How US anti-monopoly actions against digital giants can impact India

Agencies
June 4, 2019

New Delhi, Jun 4: The anti-monopoly actions against digital giants by the US government and Congress have the potential to affect India in significant ways because of their penetration in the country but New Delhi will have limited ability to exert similarly overarching control on them.

In the latest move, the Democratic Party-controlled House of Representatives Judiciary Committee announced on Monday that it was opening wide-ranging investigation of anti-trust actions by Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook opening the way for legislation impacting their operations worldwide.

At the other political end, the Justice Department was reported to be preparing to conduct anti-trust probes into Google, and the Federal Trade Commission into Amazon.

The digital giants that enjoy a monopoly of search and social media have made enemies on both sides of the political aisle: the Democrats because of their perception that social media was responsible for the defeat of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, and the conservatives due their belief that Google and some segments of the social media are biased against them. In addition, The Washington Post that is owned by Amazon head Jeff Bezos is a strident critic of President Donald Trump.

The Judiciary Committee's ant-trust subcommittee head Representative David Cicilline told reporters in Washington that the panel will investigate why the digital "the market is failing, why the internet is broken and why it's not functioning well". It will then look at legislative action to remedy the situation, he added.

The digital giants have not reacted to the proposed anti-monopoly probes. But in the context of a European Union fine of $5.1 billion on Google for including its search and other apps in its Android operating system, Sundar Pichai, the embattled Indian American head of Google, had denied his company was a monopoly.

He had tweeted: "Rapid innovation, wide choice, and falling prices are classic hallmarks of robust competition. Android has enabled this and created more choice for everyone, not less."

Any action by the US on the tech behemoths will potentially have a bigger impact on India than on the US in some cases because of the bigger customer bases they have in India, which unlike China does not have home-grown alternatives to match them.

India has at least 300 million Facebook users while there are only 210 million in the US, according to Statista. According to some estimates, India has as many WhatsApp users as Facebook users, while in the US they number only in tens of millions.

In India, Google overwhelms search and 98 percent of smartphones use its Android operating system. 

Its YouTube has 245 million users in India and Google Pay, 22 million users, according to PC Magazine.

And Amazon has an Indian subsidiary that had $8.8 billion in sales.

But any legislative or administrative action taken in the US will impact India in significant ways because of large customer base they have there - and, in the case of Google, and Facebook and WhatsApp, the political influence they wield.

Splitting the companies or placing other restrictions by the US will affect their operations in India - and despite India having a larger user base in the case of digital networks and huge market share in the case of Amazon, New Delhi will not be having a similar say in the matters.

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Agencies
January 4,2020

Washington D.C: One of the greatest spectacles of modern art is still thriving in the Australian outback as confirmed by satellite imagery of NASA. The Marree Man is a massive geoglyph depicting an aboriginal hunter, that spans over 2.6 miles in the Southern Australian region.

Discovered by a pilot in 1998, its origin still remains a mystery even to this date.

The Marree Man was given a new lease of life in 2016 when a group of people from the neighboring town of Marree plowed its lines to avert its fading due to erosion.

After NASA shared the image of the art-work that was taken in June, the efforts of the good samaritans turned out to be a total success, reported CNN Travel.

The restoration team believes that the refurbished Marree Man would last longer than its original version.

According to NASA, "They [the team] created wind grooves, designed to trap water and encourage the growth of vegetation. They hope that eventually, the man will turn green."

In a previous article, CNN reported that an entrepreneur by the name of Dick Smith took upon himself to unravel the geoglyph's mystery in 2016. His team combed through all the available evidence but couldn't find anything conclusive.

In 2018 he even offered a 5,000 Australian dollar reward for anyone who knows the identity of its creator.

Nobody turned up with an answer but it was speculated that unknown artist lives in Alice Springs or even might be an American.

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Agencies
July 18,2020

New Delhi, Jul 18: India's national cybersecurity agency CERT-in, has warned people of credit card skimming spreading across the world through e-commerce platforms.

Attackers are typically targeting e-commerce sites because of their wide presence, popularity and the environment LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP), the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) said in a notice on Thursday.

Recently, attackers targeted sites which were hosted on Microsoft's IIS server running with the ASP.NET web application framework, it said.

Some of the sites affected by the attack were found to be running ASP.NET version 4.0.30319, which is no longer officially supported by Microsoft and may contain multiple vulnerabilities, CERT-In said.

The notice also included a list of best practices for website developers including the use of the latest version of ASP.NET web framework, IIS web server and database server.

The advisory is based on research by Malwarebytes which found that this skimming campaign likely began sometime in April this year.

Credit card skimming has become a popular activity for cybercriminals over the past few years, and the increase in online shopping during the pandemic means additional business for them, too, Malwarebytes said in a blog post, adding that attackers do not need to limit themselves to the most popular e-commerce platforms.

Researchers from global cybersecurity and anti-virus brand Kaspersky had warned in December last year that more cybercriminal groups will target online payment processing systems in 2020. 

It said that over the past couple of years, so-called JS-skimming (the method of stealing of payment card data from online stores), has gained immense popularity among attackers. 

Kaspersky researchers in their report said they are currently aware of at least 10 different actors involved in these type of attacks.

Their number will continue to grow during the next year, the report said, adding that the most dangerous attacks will be on companies that provide services such as e-commerce as-a-service, which will lead to the compromise of thousands of companies.

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Agencies
July 9,2020

Twitter has hinted that it is planning a paid subscription platform that can be reused by other teams in the future.

The news that the micro-blogging platform is building a subscription platform with a team codenamed "Gryphon" resulted in Twitter stock rising over 8% on Wednesday.

Twitter revealed its plan via a job listing that seeks a full-stack senior software engineer in New York to join "Gryphon".

Interestingly, Twitter "edited" the job listing once the news broke, removing the part about "Gryphon" and any mention of their internal team or their subscription feature. The listing said the company is looking for an Android engineer to "work on a bevy of backend engineering teams to build components that allow for experimentation to deliver the best experience possible to all of our users".

Later, Twitter users noticed that the company restored the earlier job listing that mentioned the upcoming subscription platform and "Gryphon".

A spokesperson for Twitter told CNN on Wednesday that it's only a job posting, not a product announcement.

This is not the first time Twitter has thought of a paid product. 

In 2017, it sent out a survey to users and a preview of what a premium offering of its TweetDeck app might look like, including breaking news alerts and more analytics, according to The Verge.

"We're conducting this survey to assess the interest in a new, more enhanced version of Tweetdeck. We regularly conduct user research to gather feedback about people's Twitter experience and to better inform our product investment decisions, and we're exploring several ways to make TweetDeck even more valuable for professionals," a Twitter spokesperson had said at that time.

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