Do you ever feel like every week is a test, and you’re confronted by a brand new monster of the week? It’s Thursday and tomorrow is Friday. I came off of my bi-annual weekly fast this week and I’m no longer light headed. I’m on with Mark Starling, Seth, John, and the First News 570 crew. This week, Feds collect Colonial Pipeline’s crypto cash, the fruit company announced new software products and nothing new on the hardware front, and one Fastly customer caused an Internet blackout. 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.
FEDS COLLECT COLONIAL CRYPTO CASH
Seriously, think about it. The US government, searched the blockchain, found DarkSide’s transactions in the ledger, figured out the public keys of their digital wallets, and seized MOST of the ill-gotten BitCoins Colonial Pipeline paid to the hacker gang. The FBI recovered $2.3 million of the original $5 million ransom by somehow cracking the private keys of DarkSide’s digital wallet. I think that’s pretty damned amazing if its true. DarkSide was operating a “ransomware as a service” business and had ultimately received $90 million in BTC payments for running the scam. The $2.3 million sum is less than the original $5 million because BitCoin has been falling out of favor lately losing value from its $60,000 high to closing at $32, 000 per BTC yesterday.
NEW SOFTWARE, NO HARDWARE AT THIS YEAR’S WWDC
About this time every year, fans of a certain fruit company look towards California to be dazzled and amazed at what’s to come in the Fall. Repeating last year’s announcements, this year’s Apple WorldWide Developer Conference was held virtually at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino. WWDC is for the developers, and while there were no hardware announcements there were plenty of new things for people to look forward to. Apple announced new operating systems in virtually every class with updates for iOS15, iPadOS, watchOS, and surprisingly an update macOS with the announcement of a new Monterrey operating system. A macOS update is somewhat surprising since Apple release Big Sur in December 2020. There wasn’t much to write home about which signals a point in product lifecycles that resemble evolutions more than revolutions.
There are some things to like however, FaceTime will be getting spatial audio enhancements which promise more lifelike sound during phone calls. Apple is clearly positioning FaceTime to take on applications like Zoom and others. At the height of the pandemic, FT just wasn’t up to snuff, and updates promise to put the app on par. Also coming out of the height of the pandemic is a new feature called SharePlay which allows people to have shared viewing experiences. I don’t know about your but watching Tiger King and Lovecraft Country using Netflix Party was a delight. You have to be on an FT call to make it work.
Apple is also touting you’ll be able to check in to your hotel using the Wallet app and will also be able to store your Driver’s License info in Wallet. macOS will get widgets and the Shortcuts app if you’re about that life. iPadOS will be getting better multitasking and allow remote control from a Mac! Now that is a useful feature. Developers will be getting beta editions of each product this week.
FASTLY CUSTOMER CHANGES SETTINGS AND INTERNET BLACKS OUT
Talk about vulnerabilities. Earlier this week, Internet provider, Fastly experienced a software glitch that caused a blackout on a huge swatch of Internet. Fastly isn’t naming names, but the customer made a configuration change in their service which trigger the bug. The bug then knocked out Internet service to a number of notable companies including Amazon, Reddit, The Guardian, Spotify, Hulu, BBC, CNN the New York Times, the UK Government…you get the point. Fastly’s engineers restored service after 50 minutes of discovering the bug. Even though the Internet is global in nature, and use routing to send traffic when significant parts of the network go down, most traffic on the Internet is routed by a small number of companies. This experience just showed how vulnerable we are when trusting our utility to a handful of companies.