Internet

Nigeria’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has warned unregistered investment-tech platforms to desist from offering foreign securities to Nigerians.

Twitch will now ban users who harass members of its community — even when that harassment takes place off Twitch. The streaming platform announced a major expansion of its off-service misconduct policy today that allows it to take action against users who mistreat people regardless of where it happens, whether it’s offline or on another social platform.

A Google researcher manager has resigned following the controversial firings of two female leaders in his organization. Samy Bengio, who oversaw the ethical AI team prior to a reorganization in February, is leaving to pursue other opportunities, according to Bloomberg. His last day will be April 28th.

Google today open-sourced Lyra in beta, an audio codec that uses machine learning to produce high-quality voice calls. The code and demo, which are available on GitHub, compress raw audio down to 3 kilobits per second for “quality that compares favorably to other codecs,” Google says.

Russia’s government will throttle data to and from Twitter for users in the country for at least another month as the company works to remove banned content.

Yahoo Answers, one of the longest-running and most storied web Q&A platforms in the history of the internet, is shutting down on May 4th. That’s the day the Yahoo Answers website will start redirecting to the Yahoo homepage, and all of the platform’s archives will apparently cease to exist. The platform has been operating since 2005.

The Supreme Court sided Monday with Google in an $8 billion copyright dispute with Oracle over the internet company’s creation of the Android operating system used on most smartphones worldwide.

Smile Telecoms Holdings Ltd., a Pan-African telecommunications group with operations in Nigeria, Uganda, Tanzania, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, announced Wednesday, that its debt restructuring plan has been approved and agreed with the lenders.

From this month, Google is updating some of its YouTube ad guidelines about drug-related videos. In a support document spotted by Gizmodo, Google says it’s “expanding monetization on educational, documentary or news content that may include violent interactions with law enforcement, recreational drugs and drug-related content, or sensitive events.” The update means more drug-related videos should be eligible to have ads placed next to them.

YouTube has announced it’s experimenting with hiding dislikes to discourage “dislike mobs” from deliberately downvoting videos from creators and channels.

GitHub has announced that its enterprise-focused secret scanning tool for private repositories is now generally available.

Spotify has invested heavily in prerecorded podcast content, and now, the company is looking to host live audio conversations. The platform announced today that it’s acquiring Betty Labs, the company behind the live sports audio app Locker Room. Spotify didn’t disclose how much it spent on the purchase.

A lawsuit that claims one of Amazon’s fulfillment centers in California failed to provide required meal breaks for employees has moved to federal court, as attorneys seek class-action status.

Netflix announced at Tokyo’s AnimeJapan 2021 Expo Saturday that it will launch 40 new anime titles in 2021, Bloomberg reported, following the success of its Blood of Zeusseries last year.

The agreement was signed by a number of Italian publishers including RCS Mediagroup; publishers of daily Corriere della Sera , popular sports daily Gazzetta dello Sport, the publisher of financial daily Il Sole 24 ore, Caltagirone editore, which owns Rome-based paper Il Messaggero, and Monrif, which publishes local papers such as Il Giorno and La Nazione.

Tech companies like Mozilla, Reddit, and Vimeo called on the Federal Communications Commission on Friday to reinstate the net neutrality rules repealed by the Trump administration.

Dropbox is adding a new feature on top of its usual offerings of storage and file sharing for free Basic accounts. Dropbox Passwords, the password management feature the company introduced for paying customers in 2020, will be free for Dropbox Basic accounts in April — with a new, arbitrary limit of 50 passwords that makes it seem suspiciously like a way to upsell you on a paid Dropbox account.

Microsoft stands to receive nearly a quarter of Covid relief funds destined for U.S. cybersecurity defenders, sources told Reuters, angering some lawmakers who don’t want to increase funding for a company whose software was recently at the heart of two big hacks.

The United Kingdom (UK) Government has again demonstrated its support to Nigeria by collaborating with the federal government to achieve inclusive digital economic agenda to promote the growth of the Nigeria Tech ecosystem and close the digital divide in the country.

A judge in California ruled Friday that Google has to face a class action lawsuit that claims the search giant secretly collects data from users even when they’re using its private “Incognito” mode, Bloomberg reported.

China denied on Friday it was planning to hit e-commerce giant Alibaba with a fine of almost $1 billion for allegedly flouting monopoly rules, as authorities put the screws on the firm as part of a crackdown on the technology sector.

Speaking at a webinar organised by Plan International Nigeria to mark the International Women’s Day, the activists urged the government and other civil society organisations to raise the bar in law enforcement and mass education of the public on ways to end online violence against children and girls.