Tech News Today for December 14, 2016
Tech News for Wednesday December 14, 2016
US President Elect Donald Trump invited a number of Silicon Valley’s top technology minds to an introductory meeting at Trump Tower that, according to sources, touched on a number of issues related to tech including China, skilled immigration, jobs and security. Those in attendance included Apple CEO Tim Cook, Alphabet’s Larry Page, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella to name a few. Also in attendence was Tesla’s Elon Musk who, it was announced prior to the meeting, will be acting as economic advisor to Trump along with Uber CEO Travis Kalanick. Read more at cnbc.com.
Iain Thomson from The Register says that Microsoft has quietly issued a patch fixing one of their Windows automatic update patches that blocked users from accessing the Internet or joining a local network. Something in the original update broke DHCP and prevented people from obtaining their LAN-side IP addresses from their broadband routers. Windows 10 users who follow their updates carefully, suspect the patch to blame came out on December 9th, but Microsoft isn't saying. Read more at theregister.co.uk.
Yahoo disclosed an entirely seperate hack from 2013 than the one reported earlier this year involving at least 500 million accounts. THIS incident involves more than 1 billion user accounts, with names, email addresses, phone numbers, birthdays, hashed passwords, and security questions and answers all leaked to a third party, the result of a hacker who accessed Yahoo’s code to forge cookies on its behalf. Verizon, who is still in the process of acquiring Yahoo, says it is evalauting the situation as the investigation unfolds. Read more at venturebeat.com.
Amazon announced today that on December 7th, Prime Air completed its first drone delivery -- a fire TV device and a bag of popcorn. The drone was completely autonomous and guided by GPS, however the UK requires that a technician be standing by in the event of failure. The delivery was part of a beta test in Cambridgeshire in England. The test currently has only two customers, but Amazon says they plan to expand to more customers who live nearby the fulfillment center. The company promises delivery in under 30 minutes in the electrical drones that fly under 400 ft, carrying packages up to 5 lbs. Read more at bloomberg.com.
A new update rolling out to Twitter users brings the capability for live video broadcasting into the app itself. It's powered by Periscope, Twitter’s live streaming service that up until now has operated on its own. Twitter users don’t need a Periscope account to take part, nor do they have to have iinstalled the Periscope app to stream. Read more at theverge.com.
Megan Morrone and Jason Howell are joined today by Andrew Hawkins of The Verge to talk about the self-driving Uber on the streets of San Francisco. Tech News Today streams live at 4PM Pacific, 7PM Eastern at twit.tv/live. Subscribe to the show and download it on-demand at twit.tv/tnt.