Indian Army asks personnel to delete 89 apps including Facebook, PUBG, Zoom

Snapchat, Tinder, OkCupid, UC Browserare among apps that should be removed, says the force.

Indian Army has asked its personnel to delete 89 apps from their smartphones including Facebook, TikTok, Tinder, PUBG, and Instagram to plug leakage of information, said Indian Army sources.

Snapchat, Tinder, OkCupid, UC Browser, Bumble, ShareIt, Xender, Helo, CamScanner, Club Factory etc are among those 89 apps.

This came days after the Government banned 59 apps, mostly Chinese including TikTok, UC News, and CamScanner amid the standoff with China.

Some of the 89 apps are among those which the Centre has already banned stating "they are engaged in activities which are prejudicial to sovereignty and integrity of India, defence of India, the security of the state and public order".

The list of apps the Indian army personnel have reportedly been asked to delete from their smartphones is divided into numerous categories like messaging apps - (We Chat, Helo, Share Chat, Viber, IMO, Hike and others), video hosting (Tik Tok, Likee, Samosa, Kwali, and others), contents sharing (ShareIt, Xender, Zapya, and others), web browsers (UC Browser and UC Browser Mini), video and live streaming (Zoom, LiveMe, Vmate, Uplive and others), utility apps (CamScanner, Beauty Plus, and True Caller), gaming apps (PUBG, Clash of Kings and others), eCommerce apps (Club Factory, AliExpress, Chinabrands, and others), dating apps (Tinder, OkCupid, Badoo, Bumble, Happn, Couch Surfing, and others), news apps (News Dog and Daily Hunt), lifestyle apps (POPXO), music apps (Hungama and Songs.pk) and blogging/microblogging apps (Tumblr, Reddit, and others).

From Facebook to Twitter: How social media platforms handle political ads

The following is how social media platforms have decided to handle false or misleading claims in political ads.

Technology News : Online platforms including Facebook and Alphabet Inc's Google face growing pressure to stop carrying political ads that contain false or misleading claims ahead of the US presidential election.

In the United States, the Communications Act prevents broadcast stations from rejecting or censoring ads from candidates for federal office once they have accepted advertising for that political race, although this does not apply to cable networks like CNN, or to social media sites, where leading presidential candidates are spending millions to target voters in the run-up to the November 2020 election.

The following is how social media platforms have decided to handle false or misleading claims in political ads:

Facebook

Facebook exempts politicians from its third-party fact-checking program, allowing them to run ads with false claims.

The policy has been attacked by regulators and lawmakers who say it could spread misinformation and cause voter suppression. Critics including Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren have also run intentionally false Facebook ads to highlight the issue.

Facebook's Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg has defended the company's stance, arguing that it does not want to stifle political speech, but he also said the company was considering ways to refine the policy.

Facebook does fact-check content from political groups. The company also says it fact-checks politicians if they share previously debunked content and does not allow this content in ads.

The company recently said it is making some changes to its approach to political ads, including allowing users to turn off certain ad-targeting tools. In addition, it will also make more ad audience data publicly available.

The expanded ad audience data features will be rolled out in the first quarter of this year and Facebook plans to deploy the political ads control starting in the United States early this summer, eventually expanding this preference to more locations.

Another change will be to allow users to choose to stop seeing ads based on an advertiser's "Custom Audience" and that will apply to all types of advertising, not only political ads.

Why boys and girls use tech differently? Here's the likely reason

Emerging research indicates that brain differences between males and females help account for the split.

Business Standard : Many parents of both boys and girls have witnessed striking differences in the way their kids use technology, with their sons generally gravitating to videogames and their daughters often spending more of their screen time scrolling through social media.

Emerging research indicates that brain differences between males and females help account for the split.

“It is entirely plausible from a neurological perspective that there’s an underlying biological component to this difference people are seeing,” said Larry Cahill, a professor of neurobiology and behavior at the University of California, Irvine, who has spent two decades researching gender differences in the brain.

In this column I’ve chronicled the aggression some boys exhibit when they have to shut off videogames and transition to other activities, as well as the problems some young men face when they go to college and have to juggle game time and school work without mom and dad’s help.

That led some readers to question why girls don’t appear to be having these problems. Of course, girls have issues of their own, such as smuggling “burner” phones to keep up with forbidden social media accounts. It’s just that when it comes to videogames, most girls seem to have a better handle on when to stop.

According to a 2017 survey conducted by Pew Research Center, 41 per cent of teenage boys said they spend too much time playing videogames while only 11 per cent of girls said they do.

Marc Potenza, a psychiatry professor at Yale University, teamed up with researchers at universities in China to find out why. Using functional MRIs, which measure brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow, the team studied neural responses in young male and female gamers, particularly in the parts of the brain associated with reward processing and craving—a motivating factor in addiction. When the men and women were shown photos of people playing videogames, those parts of the men’s brains showed higher levels of activation than those parts of the women’s brains.

Brain regions that have been implicated in drug-addiction studies also were shown to be more highly activated in the men after gaming. The researchers said the results suggest men could be more biologically prone than women to developing internet gaming disorder.

Why Zuckerberg's Facebook needs Instagram founders now more than ever

Kevin Systrom, a founder of Instagram, wasn't a 'team player.' That was exactly what the company needed.

Business Standard : This week, Facebook lost an executive who, in a better and different world, might one day have taken the helm of the social networking giant.

On Monday, Kevin Systrom, as well as his longtime partner, Mike Krieger, the founders of Instagram, quit Facebook. While seemingly out of the blue, it was a long time coming. The reason? Their unhappiness over increasingly aggressive meddling by Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, about how Instagram was run.

ALSO READ: After Whatsapp, Instagram founders quit amid tensions with Zuckerberg

This might seem like business as usual in Silicon Valley. Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion in 2012, when it was a wee thing, and helped it surpass a billion users. Fighting over control of tech companies is commonplace, and executive shuffles happen all the time. At Facebook alone in the last two years, the founders of WhatsApp, the messaging product, left amid disagreements over the placement of advertising. So too much of the team that founded the Oculus, Facebook’s virtual reality project, as well as a conga line of other founders of start-ups the social media giant has swallowed whole. They all essentially took the money and ran (usually to luxury yachts in Fiji).

But what happened with the Instagram guys is different. A pair of extraordinarily talented entrepreneurs — who multiple sources said very much wanted to stay at Facebook, who have a gift for making great products and whose jewel-in-the-crown unit was driving the future of the entire Facebook ecosystem — had worked hard to make their creation a huge success and had remained at the company for six years already. This is not typical in tech, which is a credit to Facebook.

But then they became so irked by their boss that they up and left without any warning.

“In a perfect world, they wanted to continue to build and were not bored at all,” said one person with knowledge of the situation. “But they were frustrated by an inability to take it to the next level.”

Frustrated indeed. Mr. Systrom returned on Monday from a parental leave and his first act was to quit. Think about that. While some inside Facebook are trying to spin the narrative that he’d spent his time away deep in contemplation and simply decided that six years was enough, that’s not the true motivation.

Instead, many sources say, a series of changes imposed from above made it clear to Mr.