December 6, 2024 • 30 mins
The shooting of UnitedHealthCare's CEO Brian Thompson has prompted some dark, disturbing reactions online -- including misinformation. Plus, we have stories about the wealthy designing bunkers to hide from the coming "Event", China's Salt Typhoon operation compromising US telecommunications companies, and more. Woof. It's rough, y'all.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and How the
tech are you. It's time for the tech news for
the week ending December sixth, twenty twenty four. And my apologies,
(00:27):
but we have some heavy stories both at the beginning
and the end of this one because of the way
news unfolded this week. One of the top stories this
week was that the United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson died
after being attacked by a gun wielding assailant in New
York City and what was clearly a premeditated act of violence. Now,
(00:49):
this is not a true crime podcast, so I'm not
gonna dwell on the extraordinary facts about this case, the
ones that have been shared with us so far. You
can read up all about that if you like. Rather,
what I wanted to talk about is how the reaction
online to this act of violence has been pretty brutal,
and not just among your typical Internet trolls. Over on Reddit,
(01:13):
moderators had to shut down a thread in which doctors
were criticizing Brian Thompson and the insurance industry as a
whole for practices that prioritize profits and shareholder return over
human life. The participants in a thread in the subreddit
r slash medicine took United Healthcare to task for allegedly
(01:33):
denying coverage to patients, all in an effort to squeeze
out more value for shareholders. It got so spicy that
moderators chose to nuke the thread from orbit, because it's
the only way to be sure. I've been seeing a
lot of response to this killing online and there's a
very dark core of eat the rich fueling a lot
of these reactions. And y'all, don't get me wrong, I'm
(01:54):
very much in the camp of eat the rich, but
I think there's a very small number of an incredibly
privileged people who wield far too much wealth and power
in the United States and beyond, and that strikes me
as wrong. However, I'm also very much in the let's
not kill anybody camp when it comes to those sorts
(02:14):
of things. I have deep compassion for the countless patients
who found themselves lacking coverage despite having insurance. Like that
should never happen. That's why we have insurance Obviously, denying
patients in need is wrong, and it's a problem that
does need to be rectified. But I also, at the
same time think that killing someone is wrong as well.
(02:37):
You know, both things can both be you know, simultaneously
be true. Anyway, I guess this is where I say
the compassion part of my philosophy of compassion and critical
thinking comes in. I don't think those who create and
foster systems that profit off the suffering of others should
get away with that. They should be held accountable and
(02:58):
be required to participate in the fixing of those systems. However,
I also think gunning someone down in cold blood isn't
a reasonable solution to those kinds of problems anyway. One
other thing I want to mention about this is that
there's a lot of misinformation going around regarding this attack.
I have seen numerous posts quoting people, primarily Elon Musk,
(03:20):
about this incident. In fact, I saw one post getting
a lot of traction on Facebook being shared by multiple
friends of mine, and in that post it appeared that
Elon Musk was tweeting out essentially that CEOs keep the
world going round and that without CEOs everything falls apart.
The only thing is I could actually find no evidence
that he ever tweeted that message, and you know, he
(03:43):
tweets a lot, and there was no record of him
actually tweeting that out. There were these photos of a tweet,
but they looked weird, like the font wasn't right, the
kerning wasn't right on the typeface. So, in other words,
at least to my eyes, it appeared to be fabricated
in order to support a narrative. Of that narrative apparently
being that Elon Musk is a billionaire with no consideration
(04:04):
or awareness of what normal folks go through, and that
he has an overinflated opinion of himself, which you know,
I agree with that perception. I think it's accurate, but
I don't think that means people should go around inventing quotes.
The guy has plenty of real quotes that give us
insight into his beliefs and thoughts. There's no need to
make up new ones just to support a particular point
(04:27):
of view. So yeah, I guess ultimately what I'm saying
when I'm bringing up this whole story is one try
and keep compassion in mind. I understand if your capacity
for compassion is stretched due to the impact the insurance
industry has had at people at large, particularly people who
(04:47):
need it most. But also keep using critical thinking when
you're seeing you know memes and stuff shared about this
because often the people who are creating them have no
real consideration for you know, reality. They might saying things
that are accurate depictions, but not actual quotations, and I
think it's important to make the distinction, by the way.
(05:08):
To stick with the tech theme, one story that has
resurfaced in the wake of the killing of Brian Thompson
is how some ultra wealthy folks have been worrying and
preparing for a tumultuous upheaval brought about by one of
many potential things like climate change or a social revolution,
or just war in general, or another pandemic, that kind
(05:30):
of thing. Douglas Rushkoff wrote about this for The Guardian
back in twenty twenty two, and even then he was
referencing an event that had happened years earlier, and the
article is titled the super rich Preppers planning to save
themselves from the Apocalypse Now. In that piece, rushkov explains
he was lured to speak at an event, only he
(05:51):
discovered this event was actually a group of billionaires who
wanted to know about practical considerations they should be, you know,
making their designing constrs, structing, maintaining and operating a shelter
or a bunker that's designed to keep their precious bodies
safe while the rest of us suffer out in the
hellscape that is the apocalypse. And he claims that at
(06:12):
one point, the fat cats asked him how best to
keep control over their security details. After all, the people
working security would be coming from the commoners and they
might share some of those sentiments with the struggling and
the dying, dirty people outside. Rushcoff suggested that they actually
extend a hand and become friends with their staff, you know,
(06:32):
before the world falls apart, because human cooperation is necessary
for survival. But the rich folks, according to Rushkoff, favored
approaches like controlling the food supply or even requiring their
security detail to wear electric shock collars. And I'm not
being dramatic here. You should read the article now. The
reason I bring up this article, which is a couple
(06:52):
of years old, more than two years old at this point,
is that new articles are popping up about very similar
topics in the wake of Thompson killing. Natasha Tiku of
The Washington Post has an article titled Fearful of Crime,
the tech elite transformed their homes into military bunkers. That
article published just yesterday, and she also talks about a
(07:14):
Silicon Valley startup company the designed security systems for the
uber rich. And the company has a name that pretty
much tells you everything you need to know the name
of the company, sourn. Now, I wish I were making
that up. It's already insane to me that there's a
tech company out there with the unironic name Palanteer. And
here you have companies catering to the ultra wealthy or
(07:36):
the defense industry, and they're eagerly adopting names from J. R. R.
