 This is Tech Talk with Buona episode 302 Don't track me, bro Welcome to Tech Talk with Buona this technology podcast covers tech news and reviews for the entire week And now here's your host me Buona McCall Greetings folks and welcome to episode 302 of Tech Talk with Buona. We got a great show Lined up for you got about five stories to discuss today is Sunday May it is May now Sunday May 5th the last year we did was in April. So goodbye April. Hello, May It's gonna okay. I'm not gonna do it. I'm not gonna do it I did the I did the whole in sync thing When April 30th rolled around and people are like want to stop I'm like no and I couldn't resist, but I'm not gonna do it here get a great show lined up for you Also, if you haven't already checked out my If you ever already checked out my other podcast on anchor.fm I have started another one called be rants where I rant about various topics. So if you have time head over to anchor.fm slash Buona for that small bite-sized Mobile recorded podcast. I think it's a lot of fun. It's a different format And it's easy to record so I can do it without stressing over post-production and all that kind of good stuff So without further ado, let's get going with the show For our first story, we will be talking about Firefox and Mozilla seems there was an issue With Firefox extensions according to this story over on in gadget calm Firefox has disabled all add-ons because of a certificate expiration and apparently this problem happened a while ago I think it was three years ago as Of the post as of right now the problem has already been addressed Firefox has already issued a update to fix this issue But on Saturday are actually on I believe it was Friday most of Friday people weren't able to use or install new extensions and people were clamoring and and and And just basically panicking running around didn't know what to do It just goes to show how reliant we've become on our browser extensions There was a workaround for this thing if you were running the nightly version of Mozilla Firefox there was an about config option you can turn on and Also, there's somebody found a workaround. I think it was one of the devs. I'm not positive They found a workaround where you could Go inside some files and reset some things, but you had to do that every single time you started the browser So if you close your browser, you get to redo it all over again. It was messy. It was messy So this is a controversial thing. I mean when it happened three years ago I vaguely recall people making a big stink about, you know, it's going to be a problem again Because if you have this kind of a certificate expiration tied to the life and death of Of your of your extensions Then if the extension if the certificate expires again, the same thing's gonna happen again I guess I guess Firefox was like well, well, we just won't let it expire again fast forward three years and the certificate expired and nobody could use extension Just another reason to use the brave route. Let me stop. I use the brave browser I love the brave browser, but you know, I respect fire. I respect Mozilla Firefox Not the browser for me right now, but I do respect them, but this is a this. This was very a very clumsy Embarrassing problem to let a certificate expire and when it did it essentially It crippled your user base to where they couldn't use their extensions, which are very popular things like last pass and People's ad blockers like you block origin and all these other popular extensions just stop working. I Saw a lot of people on Reddit and threads. They were talking about Switching to another browser until this got fixed people like I'm going back to Chrome or nobody mentioned brave though. I Was sad about that. I'm like just just come over the brave Just come the brave check it out guys over in the gadget in gadget.com They got the details the Firefox extensions were disabled for quite a bit But now they've been fixed and for our next story. We're gonna talk about Facebook. I am back on it Take a break But now we're gonna talk a little bit about Facebook and it is a positive spin on the company if you you know If you look at it from a certain perspective this article over on tech crunch calm says that Facebook is pivoting They're pivoting and the first line on this article is the future is private Well, how do you know what the future is if it's private? No, just joking Mark Zuckerberg was quoted as saying that on Facebook's roadmap at the Facebook developers conference in San Jose the future is private and Zuckerberg goes on record to say we don't exactly have the strongest reputation on privacy right now to put it lightly Haha Chuckles all around Understatement of the year but Facebook is essentially I said essentially essentially there's a there is a YouTube video up. I don't know if you guys know of somebody did the YouTube mix up of me saying essentially in all of my All of my podcast, oh, no it was essentially it was not that it was necessarily It was the word necessarily. It just showed me. I was cracking up at it like necessarily, necessarily, not necessarily, not necessarily. I just