#03technologysolutions

Popular smartphone apps including Spotify and Pinterest suffered outages Friday for a few hours due to a bug in Facebook's systems.Facebook has resolved the problem, a spokesperson said."Earlier today, a code change triggered crashes for some iOS apps using the Facebook SDK," or software development kit, the spokesperson said."We identified the issue quickly and resolved it. We apologise for any inconvenience."App users began reporting on Twitter early Friday that they were unable to open Spotify and other sites.Downdetector, which monitors for internet problems in real time, showed a rise in problems for a number of applications, including Spotify, Pinterest, Waze, and The New York Times.It reported a major spike in problems around 10:30am GMT (4pm IST), and a decline in user issues at around 1pm GMT (6:30pm IST).In 2020, will WhatsApp get the killer feature that every Indian is waiting for? We discussed this on Orbital, our weekly technology podcast, which you can subscribe to via Apple Podcasts or RSS, download the episode, or just hit the play button below. Read the full article

If any place was prepared for quarantine, it was Milton Keynes. Two years before the pandemic, a start-up called Starship Technologies deployed a fleet of rolling delivery robots in the small city about 50 miles northwest of London.The squat six-wheeled robots shuttled groceries and dinner orders to homes and offices. As the coronavirus spread, Starship shifted the fleet even further into grocery deliveries. Locals like Emma Maslin could buy from the corner store with no human contact.“There’s no social interaction with a robot,” Ms. Maslin said.The sudden usefulness of the robots to people staying in their homes is a tantalizing hint of what the machines could one day accomplish — at least under ideal conditions. Milton Keynes, with a population of 270,000 and a vast network of bicycle paths, is perfectly suited to rolling robots. Demand has been so high in recent weeks, some residents have spent days trying to schedule a delivery.In recent years, companies from Silicon Valley to Somerville, Mass., have poured billions of dollars into the development of everything from self-driving cars to warehouse robots. The technology is rapidly improving. Robots can help with deliveries, transportation, recycling, manufacturing.But even simple tasks like robotic delivery still face myriad technical and logistical hurdles. The robots in Milton Keynes, for example, can carry no more than two bags of groceries.“You can’t do a big shop,” Ms. Maslin said. “They aren’t delivering from the superstores.”A pandemic may add to demand but does not change what you can deploy, said Elliot Katz, who helps run Phantom Auto, a start-up that helps companies remotely control autonomous vehicles when they encounter situations they cannot navigate on their own.“There is a limit to what a delivery bot can bring to a human,” Mr. Katz said. “But you have to start somewhere.”Industry veterans know this well. Gabe Sibley, an engineer and a professor who previously worked with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, started Zippy for sidewalk deliveries in 2017. But the San Francisco company quickly ran into challenges. The robots could move only at the pace of walking, around 1 mile per hour. That severely limits the delivery area, particularly for hot food, Mr. Sibley said.The company never deployed any robots, selling in 2018.“In this country, where we designed our cities around the car, the solution to sidewalk delivery is to use the roads,” Mr. Sibley said.Founded in 2014 and backed by more than $80 million, Starship Technologies is based in San Francisco, and it has deployed most of its robots on college campuses in the United States. Equipped with cameras, radar and other sensors, the robots navigate by matching their surroundings to digital maps built by the company in each new location.The company chose Milton Keynes for a wider deployment in part because the robots could navigate it with relative ease. Built after World War II, the city was carefully planned, with most streets laid out in a grid and bicycle and pedestrian paths, called “redways,” running beside them.When the Starship robots first arrived in Milton Keynes, one of the fastest-growing cities in Britain, Liss Page thought they were cute but pointless. “The first time I met one, it was stuck on the curb outside my house,” she said.Then, in early April, she opened a letter from the National Health Service advising her not to leave the house because her asthma and other conditions made her particularly vulnerable to the coronavirus. In the weeks that followed, the robots provided a much-needed connection to the outside world.Smaller deliveries suit Ms. Page because she lives alone. A longtime vegan, she can order nut milk and margarine straight to her door. But like the grocery vans that deliver larger orders across the city, the Starship robots are ultimately limited by what is on the shelves.“You pad out the order with things you don’t really need to make the delivery charge worthwhile,” Ms. Page said. “With the last delivery, all I got were the things I didn’t really need.”Residents like Ms. Page set deliveries through a smartphone app. They typically pay a British pound (about $1.20) for each delivery, but in Milton Keynes, Starship has raised the price to as much as £2 during the busiest times so more people will shop in off hours.The robots deliver groceries to doctors, nurses and other employees of the N.H.S. for free. They even join the Thursday night tribute to the N.H.S., blinking their headlights as residents clap and cheer from their doorsteps. The fleet of 80 robots will soon expand to 100.Though this may be the most extensive deployment of delivery robots in the world, others have popped up in recent years. In Christiansburg, Va., Paul and Susie Sensmeier can arrange drugstore and bakery deliveries via flying drone. Wing, which is a subsidiary of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, has been offering drone deliveries in the area since the fall.They can order penne pasta, marinara sauce and toilet paper. But they can’t order prescription medicines via Wing — the drones are stocked at a Wing warehouse, not at a drugstore — and like the robots in Milton Keynes, the drones can carry only so much.