Interesting Tech News from October 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.
IPHONE 12 AND IPHONE 12 PRO
Apple announced iPhone 12 Pro, iPhone 12 Pro Max, iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 mini. All new phones have 5nm A14 bionic chip and are 5G capable. This means that all of them are going to be similar in processing power. So, where do the differences start? Below I am going to give you a very quick 20 sec overview based on what you really want:
You want a small form factor? Go for iPhone 12 mini, which is just 1cm short of iPhone X.
Go for iPhone 12, if a) Mini is too small for you, b) you don’t want to pay the price of iPhone 12 Pro, c) you are not too interested in Augmented Reality and d) you are satisfied with just 2 cameras and 2x optical zoom.
If powerful camera system with more optical zoom and a refined AR experience is worth the Pro price, then go for iPhone 12 Pro.
And if size does matter to you and you want next level of image stabilization with extra detail in your photos and videos, iPhone 12 Pro Max should be your choice.
In addition to iPhone announcements, Apple also introduced Home Pod mini with a new intercom system, which can prove to be quite handy.
HOW USE OF MICROSOFT EXCEL RESULTED IN THE LOSS OF COVID-19 TEST RESULTS
It’s not hard to see how an automated process of importing test results from CSV files to Excel templates resulted in the loss of data. The process seemed simple:
Firms paid to perform Covid tests, send their case results in CSV format to PHE (Public Health England).
Each case result could have several rows of data
PHE through an automated process imports those case results into Excel templates.
The data is then uploaded to different dashboards for viewing and analysis
So, what went wrong? A bit of background. You can create an excel file in 2 formats, xls and xlsx. XLS format used by Excel 2003 and older versions can only allow 65,536 rows and 256 columns. On the other hand, the xlsx format introduced in 2007 and newer versions can allow 1,048,576 rows and 16,354 columns. Unfortunately, in step 3 above, PHE was using xls file format, which basically meant that the template could only process certain number of cases, which were going to be far lesser than if they were to use xlsx format. Once the limit reached, any further cases were just left off. That’s how the results got lost.
Yes, as the case count continue to rise, it’s not hard to see that xlsx limit could be easily breached as well. PHE would need to come up with a more robust solution.
INTEL BRINGS SGX TECHNOLOGY TO XEON PROCESSORS IMPROVING ITS CONFIDENTIAL COMPUTING OFFERINGS
Google enabled confidential computing earlier this year by making use of AMD’s Epyc processors. I wrote about it here.
Although Intel’s SGX (Software Guard Extension) technology is not new, but it needed some key improvements, such as:
a) Bigger memory so that it can run much bigger applications and VM machines. Intel is now offering 1TB memory enclaves, as compared to a few megabytes it offered before.
b) Developer friendly, so that there is no need to re-write applications to make use of SGX
c) Availability on Data Centre chips.
All of the above improvements will be coming to Intel’s upcoming Ice Lake Chips (Xeon Processors). We can expect to see deployment of this new technology in Azure cloud next year.
4G LTE ON THE MOON
NASA has selected Nokia to deploy a 4G/LTE cellular network on the moon. The requirements for the 4G communication system are:
It should be of small form factor, which is able to meet constraints of space payload
Obviously, it should use less power
It should be able to withstand the harsh conditions during launch, landing and while in the space
It should be an end-to-end solution
The project is expected to be completed by late 2022.
MAJOR CYBER ATTACKS DISCOVERED IN THE MONTH OF OCTOBER 2020
Sopra Steria a French IT consulting firm with over billion dollar revenues, became a victim of Ryuk Ransomware. The company claims there was no damage caused to its customer’s information systems. Was the data encrypted? If yes, then was Sopra Steria able to decrypt? Unsurprisingly, these important details are unknown.
According to Bloomberg more than 2000 Robinhood trading accounts were hacked and customer’s funds disappeared. Some customers claim that they had setup 2 factor authentication. Apparently, the hacks were made possible with compromised customer’s email. Bottomline is that it’s still a mystery how the attack happened and Robinhood did not even share any information regarding the hack on their website at the time of writing.
Trump’s campaign website was defaced in cyber-attack involving cryptocurrency scam.
NOTABLE TECH ACQUISITIONS IN OCTOBER 2020
Intel’s roughly $9 billion sale of its NAND business to SK Hynix, will help Intel focus on its processor business, amid increasing competition with AMD.
While AMD’s purchase of Xilinx for $35 billion will help AMD expand its footprint in data server, cloud, 5G and automotive market.
Apple acquires AI startup Vilnyx for $50 million. Vilnyx builds AI technology for video analysis.
OTHER TECH NEWS FROM OCTOBER 2020
Patients of some of the hospitals and healthcare systems in Canada and UK, will now be able to check their health records on their iPhone.
API battle between Google and Oracle continues. Oracle claims that it should be compensated by Google for using its Java code in Android OS.
Facebook will need to continue improving its AI algorithms, so that they can distinguish between onions and sexually suggestive content.
Cloudflare launched API Shield, available to cloudflare account holders. The shield is designed to protect APIs exposed to the internet by providing a deny-all positive security model for all incoming connections. The shield works by ensuring that connections are established only if the relevant cryptographic information is provided.
A necklace called Bump that warns you if you are not socially distancing, helped made London marathon possible this year during Covid-19 restrictions.
If you have a PayPal account, you can now buy and sell bitcoin and other virtual coins.
Zoom has finally enabled end-to-end-encryption for all of its accounts at the expense of some features.
BT is another company which is ditching Huawei in favour of Ericsson for 5G.
Is Apple developing its own Google Search alternative?
Big Tech (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Alphabet) earnings tsunami was unleashed end of October. Not surprisingly, all companies did better than expected, thanks to COVID-19. Have you been lately seeing more ads on YouTube? Yes, this was reflected in record YouTube revenues. People ordered more online, which was reflected in Amazon’s quarterly earnings. WFH translated into buying more iPads and Macs, this was reflected in Apple’s earning report.
Thank you and see you next month.