1) Police in all 50 states are using secret tools to break into locked smart phones, not for just major felony crimes, but for cases such as low-level shoplifting. Police are using phone-cracking technology far more often than was previously known, often without any warrants. The police can use this technology to extract all of a person’s information, including photos, text messages, contacts, web browsing history and even where a person has been including at what times. These software tools are sold by firms such at Grayshift, Cellebrite, and AccessData, with police spending from $9,000 to more than $20,000 to buy and license the tools.
2) The Muslim fundamentalist attacker, who beheaded a French school teacher, is reported to have paid students to identify the teacher before the beheading, says the French prosecutor. The Chechen teenager beheaded the French teacher for showing caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad in class. It has also been confirmed that contact has been established between the teenager and an angry parent at the school, who had called on social media for the teacher to be fired.
3) The internet app Quibi, mostly a mobile streaming service that struggled to keep up with its own hype, is shutting down, a move coming less than seven months after it launched. Although the company has enough money to keep operating for a significant period of time, it has decided to make a graceful exit. The company will shop around to see if anyone wants to buy its assets over the coming months, and then it will return cash to its shareholders. Quibi launched in the US and Canada this last April as a service for watching videos on the go, just when the lock-down for the COVID pandemic started. The timing was a misfortune, and flawed strategies kept the service from reaching its ambitious growth goals, plus they underestimated the number of viewers interest in watching on TVs. The service competed with YouTube, the short-video specialist that is already drawing in more than 2 billion viewers every month.
4) Stock market closings for – 22 OCT 20:
Dow 28,363.66 up 152.84
Nasdaq 11,506.01 up 21.31
S&P 500 3,453.49 up 17.93
10 Year Yield: up at 0.85%
Oil: up at $40.61