Tech Digest daily roundup: Tesla market value hits $1 trillion
Tesla surpassed a market value of $1 trillion on Monday, making it the fifth such firm to reach the milestone. Shares in the electric carmaker climbed 12.6% after it struck a deal to sell 100,000 vehicles to the car rental firm Hertz. Tesla has been the world’s most valuable carmaker for some time, but brands like Ford and GM make more cars. Previously only Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Google-owner Alphabet have reached a $1tn valuation. For years, Tesla struggled to ramp up production of its cars, leading some investors to speculate it would fail. But last year the company, led by billionaire Elon Musk, upped its game and became profitable for the first time, prompting its shares to take off. BBC
Britain’s most classified material is to be hosted in the cloud by Amazon after GCHQ struck a deal with the American tech giant, it has been reported. MI5 and MI6, will also use the system provided by Amazon’s cloud computing arm AWS to store secret data as part of the deal, according to the Financial Times. All the agencies’ data will be held in Britain and Amazon will not have access to information stored in the system, according to reports. However, concerns are likely to be raised about the privacy and sovereignty implications of such material being hosted by a non-British company. Telegraph
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said recent claims against the social media giant are an attempt to “paint a false picture of our company”. Whistleblower Frances Haugen has told MPs that groups on the social media site can be “dangerous” because they use algorithms that “take people who have mainstream interests and push them to extreme interests”. She said groups can become “echo chambers” that reinforce people’s opinions and gave the example that users with left-wing opinions can be pushed to the radical left, while those looking for healthy recipes can be pushed towards anorexia content. Sky News
Almost three quarters (72%) of Brits have never been in an electric vehicle (EV), either as the driver or passenger, according to new research by Appinio. The data of 2,000 of people in the UK aged between 16 and 65 reveals there is still work to do to expose the general public to EVs and help them become more familiar with the technology behind them. Additionally, 51% claim to not know anyone who owns an EV – this is reflected in only 15% of people learning about EVs from friends and family. Automotive Management
Sony’s pretty adept at crafting compact yet capable mirrorless cameras. It’s not too bad at making smartphones either. So effectively, it would be a shrewd idea to meld the two into one device, right? That’s seemingly what the company’s new Xperia Pro-I is. The Sony Xperia Pro-I isn’t a direct successor of the original Xperia Pro, which debuted earlier this year. Instead of packing an HDMI out port that few seemingly embraced, the Xperia Pro-I brings in a 1-inch primary camera sensor that dominates the phone’s rear plate. It sits behind a 24mm lens which can shoot at f/2.0 and f/4.0. It’s by no means the first 1-inch camera phone we’ve seen out in the wild, but it might be more accessible to most than the Sharp Aquos R6, or Leica’s Leitz Phone 1. Android Authority
