It’s another Thursday, and Mark Starling is back! That means it’s time to talk tech with the First News 570 crew. In this week’s roundup, the Batterygate saga ends with an Apple settlement, a bunch of celebrity Twitter accounts are implicated in a Bitcoin scam, and the US Senate bans TikTok. 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.
A quick break from the silly world of technology news.
For real, for real people. We can fault leadership for not taking swift and definitive action while COVID-19 was just beginning to make its impact felt on all of us. Now, we have to take our health and safety into our own hands. This week, I’ve read reports of summer camps experiencing C19 outbreaks, cities and towns are re-entering shelter-in-place phases, and schools are pressing the issue of sending kids back to closed in spaces. I know it can sound elitist to talk about working from home, and I fully know that people need to work, but with 1% of our nation’s population having been infected, and 130k people died because of this, we have to operate on our own volition.
Personally, there have been two deaths in our family (they were older) due to covid, one of my software developers and his fiancee’ had contracted and it was touch and go, and I have friends who went on a water park trip, contracted covid, and now have ruined friendships over their behavior.
Wear a mask. Not only for your safety, but for the safety of your neighbors. Avoid large gatherings, get takeout from your favorite restaurants if you want to keep them in business (and tip well). If you want go out, practice social distancing so you decrease the chance of spread to your friends and family. And try to limit your time out and about.
This shit is real.
If you’re a fan of the fruit company, now’s your time to pass GO! and collect $25. This week, Apple has reached a settlement with the State of California to the tune of $500 million. Or half a billion dollars with a ‘B’. The settlement brings the Batterygate tech opera to a close. You may recall, Apple was purposefully (and negatively) impacting iPhone battery performance in a bid to get people to buy more devices. The people did buy more devices. Apple apologized in 2017, but they needed to pay for such heinous deeds. In order to qualify for the settlement you’ll need to have owned an iPhone 6, 7, or SE variant running iOS 10.2.1 or 11.2 before December 21, 2017. I was jailbreaking during this time and refused to upgrade, so I’m not sure where I stand. To find out more details and file a claim, visit the settlement website.
A GAGGLE OF CELEBS AND BIG WIGS HOOKED IN TWEET SCAM
The Twitter accounts of Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Obama, and others were all hacked and became part of a ring mimicking the classic ‘Give-Me-Dough-I-Give-You-Mo’ scam. The accounts sent out tweets indicating that the account holders (Musk, Gates, Obama, etc.) would send back a doubled amount of Bitcoin if a user sent them BTC first. In the understatement of the year, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is quoted as saying, “Tough day for us at Twitter. We are all sorry this happened.” Cybersecurity experts are saying this has become the most severe hack on social media this year. Twitter took the extreme step of silencing the hacked accounts. Admittedly, this is a tough hack to swallow. The world is in the midst of a tough time, and people are struggling, some are desperate. Scams like this suck to the extreme.
US SENATE: STOP USING TIKTOK ON GOV DEVICES
The US Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee will be considering legislation to ban federal employees from using TikTok on government issued devices. TikTok is owned by Chinese company ByteDance, and the wildly popular app is coming under scrutiny due to the ongoing trade/health/tech dispute between the United States and China. 60% of TikTok US’s users are between the age of 16 and 24, not necessarily fed material, but you get the point. The US Senate is raising the specter of national security to justify the ban, but are they banning Facebook, too?
AMAZON TELLS CORPORATE EMPLOYEES TO STAY HOME UNTIL 2021
You read that headline right. Citing spikes in in coronavirus infection rates, Amazon has extended work from policies for its corporate employees until Jan 8, 2021. I honestly can’t blame them for the move seeing how many states are seeing infection rates dwarf the figures reported in April and March as the virus was first making its impact in the US. It’s an interesting move as its second headquarters is just being constructed in Crystal City, VA. At the same time, Amazon has ended its no questions asked leave policy at some of its warehouses as some employees have fallen ill to the virus.
