Roundup: Musk’s Twitter U-turns and Apple and Amazon hit with iPhone lawsuit

Musk introduces “Official” Twitter label – but axes it hours later

Elon Musk’s short-lived ownership of Twitter has continued in rollercoaster fashion after the billionaire introduced a new form of verification to the platform – only to remove it hours later.

When Musk completed his takeover of Twitter last month, he promised to overhaul the social media firm’s “blue tick” verification system, introducing a paid-for option. This week, Twitter went live with the revamped Twitter Blue and some users noticed they also had the word “official” under their account, denoting it wasn’t a paid-for tick.

However, within hours the “official” tag had been removed, with Musk calling it ‘an aesthetic nightmare’.

Apple and Amazon accused of iPhone price-rigging in class action lawsuit

A new antitrust lawsuit is accusing Apple and Amazon of rigging the market to keep the price of iPhones and iPads artificially high.

The class-action proposal comes from law firm Hagens Berman, which has already been successful in reaching settlements worth over $500 million against Apple in other matters.

It alleges that Apple and Amazon reached an agreement in 2019 which would limit the number of Apple resellers on the Amazon Marketplace, from 600 to just seven, while Amazon kept receiving iPhones and iPads at a discounted wholesale rate.

Hagens Berman claims that neither entity have denied the existence of this agreement. In fact, Amazon even admitted its existence to the U.S. Congress in other hearings, the US law firm alleges.

https://www.neowin.net/news/class-action-lawsuit-alleges-apple-and-amazon-rigged-the-market-to-raise-price-of-iphone/

SMEs left vulnerable by budget concerns

Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are increasingly worried about cyber-attacks and would love to increase the budgets set aside for protecting their endpoints.

However, they worry that due to economic uncertainty and inflation, they will have to change their plans and leave their virtual premises vulnerable to malware, hackers and criminals, a new report from OpenText has found.

It found the majority of SMBs (67%) have a cybersecurity budget of less than $50,000 a year. While more than half (59%) plan on upping the ante next year, 57% fear inflation will force them to change their plans and cut their cybersecurity budgets.

https://www.techradar.com/news/small-businesses-worry-about-cutting-security-budgets-as-economic-worries-hit-hard 

Zoom and Tesla team on in-car video calls

Zoom has partnered with Tesla to bring video conferencing into its vehicles.

The announcement was made at the 2022 Zoomtopia conference, where Zoom’s group product manager Nitasha Walia revealed the video conferencing feature “will come standard on all new Tesla models soon.”

“You’ve been zooming from your home, your office, your phone and even your TV,” Walia added. “We’re going to make it even easier for you to zoom from anywhere.”

https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/09/tesla-vehicles-will-soon-have-zoom-video-conferencing/