An embarrassing data breach, a new name, and an alien message
We hope you had a good day and now we want to give you some exciting information to take with you into the evening. t3n Daily is also available as a newsletter. Here are the topics of the day.
Actually, the Schufa app should provide more transparency and inform about the creditworthiness of a person. But a hacker discovered a security gap in Bonify and showed that you can not only get your own Schufa information, but also that of other people – for example that of the former Minister of Health Jens Spahn.
She also revealed how security researcher Lilith Wittmann from the Zerforschung collective managed to get such highly sensitive data: “After you have verified your data using the Bankident procedure, you can update it for about a second via a programming interface. That’s how I got Jens Spahn’s Boniversum score, for example, and I was also able to have tenant information drawn up.” After the security gap became known, the Bonify app was taken out of service. It now says: “We apologize for the inconvenience, we are currently performing maintenance.”
They contain a message from NASA to possible aliens: the master tapes of the Voyager Golden Records. Now they’re going under the hammer at Sotheby’s. The auction house expects the price to be around half a million US dollars. The two space probes Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have been in space since 1977 and have still not encountered extraterrestrial life. The Golden Records contain a variety of sounds, images, and instructions for playing the “gold record,” as well as a map showing the location of the earth.
The original master tapes used to record the plates come from the collection of astrophysicist Carl Sagan and writer Ann Druyan. They contain greetings in 59 different languages, 27 pieces of music, sounds of nature, and 115 images, including scenes from everyday life and landmarks like the Golden Gate Bridge. The Voyager Golden Records auction is scheduled to take place on July 27, 2023.
That Elon Musk wants to rename Twitter X is a risk. A look into the past reveals that there were renamings of companies and brands before, which did not always go smoothly. Karstadtquelle changed its name to Arcandor, but the name change could not prevent insolvency. Oerlikon became Unaxis and then Oerlikon again, but here too there was no economic success. In fact, there are also cases in which the renaming was successful and did not affect sales. For example, when Raider became Twix. Was that due to the claim “Raider is now called Twix – otherwise nothing will change!”?
It also led to more growth and flexibility in management when Google changed its parent company to Alphabet. Xing became New Work SE, which met with criticism but remained economically successful. Philipp Morris was renamed Altria Group to separate the other products from the tobacco brands’ negative image. And Weight Watchers simply became WW for a short time, which led to controversy but helped the company to go on a digitization offensive.
The Dishbrain project connects human brain cells with silicon-based hardware to enable machines to continuously learn throughout their lives without losing old skills. Researchers from Monash University and the Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health partnered with startup Cortical Labs to launch this groundbreaking research project. 800,000 brain cells, which are “taught” specific tasks, are grown in a dish.
This concept of lifelong learning allows machines to acquire new skills and adapt to change while applying previously learned knowledge to new tasks. All of this is done while considering limited resources such as processing power, memory and energy. Dishbrain thus offers a promising approach for the development of future machine intelligence that is modeled on biological neural networks. The researchers were already able to teach the chip the computer game “Pong” by having the brain cells react to the ball and the racket.
Samsung invites you to the second Galaxy Unpacked event of the year, which you can follow in the live stream. On July 26, 2023, under the motto “Join the Flip side”, the company will launch its next generation of foldables in Seoul, South Korea – which will very likely include the Galaxy Z Flip 5 and Fold 5. While Samsung does not name the models, it promises that the “next generation of its foldable series will offer improvements based on years of research, development and investment”.
The successor to the Galaxy Z Flip 4 is rumored to have a larger exterior display, similar to the Motorola Razr 40 Ultra. In addition, in contrast to the previous models with a wedge-shaped opening on the hinge, the new foldables should be able to be folded flat. In addition to the foldables, Samsung is expected to unveil the Galaxy Watch 6 Classic with a rotating bezel, and the Galaxy Tab S9 with an 11-inch AMOLED display that’s said to be water and dust resistant. Furthermore, new Galaxy Buds and a new Smarttag generation with UWB support are expected. Enough reasons to tune in to the live stream!
That’s it for the t3n daily. You can find much more about all aspects of digital life, working life and the future around the clock at t3n.de.
