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Tech giant&nbsp;Twitter has been fined $100,000 for ''multiple campaign finance violations'' for failing to keep records of&nbsp; advertisements public.

It has been asked to pay Washington state's Public Disclosure Transparency Account&nbsp;the state's Attorney General Bob Ferguson said on Tuesday.

It comes with less than a month to go for the United States election 2020 on November 3.

Interestingly, Twitter&nbsp;earned nearly $200,000 for campaign ads from 2012 through 2019 but failed to follow Washington state disclosure laws, the attorney general's office said in a statement.

According to papers filed at the King County Superior Court, the company failed to maintain the required records for at least 38 Washington candidates and committees that reported paying $194,550 for political advertising on&nbsp;Twitter's platform since 2012.

"Transparency in political advertising is critical to a free and informed electorate," Ferguson said. "Whether you are a local newspaper or a multinational social media platform, you must follow our campaign finance laws."

Tech giant Twitter has been fined $100,000 for ''multiple campaign finance violations'' for failing to keep records of advertisements public. It has been asked to pay Washington state's Public Disclosure Transparency Account the state's Attorney General Bob Ferguson said on Tuesday.

Tech giant Twitter has been fined $100,000 for ''multiple campaign finance violations'' for failing to keep records of advertisements public. It has been asked to pay Washington state's Public Disclosure Transparency Account the state's Attorney General Bob Ferguson said on Tuesday. It comes with less than a month to go for the United States election 2020 on November 3. Interestingly, Twitter earned nearly $200,000 for campaign ads from 2012 through 2019 but failed to follow Washington state disclosure laws, the attorney general's office said in a statement. According to papers filed at the King County Superior Court, the company failed to maintain the required records for at least 38 Washington candidates and committees that reported paying $194,550 for political advertising on Twitter's platform since 2012. "Transparency in political advertising is critical to a free and informed electorate," Ferguson said. "Whether you are a local newspaper or a multinational social media platform, you must follow our campaign finance laws."

US election 2020: Twitter fined $100,000 for campaign violations; earned twice during process

NEW YORK — Facebook has just leased enough new office space in Manhattan to nearly triple its current local workforce, including at one of the city’s most iconic buildings, the 107-year-old former main post office complex near Pennsylvania Station.

Apple, which set up its first office in New York a decade ago, is expanding to another building in Manhattan. And Google and Amazon are stitching together corporate campuses in the city more quickly than anywhere else in the world. Amazon paid roughly $1 billion in March for the iconic Lord &amp; Taylor building on Fifth Avenue.

Despite a pandemic that has ravaged New York, hollowed out many of its office buildings and raised fundamental questions about its future, the four companies collectively known as Big Tech are all significantly expanding their footprint in the city, giving it a badly needed vote of confidence.

With fears that the virus could spike again in the colder months, many companies are grappling with how, when and even if office workers will come back to buildings in Manhattan. And the tech giants have not brought their workers back yet, either.

Even so, the giants have not only moved forward with previous growth plans, but have also increased their pace of hiring and office acquisition during the pandemic.

The industry’s embrace of New York City comes despite the tumultuous reception that Amazon received last year when it proposed building a sprawling headquarters in Queens. Amazon abandoned the plans in the face of political and community opposition, but now has acquired more than 2 million square feet of office space for corporate workers, as well as warehouses from Staten Island to Queens to the Bronx.

After Amazon bought the Lord &amp; Taylor building, it announced in August that 2,000 employees would eventually work there, increasing by half its current tech workforce of 4,000.

Amazon now has eight office properties in New York, most of which are clustered in Midtown. The company recently expanded outside Manhattan, leasing space on the Brooklyn waterfront for its Amazon Music team.

“We know that talent attracts talent, and we believe that the creative energy of cities like New York will continue to attract diverse professionals from around the world,” said Ardine Williams, Amazon’s vice president of workforce development.

Even with Big Tech’s expansion, the city continues to face a fundamental challenge: Most offices have been deserted since March, devastating the local economy and the ecosystem of transit, stores, restaurants and other business that depend on workers. Only about 12% of workers have returned to Manhattan offices managed by CBRE, a commercial real estate firm that manages 20 million square feet of office space in the city.

Many people do not want to go back to offices until there is a vaccine. Even after that, there are mounting questions about whether the pandemic has fundamentally tarnished the allure of the office towers of Midtown and Lower Manhattan.

What’s more, a recent uptick in new cases in parts of Brooklyn and Queens has raised fears that a second wave looms and that restrictions on daily life could be reimposed.

Collectively, Amazon, Google, Facebook and Apple have hired more than 2,600 employees in the city so far this year, bringing their total employment to over 22,000 people. Facebook alone has added 1,100 workers to bring its current workforce up to 4,000.

Apple, Amazon and Facebook have gobbled up more than 1.6 million square feet of office space since the start of the year, most of which was leased or bought during the pandemic. Before the pandemic, Google added about 1.7 million square feet of office space as part of a corporate campus rising along the Hudson River in Manhattan.

The companies now have enough new office space to hire another 15,000 employees. When those workers will arrive at the new offices remains uncertain; all four companies have allowed their employees to work remotely and some, including Facebook, foresee a future in which up to half its employees work from home.

Executives at the companies said their investments even during one of the city’s darkest periods reflect their belief that the features that set New York apart — its diversity, culture, regional transportation network and numerous colleges and universities — will keep luring people after the pandemic.

To a large extent, the companies are also wagering that current and future employees will be eager to return to shared workplaces that promote spontaneity and collaboration.

“The big takeaway here is that New York will always be a tech hub,” said William Floyd, director of external affairs for Google’s New York offices, which has about 9,000 workers, more than half of whom are engineers.

Google is on target to employ 14,000 people in the city in the coming years, fulfilling a 2018 pledge to double its New York City workforce. The company has pieced together a sizable corporate campus in and around the Chelsea neighborhood in Manhattan, including several properties that are under construction.

The tech sector first settled in New York more than two decades ago, a tiny player in the shadows of the city’s traditional powerhouse industries like finance, media, real estate and health care. Google opened its first outpost outside California, a sales office in Manhattan with a lone employee, in 2000.

But in recent years, New York has blossomed into a bona fide tech hub, an East Coast rival to Silicon Valley that has become a second home to tech behemoths but has also given rise to thousands of startups.

The larger companies have established a tech corridor on Manhattan’s West Side, stretching from West 34th Street in Midtown south to the World Trade Center area in Lower Manhattan.

The focus of the tech companies in New York has shifted from marketing and sales departments to teams that mirror those in Silicon Valley. They have recruited engineers and developers from local and regional universities and filled some roles with West Coast employees who want to decamp to New York City.

For every Big Tech company in the city, there are numerous smaller but still sizable firms, including Salesforce, LinkedIn, Spotify and ZocDoc. Microsoft, another tech giant, has a modest presence in offices near Times Square.

Before the pandemic, the city’s tech sector employed 150,100 people, and had added a total of 15,700 jobs in 2018 and 2019, according to the New York state comptroller’s office. Most of the new jobs were in fields like software, data processing and internet publishing.

The pace of hiring is expected to keep climbing.

In August, when Facebook grabbed all the office space at the James A. Farley Building near Pennsylvania Station, it cemented Manhattan’s West Side as its East Coast campus.

The company said it leased 730,000 square feet at the old post office in part because of its cavernous layout — a rarity among New York City buildings — which mimics the large open areas at its headquarters in Menlo Park, California. When a renovation is completed next year, the building will be filled with engineers.

“The floor plan will allow for multiple teams to be housed on those floors,” said Jamila Reeves, a company spokeswoman, “and we don’t necessarily have to break folks up.”

Around the corner from the Farley Building, Apple signed a lease for 220,000 square feet at 11 Penn Plaza, a 1923 art deco tower near Madison Square Garden.

Before the deal, Apple, which has said very little about its plans in the city, had not expanded beyond an office building on Fifth Avenue in the Flatiron neighborhood that it moved into in 2011.

Smaller tech companies have also kept adding to their payrolls right through the outbreak.

MongoDB, a cloud database platform whose headquarters are in Midtown Manhattan, has hired 97 employees since the beginning of the pandemic, bringing its total workforce in the city to 551.

The company, whose products are used by Verizon, eBay and Adobe among other companies, has more than 2,100 employees worldwide and is creating a hybrid work model to have employees work remotely some days and in the office on others.

“While there are questions about what the future of work post-COVID will look like, we plan to maintain office spaces in New York,” said Dev Ittycheria, the company’s chief executive. “We believe that being physically present with colleagues in an office can offer important opportunities for in-person interaction, collaboration, and connection that are important for the success of our company.”

One of the company’s newest hires, Farah Wahab, started in August as a product marketing manager after working for five years at tech companies in San Francisco.

Though San Francisco has a far larger tech scene, she said the city felt more insular compared with New York.

“I love S.F. but it can feel a bit like a tech-centric bubble isolated from the real world,” Wahab, 32, said. “Being around different industries and types of people, as well as greater access to the market, was important to me both personally and professionally.”

Kia D. Floyd, Facebook’s head of public policy for the east and Midwest regions, pointed out that the company set up shop in New York shortly before the 2008 Great Recession, another challenging period of uncertainty in the city.

“People fled the city then and didn’t think it would come back,” Floyd said. “But the city has grit and resilience and diversity, and it was always going to be inspirational for businesses like ours.” 
&nbsp;

NEW YORK — Facebook has just leased enough new office space in Manhattan to nearly triple its current local workforce, including at one of the city’s most iconic buildings, the 107-year-old former main post office complex near Pennsylvania Station.

NEW YORK — Facebook has just leased enough new office space in Manhattan to nearly triple its current local workforce, including at one of the city’s most iconic buildings, the 107-year-old former main post office complex near Pennsylvania Station. Apple, which set up its first office in New York a decade ago, is expanding to another building in Manhattan. And Google and Amazon are stitching together corporate campuses in the city more quickly than anywhere else in the world. Amazon paid roughly $1 billion in March for the iconic Lord & Taylor building on Fifth Avenue. Despite a pandemic that has ravaged New York, hollowed out many of its office buildings and raised fundamental questions about its future, the four companies collectively known as Big Tech are all significantly expanding their footprint in the city, giving it a badly needed vote of confidence. With fears that the virus could spike again in the colder months, many companies are grappling with how, when and even if office workers will come back to buildings in Manhattan. And the tech giants have not brought their workers back yet, either. Even so, the giants have not only moved forward with previous growth plans, but have also increased their pace of hiring and office acquisition during the pandemic. The industry’s embrace of New York City comes despite the tumultuous reception that Amazon received last year when it proposed building a sprawling headquarters in Queens. Amazon abandoned the plans in the face of political and community opposition, but now has acquired more than 2 million square feet of office space for corporate workers, as well as warehouses from Staten Island to Queens to the Bronx. After Amazon bought the Lord & Taylor building, it announced in August that 2,000 employees would eventually work there, increasing by half its current tech workforce of 4,000. Amazon now has eight office properties in New York, most of which are clustered in Midtown. The company recently expanded outside Manhattan, leasing space on the Brooklyn waterfront for its Amazon Music team. “We know that talent attracts talent, and we believe that the creative energy of cities like New York will continue to attract diverse professionals from around the world,” said Ardine Williams, Amazon’s vice president of workforce development. Even with Big Tech’s expansion, the city continues to face a fundamental challenge: Most offices have been deserted since March, devastating the local economy and the ecosystem of transit, stores, restaurants and other business that depend on workers. Only about 12% of workers have returned to Manhattan offices managed by CBRE, a commercial real estate firm that manages 20 million square feet of office space in the city. Many people do not want to go back to offices until there is a vaccine. Even after that, there are mounting questions about whether the pandemic has fundamentally tarnished the allure of the office towers of Midtown and Lower Manhattan. What’s more, a recent uptick in new cases in parts of Brooklyn and Queens has raised fears that a second wave looms and that restrictions on daily life could be reimposed. Collectively, Amazon, Google, Facebook and Apple have hired more than 2,600 employees in the city so far this year, bringing their total employment to over 22,000 people. Facebook alone has added 1,100 workers to bring its current workforce up to 4,000. Apple, Amazon and Facebook have gobbled up more than 1.6 million square feet of office space since the start of the year, most of which was leased or bought during the pandemic. Before the pandemic, Google added about 1.7 million square feet of office space as part of a corporate campus rising along the Hudson River in Manhattan. The companies now have enough new office space to hire another 15,000 employees. When those workers will arrive at the new offices remains uncertain; all four companies have allowed their employees to work remotely and some, including Facebook, foresee a future in which up to half its employees work from home. Executives at the companies said their investments even during one of the city’s darkest periods reflect their belief that the features that set New York apart — its diversity, culture, regional transportation network and numerous colleges and universities — will keep luring people after the pandemic. To a large extent, the companies are also wagering that current and future employees will be eager to return to shared workplaces that promote spontaneity and collaboration. “The big takeaway here is that New York will always be a tech hub,” said William Floyd, director of external affairs for Google’s New York offices, which has about 9,000 workers, more than half of whom are engineers. Google is on target to employ 14,000 people in the city in the coming years, fulfilling a 2018 pledge to double its New York City workforce. The company has pieced together a sizable corporate campus in and around the Chelsea neighborhood in Manhattan, including several properties that are under construction. The tech sector first settled in New York more than two decades ago, a tiny player in the shadows of the city’s traditional powerhouse industries like finance, media, real estate and health care. Google opened its first outpost outside California, a sales office in Manhattan with a lone employee, in 2000. But in recent years, New York has blossomed into a bona fide tech hub, an East Coast rival to Silicon Valley that has become a second home to tech behemoths but has also given rise to thousands of startups. The larger companies have established a tech corridor on Manhattan’s West Side, stretching from West 34th Street in Midtown south to the World Trade Center area in Lower Manhattan. The focus of the tech companies in New York has shifted from marketing and sales departments to teams that mirror those in Silicon Valley. They have recruited engineers and developers from local and regional universities and filled some roles with West Coast employees who want to decamp to New York City. For every Big Tech company in the city, there are numerous smaller but still sizable firms, including Salesforce, LinkedIn, Spotify and ZocDoc. Microsoft, another tech giant, has a modest presence in offices near Times Square. Before the pandemic, the city’s tech sector employed 150,100 people, and had added a total of 15,700 jobs in 2018 and 2019, according to the New York state comptroller’s office. Most of the new jobs were in fields like software, data processing and internet publishing. The pace of hiring is expected to keep climbing. In August, when Facebook grabbed all the office space at the James A. Farley Building near Pennsylvania Station, it cemented Manhattan’s West Side as its East Coast campus. The company said it leased 730,000 square feet at the old post office in part because of its cavernous layout — a rarity among New York City buildings — which mimics the large open areas at its headquarters in Menlo Park, California. When a renovation is completed next year, the building will be filled with engineers. “The floor plan will allow for multiple teams to be housed on those floors,” said Jamila Reeves, a company spokeswoman, “and we don’t necessarily have to break folks up.” Around the corner from the Farley Building, Apple signed a lease for 220,000 square feet at 11 Penn Plaza, a 1923 art deco tower near Madison Square Garden. Before the deal, Apple, which has said very little about its plans in the city, had not expanded beyond an office building on Fifth Avenue in the Flatiron neighborhood that it moved into in 2011. Smaller tech companies have also kept adding to their payrolls right through the outbreak. MongoDB, a cloud database platform whose headquarters are in Midtown Manhattan, has hired 97 employees since the beginning of the pandemic, bringing its total workforce in the city to 551. The company, whose products are used by Verizon, eBay and Adobe among other companies, has more than 2,100 employees worldwide and is creating a hybrid work model to have employees work remotely some days and in the office on others. “While there are questions about what the future of work post-COVID will look like, we plan to maintain office spaces in New York,” said Dev Ittycheria, the company’s chief executive. “We believe that being physically present with colleagues in an office can offer important opportunities for in-person interaction, collaboration, and connection that are important for the success of our company.” One of the company’s newest hires, Farah Wahab, started in August as a product marketing manager after working for five years at tech companies in San Francisco. Though San Francisco has a far larger tech scene, she said the city felt more insular compared with New York. “I love S.F. but it can feel a bit like a tech-centric bubble isolated from the real world,” Wahab, 32, said. “Being around different industries and types of people, as well as greater access to the market, was important to me both personally and professionally.” Kia D. Floyd, Facebook’s head of public policy for the east and Midwest regions, pointed out that the company set up shop in New York shortly before the 2008 Great Recession, another challenging period of uncertainty in the city. “People fled the city then and didn’t think it would come back,” Floyd said. “But the city has grit and resilience and diversity, and it was always going to be inspirational for businesses like ours.”

Manhattan emptied out during the pandemic. But Big Tech is moving in

An app launched by China's Tuber by a cybersecurity firm Qihoo 360 disappeared after it gave the country’s internet users access to Facebook and Google which are banned in the Communist country.

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/technology/quantum-leap-united-states-unveils-blueprint-for-virtually-unhackable-internet-315799">Also Read:&nbsp;'Quantum' leap: United States unveils blueprint for virtually 'unhackable internet'</a>

The App also allowed Chinese citizens to legally access Youtube and Instagram photos without resorting to the illegal virtual private network(VPN). However, it disappeared from &nbsp;Huawei's app store.

