[Free] Weekly News - 12/4/22

In this newsletter, we will cover 2022 recaps, the Twitter and Apple feud, Advent of Code, and more.

Nicholas Fasching

Dec 4, 2022 • 17 min read

DALL-E 2 Generated Image Using Prompt: "An ornament programming while sitting under a Christmas tree, realistic"

✋

This is the free weekly newsletter for the month of December. It takes me a lot of time to make these, so subscribing to my paid subscription would help a lot. Future newsletters are only available to paying subscribers.

2022 is Ending Soon - Yearly Recaps

As the year is coming to an end, many companies are providing personalized and general recaps for the year. Here are all the current recaps!

Spotify Wrapped 2022

Spotify Wrapped for 2022 has arrived! All Spotify users will get a "Listening Personality" with over 40,000 unique messages from Artists on Spotify.

Spotify also has some metrics for 2022 such as Bad Bunny being the top artist and "As It Was" by Harry Styles being the top song. You can learn more about 2022 Wrapped on Spotify's website.

Apple Music Recap 2022

Don't worry if you aren't a Spotify user because Apple Music has created its first-ever yearly personal recap (technically it started in 2019, but it was very primitive). It covers your top artist, song, and album, also covering your total playtime (I personally spent 20% of 2022 playing music). Some complain that it misses the point of Spotify Wrapped because you can't share your statistics.

YouTube Music Recaps

If you are not an Apple or Spotify person, YouTube Music is joining the club with its own 2022 recap.

App Store Rewards

Along with the Apple Music '22 Recap, Apple also announced awards for the App Store this year. The best iPhone app of the year goes to BeReal (a unique take on social media) and the best Mac app of the year goes to MacFamilyTree 10. The best mobile game of the year goes to Apex Legends Mobile and the best Mac game of the year goes to Inscryption. You can find more of the awards on Apple's official website below.

Word of the Year - Gaslighting

Word of the year according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary is gaslighting. During 2022, gaslighting saw a 1740% increase in lookups with high interest throughout the year. Oligarch, Omicron, Codify, LGBTQIA, Sentient, Loamy, Raid, and Queen Consort were also mentioned.

Space

Artemis 1 Makes History

Artemis 1's spacecraft Orion makes history this week by flying the furthest distance from Earth for a spacecraft designed for humans. It took an "instantly iconic photo" of the Earth and Moon sitting next to each other in the black void of space.

NASA is so far really happy with Artemis 1 and says that humans will be living and working on the moon by 2030.

500-Year-Old Letter Finally Decoded by French Scientists

In 1547, Roman Emperor Charles V sent a letter to his ambassador using a secret code. It took almost 5 centuries, but French Scientists finally decoded his letter and found out that Charles V was afraid of a possible secret assassination plan.

Artificial Inteligence (AI)

Nvidia Minecraft Bot Wins Award

Nvidia won the Outstanding Datasets and Benchmarks Paper Award at the 2022 NeurIPS (Neural Information Processing Systems) conference for its Minecraft bot named MineDojo.

It was trained on 730,000 YouTube videos with 2.2 billion transcribed words, ~7,000 wiki pages, and 340,000 Reddit posts with 6,600,000 comments.

OpenAI's Free to Use ChatGPT

OpenAI has publicly released their new ChatGPT chatbot for free to everyone.

You give the AI text, and it will provide you with a response. It tries its best to understand what you said and respond in a human-like way. It is really cool and could greatly improve those annoying "digital assistants" found on many websites. I highly recommend trying it out:

Someone even made ChatGPT do an SAT test and it scored 1020, which means the AI is in the 52nd percentile. Wait... does that mean this AI is smarter than 52% of people?

I made ChatGPT take a full SAT test. Here's how it did: pic.twitter.com/734sPFU3HY
— david (@davidtsong) December 2, 2022

Disney's New AI can Change the Age of Actors/Actresses

Disney has announced their new neural network AI that can change an actor's age easily. Its purpose is to significantly increase the speed of manually making an actor look older or younger which can take weeks. Disney says its AI is "production ready" and could start being used in upcoming films.

