This is round up of the news happened this week.
Reviews
- A closer look at the capabilities and risks of iPhone X face mapping https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/04/a-closer-look-at-the-capabilities-and-risks-of-iphone-x-face-mapping/?ncid=rss
- Review of Amazon’s recently updated Kindle Oasis, the company’s latest e-reader https://www.wired.com/2017/11/review-kindle-oasis-2/
Opinions
- Should you cover your webcam? https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/11/4/16604448/webcam-tape-over-security
Advice
- Cryptocurrencies can feel secure, because they decentralize and often anonymize digital transactions. They also validate everything on public, tamper-resistant blockchains. But those measures don’t make cryptocurrencies any less susceptible to the types of simple, time-honored scams grifters have relied on in other venues. Just this week, scams have arisen that divert funds from users’ mining rigs to malicious wallets, because victims forgot to change default login credentials. https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-keep-bitcoin-safe-and-secure/
News
- Saudi Arabia is in the midst of a crackdown on alleged corruption, and its dragnet has caught one of the tech world’s most important investors: the country has arrested Prince al-Waleed bin Talal over money laundering charges. He has major stakes in satellite TV providers and in recent years has been one of the largest individual investors in a number of well-known tech giants, including Apple and Lyft. The royal is particularly important to Twitter’s fate. He poured $300 million into the social network in 2011, and his stake is second only to that of Twitter co-founder Ev Williams — even CEO Jack Dorsey has a smaller financial commitment. https://www.engadget.com/2017/11/05/saudi-arabia-arrests-major-tech-investor/
New Launch
- Salesforce has announced myEinstein, a package of tools it created to help developers and Salesforce admins customize their AI tools for their particular business. https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/06/salesforce-to-offer-more-customized-ai-with-myeinstein/?ncid=rss
- New iOS app called Album+ is taking advantage of the increased AI capabilities and GPUs in modern iPhones to help people better manage their photos. The app’s features are similar to those found in something like Google Photos — it also can de-duplicate photos, for example, as well as categorize the people, places and objects it finds in your images. But the difference is that Album+ organizes and ranks photos using on-device, offline machine learning — there’s no need to connect with the cloud, that is. https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/06/album-organizes-photos-with-a-i-that-runs-on-your-phone-not-in-the-cloud/?ncid=rss
- Intuit, the company behind products like QuickBooks and TurboTax, is getting into the small business lending space. With QuickBooks Capital, QuickBooks users can now get access to small business loans up to about $35,000 for up to six months right from inside their bookkeeping software. https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/07/intuit-launches-quickbooks-capital-a-small-business-lending-service-powered-by-ai/?ncid=rss
- Facebook messenger update adds Customer Chat, a plugin that lets businesses carry on Facebook Messenger conversations right on their own website.This enables companies to have a continuous chat session, regardless of whether a user is on Facebook Messenger or the company’s home page. It’ll also work across devices — something key since so many customers do everything on mobile these days. https://www.engadget.com/2017/11/07/facebook-messenger-customer-chat-update/
- Google’s new feature that lists restaurant wait times will help you plan around your hunger pangs. The update will arrive to Google search and Maps “soon.” It will show you how long you’ll have to wait to get a seat at a restaurant at any particular hour. Google says it’ll have wait times for nearly a million sit-down restaurants around the world. https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/7/16617500/google-restaurant-wait-times-maps-search
- Fitbit is the favorite wearable producer in the medical research world and because of that, its products were just chosen by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to play a role in its long-term All of Us research program. https://www.engadget.com/2017/11/07/fitbit-chosen-long-term-national-health-study/
- AWS announced a new set of five tools designed to protect customers from themselves and ensure (to the extent possible) that the data in S3 is encrypted and safe. https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/07/new-tools-help-could-help-prevent-amazon-s3-data-leaks/?ncid=rss
- Twitter’s expansion to 280 characters is rolling out publicly today to all users in supported languages, including English. https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/07/twitter-officially-expands-its-character-count-to-280-starting-today/?ncid=rss
- Cohen (BitTorrent Inventor) has just started a new company called Chia Network that will launch a cryptocurrency based on proofs of time and storage rather than bitcoin’s electricity-burning proofs of work. Essentially, Chia will harness cheap and abundant unused storage space on hard drives to verify its blockchain.https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/08/chia-network-cryptocurrency/?ncid=rss
- Microsoft is hoping to make it a little less painful with a new feature coming to Word called Resume Assistant.
Resume Assistant will detect that you’re writing a résumé and offer insights and suggestions culled from LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a vast repository of both résumés and job openings and lets you see how other people describe their skillsets and which skills employers are looking for.https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/11/linkedin-integration-coming-to-word-to-help-you-build-a-better-resume/
Vulnerability
- A vulnerability found within a popular wallet has frozen potentially hundreds of millions of dollars of the crypto currency in a second setback in recent months.The issue affects multi-sig wallets — a technology that uses the consent of multiple parties for additional security on transactions — that were deployed after July 20. In other words, ICOs that were held since then may be impacted. https://paritytech.io/blog/security-alert.html
- A researcher has documented almost 2,500 sites that are actively running cryptocurrency mining code in the browsers of unsuspecting visitors, a finding that suggests the unethical and possibly illegal practice has only picked up steam since it came to light a few weeks ago. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/11/drive-by-cryptomining-that-drains-cpus-picks-up-steam-with-aid-of-2500-sites/
Crazy
- IBM argued that the Canada province should use a blockchain to manage its legal marijuana market. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/11/ibms-plan-to-regulate-pot-with-blockchains-isnt-as-crazy-as-it-sounds/
