Absentee ballot. Canada’s new transparency rules for political ads are too difficult for Google to meet, so the search giant says it won’t accept any such ads for the upcoming 2019 elections there. “It is painful for us,” Google Canada’s head of public policy Colin McKay says. Separately, a particular group of male software engineers at Google was underpaid relative to their female counterparts, the company said on Monday. They were an undisclosed portion of almost 11,000 Google employees who got a total of $10 million of pay adjustments in 2018.
Cold case. The FBI and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police are said to be looking into the implosion of Quadriga, a cryptocurrency exchange that has been unable to account for at least $136 million in customer funds since the mysterious death of its 30-year-old CEO in December. After the death of Gerald Cotten, the company said he was the only person able to unlock large reserves of customer cryptocurrency—implying the funds are now gone forever.
To the quick. After 5G wireless and Wi-Fi 6, the folks behind the USB connection standard must have felt left out. They’ve come up with a USB 4 standard, which it appears will use the same USB-C ports that work for USB 3 devices. Oh yeah, and the top speed for data transfer doubles to 40 Gbps.
Slipping in. Cybersecurity is tough, but it shouldn’t be this tough. I found this headline hard to avoid clicking: “IBM interns find 19 vulnerabilities in corporate check-in systems.”
Making friends and influencing people. Wondering how Apple products have avoided becoming ensnared in the trade war between the United States and China? It’s at least partly because CEO Tim Cook and his team worked their tails off lobbying to avoid tariffs on the iPhone. The South China Morning Post has a behind-the-scenes story. Perhaps in the same vein, Microsoft hosted First Lady Melania Trump on Monday as part of her campaign against cyberbullying.
Lock down. The wide open ecosystem of podcasting has spurred growth in programming but not so much in ad dollars. New startup Luminary, backed by $100 million of venture capital, has a new idea: a closed ecosystem.