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Facebook Announced Shorter, Clearer & Simpler Privacy Policy

November 15, 2014 By Rebecca McGhee Leave a Comment

Facebook — a renowned social-networking site with 1.3 billion users globally, has recently updated its privacy policy, making it shorter, clearer and simpler to see. However, the update also makes way for a larger payments push along with the more targeted advertisements.

Lots of people complained about the Facebook’s long Policy Agreement and also about the difficulty of understanding it. After facing huge criticism, FB finally decided to update the policy document by cutting 70% of its length.

Facebook introduced the new Privacy Policy on Thursday. It’s an interactive guide that helps users to better understand how Facebook collects and uses their data. In addition, you can read frequently asked questions and learn how to control who sees your posts and info.

Facebook’s Chief Privacy Officer, Erin Egan stated in a blog post Thursday, “Facebook is suggesting updates to the terms to use, data and cookie policy to mirror additional features, while attempting to more clearly let you know how its services work.”

Facebook is upgrading its guidelines to describe the way it will get location information, with respect to the features someone uses. “For instance, later on, if you choose to share where you are, you may see menus from restaurants nearby or updates from buddies in the region,” Egan added.

“Facebook is also experimenting with the way people could make purchases. Additionally, to the buy button that Facebook is testing in certain regions to permit individuals to buy things without departing the platform, it’s also focusing on new methods to make transactions easier and secure,” Egan said.

In addition, Facebook is showing curiosity about understanding battery and signal strength of users’ devices “to make certain our applications work nicely.” Facebook may also request permission to make use of phone location “to offer optional features like check-ins or adding where you are to posts,” Egan stated.

Though the social network stated it would continuously enhance the way it serves advertisements in line with the applications and sites its customers use, choosing from targeted advertisements can get simpler.

Facebook already provides an opt-out for targeted advertisements, however the option presently doesn’t work across browsers and products. This elevated hackles in Germany, where consumer organizations have called the practice absurd.

“When you know us you shouldn’t see these kinds of advertisements, your choice instantly is applicable to each device you use to access Facebook, adding the ad preferences tool is going to be provided in additional countries, initiating with Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, and the U.K,” Egan added.

As part of the overhaul, Facebook introduced “Privacy Basics”, a tool that provides customers’ tips along with a how-to steer to take control of their profiles, in addition to a shorter and clearer privacy policy. The tool has information about untagging, unfriending, and blocking, and how to choose an audience for posts.

Facebook has planned to set the final updates on the 20th of November. Until then, users have to submit comments and suggestions.

Facebook’s New Privacy Policy

November 13, 2014 By Jason Leathers Leave a Comment

According to the recent reports revealed, Facebook has updated its privacy policy, which makes it shorter, clearer and simpler to see. However the update also makes way for a larger payments push along with the more targeted advertisements.

Egan further stated that, “Facebook is also experimenting with the way people could make purchases. Additionally, to the buy button that Facebook is testing in certain regions to permit individuals to buy things without departing the platform, it’s also focusing on new methods to make transactions easier and secure.”

Additionally, Facebook is showing curiosity about understanding battery and signal strength of users’ devices “to make certain our applications work nicely.” Facebook may also request permission to make use of phone location “to offer optional features like check-ins or adding where you are to posts,” Egan stated.

Though the social network is promising changes. “When you know us you shouldn’t see these kinds of advertisements, your choice instantly is applicable to each device you use to access Facebook,” Egan stated, adding the ad preferences tool is going to be provided in additional countries, initiating with Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, and the U.K.

We also reassured folks who might worried about exactly what the updates mean for which type of data Facebook shares to marketers, Egan stated. “Nothing is altering with these updates-we help marketers each folks with relevant advertisements without letting them know who you are.”

Amazon Launches Cloud Region In Germany

October 23, 2014 By Brian Galloway Leave a Comment

Jassy stated in his virtual briefing from Munich, “In Germany, we have thousands of customers of AWS who have been using AWS from other regions. And lots of customers have asked us to have a region here in Germany as they’d like to move to AWS but they feel they can’t do so until there is infrastructure in Germany.”

Fears regarding putting data in the cloud have heaped on since the Edward Snowden, former national security contractor’s revelations surfaced about the US government probing on consumers and businesses. Because of these concerns, there seems a reluctance by some international companies to put data in US data carriers and a wish for some US companies to store data outside the country.

