31. Stephen Hawking dies

Theoretical physicist, and author of A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking died on March 14, 2018 at 76. His ashes have been interred at Westminster Abbey next to the grave of Sir Isaac Newton.

SEE: Photo Galleries (TechRepublic Flipboard magazine)

30. Silicon Valley hits the mute button on Alex Jones

August 2018 was a bad month for Alex Jones, who has infamously claimed that 9/11 was an inside job and the school shooting at Sandy Hook was a hoax. Facebook, YouTube, Spotify, LinkedIn and Twitter banned the right-wing conspiracy theorist, and his site InfoWars, while Apple pulled most of his podcasts from iTunes.

Facebook said they acted because Jones had glorified violence and used dehumanizing language toward minority groups. YouTube cited a violation of its rules against hate speech and harassment.

SEE: Photo Galleries (TechRepublic Flipboard magazine)

29. Amazon opens its first automated supermarket, Amazon Go

Amazon continues to disrupt retail: In January, the company opened its first automated supermarket, Amazon Go. The Seattle store boasts deep learning tech called Just Walk Out, which allows you to just grab what you want and leave without having to scan your items or pay a cashier–Amazon bills your account.

SEE: In Amazon Go, no one thinks I’m stealing (CNET)

28. Google employees protest over Project Maven

In April 2018, 4,000 Google employees signed a letter (PDF) requesting its CEO end the company’s participation in Project Maven, a Pentagon effort to develop an AI that can identify humans in military drone footage. “We believe that Google should not be in the business of war,” the letter reads.

In May, it was reported that a dozen Google employees had quit over the company’s continuing involvement.

SEE: Photo Galleries (TechRepublic Flipboard magazine)

27. Massive Visa outage

On June 1, 2018, the Visa credit card network suffered an eight-hour-long outage across Europe due to a hardware failure. This left millions unable to complete purchases with plastic, causing runs on ATMs.

SEE: Photo Galleries (TechRepublic Flipboard magazine)

26. Samsung shows off a foldable phone

In November 2018, Samsung unveiled its new Infinity Flex Display, a 7.3-inch foldable phone screen expected to be built into consumer devices soon.

SEE: Photo Galleries (TechRepublic Flipboard magazine)

25. Microsoft releases its first Linux product

In April 2018, Microsoft released the Azure Sphere, a software and hardware stack with a custom Linux kernel. The move marked a major shift for Microsoft–former CEO Steve Ballmer once called Linux a cancer on Microsoft’s intellectual property.

SEE: Photo Galleries (TechRepublic Flipboard magazine)

24. Thanos snaps half the universe out of existence

Avengers: Infinity War, the top-grossing movie of 2018 that ends (spoiler alert!) with the deaths of exactly half the universe, inspired one of the biggest memes of the year. On June 11, more than 700,000 redditors joined together on r/thanosdidnothingwrong to put their fate in the mad giant’s hands, causing exactly half of them to be banned in a single snap.

The event was big enough to draw the attention of Marvel Entertainment, who noted the subreddit was now “perfectly balanced.”

SEE: Photo Galleries (TechRepublic Flipboard magazine)

23. GitHub hit with the largest DDoS attack ever

On Feb. 28, 2018, GitHub.com became unavailable due to a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that peaked at 1.35Tbps via 126.9 million packets per second. The attack, believed to be the largest ever, lasted for roughly 10 minutes.

SEE: GitHub: A cheat sheet (TechRepublic)

22. Google's Duplex AI tricks a human

At Google’s I/O developer conference in June, the company demoed its new artificial intelligence technology called Duplex. The AI tech was lifelike enough to make a dinner reservation over the phone–without tipping off the person on the other end of the line that they were talking to a robot.

SEE: Photo Galleries (TechRepublic Flipboard magazine)

21. The US Commerce Dept. settles with ZTE

In June 2018, China-based ZTE Corporation reached a $1.7 billion settlement with the US Commerce Department, allowing the company to resume business with American suppliers. The move follows ZTE’s 2017 court admission that it had illegally sold devices with US-made parts to Iran.

