Technology

    We’re often told to be careful what we post online, as it will be there forever even when you die. In the age of social media, everyone’s digital life remains available after their deaths. However, what each social media platform does with accounts when its users pass away varies and also depends on the wishes of the immediate family. For some people, having the option to visit a deceased person’s social media account can offer comfort, while others prefer that the page is deleted for good when a loved one passes away – so some social media platforms offer both options. When Facebook, which sees 8,000 members die a day, according to ABC, first introduced memorial accounts, anyone could report a user as dead which would permanently lock the account and keep it from ...

    Election interference and harmful speech are issues that can never fully be solved by Facebook, according to the social media giant’s embattled boss. In an end-of-year post on Mark Zuckerberg's own Facebook page, the chief executive claimed the company had fundamentally altered our DNA to focus more on preventing harm in all our services during the year. He noted that his biggest personal challenge for the year has been to address some of the issues that have caused the company to draw intense criticism in 2018. Earlier this year, Facebook was embroiled in a scandal over the harvesting of the personal data of 87m users by Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm, which used it for political reasons. The firm went on to work for the campaign of Donald Trump,...

    Facebook might not only know where you are in the future, but also where you're going next. Buzzfeed News has discovered that the social network has filed a patent application entitled Offline Trajectories for a technology can predict where you're going based at least in part on previously logged location data. Based on the application's wording, it'll be able to use your previously logged location, as well as other people's, to make predictions. Say, you typically go to a specific restaurant after spending time at the gym. The technology starts by determining your current location, and if you're at the gym, it will compute for the probability that you're going to that restaurant next. If it determines that you are indeed heading to that restaurant and that locat...

    Winter may be coming, but Morocco has decided to stop marking the changing of the seasons by turning back its clocks. As millions of people around the world prepare for an extra hour of sleep this weekend (or one more episode of your current Netflix series of choice), the north African nation has instead abandoned the concept of clock changes and chosen to stick to summer time all year round. The Moroccan government said the decision to stay on GMT+1 would save an extra hour of natural light and reduce electricity consumption. It is a move that could be soon replicated in plenty of other countries, with the EU consulting on a proposal to abandon the practice from 2019. Since 2002, the twice-yearly time change has been dictated by an EU directive, with a harmonised...

    The US technology giants collectively known as Faangs Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google. They are just five companies but they are together worth more than the huge international businesses that make up the entire FTSE 100, more than the companies that comprise Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index, and more than Germany’s Dax and France’s Cac 40 put together. They are the US technology giants collectively known as Faangs Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google (owned by Alphabet these days) and their stellar stock market performances of the past few years has continued in the first six months of 2018 despite a number of serious headwinds. Technology companies in general have been buffeted by Donald Trump’s trade battles, in particular the idea of restricting C...

    Microsoft is launching rebranded Microsoft News apps for both iOS and Android today, alongside using its news engine to power news across a variety of Microsoft products. While the MSN name is going away on Android and iOS, the site itself will remain branded as MSN.com, a portal for news that the software maker launched back in 1995. Microsoft News is the new name for our news engine that powers familiar sites like MSN.com, and our newly redesigned Microsoft News app for iOS and Android, explains Rob Bennett, editor-in-chief of Microsoft News. Microsoft News also powers news on Microsoft Edge, the News app in Windows 10, Skype, Xbox and Outlook.com. Microsoft is combining curated news from more than 1,000 “premium publishers” and 3,000 brands with human editors a...

    Facebook said Thursday that it would notify 14 million users that posts they intended to share privately may have been published publicly, the company’s latest setback as it tries to rebuild user trust after the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The issue arose from a bug affecting Facebook’s audience selector tool, which allows users to decide whether to publish a post only to their friends or to a broader audience. The tool usually remains on the setting that was used most recently so that a user who only wants to share posts with friends does not have to keep selecting that option. But while the bug was active, from 18 May to 27 May, the setting was automatically changed to public. We have fixed this issue and starting today we are letting everyone affected know and ...

    NASA scientists have solved the 39-year-old mystery of Jupiter's lightning storms. When Voyager 1 flew past the planet in 1979, it collected data showing mysterious lightning-associated radio signals completely different to the signals produced by lightning on Earth. In a paper published in the journal Nature, the scientists from NASA's Juno mission have discovered that Jovian lightning is inside-out compared to lightning on Earth. While the revelation showed how Jupiter lightning is similar to Earth's, the new paper also notes that where these lightning bolts flash on each planet is actually quite different. Jupiter lightning distribution is inside-out relative to Earth, said Shannon Brown, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the lead author of th...

    Microsoft has dropped a huge data centre at the bottom of the ocean. If surrounding hundreds of computers with a large body of water sounds like a terrible idea then wait, there is method to Microsoft’s madness. Microsoft believes it has a solution to this environmental problem which is Project Natick. It’s a data centre that’s powered completely by local renewable energy (solar and wind) and then cooled by nothing more than the ocean around it. Computers often get warm, data centres on the other hand get scorching hot, and to keep them from overheating companies have to either install vast cooling fans or use supercooled liquid to keep them from melting. Rather than bringing the cooling to the computer, Project Natick literally places the computers into a natural...

    The package came in a small black box, covered in tape. It had no return address. Under layers of packaging, there was a box labeled Smart Watch, with no brand name. Inside the box was the watch itself, which looked nothing like the inexpensive Apple Watch I’d hoped it would be. Instead, the large digital face featured icons for Twitter, Facebook, a pedometer, and a photo-taking app called Camina rather than camera. It was about what you’d expect for a smart watch that cost less than $20. I ordered the watch from Wish.com, one of a growing number of sites that allows consumers from around the world to buy deeply discounted goods from China, directly from sellers or manufacturers there. After receiving promotional emails from Wish offering bikinis for $4 (marked down from ...