Jassy addressed these concerns in his briefing by stating AWS significantly inspects any government demand for customer data and fervently fights what it believes to be straining government requests. Let’s suppose, if Amazon is required to hand over any customer data because of a subpoena, AWS informs the customer. There is just one way that the customer can protect their data is by encrypting it and holding the keys themselves, through a service Amazon calls Cloud Hardware Security Module (HSM), he added.

While, talking about the AWS regions, he said that it’s the company’s 11th region in Germany and the 2nd in Europe.

Moreover, besides privacy considerations, another reason for opening the German region is to enable European customers to spread workloads across regions. We are currently experiencing rapid growth in Europe that the New region will support, Jassy said.

The company’s EC2 virtual machines prices in the Frankurt region begin at $0.015 per hour, which is slightly higher than the $0.013 price for US-East VMs, but still less than the California ($0.017), Asia/Pacific (Tokyo, Singapore and Sydney are $0.020) and Sao Paulo ($0.027) regions. AWS has other regions in Oregon, Ireland, Beijing and a GovCloud region for government workloads.

When it comes to an AWS region, it comprises of multiple data centers, which are called as Availability Zones. The Frankfurt region has two AZs that run on carbon-neutral power.

Certainly, Amazon is not the first cloud provider with German data centers, with IBM and Fujitsu being among the others that do.

This is actually the second major news announcement from AWS this week. Earlier, the company announced AWS Directory Service that enables customers to store their authentication directories in Amazon’s cloud.

Scientists Sequenced A 45000-Year-Old Man’s Genome

October 23, 2014 By Rebecca McGhee Leave a Comment

The DNA of a 45000 year old bone of a Siberian man has been recently examined by the researchers to find out when human and Neanderthals first interbred. On record, this is an oldest genome sequence of Homo sapiens exposing a mysterious population that may once have spanned northern Asia. The study is published in the Nature journal.

The oldest human genome also revealed that the closest extinct relatives of the modern humans were the Neanderthals who lived in Europe and Asia and vanished around 40,000 years ago. The Neanderthals interbred with ancestors of modern humans when modern humans began spreading out of Africa and today 1.5 to 2.1 percent of the DNA of anyone living outside Africa is Neanderthal in origin, study reveals.

“It remains vague when interbreeding between Neanderthals and modern humans happened. But it probably ranged between 37000 to 86000 years ago,” researchers stated.

The researchers examined the bone (human left femur), discovered by Nikolai Peristov, an artist and mammoth ivory collector on the left bank of the river Irtysh near the settlement of Ust’-Ishim in western Siberia in 2008. The age of the man’s bone to be is about 45,000 years old, researchers stated.

Janet Kelso, co-author of the study and a computational biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, told Live Science, “This is the earliest directly dated modern human outside of Africa and the Middle East, and the oldest modern human [genome] to have been sequenced.”

Formerly, the researchers had proposed modern humans firstly populated Asia by traveling towards southern, coastal route that gave rise to the present-day people of Oceania, while a later, more northern migration, gave rise to mainland Asians. Kelson stated, “the researchers’ evidence for the modern human presence in Siberia 45,000 years ago specifies that the early modern humans were not just migrated to Eurasia through a southern route as previously suggested.”

The researchers further examined the carbon and nitrogen isotopes present in the man’s bone proposes that he ate C3 plants, which rule cooler, wetter, cloudier regions such as garlic, eggplants, pears, beans and wheat as well as animals that also dined on C3 plants. Though, the study analysis reveals that he might have eaten aquatic foods like fresh water fish.

The DNA analysis of mans’s bone revealed that the he was closely related to present-day Asians and to early Europeans. “From this we conclude that the population to which the Ust’-Ishim individual belonged diverged from the ancestors of present-day Europeans and Asians before, or at around the same time as, these groups diverged from one another,” Kelso said.

The researchers believed that 45,000 years old man carried a similar level of Neanderthal ancestry as present-day Eurasians and the Neanderthal genes moved into the ancestors of this man 7,000 to 13,000 years before he lived.

The results of the study propose that modern humans and Neanderthals interbred around 50,000 to 60,000 years ago, “which is close to the time of the major expansion of modern humans out of Africa and the Middle East,” Kelso added.