White House trade adviser Peter Navarro noted that the deal, made possible by President Trump, was a personal favor to the president of China.

SEE: Photo Galleries (TechRepublic Flipboard magazine)

19. Google employees walk out over the company's treatment of women

On November 1, 2018, Google employees around the globe staged a mass walkout in protest over the company’s handling of sexual harassment claims. The walkout followed a New York Times investigative report that said the company gave Android creator Andy Rubin a $90 million severance package, even after finding claims that he coerced an employee into sex to be credible.

SEE: Photo Galleries (TechRepublic Flipboard magazine)

18. T-Mobile and Sprint announce plans to merge ... again

After two previously unsuccessful attempts to merge in 2014 and 2017, T-Mobile and Sprint again announced a $26 billion merger deal in April 2018. If the merger passes FCC muster, the two wireless providers will unite under the T-Mobile name some time in the first half of 2019.

SEE: Photo Galleries (TechRepublic Flipboard magazine)

17. SpaceX tests the Falcon Heavy rocket

In February 2018, SpaceX successfully launched its 230-foot-tall Falcon Heavy rocket for the first time, sending its payload–a Tesla Roadster with an astronaut dummy named Starman–into elliptical orbit around the sun.

SEE: Photo Galleries (TechRepublic Flipboard magazine)

16. Uber's fatal autonomous crash

In March 2018, an Uber car in autonomous driving mode struck and killed a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona. It was the first known pedestrian fatality for the technology–one that likely could have been prevented, according to a video analysis report from our sister site CNET.

SEE: Photo Galleries (TechRepublic Flipboard magazine)

15. Tesla's fatal Autopilot crash

There was no shortage of bad news for Tesla this year: On March 23, 2018, a Tesla Model X drifted out of its lane and accelerated into a crash attenuator on a California highway, apparently while in Autopilot. Its driver was killed.

Shortly after, another Tesla owner shared a video of his car similarly veering toward a crash barrier while in Autopilot mode, this time in Chicago.

SEE: Photo Galleries (TechRepublic Flipboard magazine)

14. Apple introduces the iPhone XR, XS, XS Max

On September 21, 2018, Apple officially released the 6.5-inch Super Retina OLED iPhone XS Max, its largest phone to date. And with a starting price of $1,099 (64GB), it’s also Apple’s most expensive phone to date, too.

The company also launched the 5.8-inch iPhone XS ($999, 64GB), and the more affordable 6.1-inch iPhone XR ($749, 64GB). Visit our sister site CNET for a full comparison.

SEE: Photo Galleries (TechRepublic Flipboard magazine)

13. The Supreme Court protects location data privacy

This June, the US Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that police need a warrant to obtain location data from mobile carriers–even when those carriers are a third party. “Time-stamped data provides an intimate window into a person’s life, revealing not only his particular movements, but through them his familial, political, professional, religious and sexual associations,” wrote Chief Justice Roberts for the court’s majority.

SEE: Photo Galleries (TechRepublic Flipboard magazine)

12. Amazon's HQ2 is coming to NYC, Virginia

On November 13, 2018, Amazon announced that it would build its second headquarters–HQ2–in New York City and Northern Virginia. Those 50,000 new jobs will come at a controversially high cost, with the two locations paying the tech giant more than $2 billion in tax incentives to win the 238-city bidding war.

SEE: Photo Galleries (TechRepublic Flipboard magazine)

11. Apple becomes the first US $1 trillion company

They were good times while they lasted: In August 2018, Apple became the first US company to surpass a market capitalization of more than $1 trillion. By November 27, 2018, though, a market-wide rout in tech companies had dropped Apple’s value back down to $827 billion.

SEE: Photo Galleries (TechRepublic Flipboard magazine)

10. Fortnite explodes in popularity

In March 2018, Tyler Blevins–better known in gaming circles as Ninja–broke Twitch streaming records when he played Fortnite live with rapper Drake for more than 635,000 concurrent viewers. It was a defining moment in the rise of Epic Games’ battle royale title, which now boasts more than 200 million registered players (as of November 2018).

