Interesting Tech News from July, 2020
This is a monthly column of curated tech news, highlighting interesting and/or valuable tech developments from the past month, which are impacting our society directly or indirectly. It also gives some vague sense of the trajectory that the technology as a whole is taking. The aim is to share the information concisely, in an easy to understand manner, help you fill some gaps on what you might have missed & learn something new.
A NEW VIDEO CODING STANDARD TO MEET THE DEMANDS OF 4K, 8K VIDEO TRANSMISSION
Internet Speed of a Typical Household
Currently mainstream video coding standards used on most of the platforms, such as on your mobile devices, Vimeo, Facebook etc. are H.264 and H.265. Google uses its own standard for YouTube called VP9. If you are an iPhone user and usually shoot footage in 4K at higher frame rate, chances are you are using H.265 i.e. HEVC codec, as higher frame rates are not generally supported on H.264.
4K footage in H.264 format will take more bandwidth as compared to 4K footage in H.265 format. This is because H.265 standard is based on sophisticated algorithms, which decrease the file size of the footage, without compromising quality, so that it can be streamed efficiently over the internet.
As 4K and 8K become more common, need for an even better standard grows. This is where H.266 comes. H.266 claims to use almost half the BW needed by H.265, without compromising quality.
Computations based on this new H.266 algorithm, will require new chips, which means adoption will take time, but for 4K and 8K applications, this is another step closer to becoming more mainstream.
GOOGLE MAKES USE OF AMD’S EPYC PROCESSOR’S SEV TECHNOLOGY TO ENABLE CONFIDENTIAL COMPUTING IN ITS CLOUD
First let’s look at 3 different types of data states.
Data in-transit: We extensively use technologies such as SSL, HTTPs, IPSec to encrypt/decrypt data while in-transit i.e. data moving over the internet/networks.
Data at-rest: We also encrypt our data when we store it on our hard drives.
Data in-use: What about data in-use? In order to be able to make decisions on the data, applications need to decrypt the data. However this gives a small window of opportunity to the hacker because the data is not encrypted while it’s being processed.
Confidential Computing takes care of data in-use by encrypting it while it’s being processed. This technology is similar to Apple’s Secure Enclave technology but on a larger scale. Google is making use of AMD’s 2nd generation EPYC processor’s SEV (Secure Encrypted Virtualization) technology to achieve this objective.
Let me give you a couple of examples.
By doing a memory dump on a virtual machine, you can access important information from its memory such as master encryption keys etc. However, if the virtual machine is using SEV technology, doing memory dump on the memory will only reveal encrypted information, which will be of no use to an attacker.
On your iPhone, hacker will not be able to decrypt your TouchID or FaceID data, because its encryption keys are stored in the Secure Enclave, a technology based on a similar idea
In addition to safety of the data, another key benefit of the SEV technology is that developers don’t have to modify their applications. One trade-off though is that this technology can have an impact on the performance depending on your environment.
APPLE, AMAZON, GOOGLE, FACEBOOK, MICROSOFT REPORTED EARNINGS
KEY TAKEAWAYS:
All the 5 big companies beat market estimates.
Number of daily active Facebook users grew by 12% from last year.
Google reported decline in its revenue for the first time in its trading history. Google’s cloud revenue grew by 43%.
Amazon’s $5.2B of quarterly profit was the largest ever in company’s 26 year history. AWS growth fell from 37% same quarter last year to 29% this quarter. Amazon is not immune to pandemic and added $2B covid related costs for its next quarterly guidance.
Although there was a decline in quarterly Microsoft’s income, its Intelligent Cloud business revenue grew by 47%.
Apple’s iPhone, services and wearable businesses posted more revenues than same quarter last year. Pandemic resulted in more iPad and Mac sales, however, store closures had an overall slight negative impact.
