A woman received $10.5 million in an accidental transaction from popular cryptocurrency platform Crypto.com and then allegedly spent it on a luxury home.
Two sisters in Melbourne, Australia, are now being chased by the courts after going on a spending spree with the cash. A Crypto.com representative confirmed to Decrypt that the matter is currently “before the courts” but would not comment further.
Crypto.com, a Singapore-based exchange that also offers a Visa debit card, mistakenly sent the huge sum when Thevamanogari Manivel, the woman who received the money, asked for a $100 refund in May 2021.
But instead of notifying Crypto.com of the mistake, Manivel and her sister Thilagavathy Gangadory allegedly went shopping with Manivel buying a $1.35 million five-bedroom home as a gift. Manivel also allegedly transferred $10.1 million into a joint account following the error.
Crypto.com noticed the mistake during an audit in December 2021. A Crypto.com employee had mistakenly entered an account number in the payment section and sent the money. The company has since taken legal action, and Victoria’s Supreme Court has ordered the home to be sold, and the money returned.
For the first time, China’s BYD became the top-performing EV brand in the world, beating Tesla by selling 3,54,000 EV units, marking a 266 percent Y-o-Y increase. In comparison, the global sales for Tesla stood at 2,54,000 units with only a 27 percent Y-o-Y increase.
The BEVs accounted for 72 percent of the report, while the PHEVs constituted the remaining EV sales. China topped the leaderboard, clocking a 92 percent Y-o-Y increase, accounting for 1.24 million units compared to the 0.64 million units sold in the previous year, followed by Europe and US.
While the top two performers in the list expect better sales amid the comparatively better situations, the other top players are also regaining the lost ground. As per the report, the top 10 EV models accounted for more than 30 percent of global EV sales in Q2 2022.
The Wuling Hongguang Mini EV was the best-selling model for the China market and grew to a whopping 16 percent on a Y-o-Y basis, becoming the third-ranked in global EV sales.
On the other hand, BMW aims to bring about 2 million BEVs on the road by 2025 as the German luxury manufacturer grabbed the fourth spot with an 18 percent Y-o-Y growth. Volkswagen saw a decline in the growth graph and only a percent Y-o-Y increase in Q2 2022. Hence, the world’s number one automobile manufacturer took the fifth spot.
Tesla is facing a class-action lawsuit in the US over phantom braking problems that the lawsuit alleged turned a safety feature into a ‘frightening and dangerous nightmare.’
The lawsuit, filed by Tesla owner Jose Alvarez Toledo in federal court in the Northern District of California seeking punitive damages, claimed hundreds of thousands of customers could seek to join his class action suit against the company.
The lawsuit accused the electric car-maker of fraudulently hiding the safety risks associated with the company’s Autopilot driver assist system, breaching its warranties, unfairly profiting from Autopilot, and violating California’s unfair competition law.
Phantom braking is when an advanced driver assistance system (ADAS), or a self-driving system, applies the brakes for no good reason.
The system can falsely detect an object on the road or anticipate a collision that will not actually happen and apply the brake to try to avoid it.
The lawsuit comes as Tesla faces a federal investigation from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) into its phantom braking problem, which first surfaced last fall. The US transport agency investigated over 400,000 Teslas for problems with their automated emergency braking systems.
The US government has received more than 750 complaints of unexpected braking from Tesla owners. According to the lawsuit, many Tesla owners have reported significant, unexpected slow-downs and stops due to the false engagement of their Class Vehicle’s braking systems, even though no objects were nearby,” the lawsuit read.
According to a court filing from last Friday, Facebook parent company Meta Platforms Inc. has agreed to settle a lawsuit that the social networking site granted access to confidential user data to other organizations, including Cambridge Analytica.
