TheNewsGuru

Tag: internet

  • Explore the International Space Station with Google Street View

    Google Street View now allows users to see the International Space Station (ISS) as close as they can see the streets of London from their homes.

    The search giant recently launched the new option for Google Street View that allows users to see the 15 connected modules of the ISS.

    Thomas Pesquet, an astronaut at the European Space Agency (ESA), spent six months on the International Space Station (ISS) as a flight engineer to capture the Street View imagery, Google said in its blog post.

    “The mission was the first time Street View imagery was captured beyond planet Earth, and the first time annotations – helpful little notes that pop up as you explore the ISS – have been added to the imagery,” Google said.

    While this is certainly an interesting option for users, Pesquet explained that due to the constraints of living and working in space, Google’s usual methods of capturing Street View couldn’t be used.

    “Instead, the Street View team worked with NASA at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas and Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama to design a gravity-free method of collecting the imagery using DSLR cameras and equipment already on the ISS,” he said.

    Post this, Pesquet sent the still photos captured by him to the Earth where they were stitched together to create panaromic 360-degree imagery of the ISS.

    As pointed out in a report by TechCrunch, when the imagery was being captured, one of Space X’s Dragon vehicles was parked at the ISS. This means that users can also see how the cargo is supplied to the ISS. You can check out the new imagery from space already from Street View section on the company’s website.

     

  • Google releases tool to backup your entire computer

    There would be no need to fear a personal computer (PC) crashing as Internet giant, Google has released a cloud-based tool that is capable of backing up and syncing all the contents of your computer.

    “You probably keep your most important files and photos in different places – your computer, your phone, various SD cards, and that digital camera you use from time to time.

    “It can be a challenge to keep all these things safe, backed up, and organized, so today we’re introducing Backup and Sync.

    “It’s a simpler, speedier and more reliable way to protect the files and photos that mean the most to you.

    “This new tool replaces the existing Google Photos desktop uploader and Drive for Mac/PC,” Google Drive Product Manager, Aakash Sahney said in a blog post.

    TheNewsGuru reports Backup and Sync is an app for Mac and PC that backs up files and photos safely in Google Drive and Google Photos, so they’re no longer trapped on your computer and other devices.

    “Just choose the folders you want to back up, and we’ll take care of the rest,” Aakash said.

    Google releases tool to backup your entire computer

    To download the Backup and Sync tool that works for both Google Photos and Google Drive, click here or here.

     

  • Trump hotels: Data breach compromises card payment details

    A data breach at a service provider has compromised card payment details at 14 properties of Trump International Hotels, management said late on Tuesday.

    The compromised information included payment card numbers and card security codes for some of the hotel chain’s reservations processed through service provider Sabre Corp’s central reservation system, according to a notice on the Trump Hotels’ website.

    The breach is part of a cyber-attack on Sabre’s systems disclosed in May. Sabre’s reservation systems are used by nearly 32,000 properties worldwide, according to Reuters.

    Sabre informed Trump Hotels about the current breach at its properties including Trump Las Vegas and Trump Chicago on June 5, according to the notice.

    The breach did not, however, affect Trump Hotels’ own systems, according to the notice. This was the third involving the hotel chain since May 2015.

    The company, formerly led by US President Donald Trump, agreed to pay $50,000 last year in a settlement over data breaches that exposed 70,000 credit card numbers and other personal information.

    Sabre’s investigation found that the unauthorized party first accessed reservation information on August 10, 2016. The last unauthorized access was on March 9.

     

     

  • Facebook announces Messenger ads expansion for businesses

    Facebook announces Messenger ads expansion for businesses

    Facebook has announced Messenger ads will begin popping up on home screens of users globally, while also urging businesses take advantage of it.

    The social network giant revealed this in an online post on Tuesday saying, “Today we’re pleased to announce the global beta expansion of Messenger ads. People already spend time on Messenger interacting and conducting commerce with businesses and brands they love, and now with Messenger ads, they have an opportunity to discover experiences directly on their home tab”.

