Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “What a YEAR! – A TechLinked Christmas Special 2021”.
Ohoho, would you look at that A stranger stepping in to warm themselves with some good old fashioned tech, news. And, of course, some piping hot cocoa.? Well, I would be happy to oblige. That’s right in this old speakeasy we’re taking a look at the biggest tech stories of the year before we ring in yet another year, probably full of overpriced and impossible to find goods., But there’ll be no sad faces tonight, because It’S the 2021 TechLinked Christmas special.. You better smile.
This year started with one of the most heartwarming tech stories ever because it was about the people rising up and fighting back against the elites on Wall Street., Who seemingly evaded any real negative outcome from the whole thing.. But hey, we had fun., That’s right. The story of GameStonks started when members of the R/WallStreetBet subreddit inspired by a Redditor named Keith Gill, AKA ( beep ) value managed to collectively drive up GameStop’s struggling stock price by 3000 % from its 52 week. Low. Crashing brokerages with the strength of their passion., But ordinary people aren’t supposed to be able to manipulate the stock market like this..
That’S Wall, Street’s job., So it didn’t look great. When the Wall Street Bet, subreddit and Discord were taken down, temporarily. Popular, investing, app Robin Hood, restricted GameStop stock and was even found to have sold users’ stocks without permission leading to a class action lawsuit against the app and an investigation by Congress.. But the meme stock crowd didn’t stop.
At GameStop.. Dogecoin saw a similar surge, leading Robin Hood to restrict that too.. It was the establishment.. However, there were plenty of analysts pointing out that, while Reddit raids on certain stocks may be new, the risk inherent in trading is not. And it’s likely that just as many or more people ended up worse off than they started.. But the GameStonk saga had a lasting impact on the amateur investors scene, which probably directly fed into another of our main stories NFTs.. But before we get to that, the first half of the year was also dominated by another story. Epic lawsuit against Apple over the 30 % revenue cut.
It takes from iOS apps. Epic continued trying to convince legislators that Apple should open up its app store filing a second lawsuit in the UK and sponsoring a number of state bills through its coalition for app fairness, none of which actually went anywhere., But either because of Epic’S, loudness or a general change in the vibes, Apple and other tech giants made a number of changes to their app stores. Microsoft’s match to the Epic Games. Store’S 12 % revenue cut Apple and Google reduce their standard 30 % cut on iOS and Android to 15 % for small developers.
And Apple also settled a separate lawsuit, allowing developers to email their users about third-party payment options.. In August, South Korea passed a law requiring mobile app stores to allow third-party payment, options. And Apple made one more concession allowing reader apps like Netflix and Spotify, to include links to pay for subscriptions on their website.
Very big of them.. In September, a ruling was finally issued in the Apple V. Epic trial, which was described as both a resounding victory for Apple and a big win for Epic, which was confusing until the actual legal analysts finished their opinion pieces..
And it became apparent that this is not the outcome: epic wanted., They would have to pay Apple, millions of dollars. And sure Apple was required to allow developers to include buttons linking to third-party payment options within 90 days, but they successfully won a stay on that order. And with both Apple and Epic appealing the result, it’s unclear what, if anything, was actually accomplished this year, other than getting Fortnite gamers all riled up., There’s a lot more to this story. And in fact I’m almost done my tech longer on it., So stay tuned for Tech longer number two., This video is probably already too long., But the Apple versus Epic was a canary in the antitrust mine, because almost every major company was investigated for anti-competitive this and exploiting dominance. That. Aye yai yai., It’s not in the Christmas spirit at all..
Nvidia continued trying to buy Arm for over a year a deal that was actively opposed by Qualcomm, Google and others., Who would have to deal with NVIDIA gloating about being basically the most important chip maker in the world. If it went through., I don’t want that.. As of this month, the FTC has sued NVIDIA to block the acquisition., So I wouldn’t hold your breath.