“I can only get two muffins or two croissants,” Susie Sensmeier, 81, said.Companies like Wing and Starship hope they can expand the reach of these services and refine their skills. Now there is new impetus.“Overnight, delivery has gone from a convenience to a vital service,” said Starship’s chief executive, Lex Bayer. “Our fleets are driving nonstop, 14 hours a day.”In Milton Keynes, Starship has gradually expanded the reach of its service, doubling its fleet and teaming up with several new grocery stores. It recently started a service in Chevy Chase, Md., not far from Washington. The company can create digital maps for the robots in days.Ms. Page, a 51-year-old business analyst who has lived in Milton Keynes for more than a quarter-century, believes the service can become a viable business.“It just seemed like a vanity project before,” she said. “The pandemic has given them a platform to launch a real business.”But as much as the pandemic has lifted start-ups like Starship, it has also hurt them. Many of the college campuses where Starship deployed its robots have shut down. Though the company has worked to shift those robots to nearby locations, it has been forced to lay off employees and contractors. Janel Steinberg, a company spokeswoman, said the cuts were “primarily about rebalancing our work force to adapt to the demand in different locations.”Nuro, a start-up in Silicon Valley, has long promised larger robots that can drive on public roads. But it has not yet deployed these robots, and like most self-driving car companies, Nuro has been forced to curtail its testing. Rather than making deliveries, its robots are shuttling supplies across an old basketball stadium in Sacramento that has been converted into a temporary hospital.Sidewalk robots and flying drones also require human help. Starship and similar companies must monitor the progress of each robot from afar, and if anything goes wrong, remote operators take over. With social distancing, that has become more difficult. Remote operators who once worked in call centers have moved into their homes.Mr. Katz’s company, Phantom Auto, is now helping companies make the transition. “This is a very, very difficult problem to solve,” Mr. Katz said. “We are in the autonomy-doesn’t-quite-work-yet business.” Read the full article

Few products today are as deeply entwined with a person’s brand as Tesla is with Mr. Musk, and so his comments can feel personal for Tesla drivers.“As a Tesla owner, a 47-year-old male recovering from Covid-19, and someone very concerned simultaneously about the environment, the economy, my kids’ and my parents’ future, this ain’t great,” said Jeff Guilfoyle, a product manager at FireEye in San Diego. “This disease is no joke, and the long-term health impacts are unknown for survivors.”Many have implored Mr. Musk online to stop.Raja Sohail Abbas, the chief executive of an outpatient psychiatric clinic in Allentown, Pa., wrote: “I am a Tesla owner and love the company. You have to stop being an idiot about this.”“Tesla owner and Fan here, but this was a disappointing tweet despite the frustrations of and holdups,” added Alex Goodchild, a D.J. in Brooklyn. “Words are weapons especially when used during situations like the one we’re currently experiencing. You sound just like Trump in this tweet.”The debate has riven the Tesla community.“The last two months, there’s been this polarization in the Elon Musk fan club,” said Paula Timothy-Mellon, a technology consultant who moderates that LinkedIn-based fan club, which has 22,000 members. “There are those who are believers in these California guidelines and there are those in favor of his push to re-open Tesla.”Driving a Tesla often carries great symbolism for the owner (and observers).“If you own a Tesla, you feel you are directly connected to Elon Musk and people think that Tesla owners are directly connected to the politics of the C.E.O.,” said Sam Kelly, a Tesla owner and investor based in Spain who posts under the name SamTalksTesla.He added that he did not think the red pill comment meant any big new political awakening from Mr. Musk.Asked to explain his thinking, Mr. Musk pasted an image of the Urban Dictionary definition of red pill in an email. It read:“‘Red pill’ has become a popular phrase among cyberculture and signifies a free-thinking attitude, and a waking up from a ‘normal’ life of sloth and ignorance. Red pills prefer the truth, no matter how gritty and painful it may be.” Read the full article

