Bytes: What’s new in tech
Clubhouse loses its mystique
“If there was a poster child for the tech industry’s irrational exuberance during the Covid pandemic, it was Clubhouse,” said Ari Levy in CNBC.com. The audio-only socialnetworking app closed an investment round valuing it at $4 billion in April 2021, when it boasted 14.2 million downloads. Invitations to Clubhouse were a sign of being in the know in Silicon Valley, and ordinary internet users followed the insiders’ lead. But “the Clubhouse fad faded quickly.” Last week, the company announced it was laying off half its staff as part of a “reset” to design and launch “the next evolution of the product.” After raising hundreds of millions of dollars in 2021, Clubhouse’s founders “insist they have enough capital to keep going,” and claim they are working on “Clubhouse 2.0.”
Gaming the H-1B visa lottery
Applications for coveted H-1B slots for foreign workers surged this year, and there seems to be one shady explanation, said Michelle Hackman in The Wall Street Journal: “Companies are colluding to cheat the lottery” by submitting the same names for multiple spots. The 85,000 spots this year got 781,000 applications. Of those, 350,000 came from applicants who entered the lottery once, a moderate increase from last year’s 307,000. But another 408,000 applications came from just 96,000 applicants. It’s not illegal for a visa application to be submitted by multiple companies, but they must attest the worker has a real job offer. Immigration officials suspect some firms were set up just to game the system with multiple applications.
An FBI warning to ignore
Forget what the FBI is telling you about “juice jacking,” said Dan Goodin in Ars Technica: Those ominous-sounding warnings about cybercriminals hacking your phone through the equipment at public charging stations are baseless. “Unless you’re a target of nationstate hackers,” most cybersecurity experts say, there’s no cause for alarm. “There are no documented cases of juice jacking ever taking place in the wild.” It’s especially unlikely if you’ve updated your operating system. Modern iPhones and Android devices “require users to click through an explicit warning before they can exchange files with a device connected by standard cables.” The FBI said its recent alert was a “general reminder” about staying safe while traveling and was based on guidance originally posted in 2019.