Activity of the Sun

It is impossible to avoid this question. This year The sun also breaks all possible records while observing him. The thing is that our star lives according to 11-year cycles, which are characterized by the growth and decline of its activity. It’s currently on track to reach its maximum, and scientists say it will be the strongest we’ve ever seen.

So for a while, more spots will form on the Sun’s surface, shining with large-scale coronal mass ejections. They fly into space at great speed and can sometimes be directed towards Earth. Colliding with its magnetic field, these bursts cause epic auroras and malfunctions in satellites and electronic devices.

New Several cases of aurora borealis were observed in Ukraine, the last of which had a blood-red hue. Auroras are usually limited to the planet’s northern regions, so they don’t reach this far south, but the strength of this year’s outbursts is unusually high.

submarine disaster

Submarine Titan / OceanGate Expeditions

The news that attracted the attention of our readers and the whole world in general was the sinking of the Titan submarine of the OceanGate company. There were five people on board, including CEO Stockton Rush. They were heading to the Titanic, but the hull broke apart on the way to the ship. The crew died instantly. Apparently, there was first an explosion and then a rapid compression of the hull due to the extremely high pressure of the surrounding water. The wreckage was found two days later.

As it turned out later, the submarine was assembled from low-quality materials, in particular, expired carbon fiber used to cover the hull. A regular joystick from a 2010 game console was used for control.

They were finally introduced

Cyber ​​truck / Tesla

We can count the main long-term buildings of the year Tesla’s Cybertruck electric pickup and Apple’s Vision Pro augmented reality headset.

• The Cybertruck was first introduced in 2019, and since then the company has further upgraded the version by changing the features and increasing the price. At the end of the year, the turntable finally saw the light of day, and the first customers have already received it. However, production rates are still low. The main stage of assembly is planned for next year.
• As for the Apple Vision Pro, the headset has not been officially released yet, but we have included it in this list as its design reveals most of the specifications and features, with the long-awaited official announcement taking place in the summer. . We’ve seen plenty of videos demonstrating the work, and third-party developers are already working to adapt their software. A headset from Apple has been predicted for many years. Very few presentations in recent years have taken place without assumptions that the company will definitely show it this time. But that only happened last year. Full production and sales are planned to begin in early 2024, but some insiders claim that Apple has run out of time to complete it, so it will delay the technology until March.

Apple Vision Pro / Remove photo

And again hackers don’t sleep

like last year, 2023 can easily be called the year of hackers and cyber attacksBecause they not only surrendered their positions, but also increased their strength. For example, this year, first Cloudflare and then Google repelled record-breaking DDoS attacks in internet history.

It is not difficult to guess the main villains in this market: Russia and China, with North Korea and Iran watching from behind.

Among the loudest events we can mention:

• Attacks on Reddit, Western Digital, TSMC, Boeing, Norton Password Manager, League of Legends developer Riot Games.
• Russian hackers attacked oblenergo, regional and military administrations, Lviv internet providers and Monobank across Ukraine in January.
• Cybercriminals did not leave Channel 24 alone throughout the year. The biggest incident happened in May.
• It happened to other countries too. German authorities reported cyber attacks on government institutions, the financial sector and airports, as well as the company Rheinmetall, which supplies weapons to Ukraine. Cyber ​​attacks were carried out against officials in the United States who were most supportive of Ukraine. Lithuania was attacked on the eve of the NATO summit in Vilnius. In November, Russian group Fancy Bear attacked seven governments in Europe. British officials, meanwhile, have accused Russia of an ongoing cyberattack campaign targeting politicians and public figures and providing “vast amounts of data.” There, in Great Britain, the Russians hacked the most dangerous nuclear facility, which deals with the disposal of nuclear waste.
• Hackers also attacked Russia. Thus, the data of millions of Mail.ru and Russian Post users, and then Auchan, Gloria Jeans, Book24 and other stores, appeared on the network. Sberbank also joined them. Later, the first code of “Yandex” was published on the Internet. North Korea was sending a very disturbing signal to Putin by breaking into a weapons factory.
• For months, it was revealed that China had access to Japanese networks and businesses that kept American bases running. all over the world. In this way, electricity, water, etc. in case of war. was hoping the resources would be disabled.
• Russian and Sudanese hackers announced an attack on the European Investment Bank.
• Russia also directed a new virus against the Ukrainian military in an attempt to steal large amounts of data from Ukrainian military facilities.
• In Poland, the train control system was hacked and the Russian national anthem and Putin’s speech were played.
• In August, unknown victims became important space telescopes in the United States. The purpose of this is not yet known.
• The year is ending Large-scale attack on Kyivstar companyIt left the company’s subscribers without communication and internet for several days.

