Samsung Galaxy S8 leak points to big dual-camera changes

With most of 2016's major smartphones now here and seemingly almost nothing left to learn about the iPhone 7, attention is turning to 2017 and to the Samsung Galaxy S8, which if the latest rumors are to be believed could have a very different camera to the Samsung Galaxy S7.

According to a Weibo leaker, the flagship will have a dual-lens rear camera, which is becoming a common feature for phones, with the LG G5 and Huawei P9 both sporting one, while the iPhone 7 Plus and LG V20 are also rumored to offer it too.

Apparently one lens on the S8 will be 12MP (just like on the S7), while the other will be 13MP, and the company will supposedly be using both its own lenses and Sony's.

This isn't the first time a dual-lens camera has been rumored for the Galaxy S8 and it's a believable feature, with so many rivals opting for the same. What's not clear though is what purpose the second lens would serve. It might be monochrome like in the Huawei P9, wide-angle like the LG G5 or something else entirely.

Upgrades all round

But according to the Weibo post, spotted by TechAndroids, it's not just the rear camera that's changing, as the front-facing camera on the Samsung Galaxy S8 will apparently be 8MP, up from 5MP on the Galaxy S7 and Samsung Galaxy Note 7.

This too is a believable change, as Samsung hasn't changed the spec of its flagship selfie snapper in a couple of years.

Supposedly the S8 will also have an iris scanner, which is the most believable part of the leak, as an iris scanner was one of the Note 7's big new features and it would make sense for Samsung to carry it over to the Galaxy S8 - although it was largely ineffective.

But while all these things seem more than possible we'd still take them with a pinch of salt for now, as the Galaxy S8 is months away and the leaker has provided no real evidence for their claims.

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The Best Encryption Software of 2016

Businesses, websites, and government agencies that store your personal data have a duty to protect that data from hackers. Not that even the best practices and security software can keep the hackers out—they always find a way in. But if the data is properly encrypted, stealing it doesn't do the hacker much good. You can up your security game by encrypting sensitive data on your own desktop and laptop computers. We've rounded up a collection of products to help you with that project. This isn't an exhaustive list, and we will update this story with additional products in the future.

No Back Doors

When the FBI needed information from the San Bernardino shooter's iPhone, they asked Apple for a back door to get past the encryption. But no such back door existed, and Apple refused to create one. The FBI had to hire hackers to get into the phone.

All of the products in this roundup explicitly state that they have no back door, and that's as it should be. It does mean that if you encrypt an essential document and then forget the encryption password, you've lost it for good.

Two Main Approaches

Back in the day, if you wanted to keep a document secret you could use a cipher to encrypt it and then burn the original. Or you could lock it up in a safe. The two main approaches in encryption utilities parallel these options.

Which is better? It really depends on how you plan to use encryption. If you're not sure, take advantage of the 30-day free trial offered by all of these products to get a feel for the different options.

Secure Those Originals

After you copy a file into secure storage, or create an encrypted version of it, you absolutely need to wipe the unencrypted original. Just deleting it isn't sufficient, even if you bypass the Recycle Bin, because the data still exists on disk, and data recovery utilities can often get it back.

Overwriting data before deletion is sufficient to balk software-based recovery tools. Hardware-based forensic recovery works because the magnetic recording of data on a hard drive isn't actually digital. It's more of a wave form. In simple terms, the process involves nulling out the known data and reading around the edges of what's left. If you really think someone (the feds?) might use this technique to recover your incriminating files, you can set your secure deletion tool to make more passes overwriting the data.

Encryption Algorithms

An encryption algorithm is like a black box. Dump a document, image, or other file into it, and you get back what seems like gibberish. Run that gibberish back through the box, with the same password, and you get back the original.

If you're an encryption expert, you may prefer another algorithm, Blowfish, perhaps, or the Soviet government's GOST. For the average user, however, AES is just fine.

Public Key Cryptography and Sharing

Passwords are important, and you have to keep them secret, right? Well, not when you use Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) cryptography.

With PKI, you get two keys. One is public; you can share it with anyone, register it in a key exchange, tattoo it on your forehead—whatever you like. The other is private, and should be closely guarded. If I want to send you a secret document, I simply encrypt it with your public key. When you receive it, your private key decrypts it. Simple!

If you want to share a file with someone and your encryption tool doesn't support PKI, there are other options for sharing. Many products allow creation of a self-decrypting executable file. You may also find that the recipient can use a free, decryption-only tool.

