I'm a big Disney fan, but the company has got a pretty ugly tarnish on it, having laid off more than thirty thousand

employees during the pandemic. And you could argue that a lot of that might be necessary from a business standpoint because some places, some points of employment within Disney, like Disneyland, for example, those remain closed with no firm reopening dates. So it's hard to justify, Hey, let's keep all the people from Disneyland on payroll indefinitely and we have no idea when we'll be able to reopen. You can see

from a business standpoint how that's a tough call. But you could also argue that Disney has been printing money for the last few years, with franchises like Star Wars and Marvel bringing in billions of dollars from the box office alone, and that's before you even touch stuff like merchandizing. The company has been losing money, however, and shareholders typically are not super crazy about that, So this is a very difficult road to travel here. It's I don't want

to to dismiss this as saying Disney bad. I am not a fan of them laying off so many people during a pandemic, But at the same time, you have to acknowledge the realities of what business is. So it's not like there's an easy decision to make here, but man talking about having the magic stripped away, or rather having to reckon with the realization that magic is all in perception, and when the veil has fallen, it's a lot harder to you know, recapture that feeling of Oh,

it's a magical company. Uh, it's a company, and it's a company that that is very much focused on its forward facing pr with the public, and that took a pretty big hit in Boeing, Chevron and Exxon Mobile also laid off thousands of employees and also remained unprofitable during the pandemic. Uber laid off a lot of its staff. Unemployment claims in the United States have hovered around one million each month, with some of the most recent being

between a hundred thousand and nine hundred thousand claims. UH the average in a year that is not going through a pandemic in the United States would be two thousand claims or so. Now we should keep that in mind that as bad as all this is, at least it's not the levels that we saw unemployment hit in March when the claims spiked up to six point nine million. Meanwhile, companies like door Ash and insta Carts saw their valuation

skyrocket as demands for home delivery services increased. We saw a lot of this stuff too, with services specializing in deliveries growing quickly and hiring on a lot of people. So there were some industries that were actually in a

hiring mode, not a laying off mode. Twitter would announce in May that it would flag tweets containing coronavirus misinformation on its service, even if those tweets should come from really important people such as President Trump, and this would kick off essentially a big old mess in the United States as Twitter would become more aggressive and flagging tweets that contained misinformation, including those coming from Trump, and the

categories of misinformation would extend beyond the pandemic as well. This would infuriate the President, who stepped up his opposition to Section two thirty A bit of American legislation that gives online platforms protection against what their users post, as well as gives them the authority to moderate posts without fear of litigation. I did a full episode about section

to thirty not too long ago. If you want to learn more about that and what the whole argument is both for and against it, I recommend you check that out. Now it's time for us to take a quick break. When we come back, we will get through spring and start pushing into the summer of But first let's take a quick break. May was when A T and T agreed to stop using five G evolution in its marketing efforts.

And if you listen to my episode about five G Myths versus Reality, you know that A T and T had rebranded its LTE service, a four G service, as five G E, with the icon and users phones changing to reflect this. Now, a lot of other carriers criticized A T and T for doing this. They claim that this was a deliberate misdirection with the intent to make people think that they suddenly had a five G phone,

when in fact they didn't. They were using a four G phone on a four G network that was being labeled as five G. A T and T faced some sanctions when they were using this in their marketing, and so ultimately the company stopped using the terminology in its various advertising campaigns, but the five G E icon on

the phones stuck around. Also in May, Doug Lavero, who had served as the head of human Spaceflight Operations at NASA for six months, resigned abruptly, and in his resignation note, he alluded to making a mistake, but there was no real elaboration on what that mistake was. Speculation and rumor soon took hold. I mean, if there's ever a gap in knowledge, people will fill it with whatever they can.

So could it be that he made some sort of controversial decision regarding the use of commercial space company like SpaceX might have something to do with the Artemis program, which has the incredibly aggressive goal of getting people back on the Moon by four At first, there wasn't much information on the matter, but later on in August, the Wall Street Journal reported that a federal criminal probe into Lavero's activities was commencing That was looking to see if

Laverro had given any information illegally to Boeing during the bidding process to design and build a new human lunar lander for the Artemis project. If he had, that would be in violation of the Procurement Integrity Act. As NASA isn't to show any favoritism to any particular bidding entity. You're not supposed to give information that might give one

bitter uh of an advantage over others. And the announcement of his resignation in May was particularly of concern because it happened just two weeks before NASA was to rely upon SpaceX launch vehicles and spacecraft to take astronauts to the International Space Station. So this was just two weeks before the first manned launch of a spacecraft on US soil since the conclusion of the Space Shuttle program. Bad timing.

