Charlotte Henry

Salesforce boss Marc Benioff is one of tech’s most compelling and surprising characters and has been for a long time. This summer, he made a decision that caught most people unawares – he named a co-CEO. A CNBC interview with Mr. Benioff reveals how time off this summer made he decide to focus only on the things he loves and touches on his purchase of Time Magazine.

Weeks at work are filled with dinners, parties, events and business council meetings exclusively for CEOs, meaning that if anyone from Salesforce is to attend, it has to be him. Meanwhile, he’s trying to run a 30,000-person company, build Salesforce towers across the globe, bolster his philanthropy, invest in start-ups, mentor other business leaders and become a louder voice on a number of social and political issues. “So I made a very good decision — to have two CEOs,” Benioff said with a laugh, during a recent interview at his home in San Francisco. “Then it’s a divide and conquer strategy.” Following his time off the grid, Benioff flew to Hawaii refreshed and resolved to focus only on the things in life he enjoys.

Hackers warned thousands of Chromecast users of a security flaw…by hijacking their devices. They were the latest people to work out how to force the Chromecast to play any YouTube video they want. For good measure, the hackers, who go by the names Hacker Giraffe and J3ws3r, encouraged users to subscribe to controversial YouTube personality PewDePie’s channel. Techcrunch spoke to researchers concerned that the vulnerability could leave exposed devices vulnerable to more damaging attacks.

The bug, dubbed CastHack, exploits a weakness in both Chromecast and the router it connects to. Some home routers have enabled Universal Plug and Play (UPnP), a networking standard that can be exploited in many ways. UPnP forwards ports from the internal network to the internet, making Chromecasts and other devices viewable and accessible from anywhere on the internet.

It has been a pretty exciting time for space technology recently. SpaceX completed its first mission for the U.S. military on December 23, 2018. On Wednesday, scientists on NASA’s New Horizons mission shared the first close-up images of an object in the distant Kuiper Belt that is not Pluto or one of its moons. On Thursday, just over 50 years since man first went to the Far Side of the Moon in Apollo 8, a Chinese robot spacecraft become the first to actually land there. BBC News Online provided a fantastic rundown of what happened in this historic mission.

Previous Moon missions have landed on the Earth-facing side, but this is the first time any craft has landed successfully on the unexplored and rugged far side. Some spacecraft have crashed into the far side, either after system failures, or after they had completed their mission.Ye Quanzhi, an astronomer at Caltech, told the BBC this was the first time China had “attempted something that other space powers have not attempted before”

In the past, Huawei ambassadors such as Wonder Woman star Gal Gadot raised some eyebrows by tweeting their love of the Chinese firm’s phones via an iPhone. Now, the company’s own PR department has done the same, tweeting a “happy new year” message from an iPhone. All rather embarrassing, particularly, as AppleInsider noted, in the context of an apparent boycott of Apple products from Chinese firms following the arrest of Huawei’s Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou at the request of the U.S.

Despite an international incident involving the arrest of Huawei’s CFO Meng Wanzhou on fraud charges related to violating U.S. trade sanctions against Iran, and the supposed Asian iPhone boycott announced by Nikkei, the Chinese phone maker’s public relations group continued to use iPhones in the promotion of its brand, as noted by MKBHD video blogger Marques Brownlee

One of the internet’s founding fathers, Larry Roberts, sadly passed away over the holiday season. Dr. Roberts pioneered packet switching technology and went on to become the Chief Scientist on the ARPANET project. He also had success in the private sector. Dr. Roberts died on 26 December 2018 after suffering a heart attack, aged 81, The Register paid tribute:

After studying electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and completing his PhD, Roberts implemented a packet-switched link for his uni. In 1966, he was appointed chief scientist for the Advanced Research Projects Agency – and put in charge of its embryonic ARPANET. He worked with packet-switching theorist Lawrence Kleinrock to create the project’s first working network of four computers connected to each other in 1969.