Chennai,  With the failure of conciliation talks, about 10 lakh bankers in private and government banks will go on strike on December 26 protesting against the merger of Bank of Baroda, Dena Bank and Vijaya Bank, the All India Bank Employees Association (AIBEA) said on Thursday.

“During the conciliation meeting held in Delhi today (Thursday), the Additional Chief Labour Commissioner advised the three banks and IBA (Indian Banks Association) to hold negotiations with the unions and convey the Union’s concerns to the government,” AIBEA General Secretary C.H. Venkatachalam told IANS.

“No assurance came from either IBA or the government. Hence the conciliation talks failed and the December 26 strike stands,” Venkatachalam added.

The AIBEA is part of the nine unions in the banking sector under the umbrella body of United Forum of Bank Unions (UFBU).

According to Venkatachalam, the strike was only against the bank mergers and there was no deadlock on the wage revision talks with IBA.

India is largely unbanked or underbanked with low density of banks. Mergers will kill bank branches while the focus should be on recovering the huge outstanding loans, the AIBEA said.

With Christmas on December 25, banks would effectively be closed for two days, affecting the banking public.

Though the bankers had wanted the strike on December 24, a Monday, for a bigger impact as the banks would then be closed for four consecutive days (December 22-25), the unions decided to strike on December 26 to lessen the impact on public.

Ahead of the strike called by the United Forum of Bank Unions (UFBU) on December 26, one of the bank officers’ union has called a strike on December 21, demanding an unconditional mandate for the XIth bipartite wage revision talks, officials said on Wednesday.In the wake of strikes and holidays, the banks will remain closed from next Friday to Wednesday, except Monday and the banking services could adversely be affected on these days.The banks will remain closed on December 22 and 23 on account of fourth Saturday and Sunday respectively. December 25 will be a national holiday for Christmas.“We called the strike on December 21 demanding a full and unconditional mandate for the XIth bipartite wage revision talks based on a charter of demands submitted in May, 2017. No headway has been made in the process so far even after 19 months since discussion on wage revision began,” All India Bank Officers Confederation’s (AIBOC) Assistant General Secretary Sajay Das said.According to him, over 3.2 lakh officers of the union would participate in the strike as “no perceptible initiative” was observed from Indian Banks’ Association to impress upon the five banks who have not yet submitted the unconditional mandate”.The union opposed the current move to restrict the salary settlements only up to Scale III by citing non-receipt of the ‘unconditional mandates’ from five banks as a reason whereas 15 banks from the public sector and two private banks have already given ‘unconditional mandates’.“AIBOC believes that it is nothing but a farcical logic to restrict the wage negotiations up to the officers in scale III whereas the entire officer community is covered under unified Service Regulations,” the statement said.During the strike on Friday, services at ATMs are expected to be “normal” while on December 26, ATM services would also be affected.The strike call also features “the burning issue of the announcement proposing to merge three public sector banks – Bank of Baroda, Vijaya Bank and Dena Bank — and the consolidation of Regional Rural Banks, union’s West Bengal unit President Subhujyoti Chattopadahyay said.

San Francisco,  Google has denied it altered YouTube code to break Microsoft Edge, thus slowing down its performance while users streamed YouTube videos — a claim made by a former Microsoft intern.

Microsoft Edge is a graphical web browser included in Windows 10, Windows 10 Mobile and Xbox One devices, replacing Internet Explorer as the default web browser.

According to a report in The Verge on Wednesday, Google disputed the claims made by Joshua Bakita, a former software engineering intern at Microsoft, who said that the company added a “hidden empty div over YouTube videos” that slowed down streaming on Microsoft Edge.

According to Google, it merely fixed a bug in YouTube.

“YouTube does not add code designed to defeat optimizations in other browsers, and works quickly to fix bugs when theya¿re discovered,” a YouTube spokesperson was quoted as saying.

Microsoft, however, was yet to comment on the specific claim made by its former intern.

“Google has been a helpful partner and we look forward to the journey as we work on the future of Microsoft Edge,” it told The Verge.

Earlier, in a post on Hacker News, Bakita revealed details of a YouTube incident that convinced some Edge browser engineers that Google added code to purposely break compatibility.

“One of the reasons we (Microsoft) decided to end EdgeHTML was because Google kept making changes to its sites that broke other browsers, and we couldn’t keep up,” claimed Bakita.

Google added a “hidden empty div over YouTube videos” that affected Microsoft’s hardware acceleration for videos, he added.

A Mozilla Firefox programme manager also claimed recently that a separate YouTube redesign made the site “5x slower in Firefox and Edge.”

Earlier this month, Microsoft said it plans to adopt the Chromium open source project for the development of its Edge browser.

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.