Top Tech Trending Stories For The Week
Tags: webdev, blockchain
Published: 2023-01-25 11:46:54


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Layoffs, hacks, Instagram, Google, openAi, Microsoft, and Ethereum Co-founder, were some of the major headlines in the Tech world this week and early last week.

From WhatsApp releasing its native macOS app compatible with Apple Silicon in a public beta to Former FTX US President Brett Harrison raising $5 million for a new crypto software startup.

Microsoft also disclosed it’s extending its partnership with OpenAI and many other stories.

LET'S GET INTO THE DETAILS.

Wikipedia, one of the world’s top 10 most visited websites, and a resource used by billions every month disclosed it's wearing a new look on desktop.

The Wikimedia Foundation, which runs the Wikipedia project, announced early this week that it's launching an updated interface aimed at making the site more accessible and easier to use with additions like improved search, a more prominently located tool for switching between languages, an updated header offering access to commonly used links, an updated table of contents section for Wikipedia articles and other design changes for a better reading experience.

INSTAGRAM

Instagram announced this week it’s expanding its selection of time management tools with the launch of a new feature called “Quiet Mode.” The feature aims to reduce users’ anxiety about taking time off from the app by silencing incoming notifications, and auto-replying to DMs.

With the new Quiet Mode feature, the app is aiming to address the real-world impacts that accompany trying to step away for a bit from an app that you regularly use — and one where others expect you to be available.

HACKS

T-Mobile revealed that a hacker accessed a trove of personal data belonging to 37 million customers.

The telecom giant said that the “bad actor” started stealing the data, which includes “name, billing address, email, phone number, date of birth, T-Mobile account number and information such as the number of lines on the account and plan features,” since November 25.

In the SEC filing, T-Mobile said it detected the breach more than a month later, on January 5, and that within a day it had fixed the problem that the hacker was exploiting.

The hackers, according to T-Mobile, didn’t breach any company system but rather abused an application programming interface, or API.

Still Talking Hacking

LastPass, one of the world's most popular password managers, has confirmed that cybercriminals stole customers’ encrypted backups during a recent breach of its systems. The breach was first confirmed by LastPass on November 30.

The Tech industry continues to suffer Job cuts and layoffs, is there a future in Tech?

Gemini exchange is reportedly undergoing its third major round of layoffs.

The New York-based cryptocurrency exchange will lay off 10% of its staff, according to reports. That follows a 10% cut in June and a 7% cut in July.

The exchange was hit hard when crypto lender Genesis, with which it had partnered for its Gemini Earn accounts, halted withdrawals on Nov. 18 — freezing some $900 million owed to 340,000 Gemini customers, among others.

It's been a brutal month for layoffs, with Genesis laying off 30% of its staff, crypto exchanges Huobi, Coinbase, and Crypto.com each laying off 20% of their employees, and Blockchain.com and OSL announcing cuts of around 30%.

The layoffs never stop,

Alphabet, the parent holding company of Google, has announced that it’s cutting around 6% of its global workforce.

In an open letter published by Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, the narrative followed a similar trajectory to that of other companies that have downsized in recent months, noting that the company had “hired for a different economic reality” than what it’s up against today.

recently Microsoft announced 10,000 job cuts, affecting nearly 5% of its workforce, which followed Amazon’s move to cut 18,000 jobs or 1.2% of its global headcount. Facebook’s parent Meta, meanwhile, revealed 11,000 layoffs back in November, hitting 13% of its workforce.

Will AI replace real developers?

After cutting 10,000 jobs, Microsoft said that it’s extending its partnership with OpenAI, the startup behind art- and text-generating AI systems like ChatGPT, DALL-E 2, and GPT-3, with a “multi-year, multi-billion-dollar” investment.

In a blog post, Microsoft said that it will increase its investments in the deployment of specialized supercomputing systems to accelerate OpenAI’s AI research and integrate OpenAI’s AI systems with its products while “introducing new categories of digital experiences.” The tech giant’s Azure cloud platform will continue to be OpenAI’s exclusive cloud provider, powering the startup’s workloads across research, products, and API services.

Some Blockchain news

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin released a new blog post over the weekend proposing a "stealth address system" for enhanced privacy protections for blockchain users.

In his writing, Buterin notes that assuring privacy remains a big challenge for the ecosystem, and that “improving this state of affairs is an important problem.”

Stealth addresses are generated by wallets and muddle public key addresses in order to transact in a private way. To access these private transactions, one must use a special key called the "spending key.”

Privacy has been a big concern for the Ethereum ecosystem, given that transacting on the blockchain is public

Will Solana overtake Ethereum?

Solana last week saw the highest number of new developers contributing to the ecosystem, with its developer count rising by 83%, the fastest of any major blockchain.

Compared to that, Polygon saw a 40% rise in developer count, Cosmos saw 25% and Polkadot saw 2%, the report showed.

Even with around 2,000 total developers as of December 2022, Solana is still about 3,500 developers short of Ethereum’s count, which had a total of about 5,700 developers.

FTX AGAIN?

Former FTX US President Brett Harrison has raised $5 million for a new crypto software startup from investors such as Coinbase. has raised $5 million for his own startup, Architect, which aims to make trading infrastructure for large crypto investors.

Architect is a software company aiming to build institutional-grade infrastructure to connect various crypto venues across decentralized and centralized exchanges.