🪅 Heap Heap Hurray Ed. #177

Wednesday is the perfect day to reflect and refocus!

From the team at HHH, wishing all our subscribers a blessed year. 🎉 

#UPI - So, the Indian government has pushed back those plans to limit big tech companies' control over the country's digital payments system... again! Looks like PhonePe and Google Pay get to continue dominating the market for a bit longer - a huge relief for them, esp with PhonePe's IPO plans.

#SharkTankIndia - Kunal Bahl is bringing the heat as the new shark! He's already clashing with the other sharks, especially Aman Gupta, and netizens are comparing him to Ashneer Grover - but with a more polished edge. The drama is real in this season's teaser!

#FakeStars - GitHub's got a bad rep on its hands with 4.5 million fake stars inflating the popularity of scam and malware-filled repositories, tricking users into trusting them.

#OpenAI - ChatGPT Search, an AI-powered search engine, can be fooled into generating misleading summaries. The Guardian found it could get ChatGPT to ignore negative reviews and generate “entirely positive” summaries by inserting hidden text into websites.

WhatsApp Gains Full Access To India’s Mass Market With NPCI Approval
In a significant move, India has lifted the cap on WhatsApp Pay, allowing the company to offer its payments service to all 500 million+ users in the country, increasing competition in India's fintech market. Previously, they were restricted to only 100 million users.

Microsoft To Boost Telangana's Digital Infrastructure?
The Telangana government reaffirmed its commitment to being a global innovation hub during a pivotal meeting with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. A central topic of the meeting was Microsoft’s data centre expansion near Hyderabad, which is slated for completion by 2025. TelangANA leaders stressed the importance of this project in boosting the region’S digital infrastructure, positioning the state as a leader in emerging technologies.

Fidelity Lowers Gupshup's Valuation By 65%
Gupshup: A 17-yr-old business messaging platform that started in India & is HQ'd in San Francisco, allowing businesses to engage with customers via messaging apps. Fidelity, which invested $16.2M in 2021, has slashed Gupshup's valuation to $486M, a 65% drop from its original $1.4B valuation.

Hackers Target Us Treasury, China Denies Involvement
Chinese state-sponsored hackers broke into the US Treasury Department's systems earlier this month. They were able to access employee workstations and some unclassified documents. China denied any involvement, calling the accusation "baseless" and saying it "consistently opposes all forms of hacking"

Volkswagen's Massive Data Leak Exposes 800,000 EV Drivers
A German news magazine says a data leak exposed the locations of 800,000 electric Volkswagen vehicles. The leak reportedly stemmed from the software running inside Volkswagen vehicles and could've allowed a bad actor to trace a driver’s exact movements.

WhatsApp - Summary of all the updates to the app in the month of December can be found here.

Ghostty | Ghostty is a fast, feature-rich, and cross-platform terminal emulator that uses platform-native UI and GPU acceleration.

Monolith | A Lightweight Recommendation System - from the makers of TikTok

Google's Product Graveyard
Google is ending support for several products in 2024, including Chromecast hardware, Jamboard, a collaborative digital whiteboard, and Google Podcasts, a standalone app. These products are being replaced by new offerings, such as Google TV Streamer and podcasting features on YouTube Music.

Cloud Native Logging Best Practices
Essential logging traits for modern cloud native applications, including structured logging, silent logs, and aggregating logs in a central system, while avoiding common pitfalls like logging into files and sensitive data.

Rekindling Joy In Tech
A programmer reflects on the tech delights of 2024, from learning Python 3 and appreciating creative online communities to enjoying modern hardware on retro computers and discovering simple, sustainable operating systems like NetBSD and Alpine Linux.