SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sep 6, 2023--

Slack, the popular workplace chat app, has broken in the middle of the day. The outage means that colleagues are unable to talk to each other. Attempting to send messages showed an error that indicated they had not been delivered – though users were still able to see old conversations. Many of the world’s biggest companies rely on Slack to connect colleagues both within and across companies. As many workplaces have gone at least partly remote, it is now a significant part of workplace communication. The outage began around 10am UK time on Thursday. Tracking website Down Detector showed a rapid spike in the number of reports of problems. The official Slack status page had not been updated at the time of publication. It had also not posted on its official Twitter accounts, which it sometimes uses to provide updates on outages. Read More Elon Musk’s Twitter rebrand ‘blocked in Indonesia’ Elon Musk takes control of @X account from user who had held it for 16 years Elon Musk’s ‘X’ is already trademarked by Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook‘s parent company Meta disabled only a small fraction of the over one million reports it received of underage users on Instagram since early 2019, a lawsuit filed by 33 US states reportedly said. The newly unsealed legal complaint accused the tech giant of carrying an “open secret” that it had millions of users under the age of 13, and that Instagram “routinely continued to collect” their personal information such as location without parental permission. The complaint stated that within the company, Meta’s actual knowledge that millions of Instagram users were under the age of 13 was an “open secret” that was routinely documented, rigorously analyzed and confirmed, and zealously protected from disclosure to the public, according to a New York Times report. Last month, attorneys general from 33 states, including New York’s AG Letitia James, filed a lawsuit against Meta alleging that the tech giant designed harmful features contributing to the country’s youth mental health crisis. The lawsuit alleged Meta created addictive and “psychologically manipulative” features targeting young people while assuring the public falsely that the platform was safe to use. “Meta has profited from children’s pain by intentionally designing its platforms with manipulative features that make children addicted to their platforms while lowering their self-esteem,” Ms James said. Meta’s spokesperson responded to the lawsuit, saying that the company was committed to providing teens with “safe, positive experiences online,” and that it had already introduced “over 30 tools to support teens and their families” such as age verification and preventing content promoting harmful behaviours. “We’re disappointed that instead of working productively with companies across the industry to create clear, age-appropriate standards for the many apps teens use, the attorneys general have chosen this path,” the spokesperson added. However, a significant portion of the evidence provided by the states was obscured from public view via redactions in the initial filing. The new unsealed complaint filed last week provided fresh insights from the lawsuit, including the accusation that Instagram “coveted and pursued” underage users for years and that Meta “continually failed” to make effective age-checking systems a priority. The lawsuit reportedly argued that Meta chose not to build effective systems to detect and exclude underage teen users, viewing them as a crucial next generation demographic it needed to capture. It also accused the tech giant of “automatically” ignoring some reports of under 13 users and allowing them to continue using the platform while knowing about such cases via the company’s internal reporting channels. The company responded that the now publicly revealed complaint “mischaracterizes our work using selective quotes and cherry-picked documents.” It said verifying the ages of its users was a “complex” challenge especially with younger people who likely do not have IDs or licenses. Meta recently said it supports federal legislation requiring app stores to get parents’ approval whenever their teens under 16 download apps. “With this solution, when a teen wants to download an app, app stores would be required to notify their parents, much like when parents are notified if their teen attempts to make a purchase,” the company said. “Parents can decide if they want to approve the download. They can also verify the age of their teen when setting up their phone, negating the need for everyone to verify their age multiple times across multiple apps,” it said. The tech giant holds that the best solution to support young people is a “simple, industry-wide solution” where all apps are held to the same standard. “By verifying a teen’s age on the app store, individual apps would not be required to collect potentially sensitive identifying information,” Meta recently said. Read More Russia places Meta spokesperson on wanted list Meta to allow users to delete Threads accounts without losing Instagram Nasa has received a signal from 10 million miles away Nasa has received a signal from 10 million miles away Elon Musk set to meet Netanyahu and hostage families in Israel Elon Musk weighs in on Dublin riots claiming country’s PM ‘hates the Irish people’

Giants wide receiver Darius Slayton had strong words for the Madden developers who rated his quarterback, Daniel Jones, so low.Whoever is in charge of setting Madden ratings better hope they never come face to face with Giants wide receiver Darius Slayton because there will be hell to pay.Sl...

Facebook owner Meta is to make approximately 490 full-time employees redundant across its Irish operations. The roles are being cut from a number of teams including finance, sales, marketing, analytics, operations and engineering. Employees at Meta Ireland were notified on Wednesday they were potentially impacted by a global restructuring which was announced by CEO Mark Zuckerberg earlier this year. In March, Meta revealed it plans to cut about 10,000 jobs globally, just four months after it axed 11,000 workers. The company said it will comply with Irish legal requirements in relation to redundancy timelines and processes. Meta, which is also the parent company of Instagram and WhatsApp, said the decision does not impact its “commitment to Ireland”, adding it will continue to be the international headquarters and base for several important company functions. The final number of redundancies will be determined by a collective consultation processes.

