This time is different. It’s been a banner beginning of summer for bitcoin investors, as the cryptocurrency on Monday traded above $11,000 for the first time in more than a year. Still a ways to go before bitcoin surmounts its previous high around $20,000 reached at the end of 2017, however.
Virtually tit for tat. President Trump may have pulled back from standard military attacks on Iran last week, but he allowed a cyberattack on the country’s rocket and missile launch computer systems to go forward, The Washington Post reports. Then on Saturday, the Department of Homeland Security warned U.S. businesses to beware of Iranian computer strikes. “These are the guys that come in and they burn the house down,” Christopher Krebs, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency at DHS, said. The administration is also considering a further crackdown on the Chinese tech sector by requiring that all equipment used in U.S. 5G mobile networks be designed and manufactured outside of China. Even European telecom gear makers Nokia and Ericsson manufacture their products in China.
Follow the money. Elsewhere in the nation’s capitol, two senators plan to introduce legislation on Monday that would force tech companies like Google and Facebook to disclose the value of the user data they collect. Democratic Sen. Mark Warner and Republican Sen. Josh Hawley announced their bill on Sunday night, dubbed the Designing Accounting Safeguards to Help Broaden Oversight And Regulations on Data, or DASHBOARD, Act on Sunday night.
Keeping me up at night. A few new entries in the files of things to be concerned about. A New York Times story questions why Amazon allows counterfeit book listings. And The Los Angeles Times debates the collection of video by Amazon and Walmart’s in-home home delivery services.
Size doesn’t matter. Also a couple of news bits on the Raspberry Pi beat. NASA says the hackers who last year stole data about upcoming Mars missions cracked network security by breaching an unauthorized Pi computer connected to its network at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. On Monday, the nonprofit Raspberry Pi Foundation unveiled its fourth generation model of the credit card-sized computer. Starting at $35, the Raspberry Pi 4 gets faster insides, more memory, and more ports.
Start saving your pennies. We’ve got a new leak about Apple’s rumored 16-inch laptop. The larger version of the MacBook Pro will have the highest screen resolution ever on an Apple laptop at 3072 pixels by 1920 pixels and will cost over $3,000.