said it about a billion times and I don't think I say it as much anymore, but I do say essentially a lot, essentially. So those are one of my thinking words. You know what you do speaking. I am on a tangent right now. When you do speaking and stuff like that, stuff like that, there's another thing. You have these phrases that you turn to, you don't know what to say. You have to teach yourself to not say those things. And there's another one. And you have to replace it with silence to get yourself out of the habit of doing it. So old technique I learned when I was doing public speaking and teaching is that you need to teach yourself to, to rid yourself of those words and I'm trying to get better at that. I got a little lazy and essentially and necessarily and and dumb and all kinds of things. There it is. All kinds of things. I'm trying to crop up, but anyway, back to Zuckerberg. I don't trust them. I'm just going to come right out and say it. The future is private. That sounds nice on paper, but according to this article on tech crunch, they speculate that the future of Facebook is going to be their own version of what's the name of this service we chat that they're, they're going to be we chat for the rest of the world encrypted into in conversations in a walled garden with commerce and everything in this, which will be very, very lucrative in terms of money and revenue potential for Facebook. But you know, they want to keep it private. I don't know. So here's the thing about Facebook. They have, you know, they deserve forgiveness. I'm from a firm believer that everyone who is truly sorry, who is truly regretful of their actions deserves forgiveness, no matter what they've done. That's my belief. That's my core moral beliefs growing up is that everyone is capable of being forgiven. That doesn't mean you should forgive everyone, but I believe everyone is capable of being forgiven. It depends on whether they're truly sorry about their actions or are they sorry that they got caught those actions. I think Facebook is in a latter category from my outside perspective. I think Facebook is doing all these things because they got caught and they, they are taking this road to shit themselves of the negative press that they've gotten from being in the, in front of the judiciary committee, committee, in front of the Senate, in front of all the government officials defending themselves for doing a lot of bad things. And that, that all those hearings exposed a lot of bad, bad practices that people just didn't know that Facebook did. It brought it to the front. It brought it on front street, as my brother used to say, it's on front street. I think they just, they're sorry that they got caught and now they're backpedaling and trying to turn everything around and claim that they're going to be private. I don't believe that they will stay that way. Here's my suspicion. I think they're going to, their new plans is going to look good on paper and the information that they tell us will sound good and there won't be anything that anybody can find. But I truly believe they're going to revert back to their old ways because I don't see Zuckerberg just doing a 180 after this. It just, it just doesn't make sense. I don't think he's the type of personality that can just stop and turn and go a different, a totally different direction. That's just me. You know, I don't hate the guy. I don't know him personally. I just know from what I read about him. So it's definitely a external, unsubstantiated, biased opinion that I have. But I think that's what we all have of Zuckerberg, right? What we know about Zuckerberg and what we talk about Zuckerberg is what we read about him, right? So I think that's, that's fair to say. And I express my opinion about Facebook all the time, about how they just neglect basic privacy principles that should be common sense, but they just, they just feel like, hey, we can do this because we can do this. I think that's why they've, they've developed a lot of bad blood between a lot of consumers and privacy advocates like myself because they just do things. They don't ask for permission. You know, they, they're taking that, that, that saying of I rather ask for forgiveness than I rather beg for forgiveness and ask for permission. They're, they're taking that to whole new levels when it comes to privacy. They just do things. They just do it. They just don't care. They just do it. But we will see the future Facebook is private. I don't know. You got to convince me otherwise. Mr. Zuckerberg and Facebook.com, whether that's going to be true. Check it out guys. TechCrunch.com has this article. Facebook is pivoting and they claim that the future will be private for Facebook. We'll see though. We'll see. And for our next story, we're going to continue to talk about privacy. And we're going to talk about DuckDuckGo, which is my default search engine. I love DuckDuckGo. If you haven't been there, go to DuckDuckGo.com. It's a privacy-focused search engine, which doesn't track you. And they've been one of the big, big, big pushers of the Do Not Tract campaign. I believe they even own the