The Daily Crunch 08/31/16 Dropbox tells some, but not all, in a 2012 security breach, and Nest's bird has flown. All that and more in The Daily Crunch for August 31, 2016. Also if you're picking sides between Uber and Google, consider that Google builds huge agile dog-like robots, at least until it finds a buyer for Boston Dynamics. 1. Dropbox drops the ball on security Wow, 60 million is a lot of user credentials floating around, Dropbox. The worst part is, it happened four years ago in 2012, when an employee's weak password led to the leak. Dropbox made a semi-disclosure at the time, but did not come anywhere close to revealing the extent of the leak, which means 60 million user email logins have been floating around on the dark web unbeknownst to users since then. Oof. At least the passwords the hackers got were hashed and salted, and it looks like that security measure wasn't cracked. 2. Uber and Google gear up for a fight Uber and Google are on this sort of slow-mo collision course that is ramping up, as Google prepares to extend its Waze-based peer-to-peer car sharing service to all users across the San Francisco area. Waze opened up its service in Israel previously, and said this was part of its eventual plan, but the pilot is about to expand to the general public, which means we'll start to see some real competition between the two tech titans. Ding ding. 3. Leaving the Nest Google's Nest lab is also in a kind of slow-mo process, but this one is more like a gradual collapse. After founder and CEO Tony Fadell departed in June, it was clear things were changing. Now led by Marwan Faraz, the smart home company is losing a group of engineers to Google's Internet of Things platform team, which is being led by Android SVP Hiroshi Lockheimer. Everyone's staying well within the larger Alphabet org, but it might be a sign of greater business unit rationalization to come for Mountain View. 4. Cars without humans at the wheel are coming to a street near you It's almost time: You're probably going to pull up to a car where there's no one technically driving eventually, but two states are in a legislative race to allow testing of fully self-driving vehicles without a human safety minder at the wheel. Michigan seems especially hot on the idea – the state has a hearing today to let the public chime in on its bipartisan bill, which would allow testing on all state roads. 5. Google now searches inside apps Apps are islands unto themselves, but Google is offering a kind of ferry service between those islands via its search app on Android. Google now has an "In Apps" search mode on the platform, which allows you to look inside your silos for contacts, messages, music and way more. At launch, it only works with Gmail, Spotify and YouTube, but Google is looking to ramp up app indexing to give it much further reach in the near future. 6. Another swing and a miss for Theranos Theranos borked it again, this time with its new Zika test. The company proudly debuted said product in the wake of its ongoing implosion around prior blood tests, but the FDA found flaws in that, too, and now it's withdrawn its request. Womp to the very loud womp. 7. iPhone likely to get 256GB of storage and Lightning EarPods The upcoming iPhone 7 is widely expected to ditch the headphone jack, and a new leak suggests we'll see a boost in the top-end capacity to 256GB, as well as Lightning EarPods included in the box, as well as an additional 3.5mm-to-Lightning adapter for your other headphones. If true, it really seems like Apple wants to make the transition as smooth as possible in this brave new 3.5mm-less world. |
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