Apple

Asahi Linux Can Now Play 3D Games

The Asahi Linux team that is trying to port Linux to Apple Silicon has achieved GPU hardware acceleration. This means that Linux games can now take advantage (still needs performance improvements) of Apple Silicon's rendering power. Playing 3D games on Linux on Apple Silicon is now reasonable.

iPhone 14 Emergency SOS via Satellite Saves Man in Alaska

Apple's new Emergency SOS via Satellite feature in the iPhone 14's has come to use and saved a stranded man in Alaska.

Apple Prevents NFT Transactions in Coinbase Wallet App

If you use the Coinbase Wallet App, you may be sad to hear that you can no longer trade NFTs on iOS. This is because Apple is blocking Coinbase as Apple wants its 30% cut on fees that Coinbase collects.

A Hand-Numbered Apple-I Computer Goes up for Auction

A fully working Apple-I computer went up for auction this week. It is hand numbered by Steve Jobs with #78. The auction will end on December 16th, 2022 with an expected buy price of $375,000.

Apple Watch Ultra is now a Diving Computer - Oceanic+

The Oceanic+ app for the Apple Watch Ultra is here. Oceanic+ plus was designed by Huish Outdoors with Apple and is used by scuba divers to track their dives. It is built for recreational use at up to 40 meters (130 feet).

Below is a real-life demo of Oceanic+

Oceanic+ has a free version, but to get more advanced features, you must pay for a subscription. It costs $9.99 a month or $79.99 a year. There is also a family plan at $129.99 a year.

Elon Musk

Twitter and Apple Feud

This week, Apple stopped buying advertisements for Twitter which certainly threatens Elon Musk. Not long after, Elon called out Apple because they "threatened to withhold" Twitter from the App Store:

Apple has also threatened to withhold Twitter from its App Store, but won’t tell us why
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 28, 2022

Elon Musk said he would make an iPhone alternative if this happened a couple days earlier. Elon asked (through Twitter of course) if Apple and Tim Cook "hate free speech" due to the cut in ad spending (though ad spending has nothing to do with free speech).

After Elon Musk met with Tim Cook, apparently "Apple never considered removing Twitter from [the] App Store." Elon Musk says he "resolved the misunderstanding" with Tim Cook, but never said where he originally heard Apple's plans.

Research firm Media Matters for America (MMA) did some investigating and found out that it seems Apple has actually increased spending on Twitter, despite Elon's word. This makes Elon Musk hard to trust and is a reminder to not believe everything you see on the internet.

More Delays to Twitter Blue, This Time to Avoid Apple's 30% Fee

Twitter was supposed to relaunch Twitter Blue this week on Friday, but it has been delayed yet again. This time Elon is trying to avoid Apple's 30% fee (but it seems unlikely). Elon also is raising the price of Twitter Blue by 1 cent from $7.99 a month to $8 a month.

Twitter Under Elon's Rule Removes COVID-19 Misinformation Policy

On November 23rd, 2022, Elon Musk officially removed the COVID-19 misinformation policy Twitter used to have. In 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) said we need to "mitigate harm from health misinformation" because it can cause harmful risk-taking behaviors, mistrust, and confusion.

This led to a European regulator threatening a continent-wide ban on Twitter if Elon fails to enforce content moderation rules required by the Digital Services Act. Elon said that "none of [Twitter's] policies have changed" which is technically true because Twitter didn't change the COVID-19 misinformation policy, they just stopped enforcing it.

Neuralink Ready to Put Computers in Human Brains in 6 Months

Elon Musk's company Neuralink which plans to put computers in human brains might achieve its goals in 6 months. But, we've heard many promises from Elon Musk before so don't be too hopeful for it to happen.

Tesla's Semi Truck is Here

Announced in 2017, coming in 2019, the Tesla Semi electric truck is here 3 years later than expected.

