The Tech Jawn: Black Tech Enthusiasts Covering The Week's Tech News And How Tech Affects Black Culture

Adult website Pornhub blocks access in Mississippi and Virginia over age verification laws. Will constituents push back against lawmakers? Bipartisan support for a proposed bill eying a ban on TikTok has analysts recommending that investors buy Meta properties.   Microsoft CEO, Satya Nedalla, would love to end exclusive titles on gaming consoles, but, admits that the market leader,...

Meta is yanking news off Facebook and Instagram in Canada because the country’s newly passed Online News Act will force the company to pay news organizations for their content. We’re learning the fallout from the Reddit Blackout where subreddit mods took their channels private to protest the company’s new API pricing model is far from over. If you’ve accidentally signed up for or tried to cancel a...

Timnit Gebru, co-founder of Black in AI, advocate for diversity in technology, and founder of the DAIR, believes that we should have some type of government oversight for Artificial intelligence. The European Parliament, a main legislative branch of the European Union, passed a draft law known as the A.I. Act, which would put new restrictions on what are seen as the technology’s riskiest uses. AIs...

Many people think the price of Electric Vehicles is the biggest obstacle holding them back from switching to EVs, but, the availability of working charging stations is also a big concern. Thousands of Reditt communities went dark for 48 hours in protest over Reddit’s new API pricing model.  The question-and-answer giant will begin charging 2.4 cents per 1000 API calls in July. WhatsApp's new...

A USAF Colonial last week told a story about a murderous AI drone simulation, but, walked the story back this week claiming that he “misspoke”. YouTube ain’t even trying anymore when it comes to removing false presidential election fraud claims. The company states ‘The ability to openly debate disproven assumptions, is core to a functioning democratic society. 15% of new US-based iPhone users...

In honor of Memorial Day The Tech Jawn crew did not record a new episode so we are hitting you with a recent episode from the archives. In episode 74 we were joined by the founder and managing partner of RareBreed Ventures, Mac Conwell. We talked about the run on and ultimate failure of Silicon Valley bank, what actually happened, and how bad it could have been if the government didn’t step in. We...

DoorDash is facing a lawsuit claiming the food delivery service charges iPhone users more for identical deliveries than Android users. Google Photos, after misidentifying Black men as Gorillas back in 2015, disabled the ability to categorize apes, and 8 years later, still hasn’t turned the ability back on. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act which frees companies from liability due to us...

Google AI, err ughm, Google I/O kicked off last Wednesday. The company spent most of its 2 hours plus keynote talking about Artificial intelligence, and it also officially announced the Pixel Tablet and the Pixel Fold phone. Elon Musk has named a new CEO to take the helm at Twitter. Linda Yaccarino, a.k.a. The Velvet Hammer, is expected to officially move into the role in within the next 6 weeks....

Is ChatGPT better at picking stocks than hedge fund managers?  According to an 8-week study in the UK, the answer is yes, and it's not even close. The Writer’s Guild of America is currently on strike, and, one of their major issues is that writers do not want to be displaced by AI. #BlackTechTwitter may have found a new home on the invite-only, federated social media startup BlueSky. And, are...

Juice Jacking may not be as big of an issue as the FBI and literally every other media outlet made it out to be last month seeing how there are no reports of it ever happening on record. Monthly subscriptions for features on new cars may be the wave of the future, but, not many in the present are looking forward to this trend. Apple won an appeals court ruling against Epic, but, the maker of Fortn...

There is no way to sugarcoat it.  Google employees think Bard is trash and you simply can’t trust it even if its tongue came notarized. Meta will soon start doling out payments from the $725 million Cambridge Analytica settlement where it sold data on 87 million Facebook users. The SCOTUS will decide if public officials blocking users on social media is an affront to free speech rights. And W...

Netflix’s Love is Blind Reunion live stream didn’t go down as planned. It turns out the cast, not, the technology is the reason for the postponement. Consumers just aren’t buying computers like they used to. Global shipments of PCs were down 29% YoY. Apple’s Mac sales were down 40.5%. Will overseas outsourcing be the next wave of remote work? Companies now know that they can be productiv...

