The Royal College of Psychiatrists wants social media data in order to reduce rates of suicide and self-harm among young people. Photograph: Alamy Social media firms such as Facebook and Instagram should be forced to hand over data about who their users are and why they use the sites to reduce suicide among children and young people, psychiatrists have said. The call from the Royal College of Psychiatrists comes as ministers finalise plans to crack down on issues caused by people viewing unsavoury material and messages online. The college, which represents the UK’s 18,000 psychiatrists, wants the government to make social media platforms…
Author: Loknath Das
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has added new pricing options for container-based software to its marketplace service. As of 13 January, select software can be billed on demand based on new consumption units, like the number of worker nodes managed. This is in addition to existing payment options of fixed monthly charges, upfront based on contract length and time-based as you go. Contracts can also be purchases for one year or more. According to AWS, the added pricing option is available from vendors including Kasten, Solodev, Intuz and Quilt Data, with “many more [products] to be added in the coming months”.…
Look around: what is happening? Australia, AI, Ghosn, Google, Suleimani, Starlink, Trump, TikTok. The world is an eruptive flux of frequently toxic emergent behavior, and every unexpected event is laced with subtle interconnected nuances. Stephen Hawking predicted this would be “the century of complexity.” He was talking about theoretical physics, but he was dead right about technology, societies, and geopolitics too. Let’s try to define terms. How can we measure complexity? Seth Lloyd of MIT, in a paper which drily begins “The world has grown more complex recently, and the number of ways of measuring complexity has grown even faster,” proposed three…
Indie Developer Matt Stark has tweeted a video of his idea for a game on twitter. It’s what he’s callling the “Polaroid Effect,” after the once-ubiquitous instant cameras. The experimental game mechanic allows a player to take a picture of a slice of environment using a camera, then place the instant-camera picture into the world as a piece of interactive environment—physically altering the world around them into a surrealist photo collage. He first posted the concept in November 2019, but was then unsure if what he has done now was even possible. “The effect is purely visual and the player can’t physically…
With another US Presidential election on the way in 2020, we can expect the debate around fake news to once again ramp up, and become a key focus of discussion as we look at how political influence spreads online. But what if fake news isn’t actually the problem? Sure, it would be easier to be able to attribute the broader shifts in the political landscape to lies and deceit online – that would help explain the more polarizing movements which seem to be gaining momentum, often despite significant evidence against many of their key claims. But various investigations – including…
No one likes to be audited. On its own, the word “audit” implies wrongdoing or, at the least, carelessness. Opening the books particularly stings when the subject of an audit believes that every obligation has been met in good faith. An audit suggests the reviewing party sees only an act of bad faith. But for software vendors, an audit has often been the traditional path to confirm whether a customer is complying with its software license agreement. In such a scenario, a vendor likely has a legitimate suspicion of misuse — regardless of whether the misuse was intentional or not.…
By chaos, Jackson is referring to the avalanche of open source software code out there that’s used anonymously for some very important projects. GitHub.com alone hosts some 40 million developers, he pointed out. “We are building the world’s critical infrastructure on software somebody else wrote, a stranger with unknown skills, motivations and desires, but the desire to innovate is so high, we’re willing to accept the risk of using some random person’s software invention,” Jackson said. Sometimes developers understand the practical use of the open source code they’re creating, and sometimes they don’t, according to Jackson. Some of it is…
Residents predict the future of technology. While each one of us have witnessed how the process of communication has evolved, the technological advancement in the 21st century has completely revolutionised the way we communicate in an unimaginable way. For years, information was relayed to us through traditional media channels like radio, TV and newspapers, but in the last 10 years, the biggest change that has taken over the communication process by a storm is the near-instant communication by email, instant messaging and social networking. With most people now having access to instant communication right in their pockets, communication of the…
Without a doubt, social media has changed the way we live in the world. It has become a tool for us to meet new people, access information and demand political change in this day and age. Did you know that social media platforms are used by one-in-three people in the world and by more than two-thirds of all internet users? That’s a lot of active users! Social media’s influence amongst the world’s internet users is undeniable. So yes – while it’s true that social media may rule the internet and our social lives, our question is, is social media is king for businesses…
According to eMarketer, Facebook lost over 2 million users under the age of 25 in 2018, which set a trend for the entire year of 2019. We are already heading into 2020 and the number of Facebook users keeps dropping. However, it’s not only Facebook that is losing members but also other social network technology enterprises such as Twitter and LinkedIn. The problem is not in anything that Mark Zuckerberg did lately. In fact, the reason why general social networks such as Facebook are becoming less interesting is the growing interest in vertical networks. What Are Vertical Social Networks A…