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 March 18th to March 24th, 2018:
- Uber’s autonomous vehicle strikes a pedestrian
- Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica dramas
- Fortnite & PUBG battle it out on iOS
- Federal Liberal Party want to charge $5 for importing a package
- SA Liberal Party kill off the solar virtual power plant
Intro
Hey everyone, Raj Deut here for Reckoner with a look back at the tech news in the week that was:
March 18th to March 24th, 2018.
Stories
In a tragic turn of events one of Uber’s autonomous vehicles struck and killed a woman crossing a dark highway in Arizona. Uber has suspended all autonomous vehicles as a result of the incident while the accident is investigated further.
Footage of the gruesome incident has since been released and while the pedestrian seemingly appears out of nowhere in less than a second neither the monitoring human, nor Uber’s autonomous systems seem to make any attempt in slowing down or swerving to avoid them.
It’s unclear at this point as to why the pedestrian was not picked up by any of the cars many sensors.
Facebook has had one of their worst weeks in the company’s history when it was revealed British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica had been able to pull the details of over 50 million Facebook users.
The company has been hired by many political organisations and in secretly recorded footage boasts about being able to manipulate voters to win campaigns, including the recent US presidential vote.
In a similar fashion to the now US president, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg took his sweet time in forming a response. His company’s gross negligence and frivolity with user data the centre of attention he stated that it had to do better – a sentiment we’ve all heard before.
Fortnite; the game that’s currently ‘top of the pops’ in the streaming world has been released on iOS. Currently available through invite only the game appears to be a highly competent port to the mobile platform.
Not to be left out fellow battle royale darling PUBG released their mobile client. Now available in the North America, Australia, New Zealand and other territories, PUBG mobile is an excellent port that some argue is better than it’s recent Xbox version.
And in Australian news the Liberal Party does its best to further alienate itself on both a federal and state level.
Federally; the Peter Dutton led Department of Home Affairs has proposed a new levy of A$5 on every package coming into the country to pay for rising security screening of the packages. 38 million packages come into the country, which would net the government $200m.
On a State level, the freshly elected Liberal party in South Australia have immediately announced they would kill the former governments joint plan with Tesla to create the world’s largest virtual power plant. The scheme will now see only its first phase go ahead that was already signed through in the installation of solar panels on some government owned housing.
Outro
And that’s it for another week! Thank you so much for joining me. As always be sure to subscribe, review, like and recommend the show so others can enjoy it too.
Lots on the website this week. We have a review of the gorgeous PlayStation VR title Moss that is probably the best VR title I’ve played so far. You’ll also find our exclusive hands on preview on Nintendo’s new La-BO kits hitting store shelves April 20.
Thanks for tuning in, have a great week and bye for now.
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