Weekend Tech Roundup January 06, 2024

Today marks the first of many upcoming moments of silence in . As of this morning, the Chrome web browser disabled cookies for 1% of its users, about 30 million people. By the end of the year, cookies —sort of. Thomas Germain Facebook recently rolled out a new “Link History” setting that creates a special repository of all the links you click on in the Facebook mobile app.

You can opt out if you’re proactive, but the company is pushing Link History on users, and the data is used for targeted ads. As lawmakers introduce tech regulations and Apple and Google beef up privacy restrictions, Meta is doubling down and searching for new ways to preserve its data harvesting empire.

Thomas Germain The price of crashed nearly , falling from $45,000 to below $41,000 in mere hours, hurting crypto’s best bull run in a year. But what, or who, could have been the culprit behind the crash? The day before, CNBC’s host of Mad Money, Jim Cramer, directed his powerful investing advice towards Bitcoin.

Maxwell Zeff After months of edging, Montana and North Carolina lawmakers have finished off Pornhub. Users in those states lost access to the adult site on Jan. 1 as new laws require people to verify their age to watch porn. That would have meant uploading a picture of your ID before you watch sorority sisters figure out how to pay the pizza delivery boy.

To spare us all, Pornhub’s parent company, Aylo, just removed access to its adult sites for those states altogether. Maxwell Zeff Classic puzzle game has been around for over three decades, and in that time, plenty of people have , usually by like a digital demolitioner. That’s a challenge in and of itself, but now, someone has taken the concept of “beating ” to the extreme by playing the NES game so hard it straight up crashed, a phenomenon also known as the “kill screen.” Levi Winslow Earlier this month, Polish hackers known as Dragon Sector accused one of Poland’s largest train makers, Newag, of intentionally when they’re repaired by third parties.

Newag threatened to sue Dragon Sector, but the story exploded as an example of why we deserve the right to repair and the company is from the Polish Office of Competition and Consumer Protection (UOKIK). On Wednesday, the Polish hackers went on the offensive, telling Newag, “We’ll see you in court,” on the stage of a conference, and described how Dragon Sector reverse engineered a train.

Maxwell Zeff What happens when a company loses a bunch of user data? Typically, they apologize and sheepishly beg for forgiveness. Not so with 23andMe. The popular genomics company, which suffered a last year, has instead opted to tell pissed off customers that they probably should’ve picked a better password if they didn’t want their data boosted.

Lucas Ropek A consumer protection group alleged Starbucks’ mobile app traps users in a vicious cycle of beverage buying in a December to Washington’s Attorney General. The coffee chain’s mobile app allegedly uses “dark patterns” to make low funds on a Starbucks Card unusable, forcing you to add $10 or lose that money altogether.

Maxwell Zeff Microsoft’s AI Copilot key is coming to computers this year. A mutual fund that helped now says the platform is worth 71.5% less than the $44 billion it was purchased for in 2022, according to Sunday. Fidelity cut the valuation of Musk’s social media platform by more than 10% in November when Elon Musk and told advertisers to “ ” Maxwell Zeff.