If you are a fan, big fan of NVIDIA buying other companies. This year, Google threatened to suspend Australia’s search, privileges. And Facebook blocked Australian users from sharing news links, because the boys down there wanted Google and Facebook to pay news outlets for the privilege of linking to Australian news articles.: Both companies eventually made big cash deals with Australia, news conglomerates just before Australia passed the law that would see them fined, otherwise., Never try to bluff an Ozzie.
They’ve played Knifey Spoony too many times., Google and Apple also made plays that were marketed as Privacy wins for consumers., But which actually solidified their power over their respective ad ecosystems.. Google’S FLoC system to replace third-party cookies ended up being delayed until 2023 due to industry concerns., But Apple’s tracking transparency feature is currently live in iOS 15., Although Apple also added the ability for iOS users to opt out of Apple’s own tracking. In addition to third-party advertisers. And lastly, Microsoft got all anti-trustee for a second when they made it super difficult to change the default browser in Windows 11 to anything other than Edge., But eventually backtracked after they realized. Everyone saw exactly what they’re doing. It’s like.
Why are you sneaking? Why are you sneaking around? I can see oh Microsoft., But perhaps the story that affected nearly everyone this year is the global supply chain issues that made buying electronics harder than the lump of coal. I’M putting in my son’s stocking this year.. Why won’t he sleep In February? It was thought the shortages would last maybe until June or later, which eventually got amended to mean until 2023, small typo., While some combination of pandemic inspired dips and spikes in demand are thought to have initially caused the shortages for PC gamers things were exacerbated by crypto Miners and scalpers buying up stock of GPUs as soon as it was available, leading NVIDIA to rerelease old models like the GTX 1050 TI..
Now last, I checked. Electronic sales are part of the economy., So understandably US President Biden stepped in and announced a $ 37 billion plan to address the chip shortage., The benefits of which will not be felt for some time. In what was ostensibly an attempt to discourage minors from buying gaming. Gpus NVIDIA released GPU, specifically for crypto mining.
And added an Ethereum mining limiter to its new RTX 3060, which the company said was unhackable. Yeah, that’s funny., Then NVIDIA accidentally leaked a driver that made the limiter very much hackable.. They followed up with special mining, limited versions of the other cards in the RTX 30 series lineups, which were eventually also hacked., Oh well. At least gamers could take some comfort in knowing that even scalper bots were having a hard time finding units in stock because they would sell out immediately. Intel announced they were getting back into the foundry business.
And there were times when we thought hey. Maybe this will maybe this will end soon hope on the horizon. You know And then other things happened like a giant boat blocking the Suez Canal or a fire at a chip, factory or ransomware attacks on the colonial pipeline and the world’s largest meat supplier.. Where am I gon na get my meat Stock shortages are now just kind of a fact of life in a world where you need a $ 200 membership to buy a PS5 at Best Buy..
So maybe we should look at the positives.. We got to witness a dangerous mob of gamers rush, a Micro Center and a truckload of GPUs get stolen like it’s “ Fast And The Furious” out there.. But hopefully US lawmakers pass that bill prohibiting scalping of high demand goods, because I’d like stories like that to remain fiction.. We’Ve got more top stories of the year coming right up, brought to you by Secret, Lab makers of chairs engineered to keep you incredibly comfortable for long hours at work and play..
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So head to the link in the description and check out Secret Lab today.. Now not mentioning cryptocurrency or NFTs would be as big of a mistake as not investing in the future of art. And basically everything and revolutionary things is gon na change everything you know in your mind, et cetera., So we have to talk about it.. One could argue, the current craze was kicked off when legendary digital artist Beeple sold a collection of his first 5,000 daily creations as an NFT for $ 69 million through Christie’s auction house, a development that rankled some true crypto art purists., Which every one of whom I Imagined to be dressed like a Matrix character at all times., But it nevertheless led to an NFT gold rush that saw Twitter founder Jack.
Dorsey sell his first tweet for nearly $ 3 million and countless bots sell NFTs of stolen art.. Some brands got in on the fun. Charmin sold toilet paper, NFTs Atari sold gaming nostalgia NFTs. And in a more positive story.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee sold part of the original source code for the web. As an NFT donating the proceeds to charity. See they can be okay, but not everyone is boarding. The crypto hype, train. India is considering banning or regulating cryptocurrency.