The lawsuit was filed due to the alleged role of Cambridge Analytica, a now-defunct British consulting firm that assisted US President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and during the UK’s Brexit referendum campaign, had inappropriately accessed and exploited Facebook user data. Though Facebook agreed to pay penalties in the US and UK and modify its privacy policies, both the social networking giant and Cambridge Analytica initially denied any wrongdoing.
The preliminary agreement, which was made public in a court filing late on Friday, comes after it was made public last month that Meta Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg will be forced to undergo questioning by plaintiffs’ attorneys. Former COO Sheryl Sandberg, who resigned from Meta in June, and current COO Javier Olivan are also expected to be presented in the lawsuit sometime this month, in the final phase of pre-trial evidence gathering. According to a document filed in San Francisco federal court, Zuckerberg has consented to undergo a deposition that may last up to six hours, while Sandberg might face questions for up to five hours. Olivan, who has long overseen the company’s expansion activities, will be questioned in detail throughout the deposition for up to three hours.
Although the settlement’s contents were not made public, it is believed that additional information may become available in late October. This is because this Class-Action civil suit which is being handled by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, has been postponed for 60 days while the plaintiffs’ and Facebook’s legal teams work out a formal settlement. Reuters said that Facebook and its attorneys from Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher did not immediately comment on requests for further information on the settlement. Neither Keller Rohrback nor Bleichmar Fonti & Auld, the two legal firms representing the plaintiffs, made any comments.
After four years in court, 87 million present and former Facebook users will receive compensation for using their personal information without their consent. As some of the users may have independently filed a lawsuit, the amount depends on how many people are in the class. Depending on the settlement amount, the attorneys will retain 25% to 33% of the total sum.
Facebook used to offer full access to app developers so that they would be equipped with data to develop games, dating apps, and other socially-friendly software using user data. Soon, marketers and academics started carrying out independent studies based on user data. Researcher Jonathan Bright explained in a blog post from 2018 how Facebook’s Graph API was able to acquire user data for years. The information that Facebook applications could take was extensive, including about me, actions, activities, birthday, check-ins, education, events, games, groups, hometown, interests, likes, location, notes, online status, tags, photographs, questions, relationships, religion/politics, status, subscriptions, website, employment record.
Things turned ugly when Facebook stated that in 2014 Aleksandr Kogan, a psychology professor at the University of Cambridge, violated its privacy standards by sharing Facebook user data collected from his personality-prediction app thisisyourdigitallife (also known as GSRApp), with third parties, including Cambridge Analytica. The app queried its users about their personalities and other aspects of their lives, and it also gathered data from them and their friends in their social networks. The data had a rather wide scope and comprised roughly 30 distinct data points about the people who downloaded the app in addition to information on those users’ Facebook friends.
In order to build a system that could profile specific US voters in order to target them with tailored political advertisements, Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy owned by hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer and led at the time by Trump’s chief advisor Steve Bannon, used personal information taken without authorization in early 2014.
To provide personality assessments for GSRApp users and their Facebook friends, Kogan and Cambridge Analytica created, utilized, and analyzed data from the app in 2014. The company used these personality scores for voter profiling and targeted advertising by comparing them to data on American voters. Kogan was able to repurpose an app he already had on the Facebook network for this endeavor, giving it the ability to gather Facebook data from app users and their Facebook friends.
The world was hit by a massive curveball when a whistleblower revealed widespread data exploitation to the Observer in 2018. The Observer is the oldest Sunday newspaper in the world, published by the Guardian group. The Guardian Media Group purchased it in 1993 to serve as a sister publication for the Guardian.
A dossier of information regarding the data misuse was presented to the Observer by whistleblower Christopher Wylie, a Canadian data analytics expert who collaborated with Cambridge Analytica and Kogan to develop and manage the program. According to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) and the National Crime Agency’s cybercrime unit, this comprised emails, contracts, bills, and financial transactions confirming one of the worst Facebook data breaches in history. This data breach resulted in the theft of more than 50 million profiles, most of which belonged to US citizens registered to vote. Additionally, it was charged with using strategies to suppress Black voters, according to Wylie.
