This post was originally published on The Asian Age | Home.
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This feature reportedly showed up in Twitter beta last month, but now it appears to be more widely available
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Premium Lite is currently being tested in Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden
This post was originally published on The Asian Age | Home.
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At a laboratory inside a Google data center in Mayes County, Oklahoma, researchers spent the fall of 2019 disassembling old hard disk drives by hand in order to extract a 2-inch-long component known as the magnet assembly. Consisting of two powerful rare earth magnets, the magnet assembly is a critical muscle within the hard drive, controlling an actuator arm that allows the device to read and write data.
Over the course of six weeks, the scientists harvested 6,100 of these magnetic muscles, all of them effectively good as new. The magnets were then shipped to a hard drive manufacturing facility in Thailand, where they were placed into new drives and, eventually, redeployed to data centers around the world.
This is a far cry from what happens to the estimated 22 million hard disk drives that age out of North American data centers each year. Typically, when a data center operator swaps out old drives for new ones — as they do every three to five years — the discarded drives are unceremoniously shredded. The rare earth elements, which took significant energy and resources to mine and turn into magnets, are lost in a sea of aluminum scrap.
But for several years, Google and others in the tech industry have been quietly working to change that. Motivated by concerns about future rare earth metal supply shortages as well as the environmental toll of rare earth mining, which casts a cloud over their green credentials, tech companies, along with partners in academia and government, are exploring whether they can mine hard drives instead. Until now, these efforts have garnered little public attention. But they may get a boost under the Biden administration, which recently flagged government data center hard drives as a promising source of the rare earth elements America needs not just for data storage devices and consumer electronics, but also for energy technologies that are key to fighting climate change.
“Hard drive magnets are important because they contain neodymium and dysprosium, which are essential for electric vehicles and wind turbines,” Hongyue Jin, a scientist at the University of Arizona who studies rare earth recycling, told Grist. Of the 17 different rare earth elements, “these two are currently the most important and critical.”
Data centers, warehouses of computers that form the physical backbone of the internet, are a great place to find those elements. They are the world’s largest consumers of hard disk drives, which are one of the largest end uses for rare earth magnets. Unlike the hard drives inside personal computers, which tend to gather dust in peoples’ basements when they reach the end of their life, data center operators have strict protocols for collecting and disposing of old hard disk drives in order to protect data security.
“A hard drive sitting in your computer at home requires you as the consumer to take it to a recycler,” said Kali Frost, a doctoral student in industrial sustainability at Purdue University. “Data centers are already a supply of millions of hard drives. The companies operating those data centers want to handle them in the best way possible, and increasingly, optimize them for sustainability.”
The U.S. alone generates nearly 17 percent of all used hard disk drives — the largest share globally — and researchers have estimated that if all of these data storage devices were recycled, they could supply more than 5 percent of all rare earth magnet demand outside of China, potentially helping meet the demand of the information technology sector as well as clean energy companies. A consortium of U.S. researchers, tech companies, hardware manufacturers, and electronic waste recyclers has recently begun exploring exactly how those rare earths can be re-harvested and given a second life.
In 2019, these stakeholders published a report identifying a host of potential strategies, including wiping and re-using entire hard disk drives, removing and reusing the magnet assemblies, grinding up old hard drive magnets and using the powder to manufacture new ones, and extracting purified rare earth elements from shredded drives. Each of these strategies has its own challenges — removing magnet assemblies by hand is labor intensive; extracting rare earths from technology can be chemical or energy intensive and produce significant waste — and for any of them to be scaled up, there needs to be buy-in from numerous actors across global supply chains.
Making even the relatively minor supply chain adjustments needed to place used or recycled rare earth magnets inside new drives “is difficult,” Jin said. “And especially when you’ve got to start from some small amount with a new technology.”
Still, some companies have begun taking the first steps. In 2018, Google, hard disk drive manufacturer Seagate, and electronics refurbisher Recontext (formerly Teleplan) conducted a small demonstration project that involved removing the magnet assemblies from six hard disk drives and placing them in new Seagate drives. This demonstration, Frost says, was the “catalyst” for the larger 2019 study in which 6,100 magnet assemblies were extracted from Seagate hard drives in a Google data center before being inserted into new hard drives in a Seagate manufacturing facility. Frost, who led the 2019 study, believes it is the largest demonstration of its kind ever done.
The results, which will be published in a forthcoming edition of the journal Resources, Conservation, and Recycling, not only showed that rare earth magnets could be harvested and reused at larger scale, but that there were significant environmental benefits to doing so: Overall, re-used magnet assemblies had a carbon footprint 86 percent lower than new ones, according to the study. Frost says that this estimate conservatively took into account the energy mix of the local power grid where the data center operated. Considering Google’s near round-the-clock renewable energy usage at this particular data center, the carbon footprint of the reused magnets was even lower.