What's the Best?

Right now there are two Editors' Choice products in the consumer-accessible encryption field. One is the easiest to use of the bunch, the other is the most secure.

AxCrypt Premium has a sleek, modern look, and when its active you'll hardly notice it. Files in its Secured Folders get encrypted automatically when you sign out, and it's one of the few that support public key cryptography.

CertainSafe Digital Safety Deposit Box goes through a multi-stage security handshake that authenticates you to the site and authenticates the site to you. Your files are encrypted, split into chunks, and tokenized. Then each chunk gets stored on a different server. A hacker who breached one server would get nothing useful.

The other products here also have their merits, of course. Read the full reviews and decide which one you'll use to protect your files. Have an opinion on one of the apps reviewed here, or a favorite tool we didn't mention? Let us know in the comments.


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Paytm parent in talks to raise $300 million from Goldman Sachs, Temasek, Mediatek

One97 Communications, which runs mobile payment and ecommerce platform Paytm, is in advanced talks to raise fresh funding of about Rs 2,000 crore ($300 million) from Taiwanese semiconductor maker MediaTek, Goldman Sachs, Singapore's Temasek and other investors, according to two persons with knowledge of the development.

This round will see Paytm's valuation more than doubling to $5 billion.

Existing investors, which include Alibaba and its payments affiliate Alipay besides venture capital firm SAIF Partners, will also be participating.

"The new round is expected to value the company at close to $5 billion," said one of the people cited above. The money will be deployed across all of Paytm's businesses -digital payments, online marketplace and the upcoming payments bank," the person said.

Paytm was valued at $2.3 billion in the last round of capital infusion in June.

Paytm E-commerce Pvt Ltd, set up earlier this month, will house the marketplace and is expected to initially mirror parent One97's shareholding. This unit is also expected to become the launchpad for Alibaba's online operations. The Chinese company's business-to-consumer site Tmall is expected to make its India debut in six months.

Founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma, who holds the payments bank licence in his personal capacity, has established Paytm Payment Bank to house the financial services business.

The arm's CEO Shinjini Kumar and Ash Lilani, whose investment firm Saama Capital is an early Paytm backer, are on the board of this entity. The bank is likely to be launched in October.

ET was the first to report on Paytm's plans to spin off its ecommerce business and raise fresh capital in its March 21 edition.

The new round of financing comes after Alibaba and Alipay invested a total Rs 4,400 crore in 2015, according to Registrar of Companies (RoC) filings. Paytm has said it raised about $675 million from Alibaba and Alipay.

ET could not ascertain the cash split between the payments bank and commerce business. Paytm did not reply to a detailed email questionnaire sent by ET and multiple calls made to its spokesperson. There was no response to emails sent to MediaTek, Goldman Sachs and Temasek.

If the deal goes through, it will be the largest financing round in India's broader technology and internet space this year, going past the $200 million raised by online marketplace Snapdeal and $150 million by grocery retailer Bigbasket. Last year saw several bumper rounds with cab hailing app Ola getting $900 million, Flipkart raising $700 million and Snapdeal getting $500 million.

But in the last 10 months, investor sentiment on the broader tech and internet ecosystem has turned cautious. Snapdeal and Flipkart have found it hard to raise capital at their existing valuation, according to multiple sources directly involved in these talks, with the latter also seeing a series of valuation markdowns by mutual fund investors.

What helps Paytm in raising capital is that it has established market leadership in consumer payments, while ecommerce companies like Flipkart are under constant threat from US rival Amazon, according to analysts.

"In the payments space, they (Paytm) have a big lead and an edge in terms of execution on the ground," said Forrester Research analyst Satish Meena.

"They are tapping the next 100 million customers, while other mobile wallets are pushing their services to the same top 50 million customers by offering cashbacks."

Paytm rivals in payments include Mobikwik, which recently raised $40 million from South Africa's Net1, and Snapdeal-owned Freecharge, which has been looking to raise a $150-300 million round since October 2015. Flipkart is also expected to launch its mobile payments business under PhonePe next week, and plans to invest $100 million initially.

Total payments through digital instruments is expected to reach $500 billion by 2020 in India, according to a study by Boston Consulting Group, with customer payments to merchants driving growth.

Paytm has been pushing its offline to online business aggressively over the last 12 months, entering areas like movie ticketing, petrol pump payments, taxi payments and education fees among others.

