Tech Digest daily roundup: Uber investigating cybersecurity incident
Uber Technologies Inc (UBER.N) said it was investigating a cybersecurity incident after a report of a network breach that forced the company to shut several internal communications and engineering systems. On Friday, Uber said it had no evidence that the incident involved access to sensitive user data such as trip histories and that internal software tools that the company had taken after the hack were coming back online. Uber began investigating the cybersecurity incident on Thursday. A hacker compromised an employee’s account on workplace messaging app Slack and used it to send a message to Uber employees announcing that the company had suffered a data breach, according to a New York Times report on Thursday that cited an Uber spokesperson. Reuters
A Dutch town has taken Twitter to court over the spread of a conspiracy theory claiming it was once home to a ring of Satan-worshipping paedophiles. False reports that Bodegraven-Reeuwijk was the site of the abuse and murder of multiple children in the 1980s were first circulated by three men in 2020. The main instigator, who grew up in the town near The Hague, said he had witnessed the crimes as a child. Local authorities want to see all posts relating to the alleged events removed. The claims have prompted dozens of people to travel to the town’s Vrederust cemetery to leave flowers and tributes at the graves of seemingly random dead children. BBC
McLaren was put at risk of collapse by a global shortage of microchips that left the British supercar manufacturer struggling to deliver orders, new accounts show. A severe lack of chips had created a “material uncertainty” over the company’s future, auditors said in the accounts, which were published this week but signed off before McLaren secured a £125m injection from investors earlier this year. The warning is a fresh demonstration of the crisis which has gripped the car industry since Covid sparked a shutdown in production, leaving companies from Volkswagen to Tesla unable to cope with surging demand when society opened back up. Telegraph
TikTok has launched a new feature that is basically just a copy of BeReal, the buzzy French social app that’s been steadily gaining popularity. BeReal invites users to take a front and back camera photo at a random time every day, designed to capture a more authentic picture of what our friends are doing all day (but, of course, you can just wait to post until you’re doing something interesting). Snapchat and Instagram have already launched front and back camera features, and Instagram is rumored to be working on its own time-based, ephemeral feature. But TikTok beat its competitors to the punch by being the first app to just outright cut-and-paste BeReal into its platform. TechCrunch
Apple Watch users who use Spotify to stream music are being warned not to update to watchOS 9 as it is rendering the music streaming app inert. Spotify has been sending out emails to users warning them against updating to the latest watchOS 9 if they want to continue to stream music. Spotify released the following statement. “Apple watchOS 9 introduced a bug that causes Spotify streaming on the Apple Watch to stop working. We urge Spotify Apple Watch users not to install the watchOS 9 update until Apple has implemented a fix for the issue. Laptop
