Tech News - Data

Facebook has been in the bad books of the lawmakers and privacy experts because of its data privacy issues and controversial business decisions. This month, Facebook came under the light for using users’ phone numbers for marketing, advertising and making users searchable by their phone numbers across the social network’s different platforms. And it seems all ain’t well at Facebook! Right after the recent investigation report by New York Times, yesterday Facebook opened up about a major blunder of exposing millions of user passwords in a plain text, soon after Security journalist, Brian Krebs first reported about this issue. https://twitter.com/fbnewsroom/status/1108762595987644418 Facebook confessed that it had kept millions of user passwords in a ‘readable format’. Facebook’s engineers and other employees who had access to the company’s internal systems could see the plaintext passwords. Facebook found out in January during the company’s routine security review, that some user passwords were being stored in a readable format within their internal data storage systems. Last year, after Alex Stamos, ex-Chief Security Officer at Facebook resigned from the company, Facebook stated that no one would replace Stamos. Facebook decided to not have a central point (CSO) but instead depend on the security teams, basically having no head leading the security team. In an interview with KrebsOnSecurity, Scott Renfro, Facebook software engineer said, “The company (Facebook) wasn’t ready to talk about specific numbers, such as the number of Facebook employees who could have accessed the data.” He further added, “We’ve not found any cases so far in our investigations where someone was looking intentionally for passwords, nor have we found signs of misuse of this data. In this situation what we’ve found is these passwords were inadvertently logged but that there was no actual risk that’s come from this. We want to make sure we’re reserving those steps and only force a password change in cases where there’s definitely been signs of abuse.” Facebook’s login systems are designed to mask the passwords and thereby make them unreadable. This issue has been fixed and the company will notify the users whose passwords were stored in the plain text format. Facebook’s blog post reads, “To be clear, these passwords were never visible to anyone outside of Facebook and we have found no evidence to date that anyone internally abused or improperly accessed them. We estimate that we will notify hundreds of millions of Facebook Lite users, tens of millions of other Facebook users, and tens of thousands of Instagram users. Facebook Lite is a version of Facebook predominantly used by people in regions with lower connectivity.” In a statement to Krebs on Security, a senior Facebook employee told that around 600 million passwords were stored in plain text, and some credentials have been stored in this way since 2012. Facebook stated that no passwords were exposed externally and the company didn’t find any evidence of abuse till date. Facebook has suggested a few steps that users can keep their account secure. Users can change their password in settings on Facebook and Instagram. Facebook suggests that its users avoid reusing passwords across different services. Users have been advised to pick strong and complex passwords for their accounts. Further Facebook recommends that users enable a security key or two-factor authentication in order to protect their Facebook account by using a third party authentication app. This way, whenever a user logs in with his/her password, Facebook will ask for a security code or ask the user to tap their security key to verify. Users are now questioning Facebook’s IT auditors and are wondering what it took the audit team this long to identify this security flaw. According to few others, Facebook opened up about this only because Kerbs on Security highlighted it, otherwise, the company would have kept it as a secret. https://twitter.com/zackwhittaker/status/1108763493392662529 Users are angry and according to them, Facebook is only concerned about their profits and don’t care about its users. Facebook has emphasized that this was an accident and unintentional. One of the users has complained that her account got hacked and she will be losing all of her content there. https://twitter.com/ashleej53189596/status/1108921181925715969 Irrespective of whether this password exposure was intentional or not, it is undeniable that Facebook has a long way to go in terms of rebuilding trust and working on its products, policies and business decisions from a safety and security perspective. To know more about this news, check out Facebook’s official announcement. Facebook takes an initiative against discriminative ads on its platform Are the lawmakers and media being really critical towards Facebook? Two top executives leave Facebook soon after the pivot to privacy announcement

On Wednesday, European authorities fined Google 1.49 billion euros for antitrust violations in online advertising and it seems to be the third antitrust fine by the European Union against Google since 2017. As per the regulators,  Google had imposed unfair terms on companies that used its search bar on their websites in Europe. Google has been abusing its power in its Android mobile phone operating system, shopping comparison services, and now search adverts. Last year, EU competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager had fined Google €4.34 billion for using its Android mobile operating system for unfairly keeping its rivals away in the mobile phone market. Two years ago, Google was fined 2.4 billion euros for unfairly favoring its own shopping services over those of its rivals. Newspaper websites or blog aggregators usually have a search function embedded to them. When a user searches something on this search function, the website provides search results and search adverts that appear alongside the search result. Google uses AdSense for Search, that provides the search adverts to the owner of the publisher websites. Google acts as an advertising broker, between advertisers and website owners that provide the space. AdSense also works as an online search advertising broker platform. Google has been at the top in online search advertising intermediation in the European Economic Area (EEA), with a market share of more than 70% from 2006 to 2016. Last year Google held nearly 75.8% and this year it’s already 77.8%. There is constant growth happening in Google’s search ad market. And it is impossible for competitors such as Microsoft and Yahoo to sell advertising space in Google's own search engine results pages. So, they need to work with third-party websites to grow their business and compete with Google. In 2006, Google had included exclusivity clauses in its contracts that prohibit the publishers from placing any search adverts from competitors on their search results pages. In March 2009, Google started to replace the exclusivity clauses with “Premium Placement” clauses. According to these clauses, the publishers had to reserve the most profitable space on their search results pages for Google's adverts and further request a minimum number of Google adverts. This, in turn, affected Google's competitors as they got restricted from placing their search adverts in the most visible and clickable parts of the websites' search results pages. It got more difficult for the competitors when Google included the clauses that would require publishers to seek written approval from Google before making any changes to the way in which the rival adverts were displayed. Google has control over how attractive the competing search adverts would be. Google also imposed an exclusive supply obligation, which would prevent competitors from placing any search adverts on the most significant websites. The company gave the most valuable positions to its adverts and also controlled the performance of the rivals’ adverts. European Commission found that Google's conduct harmed competition and consumers, and affected innovation. Google might face civil actions before the courts of the Member States for damages suffered by any person or business because of its anti-competitive behaviour. To know more about this news, check out the official press release. Google announces Stadia, a cloud-based game streaming service, at GDC 2019 Google is planning to bring Node.js support to Fuchsia Google Open-sources Sandboxed API, a tool that helps in automating the process of porting existing C and C++ code    