This is expected to be key drivers in monthly gross merchandise value (GMV) increasing to $500 million by December from $300 million in July, Sharma told ET in an interview earlier this month. Sharma had also said that Paytm is running at a 1% operating loss, which includes online marketing, payment gateway and cashback costs.

According to RoC filings, One97's losses swelled to Rs 1,534 crore in the year ended March from Rs 372 crore in FY15. This would mean that its average monthly cash burn was $19 million as it spent aggressively to build a mobile wallet customer base and launch an online marketplace after first raising capital from Alipay in February 2015.

As of now, Sharma holds 21.33% stake in One97 and its earliest venture capital investor SAIF Partners has 30.81%. Alibaba holds 8.53% while Alipay is the single largest shareholder with a 32.41% holding.

for more development and traing cum Webiste Development call +919568180808 or go to SPOKES TECHNOLOGIES

Paytm parent in talks to raise $300 million from Goldman Sachs, Temasek, Mediatek

One97 Communications, which runs mobile payment and ecommerce platform Paytm, is in advanced talks to raise fresh funding of about Rs 2,000 crore ($300 million) from Taiwanese semiconductor maker MediaTek, Goldman Sachs, Singapore's Temasek and other investors, according to two persons with knowledge of the development.

This round will see Paytm's valuation more than doubling to $5 billion.

Existing investors, which include Alibaba and its payments affiliate Alipay besides venture capital firm SAIF Partners, will also be participating.

"The new round is expected to value the company at close to $5 billion," said one of the people cited above. The money will be deployed across all of Paytm's businesses -digital payments, online marketplace and the upcoming payments bank," the person said.

Paytm was valued at $2.3 billion in the last round of capital infusion in June.

Paytm E-commerce Pvt Ltd, set up earlier this month, will house the marketplace and is expected to initially mirror parent One97's shareholding. This unit is also expected to become the launchpad for Alibaba's online operations. The Chinese company's business-to-consumer site Tmall is expected to make its India debut in six months.

Founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma, who holds the payments bank licence in his personal capacity, has established Paytm Payment Bank to house the financial services business.

The arm's CEO Shinjini Kumar and Ash Lilani, whose investment firm Saama Capital is an early Paytm backer, are on the board of this entity. The bank is likely to be launched in October.

ET was the first to report on Paytm's plans to spin off its ecommerce business and raise fresh capital in its March 21 edition.

The new round of financing comes after Alibaba and Alipay invested a total Rs 4,400 crore in 2015, according to Registrar of Companies (RoC) filings. Paytm has said it raised about $675 million from Alibaba and Alipay.

ET could not ascertain the cash split between the payments bank and commerce business. Paytm did not reply to a detailed email questionnaire sent by ET and multiple calls made to its spokesperson. There was no response to emails sent to MediaTek, Goldman Sachs and Temasek.

If the deal goes through, it will be the largest financing round in India's broader technology and internet space this year, going past the $200 million raised by online marketplace Snapdeal and $150 million by grocery retailer Bigbasket. Last year saw several bumper rounds with cab hailing app Ola getting $900 million, Flipkart raising $700 million and Snapdeal getting $500 million.

But in the last 10 months, investor sentiment on the broader tech and internet ecosystem has turned cautious. Snapdeal and Flipkart have found it hard to raise capital at their existing valuation, according to multiple sources directly involved in these talks, with the latter also seeing a series of valuation markdowns by mutual fund investors.

What helps Paytm in raising capital is that it has established market leadership in consumer payments, while ecommerce companies like Flipkart are under constant threat from US rival Amazon, according to analysts.

"In the payments space, they (Paytm) have a big lead and an edge in terms of execution on the ground," said Forrester Research analyst Satish Meena.

"They are tapping the next 100 million customers, while other mobile wallets are pushing their services to the same top 50 million customers by offering cashbacks."

Paytm rivals in payments include Mobikwik, which recently raised $40 million from South Africa's Net1, and Snapdeal-owned Freecharge, which has been looking to raise a $150-300 million round since October 2015. Flipkart is also expected to launch its mobile payments business under PhonePe next week, and plans to invest $100 million initially.

Total payments through digital instruments is expected to reach $500 billion by 2020 in India, according to a study by Boston Consulting Group, with customer payments to merchants driving growth.

Paytm has been pushing its offline to online business aggressively over the last 12 months, entering areas like movie ticketing, petrol pump payments, taxi payments and education fees among others.

