Archives -- IRAI Titbits

Archives -- IRAI Titbits

IRAI Titbits -- 200801
https://infoforuse.blogspot.com/2020/08/irai-titbits-200801.html

IRAI Titbits-- 200711
https://infoforuse.blogspot.com/2020/08/irai-titbits-200711.html

IRAI Titbits -- 200701
https://infoforuse.blogspot.com/2020/08/irai-titbits-200701.html

IRAI Titbits -- 200701

IRAI Titbits -- 200701

IIT Madras, India’s top technical institute offers the world’s first online BSc Degree program in Programming and Data Science. More info at  https://www.onlinedegree.iitm.ac.in/

According to  the recent survey by Kaspersky, parents in the Asia Pacific region are more worried about their kids or family members watching over their online activities than hackers and give more time in hiding their private data from partners than cybercriminals. Surprisingly,  cybercriminals are their least concern with only 3.1 per cent.

Infraud was founded in Ukraine in 2010 and become a premier destination on the web for purchasing goods with counterfeit or stolen credit card information, according to US authorities, touted itself with the slogan "In Fraud We Trust."

Swiggy’s annual report on the country’s food ordering habits revealed that Indians ordered an average of 95 biryanis per minute, or 1.6 biryanis per second, in 2019. According to the startup Biryani By Kilo (BBK),  the biryani market in India is estimated to be approximately Rs 1,500 crore in the organised sector, and Rs 15,000 crore in the unorganised sector.

Indian office workers estimate that they waste an average of 53 minutes a day due to outdated and inefficient technology, according to the Salesforce APAC Employee Engagement report

According to Nasscom, India  has 1,300 captive centres of American and other multinational companies and they employ over 10 lakh workers

The Halol, Gujarat-based startup manufactures nanofiber-based masks called 4S SHIELD, and covers the four sensory organs of the body – eyes, nose, ears, and mouth.

SoftBank was one of Alibaba's earliest backers, making a $20 million investment in the company two decades ago that was worth $60 billion by 2014.

Amazon is launching a new service called Honeycode that enables AWS customers to build apps for their business without any coding experience.

Facebook will now warn users if they're sharing an old news story with a pop-up, TechCrunch reports. The pop-up will appear if you try to share a story older than 90 days.

The AR market is predicted to be worth $60.55 billion USD by 2023, and it's likely to be led by some of the biggest names in tech: Google, Samsung, HTC, and Microsoft. 

As per latest Top 500 report, The fastest supercomputer in the world is Fugaku, which is installed at RIKEN Center for Computational Science in Kobe, Japan. Fugaku is powered by Fujitsu’s 48-core A64FX SoC, the first number one system on the list to be powered by ARM processors. Fugaku gave a High Performance Linpack result of 415.5 petaflops, which is 2.8 times faster than Summit (148.8 petaflops) -- the second fastest supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee

China dominates the TOP500 with 226 supercomputers. US is second with 114 systems and Japan is third with 30.

IRAI Titbits Archives at

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IRAI Titbits -- 200711

IRAI Titbits -- 200711

TCS to hire 40,000 freshers like last year. Further, plans to double its US campus hires to nearly 2,000 this fiscal, as part of an effort to reduce dependence on H-1B and L-1 work visas, which are becoming increasingly difficult to get.

The Supreme Court on 10th Jul 2020,  agreed in principle that serving notices and summons to people, integral to judicial processes, through instant messaging services like WhatsApp and Telegram, in addition to emails, would be legally valid.

Mastercard and Visa may be challenged by a new European payment system referred to as the Pan European Payment System Initiative (PEPSI), which will process card payments in addition to making fund transfers and mobile payments without using Mastercard's or Visa's network  to help banks generate more revenue from payments

The first online end-semester examination at Central University of Punjab (CUP), Bhatinda came to a halt after hackers hacked into the question banks on Wednesday, 8th Jul. The university and faculty members received a mail from ‘ProtonMail’, with a link, clicking which gives access to all the questions of the ongoing exams which started on Tuesday, 7th Jul.

Mewat, Bharatpur and Mathura, which form the tri-junction of Haryana, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, have emerged as cyber fraud's new ‘Jamtara’ — the sleepy district of Jharkhand often known as the country’s phishing capital and home to many scamsters involved in hacking.

According to research firm IDC, the India smart wearables market clocked 80.6% year-over-year (y-o-y) growth to 4.2 million unit shipments in the March 2020 quarter of which, watches accounted a y-o-y growth of 43.3% with about 2,09,400 watches being shipped in the country.

Harvard University and MIT have announced to sue the Department of Homeland Security and the federal immigration agency on new guidelines barring foreign students from remaining in America if their universities switched to online-only classes in the Fall.

Truecaller claims it is an app of Swedish origin and provides service for over 170 million people in India, identifying and blocking hundreds of millions of spam calls and SMS every single day.

Currently, over 95% of POS (Point of Sales) terminals  used in India are imported from China. The POS market is dominated by three global manufacturers – US-based Verifone, France-based Ingenico and Hong Kong-based Pax Technologies with all  having manufacturing bases in China. 

There is  surprisingly, no Made in India POS device while 1.5 million new POS terminals were deployed in India last year and sales of new devices is expected to grow 10-15% whose market size is in the range of 1500-1800 crores per annum.

A company aiming to set up a POS manufacturing unit in India will need certifications from EMV card networks, PCI-DSS and ISO certifications, which generally take 10-12 months.

Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), in Abu Dhabi, is said to be  the world’s first graduate-level, research-based artificial intelligence university.

