Biden gets the power to ban TikTok, Microsoft Exchange Online is taken offline and Twitter is having second thoughts about its unrestricted free speech policy.
Welcome to trending hashtags for Wednesday, March 2.
I’m your host Jim Love, CIO of IT World Canada and TechNewsday in the US – here’s today’s top tech news.
The US House Foreign Affairs has now approved a bill giving President Biden the power to ban TikTok.
It is unclear how the ban would work but it gives Biden the power to ban any transactions with TikTok, effectively blocking anyone in the US from accessing the app.
The bill would also require Biden to ban any entity that may transfer sensitive personal data to an entity subject to the influence of the Chinese government.
TikTok is used by more than 100 million Americans, but it is banned on state-owned devices in more than 30 states across the US. Canada and the European Union Also in the process of banning.
Representative Michael McCaul, the Republican chair of the committee that sponsored the bill, said: “Anybody who has downloaded TikTok on their device has given the CCP (Communist Party of China) a backdoor to all of their personal information. It’s a spy balloon in his phone. ,
Democrats are urging caution, saying the decision was rushed and more deliberation is needed. Some have also pointed out that the ban would be too broad and could require the US to impose sanctions on Korean and Taiwanese companies that supply Chinese companies with semiconductor chips and other equipment.
In response to the vote, a TikTok spokesperson said that “the US ban on TikTok is a ban on the export of American culture and values to the billions of people who use our service around the world.,
While the committee is the first step in the legislative process, the bill has yet to be passed by the full House and the US Senate before going to President Biden for signing into law.
Source: reuters
Microsoft is investigating yet another worldwide outage, this time affecting Exchange Online, its cloud-based email service. The problems reportedly started yesterday morning.
An alert was issued later during the day when a potential Directory Based Edge Blocking (DBEB) issue was identified. DBEB allows administrators to reject messages sent to invalid recipients in Exchange Online.
The company said that “the effect is specific to users who are served Through affected infrastructure in North America, Europe and the United Kingdom.
Later in the afternoon, Microsoft tweeted: “We have confirmed that user impact has been resolved by diverting EOP traffic to alternate infrastructure.”
Another worldwide outage knocks down many Microsoft 365 Services in late January after a change in the router’s IP address caused packet forwarding issues between routers in Microsoft’s Wide Area Network (WAN).
Source: IT World Canada
Elon Musk is backing down on his promises of unbridled “freedom of expression” on Twitter.
In an updated policy introduced on Monday, users are not allowed longer To wish harm and express similar feelings on others.
The rules state, “This includes (but is not limited to) expecting others to die, become ill, experience tragic events, or other physically harmful consequences.”
Twitter has allowed these statements in its previous policy, saying they are not against the platform’s rules and are not likely to cause serious or permanent injury.
The newly updated policy also prohibits people from threatening to “damage civilian homes and shelters, or infrastructure necessary for daily, civilian or business activities”.
Twitter is now reviewed Despite Musk’s push for unrestricted speech sin, its speech rules at timeshis acquisition. Company rules regarding doxing were the first to change.
The company mentioned in a series of tweets that it may suspend accounts that break the rules or force them to delete controversial tweets.
Source: Engadget
Volkswagen Group is launching its own in-car app store that will include Spotify, TikTok, Yelp, Weather Channel and more.
The App Store will launch this year with some new Audi models and will be rolled out later for additional cars and brands like Porsche, Lamborghini and Bentley.
The App Store was developed with Harman, an automotive supplier that is now a subsidiary of Samsung.
Last month, Mercedes-Benz also announced that their new cars, starting with the 2024 E-Class, will include built-in apps. for tiktokZoom, Vivaldi Web Browser, and more.
Curiously, Volkswagen’s App Store will also be made available on current-model internal combustion cars like the A4 and Q5—not just next-gen electric vehicles where connected services and over-the-air updates will become the norm. But Volkswagen said the App Store is crucial to its future plans to move fully to connected and autonomous vehicles.
“If you talk about 40 million connected vehicles by 2030, it’s relevant for developers to say, why not [curate] Is my application even in that ecosystem?” said Dirk Hilgenberg, CEO of Cariad, VW Group’s in-house software division.
The new app-store will also be a big software test for Volkswagen That has faced intense competition from Tesla and others and often led the carmaker to release software that wasn’t ready for prime time despite its advanced features.
Source: ledge
Researchers at the University of British Columbia have discovered a material that could one day make our everyday electronics and even cell phones cheaper and more environmentally friendly.
An instrument provided by the University of Saskatchewan, called the Canadian Light Source’s (CLS) REIXS beamline, was also instrumental in measuring the material’s behavior.
The material discovered by lead researcher Alannah Halas is known to be a high-entropy material, which means it is made of a A disordered mixture of five or more elements. whereas an entropy or a disordered system While usually a disadvantage, this material has useful properties such as adjustable magnetoresistance.
For those who may have a slight problem with that description, slightly easier terminology is saying that the new material is made from common elements to replace the rare, expensive, and often highly toxic materials used in today’s devices. Can
“This type of research could be promising for any application requiring magnetic materials. By simply changing the ratio of atoms, we can achieve a wide range of behaviors and strengths,” Halas said.
Source: canadian light source
And if you think that’s a breakthrough, a group in the UK called the Unconventional Computing Laboratory is exploring how mushrooms can accomplish computing tasks.
It’s not as crazy as it sounds. Scientists have known for some time that the branching and web-like root structures of fungi are capable of sending and receiving electrical signals, as well as maintaining memory. They speculate that these routes may also capture network dynamics that typically escape the zero and zero of classical computers.
As bizarre as it sounds, the mushroom and computer pairing is just one of many new approaches to computing being investigated by scientists.
as problems we try to solve with computers become more and more complex, entirely new systems may have to be supplemented or replace our current chip based digital computation,
Quantum computers have attracted much attention because they process information in different ways and provide more precise calculations for some problems.
But they are only one way of finding ways to handle bigger things. complex problems. Chemical and even living systems are also viable potential alternatives. For example, human neurons process information at highly complex levels.
The goal is to find out whether the information can be processed in new ways.
Therefore, by decoding the language used by mushrooms to send signals, scientists may be able to better understand our underground ecosystems and harness them to improve our own information systems.
While mushroom computers may never match the speed of today’s modern machines, they can self generate and be more fault tolerant, able to be reconfigured by naturally growing and evolving and most importantly It’s that they consume very little energy.
Source: popular Science
This is today’s top tech news
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