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department is planning to file antitrust charges against Google as early as this summer, said two people with knowledge of the situation, in what would be one of the biggest antitrust actions by the United States since the late 1990s.The Justice Department is still investigating the internet company and has been making progress on its case, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the details were confidential. The regulators are focused on Google’s dominance in the online advertising industry, and the case will also involve allegations that the company abused its dominant position in online search to harm competitors, the people said.State attorneys general are likely to file their own antitrust lawsuit against Google or join the Justice Department case sometime this year, said a person with knowledge of the state investigation.Taken together, such actions against Google, which controls around 90 percent of all web searches globally, would be one of the biggest antitrust cases in the United States since the 1990s when the Justice Department joined 20 states to sue Microsoft. The two sides reached a settlement in 2001.The moves would also set a benchmark for how regulators and lawmakers proceed with investigations into other large tech companies such as Facebook and Amazon, which the Federal Trade Commission, state attorneys general and Congress are scrutinizing for their market power and corporate behavior. For nearly two decades, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple and others have grown with little regulation from American authorities, becoming gateways to internet search, advertising, online communications, digital entertainment and e-commerce.The plans by the Justice Department and state attorneys general were earlier reported by The Wall Street Journal.Google said it was continuing to engage in the various investigations. “We don’t have any updates or comments on speculation,” the company said. ”Our focus is firmly on providing services that help consumers, support thousands of businesses, and enable increased choice and competition.”The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A spokeswoman for the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, who is leading the states’ investigation, pointed to his previous comments that the states hoped the investigation would wrap up by this fall.The Justice Department began exploring whether to open a case against Google for potential antitrust violations last year. Attorney General William P. Barr has since stated publicly that he would like the department to decide by the summer whether to bring charges.As part of its inquiry, the Justice Department has spent months interviewing Google’s competitors in the areas of search, advertising technology and news publishers, seeking information about the company’s business practices.Last year, the states sent a detailed request for information, known as a civil investigative demand, asking Google to answer questions about its advertising technology business. The company and the State of Texas reached a deal earlier this year that would allow the states to gain access to key documents. In March, they discussed options to allow the states to share information with the Justice Department, according to documents obtained through a public records request.Google captures roughly one-third of every dollar spent in online advertising. Its search engine is the on-ramp to the internet and controls what information users see, while the company owns many of the critical tools and technologies used to advertise online. It also boasts seven businesses with more than one billion users.Antitrust scrutiny has been one of the prominent issues hanging over Google. But as the investigations have ramped up, the Silicon Valley company has played down the concerns about regulatory actions, noting that it has been investigated before and emphasizing how consumers are satisfied users of its products.In past investigations by U.S. regulators, Google did not end up facing charges. In 2013, the F.T.C. decided to wrap up a 19-month investigation without charging the company of violating antitrust laws. At the time, some staff members at the agency felt that there was sufficient evidence to press forward with a case, but the commissioners voted unanimously to close the matter.Cecilia Kang and David McCabe reported from Washington and Daisuke Wakabayashi from Oakland, Calif. Steve Lohr contributed reporting from New York. Read the full article

Facebook and a team of African and global telecom majors have struck a deal to build one of the world's largest subsea cable networks, boosting internet availability across three continents, they said in a joint statement on Thursday.South Africa's MTN GlobalConnect and Mauritius-based infrastructure provider WIOCC are partners in the project, along with China Mobile International, French telecoms major Orange SA, Saudi Arabia's stc, Telecom Egypt, and Vodafone.The project, called 2Africa, aims to build 37,000 kilometres of subsea cable infrastructure which will directly connect countries around the African coast to Europe and the Middle East, according to its website.The network will have a design capacity of up to 150 terabytes per second (Tbps) on key parts of the system, the site said. The 11 new cables rolled out between 2009 and 2016 in sub-Saharan Africa provided around 70Tbps of design capacity.Subsea infrastructure provider Alcatel Submarine Networks will build the project, which is expected to be operational by 2023/24, the statement said. The companies did not reveal how much money they were investing."2Africa... will interconnect Europe, the Middle East, and 21 landings in 16 countries in Africa," the partners said in the statement.Subsea cables form the backbone of the internet, carrying 99 percent of the world's data traffic.Africa's big economies have a large and fast growing population of internet users, with growth in internet use fuelled by rapidly expanding mobile broadband networks and ever more affordable phones.However, with a population of 1.3 billion, Africa is still a laggard in internet connectivity, with average internet penetration at around 39 percent against a world average of 59 percent.On completion the subsea network will deliver more than the total combined capacity of all subsea cables serving Africa today, the firms said in the statement."Improving connectivity for Africa is a significant step which lays the groundwork for increased digitalisation across the continent," said Vodacom International Business Chief Officer Diego Gutierrez.Vodacom, which is majority owned by Britain's Vodafone, is South Africa's second biggest telecom player.© Thomson Reuters 2020 Read the full article

