tech news

Meta rolls out new privacy updates in bid to keep teen users safe

New online safety precautions have been introduced by social media behemoth Meta to protect teenage users.

Last year, Meta introduced some of the steps that might be taken to keep teenagers away from possibly suspicious adults. For instance, the company forbids adults from contacting minors with whom they are not connected or from seeing adolescents in its People You May Know suggestions.

On Monday, Meta said that it would add new safeguards to its social networking sites Facebook and Instagram to safeguard young users from harm online. Facebook announced in a blog post that anybody below 16, or 18 in some regions, will now automatically have more private settings for their accounts.

The company is experimenting with additional safeguards to prevent teens from communicating with questionable adults they are not related to, and they won’t display them in the People You May Know section for teens.

The company is also completely eliminating the message button from teen Instagram profiles when they are visited by suspicious adults as an additional degree of security. According to Meta, an adult account that has lately been reported or blocked by a youngster qualifies as suspicious.

The updated tools come with more standard privacy settings and safety notifications. Some privacy options allow kids to control who may view their friends list, posts that they’re tagged in, and who can add comments on their public posts.

Meta noted, “We’re working with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) to build a global platform for teens who are worried intimate images they created might be shared on public online platforms without their consent.”

In order to combat the online proliferation of self-generated personal photographs, new tools and training are also being developed. Meta is collaborating with Thorn and their NoFiltr brand to develop instructional resources that will assist youngsters in lessening the shame and stigma associated with intimate photographs.

Meta noted, “We found that more than 75% of people that we reported to NCMEC for sharing child exploitative content shared the content out of outrage, poor humor, or disgust, and with no apparent intention of harm. Sharing this content violates our policies, regardless of intent.

We’re planning to launch a new PSA campaign that encourages people to stop and think before resharing those images online and to report them to us instead.”

Teens can use a variety of tools created by Meta to inform the platform when something in one of its apps causes them to feel uncomfortable. They are encouraged to use these tools through new notifications the company has introduced.

For instance, the company sends teens safety notifications with instructions on how to deal with abusive messages from adults and prompts them to report profiles to the platform when they block someone.

Over 100 million users viewed safety notifications on Messenger in a single month in 2021. Additionally, the company has made it simpler for users to access the reporting tools. As an outcome, the company received over 70% more reports from minors, in Q1 2022 compared to Q1 2021, on Instagram DM, and Facebook Messenger.

Sandhya Gupta

I am a law graduate from NLU Lucknow. I have a flair for creative writing and hence in my free time work as a freelance content writer.

Bob Iger is returning to head Disney as Bob Chapek steps down

One of Disney’s most successful CEOs, Bob Iger, is coming back to lead the media conglomerate once more.

Disney has reverted the CEO change that caught everyone off guard in 2020, with Bob Iger resuming his position as the CEO and taking the place of Bob Chapek, his replacement. Iger, who also holds the majority of the company’s stock, will now begin a fresh two-year tenure as CEO.

Susan Arnold, Chairman of the Board for Disney stated, “We thank Bob Chapek for his service to Disney over his long career, including navigating the company through the unprecedented challenges of the pandemic. The Board has concluded that as Disney embarks on an increasingly complex period of industry transformation, Bob Iger is uniquely situated to lead the Company through this pivotal period”.

As per Disney, Susan Arnold will continue serving as the chairperson and there has been no change to the board. Iger led Disney as CEO for 15 years, from 2005 to 2020, before choosing to step aside and transfer control to Bob Chapek.

Notably, Chapek and Disney agreed to a three-year contract extension in June. Iger declared upon his return that he was excited to rejoin Disney and that he was hopeful about the company’s future.

Bob Iger noted, “Disney and its incomparable brands and franchises hold a special place in the hearts of so many people around the globe — most especially in the hearts of our employees, whose dedication to this company and its mission is an inspiration.

I am deeply honored to be asked to again lead this remarkable team, with a clear mission focused on creative excellence to inspire generations through unrivaled, bold storytelling.”

Iger managed Disney’s significant deals with Marvel, Pixar, and 21st Century Fox during his previous stint. The returning CEO also informed the Disney workers, including the cast members, via email that they would learn more about this decision “tomorrow and in coming weeks” from the leadership.

The corporation had not benefited greatly from Chapek’s 11-month tenure as the CEO. The share price of the company decreased by over 40% during his tenure. He was also criticized for not actively opposing Florida’s anti-gay law. Under his leadership, the corporation terminated senior content executive Peter Rice and missed the chance to secure digital streaming rights for the Indian Premier League.

The news was well received by investors, who drove Disney stock up 9% on Monday after it had lost about 36% of its worth this year.

The announcement comes at a pivotal time for Disney. A little more than two weeks have passed since Disney released its Q4 2022 financial results, stating that both its media and park sectors fell short of analyst expectations. Its streaming sector has expanded as more subscribers choose a package option that combines Disney Plus, ESPN Plus, and Hulu, but streaming fees are also rising.