This is expected to be key drivers in monthly gross merchandise value (GMV) increasing to $500 million by December from $300 million in July, Sharma told ET in an interview earlier this month. Sharma had also said that Paytm is running at a 1% operating loss, which includes online marketing, payment gateway and cashback costs.

According to RoC filings, One97's losses swelled to Rs 1,534 crore in the year ended March from Rs 372 crore in FY15. This would mean that its average monthly cash burn was $19 million as it spent aggressively to build a mobile wallet customer base and launch an online marketplace after first raising capital from Alipay in February 2015.

As of now, Sharma holds 21.33% stake in One97 and its earliest venture capital investor SAIF Partners has 30.81%. Alibaba holds 8.53% while Alipay is the single largest shareholder with a 32.41% holding.

for more development and traing cum Webiste Development call +919568180808 or go to SPOKES TECHNOLOGIES

Paytm parent in talks to raise $300 million from Goldman Sachs, Temasek, Mediatek

One97 Communications, which runs mobile payment and ecommerce platform Paytm, is in advanced talks to raise fresh funding of about Rs 2,000 crore ($300 million) from Taiwanese semiconductor maker MediaTek, Goldman Sachs, Singapore's Temasek and other investors, according to two persons with knowledge of the development.

This round will see Paytm's valuation more than doubling to $5 billion.

Existing investors, which include Alibaba and its payments affiliate Alipay besides venture capital firm SAIF Partners, will also be participating.

"The new round is expected to value the company at close to $5 billion," said one of the people cited above. The money will be deployed across all of Paytm's businesses -digital payments, online marketplace and the upcoming payments bank," the person said.

Paytm was valued at $2.3 billion in the last round of capital infusion in June.

Paytm E-commerce Pvt Ltd, set up earlier this month, will house the marketplace and is expected to initially mirror parent One97's shareholding. This unit is also expected to become the launchpad for Alibaba's online operations. The Chinese company's business-to-consumer site Tmall is expected to make its India debut in six months.

Founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma, who holds the payments bank licence in his personal capacity, has established Paytm Payment Bank to house the financial services business.

The arm's CEO Shinjini Kumar and Ash Lilani, whose investment firm Saama Capital is an early Paytm backer, are on the board of this entity. The bank is likely to be launched in October.

ET was the first to report on Paytm's plans to spin off its ecommerce business and raise fresh capital in its March 21 edition.

The new round of financing comes after Alibaba and Alipay invested a total Rs 4,400 crore in 2015, according to Registrar of Companies (RoC) filings. Paytm has said it raised about $675 million from Alibaba and Alipay.

ET could not ascertain the cash split between the payments bank and commerce business. Paytm did not reply to a detailed email questionnaire sent by ET and multiple calls made to its spokesperson. There was no response to emails sent to MediaTek, Goldman Sachs and Temasek.

If the deal goes through, it will be the largest financing round in India's broader technology and internet space this year, going past the $200 million raised by online marketplace Snapdeal and $150 million by grocery retailer Bigbasket. Last year saw several bumper rounds with cab hailing app Ola getting $900 million, Flipkart raising $700 million and Snapdeal getting $500 million.

But in the last 10 months, investor sentiment on the broader tech and internet ecosystem has turned cautious. Snapdeal and Flipkart have found it hard to raise capital at their existing valuation, according to multiple sources directly involved in these talks, with the latter also seeing a series of valuation markdowns by mutual fund investors.

What helps Paytm in raising capital is that it has established market leadership in consumer payments, while ecommerce companies like Flipkart are under constant threat from US rival Amazon, according to analysts.

"In the payments space, they (Paytm) have a big lead and an edge in terms of execution on the ground," said Forrester Research analyst Satish Meena.

"They are tapping the next 100 million customers, while other mobile wallets are pushing their services to the same top 50 million customers by offering cashbacks."

Paytm rivals in payments include Mobikwik, which recently raised $40 million from South Africa's Net1, and Snapdeal-owned Freecharge, which has been looking to raise a $150-300 million round since October 2015. Flipkart is also expected to launch its mobile payments business under PhonePe next week, and plans to invest $100 million initially.

Total payments through digital instruments is expected to reach $500 billion by 2020 in India, according to a study by Boston Consulting Group, with customer payments to merchants driving growth.

Paytm has been pushing its offline to online business aggressively over the last 12 months, entering areas like movie ticketing, petrol pump payments, taxi payments and education fees among others.