domain, DoNotTrack.com or something like that. This article comes by way of searchengeland.com. And it states that DuckDuckGo proposes the Do Not Track Act of 2019. So what this proposed law is looking to do is to allow us to opt out of tracking from browsers. Are you probably saying, well, we can do that already? Well, it doesn't work. Because when we opt out of tracking, sites still track us. And that's the point that DuckDuckGo is making. They want DoNotTrack to actually work as it should, reason why we should care. As it says, DoNotTrack is a voluntary signal sent by browsers, which means sites have the option of respecting or ignoring it. So just because you enable this DoNotTrack thing in your browser, it doesn't mean that the systems or the sites out there can actually do it. They have to honor it. So if this particular proposal where they go through and pass it in the law, sites would be required to cease certain user tracking methods, which means less data available to inform marketing and advertising campaigns. So yeah, that's the goal of it. To have DoNotTrack actually be a hard switch rather than a voluntary thing. And I'm all for it because we call it the filter bubble. If you don't know what the filter bubble is, you probably have seen it, and you've noticed it. When you go to Amazon and you search for, let's say you're searching for a camera, and you search for a certain camera name you browse around, okay. And then you go to another site, and then all of a sudden you see ads about cameras. Oh, okay, you go to your phone and you're like, wait a minute, there's an ad that plays when you go watch YouTube, it's about a camera. Now if you go to Google and search for something, or if you search for a webcam, all of a sudden you're seeing ads about that other camera, you're seeing search results related to that camera that you searched for before, but not the camera that you're looking for. So essentially, the filter bubble that you've created based on your past actions and what these companies try to do is that they try to fashion your results and shape your results based on what they think you want to see based on past actions. So they're taking your data and they're using it across multiple sites to filter your results instead of giving you hard raw results like we've had in the past. You've got this different set of results based on what they think you want. And a lot of the times the results you get don't match what you need. So Do Not Track would help to prevent the filter bubble, which is a big, big deduct that Go has been preaching for years. So here's what this thing covers. The Do Not Track Act of 2019 says response to D&T signals or Do Not Track signals including consent, permitted uses, and anonymizing data, contractual obligations and liabilities including third-party tracking, transparency on how data will be used, which is very important, and enforcement, including fines for violations. And I think that last point is the most important. You can make what kind of law you want regarding these types of technologies because the laws really still, the laws of land haven't caught up to technology yet. They're slowly catching up. Unless they're sort of fine or repercussion, companies aren't going to change the way to do things, sadly. That's the world we live in right now on the internet is companies will just continue to do things until there's some sort of a consequence for doing that. And even if there's a consequence, if it's not really enforced, it doesn't mean anything. We talked about, I believe it was the FCC and Robocalling, Spam Calling, how so many people have been fined but they haven't collected on those fines. It's like millions of dollars fines that they've collected on like a thousand dollars or something, a really, really, really low amount. So sure, you can find someone, but if you can't enforce it, then it's pointless. So that's why this thing is worded as enforcement, including fines and violations. So do not track, hopefully this will get some traction. No pun intended. Hopefully this will get some traction because I firmly believe that if you tell your browser that you don't want to be tracked, it should actually work and you shouldn't have to hope that the website you're going to is not going to track you. Now I understand that there are people out there, they don't care about that. They don't care about, I'm not going to say they don't care about privacy because that could be a little harsh, but they don't care about being tracked, which is why I think this should be an option. If people want to be tracked, they like the way things occur when they're tracked, then they should not turn on do not track. This is for people who don't want to be tracked. It's a fairly simple point. Do not track me means do not track. Check it out guys. Searchinggeland.com has the details. DuckDuckGo proposes the Do Not Track Act of 2019. And for the next story, we're going to talk about the FCC and broadband internet. Ajit Pai says he's fixed a giant FCC error that exaggerated broadband growth. This story comes by way of ours, technica.com, essentially