It was just yesterday when the employees of Kickstarter, an American crowd-funding platform for creative projects, announced that they are forming a labor union called Kickstarter United, to secure more rights for the firm’s employees. Kickstarter could be the first major tech company comprising a union representation in the US. Today, Perry Chen, CEO, Kickstarter announced that he is stepping down from his role as a CEO at Kickstarter. Chen stated in an open letter on Kickstarter’s blog that he's going to focus more on the high-level and long-term goals within the company in his role as Chairman of the board. Chen notes that Kickstarter has managed to accomplish a lot in just ten years. For instance, the firm has successfully funded nearly 160,000 projects from all over the world and have pledged to over $4.2 billion projects. Aziz Hasan, head of Kickstarter’s Design & Product teams, will be now handling the daily responsibilities as an ‘Interim CEO’. The Kickstarter PBC board will be working with Aziz over the next weeks and months to make his role as an Interim CEO permanent. BuzzFeed had reported earlier last year in April that after Chen returned back to the role of CEO in 2017, about 50 out of 120 Kickstarter employees had left the company. Out of these, seven of the eight members were a part of the firm’s executive team. “Chen strongly exerted his will on the company — making sudden changes to planned-out Kickstarter features, scrapping project timelines at the last minute, forcing out highly respected employees, and trying to shake up office culture in ways that struck the rank and file as simply bizarre”, mentioned BuzzFeed. Also, As first reported by the Verge, Kickstarter Union states that the firm overall has failed at manifesting its values within the workplace. The Union hopes to encourage “solidarity, transparency, and accountability; a seat at the table.” “It’s been a true honor to serve as CEO for the first five years of this company and again for the last two...10 is just the beginning. And I cannot wait to see what the next 10 years of Kickstarter will bring”, states Chen. You can check out Chen’s official letter here. Dr. Fei Fei Li, Google’s AI Cloud head steps down amidst speculations; Dr. Andrew Moore to take her place Linus Torvalds is sorry for his ‘hurtful behavior’, is taking ‘a break (from the Linux Community) to get help’ Vim-go creator, Faith Arslan, takes an “indefinite sabbatical” from all his open source projects as he’s burnt out

Yesterday, the team at Facebook announced changes in how the platform manages ads related to housing, employment, and credit on the platform. According to the team at Facebook, “These changes are the result of historic settlement agreements with leading civil rights organizations and ongoing input from civil rights experts.” This announcement comes when the report related to the investigation on Facebook by The New York Times got published. The announcement reads, “One of our top priorities is protecting people from discrimination on Facebook.” https://twitter.com/fbnewsroom/status/1108065626340364288 One of the US’ top housing civil rights organizations, the National Fair Housing Alliance (NFHA),  the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Communication Workers of America (CWA) and other private parties, had filed litigation against Facebook. These parties wanted to have stronger action towards protection against abuse. According to Facebook’s blog post, civil rights leaders and experts who oversee the Facebook civil rights audit have also raised their concerns regarding this issue. Facebook has taken the concerns of civil rights leaders and have started working towards reviewing their ad tool. Facebook’s blog post reads, “We take their concerns seriously and, as part of our civil rights audit, engaged the noted civil rights law firm Relman, Dane & Colfax to review our ads tools and help us understand what more we could do to guard against misuse.” Though Facebook’s policies prohibit advertisers from using their tools to discriminate, the platform has removed targeting ads related to protected classes such as race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and religion. https://twitter.com/noamscheiber/status/1108066283596251136 As there is a history of discrimination in the areas of housing, employment, and credit but according to Facebook, this harmful behavior should not happen through their ads. Facebook has announced certain changes as part of their settlements with the NFHA, ACLU, CWA and other groups to protect people on Facebook. Changes announced by Facebook The ones who want to run housing, employment or credit ads now won’t be allowed to target by age, gender or zip code. The advertisers who are offering housing, employment and credit opportunities will now have a smaller set of targeted categories for using in their campaigns. Multicultural affinity targeting won’t be available for these ads. Any detailed targeting option that describes or appears to be related to protected classes won’t available. Facebook is working on a tool which will help users to search and view all current housing ads in the US that are targeted to different places across the country. Facebook’s blog post reads, “Housing, employment and credit ads are crucial to helping people buy new homes, start great careers, and gain access to credit. They should never be used to exclude or harm people. Getting this right is deeply important to me and all of us at Facebook because inclusivity is a core value for our company.” To know more about this news, check out Facebook’s blog post. Two top executives leave Facebook soon after the pivot to privacy announcement Facebook tweet explains ‘server config change’ for 14-hour outage on all its platforms Facebook under criminal investigations for data sharing deals: NYT report

