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Tech Stories You Probably Missed - Q4 2022

Fri, 23 Dec 2022 17:05:00 Z

Our co-founder, Michał Błędowski, posts a #TechBrief (short collection of relevant tech stories) every Monday on LinkedIn. We have created a summary of all the latest, most interesting Tech news from the industry, that took place in the last quarter of 2022.

If you want to stay up to date on what's going on in the tech industry, including crucial cybersecurity stories, social media, innovations and finance connect with Michał on Linkedin.

Jump to any #TechBrief you like:

19.12.22

💻💻💻 Elon Musk: Twitter users vote in favor of boss resigning

Following the billionaire's poll on his future, Twitter users voted in favor of Elon Musk stepping down as the platform's CEO. After Mr Musk asked his 122 million followers if he should step down, 57.5% said yes.

Mr Musk, who paid $44 billion (£36 billion) for Twitter, indicated before the poll concluded that he would follow the results. Since taking over the site, the technology mogul, who also owns Tesla and Space X, has endured a flood of criticism.

Mr Musk has failed to respond after the poll ended. Even if he resigned as CEO, he would still be the sole owner of Twitter.

Source Story: https://lnkd.in/d9iQaVfe

🎨🎨🎨 Artists are fed up with AI-image generators

Since the development of AI systems such DALL·E 2, Lensa AI, and Midjourney, artists have complained that such tools steal their work, given that they've been fed an unending supply of their compositions as inputs. Many of these technologies, for example, may be instructed to generate pictures in the manner of a certain artist.

The current legal consensus, to the anger of many artists, determines that AI-generated work is in the public domain and hence not copyrighted. Users are informed in the terms of service for systems such as DALLE 2, established by the research laboratory OpenAI, that no photos are copyrighted despite the fact that OpenAI owns them.

Source Story: https://lnkd.in/dSeSFAxV

📺📺📺 The golden age of streaming TV is over

In recent months, there's been a broad acknowledgment that the streaming model just isn't producing the same returns as the previous one, in which a film or television program had numerous chances for extra rights purchases and releases.

As a result, Netflix and other streaming services are abandoning creative risk in favor of monotonous, lowest-common-denominator content.

12.12.22

🚀🚀🚀 SpaceX moon flight to include DJ, YouTuber and K-pop rapper

A commercial DJ, a K-pop rapper, and a space YouTuber have been chosen by a Japanese billionaire for a private SpaceX voyage around the Moon.

Yusaku Maezawa, a businessman, introduced his team on Friday, following a global hunt for creative individuals last year.

The most high-profile selections are American DJ Steve Aoki and Korean sensation TOP. The voyage, which is scheduled for next year, might be the first human lunar journey since 1972.

Source Story: https://lnkd.in/dXGupeSe

🩺🩺🩺 Using artificial intelligence to spot breast cancer

Breast cancer is becoming more frequent in low and middle-income nations, yet early detection screening programs remain limited.

A startup in India has created a less expensive, non-invasive test that employs thermal imaging and artificial intelligence.

Although the test is less accurate than mammography, it is believed that it will aid in the detection of some early tumors in persons who would not otherwise have access to mammography screenings.

Source Story: https://lnkd.in/dvfhJgmG

🔬🔬🔬 US scientists achieve ‘holy grail’ net gain nuclear fusion

According to reports, US scientists have conducted the first nuclear fusion experiment to achieve a net energy gain, a significant breakthrough in a field that has been pursuing such a result since the 1950s, and a potential milestone in the search for a climate-friendly, renewable energy source to replace fossil fuels.

“Scientists have struggled to show that fusion can release more energy than is put in since the 1950s, and the researchers at Lawrence Livermore seem to have finally and absolutely smashed this decades-old goal,” Arthur Turrell, deputy director of the UK Office for National Statistics, wrote on Twitter on Sunday.

06.12.22

🛫🛫🛫 No more airplane mode? EU to allow calls on flights

Airline passengers in the European Union (EU) will soon be allowed to fully use their phones in the aircraft.

The European Commission decided that airlines can provide 5G technology alongside slower mobile connectivity on board planes.

This might mean that passengers will no longer need to put their phones on airplane mode, although the specifics of how this will be implemented remain unclear.

Member nations have until 30 June 2023 to make the 5G frequency bands available for flights.

Thierry Breton, EU Commissioner for the Internal Market, said the plan would "enable innovative services for people" and help European companies grow.

"The sky is no longer a limit when it comes to possibilities offered by super-fast, high-capacity connectivity," he said.

🗞🗞🗞 Meta threatens to remove US news content if new law passes

Meta has threatened to take down news articles on Facebook in the United States. It opposes a proposed law that would give news organizations more negotiating power over revenues for content shared on Facebook.

Last year, a similar regulation in Australia caused news on Facebook to be temporarily stopped.

Meta says that its platform does, in fact, improve traffic to failing news publishers.

📻📻📻 New quantum receiver the first to detect entire radio frequency spectrum

A powerful quantum sensor can analyze the entire radio frequency and real-world signal spectrum, opening up new possibilities for military communications, spectrum awareness, and electronic warfare.

"All previous demonstrations of Rydberg atomic sensors have only been able to sense small and specific regions of the RF spectrum, but our sensor now operates continuously over a wide frequency range for the first time," said Dr. Kevin Cox, a researcher at the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command

28.11.2022

💻💻💻 Google is engaged in a new project: training artificial intelligence (AI) to write code

People connected to the new Google project (named Pitchfork) reveal that its goal is to train artificial intelligence (AI) to write code, subsequent bug fixes, and code updates.

In response to the revealed information, a Google spokesperson claimed: “The Pitchfork team is working closely with the company’s research team to explore different use cases to help developers.”

🎮🎮🎮 China Game Industry Group Committee announces youth gaming addiction resolved

Since August 2021, children in China have been banned from gaming for more than three hours a week. The reason for this decision was to blame gaming for rising poor concentration, mental health problems, sleep disorders, and more health issues among children. Concerns were even higher when learning went online.

But with winter coming, children are spending more time inside - and some parents have allowed them to spend more time online to keep them entertained.

There are speculations that the backdrop to the report was declining revenues in China, said Asian games market experts Niko Partners.

🔬🔬🔬 A team of researchers at Johannes Kepler University has found that the skin of a certain kind of mushroom can be used as a biodegradable base for computer chips

As the production of electronic devices continues to increase, scientists are looking to change components to be biodegradable. “The vast number of devices produced every day along with the decrease in their lifetime inevitably results in the generation of enormous amounts of electronic waste,” the authors write in their paper, published in Science Advances.

This species of fungus grows in European mountains and is named Ganoderma lucidum. It creates a fibrous skin to protect its substrate, which if peeled off can instead protect microchips. But more research is essential in this case.

21.11.22

🔬🔬🔬 A grid of quantum islands could reveal secrets for powerful technologies

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) built grids of small groupings of atoms known as quantum dots and investigated what occurs when electrons plunge into these atomic archipelagos.

Measuring electron behavior in these very simple settings provides important insights into how electrons behave in complicated real-world materials and might help researchers in developing devices that enable powerful quantum computers and other revolutionary technologies.

Image and story source: https://lnkd.in/dyBtzVZ6

🍴🍴🍴 Lab-grown chicken safe to eat, say US regulators

For the first time, a meat product made in a lab has been approved for human consumption.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) of the United States has approved cell-cultured chicken following a "careful review."

Upside Foods created it in steel tanks using cells obtained from living animals.