China controls all access to the Internet in the country with users allowed to access only government sanctioned sites. Tuber was reportedly dowloaded five million times on Huawei’s App store.

The new app had allowed millions of Chinese to bypass the state-controlled Great Firewall. After it was launched, it required personal information from users namely names and identity card numbers even as some users complained it too slow.

Qihoo 360 is owned by China's tech tycoon Zhou Hongyi who had delisted his company from the New York stock exchange four years ago and aligned itself to China's policies. The US had earlier this year sanctioned Zhou’s two companies over national security concerns.

The US government had earlier clamped down on China's popular video-sharing app TikTok over security concerns. US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said following the Trump administration's line had said that TikTok must become a "US-based company controlled by US investors".

However, China's Xi Jinping regime accused Trump of "bullying" and "abusing national power" in its bid to take over TikTok.

An app launched by China's Tuber by a cybersecurity firm Qihoo 360 disappeared after it gave the country’s internet users access to Facebook and Google which are banned in the Communist country.

An app launched by China's Tuber by a cybersecurity firm Qihoo 360 disappeared after it gave the country’s internet users access to Facebook and Google which are banned in the Communist country. Also Read: 'Quantum' leap: United States unveils blueprint for virtually 'unhackable internet' The App also allowed Chinese citizens to legally access Youtube and Instagram photos without resorting to the illegal virtual private network(VPN). However, it disappeared from Huawei's app store. China controls all access to the Internet in the country with users allowed to access only government sanctioned sites. Tuber was reportedly dowloaded five million times on Huawei’s App store. The new app had allowed millions of Chinese to bypass the state-controlled Great Firewall. After it was launched, it required personal information from users namely names and identity card numbers even as some users complained it too slow. Qihoo 360 is owned by China's tech tycoon Zhou Hongyi who had delisted his company from the New York stock exchange four years ago and aligned itself to China's policies. The US had earlier this year sanctioned Zhou’s two companies over national security concerns. The US government had earlier clamped down on China's popular video-sharing app TikTok over security concerns. US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said following the Trump administration's line had said that TikTok must become a "US-based company controlled by US investors". However, China's Xi Jinping regime accused Trump of "bullying" and "abusing national power" in its bid to take over TikTok.

China's Tuber app bypasses Great Firewall, then disappears

Apple iPhone 12 series - Apple Inc on Tuesday (October 13) launched its next-generation iPhone 12, with faster 5G connectivity that the Cupertino-based&nbsp;company hopes will&nbsp;keep its sales booming through the end of the year. During the launch event, Apple unveiled four iPhone 12 devices. iPhone 12, iPhone 12 Mini, iPhone 12&nbsp;Pro and iPhone 12 Pro Max.&nbsp;All are equipped with 5G technology.

The core of the line-up, the iPhone 12 has a 6.1-inch display, while a 'Mini' version has 5.4-inch and is slightly cheaper. A 'Pro' version comes with three cameras and a new 3-D 'lidar' sensor. The largest in the series is the 'Pro Max'.&nbsp;

iPhone 12 will be available in India October 30 onwards. Dates for other devices have&nbsp;not been specified.

&nbsp;

<h2>Apple iPhone 12 series - Specifications</h2>

The iPhone 12 mini, iPhone 12, iPhone 12 Pro, and the iPhone 12 Pro Max run on iOS 14 out of the box.

All of these phones come with Super Retina XDR OLED displays.&nbsp;

These smartphones are powered by the A14 Bionic SoC, which is designed to handle talks including 4K video editing.

iPhone 12 mini has a 5.4-inch screen while iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro have 6.1-inch form-factor&nbsp;

iPhone 12 Pro Max has a 6.7-inch screen.

The iPhone 12 mini and iPhone 12 feature 12-megapixel dual rear cameras with an f/1.6 aperture and f/2.4 aperture respectively.

iPhone 12 Pro and iPhone 12 Pro Max have 12-mexapixel triple rear cameras that have wide (f/1.6), ultra-wide (f/2.4) and additional telephoto (f/2.0 on Pro and f/2.2 on Pro Max) lens. They also include a LiDAR (a portmanteau of light and radar) scanne&nbsp;

&nbsp;

<h2>The price:&nbsp;Apple iPhone 12 series</h2>

iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Mini will be available in 64GB, 128GB and 256 GB variants.

If you want a choice of colours, it's available as well.

You can choose between Black, White, Blue, Green and Red.

64 GB variant of iPhone 12 mini has been priced at Rs 69,900.

iPhone mini 12 with 128GB storage will cost you Rs 74,900

Its 256GB storage variant will set you back by Rs 84,900.

&nbsp;

<h2>iPhone 12</h2>

64 GB iPhone 12 has been priced at Rs 79,900.

128GB variant will cost you Rs 84,900

And Finally, 256GB variant wil be yours if you pay 94,900.

iPhone 12 has been designed by Apple to be a successor of iPhone 11.

&nbsp;

<h2>iPhone 12 Pro and iPhone 12 Pro Max</h2>

These are larger iPhones in this series unveiled by Apple. Both feature 512 GB variant.

iPhone 12 Pro starts selling at Rs 1,19,900 &nbsp;for 128GB model.

256 GB model will be yours if you pay 1,29,900

512 GB iPhone 12 Pro will be your neighbour's envy if you shell out a cool Rs 1,49,900

iPhone 12 Pro is intended to be a successor for iPhone 11 Pro

&nbsp;

<h2>Let's talk about iPhone Pro Max</h2>

iPhone Pro Max is the top-of-the-line for this series.

Its 128GB variant has been priced at Rs 1,29,900

The model with 256GB internal memory will cost you 1,39,900

512GB variant will be yours if you pay Rs 1,59,900

iPhone Pro and iPhone Pro Max will be available in Gold, Graphite, Pacific Blue, and Silver colours. 
&nbsp;

Apple iPhone 12 series - Apple Inc on Tuesday (October 13) launched its next-generation iPhone 12, with faster 5G connectivity that the Cupertino-based company hopes will keep its sales booming through the end of the year.

Apple iPhone 12 series - Apple Inc on Tuesday (October 13) launched its next-generation iPhone 12, with faster 5G connectivity that the Cupertino-based company hopes will keep its sales booming through the end of the year. During the launch event, Apple unveiled four iPhone 12 devices. iPhone 12, iPhone 12 Mini, iPhone 12 Pro and iPhone 12 Pro Max. All are equipped with 5G technology. The core of the line-up, the iPhone 12 has a 6.1-inch display, while a 'Mini' version has 5.4-inch and is slightly cheaper. A 'Pro' version comes with three cameras and a new 3-D 'lidar' sensor. The largest in the series is the 'Pro Max'. iPhone 12 will be available in India October 30 onwards. Dates for other devices have not been specified. Apple iPhone 12 series - Specifications The iPhone 12 mini, iPhone 12, iPhone 12 Pro, and the iPhone 12 Pro Max run on iOS 14 out of the box. All of these phones come with Super Retina XDR OLED displays. These smartphones are powered by the A14 Bionic SoC, which is designed to handle talks including 4K video editing. iPhone 12 mini has a 5.4-inch screen while iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro have 6.1-inch form-factor iPhone 12 Pro Max has a 6.7-inch screen. The iPhone 12 mini and iPhone 12 feature 12-megapixel dual rear cameras with an f/1.6 aperture and f/2.4 aperture respectively. iPhone 12 Pro and iPhone 12 Pro Max have 12-mexapixel triple rear cameras that have wide (f/1.6), ultra-wide (f/2.4) and additional telephoto (f/2.0 on Pro and f/2.2 on Pro Max) lens. They also include a LiDAR (a portmanteau of light and radar) scanne The price: Apple iPhone 12 series iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Mini will be available in 64GB, 128GB and 256 GB variants. If you want a choice of colours, it's available as well. You can choose between Black, White, Blue, Green and Red. 64 GB variant of iPhone 12 mini has been priced at Rs 69,900. iPhone mini 12 with 128GB storage will cost you Rs 74,900 Its 256GB storage variant will set you back by Rs 84,900. iPhone 12 64 GB iPhone 12 has been priced at Rs 79,900. 128GB variant will cost you Rs 84,900 And Finally, 256GB variant wil be yours if you pay 94,900. iPhone 12 has been designed by Apple to be a successor of iPhone 11. iPhone 12 Pro and iPhone 12 Pro Max These are larger iPhones in this series unveiled by Apple. Both feature 512 GB variant. iPhone 12 Pro starts selling at Rs 1,19,900 for 128GB model. 256 GB model will be yours if you pay 1,29,900 512 GB iPhone 12 Pro will be your neighbour's envy if you shell out a cool Rs 1,49,900 iPhone 12 Pro is intended to be a successor for iPhone 11 Pro Let's talk about iPhone Pro Max iPhone Pro Max is the top-of-the-line for this series. Its 128GB variant has been priced at Rs 1,29,900 The model with 256GB internal memory will cost you 1,39,900 512GB variant will be yours if you pay Rs 1,59,900 iPhone Pro and iPhone Pro Max will be available in Gold, Graphite, Pacific Blue, and Silver colours.

Apple iPhone 12 series: Check out prices, availability, specs and more

Facebook Inc will start banning ads that explicitly discourage people from getting vaccinated, the world's largest social media company said on Tuesday, as it also announced a new flu vaccine information campaign.

Ads advocating for or against legislation or government policies around vaccines, including a COVID-19 vaccine, will still be allowed, the company said in a blog post. It will begin to enforce the new global policy in the next few days.

Facebook, with 2.7 billion monthly active users, has been under pressure from lawmakers and public health groups to crack down on anti-vaccine content and misinformation on its platform. The company said that although a COVID-19 vaccine would not be available for some time, the pandemic had highlighted the importance of preventative health behaviors.

Also read:&nbsp;<a href="http://13.235.153.162/world/facebook-censors-wion-after-interview-with-chinese-virologist-dr-li-meng-yan-who-claimed-covid-19-is-lab-manufactured-334832" hreflang="en">Facebook censors WION after interview with Chinese virologist Dr Li-Meng Yan, who claimed COVID-19 is lab manufactured</a>

Facebook's previous rules prohibited ads containing vaccine misinformation or hoaxes identified by leading health organizations, but allowed ads opposing vaccines if they did not contain false claims.

This summer, Facebook Public Policy Manager Jason Hirsch told Reuters the company believed users should be able to express personal anti-vaccine views and that more aggressive censorship could push people hesitant about vaccines towards the anti-vaccine camp.

Facebook will also start directing U.S. users this week to information about the flu vaccine and how to get it, according to the company's Head of Health Kang-Xing Jin and Director of Product Management Rob Leathern in the blog post.

Facebook is working with public health partners like the World Health Organization and UNICEF on messaging campaigns to increase immunization rates, they added.

Also read:&nbsp;<a href="http://13.235.153.162/world/facebook-to-ban-content-which-denies-and-distorts-the-holocaust-334797" hreflang="en">Facebook to ban content which denies and distorts the Holocaust</a>

Anti-vaccine content and misinformation about the new COVID-19 vaccines have flourished on social media platforms including Facebook during the coronavirus pandemic, researchers told Reuters earlier this year.

In September, the company also said it would stop recommending health-related Facebook groups, saying it was crucial that people get health information from "authoritative sources."

Facebook Inc will start banning ads that explicitly discourage people from getting vaccinated, the world's largest social media company said on Tuesday, as it also announced a new flu vaccine information campaign.

Facebook Inc will start banning ads that explicitly discourage people from getting vaccinated, the world's largest social media company said on Tuesday, as it also announced a new flu vaccine information campaign. Ads advocating for or against legislation or government policies around vaccines, including a COVID-19 vaccine, will still be allowed, the company said in a blog post. It will begin to enforce the new global policy in the next few days. Facebook, with 2.7 billion monthly active users, has been under pressure from lawmakers and public health groups to crack down on anti-vaccine content and misinformation on its platform. The company said that although a COVID-19 vaccine would not be available for some time, the pandemic had highlighted the importance of preventative health behaviors. Also read: Facebook censors WION after interview with Chinese virologist Dr Li-Meng Yan, who claimed COVID-19 is lab manufactured Facebook's previous rules prohibited ads containing vaccine misinformation or hoaxes identified by leading health organizations, but allowed ads opposing vaccines if they did not contain false claims. This summer, Facebook Public Policy Manager Jason Hirsch told Reuters the company believed users should be able to express personal anti-vaccine views and that more aggressive censorship could push people hesitant about vaccines towards the anti-vaccine camp. Facebook will also start directing U.S. users this week to information about the flu vaccine and how to get it, according to the company's Head of Health Kang-Xing Jin and Director of Product Management Rob Leathern in the blog post. Facebook is working with public health partners like the World Health Organization and UNICEF on messaging campaigns to increase immunization rates, they added. Also read: Facebook to ban content which denies and distorts the Holocaust Anti-vaccine content and misinformation about the new COVID-19 vaccines have flourished on social media platforms including Facebook during the coronavirus pandemic, researchers told Reuters earlier this year. In September, the company also said it would stop recommending health-related Facebook groups, saying it was crucial that people get health information from "authoritative sources."

Facebook will ban ads discouraging people from getting vaccines

Big technology monopoly is facing the heat in the United States after two significant reports on diverse issues highlighted how uniquely powerful they are.

A US&nbsp;House of Representatives panel looking into abuses of market power by four big&nbsp;technology companies found they used "killer acquisitions" to smite rivals, charged exorbitant fees and forced small businesses into "oppressive" contracts in the name of profit.

Also see:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/photos/key-moments-of-antitrust-hearing-bezos-snack-put-your-mask-on-316939">Key moments of antitrust hearing: Bezos' snack, 'Put your mask on'</a>

The antitrust subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee recommended that Alphabet Inc's&nbsp;Google, Apple Inc, Amazon.com&nbsp;and Facebook,&nbsp;with a combined market value of over $5 trillion, should not both control and compete in related businesses.

<div class="videoWrapper trancodeVideo"><iframe allowfullscreen="" autoplay="1" class="includeVideo" frameborder="0" height="350" src="https://www.wionews.com/videos/gravitas-why-the-monopoly-of-big-tech-needs-to-be-broken-334838/embed" style="width:100%;max-width:560px;" width="560"></iframe></div>

The panel's report revealed that the tech giants have maintained their monopoly position&nbsp;by using the vast amounts of data they have&nbsp;gathered on consumers and other businesses in order to muscle out rivals, gain an advantage in new product markets and reduce innovation by others.&nbsp;

Also read:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/technology/ceos-of-apple-amazon-facebook-and-google-to-testify-in-congress-over-antitrust-issues-310090">CEOs of Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google to testify in Congress over antitrust issues</a>

The scathing 449-page report, the result of the first such congressional review of the&nbsp;tech&nbsp;industry - suggested expansive changes to antitrust law and described dozens of instances where the companies misused their power, revealing corporate cultures apparently bent on doing what they could to maintain dominance over large portions of the internet.

"To put it simply, companies that once were scrappy, underdog startups that challenged the status quo have become the kinds of&nbsp;monopolies&nbsp;we last saw in the era of oil barons and railroad tycoons," the report said.

In anticipation of the report, Amazon warned in a blog post Tuesday against "fringe notions of antitrust" and market interventions that "would kill off independent retailers and punish consumers by forcing small businesses out of popular online stores, raising prices and reducing consumer choice."

Google said in a statement that it competes "fairly in a fast-moving and highly competitive industry. We disagree with today’s reports, which feature outdated and inaccurate allegations from commercial rivals about Search and other services."

Facebook called itself "an American success story" in response to the report. "We compete with a wide variety of services with millions, even billions, of people using them. Acquisitions are part of every industry, and just one way we innovate new&nbsp;technologies to deliver more value to people," the social network said.

Apple said, "Scrutiny is reasonable and appropriate but we vehemently disagree with the conclusions." The company also defended its commission rates and said it would issue a more extensive response in the coming days.

After more than a year of investigation involving 1.3 million documents and more than 300 interviews, the committee led by Democratic Congressman David Cicilline found companies were running marketplaces where they also competed, creating "a position that enables them to write one set of rules for others, while they play by another."

Coming just weeks before the November&nbsp;3 presidential election, the content of the report became increasingly political, an opportunity for Republicans and Democrats to boost their credibility in the fight against market domination by big&nbsp;tech&nbsp;companies.

That said, Congress is unlikely to act on the findings this year. Since the report reflects the views of the Democratic majority in the House, it sends a clear signal that should Joe Biden win the White House, the pressure on the companies could well continue.

Also, the report is likely to inform existing antitrust probes against the companies. Counsels for the committee, who did not wish to be identified, said they have been speaking to the Federal Trade Commission, which is investigating Facebook and Amazon. Also, Chairman Cicilline has been in contact with state attorneys general, who are investigating Facebook and Google, they said.

Separately, the US&nbsp;Justice Department is investigating large&nbsp;technology companies and is expected to bring a lawsuit against Google soon.

US lawmakers believe that&nbsp;tech platforms have used data to perpetuate a cycle of dominance that accrues to them more and more power. To keep their power in check punitive actions need to be taken.

