Week 14: April 2, 2018 - April 8, 2018
Twitter to cripple third-party apps
Third-party Twitter apps already have a hard limit to the number of users their apps can have. Now Twitter is preparing to cut support to some of their streaming API from third-party apps. This will make it impossible to have popup notifications and automatic refresh. Twitter will introduce a new account activity API but no details to the devs are revealed yet. Third-party Twitter devs teamed up to inform their users about the Twitter actions.
Facebook Privacy Issues
Facebook confirmed that the company is scanning imaged and links people are sending for violation of company rules. They also read chats if they are flagged by moderators. This is an automated system to prevent abuse and violation of certain rules and standards. Images are scanned and compared to certain pornographic and known child pornography images to prevent the sharing of those. Facebook says the system is very similar to the system that many other companies are using today.
On other privacy-related Facebook issues, the company will be making a feature that let users delete Facebook Messenger messages available more widely. Users noticed that many messages from Mark Zuckerberg disappearing. The feature is developed after the 2014 Sony hack and is allowing certain executives to delete messaged after some period of time. The company said it will take some time but it will make the feature available more widely and that in the meanwhile it will stop deleting executive's messages.
Apple rumored to use its own chips in Macs
Apple may be ready to use their own chips in Macbooks by 2020. Apple already started using Apple made chips in iPhones for some years now that have great performance. The chip in iPhone X is almost matching in performance a 2017 MacBook Pro and have great power efficiency.
After the rumors broke out Intel stock dropped a little but Apple is hardly the biggest Intel chip customer. Apple orders give Intel 5% of its annual revenue.
If Apple succeeds it will be the first of the major PC makers to use their own chips.
Google banned cryptomining extensions
Google banned cryptomining extensions from their Chrome Web Store in an effort to fight malicious cryptomining extensions. Cryptomining extensions were allowed as long as they stated and worked as a single purpose extension. Most (90%) of those didn't respect those rules.
As of now, no new extensions are permitted and from June existing extensions will be removed.
Bitmain rivals AMD/Nvidia
Beijing-based Bitmain announced new hardware that rivals AMD and Nvidia in mining specs.
Bitnamain's new ASICS has the following specs:
- 180 MH/s (megahashes per second)
- 800 watts of electricity consumption
- Retail price: $800
It is averaging 5x from the current GPUs used for mining but the price and power used is greater too. Overall though, it is almost 3 times more cost-effective per MH/s compared to the GPU hardware used today.
Soros and Rockefellers invest in Crypto
Soros Fund Management secured approval to trade cryptocurrencies. Rockefellers venture firm, Venrock also partnered with Coinfund to invest and promote blockchain business innovations. Crypto investors and experts believe that interest from big names in the industry like those will help with financial watchdogs and regulators which take any chance to attack cryptocurrencies.
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