In Q3 2022, the business reported revenues of $20.2 billion, falling short by over $1 billion of analyst estimates. Disney’s CFO at the time, Christine McCarthy, stated that the goal for the company is to become profitable by the 2024 fiscal year.

Sandhya Gupta

I am a law graduate from NLU Lucknow. I have a flair for creative writing and hence in my free time work as a freelance content writer.

Jeff Bezos Warns of Economic Recession, Advises People To Avoid Expensive Purchases

Leave a Comment / News, Tech News / By Suhani Jain

Amazon founder and Billionaire Chief Executive officer, Jeff Bezos, has advised customers and owners of small businesses to postpone major purchases in advance of the holiday period.

He said that he can tell that the economy doesn’t really look good in recent times right in a CNN sit-down interview released on Monday after reporter Chloe Melas asked if the economy was going through a recession.

Jeff Bezos claimed that if we aren’t in a recession right now, we are very probably to enter one very soon.

“Take some risk off the table, keep some dry powder on hand…. Just a little bit of risk reduction could make the difference for that small business, if we do get into even more serious economic problems. You’ve got to play the probabilities a little bit,” Bezos was quoted as saying.

“If you’re an individual considering to purchase a big-screen TV, you might want to wait, hold onto your money, and see what transpires. The same is true with a new automobile, refrigerator, or whatever else. Just remove some risk from the equation,” he added.
Source: tribuneindia.com

It is undoubtedly not the suggestion you hoped to hear out from a person who owns and manages the e-commerce website which pervades Black Friday sales year after year, as well as it is equally hugely profitable Cyber Monday sale a few days later.

Jeff Bezos’ suggestion came not long after The New York Times disclosed that Amazon intends to lay off about 10,000 employees, many from its Alexa, sales, and human resources sections, in one of the company’s largest layoffs in history.

So, it appears that Bezos will be pinching pennies at the cost of thousands of employees, but likely not his wallet. In another section of the interview, Bezos bragged about how he intended to give away his massive wealth, planning to announce a 100 million USD donation to songster and philanthropist Dolly Parton.

Suhani Jain

I am a student pursuing my bachelor’s in information technology. I have a interest in writing so, I am working a freelance content writer because I enjoy writing. I also write poetries. I believe in the quote by anne frank “paper has more patience than person

WhatsApp To Soon Launch New Yellow Pages-Style Business Directory

Leave a Comment / News, Tech News / By Sandhya Gupta

WhatsApp is formally debuting a brand-new business directory feature in the UK, Colombia, Brazil, Indonesia, and Mexico. The new tools will be introduced for the first time in Brazil, one of Whatsapp’s largest markets, outside of pilot projects.

WhatsApp has revealed the release of a business directory feature that supports in-app transactions. Users can use this feature to find nearby businesses. Users can look up the business by categories including banking, dining, and travel.

After a brief test in So Paulo, Brazil, last year, WhatsApp decided to officially launch the service. In Brazil, the feature is only accessible through Android, however, it is accessible through both Android and iOS in the other four countries.

At a meeting in Brazil devoted to WhatsApp, the company said that the “business search” tool will help people find contacts for businesses more quickly. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, noted, “We want to make it easier for people to get more done on WhatsApp.

Part of that is building better ways to engage with businesses. The ultimate goal here is to make it so you can find, message, and buy from a business all in the same WhatsApp chat.” To start a conversation with a business on Whatsapp, users previously had to enter a mobile number to their phone contacts or follow a link on a different site.

The feature’s release coincides with WhatsApp’s increased marketing of itself as a platform for users to contact businesses in addition to family and friends. According to Meta, more than 175 million users use WhatsApp to communicate with business accounts daily as of October 2020.

Other e-commerce-related features have also been introduced to the service, such as support for in-app shopping.. According to a press statement from WhatsApp, the merchant payments functionality is now being tested in Brazil “with multiple payment partners.”

The business-oriented features of WhatsApp are noteworthy since they represent one of the few means the platform is monetized using the WhatsApp Business API. It doesn’t similarly display ads as Instagram and Facebook, two of Meta’s other top services, do. However, a Meta executive told Reuters a year ago that WhatsApp’s business model “in some form or another” is likely to include adverts in the future.

With the debut of person-to-person payments in 2020, Meta recently announced WhatsApp’s “first-ever end-to-end shopping experience” in India with JioMart earlier this year. However, the expansion in Brazil has been more delayed. The payments function of WhatsApp was shut down by Brazil’s national bank in 2020, not long after it was introduced.

The Financial Times reported in April of this year that Meta was having trouble obtaining payment providers for its payment-to-merchant service.

Over 2 billion people use WhatsApp worldwide. According to the company’s quarterly earnings, which were cited by TechCrunch last month, the click-to-WhatsApp ad business had increased revenue by 80% year over year and was on course to reach $1.5 billion annually.

Recently, Meta reported its first-ever yearly revenue drop and laid off over 11,000 employees.

Sandhya Gupta

I am a law graduate from NLU Lucknow. I have a flair for creative writing and hence in my free time work as a freelance content writer.