Recommendations

The panel recommended companies be prohibited from operating in closely aligned businesses. While they did not name any one company, this recommendation would suggest that Google, which runs the auctions for online ad space and participates in those auctions, should potentially be required to separate clearly, or not even operate, the two businesses. For a factbox, click

Facebook's acquisition of Instagram in 2012 is another example of this. Instagram at the time was small and insignificant, but Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg saw its potential and noted that it was "building networks that are competitive with our own" and "could be very disruptive to us," the report said.

As part of the report, the committee staff drew up a menu of potential changes in antitrust law. The suggestions ranged from the aggressive, such as potentially barring companies like Amazon.com from operating the markets in which they also compete, to the less controversial, like increasing the budgets of the agencies that enforce antitrust law: the Justice Department's Antitrust Division and the Federal Trade Commission.

The report also urged Congress to allow antitrust enforcers more leeway in stopping companies from purchasing potential rivals, something that is now difficult.

The antitrust panel will take up the majority report after the October recess for formal adoption and will have a vote on it, the counsels for the committee said.

Big technology monopoly is facing the heat in the United States after two significant reports on diverse issues highlighted how uniquely powerful they are. A US House of Representatives panel looking into abuses of market power by four big technology companies found they used "killer acquisitions" to smite rivals, charged exorbitant fees and forced small businesses into "oppressive" contracts in the name of profit.

Big technology monopoly is facing the heat in the United States after two significant reports on diverse issues highlighted how uniquely powerful they are. A US House of Representatives panel looking into abuses of market power by four big technology companies found they used "killer acquisitions" to smite rivals, charged exorbitant fees and forced small businesses into "oppressive" contracts in the name of profit. Also see: Key moments of antitrust hearing: Bezos' snack, 'Put your mask on' The antitrust subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee recommended that Alphabet Inc's Google, Apple Inc, Amazon.com and Facebook, with a combined market value of over $5 trillion, should not both control and compete in related businesses. The panel's report revealed that the tech giants have maintained their monopoly position by using the vast amounts of data they have gathered on consumers and other businesses in order to muscle out rivals, gain an advantage in new product markets and reduce innovation by others. Also read: CEOs of Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google to testify in Congress over antitrust issues The scathing 449-page report, the result of the first such congressional review of the tech industry - suggested expansive changes to antitrust law and described dozens of instances where the companies misused their power, revealing corporate cultures apparently bent on doing what they could to maintain dominance over large portions of the internet. "To put it simply, companies that once were scrappy, underdog startups that challenged the status quo have become the kinds of monopolies we last saw in the era of oil barons and railroad tycoons," the report said. In anticipation of the report, Amazon warned in a blog post Tuesday against "fringe notions of antitrust" and market interventions that "would kill off independent retailers and punish consumers by forcing small businesses out of popular online stores, raising prices and reducing consumer choice." Google said in a statement that it competes "fairly in a fast-moving and highly competitive industry. We disagree with today’s reports, which feature outdated and inaccurate allegations from commercial rivals about Search and other services." Facebook called itself "an American success story" in response to the report. "We compete with a wide variety of services with millions, even billions, of people using them. Acquisitions are part of every industry, and just one way we innovate new technologies to deliver more value to people," the social network said. Apple said, "Scrutiny is reasonable and appropriate but we vehemently disagree with the conclusions." The company also defended its commission rates and said it would issue a more extensive response in the coming days. After more than a year of investigation involving 1.3 million documents and more than 300 interviews, the committee led by Democratic Congressman David Cicilline found companies were running marketplaces where they also competed, creating "a position that enables them to write one set of rules for others, while they play by another." Coming just weeks before the November 3 presidential election, the content of the report became increasingly political, an opportunity for Republicans and Democrats to boost their credibility in the fight against market domination by big tech companies. That said, Congress is unlikely to act on the findings this year. Since the report reflects the views of the Democratic majority in the House, it sends a clear signal that should Joe Biden win the White House, the pressure on the companies could well continue. Also, the report is likely to inform existing antitrust probes against the companies. Counsels for the committee, who did not wish to be identified, said they have been speaking to the Federal Trade Commission, which is investigating Facebook and Amazon. Also, Chairman Cicilline has been in contact with state attorneys general, who are investigating Facebook and Google, they said. Separately, the US Justice Department is investigating large technology companies and is expected to bring a lawsuit against Google soon. US lawmakers believe that tech platforms have used data to perpetuate a cycle of dominance that accrues to them more and more power. To keep their power in check punitive actions need to be taken. Recommendations The panel recommended companies be prohibited from operating in closely aligned businesses. While they did not name any one company, this recommendation would suggest that Google, which runs the auctions for online ad space and participates in those auctions, should potentially be required to separate clearly, or not even operate, the two businesses. For a factbox, click Facebook's acquisition of Instagram in 2012 is another example of this. Instagram at the time was small and insignificant, but Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg saw its potential and noted that it was "building networks that are competitive with our own" and "could be very disruptive to us," the report said. As part of the report, the committee staff drew up a menu of potential changes in antitrust law. The suggestions ranged from the aggressive, such as potentially barring companies like Amazon.com from operating the markets in which they also compete, to the less controversial, like increasing the budgets of the agencies that enforce antitrust law: the Justice Department's Antitrust Division and the Federal Trade Commission. The report also urged Congress to allow antitrust enforcers more leeway in stopping companies from purchasing potential rivals, something that is now difficult. The antitrust panel will take up the majority report after the October recess for formal adoption and will have a vote on it, the counsels for the committee said.

Why United States wants to break apart tech monopoly

Facebook announced Monday that it will ban content that denies or distorts the Holocaust, describing the move as its latest effort to free the platform of hate.

The social media giant, which has long been criticized for not doing enough to disempower Holocaust deniers and other hate groups, said it would redirect users who search for terms about the Holocaust or its denial "to credible information off Facebook," according to a company statement.

"Our decision is supported by the well-documented rise in anti-Semitism globally and the alarming level of ignorance about the Holocaust, especially among young people," said a statement by Facebook vice president of content policy Monika Bickert.

Bickert cited a survey that showed almost a quarter of young adults in the United States saying the Holocaust was a myth or had been exaggerated.

Bickert described the steps on Holocaust denial content as part of its stepped-up effort to address hate after the company earlier banned more than 250 white supremacist groups, took down 22.5 million pieces of hate speech in the second quarter and banned anti-Semitic stereotypes.

She cautioned that the change will take time.

"Enforcement of these policies cannot happen overnight," Bickert said. "There is a range of content that can violate these policies, and it will take some time to train our reviewers and systems on enforcement."

Facebook's move was applauded by Anti-Defamation League Chief Executive Jonathan Greenblatt, who called the action "a big deal."

"This has been years in the making," Greenblatt said on Twitter. "Glad it finally happened."

Facebook announced Monday that it will ban content that denies or distorts the Holocaust, describing the move as its latest effort to free the platform of hate. The social media giant, which has long been criticized for not doing enough to disempower Holocaust deniers and other hate groups, said it would redirect users who search for terms about the Holocaust or its denial "to credible information off Facebook," according to a company statement.

Facebook announced Monday that it will ban content that denies or distorts the Holocaust, describing the move as its latest effort to free the platform of hate. The social media giant, which has long been criticized for not doing enough to disempower Holocaust deniers and other hate groups, said it would redirect users who search for terms about the Holocaust or its denial "to credible information off Facebook," according to a company statement. "Our decision is supported by the well-documented rise in anti-Semitism globally and the alarming level of ignorance about the Holocaust, especially among young people," said a statement by Facebook vice president of content policy Monika Bickert. Bickert cited a survey that showed almost a quarter of young adults in the United States saying the Holocaust was a myth or had been exaggerated. Bickert described the steps on Holocaust denial content as part of its stepped-up effort to address hate after the company earlier banned more than 250 white supremacist groups, took down 22.5 million pieces of hate speech in the second quarter and banned anti-Semitic stereotypes. She cautioned that the change will take time. "Enforcement of these policies cannot happen overnight," Bickert said. "There is a range of content that can violate these policies, and it will take some time to train our reviewers and systems on enforcement." Facebook's move was applauded by Anti-Defamation League Chief Executive Jonathan Greenblatt, who called the action "a big deal." "This has been years in the making," Greenblatt said on Twitter. "Glad it finally happened."

Facebook to ban Holocaust denial content

Apple iPhone 12 launch event: What to expect!

The US giant Apple is expected to release new iPhones later today - October 13. The launch event is set to begin at 10 AM California time (10.30 PM IST). The tag line for today’s event is “Hi, Speed”.

Even though the company hasn’t revealed official details of any anticipated releases yet, the features and specs of the upcoming iPhones have been making the rounds on portals for a while now.

4 new iPhones?

If leaks and rumours are to be believed, Apple is launching not 3, but 4 phones this year!

The devices slated for release are as follows: iPhone 12, iPhone 12 Pro, iPhone 12 Pro Max, and a new spin to the device - iPhone 12 Mini, which will boast a 5.4 inch screen.

To cater to varying user needs, the company is releasing phones with different sizes, ranging from 5.4 inches to 6.7 inches. The devices will come with OLED displays, and will also support 5G technology, paving way for it to become the standard in new phones now.

Apple is going to equip the new devices with its high-performance A14 chipset, and an improved camera.

How much will iPhone 12 cost?

In terms of pricing, the iPhone 12 series is set to begin pricing at $699 and go up to $1099 for the iPhone 12 Pro.

The launch event will take place in Apple Park, California at 10 AM local time. To stream the event live, one may go to the Apple website, or their official YouTube channel.&nbsp; Apple TV users can stream the event live!

According to reports, the company could also release “Air Tags” - a bluetooth tracker, a new HomePod smart speaker, a brand new Apple TV box, and new headphones that go over one’s head!

Apple iPhone 12 launch event: What to expect! The US giant Apple is expected to release new iPhones later today - October 13. The launch event is set to begin at 10 AM California time (10.

Apple iPhone 12 launch event: What to expect! The US giant Apple is expected to release new iPhones later today - October 13. The launch event is set to begin at 10 AM California time (10.30 PM IST). The tag line for today’s event is “Hi, Speed”. Even though the company hasn’t revealed official details of any anticipated releases yet, the features and specs of the upcoming iPhones have been making the rounds on portals for a while now. 4 new iPhones? If leaks and rumours are to be believed, Apple is launching not 3, but 4 phones this year! The devices slated for release are as follows: iPhone 12, iPhone 12 Pro, iPhone 12 Pro Max, and a new spin to the device - iPhone 12 Mini, which will boast a 5.4 inch screen. To cater to varying user needs, the company is releasing phones with different sizes, ranging from 5.4 inches to 6.7 inches. The devices will come with OLED displays, and will also support 5G technology, paving way for it to become the standard in new phones now. Apple is going to equip the new devices with its high-performance A14 chipset, and an improved camera. How much will iPhone 12 cost? In terms of pricing, the iPhone 12 series is set to begin pricing at $699 and go up to $1099 for the iPhone 12 Pro. The launch event will take place in Apple Park, California at 10 AM local time. To stream the event live, one may go to the Apple website, or their official YouTube channel. Apple TV users can stream the event live! According to reports, the company could also release “Air Tags” - a bluetooth tracker, a new HomePod smart speaker, a brand new Apple TV box, and new headphones that go over one’s head!

Apple iPhone 12 launch event today: What to expect, when to watch, and more!

Apple is expected on Tuesday to unveil a keenly anticipated iPhone 12 line-up starring models tuned to super-fast new 5G telecom networks in an update considered vital to the company's fortunes.

A streamed event was cryptically teased with the message "Hi, Speed" in an apparent reference to the faster wireless networks being introduced in many parts of the world.

Analysts expect Apple to&nbsp;introduce a selection of iPhone 12 models in multiple sizes, with some shipping earlier than others due to the toll the pandemic has taken on the company's supply chain.

"We believe iPhone 12 represents the most significant product cycle for Cook &amp; Co. since iPhone 6 in 2014 and will be another defining chapter in the Apple growth story," Wedbush analyst Dan Ives said in a note to investors, referring to chief executive Tim Cook.

The time is ripe, analysts said, for Apple to hit the market with an iPhone tailored to the super-fast 5G telecom networks taking root around the world.

"Apple absolutely needs 5G right now," said Techsponential analyst Avi Greengart, "not for the US, but for China, where 5G is driving purchase decisions."

Some Apple rivals have already produced 5G models, and China is far ahead of the US when it comes to the new-generation networks.

5G networks are touted as promising an exponential leap in the amount and speed of wireless data, enabling advances in self-driving vehicles, virtual reality, connected health and more as sensors and servers communicate instantly.&nbsp;

"5G is happening in China with or without Apple; in fact, more 5G phones than non-5G phones are selling in China," said analyst Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights &amp; Strategy.

New-generation 5G networks have also taken shape in South Korea and in parts of Europe.

Meanwhile, US telecom firms are looking at a 5G iPhone as a catalyst for consumer interest that will justify the big investments needed for those networks, according to analysts.

"US carriers are waiting for Apple to announce a 5G iPhone to put the pedal to the metal in the US," said Moorhead.

- Powering the 'ecosystem' -

Apple also needs a 5G-capable iPhone to maintain its premium image, analysts added.

Powerhouses Samsung and Huawei already have 5G smartphones on the market.

Google recently unveiled two new smartphones with 5G wireless capability under its Pixel brand, which showcases the Android mobile system but has limited market share.

"Apple got away with not releasing a 5G device last year because the 5G use-cases and network coverage simply wasn’t there," said Futuresource Consulting research analyst Stephen Mears.

"Apple won’t want to be perceived as being two generations behind on 5G handsets."

The streamed event comes a month after Apple unveiled new service bundles and smartwatch models tied to the iPhone, which remains at the heart of its money-making ecosystem.

Adding 5G iPhones to its line-up should help Apple "drive forward" with that lucrative blend of hardware, software, services and digital content, Mears said. From the health-centric Apple Watch to subscriptions to music and television services, the iPhone is at the center of the user experience.

Apple remains the most expensive company on Wall Street, where it ended the formal trading session Friday with a value of $2.03 billion, based on its share price.

- Pandemic slows sales -

Rumors swirling ahead of the event include that Apple will unveil new iPhones in an array of sizes, from a small model with a 5.4-inch (13.7-centimeter) screen to one with a 6.7-inch screen, measured diagonally.

Overall, it has been a tough year for the smartphone industry, with the pandemic disrupting economies and supply chains.

"Recovery will be slow, with tough market conditions expected to continue through 2021," Mears said.

Total smartphone sales were down 16 percent in the second quarter, according to research firm IDC.

Its survey showed Huawei leading the market, ahead of Samsung, Apple and Chinese firms Xiaomi and Oppo.

Apple is expected on Tuesday to unveil a keenly anticipated iPhone 12 line-up starring models tuned to super-fast new 5G telecom networks in an update considered vital to the company's fortunes.

Apple is expected on Tuesday to unveil a keenly anticipated iPhone 12 line-up starring models tuned to super-fast new 5G telecom networks in an update considered vital to the company's fortunes. A streamed event was cryptically teased with the message "Hi, Speed" in an apparent reference to the faster wireless networks being introduced in many parts of the world. Analysts expect Apple to introduce a selection of iPhone 12 models in multiple sizes, with some shipping earlier than others due to the toll the pandemic has taken on the company's supply chain. "We believe iPhone 12 represents the most significant product cycle for Cook & Co. since iPhone 6 in 2014 and will be another defining chapter in the Apple growth story," Wedbush analyst Dan Ives said in a note to investors, referring to chief executive Tim Cook. The time is ripe, analysts said, for Apple to hit the market with an iPhone tailored to the super-fast 5G telecom networks taking root around the world. "Apple absolutely needs 5G right now," said Techsponential analyst Avi Greengart, "not for the US, but for China, where 5G is driving purchase decisions." Some Apple rivals have already produced 5G models, and China is far ahead of the US when it comes to the new-generation networks. 5G networks are touted as promising an exponential leap in the amount and speed of wireless data, enabling advances in self-driving vehicles, virtual reality, connected health and more as sensors and servers communicate instantly. "5G is happening in China with or without Apple; in fact, more 5G phones than non-5G phones are selling in China," said analyst Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights & Strategy. New-generation 5G networks have also taken shape in South Korea and in parts of Europe. Meanwhile, US telecom firms are looking at a 5G iPhone as a catalyst for consumer interest that will justify the big investments needed for those networks, according to analysts. "US carriers are waiting for Apple to announce a 5G iPhone to put the pedal to the metal in the US," said Moorhead. - Powering the 'ecosystem' - Apple also needs a 5G-capable iPhone to maintain its premium image, analysts added. Powerhouses Samsung and Huawei already have 5G smartphones on the market. Google recently unveiled two new smartphones with 5G wireless capability under its Pixel brand, which showcases the Android mobile system but has limited market share. "Apple got away with not releasing a 5G device last year because the 5G use-cases and network coverage simply wasn’t there," said Futuresource Consulting research analyst Stephen Mears. "Apple won’t want to be perceived as being two generations behind on 5G handsets." The streamed event comes a month after Apple unveiled new service bundles and smartwatch models tied to the iPhone, which remains at the heart of its money-making ecosystem. Adding 5G iPhones to its line-up should help Apple "drive forward" with that lucrative blend of hardware, software, services and digital content, Mears said. From the health-centric Apple Watch to subscriptions to music and television services, the iPhone is at the center of the user experience. Apple remains the most expensive company on Wall Street, where it ended the formal trading session Friday with a value of $2.03 billion, based on its share price. - Pandemic slows sales - Rumors swirling ahead of the event include that Apple will unveil new iPhones in an array of sizes, from a small model with a 5.4-inch (13.7-centimeter) screen to one with a 6.7-inch screen, measured diagonally. Overall, it has been a tough year for the smartphone industry, with the pandemic disrupting economies and supply chains. "Recovery will be slow, with tough market conditions expected to continue through 2021," Mears said. Total smartphone sales were down 16 percent in the second quarter, according to research firm IDC. Its survey showed Huawei leading the market, ahead of Samsung, Apple and Chinese firms Xiaomi and Oppo.

