Junior Digest

Oct01,2022:Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Saturday launched 5G internet services at the India Mobile Congress held in New Delhi’s Pragati Maidan. The technology is expected to provide high speed internet and a lower latency in transfer of data.

“It will increase energy efficiency, spectrum efficiency and network efficiency,” the prime minister’s office said in a release.
Earlier on Saturday, Modi launched the sixth India Mobile Congress and visited stalls set up by telecom operators to get a first-hand experience of the functioning of 5G networks.

June 22,2022:Twitter’s board has recommended unanimously that shareholders approve the proposed $44 billion sale of the company to billionaire and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, according to a regulatory filing on Tuesday.
Mr. Musk reiterated his desire to move forward with the acquisition last week during a virtual meeting with Twitter employees, though shares of Twitter remain far below his offering price, signaling considerable doubt that it will happen.
Shares rose about 3% to $38.98 before the opening bell on Tuesday, far short of the $54.20 per-share that Mr. Musk has offered for each share. The company’s stock last reached that level on April 5 when it offered Mr. Musk a seat on the board before he had offered to buy all of Twitter.

MOSCOW,Sept 27,2022: Russia on Monday granted citizenship to former American intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, who fled prosecution after he revealed highly classified US surveillance programs to capture communications and data from around the world.
A decree signed Monday by Russian President Vladimir Putin listed Snowden as one of 75 foreign citizens listed as being granted Russian citizenship. After fleeing the US in 2013, Snowden was granted permanent Russian residency in 2020 and said at the time that he planned to apply for Russian citizenship without renouncing his US citizenship.
Ties between Washington and Moscow are already at their lowest point in decades following Putin’s decision to launch what the Kremlin has dubbed a “special military operation” in Ukraine.
While Snowden, 39, is considered by supporters to be a righteous whistleblower who wanted to protect American civil liberties, US intelligence officials have accused him of putting US personnel at risk and damaging national security. He currently faces charges in the United States that could result in decades in prison.
“Our position has not changed,” State Department spokesman Ned Price said Monday. “Mr. Snowden should return to the United States where he should face justice as any other American citizen would.”
Snowden becomes a Russian citizen as Moscow is mobilizing reservists to go to Ukraine. In Russia, almost every man is considered a reservist until age 65, and officials on Monday stressed that men with dual citizenship are also eligible for the military call-up.
Snowden, however, has never served in the Russian armed forces, so he is not eligible to be mobilized, his lawyer Anatoly Kucherena told the Interfax news agency. Having previous combat or military service experience has been considered the main criterion in the call-up.
Kucherena told Russia’s state news agency RIA Novosti that Snowden’s wife, Lindsay Mills, an American who has been living with him in Russia, will also be applying for a Russian passport. The couple has two children.
“After two years of waiting and nearly ten years of exile, a little stability will make a difference for my family,” Snowden tweeted Monday. “I pray for privacy for them — and for us all.”
Snowden, who has kept a low profile in Russia and occasionally criticized Russian government policies on social media, said in 2019 that he was willing to return to the US if he’s guaranteed a fair trial.
Snowden has become a well-known speaker on privacy and intelligence, appearing remotely at many events from Russia. But he has been sharply criticized by members of the intelligence community, and current and former officials from both US political parties say he endangered global security by exposing important programs. A US damage assessment of his disclosures is still classified.
James Clapper, who served as US director of national intelligence at the time of the disclosures, said Snowden’s grant of citizenship came with “rather curious timing.”
“It raises the question — again — about just what he shared with the Russians,” Clapper said in an email Monday.
Snowden has denied cooperating with Russian intelligence and was traveling through Moscow when the US revoked his passport.
Snowden leaked documents on the National Security Agency’s collection of data passing through the infrastructure of US phone and Internet companies. He also released details about the classified US intelligence budget and the extent of American surveillance on foreign officials, including the leaders of US-allied countries.
Snowden says he made the disclosures because he believed the US intelligence community had gone too far and wrongly infringed on civil liberties. He also has said he didn’t believe the administration of former President Barack Obama, which was in office when Snowden leaked the records to journalists, would act had he made an internal whistleblower complaint instead.
His decision to turn against the NSA came when he used his programming skills to to create a repository of classified in-house notes on the agency’s global snooping and as he built a backup system for agency data, he wrote in his 2019 book “Permanent Record.”
Reading through the repository, Snowden said he began to understand the extent of his government’s stomping on civil liberties and became “cursed with the knowledge that all of us had been reduced to something like children, who’d been forced to live the rest of their lives under omniscient parental supervision.”
Snowden was charged in 2013 with unauthorized disclosure of US national security and intelligence information as well as theft of government property. The three charges each carry a maximum 10-year penalty.
The Justice Department also sued to stop Snowden from collecting profits on his memoir, saying he had violated his nondisclosure agreements with intelligence agencies.
The White House on Monday referred comment on Snowden’s citizenship to the Justice Department, citing the pending criminal charges.

