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There was a theme throughout the speech, linking Facebook communication with major civil rights movements of ages past. Zuckerberg name-dropped the likes of Martin Luther King Jr and Frederick Douglass, and went so far as to call it a “fifth estate alongside other power structures in our society.” Zuckerberg spent the first part of his speech touting the good Facebook had done, and how it’s “decentralized power by putting it in people’s hands....

The country’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) said it plans to fine the US-based chain £99 million ($123 million) under EU GDPR laws for a data breach that exposed personal details of over 339 million guests. Seven million of the affected users were UK residents, and 30 million related to residents of 31 countries in the European Economic Area (EEA). The incident concerns a 2014 data breach of hotel company Starwood, which was acquired by Marriott in 2016....

The international market for databases capable of handling major corporate data collection will top $155 billion by 2026. Being a part of that mammoth global tech explosion means understanding databases, which can start right in the heart of the average user’s personal computing experience: Microsoft Office. Microsoft Access is the perfect tool for learning how databases work, then advancing to the management, security and growth concerns large organizations share. With the Microsoft Access Complete Course: Beginner to Advanced ($12....

These “antiquated” beliefs didn’t stay in the 18th century. Just last year, an engineer from Google published a whole manifesto detailing the various ways women were biologically different from men, and urged Google to have an “honest discussion about the costs and benefits of our diversity programs.” But Gina Rippon, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the Aston Brain Center in Birmingham, UK and the author of The Gendered Brain (Gender and Our Brains in the US), believes any scientist trying to find innate and biological brain differences between the genders will come up short — her research reveals brains reflect the life they’ve lived, not the biological sex of their owners....

With the disclaimer that many patents never end up becoming an actual product, the patent does hint at how Meta envisions the future of communication. What’s the patent about? Meta, then Facebook, filed a Patent Application in 2020 titled 3D Conversations in an Artificial Reality Environment. Specifically, the application outlines a pipeline for capturing and transmitting 3D representations of callers, “allowing conversation participants to appear as if face-to-face.” To be clear: this is a patent application that’s recently been made public; the patent hasn’t been granted yet....

According to multiple reports from Reuters and Bloomberg, Pemex (short for “Petróleos Mexicanos”) servers were infected by Ryuk, a ransomware strain that’s typically distributed via email phishing campaigns or botnets like Emotet. “We are taking measures at the national level to fight Ryuk ransomware, which is affecting various Pemex servers in the country,” Pemex told Reuters. Ryuk — believed to be operated by cybercrime group Grim Spider — primarly targets large organizations, and has been involved in a number of high-profile ransomware cases just this year, including those in Riviera Beach and Lake City, leading city officials to pay up a collective ransom of $1....

As offices shut down and people were sent home to work, the lines between personal and professional became increasingly blurry. Employees had to get used to this new normal but… so did employers. [Read: 4 ridiculously easy ways you can be more eco-friendly] Some managers have embraced the opportunity to take stock of their leadership style, making an effort to ensure their employees feel trusted and appreciated. Others are showing symptoms of micro-managing and paranoia....

Companies will often conceal key sales and usage figures on exactly how a product is doing. Yet after years of fits and starts in the shadow of competitor and industry powerhouse AWS, you don’t have to read too closely between the lines to know Microsoft has become increasingly intrigued by the success of their own cloud services platform Azure. With Azure riding the wave, now’s the time for savvy IT pros to make sure they know all the ins and outs of the rising platform....

Till now, Google Play store only had unofficial Bing Wallpaper apps. However, this new app brings Bing’s official wallpaper gallery with additional features. The app shows a new image daily that you can set as your wallpaper. You can set the wallpaper to change automatically every week or month too. [Read: This AI spits out an infinite feed of fake furry portraits] It also has a gallery section to explore wallpapers of different categories....

12 teraflops and so much more. Discover what the next generation of gaming means to Xbox: https://t.co/WWFJ6YkHzT#PowerYourDreams pic.twitter.com/RDlWXwVF8f — Xbox (@Xbox) February 24, 2020 According to Xbox head Phil Spencer, the XSX will have an impressive 12 teraflops of GPU performance, “twice that of an Xbox One X and more than eight times the original Xbox One.” It’ll also have hardware-accelerated ray-tracing and Variable Rate Shading (VRS), which, in short, will make the games look prettier and more realistic....

