would you look at that a stranger stepping in to warm themselves with some
good old-fashioned tech news and of course some piping hot cocoa
well i would be happy to oblige that's right in this old speakeasy we're taking
a look at the biggest tech stories of the year before we ring in yet another
year probably full of overpriced and impossible to find goods but there'll be
no sad faces tonight because it's the 2021 techlink christmas special
you better smile this year started with one of the most
heartwarming tech stories ever because it was about the people rising up and
fighting back against the elites on wall street who seemingly evaded any real
negative outcome from the whole thing but hey we had fun that's right the
story of game stunks started when members of the r wall street bets
subreddit inspired by a redditor named keith gill aka
value managed to collectively drive up gamestop's struggling stock price by 3
000 from its 52-week low crashing brokerages
with the strength of their passion but ordinary people aren't supposed to be
able to manipulate the stock market like this that's wall street's job so it
didn't look great when the wall street bets subreddit and discord were taken
down temporarily popular investing app robinhood restricted gamestop stock and
was even found to have sold user stocks without permission leading to a
class-action lawsuit against the app and an investigation by congress
but the meme stock crowd didn't stop at gamestop dogecoin saw a similar surge
leading robin hood to restrict that too it was the establishment
however there were plenty of analysts pointing out that while reddit raids on
certain stocks may be new the risk inherent in trading is not and it's
likely that just as many or more people ended up worse off than they started but
the game stunk saga had a lasting impact on the amateur investors scene which
probably directly fed into another of our main stories
nfts but before we get to that the first half
of the year was also dominated by another story epic's epic lawsuit
against apple over the 30 revenue cut it takes from iOS apps epic continued
trying to convince legislators that apple should open up its app store
filing a second lawsuit in the uk and sponsoring a number of state bills
through its coalition for app fairness none of which actually went anywhere
but either because of epic's loudness or a general change in the vibes apple and
other tech giants made a number of changes to their app stores microsoft
matched the epic game store's 12 revenue cut apple and google reduced their
standard 30 cut on iOS and Android to 15
for small developers and apple also settled a separate lawsuit allowing
developers to email their users about third-party payment options in august
south korea passed a law requiring mobile app stores to allow third-party
payment options and apple made one more concession allowing reader apps like
netflix and spotify to include links to pay for subscriptions on their website
very big of them in september a ruling was finally issued in the apple v epic
trial which was described as both a resounding victory for apple and a
big win for epic which was confusing
until the actual legal analysts finished their opinion pieces and it became
apparent that this is not the outcome epic wanted they would have to pay apple
millions of dollars and sure apple was required to allow developers to include
buttons linking to third-party payment options within 90 days but they
successfully won a stay on that order and with both apple and epic appealing
the result it's unclear what if anything was actually accomplished this year
other than getting fortnite gamers all riled up there's a lot more to this
story and in fact i'm almost done my tech longer on it so stay
tuned for tech longer number two this video is probably already too long but
the apple vs epic was a canary in the antitrust mine because almost every
major company was investigated for anti-competitiveness and exploiting
dominance that uh yay it's not in the christmas spirit at all
NVIDIA continued trying to buy ARM for over a year a deal that was actively
opposed by qualcomm google and others who would have to deal with NVIDIA
gloating about being basically the most important chip maker in the world if it
went through don't don't want that
as of this month the ftc has sued NVIDIA to block the acquisition so i wouldn't
hold your breath if you are a fan a big fan of NVIDIA buying other companies
this year google threatened to suspend australia's search privileges and
facebook blocked australian users from sharing news links because the boys down
there wanted google and facebook to pay news outlets for the privilege of
linking to australian news articles both companies eventually made big cash deals
with australian news conglomerates just before australia passed the law that
would see them find otherwise never try to bluff an aussie they've
played knifey spoony too many times
google and apple also made plays that were marketed as privacy wins for
consumers but which actually solidified their power over their respective ad
ecosystems google's flock system to replace third-party cookies ended up
being delayed until 2023 due to industry concerns but apple's tracking
transparency feature is currently live in iOS 15. although apple also added the
ability for iOS users to opt out of apple's own tracking in addition to
third-party advertisers and lastly microsoft got all anti-trustee for a
second when they made it super difficult to change the default browser in Windows
11 to anything other than edge but eventually backtracked after they
realized everyone saw exactly what they're doing it's like
why are you sneaking why are you sneaking around i just i can see
oh microsoft but perhaps the story that affected nearly everyone this year is
the global supply chain issues that made buying electronics harder than the lump
of coal i'm putting in my son's stocking this year
why won't he sleep in february it was thought the shortages
would last maybe until june or later which eventually got amended to mean
until 2023 small typo while some combination of
pandemic-inspired dips and spikes in demand are thought to have initially
caused the shortages for pc gamers things were exacerbated by crypto miners
and scalpers buying up stock of gpus as soon as it was available leading NVIDIA
to re-release old models like the gtx 1050 ti now last i checked electronic
sales are part of the economy so understandably u.s president biden
stepped in and announced a 37 billion dollar plan to address the chip shortage
the benefits of which will not be felt for some time in what was ostensibly an
attempt to discourage miners from buying gaming gpus NVIDIA released gpus
specifically for crypto mining and added an ethereum mining limiter to its new
rtx 3060 which the company said was unhackable
yeah that was that was funny then NVIDIA accidentally leaked a driver that made
the limiter very much hackable they followed up with special mining limited
versions of the other cards in the rtx 30 series lineups were
