NewsBytes Briefing: Amazon accused of discriminating against blacks, and more
Not long after being caught stealing tips from its drivers, Amazon follows in Google's footsteps and gets accused of discriminating against a black employee. It is almost funny how the Silicon Valley tech oligarchy screams the loudest for social justice and racial equality, but is also eventually exposed to be the biggest perpetrator of the same crimes. Almost, because these crimes are no jokes.
Instagram responds to Clubhouse threat with more features
Clubhouse brought about a paradigm shift in how people experience social media. And that has got everyone from Facebook to Twitter scrambling to add similar features to their products. Even as Facebook is already working on a Clubhouse clone, Instagram is adding Live Rooms, which enables a live interactive session with up to four participants. There's nothing like competition to get corporations into action.
Here's the real takeaway from the Hurun Global Rich List
Even as everyone obsesses over banal statistics concerning obscenely rich folks, it's easy to overlook the uncharacteristic increase in the wealth of a few dozen individuals. Most notably, billionaires amassed $3.5 trillion in 2020 alone—the same year the common folks lost their jobs and were locked inside their own homes. It's almost as if these contrasting phenomena might be related.
Grimes sold $6 million worth of blockchain-driven digital art
It looks like blockchain is going after Sotheby's lunch money. Elon Musk's partner and musician Grimes managed to sell $6 million in digital art comprising mostly of short videos. The pieces were sold on Nifty Gateway as Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), which are blockchain driven means for collecting digital art. There is a good chance that this might revolutionize art collection as we know it.
Hacker group unc0ver releases jailbreak utility for iOS 14.3
Even as Apple and Epic duke it out in the courts over Apple's exorbitant App Store fees, some hackers have quietly managed to Jailbreak iPhones and iPads up to iOS 14.3. Jailbreaking, or homebrewing, is popular in geek circles and essentially frees up hardware from proprietary control of the manufacturer, thereby allowing users to make full use of the devices they have paid for.
