This Week In Tech – April 12 2020

I accidentally left this post unpublished it was meant to go up midday yesterday.

This week Boeing decided to re-fly Starliner, Quibi launched, Sony showed off the controller for the PS5 and, you can get a free trial of Stadia. Also, Rocket Lab conducts a recovery test, there’s new Zoom news and, Apple and Google team up on contact-tracing tech. Like every week there’s more in the Other News section and the Interesting Things of the Week.

Starliner

In a press release on Monday, Boeing announced that they are going to re-fly an uncrewed test flight of Starliner. This is due to the original flight last December being unsuccessful which ended in a ton of errors. The second test-flight will be at no cost to taxpayers. There was no timeline given for when the next flight will be.

Quibi Launch

On Monday the short form streaming service Quibi launched. Ir is helmed by the entertainment industry veteran Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman former CEO of eBay and HP. Quibi is an interesting concept, a streaming service that is based around 10-minute clips made for mobile.

New PS5 Controller

In a Press Release on Tuesday Sony announced details about the controller for the PS5. It’ll be called the DualSense and will have new features including a built-in microphone and adaptive triggers. They also are changing the share button, quoting the release ”With Create, we’re once again pioneering new ways for players to create epic gameplay content to share with the world, or just to enjoy for themselves. We’ll have more details on this feature as we get closer to launch”. The controller also has a new colour scheme

Rocket Lab

Also on Tuesday, Rocket Lab posted a video of their first successful booster recovery test.

Stadia Free

In a release on Wednesday, Google announced that Stadia is going to be free for three months for current users and new users will get the trial offer. New users will get the option to downgrade to Stadia free and keep the games they had at the end of a free trial.

Zoom News

In a release on Wednesday, Zoom announced that they created a council of CISOs (Chief Information Security Officer) to advise on security after all the recent issues. The council will include CISOs from HSBC, NTT Data, Procore, and Ellie Mae, among others. Also, within the council us an advisory board that includes security leaders from VMware, Netflix, Uber, Electronic Arts, and others. They also brought on Alex Stamos former CISO of Facebook and Adjunct Professor at Stanford’s Freeman-Spogli Institute brought on as an outside advisor

Apple and Google are working on Contact Tracing software

On Friday Apple and Google each sent a press release announcing that they are teaming up on a contact-tracing system to track COVID-19. The system uses Bluetooth to trade anonymized rotating IDs of each device. The IDs change every 15 minutes so there’s a way to determine the length of interactions and the IDs will be recorded. The system doesn’t share any location data just the IDs of devices that have been in transmissive proximity of the infected person device. This Wired article does a good job of explaining in an in-depth and understandable way.

Other News

In other news, OriginPC announced that they are releasing a Laptop with a 12-core processor. The Entertainment Software Association announced that they are entirely cancelling E3 for this year meaning that there’s not even going to be an online event. They also announced the 2021 event will take place between June 15-17, 2021. This week Disney Plus passed 50M subscribers and Google Duplex is out now in UK, Australia and, Canada.

Interesting Things of the Week

Q&A with G Suite VP From Protocol

This coming week is the 50th anniversary of Apollo 13 you can follow it in real time here

Link Dump

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