Spotify Sells Audiobooks; Morgan Stanley Fined-Security Lapses; Google’s ‘Results About You’; Nvidia Bows Next High End GPU

Spotify moves into another area to feed more to your ears. Mashable.com reports that they picked up audio book platform Findaway in 2021, and now are launching Spotify Audiobooks in the US. One big difference between the books and the music streams and podcasts on the platform—the books aren’t free. You will have to pay like with Spotify Premium…and by the way, there’s no discount for Premium users on books. Spotify says they have over 300,000 titles to choose from. 

Morgan Stanley has been fined for playing fast and loose with customer data. According to arstechnica.com, for 5 years they sold unencrypted, unwired hard drives at auction! The Security and Exchange Commission has nicked them for $35 million. The SEC says data for more than 15 million customers was exposed. Of course, besides the fine, there are no consequences to the bank. They paid the fine with the usual ‘we neither admit nor deny’. 

In May, at their I/O event, Google announced a new tool to streamline the process of removing Search results that contain your contact and other personal identifiable information (PII), and it’s now starting to go live. 9to5google.com says you can open the Google app on Android and when you tap the profile avatar in the top right corner, you’ll see a new ‘Results about you” menu item. From there, you can hit a page that tells how to ask Google to remove Search results that contain your phone number, home address, email, etc. There is an ‘In Progress’ and an ‘Approved’ feed where you can check back and see what they have removed.

The last several years, graphics processors have been hard to get and crazy expensive, driven by crypto miners who have been scooping them up to make money in the crypto field. Now, Nvidia has debuted a new high end RTX 4090 GPU…for $1599. Techcrunch.com notes that the new 4-series cards have a new architecture that improves image quality…and of course are faster than ever. The cards will be available in November, so long as you have the ‘coin.’