WhatsApp banned 2.39 million Indian accounts in July, the highest so far this year, the Meta-owned popular instant messaging app said late on Thursday in its monthly report.
The Asian nation’s stricter IT laws have made it necessary for large digital platforms to publish compliance reports every month.
Draft rules circulated in June proposed setting up a panel to hear user appeals, and said that significant social media messaging platforms shall allow identification of the first originator of information if directed by courts to do so.
Of the accounts barred, 1.42 million were ‘proactively banned,’ before any reports from users.
Several accounts were banned based on complaints received through the company’s grievances channel and the tools and resources it uses to detect such offenses, the social media platform said. In July, WhatsApp received a total of 574 grievance reports.
The messsaging platform, which has been criticised earlier for spreading fake news and hate speech in the country, as well as elsewhere in the world, had taken down 2.21 million accounts in India in June WhatsApp bans 2.4 million Indian accounts in July: WhatsApp bans 2.4 million Indian accounts in July:
Facebook has brought a new feature following James Cameron’s 3D movie ‘Avatar’ to create animated pictures of the users.
Any Facebook user can create their own animated avatar or character with this feature. Users will get face and outfit options to design a character. Users will find a variety of hairstyles, facial shapes, and great dress options in this feature.
Ways to create Avatar:
> Update your Facebook app first.
> Now go to the see more option by clicking on the menu option of the app.
> You have to click on the ‘Avatars’ option.
> Clicking Avatar will open a new page. Here you can choose the cartoon face of your choice by clicking on the Avatar option. Avatar’s eyes, nose, lips, hair, eyebrows, mustache - everything can be arranged as you wish.
> Users can also choose the clothes of their choice.
Human To Human Brain Interface Allows Researcher To Control Another Person Hand Motions Over The Internet, Credit: University of Washington
University of Washington researchers have performed what they believe is the first noninvasive human-to-human brain interface, with one researcher able to send a brain signal via the Internet to control the hand motions of a fellow researcher. University of Washington researcher Rajesh Rao, left, plays a computer game with his mind. Across campus, researcher Andrea Stocco, right, wears a magnetic stimulation coil over the left motor cortex region of his brain. Stocco’s right index finger moved involuntarily to hit the “fire” button as part of the first human brain-to-brain interface demonstration. Using electrical brain recordings and a form of magnetic stimulation, Rajesh Rao sent a brain signal to Andrea Stocco on the other side of the UW campus, causing Stocco’s finger to move on a keyboard. While researchers at Duke University have demonstrated brain-to-brain communication between two rats, and Harvard researchers have demonstrated it between a human and a rat, Rao and Stocco believe this is the first demonstration of human-to-human brain interfacing. “The Internet was a way to connect computers, and now it can be a way to connect brains,” Stocco said. “We want to take the knowledge of a brain and transmit it directly from brain to brain.” The researchers captured the full demonstration on video recorded in both labs. The following version has been edited for length. Rao, a UW
professor of computer science and engineering, has been working on brain-computer interfacing in his lab for more than 10 years and just published a textbook on the subject. In 2011, spurred by the rapid advances in technology, he believed he could demonstrate the concept of human brain-to-brain interfacing. So he partnered with Stocco, a UW research assistant professor in psychology at the UW’s Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences. On Aug. 12, Rao sat in his lab wearing a cap with electrodes hooked up to anelectroencephalographymachine, which reads electrical activity in the brain. Stocco was in his lab across campus wearing a purple swim cap marked with the stimulation site for the transcranial magnetic stimulation coil that was placed directly over his left motor cortex, which controls hand movement. The team had a Skype connection set up so the two labs could coordinate, though neither Rao nor Stocco could see the Skype screens. Rao looked at a computer screen and played a simple video game with his mind. When he was supposed to fire a cannon at a target, he imagined moving his right hand (being careful not to actually move his hand), causing a cursor to hit the “fire” button. Almost instantaneously, Stocco, who wore noise-canceling earbuds and wasn’t looking at a computer screen, involuntarily moved his right index finger to push the space bar on the keyboard in front of him, as if firing the cannon. Stocco compared the feeling of his hand moving involuntarily to that of a nervous tic. “It was both exciting and eerie to watch an imagined action from my brain get translated into actual action by another brain,” Rao said. “This was basically a one-way flow of information from my brain to his. The next step is having a more equitable two-way conversation directly between the two brains.” The cycle of the experiment. Brain signals from the “Sender” are recorded. When the computer detects imagined hand movements, a “fire” command is transmitted over the Internet to the TMS machine, which causes an upward movement of the right hand of the “Receiver.” This usually results in the “fire” key being hit.