Facebook has constantly been in news since quite some time now for its data leaks and data privacy concerns. The recent Christchurch attacks got live streamed on Facebook which has already given rise to a lot of controversy about the working of Facebook. Last month, the company came under the radar because of the deplorable working conditions of content moderators. Facebook’s content reviewers were affected by the disturbing content on the platform. The reviewers are affected to an extent that they are tried to overcome their PTSD by having sex and getting into drugs at work, reports The Verge. In January this year, advocacy groups such as Open Market Institute, Color of Change, and the Electronic Privacy Information Center among others, wrote to the Federal Trade Commission, requesting the government to intervene into how Facebook operates. FTC has been investigating on Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal based on whether the sharing of data with Cambridge Analytica and other privacy disputes violated a 2011 agreement with the FTC. According to a report by TechCrunch, Facebook has paid teenagers to spy on their behavior and the company has gone to an extent where it has been asking users to screenshot their Amazon order history page. As per a report by The Wall Street Journal, Facebook has also collected highly sensitive data through the back doors of other apps, such as ovulation trackers, in order to target ads at users who don’t even have their Facebook accounts linked to those apps. They are even targeting ads at users who aren’t on Facebook. As per a report by The New York Times, Facebook gave 60 phone device makers direct access to its users’ data and this action by Facebook is under criminal investigation. David N. Cicilline, Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law writes in a report, “After each misdeed becomes public, Facebook alternates between denial, hollow promises and apology campaigns. But nothing changes. That’s why, as chairman of the House Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law, I am calling for an investigation into whether Facebook’s conduct has violated antitrust laws.” German antitrust authorities have already issued an order against Facebook’s data collection practices. Even an investigation by the British Parliament has compared Facebook to a company of “digital gangsters” that considers itself “ahead of and beyond the law.” According to David, Facebook is a repeat offender, and when a company repeatedly goes against the laws, action needs to be taken. He further added, “This includes removing members of the company’s board, or even top executives, along with other changes to the company’s business model to address dysfunction at the top.” F.T.C. can also pursue other ways to fix this problem. For example, after German antitrust enforcers found that Facebook abused its dominant market position, it required Facebook to stop combining different sources of its users’ data without their consent.” On the other hand, Facebook says, The New York Times has been negative towards it. A report by Redcode states that the argument is partially correct and they have backed it by the data. As per the report by Recode, “Times’ coverage of Facebook has been, on average, almost exclusively negative since the 2016 elections, according to new data analyzed by researcher Joe Hovde, a full-time data analyst at a retail tech company.” Hovde did the analysis by including stories with “Facebook” in the article headline and summary text, and further scored the words on a scale of -5 for very negative words such as ‘curses’ unlikely to show up in the Times article, to +5 for extremely positive, using words such as superb or breathtaking. Though there are enough proofs against Facebook but only time will tell if Facebook is actually involved in deceiving the users or the media is hiding the real picture. Two top executives leave Facebook soon after the pivot to privacy announcement Facebook tweet explains ‘server config change’ for 14-hour outage on all its platforms Facebook under criminal investigations for data sharing deals: NYT report

Microsoft announced the March release of Azure Data Studio, yesterday. This latest Azure Data Studio release explores features such as preview support for PostgreSQL in Azure Data Studio,  corresponding preview PostgreSQL extension in Visual Studio Code (VS Code), and SQL Notebooks, among others. What’s new in Azure Data Studio? PostgreSQL extension for Azure Data Studio There’s new preview support for PostgreSQL in Azure Data Studio. The preview support adds on-premises and Azure Database for PostgreSQL to its existing support for SQL Server, Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Managed Instance, Azure SQL Data Warehouse, and SQL Server 2019 big data clusters. The Azure Data Studio extension for PostgreSQL comprises a Tools API service that offers data management and high performant query execution capabilities. Azure Data Studio also provides a modern, keyboard-focused PostgreSQL coding experience, that simplifies your everyday tasks. Users can also run on-demand SQL queries now such as the view and save results as text, JSON, or Excel. There’s also an extension marketplace for Azure Data Studio for developers that help them build and contribute back into the open source ecosystem. Microsoft team states that it is making the new PostgreSQL extension experience open source under the MIT license. This will allow the users to connect to all PostgreSQL databases in case they’re running on Azure (Azure Database for PostgreSQL). SQL Notebooks Using SQL Notebooks, you can easily interleave the written instructions, analysis, diagrams, and the animated GIFs using markdown. You can then add code cells with the SQL code to be executed. The SQL Notebook functionality has been built into the base of Azure Data Studio product and requires no additional extensions to connect to servers and execute the SQL result sets. These SQL notebooks can be used like any other regular query editor. You can get started with SQL notebooks just like a regular query editor. In case you’d like to use other languages such as Python, R, or Scala, you’ll be prompted to install other additional dependencies. PowerShell extension PowerShell extension from Virtual Studio (VS) Code is now featured in the Azure Data Studio marketplace. The new PowerShell extension aligns with the other automation scenarios used by the database administrators and developers. There’s an integrated terminal in Azure Data Studio that makes it easy for users to integrate PowerShell experiences with data. SQL Server dacpac extension Microsoft team mentions that it has been trying to improve the Data-Tier Application Wizard in Azure Data Studio after receiving feedback from the community. Originally shipped with the SQL Server Import extension, this feature will now be shipped as a separate extension. This is because the team plans to bring more features making it easy to use dacpacs and bacpacs in Azure Data Studio. This extension will also be included in the Admin pack for SQL Server, an extension pack that lets you quickly download the popular features from SQL Server Management Studio. Other Changes Community extension highlight: Queryplan.show The Queryplan.show extension adds integration support to visualize query plans using the community extension Queryplan.show. Visual Studio Code Refresh from 1.26.1 to 1.30.2 There have been a few refresh updates from the July release (1.26.1) to the November release (1.30.2) of VS Code. Highlights are as follows: New Settings editor UI making it easy to modify Azure Data Studio settings. Multiline search improvements. Better macOS support. SQL Server 2019 Preview extension The Microsoft team has been moving features from the SQL Server 2019 preview extension into the core Azure Data Studio tool for decades now. Here is a summary of the features moved into the core tool: Jupyter Notebook support has been moved to Azure Data Studio. Bug fixes in the External Data wizards: New schemas typed into the table mapping controls were getting lost. This is fixed now. Oracle type mappings have been updated. For more information, check out the official March release notes for Azure Data Studio. Microsoft Azure reportedly chooses Xilinx chips over Intel Altera for AI co-processors, says Bloomberg report Microsoft Azure now supports NVIDIA GPU Cloud (NGC) Microsoft Azure’s new governance DApp: An enterprise blockchain without mining