Following an examination by the US Department of Agriculture, it will be available for sale to consumers.

The FDA stated that it made its decision based on data and information submitted by the company and that it had "no more questions at this time."

"We started Upside among a world full of skeptics, and now, we've created history again as the first company to get a 'No Questions Letter' from the FDA for produced meat," said the company's founder and CEO, Uma Valeti.

💬💬💬 Facebook is removing religious views, political views, 'interested in,' and address fields from user profile bios

Beginning December 1st, Facebook will eliminate a variety of personal facts from user profile biographies.

The "Interested in," religious and political opinions, and address fields will be removed from the platform. The removals came only a week after Meta laid off 11,000 employees throughout the corporation.

Facebook has not stated why these facts are being removed from its profiles.

14.11.22

🔬🔬🔬 Synthetic Photosynthesis Could Reduce Greenhouse Gasses and Provide Fuel Alternative

Scientists have discovered a mechanism to activate photosynthesis in a synthetic material.

The method has a lot of potential for developing a system that may drastically cut greenhouse emissions connected to climate change while simultaneously producing clean electricity.

Fernando Uribe-Romo, a chemistry professor at the University of Central Florida, and his students devised a method to initiate a chemical reaction in a synthetic substance known as metal-organic frameworks (MOF) that converts carbon dioxide into harmless organic molecules.

🕸🕸🕸 What is Web 3?

Most websites in the beginning were static, immovable pages. At the turn of the century, the move to Web 2.0 and dynamic content happened. Pages could now respond to user interaction, and ideas like blogs and wikis allowed users to produce new content.

Those who want a more secure and decentralized web consider Web3 to be the third big development. Some believe that by utilizing blockchain, bitcoin, and NFTs, Web3 will provide the privacy, scalability, and security that are currently absent.

Web3 is generating attention, but it does not come without its critics. Because it is so reliant on bitcoin, and cryptocurrency solutions are mostly consolidated under a small number of major businesses, the new web may wind up like the old web - centralized and dominated by big tech.

💻💻💻 Musk tells Twitter staff remote working will end

According to sources, Elon Musk has informed Twitter employees that remote working would be discontinued and that "tough times" lay ahead.

According to Bloomberg, the owner of the social media business stated in an email to employees that employees will be required to work at least 40 hours each week.

Mr Musk went on to say that there was "no way to sugarcoat the reality" that the weakening global economy will hurt Twitter's ad income.

07.11.2022

🌍🌳🌍 What the tech industry anticipates from next week's COP27 climate meeting?

Big Tech now has a place at the negotiating table for climate change. While corporations do not have an official vote, they do have significant influence over multinational agreements.

Tech corporations are also important players in negotiating side deals. At last year's climate negotiations in Glasgow, for example, big tech firms and governments from around the world launched the First Movers Coalition to help launch young climate innovation sectors.

Kate Brandt, chief sustainability officer at Google

“COP27 is taking place against a backdrop of intersecting crises in the global economy including economic uncertainty, an energy crisis in Europe, and climate change impacts globally, but we cannot slow our progress. This is why collaboration, implementation, and innovation will be essential over the next decade, and the discussions and outcomes over the next two weeks will be key in driving progress.”

💰💰💰 Billions being spent in metaverse land grab

According to research, about $2 billion dollars has been spent on virtual property in the last year as people and businesses compete for a footing in the metaverse.

However, we are still years away from the metaverse being a single immersive online world where individuals may live, work, and play in virtual reality. So, is the land grab a big risk?

🧑‍💻🧑‍💻🧑‍💻Will nationalism end the golden age of global AI collaboration?

Until recently, the borderless, open-source software movement that has brought AI engineers and technology from the United States and China together has risen above geopolitical issues. Could national security crackdowns change it?

In 2017, when Ben Wu, a Chinese developer, sought to install Facebook's open-source AI framework PyTorch, he went to its online community on GitHub and asked for help.

Soumith Chintala, a Facebook AI research engineer located in New York, demonstrated how he could swiftly download it.

PyTorch has become a core component of AI technology, owing in large part to daily knowledge-sharing interactions such as the one between Wu and Chintala. And, despite becoming increasingly corporatized, the borderless, open-source software movement has risen above geopolitical tensions between China and the United States, which have centered on concerns about China's use of AI for repressive surveillance, plans to transfer civilian technology for military applications, and Chinese government espionage and intellectual property theft.

02.11.2022

✅✅✅ Elon Musk says Twitter "blue tick" to be revamped

Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter, has stated that the procedure of obtaining the renowned "blue tick" would be altered, following speculations that the company may begin charging $20 (£17) per month to be verified.

Days after taking over the social media giant, Mr. Musk tweeted that the authentication procedure was being revised.

A blue tick is presently free and used to indicate that an account is genuine.

On Friday, Mr. Musk finalized his $44 billion (£37.9 billion) buyout and christened himself Chief Twit on Twitter.

📺📺📺 Goodbye binge-watching: Netflix, and others, bringing back ad breaks in coming weeks

Starting Tuesday, Canadian Netflix subscribers will have a new membership option that is less expensive but comes with a catch: commercial breaks will be introduced into their favorite shows.

After years of nonstop binge-watching, the world's largest streaming service is allowing time for a message from its advertisers. And, as inflation continues to sting consumers, the prospect of a cheaper Netflix package may appeal to some.

Netflix isn't the only one that believes that commercial television is making a comeback.

⛔⛔⛔ AI network detects drunkenness by evaluating infrared images of human faces with 93% accuracy

A convolutional neural network can analyze thermal infrared photos of human faces and detect whether the individual is intoxicated with 93% accuracy.

The approach presented in the International Journal of Intelligent Information and Database Systems has the potential to be deployed in areas where drunk driving and intoxicated behavior are prevalent.

Every year, over a million people die in road traffic accidents throughout the world, with a high percentage of fatalities being the direct result of intoxication.

17.10.2022

📵📵📵 E-waste: Five billion phones to be thrown away in 2022

According to the International Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Forum, 5.3 billion mobile phones will be discarded this year.

Based on worldwide trade statistics, their forecast shows the rising environmental challenge of "e-waste."

According to the study, many consumers keep outdated phones rather than recycle them.

Precious minerals that cannot be recovered from discarded electronics, such as copper in wire or cobalt in rechargeable batteries, must be mined.

🧑‍💻 AI technologies fail to eliminate recruiting bias, according to new research

According to a study, artificially intelligent recruiting technologies do not minimize bias or enhance diversity.

"There is growing interest in new ways of solving problems such as interview bias" write the Cambridge University academics in the journal Philosophy and Technology.

An international poll of 500 human-resources experts in 2020 revealed that roughly a quarter were utilizing AI for "talent acquisition, in the form of automation," according to the research.

However, utilizing technology to lessen bias is counter-productive, according to Dr Kerry Mackereth, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge's Center for Gender Studies.

💉💉💉 Cancer vaccine could be available before 2030, says scientist couple behind COVID-19 shot

A cancer vaccination might be widely accessible within the next decade, according to the husband-and-wife pair that co-founded BioNTech, the biotechnology firm that collaborated with Pfizer to create a successful messenger-RNA (mRNA) injection against COVID-19.

"Yes, we feel that a cure for cancer, or to changing cancer patients' lives, is in our grasp," said Professor Özlem Türeci. According to Professor Uğur Şahin, the cancer vaccine, which would draw on scientific advancements made during the creation of the COVID-19 injection, might be widely accessible within eight years.