MAJOR CYBER ATTACKS DISCOVERED IN THE MONTH OF JULY, 2020
Verified Twitter accounts owned by prominent figures such as Obama, Elon Musk, Bill Gates etc. were hacked in this breach. Through the hacked accounts, hackers tried to scam people into transferring money to Bitcoin Wallets. As per twitter’s latest update and at the time of this writing, hackers made use of Administrative tools, that were supposed to be only accessible by the Twitter Employees, to hack 130 twitter accounts. Hackers were not able to view the previous account passwords but might have been able to view personal information. During the hack Coinbase halted more than $280k of bitcoin transactions. Twitter staff was targeted through phone spear-phishing scam.
Royal Military College of Canada also became the victim of the Cyber Attack. Website remained offline and faculty was instructed not to use computers or plug devices into the network. Details about the attack are unknown and investigation is still ongoing.
UK, US and Canada security organizations issued joint statements on persistent cyber attacks on organizations developing COVID-19 vaccine in these 3 countries.
Garmin, which produces GPS applications for Marine, Automotive, Aviation and Health & Fitness Industry, revealed on July 27 that they were a victim of the cyber attack. Their systems were encrypted, which suggests that it was a ransomware attack. Just like any other company, they did not reveal the full details. It’s been over 2 days since the discovery and their services were still not fully functional.
NOTABLE TECH ACQUISITIONS IN JULY, 2020
Uber acquires meal delivery service Postmates for $2.65 billion. This will help both companies to tap into each others extensive delivery networks.
NetApp provide data storage solutions for hybrid cloud environments. Spot.io helps customers manage cloud services they are utilizing in a cost effective way through their AI based software solutions. NetApp buys Spot.io for $450 million.
HPE a spin off from HP Inc. provides cloud services and solutions and has presence on AWS and Azure. A $925 million purchase of SD-WAN player Silver Peak, seems very consistent with its current offerings and will help it advance further into SDN technology.
Analog Devices, maker of Integrated Circuits (ICs) will buy another IC maker Maxim Integrated for $21 billion.
OTHER TECH NEWS FROM JULY 2020
Major vulnerability was discovered on f5 devices, which had the potential to allow hackers to compromise corporate networks by exploiting it with or without privileged access. Read the details here.
It’s not only TikTok which was caught reading your clipboard data. LinkedIn also joins the party, thanks to iOS14’s new privacy feature.
Due to COVID-19, demand for Webcams continue to grow. GoPro follows the lead of DSLR companies such as Canon and Olympus, and now lets you transform Hero8 into a webcam through a firmware update.
Amazon buyers will now have a comfort of finding out more about third party amazon sellers in the US. Amazon is making this move to combat counterfeiting, which it had struggled with in the past.
Just like Netflix, Amazon will also be introducing individual profiles for its Prime Video customers.
When it comes to Cloud, Google is at 3rd position not 1st, but TikTok’s $800 million purchase of Google Cloud services would give Google some boost.
KFC is working with 3D Bioprinting Solutions, to create world’s first lab-made chicken nuggets. KFC will provide its breading and spices to the Russian company to replicate its signature KFC chicken nugget taste.
Intel’s 7nm chip delay is good news for AMD and TSMC.
UAE launched its first ever historic mission to Mars called Hope from Japan. The mission aims to study Mars’s weather pattern. It’s a major milestone for the small Arab nation.
BMW is following Tesla’s lead and is going to offer features based on a subscription model through its Operating System 7. What that means is that for example if you want to have Adaptive Cruise Control enabled, pay for it and BMW will enable that feature through its software. When you don’t want it, disable it and stop paying for it.
Did the tech titans namely Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple try to curb the competition by adopting anti-competitive tactics? Congress grilled the CEOs of these giants to find answers to the year long investigation.
Websites and services that rely on Cloudflare’s DNS, instead of Google’s DNS suffered from outages. Cloudflare blamed a backbone router, which because of some error announced bad routes, causing some parts of the network unreachable.
Space internet race is heating up. Amazon now has approval from FCC to complete its Kuiper constellation of 3,236 satellites, which will enable Amazon to provide satellite internet service just like SpaceX’s starlink project.
Canon announced long awaited EOS R5 and R6 mirrorless cameras along with RF telephoto and macro lenses. EOS R5 is EOS R’s successor, and have some impressive specs such as 45MP sensor and ability to record un-cropped 4k@120fps and 8k@29.9 video.
Thank you and see you in September.