Last week, Cookiebot, a company that provides organizations cookie and online tracking consent solution, published a report named Ad Tech Surveillance on the Public Sector Web. The report highlighted that ad tech companies are pervasively tracking EU citizens who visit non-ad funded government and public sector websites. These companies are systematically tracking the online activity of EU citizens even on sites sharing sensitive health information such as pregnancy, sexual health, cancer or mental illness. How does this tracking happen? Modern websites often include multiple third-party JavaScript technologies to enable features like video players, social sharing widgets, web analytics, and galleries. These scripts in addition to providing the feature can also act as Trojan horses, opening backdoors to the website code. And, through these backdoors tech companies can insert their ad trackers. For instance, the Health Service Executive (HSE), the organization that manages the delivery of all public health services in Ireland, installed a popular social sharing tool named ShareThis on its official website. This tool automatically adds a button on each web page providing users a quick way to share information across social media platforms. But, in the background, it also acts as a “Trojan Horse” by releasing ad trackers from more than 20 ad tech companies into every web page it is installed. What were the key highlights of this report? Google tracks twice as much as any other company The report remarked Google as “the Kingpin of Tracking” revealing that the tech giant tracks more than twice as much as any other company. Google controls the top three tracking domains in the study namely YouTube.com, DoubleClick.net, and Google.com. Using the combination of these domains, Google tracks website visits to 82% of the EU’s main government websites. The report further states that YouTube automatically loaded a tracker from DoubleClick.net, Google’s primary ad serving domain, on government websites of 22 EU member states. “Tracking scripts from youtube-nocookie.com were identified on the Italian, Slovenian, Austrian and Greek government websites, which means these websites are using YouTube’s artfully-named “Privacy-Enhanced Mode” to limit tracking of their citizens. It turns out that this does not “enhance privacy” as much as they might expect,“ says the report. Tracking on government websites Cookiebot conducted “deep domain scans” on 184,683 pages of all EU official government websites and found ad trackers on 89% of these web pages. The following are the key findings when they analyzed EU government websites: Out of 28 EU member states, 25 government websites had ad trackers. The highest number of tracking companies were found on government websites of the French (52), Latvian (27), Belgian (19) and Greek (18). Spanish, German and the Dutch were at the other end of the spectrum with no commercial trackers found. Tracking on public health service sites GDPR in Article 9 clearly mentions that the processing of information related to a person’s health condition, which comes under “special categories of personal data”, should be prohibited. However, 52% of EU public health service web pages had commercial trackers. The following are the key findings when they analyzed public health service sites: Out of this 52%, the Irish health service shows 73% of their landing pages contain ad trackers. UK, Spain, France, and Italy had ad trackers on 60%, 53%, 47%, and 47% of landing pages respectively. Though Germany showed lowest ad tracking on their web pages, one-third of their landing pages had trackers. The analysis also showed that a single French webpage about abortion being monitored by 21 different companies and another German webpage about maternity leave monitored by 63 companies. To know more in detail, read the full report by Cookiebot. Google to be the founding member of CDF (Continuous Delivery Foundation) Google announces the stable release of Android Jetpack Navigation Android Q Beta is now available for developers on all Google Pixel devices

