Technology Archives - Daily Chronicles

Meta To Lay Off Employees In Metaverse Silicon Unit

4Oct

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Technology

Meta To Lay Off Employees In Metaverse Silicon Unit

Meta (META.O) is planning to lay off employees on Wednesday in the unit of its metaverse-oriented Reality Labs division focused on creating custom silicon, two sources familiar with the matter told Reuters on Tuesday. Employees were informed of the layoffs in a post on Meta's internal discussion forum Workplace on Tuesday. The post said they would be notified about their status with the company by early Wednesday morning, one of the sources said. A Meta spokesperson declined to comment on the plans. Reuters was not able to determine the extent of the cuts to the silicon unit, called Facebook Agile Silicon Team, or FAST. If the cuts are deep, they could hamper Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg's project to build augmented and virtual reality products enabling access to a set of ...

Kenya Hit By Record 860 Million Cyber-Attacks In 2023

4Oct

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Technology

Kenya Hit By Record 860 Million Cyber-Attacks In 2023

Kenya has recorded 860 million cyber-attacks this year, the highest yet, according to the Communications Authority (CA). CA says Kenya has witnessed an upsurge in “the frequency, sophistication and scale” of cyber-threats targeted at the country’s critical information infrastructure (CIIs) in 2023. “In the last 12 months alone, the attacks have skyrocketed to a new high of 860 million cyber-attacks. Of these attacks, 79% were a result of cyber criminals exploiting flaws and vulnerabilities in organizations' internal controls, system procedures and information systems, which they used to gain unauthorized access to the computer systems,” the authority says in a new statement. This is in comparison to six years ago when CA says cyber-attacks in the country stood at 7.7 million ...

WhatsApp Rolls Out Business Payment Tool In Brazil

12Apr

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Technology

WhatsApp Rolls Out Business Payment Tool In Brazil

Meta Platforms on Tuesday began rolling out its payments tool to small and medium-sized firms through its WhatsApp messaging platform in Brazil, part of Meta's strategy to use the Brazilian market as a key test space for business messaging. The development of business messaging has become all the more urgent as Meta's core advertising business has stalled. The service, provided in partnership with payment processors including MercadoLibre's Mercado Pago, Itau Unibanco's Rede and Cielo, will allow WhatsApp users to make purchases and pay directly through the app with credit and debit cards from Mastercard and Visa, Meta said in a statement. The tool will initially be available for some merchants that use WhatsApp Business. Clients of WhatsApp's API, which mainly serves large b...

Facebook Owner Meta Releases AI Model That Can Identify Items Within Images

6Apr

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Facebook Owner Meta Releases AI Model That Can Identify Items Within Images

Facebook owner Meta published an artificial intelligence model on Wednesday that can pick out individual objects from within an image, along with a dataset of image annotations that it said was the largest ever of its kind. The company's research division said in a blog post that its Segment Anything Model, or SAM, could identify objects in images and videos even in cases where it had not encountered those items in its training. Using SAM, objects can be selected by clicking on them or writing text prompts. In one demonstration, writing the word "cat" prompted the tool to draw boxes around each of several cats in a photo. Meta has teased several features that deploy the type of generative AI popularized by ChatGPT, which creates brand-new content instead of simply identifying...

What You Get With Twitter’s New Ksh.10K Annual Subscription

19Jan

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Technology

What You Get With Twitter’s New Ksh.10K Annual Subscription

Twitter Blue, Elon Musk’s subscription option for Twitter since he acquired the social media platform in October last year, has been rolled out for Android users. Twitter launched the Ksh.10,000-a-year ($84) Blue subscription for web users on Monday as an addition to the Ksh.993 ($8) monthly option. For mobile, Android users got a Ksh.1,365 ($11) monthly plan on Thursday, similar to what iOS users are required to pay. So far, Twitter Blue is available in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. But what exactly does one get for forking out such amounts of money to access the originally-free platform? The first premium feature Twitter is offering under the Blue plan is the blue verification mark, although it is unclear how Twitter will...

