It’s Friday! The weekend is nearly here! So let’s have a look at what happened in tech over the last 7 days.

In this issue:

  • The CES Comedown
  • National Lottery Hacker Jailed For Nine Months
  • Elon Musk: ‘Teslas will soon talk to people if you want.’
  • Hasta La Vista, Windows 7!
  • Sony To Skip E3… Again

 

The CES Comedown

Attendees at a convention

CES is over for another year. Which means the world’s best tech journalists are probably recovering from convention flu!

CES was another smash hit, with lots going on in the consumer space – from rotating TV screens, self rocking cradles and some more personal items.

In the networking world, Zyxel stunned the judges with their The Halo Light: 10G Fiber WiFi6 Intelligent Home WiFi System.

“2019 was an exciting year for Zyxel” Erin Po, Zyxel marketing director. “Aside from launching several of our new innovative products and solutions successfully, we also won these two significant awards from the prestigious Consumer Electronics Show, CES 2020. CES has been the global stage for innovators and breakthrough technologies for 50 years, and we are so honoured to receive this recognition, especially the “Best of Innovation” Award in Computer Peripherals & Accessories category.”

Elsewhere at the show, Netgear announced a range of new products, from a WiFi 6/5G mobile router, a 4G LTE addition to the Orbi family and some seriously powerful PoE+ applications.

Arlo hit the awards list with their Arlo Floodlight. Their brand new camera is set to be the first wire-free floodlight with an integrated camera on the market. The Arlo Floodlight comes with a built-in siren that can be triggered automatically, or manually from the Arlo app, when motion or audio is detected.

Also, we need to talk about this car. I mean, look at it…

Elon Musk: ‘Teslas will soon talk to people if you want.’

In other car news, Tesla Cars will be able to talk to nearby pedestrians. We know Tesla are adding external speakers to their cars, though initially, this was to comply with new regulations requiring silent electric cars to actually make noise.

But Tesla seems to be taking this to the next level. CEO Musk released a clip which showed a Tesla saying  “Well, don’t just stand there staring, hop in.” to a nearby pedestrian.

While this isn’t a new idea (Lorries have been shouting safety messages for a while), it’s interesting to see it applied to vehicles for non-safety reasons.

Read more on The Verge

National Lottery Hacker Jailed For Nine Months

CyberSecurity - red keyboard

Notting Hill-based hacker, Anwar Batson, was jailed this week after hacking Camalot, the company who run the National Lottery.

Batson targeted the 9 million-strong database through Sentry MBA, a HTTP bot widely used in credential stuffing attacks. Batson supplied the password to another person, who stole £13 from the account, giving Batson £5 in return.

Initially, Batson denied his role in the attack, claiming his devices had been cloned by online trolls. However, when police inspected the devices in question, they discovered multiple pieces of evidence linking him to his alias “Rosegold”, and conversations between Rosegold and two men who had already been sentenced for their role in the cyber attack.

Read more on ComputerWeekly.com

Hasta La Vista, Windows 7!

Windows 7 is no more. Or at least, Microsoft won’t be supporting it. Which is a major problem if you’re one of the 26% of PC users still running it. The operating system was one of Windows’ fasting selling OS, which isn’t surprising considering it replaced the largely terrible Windows Vista.

via GIPHY

Read more on The Verge

 

Sony To Skip E3… Again

Playstation

In a move that is both surprising and not surprising, Sony are skipping E3 again.

With Sony set to release the PS5, we were quite shocked that they were going to miss the gaming world’s biggest party.

But, given they skipped last year, maybe it’s not as surprising as we thought.

Anyway, Sony released a statement:

“We have great respect for the ESA [E3’s parent company] as an organisation, but we do not feel the vision of E3 2020 is the right venue for what we are focused on this year.”

Sony also mentioned they want their “global events strategy” to be more fan-focused, so maybe other events are on the horizon?

Read more on CNET.

 

And that’s the week in a nutshell. Got a story for us? Drop us a message over on Twitter!