Weekly Tech Newsletter Featured

[Free] Weekly News - 11/13/22

In this newsletter, we will cover the Twitter Blue mistake, the FTX fiasco, GitHub universe, Amazon delivery drones, and more.

Nicholas Fasching

Nov 13, 2022 • 21 min read

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You may have noticed that this newsletter is free, unlike the others. This is a one-time sample of what my newsletters look like every week. I put a lot of work into them and I hope you will become a paying subscriber after reading!

Elon Musk

Twitter Blue

This week, Elon Musk officially rolled out the updated Twitter Blue subscription for $8 a month... but there are 3 major issues. The first is that Twitter Blue is only available for iPhone users (it is not available on Android or Twitter's website). The second issue and biggest issue is that people can get the "verified checkmark" just for paying.

This means the "verified checkmark" doesn't verify who you actually are, but it only verifies that you pay $8 per month. The third issue is that the meaningless "verified checkmark" is replacing the trusted "Official" label on important accounts such as PCMag and TechCrunch. This has led to many scam accounts impersonating popular celebrities and companies such as LeBron James and a slew of parody accounts. Twitter started preventing accounts from changing their name, preventing new accounts from getting Twitter Blue, and banning unlabeled parody accounts to combat these impersonators. This was followed by Tumblr (another social media platform) mocking Elon Musk by selling a meaningless blue checkmark for $7.99, but you get 2 for the price of 1.

Shortly after the new Twitter Blue was released, Twitter quietly removed the $8 paid verification and brought back the "Official" label to prevent the impersonation of high-status accounts.

Twitter Advertisers

With all of the chaos that Elon Musk has brought to Twitter, advertisers have been ending their advertising on the platform. Even one of the biggest ad firms, Omnicom Media Group, is recommending its clients stop advertising on Twitter. But, Elon Musk has tried to ease advertisers' worries by answering questions and telling advertisers that Twitter's growth is higher than ever.

Mastodon Reaches 1 Million Users After Twitter Users are Leaving

Many long-time users of Twitter are switching over to the new decentralized social media platform called Mastodon. Mastodon now has reached over 1 million active users mainly because of Musk's actions on Twitter.

Twitter Asks Fired Employees to Return

After Twitter laid off over half of its entire staff team, they have started asking dozens of the fired to come back. Twitter has said that it laid off some staff by accident and realized that they actually needed some laid off staff to continue building Elon Musk's vision of Twitter.

Tesla Reaches Fourth Recall in Just 2 Months

Last week on November 1st, Tesla announced another recall for 40,000 Tesla vehicles for loss of power steering assist on rough roads. This is one of 4 recent recalls that started back on September 19th and have accounted for a total of 1,161,047 recalled vehicles.

Elon Musk Sells $4 Billion of Tesla Stock

After Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion, he sold 19.5 million shares in Tesla worth about $4 billion. This adds up to Elon Musk selling $19 billion worth of Tesla stock in the past year. Elon has lost $90 billion this year decreasing his wealth to about $179 billion, but he is still the richest person in the world.

Layoffs

Over 1,300 tech companies have laid off over 215,000 employees since COVID-19. Here's a website to view all of the layoffs per company.

Meta Lays Off Over 11,000 Employees

Meta has announced that they will lay off over 11,000 employees (about 13% of the entire company) which is the biggest layoff Meta will ever have had. But, Meta promises many things to help the laid-off employees such as paying for remaining paid time off (PTO), 6 months of health insurance, and 2 weeks of base pay for every year of service plus 16 weeks.

GitHub Universe

GitHub Universe was a major tech event covering all of the new changes in popular code repository platform GitHub. It was held from November 9th through 10th. Here are all the new changes developers get to benefit from.

"Hey Github!" - The Voice Programmer

GitHub announced in the keynote event "Hey GitHub!" This is a new tool that allows you to program with your voice. It is excellent for people with difficulty typing such as people with repetitive stress injury (RSI). It is currently in a technical preview where you can signup for a waitlist. I recommend checking out the very interesting demo on the website.

