Thanksgiving week here in the USA, we see record sales, US Navy suffers data breach, Scotland’s unicorn sold to China, Oracle buys a DNS company, Twitter laying off over 300 people, a battery that lasts for weeks from a charge in seconds, and how swearing can show your intelligence.
- US Navy suffers data breach with 130,000 names out in the open
Another data breach story to tell, however this one is a little more unique considering it is the military data of current and in-active personnel that was hacked, from a consultant at HP when their laptop was stolen.
One has to naturally ask why an external consultant was hosting this data on their laptop in the first place? That exhibits very poor development processes. Shame on you HP.
- Scotland’s unicorn, Skyscanner, is sold to a Chinese company for £1.4B
A company based in Edinburgh founded in 2003 offering cheap deals on air travel and hotels sold to a Chinese company this week. What is interesting about this story is that illustrates that ignoring China may be a mistake; they only opened an office there in 2012 and then acquired a Chinese rival. A risky move at the time I am sure, but it has paid off now.
Incidentally, speaking of unicorns, did you know that the unicorn is the official animal of Scotland? I just made your next dinner party more interesting – thank you.
- Dyn, the DNS company, sells to Oracle for $600M
Another healthy purchase, is that of the start-up come good, Dyn, who provide DNS resolution services for many of the big properties of the Internet. Oracle has snapped them up to further cement their move into the cloud industry. Dyn are a great company, so let us hope Oracle, doesn’t get all Oracle on them and leave them to do their thing.
If the name Dyn sounds familiar then you are right, they were taken down as part of a massive DoS attack on the Internet a few weeks ago.
- An overzealous salesman offers cloud services to Amazon’s CTO
This one is just one of those legendary tales that illustrates just how bad cold emailing from a list can be. One salesman emailed Werner Vogels, the considered father of cloud computing, asking if Amazon had made the transition to the cloud yet. Oops.
Vogels shamed them on Twitter – which is a shame; I would have strung the sales guy on a little more to see at what point some research kicked in humility struck the poor guy.
- Twitter is planning on laying off 350 employees
The media’s best loved channel is struggling despite record numbers of eyeballs on its product. The problem is of course, turning those eyeballs into paying customers. This week in their earnings call they said this move was a way to make the company more efficient.
Some companies are just not intended to make money; Twitter is a feature, not a product, and should just be bought by a large media company and integrated.
- Battery that charges in seconds, but lasts for weeks?
The news that researchers at the University of Central Florida have developed a supercapacitor that can last 20 times longer than the current battery technology has people dreaming of real cord-cutting! Not only that, but it only takes a few seconds to bring it back to full charge.
This is truly science fiction stuff and if they can pull this off and commercialize it they may have solved one of man’s biggest problems – how do I make my phone last a full day!?
- Black Friday is set to break all records; $1B purchased on smartphones alone
This is Thanksgiving week in the USA, and that means only one thing, bargains galore! This year retailers are saying their tills are ringing louder than before even though a lot of have purposely closed on Black Friday as a mark of anti-consumerism.
What is interesting, more people are using their phones for grabbing bargains, with over $1B in sales originating from handsets. I will confess to doing this – I was in BestBuy and bought the same LG headset on Amazon as I was standing with the box in my hand; $20 cheaper and same day delivery!
- People who swear are more intelligent, so science says
You know how it goes, you drop the off ‘fuck’ and people think it’s a lack of vocabulary (though Billy Connolly famously said, he knows lots of words, but still prefers fuck). Apparently researchers have found, that those that swear often actually have a higher number of words overall. There you go!
And if you need some help to add some colour into your language then let me help you with the excellent online FOAAS Fuck Off As A Service. You’ll be firing them out in no time.
… and this week’s soundtrack is brought to you from the gentleman of American country, Tim McGraw.
Barely a week goes by when we don’t learn of a hack of some sort, but this one takes the prize for the largest number of users affected in 2016 at 412M users. This haul included passwords, in both clear and (weak) hashed format. The issue here is of course that the vast majority of people repeat their email/passwords combinations, opening them up for not only blackmail, but identify theft.
