Alphabet-Google Workers Look to Unionizing; Samsung Unpacked Date Announced; Backdoor in Zyxel Firewalls & VPNs; Freshened Tesla Model X Spotted

Over 200 Google and Alphabet employees have announced plans to form a union. Techcrunch.com reports that the union is the CWA, Communication Workers of America, and it’s part of the union’s campaign to organize digital employees. The Alphabet Workers Union seeks to be open to both employees and contractors. The bulk of the employees are based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Kickstarter and Glitch unionized last year. We are also hearing of moves to unionize at Apple. 

The next Samsung event will be January 14th at 7am Pacific, and the company will be showing off the latest and greatest Galaxy flagship phones….likely to be the S21. S21 Plus, and S21 Ultra. Theverge.com notes there have already been massive leaks about the phones, but there are always a few things that haven’t been leaked out. Samsung teased with ‘Welcome to the Everyday Epic.’ We’ll have details here after the presentation on the 14th.

In a troubling discovery, a backdoor account has been found in more than 100,000 Zyxel firewalls and VPN gateways. Zdnet.com says there’s a hard-coded, admin-level backdoor account that grants attackers root access using either the SSH interface or the web admin panel. The backdoor was found by a team of Dutch security researchers from Eye Control. It doesn’t get much worse than this! If you use anything from Zyxel, update your system asap! Patches are already available for a number of their devices. 

A Tesla Model S with some styling changes was spotted in Palo Alto over the weekend. Mashable.com reports that EV YouTube channel  https://www.youtube.com/c/TheKilowatts/featured posted video and have a running description of the vehicle. It has more aggressive headlights and rear styling, among other things. This comes on the heels of Tesla announcing that they delivered 499,550 vehicles in 2020, just barely under the 500,000 they had been shooting for. Final numbers may be as much as .5% more, which would put them over the top. 2020 was an exceptional year for the EV maker….shares were up 743%!