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  Swedish caller identification app Truecaller on Thursday rolled out its latest version 12 with a new Video Caller ID feature addition, call recording for free users, and a redesigned user interface (UI). A total of five features have been announced as part of the Truecaller Version 12 update . "Truecaller is a vital part of communication for over 22 crore Indians, for both their professional and personal needs. We are humbled by the level of trust people have shown in us but we are also driven by the goal of transforming communication," Rishit Jhunjhunwala, Chief Product Officer and Managing Director, Truecaller India said in a statement. >>> Read More

  The Bombay High Court on Thursday commuted to life imprisonment the death penalty awarded to three convicts in the 2013 gangrape case of a 22-year-old photojournalist inside the defunct Shakti Mills compound in central Mumbai, saying that they "deserve imprisonment for life to repent the offence committed by them". Shakti Mills gangrape case A division bench of Justices Sadhana Jadhav and Prithviraj Chavan refused to confirm the death penalty awarded to Vijay Jadhav, Mohammad Qasim Shaikh and Mohammad Ansari, and commuted their sentence to life imprisonment for the remainder of their lives. The bench, while pronouncing its order said that it cannot ignore the fact that the offence has shocked the collective conscience of the society and rape is a violation of human rights, but the sentence of death is irrevocable. Click Here

  Jon Batiste might be the Grammys biggest surprise: The multi-genre performer and recent Oscar winner made such an impression on voters that he scored the most nominations with 11 on Tuesday. Batiste earned an album of the year nod for We Are along with record of the year with Freedom, a feel-good ode to the city of New Orleans. Oscar Awards 2022  His nominations span several genres including R&B, jazz, American roots music, classical and music video. Justin Bieber, Doja Cat and HER each came away with the second-most nominations with eight by the time the Recording Academy was done announcing its nominees for its January 31 show. Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo both had seven nods. Along with Batiste's surprise domination, another shock was The Weeknd nabbing three nominations after the pop star claimed he would not allow his label to submit his music. Click Here

  WhatsApp is adding more details to its privacy policy and flagging that information for European users, after Irish regulators slapped the chat service with a record fine for breaching strict EU data privacy rules. Starting Monday, WhatsApp's privacy policy will be reorganized to provide more information on the data it collects and how it's used. The company said it's also explaining in more detail how it protects data shared across borders for its global service and the legal foundations for processing the data. WhatsApp is owned by Facebook, now renamed Meta Platforms. With the update, users in Europe will see a banner notification at the top of their chat list that will take them to the new information. Read More

  Meta-owned Facebook Messenger and Instagram are delaying plans to encrypt users' messages until 2023. In a post in The Telegraph, Antigone Davis, Meta's head of safety, attributes the delay to concerns about user safety. "We are taking our time to get this right and we don't plan to finish the global rollout of end-to-end encryption by default across all our messaging services until sometime in 2023," Antigone Davis wrote in The Telegraph. "As a company that connects billions of people around the world and has built industry-leading technology, we're determined to protect people's private communications and keep people safe online," added. Read Full Article Here

  Tech giant Microsoft is planning to add a new price tracker to its Edge browser, as well as a new feature that will let people easily change their passwords if they have been leaked online. The price-tracking feature will be available soon and is designed to track products you have recently viewed and alert you of price changes, The Verge reported. The company has focused a lot on shopping improvements with its Edge browser and already has price comparison, price history, and built-in coupons in Edge. "This feature is coming soon and will be built into the browser, so you just need to browse as you normally would, and Microsoft Edge will let you know if any of the items you have recently looked at have changed in price," said Liat Ben-Zur, a Microsoft executive working on the company's "Modern Life" initiative. Click Here

  Encrypted messaging app Telegram on Friday announced that it is launching Sponsored Messages that will allow anyone to promote their channel or bot. Sponsored messages on Telegram are shown only in large public one-to-many channels with more than 1,000 members -- and are based solely on the topic of the public channels in which they are shown. This means that no user data is mined or analysed to display them. " Sponsored messages are currently in test mode and are not available to everyone," the company said in a statement. "Once they are fully launched and allow Telegram to cover its basic costs (such as equipment and data centres that are used by channel admins to deliver their content to our hundreds of millions of users), we plan to start sharing ad revenue with the admins of the channels where Sponsored Messages are displayed -- because it is fair," it added. Read More