May 13, 2022: Elon Musk tweeted on Friday that his $44-billion cash deal for Twitter Inc was “temporarily on hold” while he waits for the social media company to provide data on the proportion of its fake accounts.
Twitter shares initially fell more than 20% in premarket trading, but after Musk, the chief executive of electric car market Tesla Inc, sent a second tweet saying he remained committed to the deal, they regained some ground.

The shares were down 10% to $40.50 in morning trading on Friday, a steep discount to the $54.20 per share acquisition price.
Musk, the world’s richest person, decided to waive due diligence when he agreed to buy Twitter on April 25, in an effort to get the San Francisco-based company to accept his “best and final offer.” This could make it harder for him to argue that Twitter somehow misled him.

Since then, technology stocks have plunged amid investor concerns over inflation and a potential economic slowdown.

The spread between the offer price and the value of Twitter shares had widened in recent days, implying less than a 50% chance of completion, as investors speculated that the downturn would prompt Musk to walk or seek a lower price.

“Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users,” Musk told his more than 92 million Twitter followers.

Twitter is planning no immediate action as a result of Musk’s comment, people familiar with the matter said. The company considered the comment disparaging and a violation of the terms of their deal contract, but was encouraged by Musk subsequently tweeting he was committing to the acquisition, the sources added.
There was no immediate reaction from the investors that Musk tapped last week to raise $7.1 billion in funding.

Washington, Dec 23,2021: The TikTok social network has become the world’s most visited website in 2021, beating both Google and Facebook, media reported.

Google comes second, while Facebook third, The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday, citing the data provided by the Cloudflare company.

TikTok topped the list of the most visited portals for the first time in February, and significantly grew in popularity in August.

TikTok is an app for creating and watching short videos, developed by the Chinese company of ByteDance.

Dec 1,2021: Twitter Inc (TWTR.N) said on Tuesday it will not allow sharing of personal media such as photos and videos on its platform without the consent of the person.

The social media company’s privacy policy already prohibits sharing of other people’s private information such as phone numbers, addresses and IDs.

“When we are notified by individuals depicted, or by an authorized representative, that they did not consent to having their private image or video shared, we will remove it,” Twitter said in a blog post.

The microblogging site’s co-founder Jack Dorsey stepped down as the chief executive of the company on Monday, handing over reins to its technology chief Parag Agrawal.

Aug 28,2022:As India is set to welcome the first phase of 5G services, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has made another announcement which states that by the end of this decade, the country will be launching a 6G network. Through the mode of video conferencing, PM Modi announced the 6G Network, during his speech at the Smart India Hackathon 2022 Grand finale.

“Youth can provide fresh ideas for promoting drone technology application in the medical and agricultural fields. By the end of this decade, we hope to introduce 6G. The government supports Indian gaming and Entertainment solutions as well. All young people should benefit from the government’s investments, Prime Minister Modi stated”.
The government has promises to roll out the latest 5G technology soon in India which will be accessible and inexpensive too. The rollout is expected to happen by October this year, as per the Union Minister of IT Ashwani Vaishnav, who stated as much during a news briefing earlier in the day.

“The industry has already started hiring for 5G infrastructure, and within two to three years, 5G services will be available everywhere in the nation”. We have asked the market to make 5G prices reasonable. We have the lowest mobile service fee in the entire world. We will receive top-notch 5G services,” according to Vaishnav.
5G will first be rolled out in 13 major cities of the countries on a trial basis. These cities are Delhi, Kolkata, Gurugram, Bengaluru, Chennai, Pune, Jamnagar, Chandigarh, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Gandhi Nagar and Lucknow.

Aug 27,2022:Meta’s Facebook has in-principle agreed to settle a lawsuit in the San Francisco federal court seeking damages for letting third parties, including Cambridge Analytica, access the private data of users, a court filing showed.
The financial terms were not disclosed in the filing on Friday that asked the judge to put the class action suit on hold for 60 days until the lawyers for both plaintiffs and Facebook finalize a written settlement.

The four-year-old lawsuit alleged that Facebook violated consumer privacy laws by sharing personal data of users with third parties such as the now-defunct British political consultancy Cambridge Analytica.

Facebook has said its privacy practices are consistent with its disclosures and “do not support any legal claims”.

Facebook and its lawyers from Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher did not immediately respond to a request for more details regarding the settlement.