Besides the pandemic and the election, another thing we need to remember about in the United States is the Black Lives Matter movement and how they would play a big part in how tech and society intersect. As organizers relied on social platforms to bring people together to demonstrate in the real world, so too did those who opposed the movement, So you had rights activists clashing with white supremacists online and off. Some platforms like Facebook tried to take a

hands off Switzerland like approach. Others like Twitter, tried to flag content that contained misinformation or those that glorified violence, including tweets from Trump, and it became the subject of increasingly heated debates about what text role is in these matters and whether or not these social platforms were making

things better or worse. Let's move into June. Early that month, a group of Facebook employees staged a virtual walk off in protest of Zuckerberg's lack of response to Trump's messaging on Facebook, largely regarding the Black Lives Matter movement. They were arguing that he was turning a blind eye to

posts that clearly violated Facebook's own terms of service. Internally, Facebook managers were told not to retaliate or require employees to use paid time off to cover for the walkout, and so the company was facing criticism both from external

sources and from within the company itself. Not that this would change things very much over at Facebook for most of twenty and you might think I have a bias against Facebook, And you know what, I guess I kind of do, as I've said in previous podcasts, if you give the truth and lies and equal ground to stand upon lines are gonna win. It's just way easier to tell people what they want to hear rather than to make them listen to the truth. At the protests themselves,

we saw tech also play a role. People used drones to get footage of protests, including one case at least one in which US Customs and Border Patrol flew a drone over Minneapolis. And I'm not talking about some little quad captor. The drone in this case appeared to be a Predator B drone a k A and m Q nine Reaper, which is designed to be a so called hunter killer drone, as in, this was a drone designed to be armed and used to track down a target

and fire upon it. Now, the agency said it was operating the drone purely as a means to keep police informed of potential problems like outbreaks of violence or looting. But the Customs and Border Patrol jurisdiction ends once you get one hundred miles out from US borders. I mean it's Customs and Borders Patrol. Minneapolis is three hundred miles away from the Canadian border, so that creates a pretty

thorny basis for operations. How can the the U S Customs and Border Patrol justify flying a drone over Minneapolis when it has no jurisdiction over that area. This is a troubling matter. The use of drones raised multiple privacy concerns and fueled allegations that the government was actively attempting to disrupt citizens as they exercise their constitutionally guaranteed First

Amendment rights to public assembly and free speech. One Twitter follower, I have suggested that I talk about how the federal government used drones and other aircraft to jam cell phone service over areas that had protesters. Now, as far as I know, that never actually happened. Jamming cell phone service is technically possible, but legally it's very tricky to do, and it brings along a lot of collateral damage because anyone in an area would find their service disrupted, whether

they were part of a protest or not. You can easily imagine how that could lead to disaster. I mean, you could have a medical emergency, or there could be a fire not even connected to the protests, and you wouldn't have any way of of contacting first responders to get aid. But there were reports of various agencies, federal and local, using things like helicopters, drones, and planes to

conduct surveillance on protesters, which definitely was happening. The cell phone jamming probably not, but surveillance definitely happened, including some allegations that the government was making use of devices called sting rays. Now, a sting ray poses as a legit cell phone service tower as far as phones are concerned, that's what it is. But it's real purpose is to pick up data from phones that are in the area.

So it's kind of like having someone posted at a cell phone tower and making note of all the phones that connect to that tower and to what those phones are there then connecting to, like if they're making a

call somewhere or uploading data to a service. In October of twenty a group of US representatives called for an investigation into the surveillance techniques that were being used by federal agencies during the Black Lives Matter protests and demonstrations, questioning whether the government violated the constitutional rights of US citizens. As I record this that has not concluded, but it points to how serious this issue was. The protests would affect the tech sector in other ways as well. Sony

chose to postpone its PlayStation five event. Largely due to the protests, Various online personalities such as YouTubers and twitch streamers would use their platforms to help raise money for the activist movement. IBM canceled and entire your program that was using machine learning and artificial intelligence to build facial recognition systems, recognizing that these technologies had a disproportionately negative

impact on people of color. Amazon announced it would stop providing facial recognition software to police for the terms of a year, with the company representatives saying that their their hope was that the US government would quote implement appropriate rules end quote regarding facial recognition technologies. During that year long ban, Microsoft also announced it would not sell facial

recognition technology to police departments in the United States. So he started to see the corporations make a shift as the public sentiment grew around the Black Lives Matter movement. On a totally different note, Microsoft announced in June that it was going to shut down its streaming video game platform uh known as Mixer. So it's kind of like Twitch.