When we hear of Denial of Server attacks, we picture 1000’s of independent machines infected with a piece of malware that saturate a servers infrastructure. Well that may not be the case anymore if researchers from TDC Security are to believed.
With all the news this week about fake news stories on Google and Facebook you would think you can take solace that something as mechanical as a car won’t betray you. Think again – those pesky German VW software engineers have been caught with their compilers down again – this time with the Audi brand.
Yes, Amazon are getting into the automotive business, by offering 3 Fiat models on their Italian website. If you recall they announced a few months ago, 
With Amazon getting into the car selling business, Tesla is now in the solar business after shareholders overwhelming approved the acquisition. All gone crazy! At first blush, a car company buying a solar panel maker makes absolutely no sense. However, to understand this you need to buy-in to Elon Musk’s vertical transport energy company (car + battery + solar).
What is a Russian recruiter to do now?!? Russia has added LinkedIn to the list of foreign sites that are no longer accessible to the average Russian user. LinkedIn has succumb to that law that dictates that any company storing personal Russian citizen data need to have those servers hosted within Russia. LinkedIn does not.
File this under, #finally. Skype is a great service, but requires both parties to have a Skype account to really benefit. Not any longer. Microsoft have finally relented and can offer Skype call sessions via a web browser, single unique link experience.
Dang naggit the US DoT has gone ruined one of the best bits of fun you can have in an electric car – that is sneaking up on runners in your neighborhood, dogs also fall into that category. They now want all cars that can run silent to emit a sound while they are under 19 mph.
A company in the UK has developed a USB stick that can detect the amount of HIV in the blood within 20 minutes, with 88% accuracy. This is a huge improvement on the ‘try-at-home’ mouth swab self testing kits that are currently available. No hint of availability or cost.
Last weekend, cyber thieves managed to successfully siphon off £2.5M from 9000 online accounts. There is no official how so far, but experts have stepped forward noting their mobile apps had some possible problems, coupled with a potential insider who was apparently selling access in the dark web.
This one is turning out to be the tech equivalent of will they or won’t they Mulder and Scully love affair. After discovering a huge data breach (500M accounts) was lost and some inside Yahoo knew this before the deal was signed, Verizon are being very coy and stroking their chins deciding on whether to continue with the $4.8B deal.
This week, head of security at Facebook gave a talk on security noting that the biggest problem facing security today, is that users are still using the same password across all their online properties. To help them fight this, they have bought password lists from hackers in the dark web to run them against their database to flag such people and have them update accordingly.
One of America’s most loved sports is in chaos as ratings plunge. NFL Commissioner has come out and said the game needs to change because people are just not willing to wait anymore. Continual timeouts, stoppages, ads (70 per game!!) are all adding up to a frustration that are turning people off the game. The Netflix ‘ad-free uninterrupted experience‘ culture is being blamed.
Ever since Concorde got grounded 13 years ago, we’ve had no way to get around the planet at any faster than 575 mph commercially speaking. However a new company, Boom Super Sonic has emerged stating they could begin flying us back and forth as early as 2020, for as little as $2500.
To know love, we first must suffer pain and BA is going to help us with that after reading about supersonic jets. They plan to add an extra seat to every row, increasing the number of seats in a standard 777 to 332 from 280.
As I’ve noted before, Snapchat is getting into the wearables market with a pair of sunglasses that can record 10 seconds of video for only $140 a pair (compared to the $1500 of the Google Glass experiment). This week they tested the market with a stealth pop-up kiosk selling the first run of units.
There seems to be no logic to the stock market at times. It was 
Just as it is sweeping up the literal ashes of its fire starter Note 7, another safety scandal has beset the South Korean company – its washing machines may have a tendency to have bits come flying off. Machines from 2011 and 2016 are being recalled as the number of people to report injury from laundry mounts.