This is expected to be key drivers in monthly gross merchandise value (GMV) increasing to $500 million by December from $300 million in July, Sharma told ET in an interview earlier this month. Sharma had also said that Paytm is running at a 1% operating loss, which includes online marketing, payment gateway and cashback costs.

According to RoC filings, One97's losses swelled to Rs 1,534 crore in the year ended March from Rs 372 crore in FY15. This would mean that its average monthly cash burn was $19 million as it spent aggressively to build a mobile wallet customer base and launch an online marketplace after first raising capital from Alipay in February 2015.

As of now, Sharma holds 21.33% stake in One97 and its earliest venture capital investor SAIF Partners has 30.81%. Alibaba holds 8.53% while Alipay is the single largest shareholder with a 32.41% holding.

for more development and traing cum Webiste Development call +919568180808 or go to SPOKES TECHNOLOGIES

The really interesting reason why ATM PINs have a 4 digit code

You walk into your friendly neighborhood ATM kiosk and swipe your card. You then punch in a 4 PIN code to authenticate yourself and proceed to withdraw money. You may have been doing this mechanically since the day ATM was introduced but have you given a thought why ATM PINs have a 4 digit code?  No! Then read on.

Automated Teller Machines (ATM) were first introduced in 1967 and now have emerged as a best option to disburse cash. Instead of visiting your bank and waiting in a long queue to withdraw money, you just have to swipe your ATM card, punch in your secret 4 digit PIN and take away the money you require.

But if someone was to find or steal your card, the only barrier protecting your money is your 4-digit ATM PIN. Ever wondered why most PINs have only 4 digits? Given that an ATM dishes out money wouldnt the manufacturers of ATMS have been wiser to introduce a longish PIN say six digit or eight digit one. Isn’t that why our email passwords are also expected to be 6 letters or more?

You see there is a bit of story behind it. ATM was invented by a wellknown Scottish inventor John Adrian Shepherd-Barron, the man who pioneered the development of the ATM machine. Barron was born in Shillong and was son to a Wimbledon ladies doubles champion, Dorothy Barron. When testing out his invention, Barron had also proposed a 6-digit PIN.

However, the first person to use his invention was his wife, Caroline. We all know that behind every successful man is a woman, and Caroline apparently rejected the idea of using a six code PIN for her husband’s invention because she could only remember the numbers up to four.

When Barron came up with the idea when he realised that he could remember his six-figure army number. But he decided to check that with his wife, Caroline.

“Over the kitchen table, she said she could only remember four figures, so because of her, four figures became the world standard,” he laughs.

Reportedly, 6 numbers stringed together were too much information for her to recall.

Although, there are many banks nowadays that offer 6 digit PINs for security purposes, shouldn’t those of us using 4 digit PINs be thanking Caroline? It gets tough to recall those 4 digits at times, imagine what 6 or more would do to us?

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Announcing Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 14905 for PC & Mobile

Here’s what’s new in Build 14905 for Mobile

We are introducing a newly refined sound set in this build, uniting the best of our past and present. We aspire to set a new bar for mobile sound set quality, and are trying to make the soundscape of technology more beautiful and harmonious. This also helps align with new sound design direction of the Windows platform as a whole, so that mobile sounds will family with desktop and tablet and be feel instantly familiar to all Windows users. We will continue to evolve – head to Settings > Personalization > Sounds to see the updated list of available sounds and let us know what you think!

Improvements and fixes for PC

We have fixed an issue causing a large blank space to appear between the address bar and web content after the address bar moves back to the top when opening a new tab in Microsoft Edge.

We have updated Narrator Scan mode for table navigation to now support CTRL + ALT + HOME to go to the beginning of the table CTRL + ALT + END to go to the end of the table.

Microsoft Edge now supports the CTRL + O keyboard shortcut for setting focus to the address bar.

We fixed an issue resulting in Sketchpad and Screen Sketch crashing after trying to change the ink color twice in a row when the ruler was visible.

Improvements and fixes for Mobile

Missed call notifications are now more actionable, with inline options to call back, text or remind yourself to do something about it later.

We fixed an issue where videos played in Windows Phone 8 apps might not pause when an incoming call was received.

We fixed an issue where, if “Show my caller ID” is set to “My contacts”, the contact being called might still see a blocked caller ID.

We fixed an issue where the Lock screen might fail to update to the new time after a time zone change.

We fixed an issue resulting in music not resuming after a call was finished, if Turn-by-Turn directions were being read out from the Maps app when the phone call came in.