It's a platform for people to stream their video game playing sessions to an audience, and they chose instead to partner with Facebook Gaming and some very high profile streamers had been enticed to leave Twitch for lucrative contracts with Microsoft. Among them guys like Ninja and Shroud, two of the

most popular video game streamers in the world. Microsoft spent a lot of money on these exclusive agreements with these top streamers, hoping that they would bring their legions of fans along with them to Mixer, but that really just didn't happen. Twitch was pulling in fifteen million visits per day with one million monthly active users. Mixer, on the other hand, was managing ten million monthly active users, literally

one tenth of what Twitch was pulling. Microsoft had introduced a lot of innovative features that users and critics were praising, but it just couldn't make much ground against the juggernauts of Twitch and YouTube gaming. The low return on investment meant that Microsoft decided to pull the plug and folks like Ninja and Shroud were free to go wherever they pleased, and the Mixer technology would transition over to Facebook gaming,

which I have honestly never checked out. I have no idea how big Facebook gaming is, uh, which is odd. It's one of those things that I've heard about, but I have never experienced. I am more of a twitch and YouTube gaming kind of guy. Also tying into this was that in June we saw another surge of the me too movement, this time focused in video games and streaming.

Many women's streamers came forward with accusations against influential people in the streaming community, most of them men, saying that they had been manipulated by these people, they had been groomed, they had been coerced, and it's all really ugly, ugly stuff. And this was also when we started hearing more about ongoing sexual harassment issues at the major video game developed Ubisoft, which would go through a tumultuous series of personnel changes

as a result. And I recently did several episodes about Ubisoft, so if you want to know more, you can check those out. But some of the people who were ultimately let go had been with the company for more than a decade and included very high ranking executives. Meanwhile, over at Facebook, the company was now dealing with more than

just criticism. Advertisers were starting to leave the platform. They were concerned that Facebook's opposition to dealing with harassment and misinformation and hate groups would end up reflecting poorly on the companies that were using Facebook to advertise their Verizon would announce it would withdraw ads from Facebook in late June, and that must have been a serious wake up call for the company because most of the companies that were

doing this, where they were backing away and boycotting Facebook, were in the small to medium range, which honestly doesn't represent very much of Facebook's revenue. It's of a few very very large companies that represent the bulk of revenue. So a company like Verizon definitely got a lot more attention, and this became known as the hashtag stop Hate for

Profit movement. More than one thousand advertisers would join this campaign, but many of those also said that their boycott was temporary and that the pandemic had made it too risky to remain off Facebook for very long, like it was unnecessary evil essentially, and the company managed to actually grow its revenue despite this boycott. As The New York Times would point out in November, the movement did more to

hurt the platform's reputation than its actual bottom line. That's not to say that a future, more widespread effort wouldn't have a greater impact, but this was more like a warning signal sent to Facebook than anything else. Facebook did agree to ban negative ads about immigrants or those who seek asylum, as well as on ads that include hate

speech or discrimination. Zuckerberg said Facebook would also begin to label quote unquote newsworthy posts that violate the site's policies, the idea being that if a post is newsworthy, then it can still be on Facebook, even if otherwise the content of that post would violate Facebook's terms of service,

but now at least Facebook would flag those ya. Meanwhile, YouTube would ban David Dukes and Richard Spencer and a few other prominent white supremacist channels from its platform after being pressured to do so, and a year after the company had said it was going to ban accounts that posted videos supporting white supremacists. So there was a big question about why it took so long for these particular

high profile cases by the company's own policies. This action was long overdue, and it followed what other platforms like Reddit had been doing in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement. These bands would sometimes include accounts or subbreddits that purported to support President Trump, turning this into kind of a political controversy, though the reason for the removal wasn't because of a political affiliation, had to do

with the actual content within these accounts and subreddits. So, for example, the subreddit community the Donald was home to a lot of posts that included hate speech and promoted conspiracy theories that blamed minorities for various societal problems, so it got the acts. Toward late June, we learned that Uber was in talks of acquiring the delivery service Postmates.

Uber already has its own food delivery service with Uber Eats, and the talks progressed throughout ending in November, when the companies agreed to an all stock transaction that would see Postmates moved to Uber for the princely sum of two point six five billion dollars worth of stock. Uber had previously attempted to scoop up grub Hub, but the company was beaten to the punch by a different company out of Europe called Just Takeaway for seven billion dollars. Holy cats.

