Tech News Today for January 27, 2017
Tech News for Friday January 27, 2017
LeakedSource, a site that housed a database full of more than 3.1 billion account passwords from many of the largest data breaches made public this past year, has been raided by law enforcement. The site had previously provided details to reporters about the AdultFriendFinder hack as well as million of Twitter accounts, among others. LeakedSource was a for-profit site, charging users to gain access to all of the raw data in including passwords. Read more at arstechnica.com.
Last month, a group of Silicon Valley bigwigs met with the then President-Elect Donald Trump to discuss tech issues. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg sat next to Trump at the table and listened as he told her and those gathered that they were "an amazing group of people." A week into Trump's Presidency now some of those leaders are beginning to either speak out against or try to woo the Trump administration. Today in a post on Facebook Sandberg took a stand against Donald Trump's reinstatement of the global gag rule and to support passage of the Global Health, Empowerment and Rights Act to reverse this order and allow health organizations to freely provide full health advice and services to women. Meanwhile, the New York Times says Google is aggressively trying to woo Republicans.
You like big drives and you cannot lie. Admit it. When Seagate says it's working on bringing you a 16 terabyte hard disk drive, you can’t stop thinking about what on earth you have that could even begin to fill up that much space. Anyway, during Seagate’s earnings call, the company announced that 14 and 16 terabyte hard drives will hit the market sometime in the next 18 months, with a 12 terabyte version also in the works that should release even sooner. Read more at arstechnica.com.
After releasing earnings yesterday, Microsoft's value is as high as its been in the past 17 years. The company's market capitalization crossed the half-trillion-dollar threshold today and Wall Street says the fact that Microsoft is equalling serving the consumer and the Enterprise is what makes them so successful. Still, investors want to see more from Microsoft devices. Read more at reuters.com.
On iOS, a new app called FaceApp allows you to take any photo of a face, and process it in ways that will make that person older, younger, reverse the gender, and yes, smile when the subject wasn’t smiling at all, and it's rather convincing. Fun to play around with for five minutes, but you’ll probably get bored of it. " Read more at theverge.com.
...And now the bad news, courtesy of this article by Nick Bilton on Vanity Fair: Imagine that this is early days for this capability and that the technology is being expanded upon to the point where we can soon pull this off in real time with equipment we already have to make a convincing pretend-reality. You think the Internet is confusing now when it comes to whats real and whats fiction… just think about what happens when these tools reach the hands of ANYONE with an agenda. We used to think “I’ll believe it when I see it.” But someday, we’ll have a hard time believing even our own eyes and ears. Read more at vanityfair.com.
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