5G iPhone expected to star at Apple event

WASHINGTON — One day in September, Elizabeth Leiba opened the LinkedIn app and saw a post by Aaisha Joseph, a diversity consultant with nearly 16,000 followers on the platform.

“Ima need #companies to stop sending their dedicated House Negros to ‘deal with the Blacks’ they deem out of control,” read the item. “It’s really not a good look — it’s actually a very #whitesupremacist and #racist one.”

The post was exactly the sort of thing Leiba, an instructional design manager at City College in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, was looking for. These days, when she pulls out her phone in search of boisterous conversation, hot takes and the latest tea, she finds herself tapping LinkedIn, which since the killing of George Floyd has become a thriving forum for Black expression.

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/us-announces-charges-against-chinese-malaysians-involved-in-worldwide-hacking-racket-328011">Also read|&nbsp;US announces charges against Chinese, Malaysians involved in worldwide hacking racket</a>

“I go onto Twitter and I get bored,” Leiba, 46, said. “Then I go right back to LinkedIn because it’s on fire. I don’t even have to go on any other social media now.”

It’s an unexpected development for what has long been the most polite and perhaps the dullest of the major social networks. LinkedIn was founded in 2003 as a place to network and post résumés — essentially, a directory of white-collar professionals. A few years ago, LinkedIn added a Facebook-like news feed that encouraged users to post links and updates, but it has never been a rollicking space. A team of editors helped enforce a mood best described as corporate.

“You talk on LinkedIn the same way you talk in the office,” Dan Roth, LinkedIn’s editor-in-chief, told The New York Times in August 2019. “There are certain boundaries around what is acceptable.”

Two staggering events have changed that. In early 2020, the pandemic hit, forcing millions to work from home and miss out on break-room chitchat — boosting LinkedIn as a place to vent. Then, the killing of Floyd in police custody in May put workers over the edge. Black grief went on display, uninhibited, at corporate America’s virtual water cooler.

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/business-economy/microsoft-to-buy-linkedin-for-262-billion-in-its-biggest-ever-deal-418">Also read|&nbsp;Microsoft to buy LinkedIn for $26.2 billion in its biggest-ever deal</a>

“I was just 43 years tired,” said Future Cain, a social- and emotional-learning director at a middle and high school in Wisconsin. “I was using LinkedIn to post positive things and uplift people during the pandemic, and I decided I can’t sit here quietly anymore.”

As protesters took to the streets to demand police reform, Leiba and Cain were among those who discovered that LinkedIn was a place to speak to the executive class on something like their home turf. Black users have taken to the site to call out racial discrimination in the workplace and share their stories of alienation on the job.

Not that it’s all serious: Much of the posting is exuberant — full of memes, Black cultural references and linguistic panache. This summer, Leiba shared a video about code-switching, in which a Black employee transforms while greeting colleagues of color (“Oh, hey, Black queen!”) and a white one (empty-headed hiking talk). “I’ve watched it at least fifty eleven times,” Leiba wrote.

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/business-economy/what-after-linkedin-will-twitter-get-bought-next-or-is-the-social-network-bubble-about-to-burst-472">Also read|&nbsp;What after LinkedIn: Will Twitter get bought next or is the social network bubble about to burst?</a>

These are the kinds of conversations, and ways of speaking, that cubicle-dwelling Black workers have typically held out of earshot of their white colleagues. As unusually charismatic posts appeared in my own feed this summer, it seemed clear that Black LinkedIn was emerging as a professional cousin to Black Twitter — the unapologetically Black digital space where people expose long-ignored injustices and pump their experience into the mainstream.

What’s less clear is how comfortable LinkedIn is with the development, having placed its content moderators in the incendiary position of determining what manner of race-related speech is appropriate for its virtual workplace of 706 million users.

Black users who post in forceful tones, and some of their allies, say they feel LinkedIn has silenced them — erasing their posts and even freezing their accounts for violating vague rules of decorum.

For example, the “House Negros” post that Joseph wrote in September vanished from the platform. Joseph, who lives in Brooklyn, New York, was able to see it when she viewed her own page, but no other users could — a practice known as shadow banning. (Later, LinkedIn added an unsigned note in red, saying the post had been removed for violating the site’s Professional Community Policies, which instruct users to “be civil and respectful in every single interaction.”) Joseph began a new item: “Let me say it louder since LinkedIn wanted to delete my post the first time.” The company removed that post, too, saying it included “harassment, defamation or disparagement of others.”

Theresa M. Robinson, a corporate training consultant in Houston, said LinkedIn had deleted a post she wrote about racism, then reinstated it after she complained. She said she never received an explanation. Two others, Cain and Madison Butler, who works in Austin, Texas, also said LinkedIn had restricted their commentary on race.

In the absence of clear communication from the company, these users are left guessing as to what the rules are — and feeling that the company is not just policing their tone but stifling their opportunity to force change in corporate America.

Nicole Leverich, a LinkedIn spokeswoman, wrote in an email: “We are not censoring content and have not made any changes to our algorithm to reduce the distribution of content about these important topics.” She added in an interview that LinkedIn was introducing a new process for notifying users when their posts were flagged for violating platform rules, and that some people hadn’t been phased in by the end of September.

The company acknowledged that it had erred in taking action against some users and restored content that was found, on appeal, not to violate its policies.

“If we make a mistake, we will own it,” said Paul Rockwell, head of LinkedIn’s trust and safety division. “We will be very clear — this is a learning opportunity for us. We’re going to continue to use that in our journey to get better and better. And we do want to nail this thing.”

Hard conversations about race

Few people think LinkedIn should look anything like the wilds of Reddit or Twitter, which have a certain amount of anonymity and even anarchy built into their DNA. Much of LinkedIn’s value — Microsoft acquired it in 2016 for $26 billion — is tied to its sense of professionalism and respectful conduct. Users must share their real names and credentials, and it’s understood that their current or prospective employers might well scan anything they post.

For Black people in the corporate realm, however, words like “professional” and “respectful” are red flags. Like the natural Black hairstyles that were once widely considered unprofessional, certain behaviors — being too Black, speaking too Black or talking too much about Black topics — have long limited advancement in companies with white cultures.

That’s what has changed on LinkedIn in the last few months. Black people are being, to use a technical term, Blackity-Black Black on LinkedIn. Much of the behavior is not so different from Black Twitter; users pepper their posts with clap emojis to emphasize every syllable, and GIFs celebrate cultural touchstones like Issa Rae’s “Insecure” and Jordan Peele’s “Get Out.” The difference is that it is all happening on a social network that mirrors the business world — a place that is predominantly white.

“It is liberating. It feels like it’s about time,” Joseph said. “We are taking back what was stolen from us — and that’s our voice. I’m talking specifically to my people in the way that we talk to each other in other spaces, and without regard for any outside audience. No longer having to stifle that has been freeing.”

Part of what Black LinkedIn has done is brought together Black professionals to be their authentic selves in front of their white colleagues. For many, it has been an existential relief, and may provide a blueprint for how Black employees choose to conduct themselves once the physical workplace reopens.

“The days of hiding and masking who you are and dealing with the BS — I just can’t even go back to that,” said Jessica Pharm, 33, who works in human resources at a manufacturing firm near Milwaukee. “Any company that gets me next is getting the full-on Jessica.”

Leiba posted on Sept. 17: “It means code-switching is OUT. It means the AFRO is coming at you on a daily basis. It means you’re getting these bangle earrings and the poppin’ lip gloss.”

Inevitably, not everyone accepts this kind of exuberance. Posts about Black Lives Matter and racial justice often attract the same kind of dismissive, and sometimes bigoted, responses found on other platforms: rejoinders that “all lives matter” or claims about Black-on-Black crime. But because the activity takes place on LinkedIn, these comments typically come with the user’s headshot, place of employment and entire work history attached.

“You start to see these people who are absolutely not OK with this focus on Blackness popping up in commentary, with their name and their company fully on display, giving zero deference to the moment,” said John Graham Jr., 39, a digital marketer and strategist at a California biotechnology company. “I find it telling that people would put their careers in jeopardy and their unconscious biases on full display.”

LinkedIn has also struggled internally with how to respond to the Black Lives Matter movement. In June, chief executive Ryan Roslansky publicly apologized for “appalling” racial comments some employees had made at a companywide staff meeting.

Rosanna Durruthy, LinkedIn’s head of diversity, inclusion and belonging, said in an interview that the company was engaging in hard conversations about race, both inside the company and out.

“We’re really beginning to focus very consistently on how we begin to address this externally” on the platform, she said.

‘Break down the status quo’

One of the most vociferous presences on Black LinkedIn is Butler, a human resources consultant and vice president at a startup. She has posted on LinkedIn since 2018 and with increasing frequency and fervor this year. The potential to speak truth to capital, she said, makes the resulting rounds of death threats worth it.

“There is something to be said about the access LinkedIn gives you to powerful CEOs and VCs to help change their outlook and how they support Black employees and founders,” said Butler, 29, referring to venture capitalists. “The conversation that has to happen in order to break down the status quo in corporate America isn’t happening on Instagram.”

Butler, who has about 40,000 followers, posts on LinkedIn daily. Her style is to be prescriptive, assail corporate norms and call out whitesplainers and trolls; she tends to close each missive with the hashtags #isaidwhatisaid, #thatsthetea and #blackgirlmagic. One recent post scolded companies that make a show of cheering on the Black Lives Matter movement but haven’t done right by their employees.

“Do the Black people in your organization feel like they matter, or do they feel like the Black stock photos you used to enhance your ‘wokeness’ footprint in the marketplace. If you can’t make the Black lives under your own roof matter, do not use Black Lives Matter as a brand strategy,” Butler wrote recently. “Don’t talk about it, be about it. Period.”

Other stars of Black LinkedIn target specific companies. Joseph, for example, has recently called out Wells Fargo, DoorDash, Microsoft and Google.

There has also been no shortage of criticism of LinkedIn itself. Users are holding the company to a standard it set for itself in June, when Melissa Selcher, chief marketing and communications officer, wrote an open letter on the platform.

“We have a responsibility to use our platform and resources to intentionally address the systemic barriers to economic opportunity,” she wrote. “We also believe we play a critical role in amplifying Black voices.”

Also in June, with Black Lives Matter protests spreading across the country, LinkedIn highlighted “Black Voices to Follow and Amplify,” a curated list of chief executives, media personalities and other influencers, including the Rev. Bernice King and Karamo Brown from the Netflix show “Queer Eye.” For the most part, members of the list post content that is general, motivational and safe.

Joseph and others took to LinkedIn to say the group contained too many establishment names and not enough activists. “Where are the Tamika Mallorys of LinkedIn on that list?” Joseph wrote, referring to a co-founder of the 2017 Women’s March.

“Black voices aren’t just corporate C-Suite ones,” wrote Patricia S. Gatlin, a talent sourcing specialist in Las Vegas.

“All Black voices need to be heard in this moment,” added Scott Taylor, a recruiter in Los Angeles. “Not just the ones your team of analysts think we should hear from.”

Leverich, the LinkedIn spokeswoman, said by email: “We use a number of factors in our selection, including members who have self-identified as Black, people from a variety of industries and with an interesting perspective to share. We’re constantly adding new voices and sorting through requests to join this program.”

In September, LinkedIn used its own company page to pose a question to its 13 million followers: “What are the best ways to normalize having conversations about race and anti-racism in the workplace? #ConversationsForChange”

The responses quickly turned sour. “LinkedIn, you can facilitate that objective by normalizing those conversations on your platform,” wrote Lenzy Ruffin, a communications strategist in Washington, D.C.

“The irony that you should post this!” wrote Abi Adamson, a diversity and inclusion consultant in London. “Kindly stop censoring Black content around racism. People like me have had our engagement go down astronomically when highlighting racism or how to be anti-racist. Help amplify our voices and stop silencing us.”

Sabrina McClimans, a graduate student in Seattle, asked the platform to “stop ‘accidentally’ disappearing the posts of Black women on your platform when they talk about race and anti-racism.”

Phil Molé, who works at a software company in Chicago, added: “I have seen cases in which individuals who harass Black women on this platform have maintained their accounts while those who speak out against racism and prejudice have had accounts suspended. It’s time for a thorough review of the way the issues are handled.”

LinkedIn did not respond to those comments. Philip Mix, a consultant in London, added to the thread after a day and a half, when there were 344 comments, saying he had gone through them “three times to make sure I wasn’t mistaken.” By his count, LinkedIn had replied to five users — four times to say “Thank you for sharing” and once with “Nicely put.”

Mix concluded: “Not sure if I’m more shocked or depressed by this miserably inadequate show from LinkedIn.”

WASHINGTON — One day in September, Elizabeth Leiba opened the LinkedIn app and saw a post by Aaisha Joseph, a diversity consultant with nearly 16,000 followers on the platform.

