The Sony Walkman turns 40 today, Cloudflare outage impacts services across the web, and China forces tourists to install text-stealing malware.
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Sony’s Walkman recently turned 40, and naturally Twitter went down memory lane, sharing photos of the various Walkman products that hung around people’s waists – or sit snugly in pockets – for decades. Before the iPod, Sony had sold hundreds of millions of its iconic cassette players. The first, sold in 1979, cost $150. Over the decades, the device accommodated CDs, mini-discs, and MP3s. Sony’s Twitter account also posted a short video celebrating the four decades of innovation spurred by the Walkman.
Trending all over social media is a Cloudflare outage took down multiple sites and services, including OKCupid, Feedly, Discord, and CoinDesk. As a result, millions of users globally were met with the “502 Gateway Error” when accessing their favourite platforms early this week. Even the website DownDetector, a popular site that tracks internet outages, was affected. In a tweet, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said the outage was due to a server overload, not an attack. As of this recording, all has returned to normal. The company estimates that sites were affected for about 30 minutes.This is the second Cloudflare outage in two weeks.
And lastly, trending on Reddit, Chinese officials are installing Android malware on tourists phones at the border in order for the government to track Islamic extremist content, but according to reporting from Vice, this also includes innocuous Islamic material, academic books, and even music from a Japanese metal band. Chinese authorities, as of this recording, did not respond to requests for comment by Vice. China is already known for constantly looming over its residents with CCTV, facial recognition systems, and physical searches.
That’s all the tech news that’s trending right now. Hashtag Trending is a part of the ITWC Podcast network. Add us to your Alexa Flash Briefing or your Google Home daily briefing.