Tolkien's works, particularly the Lord of the Rings series, and
these are often names that are associated with bad guys.
So they're saying the quiet part out loud, y'all. Anyway,
if you want to get angry at rich people who
seem to think that it's better to live in a
world that's falling apart as long as they personally continue
(07:58):
to accumulate wealth, rather than live in a world where
they don't accumulate so much wealth and the rest of
the world starts to patch itself up, like, oh, well, no,
I want to have money, So why would I deny
myself all that money just so that the world could
potentially fix some problems. Let the world sort itself out.
(08:21):
I need mine. Well, these two articles are a pretty
darn good start for you to go down your journey
of decrying the rich. It's interesting because, like, there's definitely
been a growing sentiment and in the world in general,
at least the world I'm familiar with that has been
anti wealthy because of these sorts of issues. And when
(08:42):
I say wealthy, I mean like ultra wealthy, the people
who are benefiting from others, you know. And it sounds
like folks are worried that it's coming to a head.
I don't think it's coming to a head yet, but
you know, pressure does seem to be building, and I
expect that's going to continue over the next few years.
Another big story here in the United States involves more
(09:03):
details around the Chinese hacking operation known as Salt Typhoon. Now,
I'm pretty sure that we talked about Salt Typhoon months ago,
that we had talked about the discovery of a naming
of this operation earlier this year, but more details have
emerged recently that indicate the project is far broader in
(09:24):
scope than first imagined. So, according to the FBI, Chinese
hackers have infiltrated telecommunication systems here in the United States,
and we're talking the big guys like AT and T, Verizon,
and T Mobile, although T Mobile claims there's no evidence
hackers accessed customer information on their network. Further, these hackers
have accessed call information and texts and that kind of thing.
(09:50):
The matter is severe enough that the Senate had a
classified briefing on the matter this past Wednesday. According to Reuter's,
Senator Rick Scott was angry that the briefing didn't detail
information on why the FBI didn't catch this intrusion and
what they could have done to prevent the intrusion. Well,
I think i'll handle this one, Senator Scott. I think
(10:10):
it's entirely possible that the manner in which the hackers
use to intrude upon these systems is not yet known.
And if you don't know how someone got into your house,
you can't really address how you would have prevented it
from happening, Right, So I would argue that perhaps more
germane at least for the immediate future, is how do
(10:30):
we oust the hackers from the systems and then shut
off access so they can no longer spy on people
here in the United States. However, I admit I am
no politician anyway, this sort of thing, you know, state
impact hackers from China infiltrating telecommunication systems on a widespread basis.
It's one of the big reasons why several politicians voted
to ban TikTok in the United States unless it's Chinese
(10:53):
parent company Byte Dance divests itself of TikTok, And I
understand that line of reasoning, but I'll point out once
again that the issue of China spying on the United
States is way way bigger than TikTok, and there's a
real danger of using TikTok to be an example of
patching a very small hole while ignoring a huge crater.
(11:17):
And if we focus exclusively on TikTok, we're going to
ignore the larger problem that continues to be an issue. Okay,
we've got more news stories to get through before we
move on. Let's take a quick break to thank our sponsors.
(11:40):
We're back, and you know what, here's another story that
involves tech, the United States and China. We left off
with one of those, let's pick up with a different one.
This one revolves around rare earth metals and other raw materials. Also,
just as a reminder, rare earth metals tends to refer
to a class of metals that aren't necessarily actually rare.
(12:02):
They might be plentiful in the Earth's crust. The problem
is they don't typically appear in concentrated forms, so getting
hold of a lot of it is hard. It requires
a lot of work. Often it requires a lot of
work that is environmentally dangerous, also dangerous to the health
of the people who are working there. Like you're using
(12:23):
a lot of caustic chemicals to leach away metals from
other material So it's dangerous stuff. But the word rare
is a little bit misleading anyway. These are materials that
are very important for different aspects of the tech sector,
and recently the United States instituted new restrictions on products
(12:44):
that contain US made semiconductor chips from being sold to
Chinese businesses, essentially saying China is desperate to get their
hands on US designed semiconductors in order to steal the
technology and then repurpose it for other stuff. This is
been an ongoing concern for many years now, and so
one way that the United States tries to address this
(13:07):
is by banning the sale of certain materials and certain
products to China so that they can't just harvest the
semiconductors and use those to create knockoffs. But in retaliation
of this increased restriction on certain products to China, China
itself has announced that it is going to ban the
(13:28):
export of several rare earth metals and other minerals and
materials that are used in industries including military applications, as
well as the tech sector in general. So you may
be aware that many of our devices rely in part
on stuff that requires this kind of material, stuff like batteries,
for example. So this is a case of two superpowers
(13:49):
squaring off against each other in an attempt to deny
access to technology or the materials used to build technology,
and I suspect we're going to see more of these
kinds of conflicts during the Trump administration, assuming the tariffs
that Trump has promised actually come to pass. To read
more about this, I recommend Ashley Bellinger's article in Ours Technica.
