Washington, Online retail giant Amazon has been slammed by several Sikh bodies for reportedly selling doormats, rugs and toilet accessories bearing the image of the highly-revered Golden Temple and was asked to immediately remove the “disrespectful products” that hurt the sentiments of the community worldwide.

Prominent community body in the US, the Sikh Coalition, said in a statement on Tuesday that it was alerted to Amazon selling doormats, rugs and toilet seat covers with the image of Golden Temple. 

In response, the civil rights organisation said it “immediately contacted Amazon to remove the products while detailing the culturally insensitive problems with the items being sold and the offensive message it sent to Sikhs around the world”.

“The Golden Temple is not a doormat,” it tweeted, adding that in the hours since, through community outreach, several pages had been removed from the Amazon portal. 

Another group, NGO United Sikhs, issued a statement calling on Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to do the same and said it had received “numerous complaints” from members of the community about the products.

Some of the items had been removed from the website on Wednesday, but the Golden Temple toilet accessories remained available, the group said.

“It’s shocking and extremely disappointing that Amazon offers these products for sale,” said United Sikhs operations manager Rajesh Singh.

“The merchandise featuring the disrespectful placement of Darbar Sahib shows a total lack of understanding on behalf of Amazon and its employees. We demand Bezos address this issue immediately.”

The group offered “Sikh awareness training” in “an effort to educate Amazon’s staff and prevent anti-Sikh products from being sold on the site in the future”.

It also “reached out to the manufacturers of the merchandise to demand their production to be ceased immediately”.

 (15:50) 

New Delhi, Chinese handset manufacturer nubia on Wednesday launched a gaming smartphone Red Magic in India for Rs 29,999.

The smartphone would be available on Amazon.in from December 20, the company said in a statement.

The 5.99-inches full-HD smartphone is packed with an optimised Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 chipset with 8GB RAM and dual-lane 128GB Universal Flash Storage (UFS) 2.1 storage.

“The launch of Red Magic has especially been crafted for the rising gaming community in India and will be a benchmark in its segment,” said Dheeraj Kukreja, Director, nubia India.

The device runs Android 8.1 Oreo and houses 3800mAh battery.

“We truly believe that with some of the unparalleled features like RGB strip, GameBoost Mode, Cooling Fans, 3800mAh battery that we have packed in this revolutionary device, the experience will be power packed in every way,” Kukreja added.

The smartphone sports a 24MP rear camera and a 8MP selfie shooter.

Facebook gave large tech companies access to users’ data, including private messages, New York Times reports.20 minutes ago

Facebook has given some of the world’s largest tech companies, such as Spotify, Amazon and Netflix, access to users’ personal information in ways not previously disclosed, according to a report released by the New York Times (NYT).

In the report, published on Tuesday, NYT says internal Facebook documents provided insights into the network’s “data-sharing agreements,” revealing that the data market is “even bigger than many consumers suspected”.

According to the publication, Facebook allowed big companies like Microsoft with its Bing search engine to “view names of virtually all Facebook users’ friends without consent”. In addition, streaming services such as Netflix, Spotify were able to access “users’ private messages,” including the ability to “read, compose and delete messages, and to see all participants on a thread”, NTY reported.

Platforms such as Sony, Microsoft and Amazon could obtain users’ email addresses through their friends, and Yahoo was able to “view streams of friends’ posts”, despite statements saying it had stopped that type of sharing before.

The agreements between the platforms and tech companies applied to more than 150 companies, most of which are technology and online retails sites.

“The deals, the oldest of which date to 2010, were all active in 2017,” NYT reported. “[But] some were still in effect this year.”

The partnership, as explained by the report, allowed Facebook to grow by bringing new users, and encourage them to use the platform, while the companies in return “acquired features to make their products more attractive.”

In 2012, Facebook was asked by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to strengthen privacy safeguards, 
as the data-sharing deals likely “violated the consent agreement, since users had no way of knowing which companies Facebook shared their data with, and no clear means of granting or withholding permission.”

