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Google

Google to block search engine for Australian users if the government enforces new code

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Due to the new law from the Australian government, Google has said that it will shut down the search engine for Australian users if it has to pay for news. According to this new code the Australian government is trying to enforce, big tech companies like Google and Facebook have to pay local media companies for the right to use their content (Reuters). Google has mentioned clearly that if the Australian government enforces this new code, 19 million Australian users will have to face degraded search quality and YouTube experience.

Enforcement of the new code

The Australian government is preparing to pass a law that will make the big tech companies like Facebook and Google negotiate with the local publishers. This means that Google will now have to bargain a payment for these local channels and broadcasters whose contents are displayed in the Google search results. The government has further decided that if the companies among themselves cannot strike a deal then an arbitrator from the Australian government itself will fix a price.

Google is not even considering playing by the rules this time and hence completely declined to negotiate any price with the local publishers. The company has made a public announcement clearly sending the message that if the law is enforced Google search in Australia will degrade. Today, Mel Silva, Managing Director of Google Australia and New Zealand said at a public hearing that if this new code is enforced as law, Google will have no choice but to make Google search engine unavailable in Australia.

Further, Silva spoke about the impact of the new proposed law, that is, the News Media Bargaining code on Australian small businesses, publishers, and users as well. She said that the most concerning part of this new code is to pay for links and snippets in the search which will have a negative impact on the business as well as the digital economy. Silva also mentioned that the company has already reached News Showcase agreements with 7 publishers in Australia. So, with a few slights amendments in this new code, none has to sacrifice or adjust here a great deal to use Google.

How did Australia respond to Google’s reaction?

Since Google mentioned clearly that if the new law is enforced, Google will have no choice but to block the search engine for Australian users, Scott Morrison, Prime Minister of Australia has made few sharp comments. In response to Google’s comment, Morrison said that in Australia they have rules for “things you can do in Australia.” He further mentioned that those who will abide by these laws are most welcome to work in Australia but the country will not respond to any form of threats.

Google

Apart from Morrison’s comment in response to what Google has said, many critical views have surfaced against these tech giants. Rod Sims, Australian Competition and Consumer Commission chair has said that these companies tend to strike a deal when they are in full power or have full control. And according to him “that’s not a commercial deal.”

Effect on Google

Google says that the search ads contribute to Google’s annual revenue and profit largely at a global level. So, if the company even offers a limited search tool for Australian users without any revision of this new code, it will be risky for the company. Google has called this new law very overly broad and hence it wants revision before the company is in a position to negotiate. The United States government has also asked the Australian government to scrap this new law and bring a more voluntary code instead. Australia proposed this new legislation last month after an investigation on the media market.

The government realized that companies like Google and Facebook have too much power in the media industry which might turn into a big threat in a democratic country. It is also noted that the statement from Google to limit its search engine for the Australian users came only hours after it struck a deal with some French news publisher. This content-payment deal is a three-year, $1.3 billion agreement to support publishers. (Reuters)

MSI

MSI is All Set to Introduce its Business Summit, Prestige, and Modern Laptops in India

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MSI the Taiwanese multinational tech giant is all set to target the Indian laptop market with its newly announced high-end laptops. Reportedly the company has upgraded its business laptop series, i.e., the Summit, Prestige, and Modern laptop series. MSI will be introducing these high-tech laptops to its Indian customers very by the end of January 2021. The three category laptops have got a total of nine laptops, i.e., Summit E15 and Summit B15 (Summit series), Prestige 14, Prestige 15 and Prestige 14 EVO (Prestige series), and Modern 15 and Modern 14 (the Modern series, a total of four variants).

According to a statement from the company, all the laptops will be equipped with the latest 11th generation Intel Core processors. MSI is a company known for its gaming laptops, but with this new launch, it has come up with non-gaming business laptops.

MSI Summit

All the new MSI laptops are thin and lightweight. Both the Summit laptops, E15, and B15 boast a thin bezel 15.6-inch 4K display and have got support for 100% Adobe RGB color gamut. The laptops are around 16.9 millimeters thick and weigh about 1.79 kilograms.

MSI Summit Series
Image Source: digit.in

These new business laptops from MSI support enterprise-grade security and include a 4GB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650Ti graphic card. Along with the SSD storage, the memory is extendable up to 64GB. The Summit laptops come with two DDR4 slots. These high-end laptops have got high-end technologies like a TPM 2.0 module, a fingerprint reader, and an IR scanner camera. 