WASHINGTON — One day in September, Elizabeth Leiba opened the LinkedIn app and saw a post by Aaisha Joseph, a diversity consultant with nearly 16,000 followers on the platform. “Ima need #companies to stop sending their dedicated House Negros to ‘deal with the Blacks’ they deem out of control,” read the item. “It’s really not a good look — it’s actually a very #whitesupremacist and #racist one.” The post was exactly the sort of thing Leiba, an instructional design manager at City College in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, was looking for. These days, when she pulls out her phone in search of boisterous conversation, hot takes and the latest tea, she finds herself tapping LinkedIn, which since the killing of George Floyd has become a thriving forum for Black expression. Also read| US announces charges against Chinese, Malaysians involved in worldwide hacking racket “I go onto Twitter and I get bored,” Leiba, 46, said. “Then I go right back to LinkedIn because it’s on fire. I don’t even have to go on any other social media now.” It’s an unexpected development for what has long been the most polite and perhaps the dullest of the major social networks. LinkedIn was founded in 2003 as a place to network and post résumés — essentially, a directory of white-collar professionals. A few years ago, LinkedIn added a Facebook-like news feed that encouraged users to post links and updates, but it has never been a rollicking space. A team of editors helped enforce a mood best described as corporate. “You talk on LinkedIn the same way you talk in the office,” Dan Roth, LinkedIn’s editor-in-chief, told The New York Times in August 2019. “There are certain boundaries around what is acceptable.” Two staggering events have changed that. In early 2020, the pandemic hit, forcing millions to work from home and miss out on break-room chitchat — boosting LinkedIn as a place to vent. Then, the killing of Floyd in police custody in May put workers over the edge. Black grief went on display, uninhibited, at corporate America’s virtual water cooler. Also read| Microsoft to buy LinkedIn for $26.2 billion in its biggest-ever deal “I was just 43 years tired,” said Future Cain, a social- and emotional-learning director at a middle and high school in Wisconsin. “I was using LinkedIn to post positive things and uplift people during the pandemic, and I decided I can’t sit here quietly anymore.” As protesters took to the streets to demand police reform, Leiba and Cain were among those who discovered that LinkedIn was a place to speak to the executive class on something like their home turf. Black users have taken to the site to call out racial discrimination in the workplace and share their stories of alienation on the job. Not that it’s all serious: Much of the posting is exuberant — full of memes, Black cultural references and linguistic panache. This summer, Leiba shared a video about code-switching, in which a Black employee transforms while greeting colleagues of color (“Oh, hey, Black queen!”) and a white one (empty-headed hiking talk). “I’ve watched it at least fifty eleven times,” Leiba wrote. Also read| What after LinkedIn: Will Twitter get bought next or is the social network bubble about to burst? These are the kinds of conversations, and ways of speaking, that cubicle-dwelling Black workers have typically held out of earshot of their white colleagues. As unusually charismatic posts appeared in my own feed this summer, it seemed clear that Black LinkedIn was emerging as a professional cousin to Black Twitter — the unapologetically Black digital space where people expose long-ignored injustices and pump their experience into the mainstream. What’s less clear is how comfortable LinkedIn is with the development, having placed its content moderators in the incendiary position of determining what manner of race-related speech is appropriate for its virtual workplace of 706 million users. Black users who post in forceful tones, and some of their allies, say they feel LinkedIn has silenced them — erasing their posts and even freezing their accounts for violating vague rules of decorum. For example, the “House Negros” post that Joseph wrote in September vanished from the platform. Joseph, who lives in Brooklyn, New York, was able to see it when she viewed her own page, but no other users could — a practice known as shadow banning. (Later, LinkedIn added an unsigned note in red, saying the post had been removed for violating the site’s Professional Community Policies, which instruct users to “be civil and respectful in every single interaction.”) Joseph began a new item: “Let me say it louder since LinkedIn wanted to delete my post the first time.” The company removed that post, too, saying it included “harassment, defamation or disparagement of others.” Theresa M. Robinson, a corporate training consultant in Houston, said LinkedIn had deleted a post she wrote about racism, then reinstated it after she complained. She said she never received an explanation. Two others, Cain and Madison Butler, who works in Austin, Texas, also said LinkedIn had restricted their commentary on race. In the absence of clear communication from the company, these users are left guessing as to what the rules are — and feeling that the company is not just policing their tone but stifling their opportunity to force change in corporate America. Nicole Leverich, a LinkedIn spokeswoman, wrote in an email: “We are not censoring content and have not made any changes to our algorithm to reduce the distribution of content about these important topics.” She added in an interview that LinkedIn was introducing a new process for notifying users when their posts were flagged for violating platform rules, and that some people hadn’t been phased in by the end of September. The company acknowledged that it had erred in taking action against some users and restored content that was found, on appeal, not to violate its policies. “If we make a mistake, we will own it,” said Paul Rockwell, head of LinkedIn’s trust and safety division. “We will be very clear — this is a learning opportunity for us. We’re going to continue to use that in our journey to get better and better. And we do want to nail this thing.” Hard conversations about race Few people think LinkedIn should look anything like the wilds of Reddit or Twitter, which have a certain amount of anonymity and even anarchy built into their DNA. Much of LinkedIn’s value — Microsoft acquired it in 2016 for $26 billion — is tied to its sense of professionalism and respectful conduct. Users must share their real names and credentials, and it’s understood that their current or prospective employers might well scan anything they post. For Black people in the corporate realm, however, words like “professional” and “respectful” are red flags. Like the natural Black hairstyles that were once widely considered unprofessional, certain behaviors — being too Black, speaking too Black or talking too much about Black topics — have long limited advancement in companies with white cultures. That’s what has changed on LinkedIn in the last few months. Black people are being, to use a technical term, Blackity-Black Black on LinkedIn. Much of the behavior is not so different from Black Twitter; users pepper their posts with clap emojis to emphasize every syllable, and GIFs celebrate cultural touchstones like Issa Rae’s “Insecure” and Jordan Peele’s “Get Out.” The difference is that it is all happening on a social network that mirrors the business world — a place that is predominantly white. “It is liberating. It feels like it’s about time,” Joseph said. “We are taking back what was stolen from us — and that’s our voice. I’m talking specifically to my people in the way that we talk to each other in other spaces, and without regard for any outside audience. No longer having to stifle that has been freeing.” Part of what Black LinkedIn has done is brought together Black professionals to be their authentic selves in front of their white colleagues. For many, it has been an existential relief, and may provide a blueprint for how Black employees choose to conduct themselves once the physical workplace reopens. “The days of hiding and masking who you are and dealing with the BS — I just can’t even go back to that,” said Jessica Pharm, 33, who works in human resources at a manufacturing firm near Milwaukee. “Any company that gets me next is getting the full-on Jessica.” Leiba posted on Sept. 17: “It means code-switching is OUT. It means the AFRO is coming at you on a daily basis. It means you’re getting these bangle earrings and the poppin’ lip gloss.” Inevitably, not everyone accepts this kind of exuberance. Posts about Black Lives Matter and racial justice often attract the same kind of dismissive, and sometimes bigoted, responses found on other platforms: rejoinders that “all lives matter” or claims about Black-on-Black crime. But because the activity takes place on LinkedIn, these comments typically come with the user’s headshot, place of employment and entire work history attached. “You start to see these people who are absolutely not OK with this focus on Blackness popping up in commentary, with their name and their company fully on display, giving zero deference to the moment,” said John Graham Jr., 39, a digital marketer and strategist at a California biotechnology company. “I find it telling that people would put their careers in jeopardy and their unconscious biases on full display.” LinkedIn has also struggled internally with how to respond to the Black Lives Matter movement. In June, chief executive Ryan Roslansky publicly apologized for “appalling” racial comments some employees had made at a companywide staff meeting. Rosanna Durruthy, LinkedIn’s head of diversity, inclusion and belonging, said in an interview that the company was engaging in hard conversations about race, both inside the company and out. “We’re really beginning to focus very consistently on how we begin to address this externally” on the platform, she said. ‘Break down the status quo’ One of the most vociferous presences on Black LinkedIn is Butler, a human resources consultant and vice president at a startup. She has posted on LinkedIn since 2018 and with increasing frequency and fervor this year. The potential to speak truth to capital, she said, makes the resulting rounds of death threats worth it. “There is something to be said about the access LinkedIn gives you to powerful CEOs and VCs to help change their outlook and how they support Black employees and founders,” said Butler, 29, referring to venture capitalists. “The conversation that has to happen in order to break down the status quo in corporate America isn’t happening on Instagram.” Butler, who has about 40,000 followers, posts on LinkedIn daily. Her style is to be prescriptive, assail corporate norms and call out whitesplainers and trolls; she tends to close each missive with the hashtags #isaidwhatisaid, #thatsthetea and #blackgirlmagic. One recent post scolded companies that make a show of cheering on the Black Lives Matter movement but haven’t done right by their employees. “Do the Black people in your organization feel like they matter, or do they feel like the Black stock photos you used to enhance your ‘wokeness’ footprint in the marketplace. If you can’t make the Black lives under your own roof matter, do not use Black Lives Matter as a brand strategy,” Butler wrote recently. “Don’t talk about it, be about it. Period.” Other stars of Black LinkedIn target specific companies. Joseph, for example, has recently called out Wells Fargo, DoorDash, Microsoft and Google. There has also been no shortage of criticism of LinkedIn itself. Users are holding the company to a standard it set for itself in June, when Melissa Selcher, chief marketing and communications officer, wrote an open letter on the platform. “We have a responsibility to use our platform and resources to intentionally address the systemic barriers to economic opportunity,” she wrote. “We also believe we play a critical role in amplifying Black voices.” Also in June, with Black Lives Matter protests spreading across the country, LinkedIn highlighted “Black Voices to Follow and Amplify,” a curated list of chief executives, media personalities and other influencers, including the Rev. Bernice King and Karamo Brown from the Netflix show “Queer Eye.” For the most part, members of the list post content that is general, motivational and safe. Joseph and others took to LinkedIn to say the group contained too many establishment names and not enough activists. “Where are the Tamika Mallorys of LinkedIn on that list?” Joseph wrote, referring to a co-founder of the 2017 Women’s March. “Black voices aren’t just corporate C-Suite ones,” wrote Patricia S. Gatlin, a talent sourcing specialist in Las Vegas. “All Black voices need to be heard in this moment,” added Scott Taylor, a recruiter in Los Angeles. “Not just the ones your team of analysts think we should hear from.” Leverich, the LinkedIn spokeswoman, said by email: “We use a number of factors in our selection, including members who have self-identified as Black, people from a variety of industries and with an interesting perspective to share. We’re constantly adding new voices and sorting through requests to join this program.” In September, LinkedIn used its own company page to pose a question to its 13 million followers: “What are the best ways to normalize having conversations about race and anti-racism in the workplace? #ConversationsForChange” The responses quickly turned sour. “LinkedIn, you can facilitate that objective by normalizing those conversations on your platform,” wrote Lenzy Ruffin, a communications strategist in Washington, D.C. “The irony that you should post this!” wrote Abi Adamson, a diversity and inclusion consultant in London. “Kindly stop censoring Black content around racism. People like me have had our engagement go down astronomically when highlighting racism or how to be anti-racist. Help amplify our voices and stop silencing us.” Sabrina McClimans, a graduate student in Seattle, asked the platform to “stop ‘accidentally’ disappearing the posts of Black women on your platform when they talk about race and anti-racism.” Phil Molé, who works at a software company in Chicago, added: “I have seen cases in which individuals who harass Black women on this platform have maintained their accounts while those who speak out against racism and prejudice have had accounts suspended. It’s time for a thorough review of the way the issues are handled.” LinkedIn did not respond to those comments. Philip Mix, a consultant in London, added to the thread after a day and a half, when there were 344 comments, saying he had gone through them “three times to make sure I wasn’t mistaken.” By his count, LinkedIn had replied to five users — four times to say “Thank you for sharing” and once with “Nicely put.” Mix concluded: “Not sure if I’m more shocked or depressed by this miserably inadequate show from LinkedIn.”

Black LinkedIn is thriving. Does LinkedIn have a problem with that?

An app launched this week in China allows access to some content on Western social media sites long banned domestically such as YouTube, marking the first product by a major Chinese tech firm that helps internet users bypass the Great Firewall.

Tuber was launched on third-party Android stores in China by a subsidiary of Qihoo 360, the biggest Chinese cybersecurity firm. The app, which has since seen millions of downloads, is not available on the Apple store just yet.

While such proxy apps are not new in China, where a virtual private network (VPN) service is typically needed to allow domestic users passage to sites such as Google or Facebook, the arrival of Tuber suggests a slight lowering of the Great Firewall.

While welcomed by internet users in China, some complained about the app`s slowness. References to sensitive political issues such as the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown and the Hong Kong protests were also censored in part, according to Reuters checks.

Users of the app must also register with personal information such as their identity card numbers and real names, while being warned against flouting state interests and going against the country`s socialist system.

Qihoo 360 could not immediately be reached for comment.

An app launched this week in China allows access to some content on Western social media sites long banned domestically such as YouTube, marking the first product by a major Chinese tech firm that helps internet users bypass the Great Firewall.

An app launched this week in China allows access to some content on Western social media sites long banned domestically such as YouTube, marking the first product by a major Chinese tech firm that helps internet users bypass the Great Firewall. Tuber was launched on third-party Android stores in China by a subsidiary of Qihoo 360, the biggest Chinese cybersecurity firm. The app, which has since seen millions of downloads, is not available on the Apple store just yet. While such proxy apps are not new in China, where a virtual private network (VPN) service is typically needed to allow domestic users passage to sites such as Google or Facebook, the arrival of Tuber suggests a slight lowering of the Great Firewall. While welcomed by internet users in China, some complained about the app`s slowness. References to sensitive political issues such as the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown and the Hong Kong protests were also censored in part, according to Reuters checks. Users of the app must also register with personal information such as their identity card numbers and real names, while being warned against flouting state interests and going against the country`s socialist system. Qihoo 360 could not immediately be reached for comment.

Chinese app allows small glimpse beyond 'Great Firewall'

WhatsApp's 5 new features Update -&nbsp;WhatsApp needs no introduction. The omnipresent messaging app has occupied space in our personal as well as professional lives. It keeps on bringing new features. Continuous WhatsApp update means users can get to experience new features.

WhatsApp's 5 new features are sure to make it more popular than it already is

These are WhatsApp's Top 5 new features:

Always mute

We can block an undesirable person but what to do when you can't block a person but still want tp ignore his/her messages?

WhatsApp has rolled out Always Mute option for its beta users on Android and iOS. While muting a chat, this option lets us 'Always mute' it instead of just 1 year. This option was spotted on WhatsApp's 2.20.197.3 update

&nbsp; 
WhatsApp new features: Storage usage section redesign

A better UI was spotted in the section that dealt with storage usage. This was spotted in Android Beta version v2.20.201.9

The better UI offered more visual cues to manage the storage in a much better way.

 
WhatsApp new features: Expiring media

This is an extension of 'expiring messages'. When a user sends an expiring media (Image, GIF, Video etc) It will get deleted from the recipient's phone as soon as he/she leaves the chat.

 
WhatsApp new features Update: Multi-device support

This feature lets a user use a single WhatsApp account on different devices. This was spotted in WhatsApp beta for Android 2.20.199.5

 
New wallpaper feature

This was spotted in WhatsApp beta for Android 2.20.199.5&nbsp;

This allows user to choose a different wallpaper based on the theme used in the app.

WhatsApp's 5 new features Update - WhatsApp needs no introduction. The omnipresent messaging app has occupied space in our personal as well as professional lives.

WhatsApp's 5 new features Update - WhatsApp needs no introduction. The omnipresent messaging app has occupied space in our personal as well as professional lives. It keeps on bringing new features. Continuous WhatsApp update means users can get to experience new features. WhatsApp's 5 new features are sure to make it more popular than it already is These are WhatsApp's Top 5 new features: Always mute We can block an undesirable person but what to do when you can't block a person but still want tp ignore his/her messages? WhatsApp has rolled out Always Mute option for its beta users on Android and iOS. While muting a chat, this option lets us 'Always mute' it instead of just 1 year. This option was spotted on WhatsApp's 2.20.197.3 update WhatsApp new features: Storage usage section redesign A better UI was spotted in the section that dealt with storage usage. This was spotted in Android Beta version v2.20.201.9 The better UI offered more visual cues to manage the storage in a much better way. WhatsApp new features: Expiring media This is an extension of 'expiring messages'. When a user sends an expiring media (Image, GIF, Video etc) It will get deleted from the recipient's phone as soon as he/she leaves the chat. WhatsApp new features Update: Multi-device support This feature lets a user use a single WhatsApp account on different devices. This was spotted in WhatsApp beta for Android 2.20.199.5 New wallpaper feature This was spotted in WhatsApp beta for Android 2.20.199.5 This allows user to choose a different wallpaper based on the theme used in the app.

WhatsApp Update: Top 5 new features in the messenger app

Apple TV+ free trial subscription - Apple TV+ may not be a direct competitor of likes of Netflix, Amazon Prime etc. but it has carved a niche and some of its shows are getting rave reviews. For those of us who were worried about Apple TV+ free trial ending, here is the good news. Apple TV+ free trial subscription may now get extended.

Apple TV+ had previously offered 1-year free subscription. The streaming service started on November 1, 2019. That means the trial will end on the last day of October 2020. But Apple TV+ free trial will now last till Feb 2021.

As per Rene Ritchie and 9to5Mac, the extension of Apple TV+ subscription will now be offered. Apple is expected to send notifications soon.

However, in order to be eligible for the extension of subscription, you should have signed up for Apple TV+ between November 2020 and January 2020.&nbsp;

However, Apple TV+ free trial is still available to those who buy a new Apple device.

Apple TV+ free trial subscription - Apple TV+ may not be a direct competitor of likes of Netflix, Amazon Prime etc. but it has carved a niche and some of its shows are getting rave reviews.

Apple TV+ free trial subscription - Apple TV+ may not be a direct competitor of likes of Netflix, Amazon Prime etc. but it has carved a niche and some of its shows are getting rave reviews. For those of us who were worried about Apple TV+ free trial ending, here is the good news. Apple TV+ free trial subscription may now get extended. Apple TV+ had previously offered 1-year free subscription. The streaming service started on November 1, 2019. That means the trial will end on the last day of October 2020. But Apple TV+ free trial will now last till Feb 2021. As per Rene Ritchie and 9to5Mac, the extension of Apple TV+ subscription will now be offered. Apple is expected to send notifications soon. However, in order to be eligible for the extension of subscription, you should have signed up for Apple TV+ between November 2020 and January 2020. However, Apple TV+ free trial is still available to those who buy a new Apple device.

Apple TV+ Subscription: Free trial will now last longer

Google&nbsp;must open talks with publishers in France about paying to use their content, an appeals court confirmed on Thursday, paving the way for an industry-wide deal in the country&nbsp;in a long-running dispute about revenues from online news.

The ruling came as the US internet giant announced it was close to a deal on compensating French media groups for news shown in&nbsp;Google&nbsp;search results.

Such a deal would represent a climbdown by&nbsp;Google, which has so far refused to comply with new EU rules giving more copyright protection to media firms for news displayed on search engines and social media.

France was the first European country to ratify the law, which&nbsp;could act as a lifeline to newspaper groups grappling with shrinking print sales.

In April, the French competition authority ordered&nbsp;Google&nbsp;to negotiate with the press in good faith,&nbsp;a ruling it appealed, accusing the authority of overstepping its jurisdiction.

Also read:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/technology/us-supreme-court-puzzled-over-google-oracle-high-tech-copyright-clash-333473" hreflang="en">US Supreme Court puzzled over Google, Oracle high tech copyright clash</a>

Google&nbsp;argues it should not have to pay to display items produced by news companies&nbsp;since they benefit by receiving millions of visits to their websites.

The French court's decision differs from last week's pledge by&nbsp;Google&nbsp;to pay $1 billion to publishers globally over the next three years for their news, as the French arrangement involves finding a sustainable methodology to remunerate publishers and news agencies.

Google's vehicle to remunerate news publishers, dubbed&nbsp;Google&nbsp;News Showcase, is set to launch in Germany, where it has signed up German newspapers including Der Spiegel, Stern, Die Zeit, and in Brazil with Folha de S.Paulo, Band and Infobae.

The French court's ruling comes hours after&nbsp;Google, the world's biggest search engine, said it was set to reach with a deal to pay French publishers for their news, the latest move to placate media groups and head off regulators siding with publishers.

