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“Microsoft’s company-wide policies and practices systematically violate female technical employees’ rights and result in the unchecked gender bias that pervades its corporate culture,” the complaint reads. “The disadvantage to female technical employees in pay and promotion is not isolated or exceptional, but rather the regular and predictable result of Microsoft’s policies and practices and lack of proper accountability measures to ensure fairness.” While Microsoft in a statement said, “We’re committed to a diverse workforce, and to a workplace where all employees have the chance to succeed....

Facebook and Instagram outage not due to any hack but some code mis-configuration says FacebookFacebook outage ascribed to hack attack by Lizard Squad At around 2.15 am ET, both the services were up and limping back to normalcy and now they have been restored to their 100 % running state. Facebook officials categorically denied any hacking or third party attack on Facebook and Instagram. A Facebook spokesperson told The Next Web that the reason behind the outage was a misconfigured code....

“Social media website Facebook, which currently has 1.5 billion users worldwide, will turn into the world’s biggest virtual graveyard by 2098,” said Hachem Sadikki, a PhD student from University of Massachusetts. This will happen because the website refuses to remove the accounts of deceased users. Instead, it turns the page into a “Memorialized” version of the page. “Facebook’s refusal to automatically delete dead users and the plateauing membership of the site means that the living will be outnumbered sooner than you might think,” the report said....

While the Facebook’s emoji reaction patents go back to 2013, however, a recent document filed on December 23, 2014 explains how the tool may look like on the social network. Users may now have the option to choose from a range of emoji that would best describe their reaction, which can used as an alternative to the usual Like thumbs up button. Currently, Slack’s emoji reaction uses icons found on iOS/Mac OS, and allows users to choose from any of the hundred options available at present....

The patent, called “Techniques for emotion detection and content delivery” was discovered by CB Insights, an organization that works on market intelligence in New York. The designs of the patent date back to 2015, and contain illustrations of a person holding a smartphone, with a camera taking a picture from which“emotion characteristics” like smiling or frowning are detected. The scary patent reveals that the footage collected would be used to analyse your emotions while you browse the site, or scroll, read, search, etc....

For many years, NPAPI plugins helped browsers add functionality such as gaming, rich interactive maps, and video support. But plugins also came with problems such as security vulnerabilities, stability issues, and performance drawbacks. The Web standards community overcame these problems by creating native functionality, such as HTML5 video, in order to do away with plugins. When Google announced its decision, speed, stability, and security were cited as reasons for ditching plugins....

It is believed that the weapon will be imported to European criminals within days, as officials fight to control the borders amid terror fears following a series of terrorist attacks in Europe in recent months. Made by the Minnesota-based manufacturer, Ideal Conceal, the 9mm double-barrel pistol known as the “iPhone Gun” has been pre-ordered 12,000 times. The company behind the legal gun said: “In today’s day and age, carrying a concealed pistol has become a necessity....

NBC news has reported that the college police department found the Kappa Delta Rho was allegedly running a secret members only Facebook page and allegedly posted explicit images of female students in unconscious state. The college police department filed a search warrant on 30th Jan, 2015 after being tipped by a former fraternity member. NBC affiliate WJAC reported on Monday that the private groups were accessible to around 144 people who were current members as well as the alumni....

The company does not sufficiently inform its users of the conditions in which their personal data are processed, nor of the purposes of this processing. They may therefore neither understand the purposes for which their data are collected, which are not specific as the law requires, nor the ambit of the data collected through the different services concerned. Consequently, they are not able to exercise their rights, in particular their right of access, objection or deletion....

According to a new report by 9to5Google, the Human Presence Sensor will be utilized to activate a so-called “snooping protection” feature on future Chromebooks. This feature will determine whether or not someone is visible to the users’ Chromebook’s camera and potentially looking at their screen. The outlet added that Google will soon be making an addition in the chrome://flags called “Enable snooping detection”, which will allow users to enable or disable the feature on supported devices....

