Hacking of Telegram channels and consequences of Microsoft failure, rising rental costs in the Russian Federation: the main thing on July 21

World

• Finland’s largest telecom operator Elisa has sued Estonia. The company is forced to abandon Huawei equipment but refuses to compensate the costs.

• The head of the Republika Srpska, Milorad Dodik, has called on Elon Musk to invest in mining in the region.

• The global smartphone market is showing record growth after three years of decline. In the second quarter of 2024, sales grew by 6% (Counterpoint Research report).

• Joe Biden announced his withdrawal from the presidential race. He recommended Vice President Kamala Harris as the new Democratic candidate.
• Yachts seized from Russian billionaires are causing difficulties for Western countries. The vessels require large sums of money for maintenance and security, and legal risks deter potential buyers.

Russia

• The cost of long-term apartment rentals in Russia continues to rise. According to Cian.Analytics, this autumn will increase by 10-15% compared to current prices.

• Economist Krichevsky described the consequences of any mortgage as dangerous. He believes that it is possible to end up homeless and in debt. The overheating of the mortgage market may be to blame; housing prices may fall sharply.

• The Central Bank: by 2025, the growth of real wages of Russians will decrease by 2.5 times. Currently, it stands at 7.3%, but it could fall to 3%. The reason is that companies cannot continue to increase employee benefits.

Business

• T-Bank Group has bought a controlling stake in Qiwi’s factoring business.

• The Moscow plant has decided to temporarily suspend production of cars. Restrictions on the operation of the plant are being introduced for two weeks, during the corporate holidays.

• MKB is demanding more than 11.4 billion rubles from Euroclear through a Moscow court.

• Nestlé is at the centre of a scandal involving water production in France. The company is accused of selling “mineral” water contaminated with faecal bacteria, E. coli and pesticides.
• The first strike in 40 years could take place at Disneyland: unions have voted in favour. Employees of an entertainment complex in California are complaining about unfair working conditions.

Technologies

• Hackers have hacked the popular Telegram messaging bot FleepBot. With its help, a political message criticizing the Ukrainian authorities was posted on several channels.

• A global outage on Microsoft Azure due to a CrowdStrike update affected 8.5 million devices. Despite the magnitude of the impact, this is less than 1% of the total number of Windows computers, Microsoft said.

• Yandex has assessed the likelihood of the Alice voice assistant being hacked. According to the head of the search and advertising technology business group, a smart speaker, like other devices, can be hacked, but the security of the product is at a high level.

• AMD has announced new Ryzen AI 300 processors that are expected to outperform the Apple M3 Pro. The chips are scheduled for release in 2024.

• OpenAI has revealed details about the GPT-4o Mini: it is a cost-effective alternative to the GPT-3.5 Turbo. Despite the cost-effectiveness, efficiency is not affected and even benefits in terms of productivity.

• AI has begun to “feel” the lack of data and restrictions are becoming more stringent. Web sources are now minimizing the use of their data. The new bans will affect not only companies developing AI, but also researchers and other stakeholders.

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