Online&Social
Telegram Shuts Down its Own Cryptocurrency
Sourced from Tech Inside. Telegram is officially calling it quits on its crypto-focused subsidiary, Telegram Open Network (TON). “Telegram’s active involvement with TON is over,” writes Pavel Durov, founder and CEO, in an announcement on his channel. “For the last 2,5 years, some of our best engineers have been working on a next-generation blockchain platform called TON and a cryptocurrency we were going to name Gram. TON was designed to share the principles of decentralization pioneered by Bitcoin and Ethereum, but to be vastly superior to them in speed and scalability,” the announcement continues. /* custom css */ .tdi_3_c4b.td-a-rec-img{ text-align: left; }.tdi_3_c4b.td-a-rec-img img{ margin: 0 auto 0 0; } Durov claims that technology had the potential to revolutionize how people store ...
Twitter Allows Staff to Work from Home Indefinitely
Image sourced from Mission Statement Academy Yesterday, CEO of Twitter Jack Dorsey sent an email to Twitter staff, notifying employees that they will able to continue working from home as long as they see fit. Dorsey notes in the same email that Twitter was an early adopter of a work-from-home model, however – much like the rest of the world – that has only been accelerated by COVID-19 stay-at-home orders. Twitter confirmed this decision in an email to Tech Crunch: “We were uniquely positioned to respond quickly and allow folks to work from home given our emphasis on decentralization and supporting a distributed workforce capable of working from anywhere. The past few months have proven we can make that work. So if our employees are in a role and situation that enables them to work from ho...
Twitter is Using New Labels to Fight COVID-19 Misinformation
Image sourced from Mission Statement Academy In an attempt to make finding credible news a little easier, Twitter has announced that it is introducing new labels for tweets that contain COVID-19-related misinformation. The social media goliath started testing labels in February after it became known that a number of public figures were tweeting misleading and manipulated media – these untrue tweets were highlighted with an orange label that includes Twitter’s policy guidelines as well as accurate information from fact-checkers and journalists. And now it seems that Twitter wants to take these labels one step further – “earlier this year, we introduced a new label for Tweets containing synthetic and manipulated media. Similar labels will now appear on Tweets containing potentially harmful, ...
How COVID-19 Misinformation Continues to Go Viral
Sourced from Speechling. Despite pledges from massive social media companies to remove dangerous instances of coronavirus misinformation – from false causes to false cures – Silicon Valley and fact-checkers around the world are struggling to stem the flow of fake news about the pandemic. Last week, a video titled “Plandemic” went viral, clocking up millions of views and clicks across Facebook and YouTube before the companies took action. “I’ve not seen a video of this type gain this kind of viral traction so quickly,” Alan Duke, the editor in chief of Lead Stories, a fact-checking group that works with Facebook told CNN. As of last-week Thursday afternoon, a book that features the subject of “Plandemic” has rocketed to number 1 on Amazon’s Best Seller’s List, where it remained over the wee...
Remote Connections Up 44% During Lockdown in Nigeria
Sourced from AFP. Many organisations across Africa are finding themselves transitioning their workforce to remote work at home as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. IT departments are re-architecting their environments on the fly to allow for remote access. Now, according to a report by Serianu, Pan-African based Cybersecurity and Business consulting firm, “in Nigeria, remote connections have increased by around 44% since the onset of COVID-19 with the highest increase realized in March 2020 after the president declared lockdown in key cities. Lagos is, by a vast amount, the most affected state, hosting over 40% of the identified vulnerable connections put at over 4,500 vulnerable connections.” The Guardian Nigeria goes on to note that the report marks increased usage of these services cau...
Global VPN Use Exploded in March
With millions working from home, the COVID-19 pandemic has seen the global usage of VPN demand swell. Demand for commercial VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) in the US jumped by 41% between 13 March and 23 March according to research from Top10VPN.com, a VPN research and testing company in the U.K. Network World writes that VPNs were already a growing industry before the coronavirus outbreak struck the world and the subsequent shutdown of workplaces. The global VPN market was forecast to grow 12% year-on-year and be worth $70-billion by 2026, according to a Global Market Insights 2020 survey. North America was forecast to remain the leader in VPN usage, with around 30% market share. Top10VPN.com found global VPN demand increased by 41% over the second half of March and remains 22% higher tha...
Children’s Internet Activity Increases by 200% During Lockdown
South African children have become more active on the Internet as the national lockdown progresses. Comparing their activity in the first week of January and the last week of March, the overall number of website visits grew by 200%. This became evident from the analysis of Kaspersky Safe Kids parental control module of Q1 2020. Children’s activity on the Internet is as important nowadays as their behaviour and social environment outside. This is why it is crucial to help a child to navigate through the information that surrounds them on the web, making sure that the experience is positive. During the worldwide lockdown, children are prone to look for entertainment online more than ever, so this period has shown some important changes in their behaviour that correlated with the increase in ...
How to Tell if a WhatsApp Message is Actually Fake News
Facebook-owned social media and chat powerhouse WhatsApp continues to take part in the fight against misinformation and Fake News – now, thanks to a new chatbot, users can fact check messages right in the app. Partnering with the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), WhatsApp is allowing users around the world to talk to this chatbot to inform them of the latest facts so that they can decide on how true or false messages sent to them are. Gadgets Africa says that “the bot is able to easily check whether a piece of news about COVID-19 is true or not”. This new chatbot service comes soon after WhatsApp began taking several measures to curb the spread of fake news and false information. Just recently, the company announced that limits put in place to reduce the amount of copy-paste chai...
Zoom Rolling Out New Security Features
Sourced from Getty Images Zoom is planning to roll out additional security features this week in order to prevent the highly unwelcome ‘zoombombing’ that has plagued the platform in recent months. This comes after the app suffered under the microscope of cybersecurity experts and even legal authorities as its explosion in popularity exposed its steep and cavernous holes in safety and security. One especially damning report by The Intercept stated that Zoom’s meetings weren’t encrypted end-to-end as they had advertised. Instead, the company offers “Transport Encryption”, a form that protects content from external attackers, but not from Zoom itself – despite what Zoom says. Zoom could use this lack of encryption to view your meetings. Another issue users of the app are having, is when troll...
The 5 Least Secure Video-Calling Apps, Reports Researcher
Sourced from Lifesize Now more than ever, video call apps have become a cornerstone of society. But as apps gain popularity more and more should users expect security issues as the developers struggle to keep their security and privacy policies updated – we saw it with Zoom, and we will continue to see it with other platforms. Security flaws in these apps could expose your personal data or private conversations to eavesdroppers and trolls. Now, non-profit security researcher Mozilla evaluated the 15 most used video call apps including Zoom, Signal, Google Hangouts, Houseparty, Skype, and Microsoft Teams, and evaluated them based on their security. “It’s more important than ever that this technology be trustworthy,” Mozilla’s VP for Advocacy Ashley Boyd says in a statement. “The good news i...