Credit: University of Washington
The technologies used by the researchers for recording and stimulating the brain are both well-known. Electroencephalography, or EEG, is routinely used by clinicians and researchers to record brain activity noninvasively from the scalp. Transcranial magnetic stimulation is a noninvasive way of delivering stimulation to the brain to elicit a response. Its effect depends on where the coil is placed; in this case, it was placed directly over the brain region that controls a person’s right hand. By activating these neurons, the stimulation convinced the brain that it needed to move the right hand. Computer science and engineering undergraduates Matthew Bryan, Bryan Djunaedi, Joseph Wu and Alex Dadgar, along with bioengineering graduate student Dev Sarma, wrote the computer code for the project, translating Rao’s brain signals into a command for Stocco’s brain. “Brain-computer interface is something people have been talking about for a long, long time,” saidChantel Prat, assistant professor in psychology at the UW’s Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences, and Stocco’s wife and research partner who helped conduct the experiment. “We plugged a brain into the most complex computer anyone has ever studied, and that is another brain.” At first blush, this breakthrough brings to mind all kinds of science fiction scenarios. Stocco jokingly referred to it as a “Vulcan mind meld.” But Rao cautioned this technology only reads certain kinds of simple brain signals, not a person’s thoughts. And it doesn’t give anyone the ability to control your actions against your will. Both researchers were in the lab wearing highly specialized equipment and under ideal conditions. They also had to obtain and follow a stringent set of international human-subject testing rules to conduct the demonstration. “I think some people will be unnerved by this because they will overestimate the technology,” Prat said. “There’s no possible way the technology that we have could be used on a person unknowingly or without their willing participation.” Stocco said years from now the technology could be used, for example, by someone on the ground to help a flight attendant or passenger land an airplane if the pilot becomes incapacitated. Or a person with disabilities could communicate his or her wish, say, for food or water. The brain signals from one person to another would work even if they didn’t speak the same language. Rao and Stocco next plan to conduct an experiment that would transmit more complex information from one brain to the other. If that works, they then will conduct the experiment on a larger pool of subjects. Their research was funded in part by the National Science Foundation’s Engineering Research Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering at the UW, the U.S. Army Research Office and the National Institutes ofHealth. Contacts and sources:Doree Armstrong, Source: Article
The Australian city of Sydney is the first in the world to install e-ink traffic signs. Slovenian digital signage company Visionect has worked with the New South Wales' Road and Maritime Services (RMS) agency to install digital signage around the city to improve daily transit and simplify road sign deployment. The displays will also significantly help cut the costs of changing road signs to reflect upcoming events.