NVIDIA made a series of new announcements, yesterday. These announcements include a new and open, 3D Design Collaboration Platform called Omniverse, NVIDIA T4 GPUs coming to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), a new NVIDIA Isaac SDK, and the new Jetson computers. NVIDIA Omniverse NVIDIA Omniverse is an interactive open collaboration platform that can simplify the studio workflows for real-time graphics. NVIDIA Omniverse, announced yesterday,  has also added support for Pixar’s Universal Scene Description technology (allows information exchange about modeling, shading, animation, etc across different applications) and Material Definition Language (allows artists to exchange information about surface materials). Other features of Omniverse include watching projects unfold in real-time via Omniverse Viewer or a tool of their choice. The Omniverse Viewer offers very high-quality photorealistic images in real time by taking advantage of rasterization and offering support for NVIDIA RTX RT Cores, CUDA cores, and Tensor Core-enabled AI.    NVIDIA Isaac SDK and the new Jetson Nano Jensen Huang, NVIDIA founder, and CEO announced NVIDIA’s Isaac SDK, last week, at the GPU Technology Conference. NVIDIA’s Isaac SDK will be made publicly available as the Isaac SDK Robotics developer toolbox in April.  NVIDIA’s Isaac SDK toolbox offers developers access to Isaac applications, Gems (robot capabilities), a Robot Engine and Sim. Isaac SDK makes it easier for the developers to add AI for perception, navigation, and manipulation into next-gen models. NVIDIA Isaac SDK has Isaac Robot Engine at the core that allows developers to build modular and high-speed robotics applications, including robot reference designs. Additionally, the NVIDIA team has also decided to open source their robot hardware reference designs, including Carter autonomous delivery, Kaya, Jetson Nano, Isaac GEMs, Isaac robot engine, and Isaac Sim.  The Isaac SDK robot developer toolbox can be used to create apps using these hardware reference designs. NVIDIA also announced a new AI computer for developers, called Jetson Nano, yesterday. It is available in two versions, the $99 developer kit (for makers, developers, students, etc) and the $129 production-ready module for mass market AI products. The Jetson Nano Developer Kit is available now and the Jetson Nano module will be made available in June 2019. NVIDIA T4 GPUs NVIDIA team published a blog post yesterday stating that AWS’s new Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) G4 instances will feature NVIDIA T4 Tensor Core GPUs, in the upcoming weeks.   The new G4 instances will offer a versatile platform to its AWS customers to deploy a wide range of AI services. Customers will be able to pair the G4 instances with NVIDIA GPU acceleration software for accelerating deep learning, machine learning, and data analytics.T4 will also be supported by Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes. The new EC2 G4 instances also offer support to the next generation of computer graphics to accelerate the workflows of creative and technical professionals. T4 will also be joining other Amazon EC2 instances featuring NVIDIA GPUs, providing developers and data scientists with compute resources available to support different customer needs. Other than that, NVIDIA Research has also come out with a deep learning model called GauGAN that makes use of the generative adversarial networks, or GANs, to convert segmentation maps into lifelike images. GauGAN allows its users to draw their own segmentation maps and manipulate the scene, labeling each segment with labels such as sand, sky, sea or snow. GauGAN has been trained on million images and is able to produce convincing results using its pair of networks, namely, a generator and a discriminator. Also, the research paper behind GauGAN has been accepted as an oral presentation at the CVPR conference in June. NVIDIA announces pre-orders for the Jetson Xavier Developer Kit, an AI chip for autonomous machines at $2499 NVIDIA makes its new “brain for autonomous AI machines”, Jetson AGX Xavier Module, available for purchase NVIDIA launches GeForce Now’s (GFN) ‘recommended router’ program to enhance the overall performance and experience of GFN

Yesterday, IBM launched its Blockchain World Wire, a global blockchain network for cross-border payments that will make use of Stablecoin by U.S. dollars and cryptocurrency to make near real-time cross border financial transactions. It is based on distributed ledger technology (DLT) for regulated financial firms. IBM Blockchain World Wire is a real-time global payments network that works towards clearing and settling foreign exchange, cross border payments and remittances. Currently, this network can transfer funds to more than 50 countries using 47 digital coins backed by fiat currencies. According to IBM, World Wire is the first blockchain network of its kind to integrate payment messaging and clearing and settlement on a single unified network while allowing participants to dynamically choose from a variety of digital assets for settlement. According to a report by Cheddar, six international banks have signed letters of intent to issue their own Stablecoins backed by their national fiat currencies including Brazil’s Banco Bradesco, South Korea’s Bank Busan and the Philippines’ Rizal Commercial Banking Corporation on IBM’s Blockchain World Wire. Advantages of Blockchain World Wire Faster payment processing Blockchain World Wire provides simultaneous clearing and settlement and eliminates multiple parties processing transactions. Lower costs The World Wire comes with reduced capital requirements for cross-border transactions. Even the clearing costs have been lowered. Transparency The World Wire provides end-to-end transparency and one exchange fee between all currencies which makes it easier. If two financial institutions that are transacting agree upon using either a Stablecoin, central bank digital currency or another digital asset as the bridge asset between any two currencies then they will be provided with trade and important settlement instructions. The institutions can use their existing payment systems by connecting it to World Wire’s APIs in order to convert the first fiat currency into the digital asset. Further, the World Wire converts the digital asset into the second fiat currency, that completes the transaction. The transaction details are recorded onto an immutable blockchain for clearing purpose. Marie Wieck, General Manager, IBM Blockchain, said, “We’ve created a new type of payment network designed to accelerate remittances and transform cross-border payments to facilitate the movement of money in countries that need it most. By creating a network where financial institutions support multiple digital assets, we expect to spur innovation and improve financial inclusion worldwide.” To know more about this news, check out IBM’s official website. Google expands its Blockchain search tools, adds six new cryptocurrencies in BigQuery Public Datasets Blockchain governance and uses beyond finance – Carnegie Mellon university podcast Stable version of OpenZeppelin 2.0, a framework for smart blockchain contracts, released!

Last week, SUSE, an open-source software company that develops and sells Linux products to business customers announced that it is an independent company now. SUSE also finalized its $2.5 billion acquisition by growth investor EQT from Micro Focus. According to the official post, SUSE also claims to be “the largest independent open source company.” Novell, a software and services based company, had first acquired SUSE in 2004. Novell then got acquired by Attachmate in 2010, which was then acquired by Micro Focus in 2014. Micro Focus then turned Suse into an independent division and further sold SUSE to EQT in 2018. The newly independent SUSE has brought in addition to its team by adding new leadership roles. Enrica Angelone has joined as SUSE’s Chief Financial Officer, and Sander Huyts, director of sales at SUSE, is the new Chief Operations Officer. Thomas Di Giacomo, former CTO for SUSE, is now the president of Engineering, Product and Innovation. According to SUSE’s blog post, SUSE’s expanded team will be actively participating in communities and projects to bring open source innovation to the enterprise. Nils Brauckmann, CEO at SUSE, said, “ Our genuinely open, open source solutions, flexible business practices, lack of enforced vendor lock-in and exceptional service are more critical to customer and partner organizations, and our independence coincides with our single-minded focus on delivering what is best for them.” He further added, “Our ability to consistently meet these market demands creates a cycle of success, momentum and growth that allows SUSE to continue to deliver the innovation customers need to achieve their digital transformation goals and realize the hybrid and multi-cloud workload management they require to power their own continuous innovation, competitiveness, and growth.” SUSE’s new move is towards capitalizing on market dynamics, creating tremendous value for customers and partners. SUSE’s independent status and EQT’s backing will enable the company’s continued expansion towards driving growth in SUSE’s core business and in emerging technologies, both organically and through add-on acquisitions. As the company has been owned by EQT, so according to few users it’s still not independent. One of the users commented on HackerNews, “Being owned by a Private Equity fund can really not be described as being "independent". Such funds have a typical investment horizon of 5 - 7 years, with potential exits being an IPO, a strategic sale (to a bigger company) or a sale to another PE fund, with the strategic sale probably more typical. In the meantime the fund will impose strict growth targets and strong cost cuts.” Another comment reads, “Yeah, I'm not sure how anyone can call private equity "independent". Our whole last year had selling the company as our top priority. Not something I'd choose in a truly independent position.” To know more about this news, check out SUSE’s official announcement. Google introduces Season of Docs that will connect technical writers and mentors with open source projects Microsoft open sources ‘Accessibility Insights for Web’, a chrome extension to help web developers fix their accessibility issues MongoDB withdraws controversial Server Side Public License from the Open Source Initiative’s approval process  

