Guess what?. Yours truly will be First News 570’s home, Asheville, North Carolina. It’s Spring Break for the Mapp School of Higher Learning and we are breaking in North Carolina. It’s another week with Mark Starling, Seth, John, and the First News 570 crew. This week, Microsoft and the US Army collaborate on augmented reality combat, hackers ransomware campaigns evolve into extortion, and Joe Biden calls out Amazon on taxes during infrastructure pitch. 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.
EXTORTIONWARE ON THE RISE AS HACKERS LOOK FOR NEW SCHEME
It’s bad, but it’s true. The United States is still getting hit with high profile attacks. High profile exploits in Microsoft products or SolarWinds may garner headlines, but low profile ransoms are on the rise according to security experts. Extortionware is an evolution of hackers making individuals and organizations pay a ransom for embarrassing information about a corporate leader or in the case of the surgery chain, the Hospital Group, publishing potentially embarrassing before and after pictures of patients. Security companies estimate criminals make tens of millions of dollars a year specifically from extortion ware scams. One of the latest incidents involved a high positioned IT Director who was watching porn on his work computer. So, first; change your passwords. Second, install patches. Third, stop watching porn on your work computer.
MICROSOFT DOES GAMING x MILITARY TECH WITH HOLOLENS CONTRACT
Microsoft was won a whopping, $21.88 billion contract to outfit the US military with 120,000 HoloLens-based headsets. HoloLens is Microsoft’s augmented reality technology and will provide the US Army its Integrated Visual Augmentation System. They’ve been testing the technology since 2018, which will provide the Close Combat Force the ability to rehearse engagements in a mixed virtual and live environment before being deployed. The system has an amazing capability for being able to see through the Bradley fighting vehicle using the IVAS’ sensors. The 10 year contract comes after Google’s Glass product and Snapchat’s Goggles pivoted toward consumer use. Microsoft kept at the technology and has found an enthusiastic customer with the military. The contract is slated to last for 10 years.
BIDENS WAGS A FINGER AT AMAZON FOR PAYING TAXES
I’m interested to see what kind of blow back Bezos will make. Yesterday, President Joe Biden called out Amazon for not paying nary-a-penny in federal taxes. The President was pitching his $2 trillion, trillion with a ‘T’, infrastructure plan stating that a company making billions in profits shouldn’t be paying less in taxes than a firefighter or teacher who is paying 20% of their salary in taxes. I actually agree. In response, Amazon’s public policy and communications chief, Jay Carney, formerly of the Obama administration cited the research and development tax credit for the reason why Amazon pays no taxes. They spend all of their profits in R&D?
With great respect, Senator @ewarren, this isn’t correct about Amazon’s tax payments. But changing the law is certainly more productive than faulting companies for following it-and far better than threatening to break up American companies so they can't criticize elected leaders. https://t.co/borLvn5GZu
— Jay Carney (@JayCarney) March 31, 2021