Two years after agreeing to a self-regulatory code of practice to tackle disinformation, Facebook (FB.O), Alphabet’s Google (GOOGL.O), Twitter (TWTR.N) and other tech rivals must try harder to be more effective, the European Commission said on Thursday.

Fake news related to COVID-19 has accelerated calls for social media to be more proactive in combating the issue.

The companies, including Mozilla and trade bodies for the advertising industry, signed up to the code in 2018 in a bid to stave off more heavy-handed regulation. Microsoft (MSFT.O) and TikTok subsequently joined the group.

There are, however, several shortcomings in the code following an assessment of its first year in operation, the commission said, according to a report seen by Reuters.

“These can be grouped in four broad categories: inconsistent and incomplete application of the code across platforms and member states, lack of uniform definitions, the existence of several gaps in the coverage of the code commitments, and limitations intrinsic to the self-regulatory nature of the code,” the report said.

The commission vice president for values and transparency, Vera Jourova, called for more action to counter new risks.

“As we also witness new threats and actors the time is ripe to go further and propose new measures. The platforms need to become more accountable and transparent. They need to open up and provide better access to data, among others,” Jourova said.

Jourova is currently working on a European Democracy Action Plan to make democracy more resilient to digital threats.

The commission is also set to propose new rules called the Digital Services Act by the end of the year which will increase social media’s responsibilities and liability for content on their platforms.

Source: Reuters

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After months of leaks, rumors, speculations its finally here, Google Pixel 4 is here. Google announced its long awaited flagship for this year the Pixel 4 and pixel 4 XL in an event held yesterday. Like their previous phones, Pixel 4 are available in two different sizes. Other than the size, display resolution and battery capacity these phones are identical. With that out of the way lets talk about all aspects of the phone.

Starting with the design, Google Pixel 4 has changed the design significantly this year. Dual tone look of the pixel phone is gone instead Google opted for Solid color which are Just Black, Clearly White, and the limited edition Oh So Orange. Clearly White and Oh So Orange have matte finish whereas Black is Glossy.

 

 

The Pixel phones this year comes with narrower profile, thanks to its 19:9 aspect ratio. The frame of the phones are made from Black Aluminum coated in multi layers for textured finish and the frame is sandwiched between two Gorilla Glass 5. Other thing changed this year is the Camera module. Google has embraced the square trend in their devices this year. Camera modules are situated on the top left side of the rear panel. This camera module houses one telephoto lens, one wide angle lens and a flash.

Another small change that’s rather big is no notched display this year. Pixel devices comes with standard displays with no notch instead has a slight chin and forehead. The Pixel 4 XL has a 6.3-inch display while the Pixel 4 has a 5.7-inch display both screen being a AMOLED panels with Quad HD+ and Full HD+ resolutions.

 

 

Talking about the hardware, Google Pixel 4 features Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 processor under the hood which is bundled with 6GB of RAM. The RAM has been increased from 4GB to 6GB this year to overcome memory management issues that Google Pixel 3 suffered last year. On the internal storage side, Google is offering two variants 64GB and 128GB with no memory card storage. By the way 128GB variant will cost you $100 more.

On the battery side, Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL comes with 2800mAh and 3700mAh lithium-ion cell respectively and comes with 18W charger. Battery capacity are very low compared to other manufacturers but Google says this is more than enough to get through a full day. Qi Wireless Charging is carried over from the previous generation for rapid wireless charging.

Pixel phones are known for its mobile photography. Where other phones couldn’t do with three or even four sensors, Google had been doing it with one and doing very good at it. But this year Google is changing its gear to do even better. Google is bringing two sensors to the Pixel phones as mentioned previously. The main sensor is 12MP wide angle, while the second sensor is 16MP telephoto sensor.