Spotify announced earlier this week that it has filed an antitrust complaint against Apple with the European Commission (EC), claiming that Apple’s rules on the App Store ‘limits choice’ and ‘ stifle innovation’ at the expense of user experience. Spotify states that Apple receives a 30% tax on purchases made through Apple’s payment system from Spotify and other similar digital services. “If we pay this tax, it would force us to artificially inflate the price of our Premium membership well above the price of Apple Music. And to keep our price competitive for our customers, that isn’t something we can do”, states Daniel Ek, CEO, Spotify in a blog post. Ek mentions that in case Spotify decides not to use Apple’s payment system, then a series of technical and experience limited restrictions are applied by Apple. For instance, Customer communication on the app is restricted including its outreach efforts beyond the app. Also, they are not able to send emails to Apple customers in certain cases. Apart from that, Apple also blocks the experience enhancing upgrades on the app on a routine basis. Spotify is not the only one to have stood up against Apple tax. Many companies have chastised and spoken against Apple tax. For instance, companies like Netflix Inc. and video game makers Epic Games Inc. and Valve Corp also complained about the cost of Tax that Apple charges, last year. However, Spotify is the first company to file a complaint against Apple tax that is registered with the EU, a regulatory body that ensures fair competition across the market. Ek states that Spotify is not looking for any special treatment and wants Apple to treat them like other apps on the App Store, including  Uber or Deliveroo, who are neither imposed any Apple tax nor do these apps have the same restrictions as Spotify. Ek also mentioned a list of requests to bring about a change in rules laid out by Apple for the app store. These are as follows: Apps should compete fairly on the merits, and not based on who owns the App Store. All apps should be subject to the same fair set of restrictions (including Apple music). Consumers should be offered a real choice of payment systems. They should not be forced to use systems that have discriminatory tariffs associated with them like Apple’s. App stores should not dictate communications between different app services and users, by placing unfair restrictions on marketing. Spotify has also launched a separate ‘Time to Play Fair microsite’ that is dedicated to making users aware of Apple’s ‘anti-competitive behavior’.  The site illustrates the complaints by Spotify extensively. Horacio Gutierrez, General Counsel, and VP, Business & Legal Affairs at Spotify, confirmed that Spotify has submitted an “economic analysis” to the European Commission, that demonstrates how Apple’s policies have impacted its business. “We are confident that the evidence will show that even though we’ve been successful as a company, and have grown our business, we could have been even more successful if it were not for the restrictions that Apple has placed on our business,” said Guiterrez. Apple’s response to the complaint Apple has responded back to Spotify, addressing the claims of the complaint on a Press release published, yesterday. Apple states that Spotify wants to leverage all the benefits of the App Store without making any Contributions to Marketplace, and it wouldn’t be the business that it is today without the App Store. “We share Spotify’s love of music and their vision of sharing it with the world. Where we differ is how you achieve that goal. Underneath the rhetoric, Spotify’s aim is to make more money off others’ work”, states Apple. It also states that the only contribution that it requires is for the digital goods and services that are purchased inside the app with their secure in-app purchase system. Apple agrees that the revenue share is 30 percent but it further states that this is only applicable for the first year of an annual subscription and then drops to 15 percent in the years after. “The only time we have requested adjustments is when Spotify has tried to sidestep the same rules that every other app follows. Just this week, Spotify sued music creators after a decision.. required Spotify to increase its royalty payments. This isn’t just wrong, it represents a real, meaningful and damaging step backward for the music industry”, says Apple. Public reaction the news is varied with some sympathizing with Spotify, while others tweeting against Spotify and in support of Apple: https://twitter.com/cassiusdarrow/status/1106504786340253696 https://twitter.com/AvramNate/status/1106042615592570880 https://twitter.com/TonyXLR2/status/1105814168664506368 https://twitter.com/IsleJoseph/status/1105819045218144257 Rene Ritchie, a Canadian blogger, Youtuber, and editor in chief of iMore, also posted a video on his YouTube channel, where he took a deep dive into the Spotify action against Apple in the EU, and called Spotify’s move as “kinda victimy”. Spotify acquires Gimlet and Anchor to expand its podcast services Spotify releases Chartify, a new data visualization library in python for easier chart creation Spotify has “one of the most intricate uses of JavaScript in the world,” says former engineer

