In case you missed the first round of news about Yahoo getting hacked in 2014 and losing personal details for 500 million accounts, now comes new that a year earlier, data for over a billion accounts ended up in the wrong hands a year earlier. Yeah, a billion Yahoo accounts. I mean, how many did they have anyway? Anyway, if you haven’t disable or deleted your Yahoo account yet, we strongly suggest you do so.
And if you still want to keep your Yahoo account, then we suggest you, of course, change your password, but we also encourage you to enable two-step verification, and it might be a good idea to clean out those old emails, which may contain information hackers can use to access other parts of your digital life. Get more details on keeping your data safe at this link.
Tech Magic, The Gathering
President-elect Trump gathered with top U.S.-based tech executives yesterday at Trump Tower, and conservative estimates put the net worth of the companies represented at well over a trillion dollars and more than a million U.S. jobs. Trump told attendees, which conspicuously did not include Jack Dorsey of Twitter, that “he was there to help” and that if they had issues, to just ring him up since “we have no formal chain of command around here.”
Topics discussed at the big meetup included tax rates, relaxation of regulations and moving more tech manufacturing to the U.S. of course, something Trump has sparred with Apple CEO Tim Cook over. Cook did attend and while shots of him with a frowny face did wash over social media, Cook did meet with Trump one-on-one after the main meeting. No details of what that private chat covered have been released… yet.
The only other tech boss to get some Trump private time was Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who is now a Trump advisor on his Strategic and Policy Forum team. With Musk a major player in electric vehicles, solar power and space transport, it will be interesting to see how Trump policies in those industries change once the administration is up and running. We’ve got more details on the historic meeting here.
Thanks for the effort, Ted
More politics/tech news now with the announcement that FCC Chairman Ted Wheeler will be stepping down on Trumps inauguration day, January 20th. Wheeler has been a vocal advocate of net neutrality and shepherded rulings that have kept the internet “open,” but industry watchers now fear that era is about to end.
As president, Donald Trump is likely to install a new FCC head that is more “pro-business,” and outside of Netflix, businesses have made it clear they’d like to be able to squeeze internet content makers and end users for all they’re worth when it comes to data speeds and ISP “fast lanes.”
What that will mean for business like Netflix and Amazon, which move huge amounts of data, is likely higher prices from ISPs, which may translate to higher prices or slower data speeds for you if you can’t afford what will surely be “premium” data tiers. Wheeler has led the agency for three years and was appointed by President Obama. He called his time on the job the “greatest honor of his professional life.”
