Technology played a big role in the news of 2016.
Here are the biggest tech stories of the year — in no particular order.
Exploding Samsung phones
Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7 phones grabbed a lot of attention due to a severe battery overheating problem. Some of the devices became so hot that they caught fire and even exploded. Samsung attempted to replace consumer’s devices — that didn’t work out great — and the U.S. Department of Transportation eventually banned the phones on flights.
Headed into 2017, the Galaxy Note 7 phones themselves aren’t a problem anymore. But Samsung will still be in damage control mode. It’ll be interesting to see if consumers decide to give Samsung another shot — assuming they haven’t already switched to an iPhone, Google’s Pixel or another comparable handset.
Apple vs. FBI
The case between Apple and the Federal Bureau of Investigation made many Americans seriously consider their stance on encryption for — perhaps — the first time. It all started with an attack in San Bernardino, California, that left 14 people dead and another 22 injured. Later, investigators wanted to unlock an iPhone 5c that belonged to one of the shooters. In order to do this, the FBI wanted Apple to give them a key that would break the phone’s encryption. Without out a key, the FBI risked bricking the phone and losing any information linked to the case. Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, took a strong stance against breaking the device’s encryption, saying that breaking encryption on this one phone would weaken the security for every other device.
Encryption is not a new technology and it’s actually something most people use every day — while banking online, signing into e-mail, even swiping (or inserting) a credit card at a kiosk. In this case, the FBI ended up taking a different route to get into the shooter’s iPhone. This wasn’t the first case where a tech firm was asked to break its own encryption and it won’t be the last.
Fake news is real
Fake news’ controversial involvement in the 2016 U.S. presidential election put its existence under the microscope — big time — but these types of stories have been around for years. Here’s a list compiled by BuzzFeed of 50 fake news stories that garnered the most engagement on Facebook in 2016.
Twenty-three of those listed were about U.S. politics. According to the list, the top fake story was “Obama Signs Executive Order Banning The Pledge Of Allegiance In Schools Nationwide.” That headline received 2.1 million shares, comments, and reactions on Facebook in just two months, according to BuzzFeed.
If this fake news revelation has taught us anything, it’s that we (as a nation) need to get far better about fact-checking before reacting to headlines. This social experiment by The Wall Street Journal does a good job showing how fake news can creep its way into our social feeds and — in some cases — give false credibility to a political bias.
Pokémon GO wins
Since the launch of Pokémon GO, an augmented reality app that lets real people catch virtual Pokémon using their smartphones, the game has seen great success all over the world. At first, it got off to a rough start — not because people weren’t using it, though. Quite the opposite, actually: so many people wanted to get started on their quest to “catch them all” that the game’s servers had a hard time keeping up.
Now that those issues are behind it, Pokémon GO’s new task is keeping people playing — and paying. Niantic has announced a whole slew of updates to the game recently that will continue into the new year.
The selling and hacking of Yahoo
The well-known and heavily trafficked internet giant Yahoo has had a rough year. The company laid off a lot of people while it looked for a buyer. Then, finally, Verizon agreed to buy it for $4.83 billion (in cash) in July. Not long after, in September, Yahoo announced that it had been hacked in 2014. According to a press release from the company, at least 500 million accounts’ information was stolen in the breach.
Fast-forward to December and the company beat its own record-setting breach with news of another hack:
“Yahoo believes an unauthorized third party, in August 2013, stole data associated with more than one billion user accounts.”
Keep in mind, when Verizon agreed to buy the ailing company it didn’t know about either hack. So this most recent news shouldn’t seem too surprising: Bloomberg reports that Verizon has a legal team looking into possibly reducing the original $4.8 billion sale price or maybe even killing the deal altogether. Which ends up being the case is something we’ll find out next year.
Related: How to delete the Yahoo account that security experts say you should dump
(Top photo credit: Flickr Franck Michel/ CC BY 2.0)