Known issues for PC

Support for kernel debugging over 1394 has been removed, but will be available in an upcoming kit release. A work-around will be posted to the Debugging Tools for Windows Blog shortly.

Adobe Acrobat Reader crashes when you try to launch it.

Cortana’s text to speech capabilities is not working in this build. For example, Cortana won’t be able to read text messages out loud for you, tell jokes, sing, or give verbal prompts.

When clicking on the power button on the Start menu, it closes the Start menu without opening the flyout with restart/shutdown options appearing. As a workaround – you can right-click on the Start button (or WIN + X) and choose to shutdown via this menu instead.

Apps such as Yahoo Mail, Trivia Crack, Google and the Skype Translator Preview app will crash in this build due to a compatibility issue from a recent platform change.

The Settings app may crash on certain editions of Windows 10 when navigating to different settings pages due to a missing .dll file. We are working on getting this fixed soon.

Known issues for Mobile

If you move apps between a SD card and internal storage (either direction), those apps will get stuck in a pending state. The workaround to get your apps working again is to uninstall the app through Settings > System > Storage (apps cannot be uninstalled from All apps list). Then you can re-install the app from the Store.

Cortana’s text to speech capabilities is not working in this build. For example, Cortana won’t be able to read text messages out loud for you, tell jokes, sing, or give verbal prompts.

A few months ago, we set out to design a new T-shirt for the Windows Insiders Program – and what better source for ideas than Windows Insiders themselves! So, we organized a design competition with a few simple rules:

1. Come up with a design that reflected the innovative spirit of the Windows Insider Program

2. Include the Windows logo and a call out to Windows Insiders.

In just a few weeks, we received some absolutely amazing designs from around the world. After a long – and often heated – selection process (including a vote by the Windows Insider community), our judges narrowed it down to five finalists before picking the ultimate winner: a beautiful design concept by E. Bautista from the United States. The final design below (zoom in to see the finer details) will soon be available on the eCompanyStore. We’ll let you know when it’s ready. Thanks to everyone for participating and congratulations to our finalists – and ultimate winner!

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Facebook is trying to get rid of bias in Trending news by getting rid of humans

Facebook will no longer employ humans to write descriptions for items in its Trending section, which attracted controversy over allegations of political bias in May. Topics appearing in the Trending section will now appear solely as a short phrase or single word, with an indication of the number of people discussing it on the social network.

Quartz confirmed from multiple sources that Facebook has laid off the entire editorial staff on the Trending team—15-18 workers contracted through a third party. The Trending team will now be staffed entirely by engineers, who will work to check that topics and articles surfaced by the algorithms are newsworthy.

Facebook maintains that trending items have always been selected by algorithms; the former editorial staff was only responsible for writing the story descriptions seen in the Trending section, according to the company. This was disputed by former contractors hired by the tech giant who told Gizmodo in May that they were instructed to manually add some stories by hand. Stories on conservative topics were routinely excluded from the Trending list even though they were popular among Facebook users, Gizmodo reported.

Facebook investigated the claims and said it found “no evidence of systematic bias,” but that hasn’t stopped the company from making changes to the feature.

A new group of humans will still be involved with Trending, although they’ll be asked to focus on correcting the algorithm’s mistakes, like preventing mundane or repetitive stories from appearing as news, according to a Facebook blog post. The retooled Trending feature will now automatically pull excerpts from news articles, a feature that may force Facebook to compensate news publishers in the European Union in the future, under proposed new rules from the European commission.

According to sources, the Trending team’s editorial staff were alerted at 4pm that they were being fired—as the news of Facebook’s switch to algorithms first broke—and were asked to leave the building by 5pm. The contractors (all of whom were at the company less than 1.5 years) were given severance equal to pay through September 1, plus two weeks, sources say.

However, removing human writers from Trending doesn’t necessarily eliminate bias. Human bias can be embedded into algorithms, and extremely difficult to strip out. That’s one of the conclusions from a study (pdf) of a popular algorithm used for processing language from Princeton University and the University of Bath released as a draft yesterday (Aug. 25). It’s currently under review for publication in a journal.

“Language itself contains recoverable and accurate imprints of our historic biases,” the authors write. “Whether these are morally neutral as towards insects or flowers, problematic as towards race or gender, or even simply veridical, reflecting the status quo for the distribution of gender with respect to careers or first names.”

Facebook’s increased reliance on automation reflects the company’s growing faith in machine intelligence. But even machines may fail to overcome some the most fundamental problems that humans face, like operating fairly in the face of embedded bias.