Codespaces Gets Many Updates

Codespaces is a tool that allows you to program in the cloud using an integrated development environment (IDE). Codespaces run in a virtual machine (VM) on the internet that allows you to program from anywhere on any device. GitHub has now announced that free accounts get 120 core hours (60 hours in the base codespaces VM) and pro accounts get 180 core hours (90 hours in the base codespaces VM). Currently, Codespaces only supports Visual Studio Code (a popular open-source IDE), but there are now public betas for the JetBrains IDEs and JupyterLab. GitHub has also announced Codespaced Templates which allows you to set up pre-made development environments with a click.

Private Vulnerability Reports

GitHub has announced a new opt-in feature that allows programmers to report vulnerabilities in a project privately to the project maintainers. This allows programmers and hackers to safely and legally report bugs without announcing them to the whole world.

GitHub Accelerator and GitHub M12 Fund

GitHub is fully committed to supporting open-source developers do their work. GitHub announced GitHub Accelerator and the GitHub M12 Fund to continue this support. GitHub Accelerator is a 10-week program that gives developers $20,000 and mentorship so these developers can quit their daytime job and fully commit to developing open-source projects. The GitHub M12 Fund is $10 million that GitHub will use to fund open-source companies and developers.

Blockchains

Web2 Creator Dismisses the Web3 Vision

Tim Berners-Lee is well known as the creator of web2 and is telling us to "ignore" web3 because "web3 is not the web at all". He says that "blockchain protocols are too slow, too expensive, and too public" whereas he believes that the web needs to be fast, cheap, and private.

Story of the Week - FTX

FTX owned by Sam Bankman-Fried was the once 4th largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world until just this past week. FTX's sister company Alameda Research (which is a trading firm) had over $5.8 billion worth of FTT (FTX's native cryptocurrency) which is a large amount of Alameda's total $14.6 billion balance. This essentially means that FTX was printing money by giving itself money that isn't actually backed by real assets and Alameda was susceptible to losing large amounts of money if FTT decreased in value. Binance had a large amount of FTT and announced that they would sell their FTT because they supposedly wanted to protect themselves if FTX failed. Due to this increase of FTT in the market FTT decreased which cause many users to want to withdraw their FTT from FTX. The issue is that FTX was in a liquidity crunch which means that they didn't have the necessary funds to pay out users. Binance offered to help FTX by buying the company, but after some due diligence, they found out about FTX mishandling user funds and some shady business practices, so Binance backed out. Due to FTX's insolvency, they stopped allowing users to withdraw funds which led to mass panic for the entire cryptocurrency world. Every cryptocurrency declined by a significant amount.

Data from Coinbase on Nov 9, 2022 @ 7:40 PM EST

Crypto.com (another cryptocurrency exchange) paused withdrawing USDC and USDT on Solana due to the "market conditions". This surely is not helping the situation. Crypto.com also has a large majority of single cryptocurrencies, 31% of their reserves are Bitcoin and 20% is in meme coin Shibu Inu. FTX signed a deal with Tron that would allow users to withdraw/swap some assets to TRX, but many still have crypto assets held with FTX.

FTX's CEO Sam Bankman-Fried was once a multi-billionaire, but overnight his wealth decreased 94% from $15.2 billion to $991.5 million. FTX has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy which means the company is reorganizing to cut costs and Bankman-Fried has stepped down as CEO.

All of this news has hit no blockchain harder than Solana. Sam Bankman-Fried was a big supporter of Solana with his trading company Alameda having over $1 billion worth of Solana assets. Solana's cryptocurrency SOL has had a decrease in value of over 50% in the past week.