(14:09):
It is titled China hits US with ban on critical
minerals used in tech manufacturing. Oh hey, let's get another
Tolkien reference in here. Why not? I mean, I'm leaving
the show in a month, so I might as well
sneak in as many as I can. I mean, I've
got a Tolkien tattoo on my arm for goodness sakes. Actually,
in this case, I'm not really sneaking anything in the
(14:30):
tech sector has me covered. Palmer Lucky, the guy who
created the Oculus VR headset and then who subsequently made
headlines with some very edge Lord activities, also has a
military defense company, because of course he does. And it's
called and Uril, which at least is not a reference
to a villain in the Lord of the Rings books. Instead,
(14:53):
it's the name of a sword anyway. And Uril has
announced a strategic partnership with open you know, the company
that's behind Chad GPT. And if you are thinking, well
that sounds bad, then you and I were on the
same page. And if you're also thinking, wait a minute,
I thought open AI was founded to be an organization
(15:15):
dedicated to the peaceful, responsible development of artificial intelligence. Well,
my dear sweet summer child, I've got some bad news
for you, because that version of open AI hasn't really
been a reality for quite some time at this point. Anyway.
Rob Thubren of tech Spot has a piece on this
(15:37):
that's titled open AI partners with Palmer Lucky's defense firm,
paving the way for AI driven military tech, And yeah,
I don't really see a positive way to spend this.
Apparently the initial focus of the partnership will be to
develop military platforms that can identify, target, and destroy unmanned drones.
(16:00):
But apparently they mentioned that they could also use that
same technology to deal with quote unquote legacy threats. Legacy
threats is a euphemism. It's a nice way to obfuscate
the fact that what they're talking about our aerial vehicles
with an actual human crew, you know, like aircraft, And
this would be a case of robots killing human beings.
(16:21):
And yes, we have all seen this movie, and yes
we do know it turns out poorly, and yet here
it is happening. Anyway. Yes, early this week, Intel announced
that CEO Pat Gelsinger is retiring from the company, but
as Stephen Vaughn Nichols a Computer World puts it, that's
(16:43):
a line that very few in the tech sector are
actually buying. So von Nichols has an article that's titled
Intel's CEO, Pat Gelsinger retires right. That's actually the name
of the article. His right has like five eyes in it. Anyway,
it indicates there's a certain level of skepticism around how
(17:05):
much of this was actually Gelsinger's own decision versus a
corporate move in an attempt to right the course of Intel.
And as you know, von Nichols writes, Intel's board of
directors has grown impatient and allegedly gave Gelsinger the choice
to either retire or face just being outright canned. Von
(17:26):
Nichols has a great treatment of what has happened at
Intel since two thousand and seven. Two thousand and seven
was when Intel fumbled a deal that would have seen
Intel chips inside Apple iPhones instead. That deal would end
up going to Samsung at the time, and von Nichols
makes a case that this was sort of the beginning
of a decline for Intel, and he says the company
(17:47):
has been in that downward trajectory ever since, and the
board apparently feels that Gelsinger didn't do enough to reverse
company fortunes. Whether anyone else can succeed in that job
remains to be seen, although against Stephen Vaughan Nichols at
the very least is not optimistic about it, and I
am inclined to agree with his assessment. Hailey Welch achieved
(18:10):
Internet celebrity with her response to a Man on the
Street interview that well, let's just say, if you don't
know Hailey Welch, if you don't know who that is,
I'm not going to go into it here because this
is a family show and I'm an old man, and
I just I just don't have the energy, y'all. But yeah,
I mean, she gave like a flippant, little funny answer
to a question and then became an Internet celebrity. And
(18:34):
apparently she wanted to leverage her newly won celebrity status
by lending her brand to a meme coin cryptocurrency that
was called a dollar Sign hawk Hawk. But that meme
coin experienced a dramatic decline in value, or, as Meredith
Clark of The Independent put it, dollar Sign hawk Quote
(18:58):
crashed by more than ninety percent just hours after it
hit the market. End quote, and in the wake of
that glorious failure, Welch is now facing accusations that she
was involved in essentially what was a pump and dump
rug pole scam. So a rug pole, in case you're
not familiar with the term, is a scheme in which
(19:18):
someone puts forward an asset that they invite people to
invest in. That asset could be anything. It doesn't have
to be digital, it could be whatever. The scam artist
owns steak in this asset, and that asset could effectively
be worthless, but the goal is to build up excitement
for this asset, to get people to buy in, and
(19:39):
that drives up the selling price of the asset, and
then the scam artist sells off their steak and essentially
they make money off of nothing at all. And then
typically they head for the hills. And that's your classic
rug pole. You pull the rug out from under the investors,
You build up excitement around something, you get people eager
to buy in out of fear of missing out, and
(20:00):
then you cash out before the whole thing comes crashing down. Now,
Welch ha said her mean Coin was never intended to
be a rug pull. That was not her aim. That however,
has not stopped an early investor from filing a complaint
with the US Securities Exchange Commission or SEC against Welch.
Welch maintains she never tried to pull a pump and up,
(20:21):
and in fact says her stake in Dollar Sign Hawk
is something that she's not even allowed to sell for
a year. And if that is true, then this just
might be a case of snipers and such taking advantage
of a meme coin launch and everyone else is ending
up left holding the bag, including Welch, which stinks but
(20:41):
also pretty predictable outcome. If I'm being totally honest, It's
not like this is unprecedented. It is very much precedented.
Waimo has announced that it is bringing its driverless cab
service to Miami, that the driverless vehicles will start trolling
around the streets in twenty twenty five. In fact, the
company says it will quote began reacquainting waymos all electric
(21:06):
Jaguar eye pieces to Miami's streets quote in a recent
press release. Now, the actual service, the driverless cab service
would wait until twenty twenty six to get into business.