MSI Prestige

For the Prestige laptops, the display is different for all. The MSI Prestige 15 has got up to a 15.6-inch display, whereas the MSI Prestige 14 and 14 EVO laptops feature up to 14-inch display. The MSI Prestige 15 and 14 laptops have the 4K UHD display, while the 14 EVO has a full HD display. The Prestige 15 is around 16.9 millimeters thick and weighs 1.65 kilograms. On the other hand, both Prestige 14 and 14 EVO are 15.9 millimeters in thickness and weighs almost 1.29 kilograms.

Equipped with the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 Ti Max-Q GPU graphics, the Prestige laptops include two DDR4 slots along with the two SSD storage slots. The RAM size for the Prestige laptops i.e., 15, 14, and 14 EVO are up to 64GB, up to 32GB of RAM, and up to 16GB of RAM, respectively. All three laptops support M.2 SSD storage. Instant wake, quicker login, and faster Wi-Fi connection are the main highlights of these laptops.

MSI Modern

Lastly, the Modern laptops feature full HD displays, the Modern 15 having a 15.6-inch and the Modern 14 having a 14-inch display. These laptops are integrated with Nvidia GeForce MX450 GPU and come with up to 32GB DDR4 of RAM. Modern 15 has got two SSD slots, whereas the Modern 14 consists of a single NVMe SSD slot.

Price Range

Since the laptops are high-end business laptops, the price range for these laptops goes really high. The company has announced the price for its laptop for the Indian market. The price of MSI Summit E15 A11SCST starts at Rs. 1,79,990, whereas the MSI Summit B15 A11M will be available for a price range of Rs. 1,23,990. The MSI Prestige 15 A11SCX costs around Rs. 1,34,990, MSI Prestige 14 A11SCX at Rs. 1,28,990, and MSI Prestige 14 Evo will be available for Rs. 95,990. Lastly, the price of Modern 15 A11SB is set to be Rs. 95,990, MSI Modern 15 A11M will cost Rs. 70,990, and MSI Modern 14 B11SB costs Rs. 89,990. The MSI Modern 14 B11M starts at Rs. 55,990, making it the cheapest laptop among them all.

The company has partnered with Flipkart for the marketing and sale of the laptop in India, and the Summit E15 and Prestige 15 laptop models are the ones that will arrive in the Indian market first. These laptops will be available in India from January 24. The company hasn’t mentioned any dates for the launch of the rest of its laptops in India. But according to the reports, all of them will be available by the first quarter of the year. 

Cyberpunk 2077

Reasons Behind the ‘Buggy’-ride of the Most-hyped Cyberpunk 2077

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After a wait of years, Cyberpunk 2077, was finally released in December 2020. But despite the long development process, the game did not have a smooth start and was filled with bugs. But then, people still settled knowing how huge the project was, and how long it took for the developers to meet the expectations of people. But now again, the newly launched game is under the limelight because of ransomware related to the game.

What is Cyberpunk 2077?

Cyberpunk 2077 is a role-playing action video game, released in December 2020 by the Polish video game developer CD Projekt S.A. The game is a follow-up to the company’s previous release The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (2015), and a team of more than 500 people has worked on it. This number is more than the number of people involved in the development process of The Witcher 3.

Cyberpunk 2020 is developed using the RED engine 4 and was made available for PlayStation 4, Stadia, Windows, and Xbox One. The company had also announced that it is going to release the game for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S in the middle of 2021 or later. Within one week of its release, the game started to show some issues regarding its performance, like the animation of the characters, issues with the objects in the game hanging at one place, etc. Only after a week of the title release, on 17 December 2020 Sony removed the game from PlayStation.

Cyberpunk 2077 is basically a combat and action game, offering many options to customize the background of the environment and the clothing, hairstyle, face as well as the voice of the lead, i.e. ‘V’, a mercenary. V is fighting and battling in an open world, set to be in Night City, California.

The Buggy Game

Cyberpunk 2077
Image Source: earlygame.com

As soon as the game got released, the users started to face many issues with the game and reported many bugs. Though several were settled with the fact that the game was a big project, many asked questions like ‘why the company rushed to release the game, when it wasn’t ready?” After more than a month of the release of the game, here we are with some of the answers.

The Reasons behind the Bugs

The foremost reason for all the bugs and issues in the game is the hype. Cyberpunk 2077 has been an ambitious project for CD Projekt. The company had announced the game in 2012, along with the futuristic features it would be adding to the game. But even after four years of the announcement of the game, there was no sign of starting its design and development. The conceptualization and the development of the game only started in 2016, intending to release the game in 2020. The company had just finished its work on The Witcher 3 and started working on Cyberpunk 2077, and according to reports, the company had made big changes to its basic structure. It also started building a new engine for the game to run on.