Of the two law firms representing the plaintiffs, Keller Rohrback did not comment while Bleichmar Fonti & Auld declined to comment.

April 26,2022: Billionaire Elon Musk has reached an agreement to acquire Twitter for approximately $44 billion, the company said. The outspoken Tesla CEO, the world’s wealthiest person, has said he wants to buy Twitter because he thinks it’s not living up to its potential as a platform for “free speech.”
It is a seminal moment for the 16-year-old company that emerged as one of the world`s most influential public squares and now faces a string of challenges.
Musk has criticized Twitter`s moderation, calling himself a free speech absolutist, said that Twitter`s algorithm for prioritizing tweets should be public and criticized giving too much power on the service to corporations that advertise.
Political conservatives hope that a Musk regime would mean less moderation and reinstatement of banned individuals including former President Donald Trump. Musk himself also has described user-friendly tweaks to the service, such as an edit button and defeating “spam bots” that send overwhelming amounts of unwanted tweets.

Discussions over the deal, which last week appeared uncertain, accelerated over the weekend after Musk wooed Twitter shareholders with financing details of his offer.
Under pressure, Twitter started negotiating with Musk to buy the company at the proposed $54.20 per share price.
Twitter shares rose 5.7% on Monday to close at $51.70. The deal represents a near 40% premium to the closing price the day before Musk disclosed he had bought a more than 9% stake.

San Francisco,July 09,2022: Tech billionaire Elon Musk is officially trying to pull out of his $44 billion agreement to purchase microblogging site Twitter. In a filing on Friday afternoon with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Musk’s team claimed he is terminating the deal because Twitter was in “material breach” of their agreement and had made “false and misleading” statements during negotiations.

“For nearly two months, Musk has sought the data and information necessary to make an independent assessment of the prevalence of fake or spam accounts on Twitter’s platform’,” Musk’s legal team wrote. “Twitter has failed or refused to provide this information,” they added. Twitter still hopes to close the deal, despite Musk’s attempted termination.

Twitter board chairman Bret Taylor wrote that the company will “pursue legal action to enforce the merger agreement” and feels “confident we will prevail” in court. Musk has been setting the stage to abandon the deal just weeks after he signed the agreement, claiming that Twitter released misleading stats about the prevalence of spam bots on its platform.

It is entirely unclear, however, that Musk can legally abandon his agreement simply because he isn’t happy about the presence of spam on Twitter, something he could have investigated before signing the deal. Twitter has gone to great lengths to show compliance with Musk’s requests. In early June, the company opened up “firehose” access to its service so that Musk could receive and analyze every tweet as it was posted. The company has also continuously tried to reassure the public that it has spam and bots under control. On Thursday, it told the press that it was blocking over a million spam accounts per day, and in May, its CEO wrote a long thread about how Twitter determines how many of its users are bots.

April 11,2022: Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has abandoned his plans to join the board of Twitter, his social network of choice.

Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal announced publicly on Sunday that Musk remains the largest shareholder of Twitter, and the company will remain open to his input.

Musk informed Twitter on Saturday morning that he would not, in fact, take the board seat.

Musk’s appointment would have started on Saturday, “contingent on a background check and formal acceptance,” according to Agrawal.

“We were excited to collaborate and clear about the risks. We also believed that having Elon as a fiduciary of the company where he, like all board members, has to act in the best interests of the company and all our shareholders was the best path forward,” he wrote.

The Twitter CEO did not say whether Musk gave specific reasons for changing his mind about taking on the new obligation.

July 13,2022:In the latest chapter of the Twitter-Musk Saga, tech giant Twitter has sued Elon Musk over the breach of his 44 billion dollar deal to buy the Firm, this comes after Twitter shares took a significant hit and Musk mocked the company’s threat to take him to court.

April 19,2022: Elon Musk took a swipe at the board of Twitter on Monday after the social media company adopted a “poison pill” to protect itself from the second-biggest shareholder’s $43 billion cash buyout offer.

“Board salary will be $0 if my bid succeeds, so that’s ~$3M/year saved right there,” Musk tweeted in response to a user’s post criticizing the board.
Musk, a self-described “free speech absolutist” who has been critical of Twitter’s policies, did not elaborate on the tweet. Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Continuing his tirade against the company, Musk had launched a poll on Thursday asking his 80 million followers if “taking Twitter private at $54.20 should be up to shareholders, not the board”, to which a large majority responded “Yes”.

Later, the Tesla (TSLA.O) chief executive also tweeted “Love Me Tender”, an Elvis Presley song, after Twitter opted a plan to sell shares at a discount to prevent any attempt by shareholders to amass a stake of more than 15%. Musk currently has a 9.1% stake.