  With the aim to extend the benefits of India's growing digital economy to more people, tech giant Google on Thursday announced several initiatives to help India's digital transformation journey. The company announced a pilot of the first-ever Google Assistant-enabled, end-to-end vaccine booking flow that will guide users through the process of booking a vaccination appointment on the COWIN website. "We have worked closely with COWIN to enable this integration, where people everywhere will be able to easily book a vaccine appointment in a more guided manner," the company said in a blogpost. This feature will work in English and eight Indian languages including Hindi, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Bengali, Marathi, Tamil and Telugu and will begin rolling out in early 2022. Read More

  In India, the most popular password is " password " and not "123456" as has been widely speculated. Interestingly, Japan is the only other country that had the same top password as India, new research showed on Thursday. Other common passwords people use in India are "iloveyou", "krishna", "sairam" and "omsairam", among others. According to new research by NordPass which is a proprietary password manager, predictable numerical and keyboard sequences are particularly popular in India. "Passwords such as 12345 and variations of qwerty were ranked high up in the lists. Worldwide, these combinations are also quite popular, as well as localised versions of qwerty (for example, aazerty' in French speaking countries)," the research showed. Click Here

  Twitter users will soon see new warning labels on false and misleading tweets, redesigned to make them more effective and less confusing. The labels, which the company has been testing since July, are an update from those Twitter used for election misinformation before and after the 2020 presidential contest. Those labels drew criticism for not doing enough to keep people from spreading obvious falsehoods. The redesign launching worldwide on Tuesday is an attempt to make them more useful and easier to notice, among other things. Experts say such labels, used by Facebook as well, can be helpful to users. But they can also allow social media platforms to sidestep the more difficult work of content moderation that is, deciding whether or not to remove posts, photos and videos that spread conspiracies and falsehoods. Read More

  Six persons, including five distant relatives of late Bollywood actor Sushant Singh Rajput , were killed when their SUV collided with a truck in Bihar's Lakhisarai district on Tuesday morning, police said. Four others were injured in the incident. The SUV was badly mangled due to the impact of the collision. The truck driver and helper, however, managed to flee. According to the police, the victims, including two women, were returning from Patna to Jamui after the cremation of Haryana Additional Director General of Police O.P. Singh's sister. Singh is married to Sushant Singh's sister. The victims have been identified as Laljeet Singh (the deceased woman's husband), Nemani Singh, Amit Shankar alias Ram Chandra Singh, Sunita Devi, Anita Devi and driver Chetan Kumar. Read More

  Implementing work from home policy in Delhi-NCR and closing down industries are some of the steps suggested by the Delhi government in a meeting of the Commission for Air Quality Management held on Tuesday, Delhi Environment Minister Gopal Rai said. Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on Saturday had announced various emergency measures, including the closure of schools for a week, a ban on construction activities and work from home for government employees, to deal with the pollution crisis faced by the city. Delhi Air Pollution "On Monday, DPCC teams went to see whether the measures are being implemented and they found that the construction work has been stopped," Rai told reporters. The Supreme Court on Monday had directed the Commission For Air Quality Management to hold a joint meeting and on Tuesday, the states of Punjab, Rajasthan, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh participated in the meeting. Click Here

  Two of the world’s richest men, fighting over a near-bankrupt Indian retailer, have made so much noise that its board has woken up super cranky. In less than a week, the three independent directors of Future Retail Ltd . have shot off two letters to the country’s competition authority, alleging that Amazon.com had deliberately misled the regulator about the true nature of its 2019 investment in a related entity. They want the antitrust watchdog to cancel the transaction. The 2025 dollar bonds of Future Retail rose a little Monday, though they still trade at 61 cents to the dollar. Based on what an arbitration tribunal in Singapore has had to say on the issue of alleged misrepresentation by Amazon, the maneuver looks like a long shot. But one never can predict the course of regulatory action in India. If the gambit succeeds, Asia’s wealthiest businessman, Mukesh Ambani, may be able to get his hands on Future’s retail stores after all, a deal Amazon boss Jeff Bezos has so far m...