SEE: Photo Galleries (TechRepublic Flipboard magazine)

9. Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities discovered

In January 2018, computer researchers discovered two major vulnerabilities in CPUs named Spectre and Meltdown. In short, it was revealed that attackers could potentially read sensitive information such as passwords when processors make data temporarily available outside of the chip via speculative execution.

Intel and Apple were quick to provide updates to patch the vulnerability.

SEE: Photo Galleries (TechRepublic Flipboard magazine)

8. Elon Musk's "funding secured" fail

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sued Musk for fraud in September, claiming this August 7, 2018 tweet about securing private funding for Tesla was false and misleading.

Musk quickly settled the suit by agreeing to step down as Tesla’s chairman and pay $40 million in penalties, among other stipulations.

SEE: Photo Galleries (TechRepublic Flipboard magazine)

7. The cryptocurrency bubble bursts

If 2017 was one of the best years for cryptocurrency investors, 2018 has been one of the worst. At the start of the year, bitcoin was valued at $13,900. By November 25, 2018, a U.S. Justice Department price-rigging probe helped push bitcoin‘s price down to $3,500, a 75 percent drop.

The value of Ethereum and Bitcoin Cash, meanwhile, suffered even sharper losses in 2018.

SEE: Photo Galleries (TechRepublic Flipboard magazine)

6. Microsoft acquires GitHub for $7.5 billion

GitHub, the largest open- and closed-source coding repository on the internet, is now part of the Microsoft behemoth. The acquisition completed on October 26, 2018, with Microsoft paying $7.5 billion in stock for the popular (and newly profitable) platform.

SEE: Photo Galleries (TechRepublic Flipboard magazine)

5. IBM buys Red Hat for $34 billion

In October 2018, open-source software company Red Hat was acquired by long-time partner IBM for $34 billion dollars. The move is expected to give “IBM a new stronghold in the cloud development platforms market,” according to Forrester analyst Dave Bartoletti.

SEE: Photo Galleries (TechRepublic Flipboard magazine)

4. Mueller indicts Russian hackers over DNC cyberattack

US special counsel Robert Mueller filed charges against 12 members of Russia’s GRU military intel agency in July 2018, claiming they had stolen thousands of emails from Democratic National Committee’s servers during the 2016 election. The indictment further claims that these Russian hackers had regular contact with senior members of the Trump presidential campaign.

SEE: Can Russian hackers be stopped? Here’s why it make take 20 years (TechRepublic cover story PDF)

3. The EU implements GDPR

It’s arguably the most sweeping data privacy legislation ever: On May 25, 2018 the European Union implemented the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). It brings strict safeguards and disclosures over personal data, new 72-hour breach reporting requirements, all with hefty fines for non-compliance.

The new law applies to companies that operate in the EU, or collect data on persons based in the EU.

SEE: Hiring kit: GDPR data protection compliance officer (Tech Pro Research)

2. Net Neutrality comes to an end

On June 11, 2018, Obama-era Net Neutrality rules officially came to an end, done in by Federal Communication Commission (FCC) head Ajit Pai and his new Republican FCC majority. The matter is anything but settled: Attorneys generals in 22 states plus the District of Columbia are currently suing the FCC, while California has passed Net Neutrality rules at a statewide level.

SEE: Photo Galleries (TechRepublic Flipboard magazine)

1. Facebook's Cambridge Analytica scandal

In March 2018, it was revealed by The New York Times and The Observer that Cambridge Analytica, the company behind President Trump’s 2016 digital campaign, had gathered personal information on 87 million Facebook users without their permission. Cambridge Analytica’s offices would be raided by the UK soon after.

Also see

• Facebook data privacy scandal: A cheat sheet (TechRepublic)
• 50 years of business computing: 1978-2028 (TechRepublic)
• The tech that changed us: 50 years of tech breakthroughs (ZDNet)
• EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) policy (Tech Pro Research)
• More TechRepublic photo galleries (Flipboard magazine)