Google declined to say whether it has any follow-up projects in the works but pointed Grist toward its publicly announced goal of developing a scalable rare earth magnet recycling process. Ines Sousa, the supplier environmental impact program manager at Google and a co-author on the new study, says there are a few challenges that still need to be overcome before that’s a reality.
These include the need for extreme cleanliness during magnet recycling “as modern hard drives are very sensitive to small particles,” and the fact that hard drives are constantly changing, resulting in new magnet designs every few years.
“There is an opportunity to make magnet design constant between generations so the reuse process can scale,” Sousa said.
Seagate spokesperson Greg Belloni told Grist that the company is “committed to working to solve the complexity” of rare earth recycling in “close collaboration with customers.” Another of its customers, computer maker Dell, is exploring a different recycling approach.
In 2019, Dell launched a pilot program with Seagate and Recontext to harvest magnets from computer hard drives collected via a Dell take-back program, crush them up, extract the rare earths, and use them to form new magnets. To date, some 19,000 pounds of rare earth magnets have been harvested for recycling via this collaboration. The project “remains a pilot program as we continue to look for ways to scale within our own operations,” Dell spokesperson Mel Derome told Grist.
While it may be years before rare earth magnets are being recycled en masse using any approach, the Biden administration could help to accelerate these efforts. Through the Critical Materials Institute at Ames National Laboratory, the federal government already funds several projects focused on developing cleaner and more efficient processes for recycling rare earth elements from magnets. In a recent report on strengthening supply chain resilience, administration officials wrote that the 4,000 U.S. government-operated data centers represent a “near term opportunity” to harvest rare earth magnets using this type of federally funded research and development.
Jin says that such a program could bring down barriers to recycling across the tech industry, similar to how the Biden administration’s plan to electrify the federal fleet could give the wider electric vehicle market a boost. It could also lay the groundwork for the electric vehicle sector to develop its own rare earth magnet recycling approaches.
“Establishing a new process for 6,000 drives is not really commercially viable,” Jin said, referring to the number of hard drive magnets recycled in the Google study. “But if we talk about 4,000 data centers, it’s more viable to change the supply chain and implement new reuse and recycling pathways. So I am really happy to hear that.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Can you recycle a hard drive? Google is quietly trying to find out on Aug 2, 2021.
This post was originally published on Grist.
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Sydney/ Web Desk:
According to BBC, YouTube said on Sunday it had barred Sky News Australia from uploading new content for one week, citing concerns about Covid-19 misinformation.
The move comes after a review of posts uploaded by the Rupert Murdoch-owned TV channel, which has a substantial online presence with 1.85 million YouTube subscribers.
YouTube did not point to specific items but said it opposed material that “could cause real-world harm”. It issued a “strike” under its three-strike policy, the last of which means permanent removal.
“We have clear and established Covid-19 medical misinformation policies to prevent the spread of Covid-19 misinformation that could cause real-world harm,” a YouTube statement said.
Sky News confirmed the temporary ban and the TV channel’s digital editor said the decision was a disturbing attack on the ability to think freely.
The last YouTube upload, from three days ago, features a host claiming that lockdowns have failed and criticizing state authorities for extending Sydney’s current stay-at-home orders.
Youtube has banned several channels over the past two years for spreading misinformation regarding Covid-19.
This post was originally published on VOSA.
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Video messages will also now come through at a higher resolution
This post was originally published on The Asian Age | Home.
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Image: 19newssite
As subscribers, readers and friends of our digital activism will have noticed, our reportage on Tibet has been lacking during the past months. We wanted to reach-out and lay bare the reasons for that absence.Firstly, there’s an increasing challenge in securing information on the situation inside occupied Tibet as the Chinese regime intensifies its suffocation of Tibetan culture. The borders are sealed. What goes down is concealed and suppressed by a digital tyranny, every movement and daily activity is monitored, assessed and recorded. It is mass-surveillance and control; of a nature and scale, which even Orwell’s nightmares could not have imagined.
Image: presentdangerchina
Then, we have the reality of a world changed. Damaged beyond recognition in less than two years, by governments implementing policies which have torn-up democratic practice and respect for individual rights. This plunge into totalitarianism employed a justification, long used by the tyrant, that the curtailment of freedoms is for the ‘good-of-the-nation.’. Of course to steer a people into quiet obedience requires an extremely powerful force. Nothing can paralyze a mind with greater efficiency, than ‘fear’. To that end citizens across the globe have been subject to a relentless program of psychological manipulation that has terrorized and traumatized. Being kept in a condition of dread and confusion. by precisely engineered messaging, has produced a frightening measure of compliance.