"Our priority remains to reach an agreement with the French publishers and press agencies,"&nbsp;Google&nbsp;said in a statement.

"We appealed to get legal clarity on some parts of the order, and we will now review the decision of the Paris court of appeal."

The ruling confirms a decision in April by France's competition authority, which ordered&nbsp;Google&nbsp;to negotiate with publishers and news agencies "the remuneration due to them for any re-use of protected content".

Under the same decision, the antitrust regulator ordered&nbsp;Google&nbsp;to open talks within three months of being asked to do so by publishers.

Google must open talks with publishers in France about paying to use their content, an appeals court confirmed on Thursday, paving the way for an industry-wide deal in the country in a long-running dispute about revenues from online news.

Google must open talks with publishers in France about paying to use their content, an appeals court confirmed on Thursday, paving the way for an industry-wide deal in the country in a long-running dispute about revenues from online news. The ruling came as the US internet giant announced it was close to a deal on compensating French media groups for news shown in Google search results. Such a deal would represent a climbdown by Google, which has so far refused to comply with new EU rules giving more copyright protection to media firms for news displayed on search engines and social media. France was the first European country to ratify the law, which could act as a lifeline to newspaper groups grappling with shrinking print sales. In April, the French competition authority ordered Google to negotiate with the press in good faith, a ruling it appealed, accusing the authority of overstepping its jurisdiction. Also read: US Supreme Court puzzled over Google, Oracle high tech copyright clash Google argues it should not have to pay to display items produced by news companies since they benefit by receiving millions of visits to their websites. The French court's decision differs from last week's pledge by Google to pay $1 billion to publishers globally over the next three years for their news, as the French arrangement involves finding a sustainable methodology to remunerate publishers and news agencies. Google's vehicle to remunerate news publishers, dubbed Google News Showcase, is set to launch in Germany, where it has signed up German newspapers including Der Spiegel, Stern, Die Zeit, and in Brazil with Folha de S.Paulo, Band and Infobae. The French court's ruling comes hours after Google, the world's biggest search engine, said it was set to reach with a deal to pay French publishers for their news, the latest move to placate media groups and head off regulators siding with publishers. "Our priority remains to reach an agreement with the French publishers and press agencies," Google said in a statement. "We appealed to get legal clarity on some parts of the order, and we will now review the decision of the Paris court of appeal." The ruling confirms a decision in April by France's competition authority, which ordered Google to negotiate with publishers and news agencies "the remuneration due to them for any re-use of protected content". Under the same decision, the antitrust regulator ordered Google to open talks within three months of being asked to do so by publishers.

Now, French court asks Google to pay publishers for their content

Action Fraud, the UK centre for reporting cybercrime and fraud, said on Thursday that between August 2019 and August 2020, losses reported by victims amounted to $86,242,444.

Millions of pounds have been lost to ‘romance fraud’ when people confined to spells of isolation during the coronavirus pandemic turn to online dating and end up handing over money after fraudsters gain their trust and ask for help in non-existing emergencies.

From June to August, the centre received more than 600 reports per month for romance fraud, indicating the victims may have met, and begun talking to, romance fraudsters during the lockdown caused by the pandemic.

Diana Fawcett, chief executive of charity Victim Support, said: "Lockdown restrictions meant people could not meet in person for a number of months, which led to many seeking to form new connections online.

Romance fraud, or dating fraud, occurs when people think they have met the perfect partner online. They gain trust over a number of weeks or months and have the victims believe that they are in a loving, caring relationship. Fraudsters may be based anywhere across the globe.

The centre launched a multi-agency campaign throughout October to raise awareness of romance fraud and provide clear and unambiguous protection advice to the public, following a 26 per cent&nbsp;rise in reports in the past year.

Action Fraud, the UK centre for reporting cybercrime and fraud, said on Thursday that between August 2019 and August 2020, losses reported by victims amounted to $86,242,444.

Action Fraud, the UK centre for reporting cybercrime and fraud, said on Thursday that between August 2019 and August 2020, losses reported by victims amounted to $86,242,444. Millions of pounds have been lost to ‘romance fraud’ when people confined to spells of isolation during the coronavirus pandemic turn to online dating and end up handing over money after fraudsters gain their trust and ask for help in non-existing emergencies. From June to August, the centre received more than 600 reports per month for romance fraud, indicating the victims may have met, and begun talking to, romance fraudsters during the lockdown caused by the pandemic. Diana Fawcett, chief executive of charity Victim Support, said: "Lockdown restrictions meant people could not meet in person for a number of months, which led to many seeking to form new connections online. Romance fraud, or dating fraud, occurs when people think they have met the perfect partner online. They gain trust over a number of weeks or months and have the victims believe that they are in a loving, caring relationship. Fraudsters may be based anywhere across the globe. The centre launched a multi-agency campaign throughout October to raise awareness of romance fraud and provide clear and unambiguous protection advice to the public, following a 26 per cent rise in reports in the past year.

Romance fraud on the rise in UK amid coronavirus pandemic

Telecoms operators Orange Belgium announced on&nbsp;on Friday that it has selected&nbsp;Nokia&nbsp;to renew its networks and roll out 5G instead on Huawei.

Orange along with&nbsp;local rival Proximus&nbsp;had decided to progressively replace Huawei-made&nbsp;mobile equipment in Belgium and Luxembourg with Nokia equipment.

The Belgian division of the operators, which share their mobile network, signed an agreement last year to share their mobile network, which is why the decision to shift to Nokia was a collective one.

Also read:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/technology/british-parliaments-defence-committee-says-huawei-colludes-with-chinese-communist-party-333440">British parliament's defence committee says Huawei colludes with Chinese Communist Party</a>

Sources close to the matter said&nbsp;they had faced political pressure to drop Huawei as a supplier following US&nbsp;accusations that Huawei’s gear could be used for spying by Beijing.

The move by Orange and Proximus represents one of the first cases in Europe where commercial operators have dropped Huawei from their next generation mobile Internet, or 5G, networks in response to political pressure.

While the United States is pressing allies to bar Huawei from 5G networks on security grounds, China and Huawei deny the spying allegations.

Belgium’s capital Brussels is home to the European Union’s executive body and parliament, making it a strategic location and a matter of particular concern for US&nbsp;intelligence agencies.

"This is the outcome of a tender organised by operators and the result of the free market," a Huawei spokesman said on the issue.

"We embrace fair competition, the more diversified a supply chain the more competitive it becomes," he said, adding that Huawei has been supplying equipment in Belgium for more than a decade and its commitment remains unchanged.

Nokia announced late last month it had clinched a deal with Britain's biggest mobile operator BT&nbsp;to supply 5G radio equipment.

Telecoms operators Orange Belgium announced on on Friday that it has selected Nokia to renew its networks and roll out 5G instead on Huawei. Orange along with local rival Proximus had decided to progressively replace Huawei-made mobile equipment in Belgium and Luxembourg with Nokia equipment.

Telecoms operators Orange Belgium announced on on Friday that it has selected Nokia to renew its networks and roll out 5G instead on Huawei. Orange along with local rival Proximus had decided to progressively replace Huawei-made mobile equipment in Belgium and Luxembourg with Nokia equipment. The Belgian division of the operators, which share their mobile network, signed an agreement last year to share their mobile network, which is why the decision to shift to Nokia was a collective one. Also read: British parliament's defence committee says Huawei colludes with Chinese Communist Party Sources close to the matter said they had faced political pressure to drop Huawei as a supplier following US accusations that Huawei’s gear could be used for spying by Beijing. The move by Orange and Proximus represents one of the first cases in Europe where commercial operators have dropped Huawei from their next generation mobile Internet, or 5G, networks in response to political pressure. While the United States is pressing allies to bar Huawei from 5G networks on security grounds, China and Huawei deny the spying allegations. Belgium’s capital Brussels is home to the European Union’s executive body and parliament, making it a strategic location and a matter of particular concern for US intelligence agencies. "This is the outcome of a tender organised by operators and the result of the free market," a Huawei spokesman said on the issue. "We embrace fair competition, the more diversified a supply chain the more competitive it becomes," he said, adding that Huawei has been supplying equipment in Belgium for more than a decade and its commitment remains unchanged. Nokia announced late last month it had clinched a deal with Britain's biggest mobile operator BT to supply 5G radio equipment.

Orange venture in Belgium replaces Huawei and awards 5G contract to Nokia

In a bid to counter fake news and misinformation campaigns, Facebook on Wednesday said it will stop carrying political advertisements in the US for an undefined period post the <a href="https://www.wionews.com/topics/us-election">presidential election </a>in the United States.&nbsp;

"(Though) ads are an important way to express voice, we plan to temporarily stop running all social issue, electoral or political ads in the US after the polls close on November 3, to reduce opportunities for confusion or abuse," Facebook, in a blogpost said.&nbsp;

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/technology/trumps-misleading-covid-19-posts-deleted-by-facebook-and-hidden-by-twitter-333111">Trump's misleading COVID-19 posts deleted by Facebook and hidden by Twitter</a>

Earlier, the social media giant vowed to prevent posting new political ads a week before the November 3 election.&nbsp;

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/facebook-classifies-qanon-as-dangerous-bans-groups-and-accounts-333040">Facebook classifies QAnon as dangerous, bans groups and accounts</a>

The blog also said that Facebook would also add "specific information" on posts if a candidate or party declares "premature victory"

" (If) a candidate or party declares premature victory before a race is called by major media outlets," it said, "we will add more specific information in the notifications that counting is still in progress and no winner has been determined."

On Thursday, the social media giant took a crackdown on fake accounts that were praising US President Donald Trump.&nbsp;

Facebook said it has banned US marketing firm Rally Forge for coordinating the "inauthentic behaviour", by way of bogus accounts to comment on news pieces rather than publishing their own article.&nbsp;

It included criticism of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and appreciation of Trump and his Republican party.&nbsp;

In a bid to counter fake news and misinformation campaigns, Facebook on Wednesday said it will stop carrying political advertisements in the US for an undefined period post the presidential election in the United States.

In a bid to counter fake news and misinformation campaigns, Facebook on Wednesday said it will stop carrying political advertisements in the US for an undefined period post the presidential election in the United States. "(Though) ads are an important way to express voice, we plan to temporarily stop running all social issue, electoral or political ads in the US after the polls close on November 3, to reduce opportunities for confusion or abuse," Facebook, in a blogpost said. Also read | Trump's misleading COVID-19 posts deleted by Facebook and hidden by Twitter Earlier, the social media giant vowed to prevent posting new political ads a week before the November 3 election. Also read | Facebook classifies QAnon as dangerous, bans groups and accounts The blog also said that Facebook would also add "specific information" on posts if a candidate or party declares "premature victory" " (If) a candidate or party declares premature victory before a race is called by major media outlets," it said, "we will add more specific information in the notifications that counting is still in progress and no winner has been determined." On Thursday, the social media giant took a crackdown on fake accounts that were praising US President Donald Trump. Facebook said it has banned US marketing firm Rally Forge for coordinating the "inauthentic behaviour", by way of bogus accounts to comment on news pieces rather than publishing their own article. It included criticism of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and appreciation of Trump and his Republican party.

Facebook to temporarily stop posting political ads in US after presidential election

The other night, as President Donald Trump convalesced at Walter Reed, I took a spin through social media to see the latest news on his health.

Instead, what I found were a bunch of paranoid partisans posting grainy, zoomed-in photos, analyzing video footage frame by frame, and people straining to connect the dots on far-fetched conspiracy theories involving a cabal of nefarious elites staging an elaborate cover-up.

No, I didn’t stumble into a room for QAnon, the pro-Trump conspiracy theory. In fact, many of the people sharing bogus and unverified claims on my feeds were die-hard Democrats. Some of them were speculating, with no evidence, that Trump was faking his bout with COVID-19 to engender sympathy and boost his reelection chances. Others claimed that Trump had died and been replaced by a body double (nope), that he had gotten a secret vaccine from Russia and was quarantining until it took effect (also nope) or that he had deliberately contracted the disease to distract the public from a New York Times article about his taxes (creative, but doubtful).

None of these theories passed the smell test, but they were retweeted and shared thousands of times anyway. Zignal Labs, a firm that tracks online misinformation, said that the theory that Trump had faked his illness had been mentioned more than 85,000 times on social media and that the hashtag #TrumpCovidHoax, which trended on Twitter in the United States, had been mentioned more than 75,000 times.

To be clear, none of the rumormongering I saw from the left was comparable to a dangerous extremist movement like QAnon, which alleges that the world is controlled by a cabal of satanic pedophiles led by prominent Democrats. And it’s understandable that people would question the official narrative of Trump’s illness. Presidents have a long history of hiding their health problems from the public, and the barrage of conflicting, confusing and dishonest information emanating from Trump and his medical team this week has made it hard to take their claims at face value.

But it is notable how easily the conspiracist’s creed — that the official narrative is always a lie, and that the truth is out there for those willing to dig for it themselves — has penetrated our national psyche. After Trump tested positive for COVID-19 last week, social media sleuths raced to dissect every statement, tweet and photograph that might reveal clues about his real condition. (Is that lump in his jacket a hidden oxygen tank? Was that video edited to remove a telltale cough?)

Unsatisfied with the official explanations given by Trump’s doctors, they sought out their own sources, like the TikTok account of Claudia Conway, the 15-year-old daughter of the former presidential adviser Kellyanne Conway, who offered a grimmer prognosis.

And when the president did emerge from Walter Reed, armchair pulmonologists pored over his homecoming video as if it were a modern-day Zapruder film, looking for evidence that he was still in dire shape.

Trump’s hospitalization — a high-stakes medical drama starring a president who is known to exaggerate his own health — made for perfect conspiracy theory fodder. And according to several experts I talked to, the lack of reliable information coming from Trump administration officials made speculation about a cover-up inevitable.

“Conspiracy theorists love a vacuum,” said Kathryn Olmsted, a professor of history at the University of California, Davis, who has studied the history of conspiracy theories. “If they’re not getting answers, they’re going to come up with their own.”

Some of what’s happening is related to the dynamics of social media platforms, which favor bold, engaging claims over dry and careful ones. But there seems to be something else happening, too — a force that is pulling us all toward conspiracy theories these days, no matter our political persuasion.

On Tuesday, Facebook officially banned the QAnon movement from its services, labeling it a “militarized social movement.” The purge was good news for those of us who have watched QAnon morph from a fringe message board stunt to a dangerous quasi-religion that organizes mass harassment campaigns, spreads life-threatening misinformation and threatens its enemies with violence.

But while QAnon may be a singularly dangerous movement, the reflexive paranoia and rejection of authority it represents is not an isolated phenomenon, or one that is limited to far-right extremists.

On Monday, as I watched a video clip of the president standing on a White House balcony, I was struck by the realization that virtually no one was simply accepting the scene at face value. Democrats were theorizing about what secret maladies he was trying to cover up. Republicans were speculating about what signals he was trying to send to his political opponents. Everyone was “doing their own research,” and looking behind the curtain for the real story. There was no text, only subtext.

I thought of Martin Gurri, a media theorist whose work I find provocative, even if I disagree with some of his conclusions. In his book “The Revolt of the Public,” Gurri writes that social media, and the internet more broadly, have eroded the authority of long-standing mass-media gatekeepers — like the newspaper you’re reading right now — and replaced it with “vital communities” of digital insurgents who are united around shared interests.

These groups, Gurri writes, develop their own sources of authority. For one group, a phalanx of white-coated doctors standing outside Walter Reed might seem authoritative. For another group, a teenage girl’s TikTok feed or a QAnon believer’s YouTube channel might hold more sway. Every group creates its own evidentiary standards, and processes information in its own way. There is no “consensus reality” they can all agree to because the idea of a single, shared reality was an artifact of the 20th century, when most people got information from a handful of big mainstream sources.

I called Gurri, who told me that he wasn’t surprised that people were turning to conspiracy theories about Trump’s illness. Uncertainty always breeds distrust, and in the age of social media, he said, authority is held by people who can effectively get their message out — even if those messages are false or misleading.

&nbsp;

“Dissemination is validation,” he said. “If you can concoct something that travels on the web, then you’re on the same plane as any expert in the world.”

Gurri, a former CIA analyst, is skeptical that we will ever return to accepting information handed to us by elites at face value. There’s simply too much information now, traveling over too many channels, for people on any side to be satisfied with a single, straightforward answer to any question — whether it’s about the president’s blood oxygen levels, an imaginary pedophile cabal or something else entirely.

&nbsp;

I don’t think, as some of Gurri’s fans in Silicon Valley do, that authority and expertise are relics of a bygone age, and I don’t think we should let social media platforms off the hook for amplifying lies and propaganda. But as I look around my feeds this week, it’s hard not to wonder if he’s right that the internet — and the erosion of authority it has enabled — has made conspiracy theorists of us all.

&nbsp;

“This is not Trump,” Gurri said. “This is structural, and even if Trump loses in November, it’s going to continue.”

The other night, as President Donald Trump convalesced at Walter Reed, I took a spin through social media to see the latest news on his health. Instead, what I found were a bunch of paranoid partisans posting grainy, zoomed-in photos, analyzing video footage frame by frame, and people straining to connect the dots on far-fetched conspiracy theories involving a cabal of nefarious elites staging an elaborate cover-up.

