Tech Nuggets with the Technology

Sunday, April 19, 2020

Smartphone players in India left in lurch as govt bars sales till May 3

Smartphone manufacturers who were taking small steps to adjust to the new normal were left in lurch after the government prohibited e-commerce platforms to sell non-essential items from April 20. https://ift.tt/34R1zHO

Parsyl, which uses an IoT supply chain data service to offer cargo insurance for shippers of perishable goods, raises $15M Series A led by GLP and Ascot Group (FinSMEs)

FinSMEs:
Parsyl, which uses an IoT supply chain data service to offer cargo insurance for shippers of perishable goods, raises $15M Series A led by GLP and Ascot Group — Parsyl, Inc., a Denver, CO-based supply chain data platform, raised 15m in Series A funding. — The round was led by GLP and Ascot Group.

Australia to Force Google, Facebook to Pay for News Content

Australia announced Monday it will begin forcing Google and Facebook to pay news companies for content, in a landmark move aimed at shielding traditional media from the tech giants' digital dominance. https://ift.tt/2Vl8UvN

All you need to know about government's Rs 1 crore 'Zoom challenge'

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Swiggy, Zomato ordered to shut down in Telangana

The Chief Minister said people should cook fresh food at home instead of ordering the food from outside, especially during the current lockdown period. https://ift.tt/2wWsDJ4 https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

Hard lobbying by trade bodies shuts doors on e-commerce

Hundreds of emails from small retailers across the country and backing of commerce ministry Piyush Goyal helped halt non-essential etail sales https://ift.tt/3aj212B https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

Supreme Court explores ways to set up more virtual courts to ensure justice delivery

With the extension of the national lockdown and likelihood of a graded lifting of the lockdown, the apex court is working towards making virtual litigation a reality https://ift.tt/2VmIIRC https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

In Covid-19 times, 200,000 reasons for job market cheer

Big employers such as Amazon, Google, Tech Mahindra, Walmart Labs, VMWare, IBM and Capgemini advertise thousands of jobs https://ift.tt/2RQKUyt https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

Coronavirus lockdown: How to get an e-pass in Punjab

Here is a guide on how to apply for a movement pass in the state of Punjab. https://ift.tt/2VC9btm

Truecaller fine-tunes algorithms to catch frauds real time: CEO Alan Mamedi

India is the biggest market for Truecaller, that became profitable as on October 2019, with 120 million daily active users https://ift.tt/2xLwAjY https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

Greenbits, a San Jose-based cannabis retail platform provider, raises $23M Series B led by Tiger Global Management and Casa Verde (FinSMEs)

FinSMEs:
Greenbits, a San Jose-based cannabis retail platform provider, raises $23M Series B led by Tiger Global Management and Casa Verde — Greenbits, a San Jose, CA-based cannabis retail platform provider, raised $23m in Series B financing. — The round was co-led by Tiger Global Management …

Contactless dining tops the menu now

Restaurants have been hit hard and are expected to continue facing a challenge in getting customers back as social distancing becomes the new norm. https://ift.tt/2XOdAw4 https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

Aarogya Setu app primed to take lead in Covid-19 war

The government is planning to incorporate all Covid-19 virus related information and services within the application. https://ift.tt/3anX48G https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

Instagram founders team up to launch a COVID-19 tracker Rtlive

Instagram founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger has reunited to launch a COVID-19 tracker called Rt.live. They have teamed up for the first time since leaving Facebook after the Instagram was acquired by Mark Zuckerberg’s company. Rt.live shows how fast the Novel Coronavirus is spreading in the United States.

The name ‘Rt’ is the unit that measures the average number of people who can get infected by an infectious person. The higher the number, the faster COVID-19 spreads among the population. A number below one shows the virus is receding and the infection rate is going down.

At present, the Rt.live shows data from the United States only. The site shows Georgia on top with a high Rt score of 1.5 while New York’s Rt score has come down to 0.54, according to TechCrunch.

The tracker’s idea came when Kreiger found out Kevin has been writing and publishing open-source data on how to calculate Rt on a daily basis. They teamed up to work and visualise the data so anyone can see how US states are doing at keeping the COVID-19 pandemic at bay.

The site shows charts and tables of infection data and assigns a Rt score to each state in the United States. The data is sourced from the COVID Tracking Project while Rt.live’s modeling system is available on GitHub. You can filter out states to see how a certain region of the country is doing as compared to the other, and also see the impact of states that have imposed stay-at-home orders versus states that have not.

The Instagram founders are also doing more individually to help US businesses stay afloat after stay-at-home orders in multiple states. The founders of the popular social networking app hopes the app serves as a dashboard for the authorities to decide when to ease lockdown orders. In India, COVID-19 cases officially touched 15,000 cases while the death toll cross 500.

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New Cloudflare tool can tell you if your ISP has deployed BGP fixes

For more than an hour at the beginning of April, major sites like Google and Facebook sputtered for large swaths of people. The culprit wasn't a hack or a bug. It was problems with the internet data routing standard known as the Border Gateway Protocol, which had allowed significant amounts of web traffic to take an unexpected detour through a Russian telecom. For Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, it was the last straw.

BGP disruptions happen frequently, generally by accident. But BGP can also be hijacked for large-scale spying, data interception, or as a sort of denial of service attack. Just last week, United States Executive Branch agencies moved to block China Telecom from offering services in the US, because of allegedly malicious activity that includes BGP attacks. Companies like Cloudflare sit on the front lines of the BGP blowback. And while the company can't fix the problem directly, it can call out those that are slow to contribute defenses.

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https://arstechnica.com