Can you believe the Hubble telescope is 26 years old? So it comes as no surprise that NASA has been spending time (and $8.7B) on creating an update to it, called the James Webb telescope. This 18 carat gold plated beauty is extremely powerful and makes the current Hubble look like a 1st generation Kodak compared to today’s high end smartphone cameras.
It has taken a while to get this one over the line, but Oracle’s big push into the accountancy SaaS world will be complete this Monday, when it completes the $9.3B purchase of NetSuite.
In another quarterly earnings report, GoPro had a rough week with its investors, as it announced that it is not as bullish on the number of units it expects to sell. GoPro point towards production problems that are not allowing them to make the volume they want to.
NetFlix have been talking around the much wanted feature of being able to offline content for viewing in poor-networked areas, on the road and up in the air. However, before you go running to purchase extra large SSD cards to start downloading, it won’t be for those of us in North America.
Is the genius in the physical pairing of the classic Billy Bass talking fish with a Raspberry PI and Amazon’s Alexa? Or is the genius simply coming up with the idea in the first place?
There are certain problems you would have thought that should have been solved by now. The light bulb we never have to change or bicycle tires that never go flat. Oh wait a minute, scratch that last one, this week we can put a check box against that.
announced the Jamboard, a very rich interactive whiteboard that integrates deeply with their recently rebranded Google Suite (formerly Google Apps). This puts it in direction competition with 
For a company that shaped the PC industry it is a little baffling they are only getting into creating their own desktop PC nearly 30 years since the desktop revolution began. But the wait was worth it.
While Microsoft was putting its vision of the non-tablet world forward, Apple is trying to redefine the laptop with its latest MacBook, with the new interactive touch bar.
Ahead of the shareholder vote later in November about the Solar City deal, Elon Musk took to the stage to announce a new revolutionary solar panel for residential homes that is near on invisible to the naked eye – no more unsightly big silver boxes on the roof.
Twitter is desperately trying to make money, but while it figures that out, it is killing off the Vine service it launched under 3 years ago. As part of this cost restructuring 300 people will be losing their jobs. With all the free media publicity Twitter gets, especially with this years US elections, they still can’t make money or find a buyer (though rumor has it that Disney maybe sniffing around again).
Microsoft is expected to release next week it’s version of Slack, called Microsoft Teams. There was a desire internally to buy Slack for $8B but Bill and Satya weren’t for having it.
We’ve all been there, schedules get pushed around and before you know it, you are grasping for some sleep whenever you can. Except you can’t just get comfortable. Anyone of my fellow air warriors will know the pain of trying to sleep on a cramped plane.
It was a long standing rumor for many years that Apple was getting into the electric car business, competing head on with Tesla. Bloomberg announced this week that the project that headed up this initiative has been dismantled with many lay-offs coming.
While we are on the subject of electric cars, Elon Musk teased the internet for a week about a big announcement and this Wednesday he held a press conference and demonstrated a Model X driving by itself from home to the office. The video is extremely impressive and worth the watch, complete with Rolling Stones theme.
While Samsung are figuring out how to rebuild its reputation Apple’s latest flagship handset, the iPhone 7, has had a couple of reports of it bursting into the flames. They haven’t officially commented on this, only to say they are investigating this thoroughly.
The king of gamers for the masses have set the standard again with its latest Switch device. Just as the Wii appealed to everyone, Nintendo are hoping to capture that same family appeal with the Switch. Think of the Wii and the 3DS and then put that in a portable, multi-player handset and you have something that could catch on.
The previous week, we had DNS provider, hover.com, go offline due to a massive DoS attack on its servers. This week it was the turn of Dyn who were the target of the same attack that knocked out many of the big players, including Twitter, Amazon and Spotify.
The real big news of the week, was that a real piece of movie history, the Ark of the Covenant, went on display at Walt Disney World Hollywood in Orlando. You can view this legendary prop while you are queuing for the Great Hollywood Movie Ride, though you will be forgiven for just queuing and not making it to the ride.
alan williamson 