"We believe that this will happen, definitely, before 2030, " he told Keunssberg.

11.10.2022

🔍🔍🔍 Former ad executive of Google creates tracker-free search engine

On Thursday, an ad-free and tracker-free search engine goes live in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. Neeva boasts 600,000 users in the United States, where it debuted last year.

Sridhar Ramaswamy, who worked at Google for 16 years and oversaw its advertising division, told BBC News that the technology sector had become "exploitative" of people's data, and he no longer wanted to be a part of it.

Trackers exchange information about internet activities, primarily in order to target advertisements. Investors have contributed $77.5 million (£68 million) to Neeva.

It provides free search, with additional capabilities such as password manager access and virtual-private-network (VPN) service offered on a subscription basis.

✨✨✨ A new VR exhibit takes you inside the James Webb Space Telescope’s image

Bits and fragments of the cosmos, as seen through the eyes of the James Webb Telescope, are on exhibit at New York City's ONX Studio.

"Unfolding the Universe: A NASA Webb VR Experience," a new installation by Mozilla Hubs, artist Ashley Zelinskie, and NASA, debuted last week. It was made to mark the space telescope's debut in December.

The virtual reality parts of the experience—a digital gallery based after photographs of galaxies and other celestial bodies from the Webb telescope—are located in the center of the exhibit's main chamber.

💻💻💻 Asia chipmaker shares decline after US curbs on China

Shares of key Asian computer chipmakers have plummeted as the United States proposed stringent new restrictions on technology sales to China.

The United States said that it will prohibit American companies from selling specific chips used in supercomputers and artificial intelligence to Chinese companies.

The new laws, unveiled on Friday, also target non-US corporations that employ American equipment.

As the global economy weakens, demand for technology enterprises is also decreasing.

Shares of Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC plunged more than 8% on Tuesday, while Tokyo Electron in Japan sank 5.5% and Samsung Electronics in South Korea declined 1.4%.

03.10.2022

🤖🤖🤖 Tesla boss Elon Musk presents humanoid robot Optimus

Elon Musk, the tech tycoon, has shown the newest prototype of a humanoid robot being created by his Tesla electric car company.

Optimus made an appearance on stage at a Silicon Valley event, waving to the audience and raising its knees. The CEO stated that the robot was still under development, but that it might be available for purchase by the public in a few years.

Tesla's mass-market robots will be evaluated by performing tasks in vehicle manufacturing, according to company engineers. During the annual Tesla AI [artificial intelligence] Day presentation, the prototype was wheeled on stage.

🎮🎮🎮 Netflix plans to start its own video game studio.

As part of its efforts to establish itself in the gaming business, Netflix is establishing its own video game studio.

Marko Lastikka, a former Zynga and Electronic Arts executive, will lead the company from its headquarters in Helsinki, Finland.

Netflix has previously acquired tiny game startups such as Night School Studio, the developer of Oxenfree.

"[It] will deliver a wide range of entertaining and profoundly engaging, unique games with no commercials or in-app purchases."

Netflix revealed a 200,000-subscriber decline in April, its first quarterly loss since 2011. Its share price fell by 35%, erasing more than $50 billion (£46.5 billion) from the company's market worth.

🔬🔬🔬 A $500 million international project will produce the most detailed brain map ever

Despite decades of investigation, science still has a lot of questions about the human brain. A new $500 million initiative to construct the most detailed map of it ever might help to alter that.

Our brains are among the most complicated things known to science. Deciphering how they operate might have enormous implications, ranging from discovering new methods to treat brain ailments and neurological problems to sparking new types of machine intelligence.

That's why the National Institutes of Health's BRAIN Initiative recently announced $500 million in funding over five years for a project to describe and map neuronal and other types of cells throughout the human brain.

The Allen Institute in Seattle will lead the initiative, but it will feature cooperation from 17 additional universities in the United States, Europe, and Japan.

For weekly updates with stories you might miss amidst the news noise, connect with Michał Błędowski on Linkedin.

➤ All You Need To Know About Low-Code And No-Code
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➤ Executive Primer On Metaverse—What Is It? Should You Invest?

Tech Stories You Probably Missed - Q2 2022

Tue, 26 Jul 2022 17:05:00 Z

If you want to stay up to date on what's going on in the tech industry, including crucial cybersecurity stories, social media, innovations and finance connect with Michał on Linkedin.

Jump to any #TechBrief you like:

20.06.2022

🖌️🖼️🎨 Adobe Photoshop Free for Everyone! (maybe)

Adobe is testing a freemium version of Photoshop in Canada. It started out with very limited functionality, as a way for graphic designers to share their work with others and collect feedback and change suggestions.

Since then, Adobe has kept adding new functionalities to the freemium version, and they might roll it out globally, but there is no declared timeline for this.

🤑💰💸 Watch Out for LinkedIn Scammers!

Crypto scammers are targeting people on LinkedIn, and they’re very patient about it. First, they’ll tell you about all the money you can make from investing in crypto.

Next, they get you to invest on a legitimate platform. Over several months, they keep building trust. Finally, once they feel confident, they direct you to a fake website that they control, and then they steal your money.

LinkedIn is actively working on the problem, but they also said “trying to identify what is fake and what is not fake is incredibly difficult.”

Apparently, they removed over 32 million fake accounts in 2021, and they have multiple safeguards always working to protect people from being scammed on the platform.

✋🛑 Record DDoS Attack– 26,000,000 requests per second!

DDoS attacks keep getting stronger. The previous record was 17 million requests per second, recorded in August 2021.

This new DDoS attack was unusual because it happened over HTTPS, which is more expensive than a HTTP attack. Plus, it was generated with a powerful botnet of hijacked virtual machines from cloud providers and powerful servers (normally, botnets are made from weaker IoT devices).

The attack targeted websites using the free Cloudflare plan, and Cloudflare’s automated DDoS protection system quickly caught it and mitigated it.

This shows how important it is to have powerful, automated tools to protect online properties. A human operator would’ve never caught or resolved an attack like this as quickly as an automated system.

13.06.2022

🔍🔓Very sneaky Linux malware

Symbiote is a powerful, never-detected backdoor into any Linux system. It literally works like a parasite – it starts with a library that loads into every process in your system.

From there, it can harvest credentials, enable rootkit functionality, and enable remote access to device. It was first detected in November, and for now it targets financial institutions in Brazil.

Nobody knows if Symbiote is widely active across many Linux systems, but it’s definitely a possibility given that Symbiote is basically undetectable, and can remove any proof of infecting a system.

✨🚄💨 HUGE HR moves from Microsoft

Microsoft just became the cool kid on the block, up there with AirBnB when it comes to giving (potential) employees exactly what they want.

The company will show pay ranges in all US job listings moving forward. This is a very exciting move that might lead the whole IT job market into greater transparency.

That’s not all. Microsoft will also remove noncompete clauses from their US employee agreement, and bring an outside company to audit if their workers’ rights are met across the board.

💬🤖🤔 Is AI already intelligent?

A Google software developer just got suspended. He believed that an AI model he was testing, LaMDA, was sentient and he got a bit too excited about it.

Google representatives say that there’s a mountain of proof that LaMDA is not sentient at all, so the answer is no, AI isn’t sentient yet. However, this story brings to light an important problem.

Pattern-matching models like LaMDA aren’t intelligent, but they are great at faking intelligence. This is because they have mountains of text data to use.

Current AI systems, even neural nets which supposedly mimic how the brain works, are still just machines that can mindlessly generate content based on pattern recognition.