France will tax big digital businesses this year whether there is progress or not towards an international deal on a levy, its finance minister said on Thursday, adding such a tax had never been more legitimate or more necessary. Nearly 140 countries from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) are negotiating the first major rewriting of tax rules in more than a generation, to take better account of the rise of big tech companies such as Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Google that often book profit in low-tax countries. Paris offered in January to suspend its digital tax on tech companies' income in France until the end of the year while any international deal was negotiated. However, the fallout from the coronavirus outbreak has left finance ministries most focused on saving their economies, potentially jeopardising the end of the year deadline. "Never has a digital tax been more legitimate and more necessary," Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire told journalists on a conference call, adding such companies were doing better than most during the coronavirus crisis. "In any case, France will apply as it has always indicated a tax on digital giants in 2020 either in an international form if there is a deal or in a national form if there is no deal." In the Czech Republic by contrast, Finance Minister Alena Schillerova said she may delay the introduction of a digital tax until next year, to take advantage of any international rule, and lower the rate to 5 percent from a currently proposed 7 percent. France's national tax has been a source of contention with Washington, which considers that it unfairly targets US digital companies. Pay up Europe has long pushed to make hugely profitable large tech companies doing business over the internet pay tax where they sell their services, rather than in tax havens deliberately chosen under what is called "aggressive tax optimisation". EU politicians, seeking funds to prevent climate change and diminish wealth differences across the 27-nation bloc, want to see a company like Google, with an annual global revenue of more than $160 billion (roughly Rs. 12.13 lakh crores), pay more tax in the European countries where it makes money, preferably at a uniform rate. Frustrated with the lack of global progress because of opposition from the United States where the tech giants are based, some countries like France introduced their own digital tax last year. Italy, Britain, and Spain have also either already introduced their own digital taxes or plan to do so. Such moves triggered threats of retaliation via trade tariffs from Washington. The urgency for a solution is increased by the COVID-19 pandemic, which triggered lockdowns around the globe and a shift to working from home. This is likely to boost the revenues of Internet giants but also makes EU governments even more in need of cash to restart their economies from their deepest ever recession expected this year. Past attempts to create an EU-wide digital tax have failed in the face of opposition from Ireland, where many big US tech companies book profits, and some Nordic countries. © Thomson Reuters 2020 Read the full article

Amazon's video game live-streaming platform Twitch is forming an advisory council of experienced users, online safety experts and anti-bullying advocates to help improve safety on the site, Twitch said in a blog post on Thursday.The council's eight members will advise on product and policy changes, focusing on areas such as harassment and protection of marginalised groups.Twitch, which was used last October to stream footage from shooting attacks in Germany, said it had doubled the size of its safety operations team this year and added new tools to help its volunteer channel moderators.The company said it also uses a combination of human moderators and automation to handle the moderation reports it receives.Twitch, which says it has 15 million daily users, is primarily a site where video gamers can livestream their games and chat to other users, though it also has channels focused on sports, music, and politics. Last year, US President Donald Trump joined the platform.The council includes Dr. Sameer Hinduja, the co-director of the Cyberbullying Research Center, sociologist TL Taylor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) whose research focuses on online gaming, Alex Holmes, the deputy CEO at UK-based youth charity The Diana Award, and Emma Llansó, the director of the Center for Democracy and Technology's Free Expression Project.Also on the council are experienced Twitch streamers CohhCarnage, Cupahnoodle, Zizaran, and FerociouslySteph."When developing this council, we felt it was essential to include both experts who can provide an external perspective, as well as Twitch streamers who deeply understand creators' unique challenges and viewpoints," Twitch said in the blog post.The move adds Twitch to the list of social platforms that have created councils to advise on site decisions, such as Twitter, which formed its Trust and Safety Council in 2016.In March, Chinese social video app TikTok, which faces U.S. scrutiny over data-sharing and censorship concerns, named members of a U.S.-focused content moderation committee to give "unvarnished views" on its policies.Last week, social media giant Facebook announced the first members of its Oversight Board, a high-profile effort to respond to criticism over content moderation decisions.But unlike the Facebook's oversight board, which can overrule the company's verdicts on certain content, a Twitch spokeswoman told Reuters that its council would not make moderation decisions.The spokeswoman said the council would meet regularly. Asked about transparency on the group's advice, she said that Twitch hopes to share periodic updates into its work.© Thomson Reuters 2020 Read the full article

