TLDR 2021-09-03

Reddit plans IPO ๐Ÿ’ฐ, gift card gangs ๐Ÿ’ณ, world's most sustainable city ๐Ÿ™๏ธ

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Big Tech & Startups

Reddit hires bankers and lawyers as it aims for $15bn IPO (2 minute read)

Reddit is hiring investment bankers and lawyers to prepare for an initial public offering. The company was valued at $10 billion last month. Reddit has not yet indicated when the IPO will begin. The site had roughly 52 million daily active users and over 100,000 communities in October last year. It gained millions of new users earlier in the year due to the GameStop trading frenzy. Reddit makes most of its money through advertising, reporting $100 million in advertising revenue in the second quarter.

Apple concedes to let apps like Netflix, Spotify, and Kindle link to the web to sign up (3 minute read)

Apple has changed its App Store rules to allow developers of reader apps to share a single link to their website to help users set up and manage their accounts. Reader apps are apps that allow users to access previously purchased content, but do not offer in-app digital goods and services for purchase. Apps like Netflix, Spotify, and Kindle will now be allowed to directly link customers to their own sign-up website. The change was made to close an investigation by the Japan Fair Trade Commission into a suspected violation of the Antimonopoly Act.
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Science & Futuristic Technology

A Former Walmart Executive Wants to Build 'the Most Sustainable City in the World' (3 minute read)

Marc Lore, a former Walmart CEO, is planning to build a city from scratch in a desert somewhere in the western US, potentially in Nevada or Idaho. The city of Telosa will be built on land that will be donated to a community endowment to help fund the city's development and improve the lives of citizens. The project will use eco-friendly building materials and processes and will be built with bikes and pedestrians in mind. Telosa will be built on the principles of inclusivity and openness. Concept images of the city are available in the article.

A New Navy Weapon Actually Stops You From Talking (3 minute read)

Acoustic Hailing and Disruption (AHAD) is a weapon invented by the US Navy designed to stop people from talking. It records speech and instantly broadcasts it at a target, disrupting a target's concentration and discouraging them from continuing to speak. The broadcasted sound is in a narrow beam and directed so only the speaker can hear it. It makes a noticeable change in behavior in the target and will likely be confusing to anyone listening to the target person. The system can also project sound onto surfaces so that audio appears to come from the target.
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Programming, Design & Data Science

Podman (GitHub Repo)

Podman is a tool for managing OCI containers and pods. It supports multiple container image formats, with full management of those images and the container lifecycle. Podman can run containers and pods without root or other elevated privileges. It currently only supports running containers on Linux.

BerylDB (GitHub Repo)

BerylDB is a data structure server that provides access to structures via a wide range of commands. It gives users access to lists, maps, keys, and channel subscriptions for their clients. BerylDB allows developers to use fewer lines of code to store, retrieve, and manage data in their apps. The server is currently available for GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, and macOS.
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Miscellaneous

Amazonโ€™s Wheel of Time show is finally revealed in its first trailer (2 minute read)

Amazon has released the first trailer for The Wheel of Time series. It establishes some of the basic tenets of Robert Jordan's world, with a specific focus on Moiraine Damodred. The trailer shows the five central characters that Moiraine ends up mentoring through the series. Various locations from the story are teased. The trailer is available in the article.

Gift Card Gang Extracts Cash From 100k Inboxes Daily (9 minute read)

A cybercrime group has been observed compromising up to 100,000 email inboxes per day to siphon gift card and customer loyalty program data to be resold online. The group is exploiting the lack of security in the IMAP protocol to check credentials and search for data. It is well known that email isn't very secure. The group will help victims earn loyalty points in order to cash out larger rewards. Most of the attacks could be prevented using multi-factor authentication. A file containing the top inbox search terms used by the group is available in the article.
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