Facebook maintains that none of these partnerships or features gave companies access to information without “people’s permission, nor did they violate the settlement with the FTC”.

Different scandals 

Facebook has faced multiple scandals in recent years. 

Earlier this year, it was revealed that 87 million users’ data was accessed by the UK data firm Cambridge Analytica, without proper user consent.READ MORE

Cambridge Analytica and Facebook: The scandal so far

Acknowledging that it had breached users’ trust, Facebook insisted that it implemented stricter privacy protections and Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive, assured lawmakers in April that people “have complete control” over everything they share on Facebook.

However, as recently as last week it was also reported that a bug may have exposed millions of Facebook users’ private photos to third party apps. 

Facebook responded to the NYT’s report and said that they do not “ignore people’s privacy settings”.

“Facebook’s partners don’t get to ignore people’s privacy settings, and it’s wrong to suggest that they do,” Steve Satterfield, Facebook’s director of privacy and public policy, said in a statement. 

“Over the years, we’ve partnered with other companies so people can use Facebook on devices and platforms that we don’t support ourselves.

“Unlike a game, streaming music service, or other third-party app, which offer experiences that are independent of Facebook, these partners can only offer specific Facebook features and are unable to use information for independent purposes.”

The platform also responded via a blog post published on Tuesday night.

In the post, the company answered different questions about the partner companies, which the company referred to as “integration partners,” and a specific kind of partnership that ran from 2010 to 2014 called “instant personalisation.”

“To be clear: none of these partnerships or features gave companies access to information without people’s permission,” the social media company said.

Companies also rejected the results of the report. 

A Netflix spokesperson in a statement to Al Jazeera said that it recently have tried various ways to “make Netflix more social.”

In 2014 it launched a feature that “enabled members to recommend TV shows and movies to their Facebook friends via Messenger or Netflix,” but that “at no time did we access people’s private messages on Facebook, or ask for the ability to do so.”

The feature “was never that popular so we shut the feature down in 2015,” Netflix added. 

142 people are talking about thisTwitter Ads info and privacy

Microsoft said that data supplied by Facebook stopped appearing in Bing search results after the contract between the two companies ended in February 2016.

“Throughout our engagement with Facebook, we respected all user preferences,” Microsoft said in a statement.

An Apple spokesman referred CNN to a paragraph in the article citing Apple officials as saying they were unaware of this agreement. 

“Any shared data would remain on the devices and be available to anyone other than the users,” the statement read.

It has been two months since the largest data breach in Facebook’s history and five days since the last time Facebook announced a significant data leak.

Aljazeera

Bengaluru,  Brazil surpassed India to become the most spammed country in the world in 2018, according to a report from popular communication app Truecaller on Tuesday.

More than six per cent of overall calls received by Indian users in 2018 were spam calls. However, the average number of spam calls received in India dropped to 22.3 calls per user/month – 1.5 per cent less than last year, the findings showed. 

On an average, a Truecaller user in Brazil received 37.5 spam calls per month – an 81 per cent increase of spam calls in a year, said the “Truecaller Insight Special Report”.

Chile, South Africa and Mexico are the three other countries among the list of top five countries affected by spam calls this year.

With regard to spam call categorisation, operators and telecom service providers continue to be the top spammers in India with 91 per cent user calls received for the upselling of various offers and balance reminders, Truecaller said in a statement. 

This is followed by scam callers and telemarketers who garnered seven per cent and two per cent of such calls respectively. 

Truecaller said it identified and blocked 17.7 billion spam calls globally, where every fourth call that users received was a spam call. 

New Delhi,  Ten media outlets from India have been selected for receiving YouTube innovation funding as part of the Google News Initiative (GNI) to help newsrooms and publishers strengthen their online video capabilities and experiment with new formats for video journalism.

