Former Apple Engineer admits of Stealing Car Trade Secrets

Here are the top trending stories from the world of technology. News that we feel every tech enthusiast should keep a tab on.

1)

Former Apple Engineer admits of stealing car trade secrets

Apple is still far from launching its much secretive autonomous car but its pet project is already in news for trade secret theft. An ex-Apple engineer Xiaolang Zhang has pleaded guilty in a trade theft case that was started in 2018. The Chinese descendant was arrested in 2018 following a complaint by Apple, which accused the engineer of stealing a 25 page document that contained top design and engineering information about Apple’s autonomous car. The tech giant further claimed that Zhang had resigned in April 2018 and quite maliciously planned to pass the trade secrets to Chinese electric car startup Xpeng. With Zhang now pleading guilty in the court, this four year case has now been officially closed.

2)

Twitter’s Ex-security head makes damaging allegation about security & bot

Twitter’s former security head Peiter Zatko, who once was also considered as a legendary hacker, has decided to turn into a whistleblower against his former company. Zatko has made some damaging allegations including the allegation that the company overlooked many security vulnerabilities and carried laxed attitude in fixing its bot & spam account problems. These damaging disclosures can give a huge boost to Elon Musk’s claim that Twitter is maliciously hiding the exact numbers of spam and bot accounts. In a yet another interesting development Elon Musk’s legal team has also sent summons to Twitter’s ex CEO Jack Dorsey to give access to some critical documents.

3)

Nandan Nilekani backed startup ShopX goes bankrupt 

E-commerce enabler startup ShopX has ran out of money and hence has filed for bankruptcy. The Bengaluru based startup said that its business of helping kirana stores in starting their own online stores was looking increasingly unviable. Due to its increasing losses,  the startup had even recently announced huge lay-offs. Backed by Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani, ShopX had raised $54 Mn till date. Nilekani had invested almost $18 Mn in the startup in his personal capacity. ShopX had not raised a single amount of funding round since 2020, which clearly reflected that even investors had started losing faith in the Bengaluru based startup.

4)

Gautam Adani acquires leading news channel NDTV   

India’s second richest man Gautam Adani is all set to buy a controlling stake in the media group NDTV. The Adani Group said that it will buy 29% stake in NDTV and soon launch an open offer to buy the remaining 26% stake in NDTV. This is Adani’s boldest bet till date in the made space and will directly compete with arch-rival Mukesh Ambani, which owns TV18 news network. NDTV is widely considered one of the few news channels that often takes a critical view of the Modi government. And this fact makes Adani’s latest acquisition really interesting, considering that the business tycoon shares a very close rapport with the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

5)

Amazon’s first job listing posted by Jeff Bezos has gone viral      

This week nearly 30 years ago, i.e. 1994, Amazon’s legendary founder & CEO Jeff Bezos had posted the first-ever job listing of his newly founded e-commerce startup. That job listing has now gone viral on the internet. Bezos, who was a little known entrepreneur back then, had posted that he is looking for a talented software developer who can help in pioneering e-commerce on the internet. He went on to add that his company is looking for candidates with BS, MS or PHD in computer science degree. That company, as we all know, has today become an e-commerce giant and one of the biggest tech companies in the world.