The first apps to get the new look include Calculator, Groove Music, Mail, Voice Recorder, Alarms & Clock, Movies & TV, and Calendar, according to The Verge, with many more on the way. At least the Mail and Calendar apps should be available to regular Windows 10 users very soon, since they appeared in the Windows 10 Release Preview update track (the others are in the slightly more beta-y Fast Ring)....

Leading off: Microsoft’s money is the big ticket item here for Cruise. While the company’s valuation has skyrocketed to about $20 billion from investors, netting one of big tech’s trillion-dollar whales has pushed GM stocks up nearly seven percent. But the cash isn’t the only thing in play here. Per a Reuters report, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says the company will provide cloud services for Cruise: This type of wheeling and dealing is nothing new for Microsoft, but the timing is interesting....

Last night, CEO and chairman Satya Nadella made the announcement on Twitter with a video. He described it as something that spans “from the factory floor to the meeting room.” The firm said the first part of metaverse will be Mesh for Teams, which will be available sometime next year. Microsoft unveiled Mesh, its mixed-reality platform, earlier this year. The new experience is part of that megaproject. — Satya Nadella (@satyanadella) November 2, 2021 The company’s idea is to have meetings with your remote colleagues in a virtual space while you can feel their ‘presence’ through virtual avatars....

Just ahead of the US Presidential elections, Microsoft has introduced new tools to detect manipulated videos that can help political campaigners and media organizations.. The detection tool, called Microsoft Video Authenticator, will analyze the videos frame-by-frame to give you a confidence score to indicate if the video was modified. The algorithm has been developed with the help of Microsoft’s Responsible AI team and the Microsoft AI, Ethics, and Effects in Engineering and Research (AETHER) Committee....

The Mars rover did not take a picture of fungi growing on the planet. And so-called ‘scientists’ did not explain the existence of fungi on Mars in a research paper. If there are mushrooms on Mars, the people on our planet have yet to uncover any evidence of their existence. But what about the headlines? Simply put: they’re bunk. As far as we can tell, all of the recent articles discussing the “discovery of fungi” on Mars are based on a recently published research paper discussing photographs from the Mars rover....

— NX (@NXOnNetflix) August 27, 2020 The story, as we know it so far, is this: Jade and Billie Wesker are forced to move to New Raccoon City, a town with dark secrets (and with a name like that, it’s not a big surprise). Then we cut to a second timeline following an adult Jade in the T-virus-decimated future. I’m not sure why the two timelines are separate, but I’ll accept that this might be explained in the show....

But this year, uncle Nigel (name changed to protect identity) will face a different challenge. Thanks to a new AI version of the classic board game, his distressing knowledge of the dictionary will be of no use at all — because real words no longer count. The BLABRECS system is the brainchild of Max Kreminski, an AI researcher and game designer. He describes his creation as “like Scrabble but worse....

The evidence for the crossover is, admittedly, a little flimsy at first glance. In Spider-Man, should you and your friendly neighborhood Peter Park visit the Avengers tower in the Upper East Side, he’ll say something to the effect of, “Too bad they’re never around. They’re on the West Coast or something.” In the trailer for the Avengers game, the Avengers are indeed on the West Coast, San Francisco specifically, when something called “A-Day” occurs that fractures the group....

Ever since Albert Einstein came up with the theory of relativity and other scientists realized that classical physics and quantum mechanics don’t really line up, we’ve been trying to reconcile those worlds. Many theoretical physicists believe that bridging the gap between obvious reality (classical physics) and the wacky quantum realm could help us finally understand the true nature of our universe. What’s the big idea? As far as we know, there’s no such thing as a “god’s eye view”of the universe....

Now our new study shows that honeybees too can learn to match symbols and numerosities, much like we humans do with Arabic and Roman numerals. Human language and mathematics Language is the ability to learn and use a system of symbolic representations for communication. This includes a capacity to relate signs to abstract information. For example, letters grouped together make a word which we can read, and sounded words put together in the correct order allow us to have a conversation....