#41: Hubble Telescope .. New Amazon CEO .. Screen of death .. REvil Ransomware attack
Hi all.
Happy to be back again after a small break. I had to get offline due to family health and other issues. I lost a few extended family members due to COVID-19. So I urge each one of you to take utmost precaution in your day to day life.
Some Bits,
European Union has officially lauched the Digital Vaccine Passport, which will show the proof of vaccination, a negative test report or past infection. Having this passport means there is no mandatory quarantine.
The passport initially recognized vaccines from Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson, but did not include AZ’s Covishield. The Indian government objected and muscled its way to get Covishield recognized.
Around 200 US companies has been hit with ‘colossal’ ransomware attack. It is speculated that REvil, a Russian hackergang', inflitrated a Florida based IT company called Kesaya, whose software is used by around 10,000 companies.
Tim Berners-Lee has successfully auctioned and sold his original source code of the web as NFT (Non Fungible Token) for $5.4 m dollars. The auctioned bundle by Sotheby’s came with around 10,000 lines of source code, a poster created by Tim representing the code, an animation of the code being entered and a letter from Tim.
And somebody has already spotted a coding error in Tim’s original source code.
Microsoft Office 365 is the king amongst Business Productivity softwares. No doubt about that. There were some worthy competitors such as Google, Open Office, Zoho, but none could usurp Office 365 from its position. Everyone tried to compete with a bundle of products of their own.
Amazon wants to change that by forming a Rebel Alliance with companies who can compete with each Office 365 product. For example Slack (vs. Teams), Dropbox (vs. One Drive) and Smartsheet (vs. Excel)
Jeff Bezos is done with being the CEO of Amazon, and Andy Jassy will take over from Monday. Mr. Jassy has one huge task ahead. Avoid split of Amazon business from government regulators.
He is keen to details and introduced a nice meeting tool called ‘the wheel’, where employees will be picked at random to provide a presentation about the business he/she is working in. Here is a WSJ article about his profile.
The Hubble telescope has stopped working, as one of its crucial components failed and went into a safe mode. Though scientists are working to get it back to normal, Hubble might be reaching the end of the road. A new one, James Webb Telescope, is already on the way.
After a spectacular IPO debut on Wednesday, Didi the Chinese ride hailing company is now facing a cybersecurity review by the Chinese government. It is in line with growing scrutiny of Chinese tech companies by their government.
Finally,
The Blue Scteen of Death gets an upgrade in new Windows 11. It will be replaced with Black Screen of Death :)
Hope this edition was informative. Till the next edition Stay Safe, Stay Healthy
Best,
-Senthil