WhatsApp rolling out ‘Report status updates’ feature on Android beta

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WhatsApp rolling out ‘Report status updates’ feature on Android beta

On Android beta, the meta-owned messaging platform WhatsApp is rolling out a new feature, which will allow users to report status updates.

Beta testers will see a new “report” action within the status options, reports WABetaInfo.

With the new feature, users can report any status update that might violate the Terms of Service, which will then be sent to the company’s moderation team.

Also, the feature makes sure that the messages, media, location sharing, calls, and status updates are all protected by end-to-end encryption on all devices.

This means that no one else, not even WhatsApp, Meta, or a proxy provider, can read the users’ personal messages and listen to their private calls.

The new feature is helpful as it will make the platform safe and secure for all users.

The report said that the ability to report status updates is available for some beta testers after installing the latest update of WhatsApp beta for Android on the Play Store, and is expected to roll out to more users over the coming days.

In January, it was reported that the messaging platform was working on this feature for Android beta.

Zoomcar partners Vistara to offer self-drive services to customers

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Zoomcar partners Vistara to offer self-drive services to customers

Car-sharing platform Zoomcar on Wednesday announced its partnership with Vistara, a joint venture of Tata group and Singapore Airlines, to become its self-drive partner.

Customers can now avail a wide choice of self-drive cars from Zoomcar while booking through the Vistara website.

Vistara customers can now book their self-drive cars with Zoomcar and earn CV Points, the company said in a statement.

As part of this association, Vistara customers can earn 5 CV Points for every Rs 100 spent when booking.

“We are delighted to partner with Vistara to bring innovative, mobility solutions to our guests. As trusted travel partners for customers across the country, we see great synergies in this partnership,” said Greg Moran, CEO, and Co-Founder Zoomcar.

Club Vistara members enjoy up to 5 CV Points on every Rs 100 spent an an additional discount of up to 15 per cent on their first booking with Zoomcar Rentals till March 31.

Zoomcar is the leading marketplace for car sharing in emerging markets, with over 20,000 cars on its technology-driven platform across India, Southeast Asia, and Egypt.

Founded in 2013 and headquartered in Bengaluru, Zoomcar employs over 300 people.

Amazon joins Vishal Garg’s Better.com to let employees use stock to buy homes

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Amazon joins Vishal Garg’s Better.com to let employees use stock to buy homes

Amazon has signed a deal with embattled online mortgage lender Better.com run by controversial Indian-origin CEO Vishal Garg to allow employees to use their shares in the company toward a mortgage down payment.

Better.com launched ‘Equity Unlocker’ which allows Amazon employees to use their vested equity as collateral for a down payment for buying homes.

According to Garg’s company, Amazon employees can finance their homes without actually selling their shares.

Amazon workers in Florida, New York, and Washington can currently use Equity Unlocker’ to secure a home loan without selling their Amazon stock.

“Even though equity is a valuable asset, it is considered ineligible by most banks and financial institutions when calculating the necessary down payment on a home,” said Garg.

To protect itself from a continued slide in Amazon’s stock price, Better.com will charge a higher rate on the mortgages of employees pledging stock “between 0.25 and 2.5 percentage points above the market rate, depending on how the down payment is structured,” according to reports.

An Amazon spokesperson told TechCrunch that the company is “always looking for opportunities” to enhance its benefits offerings “and better support employees’ mental, physical, and financial wellness.”

In December 2021, Garg laid off nearly 900 employees over a Zoom call that created a furor.

In total, he laid off more than 4,000 employees in the US and India.

According to the company, the uncertain mortgage market conditions created an exceedingly challenging operating environment for many companies in the industry.

India’s mobile download speeds up by 115% since 5G launch

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India’s mobile download speeds up by 115% since 5G launch

As 5G roll-out picks up speed, the median download speeds across India increased by a massive 115 percent since the launch of 5G on October 1 last year, a report showed on Wednesday.

The median download speed increased from 13.87 Mbps in September to 29.85 Mbps in January 2023, according to Ookla, the global leader in network intelligence and connectivity insights.

As a result, India’s position on the Speedtest Global Index improved by 49 places from 118th in September 2022 to 69th in January.

The data shows improvement in LTE speeds for both Jio and Airtel since the launch of 5G services, as all their investments into network modernization are paying off.