Solana to Support Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)

Neon Labs, the developers of the Solana blockchain, are planning to support the EVM on Solana on December 12th. This means that developers can develop for Ethereum and deploy to every EVM-supported blockchain now including Solana. This will greatly increase the amount of distributed apps (dApps) on the Solana blockchain.

US Department of Justice Recovers $3.36 Billion in Bitcoin

A little over a decade ago in September 2012, a man unlawfully obtained over 50,000 Bitcoin from dark-web market Silk Road. The US Department of Justice (DOJ) announced this week that about a year ago, they seized 50,676.17851897 Bitcoin (currently worth about $3.36 billion) from this man's home.

FIFA Goes to Web3 After Contract with EA Ends

For quite a while, Electronic Arts (EA) has owned the rights to making FIFA (soccer) games. Now that EA's contract has ended, 4 new FIFA games will utilize blockchain technology.

GameStop NFTs Trade $5 Million of Value in a Week

GameStop is starting to become a web3 company. In just one week, it had reached $5 million in trading volume for its NFTs.

Ethereum is Becoming Deflationary

Ever since the Ethereum Merge (when they changed to proof of stake), the amount of Ethereum being created has decreased significantly. Actually, very recently Ethereum has become deflationary. If Ethereum kept using proof of stake, over 670,000 Ethereum would have been created since the merge, instead, over 6,000 Ethereum has been destroyed since the merge.

Apple

"Hey Siri" Will Soon be Just "Siri"

Apple is reportedly planning to change the wake word for Siri to just "Siri" from "Hey Siri". Apple is also working to improve Siri's support for other third-party apps.

Apple Music for the Web Adds Live Lyrics

After a long time, Apple is adding the Live Lyrics feature to the web version of Apple Music. This is only in Apple Music Beta for the web, but it will probably come to the full release of Apple Music on the web soon.

Apple is Going Past Their Planned 2-year Transition to Apple Silicon

2 years ago, Apple announced that it would undergo a 2-year transition and this week marks the first week in the 3rd year of this transition. Apple has failed to meet its deadline with its last Intel mac being the Mac Pro. The Mac Pro is overdue for a makeover but there still aren't even rumors of a new Apple Silicon-based Mac Pro.

iPhone 14 Stabilization Demoed in New "Shot on iPhone" Video

Apple has just released a new "Shot on iPhone" video demoing the action mode feature on the new iPhone 14 Pros. It is pretty incredible how stabilized the iPhone 14 Pros can get will super shaky camera footage. I recommend checking it out.

Storing Your ID in Apple Wallet Expands to Colorado

Last year in 2021, Apple announced that users will be able to store their driver's license or state ID in Apple Wallet. This feature eventually came out in 2022 with only Arizona and Maryland supporting the feature. Now, Colorado is joining the club allowing users to digitalize their driver's license and state ID.

Apple Sued for Deceiving Users With Privacy Settings

Apple is defending against a class action lawsuit for harvesting iPhone user data even when Apple's own privacy settings said they wouldn't. This comes after a Gizmodo report that showed Apple was collecting analytical data in the App Store, Apple Music, Apple TV, Books, and Stocks. This was discovered by 2 independent researchers at software company Mysk.

Artificial Intelligence

The Spread of Text-to-Image AI

With the recent public release of OpenAI's DALL-E text-to-image AI, these AI generators have been super popular. Design platform Canva is adding a text-to-image AI feature in their app. PhotoRoom is using text-to-image AI to allow sellers to change the background in product shots. Midjourney tests a new version of its AI image generator that has details DALL-E can't get. Draw Things brings text-to-image AI to iPhones. As you can see, text-to-image AIs are spreading everywhere.

Expert-Level Go AI Fails Against Amateur Moves

In 2016, the best human player lost to the Alpha Go AI in the ancient board game Go. More recently KataGo has become popular as an open-source version of a top-ranking Go AI. A group of AI researchers created an AI that can be defeated by amateur human players, but exploits untrained parts of KataGo and can beat it up to 99% of the time.

