The U.S. government will pay telcos to rip out Huawei gear, Yahoo shuts its doors in China, and Facebook’s rebranding hits a trademark snag.
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It’s all the tech news that’s trending right now, welcome to Hashtag Trending! It’s Wednesday, November 3rd, and I’m your host, Jori Negin-Shecter.
Here comes the great migration. In the coming months, the U.S. will begin replacing Huawei and ZTE telecom equipment in its networks. The two Chinese companies have been marked as a national security threat by the U.S. government since 2018, and have been forbidden from doing business with U.S. tech companies. To help smooth the transition, the FCC has deployed a reimbursement program for affected telcos. They estimate it will cost more than $1.8 billion dollars to complete the replacement.
Yahoo has officially shut down its services in China and blocked access from the country. In a statement to CNN Business, a Yahoo spokesperson attributed the decision to increasingly challenging business and legal environments. Yahoo has been slowly reducing its services since 2013, first cutting email and news, then closing its Beijing office in 2015. With this move, Yahoo joins Microsoft, who recently shut down LinkedIn in the country, as another tech giant to exit China.
Facebook’s facelift has hit a small financial snag. Its new name, Meta, apparently steps on a pending trademark of a custom PC company. The PC maker has been operating for a year and filed for the Meta trademark in August, long before rumors that Facebook wanted to change its name. The company is now asking Facebook for $20 million to cover the cost of the rebranding. One anonymous source, however, said that Facebook believes it has the rights to use the trademark for itself. If the trademark office grants Meta to the PC Maker, then it will likely cost Facebook even more money to buy it.
And now for something a little bit different. Memes and hype can be powerful forces for investors, but as one new scam proved, it’s not without its risks. Riding on the success of Korean thriller TV series Squid Game, a few scammers duped investors out of their money with SQUID, a cryptocurrency based on the show. The scammers pumped up the price of the coin to more than $2,800 before cashing out their coins, tanking the coin’s value to zero and leaving investors empty handed. Crypto investment is a game with a few winners and a lot of losers…which sounds an awful lot like a certain show that recently aired.
That’s all the tech news that’s trending right now. Hashtag Trending is a part of the ITWC Podcast network. Add us to your Alexa Flash Briefing or your Google Home daily briefing. Make sure to sign up for our Daily IT Wire Newsletter to get all the news that matters directly in your inbox every day. If you have a suggestion or tip, please drop us a line in the comments or via email. Thanks for listening, I’m Jori Negin-Shecter.