This Week in Tech – 10/15/2017
Google Will Hit 100 Percent Renewable Energy This Year
Google has announced that after 10 years a carbon-neutral company, it will be able to brag running on entirely renewable energy at the end of 2017. That means that all of the electricity the company consumes in both its data centers and offices are provided by wind and solar energy…
Richard Branson Discusses Space Travel, AI, and His Friendship With Obama
Business Insider Nordic got an exclusive chat with legendary entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson as he visited the Nordic Business Forum (NBF) in Helsinki. Cramped together in a tiny meeting cube, we picked Branson’s brain on everything from Nordic entrepreneurs to his bromance with Obama…
Judge Says US Govt Has ‘No Right to Rummage’ Through Anti-Trump Protest Website Logs
A Washington DC judge has told the US Department of Justice (DoJ) it “does not have the right to rummage” through the files of an anti-Trump protest website – and has ordered the dot-org site’s hosting company to protect the identities of its users…
Tom Wheeler to Ajit Pai: “Why the Silence” About Trump’s Media Threats?
Tom Wheeler, the former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, implored his successor, Ajit Pai, to say something publicly about President Donald Trump’s threats to take NBC and other networks off the air because of their news coverage of the chief executive…
Equifax Website Borked Again, This Time to Redirect to Fake Flash Update
In May credit reporting service Equifax’s website was breached by attackers who eventually made off with Social Security numbers, names, and a dizzying amount of other details for some 145.5 million US consumers. For several hours on Wednesday, and again early Thursday morning, the site was maliciously manipulated again, this time to deliver fraudulent Adobe Flash updates, which when clicked, infected visitors’ computers with adware that was detected by only three of 65 antivirus providers…
Microwave Breakthrough Helps Boost Hard Drive Sizes
The data-storing abilities of hard drives could soon swell to 40 terabytes (TB) and beyond, says Western Digital. Currently the largest hard disk drive (HDD) that stores data on spinning disks can hold about 14TB of information. Western Digital said the bigger drives were made possible by finding a way to use microwaves to write data on 3.5in drives…
Equifax Rival TransUnion Also Sends Site Visitors to Malicious Pages
Equifax isn’t the only credit-reporting behemoth with a website redirecting visitors to fake Adobe Flash updates. A security researcher from AV provider Malwarebytes said transunioncentroamerica.com, a TransUnion site serving people in Central America, is also sending visitors to the fraudulent updates and other types of malicious pages…