In the News: Twitter’s Million Dollar Hack, Gmail’s Rebranding, and NBC’s Peacock
As quarantine continues to be extended with no end date at sight, more and more companies are finding ways to adapt their operations and leverage their platforms to the current market conditions and consumer demands. Gmail is going through a complete redesign to incorporate many of Google’s tools in one platform to compete with the likes of Slack and Zoom. NBC launches their new free streaming service Peacock and Twitter is in the spotlight after a mayor cyber-attack.
Twitter Confirms Employees Related to Major Cyber-Attack
After an unprecedented cyber-attack on Wednesday that involved multiple hackers taking over multiple high-profile accounts on Twitter. Ex-president Barack Obama, Joe Bide, Elon Musk, Bill Gates were only some of the accounts that the hackers managed to get a hold of.
This coordinated hack consisted of a series of tweets posted from all of those accounts incentivizing people to send any amount of money to a specific bitcoin address and in return, they would double their money and send it back. Early reports say that around $120,000 were sent to the hacker’s account, but the official number is still to be confirmed.
Twitter has shed some light on how the attack came to be. In a series of tweets posted this evening under its support channel, Twitter said that its internal systems were compromised by the hackers, confirming theories that the attack could not have been conducted without access to the company’s own tools and employee privileges.
The whole event has raised a heated debate among users and government officials when it comes to the current cybersecurity policies and practices in society and the responsibility that social media companies have when it comes to protecting the data of their millions of users.
Is Gmail Trying to be the New Slack?
The company has unveiled a complete redesign of the Gmail platform right before next week’s Google Cloud conference. The app seems to have gone through a grand redesign as it won’t be just Gmail, but an unified app for all of Google’s platforms: Gmail, Chat, Meet, and Rooms.
Right now, however, the main change is simply putting these tools into the your phone and desktop. It should be less bouncing around between browser tabs and apps. In one example, users on the desktop will be able to get a view with a chat in one column, a doc in another, and a Google Meet video chat hovering over both
This new update is the latest attempt from the company to try to catch up to other virtual-workspace platforms such as Slack, Zoom, and Hangouts. As quarantine continues to be extended with no end date at sight, more and more companies are finding ways to adapt their operations and leverage their platforms to the current market conditions and consumer demands.
Peacock Joins The Party
Peacock has joined the party. In what seems to be a never-ending, always-increasing list of streaming services, NBC’S Peacock is the last major streaming services to launch. But Peacock is a little bit late to a very crowder party already filled with Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, and Amazon Prime — which means it’s going to be a big challenge to break through to customers.
Peacock does have a trick up its sleeve, though: a completely free, ad-supported tier that will offer thousands of hours of content to customers.
The platform is looking to take a similar approach to the one of Disney and Disney+ by looking to unite NBC’s shows, Universal Studios’ films, and original content into their platform.