The other night, as President Donald Trump convalesced at Walter Reed, I took a spin through social media to see the latest news on his health. Instead, what I found were a bunch of paranoid partisans posting grainy, zoomed-in photos, analyzing video footage frame by frame, and people straining to connect the dots on far-fetched conspiracy theories involving a cabal of nefarious elites staging an elaborate cover-up. No, I didn’t stumble into a room for QAnon, the pro-Trump conspiracy theory. In fact, many of the people sharing bogus and unverified claims on my feeds were die-hard Democrats. Some of them were speculating, with no evidence, that Trump was faking his bout with COVID-19 to engender sympathy and boost his reelection chances. Others claimed that Trump had died and been replaced by a body double (nope), that he had gotten a secret vaccine from Russia and was quarantining until it took effect (also nope) or that he had deliberately contracted the disease to distract the public from a New York Times article about his taxes (creative, but doubtful). None of these theories passed the smell test, but they were retweeted and shared thousands of times anyway. Zignal Labs, a firm that tracks online misinformation, said that the theory that Trump had faked his illness had been mentioned more than 85,000 times on social media and that the hashtag #TrumpCovidHoax, which trended on Twitter in the United States, had been mentioned more than 75,000 times. To be clear, none of the rumormongering I saw from the left was comparable to a dangerous extremist movement like QAnon, which alleges that the world is controlled by a cabal of satanic pedophiles led by prominent Democrats. And it’s understandable that people would question the official narrative of Trump’s illness. Presidents have a long history of hiding their health problems from the public, and the barrage of conflicting, confusing and dishonest information emanating from Trump and his medical team this week has made it hard to take their claims at face value. But it is notable how easily the conspiracist’s creed — that the official narrative is always a lie, and that the truth is out there for those willing to dig for it themselves — has penetrated our national psyche. After Trump tested positive for COVID-19 last week, social media sleuths raced to dissect every statement, tweet and photograph that might reveal clues about his real condition. (Is that lump in his jacket a hidden oxygen tank? Was that video edited to remove a telltale cough?) Unsatisfied with the official explanations given by Trump’s doctors, they sought out their own sources, like the TikTok account of Claudia Conway, the 15-year-old daughter of the former presidential adviser Kellyanne Conway, who offered a grimmer prognosis. And when the president did emerge from Walter Reed, armchair pulmonologists pored over his homecoming video as if it were a modern-day Zapruder film, looking for evidence that he was still in dire shape. Trump’s hospitalization — a high-stakes medical drama starring a president who is known to exaggerate his own health — made for perfect conspiracy theory fodder. And according to several experts I talked to, the lack of reliable information coming from Trump administration officials made speculation about a cover-up inevitable. “Conspiracy theorists love a vacuum,” said Kathryn Olmsted, a professor of history at the University of California, Davis, who has studied the history of conspiracy theories. “If they’re not getting answers, they’re going to come up with their own.” Some of what’s happening is related to the dynamics of social media platforms, which favor bold, engaging claims over dry and careful ones. But there seems to be something else happening, too — a force that is pulling us all toward conspiracy theories these days, no matter our political persuasion. On Tuesday, Facebook officially banned the QAnon movement from its services, labeling it a “militarized social movement.” The purge was good news for those of us who have watched QAnon morph from a fringe message board stunt to a dangerous quasi-religion that organizes mass harassment campaigns, spreads life-threatening misinformation and threatens its enemies with violence. But while QAnon may be a singularly dangerous movement, the reflexive paranoia and rejection of authority it represents is not an isolated phenomenon, or one that is limited to far-right extremists. On Monday, as I watched a video clip of the president standing on a White House balcony, I was struck by the realization that virtually no one was simply accepting the scene at face value. Democrats were theorizing about what secret maladies he was trying to cover up. Republicans were speculating about what signals he was trying to send to his political opponents. Everyone was “doing their own research,” and looking behind the curtain for the real story. There was no text, only subtext. I thought of Martin Gurri, a media theorist whose work I find provocative, even if I disagree with some of his conclusions. In his book “The Revolt of the Public,” Gurri writes that social media, and the internet more broadly, have eroded the authority of long-standing mass-media gatekeepers — like the newspaper you’re reading right now — and replaced it with “vital communities” of digital insurgents who are united around shared interests. These groups, Gurri writes, develop their own sources of authority. For one group, a phalanx of white-coated doctors standing outside Walter Reed might seem authoritative. For another group, a teenage girl’s TikTok feed or a QAnon believer’s YouTube channel might hold more sway. Every group creates its own evidentiary standards, and processes information in its own way. There is no “consensus reality” they can all agree to because the idea of a single, shared reality was an artifact of the 20th century, when most people got information from a handful of big mainstream sources. I called Gurri, who told me that he wasn’t surprised that people were turning to conspiracy theories about Trump’s illness. Uncertainty always breeds distrust, and in the age of social media, he said, authority is held by people who can effectively get their message out — even if those messages are false or misleading. “Dissemination is validation,” he said. “If you can concoct something that travels on the web, then you’re on the same plane as any expert in the world.” Gurri, a former CIA analyst, is skeptical that we will ever return to accepting information handed to us by elites at face value. There’s simply too much information now, traveling over too many channels, for people on any side to be satisfied with a single, straightforward answer to any question — whether it’s about the president’s blood oxygen levels, an imaginary pedophile cabal or something else entirely. I don’t think, as some of Gurri’s fans in Silicon Valley do, that authority and expertise are relics of a bygone age, and I don’t think we should let social media platforms off the hook for amplifying lies and propaganda. But as I look around my feeds this week, it’s hard not to wonder if he’s right that the internet — and the erosion of authority it has enabled — has made conspiracy theorists of us all. “This is not Trump,” Gurri said. “This is structural, and even if Trump loses in November, it’s going to continue.”

Why conspiracy theories are so addictive right now

The&nbsp;British parliament's defence committee on Wednesday highlighted&nbsp;''clear evidence of collusion'' between telecoms giant&nbsp;Huawei and the&nbsp;Chinese Communist Party.

The&nbsp;parliament committee has urged Prime Minister Boris Johnson&nbsp;to prepone the deadline set to remove all&nbsp;Huawei&nbsp;equipment from the United Kingdom.

In&nbsp;July, Johnson had ordered&nbsp;Huawei&nbsp;equipment to be purged from the nascent 5G network by the end of 2027. US&nbsp;President Donald Trump claimed credit for the British decision.

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"The West must urgently unite to advance a counterweight to China’s tech dominance," Tobias Ellwood, chairman of the defence committee, said. "We must not surrender our national security for the sake of short-term technological development."

The Committee did not go into detail about the exact nature of the ties but said it had seen clear evidence of&nbsp;Huawei&nbsp;collusion with "the Chinese Communist Party apparatus".

Huawei&nbsp;said the report ''is built on opinion rather than fact. We’re sure people will see through these groundless accusations of collusion and remember instead what&nbsp;Huawei&nbsp;has delivered for Britain over the past 20 years."&nbsp;

Trump identifies China as the United States' main geopolitical rival, and has accused the Communist Party-ruled state of taking advantage over trade and not telling the truth over the novel coronavirus outbreak, which he calls the "China plague".

Washington and its allies say&nbsp;Huawei&nbsp;technology could be used to spy for China.&nbsp;Huawei&nbsp;has repeatedly denied this, and says the United States is simply jealous of its success.

British ministers say the rise to global dominance of&nbsp;Huawei, founded in 1987 by a former People's Liberation Army engineer, has caught the West off-guard.

The defence committee said it supported Johnson's decision to eventually purge&nbsp;Huawei&nbsp;from 5G but noted that "developments could necessitate this date being moved forward, potentially to 2025 which could be considered economically feasible."

The British parliament's defence committee on Wednesday highlighted ''clear evidence of collusion'' between telecoms giant Huawei and the Chinese Communist Party.

The British parliament's defence committee on Wednesday highlighted ''clear evidence of collusion'' between telecoms giant Huawei and the Chinese Communist Party. The parliament committee has urged Prime Minister Boris Johnson to prepone the deadline set to remove all Huawei equipment from the United Kingdom. In July, Johnson had ordered Huawei equipment to be purged from the nascent 5G network by the end of 2027. US President Donald Trump claimed credit for the British decision. "The West must urgently unite to advance a counterweight to China’s tech dominance," Tobias Ellwood, chairman of the defence committee, said. "We must not surrender our national security for the sake of short-term technological development." The Committee did not go into detail about the exact nature of the ties but said it had seen clear evidence of Huawei collusion with "the Chinese Communist Party apparatus". Huawei said the report ''is built on opinion rather than fact. We’re sure people will see through these groundless accusations of collusion and remember instead what Huawei has delivered for Britain over the past 20 years." Trump identifies China as the United States' main geopolitical rival, and has accused the Communist Party-ruled state of taking advantage over trade and not telling the truth over the novel coronavirus outbreak, which he calls the "China plague". Washington and its allies say Huawei technology could be used to spy for China. Huawei has repeatedly denied this, and says the United States is simply jealous of its success. British ministers say the rise to global dominance of Huawei, founded in 1987 by a former People's Liberation Army engineer, has caught the West off-guard. The defence committee said it supported Johnson's decision to eventually purge Huawei from 5G but noted that "developments could necessitate this date being moved forward, potentially to 2025 which could be considered economically feasible."

British parliament's defence committee says Huawei colludes with Chinese Communist Party

After a long battle bwteeen Fortnite and Apple Inc, it is now Google Play Store which has been caught in a battle for commission rates with app developers.

South Korea has started a probe into the Google's plan of charging 30 per cent commission for the apps on the Google Play Store&nbsp; — similar to Apple.

While Google has been charging the same commission for some time, it has not been very strict about it, unlike PAple Inc. which was caught in a battle with the popular video game Fortnite.

Google has now announced that the policy will be strictly initiated from next year, but will apply to less than three per cent of the developers. However, South Korean app developers have raised concerns about this and feel that the commission fee of 30 per cent is a little too high, especially in the pandemic.

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/technology/google-faces-new-antitrust-case-in-india-over-abuse-in-smart-tvs-market-sources-333434">Also read|&nbsp;Google faces new antitrust case in India over abuse in smart TVs market: Sources</a>

Joh Sung-wook, chairperson of the Korea Fair Trade Commission (KFTC), on Thursday said Google's plan was being investigated for possible "anti-competitive practises".

"Competition isn't working properly in the industry," she told lawmakers during a parliamentary audit.

"We are searching for anti-competitive practices in order to restore competition."

These comments have come after few South Korean companies knocked on the court's door to re-assess the permission granted to Google in this case and bring a change in this policy.

South Korea is an important marker for Google Play Store as the play store held a 63.4 per cent share of total app store sales in South Korea last year leaving behind Apple Store which only has 24.4 per cent.

After a long battle bwteeen Fortnite and Apple Inc, it is now Google Play Store which has been caught in a battle for commission rates with app developers. South Korea has started a probe into the Google's plan of charging 30 per cent commission for the apps on the Google Play Store — similar to Apple.

After a long battle bwteeen Fortnite and Apple Inc, it is now Google Play Store which has been caught in a battle for commission rates with app developers. South Korea has started a probe into the Google's plan of charging 30 per cent commission for the apps on the Google Play Store — similar to Apple. While Google has been charging the same commission for some time, it has not been very strict about it, unlike PAple Inc. which was caught in a battle with the popular video game Fortnite. Google has now announced that the policy will be strictly initiated from next year, but will apply to less than three per cent of the developers. However, South Korean app developers have raised concerns about this and feel that the commission fee of 30 per cent is a little too high, especially in the pandemic. Also read| Google faces new antitrust case in India over abuse in smart TVs market: Sources Joh Sung-wook, chairperson of the Korea Fair Trade Commission (KFTC), on Thursday said Google's plan was being investigated for possible "anti-competitive practises". "Competition isn't working properly in the industry," she told lawmakers during a parliamentary audit. "We are searching for anti-competitive practices in order to restore competition." These comments have come after few South Korean companies knocked on the court's door to re-assess the permission granted to Google in this case and bring a change in this policy. South Korea is an important marker for Google Play Store as the play store held a 63.4 per cent share of total app store sales in South Korea last year leaving behind Apple Store which only has 24.4 per cent.

South Korean developers request change in 30% commission for Google Play Store

The landmark copyright lawsuit between tech giants&nbsp;Google and&nbsp;Oracle has puzzled and divided the&nbsp;Supreme Court of the&nbsp;United States of America.

Trying to resolve an $8 billion-plus copyright dispute, the shorthanded court, down one justice following last month's death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg,&nbsp;heard oral arguments on Wednesday.

The case has been revived after&nbsp;Google's appeal to review&nbsp;a lower court ruling&nbsp;in which&nbsp;Oracle&nbsp;sought&nbsp;damages from the company for&nbsp;copying thousands of lines of computer code from its popular Java programming language without a license in order to make Android, a competing platform that has harmed&nbsp;Oracle's business.

To create Android, which was released in 2007, Google wrote millions of lines of new computer code. But it also used 11,330 lines of code and an organisation that's part of Oracle's Java platform.

Google says what it did is long-settled, common practice in the industry, a practice that has been good for technical progress. And it says there is no copyright protection for the purely functional, noncreative computer code it used, something that couldn't be written another way. But Oracle says Google committed an ''egregious act of plagiarism''&nbsp;and sued.

A jury cleared Google in 2016, but the US&nbsp;Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit overturned that decision in 2018, finding that Google's inclusion of&nbsp;Oracle's software code in Android was not permissible under US&nbsp;copyright law.

Google lawyer Thomas Goldstein told the justices that the disputed Java code should not receive copyright protection because it was the "the only way" to create new programs using the programming language.

Chief Justice John Roberts suggested Google still should have paid&nbsp;Oracle&nbsp;for a license to Java.

"Cracking the safe may be the only way to get the money that you want, but that doesn't mean you can do it," Roberts said.

Justice Neil Gorsuch questioned Goldstein on whether Google had simply piggybacked on&nbsp;Oracle's innovation.

Gorsuch asked, "What do we do about the fact that the other competitors, Apple, Microsoft ... have, in fact, been able to come up with phones that work just fine without engaging in this kind of copying?"

Oracle&nbsp;and Google, two California-based technology giants with combined annual revenues of about $200 billion, have been feuding since&nbsp;Oracle&nbsp;sued for copyright infringement in 2010 in federal court in San Francisco.

Google has said the shortcut commands it copied into Android do not warrant copyright protection because they help developers write programs to work across platforms, a key to software innovation.

The landmark copyright lawsuit between tech giants Google and Oracle has puzzled and divided the Supreme Court of the United States of America. Trying to resolve an $8 billion-plus copyright dispute, the shorthanded court, down one justice following last month's death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, heard oral arguments on Wednesday.

The landmark copyright lawsuit between tech giants Google and Oracle has puzzled and divided the Supreme Court of the United States of America. Trying to resolve an $8 billion-plus copyright dispute, the shorthanded court, down one justice following last month's death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, heard oral arguments on Wednesday. The case has been revived after Google's appeal to review a lower court ruling in which Oracle sought damages from the company for copying thousands of lines of computer code from its popular Java programming language without a license in order to make Android, a competing platform that has harmed Oracle's business. To create Android, which was released in 2007, Google wrote millions of lines of new computer code. But it also used 11,330 lines of code and an organisation that's part of Oracle's Java platform. Google says what it did is long-settled, common practice in the industry, a practice that has been good for technical progress. And it says there is no copyright protection for the purely functional, noncreative computer code it used, something that couldn't be written another way. But Oracle says Google committed an ''egregious act of plagiarism'' and sued. A jury cleared Google in 2016, but the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit overturned that decision in 2018, finding that Google's inclusion of Oracle's software code in Android was not permissible under US copyright law. Google lawyer Thomas Goldstein told the justices that the disputed Java code should not receive copyright protection because it was the "the only way" to create new programs using the programming language. Chief Justice John Roberts suggested Google still should have paid Oracle for a license to Java. "Cracking the safe may be the only way to get the money that you want, but that doesn't mean you can do it," Roberts said. Justice Neil Gorsuch questioned Goldstein on whether Google had simply piggybacked on Oracle's innovation. Gorsuch asked, "What do we do about the fact that the other competitors, Apple, Microsoft ... have, in fact, been able to come up with phones that work just fine without engaging in this kind of copying?" Oracle and Google, two California-based technology giants with combined annual revenues of about $200 billion, have been feuding since Oracle sued for copyright infringement in 2010 in federal court in San Francisco. Google has said the shortcut commands it copied into Android do not warrant copyright protection because they help developers write programs to work across platforms, a key to software innovation.

US Supreme Court puzzled over Google, Oracle high tech copyright clash

Alphabet Inc's Google is facing a new antitrust case in India in which the U.S. tech giant is alleged to have abused its Android operating system's position in the smart television market, a source and two lawyers involved in the case told Reuters.

The case is Google's fourth major antitrust challenge in India, one of its key markets where it is currently facing public criticism from local startups for enforcing certain policies and company charges they contend hurt their growth.