Roku lays off 200 employees after weak Q4 Results

Leave a Comment / News, Tech News / By Suhani Jain

In the perfect example of what appears to be daily job cuts in Big Tech, Roku declared its plans presently to lay off about 200 employees, which represents nearly 7 per cent of its workforce. In an SEC filing, the streaming company stated that it intends to cut jobs in the United States due to economic conditions.

The company estimates that the reductions will cost between 28 and 31 million USD in severance pay, notice pay where relevant, employee benefits contributions, as well as other costs.

“Due to the current economic conditions in our industry, we have made the difficult decision to reduce Roku’s headcount expenses by a projected 5%, to slow down our [Operating Expenses] growth rate. This will affect approximately 200 employee positions in the U.S. Taking these actions now will allow us to focus our investments on key strategic priorities to drive future growth and enhance our leadership position,” Roku said in an official statement.
Source: techcrunch.com

As per Roku, a large percentage of the layoffs will occur in Q4, with the remainder predicted to be “substantially complete” by the end of Q1 2023.

In a statement, Roku said, “Taking these actions now will allow us to focus our investments on key strategic priorities to drive future growth and enhance our leadership position.”
Source: engadget.com

These layoffs arrive after Roku warned during its most recent quarterly results that it expects a year-over-year profits decline in Q4. In pre-market trading today, the company’s stock fell nearly three per cent.

Job cuts in Big Tech have emerged as an unfortunate trend in recent days. Roku’s layoffs arise on the heels of downsizing at Meta, which laid off 11,000 of its employees last week; Twitter, which laid off nearly 3,800 staff members earlier this month; and Amazon and Microsoft.

Even though Apple has thus far been an exception, it has decided to impose a hiring freeze that is expected to last until late 2023. Similarly, Disney is reportedly freezing hiring and planning layoffs, while Netflix laid off about 300 workers in June. Streaming companies, including Roku, have encountered the dual difficulties of an uncertain economy and revenue downturn following a surge during the coronavirus pandemic.

Suhani Jain

Nvidia and Microsoft Collaborate To Build AI Supercomputers

Leave a Comment / News, Tech News / By Sandhya Gupta

Nvidia and Microsoft are working together over a “multi-year collaboration” to build “one of the most powerful AI supercomputer in the world,” which will be capable of handling the large processing workloads needed to teach and scale AI.

According to the reports, the AI supercomputer will be driven by Microsoft Azure’s cutting-edge supercomputing technology along with Nvidia GPUs, networking, and a comprehensive stack of AI software to support businesses in training, deploying, and scaling AI, including big, cutting-edge models.

NVIDIA’s A100 and H100 GPUs will be part of the array, coupled with their Quantum-2 400Gb/s Infiniband networking technology. In particular, this would be the first public cloud to feature NVIDIA’s cutting-edge AI tech stack, allowing businesses to train and use AI on a large scale.

Manuvir Das, VP of enterprise computing at Nvidia, noted, “AI technology advances as well as industry adoption are accelerating. The breakthrough of foundation models has triggered a tidal wave of research, fostered new startups and enabled new enterprise applications. Our collaboration with Microsoft will provide researchers and companies with state-of-the-art AI infrastructure and software to capitalise on the transformative power of AI.”

NVIDIA will work with Azure to research and accelerate advancements in generative AI, a rapidly developing field of artificial intelligence where foundational models like the Megatron Turing NLG 530B serve as the basis for unmonitored, self-learning algorithms to generate new text, digital images, codes, audio, or video.

Additionally, the companies will work together to improve Microsoft’s DeepSpeed deep learning optimization tool. Azure enterprise clients will have access to NVIDIA’s full suite of AI processes and software development tools that have been tailored for Azure. In order to speed up transformer-based models used for huge language models, generative AI, and generating code, among other uses, Microsoft DeepSpeed will make use of the NVIDIA H100 Transformer Engine.

With twice the capacity of 16-bit operations, this technology uses DeepSpeed’s 8-bit floating point accuracy capabilities to significantly speed up AI calculations for transformers.

Verge reports that due to the recent quick expansion of these AI models, there has been a major increase in the demand for robust computer infrastructure.

The partnership is intriguing for several reasons, but notably, because it makes one of the largest computing clusters accessible to companies. Due to optimizations made in the newest ‘Hopper’ generation of NVIDIA GPUs, this will not only enable companies to train and implement AI at a level that was previously impractically pricey to do but also allow them to do it at a significant level of efficiency.

Although NVIDIA has a supercomputer of its own, the collaboration demonstrates that they are aware of the enormous computational demands placed on them by contemporary algorithms. This development represents a collaboration between two of the largest organizations in the AI industry.

Microsoft has experience in this area, as seen by its relationship with OpenAI and dedication to the development of ethical and safe AI. Contrarily, NVIDIA has been a pillar of AI development and research for the past ten years thanks to its potent GPUs and supporting tech stack, which includes CUDA and Tensor cores.

Sandhya Gupta

I am a law graduate from NLU Lucknow. I have a flair for creative writing and hence in my free time work as a freelance content writer.

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