Also, with new changes and a lot of burdens, many of the main developers left the project. The goals of the company suddenly changed, and it was looking forward to building a massive game with a lesser number of people in their team. In fact, if we believe the reports, the demo of Cyberpunk presented in the E3 2018 did not include any real information regarding the game.

And then happens the pandemic, the reason for most of the disasters in the world in 2020. In the case of Cyberpunk 2077 too, the developers were not able to pull out the desire results sitting away from each other. If we see some of the latest interviews of the current and the former developers of Cyberpunk 2077, the game was not ready for a release so soon and needed a lot of work done on it. Now since there has been a lot of a complaint against the game, companies like Sony are offering a refund to its customers. Also, the CD Projekt developers are constantly working on the game to make it bug-free.

The Ransomware

After the numerous complaints due to the bugs, there has been another issue with the game. Some suspicious people have created a similar site as the Play Store, where they are offering downloads for the mobile version of Cyberpunk 2077. This download includes nothing but malware. And upon the download, the hackers get access to the information that is stored on the phone. This leads the hackers to ask for money from the owner in return for the release of the information.

But here we must tell you that CD Projekt never released a mobile version of the game. But, even if you have got your information hacked, you should not worry, because this ransomware, dubbed Coder Ware, uses a hardcoded key, such that you can recover your information using a decryptor, without paying any money. So always be careful with your downloads on the internet.

Xiaomi

US government blacklisted Xiaomi and eight more Chinese companies

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Though Joe Biden won the last presidential election in the US, Trump is not making his departure easy on China. From last year especially with the breakout of COVID-19, the US government has taken many harsh decisions against China. First, it started with Trump accusing China of the breakout of the novel coronavirus which was followed by attacking their trade relation. Trump issued the ban of TikTok and similar apps from the US and recently he barred any US transaction using Alipay and 8 other Chinese apps. Last weekend, which was the last week for Trump in the White House, he blacklisted Xiaomi and 8 eight Chinese companies in the US.

The US government blacklisted these nine companies due to alleged military links which also include Commercial Aircraft of China and one of the largest Chinese oil companies. Blacklisting these companies also put the US investors in a big dilemma who put their money in these Chinese companies.

Xiaomi on defense statement

Banning Xiaomi from the US will affect both the company and its stakeholders. After Trump and his government decided to blacklist these nine Chinese companies, Xiaomi put out a statement on Twitter that they are “not owned, controlled, or affiliated” in any way to the Chinese military. The company further mentioned that they will take proper action in the best interest of its stakeholders. Xiaomi is a very popular company for its smartphones and has a market across 90 countries so far. Last year, the company even outrun Apple in terms of selling smartphones in the third quarter. Even in the pandemic, the company has made huge sales as it rose to CNY 53.54billion in the second quarter of 2020.

The question is how the citizens of the US will respond to this since Trump lost the last election to Biden. There has been a huge tension growing between Beijing and the White House putting giant tech companies and their stakeholders in the crosshair. Though Biden didn’t make any comments even when transactions with Alipay and other Chinese companies were banned last month, people are curious to see how Biden responded to this Sino-US tension.

Xiaomi
Image Source: ft.com

Blacklisting China National Offshore Oil Corp

CNOOC is one of the other 8 Chinese companies that the Commerce Department has but in the entity list. Being added to the entity list means the US firms are now barred from trading with these companies. The US firms don’t have the permission to transfer technology without any further notice or grant from the US government. Under Trump’s administration, the list seems neverending as every month we find banning of some other Chinese companies on the news headlines.

According to Gadgets 360, CNOOC has been involved in many activities having connections to the disrupted waters of the South China Sea. CNOOC carried out offshore drilling operations in this region which confirms the soring relationship between Beijing and other nations like Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan, etc. This proves that not only the Sino-US relation is under a lot of stress but also many Asian countries have an objection to China’s territorial claims. A few months ago, tension escalated between India and China due to the dispute in LAC. US thinks that these reckless actions of China for militarisation will have an impact on the US’s national security as well.