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/technology/google-to-pay-usd-1-billion-to-news-publishers-for-their-content-331748">Google to pay USD 1 billion to news publishers for their content</a>

It also comes as Google faces new antitrust challenges in the United States, and a potential antitrust probe in China that is set to look into how it allegedly uses its dominance of its Android mobile operating system to stifle competition. Google has denied any wrongdoing.

The Competition Commission of India (CCI) has since June been looking into allegations that Google engages in anti-competitive practices by creating barriers for firms wanting to use or develop modified versions of Android for smart TVs, such as Amazon Fire TV's operating system, according to the source, who has direct knowledge of the case.

The case has been filed by two Indian antitrust lawyers, Kshitiz Arya and Purushottam Anand. They both confirmed the case filing against Google for alleged abuse in the smart television market, but declined to comment further.

The source said the CCI had directed Google to submit its written responses to the allegations and that the company has sought more time.

A Google spokesman declined comment, since the case with the antitrust body was pending. Amazon and the CCI did not respond to requests for comment.

Unlike Indian court cases, filings and details of cases reviewed by the CCI are not disclosed publicly.

The antitrust watchdog could order a wider investigation against Google if it finds merit in the allegations, or throw out the case completely.

Smart TVs, or WiFi-enabled TVs with apps for streaming services like Netflix and YouTube, have become increasingly popular in India.

Data from Counterpoint Research shows 8 million smart TV sets were sold in India in 2019. Three in five smart TVs sold in India are based on Google's Android system, which also powers nearly 99% of India's half a billion smartphone user base.

The latest case alleges that Google's agreements with companies such as Xiaomi and TV manufacturer TCL India effectively stop them from using both the Android system and a modified version of it on different devices they make, according to the source.

For example, if a company sells smartphones based on Google's Android, it cannot sell smart TVs running on competing platforms like the Amazon Fire TV system, according to the case against the Mountain View, California-based company, the source said.

And in reverse, if a company's smart TV is using Amazon's Fire operating system, then that company is restricted from offering Google's popular Play Store or the Google maps app on its smartphones.

Xiaomi India and TCL India, which is part of China's TCL Technology Group Corp, are both party to the case along with Google. Xiaomi did not respond to requests for comment while TCL declined to comment.

In 2018, the CCI fined Google 1.36 billion rupees($18.5 million) for "search bias," but a company appeal against that is pending. The CCI last year also started probing Google for allegedly misusing its dominant position to reduce the ability of smartphone makers to opt for alternate versions of its Android system.

Earlier this year, the CCI started reviewing a case alleging that Google abuses its market position to unfairly promote its mobile payments app in the country.

Alphabet Inc's Google is facing a new antitrust case in India in which the U.S. tech giant is alleged to have abused its Android operating system's position in the smart television market, a source and two lawyers involved in the case told Reuters.

Alphabet Inc's Google is facing a new antitrust case in India in which the U.S. tech giant is alleged to have abused its Android operating system's position in the smart television market, a source and two lawyers involved in the case told Reuters. The case is Google's fourth major antitrust challenge in India, one of its key markets where it is currently facing public criticism from local startups for enforcing certain policies and company charges they contend hurt their growth. Also read | Google to pay USD 1 billion to news publishers for their content It also comes as Google faces new antitrust challenges in the United States, and a potential antitrust probe in China that is set to look into how it allegedly uses its dominance of its Android mobile operating system to stifle competition. Google has denied any wrongdoing. The Competition Commission of India (CCI) has since June been looking into allegations that Google engages in anti-competitive practices by creating barriers for firms wanting to use or develop modified versions of Android for smart TVs, such as Amazon Fire TV's operating system, according to the source, who has direct knowledge of the case. The case has been filed by two Indian antitrust lawyers, Kshitiz Arya and Purushottam Anand. They both confirmed the case filing against Google for alleged abuse in the smart television market, but declined to comment further. The source said the CCI had directed Google to submit its written responses to the allegations and that the company has sought more time. A Google spokesman declined comment, since the case with the antitrust body was pending. Amazon and the CCI did not respond to requests for comment. Unlike Indian court cases, filings and details of cases reviewed by the CCI are not disclosed publicly. The antitrust watchdog could order a wider investigation against Google if it finds merit in the allegations, or throw out the case completely. Smart TVs, or WiFi-enabled TVs with apps for streaming services like Netflix and YouTube, have become increasingly popular in India. Data from Counterpoint Research shows 8 million smart TV sets were sold in India in 2019. Three in five smart TVs sold in India are based on Google's Android system, which also powers nearly 99% of India's half a billion smartphone user base. The latest case alleges that Google's agreements with companies such as Xiaomi and TV manufacturer TCL India effectively stop them from using both the Android system and a modified version of it on different devices they make, according to the source. For example, if a company sells smartphones based on Google's Android, it cannot sell smart TVs running on competing platforms like the Amazon Fire TV system, according to the case against the Mountain View, California-based company, the source said. And in reverse, if a company's smart TV is using Amazon's Fire operating system, then that company is restricted from offering Google's popular Play Store or the Google maps app on its smartphones. Xiaomi India and TCL India, which is part of China's TCL Technology Group Corp, are both party to the case along with Google. Xiaomi did not respond to requests for comment while TCL declined to comment. In 2018, the CCI fined Google 1.36 billion rupees($18.5 million) for "search bias," but a company appeal against that is pending. The CCI last year also started probing Google for allegedly misusing its dominant position to reduce the ability of smartphone makers to opt for alternate versions of its Android system. Earlier this year, the CCI started reviewing a case alleging that Google abuses its market position to unfairly promote its mobile payments app in the country.

Google faces new antitrust case in India over abuse in smart TVs market: Sources

The great China decoupling is truly underway with India slowly emerging as a viable alternative. New Delhi has given its nod to partners of Apple and Samsung to set up their smartphone manufacturing in India.

India wants to become a smartphone production hub. As many as 16 global companies are ready to set up a base in India.

The Indian government has promised these firms incentives worth well over six billion dollars, and the biggest beneficiaries could be Samsung and Apple.

The South Korean electronics giant has won a place in the government's incentive programme. Three contract manufacturing partners of Apple are also on the list.

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/distrust-of-china-jumps-to-new-highs-in-democratic-nations-333269">Also read:&nbsp;Distrust of China jumps to new highs in democratic nations</a>

Ambitious targets

India wants smartphone makers to produce phones and components worth more than 143 billion dollars over the next five years.

According to a report, 60 per cent of the products made locally will be exported. The incentives will generate two lakh direct and six lakh indirect jobs.

India wants to leverage the anti-China sentiment in the global markets. Since the outbreak of the&nbsp;coronavirus, decoupling from China has become the new buzzword as major companies have announced plans to move out of China.

Samsung has shutdown its mobile phone production in China. The company has expanded production in India and Vietnam. Hasbro began shifting its manufacturing last year. The toy maker wants to have only 50 per cent of its products to come from China by the end of this year.

Apple's supplier Foxconn is leaving China too. Reports say the company plans to invest one billion dollars to expand its factory in Chennai.

Electronics company Nintendo and tech company GoPro want to leave China too.

India has positioned itself to leverage this great China exit. In an effort to attract smartphone makers,&nbsp;New Selhi came up with an incentive scheme. These companies have been given a 6 per cent financial incentive on additional sales of goods for the next five years. This is likely to be offered as a tax rebate.

However, India faces an uphill battle.

Chinese smartphone makers dominate the Indian market. According to one report, these companies command an 80 per cent market share in India alone.

So, India must break this Chinese monopoly — anroad, as well as at home.

The great China decoupling is truly underway with India slowly emerging as a viable alternative. New Delhi has given its nod to partners of Apple and Samsung to set up their smartphone manufacturing in India.

The great China decoupling is truly underway with India slowly emerging as a viable alternative. New Delhi has given its nod to partners of Apple and Samsung to set up their smartphone manufacturing in India. India wants to become a smartphone production hub. As many as 16 global companies are ready to set up a base in India. The Indian government has promised these firms incentives worth well over six billion dollars, and the biggest beneficiaries could be Samsung and Apple. The South Korean electronics giant has won a place in the government's incentive programme. Three contract manufacturing partners of Apple are also on the list. Also read: Distrust of China jumps to new highs in democratic nations Ambitious targets India wants smartphone makers to produce phones and components worth more than 143 billion dollars over the next five years. According to a report, 60 per cent of the products made locally will be exported. The incentives will generate two lakh direct and six lakh indirect jobs. India wants to leverage the anti-China sentiment in the global markets. Since the outbreak of the coronavirus, decoupling from China has become the new buzzword as major companies have announced plans to move out of China. Samsung has shutdown its mobile phone production in China. The company has expanded production in India and Vietnam. Hasbro began shifting its manufacturing last year. The toy maker wants to have only 50 per cent of its products to come from China by the end of this year. Apple's supplier Foxconn is leaving China too. Reports say the company plans to invest one billion dollars to expand its factory in Chennai. Electronics company Nintendo and tech company GoPro want to leave China too. India has positioned itself to leverage this great China exit. In an effort to attract smartphone makers, New Selhi came up with an incentive scheme. These companies have been given a 6 per cent financial incentive on additional sales of goods for the next five years. This is likely to be offered as a tax rebate. However, India faces an uphill battle. Chinese smartphone makers dominate the Indian market. According to one report, these companies command an 80 per cent market share in India alone. So, India must break this Chinese monopoly — anroad, as well as at home.

Another win: Samsung and Apple strike deal with India; abandon China

Instagram, on Monday announced global expansion of its shopping service across IGTV. Instagram also plans to test the release on Reels, its rival to Tiktok. Instagram's shopping service lets you watch a video and checkout in a few taps. Instagram shopping service gives way to creators and influencers new ways to monetize their presence on Instagram.

As of today, users can purchase and view products across IGTV, Instagram Live and stories.

Expanding Instagram shopping service on IGTV may open a new revenue stream for the company. On IGTV, users can visit the seller's website or checkout in-app. This allows Instagram to collect seller's fee.

Also Read | <a href="https://www.wionews.com/technology/instagram-turns-10-how-to-customise-icon-on-android-and-iphone-333138">Instagram turns 10: How to customise icon on Android and iPhone</a>

Instagram COO Justin Osofsky said that by bringing shopping to IGTV and Reel, they are making it easy to shop directly from videos.

There hasn't yet been an announcement from Instagram as to when exactly will Reels would get shopping features. However, the feature may be rolled out later this year.

Instagram, on Monday announced global expansion of its shopping service across IGTV. Instagram also plans to test the release on Reels, its rival to Tiktok. Instagram's shopping service lets you watch a video and checkout in a few taps.

Instagram, on Monday announced global expansion of its shopping service across IGTV. Instagram also plans to test the release on Reels, its rival to Tiktok. Instagram's shopping service lets you watch a video and checkout in a few taps. Instagram shopping service gives way to creators and influencers new ways to monetize their presence on Instagram. As of today, users can purchase and view products across IGTV, Instagram Live and stories. Expanding Instagram shopping service on IGTV may open a new revenue stream for the company. On IGTV, users can visit the seller's website or checkout in-app. This allows Instagram to collect seller's fee. Also Read | Instagram turns 10: How to customise icon on Android and iPhone Instagram COO Justin Osofsky said that by bringing shopping to IGTV and Reel, they are making it easy to shop directly from videos. There hasn't yet been an announcement from Instagram as to when exactly will Reels would get shopping features. However, the feature may be rolled out later this year.

Instagram announces expansion of shopping on IGTV, to do same for Reels

Instagram needs no introduction. The photo sharing app is the go to app for millions across the world to flaunt their style, make funny videos, or even support a cause. Instagram has given many taste of fame they never thought they'd get. These influencers have thousands of followers from across the world. Instagram changed the online game and it has turned 10. The iconic app went though many changes over the years. And now its taking a look back at its previous avatars.

Long before it was a globe spanning mega-phenomenon, Instagram had a classic look. A polaroid camera adorned the icon of the app. There is a special fan following for the classic icon. Instagram's icon underwent many changes after the owners decided to ditch the polaroid cam. And all these icons are now available again.

Here's how to change Instagram icon

<ol>
	<li>Load the app, tap icon in the lower right to go to your profile.</li>
	<li>Tap three line in the top-right hand corner. A menu will open</li>
	<li>Tap Settings. Now another menu will open. To access the 'hidden' menu to change Instagram icon, hold and drag the Settings menu downwards till confetti explodes across the screen</li>
	<li>Voila. All the icons are at your service. Select your favorite, confirm and you're done.</li>
</ol>

Instagram needs no introduction. The photo sharing app is the go to app for millions across the world to flaunt their style, make funny videos, or even support a cause.

Instagram needs no introduction. The photo sharing app is the go to app for millions across the world to flaunt their style, make funny videos, or even support a cause. Instagram has given many taste of fame they never thought they'd get. These influencers have thousands of followers from across the world. Instagram changed the online game and it has turned 10. The iconic app went though many changes over the years. And now its taking a look back at its previous avatars. Long before it was a globe spanning mega-phenomenon, Instagram had a classic look. A polaroid camera adorned the icon of the app. There is a special fan following for the classic icon. Instagram's icon underwent many changes after the owners decided to ditch the polaroid cam. And all these icons are now available again. Here's how to change Instagram icon Load the app, tap icon in the lower right to go to your profile. Tap three line in the top-right hand corner. A menu will open Tap Settings. Now another menu will open. To access the 'hidden' menu to change Instagram icon, hold and drag the Settings menu downwards till confetti explodes across the screen Voila. All the icons are at your service. Select your favorite, confirm and you're done.

Instagram turns 10: How to customise icon on Android and iPhone

Facebook Inc and&nbsp;Twitter&nbsp;took action on posts from US&nbsp;President Donald Trump on Tuesday for violating their rules against coronavirus misinformation by suggesting that COVID-19 was just like the flu.

Facebook took the post down but not before it was shared about 26,000 times, data from the company's metric tool CrowdTangle showed.

"We remove incorrect information about the severity of COVID-19," a company spokesman said.

The world's largest social media company, which exempts politicians from its third-party fact-checking program, has rarely taken action against posts from the Republican US&nbsp;president.

Twitter&nbsp;disabled retweets on a similar tweet from Trump on Tuesday and added a warning label that said it broke its rules on "spreading misleading and potentially harmful information related to COVID-19" but that it might be in the public interest for it to remain accessible.

<img alt="t" data-entity-type="file" data-entity-uuid="5c5ed150-d6db-4c41-83e3-57a261524924" src="//cdn.wionews.com/sites/default/files/inline-images/_114786882_hidden.jpg" />

During the 2019-2020 influenza season, the flu was associated with 22,000 deaths in the United States, according to estimates from the US&nbsp;Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Since the first case of the novel coronavirus was recorded in the United States at the beginning of this year, more than 210,000 people in the country have died of the disease caused by the virus, the world's highest death toll.

On Monday, Trump told Americans "to get out there" and not fear COVID-19 as he returned to the White House after a three-night stay in a military hospital outside Washington where he was treated for COVID-19.

"Silicon Valley and the mainstream media have consistently used their platforms to fearmonger and censor President Trump to serve their own agenda, even now during this critical moment in the fight against coronavirus," Trump campaign spokeswoman Courtney Parella said.

Twitter, which has been using labels to flag tweets with misinformation - including from the president - told Reuters it is currently trying to respond more quickly and more overtly.

Facebook removed a Trump post for coronavirus misinformation for the first time in August. The post included a video in which the president falsely claimed that children were "almost immune" to COVID-19.

Facebook Inc and Twitter took action on posts from US President Donald Trump on Tuesday for violating their rules against coronavirus misinformation by suggesting that COVID-19 was just like the flu.

Facebook Inc and Twitter took action on posts from US President Donald Trump on Tuesday for violating their rules against coronavirus misinformation by suggesting that COVID-19 was just like the flu. Facebook took the post down but not before it was shared about 26,000 times, data from the company's metric tool CrowdTangle showed. "We remove incorrect information about the severity of COVID-19," a company spokesman said. The world's largest social media company, which exempts politicians from its third-party fact-checking program, has rarely taken action against posts from the Republican US president. Twitter disabled retweets on a similar tweet from Trump on Tuesday and added a warning label that said it broke its rules on "spreading misleading and potentially harmful information related to COVID-19" but that it might be in the public interest for it to remain accessible. During the 2019-2020 influenza season, the flu was associated with 22,000 deaths in the United States, according to estimates from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Since the first case of the novel coronavirus was recorded in the United States at the beginning of this year, more than 210,000 people in the country have died of the disease caused by the virus, the world's highest death toll. On Monday, Trump told Americans "to get out there" and not fear COVID-19 as he returned to the White House after a three-night stay in a military hospital outside Washington where he was treated for COVID-19. "Silicon Valley and the mainstream media have consistently used their platforms to fearmonger and censor President Trump to serve their own agenda, even now during this critical moment in the fight against coronavirus," Trump campaign spokeswoman Courtney Parella said. Twitter, which has been using labels to flag tweets with misinformation - including from the president - told Reuters it is currently trying to respond more quickly and more overtly. Facebook removed a Trump post for coronavirus misinformation for the first time in August. The post included a video in which the president falsely claimed that children were "almost immune" to COVID-19.

Trump's misleading COVID-19 posts deleted by Facebook and hidden by Twitter

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