Category:

Technology

Twitter shares rise on record yearly growth in daily users

Twitter’s average monetizable daily active users (mDAU) increased 34% year over year to 186 million, above analysts’ estimate of 176 million, in a rise it said was primarily driven by external factors such as shelter-in-place requirements and increased conversation around the COVID-19 pandemic.Chief Executive Jack Dorsey opened a conference call with analysts by apologizing for the hack that compromised the accounts of high-profile users last week, saying “we feel terrible.” In a statement, Dorsey said Twitter had taken steps to improve its security and “resiliency against targeted social engineering attempts.”

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Signs of farm ‘revolution’ in India as coronavirus prompts change

India is the world’s biggest exporter of rice and the world’s second-biggest producer after China. Across the country’s grain bowl states of Haryana and neighbouring Punjab, thousands of farmers like Kajal have been forced by the coronavirus to mechanise planting.

They are still wary of the technology and overturning the time-honoured use of manual labour.

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Facebook’s WhatsApp to partner with more Indian banks in financial inclusion push

WhatsApp will also expand pilot projects with banking and other partners to cover financial services such as pensions and insurance.

“Our collective aim over the next two to three years should be to help low-wage workers and the unorganised, informal economy easily accesses three products – insurance, micro-credit and pensions,” Abhijit Bose, WhatsApp’s India head told a fin-tech summit

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SoftBank-backed fintech startup seeks $3.5 billion value in IPO

The startup plans to secure about $250 million in a round of financing at a $2 billion-plus valuation before a September 2021 initial public offering, co-founder Yashish Dahiya told Bloomberg News. Policybazaar is now selecting two to three IPO lead underwriters from a roster that includes several Wall Street banks, said Dahiya, chief executive officer of Policybazaar parent ETech Aces Marketing and Consulting Pvt.“The IPO size will be about $500 million,” Dahiya said from London, where he is currently based. “We have global interest and will raise in the coming weeks” for the pre-IPO financing.

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Twitter says attackers downloaded data from up to 8 non-verified

Hackers may have also attempted to sell the user names of some of the accounts, it said.

The high-profile accounts that were hacked also included rapper Kanye West, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, investor Warren Buffett, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, and the corporate accounts for Uber and Apple.

In its latest statement, Twitter said attackers “manipulated a small number of employees” to gain access to the internal support tools used in the hack.

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N-95 masks with valved respirators ineffective against Covid-19, says govt

“It is to bring to your knowledge that the use of valved respirator N-95 masks is detrimental to the measures adopted for preventing the spread of coronavirus as it does not prevent the virus from escaping out of the mask. In view of the above, I request you to instruct all concerned to follow the use of face/mouth cover and prevent inappropriate use of N-95 masks,” DGHS Rajiv Garg said in the letter.

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Update your Google Chrome browser now to avoid hackers, says CERT-In

“Multiple vulnerabilities have been reported in Google Chrome that could allow remote attacker to execute arbitrary code, bypass security restrictions, access sensitive information, contact spoofing attack and denial of service (DoS) attack on the targeted system,” the Computer Emergency Response Team-India (CERT-In) warned in its latest advisory.

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