Daily Tech Headlines – February 8, 2018
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| Daily Tech Headlines – February 8, 2018 | |
| Number | 434 |
| Broadcast Date | FEBRUARY 8, 2018 |
| Episode Length | 3:43 |
| Hosts | Sarah Lane |
Twitter has first profitable quarter since IPO, Amazon rolls out Whole Foods delivery in select US cities, iBoot source code for iOS 9 posted to GitHub.
Headlines
- Twitter just had its first profitable quarter after going public 4 years ago. The company's 2017 Q4 brought in $91 million, after losing $167 million in the same quarter the year prior. Other good news - Twitter's revenue grew to $732 million, up 2% from $717 million this time in 2016. Monthly users grew by 4% year over year, though flat since Q3, staying at 330 million total. Monthly users declined in the US, falling from 69 million to 68 million.
- Source code for iBoot, a core component of the iPhone’s operating system was posted on GitHub which could help hackers find vulnerabilities in iOS and make jailbreaks easier. The iBoot code applies to iOS 9, with some portions likely still used in iOS 11. Apple filed a DMCA takedown notice and the code has been removed from GitHub.
- Amazon has added Whole Foods grocery delivery its Prime Now delivery service, allowing Prime customers to order select items and get them delivered within two hours. If you live in certain parts of Austin, Dallas, Virginia Beach, or Cincinnati. The Wall Street Journal reports that Amazon plans to expand the service to other markets, but no word on a timeline.
- John Perry Barlow, a founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, died Wednesday at the age of 71. EFF executive director Cindy Cohn shared the news in a blog post. Barlow founded the EFF in 1990 with Mitch Kapor and John Gilmore.
- According to reports from local media in China, police are testing sunglasses with built-in facial recognition at train stations in the “emerging megacity” of Zhengzhou, where they’ll be used to scan travelers during the upcoming Lunar New Year migration. The sunglasses are controlled by a connected mobile unit and sell for 3,999 yuan, or $636 (with facial recognition costing extra). LLVision which makes the glasses says they’re able to recognize individuals from a pre-loaded database of 10,000 suspects in just 100 milliseconds, but says accuracy levels in real-life usage may vary due to “environmental noise.”
- Microsoft has announced its Build conference for Windows developers is happening May 7-9 in Seattle. Registration opens February 15th and if previous years are any indication, tickets will sell out quickly. However, this Build will overlap with Google's I/O conference which takes place on May 8-10.
- In a class action complaint filed this week, plaintiffs allege that the microphones in their Pixel and Pixel XL phones were defective and that Google knowingly sold them. The lawsuit also claims that some warranty replacement phones continued to have problems, though neither of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit had their phones repaired within Google’s standard warranty period. Google acknowledged the Pixel phones’ microphone issues in March 2017.
- A trade group called The Internet Association representing tech companies like Google and Facebook is backing a bill that would reverse the repeal of the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) net neutrality rules. The IA sent a letter Thursday to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) arguing that the FCC rules should be reinstated.
Links
| Preceded by: "Daily Tech Headlines – February 7, 2018" |
Daily Tech Headlines – February 8, 2018 |
Followed by: "Daily Tech Headlines – February 9, 2018" |