Impact of modern technology in education

Technology is a gift of God. After the gift of life it is perhaps the greatest of God's gifts. It is the mother of civilizations, of arts and of sciences. Technology has certainly changed the way we live. It has impacted different facets of life and redefined living. Undoubtedly, technology plays an important role in every sphere of life. Several manual tasks can be automated, thanks to technology. Also, many complex and critical processes can be carried out with ease and greater efficiency with the help of modern technology. Thanks to the application of technology, living has changed and it has changed for better. Technology has revolutionized the field of education. The importance of technology in schools cannot be ignored. In fact, with the onset of computers in education, it has become easier for teachers to impart knowledge and for students to acquire it. The use of technology has made the process of teaching and learning all the more enjoyable.

Read The Full Paper:  https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325086709_Impact_of_modern_technology_in_education

Cambridge Analytica (Part 2)

What was the Russia link?

In a companion piece, The Times reported that people at Cambridge Analytica and its British affiliate, the SCL Group, were in contact with executives from Lukoil, the Kremlin-linked oil giant, as Cambridge built its Facebook-derived profiles. Lukoil was interested in the ways data was used to target American voters, according to two former company insiders. SCL and Lukoil denied that the talks were political in nature and said the oil giant never became a client.

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, left, with Vagit Alekperov, head of the oil giant Lukoil, which was in talks with Cambridge Analytica employees.Credit...Mikhail Klimentyev/RIA Novosti/Kremlin, via Reuters

March 18

Anger on both sides of the Atlantic

The articles drew an instant response in Washington, where lawmakers demanded that Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, testify before Congress. Democrats looking into Russian interference in the 2016 election — already interested in Cambridge’s role in providing analytics to the Trump campaign — said they would seek an investigation into the leak. They were echoed by lawmakers in Britain investigating Cambridge Analytica’s role in disinformation and the country’s referendum to leave the European Union.

Cambridge Analytica and Facebook: The Scandal and the Fallout So Far...(Part 1)

In March, The New York Times, working with The Observer of London and The Guardian, obtained a cache of documents from inside Cambridge Analytica, the data firm principally owned by the right-wing donor Robert Mercer. The documents proved that the firm, where the former Trump aide Stephen K. Bannon was a board member, used data improperly obtained from Facebook to build voter profiles. The news put Cambridge under investigation and thrust Facebook into its biggest crisis ever. Here’s a guide to our coverage.

March 17

Harvesting data and testing election law

The Times reported that in 2014 contractors and employees of Cambridge Analytica, eager to sell psychological profiles of American voters to political campaigns, acquired the private Facebook data of tens of millions of users — the largest known leak in Facebook history.

There was more. Our article first showed how Cambridge received warnings from its own lawyer, Laurence Levy, as it employed European and Canadian citizens on campaigns, potentially violating American election law. The Times also found that tranches of raw data still existed beyond Facebook’s control.

Is Facebook selling your data?

The New York Times has once again gotten its hands on a cache of documents from inside Facebook, this time detailing data-sharing arrangements between the company and other corporations, which had “more intrusive access to users’ personal data than [Facebook] has disclosed” for most of the past decade, the article revealed.
Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, got Facebook users’ friends, whether or not the users agreed to grant that access. Netflix and Spotify got access to users’ messages. Amazon got names and contact information. And, of course, Facebook got things in return. The Times states that Facebook used data from other companies, including Amazon, in its “People You May Know” feature, which has long attracted attention for its mysterious suggestions.
But while the story recalls the explosive Cambridge Analytica episode, it’s much more mundane. These were not bad actors, but merely actors playing exactly the role that Facebook wanted them to play. The goals of these integrations were not nefarious, at least from what we currently know, even if the idea that Spotify’s engineers would have access to your Facebook message data is probably not intuitive to most people.

Read: Cambridge Analytica and the dangers of Facebook data harvesting

Facebook responded to the story with a long blog post in which the company argued that the data-sharing “work was about helping people” do things on the internet “like seeing recommendations from their Facebook friends—on other popular apps and websites, like Netflix, The New York Times, Pandora, and Spotify.”