These 10 news organisations – Asianet News Media and Entertainment Pvt. Ltd., Bharatiya Digital Party (BhaDiPa), FACTLY, Gaon Connection, India Today Group, Live Data Visualisation Pvt. Ltd., NDTV, NYOOOZ, ShepHertz and Video Volunteers — are among the 87 selected from 23 countries. 

“Today’s announcement reinforces our commitment to supporting a strong future for news video,” Timothy Katz, Director of News Partnerships, YouTube, said in a blog post on Tuesday. 

“Hailing from 23 countries around the world, they represent a diverse array of broadcasters, traditional and digital publishers, local media, agencies and creators, but all share a commitment to quality journalism and a spirit of innovation,” Katz added.

As part of the launch of Google News Initiative in March, YouTube committed $25 million funding to support the future of news. 

Many of the projects selected for the innovation funding are focused on expanding newsroom video operations and trying out new ways of reporting news through video — from reaching younger audiences online to exploring live and fact-checking formats. 

Other projects look at the sustainability of news organisations, including work on new business models and programmes to support a healthy news ecosystem. 

“Over the coming months, we’ll be sharing insights gained from the projects and giving newsrooms the opportunity to benefit from the learnings,” Katz added.

Twitter Inc shares fell almost 7 percent after the company said it was investigating unusual traffic that it said might be from state-sponsored hackers.

In what appeared to be an unrelated issue, a security firm also said that hackers used the platform to try to steal user data.

Twitter said in a blog that it discovered suspicious traffic to a customer-support forum while investigating a security bug that exposed user data, including users’ phone country codes and details on locked accounts. It said the bug was fixed on November 16.

Twitter said it observed a large amount of traffic to the customer support site coming from individual internet IP addresses in China and Saudi Arabia.

“During our investigation, we noticed some unusual activity involving the affected customer support form API. Specifically, we observed a large number of inquiries coming from individual IP addresses located in China and Saudi Arabia,” Twitter said in a press release.

“While we cannot confirm intent or attribution for certain, it is possible that some of these IP addresses may have ties to state-sponsored actors,” the blog said.

160 people are talking about thisTwitter Ads info and privacy

Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter blamed the share price tumble on concerns that news of a breach could hurt growth and user engagement.

“Clearly, a breach like this impairs user trust in the platform,” he said.

Separately, security software maker Trend Micro Inc said in a blog earlier on Monday that attackers sent out two tweets in October in a bid to steal data from previously infected machines.

The hackers hid instructions in tweeted memes that secretly ordered infected devices to send information, including usernames, screen images and other content, Trend Micro said.

A Twitter spokesperson declined to comment on the Trend Micro report.

New Delhi,  The year leading up to the 2019 general elections was defined by a slowdown in investment, slackening growth, falling GST revenues, the biggest bank fraud and a credit crunch that provoked the most significant crisis in government-RBI relations.

It was topped up by the abrupt resignation of Urjit Patel as the RBI Governor, a rare phenomenon in the banking world. He was immediately replaced by former Economic Affairs Secretary Shaktikanta Das the man who was the vocal face during demonetisation and seen as a ‘yes’ man of the government.

India, meanwhile, continued to be the fastest growing big economy during 2018 with its gross domestic product (GDP) rising at above 7 per cent, after having slipped to 6.7 per cent in the previous financial year, mainly on account of the impact of demonetisation. 

Even as it is projected to overtake China by GDP in the coming year, India jumped 23 spots in the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business rankings to 77th place, continuing its impressive climb on this score for the third year running. 

The pace of the country’s GDP growth slowed substantially during the second quarter of the current fiscal to 7.1 per cent, from 8.2 per cent in the previous quarter, mainly on the back of a drop in manufacturing, agriculture and mining. By criteria of gross value added (GVA), which includes taxes and excludes subsidies, growth fell to 6.9 per cent from 8 per cent during the April-June period.

On the inflation front, lower food prices kept headline inflation down, which touched a 13-month low of 3.3 per cent in October, and fell further to 2.3 per cent last month. Core inflation, however, continued to remain elevated.

