Whoa! It’s been a week. I made it back home alive after Mark’s visit to DC. It’s another Thursday, and I’m back in the saddle with Mark Starling, Seth, John, and the First News 570 crew. This week’s top tech stories: Facebook was down for the count, small businesses lose out, and Windows 11 launches with new Start button. You can listen to Mark and I point and laugh while talking about the wild and crazy technology world every Thursday morning, LIVE at 6:43am Eastern.

FACEBOOK WENT DOWN FOR HOURS: MEMES WIN

On Monday, the Big Blue App family went down for almost six hours. For an app where people check the screen several times an hour, it was an eternity. Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp were also down because all network paths travel to Facebook. The culprit? Somewhere in the bowels of Internetwork configurations, the Internet routing that points web browsers to Facebook.com were removed or misconfigured. Facebook issued a statement, “configuration changes on the backbone routers,” caused the outage. Computer networks need routers to point non-rememberable Internet addresses to Facebook.com. When these settings got messed up, your Facebook service did too. The conspiracy theorists believe the outage was prompted by Facebook whistle blower, Frances Haugen’s interview on 60 minutes. She was the person who left Facebook and delivered copies of internal memos to the Wall Street Journal. Honestly, this outage was caused by something stupid. Someone fat fingered something or uploaded the wrong configuration file. It happens ALL THE TIME.

since FB and IG is down, Twitter Party yall'!!!!!! pic.twitter.com/c1XKbCDtte

— domo (@D_Omogggg) October 4, 2021

FACEBOOK COST SMALL BUSINESSES REAL MONEY

It was estimated that Facebook lost about $100 million during Monday’s outage. The outage also removed $6 billion of Mark Zuckerberg’s personal fortune and $40 billion of the company’s market value. Today, many small businesses are using Facebook and Instagram as the sole source of their lead generation and sales. Many entrepreneurs were making hundreds and thousands of dollars per day on these social platforms. The outage made small business owners realize multiple sales channels are still a reality and relying on one company’s infrastructure isn’t the best practice.

WINDOWS 11 LAUNCHES WITH UPGRADED EXPERIENCE

Microsoft’s Windows 11 operating system launched on Tuesday. The latest operating system has a number of upgrades and changes with some changes making a comeback from Windows Vista. Windows has adopted rounded corners for icons and windows which users have become familiar with from phones and tablets. Widgets have made a comeback and are available via a retractable sidebar. And, the Start button has now been placed in the center of the screen. One new feature may keep users from upgrading. Microsoft has imposed a minimum requirement that a user’s PC must have a new TPM, Trusted Platform Module, security chip for the Windows 11 upgrade. If your computer doesn’t have it, you’ll have to buy a new PC. The TPM is a cryptographic chip used by security programs.

I’m ready for a wild night! Mark Starling is in the his-ouse and I wished work wasn’t bogging me down. I spent the last two days at the AWS Public Sector Summit and today I’m on the roof with Mark Starling, Seth, John, and the First News 570 crew. This week’s top tech stories: Amazon asks you to apply to buy its latest product, Instagram for Kids is paused by Facebook, and brand influencers cuss out the industries they flaunt. You can listen to Mark and I point and laugh while talking about the wild and crazy technology world every Thursday morning, LIVE at 6:43am Eastern.

NEW ASTRO MAY HAVE DEATH WISH CLAIMS DEVELOPERS

Not the mini-van. For the past two days, yours truly was one of the denizens of the AWS faithful and attended the AWS Public Sector Summit in Washington, DC. I haaaddd a ball, but it was work. Yesterday, while I was getting my last hobnob in with AWS executives, the company with the Smile on the Box announced Astro. A $999 robot you have to apply to buy. Astro is a household robot for home monitoring. It’s an Alexa powered, motorized little gadget with cameras, speakers, and a microphone for you to keep an eye on your stuff. It has a detachable cupholder that can also be used for bringing you drinks, snacks, and other miscellaneous items. Despite being an Alexa powered monitoring device, Astro is built for data privacy according to Amazon and can have its cameras, microphones and other sensors turned off. I think Astro is adorable. Amazon’s developers on the other hand disagree with Amazon having to come to Astro’s defense even before its released. Amazon engineers have said Astro is actually terrible, and has been known to roll itself down the stairs ending its digital life. Furthermore, leaks as reported by Vice has said Astro’s parts are prone to breaking. Look, I think this is great. My parents bought my sister and I remote controlled robot with a serving tray and microphone. I loved the thing! I hope Astro thrives. Astro is available by invite only. You know what I’ve done. I bow down to our robot overlords.

[Read more…] about Alexa Powered Astro Makes Debut, Influencers Give Industries the Middle Finger, Instagram for Kids Paused

Another wild week! Last night, I had heart palpitations thanks to some nonsense. Another busy week this past week. I’m on with Mark Starling, Seth, John, and the First News 570 crew. This week’s top tech stories: Iranian nuclear scientist assassinated by robot, new white paint cools buildings, and Cozomo de’ Medici doxxes himself. You can listen to Mark and I point and laugh while talking about the wild and crazy technology world every Thursday morning, LIVE at 6:43am Eastern.