Thanks to the combined efforts of Microsoft, Google, Apple and Mozilla. They have amalgamated to develop a new binary format code called WebAssembly (WASM) that aims at increasing the speed and efficiency with which browsers compile, parse, and render Web applications and WebPages as compared to text-based JavaScript and asm.js. Engineers from the companies have formed the informal W3C community group, Web Assembly CG, to further development. WebAssembly will be executed inside the JavaScript engine and can be decoded much faster....

For those unaware, Google Assistant is an official Google app available on smartphones, tablets, and Google Home speakers, which allows its users to turn their devices into a virtual digital assistant. In an announcement on a blog post, Google’s Vice-President of Product Nick Fox said: “Similar to Android, where we’ve partnered closely with mobile carriers and device makers to build great products for people everywhere, we’re taking an ecosystem approach to the Assistant on mobile”....

Kickass visitors on Chrome are notified that “Attackers on kat.cr might attempt to trick you into installing programs that harm your browsing experience (for example, by changing your homepage or showing extra ads on sites you visit).” while the Firefox users are told that “This web page at kat.cr has been reported to contain unwanted software and has been blocked based on your security preferences.” Chrome users can get around this message by clicking Details and then “visit this site” while Firefox users can click “Ignore this warning....

Google has been using the Tensor Processing Units (TPU) custom-built chips to power its data centers according to Google’s senior VP for its technical infrastructure Urs Holzle. Now it wants TPU to power its machine learning algorithms. Google says it’s getting “an order of magnitude better-optimized performance per watt for machine learning” and argues that this is “roughly equivalent to fast-forwarding technology about seven years into the future.” Google said that it has managed to speed up the machine learning algorithms with the TPUs because it doesn’t need the high-precision of standard CPUs and GPUs....

For those unfamiliar, RAISR is a new method for image processing that takes a low-res upload of a photo and uses machine learning technology to fill in the gaps between the pixels, so that the end-user gets the full resolution of the photo while using a fraction of the bandwidth and download time. According to Google, this new technology is now ready for mobile use also: “RAISR produces results that are comparable to or better than the currently available super-resolution methods, and does so roughly 10 to 100 times faster, allowing it to be run on a typical mobile device in real-time....

One such Google Nexus 6 user had a harrowing time with her smartphone. She says that the Nexus 6 was lying unused and not charged and still it just swelled up and exploded. She took to Twitter to post her experience and share the images of exploded Nexus 6. — Monica Jasuja (@jasuja) May 1, 2015 The Nexus 6 battery in the case of this particular user not only swelled but actually exploded....

The European Internet users have made this request after the EU court granted them the ‘right to be forgotten’ last May. Under this ruling, Google has been lawfully made responsible for removing the links of users from its database when the citizens demand. According to the data, Google has received 348,085 requests and evaluated more than 1.2 million links for removal. Of those, it has removed 441,032 URLs. Google opted not to remove 608,169 more URLs; the rest are pending review or require additional information....

The biggest searchers of those wanting advice on how to get to Canada was revealed with the top five states: Massachusetts, Washington, Georgia, Tennessee and Virginia. It’s interesting to note that four of those five states were where Trump won a majority vote. It’s unclear whether the results were triggered by Donald Trump taking seven states or Hillary Clinton also winning seven. Of course, it’s also a possibility a percentage of those searching are charmed by Canada’s new Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau....

The service is currently available in all twenty-two countries where Stadia is offered. According to the Korean company, native support of Stadia gameplay on LG Smart TVs helps deliver instant access to high-end games with support for exceptional graphics and frame rates on cutting-edge displays. The Stadia store features over 200 popular games such as Cyberpunk 2077, Resident Evil Village, Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, Hitman 3, Baldur’s Gate 3 as well as access to a growing list of free games and demos, which are all playable with just a compatible controller, no downloading required....