Education on technology

Sam Bankman-Fried was blocked from using virtual private networks while out on bail, as a judge expressed concern that VPNs present similar risks to the FTX co-founder's use of encrypted messaging apps. Bankman-Fried, who was charged with fraud after the cryptocurrency exchange collapsed, says he used a VPN just to watch football. US District Judge Lewis Kaplan on Tuesday added the private networks, which hide a user's IP address, to the list of technologies Bankman-Fried is barred from using. In a letter to Kaplan filed late Monday night, federal prosecutors said they recently discovered Bankman-Fried had used VPNs on two recent occasions. The government said VPNs could be used to access international crypto exchanges, allow data transfers without detection and offer a covert method of getting onto the dark web. The Big Game In a letter early Tuesday morning responding to the government's claims, Bankman-Fried's attorney Christian Everdell said his client had used ...

The Department of Telecommunications has asked sector regulator TRAI to make quality of service norms stricter in order to curb call drops and improve call quality, an official source said on Tuesday. The move comes after the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) collected feedback from the public through an IVRS call around call drop, quality of calls etc. "Quality of service is very important for customer satisfaction and protection of their interests. DoT has requested TRAI for improvement in the present quality of service (QoS) through more stringent parameters," an official said. The source said that the DoT also observed few key performance indicators while broadly studying global best practices on QoS. "Same has been shared with Trai today," the source added. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has called a meeting with telcos on February 17 to discuss measures and action plan for improving service quality, review of norms, benchmarks fo...

Fintech firm PhonePe has raised another $100 million (about Rs. 828 crore) in primary capital from new investors Ribbit Capital and TVS Capital Funds with participation from existing investor Tiger Global, at a pre-money valuation of $12 billion (roughly Rs. 99,400 crore), the company said on Tuesday. This follows a $350 million (roughly Rs. 3,000 crore) primary fundraise by the company on January 19 from General Atlantic. "PhonePe started its latest fundraise with a target of raising up to $1 billion (roughly Rs. 8,300 crore) in capital, post its domicile shift to India. With this second tranche, it has already raised $450 million (roughly Rs. 3,800 crore) within six weeks from leading investors. The company expects further investments from leading global, as well as prominent high net worth Indian investors in due course," it said in a statement. PhonePe plans to deploy these funds to scale up its payments and insurance businesses in India, as well as to launch and aggre...

Chinese chip design company Unisoc (Shanghai) Technologies is seeking to raise CNY 10 billion (roughly Rs. 12,150 crore) in a new funding round that will value the firm at about CNY 70 billion (roughly Rs. 85,000 crore), three people with knowledge of the deal told Reuters. Unisoc has approached several state-backed investment funds for the round, tapping increased local investor interest in China's domestic chip industry, which is gearing up to be more self-sufficient in the face of US pressure, the people said. One of the people said that the company aims to reach a shortlist of investors by mid-March, and close the round by the end of June on the way to an eventual domestic listing. The sources all declined to be identified as the information is confidential. The company announced it was raising funds last week, with its board secretary, Jia Shaoxu, saying it would use the funds to enhance its technology and product competitiveness, according to its official WeChat account. I...

Google's parent company Alphabet has lost a hefty $100 billion (roughly Rs. 8.3 lakh crore) or nearly a tenth of its market value after its new AI chatbot, Bard, botched an answer to a query on an ad promoting its launch. It claimed that the James Webb space telescope took the first pictures of planets outside the Earth's solar system when in fact it was the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope. At the same time, Microsoft saw its shares rise 3 percent on announcing that it would be integrating ChatGPT into Bing , Office , and Teams . Microsoft is a significant shareholder in OpenAI, maker of this much-heralded AI chatbot. Many are asking if we are witnessing Google's Kodak moment, in reference to the American camera giant's famous demise at the hands of digital photography. That could be overstating it, but we certainly think there is some merit to investors' concerns for Google's future as a search engine company. How disruption happe...

Amazon.com Inc's self-driving vehicle unit, Zoox, said on Monday it has successfully tested a robotaxi with employees as passengers on a public road in a move to bring it closer to commercial service for the general public. The February 11 test, conducted between two Zoox buildings a mile apart at its headquarters in Foster City, California, was part of the launch of a no-cost employee shuttle service that will also help the company refine its technology. "Putting the vehicle on (an) open public road and validating our approach to all of the different requirements, including regulatory, is a big step and we would not have done it unless internally we were already looking at the line of sight for going commercial," Chief Executive Aicha Evans told reporters on a conference call. Evans declined to provide a timeline for the commercial launch, which will need additional government clearances. The industry's automated vehicle segment has not rolled out as fast as ori...

ChatGPT, a fast-growing artificial intelligence program, has drawn praise for its ability to write answers quickly to a wide range of queries, and attracted US lawmakers' attention with questions about its impact on national security and education.  ChatGPT was estimated to have reached 100 million monthly active users just two months after launch, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history, and a growing target for regulation.  It was created by OpenAI , a private company backed by Microsoft , and made available to the public for free. Its ubiquity has generated fear that generative AI such as ChatGPT could be used to spread disinformation, while educators worry it will be used by students to cheat.  Representative Ted Lieu, a Democrat on the House of Representatives Science Committee, said in a recent opinion piece in the New York Times that he was excited about AI and the "incredible ways it will continue to advance society," but also "frea...