there, essentially apparently here I go again. There was an error in a broadband report that the FCC released and it understated numbers. One of the big mistakes which was caught by a group called Barrier Free, this is an advocacy group that was able to discover this error, that the FCC claimed that the number of Americans lacking access to fixed broadband increased. So more people got broadband. They said that the percentage of people without broadband had dropped from by over 25%. From 26.1 million to 19.4 million in 2017. But that N number was incorrect. It was actually 21.3 million, not 19.4 million. So it was about 2 million off. They overstated the number of people that gained broadband by about 2 million people. So it's pretty, I don't know, it's a 2% overall, I guess you can say 2%, not 2%, 10%, yeah, 10%. I can't math. It's about 10% error. So that's kind of big. 10% error to me is kind of big, especially when you're talking about this kind of stuff. A Jeep Pi, they released an updated press release that stated that it comes to the same conclusion that even after this revised broadband port, that they feel that we're doing a lot better in this area than we were in the past, because this whole thing started that the FCC said that we're making great strides in improving broadband in the U.S. There were some other errors in this as well. Let's see, there were some more corrected numbers according to ours, Technica, that 4.3 million Americans in rural areas gained broadband during the report period. And the FCC claimed that it was 5.6 million. So again, they're hovering around that 10% mark error. It's just like a whole million just like dropped. Free Press found that 2 million of those were due to the barrier freeze of running this filing. So actually, I got this wrong. Barrier free is not the advocacy group, it's free press. Barrier free is the group that provided this report that was incorrect. I got it completely backwards. I apologize for that. I knew it was something like that. They had the name free in it and free press, that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it. But anyway, Barrier free was the agency that made a mistake with this report and free press was the one who found it. And more errors, before the mistake, we discovered FCC to set that 250 down and 50 megabit up increased by 45% to 205 million Americans and the access to 100 down and 10 up increased by nearly 20%. And those were wrong as well. Also his release said that the deploying fiber to 5.9 million homes, deploying fiber to 5.9 million homes in 2018, the largest number ever recorded. But as this article successfully points out that this was due to mostly due to an Obama era FCC thing that required ATT to complete in 2015 when AT&T was allowed to buy direct TV. That's just how I got fiber. So I know about this. So there was a lot of errors in this, this agency, this company known as Barrier free, they really, really neglected a lot of numbers if you think about it. If you're going to include a report with millions of Americans and this is our statistics, don't be 10% plus off. Don't be that far off because it could really skew people's interpretations on deltas and where we've come and where we're going to go. Personally, I believe that the tail codes are not doing enough. I mean, there was a lot of stuff that was promised to us that we still haven't got in terms of infrastructure deployed. And a lot of these companies are looking at the bottom line rather than, you know, their responsibility to deploy this stuff. So there's a lot of fees being introduced illegally. And the good news is that they're being sued for this stuff. I'm seeing articles all the time about companies being sued for erroneous fees and erroneous, like things that appear on your bill that you don't know what is for is like some processing fee and all these different things that don't make sense and they're being sued for it. So they're having to pay millions. But I think in the end, they're probably going to save money, sadly, because the actual lawsuit settlement is going to be less than what they would have to pay if they had to do it. They had to do what they were supposed to do. Anyway, it's neither here or there, but I really believe that the infrastructure in the U.S. is still bad. I know people in a lot of places and I was like this for a while until AT&T brought fiber here, that they're stuck with either one company or no company. And that one company is really, really bad and their customer service is bad and they don't have to be good because you can't go anywhere else. It's like you don't have a choice. You either get their company or you try your success with some sort of a satellite internet company, which can be all over the place. Anyway, check this story out, guys. The FCC says that we're doing a lot better. And here's the numbers to prove it, but the numbers were really off, but they came to the same conclusion. Check it out. And for our final story, a man in Taiwan swallowed his AirPods. Yeah, he swallowed his Apple earbuds known as AirPods or wireless ones. And he said he accidentally swallowed it. Ben