The Department of Information Technology and Electronics, Govt. of West Bengal takes this opportunity to announce the release of beta version of SelfScan, an android-based mobile scanning app for easy scanning, sharing, storing of documents, anytime, anywhere across the globe. The bilingual website for the SelfScan app can be accessed at https://selfscan.nltr.org

Karnataka allows flexible hiring across industry. Employment under the fixed term workmen (FTW) category allows flexibility to the industry to hire and fire easily, and is seen as more flexible than the contract system.

JioMeet, which was launched on 2nd jul 2020 , supports HD audio and video call quality with up to 100 participants  for unlimited duration and offers features like screen sharing, meeting schedule features, and more.

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IRAI Titbits -- 200801

IRAI Titbits -- 200801

Rural India with 227m Internet users over takes Urban india having 205m Internet users

The FCC has unanimously approved Amazon’s Project Kuiper, giving the tech giant the go-ahead to deploy and operate a constellation of 3,236 satellites. The company plans to invest over $10 billion on the project

India still has 300 million mobile subscribers trapped in the 2G era, their feature phones keep them excluded even from the basic usage of the internet at a time when both India and the rest of the world are standing at the doorsteps of 5G telephony. 

The decks have been cleared for the formation of three capital cities for Andhra Pradesh – the executive capital at Visakhapatnam, the legislative capital at Amaravati and the judicial capital at Kurnool.

China recently has announced its fully operational home-made Beidou navigation satellite system is ready to provide global services, joining an elite group providing space-based systems comprising the US’s GPS, Russia’s GLONASS and the European Union’s Galileo. Over 300,000 scientists, engineers and technicians from more than 400 domestic institutes, universities and enterprises have been involved in Beidou’s development since the 1990s

IRNSS is an independent regional navigation satellite system being developed by India. It is designed to provide accurate position information service to users in India as well as the region extending up to 1500 km from its boundary, which is its primary service area

The quantum of COVID-19 biomedical waste generated in the national capital has increased from 25 tonnes per day in May to 349 tonnes per day in July, the Environment and Pollution (Prevention and Control) Authority has said in a report submitted to the Supreme Courtt

In June 2020, France and Germany kicked off the GAIA-X cloud project, a non-profit foundation designed to re-establish European control over US and Chinese cloud giants.

MLPerf, the consortium of over 70 companies and academic institutions behind the MLPerf suite for AI performance benchmarking consists of object detection, image classification, natural language processing, machine translation,  recommendation & reinforcement learning benchmarks.

Just as in Industry 4.0 as the fourth industrial revolution, Society 5.0 is also depicted as an evolution in five societal stages in the position paper of Keidanren: 1) the hunting society, 2) the agrarian society, 3) the industrial society, 4) the information society, and, 5) the super-smart society a.k.a. Society 5.0.

Visitor Location Register (VLR), a key metric reflecting the number of active subscribers on a mobile network, indicated that 95.26% of the users were active for Airtel, 88.85% for VIL and 78.75% for Jio.

Hackers have compromised student and alumni data at least eight universities in the UK and Canada including University of York, University College, Oxford, University of Leeds and University of London via a massive attack on a US-based Blackbaud, software provider for education administration, fundraising, and financial management.

The Andean condor can fly 100 miles without flapping its wings, according to recent research published in PNAS. The bird's 10-foot wingspan appears to help it catch bursts of rising air, allowing it to only flap its wings for about 1% of flight time.

According to GeekWire, Microsoft is reportedly trimming its workforce in the news business (MSN) further amid shift to artificial intelligence (AI)-based algorithms and automation to perform their editorial duties.

According to Nasscom, the adoption of big data, analytics, artificial intelligence and Internet of Things is expected to push the cloud market in India to $7.1 billion by 2022, growing at an annual rate of 30%.

According to Velchamy Sankarlingam,  President of Products and Engineering, Zoom, at the end of Dec 2019, Zoom had 10 million daily meeting participants. By the end of April,  it had reached 300 million daily meeting participants. The use cases for the platform took off.. in diff ways.. from workplace collaboration to yoga classes, weddings, graduations on Zoom.. Further, between Jan and April, Zoom recorded the growth of 67 times the number of free users and 4 times the number of paid users in India.

In a change of guard at HCL Technologies, co-founder Shiv Nadar has stepped down from the position of the Chairman of the Board of directors. Roshni Nadar Malhotra, currently a non-executive director has been appointed as the Chairperson of the Board of Directors with effect from July 17, 2020. Shiv Nadar would continue to be the Managing Director of the company with the designation as the Chief Strategy Officer of the company.

The Punjab Police cyber crime cell has warned people against downloading any ‘.apk’ files that mimic the services of TikTok or any other popular apps banned by the Indian government as these can be sources of malware.

Microsoft issued a fix for a bug which had been in its code for 17 years. The vulnerability, which the company says is not known to have been exploited, could reportedly have allowed attackers to take over a victim’s entire IT infrastructure — making it possible to steal sensitive information and manipulate network traffic like emails.

According to the survey to identify today’s most pressing data management challenges and solutions to them by Seagate and  IDC,  68% of  data available in  enterprises  goes unused while over the next two years, enterprise data globally will grow at a 42.2% annual rate. 

In 2019, Cognizant settled the charges (of authorising a contractor to pay a $2 million bribe to a senior government official to issue a planning permit for its new campus in Chennai, india) with the SEC without admitting or denying the allegations. It agreed to pay disgorgement and prejudgment interest of approximately $19 million and a penalty of $6 million.

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