Top tech stories of last six months of 2018
December 27, 2018 | Investopaper
Let us continue the top tech stories that made headlines in the recent six months of 2018.
In July, Tesla CEO Elon Musk apologized to the British diver who rescued 12 boys trapped in a Thailand cave. After he was accused of making harsh comments on the diver by calling him a rapist, he stated that those words were spoken in anger.
In August, Elon Musk again made the headlines by expressing his intentions to take Tesla private. This remark led to the loss for the shareholders of Tesla, although the value has jumped back after Musk’s settled the issue by agreeing to step down as chairman of Tesla and paid $2o million personally.
In September, Twitter banned Alex Jones and his publication Infowars. Infowars is a far-right American conspiracy theory and fake news website. Twitter took this action by complying to the violation of abusive behavior policy. This move was appreciated and followed by other tech companies like YouTube, Apple, and Facebook. This was a major turning point for how these companies deal with public debate. Another breaking news was that Comcast outbidding Disney in three rounds to acquire Sky.
In October, one of the biggest tech acquisition news made the headlines as IBM agreed to buy Red Hat for $31billion. This was an attempt by IBM to keep big blue relevant in a world where more enterprises are shifting to cloud computing.
In November, Google employees, in thousands of numbers protested against the company’s behavior on addressing the sexual harassment which led the company to revise and restructure the policies regarding sexual harassment.
In December, Huawei’s Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou was arrested by Canada on charges of defrauding banks, by hiding payments from Iran in violation of US sanctions. Also, Facebook share price tumbled in December after New York times revealed that Spotify, Netflix and Royal Bank of Canada were given uninvited access to read, write and delete the message of private users. Facebook later clarified the issue.