Image: opinionjuris
So it is, that our community and wider society are fractured, while rights once cherished and defended now replaced by an orthodoxy which elevates the edict of the state to a position of unquestioned authority. Dissent is met with derision, slander, and censorship. Police and security forces are given additional powers, draconian legislation is rushed into existence, all implemented to produce conformity. There’s no critical or independent media challenging the strangulation of democracy and human rights. Indeed, journalism has become a willing conduit for the propaganda narrative, an enthusiastic delivery-boy of fear.
Image: asiapacificsecuritymagazine
These oppressive measures, engineered patriotism, state-control, censorship have worrying similarities with the default governance of the Chinese regime. There are darker parallels. Since the reported emergence of this flu-variant virus digital technology has been employed by governments as a form of identity card. Under the claim of monitoring infection spread invasive apps enable a person’s movement to be directly tracked. Cell phones have been occupied by your authorities, it is you which is being surveyed. In an echo of Pavlov’s experiments you are groomed to respond to the latest ping alert from a public health body, it is behavioral control and reinforcement. More than that in serving as a certification of injection it’s part of a process that creates division and suspicion, bringing into being ‘them and us’. Will such technology, as it is in China, soon be used to record, assess and reward approved social behaviors? A model-citizen on the end of a virtual leash!
Image: sgtreport
The activism on Tibet provided by our network is volunteered by people in differing locations and cultures. Yet since the start of 2020 there’s, without doubt, been a commonality of experience within those respective places; which has witnessed the disintegration of civil liberties and rise of government control. It is increasingly observable that democracy and human rights are in retreat. Such is nature of these troubling circumstances, and potentially catastrophic impacts for fellow citizens, that we decided to dial-down our focus on Tibet. We’re still reporting across Instagram, Twitter and Facebook but less frequently. While this platform is committed to bringing Tibet linked news, as and when required, resources and attention so generously donated by our team is directed towards a human rights struggle which is now urgently demanded within our own communities.
This post was originally published on TIBET, ACTIVISM AND INFORMATION.
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Users could migrate their chat history from iOS to Android by using a ‘Switch to Android’ on the App Store
This post was originally published on The Asian Age | Home.
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Web Desk:
According to India today, Google has launched a new standalone web app for Google Meet. The web app also known as Progressive Web Application has all the features of the Google Meet app, but this is strictly for the web. You will no longer have to type out the URL or go to Gmail to start a meeting on Google Meet; you can simply download the app on your laptop, computer, or MacBook and use it.
Google has clarified that there is no change in terms of functionality. If you download the Google Meet app on your laptop or computer, you will no longer have to find it through the browser to start a meeting. It will be available in your downloaded apps section. You can simply open the app and start a meeting as we do on smartphones when we have the apps installed on our device.
The Google Meet web app will run on any device with Google Chrome browser version 73 and up irrespective of the operating system. This means that the Google Meet can run on Windows, Mac OS, Chrome OS, and Linux devices. It would be particularly useful for Chrome book users.
Google said that the app would be rolled out gradually. The users will be available to download it within 15 days. The web app would be available to all Google Workspace customers, as well as G Suite Basic and Business customers and users with personal Google Accounts.
This post was originally published on VOSA.
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Web Desk:
According to Gadget360, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has confirmed that the next hardware product from the company will be smart glasses being developed in collaboration with Ray-Ban owner Essilor Luxottica.
The glasses are said to have the iconic frames that Ray-Ban is famous for, integrated with AR features. The Ray-Ban branded eyewear from Facebook is among the first steps in creating futuristic eyewear that augments the real world with data or graphics from the Internet.
In the latest earnings call, Zuckerberg confirmed the arrival of its AR Glasses next. He said:
“Looking ahead here, the next product release will be the launch of our first smart glasses from Ray-Ban in partnership with Essilor Luxottica,” said Zuckerberg.
He went on to say that the glasses have their iconic form factor, and they let you do some pretty neat things.
“I’m excited to get these into people’s hands and to continue to make progress on the journey towards full augmented reality glasses in the future.”
Technical specifications of the smart glasses to be produced by the Franco-Italian firm were not disclosed. And Zuckerberg did not touch upon a specific timeline for launch either.
This post was originally published on VOSA.
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San Francisco/ Web Desk:
Instagram introduces new safety features to keep young users safe from unwanted adults. Through a press release, Instagram owner company Facebook has announced these new safety features.
It’s making new accounts private by default for kids under 16, blocking some adults from interacting with teens on its platform, and restricting how advertisers can target teenagers.
The changes come as the Facebook-owned photo-sharing app is under pressure from lawmakers, regulators, parents and child-safety advocates worried about the impact of social media on kids’ safety, privacy, and mental health.
