Clicked: Huawei Prepared for Any Further U.S. "Attacks" Plus More ICYMI Tech Stories

The World Economic Forum happened this week in Davos where global leaders, corporate titans and thinkers meet and Ren Zhengfei, Huawei’s CEO spoke on Tuesday aiming to downplay the threat that the Chinese giant poses while insisting that the company is fully prepared to withstand any further U.S. “attacks” on its business. The US and China are in a fierce battle with the former imposing trade restrictions that have already limited Huawei’s ability to sell phones around the world. The restrictions not only limited the company’s ability to do business in the US but also limiting access to U.S chips and software. The US has also pressured its allies to not use Huawei’s working technology for their 5G systems.

“We are more confident we can survive even further attacks,” Ren said, appearing at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland.

Why Huawei is the United States’ 5G boogeyman[Read More]

In matters 5G, other tech companies agree that Huawei’s 5G tech has made considerable progress. “Whether we like it or not, they are a year or two ahead, ” said Siemens CEO Joe Kaeser at a Davos panel. The company had tested gear from all the 5G equipment vendors and found Huawei had a technological edge

Erik Ekudden, CTO Ericsson said that their company was far ahead of the competition when it comes to pure 5G technology. He added that the uncertainty over the rules of the 5G road have harmed business regardless of who’s winning the tech race on 5G.

This week in tech giants

Google and IBM have both called for global regulations on artificial intelligence warning that the technology has the potential to bring significant negative consequences along with potential good

https://twitter.com/aprilaser/status/1220411256781316103

Huawei has postponed HDC.Cloud 2020 – their developer conference in China following the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan which was planned to take place in Shenzhen on February 11th to 12th, but has been pushed back to March 27th-28th. 17 people are confirmed to have been killed by the SARS-like virus so far.
The UK has been told to hold off on reforms to tax on tech giants. France even paused their own tech tax to not start a trade war with the USA.
Esther Dyson who was the founding chairman of ICANN – the group that oversees how web addresses are handed out is urging the organization to block the administration of .org domains from being turned over to a private company. .org domains have been used by non-profits and organizations as opposed to commercial entities. “We don’t want to buy .org,” Dyson said, “We want if necessary to create a governance structure for it. And then we want to resign in favour of a new board elected by the 10 million-plus entities using .org domains.”
Roh Tae-moon named as Samsung’s new mobile chief. He becomes the youngest president as the firm seeks to defend its lead in the handset market from rising challenges from rivals such as Huawei Technologies Co Ltd.
Uber sold Uber Eats, its food delivery business in India to rival Zomato with a growing pressure from investors to figure out a path to profitability. Uber Eats India accounted for just 3% of the company’s global food delivery gross bookings and at least 25% of its adjusted operating loss.
Browser maker Opera and its troubled pivot to microfinance
Google’s policing of rogue mobile loan apps is hardly effective and it shows
Apple dropped plan for encrypting backups after FBI complained
Microsoft overhauled its Edge browser and is now built on Google’s open-source Chromium architecture. It can now handle Chrome extensions on Windows 10 and macOS.
Microsoft disclosed the existence of a serious flaw in Internet Explorer across all versions of Windows
Google confirms that I/O 2020 will take place from May 12 to May 14 at the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View
Google’s new look for desktop search results blurs the lines between ads and search results, leading many critics to identify it as a dark pattern
Amazon is reportedly working with Visa to test hand recognition for in-store payments
The UN is calling for an investigation after Saudi Crown Prince MBS was allegedly implicated in the hacking of Jeff Bezo’s iPhone X.

We're about to to find out whether messing with a billionaire's phone is going to be a bigger international problem for Saudi Arabia than killing one of that billionaire's employees.https://t.co/wvzchLIZe8

— Binyamin Appelbaum (@BCAppelbaum) January 22, 2020

Yeah, who'd have thought a crown prince would be the infosec world's end-level boss? https://t.co/uBKFKbhTZP

— The Register (@TheRegister) January 22, 2020

Thread. Jeff Bezos, Jamal Khashoggi, Saudi Arabia, hacking https://t.co/lu3ciGeEuj

— Matt Steinglass, quitting this fascist platform (@mattsteinglass) January 23, 2020

This week in social media

Facebook and Twitter provide information to the government and to prosecutors, but not to the accused’s lawyers[Read More]
Healthcare workers continue to utilize their social media channels to mock those in their care.[Read More]
Social media use isn’t as linked to poor mental health as you might think, new research based on 40 studies suggests[Read More]
Facebook apologised after a translation bug called China’s president an explicit name.
ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company is getting into mobile gaming.
ByteDance is looking for a new US-based CEO for TikTok as it plans to distance itself from talk of connections to the Chinese government

This week in streaming

Apple is set to create podcasts to promote some of its Apple TV+ programming.
Disney+ is set to launch across Europe one week earlier than expected
Spotify is testing letting influencers post stories to introduce their own playlists
Amazon claims Prime Video has 65K titles, but 66% of those are user uploaded, including thousands of short instructional clips and conspiracy-theory videos
TikTok has signed a licensing deal with music rights agency Merlin for indie label music in videos and, source says, in its upcoming music streaming service, Resso.
Amazon says Amazon Music has 55M users across six different price tiers, including a free tier, “nearly all” of which are paying subscribers
Netflix now boasts 1,211 originals and has been adding one show a day on average over the past eight months

Q4 2019 Streaming Services US Customer Base (according to Wall St. Journal):

Netflix: 61.3
Amazon Prime: 42.2
Apple TV+: 33.6
Hulu: 31.8
Disney+: 23.2https://t.co/oxjh7fFaK1

— Andru Edwards (@AndruEdwards) January 24, 2020

Interesting Reads

The secretive company that might end privacy as we know it

The privacy paranoid among us have long worried that all of our online photos would be scraped to create a universal face recognition app. My friends, it happened and it’s here: https://t.co/qfv5b27mzg

— Kashmir Hill (@kashhill) January 18, 2020

Researchers have objected that using bots to scrape information in bulk from, say, Facebook could be deemed a felony.

If there were ever a case to make, though, this is it: a company snatching 3 billion photos to build a service to identify any stranger.https://t.co/31JzTBkzvy

— Jonathan Zittrain (@zittrain) January 18, 2020

There’s a million things that are horrifying about this amazing story from @kashhill, but one thing that sticks out to me is how Clearview scraped Venmo photos. Venmo is a privacy disaster and the company refuses to make transactions private by default https://t.co/PScYwsi8FF

— Louise Matsakis (@lmatsakis) January 18, 2020

The craigslist of guns: Inside Armslist, the online ‘gun show that never ends’ [Read More]
Total fines for GDPR violations across Europe have reached €114m.
UK watchdog sets out ‘age-appropriate’ design code for online services to keep kids’ privacy safe
Behind the Scenes at Rotten Tomatoes
Since the rollout of iOS 13, which warns users of apps tracking their location, marketers have collected 68% less background and 24% less foreground location data
Tech executives and employees, particularly from Facebook, have become increasingly common targets for swatting -The recent case was in November last year when Instagram’s Adam Mosseri was swatted.