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 July 8th to July 14th, 2018:
- Elon Musk has a tantrum
- Mark Zuckerberg & the holocaust
- Google cops a $4.34b euro fine by the EU
- Singapore’s health system is hacked
- Apple shows off their new Melbourne store design
Intro
Hey everyone, my name’s Raj Deut and it’s time to take a look back at the tech news in the week that was:
July 15th to July 21st, 2018.
Stories
Elon Musk went full dickhead this week taking a leaf from Trump’s Twitter playbook. The Silicon Valley billionaire lashed out at a British ex-pat living in Thailand whom criticised Musk’s submarine and its usefulness in the rescue efforts of the children in Thailand’s flooded cave system.
Vern Unsworth made his feelings very clear in a CNN interview that Musk’s submarine was never going to be of any use and that he could, “stick the submarine where it hurts”.
Musk then flailed on the ground like a two year old having a tantrum or Neymar faking an injury in the World Cup launching into a tirade on Twitter ending with “sorry pedo guy, you really did ask for it”.
The tweet caused Telsa stock to drop 3% but has since recovered with Musk apologising for the outburst days later.
In an attempt to surpass Musk as idiot of the week, Mark Zuckerberg gave it a fair crack in saying Holocaust deniers shouldn’t be banned from Facebook.
Shockingly in the same interview he spouted that fake news factory machine InfoWars should also be given a voice on his platform.
At this point, perhaps after registering he’s actually Jewish himself, Zuckerberg realised what he’d said was likely not appropriate and back peddled with the damage already done.
Google was on the end of a second and record setting fine from the EU for breaching antitrust regulation with the Android operating system.
Fined a massive €4.34 billion the EU believes Google abused their power in forcing Android phone manufacturers to have the Google play store and Chrome installed.
The forced installation of Google’s eco system ensures that their search and suite of apps are the only available and prevents manufacturers from installing alternatives.
Google have since made some thinly veiled threats that they may have to begin charging for the OS in the future to subside their losses should they be forced to de-couple their software from the OS.
As the Australian government does its best to convince us all that putting all of your personal and medical information in their new “My Health Record” system is a great idea, Singapore’s equivalent was hacked on Friday with 1.5 million patients, including Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s, stolen.
It’s believed hackers infiltrated the system through a front-end workstation to gain credentials that were then used to remotely execute the attack.
The breach was active for the month of June before being detected and focused on records spanning three years of clinic visits.
And finally on the local front Apple have unveiled a new design for their heavily criticised Federation Square flagship store.
The new design is more aligned to the existing structures making up Fed Square albeit decisively boring representing a large silver storage container more than anything else.
Even with the removal of the garish pagoda like design previously put forward Apple face a significant public out lash for further commercialising what is considered a public space, despite it already containing many commercial retailers and hospitality outlets.
Outro
And that’s it for another week!
If you enjoy the show then please share it with your friends. There are both video and audio only versions available everywhere from Facebook to YouTube, Soundcloud, iTunes and of course on the Reckoner website.
Speaking of on the website this week the new episode of “I don’t quite know” with Jeff Cannata and myself talking about all things online dating and the last of our E3 coverage for 2018.
Have a great week and bye for now.
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