When tech giants squabble: upday UK’s tech recap
An Amazon Fire TV that plays YouTube videos – is that too much to ask for?
Instead of giving the people what they want, Amazon and Google are taking swipes at each other. Meanwhile, Facebook is becoming kid-friendly and YouTube is going through a clean up. But first, bitcoin.
New week, same story
Bitcoin surged to new heights this week. Again.
Everyone’s favourite cryptocurrency crossed the $15,000 mark on Thursday — surging $3,000 in less than 24 hours.
Bitcoin began the year below $1,000. Its value has climbed by more than 1,000% in 2017. The surge in price has led some analysts to label it a bubble. But for now, it continues making bitcoin investors richer.
Bitregret
Watching from the sidelines, some of us may be kicking ourselves for not investing (or cashing out too early 🙋🏽).
But this guy must be cursing himself the most.
James Howells claims to have unintentionally dumped 7,500 bitcoin in mid-2013. Digging up a landfill site is an expensive project, but he’ll pocket $80m if it pays off.
Meanwhile, the British government is scratching its head over cryptocurrency regulation. The Treasury wants to crackdown on cryptocurrencies to combat tax evasion, money laundering and terrorism. It announced the drive as work began across the EU to bring transparency to virtual currency exchanges.
Regulating a cryptocurrency is easier said than done. Good luck, chaps!
Google v Amazon
Google and Amazon are having a row. And we have to bear the brunt of it. 🙄
Google has pulled support for YouTube from Amazon’s home devices. This means that Echo Show and Fire TV owners can no longer access YouTube through the app.
On surface, the quarrel started because Amazon’s Echo Show was “violating Google’s terms of service”. It has since emerged that may be due to Amazon’s unwillingness to sell certain Google products.
In summary: Google is trying to force Amazon to sell its Home smart speakers, Chromecast and Nest products. And Amazon doesn’t want to because it has its own competitive offerings.
So much drama!
Won’t somebody think of the children
Only those aged 13 and over have been allowed to use Facebook until now. The social networking giant is launching its first app tailored for young children.
Messenger Kids is a simplified version of Facebook’s existing messaging app. It’s a ringfenced network that needs parental approval before use. The company has pinky-promised it won’t be used to feed data for advertising.
But some don’t believe Facebook.
Our very own health secretary had harsh words for the new app.
Internet’s worst job
Trolls, paedophiles and extremists — YouTube has had its hands full lately with many scandals. To clean up the platform, the Google-owned company is boosting its video content moderation team to as many as 10,000 people. That’s 10,000 people who will need to watch awful YouTube content as their job. Sounds pretty grim.
YouTube’s CEO Susan Wojcicki said in addition to an increase in human moderators, YouTube is continuing to develop advanced machine-learning technology to automatically flag problematic content for removal.
Best of 2017
For most people, December marks the start of Christmas decorations. For us, at upday, December means we can shamelessly start our annual recaps.
It’s not just us. Almost everyone in publishing milks the end-of-year nostalgia. Twitter released its year in review and Spotify reminded us about everything we listened to.
As your trusty curators, here’s our top techie suggestion for an end-of-year read.
AI sci-fi
Two researchers have spent the past few years developing software that analyses literary databases. Their program can identify dozens of structural and stylistic details in huge chunks of text, and if you give them a collection of great stories, they are able to identify all the details that those great stories have in common.
This week’s suggested long read is a (annotated) science fiction story written with the help of an AI.
Aspiring novelists, take note.
