Technology

A Google spokeswoman said the company did not yet know how the ads had got through its approval process, which uses a combination of automated and manual review. Alphabet Inc’s Google said on Monday that it had removed search ads that charged users searching for voting information large fees for voter registration or harvested their personal data. A Google spokeswoman told Reuters that the company’s misrepresentation policy barred such ads, which were found by the non-profit watchdog Tech Transparency Project when searching for terms such as “register to vote,” “vote…

The Indian unit of Amazon.com has eliminated all single-use plastic in its packaging across fulfillment centers in the country, in line with its target to weed out the packaging material by June, the e-commerce giant said Today. The company said in addition to replacing packaging materials such as bubble wraps and air pillows with “paper cushions”, it had also swapped out packaging tapes with other bio-degradable options. “We have successfully eliminated single-use plastic in all our fulfillment centers a 100%,” Akhil Saxena, vice-president of customer fulfillment for the APAC, LATAM…

Hyderabad: Today’s Oracle announced an opening of its second cloud region in Hyderabad. This follows Oracle’s launch of Mumbai Cloud region in 2019.  With the latest opening, India joins the US, Canada, Japan, Australia, South Korea, and the European Union to have multiple Oracle Cloud regions. Oracle said that the new Cloud region will help its Indian customers and partners to access to all Oracle Cloud suite which includes platforms such as Oracle Autonomous Database and Oracle Autonomous Linux, as well as Oracle Cloud Applications. Last year, Oracle launched as many 20…

A couple of days ago a popular social media app called TikTok came in the headlines for its suspicious behaviour of snooping on the iPhone’s clipboard. While the company is yet to fix this, a couple of researchers have found additional 53 iOS apps that work in a similar fashion. As reported by Ars Technical, these 53 apps discovered by researchers Talal Haj Bakry & Tommy Mysk back in March have still not stopped snooping on the iOS device’s clipboards. It is said that these apps peek on the handset’s saved clipboard,…

Several people are forwarding a message on WhatsApp & social media platforms claiming that a COVID-19 exposure sensor has been silently “inserted into every phone.” The message is actually referring to the COVID-19 contact tracing system that Apple and Google have jointly built to enable exposure notification on both Android & iPhone devices. However, this doesn’t mean that a tracker has been installed to track your location or any other details. As per the message that has widely spread on WhatsApp, the COVID-19 exposure sensor has been installed on every single Android & iPhone device. The message…

Google Pay is not banned in India, clarified the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI). The NPCI is an umbrella organisation that operates digital payments in India, and developed the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) which is used for payments by platforms like Google Pay, PhonePe, and Paytm. On social media, there is a trending hashtag “GPayBanned By RBI”, accompanied by news that the Reserve Bank said that Google Pay was not a payments system operator. However, soon after this began to circulate, the NPCI has issued a statement confirming that…

Astronomers have a found a new exoplanet hiding in the debris disk of a star. Dubbed as AU Mic b, the exoplanet was found after decades of search, around the red dwarf star, AU Microscopii that is roughly 32 light-years away. This discovery will help scientists understand planetary formation processes including that of our own solar system. Astronomers expect that there are more exoplanets in this system but are hidden due to the disk of debris around AU Microscopii. What is AU Mic b? The new exoplanet, AU Mic b, is…