As Gizmodo reported in May, Facebook’s primary reason for hiring human curators appeared to be to train their algorithms in what was newsworthy—and so it’s very likely their human biases were recorded and potentially amplified by the AI.

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The iPhone 7S may ditch the iconic home button

With seemingly few mysteries left surrounding the iPhone 7 attention is already turning to the iPhone 7S, and one big change we might see in next year's phone is the removal of the home button.

This is a rumor we've heard before, but now Bloomberg is making the same claims, citing "a person familiar with the matter."

The site doesn't go into any more detail, other than to say that the changes to the phone are designed with a focus on the display in mind, with possibly ultrasonic frequency used to identify the finger.

This adds up with earlier rumors, which suggested that a future iPhone would have a fingerprint scanner built into the screen, allowing the display to be bigger, with less bezel above and below it.

It sounds like an ambitious change, but with the iPhone 7 likely to be a fairly modest upgrade we're expecting big things from the iPhone 7S, especially as it will mark the iPhone's tenth anniversary.

One step at a time and the removal of the home button might not be a sudden change, as there have also been rumors that Apple will redesign the button for the iPhone 7, making the button pressure-sensitive rather than having it physically click.

That's one of the things we're less sure we're going to see on the iPhone 7, as it's not been as heavily rumored as other changes, like the removal of the headphone jack, but it would make sense as a step towards the total removal of the button.

We'll know soon, as the iPhone 7 is expected to launch on September 7. The iPhone 7S is likely still over a year away, so we'll have a much longer wait to find out whether Apple is getting rid of the home button entirely, but one way or another the iPhone 7S is likely to be a big change, with a massive curved screen and a glass back also rumored.

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WhatsApp’s new privacy policy is unfair, but legal

WhatsApp has always made huge promises of safeguarding privacy, whether through the introduction of end-to-end encryption or through its promise of no compromise with privacy following its acquisition by Facebook. The sweeping changes to its privacy policy announced yesterday naturally came as a huge shock to its users. The chief changes being made are that WhatsApp will now share customer information with Facebook, in order to provide targeted ads and better friend suggestions, and with other third parties to allow businesses to communicate with users. WhatsApp has given its users a time limit of 30 days to opt-out of the new privacy policy. While the sudden announcement seems like a U-turn on every promise ever made by WhatsApp, the change is unfortunately legal.

WhatsApp can now share all information collected with anyone

Two years ago when WhatsApp was acquired by Facebook, WhatsApp put up a blogpost which assured its users that the acquisition will leave its privacy practices unchanged. WhatsApp’s previous privacy practices were extremely user friendly. Basically the only information that WhatsApp collected was its customers’ contact number, their device information, and the contact numbers on their friends list. The old Privacy Policy made express promises that no information would be shared with anyone else, there would be no third-party ads, and no information shared for commercial or marketing purposes. WhatsApp’s new Privacy Policy now gives a vast list of information which it collects:

Information on your online status such as when you were last seen online, when you updated your status message, etc.

Information from third party services that are integrated with WhatsApp, for example, if you share any article from the web using WhatsApp.

Information on who is messaging you, calling you or which groups you belong to.

Under the new Privacy Policy, there is no restriction being placed on what type of information is shared with whom.

Yet another change is while the new Privacy Policy keeps the promise of no third party banner ads, it now says that in future if WhatsApp changes its mind, it can have these ads through a change in the privacy policy.

WhatsApp’s changes to privacy maybe unfair, but is legal

While the sweeping changes made to WhatsApp’s privacy policy makes it appear that WhatsApp is deceiving its users, unfortunately, legally, WhatsApp can do this. All it needs to do is inform its customers of the change, and obtain their consent for the same. Had the changes been made without informing the customers or without offering an opt-out mechanism, then WhatsApp would have fallen afoul of privacy legislations. In fact, following Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp in 2014, the US Federal Trade Commission sent a letter to Facebook warning Facebook against making changes to its privacy practices without informing its customers.

Is asking customers to opt-out adequate as consent to the changes?

Obtaining adequate and legal consent of the customers is a very important part of a valid change to privacy practices. All online terms and conditions, as also WhatsApp’s old Privacy Policy, state that changes will be made from time to time to the terms, and your continued use of the app will amount to consent. Usually, users need not even be informed of the changes made. In the case of changes to privacy practices, particularly when your personal information is being transferred to third parties, like WhatsApp is here, the case is different. In such a case, the customer needs to be informed of the change, and must specifically consent to that change.

