Business, Financial & Legal Posts - Page 1

I can't believe I'm writing this but WarnerMedia subsidiary company Otter Media has a division that is a "social content company for talent and brands" called Fullscreen.

Twitch streamer 'AnneMunition' had two of her videos demonetized... for using the numbers "36" and "50". Yeah, you read that right. The videos in question are from 2017, with AnneMunition's playthrough of The Witcher 3. Both of these videos didn't have millions of views or anything, but just a few thousand views and bad news for the Twitch streamer as it will leave a bad record on her YouTube account.

She has of course disputed the claims, telling YouTube: "you can't copyright a number, you wombats".

A big story was released by The Guardian this week, and it was about Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and his phone reportedly being hacked by the Saudi Prince.

The original report stated that Bezos received a message from Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman that contained a malicious file. Security forensics firm FTI Consulting conducted an investigation into the file and concluded with "medium to high confidence" that the Saudi Prince was to blame. If you are interested in checking out the report, a link to it can be found here.

Cybersccop, a fellow security professional, has openly said that FTI didn't go far enough into their investigation. There's also Facebook's former Chief Security Officer, Alex Stamos who goes against the FTI's report, stating there was "no smoking gun". At the moment, this story has a lot of contradictory statements, with one report claiming the Saudi Prince was responsible, and other security officials saying there isn't enough evidence in the report to claim that Bezos' phone was even hacked.

Yesterday news came out about Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' phone being hacked by the Saudi crown prince. Now, we are learning that Bezos could have had his phone microphone enabled for months.

According to a forensic analysis of Bezos' hacked phone, Bezos could have had the Saudi government in his pocket listening for months. The report comes from cybersecurity firm FTI Consulting which are the investigators that were hired by Bezos after he realized his phone was compromised.

The report says, "FTI assesses that Bezos' device was compromised on May 1, 2018 and that the compromise resulted in gigabytes of data exfiltration that likely contained sensitive data such as personal photos, text messages, instant messages, emails, and possibly local (eavesdropped) recordings done via the phone's microphone."

We all know and love Linus Sebastian from LinusTechTips, and the man himself and his tech channel have reached a massive milestone of 10 million subscribers. But his latest video, in my opinion, is one of his best:

The video is one of, if not his most personal yet and that is something I love more than the usual hands-in-the-air, super-fun videos. It's raw Linus, addressing a near mid-life crisis of sorts. He had some life changing events happened which made him look through the prism of life a little differently, something that I've been doing over the last year or so.

By the end of the video Linus himself says he is not immediately retiring, but doesn't rule it out -- it's something that he might eventually do, so we could see the end of Linus appearing in a majority of the videos. LTT is run by a team of talented people who can easily take the reigns, but it would be a gigantic change for the tech channel if/when that happens.

For now, they're not tears... I was just cutting onions up, I swear...

Jeff Bezos, the Amazon CEO and the world's richest man, reportedly had his phone "hacked" by the crown prince of Saudi Arabia.

According to the report by The Guardian, sources who have remained anonymous have told the site that Saudi prince Mohammed bin Salman sent a malicious file that infiltrated Bezos' phone through WhatsApp on May 1st, 2018. Before the file was sent, Bezos and Salman were said to be having a friendly exchange, then the file was sent over, and according to those same sources, large amounts of data were transferred off Bezos' phone.

At the moment, there's no knowledge of what was taken off Bezos' phone, but since the "hack" happened back in 2018, Bezos has had some private messages leaked online. The text messages reflected an extramarital relationship, which then triggered Bezos to put full force in discovering how these texts made it online. Bezos' own investigation team says they are "highly confident" that the Saudis had managed to "access" Bezos's phone and acquired "private information".

Facebook has taken one on the chin, as recently the big company incorrectly translated the Chinese President's name into something extremely rude.

