Education on technology

Facebook content moderators in Kenya are suing the social media site's parent company Meta and two outsourcing companies for unlawful redundancy, a rights group said on Monday. The 43 applicants say they lost their jobs with Sama, a Kenya-based firm contracted to moderate Facebook content, for organising a union. They also say they were blacklisted from applying for the same roles at another outsourcing firm, Majorel, after Facebook switched contractors. Last month Meta filed an appeal in Kenya challenging a ruling which said it could be sued in a separate lawsuit brought by a moderator over alleged poor working conditions, even though it has no official presence in the east African country. The court cases could have implications for how Meta works with content moderators globally. The US company works with thousands of moderators around the world, tasked with reviewing graphic content posted on its platform. "This is a union-busting operation masquerading as a mass red...

Amazon.com on Monday said it would axe another 9,000 roles to make its operation lean and manage economic uncertainty, marking a new round of job cuts that pile onto the technology sector's woes. In a remarkable turn for a company long touting its job creation, Amazon will have eliminated 27,000 positions in recent months, or 9 percent of its roughly 300,000-person corporate workforce. The latest slashing focuses on Amazon's highly-profitable cloud and advertising divisions, once seen as untouchable until economic concerns led business customers to scrutinize their spending. Job reductions are coming to Amazon's streaming unit Twitch , as well, following cuts that began in November focused on the company's devices, e-commerce and human-resources organizations. Amazon aims to finalise whom it will terminate by April. Amazon's stock fell 2 percent. The decision follows a near-endless drumbeat of layoff news in the technology sector that has seen some of the worl...

Google Camera 8.8, the latest version of Google's camera app for Pixel handsets, is rolling out to older smartphone models. The update brings performance improvements to the company's camera app. Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro owners will see improvements while using the Night Sight feature to see reduced noise in images with the help of machine learning technology. The update is available for the Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro, and adds camera stability and performance improvements in certain conditions. According to a 9to5Google report , the Google Camera 8.8 update for the Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro brings the Faster Night Sight feature from the latest generation of Pixel phones, along with improved exposure levels and fewer motion blur issues. This feature was first introduced on the Pixel 7  series out-of-the-box. The report further says that the new Camera 8.8 update will let users select the exposure time accordingly using the camera app. They can tap the “seconds” option on the Nigh...

In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration produced the first-ever image of a black hole, stunning the world. Now, scientists are taking it further. The next generation Event Horizon Telescope (ngEHT) collaboration aims to create high-quality videos of black holes . But this next-generation collaboration is groundbreaking in other ways, too. It's the first large physics collaboration bringing together perspectives from natural sciences, social sciences and the humanities. For a virtual telescope spanning the planet, the larger a telescope, the better it is at seeing things that look tiny from far away. To produce black hole images, we need a telescope almost the size of Earth itself. That's why the EHT uses many telescopes and telescope arrays scattered across the globe to form a single, virtual Earth-sized telescope. This is known as very long baseline interferometry. Harvard astrophysicist Shep Doeleman, the founding director of the EHT, has likened this k...