Today’s Tech Digest: Twitter’s record revenues, Instagram’s stricter penalties
Twitter has posted record revenues for the last quarter of 2020, capping off what chief executive Jack Dorsey said was “an extraordinary year” for the platform. The social messaging platform said revenue grew 28% to $1.29bn (£930m) compared to the last quarter of 2019. See full story here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-55993097
Instagram is to impose stricter penalties, including the removal of accounts, to prevent abusive messages on its platform, following recent racist abuse directed at footballers including Manchester United’s Axel Tuanzebe and Chelsea’s Antonio Rudiger and Reece James. The government has said it will change the law to make social media companies more accountable for malicious content. Full story here: https://www.skysports.com/football/news/11095/12214128/instagram-announces-tougher-sanctions-on-abusive-messages-after-racist-abuse-directed-at-footballers
The UAE has put its Al-Amal (‘Hope’) spacecraft into orbit around Mars ahead of China’s and NASA’s arrivals. The United Arab Emirates is now only the fifth country, and the first Arab country, to successfully arrive at Mars. Hope spent over 200 days travelling from Earth to the red planet and while it won’t deliver a rover on the planet’s surface it’s set to take on some important science by studying the planet’s atmosphere, weather and seasons. You can watch Hope enter Mars’ orbit in this YouTube video below.
Cloud computing giant Salesforce has declared “The 9 to 5 workday is dead”. Instead, the company plans to offer more employee flexibility once the pandemic is over, only requiring a small workforce to come into the office 4-5 days per week. See https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2021/02/10/9-to-5-workday-dead-says-salesforce-live-updates/
The company behind troubled gaming blockbuster Cyberpunk 2077 was hit by a ransomware attack last night. In a post on its Twitter feed on Tuesday, Polish developers CD Projekt shared the ransom note left by the hackers, who claimed to have copied the source code for a number of the studio’s biggest games including Cyberpunk and The Witcher 3, as well as encrypted the servers themselves. See here for full story: https://www.theguardian.com/games/2021/feb/09/makers-of-cyberpunk-2077-game-hit-by-ransomware-hack
‘Romance fraud’ – scamming someone out of money by pretending to want a relationship – has been on the rise during lockdown. According to UK Finance, there was a 20% increase in bank transfer fraud linked to romance scams in 2020 with UK’s Action Fraud claiming £68m lost to such scams during the year. See full story here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-55997611
