The week that was (TWTW) takes a look back at the week’s most prominent tech stories from around the world.
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In the week that was February 4th to February 10th, 2018.:
- Australia’s New Payments Platform launches but has privacy issues
- DJI to enforce CASA quiz before flying your drone
- Government websites hacked to mine crypto currencies
- Salon invites ad-blockers to mine crypto for them
- Uber & Waymo settle out of court
- Facebook continue to act with no interest beside their own
Intro
Hey everyone, Raj Deut here for Reckoner with a look back at the tech news in the week that was:
February 11th to February 17th, 2018.
Stories
Australia’s “New Payments Platform” launched this week. The NPP, which has been in development since 2012, paves the way for banks to allow virtually instant transfers between Australian bank accounts.
The system has come under heavy privacy scrutiny as it reveals a payee’s registered name simply by entering their phone number essentially turning the NPP into a giant reverse lookup database.
DJI announced that beginning this week Australian drone owners using either the DJI GO or DJI 4 apps will need to complete a short quiz in order to continue using their drone.
The quiz will consist of nine questions based on Australia’s Civil Aviation Safety Authority drone regulations and follows suit in DJI’s flight procedures already in place for users in the US and UK.
Thousands of government websites across the globe this week fell prey to a hack that installed a browser based cryptomining script in them. Australian sites ranked highly amongst those affected and included the Queensland government’s site for legislation, the Victorian parliaments, the city of Unley and many more.
On the flip side, popular online media outlet Salon began trialling an authorised use of a similar browser based cryptomining script. Salon’s appears as an option when browsing the site with an ad blocker enabled and asks the user for their explicit permission to use their machine to generate currency as a way of generating revenue.
Uber and Waymo came to an agreement settling their ongoing legal battle over the alleged theft of trade secrets. As a part of the agreement Uber has promised that none of Waymo’s confidential information would be used in the development of their technology and agreed to give Waymo a 0.34% equity share of the company worth US$244 million.
And finally Facebook gently reminds everyone they’re out there to steal your data and make money from it as it was revealed the Facebook owned and promoted Onavo VPN app may secure your connection as promised but does so whilst routing information on your browsing straight back to it’s parent.
The company also enabled 2 factor authentication this week but with the requirement of registering your mobile number as a means to further acquiring your personal information much to the chagrin of privacy advocates everywhere.
Outro
That’s it for another week but before I go, two big announcements for you all. The Week That Was is now available as a podcast and is available to subscribe to via iTunes.
It’s also available now as a Flash Briefing on your Amazon Echo, which you can enable by searching for the skill “Reckoner” in your Alexa App.
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Be sure to check out the website this week there’s lots to see. We go hands on with a play through of the remastered Shadow of the Colossus on PS4 as well as review darling iOS release Florence from Mountain Games.
Thanks for tuning in, have a great week and bye for now.
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