Karina Newton, Instagram’s head of public policy, told NPR that the changes announced on Tuesday are aimed at creating “age-appropriate experiences” and helping younger users navigate the social network.
Starting this week, when kids under 16 join Instagram, their accounts will be made private automatically, meaning their posts will only be visible to people they allow to follow them. Teens that already have public Instagram accounts will see notifications about the benefits of private accounts and how to switch.
Instagram is also taking steps to prevent what it calls “unwanted contact from adults.” It says adults who, while not breaking Instagram’s rules, have shown “potentially suspicious behavior”, such as if they’ve been blocked or reported by young people, will have limited ability to interact with and follow teens.
“We want to ensure that teens have an extra barrier of protection around them out of an abundance of caution,” Newton said.
Facebook is also changing the rules for advertisers on Instagram as well as its namesake app and its Messenger app. Starting in a few weeks, they will be able to target people under 18 with ads based only on age, gender, and location, but not other information the company tracks, such as users’ interests or habits on its own apps or other apps that share data with the company.
Facebook and Instagram also say they are working on better methods of verifying users’ ages, so they can determine when policies for teens should apply, and do a better job of keeping kids under 13 off the apps.
This post was originally published on VOSA.
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Bharti Airtel tweaked its low-end (2G) tariff portfolio by discontinuing entry-level Rs 49 plan for users
This post was originally published on The Asian Age | Home.
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South Korea/ Web Desk:
Many experts believe that the smartphone can be used for useful purposes after the hardware changes. Now the news is circulating that experts from South Korea have successfully experimented with the use of smartphones as thermometers.
The Korean institute of science and technology has developed a government-funded, cost-efficient, and effective thermal imaging sensor that works perfectly up to 100 degrees Celsius. The thermometer can also be added to the phone by attaching it to the smartphone camera.
Temperature sensing sensors are becoming more common in the context of the epidemic. They are commonly used in hospitals, banks, and other institutions.
In this context, many smartphones manufacturers want to add the most accurate thermometer to their phones.
An optoelectronics specialist at the Korean Institute of Science and Technology, Professor Jun Wen Choi, has developed a trustable, low-cost optical sensor that is free from other defects of the past. This sensor does not require any additional systems to cool down. This minor sensor can be easily mounted in a smartphone’s camera.
Sensor made of Vanadium dioxide absorbs Infrared radiations and converts it into electric signals, which in turn reflects heat in numbers. It is so sensitive that it converts heat into an electrical signal three times more accurately than a normal sensor.
Even if the temperature is 100 degrees Celsius, it shows its readings in just three milliseconds. Due to its high speed, it can also be used in automobiles.
This post was originally published on VOSA.
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Notably, Apple does already use titanium for its Apple Watch Edition, which earlier used to have a ceramic case
This post was originally published on The Asian Age | Home.
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Video games, like any creative product, reflect and refract the conditions of their production. Today, what they most resemble is twenty-first-century work.
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
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Web Desk:
WhatsApp, a worldwide popular messaging app, is constantly introducing new features for the convenience of its users. Through these new features, WhatsApp solves the problems of thousands of users.
WhatsApp Status is a feature that allows any user to share their feelings and emotions with their friends, but many people may not know that any user’s WhatsApp status video can be easily downloaded.
Do you often find a video on a friend’s WhatsApp status so impressive that you want to see it in your archive or status?
If so, let’s find out how to download a video from the WhatsApp status of any friend or contact list.
Here’s a quick trick to download a video from someone else’s status:
Step 1: Download Google Files on Android smartphone from Google Play store.
Step 2: After that click on the menu icon at the top left corner of the app
Step 3: Click on the Settings option
Step 4: Turn on the toggle for the “show hidden files” option
Step 5: Head to the file manager of your smartphone
Step 6: Next click on internal storage option > WhatsApp> Media > Statuses
Step 7: In the folder, you will be able to check the status that you have viewed. Click on the photo/video that you are looking for
Step 8: Long press on the status video that you wish to download and save it to your desired location.
This post was originally published on VOSA.
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Apple’s iPhone 13 lineup will feature support for up to 25W of wired fast charging speeds
This post was originally published on The Asian Age | Home.
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Most solar panels covering the world’s rooftops, fields, and deserts today share the same ingredient: crystalline silicon. The material, made from raw polysilicon, is shaped into wafers and wired into solar cells, devices that convert sunlight into electricity. Recently, the industry’s dependence on this singular technology has become something of a liability. Supply chain bottlenecks are slowing down new solar installations worldwide. Major polysilicon suppliers in China’s Xinjiang region — accused of using forced labor from Uyghurs — are facing U.S. trade sanctions.
