Welcome to Between the Bytes where we’re not as smart as your average nerd. I’m Gary Arnold
Our first bit of news is a Facebook algorithm update. Facebook is updating its algorithm to disincentivize click-baiting articles and headlines. The new algorithm will now take into account anytime people are asking for comments or likes or votes in their posts that don’t really have anything else relevant. So hopefully we can expect to see a little less of that in your Facebook newsfeed.
In some cybersecurity news, the US government is making claims and attributing the recent wanna cry attack to North Korean hackers. The attack in the spring that brought down thousands of computers in Europe is being attributed to North Korean hackers for all these political and other reasons. They haven’t released the full list of evidence or other reasons why they believe that but it’s obviously not a stretch of the imagination. If you recall, the wanna cry attack was a series of ransomware attacks that took over many computers in Europe in the United Kingdom. It served as a reminder to keep your computers updated and your operating systems at their most current and to make sure that you have ransomware and antivirus software installed on your systems work.
Cryptocurrency has been on a huge upswing over the past couple of weeks. Many of the cryptocurrency coins have been increasing in value dramatically. Bitcoin is near 20,000 dollars a coin and is expected to break that benchmark by the end of the year. Litecoin, as well as Etherium, have also seen massive increases over the past few weeks and it’s becoming more and more popular. If you’re curious about Bitcoin and cryptocurrency we’ve recently put up a video about the basics of cryptocurrency from one of our resident tech experts and expert in Bitcoin investor and we’ll have more videos with him in the coming weeks so stay tuned for that to learn more about cryptocurrency.
Silicon Slopes has recently announced their keynote speaker for the 2018 Tech Summit coming this January. The speaker is going to be Shantanu Narayen the president and CEO of Adobe. Adobe obviously has a very big footprint here in Silicon Slopes and we’re excited to go see him, it’s going to be an awesome event. In our last bit, as promised it wouldn’t be Between the Bytes episode without a plug for Star Wars. Star Wars: The Last Jedi, it’s a great movie we highly recommend going to see it. It was very enjoyable, very fun, and very surprising so if you haven’t seen it, go check it out.
This week’s Tech History for Between the Bytes on December 18th in 1926, the word photon was first used in a scientific setting to describe packets of energy in light. Also on December 19th in 1958, the first radio transmission from space was sent to earth. And finally, on the 1999 Time magazine, Jeff Bezos was named the man of the year right at the peak of a dot-com bubble. Little did they know how far he would come from that time.
That’s it for this week’s episode of Between the Bytes, be sure to LIKE and subscribe and check back for other videos in the coming weeks. Thanks for watching.