Concerns regarding Facebook’s participation in selecting voters for the US presidential election have become even more pressing in light of the revelation of the enormous amount of data collected and the purposes for which it was used. This revelation compelled Zuckerberg to testify before Congress and resulted in the social media company being fined a multibillion-pound penalty. This is because, as per Facebook’s platform policy, data from users could only be collected to improve the user experience in the app and could not be sold or used for advertising – implying that the social networking company was lying about using user data for unethical purposes. Days after the article was released, Facebook’s stock price plummeted by an amount greater than $100 billion.
Facebook first refuted that Cambridge Analytica had violated data security and that Kogan’s company GSR had harvested information. In a statement, the company said that Kogan acquired access to this information in a lawful manner and through the appropriate procedures, but did not afterward adhere to company policies because he disclosed the data to outside parties. Later Facebook claimed to have withdrawn the app in 2015 and requested proof from anybody who had copies that the data had been destroyed.
In August 2016, a letter from Facebook’s attorneys ordering him to delete any data he had that had been obtained by GSR was included in the proof Wylie provided to the UK and US authorities.
Since the Cambridge Analytica scandal surfaced, Facebook has reduced the amount of information available to developers, blocked access to its data from hundreds of applications suspected of misusing it, and made it easier for users to set limits on the sharing of personal information. Just two months after the revelation that the political consulting firm had gathered the personal information of 87 million users, the company filed for bankruptcy. What’s scary is we only know about how Facebook gave Cambridge Analytica access to user personal data. There is a possibility that the company is still keeping other instances of data leaks under wraps.
The British Information Commissioner’s Office swiftly turned its attention to Cambridge Analytica and Facebook in its investigation into data and politics. In a separate investigation, the Electoral Commission also looked into Cambridge Analytica’s involvement in the EU referendum. Due to the data sharing incident, Facebook was fined £500,000 (maximum possible fine) in the UK by the Information Commissioner’s Office. In October 2019, the company decided not to appeal the ICO penalty.
In the meanwhile, the US Federal Trade Commission slapped Facebook with a record-breaking $5 billion in July 2019 for its participation in the incident. In order to improve its monitoring of privacy policies, the agreement called for the company’s board of directors to be restructured. The FTC also looked into whether this breach was in violation of a consent agreement signed in 2012 between Facebook and the agency, which required Facebook to improve user privacy protection. A separate lawsuit from last year said Facebook paid the FTC $4.9 billion more than required as part of a settlement to shield Zuckerberg.
While Facebook tried to allegedly shift attention from its role in the Cambridge Analytica breach by renaming itself Meta, both Meta and the social networking site Facebook are still drowning themselves in lawsuits.
After almost a million Britons signed up for a lawsuit organized by an organization called “You owe Us,” which has the claimed purpose of illustrating that the world’s biggest firms are not above the law, the social networking giant was slammed with a mass action lawsuit in the UK in October 2020.
In March 2020, Australian Information Commissioner and Privacy Commissioner Angelene Falk filed a lawsuit in the Federal Court against Facebook Inc. and Facebook Ireland. She claimed at the time that Facebook had violated Australian privacy legislation by engaging in significant and/or persistent invasions of privacy. Earlier in February, the Federal Court granted the Commissioner permission to sue Facebook. Attorney General Karl Racine of Washington, DC, filed the most recent complaint against Meta in May this year.
While Meta and Facebook are desperately grasping straws since the Cambridge Analytica scandal took the world by storm, one wonders if the current settlement can reverse the damage inflicted. At the same time, a detailed and transparent probe is required to investigate the possible hidden data breaches in the past by Facebook. The company has been under heat for racist mislabeling facial recognition AI before.
Vijay Balakrishnan has joined United Phosphorus Limited (UPL), a global provider of sustainable agriculture solutions, as their Senior Vice President (VP) and Chief Data & Analytics (D&A) Officer. Balakrishnan previously worked as the Group Chief Data Officer at Michelin, India.