Fortunately, crystalline silicon isn’t the only material that can help harness the sun’s energy. In the United States, scientists and manufacturers are working to expand production of cadmium telluride solar technology. Cadmium telluride is a type of “thin film” solar cell, and, as that name suggests, it’s much thinner than a traditional silicon cell. Today, panels using cadmium telluride supply about 40 percent of the U.S. utility-scale market, and about 5 percent of the global solar market. And they stand to benefit from the headwinds facing the broader solar industry.
“It’s a very volatile time, especially for the crystalline silicon supply chain in general,” said Kelsey Goss, a solar research analyst for the energy consultancy group Wood Mackenzie. “There’s great potential for cadmium telluride manufacturers to take more market share in the coming year.” Especially, she noted, since the cadmium telluride sector is already scaling up.
In June, the solar manufacturer First Solar said it would invest $680 million in a third cadmium telluride solar factory in northwest Ohio. When the facility is finished, in 2025, the company will be able to make 6 gigawatts’ worth of solar panels in the area. That’s enough to power roughly 1 million American homes. Another Ohio-based solar firm, Toledo Solar, recently entered the market and is making cadmium telluride panels for residential rooftops. And in June, the U.S. Department of Energy and its National Renewable Energy Laboratory, or NREL, launched a $20 million program to accelerate research and grow the supply chain for cadmium telluride. One of the goals of the program is to help insulate the U.S. solar market from global supply constraints.
Researchers at NREL and First Solar, previously called Solar Cell Inc., have worked together since the early 1990s to develop cadmium telluride technology. Cadmium and telluride are byproducts of smelting zinc ores and refining copper, respectively. Whereas silicon wafers are wired together to make cells, cadmium and telluride are applied as a thin layer — about one-tenth of the diameter of a human hair — to a pane of glass, along with other electricity-conducting materials. First Solar, now the world’s largest thin film manufacturer, has supplied panels for solar installations in 45 countries.
The technology has certain advantages over crystalline silicon, said NREL scientist Lorelle Mansfield. For instance, the thin film process requires fewer materials than the wafer-based approach. Thin film technology is also well-suited for use in flexible panels, like ones that cover backpacks or drones or are integrated into building façades and windows. Importantly, the thin film panels perform better in hot temperatures, while silicon panels can overheat and become less efficient at generating electricity, she said.
But crystalline silicon has the upper hand in other areas, such as their average efficiency — meaning the percentage of sunlight that panels absorb and convert into electricity. Historically, silicon panels have had higher efficiencies than cadmium telluride technology, though the gap is narrowing.Today’s industrially produced silicon panels can achieve efficiencies of 18 to 22 percent, while First Solar has reported an average efficiency of 18 percent for its newest commercial panels.
Still, the main reason silicon has dominated the global market is relatively simple. “It all comes down to the cost,” Goss said. “The solar market tends to be highly driven by the cheapest technology.”
Crystalline silicon costs about $0.24 to $0.25 to produce each watt of solar power, which is less than other contenders, she said. First Solar said it no longer reports the cost-per-watt to produce its cadmium telluride panels, only that costs have “declined significantly” since 2015 — when the company reported costs of $0.46 per watt — and continue to drop every year. There are a few reasons for silicon’s relative cheapness. The raw material polysilicon, which is also used in computers and smartphones, is more widely available and inexpensive than supplies of cadmium and telluride. As factories for silicon panels and related components have scaled up, the overall costs of making and installing the technology have declined. The Chinese government has also heavily supported and subsidized the country’s silicon solar sector — so much so that about 80 percent of the world’s solar manufacturing supply chain now runs through China.
Falling panel costs have driven the global solar boom. Over the last decade, the world’s total installed solar capacity has seen a nearly tenfold increase, from about 74,000 megawatts in 2011 to nearly 714,000 megawatts in 2020, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency. The United States accounts for about one-seventh of the world’s total, and solar is now one of the largest sources of new electricity capacity installed in the U.S. every year.
The cost per watt of cadmium telluride and other thin film technologies is similarly expected to shrink as manufacturing expands. (First Solar says that when its new Ohio facility opens, the company will deliver the lowest cost per watt on the entire solar market.) But cost isn’t the only metric that matters, as the industry’s current supply chain issues and labor concerns make clear.
Mark Widmar, CEO of First Solar, said the company’s planned $680 million expansion is part of a larger effort to build a self-sufficient supply chain and “decouple” the U.S. solar industry from China. Although cadmium telluride panels don’t use any polysilicon, First Solar has felt other challenges facing the industry, like pandemic-induced backlogs in the maritime shipping industry. In April, First Solar told investors that congestion at American ports was holding up panel shipments from its facilities in Asia. Increasing U.S. production will allow the company to use roads and railways to ship its panels, not cargo ships, Widmar said. And the company’s existing recycling program for its solar panels allows it to reuse materials many times over, further reducing its reliance on foreign supply chains and raw materials.
