Hello.
I painted my nails the color of the dark dimension, but stuff still happened.
So what's up?
Ring, ring?
That's the sound of your doorbell spying on you and also getting you money.
Kind of.
Ring doorbells owned by Amazon were hit with a lawsuit from the FTC saying,
hey, your employees are illegally accessing user data, like accessing videos
taken by your doorbell without your knowledge, against your will,
and against their own terms of service.
Basically, the thing they said they wouldn't do, but they did it anyway
and they got a bunch of video to train their algorithms or something without telling anyone.
Beyond that, their lack's approach to privacy allowed hackers to hack ring doorbells and ring cameras and stuff.
Basically, hackers could just look at your videos.
Really cool, really cool, really cool.
The FTC is now issuing $5.6 million worth of refunds via like over a hundred thousand PayPal refunds,
which is certainly an option.
And this is actually the smaller of two FTC settlements with Amazon.
The other one being that Amazon's Alexa was storing the voice data and location information of children
for far longer than they said they would.
Very cool.
Love having a company create voice imprints and location data of children.
Really cool, but at least we can buy stuff with our voice.
Last quick note, Ring Only very recently changed their policy,
which previously allowed law enforcement officers to access your camera without your permission.
So, you know, we're running this again apparently because Harvey Weinstein's rape conviction
has been overturned in New York.
The New York Court of Appeals overturned Weinstein's conviction in the state of New York.
He's still convicted in California.
The argument was that he was not tried fairly in New York
and that the prosecution called witnesses that were not a part of the allegations,
which is just unfair to the guy who serially raped people.
Unfair to call people to the witness stand that could incriminate him.
I want to be clear, this does not mean that he's been found innocent instead of guilty.
They're basically calling a mistrial and it's just going to go over again.
Just a redo, a salty run back.
Here's a tip.
Don't use your local position of authority to sexually abuse women.
That's a tip from me to you.
More like rip talk.
I'm in danger.
Bite Dance has said that they would rather just shut down TikTok in the U.S. than sell it
if everything that goes through goes through.
Backing up for a second, the U.S. Congress just recently passed a TikTok ban.
It was part of a larger spending bill and the TikTok ban was like tacked on to it,
but it was passed and signed by Biden.
I'm not giving them any latitude here.
They threw this ban in on a must pass bill.
It's shitty.
It's garbage and it's shitty, but it's also probably not going to do anything immediately.
There's a year long grace period to begin with and there's also going to be just myriad lawsuits.
I find it personally very unlikely that TikTok will be going away anytime soon.
Follow me elsewhere though.
But with all that said, Bite Dance doesn't actually make a profit off of TikTok.
It's not profitable.
Many tech platforms are actually not profitable.
There's just an egregious amount of money in tech venture capitalism.
They can just kind of keep propping stuff up until it might eventually make a profit.
It's wild, but if Bite Dance were to sell TikTok, they'd be potentially exposing their algorithms,
which is their secret sauce.
All of these social media companies want to have the winning algorithm.
They don't want to share it.
And so when they're looking at it, they're like, well, we're operating at a loss.
And if we sell it, we expose our industry secrets.
So why wouldn't we just shut it down if you're going to force us to?
Now, you should still be mad.
The government should not have the authority to determine what apps you can and cannot use.
I do not care if it is a threat to quote national security.
The threat to national security that they're claiming is that other people might be able to influence your thought rather than them.
The threat to national security that they are afraid of is freedom of speech.
Even in the case of it being a foreign government propagandizing us or whatever,
the U.S. government is not allowed to determine what can and cannot be conveyed to U.S. citizens
because that would infringe free speech.
So there's not much water to be held in this bucket of their legislation.
I didn't sleep well last night.
Boeing is a very healthy and safe place to work for as an engineer who is focused on safety.
I'm going to blink twice now for no reason.
John Barnett, the guy who was recently found dead after being a whistleblower for Boeing,
he worked there for quite some time being a quality control manager.