Hectic Days: A Protest Spotlighting on Climate Change

September 19, 2014 By Brian Galloway Leave a Comment

In the Bushwick part of Brooklyn, there is a 3-story storehouse having hundreds of people who are working hard in order to go round the People’s Climate March intended to happen this Sunday into a visual manifestation.

Certainly, the Hurricane Sandy sufferers from the Rockaways are working on a 3- foot inflatable life preserver with several other artists along with the migrant artists building a papier-mâché tree entrenched with hatchets. In another place, there are spiritual chiefs, who were busy in constructing an ark along with some researchers who were building a chalk-board filled with computations regarding carbon.

According to the organizers, this protest seems to be one of the largest protests concerning climate change going to happen in the entire history of United States which ultimately has changed the New York City to a spot of scheduling and creativeness, sketching graying neighboring campaigners together with the juvenile artists coming as far as from Germany.

Rachel Schragis, an artist and campaigner, who is basically belonged from Brooklyn, is organizing the making of hovers, posters and symbols stated that, “It is the last munch the creation of 6-months of work to create the People’s Protest a huge hit, gorgeous appearance of the climate progress.”

This protest is actually planned by dozens of ecological, labor and socials justice societies will move through Midtown Manhattan all along a 2 mile road permitted by the city’s Police Department in the preceding month. The protest will initiate at Columbus Circle at around 11:30 am and after that it travels towards eastern side beside 59^th St, south on Avenue of the Americas and west on 42^nd St, ending at 11^th Avenue and West 34^th St.

In contrast to the nuclear disarmament protest held back in 1982, which drew almost 5 million people to the Central Park, this protest will fully relying on the protesters to televise a message of irritation and annoyance at what planners explain it as a action lacked by American and world leaders.

It has been decided that after a moment of silence at 1 pm, all the protestors are allowed to use devices such as cell phones, alarms, and whistle in order to produce as much noise as possible. The protest is helped by the almost 20 marching bands along with the ringing of church bells crossways the city.

Bill McKibben, co-founder of the group 350.org stated that, “We also play the intruder alarm on people who are pinching the future.” He is serving to manage the protest plus the author of numerous books on climate change, particularly “The End of Nature,” printed 25-years back.

“It’s not like that things are not improving, though they getting terribly poorer. In contrast to other problems we are facing, this one’s time up. If we don’t get it right almost immediately, we will never get it right.” Mr. McKibben told in a telephonic interview scheduled on Wednesday.

According to the organizers, there is no way to forecast how many people will come out at the protest, though 1400 ‘partner firms’ are ready to join up, including various small groups to international alliances. Additionally, students have activated protestors with more than 300 college campuses, and more than 2,700 climate events in 158 countries are intended to agree with the New York protest, as well as rallies in Delhi, Jakarta, London, Melbourne and Rio de Janeiro.

To bring campaigners in New York from remote areas like Kansas and Minnesota almost 496 buses are expected by organizers.

Mr. McKibben says that the most functional gasoline gallon which was ever used by people is the one which take them to the protest rally.

The sunniest weather of high temperature up to 81 degree centigrade will persuade a larger audience forecasters’ said.

In Feb. 2013 near Washington round about 40,000 protestors evicted to claim an action on climate changes and to change the controversial XL pipeline.

The central park of west-north of Columbus is closed by police, and before the start of march planners asked protestors to arrive from West 65th to West 86th road.

Leslie Cagan has met the police to sort out the issues of Sunday march. He is a person who basically organizes the expression of nuclear disarmament in 1982. He said that central park west region can seize a lot of people estimated from 80,000 to 100,000.

Organizers request the protestors only to go to different areas which are decided along the central park west.

E.g. different families, students and youth can assemble from north of 65 street below rubric and all the furniture is provided by organizers for this protest.

Organizers have arranged for telephone banks, and they also cover all subways with pamphlets and also give news in different news channels.

Fifty two minutes documentary has also been released on TV channels which are based on all disturbances which they faced during planning the march. This film was released on 7^th September, which consist of pre march relies and meetings which held on this issue which also includes the education on climate changes and sheathing efforts to stop it.

Organizers said that they select Sunday for this protest because there comes a climate peak on Tuesday in United Nations. Delegates of world predicted to have very high-level debates on changing climate.

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