Tech year: Stories that make headlines in 2021

The year 2021 introduced us to technological terms including Metaverse and NFT (non-fungible token).

Facebook has taken an impressive new direction, going into virtual reality.

The internet, which had been working fine after a series of lockdowns, experienced a few woes.

And we learned that those chips in all of our devices, which we take for granted, are not infinite.

Here’s our recap of some of the biggest BBC Technology stories from the past year.

Despite his defeat in the presidential election at the end of 2020, Donald Trump continues to make headlines in 2021.

The tweet that led to the ban was seen as particularly offensive because of the storming of the Capitol building just a day earlier.

The events serve as a wake-up call to social media networks that previously gave politicians more or less permission to repost online.

Over the course of the past year, both Facebook and Twitter have adopted new regulations on how to handle high-profile accounts of world leaders and politicians.

Of course, that wasn’t the last we heard from Mr Trump – but more on that after that.

Facebook insists the changes do not mark drastic changes, but admits that communication is poor.

Privacy advocates say they only emphasize that WhatsApp collects large amounts of data for its parent company.

A few days after the backlash was reported in the media, WhatsApp revealed that those who do not accept its updated terms and conditions will not be able to receive or send messages after the deadline. May 15.

Later that year, WhatsApp was forced to rewrite its privacy policy after being fined £190 million by the Irish data protection authority. Then it has to provide more information about what exactly it does with user information.

In the spring, the creator of the anti-virus program John McAfee, who has always been a controversial figure, was accused of fraud – allegedly promoting the cryptocurrency on Twitter to increase the price.

At the time, he was being held in Spain on separate charges related to tax evasion.

It’s been a year dominated by chip shortages – the result of a combination of factors, including the pandemic and a sharp increase in demand for certain goods as everyone likes them. adapt to working, studying and socializing at home.

In April, Cisco became one of the first companies to warn that computer chip shortages were a problem, although suggesting it could last for six months is considered quite optimistic.

Some pointed out that it appeared to be more than just a glorified 1990s style blog – and just a month later, it was shut down.

It has raised $1 billion to date, but has also been controversial and is facing investigation from the SEC.

Similar problems have hit Amazon Web Services, Akamai, and Cloudflare during the year, leading some to question the reliance on a few companies to keep the Internet running.

One of Silicon Valley’s original innovators, Jeff Bezos, withdraw from Amazon, exactly 27 years after he founded the online retail giant. To many, he was a business visionary, and the company he founded proves this – worth $1.8 million by the time he left.

But like all tech giants, Amazon is facing increasing scrutiny, such as the way it treats warehouse workers, as well as questions about whether it is independent. online retail rights or not.

However, Mr. Bezos is not about to step out of the limelight. His latest obsession is Space – in October, he and Star Trek’s original Captain Kirk, aka William Shatner, were blown up into suborbital orbit on his Blue Origin rocket .

This year, we learned that NFT stands for Non-Fungible Token. Less understood is what it means – essentially a digital token that can be used as a way of paying for digital collections.

Elsewhere, an NFT of an animated cat GIF sold for more than £365,000, while Jack Dorsey’s first tweet reached £2.5 million and Tim Berners-Lee’s web source code NFT went for a price. 5.4 million dollars.

But the NFT craze is not without its critics: author David Gerard describes NFTS as “a new form of worthless magic bean”.

Either way it’s hard to ignore, and the NFT has included it in the Collins dictionary of new words for 2021 – along with the Metaverse.

Documents published by Apple and discovered by MacRumours suggest that motor vibrations can harm the phone’s optical image stabilization or closed-loop autofocus systems.

The BBC’s retelling of the story has received millions of hits.

That’s also the month Facebook announced its new focus on the metaverse — a concept that has quickly become one of the most hyped words of 2021, and one for which Mark Zuckerberg seems to be extremely enthusiastic.

It’s essentially a virtual reality version of the Internet in which Meta, along with a number of other big names in the tech industry, believes we’ll all be living, playing, and working at some point. Future.

Of course, more are skeptical whether the newfound enthusiasm for the metaverse – coming not only with the company’s rebranding but also the plan to hire 10,000 people in the EU to build it – is a distract from Facebook’s ongoing problems with real-world content. .

It took him to a golf course and a shiny Moscow skyscraper. He doesn’t find the hackers, but he does know that they are making a huge amount of money – besides driving the necessary Lamborghinis, holding luxurious weddings, and raising exotic pets.

The Kremlin denies any direct links to the Russian state, but experts believe hackers are allowed to thrive in the country provided they don’t target Russian citizens. While US law enforcement claims they are also enlisting to hack the state.

This year, there has been a new wave of misinformation around vaccinations, Covid, and politics.

The technology is also not immune to conspiracy theories, with attacks on 5G transmitters from people who believe they ignore dangerous radio waves.

Although there is no evidence that transmitters cause any harm, the theory has spawned a range of products that are said to protect people against them.