Week 22: May 28, 2018 - June 3, 2018
China investing in Foxconn
Foxconn Industrial Internet, a huge manufacturer for Apple and other companies, had its initial public offering. Big companies like Baidu, Alibaba Group Holdings and Tencent Holding are investing a total of $45 million to buy 21.8 million of Foxconn's shares.
The company plans to raise $4.3 billion to start new manufacturing projects such as fifth generation wireless technologies.
Other notable companies that are investing are the China Railway Corp. and China Life Insurance Co.
Google on Project Maven
Google will not renew the contract it has with the Pentagon after it ends in March of 2019. Google's contract with the Pentagon is about providing artificial intelligence technology to improve the analysis of video images that aims to be used on targeting strikes with drones.
That project was very controversial inside Google and cause the resignation of some people over this military project. Many more people in the company signed a petition wanting for Google and the contractors to never build warfare technology.
Xiaomi's new flagships
Xiaomi announced their new flagships including a very iPhoneX-ish design for the new Mi 8. The basic model costs $420 and have the following specs:
- Snapdragon 845
- 6GB Ram
- 64GB storage
- Dual 12MP Cameras
- 6.21-inch 2238x1080 AMOLED screen
It also has the controversial front notch that includes the camera and the sensors necessary for Face Unlock. Lastly it has the usual for Xiaomi rear fingerprint and as they must copy non-features as well, no headphone jack.
The higher cost model ($580) has in addition a front in-screen fingerprint reader as well as 8GB of Ram and 128GB of storage. It also feature a fancy transparent back which you can see the mainboard of the phone MIUI 10 (which has a new recent screen, an assistant, gesture control and of course... Animojis).
ASUS' crypto-mining motherboard
Asus announce a new motherboard that can support up to 20 graphic cards to be used for mining. The H370 motherboard has 20 PCIe-over-USB ports for simpler connectivity to the mining hardware. Last years model sold better than Asus expected and that motivated for the new model. The motherboard will launch later this year with no price announced yet.
Cryptocribs, a crypto BnB
Cryptocrips aims to be a decentralized Airbnb. It allows you rent a place and pay with cryptocurrency only. It currently lists 1,500 or so host all over the world which is not much but it is a start. Founders aim to combine Airbnb and Craiglist with decentralization.
The company says that they will always host listings but the bigger plan is to build a decentralized platform for other developers to build reputation based applications.
Hackers: Now accepting crypto
A hacker group that stole information about 50 thousands of Canadian bank users a demanding a total of $1 million in XRP cryptocurrency or they will release the data that they stole.
The data they stole include, security questions and answers, account balances and insurance numbers.
The hackers claim that it was easy to perform the hack because the system was using too much permissions to half-authenticated users. The check for the right password was only done after the security question was input correctly.
In general Banks and other institutes have a practice no to make payment to extortionists or fraudsters.
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
