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Week 18: Check out what happened in the tech world

Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter and the disturbances in the cryptocurrency market continue to be the leading tech news. WhatsApp has added three new features including emoji reactions. Instagram experiments with full-screen videos on Home Feed in TikTok style. Accenture and SAP join to augment values from Cloud Services and Business Innovation. These and more news in this edition of Friday Tech News Wrap-Up for Week 18 of 2022.

Twitter to get more investors, commercial and government users may be charged for services

Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter continued to be in news. The media reported that 19 new investors are keen to support the $44bn acquisition of Twitter. The total commitments of $7.1bn will have big names including Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, venture firm Sequoia Capital and crypto exchange Binance.

In the meantime, through a few tweets, Elon has reflected some of his thoughts on his strategy for Twitter going forward. He has hinted that Twitter will charge the business and government users.

It is important to note the media has reported that Parag Aggarwal, CEO of Twitter, will continue to be the CEO till the acquisition deal is closed.

Crypto market crashed this week

Bitcoin drops 8% as $126 billion is wiped off the cryptocurrency market. According to CoinDesk data, Bitcoin was down more than 8% at $36,251.50 today. On Thursday, bitcoin dipped below $36,000. Other cryptocurrencies including ether and XRP were also down sharply.

Credit: CoinDesk

Many factors are said to have contributed including increased market volatility, rising inflation, geopolitical crises, and concern over tighter monetary policy by the Fed.

Experts believe this is the best time to invest as Cryptocurrency is a long-term investment.

Here are five simple ways to kickstart your journey for investment.

What’s new with WhatsApp?

WhatsApp has added three new features that will certainly enhance the usability of the App:

  1. Emoji reactions are now available on the latest version of the app
  2. Sending files within WhatsApp up to 2GB in size at a time. This is an increase from the previous limit of 100MB.
  3. Adding up to 512 people to a group

Last month, WhatsApp added Communities enabling people to bring together separate groups under one umbrella. As per WhatsApp, “this is helping people to receive updates sent to the entire Community and easily organize smaller discussion groups on what matters to them. Communities will also contain powerful new tools for admins, including announcement messages that are sent to everyone and control over which groups can be included. The feedback we’ve received so far has been very positive and we can’t wait to get many new features into people’s hands.”

Go Passwordless for more security?

Google plans to implement passwordless support for FIDO Sign-in standards in Android & Chrome. Apple and Microsoft will offer support for their platforms. As per the announcement n honor of World Password Day, this is available starting the coming year and will still take time to reach everyone’s devices.

When you sign into a website or app on your phone, you will simply unlock your phone — your account won’t need a password anymore.
Instead, your phone will store a FIDO credential called a passkey which is used to unlock your online account. The passkey makes signing in far more secure, as it’s based on public key cryptography and is only shown to your online account when you unlock your phone.
To sign into a website on your computer, you’ll just need your phone nearby and you’ll simply be prompted to unlock it for access. Once you’ve done this, you won’t need your phone again and you can sign in by just unlocking your computer. Even if you lose your phone, your passkeys will securely sync to your new phone from cloud backup, allowing you to pick up right where your old device left off.
timeline of password progression
Credit: Google

2FA for GitHub users by the end of 2023

To make the software ecosystem more secure, GitHub announced all users who contribute code on GitHub.com to enable one or more forms of two-factor authentication (2FA) by the end of 2023.

Explaining why account security and 2FA matter, the blog writes:

In November 2021, GitHub committed to new investments in npm account security in the wake of npm package takeovers resulting from the compromise of developer accounts without 2FA enabled. We continue to introduce improvements to npm account security, and are equally committed to securing the accounts of developers using GitHub.

Most security breaches are not the product of exotic zero-day attacks, but rather involve lower-cost attacks like social engineering, credential theft or leakage, and other avenues that provide attackers with a broad range of access to victim accounts and the resources they have access to. Compromised accounts can be used to steal private code or push malicious changes to that code. This places not only the individuals and organizations associated with the compromised accounts at risk, but also any users of the affected code.

Software security starts with the developer: Securing developer accounts with 2FA
Pic Credit: GitHub

Accenture and SAP join to augment values from Cloud Services and Business Innovation

To help large enterprises move to the cloud and deliver continuous innovation. Accenture and SAP offer new services augmenting business transformation through technology, data, and AI. Julie Sweet, chair and chief executive officer, of Accenture, said, “SAP and Accenture are now offering the ability for large enterprises to dramatically accelerate their transformations and new opportunities for growth.”

Accenture is the largest SAP partner to offer services entirely designed to help large enterprises across industries easily plan, implement and manage deployments of RISE with SAP in the cloud.
 

Instagram experiments with full-screen videos on Home Feed

Photos and video-sharing platform Instagram is adding a new feature so that users can see the full-screen, vertical video in their feed, similar to that in TikTok.

Instagram chief Adam Mosseri informed via a tweet that the image-sharing platform is currently testing a new immersive viewing experience in its Home Feed.  He also asked for the feedback of the users who have already got it on their feeds.

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