Yesterday, Senator Brian Schatz and Senator Roy Blunt introduced a new bill titled, “Commercial Facial Recognition Privacy Act of 2019”. This bill would prohibit companies from using facial recognition technology to identify an end user for different purposes without the user’s consent. According to Blunt, “Consumers are increasingly concerned about how their data is being collected and used, including data collected through facial recognition technology. That’s why we need guardrails to ensure that, as this technology continues to develop, it is implemented responsibly." Brian Schatz said, "Our faces are our identities. They’re personal. So the responsibility is on companies to ask people for their permission before they track and analyze their faces." He further added, "Our bill makes sure that people are given the information and – more importantly  – the control over how their data is shared with companies using facial recognition technology.” The facial recognition tech providers would have to meet security standards set by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. In December 2018, Microsoft President Brad Smith, published a blog post, requesting governments to regulate the rapid evolution of Facial Recognition technology. He stated, “Unless we act, we risk waking up five years from now to find that facial recognition services have spread in ways that exacerbate societal issues. By that time, these challenges will be much more difficult to bottle back up.” “Schatz and Blunt's bill appears to propose some similar guidelines, but it does not address the use of facial recognition technology by law enforcement — a hot-button issue as police departments across the country implement the technology in their efforts to track and identify potential criminals”, The Hill reports. Regarding the bill, Brad Smith said, “Facial recognition technology creates many new benefits for society and should continue to be developed. Its use, however, needs to be regulated to protect against acts of bias and discrimination, preserve consumer privacy, and uphold our basic democratic freedoms.” To know more visit the official release page, Commercial Facial Recognition Privacy Act of 2019. FastMail expresses issues with Australia’s Assistance and Access bill U.S. Senator introduces a bill that levies jail time and hefty fines for companies violating data breaches Lawmakers introduce new Consumer privacy bill and Malicious Deep Fake Prohibition Act to support consumer privacy and battle deepfakes

Facebook’s top executives, Chris Cox, Head of Products and Chris Daniels, Head of Whatsapp, have announced their exit from the company. It marks yet another highest-level departure at the tech giant amid a controversial shift to combine its various social media platforms. Cox’s unexpected departure, which he and Zuckerberg announced in separate Facebook posts on Thursday, comes months after Cox was promoted in a major reorganization. In May last year, Cox was put in charge of Facebook’s “family of apps,” including Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp and Facebook itself — which together have over 2.7 billion users worldwide. These apps have been distinct until recently, when Zuckerberg announced plans to unify them with a new focus on privacy. “It is with great sadness I share with you that after thirteen years, I’ve decided to leave the company,” Cox wrote in his post. “Since I was twenty-three, I’ve poured myself into these walls. This place will forever be a part of me.” Another longtime executive, Chris Daniels also announced his exit on Thursday. Chris moved upward in the reorganization last May and took over WhatsApp after running Internet.org, the company’s philanthropic project to promote global Internet access. “At this point, we have made real progress on many issues and we have a clear plan for our apps, centered around making private messaging, stories and groups the foundation of the experience, including enabling encryption and interoperability across our services,” Zuckerberg wrote. “As we embark on this next major chapter, Chris has decided now is the time to step back from leading these teams.” In his blog post, Zuckerberg said Cox had told him several years ago that he planned to move but that Cox decided to hold off on leaving until the company made more progress combating misinformation and Russian interference — controversies that erupted in the wake of the 2016 election. Zuckerberg said he does not plan to replace Cox. The role of integrating the apps will go to another longtime Zuckerberg deputy and former Head of Growth, Javier Olivan, he said. Cox, who dropped out of a Stanford University graduate degree program to work with Zuckerberg when the company had just 15 engineers, was widely seen as one of the most popular and capable executives at the social network. Cox was a sounding board for Zuckerberg on product ideas. He launched Facebook’s flagship scrolling news feed nearly a decade ago and ran human resources before he was promoted to run the Facebook app in 2014. Cox is one of many senior executives to leave Facebook since the controversies erupted. The company’s Head of Policy Elliot Schrage, its General Counsel Colin Stretch, its Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos, along with the heads of WhatsApp and Instagram and its top communications executive, had all announced their exits from the company in the last few years. But the highest profile departures, including Cox, are people in Zuckerberg’s inner circle who have been at Facebook since the earliest days of the company and became fabulously wealthy after the social network’s $104 billion public offering. Cox hinted at the challenges of recent years in his goodbye post. “For over a decade, I’ve been sharing the same message that Mark and I have always believed: social media’s history is not yet written, and its effects are not neutral,” he wrote. “It is tied up in the richness and complexity of social life. As its builders we must endeavor to understand its impact — all the good, and all the bad — and take up the daily work of bending it towards the positive, and towards the good. This is our greatest responsibility.” Facebook tweet explains ‘server config change’ for 14-hour outage on all its platforms Facebook under criminal investigations for data sharing deals: NYT report Facebook family of apps hits 14 hours outage, longest in its history

