Tech Updates and News

2021-10-12 19:10:26 ​A Twitch streamer who owns the "@squidgame" Instagram handle said that she believes the platform took down her account because fans of the Netflix show "Squid Game" either mass reported her account or tried to gain access to it. 

Lydia Ellery, who also uses the "@squidgame" handle on Twitch, said on Twitter that she briefly lost access to her Instagram account on Friday. Ellery has been posting on the Instagram account since November 2012. Open / Comment

2021-10-11 18:00:08 ​Google is pulling the plug on climate deniers on its platform, banning content that contradicts well-established research from the scientific community, the company announced on Thursday.

Google-owned YouTube previously banned all anti-vaccine content, despite historically avoiding content moderation.

The policy will affect advertisers, publishers, and YouTube creators. Open / Comment

2021-10-10 18:04:08 ​Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have repeatedly used third parties or act as subcontractors to sidestep public scrutiny and work with US immigration agencies, despite employee backlash and some company policies against doing such work. The use of intermediaries has helped these tech giants quietly secure dozens of cloud contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, Insider has found.

The details from this Insider Investigation shed new light on not only the long reach of cloud giants but the many ways these companies continue to contribute to the machinery of the US immigration system, intentionally or unintentionally. Open / Comment

2021-10-10 16:03:34 The channel led by a simple astrophysics professor from Stanford is rapidly gaining popularity on Telegram!

He created a Telegram channel for his students, explaining to them the most complicated phenomena of space in simple language, but as it turned out, not only his students are interested in his articles and answers to questions, but thousands of people around the world as well!

Wondering how black holes form, what would happen to Earth if the moon disappeared, and why we'll never encounter aliens?

Subscribe: @thespace_tg Open / Comment

2021-10-10 16:00:42 The channel led by a simple astrophysics professor from Stanford is rapidly gaining popularity on Telegram!

He created a Telegram channel for his students, explaining to them the most complicated phenomena of space in simple language, but as it turned out, not only his students are interested in his articles and answers to questions, but thousands of people around the world as well!

Wondering how black holes form, what would happen to Earth if the moon disappeared, and why we'll never encounter aliens?

Subscribe: @thespace_tg Open / Comment

2021-10-08 21:00:17 ​Snapchat users spent 23% more time on the app while Facebook was down for over 6 hours on Monday, Bloomberg reported.

Telegram’s CEO said the app gained 70 million new users during the outage, which also took WhatsApp offline. Open / Comment

2021-10-08 18:00:38 ​Snapchat is adding new features to cut down on the sale of fentanyl and other illegal drugs on the social media platform, the company announced Thursday.

Snapchat said it is improving its automated detection system to notify the company of drug sales occurring over the app.

The company said it also hired more people to respond to law enforcement requests during criminal investigations, and launched an education feature called Heads Up, which redirects people who search for certain drug terms to educational material about the health effects of illegal drugs. Open / Comment

2021-10-07 21:12:14 ​AT&T played a significant hand in the creation and continual support of One America News, the far-right media outlet that built its coverage around election conspiracy theories and COVID misinformation, creating a "lucrative relationship" between the two companies, according to a Reuters investigation published Wednesday.

The founder of OAN testified in a 2019 deposition that the concept originated with AT&T.

Between the 2020 election and the January 6 insurrection, OAN enjoyed a boost to its relatively minor ratings and increasingly became former President Donald Trump's preferred cable network. Open / Comment

2021-10-06 20:01:20 ​Amazon is dropping the prices of AirPods in the lead-up to the holiday season. The sale marks some of the best prices we've seen for the earbuds all year.

The best deals include $70 off the AirPods Pro and AirPods with Wireless Charging Case. Open / Comment

2021-10-05 18:59:43 ​Technology outages are not uncommon, but to have so many apps go dark from the world’s largest social media company at the same time was highly unusual. Facebook’s last significant outage was in 2019, when a technical error affected its sites for 24 hours, in a reminder that a snafu can cripple even the most powerful internet companies.
This time, Facebook said late Monday, the culprit was changes to its underlying internet infrastructure that coordinates the traffic between its data centers. That interrupted communications and cascaded to other data centers, “bringing our services to a halt,” the company said.
Facebook eventually restored service after a team got access to its server computers at a data center in Santa Clara, Calif., three people with knowledge of the matter said. Then they were able to reset them. Open / Comment