Following the release of the GDP numbers, US agency Fitch Ratings lowered India’s growth forecast for the fiscal to 7.2 per cent, from an earlier projection of 7.8 per cent rise, “on weaker-than-expected momentum in the data, higher financing costs and reduced credit availability.”

The year witnessed the biggest fraud in Indian banking history with the Rs 14,000 crore scam on state-run Punjab National Bank (PNB) committed over a number of years and reported in February. The fraud was committed from 2011 till 2017 by illegally issuing letters of undertaking and rolling over foreign letters of credit to diamantaire Nirav Modi and his uncle Mehul Choksi from PNB’s Brady House branch in Mumbai. 

Both are currently absconding and Interpol has issued red corner notices against them.

Twin storms hit the country in September — rising fuel prices that climbed new highs daily and a falling rupee that spiralled down to new lows against the US dollar before recovering somewhat towards the end of the month.

The year’s global protectionist measures unfolding through the US-China trade war, along with high crude oil prices, put the rupee on a downward spiral, dragging it down to a record low of 72.98 against the US dollar on September 18.

According to analysts, concerns over a rise in inflation rate, growing protectionism in global trade and an outflow of foreign funds from the country’s equity markets have had an adverse impact on the Indian currency. It fell nearly 15 per cent since the start of the year to become Asia’s worst-performing currency.

On the other hand, transport fuel prices in the country began going up almost daily since August 1, incessantly recording new highs across the country, even as the UK Brent crude oil climbed to $86 per barrel. A weak rupee and high excise duty added to the heady mix that made for high petrol and diesel prices in the country before beginning to fall from late October in tandem with global crude prices. 

“The widening of the current account deficit amidst tighter global financing conditions should put downward pressure on the currency, and we forecast the rupee to weaken to 75 against the dollar by end-2019,” Fitch said. 

The defining moment, however, came in December with the resignation of the RBI Governor nine months prematurely and the first such instance since Independence, which prompted Patel’s predecessor Raghuram Rajan to say that it should be a cause of concern for all Indians. 

The historic tensions in government-central bank relations were re-ignited in October when, in a public lecture, RBI Deputy Governor Viral Acharya talked about the independence of the Reserve Bank, arguing that any compromise could be “potentially catastrophic” for the economy. 

The government responded with the Finance Ministry seeking discussions with the central bank under the never-used-before Section 7 of the RBI Act which empowers the government to issue directions to the RBI Governor, who then summoned a meeting of the bank board. 

Central to the issue was the government’s demand that the RBI hand over its surplus reserves by making changes to the “economic capital framework”. Analysts noted that the government’s demand came in the face of a huge fiscal deficit and the need to boost the economy in an election year.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi met with Governor Patel before the board meeting and what emerged on November 19 was seen as settling the debate on the central bank’s autonomy and clearly establishing the government as a stakeholder in policy making.

The current liquidity crunch, particularly among non-banking finance companies, follows a series of defaults in late October by the privately-run IL&FS. 

In hindsight, the words of Sudipto Mundle on the Board of Governors of the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy, after the November board meeting proved prophetic.

“The RBI-government fight has been pushed down, abated for now and postponed, but the NPAs issue continues to remain,” he said. 

Chennai,  (IANS) Indian space agency ISRO has shortlisted 14 companies out of over 100 companies that showed interest in its lithium ion cell technology, said a senior official.

“Over 100 companies showed interest in our lithium ion cell technology. Out of them, 14 have been shortlisted. We will enter into a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with them once they agree for the same,” S. Somanath, Director, Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC), told IANS.

The VSSC is part of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).

Somanath said ISRO has already transferred the technology to BHEL for production of space grade lithium ion batteries.

In June it announced its decision to transfer its own lithium ion cell technology to the Indian industry on a non-exclusive basis for use in automobiles for Rs 1 crore.

The space agency had said the initiative will accelerate the development of the indigenous electric vehicle industry.

