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Talking Tech with Carmi Levy · Kvetch & Release

• 0:03
  Welcome back to AM eight hundred ckl W. I love it when I get
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  an opportunity to talk tech, and I love it when I get to chat
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  with Carmi Levy. So let me tell you, like this is a perfect
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  confluence of the two things. Carmie, how you doing today? You are
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  one of the foremost tech experts that I get to chat with on a regular
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  basis. Well, I'm talking with you, John, So it's a happy
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  day for me as well. I promise you. The pleasure is absolutely online.
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  I love when we get to just nerd out on there. It absolutely
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  makes my day every single time. And thank you so much for having me.
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  Well, thank you for joining. Well, listen, there's some interesting
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  news that's happening right now in the country. The first one here we found
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  out yesterday that online streaming services must now pay into a fund for Canadian news
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  and content. What is happening here, Carmie. Well, so we've all
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  heard about Bill c. Levin, which became the Online Streaming Actist the law.
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  It was an act of last year. It passed the House, had
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  passed the Senate, it received royal assent. All that good stuff. What
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  normally happens whenever a law like that becomes the law is then it gets handed
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  over to our national regulator, in this case the CRGC, and then they
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  figure out how to enact it, how to make it manageable in the day
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  to day, What are the rules that are going to apply to everyone,
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  what's it going to look like in practice. So that's what the CRGC has
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  been doing. They've been holding public consultations, they've been figuring stuff out,
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  and they've been issuing announcements about what this law is going to look like as
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  it is enforced. And so this week their announcement was a big one.
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  They basically said that streaming services like Netflix or Disney or Spotify, they are
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  now going to have to pay upwards of five percent of their annual revenue into
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  a fund that will then go to provide funding to local and Aboriginal broadcasting,
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  local news and local news on radio and TV, which of course we know
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  have been signific short funded in recent years, as well as French language content.
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  So what this does really is it levels the playing field because for years,
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  traditional broadcasters had to spend on this, whereas traditional streaming companies did not.
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  You know, your Netflix subscription, big American company comes into Canada,
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  collects billions of dollars in revenue from Canadian subscribers, doesn't contribute back to the
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  market to ensure that Canadian production, Canadian productions can see the light of day.
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  So this just ensures that everyone's playing by the same rules and it ensures
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  that funding continues to flow to make sure that Canadian stories get told, Canadian
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  productions get made. Canadians who work in the entertainment and production industry will continue
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  to have jobs because the money will be there. So this is a really
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  important announcement. Netflix of course not very happy about it, as we would
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  expect, but it really is a good news story for Canadians. So it's
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  gonna be raising two hundred million dollars a year, I see here, But
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  I guess my question, and this is not a tech side of things,
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  but just since we're on this, I got to imagine they're probably going to
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  be raising our bills by I don't know, an equal amount to what they're
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  losing to make up for it. But you're absolutely right. There is never
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  a free lunch in anything, and that definitely applies when it comes to your
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  streaming bill. So if anybody thought that Netflix and others were simply going to
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  swallow that two hundred million dollars a year and not pass that on to us.
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  I think that would have been spectacularly naive. So no, we will
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  over time and likely be spending more on our subscriptions because of that. Those
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  costs will be passed through to us. But I think as Canadians we need
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  to really think about what is the cost? In other words, if our
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  Netflix bill could be two dollars a month less, but we would have a
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  Canadian production industry that was in trouble that you know, your kids couldn't get
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  jobs in this industry because there just wasn't any money for it, and Canada
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  would no longer be able to produce great TV and movies and radio. Would
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  we really want that? So a cheaper Netflix bill versus a vibrant Canadian you
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  know, Canadian cultural landscape, I think most of us would pay a couple
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  of months, a couple bucks more for a month in order to have that
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  advantage of Canadian funded productions north of the border. At the end of the
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  day, you know, you sort of have to decide what is the the
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  greater cost. And I think in this case, starving Canadian productions. Really
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  wasn't an answer than anybody would have been happy with. Yeah, well,
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  we'll see how it all unfolds, because we're seeing statements from all of the
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  streaming companies. We'll assess and see what it looks like. But it's probably
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  gonna be bad for Canadians. We'll see what the RD for Canadians looks like.
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  Watch that bill and be prepared to look at your offerings to drop the
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  services if they're too expensive, or maybe move to an ad supported to her
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  to save yourself a few bucks every month, which is a good strategy.
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  Also, now let's move on talking about deleting evidence and dismissing reports. What
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  is going on with our Canadian agencies and fighting cybercrime. So we have an
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  augurer gen Her name is Karen Hogan, and she took a look at how
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  the federal government held all of their departments and agencies. How are they dealing
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  with cybercrime? In other words, when cybercrime happens, does Canada have a
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  comprehensive strategy to deal with it? The Canadians have the resources in place that
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  they know where to go if they've been defrauded or if they've been somehow compromised,
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  their data has been breached. And what our Auditor General found out was
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  that really it's a disconnected mess that you have all sorts of different organizations,
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  the RCMP, the Communications Security Establishment or the CSC, the CRTC, public
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  Safety Canada, and everybody's got different resources and different websites and different platforms and
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  different rules and different points of contact, and no one seems to be in
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  charge. And what often happens is if you're a Canadian and you file a
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  report with one of them saying hey, I've been cyber preached and I had
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  to have a problem, please investigate, if they managed to file it with
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  the wrong organization, what ends up happening is the organization in some cases will
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  say sorry, we're not the organization to deal with that, but we will
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  let pass that information along to the right organization. In many cases that never
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  gets shared. So what ends up happening is Canadians are being victimized by cybercrime,
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  but the organizations that are tasked with keeping them safer aren't coordinating amongst themselves
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  to ensure that we are safe, and that is a huge problem. Otter
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  General basically says, we've got to do better. So This would be like
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  picking up the phone calling nine one one. They say they're sending an officer
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  over and nothing happens. That's right, And oh, leo, you shouldn't
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  you shouldn't be calling us. You should have called these other people, call
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  this other lawn maybe nine to one two, whatever it is. But don't
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  worry. This time, we will call them and let you let them.