    Facebook enticed businesses to take advantage of a new tool for creating ads for Messenger, which it said is used by more than 1.2 billion people monthly.

    “Messenger is dedicated to building new and creative ways to help businesses and developers connect with the more than 1.2 billion people around the world who use the platform every month,” the post further stated.

    Facebook announces Messenger ads expansion for businesses

    Facebook says “for developers, having a variety of ways to surface the conversational, visual and social experiences they’ve built for businesses and people is crucial,” and that “Messenger ads offer developers and businesses a way to use Facebook targeting to extend their reach to people around the world”.

    The Facebook suite of ad products in Messenger now include:

    • Messenger ads – found in the home tab of Messenger. When people tap on an ad, they will be sent to the destination chosen during ads creation. This can be your website or a Messenger conversation.
    • Click to Messenger ads – takes full advantage of the personalized nature of messaging by driving people to a conversation after they interact with the ad in Facebook, Instagram or Messenger.
    • Sponsored messages – allows businesses to re-engage with people who have started a conversation with them.

    “Starting today, some advertisers will begin to see Messenger ads as part of automatic placements within Power Editor and Ads Manager.

    “Advertisers will be able to add Messenger to campaigns using the Traffic and Conversion objectives and leverage existing targeting options,” Facebook stated.

    The social media firm said a small percentage of people will begin to see ads in their Messenger Home tab towards the end of this month.

    If you’re working with a brand or business, Facebook says, if you are interested in learning more, further information and creative options can be found here.

     

  • Did you receive the Jayden K. Smith message?

    Did you receive the Jayden K. Smith message?

    I did as did some millions of Facebook users who received the warning message about a friend request from some Jayden K. Smith.

    Globally, Facebook and Twitter users have been sent into a frenzy being warned not to accept an unsolicited friend request from one mysterious Jayden K. Smith, who is not Will Smith’s son because that would be Jaden Smith.

    “Please tell all the contacts in your messenger list not to accept Jayden K. Smith friendship request.

    Did you receive the Jayden K. Smith message?
    This Jaden Smith does not want to be your Facebook friend, most probably. Source: Instagram

    “He is a hacker and has the system connected to your Facebook account. If one of your contacts accepts it, you will also be hacked, so make sure that all your friends know it. Thanks. Forwarded as received.

    “Hold your finger down on the message. At the bottom in the middle it will say forward. Hit that then click on the names of those in your list and it will send to them,” was the version of the message I received from more than 15 contacts I know on my friends’list.

    This drove my curiosity to want to find out what this is all about and it took me to myth-busting website, Snopes that this has been a “long running hoax”.

    “Accepting a Facebook friend request from a stranger will not provide hackers with access to your computer and online accounts.

    “Variants of these messages are circulated endlessly, with different names swapped in and out.

    “The most common variant of this hoax is one that warns the reader not to accept Facebook friend requests from ‘hackers’ purportedly named ‘Christopher Davies’ and ‘Jessica Davies,’ otherwise one of the two will wreak some unspecified havoc,” Snopes said in a post busting the Jayden K. Smith myth.

    As to whether it’s dangerous, it’s generally thought not. Simply accepting a friend request is a relatively inefficient way of delivering a virus or other IT nasty. Fooling people into opening a rogue email attachment works far better.

    But there’s no guarantees, states Snopes.

    “It’s not outside the realm of possibility that an e-mail message or a link posted on Facebook might carry a virus payload which could infect your computer and allow it be controlled by a botnet, but virus warnings that correspond to the patterns detailed above can be safely dismissed as japes,” Snopes further stated.

     

  • Death sentence: Facebook meets with Pakistani govt

    Death sentence: Facebook meets with Pakistani govt

    A senior Facebook official met with Pakistani interior minister on Friday to discuss a demand the company prevent blasphemous content or be blocked.

    The meeting comes after a Pakistani counter-terrorism court sentenced a 30-year-old man to death for making blasphemous comments on Facebook, part of a wider crack-down.

