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 September 23rd to September 29th, 2018:
- Facebook expose 50m accounts
- Uber come to a settlement for their data breach
- Oculus Quest is a new all-in-one VR solution
- MacOS 10.14 Mojave is out
- Instagram co-founders have left Facebook
- Telltale games shuts down
- Elon Musk steps down as Tesla chair for $420 tweet
Intro
Hello everyone, my name’s Raj Deut and being on the road this week it’s going to be a primarily audio based look back at the tech news in the week that was:
September 23rd to September 29th, 2018.
Stories
We kick things off with Facebook alerting the world to the fact that 50 million of its users are susceptible to a security security hole in their system.
The issue, Facebook’s “view as” feature that allows users to view their own profile as if they were someone else had a somewhat largish flaw exposing user tokens and allowing you to then log in and act as that user in any of Facebook’s systems.
Facebook has identified 10 millions users directly affected along with an additional 40 million that used the “View As” feature and could be potentially exposed. All 50 million are being forced them to login again in order to refresh their tokens and avoid any foul play.
Uber you may remember, unlike Facebook, chose to hide their security flaw which resulted in a data breach of some 57 million users.
Now, the company appears to have come to an agreement with all 50 American states settling on a US$148m fine.
In a statement issued by the Californian Attorney-General he referred to Uber’s decision to cover up their breach as a “blatant violation of the public’s trust” and that their actions to cover it up a “deliberate disregard of the law”.
And now for something a little less 50 million users exposed…
Oculus announced their long awaited, all in one VR solution this week. The Oculus Quest requires no additional hardware to work, which means no smartphone to slot into the headset and no PC to send a signal to it.
The new Oculus Quest also introduces Oculus’ new inside-out tracking system which does away with the need for external sensors for monitoring your position and obstacle avoidance whilst in VR.
The new Quest includes a 1600×1440 resolution display for each eye with 64GB of storage and will be on sale in Q2 2019 for US$399.
Apple unleashed macOS 10.14 Mojave on the world this week. The update unveiled earlier at Apple’s developer conference, WWDC brings a number of new features to the platform.
One of the biggest, and most requested is purely an aesthetic one with a new “Dark mode” being introduced. There are some other UI enhancements like being able to markup and edit files whilst in quick look but the majority of the work is behind the scenes.
And finally to finish things off this week, something a little different… a few shorter headlines of significant stories that I’m sure are of interest…
Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom & Mike Krieger have both announced they’re leaving Facebook after two years since being bought out. The two cite wanting to be more creative but rumours swirl that there was a lot more to it than that.
Telltale Games, the studio behind the very popular The Walking Dead series has abruptly and sadly announced they’ll be closing down effective immediately and ceasing all works on upcoming titles.
And Elon Musk has been sued by the SEC for his infamous $420 tweet in which he said was in part done because he’d just learnt the significance of the number from his girlfriend and thought it funny. He’s agreed to step down as Tesla chairman but will remain CEO.
Outro
And that’s it for another week!
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Have a great week and bye for now.
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