ICT,CS Owalo Says First Locally-Made Mobile Phone To Be Ready By August

11Jan

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Technology

ICT,CS Owalo Says First Locally-Made Mobile Phone To Be Ready By August

Information Cabinet Secretary Eliud Owalo says Kenya is on its track to manufacturing mobile phones under the ambitious multi-million-shilling Konza Techno-polis plan in Malili, Machakos County. As the fate of Konza, which was touted as Africa’s Silicon Savanah ahead of its launch in January 2013, remains unclear ten years later, the CS says the infrastructure is already in place and that local telecoms will be among the first firms to set camp this year. “The telecoms have realised that in the near future, Kenya must become a manufacturer of phones and cheap technology as opposed to a chief importer, so we are going to start manufacturing, the technology is already there and we are going to roll out this initiative by July,” Owalo said on Tuesday. Speaking to Citi...

Twitter Will Now Ban Some Links To Other Social Media Sites

19Dec

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Technology

Twitter Will Now Ban Some Links To Other Social Media Sites

Twitter said Sunday it would ban links to other social media services and suspend accounts that try to direct users to alternative platforms, in an apparent attempt to stem user defections to competitors. But Twitter CEO Elon Musk later relented, loosening the policy and causing widespread confusion about what kind of linking was allowed and disallowed on the platform. Under the new policy stated Sunday afternoon, links to content on Facebook and Instagram would be prohibited, as well as links to content on emerging Twitter alternatives, including Mastodon and Post. The rule also covers Truth Social, the Twitter clone backed by former President Donald Trump. Twitter’s move signals a shift toward a more closed environment, one that still accepts incoming traffic from other sit...

Twitter Suspends Accounts Of Journalists Covering Musk

16Dec

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Technology

Twitter Suspends Accounts Of Journalists Covering Musk

Twitter suspended Thursday accounts of more than a half-dozen journalists who had been writing about the company and its new owner Elon Musk. Silencing journalists at Twitter while claiming to be a free speech champion is the latest controversy provoked by Musk since he took over the company, which has seen staffing gutted and advertisers exit. Some of the journalists had been tweeting about Twitter shutting down an @ElonJet account that tracked flights of billionaire Musk's private jet and about versions of that account hosted at other social networks. Twitter did not say why the reporters' accounts were suspended. "Nothing says free speech like suspending journalists who cover you," Sarah Reese Jones of news commentary website PoliticusUSA said in a tweeted response to p...

Whatsapp rolls out new feature that blocks capturing of photos and videos

14Dec

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Technology

Whatsapp rolls out new feature that blocks capturing of photos and videos

WhatsApp took a cue from Snapchat and added the ability to view once The feature allows users to send photos and videos that can only be seen once—they self-destruct after that. It is a handy option to have, especially when sharing private and sensitive photos. But the Meta-owned company made a major oversight in how it implemented the feature: you could take screenshots of view once media, thereby defeating their entire purpose. A year later, in August 2022, Mark Zuckerberg announced screenshot blocking was coming up soon for self-destructing media. The feature is now showing up for some beta testers of the app. WhatsApp has released a new version of its view once media viewer with built-in screenshot blocking for selected beta users. Like on Google Pay and other apps, when you t...

What You Need To Know About Twitter’s New Multi-Coloured Verification Badges

13Dec

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Technology

What You Need To Know About Twitter’s New Multi-Coloured Verification Badges

Twitter on Monday relaunched an option for users who pay for its subscription service to receive a coveted “blue check,” one month after the company was forced to pull the feature amid a wave of “verified” accounts pretending to be brands and high-profile users. The updated verification system, which expands on check mark options with multiple new colors, is part of new owner Elon Musk’s effort to grow its subscription business and bolster the bottom line of the company he bought for $44 billion, including a substantial amount of debt financing. The new Twitter Blue subscription service will cost $8 per month for users that subscribe via the web platform and $11 per month for those who subscribe on the iOS app, according to a tweet from Esther Crawford, the T...