Climate change threatens to exacerbate political instability, particularly in the Pacific region where rising temperatures pose an “existential

A mother who received a heart transplant has told how her daughter twice saved her life using the Alexa home assistant service. Emma Anderson, from Robroyston in Glasgow, has appeared in a music video by Scots chart star Tom Walker. She was diagnosed with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy just before she turned 16, which makes the heart muscle too thick to function correctly. The 27-year-old received a life-saving heart transplant last year at the NHS Golden Jubilee hospital in Clydebank. She told her daughter Darcey from a young age that she had a “sore heart”, and taught her what to do if she became ill at home. Darcey, now aged six, stayed calm and has been able to raise the alarm on two occasions. Ms Anderson said: “We told Darcey that mummy had a sore heart so she’s always known I’ve had heart problems. “I set up the Alexa so that if I passed out or was feeling unwell all she had to do was say, ‘Alexa, call help!’, and that would call my mum who lives around the corner. “And she’s had to call on Alexa a couple of times, she even called an ambulance on her own and that time I was in a really bad way. “I’m so proud of her, she is a wee superstar.” She is a wee superstar! Emma Anderson When first diagnosed, she had an internal defibrillator implanted inside her chest, which “fired” three times last year. She said the heart transplant had been transformative and she was able to marry her partner Conner in July last year. Ms Anderson said: “Since my transplant I have a totally new life now. “I can actually walk to school and pick her up and walk back again, something I could never do before. “Over Easter, I managed to take Darcey swimming and to the play park, the farm park, simple things I wasn’t able to do before, I can do now. I’m able to be a mummy now.” She continued: “Getting a transplant is a very hard road, it’s not easy. “I was on life support and all sorts of other treatments after my operation for a long while, and my muscles deteriorated so much I couldn’t walk any more. “The only thing I seemed to care about once I was better was learning to walk again so I could walk down that aisle and get married. I was literally discharged just over a week before the wedding, I still had stitches in walking down the aisle.” While recovering in hospital, Ms Anderson created a TikTok video with images of different stages of her heart journey using Scots singing star Tom Walker’s song, The Best Is Yet To Come. The singer was so touched by the video he invited her to London to appear in a video featuring people who had inspired him. She said: “Tom contacted me and asked me to go down to London and be part of his music video to raise awareness. “So I went down and did that with other people who were absolutely incredible, who had been through a lot in life too, and it was so nice of Tom to recognise that through his inspiring music. “Like the lyrics say, I definitely think the best is yet to come for me thanks to my organ donor.” Chief executive of NHS Golden Jubilee, Gordon James, said: “As we celebrate 75 years of the NHS, Emma’s inspiring story shows us how valuable and crucial the life-saving care the NHS provides is to our patients.”

The chance to name a new car is precious, a billion-dollar branding exercise with decades of potential staying

Social media influencer Kai Cenat has been charged with inciting a riot after he announced a giveaway of

LAKE MARY, Fla.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jul 27, 2023--

Over the past few years, restaurants have been investing in artificial intelligence tech for drive-thrus. They say it will spped up the drive-thru and boost sales. But customers — and workers — may not be thrilled with the technology.

Your brain doesn’t work the same when you speak to someone on Zoom, scientists have confirmed. Neural signalling is significantly less when chatting to someone through a video call rather than having a face-to-face conversation, the new study found. When researchers watched the brain of someone talking in real life, they found that there was a detailed and complex system of neurological activity. On Zoom, however, that was dramatically less. It suggests that there is still something fundamentally lacking about speaking with someone online. People’s faces are not able to light up people’s brains in the same way, the researchers suggest. That is something of a surprise: current models suggest that the brain should process people’s faces in the same way whether they are on Zoom or in real life, given the features of them are the same. But the new study suggests that there really is something fundamentally different between the two contexts. “In this study we find that the social systems of the human brain are more active during real live in-person encounters than on Zoom,” said Joy Hirsch, a Yale professor who was the lead author on the new study. “Zoom appears to be an impoverished social communication system relative to in-person conditions.” To find that, researchers studied people’s brains in real time as well as looking at other signals, such as where people’s eyes moved. As well as increased neural activity, the researchers found that people’s eyes hovered for longer on the real faces, for instance. The two people’s brains also seemed to be more co-ordinated. That suggests that there are more social cues being shared between the two people, they said. “Overall, the dynamic and natural social interactions that occur spontaneously during in-person interactions appear to be less apparent or absent during Zoom encounters,” Professor Hirsch said. “This is a really robust effect.” The study suggests that face-to-face encounters remain very important, even as technology companies and others come up with new ways for us to interact with people remotely, the authors said. “Online representations of faces, at least with current technology, do not have the same ‘privileged access’ to social neural circuitry in the brain that is typical of the real thing,” said Professor Hirsch. The findings are described in a new paper, ‘Separable Processes for Live “In-Person” and Live “Zoom-like” Faces’, published in Imaging Neuroscience. Read More The Apple Watch feature everyone has been waiting for has finally arrived Scientists find surprise ‘layer’ underneath surface of Mars Apple’s plans for the future of AirPods might just have been revealed