A Twitter logo is seen on a computer screen in this photo illustration in Warsaw, Poland on March 5, 2019. (Photo by Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images) NURPHOTO VIA GETTY IMAGES Dodge County, Wisconsin. Perhaps not the most famous place in the world, but the county’s sheriff’s office has become the latest law enforcement authority in the United States to begin naming and shaming the individuals it arrests. Beginning from August, the names and mugshots of people detained on suspicion of “operating while intoxicated” will be posted on Facebook, with the sheriff’s office declaring, “It is always our hope that we can gain…
Author: Loknath Das
In July, several reputable websites reported a critical security flaw in VLC, a popular open-source, multiplatform media-player application. Readers were urged to uninstall VLC before they got hacked. The problem is, the vulnerability did not exist—at least, not in the way the sites reported. The stories followed a disclosure made by a German security agency that claimed VLC had a critical remote code execution (RCE) exploit. This type of vulnerability allows attackers to perform arbitrary commands on compromised machines, such as installing and modifying applications, running malicious payloads, and stealing information. The researchers filed the report with the Mitre Corp., a US government–funded…
Muthoot Finance on Monday reported a rise of 9 per cent in consolidated net profit at Rs 563 crore for the quarter ended June 30, 2019. The company’s net profit in the year-ago period stood at Rs 518 crore. Total income increased to Rs 2,067.67 crore during the quarter as against Rs 1,783.47 crore in the same period of the previous fiscal, the company said in a regulatory filing. Consolidated loan assets under management (AUM) rose 18 per cent to Rs 40,228 crore during the latest June quarter, as against Rs 33,954 crore a year ago, a company statement said. Consolidated…
Rumour has it that the folks behind the Call of Duty franchise are working on a free battle Royale game that’s set for release in early 2020. The Battle Royale gameplay mode, inspired by a Japanese movie of the same name – and not the more recent Hunger Games franchise – and popularised by the likes of PUBG and Fortnite, is a game mode that the Call of Duty franchise has yet to crack. In this mode, up to 100 players are dumped in an arena and forced to scavenge for weapons and resources in an ever-shrinking arena. The last player to survive wins. PUBG could soon…
The White House wants the U.S. government to have a much bigger say in what you see on social media. A new draft executive order from the White House would put the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in charge of deciding what sites like Twitter and Facebook can remove from their sites, reports CNN, which obtained a copy of a summary of the order. President Donald Trump and other conservative leaders have long said that conservative content is censored on major social media networks — even though the data clearly shows otherwise. This order, called “Protecting Americans from Online Censorship,” appears aimed at making…
Bengaluru: Altico Capital India Ltd, a non-banking financial company (NBFC), plans to expand into the housing finance sector and acquire a retail lending portfolio, said a top executive. Altico is in talks with a few housing finance companies, including Reliance Home Finance Ltd, and the due diligence process will start for the latter, he said. “Housing finance complements our wholesale lending business. The valuations of housing finance companies were quite high earlier unlike today, when there are opportunities and platforms available at reasonable valuations. Our strategy to enter the housing finance business is not a reaction to what has transpired in…
The FBI plans to more aggressively surveil social media, after threats from mass-murdering assailants have been discovered online, leading Trump and others to call for action. However, Facebook, Twitter and others may not be on the same page, according to The Wall Street Journal. The FBI is reviewing proposals for datamining contractors, who would monitor and collect perceived threats on social media “to proactively identify and reactively monitor threats to the United States and its interests.” The request was posted before the mass-shootings in El Paso and Dayton that prompted Trump to demand intensified threat detection measures. Ticker Security Last Change %Chg TWTR TWITTER…
Companies have rushed to embrace deep learning’s potential in their efforts to automate their enterprises, often with an eye towards replacing as much of their human workforce as possible or to scale their operations without expanding their hiring. An endless stream of success stories tout AI’s success in replacing an ever-growing array of traditionally automation-resistant jobs, while developers are hard at work finding ways to replace the rest of them. Yet social media platforms give pause to this idea that deep learning is quite at the inflection point of causing a wave of job displacement. Silicon Valley has been at…
Social media is a living organism. Things change all the time. They change in response to developers’ ideas, user requests, scandals, politics and the rise of social awareness. People behind social media networks never sleep. They test new features, algorithms, ads and designs. They are doing their best to keep you attached to your phone, even though one would assume it’s literally impossible to spend more time on social media than we do already. For marketers, it’s vital to stay up-to-date with how social media develops. Every feature and every update might become crucial to us. Then again, it might…
Everyone, who’s anyone, has been saying India’s information technology (IT) sector needs to shift its focus from services to products. That the two are chalk and cheese, and it isn’t easy to make the leap, is an understatement. Amit D. Mishra learnt this the hard way after he sold his seven-year-old business automation services company in Pune to build a software product. Mishra started his software-as-a-service (SaaS) company, Interview Mocha, in November 2012 when funding had just started to flow, and software products like Freshdesk were competing with the best in the world. Mishra, an ex-IBM-er, had struggled to find candidates with…