But if even a Google developer can get fooled by them, it means that the general public is at huge risk of being manipulated through malicious use of AI systems.

06.06.2022

💪🖥️🤖 US overtakes Japan with most powerful supercomputer in the world

The world’s most powerful supercomputer, The Frontier, runs on AMD Epyc CPUs and is powered by Hewlett Packard Enterprise's (HPE) Cray EX platform.

It’s the first real exascale system – meaning that it can perform a billion billion (a quintillion) operations per second.

It can hit 1.1 exaflops (floating point operations per second), whereas the Japanese contender (Fugaku) performed at 442 petaflops.

The Frontier is not just the most powerful but also the most efficient supercomputer, which is WILD. It runs at 52.23 gigaflops per watt.

✨🚄💨 Japanese researchers transmit 1 Petabit per Second in standard optic fiber

With a bit of new hardware applied to conventional cable infrastructure, a new system demonstrated data transmission of 1.02 petabit per second over 51.7 km.

If implemented, this system would get humanity ready for Beyond 5G, a term used to describe the explosion of data exchange after wide adoption of 5G.

⚙️🎮🚙 Unreal engine in cars? Yes!

Epic joins Volvo in a partnership to use Unreal Engine, the most popular video game graphics engine, to create the HMI (Human-Machine Interface) for a new generation of Electric Vehicles from Volvo.

Epic will support Volvo by building a platform for Volvo designers to build safe, beautiful interfaces for vehicles.

It’s really fun to see such partnerships in the world. Who would’ve thought 20 years ago that a leading gaming company would be partnering with a leading car manufacturer to make cars safer?

30.05.2022

⚠️ ⚠️ ⚠️Update Zoom IMMEDIATELY

Critical bug discovered and fixed in Zoom. Hackers can install malware on your device through your outdated Zoom client. Update your Zoom client immediately if you’re not on the latest version!

👮👮👮 New type of hacking attack

New type of hacking attack discovered – account pre-hijacking (thanks to a study funded by Microsoft Security Response Center).

Hackers can take control of an account before it’s created. Then they wait until the account is filled with personal data, and lock the account owner out.

📡 📡 📡American Telecom giant hacked

Hacker social engineered their way into stealing employee data from the American telecom giant, Verizon. He pretended to be from internal support, got an employee to provide remote access to their computer, and installed a script to steal the data.

He called Verizon employees idiots, and is asking for $250,000 to return the data.

23.05.2022

➗➕➖ Why aren’t all programmers great at maths?

Creator of LaTeX and TLA+ is a bit disappointed that programmers are afraid of maths.

His opinion is that most programmers brush through maths in college, learn the necessary basics and then just forget about it.

Advanced maths may not be necessary for all software development, but there are many areas where mathematical thinking is critical to solve problems efficiently.

What do you think? Should programmers learn more maths?

🌑🌑🌑All human knowledge on the Moon

A company wants to back-up all of our knowledge in datacenters on the Moon.

The first tiny datacenter will likely be sent by the end of 2022 as proof of concept.

From there, the company has a roadmap of how to develop the system.

Why the Moon? Because Earth is not really safe, as evidenced by the flooding of the Global Seed Vault (a back-up of critical seeds).

It’s easy to criticize this idea, but if we’re going to be a spacefaring species, this is the type of stuff we need to start thinking about.

🤫🤫🤫 Apple takes back their new work rules

Last week, I mentioned the story of a top Machine Learning researcher that left Apple due to their “3 days in-office" inflexible work policy.

The researcher has already landed a job at Alphabet’s DeepMind, and Apple is no longer forcing the 3-day in-office rule.

Apple representatives stated that they’re pushing the topic away for now.

For an industry so focused on disruption and innovation, tech executives have a really hard time understanding that workers in tech don’t want to be held by the hand anymore.

Flexibility is the new normal. Accept it and implement it, or enjoy having much less candidates for your jobs than flexible companies.

16.05.2022

💸💸💸 Tech Markets Are Going Down, But It's OK

The Economist offers an interesting and rational take on the current tech / crypto market downfall:

--- This is not another dotcom crash, back then companies had zero fundamentals (good revenues / business models). Modern tech companies have more solid bottom lines, even those that crash.

--- Established companies are mostly A-OK (Salesforce, Intel, IBM, Adobe, Oracle, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft).

--- The stocks hurt the most are hyped-up start-ups, like Robinhood (lost 80% of value since going public in July 2021), or Uber ($6 billion loss in the first quarter of 2022 alone).

--- Pandemic slowdown and Ukraine war have changed investor outlook on the future.

--- Bitcoin was below $26,000 just a few days ago, down from almost $60,000 half a year ago. The next 4 biggest coins have lost on average 70% in value. Sales on one of the big NFT marketplaces, OpenSea, has dropped by more than half.

--- All in all, we’re seeing multiple small tech bubbles bursting, but digital technology continues to eat the world and it’s still very, very hungry.

🙊🙊🙊 The Curious Case of Luna

Luna might be the biggest crash in crypto history. The price of Luna went from $116 in April to a single penny ($0,01).

But it’s not the full story. Luna is a coin based on the Terra blockchain. Terra offered UST, which also crashed. UST is a stablecoin (in theory, 1 UST should always be worth 1 USD).

UST creators sold UST and promised buyers 20% interest on their investment. People liked this idea, and invested over $14 billion into UST through this specific mechanism, called the “Anchor Protocol”.

On May 7, one big transaction led to many investors trying to sell their UST. Ultimately, this destroyed the value of UST. Instead of staying at $1, it dropped to less than $0,20.

This whole situation wiped $15 billion from the crypto market. Many people lost their savings.

Finally, people are questioning the crypto hype (especially around stablecoins), and regulators are becoming interested. Maybe this will inspire some lasting change in the crypto market.

09.05.2022

🤝🤝🤝 Remote Work

Apple’s chief of machine learning leaves because Apple is trying to get people to come back to the office. Multiple Apple employees created an open letter to their bosses, criticizing Apple’s new 3-day-per-week in-office requirement.

AirBnB had 800,000 people visit their careers page after they announced that everyone in their company can work from any place in the world.

It’s clear that workers in tech demand flexibility.

If you let your employees work 100% remotely, you’ll find many more potential candidates for your open jobs.

Apple’s chief of machine learning leaves

Apple employees criticize in-office requirement

AirBnB mass visits to career page

🤐🤐🤐 Amazon Fights Against Fake Reviews

Some positive news from Amazon for a change.

Amazon is fighting in court against 3 big fake review companies, which altogether had more than 350,000 reviewers working for them.

Fake reviews are a plague and it’s good to see that Amazon can recognize this, and fight against it. Obviously, it’s in their best interest to make sure people aren’t lied to on their platform.

🤖 🤖 🤖 Learn Web Development (and other things) From Microsoft

Upgrade your career and start becoming a web developer with Azure Cloud Advocates!

The Azure Cloud Advocates team provides full, beginner-level curriculums for you to learn new skills.

And it’s not just web development! They’ve also done: -Machine Learning for Beginners -IoT for Beginners -Data Science for Beginners

02.05.2022

🏫🏫🏫 The First Real Public Online School?

I’ve always been a fan of Khan Academy.

If you don’t know, it’s an open project with world-class educational materials for kids, teenagers and college students.

Now, it’s morphing into an even more powerful project – the Khan World School, backed by the Arizona State University Preparatory Academy.

Essentially, students of Khan World School will be able to learn in an incredibly agile way, somewhat similar to high-class tutoring, but in a digital environment.