In a LinkedIn post, Balakrishnan announced that he will be leading the group D&A focus at UPL from today. He said he would be responsible for setting up a new D&A center in Bengaluru to augment the current D&A activities globally.
He said, “I’m looking forward to learning the dynamics of the agriculture industry and the varied roles of tech and D&A to maximize value across the spectrum.” Balakrishnan has an MBA in Finance from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi.
United Phosphorus Limited offers an integrated portfolio of both patented and post-patent
agricultural solutions for various arable and specialty crops, including biological, crop protection, seed treatment, and post-harvest solutions covering the entire crop value chain.
According to his LinkedIn profile, Balakrishnan is passionate about enabling business decisions through smart insights derived from the right data at the right time and exploring unique ways of data delivery, including reports, interactive dashboards, mobile Apps, alerts, chatbots, smart bulbs, and AR/VR.
If you’re aware that the Internet is not safe and that it can be tough to protect your private data when surfing the Internet, you’re in the right place. The ideal way to protect your online safety is to set up an efficient solution like proxies or VPNs.
However, people are typically confused about the differences between these two tools. Even though both services can provide you anonymity, safety, and security, they still have different uses and advantages.
That’s why we’ve decided to help you choose the solution that fits your needs by listing the main differences between VPNs and proxies.
Introduction to proxies
Just imagine that between your computer and the server exists another intermediary service. That intermediary computer between online resources and the end-user is a proxy server. A proxy acts as a third-party tool that manages Internet traffic between protocols and networks.
There are a lot of proxy servers that have different levels of privacy, security features, and functionality. They are either private or public, and their functionality and privacy level depend on whether you opt for a public or private solution.
Proxies transfer your request to a particular website. Before you get the required results, the requested information again travels through a proxy server before it reaches your computer to double-check if the requested information is safe and secure.
Benefits of using proxies
Here are some benefits that most proxy servers provide.
Improved speed
Most proxies cache the website data, so once you visit a certain page, your proxy solution immediately stores the important data making it quicker and less complicated to revisit the same page.
Anonymity
The primary function of proxies is to provide anonymity so that you don’t need to worry about hackers tracking you online. Proxies can hide, rotate, or change your IP address which means your data is safe for every request you make online.
Filtered content
Malicious pages, messages, and spam emails are unavoidable when browsing the web. Using a proxy means the malicious content can’t reach you without passing through a proxy server first. This way, proxies can prevent malware from harming your device and valuable data.
Passing geoblocking restrictions
Websites typically restrict content to users from different geographical locations for many reasons. However, a proxy can pass through those restrictions and provide you access to all content on the web. For example, using a UK proxy from China can allow you access to all UK sites you’re interested in visiting. Click here to read more about the UK proxy and how it can help you.
Introduction to VPN
VPN or Private Virtual Network is what the name itself suggests – a private network that establishes a secure bridge between the server and user. Simply put, VPN provides secure web surfing by creating a virtual tunnel that protects your data from external influences and hackers.
This solution provides authentication and integrity protection, and it can encrypt the data you’re sharing through the web and make it hard to compromise in any way. In other words, you can prevent cyber criminals from compromising sensitive data like confidential business materials or bank account numbers by using VPN services.
Benefits of using VPN
Here are some noticeable benefits of using a VPN tool.
Online security
VPN is not only suitable for hiding your IP address. This tool can also encrypt the data you share online, making it safe and unreadable to cybercriminals and hackers. It hides your online identity, encrypts sensitive data, and improves your online security.
ISP protection
Believe it or not, there are reasons to protect your data, even from your Internet Service Providers. Your ISP is allowed to share and sell your data to the government and even to other companies. One of the ways to prevent that is by setting up a VPN solution.
For accessing blocked content
Like proxies, VPNs allow you access to restricted online content and protect sensitive data while downloading and surfing.