And I'm sure there are many people in Miami who
could benefit from improved transportation options. I'm thinking of like
seniors in Miami who might not have easy ways to
(21:28):
get around, and I am glad that they will have
more options. However, I'm also worried that adding more cars
to the streets isn't really the ideal solution. But what
do I know? I mean, hasn't stopped us from doing
it in other markets too, even though I think ultimately
that there are other solutions that could not only give
(21:48):
more options for those who need transportation, but also have
a smaller impact on overall traffic in cities. And I
don't know, I think adding more cars does not really
address the traffic issue. In fact, I mean this might
be ignorant speaking, but it seems to me like it
just exacerbates that problem. All right, we've got more headlines
(22:11):
to get through before we get to that. Let's take
another quick break to think our sponsors. Google has also proclaimed,
through the AI arm of Google called DeepMind, that an
(22:31):
AI research laboratory called Gencast has developed a weather predicting
AI model that is more accurate than existing models, the
models that meteorologists typically depend upon, and that this model
can better predict extreme weather events up to fifteen days
out and in less time than it would take a
(22:53):
traditional model. This is interesting, and if it is true,
it could potentially lead to a rather drastic improvement in
weather forecasting and disaster preparedness. Now, I'm sure it's going
to take a lot more time to analyze gen casts,
systems and results to make certain that in fact, what
appears to be an improvement is really the case, right,
(23:16):
Because it could just be that it looks like it's
an improvement, but maybe over the long run, when you
get a larger sample size, those advantages might wash out.
We don't know. I hope they don't wash out, but
you need a lot of testing to make sure that
these things are actually more accurate. But this is the
sort of AI application I can actually really get behind.
(23:38):
If we can develop AI that is more effective at
analyzing data and patterns than we are in order to
do stuff like forecast the weather, I think that's great.
I think if people have an accurate or at least
a pretty accurate forecast, that if there are signs of
severe weather on the horizon, they can have more time
(23:59):
to prepare for that. I think that could save countless lives.
But we have to understand also that weather is an
extremely complex phenomena, and even a really effective model is
going to get things wrong sometimes. I know people who
get mad when it's been predicted that there's going to
be really traumatic, like severe weather, and then it turns
out to not be so bad, and they get angry
(24:20):
about it, And I'm like, y'all are angry about the
wrong things. I would be angry if I were told
it was just going to be a little bit of
a sprinkle outside and then a tornado tore my house down.
That's when I would get mad. I don't get mad
the weather's not as bad as I was told it
was going to be. I don't know, I'm probably a weirdo.
Bill Nelson, the administrator for NASA, announced that the agency's
(24:42):
Artemis program is going to experience a bit of a delay,
and I think this comes as a surprise to absolutely
no one. I'm pretty sure that I've mentioned a few
times this year that I thought NASA's earlier plan for
Artemis was overly ambitious. But right now, the Artemis mission
the next one, which is to send astronauts on a
(25:03):
trip that will take them around the backside of the
Moon and then back to Earth, not landing on the Moon,
just going around it. That mission has now been pushed
back to April twenty twenty six. The Moon landing mission,
which would return astronauts to the lunar surface for the
first time since nineteen seventy two, has now been pushed
back to twenty twenty seven. Further, Trump's pick for the
(25:26):
new head of NASA is Jared Isigmann, who is a
filthy rich businessman who back in twenty twenty one paid
SpaceX and undisclosed amount of money, but I imagine it
was a princely sum to fly aboard a SpaceX mission
in an all civilian space tourist mission. He would later
on fly in a second space tourist mission to become
(25:49):
the first space tourist to participate in an EVA. That's
an extra vehicular activity or spacewalk. Do you and me?
And In very sad news, we learned not too long
ago that Marshall Brain, the founder of HowStuffWorks dot com,
committed suicide in his office at the campus of North
Carolina State University. Brain founded how stuff Works in the
(26:12):
nineteen nineties. He used his passion for learning and communicating
to build a site that aim to explain how everything works.
He would later launch a podcast called brain Stuff that
would become the first of many stuff shows to launch,
including tech Stuff, and the story obviously has a big
(26:32):
personal impact on me. I literally would not have the
career I am in right now without Marshall Brain. I
wouldn't be here, I wouldn't be doing this podcast. I
met Marshall Brain several times, but we never actually worked
together on any projects. Some of my colleagues spent much
more time with him, and all of us from the
Stuff era are still processing this and grieving for his family.
(26:57):
I have no real details to share about his story
and what led up to him deciding to take his
own life. There are pieces in outlets like Ours Technica
that shed a little more light into what was going
on leading up to his death, but I don't feel
like this is the right place to dive into that.
I would just like to say that if you are
(27:17):
struggling with thoughts of suicide, reach out for help. There's
no shame in reaching out for help, and I, for one,
would prefer a world that has you in it. That's
a very heavy note to end on. I do have
a couple of additional reading suggestions for all of y'all
before I head out. First up is a piece in
The Verge by Elizabeth Lopoto titled stop using Generative AI
(27:41):
as a search engine. Lopato details incidents in which people
have used generative AI to answer questions only to receive
incorrect answers, often with invented details that just never really
happened in the real world, which is really similar to
what I found when I use chat GPT to quote
unquote write an episode of Tech Stuff. You know, if
(28:02):
you haven't listened to that episode, you should, because I
bring up some big concerns I have as a result
of what I got when I use chat GPT to
do that. But check out Lopato's piece for more insight
into that issue. And finally, I recommend reading Tim Cushing's
piece in Tech Dirt titled Federal Court says dismantling a
(28:24):
phone to install firmware isn't a search, even if it
was done to facilitate a search. So essentially what the
story is saying is that a court has decided that
law enforcement officials do not need to secure a search
warrant before attempting to compromise a phone or other device
like a laptop. But once they do get access to
(28:45):
that device, they then would need to get a search
warrant in order to actually search the device. They wouldn't
be allowed to search it after breaching it unless they
had the warrant. They just don't need the warrant to
start the process of breaching the device. Moreover, the essentially
hold on to the locked or defunct or broken device
for as long as they need to before they're able
(29:06):
to crack it open. So check out that article. He
brings up some pretty interesting arguments about the good and
the bad of that, and he advocates for more of
a more clarity around this from a court perspective, which
I think makes sense, Like we live in that world
(29:26):
where this is a very real possibility and the laws
that guide us around illegal search and seizure were not
