Week 12: March 19, 2018 - March 25, 2018
Google to fight fake news
Google is introducing the Google News Initiative which will focus on three things to fight fake news more effectively. Its goals are to promote quality journalism, find sustainable business models for news organizations to grow and evolve those organizations technologically.
Google will also partner with more fact-checking sites and try to show better new stories during breaking news moments which is when many fake news stories surface.
The overall effort will cost Google up to $300million over the next 3 years.
Elon Musk deletes company pages after a dare
After all the "data leaks" from Facebook, the co-founder of WhatsApp tweeted to delete facebook. After Musk joked about "What's facebook?" a fan asked him to delete the company page if he is the man. Musk replied and then he has done just that.
The SpaceX's Facebook page had over 2.6 million likes before the deletion of the page.
Uber's Fatal Crash
An Uber self-driving car involved in a fatal car accident this week in Arizona. the LiDAR sensors didn't detect the on foot cyclist in time and the fatal accident happened. The conditions were very dark and it was hard to even see the woman.
Arizona banned Uber autonomous vehicles after the crash but the big question here is, would a human in a non-autonomous vehicle could have prevented the crash?
Caution: The following video shows the footage before the crash.
Ledger hardware wallet backdoored
A 15-year-old from the United Kingdom demonstrated a proof-of-concept 300 bytes long backdoor that is able to create specific recovery passwords so that the attacker can use those to recover the keys from the hardware wallet. Even though the vulnerability is patched the backdoor creator isn't sure if it can't be exploited again as this seems to be a root design problem of the microprocessor and not a simple bug.
More GPUs needed
Nvidia CEO said during an interview that many high-end GPUs are out of stock and the production needs to be further increased to meet mines and gamers demands. His quote was:
"We're sold out of many of our high-end SKUs, and so it's a real challenge keeping [graphic cards] in the marketplace for games ... we have to build a whole lot more ... We've got to come closer to the demand of the market. And right now we're not anywhere near close to that and so we're just going to have to keep running."
Many gamers are frustrated from the rise of the GPU prices due to the high demand for them. I will be making a more detailed articled about this matter in the furure.
Malta to become "Blockchain Island"
The world's biggest cryptocurrency exchange, Binance with a daily trading volume of $1.7 billion per day has moved its headquarters to Malta. The friendly attitude of Malta towards made them a great target for companies related to cryptos. Binance need to get their resources and more than 200 full time employees relocated to get started.
The way Malta deals and regulated crypto related matters will certainly help boost their economy and it already makes it ideal for other companies in the same space too.
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