Really excited to see if this project will spread across the world.

Public education DESPERATELY needs innovation!

🤐🤐🤐 Google Makes It Easier to Protect Your Data

Google just expanded their options for removing your data from search results.

If you don’t know, Google has a special form where you can ask them to hide search results with your sensitive data.

So far, it’s been limited to data like bank account numbers, or credit card numbers, but now it’s being expanded to data like phone numbers, emails and even physical addresses.

I’ve tried this feature before, it’s nothing amazing but it’s good to see privacy-first features being expanded.

Maybe privacy is starting to be taken seriously by Big Tech?

🔍🔍🔍 Insider Facebook Documents

Another batch of insider Facebook documents has just dropped.

With almost 40 documents, there’s a lot to read here, mostly about the ranking system (the algorithms that decide what you see on Facebook’s News Feed).

The documents suggest that Facebook’s employees don’t really know how the ranking system works, and aren’t sure what effect it has on users.

To us, normal people, it’s clear what the effect is.

We’ve all had those friends or family members who, seemingly all of a sudden and at the same time, started sharing antivaxx or q-anon propaganda online and in person.

We’ve all spent time arguing on Facebook, and then wondering “what the hell is wrong with me?”.

You might not admit it, but I know you did it. Facebook is perfectly designed to make us rage and engage in flame wars. It’s the single best way to keep people on the platform.

So, it’s great to see that the mysterious workings of Facebook are being uncovered. Perhaps it’ll lead to some positive change.

26.04.2022

🏢🏢🏢 US Homeland Security with 122 cyber-risks

Bug bounty programs – they’re great! Why don’t you have one yet?

USA’s Department of Homeland Security initiated a bug bounty program in December 2021.

To date, hackers have found 122 vulnerabilities in their system.

27 of those vulnerabilities were critical.

This is actually not the first time they did this – there have been several other DHS bug bounty programs, a notable one being “Hack the Pentagon”.

💶💶💶 EU is fighting back against Big Tech

This is the type of story that makes me happy to be a citizen of the European Union.

The EU has already passed the DMA (Digital Markets Act), which should make digital markets a bit more equal for all.

Now, they’re moving along with the DSA (Digital Services Act).

The DSA suggests strong laws that will force tech companies to get better at moderating content on their platforms.

It also deals with things like Dark UI Patterns, with true-to-life statements that “canceling subscriptions should be as easy as signing up for them.”

I think we can all agree, I definitely do!

Let’s not forget – among other things, the EU is also fighting for our right to repair our devices, uniform chargers for all mobile devices, and much more.

It’s good to see people in positions of power actually trying to make life better for all of us in the working class.

🤖🤖🤖 Bug of the year

Has your development team updated Java yet? They should!

The programming language Java (versions 15 to 18) had a huge security vulnerability.

It was reportedly first noticed in November 2021.

Oracle, Java’s developers, patched the vulnerability this month.

The issue was described by one researcher as a “psychic paper”.

It’s a term from the “Dr Who” TV series, and it means a universal ID card.

Hackers could easily take control of encrypted communications, authentication tokens, code updates and more.

Java apps with the vulnerability wouldn’t even show that anything wrong is going on.

19.04.2022

😭😭😭 Windows 11 irrelevant?

Almost all Windows users completely ignored the option to upgrade to Windows 11.

A new study shows that Windows 10 still dominates, with over 80% of Windows users.

Windows 11? Less popular than Windows XP, with only 1,41% of Windows users.

Yes, you read that correctly. The 2001-released Windows XP is actually more popular (1,71% user share) than the newest version of Windows.

🤖🤖🤖 What’s the deal with Atlassian?

This is something you never see. Issues with modern software products (especially as huge as Jira) are resolved in hours, maybe a day.

Atlassian just had an outage that lasted more than a week. The consequences are still being fixed.

Atlassian handled PR and user communication very poorly. Over 400 accounts, some as big as 4,000 seats, didn’t get much information or support from the company during that time.

What caused the outage? Oh, just a faulty execution of a script that had “permanent delete” privileges and received a wrong list of user IDs to clean, so it cleaned out active user accounts.

This couldn’t have come at a worse time. Atlassian is in the process of retiring its Server product in favor of a new Cloud product.

Even though the outage hit less than 0,18% of their customer base, this situation has definitely reduced the trust that people had in Atlassian products.

💸💸💸 Elite lawsuits

Elon Musk did a no-no, because he waited too long to admit that he bought a lot of Twitter shares.

First, he bought as much as he could at a lower price. He waited over a week and only then made his purchase public, which drove the share price up by 10$.

Twitter shareholders are now pursuing legal action against Musk because he only made himself richer, and didn’t help those guys get more $$$. After all, they could’ve bought more shares at a cheaper price, too!

Oh, the injustice. Oh, the drama! It’s so sad to see the elites miss out on stock market opportunities.

11.04.2022

🖥️ Protect your Azure services

Over 218 dangerous NPM packages are out to steal personal information from Azure services.

These malicious packages rely on typosquatting. They have names similar to popular packages, so developers can easily install them by mistake.

Researchers that found these packages stated: "The attacker is relying on the fact that some developers may erroneously omit the @azure prefix when installing a package. For example, running npm install core-tracing by mistake, instead of the correct command – npm install @azure/core-tracing."

Exciting new tech releases

OpenAI just opened up the waitlist for Dall-e-2, an AI system that creates images based on text input.

Check out Dall-e-2

Also, the long-awaited Unreal Engine 5 is finally available to download for anybody who wants to use it:

🤑 Is this a world record?

In just 11 months, Intel’s CEO Pat Gelsinger earned 1,711 times as much as the average Intel worker.

Executive pay has been rising in the United States. Apple’s Tim Cook earned 1,447 times as much as an average Apple worker in 2021.

Not to peek into other people’s wallets, this story is fascinating simply because of the astronomically large difference in earnings between workers and their CEOs.

😟 Feeling optimistic? This will help you stop

The Tech Oversight Project wants to hold Big Tech accountable when lawmakers don’t. Such occasions are aplenty.

So aplenty, in fact, that the Big Tech Wiki created by TOP already has almost 100 records of Big Tech wrongdoings, even though they just created it.

If you were feeling optimistic this week (which would be weird given the state of the world at the moment), this will get you frowning again.

Summary

Did you find any stories that you missed in the last months? We truly hope so!

For weekly updates with stories you might miss amidst the news noise, connect with Michał Błędowski on Linkedin.

Tech Stories You Probably Missed - Q1 2022

Mon, 11 Apr 2022 17:05:00 Z

Our co-founder, Michał Błędowski, posts a #TechBrief (short collection of relevant tech stories) every Monday on LinkedIn. It's not super popular (yet?), so we're doing a showcase summary of posts from the first quarter of 2022.

If you want to stay up to date on what's going on in the tech industry, including crucial cybersecurity stories that might help keep your infrastructure safe, connect with Michał on Linkedin.

Jump to any #TechBrief you like:

28.03.2022

👺 Protect Your Enterprise from Lapsus$ Attacks!

Enterprise-level companies are getting hacked left and right by the Lapsus$ group. Here are some resources to learn about these attacks, and maybe prevent them.

Microsoft released a report detailing their research on the attacks, read it right here.

For a general overview of the attack methodology and security tips for avoiding these attacks, read the full article at BleepingComputer.

💰 Enterprise Browser Worth More Than a Billion

There’s a new unicorn start-up in town and its product is... a browser.

