Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates once again topped the Forbes magazine list of the world’s richest billionaires, while US President Donald Trump slipped more than 200 spots, the magazine said on Monday. Gates, whose wealth is estimated at $86 billion, led the list for the fourth straight year; Gates’s is followed by Warren Buffett, the American magnate, and Berkshire Hathaway chief with an estimated wealth of $75.6 billion.
Hackers, intelligence agencies and advertisers could be tracking your online video-watching habits, even when the sites in question, such as YouTube, provide encryption and promise anonymity, according to research by a Ben Gurion University cyber-security expert, who presented the research at a recent Black Hat Europe cyber-security gathering in London.
Gaps in YouTube’s encryption enable both government intelligence agencies, hackers and internet marketers to determine which videos a user is watching, said the researchers.
Consumers in Switzerland are shopping more and more products from foreign ecommerce websites. Last year, the total value of online purchases Swiss consumers made abroad was worth 1.3 billion Swiss Francs, which corresponds to 1.22 billion euros. That’s an increase of 18% compared to last year.
And that growth is mostly due to Swiss consumers shopping online more and more from Chinese websites, a new survey by Swiss mail-order association VSV, GfK, Swiss Post and MediaFocus shows. According to this study, online purchases at foreign ecommerce websites have doubled between 2012 and 2016. And this development is likely to continue in the coming years. The study authors assume that cross-border ecommerce in Switzerland will continue to grow disproportionately.
Online gambling sites are no longer welcome in Switzerland after legislators voted to require internet service providers to block the domains of unapproved sites. The Swiss House of Representatives voted on Wednesday in favor of the proposed blockage of Internet access to real-money gambling websites that have not been licensed by local authorities.
The measure had previously been approved by the Senate. Discussions over the proposed block of international operators emerged once again in January. However, the effort, which has long been called for by domestic casino, betting, and lottery companies, lost some momentum after Swiss telecoms voiced certain opposition earlier this year. “Blocking websites works – experience abroad demonstrates that,” said Thierry Burkart from the centre-right Radical Party.
After many months of rumors, YouTube has officially announced its entry into streaming live TV. YouTube TV will let you access live and recorded content from major networks, both the big broadcast players as well as some options typically found on cable.
"Half the cost of cable with zero commitments" said the announcement. For $35 a month, YouTube TV will include live streaming of ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, ESPN and about 30 of the biggest cable TV channels.
Google and Jigsaw have launched a new tool that uses artificial intelligence to filter ‘toxic’ comments online. The tool, known as Perspective, has been designed to crack down on online harassment by letting creators and readers identify abusive comments or comments that are likely to make ‘someone leave a conversation’.
Google’s freely available software is being tested by a range of news organisations, including The New York Times, The Guardian and The Economist, as a way to help simplify the jobs of humans reviewing comments on their stories.”News organizations want to encourage engagement and discussion around their content but find that sorting through millions of comments to find those that are trolling or abusive takes a lot of money, labor, and time. As a result, many sites have shut down comments altogether. But they tell us that isn’t the solution they want. We think technology can help.” said Jared Cohen, president of Jigsaw, the Google social incubator that built the tool.
"Even in an age of rising nationalism, we as a global technology sector need to become a trusted and neutral digital Switzerland," Smith said at the RSA Conference 2017 in San Francisco.
This week’s security conference is getting more focus than ever before, thanks to the 2016 US presidential election, which generated more news on cyberattacks, email leaks, and cybersecurity blunders than anything else. The United States had formally accused Russia of hacking the Democratic Party to influence election results. While the US and private security firms released reports showing a connection to Russia, not everyone trusted these results since Russia won’t accept the blame and a Democratic President was then leading the US.
Although the US election is over, the problem of fake news isn’t. Apple CEO Tim Cook said it’s time to do something about it.
“All of us technology companies need to create some tools that help diminish the volume of fake news,” Cook said in an interview with the Daily Telegraph on Friday. Cook also called for governments to lead information campaigns to crack down on fake news in an interview with a British national newspaper. The scourge of falsehoods in mainstream political discourse came to the fore during recent campaigns, during which supporters of each side were accused of promoting misinformation for political gain.