Why didn’t WhatsApp adequately inform users of the change?

The only questionable part of WhatsApp’s changes is whether it adequately informed its customers about the changes. When WhatsApp introduced end-to-end encryption, every user was informed of this change on their chat screens. Surprisingly, now when a change of this scale has been made to its privacy practices, there is no similar notice on the chat screens. The only source of information is the blogpost, and it is questionable how many WhatsApp users actually take the trouble to check WhatsAp’s blogs. The blogpost itself outlines only some of the changes being made.  It doesn’t inform customers of the extent of the changes being made. The new Privacy Policy, which WhatsApp claims has been written to make it easier for the people to understand, is actually even more confusing to understand, and leaves vast scope for misinterpretation and misuse.

For more information about Website Development and Software Development call +91-9568180808

WhatsApp’s new privacy policy is unfair, but legal

WhatsApp has always made huge promises of safeguarding privacy, whether through the introduction of end-to-end encryption or through its promise of no compromise with privacy following its acquisition by Facebook. The sweeping changes to its privacy policy announced yesterday naturally came as a huge shock to its users. The chief changes being made are that WhatsApp will now share customer information with Facebook, in order to provide targeted ads and better friend suggestions, and with other third parties to allow businesses to communicate with users. WhatsApp has given its users a time limit of 30 days to opt-out of the new privacy policy. While the sudden announcement seems like a U-turn on every promise ever made by WhatsApp, the change is unfortunately legal.

WhatsApp can now share all information collected with anyone

Two years ago when WhatsApp was acquired by Facebook, WhatsApp put up a blogpost which assured its users that the acquisition will leave its privacy practices unchanged. WhatsApp’s previous privacy practices were extremely user friendly. Basically the only information that WhatsApp collected was its customers’ contact number, their device information, and the contact numbers on their friends list. The old Privacy Policy made express promises that no information would be shared with anyone else, there would be no third-party ads, and no information shared for commercial or marketing purposes. WhatsApp’s new Privacy Policy now gives a vast list of information which it collects:

Information on your online status such as when you were last seen online, when you updated your status message, etc.

Information from third party services that are integrated with WhatsApp, for example, if you share any article from the web using WhatsApp.

Information on who is messaging you, calling you or which groups you belong to.

Under the new Privacy Policy, there is no restriction being placed on what type of information is shared with whom.

Yet another change is while the new Privacy Policy keeps the promise of no third party banner ads, it now says that in future if WhatsApp changes its mind, it can have these ads through a change in the privacy policy.

WhatsApp’s changes to privacy maybe unfair, but is legal

While the sweeping changes made to WhatsApp’s privacy policy makes it appear that WhatsApp is deceiving its users, unfortunately, legally, WhatsApp can do this. All it needs to do is inform its customers of the change, and obtain their consent for the same. Had the changes been made without informing the customers or without offering an opt-out mechanism, then WhatsApp would have fallen afoul of privacy legislations. In fact, following Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp in 2014, the US Federal Trade Commission sent a letter to Facebook warning Facebook against making changes to its privacy practices without informing its customers.

Is asking customers to opt-out adequate as consent to the changes?

Obtaining adequate and legal consent of the customers is a very important part of a valid change to privacy practices. All online terms and conditions, as also WhatsApp’s old Privacy Policy, state that changes will be made from time to time to the terms, and your continued use of the app will amount to consent. Usually, users need not even be informed of the changes made. In the case of changes to privacy practices, particularly when your personal information is being transferred to third parties, like WhatsApp is here, the case is different. In such a case, the customer needs to be informed of the change, and must specifically consent to that change.

Why didn’t WhatsApp adequately inform users of the change?

The only questionable part of WhatsApp’s changes is whether it adequately informed its customers about the changes. When WhatsApp introduced end-to-end encryption, every user was informed of this change on their chat screens. Surprisingly, now when a change of this scale has been made to its privacy practices, there is no similar notice on the chat screens. The only source of information is the blogpost, and it is questionable how many WhatsApp users actually take the trouble to check WhatsAp’s blogs. The blogpost itself outlines only some of the changes being made.  It doesn’t inform customers of the extent of the changes being made. The new Privacy Policy, which WhatsApp claims has been written to make it easier for the people to understand, is actually even more confusing to understand, and leaves vast scope for misinterpretation and misuse.

For more information about Website Development and Software Development call +91-9568180808