Suve reportedly fell asleep while wearing Apple's wireless head earbuds and found that he was missing one headphone when he woke up. He then used Apple tracking feature to find it, which prompts a loose AirPods that's connected with that's connected and within range to play a sound. He heard a beeping sound and he didn't know where it was coming from. He checked on his blanket. He looked around, but he couldn't find it. And then he realized it was coming from his stomach. Medics at Cow Swing Municipal Hospital indeed confirmed that the AirPods was in his stomach and was in the process of passing through his digestive system. The report said he said he found the AirPods the next day after passing it naturally. Oh, gosh. The the earbud was still intact and worked properly. After he cleaned it and let it dry, the battery was at 41%. I'm not making this up. It was incredible. So TLDR man falls asleep, eats his headphones while asleep, poops it out. And they still work and the battery life is at 41%. Apple, you should be proud. This kind of QA testing doesn't happen everywhere, man. Our headphones still work even after you eat and poop. Oh, my gosh, this is one of the most bizarre stories. The thing that got me like when I first saw the headline, I was like, how do you how do you eat AirPods accidentally? Like I was like, was he is this like a tied pod thing where he's just like going to swallow something stupid. But he fell asleep. And I guess he was dreaming he was eating some something. I'll do a cookie, some Reese's Cups. Because he didn't chew. He just swallowed. I am. That's the part that gets me. The fact that it still still works doesn't surprise me. You know, I'm that doesn't surprise me at all. The thing that surprises me is how he managed to eat it while falling asleep. Nobody's explained that. I haven't seen that. I haven't seen this article. But how in the world? This article says it's not the first time electronic devices have been swallowed in 2016. A man in Ireland swallowed an entire cell phone and had to undergo surgery to remove it from his stomach. What are you all doing in Ireland, man? The incident was documented in the International Journal of Surgical Case Reports, and the man is said to have recovered normally. A 13 year old girl in South Korea also swallowed her misfit shine and fitness tracker, which also still worked after doctors removed it. People just eating everything, man, like like kids, like two year olds. It's like, don't eat your phone. How do you eat a phone? These are dares. I'm convinced these are like dares. These are tie pods. So you're like, it's over on businessasider.com. They got the details. This guy swallowed his air pods and pooped them out. They still work. And that concludes episode 302 of Tech Talker 1. I want to thank you all for listening to this show. Please, please subscribe to this podcast and my other game chat with Buona. Go to Buona.tv slash podcast for all the subscription links or you can check the article description to see how you can subscribe on Spotify, iTunes, on Google Play. What happened? Also, check out my short, my short form podcast called Be Rance over on anchor.fm slash point. You can check it out. I stream weekly, daily, almost every day. Twitch.tv slash Buona. We stream a lot of stuff. We hang out. We talk. We talk. We talk some more. Twitch.tv slash Buona, which I now have got a URL. Short URL called Buona dot live from one of my new sponsors over there over on Twitch. I'm sponsored by Hover over there now. You ever heard of hover dot com? If you guys can, if you want to buy a subscription, head over to hover dot com slash Buona. And when you use that link, I'll get a cut. You guys can get 10% off using that link and you can buy your own domain over there. So I appreciate that over at hover. I'm going to see if they want to extend that to podcasting, you know, and then I'll do a formal thing here. But, you know, head over to Twitch and if you want to use hover, you can check that out. We got merchandise too, guys. We got merchandise at www.designbyhumans.com slash shop slash Buona. So I've got a couple of things up there. We got a t-shirt. We got a mug and we got some stickers up there right now. Looking to expand, but, you know, we got to get people to buy stuff so that I can get a better variety of stuff from Design by Humans. So that's that's the goal over there is YouTube. We're going to be making some changes over there at our YouTube channel. You look for some updated formats and some more higher level productive production content. We're going to kick it up a notch on the quality. Try to make things a little bit better and try to monetize this thing a little bit better because our YouTube channel right now could be a lot better. So we're going to try to put some effort into that. So check it out if you can. Instagram.com slash Buona YouTube. I'm sorry, Twitter.com slash Buona. Those are my main socials and join our Discord. We have a community discord at discord.gg slash Buona. This is Tech Talk with Buona Episode 302. You guys have a great, great week and I will see you all next time. Bye bye.