IRANIAN NUCLEAR PHYSICIST KILLED BY AI ROBOT

It seems like more news is imitating movies. In a really wild story, an independent outlet has reported on the assassination of Iranian nuclear physicist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh. Fakhrizadeh was a member of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and one of the chief scientists of Iran’s nuclear program. Fakhrizadeh proved to be an elusive target for Israeli’s Mossad Special Services branch and ultimately resolved to assassinate the Iranian scientist before Joe Biden took office. From interviews with witnesses and reports from official and unofficial sources, it appears that Fakhizadeh was assassinated by a trained sniper, operating an AI-guided robot that was firing a machine gun from the back of a pickup. The sniper was operating the robot countries away, and the AI compensated for distance wind and more by killing Fakhrizadeh while he was driving with his wife. His wife survived the attack with no injuries although she was sitting inches away from him in the car. Things like this elevate the type of warfare and arms countries can deploy. Multiple outlets are confirming the story. It is worth the read.

PURDUE UNIVERSITY CREATES THE WORLD’S WHITEST PAINT

When it comes to technology, most of think about 1s and 0s or bowing down to our robot overloads. This week, Purdue University announced a groundbreaking innovation for paint. Purdue scientists have invented the world’s whitest paint. On the ahem, surface, that doesn’t sound important, but most buildings need to be air conditioned because of all of the solar radiation absorbed by the building. This new, super white paint reflects…98.1% of solar radiation. This means…the surface below the paint is cooled below the surrounding temperature WITHOUT consuming power. Covering an area of 1,000 square feet with this paint results in a cooling power of 10 kilowatts! Yes, you read that right and if you’re keeping up, you could paint the building with this stuff and not need to run air conditioning. Go science!

THE DO-DOUBLE-G IS REALLY COZOMO de’ MEDICI

We’re rounding out this week’s stories with one about Snoop Dogg. The rapper, face of 10,000 Crimes Cali Red, friend of Martha Stewart, marketer of INDOGGO, and pourer of gin and juice revealed he’s the NFT kingpin COZOMO de’ Medici. Cozomo arrived on the scene in August and reveled in collecting rare CryptoPunk NFTs and others worth $17 million. Snoop, uh, Cozomo has been dealing in NFTs for a while in Internet time. He released a track called NFT minted as an NFT in the spring, released his own Snoop Dogge coins, and collaborated with the Nyan Cat meme’s artist to create Nyan Dogg. For those in the audience NFTs are non-fungible tokens. A blockchain technology that provides a seal of authenticity for digital products.

Meanwhile, after debuting BitCoin as legal tender, many El Salvadorians are now protesting the crypto currency. Especially since BitCoin has just taken a HUGE hit in the last several days. It doesn’t help when the president is calling himself, dictator. Man, we just reported about this.

It’s Thursday, and this week has been an amazing week for technology news. We have a lot to share this week. I’m on with Mark Starling, Seth, John, and the First News 570 crew. This week’s news: regular people become astronauts and blast off a SpaceX rocket, the Fruit Company announces new phones and watches to burn money on, and the most powerful AI bot is…black. You can listen to Mark and I point and laugh while talking about the wild and crazy technology world every Thursday morning, LIVE at 6:43am Eastern.

ORDINARY PEOPLE BECOME SPACE JOCKEYS

One of this week’s big news items was last night’s Inspiration4 mission. Last night, around 8 o’clock, SpaceX flew 4 astronauts who were once ordinary citizens into space higher than the International Space Station. They flew 80 miles higher than the IST to a flight of 360 miles. Onboard were a GED holding payment processing exec, a physician’s assistant at St. Jude’s Hospital, a community college professor, and a Lockheed Martin data engineer. Flights like this are the proof the industry needs to show that spaceflight is safe for civilians. The flight used SpaceX’s Falcon9 rocket as the launch vehicle, and the Resilience capsule that was used to ferry SpaceX’s astronauts to the IST last summer. Capsule and booster were refurbished for the flight, demonstrating how close we are to making Earth escaping flights a regular thing.

FRUIT COMPANY ANNOUNCES NEW PRODUCTS YOU CAN BUY NEXT WEEK

The first set of big news for the week came from Apple. We teased their latest iPhone event on last week’s tech segment, and Apple delivered on everyone’s expectations. Apple announced a plethora of new devices, but are they enough to entice you to upgrade? Apple is shipping iPhone 13s all the way from regular to Pro Max. Apple has always touted its photo and video capabilities and this year, Apple has introduced Cinematic mode. A way of shooting video that allows you to shift focus around the scene, Hollywood style. Apple is saying this: the iPhone 13 shoots in Dolby Vision HDR, and…and…you are allowed to do all of these focusing tricks AFTER you shoot the video!

I’m sharing their promo video so you can check it out.

The latest iPhones are powered by a new A15 Bionic chip. This chip is the latest Apple silicon with a mind boggling 15 billion transistors. So, that’s 3.2 billion more transistors than the A14. That’s billions more with a ‘B’. Apple’s silicon has been outperforming other products for years now and it keeps getting faster. Apple’s phones will get better battery thanks to bigger cells and better code. The big one gets a whopping 1 terabyte of storage. Which is f-ing insane. You’ll need the pro for Cinematic mode. All phones are available next week.