Facebook has openly apologized for displaying Chinese President Xi Jinping's name as "Mr. Sh*thole" when translating it from Burmese to English. So how was this translation error realized? China's President was visited by Myanmar's President and was required to sign a bunch of new agreements. Translations of these new agreements were then published on Burmese state counselor Aung San Suu Kyi's Facebook page.

When readers translated the statements from Burmese to English, they were shocked at the multiple references to Xi Jinping's name and the wording "Mr. Sh*thole". Facebook has since apologized for the error, claiming it happened due to "technical issue". The company also said that Xi Jinping's name wasn't present in their database, so they took a wild stab in the dark at translating it and failed.

NBCUniversal has just secured Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane, with MacFarlane signing a huge $200 million TV deal that gives him some great flexibility.

MacFarlane will be leaving his warm home of 20th Century Fox TV, with MacFarlane's new deal will see the Family Guy creator creating new content for NBC's entire portfolio. Not only that, but MacFarlane will be free to sell to outside buyers including Netflix, as well as being a free agent on the movie side of things.

MacFarlane is a big fish to catch, so it should come as no surprise that he was being courted by Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Warners, Sony, ViacomCBS and Disney. In the end, the 5-year $200 million deal with more freedom at NBCUniversal won him over.

Bose has announced some rather large news for its retail dominance in major markets globally, with the audio-focused company announcing it will be closing retail stores in multiple countries.

Bose will be closing its retail storefronts in the US, Australia, Europe and Japan which will see a total of 119 stores closing and hundreds of jobs slashed. It's a big shock considering Bose first opened its first physical store in 1993, and has continued to spread its audio retail goodness across the world since.

The retail stores have been the perfect way to display and show off their audio products like headphones and speakers, especially Bose's iconic noise-cancellation headphones. Recently, Bose has been pushing into smart speakers, earbuds, sunglasses, and other products.

If you thought that the mobile market wasn't big, then you thought wrong. Sensor Tower has released new statistics that reveal throughout 2019, an estimated $83.5 billion dollars was spent in the mobile market.

The new statistics have been released on the Sensor Tower website, and show that throughout 2019 a growth of 16.3% occurred in spending for Apple's App Store. In 2018, the App Store pulled in $46.6 billion in spending, compared to in 2019, where it managed to beat the record with $54.2 billion. Looking at the Android market in 2018, the Google Play Store's total revenue was estimated to be $24.8 billion. In 2019 that number increased slightly to $29.3 billion.

The mobile gaming market was a massive player in the total revenue, pulling in a lions share of $61.7 billion spent, a 12.8% increase when compared to 2018. So what mobile games generated the most revenue? According to Sensor Tower, games such as Honor of Kings, Pokemon GO, Fire Emblem Heroes, Garena Free Fire, Call of Duty Mobile, and more contributed the most towards the gaming market's total revenue earnings. The game that managed to rake in the most revenue was Tencent's Honor of Kings with a ridiculous $1.5 billion.

An American man has made a strange filing in an Iowa court, asking his new ex-wife and attorney to meet him on the field of battle.

The Kansas man is 40-year-old David Ostrom, who says that his now ex-wife, Bridgette Ostrom, has "destroyed (him) legally". So in response to being "destroyed legally", Ostrom has asked the court to grant him 'trial by combat' and to give him twelve weeks to prepare his weapons for battle. Ostrom wants to forge his own kata and wakizashi swords for the trial. According to the Des Moines Register, the court states, "To this day, trial by combat has never been explicitly banned or restricted as a right in these United States".

Ostrom's main target in this trial by combat is not his ex-wife but instead her attorney, Matthew Hudson. Ostrom says, "I think I've met Mr. Hudson's absurdity with my own absurdity." Ostrom even suggested to his ex-wife to choose Hudson as her "champion". In response to the trial by combat request, Hudson has filed a motion to suspend Ostrom's visitation rights to his children and has asked to court to enforce a psychological evaluation on Ostrom.