“When 5G was first launched in October 2022, there was a wide disparity in the early 5G network performance users were experiencing on 5G-capable devices,” the report noted.

The median 5G download speeds then oscillated between 512.57 Mbps (Gujarat) and 19.23 Mbps (Uttar Pradesh West) as the 5G networks build out started.

In fact, in nine telecom circles: Andhra Pradesh, Kolkata, North East, Haryana, Rajasthan, Bihar, Punjab, Kerala, and Uttar Pradesh West, the median 5G download speed was below 100 Mbps because networks were very much at the testing stage.

“Four months on, in January 2023, 5G median download speeds had greatly increased across all of the telecoms circles” exceeding 200 Mbps everywhere except Jammu and Kashmir, with Kolkata clocking speeds over 500 Mbps,” the report noted.

Moreover, 5G investments made by the operators have also propelled an increase in 4G LTE speeds thanks to the modernization of the underlying infrastructure.

For instance, the median 5G download speed is 25 times that of 4G LTE (338.12 Mbps vs. 13.30 Mbps), and the median 5G upload speed is 4.5 times 4G LTE (19.65 Mbps vs 3.55 Mbps).

“This must be caveated by the fact that these are still early days for 5G in India, and 5G performance will most likely decrease once those networks are commercially available,” said the report.

WhatsApp may soon add newsletters to Status tab on Android beta

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WhatsApp may soon add newsletters to Status tab on Android beta

Meta-owned messaging platform WhatsApp is reportedly redesigning its Status tab to include newsletters, for Android beta.

The company is working on changing the Status tab by adding two different sections– status and newsletter reports WABetaInfo.

The important aspects of this newly designed section will be the incorporation of users’ subscribed newsletters directly into the status tab, as well as the capability to search for newsletters by username.

Moreover, status updates will be displayed in a horizontal layout similar to Instagram Stories.

Users who create and subscribe to a newsletter will have their phone numbers hidden to prevent the disclosure of their identity.

Also, users will likely be able to control who they follow and no one else will be able to see that, the report said.

Last month, it was reported that the messaging platform was working on a new private newsletter feature, which will be a one-to-many tool for broadcasting information.

Meta creating team to build AI tools: CEO

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Meta creating team to build AI tools: CEO

Meta Ceo Mark Zuckerberg had announced the top product team which is helping to create artificial intelligence(AI).

Posting on Facebook Mark said on Monday,” We are making the best product team in Meta mainly concentrate on creative AI  to supercharge our work in a particular area.”

“We’re starting by pulling together a lot of the teams working on generative AI across the company into one group focused on building delightful experiences around this technology into all of our different products.”

He further explained that in the short term, the company will focus on building creative and expressive tools.

And, over the longer term, the company will develop “AI personas” which will help users in a variety of ways.

The company is also exploring experiences with text (like chat in WhatsApp and Messenger), images (like creative Instagram filters and ad formats), as well as “video and multi-modal experiences.”

“We have a lot of foundational work to do before getting to the really futuristic experiences, but I’m excited about all of the new things we’ll build along the way,” he added.

Last week, Meta joined the AI chatbot race with its own state-of-the-art foundational large language model designed to help researchers advance their work in the field of AI. However, Meta’s Large Language Model Meta AI (LLaMA) isn’t like ChatGPT-driven Bing at the moment as it can’t yet talk to humans but will help researchers.

Meta launches new platform to remove minors’ intimate images online

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Meta launches new platform to remove minors’ intimate images online

To protect the images of youngsters and minors from misuse online, Meta introduced a fresh platform.

The social media network said, this is helping the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in the development of ‘Take It Down, the stage which gives assistance to stop the distribution of adult pics online.

“We have also announced the features that do strict protection for the teenagers from mistrustful adults on social media like Instagram, Facebook, etc..” said Antigone Davis, Global Head of Safety at Meta.

‘Take It Down’ lets young people take back control of their intimate images.

People can go to TakeItDown.NCMEC.org and follow the instructions to submit a case that will proactively search for their intimate images on participating apps.

The platform then assigns a unique hash value and” numerical code a” to their image or video privately and directly from their own device.

“Once they submit the hash to NCMEC, companies like ours can use those hashes to find any copies of the image, take them down, and prevent the content from being posted on our apps in the future,” said Meta.