Not just any browser. A super safe enterprise browser.

It’s called Island. It was revealed to the public only last month, and is already valued at #1.3 billion.

Island is fully configurable and customizable for enterprise IT admins.
You can control functionalities like copy-and-paste, screen capture and content downloads.

It also has (and this is probably why Island’s so valuable) advanced controls for managing how the browser interacts with SaaS applications. This would be useful for preventing data leakage.

🤖 Metaverse Pain

A Japanese start-up is developing technology to make real pain in virtual reality.

This kind of news is a great starting point for spiralling into dystopian thoughts.

☎️ Dumbphones Are Back

It might be thanks to the 2017 relaunch of Nokia 3310, or nostalgic TikTok videos with old cellphones, but dumbphones are making a comeback.

More people are searching for dumbphones online, and sales were expected to hit 1 billion devices in 2021 from 400 million in 2019 (actual 2021 sales numbers haven’t come in yet).

Will the trend to replace smartphones with dumphones continue to escalate?

🖨️ Print your GitHub issues

Engineer Andrew Schmelyun proposes a new way to handle GitHub issues – print them!

As Andrew reports on his blog, managing multiple GitHub projects means that he often gets messages and emails about project issues reported by users.

But it’s too easy to lose track of an email, so he repurposed a receipt printer to print issues as they are reported. Great way to spice up your workday!

21.03.2022

👨‍🏫 Great Project for You and Your Kid

Looking for a cool project to do with your kids? Here it is!

IBM is giving everyone free designs for a fully-functional microscope.

It’ll cost you $300 to build. You’ll need some LEGO parts, a Raspberry PI computer and camera, and a little bit of 3D printing.

An awesome project to do with your kids or by yourself, resulting in a piece of useful scientific equipment for a tiny cost.

⏰ Daylight Savings Time Forever!

I wasn’t expecting to see this in the news, but the US Senate has just approved a bill to keep Daylight Savings time throughout the whole year.

American citizens will no longer have to move their clocks 1 hour forward and back every 6 months.

Many software developers will smile at least a little bit. Daylight savings is a real problem for commercial programmers.

The change is going to come into effect next year, in 2023.

Will the rest of the world do this, too? It would be great!

⛔ The Worst Idea of 2022

It’s tempting to try and help out in the conflicts happening in Eastern Europe. One programmer got a bit too excited, though.

He inserted very dangerous code into a popular code library called node-ipc, which has millions of weekly downloads.

If the code recognized a Belarus- or Russia-based served, it removed all the files from it and replaced them with a heart emoji.

While an interesting story of protest, it’s also a blatant attack on the values of open source.

This has been happening often recently. It brings to mind Marak, the open-source programmer who intentionally put malicious code into popular libraries.

What these programmers seem to forget is that those code libraries are used in many projects. Sometimes they can be part of mission-critical systems.

Money, time, data, and even human lives are on the line. I only hope that other open-source programmers recognize that this is not the right way to protest, regardless of your political views.

14.03.2022

😊 Most People Are Actually Nice

Axios reports that most people are nice, and too busy to use social media.

All that negativity we’re seeing on Twitter? A lot of it is published by bad apples that we shouldn’t pay attention to.

In the US alone, 75% of people never post to Twitter.

🚫 Never Upset Your Community

PC-building company Artesian Builds went from ambitious small business to a bankrupt PR trainwreck within a week.

What did they do wrong? First, they did a questionable PC giveaway on Twitch.

They picked the winner, but then they noticed that it was a Twitch streamer with a small audience.

So, they quickly changed the rules of their competition and refused to reward the small streamer, while belittling her for having such a small audience.

The internet didn’t like that, and now Artesian is shut down indefinitely. Apparently, they had some tax issues to go along with their lack of respect for their own community.

This is a great reminder to never disrespect your community!

🛰️ Google Acquires Cybersecurity Company For $5.4 billion

Mandiant is best known for uncovering the SolarWinds hack, which compromised computers across the US federal government.

Now, Google is buying them in order to improve the security of Google Cloud.

Microsoft was reportedly interested in buying Mandiant as well. Is 2022 going to be a big year for cybersecurity firm acquisitions?

07.03.2022

👮 Cybersecurity stories

One ransomware group just stole data from both NVIDIA and Samsung.

In the case of NVIDIA, they also released ransom demands. Among others, they want NVIDIA to open-source their device drivers.

Samsung is relatively quiet for now, whereas NVIDIA is confident that their business will remain unaffected.

Meanwhile, after providing internet to Ukraine, Elon Musk’s SpaceX had to divert their efforts to cyber defense and protection from signal jamming. Someone isn’t a fan of SpaceX’s satellite internet offering.

Lastly, scams on dating apps. There has been a major outbreak in so-called “pig-butchering” scams.

Scammers "fall in love" with someone, and then convince them to invest into crypto scams. Victims of the scam often lose millions.

🚮 Steve Wozniak and space junk

There’s a new space power trio in town: Steve Wozniak (Apple co-founder), Alex Fielding (Wozniak’s business friend), and Moriba Jah (expert on space trash).

The core offering of their start-up, Privateer, will be software that will help create the richest, biggest, most detailed database of all the space trash around Earth.

🍹 Would you drink a printed drink?

Cana is a 3D printer that can make 1000 different drinks.

It uses “novel microfluidic liquid dispense technology".

There’s a pro-environmental message attached, with a promise to reduce water waste needed to grow fruits for making orange juice and wine.

It’s kind of sad when technologists don’t realize that they’re actually saying “growing fruit is a waste of water”. You could also read it as “farming is bad”.

Will it just be another SodaStream type of product? Something that never reaches mass adoption, but is perhaps enjoyed by some? Time will tell.

Maybe some things are meant to be made the old-fashioned way? If you ask me, drinks like wine and orange juice are only appealing when they come from nature, not a 3D printer.

28.02.2022

🎖️ Servant of the People

You might be searching for this too, took me a while to find it so I thought I’d share.

The TV series “Servant of the People”, starring Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is free to watch on YouTube.

Especially for people born and living in the developed West, this can be an illuminating and light-hearted look into the realities of life in Ukraine.

(there are English subtitles, you can turn them on in the YouTube player)

🔐 Strengthen your cybersecurity

In these uncertain times, cybersecurity is more important than ever. GitHub recognizes this, and it’s providing resources for all who want to improve digital security in their software solutions.

The GitHub Advisory Database has been moved to a public repository, where everyone interested can browse “the largest database of vulnerabilities in software dependencies in the world”.

GitHub has also opened up the Advisory Database to third-party contributions.

✋ Take a break from social media

If you’re using social media productively, to organize help or connect with loved ones, absolutely go ahead and keep using it.

But if you’re doom-scrolling, endlessly looking for news headlines and other people’s opinions on what’s happening right now, please stop.

Take a break from social media.

To get you started, below is a link to great article by Johann Hari at The Guardian, about how technology use combined with everyday stress is destroying our ability to concentrate. Here’s an excerpt:

“I believe we now need an attention movement to reclaim our minds. I believe we need to act urgently, because this may be like the climate crisis, or the obesity crisis – the longer we wait, the harder it will get. The more our attention degrades, the harder it will be to summon the personal and political energy to take on the forces stealing our focus. The first step it requires is a shift in our consciousness. We need to stop blaming ourselves, or making only demands for tiny tweaks from our employers and from tech companies. We own our own minds – and together, we can take them back from the forces that are stealing them.”

21.02.2022

🛑 Mark, stahp!

