The Lighthouse IT Podcast - December 15th, 2023
This week, Matt & Griff discuss the tactics of hackers, good and bad AI news, some more bad news for Google, some good news for Canada, some very bad news for Bluetooth, the massive growth of TikTok, and more!
Listen here!
News
Hackers want your retreat photos on LinkedIn
Lots of companies love to share photos of events they host for their employees, and lots of hackers love it too, as those photos often contain little details that can be used to craft convincing social engineering attacks.
iMessage + Beeper = Ross & Rachel of our time
Despite Apple's attempts to kill the app, Beeper Mini continues to allow Android users to send and receive iMessages.
Google drops Gemini to compete with GPT-4
Google's latest AI model known as Gemini has just been released, now we wait to see how it compares against GPT-4
Bluetooth flaw gives it a cavity
You might want to turn off your Bluetooth connections while we wait for a new patch, as a major vulnerability can allow hackers to use it to send commands to your devices.
Google's best Gemini demo was faked, but are we surprised?
Many people have been very impressed by the recent video from Google demonstrating the capabilities of their recently released Gemini AI. Which is a shame since the video was faked.
Google caves and agrees to pay news companies for content in Canada
Canada has been working to promote and protect their domestic news and internet content creators, and recently got a big win when Google decided to play ball and start paying for the Canadian content shared on their platform.
Jury decides Google has illegal monopoly in app-store fight
Epic Games' second court case against a major app distribution platform has ended much more favorably for them than the last one.
Mistral AI, a Paris-based OpenAI rival, closed its $415 million funding round
Mistral AI, the European rival to OpenAI, recently had a very successful funding round. This is shortly off the heels of them providing open access to their Mistral 7B AI.
Perplexity AI promises to dethrone Google Search by offering more up-to-date & factual info than Chat-GPT
Founded by former Google AI researchers, Perplexity AI is already showing great potential and the team behind it has lofty expectations.
Chat-GPT might be getting lazy this winter as people test the "winter break hypothesis"
Perhaps AI is learning more from us than we realize, as people have noticed ChatGPT getting "lazy" as we get close to the years end.
Meta to remove cross-app messaging between Facebook and Instagram
This seems an odd move given the popularity of interconnectivity in general among the tech sphere, especially from Meta specifically.
TikTok becomes first non-game app to reach $10B in consumer spending
After reaching a billion monthy active users back in 2021, TikTok has now also reached $10 billion in revenue between Apple App Store and Google Play combined, the only non-game app to be able to make such a claim.