Hey
Welcome to the Wire Weekly.
We have a shitload of amazing stories waiting to be read by you. Recorded between 25 July and 1 August.
🐦 Twitter Hackers Behind The Bar, But Their Tool Still In Hands Of 1000s
The Arrest and the charges
- The "mastermind" behind the hack was a 17 years old Californian teen, named Graham Ivan Clark. He was arrested Saturday morning with 30 felony charges against him.
- Pseudonymed Kirk, he convinced one of the company’s employees that he was a co-worker in the technology department who needed the employee’s credentials to access Twitter's internal tool.
- He then misued the credential to get access to 130 twitter accounts.
- The two others, Mason John Sheppard, 19, of the United Kingdom, and Nima Fazeli, 22, of Orlando, Fla., were accused of helping Clark.
- Sheppard is charged with computer intrusion, wire fraud conspiracy, and money laundering conspiracy charges, the most serious of which comes with a 20-year sentence and a $250,000 fine in the US.
- And Fazeli is facing five years in prison and a $250,000 fine for one count of computer intrusion.
“This was not an ordinary 17-year-old,” Mr. Warren (Prosecutor) said.
This might happen again.
- But 1000s of Twitter's own employees have access to the internal tool which means they've access to personal data of over 300 million accounts. And it's not the first time it has been misused.
- [image]
- Once Saudi Arabia paid 2 Twitter employees to to access personal data of some activists. And a Twitter employee once even blocked Trump’s account for a short while.
- To make the issues worse, Twitter DMs aren't encrypted, which means Twitter employees can read your DMs. (For context, WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal and iMessages are encrypted.)
The Week's News
Bezos, Cook, Zuckerberg and Pichai grilled by the Congress
- CEOs of the 4 biggest tech giants - Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google have been questioned by the US Congress for being anti-competitive.
- All of these companies use their powers and dominance to kill their competition. Here's how:
- Amazon tracks what other sellers sell on it's platform and makes competitive products in a lower price below the manufacturing costs. This effectively makes the sales of the other seller zero.
- Apple demands a straight 30% commission from apps people pay money to. For example, a subscription based app like Netflix has to pay 30% of what it earns to Apple to remain in the App Store, which is the only way an app can enter iPhones in a large scale.
- Facebook simply buys out all competition. Evidences say if a company resists selling itself, then Facebook threatens them to copy all of their features and drop their customer share. (like they copied Stories from Snapchat)
- Google steals competitors data to make their own products and threatens to make them effectively dissappear from the web if they resist. Yelp, for example, had his reviews data stolen by Google and shown on the search pages.
📢 PUBG might get banned. But Tencent is trying everything to stop
- The next app on India’s ban list is PUBG and 274 others for “possible violation of national security and user-privacy”
- Other apps include Resso by ByteDance, AliBaba’s AliExpress and more
- In response, Tencent updated PUBG’S privacy policies to include that Indian users' data is stored and processed in India only.
A Helicopter Ride Over Mars? NASA's About to Give It a Shot
- NASA's fourth Mars rover, Perseverance started it's six-month journey to the Red Planet.
- It carries a payload that hasn't been into space before - an autonomous helicopter called Ingenuity
- If things go as planned, Ingenuity will spin it's rotors on April 2021 and become the first space craft to go airborne on Mars.
👀 Google’s next undersea cable will connect the US with the UK and Spain
- Google revealed that it’s invested in a new cable line to connect New York with London and Bilbao.
- The cable, named Grace Hopper, is the fourth Google-owned pipe.
- It's designed to bolster the forthcoming rollout of Google Cloud in Spain, as well as improve connectivity between the US and Europe. Ready in 2022.
(Engadget)
CES Las Vegas Event Goes Online Only
- CEO Gary Shapiro announced CES 2020 Las Vegas Event has been cancelled.
- Instead, CES 2021 will be held as an online-only event.
- CES 2022 is planned to happen as normal in the first weeks of the year.
- Sony, Microsoft and Samsung are having their own digital events separately.
Flipkart Launches Hyperlocal Delivery Service
- Flipkart's hyperlocal delivery service called Flipkart Quick to launch in sub-urbs of Bangalore.
- It promises deliver of over 2000 items within 90 minutes from local grocery stores. Customers can also schedeule a 2 hour slot for delivery for ₹29.
- Back in 2015, Flipkart tested a similar service named 'Nearby' which they rolled back.
👨🏭 iPhone 11 to be manufactured locally in India
- Apple has setup a new production line for the companies flagship iPhone 11 in a Foxconn plant in South India.
- Plan are to produce roughly $40 billion worth of smartphones.
- With the iPhone 11 now being locally manufactured, the 30% import charge will be waived off for Apple, which might result in a price drop.
🎮 A PS5 Leak Hints At The First Customizable PlayStation Ever
- The information about the customizable faceplates comes from ResetEra which has posted images of a bunch of faceplates in what looks like the assembly process of the PS5.
- The white plates on the PS5 can be snapped on and off. This means that you will be able to purchase additional plates aftermarket to customize the console to your liking.
(Digit)
🥽 A new Oculus Quest has seemingly leaked from every angle
- Walking Cat, a leakster, posted what appear to be more marketing images on Twitter, and in one of their tweets, mentioned a mysterious September 15th date, which could indicate when Facebook-owned Oculus plans to launch this rumored new Quest VR headset.
- Although Facebook declined to comment on the launch date, it is probably September 15th.
📱Samsung Galaxy Note 20: Release date, leaks and more
- Samsung has confirmed its next Galaxy Unpacked event will take place online on 5 August where we're expecting to see the launch of 5 devices - including the new Note 20 models.
- A South Korean media report claims the series will be available from 21 August, which if true, means preorders are likely to start straight after the event on 5 August.
- A report on MySmartPrice claims the Note 20 4G will start at €999 and the Note 20 Ultra 5G will start at €1349.
We'd love to hear your feedback on this mail. You can hit reply or go to this page. Thanks.
If someone forwarded you this, sign up here.
Cheers,
The Wire Mail team
0 comments