The e-ink displays look much the screen on an Amazon Kindle device, and have the advantage of being easy to read in bright sunlight. The devices are also powered via solar panels, so are self-contained and low-cost to run. Messages to the screen can be updated remotely via smartphone or PC, and opens up traffic management to the Internet of Things (IOT) world. Rok Zalar, Visionect’s head of product development, explains how it works: "The hardware components are managed by server software programmed to 'wake up' the sign for certain pre-scheduled windows of time when the content on the sign will be changed using 3G technology. Outside of the ‘waking’ time, the traffic signs use no power." In addition to saving energy, the fully customisable e-traffic signs help cities save on temporary road sign placement as well. It has been reported, for example, that the city Los Angeles puts up 558,000 temporary parking restrictions signs every year at a cost of $9.5 million. Source: InAVate
In 2010, Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine, wrote “The Web Is Dead.” He argued that the future of the Internet and connectivity wasn’t in the World Wide Web, but in a fragmented collection of many different platforms — people consuming content via mobile devices, native apps and other means outside of a traditional web browser. While Anderson’s sensational claim raised a lot of eyebrows, and sparked enormous debate, I wasn’t sure what to make of his prediction at the time. But four years later, we have a little more perspective. In 2014, ‘the web’ — the means by which we access the Internet using a web browser — is hardly dead, although there certainly has been a significant shift our relationship with the Internet. In its infant stages, going online meant using AOL or Earthlinkto dial up a connection to the web. Today, we use the Internet for different reasons, and our connectivity is better, faster and stronger than ever. The disruptive technology that is the Internet is no longer a baby, it’s more like a toddler learning to walk. When your babies learn to walk, you breathe a sigh of relief at their newfound mobility. But that relief quickly turns to frustration as you realize you’ve only traded one set of problems for another. Your newly mobile child can now get into everything, climb and break everything. The same is true with the Internet. One of the most astonishing ways it's changed our lives, for example, is by changing the way we consume music and videos. It’s severed our ties to old, “hard media” like videotapes, CDs and DVDs — an amazing liberation — but has also introduced a whole new, frustrating labyrinth of alternatives at the same time. Anderson’s prediction of fragmentation is most obvious when you look on top of (or under) your TV. Odds are, where we used to store our DVD cases and video sleeves, most of us now have an assortment of streaming devices. Instead of having one giant VCR, we can now choose from having a cable box, TiVO, DVR, Apple TV, Chromecast, Roku, Amazon Fire TV and much more. But the irony is that with all these choices, we can’t actually choose just one. You can’t stream iTunes media through your Chromecast, and you can’t watch Amazon Prime on your Apple TV. Roku is great, but doesn't work with AirPlay. You can watch Netflix on your Apple TV, but, of course, Netflix doesn’t have half the movies you wish it did available for streaming. If you want voice control on your device, only Amazon Fire TV has it. Are you the old fashioned type who still likes using a remote control? Don’t get Chromecast. Oh and by the way, if you don't want a wallet-sized device cluttering up your living room, you can just switch to Amazon’s new Fire TV Stick, which is about the size of a thumb drive. But that’s only if you don’t already have the Roku Streaming Stick, or if you aren’t waiting for Wal-Mart’s just-announced VUDU Spark Stick. (I can’t wait to see what Microsoft and Blackberry have up their sleeves to try to jump into this game — their product names are bound to be interesting.) I’m old enough to remember watching VHS tapes, but not enough to remember the video format wars in the ‘80s. My dad told me a story of the VHS tape fighting against the smaller, arguably better, Betamax format. As the story goes, VHS ended up with a better selection of videos – today we’d say they had more “content providers” — and ergo won the format war despite downfalls in size and picture quality. There was a similar war in the early 2000s: HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray. But what this costly war actually proved was that hardware format doesn’t matter anymore. While people were busy upgrading their home video collections from VHS to HD-DVD or Blu-Ray, the Internet was born. Streaming digital media became the new way to watch movies and most of us stopped purchasing movies altogether, opting for monthly subscription fees for on-demand consumption using services like Netflix. The lure of the Internet delivering whatever we wanted, whenever and wherever we wanted and on any device wanted, trumped everything else. Is this all for the better? I still don’t know. I see benefit in no longer needing to spend my hard-earned cash on hardware that’ll become obsolete in five or 10 years, and not being confined to a desktop when I want to access web content. (I'm grateful to be free from lugging my massive CD sleeve around in my car too. However, there’s always the risk that I’ll want to listen to a certain album, or watch a certain movie, only to find out that it's “not available.”) I think we’ve reached an awkward phase for the Internet. It’s beyond the baby stages and learned to walk. It’s still gaining confidence, and smiles a big, toothy grin with several missing teeth. The web isn’t dead; we’re all just impatiently watching it to grow up. Ron is a web guy, IT guy, and Internet marketer living in Colorado Springs with his wife and five children. He can often be overheard saying things like "Get a Mac!" and "Data wins arguments,” wandering around the downtown area at least five days a week. Follow him on Twitter at@ronstauffer or email him at indy@ronstauffer.com. Questions, comments and snide remarks are always welcome. Source: Article
