This week was CES, lots of space news, There’s a new Ring Doorbell security flaw, lots of Google news, Bell Canada may be tracking you, some great new in the Cambridge Analytica case, fake 5G, Samsung Unpacked event announced and, more in the Other News section.
CES
I know that CES was last week but I’m still working on a few articles about CES. Intel talked about their next-gen chips. Lots and lots of TVs were announced some of them with Google Assistant and Alexa.
Space News
Forming Black Hold Spotted For First Time
On Thursday, Raffaella Margutti talked to Space.com about a study he authored that released that day. The interview is about a blast referred to as “The Cow” which was discovered sometime last year. The study determines that the phenomenon may have actually been the formation of the black hole.
Hubble Loses Its Best Camera
On Tuesday, in a statement, NASA announced that Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 has broken. That camera is the one that took many of Hubble’s best pictures. The malfunction will most likely last until the end of the government shutdown. There’s no chance of repairing it because it’s too far away.
Deep Space Signals Detected
Early in the week University Of British Columbia astronomers discovered an FRB (fast radio burst). This is only the second repeating FRB discovered. This could be many things, but it is unknown what it actually is.
SpaceX News
On Thursday Elon Musk posted an image of the first scale model of Starship (formerly known as BFR) their interplanetary vehicle.
Starship test flight rocket just finished assembly at the @SpaceX Texas launch site. This is an actual picture, not a rendering.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 11, 2019
The picture fron the tweet isn’t working for me either
Google Assistant
On Monday (before CES), Google announced new and updated features such as: being able to check in to hotels and flights,
Right To Be Forgotten
To preface the “Right To Be Forgotten” is an EU law that requires anything to be removed from the web if an involved party asks for it to be taken down.
This week Google won a “Right To Be Forgotten” case that the initiated in 2018. So now they only have to remove search results in EU member countries. But now most likely the verdict will be appealed and it will take a long
Lawsuit
On Tuesday, lots of sites reported that Google is being sued by investors for covering up systematic sexual harassment. The suit requests that the stock is split in a way that causes Larry Paige and Sergey Brin to lose power in the company and that former employees that got payouts to return them.
Bell Canada
Earlier this week Canadian telco Bell Canada started taking data from all their customers. The data includes pretty much anything that they can get including: whom you call and when you call them, what you watch on tv and when you watch it and, lots more. They are collecting this data on an opt-out basis.
Cambridge Analytica
On Tuesday, SCL Elections parent company of Cambridge Analytica was fined £15,000 by the UK’s cybersecurity watchdog. The fine was under an EU regulation called “Subject Access Request”.
Fake 5G
On Tuesday, it was discovered that AT&T is faking that certain customers are getting 5G with the phone saying that it was getting “5G E” service. The truth is that no one ever got 5G service “5G E” is actually just 4G LTE. So the other carriers criticized AT&T for doing that,
Samsung Unpacked Event Announcement
Samsung announced their Galaxy Unpacked event for February 20, it is possible that they will announce their first foldable phone maybe calling it the Galaxy F, but they will also announce the S10. I may liveblog the event if I’m available.
Other News
In other news, Ikea Smart releases window shades, IMDb launches a streaming service that is free, but (only in the US, Amazon may be launching a cloud gaming service, NASA’s InSight lander is on Track to Start Collecting Data Next Month, The Chromecast Audio is Getting Discontinued, Ubisoft joins Epic Games Store and, Walmart is starting a self-driving grocery delivery service.