Today is Sunday, October 9th: time for the weekly roundup of the good, the bad and the ugly tech news of the week!
The Good
Finally some good news with the Windows 11 2022 Update (22H2). Coming later this month….(may be as early as this ‘Patch Tuesday’ the 11th?) are the additional set of experiences for Windows 11. Two big features/experiences for those who have already upgrade to the 22H2 update will include the Tabbed File Explorer and improved taskbar.
The Bad
Google Chrome is one of the most popular browsers for non-mobile users. Unfortunately, that popularity makes it a huge target for exploits and thus the unflattering honor of being the browser with the most vulnerabilities so far this year. Google Chrome has had 300+ discovered vulnerabilities this year so far However, this is not all bad as these vulnerabilities have been addressed and patched thanks to Google’s aggressive bug bounty program. It would be a lot worse if these vulnerabilities are being undetected, unreported and left unpatched.
The Ugly
We have Google yet again; this time it is Android. Google has agreed to pay Arizona $85 Million for Illegal Android Tracking. This was a settlement from a 2020 lawsuit filed by Arizona claiming Google continued to track users for targeted advertising, even after they turned off location data settings. Google has also been sued for the same claims by Texas, Indiana and Washington D.C. The reason this is so ugly besides the obvious privacy violations is the size of this fine. $85 million is pocket change for Google working out to around the amount of revenue they earn in around 3-hours. Worse yet they were given a reduced fine of around $4 billion by the EU for being anti-competitive. This sets a bad precedence that being anti-competitive is far worse than violating user’s privacy.