equipped to handle those kinds of scenarios, so we really
do need more clarification on that. That's it for this
episode of the tech News of tech Stuff. I hope
all of you out there are doing well, and I'll
(29:49):
talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an
iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio, app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and How the
tech are you. It's time for the tech news for
the week ending December sixth, twenty twenty four. And my apologies,
(00:27):
but we have some heavy stories both at the beginning
and the end of this one because of the way
news unfolded this week. One of the top stories this
week was that the United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson died
after being attacked by a gun wielding assailant in New
York City and what was clearly a premeditated act of violence. Now,
(00:49):
this is not a true crime podcast, so I'm not
gonna dwell on the extraordinary facts about this case, the
ones that have been shared with us so far. You
can read up all about that if you like. Rather,
what I wanted to talk about is how the reaction
online to this act of violence has been pretty brutal,
and not just among your typical Internet trolls. Over on Reddit,
(01:13):
moderators had to shut down a thread in which doctors
were criticizing Brian Thompson and the insurance industry as a
whole for practices that prioritize profits and shareholder return over
human life. The participants in a thread in the subreddit
r slash medicine took United Healthcare to task for allegedly
(01:33):
denying coverage to patients, all in an effort to squeeze
out more value for shareholders. It got so spicy that
moderators chose to nuke the thread from orbit, because it's
the only way to be sure. I've been seeing a
lot of response to this killing online and there's a
very dark core of eat the rich fueling a lot
of these reactions. And y'all, don't get me wrong, I'm
(01:54):
very much in the camp of eat the rich, but
I think there's a very small number of an incredibly
privileged people who wield far too much wealth and power
in the United States and beyond, and that strikes me
as wrong. However, I'm also very much in the let's
not kill anybody camp when it comes to those sorts
(02:14):
of things. I have deep compassion for the countless patients
who found themselves lacking coverage despite having insurance. Like that
should never happen. That's why we have insurance Obviously, denying
patients in need is wrong, and it's a problem that
does need to be rectified. But I also, at the
same time think that killing someone is wrong as well.
(02:37):
You know, both things can both be you know, simultaneously
be true. Anyway, I guess this is where I say
the compassion part of my philosophy of compassion and critical
thinking comes in. I don't think those who create and
foster systems that profit off the suffering of others should
get away with that. They should be held accountable and
(02:58):
be required to participate in the fixing of those systems. However,
I also think gunning someone down in cold blood isn't
a reasonable solution to those kinds of problems anyway. One
other thing I want to mention about this is that
there's a lot of misinformation going around regarding this attack.
I have seen numerous posts quoting people, primarily Elon Musk,
(03:20):
about this incident. In fact, I saw one post getting
a lot of traction on Facebook being shared by multiple
friends of mine, and in that post it appeared that
Elon Musk was tweeting out essentially that CEOs keep the
world going round and that without CEOs everything falls apart.
The only thing is I could actually find no evidence
that he ever tweeted that message, and you know, he
(03:43):
tweets a lot, and there was no record of him
actually tweeting that out. There were these photos of a tweet,
but they looked weird, like the font wasn't right, the
kerning wasn't right on the typeface. So, in other words,
at least to my eyes, it appeared to be fabricated
in order to support a narrative. Of that narrative apparently
being that Elon Musk is a billionaire with no consideration
(04:04):
or awareness of what normal folks go through, and that
he has an overinflated opinion of himself, which you know,
I agree with that perception. I think it's accurate, but
I don't think that means people should go around inventing quotes.
The guy has plenty of real quotes that give us
insight into his beliefs and thoughts. There's no need to
make up new ones just to support a particular point
(04:27):
of view. So yeah, I guess ultimately what I'm saying
when I'm bringing up this whole story is one try
and keep compassion in mind. I understand if your capacity
for compassion is stretched due to the impact the insurance
industry has had at people at large, particularly people who
(04:47):
need it most. But also keep using critical thinking when
you're seeing you know memes and stuff shared about this
because often the people who are creating them have no
real consideration for you know, reality. They might saying things
that are accurate depictions, but not actual quotations, and I
think it's important to make the distinction, by the way.
(05:08):
To stick with the tech theme, one story that has
resurfaced in the wake of the killing of Brian Thompson
is how some ultra wealthy folks have been worrying and
preparing for a tumultuous upheaval brought about by one of
many potential things like climate change or a social revolution,
or just war in general, or another pandemic, that kind
(05:30):
of thing. Douglas Rushkoff wrote about this for The Guardian
back in twenty twenty two, and even then he was
referencing an event that had happened years earlier, and the
article is titled the super rich Preppers planning to save
themselves from the Apocalypse Now. In that piece, rushkov explains
he was lured to speak at an event, only he
(05:51):
discovered this event was actually a group of billionaires who
wanted to know about practical considerations they should be, you know,
making their designing constrs, structing, maintaining and operating a shelter
or a bunker that's designed to keep their precious bodies
safe while the rest of us suffer out in the
hellscape that is the apocalypse. And he claims that at
(06:12):
one point, the fat cats asked him how best to
keep control over their security details. After all, the people
working security would be coming from the commoners and they
might share some of those sentiments with the struggling and
the dying, dirty people outside. Rushcoff suggested that they actually
extend a hand and become friends with their staff, you know,
(06:32):
before the world falls apart, because human cooperation is necessary
for survival. But the rich folks, according to Rushkoff, favored
approaches like controlling the food supply or even requiring their
security detail to wear electric shock collars. And I'm not
being dramatic here. You should read the article now. The
reason I bring up this article, which is a couple
(06:52):
of years old, more than two years old at this point,
is that new articles are popping up about very similar
topics in the wake of Thompson killing. Natasha Tiku of
The Washington Post has an article titled Fearful of Crime,
the tech elite transformed their homes into military bunkers. That
article published just yesterday, and she also talks about a
(07:14):
Silicon Valley startup company the designed security systems for the
uber rich. And the company has a name that pretty
much tells you everything you need to know the name
of the company, sourn. Now, I wish I were making
that up. It's already insane to me that there's a
tech company out there with the unironic name Palanteer. And
here you have companies catering to the ultra wealthy or
(07:36):
the defense industry, and they're eagerly adopting names from J. R. R.