China’s militarization efforts

Responding to the territorial claims of China and actions in the South China Sea, US Commerce Secretary, Wilbur Ross, commented that China’s rigorous attempts to acquire “sensitive intellectual property and technology” possess a threat to the national security of the US as well as the international community. He further adds that CNOOC acts like a bully trying to intimidate the neighboring nations of China so that the Chinese military “continues to benefit from government civil-military fusion policies” with evil motives.CNOOC denied commenting at the moment. Skyrizon, another Chinese company in aerospace technology has also been blacklisted.

Both China and the US are very powerful nations that now seem to stop at nothing. Over the past year, many decisions to suppress the influence of Chinese companies in the US have been taken which will affect the economy of China. But, if China retaliates and the stakes are high, both nations will shift from multilateralism to bilateralism. It will become the competition of power and the collateral damage will become unfathomable. 

Signal

People are switching from WhatsApp to Signal. Should you too?

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By now all of us have heard the name Signal for at least one time. We are hearing that people are switching from WhatsApp to Signal after WhatsApp announced the new privacy policy for the users. According to this new privacy policy, some of the users’ data in WhatsApp will be given to the parent company, Facebook. This became a big concern as privacy matters to the users when they are using a personal messaging app. So, here is everything you need to know about Signal and how secure it is, and should you too move from WhatsApp to Signal?

What is Signal?

Signal is a messaging app similar to WhatsApp where the messages are end-to-end encrypted. The security system of the Signal app is very strong and the code is accessible to all since it is an open-source application which any independent programmer or expert can view and contribute from time-to-time. Signal also claims that it does not collect any user data like contact details, messages, profile information, etc. There are only two details that Signal collects and those are how long Signal has been installed in someone’s phone and the last date of installation.

Signal
Image Source: play.google.com

Like WhatsApp, the Signal app is available on Android, iOS, Windows, Mac, and Linux. After downloading and signing up in Signal via phone, you can connect it to your Windows or Mac. Once linked with your PC, you can chat from your computer even if the phone is switched off.

Now, the question of the hour is why people are shifting from WhatsApp to Signal?

Why are people switching from WhatsApp to Signal?

A wave of fear rose among the WhatsApp users last week when a pop-up notification came on WhatsApp that it may share some of the user data with Facebook. This notification came with a yes or decline option to agree to the new privacy policy in WhatsApp. Since then a strong migration movement of the WhatsApp users to other messaging apps like Signal and Telegram increased gigantically. Telegram is mostly preferred for group chats while WhatsApp users are installing Signal for its highly secure system. If this migration continues, it will weaken the strength of big tech companies like Facebook and WhatsApp. A chain of messages has been spread that says Facebook could read the messages of WhatsApp users which increased the tension and fear among individuals. Though WhatsApp tried to reach out to people that they couldn’t see the encrypted chats or calls, it seemed like damage control.

Users are growing on Signal

Signal is witnessing the biggest number of new users in the past two years. Last year, Signal witnessed a download of 50,000 per day which rose to 1.3 million users on Monday alone. Among the new users, Signal said that India is one of the biggest areas from where most of the new users are coming in. After the news of privacy concerns broke out on the net last week, Signal became the top app in 70 countries for iOS users and in 45 countries for Android users. (The New York Times)

On the other hand, with the rising popularity of end-to-end encrypted messaging apps like Signal, it becomes hard for the government or similar authorities to investigate crimes. It becomes a safe hiding place for the criminals as law enforcement authorities can’t play any strong part in this. Louis Grever, head of the Association of State Criminal Investigative Agencies, said that these encrypted platforms “does allow groups that have an ill intent to plan behind the curtain.” So, the pros and cons of these highly encrypted messaging platforms have become a hot topic of debate for everyone.

Brian Acton, Founder of Signal and WhatsApp

Signal founder Brian Acton
Image Source: economictimes.indiatimes.com

Signal was created by an American cryptographer called Moxie Marlinspike which today is a part of the Signal Foundation. Signal Foundation is a non-profit foundation that was founded in 2018 when Brian Acton, the former co-founder of WhatsApp, loaned initial funding of $50 million to build this foundation and became the co-founder of Signal.

Privacy policy of WhatsApp

With the growing concern among WhatsApp users, the company has answered and cleared all the queries of the citizens. WhatsApp said that though the privacy policy of WhatsApp has been recently updated that does not affect the end-to-end encrypted chats among your friends and family. This new privacy update is especially for the business messaging in WhatsApp which is both optional and provides full transparency on how they collect the user data.

WhatsApp has made it loud and clear that neither WhatsApp nor Facebook can read out messages or hear our calls. WhatsApp doesn’t share our contact with Facebook and they cannot see our shared location as well. What WhatsApp is doing is providing an option for the business accounts to use a secure hosting service from Facebook. And, at times some data can be used for marketing purposes on Facebook. You can always know more if you check out the privacy policy website of WhatsApp.

