This Week
Battery is the new black
Real life Tony Stark — Elon Musk and his team over at Tesla motors announced their latest electric car, the Model 3. Tesla, who are really leading the way when it comes to electric cars, have impressed the whole industry, again, and have proven that electric doesn’t have to be boring… or slow.
The Model 3 can go from 0 to 60 in under 6 seconds, has a range of 215 miles per charge, can comfortably sit 5 full grown adults and because this is tesla it looks ridiculously like something from the future.
I really can’t see an argument against driving something that looks cool and is also helping our planet. The Model 3 is slated for a late 2017 release and is currently available for preorder with a $1,000 deposit and $35,000 base price.
Microsoft bets big on bots
Microsoft had its ‘Build 2016’ developer conference this week. For those of you who don’t know, Build is where Microsoft invites developers to see what they’re working on, from Windows right through to Xbox (and everything inbetween).
This year they spoke about bots. What are bots? I hear you cry from that great digital beyond. Well bots simply put are your digital assistants like Siri or Cortana, and Microsoft plans on making them smart. Like, really smart. Microsoft is envisioning more than just a transactional exchange between human and machine (what we currently have), they want you to have very real, very human conversations with bots.
Microsoft is betting big on this. So big in fact that the majority of the conference was dedicated to bots (sorry Windows mobile…. For real though, what’s going on with Windows mobile?). This could either be the beginning of a whole new way for us to interact with our machines or the beginning of SkyNet, either way we are fully in the future and there is no getting out of it now.
Care about your encryption
Sticking with the SkyNet theme, the FBI have finally hacked the iPhone of Syed Farook. If you’re not up to speed, don’t fear, I got you. Basically:
- Man (Syed Farook) commits act of terror.
- FBI need access to his iPhone.
- FBI ask Apple to provide access iPhone.
- Apple decline.
- FBI threaten Apple with legal action.
- Apple say “see you in court”.
Which brings us to the FBI hacking into the iPhone themselves without the help of Apple nor the back door they were willing to go to court over.
So what is the lesson here then?
If at first you don’t succeed, hack, hack and hack again.
But in all seriousness, there is a massive debate to be had, and is being had, about this. The line between our civil rights and privacy, and our national security doesn’t exist anymore. If we want one, we lose the other. Apple giving access to the FBI via a back door could have really would’ve rocked the whole (tech) world. This definitely won’t be the last we hear of this.