Tolkien's works, particularly the Lord of the Rings series, and
these are often names that are associated with bad guys.
So they're saying the quiet part out loud, y'all. Anyway,
if you want to get angry at rich people who
seem to think that it's better to live in a
world that's falling apart as long as they personally continue
(07:58):
to accumulate wealth, rather than live in a world where
they don't accumulate so much wealth and the rest of
the world starts to patch itself up, like, oh, well, no,
I want to have money, So why would I deny
myself all that money just so that the world could
potentially fix some problems. Let the world sort itself out.
(08:21):
I need mine. Well, these two articles are a pretty
darn good start for you to go down your journey
of decrying the rich. It's interesting because, like, there's definitely
been a growing sentiment and in the world in general,
at least the world I'm familiar with that has been
anti wealthy because of these sorts of issues. And when
(08:42):
I say wealthy, I mean like ultra wealthy, the people
who are benefiting from others, you know. And it sounds
like folks are worried that it's coming to a head.
I don't think it's coming to a head yet, but
you know, pressure does seem to be building, and I
expect that's going to continue over the next few years.
Another big story here in the United States involves more
(09:03):
details around the Chinese hacking operation known as Salt Typhoon. Now,
I'm pretty sure that we talked about Salt Typhoon months ago,
that we had talked about the discovery of a naming
of this operation earlier this year, but more details have
emerged recently that indicate the project is far broader in
(09:24):
scope than first imagined. So, according to the FBI, Chinese
hackers have infiltrated telecommunication systems here in the United States,
and we're talking the big guys like AT and T, Verizon,
and T Mobile, although T Mobile claims there's no evidence
hackers accessed customer information on their network. Further, these hackers
have accessed call information and texts and that kind of thing.
(09:50):
The matter is severe enough that the Senate had a
classified briefing on the matter this past Wednesday. According to Reuter's,
Senator Rick Scott was angry that the briefing didn't detail
information on why the FBI didn't catch this intrusion and
what they could have done to prevent the intrusion. Well,
I think i'll handle this one, Senator Scott. I think
(10:10):
it's entirely possible that the manner in which the hackers
use to intrude upon these systems is not yet known.
And if you don't know how someone got into your house,
you can't really address how you would have prevented it
from happening, Right, So I would argue that perhaps more
germane at least for the immediate future, is how do
(10:30):
we oust the hackers from the systems and then shut
off access so they can no longer spy on people
here in the United States. However, I admit I am
no politician anyway, this sort of thing, you know, state
impact hackers from China infiltrating telecommunication systems on a widespread basis.
It's one of the big reasons why several politicians voted
to ban TikTok in the United States unless it's Chinese
(10:53):
parent company Byte Dance divests itself of TikTok, And I
understand that line of reasoning, but I'll point out once
again that the issue of China spying on the United
States is way way bigger than TikTok, and there's a
real danger of using TikTok to be an example of
patching a very small hole while ignoring a huge crater.
(11:17):
And if we focus exclusively on TikTok, we're going to
ignore the larger problem that continues to be an issue. Okay,
we've got more news stories to get through before we
move on. Let's take a quick break to thank our sponsors.
(11:40):
We're back, and you know what, here's another story that
involves tech, the United States and China. We left off
with one of those, let's pick up with a different one.
This one revolves around rare earth metals and other raw materials. Also,
just as a reminder, rare earth metals tends to refer
to a class of metals that aren't necessarily actually rare.
(12:02):
They might be plentiful in the Earth's crust. The problem
is they don't typically appear in concentrated forms, so getting
hold of a lot of it is hard. It requires
a lot of work. Often it requires a lot of
work that is environmentally dangerous, also dangerous to the health
of the people who are working there. Like you're using
(12:23):
a lot of caustic chemicals to leach away metals from
other material So it's dangerous stuff. But the word rare
is a little bit misleading anyway. These are materials that
are very important for different aspects of the tech sector,
and recently the United States instituted new restrictions on products
(12:44):
that contain US made semiconductor chips from being sold to
Chinese businesses, essentially saying China is desperate to get their
hands on US designed semiconductors in order to steal the
technology and then repurpose it for other stuff. This is
been an ongoing concern for many years now, and so
one way that the United States tries to address this
(13:07):
is by banning the sale of certain materials and certain
products to China so that they can't just harvest the
semiconductors and use those to create knockoffs. But in retaliation
of this increased restriction on certain products to China, China
itself has announced that it is going to ban the
(13:28):
export of several rare earth metals and other minerals and
materials that are used in industries including military applications, as
well as the tech sector in general. So you may
be aware that many of our devices rely in part
on stuff that requires this kind of material, stuff like batteries,
for example. So this is a case of two superpowers
(13:49):
squaring off against each other in an attempt to deny
access to technology or the materials used to build technology,
and I suspect we're going to see more of these
kinds of conflicts during the Trump administration, assuming the tariffs
that Trump has promised actually come to pass. To read
more about this, I recommend Ashley Bellinger's article in Ours Technica.
(14:09):
It is titled China hits US with ban on critical
minerals used in tech manufacturing. Oh hey, let's get another
Tolkien reference in here. Why not? I mean, I'm leaving
the show in a month, so I might as well
sneak in as many as I can. I mean, I've
got a Tolkien tattoo on my arm for goodness sakes. Actually,
in this case, I'm not really sneaking anything in the
(14:30):
tech sector has me covered. Palmer Lucky, the guy who
created the Oculus VR headset and then who subsequently made
headlines with some very edge Lord activities, also has a
military defense company, because of course he does. And it's
called and Uril, which at least is not a reference
to a villain in the Lord of the Rings books. Instead,
(14:53):
it's the name of a sword anyway. And Uril has
announced a strategic partnership with open you know, the company
that's behind Chad GPT. And if you are thinking, well
that sounds bad, then you and I were on the
same page. And if you're also thinking, wait a minute,
I thought open AI was founded to be an organization
(15:15):
dedicated to the peaceful, responsible development of artificial intelligence. Well,
my dear sweet summer child, I've got some bad news
for you, because that version of open AI hasn't really
been a reality for quite some time at this point. Anyway.