Differences between VPN and Proxy
Even though they both work to protect your safety, VPNs and proxies are not the same tools. Here are the main differences between these solutions:
Proxies work on an application-level principle, so they can only reroute the data of a specific browser or app;
VPNs, on the other side, encrypt your data on the operating system level;
VPNs are slower than proxies since they need time to finish the data encryption;
Proxies can allow you quicker access to restricted websites – a UK proxy can provide people outside the UK with quicker access to restricted content;
Unlike proxy servers, free VPN solutions usually have limited features;
Proxies are a better solution for small-business owners;
VPN connections frequently drop, and proxies might be a more reliable solution.
Conclusion
No matter which solution suits you better, go for legit service providers. Free-to-download tools are typically limited in features and unreliable. We hope that now you understand the main differences between these tools and that you can determine which solution is better for your needs.
In order to improve privacy, Cornell researchers have created a wearable earphone gadget called “earable” that uses sonar technology to bounce sound off the cheeks and turn the echoes into an avatar of a person’s actual moving face. The device, called EarIO, was created by a team under the supervision of information science professor François Guimbretière and assistant professor Cheng Zhang. It is compatible with commercially available headsets for hands-free, cordless video conferencing and streams face expressions in real time to smartphones.
Zhang, who is the principal of the Smart Computer Interfaces for Future Interactions (SciFi) Lab, affirms that sonar has the edge over camera-based wearable sensors. Devices that track facial movements using a camera are typically large, heavy, and energy-hungry– factors that make wearables a much less alluring option. Additionally, he stated that a lot of private information is collected through camera wearables, as the device would need to connect to a Wi-Fi network and transport data back and forth to the cloud, possibly leaving it accessible to hackers. In comparison, adopting acoustic technology for facial tracking can provide more privacy, affordability, comfort, and battery life. Moreover, using auditory signals requires less energy than recording pictures; the EarIO consumes only a quarter of the energy of a similar camera-based device that the SciFi lab previously created.
The team explains the working of EarIO earable in the Proceedings of the Association for Computing Machinery on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable, and Ubiquitous Technologies. The paper is titled “EarIO: A Low-power Acoustic Sensing Earable for Continuously Tracking Detailed Facial Movements.”
The EarIO earable emits sonar pulses like a ship. The audio is emitted through speakers on each side of the earphone, and it operates by reflecting sound off the wearer’s cheeks. The echoes are picked up by a microphone, and they alter when the user talks and moves their face. The skin stretches and moves as users speak, smile, or lift their eyebrows, altering the echo profiles. The researchers leverage deep learning to analyze the data continuously and translate the changing echo profiles into complete facial expressions.
The accuracy of the EarIO earable’s face-impersonation ability was checked by the researchers using a smartphone camera by testing it on 16 respondents. In preliminary testing, the researchers discovered that the earable functions while users are seated and moving around, and that external noises such as wind, ambient road noise, and background talk have no effect on acoustic signaling. However, there could be inherent problems due to the high sensitivity of the sensing method. Co-author and Ph.D. student in information science Ruidong Zhang commented, EarIO’s performance is excellent because it can monitor very small motions, but it’s also negative because when anything changes in the surroundings or when your head moves slightly, the team captured those unwanted data too. The researchers want to prevent similar disturbances in future versions.
On the flip side, EarIO earable has some limitations. For instance, its battery life is limited to three hours. Therefore processing must be transferred to a smartphone, and the echo-translating AI system needs 32 minutes of face data to train before it can recognize expressions for the first time. However, the researchers argue that it’s a lot more streamlined experience than the recorders often used in animation for films, television, and video games.
An e-commerce venture between Meta, Reliance Retail, and Jio Platforms is bringing grocery shopping to WhatsApp through the JioMart app. It intends to provide a global end-to-end shopping experience on the popular messaging platform.