Watches. Apple’s getting new watches as well. The new Apple Watch 7 will have a bigger display with thinner display borders improving the performance. The watch 7 will also feature a crack resistant display and faster charging. I thought it already charged fast.

Apple’s releasing new iPads as well. The iPad isn’t as ground breaking as it once was. The latest pro model will get the A13 chip which is old hat for iPhone users, but the screens are great looking still. After 2 years, the iPad Mini finally gets an update. The iPad Mini finally gets TouchID and a new Apple Pencil.

Everything is available next week.

You can watch a rerun here.

WILL C.L.AI.R.A. BRING SASSAFRASS TO GPT-3?

Earlier this week, the Creative Lab and leadership organization, Trill or Not Trill announced a new virtual AI named C.L.AI.R.A. C.L.AI.R.A. is a bit different in that she is a Black/Latina AI and is running using Generative Pre-Trained Transformer 3 technology, also known as GPT-3. Yup. The upgrade from GPT-2. That GPT-2. C.L.AI.R.A. is bilingual, Afro-Latina, and will be debuting at schools this month. The Creative Lab is a non-profit that has a mission of helping minority and poor communities obtain technology skills. If you are a regular First News 570 listener, you may remember we reported on a technology called GPT-2. At the time, GPT-2’s scientists had said the technology was too dangerous to place in public consumption because the writing and output of the tech made it very hard to distinguish between a human and a bot’s speech. GPT-3 is even more powerful with the highest class of the product being trained on 175 billion pieces of speech. I am super geeked out and fascinated by this. With three parameters you can get a machine to give you text/speech. I love it!

This means, and you need to understand this, you can tell GPT-3 a subject, and GPT-3 will do the research and give you back information on the subject in a human voice. A human voice making it hard for readers to tell. GPT-2’s scientists thought this tech would hurt humans by making it easy to spread misinformation and fake news that seems to come from credible sources. They didn’t think credible sources would spread misinformation and fake news on their on accord anyway. C.L.AI.R.A. has a generated face, generated voice, and the world’s most powerful artificial intelligence. What should we be concerned about?

You may not believe it, but I actually took some time off last weekend! I have an all day release planning meeting and the rest of the weekend should be coasting down hill. I’m on with Mark Starling, Seth, John, and the First News 570 crew. This week’s news: El Salvador is the first country to tenderly spend BitCoin, the FAA grounds Virgin Galactic, and Elizabeth Holmes v US heats up. You can listen to Mark and I point and laugh while talking about the wild and crazy technology world every Thursday morning, LIVE at 6:43am Eastern.

EL SALVADOR FIRST TO ACCEPT BITCOIN AS LEGAL TENDER

Yup. That’s right. Yesterday, El Salvador became the first country to accept BitCoin as legal tender. Which means businesses will be obliged to accept BitCoin as a form of payment for goods and services. El Salvadorean consumers will can submit BTC and US dollars for payments hence forward. El Salvadoreans are further encouraged to spend BTC thanks to the government’s new app which promises to give each citizen $30 in BitCoin after they’ve activated the digital wallet. BitCoin is highly volatile shifting between $20,000, $63,000, and $30,000 per BTC in the last year. Some consumers are excited, others are highly concerned about how secure their earnings will be.

THERANOS TRIAL STARTS, HOLMES PAINTS HERSELF AS VICTIM

I. Am a startup founder. *gasps* I get it. Startup founders are often high energy, high merchant, and the future is so bright individuals. Startup founders often overstate, it’s a problem, and that’s the defense Theranos founder, Elizabeth Holmes is using in her and Theranos wire fraud trial. US prosecution is trying to paint Elizabeth Holmes as defrauding investors out of almost $700 million in funding, versus inventing a product that wasn’t right or ready and flaming out like many startups do. Honestly, it’s hard to say if Holmes lied about the super fast and easy blood testing kits it was promising, or if she didn’t know what she was talking about. In the end, Holmes wasn’t the genius the press and investors made her out to be. But, investors aren’t the smartest people in the room anyway.

VIRGIN GALACTIC GROUNDED UNTIL FAA COMPLETES INVESTIGATION

After flying so high, it sucks to be pulled back to the ground. The FAA has grounded Virgin Galactic after its SpaceShipTwo aircraft veered off of its intended flight plan during its reentry. SpaceShipTwo is the craft Richard Branson was onboard during his flight into lower Earth orbit. Flight paths are critical for maintaining safe skies and SpaceShipTwo’s course deviated from the filed flight plan. Virgin Galactic says that the deviation was a minor, but purposeful course correction and that their flights are safe. Virgin Galactic will be able to resume flights as soon as the FAA completes an investigation into the flight and certifies VG is ready to blast off.

A big Apple event is scheduled for September 14th. I’ll be here and on-the-air next Thursday to report on what we believe will be the new iPhone 13 and possibly a new Apple Watch. Mark it on your calendar.

Hey, did you know I have a new book coming out. Subscribe to my mailing list at lessonsoncomputing.com to stay in the know.