While China has gone for the nuclear option. Metaphorically. The CCP banned crypto mining in the summer then banned all cryptocurrency transactions in September, going so far as to cut off power to certain regions which affected unrelated factories, supplying components to Apple Intel and others..
Meanwhile, El Salvador became the first country in the world to make Bitcoin legal tender. And the experiment is not going super well., With the crypto industry being shaken by numerous heists hacks and pump and dump schemes.. You know about the Squid Game one and you should have saw it coming., While many game developers and digital platforms have announced and then canceled NFT plans, including Steam, which banned all NFT based games.. Other companies and people are forging ahead like Peter Molyneux.. His game Legacy sold $ 54 million in land tokens and Ubisoft refuses to acknowledge that their Quartz NFT system for Ghost Recon is kind of flopping., Love them or hate them. Nfts are probably here to stay at least until each revolutionary one of a kind, eight based pyramid scheme in which they exist collapses.
Speaking of collapsing, it seemed like something like that was in the cards for Facebook. This fall after the company was rocked by numerous whistles. Being blown about its inner workings., After sustaining criticism for stopping researchers from finding out how the Facebook social platform operates, the Wall Street journal published internal research, showing the company knew that Instagram can be bad for kids’ mental health, particularly teenage girls. Facebook halted development of its Kids focused Instagram app to avoid some of the scrutiny only to be hit with a coordinated barrage of articles from multiple publications about the Facebook papers. A series of internal documents showing Facebook suppressed moderation teams worked to undermine Apple’s efforts to protect user privacy. And generally made social media more toxic than it already was.. Fortunately, soon after that, Facebook rebranded itself as Meta and effectively started a publicity cycle about the metaverse. A super connected super social next version of the internet..
To recap: Facebook made everyone forget about their horrendous internal workings by announcing they were making, basically the entire internet, a virtual reality, social platform.. What is this here? Did you know? Microsoft released a new operating system this year; No, no, no, not Windows 10X! That died a horrible death in secret., I’m talking about Windows 11.. Well, there were some reasons to be excited like the new Microsoft store’s, excellent revenue sharing scheme and support for Android apps..
The hype pretty quickly died down because of the hardware requirement for a trusted platform, module or TPM., And when Windows 11 officially launched on October 5th, it was plagued with a host of bugs, which took many weeks to fix.. As of now. Adoption is estimated to be anywhere from 2 to 9 % of Windows users, who can’t really see a good reason to upgrade just to make the number go up by one., Although that is fun. Chin up Microsoft.. Maybe people just need some time to get used to Windows 11..
It’S like NFTs they’ll, get there. Hey. Let’S end on a positive note. This year, the Right to Repair movement transformed from a few people whining about not being able to use their fancy screwdrivers more to a national topic of interest..
Louis Rossman deserves much of the credit for starting a Go-Fund me in March. To campaign for Right to Repair legislation. And a few months later, Joe Biden issued an executive order directing the FTC to establish new regulations.. Now, do I wan na make the claim that those two things are directly related? I mean this has kind of a jokey low effort video. So you know what Yeah yeah I do. Louis Rossman is the president of the United States.
Microsoft, committed to making it Surface devices more repairable and later announced a partnership with iFixit. Valve posted of repair guide. For the Steam Deck, while also telling people they probably shouldn’t, actually try this fair, enough. And even Apple announced a self-service repair program that will let people repair their iPhones without voiding, their warranty.
Walled gardens are opening up.. Our screwdrivers have things to do again.. You know what Maybe 2021 wasn’t so bad a year after all., Even Cyberpunk Steam ratings got to a mostly positive. Now.
Obviously, there are way too many stories that we didn’t get to cover in this episode., But I think that’s plenty of tech, news for one yuletide eve. So from my tech news to yours Merry Christmas. Time to count some sugar plums.. These are all new ultra rare sugar plums that are gon na, be tripled their worth a year from now..
You just trust me, ta-ta, .