As First Solar churns out panels, scientists at both the company and NREL continue to test and improve cadmium telluride technology. In 2019, the partners developed a new approach that involves “doping” the thin film materials with copper and chlorine to achieve even higher efficiencies. Earlier this month, NREL announced the results of a 25-year field test at its outdoor facility in Golden, Colorado. A 12-panel array of cadmium telluride panels was operating at 88 percent of its original efficiency, a strong result for a panel that’s sat outside for over two decades. The degradation “is in line with what silicon systems do,” according to the NREL release.
Mansfield, the NREL scientist, said the goal isn’t to replace crystalline silicon with cadmium telluride or establish one technology as superior to the other. “I think there’s a place for all of them in the market, and they each have their applications,” she said. “We want all energy to go to renewable sources, so we really need all of these different types of technology to meet that challenge.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A different kind of solar technology is poised to go big on Jul 26, 2021.
This post was originally published on Grist.
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When a user initiates a Google search, the results that show up will have 3 vertical dots in the upper right-hand corner on the Google page
This post was originally published on The Asian Age | Home.
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California/Web Desk:
In the next phase, Facebook is planning a large-scale teaching program and in this regard, the social media site collaborates with popular online course platform Coursera.
At the initial level, two new courses will be introduced including Marketing Analytics and Software development programs. Previously, Facebook has introduced a Social Media Marketing course which is still popular.
Facebook has said that we will provide technical skills to the students, which can easily be passed from one student to another. This program will depend on the speed of the learner but will last up to 20 weeks.
Facebook has also said that more job-oriented courses will be introduced, but will preferably offer courses that are in extraordinary demand. Facebook wants to reach out to people around the world who come from different backgrounds and income groups.
It is to be noted that Facebook has introduced certification scholarships for one lakh black students while during the pandemic 3000 more scholarships were awarded.
Earlier, Facebook had offered certification scholarships to 100,000 black students, while another 3,000 scholarships were provided in the Covid-19 epidemic. However, the Covid-19 Scholarship was offered to Facebook employees around the world. For new courses, priorities will be given to refugees, students from poor countries, and families of ex-soldiers.
Noting the importance of the new courses, Facebook said that according to the report of the World Economic Forum 2020, by 2025, half of the world’s employees will have to learn new courses in a rapidly changing context. That’s why Facebook has launched these two major programs with Coursera.
This post was originally published on VOSA.
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Tokyo/Web Desk:
With the start of the Tokyo Olympics 2020, Google has changed its doodle on the homepage and launched the “Champions Island Games” which can be played online. This doodle championship will last for a week.
These are 16-bit video games developed in collaboration with the Japanese animation company Studio 4° C. All the video games in this championship consist of the games played in the Olympics, while each game highlights the Japanese landscape, society, civilization, and culture.
The main character of these games is a ninja cat called “Calico” which is controlled by the user himself. The championship has a total of seven small online games, including skateboarding, table tennis, and wall climbing, each of which has a “legendary champion” who can only be defeated by winning the final stage.
The games are arranged like a cartoon movie in which “Calico” ninja cat arrives on an island where the sports championship is being held. Calico competes in the same championship. Like the doodle games created in the past, these games can only be played online in the browser.
This post was originally published on VOSA.
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Apple is able to include the more premium displays because of cost-savings associated with using its own silicon
This post was originally published on The Asian Age | Home.
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San Francisco/ Web Desk:
YouTube had announced to provide some amazing and revolutionary features and now in this regard, YouTube Live Streaming has introduced the option of shopping, which is being used by certain users.
It aims to increase e-commerce and monetization facilities. YouTube announced earlier this year that it would offer online shopping options on its platform. Currently only serious and reputable brand makers are given the option to try. The goal was to instantly purchase standard products from YouTube.
YouTube has previously said in its research that 33% of its users have admitted that they are buying 33% of the items just by looking at the comments and advertisements on YouTube.
During a pandemic, YouTube through its platform has made an extraordinary effort to strengthen and promote E-commerce. Various product tags and ads will be added as a new option. This can be done automatically, while video stream makers will be able to add it themselves.
Therefore, it is to be expected that the YouTube app could be an E-commerce machine and users will be able to purchase items in video clips, but its popularity will have to wait a few months.
This post was originally published on VOSA.
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Social Media Desk/Web Desk:
The first time the Chinese-owned popular video-sharing app was banned in Pakistan was in October 2020. According to the PTA, the decision was taken over complaints regarding indecent and immoral content.
The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) on Wednesday again blocked access to TikTok, a popular video-sharing platform, for its failure to take down inappropriate content.
“In light of relevant provisions of Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act 2016, PTA has blocked access to TikTok app and website in the country,” the authority said in a brief statement.