 

 

Google is also bringing many new features to their cameras. One of which is Live HDR+. This feature will allow users to see a more accurate representation of what the resulting image will look like. This tool will also add brightness and shadow slider to tweak their shots as needed. Another feature Google tweaked this year is the portrait mode. With the addition of another lens, Pixel phones will be able to capture portrait photos more accurately giving proper separation between the subject and the background. Next up is the Night Sight. This feature is awesome. This feature takes 15 shots at once and blends them together to make one photo, one very good bright photo.

The Pixel Phones come with the latest Android 10 in the software side with many various features like Motion Sense which relies on Radar tech from Soli to register the motion of your hand, new Google Assistant that will be able to perform far more voice actions when not connected to the internet, a new voice recorder app which is able to transcribe text in real time and upgraded face unlock tool which uses Motion Sense radar module and Titan M chip to encrypt the face ID data and keep it secure.

 

 

Finally, the Pricing of the phone. The Pixel 4 is priced at $799 for the 64GB variant and $899 for the 128GB variant which is approximately equivalent to Nrs. 91,400 and 1,02,800 respectively . Whereas Pixel 4 XL is priced at $899 and $999 for the 64GB and 128GB respectively which comes at Nrs. 1,02,800 and 1,14,200 respectively.

 

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Facebook on Friday rolled out its redesigned website with a less cluttered look and a dark mode. The company first showed the new design of the site at its F8 developer conference in 2019. In fact, Facebook began testing the new feature with a new small number of users earlier this year.

Now the brand new Desktop version is live for many users around the world. If you don’t see it yet it should be available in the next few days.

Facebook desktop site: What’s new?

The new design makes the desktop version similar to the mobile experience. The company says the new design makes it easier to find features such as Videos, Games, and Groups. Like Facebook’s mobile app, the desktop website will load faster. The new design also makes it easier to create Events, Pages, Groups, and ads.

The highlight of the newly redesigned desktop experience is a new dark mode that will help reduce eye fatigue, readability of text, and better contrast. Last month, Facebook brought the dark mode to Facebook Messenger. Facebook-owned WhatsApp also got dark mode in March.

How to switch to Facebook’s brand new website

Go to the Facebook homepage, tap on the down arrow button in the top right corner.

Choose “Switch to new Facebook”

In case you want to enable the dark mode, just tap on the down arrow button, and tap the Dark Mode toggle. The adoption of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram have doubled during the coronavirus pandemic.

Google's John Mueller said on Friday's webmaster hangout that while the current URL parameter tool has been missing data for a while, it is not a sign that Google will deprecate it. In fact, he said when the tool does migrate to the new Search Console, it "will have some really cool stuff coming out."

John would not say more outside of "it'll be pretty cool" and he does not want to pre-announce anything.

He said this at the 11:04 mark when Mihai asked him about what is going on with the missing data in the URL parameter tool. John said the data should be fixed "fairly soon."

Here is the transcript on the data issue part:

The data there has been missing for a really long time but that's not because we want to deprecate it it's just because things are weirdly stuck on our side with kind of the various teams that are involved with creating that data. Internally we use the kind of similar data already, it's not that we don't follow that input at all. It's just the data that we display in Search Console is kind of stuck just before it reaches Search Console.
And my understanding is that that should get resolved fairly soon but I've been hoping that that's fairly soon for a while now. So I've been nudging a little bit more. Hopefully, that'll get better.

Then he hinted at what is to come, without saying more than it would be very cool and useful for very large sites:

With regards to moving to the new Search Console, My understanding is that they do want to kind of keep that functionality and move that to the new tool as well. I expect especially for larger websites we will have some really cool stuff coming out as well over time that. Yeah, it'll be pretty cool. I don't want to pre-announce anything so I'm not going to go into more any details there. But it definitely is something that makes sense to focus on as you mentioned for e-commerce sites with a lot of parameters. You can clean up some things there and make it a little bit easier to crawl and index your site.

We know Google still uses the data from this tool, a lot. And Google did say the URL parameter may change, which is why we have not seen it migrate yet from the old Search Console to the new Search Console.

Source: seroundtable

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