Experts view on WhatsApp privacy policy

Many experts after studying WhatsApp’s new privacy policy have said that misinformation has been spread. Pranesh Prakash, Affiliated Fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project has said that the new privacy policy of WhatsApp concerns business interactions thus giving new ways to handle transaction and payment data. He further said that privacy has been more tightened after Facebook acquired WhatsApp as the company willingly decreased its power to access chats and calls to identify business content.

So, now it is up to the users to choose the right app based on security concerns, privacy, and convenience. They shouldn’t decide by paying heed to the misinformation and rather get informed about it from genuine sources.

AMD

New Ryzen 5000 series mobile processors by AMD released in CES 2021

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The new AMD’s Ryzen 5000 series mobile processors promise the best gaming experience for 2021. Most of the new processors in this new series are based on the architecture of 7nm ‘Zen 3’ and the company claims this model to be both energy-efficient and high in performance. AMD revealed this big announcement at the virtual event of CES 2021. Lisa Su, CEO of AMD, said that the new Ryzen 5000 mobile series is the most powerful processor ever built.

These new processors will be available in the early Q1 2021 from manufacturing companies like Lenovo, Asus, Acer, Dell, and HP. Su also mentioned that about 150 models will be launched this year showing a 50% increase in growth over the previous generation. Apart from the new series of mobile processors, AMD also showed a glimpse of upcoming Radeon GPUs for both desktops and laptops. Along with this, the company showed a teaser of the next-gen Epyc data centers CPUs.

AMD Ryzen 5000 series

AMD
Image Source: digit.in

The 5000 series of AMD processors have two main categories, namely, the H series and the U series. Laptops of the H series are extensively used by gamers and content creators whereas the U series laptops are more of ultraportable notebooks.

Ryzen H, HS, and HX series

As the H series processors are specially designed for high-performance gaming laptops, the company is focusing on Ryzen HX as a differentiating brand to represent the choice for ultimate gaming laptops. The battery life of this new series of laptops is outstanding so that the gamers are not interrupted while playing. The processor of the H series has 3 cores and 16 threads. As compared to the last generation processors, Ryzen 9 5980HX has a 23% increased capability to perform single-thread performance and a 17% boost in performing multi-thread functions.

While the new HX series is all focused on gaming quality with a boost speed of 4.6 GHz, 45W TDP, 20MB of L2+L3 cache, the HS-series processors are designed for thin and light systems. On the HS-series, Ryzen 9 5980HS also has 8 cores and 16 threads. It allows a top boost speed of 4.8 GHz and like AMD says “the fastest mobile processors you can get.”  Some of the new processors in the H-series, HS-series, and HX-series are Ryzen 7 5800H, Ryzen 9 5980HX, and Ryzen 9 5900HS respectively.

The U-series from Ryzen

According to the company, the new Ryzen 7 5800U from the U-series is rated for a high battery life of 17.5 hours of general usage and 21 hours in case of video playback. This new processor of the U-series also has 8 cores and 16 threads with a boost speed of 4.4 GHz slightly lower than the H-series. AMD claims that this processor will deliver the fastest productivity in ultrathin notebooks. Targeting mainly the general consumers like students and office goers, the new processors of the U-series will provide a 16% boost in the single-thread performance and 14% in the multi-thread performance. Till now, 5 new models of the U-series have been announced by the company but some of them will still run on the Zen-2 architecture. Models like Ryzen 7 5700U, Ryzen 5 5500U, and Ryzen 3 5300U will run on Zen-2 architecture.

Apart from the new H-series and U-series processors, AMD has also introduced new Ryzen desktop processors. The company revealed new variants of Ryzen 9 5900X and Ryzen 7 5800X for a better experience for desktop users. AMD claims that the desktop process Ryzen 9 5900X will increase the 1080p gaming performance by making it 24% faster than the previous generation.

New Intel processors

With introducing so many powerful processors this year, it will give a tough competition for the Intel processors. In the virtual event of CES 2021, Intel also introduced the new Tiger Lake H systems. Last year, Intel launched the 11th Gen Tiger Lake processors and in CES 2021, the company released the H-series of the 11th Gen Core chips. Intel is introducing 35W H-series chips so that the performance is enhanced for the lightweight small laptops. The details are not very clear about the upcoming models for 45W chips which AMD needs to look out for.