Meanwhile, in a series of tweet replies, co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey called out Twitter’s board on Saturday, saying “it’s consistently been the dysfunction of the company.”

Dorsey’s statement was a reply to a tweet by venture capitalist Garry Tan that said: “The wrong partner on your board can literally make a billion dollars in value evaporate.”

Shares of Twitter were up about 4% at $46.85, still significantly below Musk’s offer of $54.20 per share. They have risen roughly 15% since Musk disclosed his stake on April 4.

Meanwhile, Twitter has also been informed by Thoma Bravo, a technology-focused private equity firm that had more than $103 billion in assets under management as of the end of December, that it was exploring the possibility of putting together a bid.

LONDON, June 18,2022: The wife of Julian Assange vowed to fight using every possible legal avenue after British Home Secretary Priti Patel on Friday approved the WikiLeaks’ founder’s extradition to the United States to face criminal charges.

Assange is wanted by U.S. authorities on 18 counts, including a spying charge, relating to WikiLeaks’ release of vast troves of confidential U.S. military records and diplomatic cables which Washington said had put lives in danger.
His supporters say he is an anti-establishment hero who has been victimised because he exposed U.S. wrongdoing in conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, and that his prosecution is a politically motivated assault on journalism and free speech.

His wife Stella said Assange would appeal after the Home Office said his extradition had been approved as British courts had concluded it would not be unjust or an abuse of process.

Jan 6,2022:Tech giants Google and Facebook were fined millions of dollars in France on Thursday (January 6).

The country’s data privacy authority – the CNIL – said it had fined Alphabet’s Google $169 million, a record for the French watchdog.

It said the U.S. company was punished for making it difficult for internet users to refuse online trackers known as cookies.

Meta’s Facebook was also fined around $68 million for the same reason.

Requiring internet users’ consent for the use of cookies is a key part of the EU’s data privacy regulation.

It is also a top priority for the CNIL, which said rejecting cookies should be as easy as accepting them.

The watchdog said that wasn’t the case on the Facebook, Google France and YouTube websites.

The CNIL has given both companies three months to comply with its order or face a fine of 100,000 euros per day of delay.

Cookies are tiny bits of data that help build targeted digital ad campaigns.

Google and Facebook will now have to provide French internet users with a simpler tool to turn them off.

It is not the first time the CNIL has targeted Google.

The firm was fined 100 million euros for another cookie-related issue in 2020.

May 26,2022:Twitter has faced a big blow as Federal Trade Commission levied a USD 150 million fine on the microblogging site, alleging that the company illegally used peoples’ personal data over six years to help sell targeted advertisements. As per Variety, Twitter violated a 2011 FTC order that “explicitly prohibited” the company from misrepresenting its privacy and security practices.

In addition to the USD150 million fine, Twitter is banned from “profiting from its deceptively collected data,” the FTC said. In August 2020, Twitter disclosed that it expected to face an FTC fine of USD 150 million to USD 250 million related to the allegations.

Dec 7,2021:Rohingya refugees sued Facebook on Monday for $150 billion over claims the social network is failing to stem hate speech on its platform, exacerbating violence against the vulnerable minority.

The complaint, lodged in a California court, says the algorithms that power the US-based company promote disinformation and extremist thought that translates to real-world violence.

“Facebook is like a robot programmed with a singular mission: to grow,” the court document states.

“The undeniable reality is that Facebook’s growth, fueled by hate, division, and misinformation, has left hundreds of thousands of devastated Rohingya lives in its wake.”

The mainly Muslim group faces widespread discrimination in Myanmar, where they are despised as interlopers despite having lived in the country for generations.

A military-backed campaign that the United Nations said amounted to genocide saw hundreds of thousands of Rohingya driven across the border into Bangladesh in 2017, where they have since lived in sprawling refugee camps.

Many others remain in Myanmar, where they are not permitted citizenship and are subject to communal violence, as well as official discrimination by the ruling military junta.

The legal complaint argues that Facebook’s algorithms drive susceptible users to join ever-more extreme groups, a situation that is “open to exploitation by autocratic politicians and regimes.”

Rights groups have long charged that Facebook does not do enough to prevent the spread of disinformation and misinformation online.

Critics say even when alerted to hate speech on its platform, the company fails to act.
They charge that the social media giant allows falsehoods to proliferate, affecting the lives of minorities and skewing elections in democracies such as the United States, where unfounded charges of fraud circulate and intensify among like-minded friends.

This year, a huge leak by a company insider sparked articles arguing Facebook, whose parent company is now called Meta, knew its sites could harm some of their billions of users — but executives chose growth over safety.