With the launch of Take It Down, people of all ages can stop the spread of their intimate images online, including young people under 18 years old; parents or trusted adults on behalf of a young person, and adults who are worried about images taken of them when they were under 18.

On Instagram, the company recently introduced new features to make it even more difficult for suspicious adults to interact with teens.

“Now, these adults will no longer be able to see teen accounts when scrolling through the list of people who have liked a post or when looking at an account’s Followers or Following list,” said the company.

If a suspicious adult follows a teen account, “we will send that teen a notification prompting them to review and remove the new follower”.

The company is also prompting teens to review and restrict their privacy settings.

“We’ve developed more than 30 tools to support the safety of teens and families across our apps, including supervision tools for parents and age-verification technology that helps teens have age-appropriate experiences online,” said Meta.

Users can now convert images into stickers on WhatsApp for iOS

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Users can now convert images into stickers on WhatsApp for iOS

Chating app WhatsApp, which is meta gained messaging platform for users to chat, is releasing a new sticker maker tool that will access customers’ change from pics into stickers on iOS.

The help of third-party applications for creating new stickers will delete by the new feature, said, WABetaInfo.

After extracting a subject out of an image, users just need to paste it within a chat to create a custom sticker from an image.

If the feature is available, the platform will instantly turn the image into a sticker that can be added to the user’s collection of stickers.

This tool was available to some users in the past few days, however, now it is rolling out to everyone on iOS 16.

Users now don’t have to switch between different applications or tools to create and use their own stickers.

“This definitely saves time and makes the process of creating and using custom stickers faster,” the report said.

Meanwhile, earlier this month, the messaging platform added some new stickers to its avatar sticker pack for Android and iOS, following its announcement of the ability to create personalised avatars.

Snap introduces AI chatbot powered by OpenAI’s GPT tech

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Snap introduces AI chatbot powered by OpenAI’s GPT tech

Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, has introduced its new artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot for Snapchat. It is powered by the latest version of OpenAI’s GPT technology.

The “My AI” chatbot is available as an experimental feature for Snapchat+ subscribers and will be rolling out this week, the company said in a blog post on Monday.

“My AI can recommend birthday gift ideas for your BFF, plan a hiking trip for a long weekend, suggest a recipe for dinner, or even write a haiku about cheese for your cheddar-obsessed pal.”

Users can also name the chatbot and customize the wallpaper for their Chat.

My AI, like other AI-powered chatbots, is prone to hallucinations and can be tricked to say almost anything.

While My AI is built to avoid any sort of biased, inaccurate, dangerous or misleading content, mistakes might however happen.

Also, users can press and hold any message from My AI to provide feedback.

“Please be aware of its many deficiencies and sorry in advance! All conversations with My AI will be stored and may be reviewed to improve the product experience,” the company said.

“Please do not share any secrets with My AI and do not rely on it for advice,” it added.

Twitter account of Trinamool Congress hacked; logo & picture changed

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Twitter account of Trinamool Congress hacked; logo & picture changed

The official Twitter account of the Trinamool Congress has been hacked, with the picture and logo of the handle changed.

The party’s national spokesman and Rajya Sabha member Derek O’Brien has confirmed the development and claimed that communications are being made with the Twitter authorities to bring the handle back to its original format.

In the hacked handle the name has been changed to “Yuga Labs” and the original party logo has been replaced by a symbolic picture combining the letters “Y” and “L”.

The “blue tick”, however, is still there.

Party sources said that the matter came to the notice of the leaders early Tuesday morning and they doubt that the hacking incident took place on late Monday night.

“The Twitter authorities have contacted and they have assured us of giving back the party’s official Twitter handle the original looks at the earliest,” a party leader said.

However, despite being hacked no derogatory comment slamming the party has been posted through this Twitter handle.

The last tweet posted by the handle at 9.01 p.m. on Monday night, read: “#DidirSurkshaKawach is a mammoth effort at securing basic sustenance for every resident in Bengal, irrespective of age, gender, caste or religion, to achieve state-wide inclusive- growth & expand welfare cover, Didir Doots is generating awareness across households.”

Party sources said that besides informing the Twitter authorities about the development, the leadership might also file an official complaint with the cybercrime division of the Kolkata Police.

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