Tech News Today For July 28, 2017

Tech News for Friday July 28, 2017

Happy Cheap Tesla Day, if $35,000 before customizations are cheap to you. Tesla will deliver its first Model 3 tonight, and ReCode says this could be Elon Musk's iPhone moment. The car is sold out through most of 2018 with 350,000 pre orders in April 2016 alone. In some states, the sting of that $35,000 price tag can be lessened by a $7,500 federal, but that will only last until Tesla has sold 20,000 vehicles in the US and it is already halfway there. Elon plans to hand out the first 30 cars tonight, mostly to employees, and you can watch the event live streamed at Tesla.com.  Read more at recode.net.

Anonymous social services like Yik Yak and Secret have been dropping like flies but Whisper is taking its sweet time. The company has laid off 20 percent of its workforce this week, or 14 of 71 employees. The editorial team saw the brunt of the hits as the company relies further on machine learning to handle some of those media management tasks. Whisper has around 20 million monthly active users, so it's not a dead zone yet when it comes to its marketable audience.  Read more at techcrunch.com.

Who among us hasn't had our favorite hangouts shut down because they've hit on hard times. One would have hoped that this would be something we could avoid in the virtual world. Not so. Today Comcast-backed Altspace VR announced that the company is shutting down on August 3rd because the company has run into unforeseen financial difficulty. According to Adi Robertson at the Verge, the deal for their next round of funding fell through.  Read more at theverge.com.

The Black Hat security conference is underway in Las Vegas, and it’s usually the time of the summer where we realize we aren’t nearly as safe as we might have thought. Nitay Artestein of Exodus Intelligence demonstrated that iOS and Android devices were widely exploitable due to the Broadcom Wi-Fi-chips inside them. But you can rest a little easier knowing that both Google and Apple issued patches last week to address the worm they call Broadpwn.  Read more at arstechnica.com.

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