US Secret Service memo warns a crime ring is targeting state unemployment insurance programs to commit fraud by using data belonging to identity theft victims — A well-organized Nigerian crime ring is exploiting the COVID-19 crisis by committing large-scale fraud against multiple state …
Motorola is lining up a slew of launches in India. The Lenovo-owned smartphone brands plans to launch the Moto Edge+ in India on May 19 and just a few days after, the company will launch the Moto G8 Power Lite. The launch date of the latter was confirmed by Flipkart via its website.
The Moto G8 Power Lite launched last month globally and features a large 5,000mAh battery and a 6.5-inch display along with triple rear cameras. It’s expected to be positioned as a budget smartphone in India.
Motorola Moto G8 Power Lite specs and featuresThe Motorola G8 Power Lite is part of the famous G-series from Moto and offers a 6.5-inch LCD panel with 20:9 aspect ratio. The phone will come with a waterdrop notch housing the front camera.
Motorola has confirmed the smartphone is splash resistant and runs on the MediaTek Helio P35 SoC paired with 4GB RAM and 64GB storage. There’s also an option to increase the storage via a dedicated microSD card slot.
On the back are three cameras that includes a 16MP primary shooter with f/2.0 aperture, a 2MP macro lens and a 2MP depth sensor. On the front, there’s an 8MP camera for selfies.
The Moto G8 Power Lite will house a 5,000mAh battery with support for 10W charging. The phone will run on stock Android 9 Pie and will have a rear-mounted fingerprint sensor.
Motorola Moto G8 Power Lite: Expected price in IndiaThe Moto G8 Power Lite is priced globally at EUR 169 which roughly converts to Rs 13,870 in India. The phone will be sold via Flipkart. More details regarding the smartphone will be revealed on May 21. The Moto G8 Power Lite will be available in Arctic Blue and Royal Blue colour variants.
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The Xiaomi Redmi Note 9 Pro Max went on its first sale last week, and the smartphone has already started to receive a new software update that brings the April 2020 security patch. The changelog doesn’t include any other new features and is 338MB in size.
The Redmi Note 9 Pro Max was launched back in March, and while the April security patch is coming a month late (we are already in May), some of Realme’s smartphones have already started receiving the May update.
The firmware version of the new update is MIUI v11.0.2.0.QJXINXM. You can check for the update by going to About Phone - Software Updates - Check for updates. Usually, it takes some time for all users to receive the update as its released in batches.
The new was first broken by Fonearena and we were able to independently verify the patch which came to the review unit in our lab.
Xiaomi Redmi Note 9 Pro Max specs and price in IndiaThe Redmi Note 9 Pro Max is powered by the Snapdragon 720G SoC coupled with up to 8GB RAM. The phone features a large 6.67-inch FHD+ LCD display with 20:9 aspect ratio and a punch-hole selfie camera. There’s a 64MP quad camera setup at the back which includes an 8MP ultrawide lens, 5MP macro lens and a 2MP depth sensor. On the front is a 32MP selfie camera. The phone comes with up to 128GB storage and a 5,020mAh battery that gets topped by 33W fast charging.
The Redmi Note 9 Pro Max starts at Rs 16,499 for the 6GB RAM variant with 64GB storage while the 6+128GB is priced at Rs 17,999 and the top variant with 8GB RAM and 128GB storage retails for Rs 19,999.
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Fitbit known for its fitness bands and smartwatches is planning to shift supply chain resources to make emergency ventilators. The CEO of Fitbit, James Parkin conversation with CNBC, revealed that the ventilators will be used to treat critical COVID-19 patients.
Fitbit will also be submitting the technology for review to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the coming weeks, according to the report. Fitbit said a team in the US has already started working on the ventilators in consultation with physicans from Massachusetts General Brigham and Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU), among others.
One of the big advantages Fitbit has, according to Park, is the infrastructure and manufacturing capability required is already available. “We already make 10 million (wearable) devices per year, and we plan to leverage that to make deliver product at whatever volumes are needed,” he said.
