Bytes: What’s new in tech
Kids’ social media ban vetoed
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis vetoed a blanket bill barring kids under 16 from opening social media accounts, said Natasha Singer in The New York Times. The bill, which was passed in the state’s legislature last month, “required certain social networks to verify users’ ages, prevent people under 16 from signing up for accounts, and terminate accounts that a platform knew or believed belonged to underage users.” Most social media sites, like Instagram and TikTok, restrict accounts for kids under 13. The bill “almost certainly would have faced constitutional challenges,” although it arrived at a time when more states are enacting restrictions around social media. DeSantis suggested that Florida’s bill “went too far by superseding the authority of parents,” and is pushing for a different child-protection bill.
Police use shortcut to track messages
Push alerts have become a powerful surveillance technique for law enforcement, said Drew Harwell and Aaron Schaffer in The Washington Post. To send a push alert, or pop-up notification, Apple and Google require that “the apps first create a token that tells the company how to find a user’s device.” Those tokens “are stored on servers run by Apple or Google, which can hand them over at law enforcement’s request” or via a court order. Last month, the FBI used push alerts from the TeleGuard messaging app to identify and arrest an Ohio man suspected of creating child pornography. The app was supposedly encrypted; however, “its developers had nevertheless allowed for the creation of a piece of data that linked back to users through their push alerts.”
A mountain of ‘technical debt’
A lot of software is too old but the expense of fixing it is prohibitive, said Christopher Mims in The Wall Street Journal. You can “imagine software as a giant mechanical contrivance.” Too many companies are “bolting more pieces onto” a clunky machine, while ignoring the “innards that may be straining under the burden of driving new functions.” Many of America’s banks and financial institutions use systems “that still rely on Cobol, a programming language first released in the early 1960s.” The constant pushing back of fixes results in what the software industry calls “technical debt”— increased costs for new systems that need to work around the old ones. Unfortunately, the cost of updating old software is estimated at more than $1.5 trillion—and “shiny new things” often take priority.