Second week of December and we see Yahoo in more security problems, malware that tests our morality, Cisco bails on their cloud, Verizon puts out the Samsung fire, Slack gains video calling, virtual assistant gets a hologram to keep us company and Henry Heimlich dies.
- New ransomware tests the morality of those infected
This is a new twist in the cyber extortion world. We all know about how malware can target a machine and start deleting files if they do not pay a given amount of money to the hackers. Well there is a way to sidestep this payment – that is to infect 2 other people and if they succumb you will get an unlock key and you are off the hook.
This will be an interesting test of people’s honesty and faith. Would you pass?
- Verizon will disable Samsung’s Note 7 this month
Verizon who previously said they wouldn’t get involved in the deactivation of Samsung’s infamous flame bursting phone have reversed their decision and in an upcoming software update they will disable people from charging the phone. This will effectively render them useless.
Only 7% of handsets are still out there after the vast majority exchanged them. This will hopefully push the last few over the line and stop the airlines from having to issue warnings on each flight.
- Amazon’s cloud claims another; Cisco discontinues their cloud
Cisco’s ‘Intercloud’ which had a $1B budget behind it will be closing its doors in March 2017. While it has not publicly acknowledged Amazon, it has noted that existing clients will be moving to other public cloud operators.
This is another big casualty in the cloud war, and while I am a huge AWS supporter, I don’t want it to be the only player in town. We need competition in this space.
- Slack has added video calling to its app
Slack, the very popular corporate chat system, has finally added video calling to its suite. This brings it inline with pretty much every other chat system. You can do one-2-one video calling, or group calling.
Once they add desktop sharing, then this will be one of the best tools for teams and really take a huge chunk away from the likes of GoTo Meeting.
- Yahoo admits to another earlier attack; 1 billion accounts at risk
The oldest property on the Internet block is just not having a good time of it. They have released details of an earlier attack, circa 2013, where over 1 billion accounts were compromised. This is in addition to the 2014 hack where 500 million accounts were abused.
As you know Verizon are trying to close a deal to purchase Yahoo, and while this probably won’t make Verizon to step away, it gives them yet another excuse to drive down the asking price from the $4.7B.
- Tech titans, minus one, met with Trump this week
The country’s new President-elect met with all the tech titans this week in a summit to discuss various things. The big players were there, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Tesla, etc. However one player was noticeably absent from this group – namely Jack Dorsey from Twitter.The very company that arguably won him the election, was left out because Trump felt they were too small a player. What do you even say to that?!?
- Girl in a box is the face of a virtual assistant
We are all starting to get use to the faceless helpers such as Amazon’s Echo, or Apple’s Siri. Well GateBox have upped the ante here and offered up a hologram to respond to your every move. While this may first appear creepy, it does make a lot of sense, to have something more contextual to react to instead of just a voice. The avatar can feedback using actions which will speed up the interactions.
This I believe is the future of this style AI functions and I can see us all having our own customized avatar that will be with us for life. Watch this space – more to come here I am sure.
- Henry Heimlich, yes that one, has sadly died
The man that invented one of the most famous anti-choking moves in the world, has sadly passed away at the age of 96. Henry invented the technique in 1974 when he discovered an alarming number of people died while eating out. He died of natural causes, as opposed to choking himself – the irony would have been too much.
In honor of the man that saved many, I give you an excellent clip from Eddie Izzard as he performs a stand-up routine around on the technique.
.. the countdown to Christmas day is in full swing and I discovered this seasonal tune from ColdPlay. I am a big Chris Martin fan, so surprised this one slipped by me a couple of years ago.
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.
After all of its woes, and for the first time a manufacturer has done such a step, Samsung have finally stopped making and shipping the Note 7. Too many flames in that smoke. This whole incident will cost the company $5B in real money and likely a more in customer goodwill and brand damage. It is a complete nightmare.
The last few weeks had a lot of buzz around the potential buy-out of Twitter by the likes of SalesForce, Google or even Disney. However, all parties have had a deep look at the in’s and out’s and opted to walk away, citing they aren’t the right fit.
The home of the automobile (BMW, Mercedes, Audi, Porsche) have voted to stop manufacturing and selling traditional gas powered engines by 2030. A bold step but their hopes is to speed up the innovation around alternative fuels. Tesla has already set the bar very high as to what electric cars can do, and Mercedes has declared they will over take Tesla’s innovation in 10 years time.
Oracle has never been shy about its boasts on its own technology. Do you remember the whole ‘Unbreakable Linux’ claim 15 years ago, until it was proven it was indeed breakable? Well Larry Ellison is at it again, claiming that Amazon is 20 years behind Oracle’s cloud and up to 24 times slower. Oh dear.
Internet of Things is creating buzz all over the industry at the moment as we look to track everything, and one company, Owlet Baby Care has taken it to your baby. They have developed a sock ($250) that monitors the wee ones heart rate and oxygen levels alerting the parents when things significantly change.
The vast majority of security hacks are down to the infallibility of the human – we’re so easily seduced and tricked into doing things we really shouldn’t. A very handy info-graphic was released this week to show all the ways scammers try to seduce you and the very simply steps you can do to present.
The big cloud providers are desperate for your IoT data – Amazon, Google, Microsoft and SalesForce have extremely rich offerings to make it real easy to pump your device data to their cloud. This week was DreamForce in San Francisco, the annual SalesForce love fest, where they announced a number of updates to their Thunder IoT cloud. The main one is marrying up the device data with core data stored in SalesForce.
I am sure you have seen the security dongles that many banks issue for online access to your account. They are small devices that continually generate numbers that you read off and type in to gain access. This technology has now come to credit cards, with France trialing the card that updates the 3 digit number on the back every hour.
Nothing better than that new smell that comes with a car or even a house, but what about the smell from a newly booted Apple Mac? Well for those diehard Apple fanboys they can keep that smell going longer, thanks to a new candle that burns the scent of a new Mac.
alan williamson 