Press Release: In the light of relevant provisions of Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act 2016, PTA has blocked access to TikTok App and website in the country.
— PTA (@PTAofficialpk) July 21, 2021
“The action has been taken due to [the] continuous presence of inappropriate content on the platform and its failure to take such content down,” the statement said.
The action has been taken due to continuous presence of inappropriate content on the platform and its failure to take such content down.
— PTA (@PTAofficialpk) July 21, 2021
Last month, the app said that more than six million videos were removed from TikTok in Pakistan in three months.
“In the Pakistani market, TikTok removed 6,495,992 videos making it the second market to get the most videos removed after the USA, where 8,540,088 videos were removed,” TikTok Pakistan’s latest transparency report said, covering January to March.
This post was originally published on VOSA.
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Photo illustration: Elise Swain/The Intercept
The most beautiful and most terrifying Twitter experience of my life — one that made me laugh so hard I got hiccups, while also convincing me that humans are destined to obliterate themselves — began with several small jokes like this a few days before the 2016 election:
My guess is that at least 75% of the MSM, including me, has a side job destroying Trump ballots pic.twitter.com/8kg5VYNSQB
— Jon Schwarz (@schwarz) November 1, 2016
It ended this past week with an unhealthy 84-tweet long thread by me and a quote tweet by Gen. Michael Flynn’s brother Joseph, informing his 400,000 Twitter followers of my malfeasance:
Everything in between happened because the right wing has a problem: They know that the 2020 election was stolen but, despite their mighty efforts, have failed to uncover any evidence for this. Granted, this isn’t a huge problem for them, since they care about evidence about as much as the Dalai Lama cares about getting on Bumble.
Still, they’ve been experiencing some modest cognitive dissonance that they’d prefer to resolve. The ideal solution would be a member of the hated mainstream media openly confessing that he and his colleagues don’t just put their thumb on the scales during their day jobs but are also so committed to cheating that they moonlight to do it directly. My 2016 tweets were that solution.
Natalie Winters, whose Twitter bio says she’s a student at the University of Chicago, had already written an article last year illustrated with my enormous head looming over a vulnerable mail-in ballot. Then, last Thursday, she started tweeting again about my criminality. I loved the idea that my compatriots and I had been openly bragging about our destruction of Trump ballots in a public forum, yet only she, with her dogged investigative prowess, had been able to run us to ground.
Then I got another tweet, demanding that I be arrested. I decided to say something so preposterous that no one could miss that I’d been joking all along:
This didn’t work. Instead, it seemed to just draw more and more outraged responses. So I started claiming that the right to destroy Trump ballots had been written into the Constitution by the Founding Fathers and that people didn’t realize this because we’ve stopped teaching civics in public schools. When someone tagged the @FBI account in hopes that it would investigate, I explained that the whole project to destroy Trump ballots had been the agency’s idea in the first place.
This also did not work, so I went beyond man’s law to God’s. The Ten Commandments demand that you shred Trump ballots, I said. When someone warned that I would be punished by karma in the end, I explained that they’d misunderstood what karma is.
Even this did not stop the deluge; on the contrary, when Flynn directed his audience to my anti-American proclamations, it exploded in intensity. I also found that I couldn’t stop myself. When someone tagged in government agencies, I did the same for all kinds of different authorities.
When I received voluminous physical threats, I responded with blithe, friendly incomprehension:
Sometimes I revealed that tweets that seemed to be from right-wing patriots were actually from members of the conspiracy.
And of course, I brought in blockchain:
I don’t have words to describe the happiness and psychological relief this brought me. Only around tweet No. 50 did I comprehend how mentally oppressive I’ve come to find it to live in a country in which about a quarter of the other people are, for all intents and purposes, members of a cult.
What made the whole thing especially rewarding was using their own modus operandi against them. As a journalist, I’m constantly anxious about making sure every sentence, every word, is accurate. Now I was acting as Trump and his minions do — free to say anything, no matter how asinine or ridiculous, with no basis in observable fact and with no sense of responsibility toward others. The only thing that mattered was my own needs from second to second, and it felt fantastic.
But I simultaneously began to experience a growing sense of psychological gloom. Partly it was the sorrow and loneliness emanating from the Trumpist tweets. The throughline through all of them was a sincere fury from people about their lives, directed at imaginary causes. Clearly most of them had no one trustworthy with whom they could talk through their problems and possible solutions. Instead, they only had the inhuman online community of their fellow rage-heads.
What was worse, though, was the overwhelming sense that this was just a more intense version of the human condition — that our brains simply aren’t designed to comprehend the world around us. Instead, their main priority is keeping us part of the tribe. Absolutely anything can be ignored if awareness of it might exile us from our little group, and all actions up to and including violence are justified to prevent us from becoming aware of facts that contradict our belief system.