Amazon Robot AI Sorts Millions of Packages

Amazon has a new robotic arm capable of sorting millions of unique packages that represent about 65% of its inventory. It shows that it could be soon when AI robots will replace humans in these factories.

Security

Google One VPN Comes to Desktops

Google is bringing its Google One VPN to macOS and Windows after originally coming to iOS earlier this year. Google One VPN is only available to users on Google's 2TB or greater "Premium" plan.

Twitter Security Executives Quit

With the continuing Twitter drama, chief information security officer Lea Kissner, chief compliance officer Marianne Fogarty, and chief privacy officer Damien Kieran have quit. This leads to concern as Twitter's security, privacy, and compliance are now all going to be challenged. Many users worry about their account security and privacy because no one is in charge to keep it safe.

The NSA Pushes for Memory-Safe Programming Languages

The National Security Agency (NSA) is encouraging projects and software companies to use memory-safe programming languages. Many popular programming languages such as C and C++ don't have memory safety which means programmers can accidentally introduce unwanted vulnerabilities. Memory-safe programming languages prevent programmers from creating memory-related issues that can be hard to notice. Memory-safe languages include C#, Go, Java, Ruby, Rust, and Swift.

Drones

Amazon Delivery Drones

Prime Air is Amazon's soon-to-be drone delivery service. By the end of this year, Amazon will use delivery drones to deliver packages in Lockeford, California. These drones will drop packages from 12 feet in the air, but they will not deliver the package if it detects an animal such as a dog below it. Residents express concerns about the privacy and safety of these drones, but Amazon reassures them that they do not need to worry.

Hacker Drone Can "See Through Walls"

Hackers have taken advantage of a $20 drone to "see through walls". It uses WiFi signals coming from your devices and uses triangulation to determine the location of those devices. It can be used to detect when someone is leaving their home with their phone and it can also be used for burglars to detect where valuable devices are in your home (laptops, phones, smart watches).

Philips Hue Smart Christmas Lights

Philips Hue has announced their newest smart home product, Festavia string lights. This Christmas string light has 250 smart LEDs in a 20-meter-long cable. These lights offer all the expected Philips Hue smart light features, but it also introduces a gradient where you can have custom multicolor lighting options. But, it comes at a hefty price of $159.99 which might offset the benefits of Festavia.

You Can Now Mute Entire Communities of People on Reddit

Reddit is releasing a new "community muting" feature that allows users to control what they don't want to see on the platform. These communities will be removed from your notifications, Home feed, and Popular feed. Users will be able to mute up to 1,000 different communities.

Nintendo and DeNA are Creating a Joint Company Called Nintendo Systems

Nintendo and mobile game company DeNA are creating s venture company called Nintendo Systems. This comes after Nintendo's 7-year-long partnership with DeNA since 2015 creating games such as Mario Run, Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, and Mario Kart Tour. This move is to help Nintendo continue to make games in the mobile game market.

Theranos Founder Elizabeth Holmes Doesn't Get New Trial

Google is Refunding 3 Years of Stadia Purchases

After the failure of Google's cloud gaming company Stadia, Google initiated a 4-month shutdown of Stadia. Google has now promised full refunds for all purchased games and hardware for Stadia. Unsuccessful services usually have a bad impact on a company, but Stadia seems like it will be very expensive for Google to handle.

Microsoft Flight Simulator Expands Flight Options

Historically, Microsoft Flight Simulator has had helicopters and gliders in their games but they were missing from the resurrection in 2020. Microsoft is celebrating Flight Simulator's 40th anniversary by adding 2 helicopters and 2 gliders to Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020. This has brought some new technical challenges and the developers admitted to cheating in some realism aspects, but they still got it to happen.

YouTube Adds Livestream Q&A Feature

YouTube is adding a Q&A feature to live-streaming which allows streamers to find questions from viewers without having to sift through the normal livestream chat.

And That's It!

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