Year: 2018

Latest: No More Bulk Tweeting and Duplicate Accounts on Twitter

Staff Writer

Twitter is announcing major limits on how users and apps can automate tweets, in order to curb spam and political propaganda bots. Developers are now banned from using any system that simultaneously posts “identical or substantially similar” tweets from multiple accounts at once, or makes actions like liking, retweeting, and following across multiple accounts at once. Twitter will remove these options from its own TweetDeck app, and third-party developers have until March 23rd to comply. Twitter says these actions are “an important step in ensuring we stay ahead of malicious…

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Vatican organizes new first ever hackathon in history dubbed VHacks

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The Vatican alias the holy city is organizing its first ever hackathon in history dubbed VHacks.”I did not have to pitch the idea to the Pope,” laughs Jakub Florkiewicz, the co-initiator of the event. “But the participants of the event hopefully will,” he adds. So how did this unlikely event come to be? “It’s a story about a student arriving in Rome with an idea, and finding people who got excited about that idea,” Florkiewicz explains. “Passionate myself about hackathons, I had the luck of meeting people – Vatican insiders –…

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Experts New thoughts That AI Might Mess with us in the Next Five Years

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When we talk about the dangers posed by artificial intelligence, the emphasis is usually on the unintended side effects. We worry that we might accidentally create a super-intelligent AI and forget to program it with a conscience; or that we’ll deploy criminal sentencing algorithms that have soaked up the racist biases of their training data. What about the people who actively want to use AI for immoral, criminal, or malicious purposes? Aren’t they more likely to cause trouble — and sooner? The answer is yes, according to more than two…

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WhatsApp Users can now Call Without Internet.

Staff Writer

It is easier for a WhatsApp user in diaspora to audio or video call or chat with his or her counterpart in Africa who has the same application than traditional telephone calls and text messages. The situation is the same for people who use Skype, Facebook Messenger, Viber and WeChat, to mention a few. But at the moment, the number of smartphone holders is very small in many developing countries especially in Africa. For instance, the number of smartphone holders in Rwanda is below 1.2 million. This challenges service providers…

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The End of Wikipedia Free Access Zero Program.

Staff Writer

The Wikimedia Foundation has announced that free access to Wikipedia will end in 2018, which was part of the Wikipedia Zero partnership programme. The organization has discontinued Zero and has stopped forming new carrier partnerships. It will let its existing alliances end over time. Wikipedia Zero was created in 2012 to address high mobile data costs when accessing the service.Through the program, the foundation partnered with mobile operators to waive mobile data fees for their customers to freely access Wikipedia on mobile devices. “Over the course of this year, no…

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Google Chrome launches new default ad-blocker

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Google has launched an ad-blocker for its Chrome web browser that is designed to prevent “annoying” and “intrusive” ads being shown to users. Google announced the move to curtail full-page and auto-playing video ads, among others, last year. The choice of which ads to block will be determined by the Coalition for Better Ads (CBA) – made up of companies including Google and Facebook. Sites will have 30 days to remove disruptive ads before blocking begins. A survey of 40,000 US and European web users found that the most intrusive…

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Snapchat CEO says the new redesign is here to stay

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Despite a lot of backlash over a big redesign for the Snapchat app, the CEO Evan Spiegel vigorously defended the redesign and basically said people need to get used to it. Spiegel said at the Goldman Sachs Internet & Technology Conference that even people complaining about the app was a sort of validation that the changes the company wants to happen are, indeed, happening. Snap aimed to try to separate the idea of communication and broadcasting with Snap into similar buckets, rather than the features being kind of mixed up…

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Germany’s Flawed New Social Media Laws

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The new German law that compels social media companies to remove hate speech and other illegal content can lead to unaccountable, overboard censorship and should be promptly reversed, Human Rights Watch said. The law sets a dangerous precedent for other governments looking to restrict speech online by forcing companies to censor on the government’s behalf. Governments and the public have valid concerns about the proliferation of illegal or abusive content online, but the new Ger“man law is fundamentally flawed,” said Wenzel Michalski, Germany director at Human Rights Watch. “It is…

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Amazon New Echo Dot ad cleared over cat food order

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A television ad for Amazon’s Echo Dot smart speaker that caused a viewer’s device to try to order cat food has been cleared by a UK regulator. The advert, which aired in October, featured a man asking Amazon’s voice assistant Alexa to order Purina cat food. A viewer said the ad caused their Echo Dot device to respond after hearing the ad on the television. The viewer complained that the ad was “socially irresponsible”. The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) announced that it would not uphold the consumer’s complaint because it…

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Winter Olympics New hit by cyber-attack

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The official Winter Olympics website was taken offline after being hit by a cyber-attack, officials have confirmed. The site was affected just before the beginning of the opening ceremony in Pyeongchang, South Korea. TV and internet systems at the Games were also disrupted, though operations were restored about 12 hours later. However, a spokesman said that the International Olympic Committee would not be commenting on who might have been behind the incident. “Maintaining secure operations is our purpose,” said Mark Adams. He added that the issue was being dealt with…

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