Week 11: March 12, 2018 - March 18, 2018
Amazon could worth 1 Trillion Dollars in 4 years
Jefferies (a global investment banking firm) says in an analysis that Amazon stock trend shows that the company could be on a track to worth 1 trillion dollars by 2022. The biggest retailers behind Amazon are the Alibaba Group Holdings and Walmart Inc. The analyst from Jefferies sees a big growth in ad business as Amazon aggressively pushes more in that direction.
Million of Facebook accounts harvested for manipulation
A whistleblower revealed how the company Cambridge Analytica spend $1 million to harvest data about 50 million Facebook accounts. The data were analyzed and used in software to help predict and personalize political advertisements to influence the voters. The company owned by Robert Mercer and at 2014 was headed by a key advisor of Trump, Steve Bannon.
Facebook suspended Cambridge Analytica from their platform since they found out about the incident.
CTS Labs on AMD vulnerability report
CTS Labs, a recent Tel Aviv-based security company released a report showing many AMD Ryzen and EPYC processors vulnerabilities. Usually when a good cybersecurity company or a researcher find a serious bug or flaw in an operating system, hardware etc it gives it to the company and provide a timeline of about 6 months (if it is serious) to fix it, before disclosing it. CTS Labs gave AMD 24 hours before releasing their report.
Many users, sites and experts are speculating that the whole report is to bring the AMD stock down after the recent security problems from Intel. Many reports are heavily aggressive towards AMD and not the technology flaws reported.
Linus Torvalds, Linux's creator, said in a post about the security problems.
"When was the last time you saw a security advisory that was basically 'if you replace the BIOS or the CPU microcode with an evil version, you might have a security problem?' Yeah."
And lastly a quote from their legal disclaimer:
Although we have a good faith belief in our analysis and believe it to be objective and unbiased, you are advised that we may have, either directly or indirectly, an economic interest in the performance of the securities of the companies whose products are the subject of our reports.
I am not going to speculate, but the report and the company is unusual in many ways.
Report about Americans use of cryptocurrency
A report by Finder shows that not many American actually own cryptocurrencies yet. The research was done to 2001 American adults and it shows that 11,9% of men and 4,3% of women own cryptocurrency.
Mostly they own Bitcoin or Ether coins and they are divided in order of year born:
- 1980-1994 (Millennials) 17% owns crypto
- 1965-1979 (Generation X) 8,75% owns crypto
- 1946- 1964 (Baby Boomers) 2,24% owns crypto
Credit: Finder-commissioned survey
Coinbase gets licenced in the UK
Coinbase obtained a e-money license in the UK. They also opened an account on Barclays that will make it easier for deposits and withdrawal of money. The license will make it easier to issue e-money and partnership with more local companies there. It will also extend to more than 20 countries as part of the European Union (for now).
This is mean mainly to speed things up regarding deposits and withdrawals of fiat money which for now it can take days.
Twitter to be the next to ban cryptocurrency ads and scams
After Facebook and Google, Twitter is reported to be the next to ban cryptocurrency ads. Twitter also plans to take actions to reduce the amount of cryptocurrency scams, meaning mainly accounts that impersonating other people and asking to send them coins.
The rumors say that the ban will affect all Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs), token sales, and cryptocurrency wallets in all countries.
That is all for this week's Bits in Technology. Feel free to comment any of the news in the comments. See you all next week.
Have a great week! - Chris Myll
