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Intuit Could Buy Credit Karma for $7 Billion

Andrew Orr ·

Financial services giant Inuit, which has products like TurboTax and Mint, is close to a deal to buy Credit Karma for US$7 billion.

There is a potentially significant business opportunity for Intuit if it completes a deal. For example, Intuit could try to match all the tax data its TurboTax customers provide with the credit-scoring data that Credit Karma holds.

That could let Intuit serve up better customer prospects to credit card issuers — and eventually let Intuit charge lenders more for access to its hoard of data.

Podcast

Taming System Preferences, Podcasts, Email, and More – Mac Geek Gab 803

John F. Braun & Dave Hamilton · · Add Comment

Sometimes things just get out of hand with your devices and need to be wrangled back into line. Today’s targets: System Preferences, the Podcasts app, IMAP email, and much more. Plus, some early replies on our search for the best way to tame our episode watch lists are already in, too! Listen as John and Dave talk through all of this, add some Cool Stuff Found, and more.

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Tesla Begins Deforestation in Germany to Build New Gigafactory

Charlotte Henry ·

 

Tesla has resumed cutting down trees in eastern Germany following local opposition, Reuters reported. The deforestation is so it can build an enormous factory in the area.

The U.S. electric carmaker last November said it will build a factory in Gruenheide in the eastern state of Brandenburg near Berlin, creating up to 12,000 jobs, a decision that was initially lauded as a vote of confidence in Germany. Tesla wants to start production in 2021, but environmentalists have exploited legal loopholes in the planning process to halt felling of trees until an environmental audit is finalised to gauge whether any rare species could be endangered.

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These Tiny Chips Could Help Stop Counterfeits

Andrew Orr ·

MIT researchers created tiny (0.002 square inches) chips that could help combat supply chain counterfeiting.

It’s millimeter-sized and runs on relatively low levels of power supplied by photovoltaic diodes. It also transmits data at far ranges, using a power-free “backscatter” technique that operates at a frequency hundreds of times higher than RFIDs. Algorithm optimization techniques also enable the chip to run a popular cryptography scheme that guarantees secure communications using extremely low energy.

Sounds interesting. I wonder if these could be used for more than counterfeits.

Featured Image credit: MIT News

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SlickWraps Was Hacked, But Hasn’t Done Anything About It

Andrew Orr ·

SlickWraps makes skins for iPhones and Androids. It was recently hacked, but fortunately by a white hat hacker without malicious intentions. The story behind it is fascinating, especially because the company has blocked him and so far has failed to do anything about it.

To say I went to great lengths to treat SlickWraps equitably would be an understatement. Candidly, after the staggering number of primitive security flaws exhibited by their administrators (e.g. the vulnerability to Dirty COW, an exploit which was patched in 2016), I question whether they deserved the leniency I am about to describe.

Update: Other people are hacking the company too. One of them sent emails to SlickWraps customers, telling them to tweet and email the company, which responded to the incident on Twitter.