Rumor has it that Sony is working on a new handheld PlayStation built for remote play. The “Q Lite” is designed to stream games over the internet from a PlayStation 5. Walmart plans to build a nationwide EV charging network at thousands of stores. It’s a smart move that would make charging up convenient while customers shop. Tesla is facing a class-action lawsuit because employees are sharing...

In this week’s episode of The Tech Jawn, we cover a couple of tech stories like Twitter’s logo changing to the logo of Dogecoin and the open letter to pause new AI development for 6 months, but the meat of this episode is our interview with author, attorney, and COO of DEI Directive, Flo Nicolas . We talk about everything from how Flo transitioned from practicing law into tech at a big telecom com...

Will Melody Hobson’s $1.45 billion Project Black fund which plans to “minoritize” existing businesses help to narrow the wealth gap? Spotify has invested less than 10% of the $100 million it pledged to its Creator Equity Fund during the Joe Rogan controversy, and it doesn’t appear it ever took the pledge seriously from the jump. Things just keep getting worse for Twitter as the social media giant...

The U.S. is threatening to ban TikTok if its Chinese owners don’t sell their stake, but, the social media giant argues that a forced sale won’t address security issues. Google cancels Google Glass, again. Is this just Google being Google or a sign that augmented and virtual reality is nowhere near becoming mainstream? A potentially landmark copyright lawsuit could affect how libraries are abl...

This week on The Tech Jawn we are joined by special guest Mac Conwell, founder and managing partner of RareBreed Ventures. He hangs out with us to talk about the run on and ultimate failure of Silicon Valley bank, what actually happened, and how bad it could have been if the government didn’t step in. We talk about the ICAN Act, why Mac was called to testify in front of Congress about it, and how...

The August 2022 LastPass breach just keeps getting worse and worse. It turns out that a developer with “literal” keys to the kingdom was hacked on his home computer which, ultimately, lead to a series of unfortunate events. The U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee voted to give the President the power to ban TikTok, but, civil liberties and digital rights groups argue that such a ban would vi...

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wants workers back into the office at least three times per week, but, 16,000 employees, really ain’t trying to hear that. Google is changing directions when it comes to podcasting. The company has stopped adding playable links directly to search results and will soon add podcasts to YouTube Music. Screen time, like video games, may not have the adverse effects on children’s...

Twitter drops the less secure sms based two-factor authentication for free users, but, lets you keep it if you are a Twitter Blue subscriber.  Meta, taking a page from Twitter’s playbook is launching, Meta Verified, a Blue verification subscription for Facebook and Instagram accounts starting at $11.99 to $14.99 per month. Walmart is closing three tech hubs, asking employees to relocate, and...

This year, an anti-Tesla full self-driving ad aired in several markets during the Superbowl. The Dawn Project spent $598,000 on the 30-second spot, but, we aren’t certain what the motivation was. In Google’s official introduction of Bard, its’ ChatGPT-like large language model AI, the search giant published false information in an ad causing Google’s stock to drop nearly 10%.  It turns o...

Nex Cubed is launching a $40 million fund that will invest in startups where at least one founder is an HBCU student, alumni, or faculty. It’s a slow news cycle for Apple and we keep getting hit with rumors of new devices. This time a new ultra-high-end iPhone that could make its debut next year. Samsung held its Galaxy Unpacked 2023 event last Wednesday It unveiled iterations to the Galaxy S...

There are rumors that a foldable iPad could be coming as soon as 2024, but would the price of such a device be cost-prohibitive? The venture capital scene got substantially worse for Black Founders in 2022. Their companies only received about 1% of the $215.9 billion raised last year, down from 1.3% in 2021. TikTok employees pick favorites with a “heat” button putting their thumbs on the scale for...

Twitter shuts off access to several third-party Twitter clients with zero notice. Twitter had the right to do it, but, was Twitter right to do it? Apple announces new M2 processors, refreshed MacBook Pros, and less expensive Mac Minis in a recorded video. Have live press events for lesser announcements gone the way of the DoDo? Big Tech Layoffs continue into 2023, but, when you look at t...

Are black and brown renters being denied access to housing based on biased algorithms? A renter’s screening company says it's not its issue because it doesn’t make renting decisions. Wyoming wants to phase out electric vehicles by 2035. We don’t think lawmakers proposed this resolution with a straight face as they attempt to make a point to states like California and New York. Is all fai...