Mr Zuckerberg has been present in almost all TechBrief posts I’ve done in the last few months. He continues to surprise with new revelations.

The newest trick that Mark pulled from his sleeve is the new name for his employees. They’re going to be called Metamates.

The new corporate mantra for Meta is “Metaverse, Metamates, me”. Very uplifting.

Meanwhile, investors are losing interest, and this whole Metaverse rebranding situation has reduced Meta’s market value by $500 billion.

☹️So many jobs, so few candidates

Tech companies are finding it difficult to hire new people.
Employees are leaving companies in droves, so much so that it’s been named The Great Resignation by journalists.

Wages have been raised across the board in order to retain talent, and more companies are willing to accept remote work (FINALLY).

One expert said it best:

“People are tired of being overworked and underpaid, and want an employer who cares about their overall well-being and future success.”

Would you agree?

🔬 Playing Wordle? You’re being tracked

The New York Times recently bought Wordle, for a price “in the low seven figures”.

Since then, it’s been loaded with ad trackers.

One Gizmodo writer finds it sad, and a bit scary, that everything has to be loaded with so many ad trackers nowadays.

(Gizmodo itself is filled with ad trackers, so it’s great to see that they’re not afraid to talk about it)

Does it matter that much? It’s standard practice in tech at the moment, so you could say that it’s ok. The problem is that the ad-tech industry is very poorly regulated.

Plus, the mountains of data that are being collected every second by these ever-present ad trackers might be used with malicious intent in the future.

Ultimately, we all have a choice. We can stop using the internet completely, or accept that we’re being tracked all the time, from every angle.

I’m sure the industry at large will figure out this conundrum, and we’re all going to be better off in the end. It will just take some time.

14.02.2022

🤭 You won’t be surprised by this

URLgenius found that YouTube and TikTok are the two mobile apps that collect the most data about you.

YouTube is more transparent. Of 14 trackers, 10 are first-party (for YouTube only) and 4 are third-party (they track your movement across different websites).

TikTok has only 1 first-party and 13 third-party trackers.

URLgenius wasn’t able to find out what happens with the data collected by TikTok’s 13 third-party trackers.

👀 Okay, this one’s a bit unusual

A bug caused in-car entertainment systems in Mazda cars to crash due to a radio signal.

HD radio signal from one radio station contained an image file that Mazda’s on-board computers couldn’t recognize.

This affected owners of Mazdas produced between 2014 – 2017. The crash was so bad that it killed the connectivity master units (CMUs) in those cars.

Replacing those units is a $1,500 cost, but Mazda has already stated that they’ll provide them free of charge (as soon as they can get them made, accounting for the current chip shortages).

🤑 Paul Graham never read business plans or balance sheets

Paul Graham, one of the most legendary Silicon Valley investors, made a pretty bold, but ultimately very reasonable, statement that he never read business plans or balance sheets.

Later he tweeted that he’d received a lot of criticism for it, but when I scroll through the responses, pretty much everybody is agreeing with him. Maybe all those negative comments are gone already?

Still, if you’re currently wondering whether to spend your time finding customers or writing a business plan, Paul Graham just told you what to do.

Good luck!

07.02.2022

🤖 Better, but not awesome yet

AlphaCode, the new AI programmer from DeepMind, claims to be as good as any average software developer. The proof is that it solved 10 coding challenges from Codeforces.com, and ranked in the top 30% of users.

While not a revelation by itself, it’s another major player in the growing market of AI programming assistants.

Do you, or any of your colleagues, already use AI pair programmers? Let me know in the comments!

👍 Facebook lost users for the first time ever

Meta is in big trouble.

TikTok is destroying Facebook in terms of video content. Meta is focusing on Instagram Reels to combat the competitor. (source)

Due to the first ever (reported) user loss on Facebook, Meta just lost over $200 billion in market value. That’s more than $200,000,000,000. Phew. (source)

The criticism from industry icons keeps on piling up, too. Phil Libin, former Evernote boss, says that he tried Meta’s VR meeting room and he thinks it sucks. (source)

The future doesn't look great for Meta. Will they pull an ace from their sleeve?

👩 The legend of Susy Thunder

Society doesn’t understand hackers. It’s very clear when you see how relaxed people are about online safety or data privacy, even at the world’s largest companies and governments.

During the pandemic, Claire L. Evans made it her mission to reach one of the world’s most notorious, while also completely unknown to the public, hacker of the past century. Susy Thunder.

If you’re going to read one long story this week, make it this one. Especially if you don’t know much about hacking. This article is a great introduction into this fascinating world.

31.01.2022

⛔ Game Developers Don’t Want NFTs and Crypto

In a survey about NFTs and crypto, game devs report that they see this market as ripe for scams and exploitation.

This is just one example in an online flood of people voicing their concerns with the current crypto hype. I’m not making any judgements about pyramid schemes or whatnot, but I’ll just leave you with a few funny videos about crypto:

📢 Update your Linux-based system

I’m sure Linux admins have already done this, but just in case – remember to patch the 12-year-old vulnerability that gives attackers root privileges on most Linux-based systems.

The bug resides in Polkit, which manages system-wide privileges in Unix-like OSes.

💡 Amazon’s Prime Video switches to WebAssembly

Prime Video developers are rebuilding their infrastructure using the relatively new WebAssembly. Why? To improve performance:

“By using Wasm instead of JavaScript for certain elements of the Prime Video app, we’ve reduced the average frame times on a mid-range TV from 28 milliseconds to 18. The worst-case frame times also decreased from 40 milliseconds to 25. And in ongoing work we’re driving the frame down still further.“

Non-developers might find it interesting that the devs started exploring how to introduce WebAssembly in their stack back in the summer of 2020. A great story to understand how difficult it is to maintain and upgrade systems at such a huge scale.

24.01.2022

🤦‍♂️ Marak receives retribution

In a recent TechBrief, I mentioned Marak. He’s an open-source programmer who made a very loud statement about how Big Tech uses open-source to reap profits without giving back.

To do so, he intentionally pushed updates that messed up his own libraries, used in thousands of live apps.

Then, Tech Crunch wrote an article about how open-source programmers are starting to fight back against Big Tech, listing stories similar to Marak’s.

Now, Marak is asking for forgiveness. GitHub pretty much banned him completely. So, he’s now claiming that his sabotage of his own libraries, along with a poignant political statement, was a "programming mistake".

What do we make of this story? I don’t know. One thing is for sure – if you’re going to go against Big Tech, you should probably prepare better.

💡 PlayStation inventor unimpressed with metaverse

The Father of PlayStation is working on a better alternative, and I for one am more interested in this than what our Big Tech behemoths have to offer.

Ken Kutaragi sees VR/AR headsets as a gimmick, and the market seems to agree (looking at the very low numbers of sold headsets and huge failures of projects like Google’s or Snapchat’s separate AR glasses).

He wants to integrate cyberspace and meatspace, but without any gimmicky, toy-like gadgets.

He doesn’t specify what exactly he’s working on, but he said he’s going to release more details this year. Keep your eyes on Ken Kutaragi and Ascent Robotics, Inc. closely this year!

😮 The Danish government just open-sourced it’s economy

The Danish economic model is now an open-source code library on GitHub.

Fascinating times we’re living in!

17.01.2022

💰 Virtual real estate

Someone paid $450,000 to live next to Snoop Dogg in an app. If nothing else, it’s a great way to spend your money--virtual assets stored on someone else’s servers, with no guarantee that they’ll survive longer than the current metaverse hype will last.

