Cargo shipping giant Maersk and IBM today announced TradeLens, a technology that applies blockchain to the global supply chain. TradeLens takes advantage of blockchain, the decentralized public ledger behind such tech as cryptocurrency — to enable global trade to be more efficient and secure. More than 94 companies and organizations are supporting the project in …
GongBox is a music platform, similar to Spotify, Apple Music, iTunes and the like. But it’s tailored for an African market. “If you think about how these products [Apple Music, Spotify etc.] are constructed,” says Simukayi Mukuna, a member of Soulistic Music, who is explaining the technicalities of the app today, “the product team lives …
Jack Dorsey, chief executive officer and co-founder, said in a tweet Thursday that he lost 200,000 followers, bringing his total down to 4 million, after Twitter made good on its pledge to remove suspicious accounts. Twitter has announced it will remove suspicious accounts from follower counts. It warned that the number of followers displayed on many profiles …
The European Parliament has voted against a controversial set of copyright rules known as the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market. The vote follows weeks of intensifying protests, with internet companies such as Mozilla and pioneers like Vint Cerf and Sir Tim Berners-Lee speaking out against the EU’s copyright proposals and Wikipedia taking its …
In a new paper, titled ‘Is Bitcoin Really Un-Tethered?’, University of Texas finance professor John Griffin, and graduate student Amin Shams, look at how Bitcoin’s price may have been artificially inflated last year. Bitcoins incredible rise in value in the last 12 months has been down to massive market manipulation, a new study has revealed. During …
Microsoft has reportedly acquired GitHub, and could announce the deal as early as Monday. GitHub is a large code repository that has become popular with developers and companies hosting their projects, documentation, and code. Apple, Amazon, Google, and many other big tech companies use GitHub. Bloomberg reports that the software giant has agreed to acquire …
Uganda’s parliament has passed a law to impose a controversial tax on people using social media platforms. The new Excise Duty (Amendment) Bill will also impose various other taxes, including a 1% levy on the total value of mobile money transactions – which civil society groups complain will affect poorer Ugandans who rarely use banking …
Facebook took moderation action against almost 1.5bn accounts and posts which violated its community standards in the first three months of 2018, the company has revealed. In its first quarterly Community Standards Enforcement Report, Facebook said the overwhelming majority of moderation action was against spam posts and fake accounts: it took action on 837m pieces …
The Guardian reports that United Kingdom and US lawyers have launched a joint class action against Facebook, Cambridge Analytica and two other companies SCL Group Limited and Global Science Research Limited (GSR). for allegedly misusing the personal data of more than 71 million people. The lawsuit claims the firms obtained users’ private information from the …
The Firefox broswer maker has suspended all advertising activities on Facebook following the the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which has embroiled the popular social networking site. In a blog post announcing the move, Denelle Dixon, Mozilla’s chief business and legal officer, said: We understand that Facebook took steps to limit developer access to friends’ data beginning …