The Lighthouse IT Podcast - September 22nd, 2023
This week, Matt & Griff discuss the latest insights into Musk's personality, Apple changing their mind (certainly not due to external pressure or anything), X switching up their financial model, mistakes at MGM leading to ransomware attacks, TikTok & TransUnion partnering up, and a whole bunch of bad news for data privacy.
Listen here!
News
New Musk biography describes his maniacal nature
Because apparently the best reaction to being told the realities of running a business with as many servers as X is to ignore everyone you don't like and do whatever you want anyways regardless of the regulations meant to protect user data that would stop you.
The most unexpected backer for "Right-to-Repair" appears
Apple has long fought against RTR, but since the movement has been gaining popularity despite their efforts to squash it, it appears they have decide to flip their stance.
iPhone launch event clues in more than just phone updates
They finally have a USB-C charging port, but they've also removed the mute switch.
Confirmed from last episode: car privacy is awful
There is no good reason cars should be collecting data on their owners' "sexual activity" but that doesn't stop Nissan and Kia.
MGM gets ransomwared by calling their own tech support
ALPHV/Blackcat have claimed responsibility for the hack, stating all it took was finding an employee's name on LinkedIn then giving tech support a call to request a password reset.
X is planning on being a paid-for-only platform, tackling bots - x gonna charge it to you
This is supposedly to help combat the numerous bots on the platform, but the average user is probably just going to find somewhere else to share their thoughts with the internet.
TikTok including Wikipedia results in their search
This is apparently to target GenZ users as a recent survey of TikTok's GenZ audience found 74% use the platform as a search engine.
The TikTok Shop finally launches in the US
Now you will be able to buy/sell directly though shoppable videos and livestreams.
TikTok announces new partnership to facilitate multi-touch attribution
And that new partner is TransUnion, so now in addition to everything else that TikTok is already in the process of tracking about you, they can track your credit score.
For those confused by that last story and how that seems okay, here is a great visual journey of why you should care about what data apps have access to. Seriously, you should read this. READ MORE
Google officially baked a user-tracking ad platform directly into Chrome
This is supposedly a step towards turning off third-party tracking cookies, but Apple Safari and Mozilla Firefox have already had those disabled for years now and they don't intend to implement this user-tracking either.
Google to require AI disclosures on political ads
Elections are approaching, which means a non-stop deluge of election ads, which now can be generated by AI. Google is at least able to recognize that might be going a bit far, and will require such ads to disclose their "synthetic" content.