President Trump has moved from alleged mail-in-ballot fraud to blaming tech for his defeat in the US election, specifically the software of Dominion Voting Systems.
The company, internationally headquartered in Canada, helped government officials in key states to organise and keep track of election results. The president’s tweets, which include claims that Dominion’s software deleted 2.7m Trump votes and switched hundreds of thousands to Joe Biden, have been given a health warning by Twitter.
For the fraud to happen, Dominion’s systems would have had to have been hacked. But the Department of Homeland Security has just come out with a clear statement saying there is nothing to support this having happened. Its Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) said: “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”
The New York Times has also investigated the claims and found that Dominion’s software was used in only two of the five counties that had problems in Michigan and Georgia. Software did not affect the vote counts, with inaccuracies in Michigan caused by human error and a Dominion glitch in Georgia causing only a delay in reporting in one county.
Meanwhile, Reuters reports the head of the CISA, Christopher Krebs, has told associates he expects to be fired. Bryan Ware, his assistant director, went on Thursday, with the White House reportedly asking for his resignation earlier this week.
Mr Krebs’ main concerns prior to the election had been over hacking and fake news being spread by agents of China, Iran and Russia. His agency appears to have prevented this, but his focus post-election regrettably has been tackling misinformation being spread by his own president.
The Internet of (Five) Things
1. Clock ticks further on TikTok disposal
The Trump administration has extended a deadline for ByteDance to restructure ownership of its video app TikTok in the US, giving the Chinese company more time to resolve national security concerns raised by the US government. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the US granted a 15-day extension to November 27.
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2. Google chief says sorry to EU commissioner
Alphabet’s chief executive Sundar Pichai has apologised to Thierry Breton after an internal document laid out a plan to target the internal market commissioner, and promised that such tactics were “not the way we operate”. In a virtual meeting, he told Mr Breton that Google was a very large company and that the document “was never shown to me”.
3. DoorDash sales surge ahead of IPO
Soaring demand during the pandemic allowed food delivery app DoorDash to post revenues of $1.9bn for the first nine months of 2020, making it profitable on an Ebitda basis, ahead of its hotly anticipated initial public offering. Its figures were released for the first time in its IPO prospectus released on Friday.
4. Palantir beats the Street with maiden results
Palantir, the data analytics company, beat Wall Street forecasts with its first quarterly earnings since becoming a public company and raised its revenue guidance for the rest of the year. The company’s revenue growth accelerated to almost 50 per cent in the first nine months, double the rate of 2019, thanks to new contracts with the US army.
5. Disney+ and cricket help House of Mouse
The bright spot in Walt Disney’s numbers was subscribers to its Disney+ streaming platform rising to 73.7m almost a year after its launch. There was also good news from South Asia, where the Indian Premier League cricket tournament attracted a record audience this year, fuelling an advertising boost for Disney-owned broadcaster Star India.
Tech tools — The Mac’s Big Sur
The Mac’s updated operating system Big Sur is now available as a free download. The interface has been redesigned and key apps including the Safari browser, Messages, and Maps have been enhanced. Ars Technica likes the bright, fresh visuals and says improvements to Control Center and other changes to the menu bar are genuinely useful. Coupled with the new Arm-based Macs, users can run iPhone and iPad apps directly on the Mac.