The launch of JioMart on WhatsApp is followed by Meta and JioMart beginning to test an integration with select users. If successful, the commerce engine could prove to be a significant source of revenue for WhatsApp, which has primarily avoided serving ads to users of the app.
Customers will be able to browse the entire grocery catalog of JioMart on WhatsApp, add items to a cart and make payments via local payments rail UPI without ever leaving the instant messaging service, the companies said.
Today @JioMart is LIVE on @WhatsApp with our first end-to-end shopping experience. You can browse products, add your items to your cart, and make your payment — all within a WA chat! Excited about the opportunities this opens up for businesses to build experiences on WhatsApp! pic.twitter.com/VkpH6OQleO
WhatsApp, which has a base of half a billion Indians each month, was approved to extend its UPI-powered payments feature to 100 million users earlier this year after several delays and setbacks.
Jio also announced it would be spending $25 billion to debut 5G services in the country in October this year and aims to reach “every town” in the South Asian market by the end of next year.
JioMart is the $221 billion Indian conglomerate’s attempt at taking on Amazon and Flipkart in India. Ambani’s Reliance Retail is the country’s largest retail chain, but it currently has limited e-commerce offerings.
Jio’s 5G LTE network will begin rolling out from Diwali in October this year. Reliance confirmed the 5G rollout date during its Annual General Meeting (AGM). It also plans to bring more affordable 5G phones to the market in partnership with Google.
The company clarified that 5G would be available in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, and Chennai sometime in October this year. The exact date is not yet official. Jio also said that 5G will roll out nationwide by December 2023.
Jio 5G will use standalone 5G instead of non-standalone 5G, which depends on 4G to provide connectivity. This will result in faster connectivity speed and reduced latency. Ambani also said during the speech that the aim is not to keep 5G out of the reach of the masses. He said that 5G connectivity would not be limited to just the privileged, and the expectation is that 5G could be more affordable from Jio.
He pointed out that Jio will have ‘proper’ 5G connectivity given its SA 5G network. In addition to the 3500 MHz mid-band, which is globally earmarked for 5G, and the 26 GHz millimeter-wave band for ultra-high capacity, only Jio has the 700 MHz low-band spectrum, which is essential for deep indoor coverage. Jio can seamlessly combine these frequencies into a single mighty data highway using an advanced technology called Carrier Aggregation.
Reliance Industries Limited chairman Mukesh Ambani said he had committed more than Rs 2 lakh crore to the rollout of 5G. The government issued spectrum assignment letters a few days ago, which means telecom providers can start rolling out 5G as soon as they are ready.
During the Annual General Meeting (AGM) 2022, Reliance launched a new Jio AirFiber plug-and-play device using which customers can opt to use a virtual PC called Jio Cloud PC. Jio AirFiber can give fiber-like speeds wirelessly via WiFi hotspots.
As part of the AirFiber service, customers can access cloud PCs. Using JioAirFiber, people can avoid all expenses related to buying computer hardware, periodically upgrading it, and choose to use a virtual PC hosted in the cloud. With no upfront investment or tension of periodical upgrades, a user will need to pay only to the extent used, which could help cut costs significantly.
A cloud PC is a virtual desktop, a highly optimized and scalable virtual machine providing end users with a rich Windows desktop experience. The data is delivered in cloud PCs rather than physical devices, data centers, or devices like workstations. Cloud PCs work on a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. Microsoft currently offers a Windows 365 Cloud PC service that hosts virtual PCs with Windows installed.
To access a Cloud PC, a user needs a device – Jio AirFiber plug-and-play device similar to Fire Stick. A CPU is not needed as the connected server will act as the powerhouse of a cloud PC.
Reliance says that the Jio Cloud PC device will be a game changer for students, small businesses, and gig workers in the country. Also, the solution will be helpful for large enterprises as no upfront investment will be required. Currently, there are no details on the availability and price of the device, but the Jio Cloud PC will likely be available after the rollout of Jio 5G services.