That’s why I’ve decided to delete all of these tweets in the next few days. I’m not worried about the threats toward me. But as with other old Twitter jokes that I deleted when David Duke and his fan club became aware of them, I’m concerned that there’s a small but real chance some of these tweets will someday show up in a mass shooter’s manifesto. It’s true that they’ve now escaped the lab, and I can’t recall them all, but at least removing the original source may reduce their spread.
So if you’d like to learn about how James Madison wrote in the Federalist Papers that “The True citizen must deftroy all Trump ballots” (No. 52) or the retired anesthesiologist who held the lives of thousands of patients in his hands over decades and now is enraged that the Justice Department hasn’t thrown me in jail (No. 63), the clock is ticking. Start here and read down, and down, and down.
For my part, I’ll be contemplating whether the problems that humanity faces are simply beyond our capacity to handle. We only have one tool to deal with them, basic rationality about reality, and there’s nothing our minds hate more than that.
The post I Tried to Make Claims About Election Fraud So Preposterous Trump Fans Wouldn’t Believe Me. It Was Impossible. appeared first on The Intercept.
This post was originally published on The Intercept.
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Bharti Airtel and other telecom operators are at present conducting 5G trials in select cities across India
This post was originally published on The Asian Age | Home.
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A little over a decade ago, Solyndra was the hottest thing in solar power. Solyndra was so exciting that then-President Barack Obama, who was trying to create green jobs while pulling the country out of the financial crisis, decided to give the company a $535 million loan guarantee from the Department of Energy.
Within two years, Solyndra was bankrupt, out-competed by cheaper solar panels coming from China. Republicans launched a big Congressional investigation, and the FBI raided the company’s headquarters to find out where all the money had gone. Mitt Romney even went to Solyndra headquarters in Fremont, California, to make a speech decrying government waste for his 2012 campaign.
Solyndra, Republicans said, was the perfect example of everything that was totally wrong with Obama’s plan to boost clean energy with government-issued loans. But what about the rest of the loans the Obama administration gave out? And what should the purpose of such a loan program even be? Reporter Shannon Osaka crunches the Department of Energy’s numbers and answers what really happened to the government’s green loan program.This story was originally published by Grist with the headline What Tesla has to do with the Solyndra loan scandal on Jul 21, 2021.
This post was originally published on Grist.
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San Francisco/Social Media:
According to Facebook, every day, people send more than 2.4 billion messages with emojis on Messenger. Emojis add color and vibrancy to Messenger chats all over the world, and people rely on them to say what words can’t.
On World Emoji Day, Facebook messenger has launched soundmojis. Soundmoji is a next-level emoji that send short sound clips in a Messenger chat, ranging from clapping, crickets, drumroll, and evil laughter, to audio clips from artists like Rebecca Black and favorite TV shows and movies.
To check out Soundmojis, head to your Messenger app, start a chat, tap the smiley face to open the expressions menu, and select the loudspeaker icon. From there, you can preview and send your favorite Soundmojis again and again.
https://messengernews.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Soundmoji-MSGR-1920×1760-2.mp4?_=1
Facebook is confident that this feature will upsurge its popularity. Users will be able to send soundmojis during chat and can be helpful in marketing. Facebook Messenger has launched an entire Soundmoji library to choose from, which will be updated regularly with new sound effects and famous sound bites.
This post was originally published on VOSA.
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Apple last year reintroduced a flat-edged design for the iPhone, and the iPhone 13 will likely build on that design
This post was originally published on The Asian Age | Home.
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Facebook launched its payments system for use across the main site, as well as WhatsApp and Instagram
This post was originally published on The Asian Age | Home.
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Web Desk:
WhatsApp has added a new Archived box on the top of the screen, which could be annoying for a lot of people. Now, you might be wondering why WhatsApp has added it on the top. So the answer to that question is very simple. WhatsApp doesn’t want you to forget that you have archived some chats.
If you are seeing the Archived box on top of the screen, it means that all your archived chats will always remain hidden and you will never see a new message from archived chats. But you can always change that in the settings section after following a few simple steps.
Step 1: Open WhatsApp on your smartphone and tap on the Archived box, which is now located on top of the screen. WhatsApp will then open all your archived chats.
Step 2: Tap on the three-dotted icon. It is on the right of the “Archived” text. Tap again on “Archive settings.”
Step 3: Disable the “Keep Chats Archived” option. After disabling it, the Archived box will disappear from the top of the screen.
Disabling this option would mean that archived individual or group chats won’t stay archived when you receive a new message from that individual or group chat. If you want them to remain archived, then you shouldn’t disable the “Keep Chats Archived” option.
This post was originally published on VOSA.