which were eventually also hacked oh
well at least gamers could take some comfort in knowing that even scalper
bots were having a hard time finding units in stock because they would sell
out immediately Intel announced they were getting back into the foundry
business and there were times when we thought you know hey
maybe this will uh maybe this will end soon
hope on the horizon you know and then other things happened like a giant boat
blocking the suez canal or a fire at a chip factory or ransomware attacks on
the colonial pipeline and the world's largest meat supplier where am i going
to get my meat stock shortages are now just kind of a fact of life in a world
where you need a 200 membership to buy a ps5 at best buy so maybe we should look
at the positives we got to witness a dangerous mob of gamers russia micro
center and a truckload of gpus gets stolen like it's fast and the furious
out there but hopefully u.s lawmakers pass that bill prohibiting scalping of
high demand goods because i'd like stories like that to remain fiction
we've got more top stories of the year coming right up brought to you by secret
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description and check out secret lab today now not mentioning cryptocurrency
or nfts would be as big of a mistake as not investing in the future of art and
basically everything and revolutionary things is going to change
all everything you know in your mind etc so we have to talk about it one could
argue the current craze was kicked off when legendary digital artist beeple
sold a collection of his first 5 000 daily creations as an nft for 69 million
dollars through christie's auction house a development that rankled some true
crypto art purists which i
every one of whom i imagine to be dressed like a matrix character at all
times but it nevertheless led to an nft gold rush that saw twitter founder jack
dorsey sell his first tweet for nearly three million dollars and countless bots
sell nfts of stolen art some brands got
in on the fun charmin sold toilet paper nfts
atari sold gaming nostalgia nfts and in a more positive story sir tim
berners-lee sold part of the original source code for the web as an nft
donating the proceeds to charity see
they can be okay but not everyone is boarding the crypto hype train india is
considering banning or regulating cryptocurrency while china has gone for
the nuclear option metaphorically the ccp banned crypto
mining in the summer then banned all cryptocurrency transactions in september
going so far as to cut off power to certain regions which affected unrelated
factories supplying components to apple Intel and others meanwhile el salvador
became the first country in the world to make bitcoin legal tender and the
experiment is not going super well with the crypto
industry being shaken by numerous heists hacks and pump and dump schemes you know
about the squid game one and you should have saw it coming while
many game developers and digital platforms have announced and then
canceled nft plans including steam which banned all nft based games other
companies and people are forging ahead like peter molyneux his game legacy sold
54 million dollars in land tokens and
ubisoft refuses to acknowledge that their quartz nft system for ghost recon
is kind of flopping love them or hate them nfts are probably
here to stay at least until each revolutionary one-of-a-kind eight-based
pyramid scheme in which they exist
collapses speaking of collapsing it seemed like something like that was in
the cards for facebook this fall after the company was rocked by numerous
whistles being blown about its inner workings after sustaining criticism for
stopping researchers from finding out how the facebook social platform
operates the wall street journal published internal research showing the
company knew that instagram can be bad for kids mental health particularly
teenage girls facebook halted development of its kids-focused
instagram app to avoid some of the scrutiny only to be hit with a
coordinated barrage of articles from multiple publications about the facebook
papers a series of internal documents showing facebook's suppressed moderation
teams worked to undermine apple's efforts to protect user privacy and
generally made social media more toxic than it already was
fortunately soon after that facebook rebranded itself as meta and effectively
started a publicity cycle about the metaverse a super connected super social
next version of the internet to recap facebook made everyone forget about
their horrendous internal workings by announcing they were making basically
the entire internet a virtual reality social platform what is this year did
you know microsoft released a new operating system this year no no not
Windows 10 x that died a horrible death in secret i'm talking about Windows 11.
while there were some reasons to be excited like the new microsoft store's
excellent revenue sharing scheme and support for Android apps the hype pretty
quickly died down because of the hardware requirement for a trusted
platform module or tpm and when Windows 11 officially launched on october 5th it
was plagued with a host of bugs which took many weeks to fix as of now
adoption is estimated to be anywhere from two to nine percent of Windows
users who can't really see a good reason to upgrade just to make the number go up
by one although that is fun chin up microsoft maybe people just need
some time to get used to Windows 11. it's like nfts you know
they'll get there hey let's end on a positive note this year the right to
repair movement transformed from a few people whining about not being able to
use their fancy screwdrivers more to a national topic of interest
lewis rossman deserves much of the credit for starting a gofundme in march
to campaign for right to repair legislation and a few months later joe
biden issued an executive order directing the ftc to establish new
regulations now do i want to make the claim that those two things are directly
related i mean this is kind of a jokey low
effort video so you know what yeah yeah i do louis rossman is the president of the
united states microsoft committed to making its
surface devices more repairable and later announced a partnership with
ifixit valve posted a repair guide for the steam deck while also telling people
they probably shouldn't actually try this fair enough and even apple
announced a self-service repair program that will let people repair their
iphones without voiding their warranty walled gardens are opening up our
screwdrivers have things to do again you know what maybe 2021 wasn't so bad a
year after all even cyberpunk steam ratings got to a mostly positive now
obviously there are way too many stories that we didn't get to cover in this
episode but i think that's plenty of tech news for one yuletide eve so from
my tech news to yours merry christmas time to count some sugar
plums these are all new ultra rare sugar plums
that are going to be triple their worth a year from now you
just trust me tata