One bit of more lighthearted news that I can add to June was published on my birthday, that would be June twenty six. That's when I learned that NASA has a design competition, or rather had a design competition, and the first prize of this competition was twenty thousand dollars, second prize was ten thousand dollars, and third prize five thousand dollars. And what you are meant to design was a toilet yep. NASA was looking for designs for a toilet that can work in micro gravity as well as

the reduced gravity on the Moon. The Moon's gravity is about one sixth that of Earth's and presumably this would be on the lunar Lander module of the future, so they had very strict size and weight limitations for this particular piece of technology. And because NASA intends to send women to the Moon, it means the toilet has to

be to work for both men and women. And a bonus, said NASA, and I swear I am not making this up, is that the toilet should be able to deal with an astronaut who needs to vomit without the astronaut having to place their head and said toilet. That was the thing that NASA was looking for. And if you have a great idea for the design, well, I hate to be the bearer of crappy news. But the deadline was August, So I guess I just flushed all those hopes and

dreams down the moon toilet. When we come back, we'll head into July and see if I can compress the second half of the year's news into one third of an episode. Spoiler alert. I couldn't, so we will have a part three. But before we get into all of that,

let's take another break. I haven't really talked about it so far in these episodes, but one of the stories that played out over the core of twenty was the fate of TikTok and how the US government was continuing to exert pressure on the company for its links to a Chinese parent company like Huawei. The implication was that the company was potentially vulnerable to Chinese government interference, and since so many Americans were using the app, it could

pose as a national security concern. Or if you look at it another way, you could say this was a high profile company that the US government could target in an ongoing trade dispute between the United States and China and thus be a point of pain that US could inflict on China. Now, the truth behind the motivations to pressure TikTok is probably somewhere between those two pillars of philosophy.

Cybersecurity experts, however, have pointed out that it is unlikely that China would be able to access data about US TikTok users because that data would be stored on servers that are here in the United States and thus outside the grasp of China directly, and that the TikTok CEO is an American CEO, so there might be a desire to access all that stuff, but not necessarily an actual ability to do that anyway. In July, we saw some

curious reactions to TikTok in corporate America. Wells Fargo sent a directive to employees to delete TikTok from any corporate owned devices, citing security concerns. Now, I don't think this is actually that unusual. Companies must frequently deal with the possibility of data breaches or security vulnerabilities, and many of them are created not because of a hole in the technical security that a company has put in place, but

rather the human element, the behavior of employees. I felt that Wells Fargo was actually pretty much in the right with this one, as the directive really only covered corporate owned devices, so to me, it's the same as if my company were to tell me, hey, you can't install the games on your work computer because that computer doesn't belong to you, it belongs to the company. So to me, that works the same way with this Wells Fargo example.

TikTok's response, however, was to say that it was open to talk with Wells Fargo about how TikTok's secures user privacy, and maybe if Wells Fargo had told employees that they couldn't use TikTok on their own personal phones, I would feel that that was a totally different conversation and would

be unjustifiable. But as it stands, I don't really see a big deal here, because even if you remove the Chinese element, let's say, all right, let's let's say let's say that it is impossible for China to get hold of that information, which is probably true. It's still a problem to have an app from a different company installed onto a corporate owned device because it could represent a potential security leak. And we already give a lot of

our information over to company. He's both private and publicly traded, and that's already an issue. It's it's almost like the problem is present. It's just that the the ultimate uh entity that we should be afraid of is misidentified, if that makes sense. Now, Interestingly, Amazon had also sent a similar directive to its employees to delete TikTok from corporate owned devices, but within a couple of hours of that, Amazon sent a follow up email saying that the first

message was sent in error, so Amazon retracted that directive. Now, we did see one big security breach in July. On July to be precise, that was buzzworthy. Hackers gained access to multiple high profile accounts on Twitter belonging to people like Bill Gates, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Elon Musk, and others. The accounts blasted out messages promising something too good to

be true, and we all know what that means. But in this case, the message has said that people should send bitcoin, the digital cryptocurrency, to a particular digital wallet, and in return they would receive double what they sent. And if you're thinking, well, that just don't make no sense, then you're way ahead of the game, because this is just a scam that praise on the impulsive and the greedy. If I walked up to you and said, hey, if you give me a five dollar bill, I'll give you

ten bucks. You would probably be suspicious of that, and you should be, because I'm a shifty character. But for some reason, scammers use this technique with Bitcoin and compromising such high profile accounts to do this seems to give the scam a bit more legitimacy. I mean, if it's coming from Barack Obama, it's got to be legit, right, So maybe that was the real difference here. So how the heck did this hack even happen? Well, once again we saw that the way into the system wasn't to

