NewsBytes Briefing: Germany clamps down on WhatsApp, and more
What's the story
Even as Indian government scrambles to figure out how to prevent Facebook from taking advantage of its citizenry, Germany has leveraged the European Union's solid privacy laws to take WhatsApp to task. Facebook's attempts to play privacy policy bait-and-switch with German users has hit a brick wall after the country has opened proceedings to stop if from enforcing WhatsApp's new unilateral policy.
Details
FBI had to remotely hack computers infected with Hafnium
The Chinese hacking group Hafnium had caused widespread panic with its coordinated cyberattacks affecting thousands of servers across USA. Interestingly, the FBI undid the damage by using the hackers' own tools to break into infected computers and fix them. But it gets even better. The FBI was then slapped with a court order instructing it to delete all backdoors to affected computers.
Gaming powerhouse
Epic Games raises more money that it can possibly burn
Speaking of Chinese trojan horses, Tencent-backed Epic Games has raised a billion dollars in its latest round. That doesn't even include Sony's $200 million investment. And it really needs all those funds, because it has been copiously bleeding money buying exclusivity deals for the Epic Games Store in its mad Kamikaze dash to unseat Valve Corporation's Steam digital video game distribution service.
Exercise in futility
Spotify's Car Thing leaves everyone wondering why it exists
Burning investor money reminds us of Spotify, whose latest hardware product has left everyone puzzled. Widely described as a car gadget that's trying to fix a problem no one has, the in-car device serves the singular purpose of interfacing with the Spotify app. Unfortunately, that is something done exceedingly well by everything from existing Android Auto and Apple CarPlay hardware integrated into most cars.
Darwin awards
Smartphones have reduced us to lemmings marching off a cliff
You know there is something really wrong with humanity when Google has to introduce a feature in Android that reminds users to look up while they are walking. It's both surprising and concerning that smartphones are so addictive that they have somehow caused enough of us to ignore our very survival instincts and walk into lampposts and busy intersections while browsing Facebook.