It was a wild and crazy week for technology news. It’s Thursday and I’m 36 hours away from a well deserved Manhattan. It’s another week with Mark Starling, Seth, John, and the First News 570 crew. This week, the Fed couldn’t push money around the economy, ClubHouse chats get spied upon, Portland cancels their smart city project, and other news. You can listen to Mark and I point and laugh while talking about the wild and crazy technology world every Thursday morning, LIVE at 6:43am Eastern.
I want to say this first. Don’t believe the hype. The BitCoiners have been out in full force lauding how BitCoin never goes down, and we need to turn to crypto and digital dollars. First, settle down. Second, BitCoin has had a share of highly public digital thefts and breaches where account holders have been wiped out. Third, your money if insured if it’s kept in a Federally insured account. Having said that, the systems banks rely on to shift money around the US economy were down for three hours today. The story is still developing, but it’s hard for me to believe how the Fed experienced down time for about 5 hours. Those systems are old and have NOT been upgraded for a few reasons. They are highly reliable and tight. The operating systems and software running those systems are not on the radar of hackers. Last time I heard a real claim of what’s running at the Fed, I heard MS-DOS 5.0. The story is still developing, but the Fed claims an operational error caused the crash and they are not elaborating on it. That’s probably the best policy. I think something ridiculously stupid happened. Again, don’t believe all the hype coming from the crypto guys. They wouldn’t have as much value in their BTC without USD.
EAVESDROPPERS HOP ON CLUBHOUSE CHATS
Just like the previous story, I want to say this first. ClubHouse is an audio application. Anyone who has an audio cable can steal the audio from any conversation and record it. Yesterday, the Internet’s latest shiny thing, ClubHouse confirmed that their chat rooms breached. The company has informed users to assume that their chats have been recorded. The breach was detected when an unknown user was able to stream the conversations held in a chatroom to an external website. The audio-only social networking app had announced it was working to safeguard user profile information from hackers last week! Like for real, we’re talking about audio. Don’t say (or do) anything stupid in digital social media platforms.
PORTLAND CANCELS EL GOOG SMART CITY PROJECT
In another setback for Google’s Sidewalk Labs side project, the city of Portland has canceled its smart city project with Google. City managers cited a lack of transparency on Google’s part and not knowing how extensive the data collection efforts will be. This news comes after Toronto bailed out of a similar project with Google. One of the principle ideas of the project is that data accumulated from people’s movements through out the city could be used to craft better policies and implement more effective traffic structures and other resources. Instead, city planners felt citizens would become lab rats generating data for a corporation. We kinda already do that.
OTHER WILD AND CRAZY TECH NEWS
Apple users who bought brand new computers using the company’s new M1 processor may have computers that are susceptible to malware. A new exploit called Silver Sparrow has infected computers with M1 chips. The code calls back to a central server with an, “await further instructions directive.” Apple says they have already fixed the issue.
Yesterday, GameStop’s stock shot up again, almost 100%. The stock rallied increasing it’s share price from $44 to $91 a share. Seeing GME stock, rise like the Phoenix…again, Internet users rushed to Reddit crashing the site.