Yesterday the team at Slack, a platform that helps businesses communicate and collaborate, removed 28 accounts because of their association with hate groups. Slack’s blog post reads, “The use of Slack by hate groups runs counter to everything we believe in at Slack and is not welcome on our platform. When we are made aware of an organization using Slack for illegal, harmful, or other prohibited purposes, we will investigate and take appropriate action and we are updating our terms of service to make that more explicit.” This initiative by Slack comes when just a few days ago Slack messages got leaked by a non-profit media group, Unicorn Riot where members of Identity Evropa promote their racist views. Big tech companies like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter have been also working in the direction of removing hate speech and racist comments. Discord, the voice and text chat platform for gamers has also taken steps in this direction after thousands of private Discord chats getting leaked from Identity Evropa and the organizers of the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally started doing rounds. The members from Identity Evropa are not considering Discord post the ban by the platform but are instead relying on Slack. A user named Matt told TPM, “Obviously, we won’t be coming back to Discord due to the widespread bans.” In a statement to The Hill, Slack made it clear that their team did not discover the hate groups by looking through users' groups or messages. In a statement to The Hill, a Slack spokesperson said, “We want to be clear that the privacy of our customer data is sacrosanct. In this case, we were informed of the possible use of Slack by hate groups and we were able to determine their affiliation on an organizational level." Few users are happy and feel relieved by this initiative by Slack. https://twitter.com/PredativePulse/status/1106270564350652416 Few others are still skeptical about the platform and are wondering if there are more such hate group channels on the platform. https://twitter.com/Charlottealaine/status/1106181956461621248 Even activists have raised their voice on this issue. Shannon Coulter, an American marketing consultant, and activist tweeted about her concern about this issue. She has a bigger question to platforms like Facebook and YouTube regarding their content. Coulter wants that these platforms take certain action towards platforms that broadcast violent content. According to her, these companies are just focusing on generating revenue based on their real-time content but aren’t much concerned about the right practices and their impact on society. https://twitter.com/shannoncoulter/status/1106403758571843584 To know more about this news in detail, check out Slack’s official blog post. Slack confidentially files to go public Airtable, a Slack-like coding platform for non-techies, raises $100 million in funding Slack has terminated the accounts of some Iranian users, citing U.S. sanctions as the reason  

Facebook has said a "server configuration change" was to blame for an 14-hour outage of its services, which took down the Facebook social media service, its Messenger and WhatsApp, and Instagram apps. "Yesterday, as a result of a server configuration change, many people had trouble accessing our apps and services. We've now resolved the issues and our systems are recovering. We’re very sorry for the inconvenience and appreciate everyone’s patience," said Facebook in a tweet. The outage started at around 09:00 Pacific Time (16:00 UTC) on Wednesday and wasn't fully resolved until 23:00 (06:00 UTC) – an extraordinary delay for a service used by billions globally. That brief and vague explanation – with no promise of an in-depth report to come – has left users and observers surprised and disappointed. Any company providing a service of similar size and impact, such as a network operator, would be expected to provide constant updates and make its executives available to publicly explain what went wrong. It's not like Facebook is allergic to revealing technical details about itself: it has a whole sub-site dedicated to its internal software and data-center engineering work, though there's not a word about its latest outage. In contrast, Google suffered a cloud platform outage, too, for about four hours yesterday, and its postmortem is detailed: a key part of its backend storage system was overloaded with requests after changes were made to counter a sudden demand for space to hold object metadata, ultimately causing services to stall. Similarly in January Microsoft faced an outage of approximately 4 hours which affected its various cloud services. They identified it as third party network provider issue affecting authentication to Microsoft accounts and they immediately shifted them to an alternate network provider. Further providing the users a detailed report on the outage issue. Unlike almost every other company running a communications service for millions of users, Facebook does not even provide a system status dashboard for the public. It has a dashboard for app developers. "We are currently experiencing issues that may cause some API requests to take longer or fail unexpectedly. We are investigating the issue and working on a resolution," it noted a few hours ago, somewhat stating the bleeding obvious. While communications companies go out of their way to reach out to media outlets and explain major multi-hour outages in order to maintain public confidence in their network. Facebook seems to feel no obligation to do so. We need fair explanation! Digging into the limited explanation of a "server configuration change" as the source of the problem, that terminology is so vague as to be useless: What sort of change? On what servers? What was the change intended to achieve? Was it tested beforehand? Was it rolled out gradually, or suddenly across all regions – and if the latter, why? Why was a rollback not immediately initiated? And if it was, why didn't it work? Why did it take 14 hours to resolve? These some are questions that you would expect a huge technology company to provide answers to. Instead, the best explanation we've found is a hypothetical rundown by Facebook's former chief information security officer Alex Stamos who assumes that Facebook engineers did initiate an automated rollback but that "the automated system doesn't know how to handle the problem, and gets stuck in some kind of loop that causes more damage. Humans have to step in, stop it, and restart a complex web of interdependent services on hundreds of thousands of systems." Just this month, US Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) made the argument that services like Facebook, Google, and Amazon have become so large and so fundamental in the digital era that they should be viewed – and legislated as – "platform utilities" and the revenue making aspects (products, ads etc) of these companies should be broken off as separate entities. When Facebook even refuses to provide a proper explanation for a 14-hour outage, the argument that there needs to be legislative oversight only grows stronger. Related to this, yesterday it was revealed by New York Times that Facebook is being investigated by a grand jury for possible criminal charges for sharing people's private data with other companies without seeking the consent of, or even informing, those that were affected. Is there more to this than meets the eye? The other big question is how a "server configuration change" led to not just Facebook but also its Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram services going down. One theory which could float around is that Facebook has either connected them up or attempted to connect them up at a low level, merging them into one broad platform. In January, CEO Mark Zuckerberg had announced that his instant-chat applications and social network be intertwined. Was the outage as a result of Facebook trying to combine systems and get ahead of regulators, especially when this month, an open debate opened up over whether Facebook's takeover of Instagram and WhatsApp should be rolled back? The timing of it all makes today’s breaking news of two important top executives leaving Facebook in less than a year, even more enigmatic. CEO Mark Zuckerberg writes about the departure of Chris Cox, Chief Product Officer and Chris Daniel, Whatsapp Vice President on his blog. We wait and watch for Facebook to come up with detailed explanation though very much unlikely of them. Facebook family of apps hits 14 hours outage, longest in its history Facebook under criminal investigations for data sharing deals: NYT report Facebook deletes and then restores Warren’s campaign ads after she announced plans to break up Facebook