brute force passwords or anything like that. Rather, the scammers targeted Twitter employees, trying to trick them into going to a dummy website to enter their credentials and solve some imaginary problem that was in the initial message. And it's the sort of approach that requires a very wide net, but you only have to catch a few fishies for

it to pay off. And it paid off. The scammers were able to get enough Twitter administrators to give them that kind of access, and they began to use Twitter's methods to access various accounts, which actually raises questions about whether or not Twitter could ever do this to your account, could Twitter send out messages under your account without your permission,

but that's a topic for another discussion. I guess Twitter eventually got it all locked down, but it was a sobering experience, particularly in a year where there was so much misinformation running rampant regarding everything from the pandemic to

social movements to the upcoming US elections. Towards the end of July, the U S Congress called upon executives from Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook to appear for hearings about whether these companies are engaging in anti competitive practices and monopolizing various tech sectors, primarily digital advertising. And it was the first antitrust hearing in the tech sector in the United States since Microsoft

had to do this back in nine now. The outcome of that Microsoft case was initially a threat of breaking Microsoft up into separate companies, but ultimately Microsoft was able to come to an agreement with the government that kept it whole, so it didn't have to split up. These discussions with Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook continue up to the recording of this podcast, but for one company in particular,

and that is Facebook, things escalated dramatically. In December, a collection of states and the US federal government sued Facebook in a pair of antitrust lawsuits, and the Federal Trade Commission, or f TC started taking steps toward demanding that Facebook divest itself of some of the properties it has acquired

over the years, like Instagram and WhatsApp. So Facebook has a history of acquiring companies that fill in gaps in what Facebook can offer, particularly from other types of social networks that serve a slightly different purpose from Facebook's main site. And sometimes it's just easier to buy up your competition

than trying to outperform them on their own turf. But now various governments and agencies are arguing that Facebook has effectively established an exclusive lock on certain online services, particularly with regard to monetization, and that further, the company has actively tried to discourage competition from other companies, and that's a big no no. It's still way too early to say how this is all going to turn out, and it's quite possible that litigation could last several years. Now.

Complicating matters is the fact that the US government changes over all action cycles, and new leaders might not share the same concerns or beliefs about Facebook as the ones who are currently pursuing this litigation, and there are those who argue that should the antitrust lawsuits conclude with Facebook having to divest itself of Instagram and WhatsApp, that the underlying problem itself still won't be solved. So, in other words,

this process is going about things the wrong way. But it's a very complicated issue with a lot of vested parties involved in Honestly, I don't know what the right answer is here, or even if there is a right answer, because tech is simple, but business is hard, you know. By the end of July, Google's parent company, Alphabet, posted the first decline in revenue in the company's history. Now,

that doesn't mean the company lost money. Rather, it means the company made less money than it had the year before, so it didn't grow. It indicated that the company wasn't growing at the same rate as it had been. Alphabet brought in a revenue of thirty eight point three billion dollars for the second quarter of so I'm not talking about annual revenue. That's the revenue that the company generated in just three months, just shy of forty billion dollars.

And this represented a two percent decline in revenues from the previous year. However, it was still more than what analysts had predicted for Alphabet given the circumstances of stuff like the pandemic and social unrest, so it was still good news for Alphabet. And when you start talking in terms like that, you begin to get a feeling of the scope of those antitrust issues that the US government and places like the European Union have really been looking into.

It's one thing to say we've had a two percent decline in revenues, which you know isn't great, particularly in a world that values year over year growth over just about everything else. But when you break that down as we only brought in thirty eight point three billion dollars for these last three months, it kind of breaks your brain, or rather it breaks my brain. I mean, your brain might be just fine. I don't. I don't mean to

project my own limitations on you. But we have now reached the end of July, and if I'm looking at this calendar correctly, we still have a few months to go. So it looks like I'm going to need to do one more episode to cover everything else. And I don't want to jump into August only to have to cut off everything after a couple of stories for the next part. So we're gonna pick up in August for part three

of our retrospective on the year. And I guess I could go on about how this is all really irrational because of our way of tracking time. It's all human construct so it doesn't really matter what I cover when. But that's not really interesting or techie, so well, I'll

just spare you. In our next episode, we'll wrap up the big stories of and you can look forward to a quick overview of the struggle between Epic Games and Apple, as well as the continuing proliferation of streaming services and how they are making huge waves in the entertainment industry at large, and more in our next episode. If you have suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, shoot them my way. It can be a technology, it could be a company, could be a personality in tech, could just

be a trend in tech. Any of those things are fair games. Send me your suggestions over on Twitter. The handle is tech Stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Y. Tech Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,