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The holidays are here — rejoice! We all need a break.
Anyway, if you took your break early and missed some tech headlines, no worries — Re/code has you covered:
- Poor Sony. Someone should send them flowers or a card or something. On Monday, a group claiming responsibility for the hack offered to withhold employee information on request, and Sony’s lawyer wrote to publishers like Re/code, Gawker and the New York Times to say that we should quit publishing “stolen information” from the hacks. A couple days later, the hackers threatened violence at movie theaters across America should “The Interview” be shown, and Sony responded by canceling the movie’s release, also under pressure from rival studios. Former Sony employees filed suit against the company for its failure to properly secure their personal data, and the White House called the hacks a “serious national security matter,” with President Obama slamming Sony for its response thus far to the crisis. But Sunday saw Sony backtrack and announce via a lawyer that the studio will indeed release the movie in some way. All the while, North Korea is still claiming innocence. That about sums it up.
- How has Amazon persuaded Wall Street that its quarterly profits don’t matter? CEO Jeff Bezos tells all in a rare lengthy interview onstage with Business Insider’s Henry Blodget. Meanwhile, Amazon workers in Germany continued to strike, and the company unveiled a one-hour delivery service for Amazon Prime customers in New York. To boost its new Prime-exclusive TV shows that you likely haven’t heard of, Amazon took out a full-page ad in the New York Times (as did Netflix), and we took a look at how Amazon and Alibaba might dive into the Indian e-commerce market.
- Snapchat CEO and founder Evan Spiegel is really bummed about having confidential company info leaked in connection with the Sony hacks. He tweeted a picture of an emotional and defiant note he sent to his staff, and he sure sounds upset. Maybe someone should check that he’s okay.
- Sean Parker donated $24 million to Stanford for the study of serious food allergies. Parker himself is allergic to peanuts, tree nuts, pecans, shellfish “and a few legumes.”
- A Palo Alto all-girls school put on a techie-themed version of “The Nutcracker” ballet called “The Codecracker.” Please watch the video.
- Facebook’s anonymous chat room app Rooms, is growing pretty slowly, and Facebook is okay with that. Also, for the first time in two years, Instagram released new photo filters.
- Jason Kilar, the former CEO of Hulu, is back with a new project: Vessel, a subscription-based Web video service focused on working with YouTube stars.
- Is it safe to use temporary messaging apps with co-workers? Probably, but if something goes wrong, it was likely an operator error. So says Tom Smith, vice president at the cloud computing firm CloudEntr by Gemalto, in a guest column for Re/code.
- Aside from the fabled space of Networking, what is it that LinkedIn is supposed to be used for? We talked with CEO Jeff Weiner, and he says the service can be a blog, a resume and a hub for what he calls “anticipatory computing.” Sure.
- Neal Stephenson, author of a bunch of big, gloriously long sci-fi novels including “Cryptonomicon” and “Snow Crash,” has been recruited to become the chief futurist of the virtual reality company Magic Leap. I’m not sure what any of that really means, or that the parties involved do either.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