Which, sure: That was one thing that these data-sharing partnerships allowed. But they also allowed Facebook to grow, and grow, and grow. To entrench itself everywhere in the social-media ecosystem. Facebook was happy to trade user data to expand its business operations, and to pretend that this was all about users defies reality. Users got a small “improvement” that they didn’t ask for. Facebook got permits to build the pipes underlying its data empire.

Back when the data-sharing partnerships began, in 2010, the vision Facebook had of itself could be called Everything-but-With-Facebook. The service would be the social spine for all other services on the web. You’d log in with it, share through it, integrate your Facebook friends into all online experiences. This vision had an arc that began with integrating Facebook with also-ran phone makers and ended in the failure of the concept, overall. But in between, as The Verge’s Casey Newton points out, it gave away more and more data until it overreached with what it called “instant personalization,” which customized results in Bing with Facebook data.

The company has been pulling back on this kind of arrangement for years now. It admits in the Times story, however, that the change was not primarily because of privacy concerns. Most of the deals that Facebook cut simply didn’t work for either party, despite the data transport going back and forth. As Android and iOS took over from the wider world of mobile phones and computers, Facebook’s vision of what it should be evolved. It would no longer be the social spine, but the suite of apps you cannot escape. For years now, the model has been: everything inside Facebook. Apps that threatened that hegemony were purchased (WhatsApp, Instagram) or battled tooth and nail (Twitter, Snapchat).

Google, Facebook users face lawsuits over defamatory reviews

But experts argue the companies are unlikely to self-regulate and change policies to reveal user identities without court orders.

Last week, a Melbourne dentist who claimed he was defamed in an anonymous online review convinced a Federal Court judge to order Google to unmask the disgruntled customer.
Dr Matthew Kabbabe claimed the potentially defamatory reviews, written under a pseudonym "CBsm 23", had cost him a significant amount of money.

After Google refused to identify the reviewer, Dr Kabbabe went to court and succeeded in getting an order that now forces Google to identify the reviewer so that Dr Kabbabe can launch legal action if he chooses to.

'Wake up Zuck!' Protesters gather outside of Facebook CEO's San Francisco home

Standing outside of Mark Zuckerberg's Tudor home in San Francisco, more than 40 protesters delivered a loud message to the Facebook co-founder: refuse political ads that contain lies. They held up colorful signs, scribbled messages in chalk on the sidewalk and chanted "Wake up Zuck!"

The nearly hour-long protest on Presidents Day was a reminder that criticism against Facebook continues to grow. Ahead of the 2020 US elections, misinformation has been a top concern after Russian trolls used Facebook to sow division among Americans. Despite scrutiny from lawmakers and celebrities, the world's social network stands by its decision to not send ads from politicians to third-party fact checkers. Zuckerberg repeatedly defends Facebook's hands-off approach to political ads, saying that people should make their own judgments about what politicians are saying.

Changing Facebook's political ads policy, though, wasn't the only item on the lengthy wish list of protesters. They want the social network to stop allowing politicians to target ads at specific groups of users, a tool known as microtargeting, and prevent people who are trying to disrupt the election from using the social network. Google limited microtargeting for political ads while Twitter banned political ads.

Some protesters also called on the government to break up Instagram and WhatsApp from Facebook and for Zuckerberg to step down. Speaking through a megaphone, one protester said he wanted Zuckerberg's name removed from San Francisco General Hospital. Another criticized the Facebook cofounder for meeting with President Donald Trump.
Facebook didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
Andrea Buff, a San Francisco resident, described herself as a fed-up Facebook user.
"I'm really worried about how Facebook is going to be used to disrupt the election and Mark Zuckerberg has made it really clear that he's not taking us seriously," she said. "His irresponsibility is threatening our democracy."