Rob Thubren of tech Spot has a piece on this
(15:37):
that's titled open AI partners with Palmer Lucky's defense firm,
paving the way for AI driven military tech, And yeah,
I don't really see a positive way to spend this.
Apparently the initial focus of the partnership will be to
develop military platforms that can identify, target, and destroy unmanned drones.
(16:00):
But apparently they mentioned that they could also use that
same technology to deal with quote unquote legacy threats. Legacy
threats is a euphemism. It's a nice way to obfuscate
the fact that what they're talking about our aerial vehicles
with an actual human crew, you know, like aircraft, And
this would be a case of robots killing human beings.
(16:21):
And yes, we have all seen this movie, and yes
we do know it turns out poorly, and yet here
it is happening. Anyway. Yes, early this week, Intel announced
that CEO Pat Gelsinger is retiring from the company, but
as Stephen Vaughn Nichols a Computer World puts it, that's
(16:43):
a line that very few in the tech sector are
actually buying. So von Nichols has an article that's titled
Intel's CEO, Pat Gelsinger retires right. That's actually the name
of the article. His right has like five eyes in it. Anyway,
it indicates there's a certain level of skepticism around how
(17:05):
much of this was actually Gelsinger's own decision versus a
corporate move in an attempt to right the course of Intel.
And as you know, von Nichols writes, Intel's board of
directors has grown impatient and allegedly gave Gelsinger the choice
to either retire or face just being outright canned. Von
(17:26):
Nichols has a great treatment of what has happened at
Intel since two thousand and seven. Two thousand and seven
was when Intel fumbled a deal that would have seen
Intel chips inside Apple iPhones instead. That deal would end
up going to Samsung at the time, and von Nichols
makes a case that this was sort of the beginning
of a decline for Intel, and he says the company
(17:47):
has been in that downward trajectory ever since, and the
board apparently feels that Gelsinger didn't do enough to reverse
company fortunes. Whether anyone else can succeed in that job
remains to be seen, although against Stephen Vaughan Nichols at
the very least is not optimistic about it, and I
am inclined to agree with his assessment. Hailey Welch achieved
(18:10):
Internet celebrity with her response to a Man on the
Street interview that well, let's just say, if you don't
know Hailey Welch, if you don't know who that is,
I'm not going to go into it here because this
is a family show and I'm an old man, and
I just I just don't have the energy, y'all. But yeah,
I mean, she gave like a flippant, little funny answer
to a question and then became an Internet celebrity. And
(18:34):
apparently she wanted to leverage her newly won celebrity status
by lending her brand to a meme coin cryptocurrency that
was called a dollar Sign hawk Hawk. But that meme
coin experienced a dramatic decline in value, or, as Meredith
Clark of The Independent put it, dollar Sign hawk Quote
(18:58):
crashed by more than ninety percent just hours after it
hit the market. End quote, and in the wake of
that glorious failure, Welch is now facing accusations that she
was involved in essentially what was a pump and dump
rug pole scam. So a rug pole, in case you're
not familiar with the term, is a scheme in which
(19:18):
someone puts forward an asset that they invite people to
invest in. That asset could be anything. It doesn't have
to be digital, it could be whatever. The scam artist
owns steak in this asset, and that asset could effectively
be worthless, but the goal is to build up excitement
for this asset, to get people to buy in, and
(19:39):
that drives up the selling price of the asset, and
then the scam artist sells off their steak and essentially
they make money off of nothing at all. And then
typically they head for the hills. And that's your classic
rug pole. You pull the rug out from under the investors,
You build up excitement around something, you get people eager
to buy in out of fear of missing out, and
(20:00):
then you cash out before the whole thing comes crashing down. Now,
Welch ha said her mean Coin was never intended to
be a rug pull. That was not her aim. That however,
has not stopped an early investor from filing a complaint
with the US Securities Exchange Commission or SEC against Welch.
Welch maintains she never tried to pull a pump and up,
(20:21):
and in fact says her stake in Dollar Sign Hawk
is something that she's not even allowed to sell for
a year. And if that is true, then this just
might be a case of snipers and such taking advantage
of a meme coin launch and everyone else is ending
up left holding the bag, including Welch, which stinks but
(20:41):
also pretty predictable outcome. If I'm being totally honest, It's
not like this is unprecedented. It is very much precedented.
Waimo has announced that it is bringing its driverless cab
service to Miami, that the driverless vehicles will start trolling
around the streets in twenty twenty five. In fact, the
company says it will quote began reacquainting waymos all electric
(21:06):
Jaguar eye pieces to Miami's streets quote in a recent
press release. Now, the actual service, the driverless cab service
would wait until twenty twenty six to get into business.