⚖️ Facebook sued for billions over data harvesting

Nothing to see here, just Facebook being Facebook.

😧 Bitcoin mining suddenly banned in multiple countries

Sweden, Norway, Kazakhstan, Iran, Kosovo, Iceland don’t want Bitcoin miners using up their electricity. More countries are likely to follow suit, unfortunately the crypto market is already much bigger than Bitcoin alone. As always, government regulations are lagging behind technological progress and moving extremely slowly.

“Perhaps the CEO of Iceland’s national power company summed up the situation best: 'Nobody would build a power plant for Bitcoin. There’s a lot of uncertainty about its future.'"

10.01.2022

💥 If you can’t fix it, just blow it up!

A guy from Finland wanted to get his Tesla S fixed (mileage: 1,500km). After a month in the shop, they said the whole battery needs replacing ($20,000+). So, naturally, this guy just blew his Tesla up with 30kg of dynamite for a YouTube video.

⭐ “😎 Livin’ our life like it's golden.”

...was the title of NASA’s Instagram post celebrating the “most complex space telescope deployment in history”. “NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope team fully deployed its 21-foot, gold-coated primary mirror, successfully completing the final stage of all major spacecraft deployments to prepare for science operations.”

💣THIS is why we can’t have nice things!

A sort of Mr Robotesque scenario happened with 2 popular open-source libraries for programmers, ‘colors’ and ‘faker’. Both have millions of weekly downloads and thousands of applications actively use them and depend on them. It’s peculiar. A "new American flag module" was added to colors.js in version v1.4.44-liberty-2, and a version '6.6.6' of faker.js was published. The image in this post is generated by the new, sabotaged faker version.

Apart from the symbolism, there were also some references to Aaron Swartz’s story thrown around. It all turned out to be a protest against Big Tech using open-source libraries without giving back to the creators. Some experts have condemned this, saying that it’s simply irresponsible to create open-source software, and then use it to act out against the organizations that rely on it.

Summary

Did you find any stories that you completely missed since the year started? We truly hope so!

For weekly updates with stories you might miss amidst the news noise, connect with Michał Błędowski on Linkedin.

Angry Nerds Verified by Pangea as One Of The Top 7% Software Engineering Vendors

Wed, 08 Dec 2021 16:00:00 Z

If you don’t know, Pangea is a community of the best software development companies around the world. As soon as we learned about them, we were eager to join their ranks.

Now, it’s official—we’ve been thoroughly verified and accepted by Pangea. What does it mean, and why should you check out Pangea? Keep reading to find out.

Pangea is Disrupting the Disruptors

The tech industry is huge, complicated, and extremely fast-paced. Anybody who has worked at a software start-up or agency for more than a year can attest to that.

At the same time, this industry is poorly regulated and confusing, breeding many challenges. One of the biggest challenges is choosing the right partners for software projects.

In this industry, we have a unique benefit—we’re (almost) never limited by geography. Borders are irrelevant to us because all we need is an internet connection to cooperate.

As a manager or entrepreneur looking for a dev team, you have thousands of companies from around the world to choose from. If you wanted to check each company to truly make an informed decision, your project wouldn’t start for years.

With such an abundance of options, choosing partners is always a compromise. Especially if you need developers specialized in technologies that are unfamiliar to you.

All of the above, combined with myriad other challenges, makes finding the perfect fit for your project a difficult job—that is unless you use Pangea. Pangea scans software development companies from every angle.

If a company is verified and has a profile on Pangea, you can decide if they’re the right partner for your project without even contacting them. Which is revolutionary as far as the software dev industry is concerned!

At Pangea, it’s all about transparency. You can search and filter companies by what you need, and you get 130+ KPIs about each company upfront to compare and decide.

“Working with Pangea is a win-win for everyone included. We're very happy to join the Pangea community!” - Sławomir Guz, Co-Founder of Angry Nerds

Before you can join Pangea, you have to go through a 6-week, thorough verification process that spans across your whole company. Here’s what the Pangea team has uncovered about Angry Nerds.

Findings From The Pangea Verification Process

One of the coolest things that Pangea does is contact your clients for detailed references. What did our clients say about us?

Our client score is 9.0 out of 10, compared to the average client score of 8.6. So, we can boldly say that we’re pretty great at this software development thing!

In a detailed breakdown, we received a score of 9.2 for these areas:

Customer journey,
UI/UX,
Project management,
Tech expertise,
Business maturity.

However, there are some areas where we still have to improve, because we received a score of 8.8 for these areas:

Quality assurance,
Documentation level,
Process maturity.

We weren’t surprised, as we’re still a relatively young organization and we understand our shortcomings. With a detailed score like this from Pangea, we’re better prepared to create a detailed roadmap for improvements in the near future.

Ultimately, we received a 9.1 Pangea score (compared to the average Pangea score of 8.4). We’re proud, but we also won’t rest until we hit a perfect 10/10!

Cheers to you, Pangea!

Pangea is about breaking through the status quo. About doing work that matters with people and organizations that care. About being transparent, and never cutting corners.

Similar values lay at the foundation of Angry Nerds, so it means a lot to us that we’re joining forces.

We believe that Pangea will help us make a bigger impact on the industry, and drive us towards the highest standards of business and software development.

Thank you for betting on Angry Nerds, Pangea!

What a year! 2018 in a nutshell

Thu, 27 Dec 2018 10:00:22 Z

More challenges!

When you’re an IT professional, you know it means you’ll never stop learning. The tech world never stops evolving and you have to be up-to-date in order to be a top-class programmer. This year, we kept on developing our skills thanks to the challenging projects we’ve been working on. All the software we’ve developed: mobile apps, websites, portals; all the simple and complex projects have been so much fun to do! We also participated in various tech events and learned from each other at work. So, if you’re looking for software development experts – here we are!

More Nerds!

Our team have grown considerably this year. We have now almost 35 Nerds on board and we’ll have another 5 Nerds joining till February. And we’ve only just begun! We’ve almost doubled our mobile squad, quadrupled .NET team and created a dedicated front-end crew! We’re still looking for talented IT professionals - developers, testers and project managers. Check our open positions and drop us a line if you’re willing to become an Angry Nerd. We’ll be very happy to welcome you to our team!

More fun!

Workplace culture has always been essential for us. We have our little traditions – Pizza Fridays once a month or regular meetings after hours just to chill or play some games. You can have a glimpse of our less official side on our Instagram! We think that working hard together and having fun together make the best and strongest teams - and we hope next year we’ll live up to these words once again!

More clients!

We would love to mention all the great projects we’ve been working on, but we play by the rules and simply cannot. But we can say that we’ve been working for more than a dozen startups and some more wonderful clients. We counted and in total we worked on 60+ projects this year alone! We are really grateful for the opportunities, trust that you gave us and great relations we’ve built together. Life is about experiences and we are so glad we could share this year with you. Thank you all!

We’re very grateful for everything that happened in 2018. Of course, there were ups and downs, but we managed to learn a lesson from both. It seems the New Year 2019 is going to be even MORE exciting. Stay tuned!

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Angry Nerds Verified by Pangea as One Of The Top 7% Software Engineering Vendors

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Cheers to you, Pangea!

What a year! 2018 in a nutshell

More challenges!

More Nerds!

More fun!

More clients!

We’re very grateful for everything that happened in 2018. Of course, there were ups and downs, but we managed to learn a lesson from both. It seems the New Year 2019 is going to be even MORE exciting. Stay tuned!