But it is impossible to write about hacker attacks without mentioning Ukraine and the IT Army, which launched powerful retaliatory attacks against Russian terrorists.

• In January, the IT Army hacked Gazprom and gained access to thousands of files.
• In March, DDoS attacks paralyzed the operations of some Russian banks.
• In April, Russian customs did not work for several days. There they even temporarily switched to using fax.
• In June, Ukrainian hackers announced that they had destroyed the “entire infrastructure” of the Russian communications operator Infotel, which ensures the work of the country’s central bank and other important institutions. It all started on June 8, when the work of the telecommunications operator was interrupted for about 32 hours.
• In September, the largest airports in Russia were attacked and their work was stopped due to the vulnerability of the internal software complex “Leonardo”.
• The “Mir” payment system was established in November.
• In the same month, the Ukrainian hacker association “Cyber ​​​​Sprovit” announced a successful attack on the Information and Mass Communications Department of the Russian Ministry of Defense. They managed to access “unique internal documents” in the Katyusha IT system, which they called “the kingdom of the infamous Igor Konashenkov”, a man who informs Russians daily about fabricated reports from the front. A large number of documents and testimonies were obtained regarding software that helps terrorists spread propaganda and monitor the information space.
• And already in December, GUR attacked Russia’s tax system, obtaining important data and destroying the terrorists’ infrastructure of the federal tax service and its 2,300 regional servers throughout the country and in the temporarily occupied territory of Crimea.

RIP Metadata Array

Virtual reality headset / Unsplash photo

2023 can be considered as the year Death of Metaverse technology. Do you still remember such a word from distant 2021? Then the whole world believed that he was the future. It was the second year of the covid pandemic, with the entire world still moving online (business, entertainment, personal communication, and more). And we’ve heard so much criticism over the years about Meta, which, despite its continued existence, never released a full-fledged version of the Meta universe, that journalists even began writing that it was stillborn.

According to employees at his company, Mark Zuckerberg was literally obsessed with the Metaverse. He imagined a future connected to virtual reality and invested billions of dollars and enormous human effort in development. But as a result, we were faced with a lame and crude virtual world with poor graphics and devoid of normal content. Users were angry because the difference between what was promised and what was realized was huge.

When artificial intelligence came on the scene, the whole world suddenly turned towards it. Even Meta itself “scored” in the meta database and put all its efforts into developing its own AI language model. The last weak news we heard about this technology was in 2022, and in 2023 there was a major Business Insider article effectively declaring, “Rest in peace, Metaverse.”

The war of the techno-kings never happened

And of course, if we have already mentioned Mark Zuckerberg, then we cannot help but touch on the cage fight that should take place between him and Elon Musk. But for the latter it all turned out to be just a joke.

It all started when Musk responded to news about a Twitter rival to Meta, a new social network called Threads. He said Zuckerberg’s company was trying to take over the world, and one user said Mark should be careful because he practices the Japanese martial art jiu-jitsu.

If he’s ready, I’m ready for a cage fight too hahaha
– replied Elon Musk.

Although it was clearly a joke, Zuckerberg unexpectedly accepted the match. From that moment on, long attempts began to organize this fight, which Musk constantly skipped: sometimes he had an operation, then his mother forbade him, then he disappeared and did not approve of the place and time. Then he suddenly appeared and began to make statements that the same evening he would go to Zuckerberg’s house and quarrel with him or make new absurd demands.

How did it all end? Nothing Musk never dared to meet with Zuckerberg. But this story held the attention of readers for several months in the summer.

TikTok is banned all over the world

TikTok/Unsplash photo

This year will also be remembered for the long and numerous attempts to ban TikTok. It’s not so much that this Chinese company, like many others, complies with Chinese laws and the government of a communist country, it has large amounts of information collected from users’ smartphones and can share it with third parties. If you read the terms of use, you might be horrified to see how much this app knows about us.

The history of blocking TikTok began during Trump’s presidency, but it was not abandoned during the Biden period. As a result, this service is now banned from use by government officials on business phones and government offices in many US states, as well as many European countries, due to its potential for espionage. But no one has yet banned TikTok nationwide, even for regular users.

• ByteDance, the company that owns the service, had to go through multiple congressional hearings to reassure government officials that no US citizen data was shared with Chinese officials. But it seems he failed to convince at least one of them.
• However, congressmen failed to persuade the company to sell its American division to a local company.

At the moment, the parties appear to have reached a ceasefire, but it is likely to be temporary.