Bots Buy Everything from the store.
If you want a new game console or a GPU this year, you may be feeling like youre on a very cruel game show. Retailers seem to sell out in seconds, and suppliers can’t keep up. But in this case, the real culprit is scalpers who use automated bots to clean the store, and turn their purchases on eBay at large markups. This bot is now big businesswe rented one for the purpose of seeing how they worked and found they have complex techniques to defeat CAPTCHAs, skip queues and avoid detection. They can even run through an proximate to speed up the recovery. If retailers don’t find a solution, the process of purchasing high-value goods will be unsustainable.
Meta
The moment that Facebook announced a name change, almost immediately after whistleblower Frances Haugen dropped a trove of documents exposing the company’s lax enforcement on misinformation and obsession with growth, was cursed. But trying to rebrand themselves to a metaverse company, without a much awkward and fake fake imitation, wasn’t useful. The jurys are still out if people want to discuss their work in an purely digital space, but the technology to make that look like what Zuckerberg and crew are advertising still lacks.
AWS Weeping the Internet.
FaZe Clan Crypto Scam.
This list might have quite some cryptocurrency-related entries, but this is probably the biggest one. One of the most popular methods of increasing a coin value is to work with influencers to promote it. After SaveTheKids announced that they were working with the mega-popular gaming group FaZe Clan, the price of the coins rose just in time for the start investors to sell out. They lost cash and FaZe fans were left holding useless tokens. When the story arrived, the group expelled Kay and suspended several others over their involvement in the pump-and-dump scam.
Squid Game Token!
The blockchain becomes an irresistible marketplace for individuals pulling the classic pump and dump scams, where a security is illegally overvalued and then left at the peak of the price. A new investor is holding the bag as well. One of the most outrageous examples happened in early November, with the launch of a Squid Game token, named after the Korean drama that was a big hit on Netflix. Founded by a group that pitched it in a coin coin as a play-to-earn price, the unit price soared to $2,856 before falling to almost nothing. It is believed that the people behind this organization made off with around $3.4 million in the scam.
NFT Mania
Innovation is a powerful force. And to never pooh-pooh the blockchain entirelythere still some interesting applications to distributed technologies that have to be discovered. That’s the flooding of NFT artwork where the only value that owns is an index of a blockchain that inundated the tech world in the second half of the year. As many people are struggling with the success of outliers like Pixel Punks and Bored Ape Yacht Club, where many businesses like Opensea sell these products, so most of them are limited to ones that are much bigger than those that won last. It is when the illustrations are not only swiped wholesale from DeviantArt, the problem so rife is that the site has built custom software tools to let artists know that their work is being used without their permission. The bubble is obvious, and when the bubble pops it’ll be quite rough.
Tesla Bot
Elon Musk was the greatest personality of all time, he’s done a lot to populize electric cars, but he’s also prone to embarrassing memes, riots and madness. In August 2021, a particularly fearful presentation was announced when Tesla announced Optimus, a humanoid robot, the company claims will be prototyped by next year and controlled by the same artificial intelligence that powers their autonomous cars. The announcement, which was followed by a clearly uncomfortable gentleman dressed in a robot costume, was awkward, and met with desision from the people who actually make robots.
5G Still Useless.
There has been about 5G in the last few years. As a big matter, it promises to deliver us our data at breakneck speed. The only problem in common is it doesn’t really do much now. In practice, 5G on both AT&T and Verizon feels just like 4G. Sure there are pockets of super-fast mmWave 5G, but this is really hard to find. People upgrading their phones under high-speed promises are feeling a little ripped off. Whether it’s coming year or not, then it’s still the case.
Activision Blizzards Culture Crisis.
It has been viewed as a boys club for a long time, when the behavior standards are a bit lax, but when whistleblowers introduced the toxic culture at Activision Blizzard, things became very bad, very quickly. It happened in July of a similar blow, the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing indictment, then filed a complaint. Activision Blizzard chief compliance officer Fran Townsend left the situation worse by downplaying the allegations into the companywide email, leading to a massive employee abandon. It was then revealed that Townsend didn’t write the email that Bobby Kotick had under his name, even though he had publicly criticized the message as tone deaf after press backlash. This is becoming more and more information about how terrible a workplace the company is and the lawsuit could lead to real change in the industry.
Texas Blizzard Pricing.
One of the most influential things that critics of algorithmic pricing and AI often talk about is that the market cannot be seen as an angrier. The case of Texas’ utility grid, who struggled to cope with the blizzard of 2021, proved to be an extreme example. A service called Griddy offered users a more affordable option – it would be better to buy electricity at wholesale prices than at a fixed rate. When freak storms blew through the state, customers who received complaints about Griddy were being charged more than nine thousand dollars per hour. For reference, the seasonal average is $50. The public outcry swindled as they saw the downtime of bank accounts. As soon as they complained, Griddy told them their best option was switch to another provider. The company was sued by the state then and dissolved the company’s business.
The Grand Theft Auto Definitive Edition.
A reminiscence in a given moment is a good way for studios to leverage the beloved intellectual property and earn some quick cash. That is more than a little while when Rockstar dropped the final version of Grand Theft Auto 3 and its two sequels. Gamers expected that modernized graphics would achieve more realism, but what they got was a bizarre fusion of high-gloss textures with awkward, ugly characters. The actual version of the original, then made for auction, so this is disappointing.
Zillow Algorithms
In the tech industry today, respect for algorithms is one of the best mantras of trust. When the real estate listing site Zillow decided to put a focus on buying and selling real estate using a business unit called iBuyer, they made decisions based on AI and machine learning. The intent was to identify undervalued properties and flip them easily. With a market like housing and volatile, especially with high prices of buying, it was inevitable that the price changes were huge in the company. At the end of the year, Zillow announced that they will leave nearly half of its workforce on a 560 million cash loss.
The Saygus fake is a crime.
Sometimes a fraud takes a long time to overcome. In 2009, the wanna-be telephone magnate Chad Sayers visited the PCMag headquarters. He talked about Saygus, his device that loaded a proprietary Android video codec that allowed two-way video calling over 3G networks. Today, we are using that kind of thing for granted, but now, a decade and a half ago, it would’ve been a serious game-changer. Sayers spent the next seven years assembling prototypes for trade show and conventions, bringing in ten million dollars in investment funds. In August, the prosecutors in Utah finally charged him with fraud. He alleges he never planned to create a product.
Freedom Phone
They say that there’s a baby boy born every minute, and with one side of the political aisle convinced Big Tech was out of his way to censor them at all times, it was ripe for a sinister guy to buy in. The Freedom Phone went out in July for the self-proclaimed bitcoin millionaire and announced that his company had bought the patented device. The $500 device was spotted rebranding the native phone of Umidgi by many of the right-wingers who had own promotional codes which amounted to less than a quarter of this price.
Trumps Social Network is a group of people who voted for their social network.
The former president has no place in social media, bringing attention with absurd words until it has been widely banned for threatening the democratic fabric of democracy. It was only a matter of time before the legion of houcksters adrift of him opened their own alternative. Or at least tried to. According to a web page in May, the company shut down in a month, but Truth Social, like the new venture, is more ambitious. Hackers quickly penetrated the system and created fake accounts for Trump and Steve Bannon. Did we miss anybody? Tell us the comments ‘top.
