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 August 19th to August 25th, 2018:
- NVIDIA unleash the new GeForce RTX 20-Series
- DJI’s new Mavic 2 drones
- Australian government bans Huawei 5G hardware
- Facebook pull Onavo VPN app
- Become a porn store with Naughty America
Intro
Hello everyone, my name’s Raj Deut and it’s time to take a look back at the tech news in the week that was:
August 19th to August 25th, 2018.
Stories
Nvidia kicked the week off holding an event ahead of Gamescom to announce their latest range of GPUs. The new GeForce RTX 20 series introduces three new GPUs, the 2070, 2080 & 2080Ti.
Ranging in price from A$899 to A$1899 for Nvidia’s Founders edition versions the new GPUs make use of the company’s latest architecture known as Turing.
Built to provide real time ray-tracing, that’s a fancy word for lighting effects, the lowest model 2070 is said to be up to six times more powerful than Nvidia’s prior architecture behemoth the Titan X.
Available for pre-order now the cards are expected to ship in September, with third party versions likely to be slightly cheaper and shipping at similar times.
Keeping the product announcements coming DJI held an event to show off the their new Mavic 2 drones. A first for the company the Mavic 2 comes in two different versions, the first the Mavic 2 Zoom which includes a 24-48mm optical zoom lens and the second the Mavic 2 Pro that comes decked out with a Hasselblad camera and 10-bit log colour profiling.
The new drones also include an upgrade sensor array meaning it can detect obstacles in 360 degrees and now has intelligent subject tracking features predicting its path when it becomes obscured by the environment.
Both have a flight time of approximately 30 minutes and are available immediately, setting you back A$1999 for the Zoom and $2299 for the Pro.
Amidst the Big Brother episode that is Australian politics this week one piece of information came out regarding suppliers of 5G hardware ahead of Australia’s 5G spectrum auction.
The announcement from now Prime Minister Scott Morrison and then comms minister Senator Fi-Fi (Mitch Fifield) alerted Chinese based Huawei that they would not be allowed to build any part of the network in Australia. The same would apply to any suppliers from China and leaves the door solely open to the European based Nokia and Ericsson.
Facebook, never short of controversy, did a variety of bone head things this week but of the most interesting was the removal of their VPN app “Onavo” from the iOS App Store.
The app, which was designed to speed up your connection whilst browsing the web securely was widely known to essentially farm everything you were doing and send that straight back to Facebook HQ.
Now in the wake of their constant privacy issues and slowing user growth Facebook appear to have taken stock and now removed the some would say “malicious” app.
And finally this week, we’re off to the movies. Well, sort of. Naughty America, creators of some of the most watched content in the world announced a new service this week that using AI allows a paying customer to be digitally inserted into some of their original adult based content alongside their favourite actor or actress.
With little info available about pricing said to be between hundreds and thousands, more has been raised around privacy concerns and the authentication of supplied photography and video required for the service to work.
Sadly Naughty America CEO, Andreas Hronopoulos, seemed non perturbed by the issue however stating:
“It’s just editing, that’s all it is. People have been editing people’s faces on pictures since the internet started.”
Outro
And that’s it for another week!
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On the website is our rundown of the upcoming Melbourne Esports Open and for our Patreon peeps, you’ve got a video review of the new Plantronics RIG 500 Pro series to watch. If you’re not a patron and would like more details on what that includes head on over to reckoner.com.au/patreon
No show next week, it’s my birthday so taking a well deserved week off as we head into the show’s 11th month! Crazy!
Have a great week and bye for now.
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