Joon Ian Wong

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

A massive protest is planned in Malaysia’s capital city, Kuala Lumpur, tomorrow, where tens of thousands of people will demand institutional changes over the theft of billions of dollars from a national wealth fund linked to prime minister Najib Razak.

China’s central bank is hiring blockchain experts to help it develop its own digital currency, according to a recruitment ad (in Mandarin) published by the bank on Nov. 9.

The head of the US’s National Security Agency said Nov. 15 that a “nation-state” consciously targeted presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, in order to affect the US election.

Facebook is following Google’s lead in trying to cut the profits companies make from publishing fake news. It has just banned fake news publishers from joining its advertising network, according to its policy on publisher conduct.

People who believe fake news on Facebook influenced the US presidential election are showing a “profound lack of empathy” and are believing in a “pretty crazy idea,” says Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg.

Facebook’s Workplace chat platform for businesses just got a huge boost.

Facebook, Twitter, and their Silicon Valley ilk are among the biggest distributors of online news in the US, making them major players in the recently concluded presidential election. Yet their CEOs are either issuing bland statements or staying silent about the outcome.

Hillary Clinton isn’t giving a concession speech tonight, her campaign chairman John Podesta said.

USB ports are ubiquitous on our electronic devices as a way to charge them and transfer data. But they’re also an easy entry point for malware or other nasty viruses.

The European Commission’s grasp of the e-commerce world is so weak, it doesn’t even ”fit with the reality” of how people actually shop online. And by the way, Amazon is where consumers go to compare prices, not Google. That’s the message Google sent to the commission yesterday in a blog post by general counsel Kent Walker.

Alibaba yesterday beat the street’s estimates on both revenue and earnings, yet its stock ended trading down 2.4%. It was down a further 0.6% in trading before the market opened today (it regained most of those losses in early trading) while short interest in the stock continues to climb, as Tim Culpan at Bloomberg Gadfly notes. What gives?

Venezuela’s currency has lost so much of its value that people have given up on counting the notes—they just weigh piles of cash. So far this year, the bolívar has lost nearly half its value compared to the dollar, while inflation has shot up as much as 15 times. That’s according to best estimates, since official data isn’t available.

Bring on the thought leaders.

In a year of monster hackers, the rise of new cryptocurrencies, and its own unresolved ”civil war” over how to enlarge its transaction capacity, bitcoin has not only survived, but thrived.

The emotional roller coaster of scandals in the US presidential race is enough to cause a heartattack. But really.

That the internet is physical can be hard to grasp. Few people have experienced this fact as viscerally as Guillaume Le Saux, captain of a ship named the Pierre de Fermat. It’s a state-of-the-art vessel that’s part of a fleet owned by French telecom company Orange, designed to lay and repair the optical fiber cables that criss-cross the world’s seabeds.

A magnitude 6.6 earthquake struck near the town of Norcia in the Umbria region of central Italy, the strongest quake the country has felt since 1980. About a dozen injuries and no deaths have been reported so far. Authorities indicated that fatalities may have been avoided because many of the residents who might have been affected were driven from their homes by a pair of quakes that struck four days ago near Visso, in central Italy.

First Marmite, now Macs.

The messaging platform Line reported disappointing third-quarter earnings (pdf) yesterday (Oct. 26), and its stock dropped 5.7% as a result. It is struggling to grow its user base beyond its traditional markets, and its current users aren’t turning to the app as frequently for its most popular activity: sending digital stickers.

Dyn, the domain name system provider that was attacked Friday (Oct. 21), has just published new detail on the incident that took down major web services like Github and Twitter.

Nintendo reported its second-quarter earnings (pdf) for 2016 today, and it broke out its profits from Pokémon Go for the first time. The company made ¥12 billion ($115 million) from licensing fees through from the game, which flow through affiliated firms including the Pokémon Company.

You may have noticed some of your Facebook friends posting updates in a giant font-size recently. They aren’t shouting, and it’s not their fault. Facebook has blown up the font size on status updates that are shorter than 35 characters.

Experts have long warned of the imminent security problems with the so-called Internet of Things. They didn’t reckon it would take shape as quickly and as dramatically as it did last Friday (Oct. 21), when IoT-connected devices like home surveillance cameras were hijacked and fashioned into weapons that disrupted vast swaths of the internet for hours.