    Joel Kaplan, Facebook’s vice president of public policy, met Interior Minister Nisar Ali Khan, who offered to approve a Facebook office in Pakistan, which has 33 million users of the network.

    Khan said Pakistan believes in freedom of expression, but that does not include insulting Islam or stoking religious tensions.

    “We cannot allow anyone to misuse social media for hurting religious sentiments,” Khan said.

    Facebook called the meeting “constructive”.

    “Facebook met with Pakistan officials to express the company’s deep commitment to protecting the rights of the people who use its service, and to enabling people to express themselves freely and safely,” the company said in an email.

    “It was an important and constructive meeting in which we raised our concerns over the recent court cases and made it clear we apply a strict legal process to any government request for data or content restrictions.”

    Pakistan’s social media crack-down is officially aimed at weeding out blasphemy and shutting down accounts promoting terrorism, but civil rights activists say it has also swept up writers and bloggers who criticise the government or military.

    One of five prominent writers and activists who disappeared for nearly three weeks this year later told a UN human rights event in March that Pakistan’s intelligence agencies had kidnapped him and tortured him in custody.

    Others’ families said right-wing and Islamist parties had filed blasphemy accusations against them to punish them for critical writings.

    Anything deemed insulting to Islam or the Prophet Muhammad carries a death penalty in Pakistan, and sometimes a mere allegation can lead to mob violence and lynchings. Right groups say the law is frequently abused to settle personal scores.

    In April, a Pakistani university student, Mashal Khan, was beaten to death by a mob after being accused of blasphemous content on Facebook. Police arrested 57 people accused in the attack and said they had found no evidence Khan committed blasphemy.

     

  • Facebook completes Internet-beaming drone second test without crash

    Facebook said on Thursday it had completed a second test of its Aquila drone designed to someday beam internet access to remote parts of the planet, and unlike in the first test, the drone did not crash.

    Facebook plans to develop a fleet of drones powered by sunlight that will fly for months at a time, communicating with each other through lasers and extending internet connectivity to the ground below.

    https://www.facebook.com/Engineering/videos/10155377054702200/

    The company called the first test, in June 2016, a success after it flew above the Arizona desert for 1 hour and 36 minutes, three times longer than planned. It later said the drone had also crashed moments before landing and had suffered a damaged wing.

    The second test occurred on May 22, Martin Luis Gomez, Facebook’s director of aeronautical platforms, said in a blog post.

    The aircraft flew for an hour and 46 minutes before landing near Yuma, Arizona, with only “a few minor, easily-repairable dings,” he said.

    Facebook engineers had added “spoilers” to the aircraft’s wings to increase drag and reduce lift during the landing approach, Gomez said.

     

  • Google to pay $2.7 billion for abusing its dominance

    Google to pay $2.7 billion for abusing its dominance

    The European Union (EU) has fined Google a record-breaking 2.4 billion-euro ($2.7 billion) in what is just a fraction of the costs from the EU’s demand that the Internet giant stop skewing search results to favour its own shopping site gaining ‘undue’ dominance in so doing.

    To some smaller businesses, this might mean ‘torn apart’, but for the search engine giant, the penalty will barely make a dent in its cash hoard of $90 billion in ad revenue.

    According to a latest PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC) Entertainment and Media Global Outlook, two-thirds of all global ad dollars this year will go to Google, Facebook, Tencent, Baidu and Alibaba, that have been tagged the Big Five.

    The Big Five are reportedly crushing everyone else in the new media world, and this has raised a lot of concerns.

    While European politicians have called on the EU to sanction Google or even break it up for the undue dominance, US critics claim EU regulators are targeting successful American firms.

    A ruling by EU antitrust chief, Margrethe Vestager, has now put an end to concerns in Europe, and raised eyebrows in the US.

    “Vestager gave Google a 90-day ultimatum to find ways to give equal treatment to smaller price-comparison services that compete with the Google Shopping ads that appear when people search for products.