Whistleblower Frances Haugen told the US Congress in October that Facebook is “fanning ethnic violence” in some countries.

Under US law, Facebook is largely protected from liability over content posted by its users.

The Rohingya lawsuit, anticipating this defense, argues that where applicable, the law of Myanmar — which has no such protections — should prevail in the case.

Facebook, which did not immediately respond to questions about the lawsuit, has been under pressure in the United States and Europe to clamp down on false information, particularly over elections and the coronavirus.

The company has forged partnerships with several media companies, including AFP, intended to verify online posts and remove those that are untrue.

Jan 25,2022: Meta has completed the first phase of a new AI supercomputer. Once the AI Research SuperCluster (RSC) is fully built out later this year, the company believes it will be the fastest AI supercomputer on the planet, capable of “performing at nearly 5 exaflops of mixed precision compute.”
The company says RSC will help researchers develop better AI models that can learn from trillions of examples. Among other things, the models will be able to build better augmented reality tools and “seamlessly analyze text, images and video together,” according to Meta. Much of this work is in service of its vision for the metaverse, in which it says AI-powered apps and products will have a key role.
“We hope RSC will help us build entirely new AI systems that can, for example, power real-time voice translations to large groups of people, each speaking a different language, so they can seamlessly collaborate on a research project or play an AR game together,” technical program manager Kevin Lee and software engineer Shubho Sengupta wrote in a blog post.

RSC currently has 760 Nvidia DGX A100 systems with a total of 6,080 GPUs. Meta believes the current iteration is already among the fastest AI supercomputers on the planet. Based on early benchmarks, it claims RSC can, compared with the company’s older setup, run computer vision workflows up to 20 times faster and the NVIDIA Collective Communication Library more than nine times faster.

Meta says RSC can train large-scale natural language processing models three times faster as well. As such, AI models that determine whether “an action, sound or image is harmful or benign” (for example, to root out hate speech) can be trained more quickly. According to the company, that research will help protect people on current services like Facebook and Instagram, as well as in the metaverse.

Along with creating the physical infrastructure and systems to run RSC, Meta said it needed to ensure there were security and privacy controls in place to protect the real-world training data it uses. It says that by using real-world data from its production systems, instead of publicly available data sets, it can more effectively put its research to use by, for instance, identifying harmful content.

This year, Meta plans to increase the number of GPUs in RSC to 16,000. It says that will boost AI training performance by more than 2.5 times. The company, which started working on the project in early 2020, wanted RSC to train AI models on data sets up to an exabyte in size (the equivalent of 36,000 years’ worth of high-quality video).

“We expect such a step function change in compute capability to enable us not only to create more accurate AI models for our existing services, but also to enable completely new user experiences, especially in the metaverse,” Lee and Sengupta wrote.

Other exascale systems are being built in the US. The delayed Aurora supercomputer at the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory is expected to hit 2 exaflops, while the El Capitan supercomputer, which will manage the country’s nuclear stockpile, is expected to top 2 exaflops when it arrives next year.

July 24,2022:A Google software engineer has been fired a month after he claimed the firm’s artificial intelligence chat bot LaMDA had become sentient and was self-aware.

Blake Lemoine, 41, confirmed in a yet-to-be broadcast podcast that he was dismissed following his revelation.
He first came forward in a Washington Post interview to say that the chatbot was self-aware, and was ousted for breaking Google’s confidentiality rules.

On July 22, Google said in a statement: ‘It’s regrettable that despite lengthy engagement on this topic, Blake still chose to persistently violate clear employment and data security policies that include the need to safeguard product information.’

LaMDA – Language Model for Dialogue Applications – was built in 2021 on the company’s research showing Transformer-based language models trained on dialogue could learn to talk about essentially anything.

It is considered the company’s most advanced chatbot – a software application which can hold a conversation with anyone who types with it. LaMDA can understand and create text that mimics a conversation.
Google and many leading scientists were quick to dismiss Lemoine’s views as misguided, saying LaMDA is simply a complex algorithm designed to generate convincing human language.

San Francisco, September 14,2022:Twitter shareholders on Tuesday voted to approve Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s $44 billion takeover bid.

The vote came as Musk’s lead team is in a court battle to get out of the deal.

Twitter confirmed that a preliminary count shows it has enough votes to approve the deal, reports The Verge.

Twitter has sued Musk for allegedly breaching the deal agreement.
The vote lets Twitter continue with a lawsuit intended to make Musk close the acquisition.

The legal battle is expected to start in mid-October.

The approval means that Musk and Twitter will proceed to an October trial in the Delaware Court of Chancery.