July 1, 2020 | ISSUE NO. 5
The Roundup is a bit-sized security newsletter designed to be read during boring meetings while providing you with material to share during your next sales lunch.
A 140B Malware Company?
ByteDance, the parent company of video-sharing mobile app TikTok, is earning a lot of attention recently. The China-based company has become the world’s most valuable unicorn (worth $140 Billion) largely because TikTok was able to engineer virality and personalization into their platform. However, TikTok is also accused of harvesting an enormous amount of data from users that they don’t need. So much so, that many security researches have called the app ‘malware’.
Should Big Tech Regulate Speech?
Over the past few weeks, several large companies (Starbucks, Coca-Cola, etc…) have announced they will be pulling advertising dollars from Facebook to push Facebook to better regulate the spread of hate on the platform. It’s clear that *almost* everyone despises hate speech and would love to get rid of it, but that’s not the question at play here. Stay tuned for this story to develop over the coming weeks and months.
Cities Have a Big Opportunity as Work From Home Continues
Cities, including our home base of Dallas, are being presented with a huge opportunity to bring in people as work from home becomes permanent in many areas and individuals are given the opportunity to shift their perception of where they can live. Many folks are fleeing high-rent areas like Silicon Valley in search of decreased cost-of-living without a huge loss of opportunities.
Riddle of the Month
How many trailing zeros are in the number ‘5!’ (5 factorial)?
