IO+'s week: cyber attacks all around us
Our weekly overview offers an overview of the most interesting stories around key innovations every Sunday.
Published on January 19, 2025
Bart is the co-founder and co-owner of Media52 (publishing IO+) and a Professor of Journalism at the University of Groningen. He is responsible for all the branches of our company—IO+, events, and Laio—and focuses on commercial opportunities. A journalist at heart, he also keeps writing as many stories as he can.
It was the week of cyber attacks: TU Eindhoven was hit hardest (with a whole week of networks down, making exams and teaching impossible), and via the national SURF network, every educational institution was affected in one way or another. For now, the lasting damage does not seem too bad, and no ransom has been demanded anywhere, according to spokespeople. For once, it ended with a hissy fit, but it is yet another warning that our society, organized entirely around digital networks, is enormously vulnerable.
Each month in the Cracked by Jordens series, we look at the cyber security of consumers and businesses in the Netherlands. This time, of course, the focus was on the attack on the TU/e - and how cybersecurity experts often act during such an attack.
Other important cyber news came from the United States, where Facebook announced it was stopping its fact-checkers. “A bolt from the blue,” experts say. But again, not entirely unexpected, given the change of power in the White House. We took stock with fact-check experts and the editor-in-chief of the ANP. Read it here.
Proud news from our offices
Nice news for Laio, our AI-powered toolkit for editors and newsrooms. As the first established media company, De Limburger will deploy our AI podcast tool, starting this Monday. With this, they want to better appeal to Maastricht's (growing) English-speaking audience. The podcast will be available every day in the early evening and is ideal for expats and international students to stay entirely updated with the latest local news in a few minutes. We've already been doing some trial runs behind the scenes, so we are confident this will become a great project.
The editor-in-chief of De Limburger paid ample attention to it in his newspaper yesterday. Read his commentary here (Dutch).
Anyone who also wants to experiment... Our artificial intelligence-fueled podcast maker is available to anyone via podcaist.com.
Other newsletters
You can also get this weekly news summary in your mailbox every Sunday morning as a newsletter. Sign up for that here. By the way, did you know that we offer several other newsletters in addition to this weekly newsletter? With about 30,000 subscribers per channel, these four monthly letters are especially popular:
1 Mauro's Green Corner: Transitioning to a greener society is not easy, but innovation and research can help us. Mauro's GREEN+ Corner monthly discusses some of the most interesting developments.
2 Elcke's Saturday Data Dive: In this four-weekly newsletter, I will keep you posted about the newest developments in the field of data.
3 Elcke & Mauro's BIO+ Bites: The BIO+ Bites newsletter is all about life sciences and the innovations reshaping them. From health innovations impacting people's lives to food tech developments.
4 Aafke's Saturday Chips: Your low-key, easy-to-follow newsletter about the fundamentals of (almost) everything. Here's Aafke's Saturday CHIPS!
Are you active on social media like Bluesky, Threads, Mastodon or Linkedin? You can find our articles there too:
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Threads https://threads.net/@ioplus.nl
Mastodon https://mastodon.social/@ioplus
Linkedin https://linkedin.com/company/ioplusen
Meanwhile, there was plenty of other news. Check it out:
- How Microsoft is shaping Dutch education: a case of soft power
- Chinese researchers made a lithium battery with unprecedented energy density in 2023. This is where their promising technology now stands.
- Our series about expats in the Netherlands: 'Dutchies don't shut your ideas out and love to get things done'
- The fourth generation: Universities open doors to new forms of education, research, and collaboration
- Innokite wants to stimulate a new wave of innovative entrepreneurship in Groningen
- Auke Bleij wants cities to breathe through moss-covered facades
- Accidental discovery leads to revolutionary energy solutions. What's the status of Air-gen technology?
- Netherlands invests in the future of food with two facilities for cellular agriculture
And here you can read it all again. Happy week, make it an innovative and entrepreneurial one!