Since the 2016 election, Facebook has pulled down fake accounts and partnered with third-party fact-checkers, but critics say those efforts aren't enough. Criticism over Facebook's political ads policy heightened after the social network rejected a request from Joe Biden's presidential campaign to pull down an ad from Trump's re-election campaign that contained misinformation about the former vice president.

Monday's protest was organized by advocacy groups, including Global Exchange and Media Alliance, according to an event's page.

Daly City resident Kathleen Dobson held up a bright pink-and-green sign with googly eyes that said "Wake the Zuck Up! Zuck sold ads to Russians for rubles. Now (Donald J. Trump is Putin's female poodle)." Donning a black-and-white hat with the words "Make Racism Wrong Again," Dobson is a member of Refuse Facism, a group calling for the removal of the Trump administration. At one point during the protest, she stuck out her middle finger as she turned toward Zuckerberg's home.
Facebook should stop accepting ads with misinformation and pull down manipulated videos such as the one that made it seem House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was slurring her speech, Dobson said.
"It's ridiculous. I mean you could play games with other things but not politics," she said. "I don't think it's a laughing matter."

Apple warns coronavirus will hurt iPhone supply and its quarterly revenue

The coronavirus is taking a bigger toll on Apple's operations than it thought, and iPhone buyers around the world could see a shortage. 

The electronics giant on Monday warned that it likely will miss the quarterly revenue guidance it gave last month. It cited two reasons for the update: the coronavirus is hurting both demand from Chinese customers and production capabilities inside the country. China is one of Apple's biggest markets and the primary location where its devices like the iPhone are assembled. Because factories are coming online later, there will be iPhone shortages around the globe, Apple said. 

"Work is starting to resume around the country, but we are experiencing a slower return to normal conditions than we had anticipated," Apple said in a statement. "As a result, we do not expect to meet the revenue guidance we provided for the March quarter."

 The company said guidance it issued at the end of January was based on information it had at the time, coupled with its estimates for when the pace of work would return to normal after the extended Chinese New Year holiday. At that time, Apple had factored the possible supplier and retail traffic impact into its revenue guidance for the March quarter, which -- at $63 billion to $67 billion -- was a bigger range than what it normally provides. That range was higher than the $62.45 billion expected by analysts.

While Apple sells a lot of its gadgets in China, it's also tied to the country in another key way. Apple designs its phones in the US, but the devices -- like many other electronics -- are assembled in China. Many of its employees travel frequently between the region and Apple's Cupertino, California, headquarters, and the slowdown in production in China is causing a shortage of iPhones and other Apple devices across the globe.
"Worldwide iPhone supply will be temporarily constrained," Apple said Monday. "While our iPhone manufacturing partner sites are located outside the Hubei province -- and while all of these facilities have reopened -- they are ramping up more slowly than we had anticipated."

A pneumonia-like disease, the new coronavirus was discovered in the Chinese city of Wuhan in December. The strain has now infected nearly 72,000 people and claimed more than 1,700 lives. It's spread beyond China's borders to places like the US, Japan and Australia. Authorities around the world have begun limiting travel and enforcing quarantines to guard against the spread.
Last week, the GSMA canceled Mobile World Congress, the world's biggest mobile show that was slated to kick off in Barcelona later this month. The trade association said it's "impossible" to proceed after company after company pulled out of MWC and as the coronavirus continued to spread. Apple doesn't attend MWC, but all of its rivals do. Many were expected to unveil their newest 5G phones in Barcelona, and those devices could now see some delays.

GitHub CLI brings GitHub to the command line

GitHub has launched GitHub CLI, a new command-line interface that promises a more-seamless way to work with the code hosting platform. GitHub CLI is available immediately in a beta version.

Installable on Windows, Linux, and macOS, GitHub CLI can be used to access issues, and pull requests from the terminal, where developers already are working with git and their code. GitHub CLI offers the following benefits:

• Easy creation of pull requests and issues with no need to leave the command line.
• Fast status checks. You can see the status of open issues and pull requests and find out what awaits review.
• Easy navigation and filtering of issues and pull requests, which can be opened in the browser.