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  We'll send them along. And then they drop the ball. The report sits
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  in a corner somewhere gathering dust, and nothing ever happens. It's terrifying,
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  especially considering just how significant cybercrime has become. We hear but cyber attacks almost
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  every day. Now, they're getting bigger, they're or sophisticated, they're making
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  more money off of the backs of hard, hard working Canadians. And now
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  we find out that the federal government really doesn't have any plan at all to
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  keep us safe. And that is one of those things that keeps me up
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  at night, because you would expect, if we have law enforcement for all
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  other kinds of crime, that we should have similar kinds of law enforcement resources
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  in place for cybercrime. And according to this report, clearly that is not
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  the case. It's just wild to think that it's not at least on the
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  government's radar enough to be talking about it, studying it, trying to figure
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  out what to do about, you know, getting to a stronger level of
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  it nationally because and you know subnationally as well, all through all levels of
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  government. Because as you were saying, I mean, cybercrime, it can
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  affect you far more than someone you know, mugging you on the street.
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  You could lose absolutely everything. If they're able to get into your systems,
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  they could impersonate your identity and steal it. I mean, it's it's terrifying.
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  It is. And anyone who's ever spoken to victim of a cybercrime,
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  and I certainly have, you know, over the years, and increasingly so
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  in recent years, it's become an increasing sort of percentage of my practice is
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  that you know, the damage isn't just a one time thing. It's ongoing.
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  It can affect people for life. And that's just in one case.
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  Imagine how many tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of Canadians are being touched
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  by this every year and they are not being supported by the governments that claim
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  to be there for them. In some cases, evidence that was supposed to
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  have been passed on to law enforcement. What was not passed on. In
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  some cases, it was deleted, you know. In other cases, the
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  right kinds of people who should have been hired for certain jobs were never hired
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  because no one bothered to write the job descriptions. I mean, all of
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  these things are just it strikes me as incredibly bushly. But considering just how
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  significant cybercrime has become, we simply can't afford to drop the ball on this
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  one because those costs are going to continue to mushroom throughout society. And we
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  can either invest now in fixing this and ensuring proper coordination, or we're going
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  to pay for it big time on the other side. And I don't think
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  Canadians really want that. No, I would agree with you on that one.
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  Now, these first two stories, while they've been you know, very
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  fun and they have more of a tech legislation focus, we haven't really had
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  an opportunity to week out Karmie, and I think that this is our opportunity
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  here. With these AI headphones. Okay, apparently you're going to be able
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  to hear a single person in a noisy crowd. Yeah, they call them
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  targets. Down hearing and it comes to us. It's a research project from
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  scientists at the University of Washington. It's an AI powered headphone system that allows
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  you to essentially look at someone in a crowd, and then what the headphones
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  do is they identify that person and the zero in on them and they focus
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  just on what they're saying, and they filter out what anyone else is saying.
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  Anyone who's ever warned hearing aids and when you're in a big crowded situation,
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  my mom wears them and she struggles with us all the time. It's
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  very difficult to focus in on the person that you are talking to and ignore
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  everyone else. The hearing ad just wants to pick up everything and amplify it.
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  So what this artificial intelligence does is it identifies the person that you're talking
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  to, and it manages to filter at everyone else. It's incredibly intelligent.
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  It knows when the person that you're talking to is moving around the room,
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  so it continues to follow them. And essentially it means that people who have
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  hearing disabilities, including my mom, stand a chance of having better communication,
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  better interaction, all thanks to AI. You know, it's interesting because AI
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  always get such a bum rap. We always talk about the dystopian stories around
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  AI. It's going to make humanity go extinct, it's going to take our
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  jobs, it's going to kill the economy. But there's so many examples of
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  artificial intelligence in medical applications like this one, where it makes such a difference.
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  It can detect Alzheimer's years before current techniques. It can identify certain cardiac
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  and neurological diseases also far earlier. This will save lives and improve the lives
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  of others. And this is a perfect example of that. And so you
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  know, from where I sit a I's got two sides to it. This
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  is one of the positive ones, and I absolutely hope right now it's only
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  prototype, but it's one of those technologies that you can see it. You
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  can see an Apple, for example, looking at us and going, hey,
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  why don't we take the software and incorporate this into our AirPods. And
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  so now hearing aids are no longer something that cost thousands of dollars and are
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  proprietary technology. It's something that you can buy for a few hundred bucks at
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  at Electronics Stir near your house. I think we could all go for that
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  and certainly you don't have to be a senior citizen with hearing problems to appreciate
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  that we will all benefit. Well, that's just it sounds incredible the technology,
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  but also the application for it, as you said, just truly able
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  to really help and change lives. And that's when technology is at its absolute
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  best. Karmie, I love talking with you. I'm glad we got to
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  geek out on the last topic there. You're the tech expert I go to
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  and I want to learn more. Thank you for your time today. Really
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  appreciate being here today with you. John, Thanks so much for having me. Thank you