And I'm sure there are many people in Miami who
could benefit from improved transportation options. I'm thinking of like
seniors in Miami who might not have easy ways to
(21:28):
get around, and I am glad that they will have
more options. However, I'm also worried that adding more cars
to the streets isn't really the ideal solution. But what
do I know? I mean, hasn't stopped us from doing
it in other markets too, even though I think ultimately
that there are other solutions that could not only give
(21:48):
more options for those who need transportation, but also have
a smaller impact on overall traffic in cities. And I
don't know, I think adding more cars does not really
address the traffic issue. In fact, I mean this might
be ignorant speaking, but it seems to me like it
just exacerbates that problem. All right, we've got more headlines
(22:11):
to get through before we get to that. Let's take
another quick break to think our sponsors. Google has also proclaimed,
through the AI arm of Google called DeepMind, that an
(22:31):
AI research laboratory called Gencast has developed a weather predicting
AI model that is more accurate than existing models, the
models that meteorologists typically depend upon, and that this model
can better predict extreme weather events up to fifteen days
out and in less time than it would take a
(22:53):
traditional model. This is interesting, and if it is true,
it could potentially lead to a rather drastic improvement in
weather forecasting and disaster preparedness. Now, I'm sure it's going
to take a lot more time to analyze gen casts,
systems and results to make certain that in fact, what
appears to be an improvement is really the case, right,
(23:16):
Because it could just be that it looks like it's
an improvement, but maybe over the long run, when you
get a larger sample size, those advantages might wash out.
We don't know. I hope they don't wash out, but
you need a lot of testing to make sure that
these things are actually more accurate. But this is the
sort of AI application I can actually really get behind.
(23:38):
If we can develop AI that is more effective at
analyzing data and patterns than we are in order to
do stuff like forecast the weather, I think that's great.
I think if people have an accurate or at least
a pretty accurate forecast, that if there are signs of
severe weather on the horizon, they can have more time
(23:59):
to prepare for that. I think that could save countless lives.
But we have to understand also that weather is an
extremely complex phenomena, and even a really effective model is
going to get things wrong sometimes. I know people who
get mad when it's been predicted that there's going to
be really traumatic, like severe weather, and then it turns
out to not be so bad, and they get angry
(24:20):
about it, And I'm like, y'all are angry about the
wrong things. I would be angry if I were told
it was just going to be a little bit of
a sprinkle outside and then a tornado tore my house down.
That's when I would get mad. I don't get mad
the weather's not as bad as I was told it
was going to be. I don't know, I'm probably a weirdo.
Bill Nelson, the administrator for NASA, announced that the agency's
(24:42):
Artemis program is going to experience a bit of a delay,
and I think this comes as a surprise to absolutely
no one. I'm pretty sure that I've mentioned a few
times this year that I thought NASA's earlier plan for
Artemis was overly ambitious. But right now, the Artemis mission
the next one, which is to send astronauts on a
(25:03):
trip that will take them around the backside of the
Moon and then back to Earth, not landing on the Moon,
just going around it. That mission has now been pushed
back to April twenty twenty six. The Moon landing mission,
which would return astronauts to the lunar surface for the
first time since nineteen seventy two, has now been pushed
back to twenty twenty seven. Further, Trump's pick for the
(25:26):
new head of NASA is Jared Isigmann, who is a
filthy rich businessman who back in twenty twenty one paid
SpaceX and undisclosed amount of money, but I imagine it
was a princely sum to fly aboard a SpaceX mission
in an all civilian space tourist mission. He would later
on fly in a second space tourist mission to become
(25:49):
the first space tourist to participate in an EVA. That's
an extra vehicular activity or spacewalk. Do you and me?
And In very sad news, we learned not too long
ago that Marshall Brain, the founder of HowStuffWorks dot com,
committed suicide in his office at the campus of North
Carolina State University. Brain founded how stuff Works in the
(26:12):
nineteen nineties. He used his passion for learning and communicating
to build a site that aim to explain how everything works.
He would later launch a podcast called brain Stuff that
would become the first of many stuff shows to launch,
including tech Stuff, and the story obviously has a big
(26:32):
personal impact on me. I literally would not have the
career I am in right now without Marshall Brain. I
wouldn't be here, I wouldn't be doing this podcast. I
met Marshall Brain several times, but we never actually worked
together on any projects. Some of my colleagues spent much
more time with him, and all of us from the
Stuff era are still processing this and grieving for his family.
(26:57):
I have no real details to share about his story
and what led up to him deciding to take his
own life. There are pieces in outlets like Ours Technica
that shed a little more light into what was going
on leading up to his death, but I don't feel
like this is the right place to dive into that.
I would just like to say that if you are
(27:17):
struggling with thoughts of suicide, reach out for help. There's
no shame in reaching out for help, and I, for one,
would prefer a world that has you in it. That's
a very heavy note to end on. I do have
a couple of additional reading suggestions for all of y'all
before I head out. First up is a piece in
The Verge by Elizabeth Lopoto titled stop using Generative AI
(27:41):
as a search engine. Lopato details incidents in which people
have used generative AI to answer questions only to receive
incorrect answers, often with invented details that just never really
happened in the real world, which is really similar to
what I found when I use chat GPT to quote
unquote write an episode of Tech Stuff. You know, if
(28:02):
you haven't listened to that episode, you should, because I
bring up some big concerns I have as a result
of what I got when I use chat GPT to
do that. But check out Lopato's piece for more insight
into that issue. And finally, I recommend reading Tim Cushing's
piece in Tech Dirt titled Federal Court says dismantling a
(28:24):
phone to install firmware isn't a search, even if it
was done to facilitate a search. So essentially what the
story is saying is that a court has decided that
law enforcement officials do not need to secure a search
warrant before attempting to compromise a phone or other device
like a laptop. But once they do get access to
(28:45):
that device, they then would need to get a search
warrant in order to actually search the device. They wouldn't
be allowed to search it after breaching it unless they
had the warrant. They just don't need the warrant to
start the process of breaching the device. Moreover, the essentially
hold on to the locked or defunct or broken device
for as long as they need to before they're able
(29:06):
to crack it open. So check out that article. He
brings up some pretty interesting arguments about the good and
the bad of that, and he advocates for more of
a more clarity around this from a court perspective, which
I think makes sense, Like we live in that world
(29:26):
where this is a very real possibility and the laws
that guide us around illegal search and seizure were not
equipped to handle those kinds of scenarios, so we really
do need more clarification on that. That's it for this
episode of the tech News of tech Stuff. I hope
all of you out there are doing well, and I'll
(29:49):
talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an
iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio, app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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