This is the first-ever production version of the Tesla Semi and with a promise to make 50,000 in 2024.

I'm not into trucks, so you can check the specs yourself. But one surprising metric is that the battery will weigh 11,000 pounds.

Data Breaches

Meta Fined $277 Million for Gigantic Data Breach

Facebook's parent company Meta was fined $277 million for accidentally leaking the personal details of up to 533 million users sometime between May 2018 and September 2019.

LastPass "Security Incident"

Back in August of this year, LastPass and its parent company GoTo had an "unauthorized party" access customer information in a third-party cloud service. The types of data leaked are unknown, but LastPass assures its customers that passwords are completely safe in a blog report about the security incident.

Florida State Tax Website Oopsie

The Florida Department of Revenue website had a security flaw that leaked hundreds of taxpayers' Social Security numbers and bank account numbers.

Epic Games Real World Object to 3D Model App

This week, Epic Games released RealityScan for free on iOS. RealityScan allows you to use your camera and make a high-fidelity 3D model from a real object. This will make it very easy for game developers and 3D artists to create realistic 3D models for the games or artworks.

Layoffs

Popular Food Delivery Service DoorDash Lays Off 1,250 People

Crypto Exchange Kraken Lays Off 1,100 People

Killer Robots Now Legal?!?

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors has voted to allow San Francisco Police to use deadly robots. These robots would let police remotely kill suspects if lethal force is needed. Keep in mind these robots are remote-controlled, not autonomous, but it still breaks Issac Asimov's "Three Laws of Robotics".

Security

Eufy Cameras Can Be Streamed Anywhere, Unencrypted

Eufy's privacy-first, cloud-less security camera has been found uploading images from the camera to cloud servers. Eufy claims this is a misunderstanding and relates to its mobile notification system.

It gets worse when some more digging was done and security researcher Paul Moore found out you could stream the live feed with no password or encryption as long as you had the correct URL.

It gets even worse when you remember that Eufy promises end-to-end encryption and footage gets sent directly to your phone, with no cloud service.

It gets even even worse when you find out that there are only 65,535 possible URLs which is extremely easy for a computer to brute-force.

Popular App Removed From Play Store for Collecting Users' Texts

Google removed 2 apps, one with over 100,000 downloads for an illegal scheme that involved forwarding text messages. Symoo, disguised as an easy-to-use SMS messenger, would ask for a user's phone number and send all of their messages to gloomy.fun (the hacker's website). Symoo on the infected phone would also forward new messages which allowed the creation of fraudulent accounts on websites that require SMS verification. Another app called VirtualNumber was also involved with this, but it only had 10,000 downloads.

Advent of Code - 2022

Advent of Code for 2022 has started! Every day up until Christmas, starting December 1st, programmers will get to solve 2 part problems for 2 stars a day. The goal is to get all 50 stars and complete the problems daily.

Advent of Code 2022

You can check out my progress so far on my GitHub:

Some people are even using AI to completely solve Advent of Code automatically.

BlockFi Files Bankruptcy Amid FTX Fall

Cryptocurrency BlockFI filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy this week amid the fall of FTX. FTX has agreed to give BlockFi a $400 million credit line option for FTX to buy BlockFi.

Telegram Shares User Data in Lawsuit

In a copyright lawsuit, the popular messaging platform Telegram disclosed administrators' names, phone numbers, and IP addresses of channels accused of copyright infringement. This comes after a teacher sued Telegram for not doing enough to prevent the unauthorized distribution of her course material.

DropBox Zero-Knowledge Encryption

DropBox is well known for Cloud-based file back-ups and file-sharing services are encrypted, but DropBox has always had control of the encryption keys. DropBox acquired German cloud security company Boxcryptor to bring zero-knowledge end-to-end encryption to its business users. This means DropBox cannot access the data of files if they wanted to, were forced to, or were hacked to.

And That Is It!

I hope you enjoyed this weekly newsletter! Have a great week!