News written by Petteri Pyyny (January, 2021)

In past few weeks, the most expensive Roomba models got a new firmware update - and it messed up the robots pretty badly.

All over the discussion forums and other venues, angry Roomba owners are complaining about the recent 3.12.8 software update that has rendered their expensive robot vacuums almost useless.

The update seems to somehow change the way how Roombas navigate and apparently, the update wasn't tested all that well. Problems caused by the update vary from Roomba not being able to find its charging dock to the extend where Roomba simply gets confused in opeen area and starts doing circles until its battery runs out.

Time lapse video of i7+ attempting to return to clean base after 3.12.8 update. After over 15 minutes of this, the roomba stopped due to low battery, failing to dock. from r/roomba

Problems are related to Roomba s9, Roomba s9+, Roomba i7, Roomba i7+, Roomba i6 and Roomba i8+ models - the very top-of-the-line of Roomba models (see our Roomba model comparison chart here). Also, the high-end floor mopping robot, Braava m6 is affected by this update.

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In a very weird row, Australia is proposing a legislation that would force online giants Google and Facebook to pay for local news publications. Basically, every time an article from Australian news site would appear in Google search results or in Facebook feed, that news site would get paid.

Similar proposals have been suggested - and even executed - in the past. Spain, France and Germany have all demanded money from Google to local news sites, but in those cases, the demands have been focused on Google News, Google's own news aggregator. In Spain, government enforced such law in a way that all news headlines shown in local Google News were eligible for payments from Google.

The result?

Google simply shut down Spanish version of Google News. And Spanish news sites lost huge chunk of their traffic immediately.

In Australia, the law would be even tougher - all news headlines shown in traditional Google search results would be eligible for payments, too. The proposed legislation doesn't put any weight on the fact that both Google and Facebook actually direct readers to such news sites. According to Google, they send "billions of clicks" each year to Australian news sites.

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According to Korean sources, electronics giant LG is planning to sell its phone manufacturing division to Vietnamese conglomerate Vingroup.

LG's phone business has been making losses for some time now and company has announced plans to restructure its operations. If the proposed deal happens, LG would retain its phone R&D and outsource the actual manufacturing to Vingroup's facilities. LG currently has phone manufacturing facilities in Vietnam, China and Brazil.

The outsourced model for phone manufacturing wouldn't be a very big shock to anyone - after all, companies like Apple have oputsourced their phone manufacturing to third party operators years ago.

Vietnamese government is supporting the deal, hoping it would expand country's high-tech sector significantly. The deal hasn't been approved yet, but according to Korean sources, it seems likely to happen.

Over the years, Finnish Customs service has gathered a huge pile of cryptocurrencies that have been seized from criminals and smugglers.

Customs service has kept all the bitcoins in their possession as they are, but now the organization plans to sell them and convert them into more traditional euros. The current value of seized bitcoins is now around 60 million euros (appx. $74M).

Most of the bitcoins in customs possession have been seized back in 2016 with a so-called Douppikauppa (literally "dope store") case where customs raideda an illegal drug-selling site that operated in dark web. Originally the bitcoins seized were worth appx 700 000 euros, but now the value has risen to more than 50 million euros, as the bitcoin's value has risen dramatically over the past five years.

After the sale, customs will transfer the money to Finnish government. Customs has been criticized for holding on to its bitcoins, but for taxpayers, the holding on to the bitcoins has been extremely wise move.

The weird year of 2020 is finally past us and it is time to take a look at tech news, events and phenomenons that happened during this year. Obviously, the global lockdown affected the lives of millions, maybe billions, across the world. But it also caused changes to how work is done, how we entertained ourselves and more.

Remote work

Sometime in February and March, most of the world was locked down as the global pandemic was spreading like wildfire, causing fatalities that we haven't seen in decades in most parts of the world.

As of this, virtually all of those who could do their work from home, were ordered to do so. This, obviously, changed many things in the online world. First of all, it put massive strain to networks all over the world when suddenly hundreds of millions of people started doing work from home who had been working at the offices before the lockdown.

Secondly, it also introduced many of us to new software solutions and applications that helped us to do remote meetings, collaborate with our peers and more. Perfect example of such software is Zoom, a video conferencing software that very few had heard of before the pandemic, but which quickly became a synonym for online video conferences.

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