Fitbit is not the only one planning on manufacturing emergency ventilators, however. US space agency NASA have made a low-cost ventilator specifically for COVID-19 patients while General Motors and Ford have opened up manufacturing space for ventilator companies to produce more.
COVID-19 cases worldwide stands at 4.6 million with over 3.1 lakh succumbing to the infectious disease.
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For years we’ve been using the phrase “gone viral” to describe something that becomes wildly popular on the internet. But it strikes a different note in the middle of a global pandemic, especially when the viral content is about an actual virus that is killing people. It’s even worse when you’re talking about “viral” content containing dangerous misinformation and conspiratorial thinking about such a virus—like Plandemic, the documentary that got millions of views on Facebook and YouTube last week before the platforms started removing it.
These past few months I’ve started catching myself whenever I write or speak about something “going viral,” searching for another way to put it. A couple of weeks ago, I started wondering whether we should even be using the word in this figurative way at all anymore. Turns out I am not alone.
“I’ve stopped myself with that expression,” Peter Sokolowski, a lexicographer and editor at large at the dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster, told me. Then Sokolowski asked one of his colleagues, computational linguist Ben Mericli, to help figure out whether other people were pulling back on using the internet sense of “viral” as well.
To do that, Mericli picked four phrases that usually refer to biological viruses (viral disease, viral infection, viral load, viral fever) and four phrases that usually refer to internet content (go viral, viral video, viral post, viral photo). He looked at their frequency in a large database of news articles from January 1 to April 30 this year and then compared that with the same period of time in 2019.
The results were pretty clear: figurative use of “viral” has clearly decreased this year as literal uses of “virus” have gone way up. “Since the outbreak, viral has just been used more often in general, with the increase owed entirely to literal use,” he said in an email. “So in that sense I suppose it’s even more striking that the figurative numbers are down.”
Although it seems logical, this decrease isn’t actually a given: plenty of words with medical or epidemiological origins are able to cohabitate in our language with their original or literal meanings, Sokolowski said. For example, both laughter and a disease can be “contagious” or “infectious.” Sometimes people don’t even realize they’re using a word with such roots.
“When people say vitriol they don’t know they’re echoing a chemical compound that burns human skin,” he said (vitriol was originally a term for sulfuric acid). But “viral” is different; the meanings are related but not the same. We have viral stories about viral infections, and we know what both mean. “It’s possible that these two words are used in such similar contexts in similar writing that it is a bad choice,” Sokolowski said.
But as I spoke to other people about their own usage, I realized that whether the current situation lasts or not, there are other reasons to question whether “viral” is appropriate language for content on the internet.
“Viral” outrage, “viral” videos, “viral” posts, and “viral” moments have been part of the language of internet culture since its beginnings. The term itself comes from viral marketing, which started in pre-social-media times with advertising agencies that promoted whisper campaigns or tried to manufacture word of mouth. But once it shifted online, “virality” dropped the connotation of having been engineered by people who were experts at getting your attention and became something more accessible and democratic: a flash cartoon spread because it was funny, a fail video because it triggered schadenfreude, a blog post because it was insightful. “Viral” became a way of implicitly signifying that something was worthy on its own merits of sharing, of media coverage, and of your attention.
But this sense of emergent, authentic popularity isn’t necessarily real: algorithms incentivize content that people are going to engage with, accelerating its spread, and people have gotten really good at manipulating how social media works in order to spread bad or potentially dangerous material. There are plenty of examples, and despite efforts to stop the flow of extreme views and misinformation, the strategies designed to hijack your attention keep working. Deep down, people should know this by now.
Plandemic spread from the antivaccine fringes because there was a deliberate push for attention by coronavirus conspiracy theorists—who exploited the way social-media culture is intended to function. They were wildly successful. For the past several weeks, well-known antivaccine personalities have been attracting millions of views by giving interviews to other YouTubers with bigger followings, creating content that boosts right-wing outrage about the lockdown, and then using their well-established online networks to get that content shared widely.