The Central government's Aarogya Setu mobile application is based on "privacy-first by design" principle keeping in mind the safety and privacy of users' data, said Amitabh Kant, CEO of NITI Aayog. He added that the user data from the app would only be provided to those government officials who were directly in charge of containing the spread of the Coronavirus in India.In an exclusive interaction with ANI, Kant informed that Aarogya Setu mobile application has been built to ensure privacy and security of personal information that was collected from people. It is based on "privacy-first by design" principle."Aarogya Setu has a clearly defined protocol for access to data. National Informatics Centre (NIC) is the fiduciary of the data, and data is only shared with government officials directly involved in COVID-19 related medical and administrative interventions on a strictly need-to-know basis and limited in scope only to their direct work," said Kant.Concerns over the Aarogya Setu App were raised when a French ethical hacker claimed to have access of the users' data and had highlighted security bugs within the app which could be privacy ramifications.Clarifying apprehensions that some users may have related to data security, Kant said: "When an individual provides his/her mobile number for registration, the Aarogya Setu server assigns an anonymous, randomized unique device identity number (DiD) and associates it with their mobile device. This pair - the mobile number, DiD and other personal information is securely stored in a highly encrypted server."After registration, the app asks for your name and mobile number (any name that you want to be called by, not your legal name). In addition, it asks for your age and gender (both have a direct co-relation to COVID-19 impact), profession (to ensure people who are in essential services are proactively assisted), countries visited in last 30 days and willingness to volunteer in times of need."All contact tracing and location information that might have been uploaded to the Aarogya Setu server is permanently deleted 45 days from the date of upload if you have not tested positive for COVID-19 within that period of time. If you are infected, all contact tracing and location information pertaining to you are permanently deleted from the server 60 days after you are declared cured of COVID-19," added Kant.While the app requests users to share location, the app does not use location data for contact tracing. "The app has clearly defined and delimited how location information is used - only on an anonymous or aggregate basis and for the specific purpose of identifying hotspots so that proactive increased testing and sanitisation of these locations can be done," he said, adding that the app does not continuously monitor any user's location.According to Government data till date, Aarogya Setu app has registered about 9.6 crore users since its launch on Apri 2l. However, contact tracing data has been fetched of only 12,000 users who had tested positive for COVID-19 constituting less than 0.1 percent of all users. "Unless a person turn COVID-19 positive, this information is never accessed or pushed to the server and is permanently deleted from the phone 30 days after it is collected," he said."The central feature of the app is location history and Bluetooth-based contact tracing in the fight against the coronavirus. The Bluetooth interaction between two phones on which the app is installed is performed anonymously, using a randomised and secure Device Identification Number (DID) that has been assigned to the devices at the time of registration," added Kant.Along with the user's location history which is sampled sparingly (once every 30 minutes), this information is securely encrypted using the native key chain of the phone's operating system and is stored on the phone itself."The Aarogya Setu engine is designed to respect the privacy of COVID-19 positive patients. The back-end of the App is integrated with ICMR database through an API, and information about patients who have tested COVID-19 positive is received in real-time. It is this ICMR database which is the source from which the app receives information about all COVID-19 positive cases," added Kant."It is only in the event there is a requirement for individual medical intervention that the anonymised personal information is re-identified. The team is exploring moving from a one-time DID to dynamically generated DIDs for every user, to further enhance privacy," added Kant in an interview to ANI.Explaining significant predications made by the Aarogya Setu, Kant said, "In the last 6 weeks, Aarogya Setu App has emerged as a key technology solution aimed in combating COVID-19. Through this app, several potential emerging and hidden hotspots were identified. The engine predicted 130 hotspots across India at the sub-post office-level between April 13th to April 20th. Every forecasted hotspot has since been declared a real hotspot and acted upon by the health ministry." Read the full article