The VSSC, located in Kerala, will transfer the lithium ion cell technology to the successful Indian industries/start-ups on a non-exclusive basis to establish production facilities in the country that can produce cells of varying size, capacity, energy density and power density catering to the entire spectrum of power storage requirements, ISRO had said.

The ISRO makes lithium ion cell batteries of various sizes and power (1.5 ampere to 100 ampere) to power its rockets and satellites.

Presently, the lithium ion battery is the most dominant battery system finding applications for a variety of societal needs, including mobile phones, laptops, cameras and many other portable consumer gadgets apart from industrial applications and aerospace.

Recent advances in the battery technology have made it the preferred power source for electric and hybrid electric vehicles also.

Bengaluru,  (IANS) Despite an increase in the number of women excelling in the tech world, women still remain highly underrepresented with just 2 per cent being promoted to leadership roles, a survey revealed on Monday.

The survey titled “Women in Technology 2018: Breaking Gender Barriers” conducted by HackerEarth, an innovation management and talent assessment company, explored the state of women technologists across the globe and the challenges faced by them in the workplace. 

It shows that only one-third of all tech teams comprised of women, demonstrating a stark disparity in the number of women employed by tech organisations.

Despite 86 per cent of the study respondents having a formal degree in computer science, most experienced a stagger in their career growth, and only 2 per cent could make it to the top roles. 

“While the number of women graduating in CS has been on a steady rise, when it comes to career growth, the numbers are staggeringly low,” Vivek Prakash, CTO and Co-Founder, HackerEarth, said in a statement. 

“Implementing policies to support women in the workplace and providing them with training and resources will help reduce the high attrition rates we have observed amongst women technologists,” Prakash added.

In a bid to seek work with emerging technologies, flexibility as well as better pay, more than 50 per cent women developers were found to move to a new job. 

Importantly, 50 per cent of the women technologists believed that “gendered wordings” in job adverts discouraged them from applying for technical positions. 

Solutions such as blind recruitments, building family-oriented policies, and upskilling opportunities will help women excel in their careers and reduce gender disparity in every organisation, the survey suggested. 

For the survey, HackerEarth surveyed over 1000 women from 35 countries holding technology positions in various organisations. 

By : Pramesh S Jain

Around 100 Illegal shops razed in Violating Vendors norms on S P Road by BBMP :

“Illegal shops violating vendors norms demolished in S P Road Bengaluru”.
“Encroachments on pavements removed in SP Road “.
In a joint operation by Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike south zone officials with Bengaluru city police with additional force for no untoward incident take place KSRP platoons were deployed to maintain law and order situation in the area on Saturday conducted a three-hour drive on Saturday to remove encroachments on pavements along S.P. Road in Bengaluru. 
Close to Hundreds shops were demolished  which were floating vendors norms were demolished a drive was carried out at 9am till 12pm it has demolished the illegal shops encroaching Land to dust. 

H.Nagaraj, Assistant executive engineer told media persons that, there were dozens of complaints from the residents of SP Road that many have encroached the pavement by establishments on road and we are unable to walk and based on complaint we have carried a demolition drive.With heavy police protection,We  have arrived at S.P. Road,which is a hub for electronic goods, at 10 a.m. and removed around 20 structures that had occupied pavements and a portion of the road.The structures, which included hotels,tea stalls, and mobile repair shops, were unauthorised.The encroachments on the road were eating into the carriage way, causing traffic snarls.Twenty shops were removed on Saturday.There are a few more left, which we will be removing in the coming days,” said H. Nagaraj, Assistant Executive Engineer, BBMP south zone.

BBMP Mayor,Gangambike Mallikarjuna, told media persons that,A joint operation was carried out by our officers and with heavy police protection we have carried a demolition drive and it is a alarm bell to encroachers and said I will be holding a meeting with all the engineers who have arrived now and will arrive at a consensus as to what action can be taken against all the encroachers in the city and a massive drive will be done in coming days we will take strict action on those who are encroaching Land illegally in the Bengaluru city she added.