In this episode:

• Google, Alphabet employees unionize
  
• Ticketmaster admits it hacked rival company before it went out of business
  
  • Besides providing login credentials, the former employee also showed Ticketmaster managers how to exploit a flaw in the URL generation scheme the rival used for unpublished ticketing webpages. To prevent the pages from being accessed by outsiders before they were made public, each one had a unique numerical value. The former employee told his new employer that the values were generated sequentially, and outsiders could use this information to view artist pages while they were still in early draft stages.
    
• Slack starts 2021 with a massive outage
  

AD BREAK

• Billionaire Jack Ma Hasn’t Been Seen in 74 Days
  
  • Jack Ma’s absence from public eye sparks Twitter discussions
    
  • Alarms about Ma’s whereabouts weren’t set off until he was replaced last week as the lead judge of a talent show for entrepreneurs, Yahoo! Finance reported. His photo was also removed from a list of judges on the show’s website, fueling speculation that the Chinese government may have gone beyond scuttling an IPO to chastise Ma for his speech.
    
• Visualized: The terrifying amount of data Facebook Messenger collects compared to Signal, iMessage, and WhatsApp
  
• Twitter acquires Breaker podcast app, will integrate its team to Spaces
  

Weird and Wacky:

• This Company Is Selling Gold-Plated Apple Headphones for an Absurd Price
  

Tech Rec:

• Sanjay - TheStreamable.com
  
• Adam - soapboxhq.com - a service I’m about to try out