    “The EU will also monitor Google for five years and can force the company to pay additional fines of up to 5 percent of its daily revenue if it doesn’t comply,” according to Bloomberg.

    Meanwhile the search engine giant is to pay a fine towering $2.7 billion to the European Commission.

    Vestager’s decision marks the end of a seven-year probe fuelled by complaints from small shopping websites as well as bigger names, including News Corp., Axel Springer SE and Microsoft Corp.

    A lawyer for Norton Rose Fulbright in Brussels, Jay Modrall said Google will have “the sword of Damocles hanging over its head” further stressing that this is because it is no longer the firm’s choice on how it makes changes to allay EU concerns. Instead, according to the legal practitioner, Google is “under a legal requirement to do so and under notice that if its commitments are not sufficient, it’ll be fined even more”.

    And according to a binding order from the European Commission, Google must “stop its illegal conduct” and give equal treatment to rival price-comparison services.

     

     

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  • China rolls out national cyber-attack response plan

    China’s top cyber authority has formalised a new nationwide cyber-attack response plan on Tuesday.

    The country seeks to ramp up protection in the face of increasingly sophisticated global ransomware scare.

    The plan requires provinces to upgrade networks and construct expert response teams as part of the centralised reporting system, said the Cyberspace Administration of China in a notice posted on its website.

    The regulations also criminalise any failure by government departments to carry out the plan.

    China has increasingly sought to fortify its cyberspace from both internal and external attacks, citing threats to its national infrastructure and political stability.

    Last month, dozens of local authorities, including police and industry regulators, were hobbled by the WannaCry ransomware attack that infected more than 30,000 Chinese organisations and 300,000 worldwide in a matter of days.

    The national response plan includes a four-tier colour-coded warning system that ranks cyber-attacks as either red, orange, yellow or blue depending on severity, with red signalling the highest level of alert.

    It also requires relevant departments to open international channels of communication during the sudden onset of international security threats.

    Cyber-attacks in China spiked by over 950 percent between 2014 and 2016, according to a PwC survey, with “Internet of Things” (IoT) connected devices identified as a particular vulnerability.

    Last October, vulnerabilities in Chinese manufactured devices were partially blamed for a large-scale attack which temporarily crippled Twitter, Spotify, Netflix and other major websites.

     

  • NIRA caps dotNG domain name registration at 90,000

    Nigeria Internet Registration Association (NiRA) first quarter report has capped the country’s domain name at 90,036 in total.

    The NiRA report reveals that the entire Africa’s continent has less than two million domain names.

    TheNewsGuru reports South Africa’s .za is having a total of 1,148,095; Kenya’s .ke a total of 61, 623 domain names. The United kingdom, the .co.uk has 10,600,000; China, .cn has 21,100,00; and India, .in has 2,235,471.

    NIRA caps dotNG domain name registration at 90,000
    President, Executive Board of Directors, Nigeria Internet Registration Association, Reverend Sunday Folayan poses with Nigerian domain name .ng image

    The Dean of NiRA Academy, Sikiru Shehu, at a workshop in Lagos, lamented Nigeria with the population of about 180 million is having less than 100,000 domains on the .ng string.

    “However, as worrisome as these figures could be, what is obvious here are great avenues to generate jobs, create wealth and employment opportunities.

    “Just imagine, a 10 million .ng domain count in Nigeria today, and the multiplier effects on websites development, domain names hosting, content development and so on. For me, domain name business is a big business and the DNS industry is very large. I see a very huge opportunity to generate jobs, create wealth, and earn forex, reduction in capital flight, boosts availability of local contents,” he said.

    Shehu identified many factors to be responsible for the slow growth of the DNS industry in Africa generally.

    These he said include low awareness; poor Internet infrastructure and penetration; lack of government policy in member countries that can drive the uptake of Africa ccTLDs; preferences for foreign domain names; poverty of minds and ideas; insufficient skilled personnel for the DNS Industry; and the absence of creative and innovative DNS entrepreneurs (Internetpreneurs).