Whitney Phillips, an assistant professor of communication and rhetorical studies at Syracuse University, researches how misinformation and extreme ideas are amplified to reach bigger and bigger audiences, particularly by media coverage. She co-wrote a book with Ryan Milner this year that employs ecological metaphors—for instance, pollution—to help explain the digital universe in which bad information spreads.
“We need to think differently about our information ecosystem,” Phillips told me. “The metaphors we use can help shape our thinking on our responsibility.”
“Viral” could be a good metaphor for the spread of misinformation, Phillips told me, if only people used it correctly. “But they’re not,” she said. And that’s particularly true for the journalists who produce stories about trending misinformation.
“There’s this tendency to talk about it as if we stand outside it,” Phillips said. But we don’t: “If you’re writing a story about a particular disinformation campaign, you become a carrier for that virus.” Same goes for those who share it, whether to endorse, mock, or condemn. In other words, people may think they’re protected from the potential harm that misinformation on the internet can bring, but many are asymptomatic carriers of that information into spaces where it can devastate.
“There’s no PPE,” Phillips said. “It doesn’t exist. There’s nothing to protect you when you write about it and read about it.”
The discomfort that I’m feeling describing something like Plandemic as viral, then, has some grounding. But it’s not that the word itself is bad, or even that it’s an inherently insensitive metaphor, although it may feel that way right now. The problem stems from how we’ve fooled ourselves into believing that “virality” is something we can observe without being part of—that we’re immune to the problem of dangerous misinformation if we don’t believe it, when in fact we are the carriers helping it spread.
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Gartner survey of IT leaders forecasts 8% YoY decline in global IT spending to $3.46T in 2020, vs. $3.76T in 2019, as budgets are slashed due to the pandemic — Another week brings another clear sign that CIOs are making deep budget cuts in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The latest beta version of WhatsApp for Android now comes with Facebook Messenger Rooms. You can now participate in video calls with 50 other people on the popular messaging service. The video conferencing option was made globally available on Facebook and on the Messenger app as well, and depending on which country you are in, it has started rolling out for WhatsApp too. According to WABetaInfo, you will need to download WhatsApp for Android beta 2.20.163 to access the service before it rolls out to your country.
If the service has been rolled out to your country, it will pop up as Rooms on a chat window under the chat sheet. It will appear on the same menu that lets users share documents, location, contacts etc. All you need to do is click on the menu and if it has been rolled out to your location, it will show up there as a Rooms option. You can also access the feature in the Calls tab on WhatsApp for Android beta where you will notice an option for you to create a Room option when clicking on the calling button.
It looks like, for now, you will be directed to the Messenger app from WhatsApp for Android beta, which is easier to manage when it comes to end-to-end encryption. As of now, the option is not available on WhatsApp for iOS but the feature should show up soon enough. Another option for WhatsApp users to video chat is on the app itself as WhatsApp group video call does support 8 different users. You can read more about that story here. WhatsApp has also seen highly forwarded messages drop by about 70 per cent after the new limit was announced. You can read more about that here. And, finally, if you want to use Dark Mode on the desktop version of Facebook, you can do so here.
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Analysis of ten years of cryptocurrency discussions and funding data shows repeated cycles of rising crypto activity followed by eventual “crypto winters” — People who've been in crypto for a long time view the space as evolving in cycles, alternating between periods of high activity and “crypto winters.”
Multiple supercomputers in some EU countries were hacked this week with crypto mining malware via compromised SSH credentials; evidence suggests a single actor — Confirmed infections have been reported in the UK, Germany, and Switzerland. Another suspected infection was reported in Spain.
A nonprofit founded by privacy advocate Max Schrems has filed a complaint against Google on behalf of an Austrian citizen, claiming Android Ad ID violates GDPR — Claims consent was neither informed, nor specific, nor free - but Google says it cannot identify a user from the ID
Reuters : SpaceX's S-1 excerpts list “manufacturing our own GPUs” among the “substantial capital expenditures” it is undertaking, wit...
