Weekly Recap #4
Apple Event, US open, BinanceUS layoffs and more
👋 Hey, Madhur here! Welcome to my Newsletter. I write about technology and lifestyle. Subscribe to my newsletter to receive all my posts directly in your inbox. Happy reading.
Apple September Event
Every year in September Apple has this event where they release new hardware (mostly iPhone and Apple Watch). As expected they released iPhone 15 series and Apple Watch 9 series. So what did they announce?
They released iPhone 15, iPhone 15 Plus, iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max, Apple Watch Series 9, Apple Watch Ultra 2, and USB-C AirPods Pro.
Yes, you read it right USB-C. It was rumored and expected that Apple would deprecate its lightning cable and replace it with USB-C on phones and other devices. So here it is, now you have a single cable to rule them all (Well new Macbook still has the magnetic charger, but you can use the USB-C port to charge). The other big change is that the iPhone now comes in a lightweight Titanium frame.
I think the coolest new feature is the tap gesture feature. You can use your one hand to control certain watch features like picking up calls, hanging up, and stopping the stopwatch using just a double tap gesture. Here’s the video showing this new feature.
Apart from hardware upgrades and dynamic island in all the iPhone, there has not been any major upgrades which kind of feels like someone with iPhone 14 doesn’t need to upgrade their phone as it’s probably not worth it. But hardcore Apple fans will still upgrade it.
US Open
The US Open Tennis Championship ended last week in Queens, NY. Novak Djokovic and Coco Gauff were the singles winners male and female categories respectively.
Djokovic won his 4th US Open championship but the more interesting record he made was, he became the first man to win 24 Grand Slam championships. What a legend. He has tied Margaret Court for this record. One more win and the only record he will have to beat is his. A tweet which shares Andy Roddick's praise of him. Here’s a video of his on-court interview
19-year-old Coco Gauff won her first singles US Championship title by defeating Aryna Sabalenka. She also became the youngest American to win the US championship after Serena Williams. Here’s a video of her on-court interview
Binance US
If you are blockchain/crypto world, you’ve probably heard of Binance. It is the world’s largest crypto exchange used all around the world. It also has a US subsidiary called BinanceUS. Since the US has a different set of regulations they have to comply with them.
In general, the stance of the US and particularly the SEC against crypto has been very negative. SEC chair Gary Gensler has been spending time more or less to kill the industry in the US (where other countries like the UK, Hongkong, etc. are working on proper regulatory frameworks). SEC has sued Coinbase and Binance for allegedly violating US security laws. Most of this came after the FTX debacle where FTX and its subsidiary Alameda went down and people lost a lot of money.
Last week we saw a bunch of departures from the Binance US leadership. Binance US CEO Brian Shroder resigned and we also saw them laying off 100 people in the US office. Following that the BinanceUS Head of Legal and Chief Risk office also left. Apart from the SEC, the CFTC has also sued Binance CEO for “Wilful evasion” of US laws.
All these things are hurting the industry at least in the US and the future of the industry could look bleak in the US if there is no regularity clarity for digital assets.
Operational Security suggestion: If you are using any application, you should enable 2FA but not with SMS messaging but with something like Google Authenticator. There have been a lot of sim swapping attacks recently where they can social engineer your mobile phone operator and pretend that you have lost your phone and you need a new SIM. And when they get the SIM, they try to recover the account using a 2FA method you have set. If it’s SMS, they just a code and then recover the account and can share malicious content. This can happen to any service using 2FA as SMS. So be on the lookout and get away from SMS 2FA as soon as possible.
Tool: AI has been changing a lot of things recently. Due to this the amount of tooling being developed has been growing. Bumped into a tool that looks quite interesting: Instagraph, which converts natural language or URLs into a visualized knowledge graph. For coders out there, here is the GitHub link.
That’s all for this week folks. I hope this was interesting and if you have any comments or other interesting things to share, feel free to put in comments.
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