During his time there, he raised concerns about faulty parts and processes that prioritized speed over safety.
And he was told to shut up.
He got pushed back.
It didn't go anywhere.
He eventually retired in 2017,
later finding himself testifying in an ongoing investigation into Boeing and why their planes keep falling apart in the sky.
And then after starting to give some really incriminating testimony,
he was found dead in what has been reported as a suicide.
Separately, the FAA is now investigating two union employees who were retaliated against by Boeing for raising similar concerns.
Now, this is America and we've got some very cool laws.
And one of those very cool laws is that commercial airline manufacturers can do their own manufacturing inspection on behalf of the regulatory agencies,
which is to say there are employees at Boeing whose job is to tell the FAA that Boeing is doing a good job.
But these people didn't do that.
They were like, oh, hey, Boeing is not doing a good job.
And then they were reprimanded.
They got very similar, terrible performance reviews, one of them left the company, and now Boeing is being investigated.
Overall, Boeing is having a very normal day and nothing is out of the ordinary.
Everything's fine.
Stop asking questions.
Game or time?
I've got my gamer stance.
Let's talk about gamer news.
David Kim, the lead designer of StarCraft Multiplayer, has founded a new game studio and is building a new RTS.
The studio is called Uncapped Games, and he's saying that this is going to be a paradigm shift for PC RTS games.
BlizzCon 2024 has been canceled.
Blizzard said this decision was not made lightly.
What they are planning to do instead is just show off stuff at other game conventions.
I think they've got some more things on their mind right now.
The last bit of gaming news for today is that Sea of Thieves is coming to PS5 this week.
It's actually the day after recording.
Lightning round.
Arizona has indicted a bunch of Trump's former goons from their like, 2020 fake-elector scheme thing, and they're not happy about that.
3D house printing is still a thing that's coming along, and recently a Portuguese company built their first two-bedroom house via 3D printing.
It's really cool if you haven't seen it.
It's like a giant arm that just like kind of poops out cement and just like goes along.
It's neat.
This guy in Belgium has a condition where his body produces its own alcohol and he was charged with a DUI,
but recently got out of the charges because he was like, I just, I can't not have alcohol in me.
Christine Noem, who is one of the front runners for Trump's potential VP picks, said in her memoir that she shot her dog and a goat while hunting one day
because the dog wouldn't learn and the goat was unruly.
And so now people are like, why did you just kill your dog?
What?
So don't, don't do that.
There's a company that's selling one of those like robot dog things, but they strapped a flamethrower to it.
They're saying it has use in wildlife control and agriculture.
This is a bad idea.
Aaron Sorkin has announced that he is working on a sequel to the social network and it's going to focus on like social media's influence on January 6th.
I have no idea what this is going to look like, but the social network was a very good movie.
So this, I hope this will be too.
Google's market cap has hit $2 trillion and stayed there.
There are two, two trillion dollars.
I don't, can I have some?
This is a casual reminder.
I po nothing.
The cops are legally allowed to force unlock your phone if you use facial recognition or thumbprint recognition.
So maybe consider turning off biometric unlock on your phone.
If you have an iPhone, you can hold the lock and power up button for a few seconds and it will lock your phone down and require a passcode to unlock.
And finally for today, a cat accidentally got shipped from Utah to California after stepping into an Amazon return box.
The receiving department at Amazon opened up a box and found a kitty.
It's okay though.
Everything is fine.
Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Stuff Keeps Happening.
Head to stuff keeps happening dot online for sources, bonus content and a accurate depiction of the creation of the universe.
If you are listening to this on some sort of podcasting application, I would absolutely love it if you could leave a positive review or, you know, if you hate me, you know what?
Honestly, I couldn't blame you for leaving an honest review.
But whatever your review is, I appreciate it very much.
And don't forget to share this around to anyone who might enjoy hearing it as well.
This is going really well.
So how do I close this down?
Thank you for listening and I will talk to you again in a week.
Nailed it.
I'm a really good podcaster.
Okay.
Bye bye.