Hackers Seizing Instagram Accounts for Ransom; Panasonic’s Higher Capacity Tesla Batteries Coming; Twitter ‘Close Friends’ Feature; Nvidia About to Throw in Towel on $40B Arm Acquisition

Hackers are grabbing the Instagram accounts of companies and also influencers with large followings. The hacking was in a new phishing campaign by Secureworks, according to zdnet.com. A friend of one of my friends in real life had this happen, and they demanded thousands to unlock the account…which the person uses in their business. the crooks send a message from ‘Instagram,’ saying there has been a copyright infringement. Yep…there’s a link…click on it, and you’re screwed. It goes to a site controlled by the hackers, where they ask for your IG login info. Bingo, you have been owned. Some ransoms are running $40,000! Don’t click on links, first of all…and if you are using sites like IG…especially for business or you are an influencer, use two part verification. The hackers appear to be in Russia and Turkey. 

Tesla cars could get Panasonic’s new higher-capacity batteries by next year. Engadget.com reports that the new batteries could boost EV range by over 15%! The batteries are twice as big as previous iterations, BUT they have five times the energy capacity! Panasonic is dropping $704 million into new equipment to produce the 4680 cell. Considering that the $30 million they had put into Tesla is now worth $3.6 billion, they can afford it! As a bonus…the new cells are cheaper to produce. That might mean less price increases on the cars…though with Elon Musk, you can’t ever tell about that.

Twitter is apparently working on a feature that lets you share tweets just with a certain group of people. Theverge.com says it seems to be their version of Instagram’s ‘Close Friends’ feature. Twitter may call this close group your ‘Flock.’ You will be able to put about 150 members into your Flock group. You can delete people from the Flock at any time, and they don’t get a notification, too. To alert members that it is a private Flock Tweet, they will see “You can see this Tweet because the author has added you to their Flock” underneath the Tweet. No indication yet on when the feature might go live to all Twitter users. Twitter did confirm that ‘Twitter Flock’ is just a placeholder name, so it may be called something entirely different. 

Nvidia may be about ready to throw in the towel on acquiring Arm. According to appleinsider.com, this is at least in part due to increased scrutiny. The FTC sued to block the deal in December of 2021, saying it would stifle innovation and hurt competition in the chip market. The deal would “give one of the largest chip companies control over the computing technology and designs that rival firms rely on to depend their own competing chips.” the UK government is also scrutinizing the deal. If the deal doesn’t go through, SoftBank will probably do an IPO for ARM.