For pull requests, GitHub CLI automatically creates a fork when developers lack one, and pushes a branch and forges a pull request to get a change merged. Developers  later can view a snapshot of what happened since the pull request was created.

GitHub is seeking user feedback on GitHub CLI. To provide it, developers can create an issue in the GitHub CLI open source repository or offer feedback on a Google form. The company wants to know what commands users want and what is clunky or missing.

This story, "GitHub CLI brings GitHub to the command line" was originally published by InfoWorld.

Microsoft springs last-minute demand on buyers of Windows 7 after-expiration support

Microsoft this week threw a wrench into the workings of its long-touted Windows 7 post-retirement support, telling IT administrators that there was a brand new prerequisite that must be installed before they can download the patches they'd already paid for.
The last-minute requirement was titled "Extended Security Updates Licensing Preparation Package" and identified as KB4538483 in Microsoft's numerical format.
The licensing prep package can be downloaded manually from the Microsoft Update Catalog. It should also appear in WSUS (Windows Server Update Services), the patch management platform used by many commercial customers. It will not, however, be automatically delivered through the Windows Update service, which some very small businesses rely on to provide them necessary patches.
Cumbersome might be a word for the process of handling the new requirement. "So we have to deploy the license prep package, reboot, rescan for updates, install the new updates and reboot again?" asked someone identified only as Eric on Twitter. (He claimed he was an administrator for more than 15,000 Windows clients in Cincinnati.)
"That is correct," replied the Windows Update Twitter account.
Failing to deploy KB4538483 means that PCs running Windows 7 - and which had been prepped to receive the first post-retirement Extended Security Updates (ESU) released Tuesday, Feb. 11 - would not get the security updates.

Prior to this week, Microsoft had said nothing of the last-second requirement, although the company had been loquacious during the run up to ESU's debut this month. Microsoft had spelled out instructions for acquiring ESU and readying Windows 7 systems for the patches arrival. Even as KB4538483 hit the Update Catalog and Microsoft revised its step-by-steps - including here and here - notification of the new prerequisite was extremely low key.

[ Got a spare hour? Take this online course and learn how to install and configure Windows 10 with the options you need. ]

No wonder KB4538483 caught admins by surprise.
"For small businesses this was very disruptive," said Susan Bradley, a computer network and security consultant, the moderator of the PatchMangement.org mailing list and the contributor known as "The Patch Lady" to the AskWoody.com Windows tip site. Bradley had actively investigated how small businesses could acquire ESUs in the months before the program's launch.
"I had to personally assist several of my clients in purchasing these keys, thought they were all set and had to reach out to them, remote into their computers and install this last minute update knowing that they wouldn't know how to get this patch, nor exactly how to install it since they normally do not go to the Microsoft catalog site," she said.
Bradley, like anyone outside Microsoft, had no idea why the Redmond, Wash. company sprung the surprise on ESU customers. "It didn't act like a normal servicing patch," she observed. After investigating further, Bradley speculated that KB4538483 was "licensing related."
Sort of.

Computerworld asked Microsoft to explain KB4538483, posing questions including, "Why was KB4538483 suddenly necessary?" and "Did Microsoft overlook something prior?"
"The Extended Security Updates (ESU) License Preparation Packages (KB 4538483 & KB4538484) address activation experience requirements identified during our testing and evaluation with a large population of preview customers," Microsoft said, answering-and-not-answering the queries, a common occurrence. "We introduced the ESU License Preparation Packages at launch on February 11, 2020, to provide a consistent user experience going forward, minimum number of package installations and minimize overall customer disruption."
More disruption now so there would be less disruption later? Okay.
"The idea behind paid-for security patches is to make it easier to be patched while you are still running Windows 7, not make it harder to get updates," Bradley told Woody Leonard, a columnist for Computerworld and the head of AskWoody.com.

This story, "Microsoft springs last-minute demand on buyers of Windows 7 after-expiration support" was originally published by Computerworld.