  Popular audio chat app Clubhouse on Tuesday said that it is rolling out a new feature -- Replay -- where users can choose to record the audio chat and then save it to a club or profile. The new feature will be available on both iOS and Android platforms. "Replays are an optional feature that creators can choose to toggle on or off for any public room. When Replays are enabled, anyone on Clubhouse can replay the entire experience whenever they like," the company said in a blogpost "They will get to see the same elements of a live room like Leave Quietly and watch the dynamic of the stage and audience shift and evolve throughout the discussion, including PTRs, mic taps, and all the special moments that only happen here," it added. Click Here

  Chinese smartphone maker OnePlus is gearing up to launch in India the Oneplus Nord 2 5G Pac-Man Edition . Ahead of the launch, however, the smartphone’s India pricing has been revealed by Amazon on its product listing page. The OnePlus limited edition smartphone will be available at a premium of Rs 3,000 (Rs 37,999) over the standard model (Rs 34,999) of similar specifications. Speaking of specifications, OnePlus has not confirmed the exact details about the Nord 2 5G Pac-Man Edition but this limited edition smartphone is expected to have the processor, storage and RAM configuration, display, and other specifications same as the top-tier model of the standard edition. The limited edition smartphone would, however, come with Pac-Man inspired skin. Besides, the phone is likely to boot a customised version of OnePlus OxygenOS with Pac-Man inspired themes, wallpapers, animations, and app icons. Additionally, the OnePlus Nord 2 5G Pac-Man Edition would come with the Pac-Man 256 pr...

  After 20 months of travel restrictions, the US is reopening its land and air borders to foreign visitors fully vaccinated against COVID-19 from Monday. The United States is flinging its doors wide open to vaccinated international travellers on Monday, welcoming many visitors who've been shut out of the country for 20 months, reported CNN. The United States is largely wide open, although there are some state and local restrictions that still apply. For example, there are mask mandates in Hawaii, Illinois, New Mexico, Nevada, Oregon and Washington. Washington, DC and Puerto Rico also require masks in indoor public spaces. Click Here

  From 'Lift Kara De', 'Kabhi Toh Nazar Mila' to 'Bhar Do Jholi Meri', singer Adnan Sami has undoubtedly entertained music lovers with his versatile songs in a career spanning over 25 years, and now getting honoured with the Padma Shri, India's fourth-highest civilian award, must be one of the biggest milestones of his life. On Monday, President Ram Nath Kovind conferred Adnan with the Padma Shri in a ceremony held in Delhi. He received the award in the presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Union Home Minister Amit Shah, and Union External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar. Considering Adnan's work, it won't be right to say that he does not deserve the honour. However, several people got irked when his name was announced to be bestowed with Padma Shri as he's born in Pakistan. Read More

  Japanese imaging giant Nikon on Friday launched a full-frame (Nikon FX-format) Z series mirrorless camera Nikon Z 9 in the Indian market. The new Z 9 body only will be available for sale across Nikon Authorized Store in India starting end of November 2021 at Rs 4,75,995. According to the company, the 'Z 9' features the world's largest variety of simultaneous subject detection amongst mirrorless cameras, with its tenacious autofocus (AF) offering, and the Real-Live Viewfinder without blackout period. "Users can enjoy shooting with stunning 8K in-camera recording for up to 125 minutes for making it the most practical camera for location shoots. The camera comes with 3D-tracking for still image shooting, this first-time feature in Nikon mirrorless cameras allows users to seamlessly capture split-second moments, from the fastest sprinters, to racing cars and effectively track them," the company said in a statement. Click Here

  Homegrown lock screen content platform Glance on Tuesday partnered with tech giant Intel to launch an innovative campaign for the 11th Gen Intel Core processors on Glance's platform available on smartphone lock screens. With over 150 million Indians spending an average of 22 minutes on Glance daily, the campaign has enabled Intel to generate product awareness and discovery among PC shoppers, through impactful storytelling, surfaced on the lock screens of millions of smartphones across the country. "We are excited to have partnered with Intel for the launch of their 11th Gen Intel Core processor, contributing to their business success, and look forward to working with them on many more such campaigns in the future," Devika Sharma, Director-Sales, Glance, said in a statement. Click Here

  Singapore is seeking to cement itself as a key player for cryptocurrency -related businesses as financial centers around the world grapple with approaches to handle one of the fastest growing areas of finance. “We think the best approach is not to clamp down or ban these things,” said Ravi Menon, managing director of the Monetary Authority of Singapore, which regulates banks and financial firms. Instead, MAS is putting in place “strong regulation,” so firms that meet its requirements and address the multitude of risks can operate, he said in an interview. Nations differ vastly when it comes to how they handle crypto: China has cracked down on large amounts of activity in recent months, Japan only recently allowed dedicated crypto investment funds -- though El Salvador has embraced Bitcoin as legal tender. In the U.S., while there are an abundance of options for investing in the burgeoning asset class, regulators are concerned about everything from stablecoins to yield-gen...