Equifax’s bad luck streak isn’t over yet. Google’s deal with HTC means the maker of Android is serious about hardware. And Bose has a new headset integration with Google Assistant.
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On Reddit, more bad news for Equifax. Earlier this month the credit bureau was the victim of a hack that saw information stolen for 143 million customers. In response, it set up a new website – equifaxecurity2017.com – for customers to see if they were affected or not. But in a series of tweets dating back to September 9th, Equifax customer service reps directed customers to securityequifax2017.com – a phishing site. Thankfully, the site was claimed by a whitehat security developer Nick Sweetling. He said he wanted to demonstrate that Equifax “made a huge mistake by using a new domain that doesn’t have any trust.” He promises no input data will leave his page.
From Facebook, people are talking about Google’s $1.1 billion acquisition of phone maker HTC. With the purchase, Google onboards the same team that helped develop the Pixel, its first branded smartphone. Now that it’s back in the hardware game with smartphones, Google will be able to make sure that a premium Android experience is available to the market. It will also be looking to improve its production performance after some delays with the Pixel last year. Besides, with HTC losing out to Samsung on the Android smartphone market, Google would much rather throw some cash at it than risk losing a big supporter of its mobile OS. What’s $1 billion when you’ve got $16 billion in cash anyway?
Trending on Google, Bose is announcing that its QC35 II headphones will be updated to work with Google Assistant. Using Google’s AI helper still requires a Bluetooth connection to an iPhone or Android phone. But you can talk to it just by pushing the action button on the headset. Google worked with Bose on the integration, so future collaboration of other products sounds likely.