This combination of photos shows logos of X, formerly known as Twitter, top left; Snapchat, top right; Facebook, bottom left; and TikTok, bottom right. Social media companies collectively made over $11 billion in U.S. advertising revenue from minors last year, according to a study from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health released Wednesday, Dec. 27, 2023. Credit: AP …
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US-Canada military center ‘tracks’ Santa for 68th year
2 The Santa tracker presented by the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) dates to 1955. The joint US-Canadian military monitoring agency has continued its decades-long Christmas tradition of tracking Santa’s whereabouts, helping children around the globe find out when his reindeer-powered, present-filled sleigh is coming to town. A 3-D, interactive website at www.noradsanta.org showed Santa Claus and his reindeer …
Read More »China drafts new rules proposing restrictions on online gaming
3 Visitors gather near a booth for Chinese technology firm Tencent at the China International Fair for Trade in Services (CIFTIS) in Beijing, on Sept. 3, 2022. China released draft guidelines Friday, Dec, 22, 2023, aimed at curbing excessive spending on online gaming in the latest move by the ruling Communist Party to keep control of the virtual economy. The …
Read More »X users report global outage: monitoring site
7 Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain Tens of thousands of global users of X, formerly Twitter, on Thursday reported problems using the Elon Musk-owned social network. Reports of the platform’s troubles began spiking just before 0600 GMT on monitoring site Downdetector. “User reports indicate problems at X (Twitter),” the site said. Timelines on the platform were emptied and no new posts …
Read More »FTC proposes strengthening children’s online privacy rules to address tracking, push notifications
3 A sign stands outside the Federal Trade Commission building, Jan. 28, 2015, in Washington. The FTC is proposing sweeping changes to a decades-old law that regulates how online companies can track and advertise to children, including turning off targeted ads to kids under 13 by default and limiting push notifications. Credit: AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File The Federal Trade Commission …
Read More »Researchers mold model for more nimble networks
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Roughly three decades since the dawn of the World Wide Web, the process by which data pings around the internet and to our devices has, by design, remained largely unchanged. Seeking to modernize the internet’s architecture through software-defined networks, scholars from Cornell and the Open University of the Netherlands have developed a programmable network model that …
Read More »Fraud is a problem so big we need to start teaching children how to spot it in schools
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Have you or someone you know been a victim of fraud? If so, that’s not unusual. The UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS) reported a rise of 25% in the number of fraud offenses in 2021 compared to 2020 in the UK. Representing over 40% of all crimes against individuals, fraud is the most common crime …
Read More »EU toughens rules on three major porn platforms
3 Pornhub, Stripchat and XVideos will have to apply stricter rules, in particular to protect children, under new EU rules. The European Union on Wednesday added three pornographic websites to its list of online platforms that are large enough to come under tougher safety regulation. Adult sites Pornhub, Stripchat and XVideos now join the likes of TikTok, X or Facebook …
Read More »Amazon’s Rival to Starlink Takes Critical Step Toward Deployment
Amazon’s Kuiper low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite network passed a significant milestone when its two orbiting satellites were able to communicate with each other at high data transfer speeds using Optical Inter-Satellite Link (OISL) technology, the company revealed last week. OISL is a key component of Kuiper’s mesh architecture, which uses infrared lasers to send data between satellites. According to …
Read More »Zipline Drone Delivery Projects Set To Takeoff in US Cities
Delivery by drone of packages to the doorstep of consumers has been slow in coming, but 2024 could be the year the technology finally takes flight. Zipline, a drone delivery outfit in San Francisco, is set to pull the chocks away from a handful of projects in U.S. cities next year, with plans to be flying in 15 burgs by …
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