by admin | May 25, 2021 | Corporate, Corporate Buzz, Markets, Technology
San Francisco : After several tech giants, including Google and Facebook, supported Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) plan to roll back Obama-era net neutrality rules, Apple called on the US communications regulatory agency to keep “strong, enforceable open internet protections”.
“An open internet ensures that hundreds of millions of consumers get the experience they want, over the broadband connections they choose, to use the devices they love, which have become an integral part of their lives,” Cynthia Hogan, Apple’s Vice President of Public Policy, said in a letter to the agency.
The FCC, led by its Chairman Ajit Pai, voted in May to start the formal process of unwinding the 2015 rules. Those rules treat regulation of internet more like that of a public utility such as water or electricity and prohibit broadband providers such as Verizon and Comcast from creating a tiered system of access, the Guardian reported on Wednesday.
Under the current net neutrality rules, it is illegal for companies to offer a high-speed lane to corporations able to pay more or to effectively slow a rival service.
The FCC’s proposal asks whether the agency should eliminate the rule banning Internet service providers from creating fast lanes (or slow lanes) that could favour one service over another, which critics say could allow them to pick winners and losers online.
Pai has said the regulations stifle corporate innovation and investment and are not necessary to guaranteeing an “open internet”.
However, Apple argued that paid fast lines should not replace “content-neutral transmission of internet traffic,”.
The tech giant has also called for increased competition and transparency in the broadband market.
“We work hard to build great products, and what consumers do with those tools is up to them – not Apple, and not broadband providers. Apple therefore believes that the Federal Communications Commission should retain strong, enforceable open internet protections,” the letter said.
Apple said the current rules reflect open internet principles and that those principles “should form the foundation of any net neutrality framework going forward”.
“Simply put, the internet is too important to consumers and too essential to innovation to be left unprotected and uncertain,” the company said in the letter.
Cloud major Oracle had voiced support for Pai’s plan to roll back its net neutrality rules.
Oracle wrote a letter to the FCC and played up its “perspective as a Silicon Valley technology company”, hammering the debate over the rules as a “highly political hyperbolic battle”, that is “removed from technical, economic, and consumer reality”.
Other companies — like AT&T and Verizon — that support Pai’s plan have made an argument that the rules stifled investment in the telecommunications sector, specifically in broadband infrastructure.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Markets, Networking, Online Marketing, Social Media, Technology
San Francisco : With an aim to go toe-to-toe with Amazon’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) assistant Alexa, Google has announced that it would put its “Assistant” on partner speakers, appliances and connected cameras.
Citing the announcement made at the Internationale Funkausstellung (IFA) industry show that kicked-off in Berlin on Wednesday, Tech Crunch reported that the move is likely to be good for both the voice-powered assistant market as well as for Google’s ability to use its service to collect useful data which it can then use to work on its advertising and marketing products.
“The more places ‘Assistant’ appears, the more likely it is that people will engage with the voice companion and that’s not territory Google wants to cede to someone like Amazon,” the report said.
The devices that would get “Assistant” include the Anker Zolo Mojo, a small cylinder speaker that’s like a third-party Google Home, which will go on sale in late October.
Two other smart speakers powered by “Assistant” are Panasonic GA10 and the TicHome Mini.
Google is also now making it possible to use “Assistant” to check on the state of your laundry or dishes, using an integration with LG’s line of home appliances.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Markets, Technology
San Francisco : In a bid to bring the augmented reality (AR) experience closer to Android users, Google has released a new software development kit (SDK) called ARCore.
The platform, which is now available for developers to experiment with, will render augmented reality capabilities to existing and future Android phones, Google said in a statement late on Tuesday.
The company built on the fundamental technologies used in Tango, another AR platform by Google, but ARCore is scalable across the Android ecosystem as it doesn’t require any additional hardware.
The new AR platform has been rolled out to Google Pixel and Samsung S8 which run on Android 7.0 Nougat and above.
Google is working with manufacturers like Samsung, Huawei, LG, ASUS and other major smartphone makers for quality and performance checks.
ARCore, which works with ‘Java/OpenGL’, ‘Unity’ and ‘Unreal’ technologies mainly focuses on three features — motion tracking, environmental understanding and light estimation.
The tech giant has also built ‘Blocks’ and ‘Tilt Brush’ applications for creation of 3D content for use in AR apps.
Last month, Apple had unveiled its ARKit platform focussing on augmented reality applications at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference, to allow developers to build apps that could place virtual content on top of real-world scenes.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Markets, Technology, World
Jakarta : After a successful run in India, Google has brought its public Wi-Fi programme ‘Google Station’ to Indonesia that will help improve access to Internet at railway stations and other locations.
“We are partnering with CBN and Fiberstar to bring high-speed public Wi-Fi to hundreds of locations across Indonesia,” Google said in a blog post on Friday.
“Soon, we will be bringing Google Station to even more places around the world. We are also continuing our work to expand Google Station across India,” it added.
Google, in collaboration with Railtel, has rolled out free Wi-Fi service at several railway stations in India, offering high-speed internet to millions of people.
Google launched its first free WiFi services at Mumbai Central station in January 2016.
The company would continue to deploy high speed Wi-Fi in 300 more stations across the country.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Markets, Media, Networking, Technology, World
San Francisco : Violence that erupted at a white supremacist rally in Virginia may have shocked many but hate crime is actually rampant in the US, Google’s new website using artificial intelligence (AI) to track hate crime has revealed.
Google has launched “The Documenting Hate News Index” in partnership with its News Lab and the data visualisation studio Pitch Interactive, collecting news reports on hate incidents and makes them searchable by name, topic and date, Fortune reported.
According to the journalism non-profit ProPublica, incidents of hate are “actually all too common in the US”.
“More than just a list, the site allows hate-related stories to be browsed by date, and shows fluctuations in overall reports of hate crimes over time,” the report noted.
While violence in Charlottesville captured headlines, media turned a blind eye to the crimes that included two fatalities in an anti-Muslim attack in Portland in May.
The incident of a teacher ripping off a young student’s hijab or the killing of a young black Army Lieutenant by a white supremacist also missed media attention.
The AI-based Google website uses machine learning to understand both the content of news reports about hate crimes and subtler things like intent and sentiment.
“That means it can detect stories about events suggestive of hate crime, bias or abuse and track the frequency of particular names, places, and more general keywords like ‘businessman’ and ‘nationalists’,” the report added.
Interestingly, “Donald Trump” is the top keyword associated with incidents of hate.
According to ProPublica, there is no reliable national database of hate crimes available. This initiative by Google, thus, remains of significant importance.
—IANS
