One Thing Today in Tech

US President Joe Biden signed an executive order on December 8 outlining a multi-billion-dollar plan for the federal government to achieve ‘net zero’ by 2050, The Verge reports. Under the plan, the US government will switch to electric vehicles, upgrade federal buildings, and use the power of the government to shift to cleaner forms of electricity. The government will stop purchasing petrol-powere...

General Bipin Rawat (63), India's first Chief of Defence Staff, his wife Madhulika, and 11 other military personnel were killed in a helicopter crash on Wednesday. The Russian-made Mi-17V5 helicopter crashed near Coonoor municipality, in the Nilgiri Hills, in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. The exact cause of the crash, which happened in foggy weather around noon, isn't clear yet, and an...

Facebook , now called Meta, is being sued for more than $150 billion by dozens of Rohingya refugees in the UK and US, accusing the social media giant of allowing hate speech against them to spread, BBC reports. They are demanding this compensation, claiming Facebook's platforms promoted violence against the persecuted minority in Myanmar and that the internet company didn’t do enough to safeguard...

A BBC investigation based on interviews with former Byju employees and customers has revealed several allegations against India’s most valuable startup, according to a report by the BBC. Byju’s has denied the allegations. Disgruntled parents allege they were misled by sales agents. They said they were lured into contracts by agents who convinced them of an urgent need only to go incommunicado a fe...

Elon Musk is being allowed to “make the rules” himself for the world’s space tech industry, Josef Aschbacher, European Space Agency’s new chief, warns in an interview with Financial Times. Musk’s private space company SpaceX and the satellites unit Starlink have won regulatory approval in the US to send up tens of thousands of satellites into low-earth orbits, to provide satellite-based internet c...

LinkedIn   has started supporting Hindi—the first Indian regional language on the professional network—to support 600 million Hindi language speakers globally, the company said in a press release. With the launch of Hindi, LinkedIn now supports 25 languages globally. As part of the phase 1 rollout of LinkedIn in Hindi, members will be able to access their feed, profile, jobs, messaging, and c...

At its re:Invent conference , Amazon Web Services announced two new initiatives to make machine learning more accessible to anyone interested in learning and experimenting with the technology. The first is a $10 million scholarship programme to make AI and ML education accessible to poor students around the world. It will benefit 2000 students every year. Top 500 students, after a first Udacity na...

Facebook’s  parent company, Meta, has been ordered to sell Giphy by the UK's Competition and Markets Authority, BBC reports . Meta, until recently known as Facebook, bought the GIF-sharing search engine last year in a deal reportedly valued at $315 million. Meta planned to integrate Giphy's database of GIFs with Instagram, according to the BBC report. But the CMA ruled the purchase unfair to...

Mark Papermaster wears multiple hats within AMD—where he is chief technology officer and executive vice president—and in the semiconductor industry and forums such as the IEEE. Papermaster is one of the people credited with AMD’s turnaround over the last decade—a turnaround for which CEO Lisa Su became a widely acclaimed business leader. In conversation with Forbes India, Papermaster talks about w...

India’s telecom ministry has advised people to not buy Starlink connections because the company doesn’t have a license yet to sell its satellite internet connections in the country. Two months ago, Starlink—owned by Elon Musk—announced that it is starting services in India and was taking bookings. The government of India has asked the company to comply with the Indian regulatory framework for rend...

America has blocked more Chinese firms from accessing US technology, adding the names of eight tech firms to a list called the ‘entity list’, BBC reports. The companies were helping the Chinese military’s quantum computing efforts, according to the report. The US has also blocked individuals and entities from Russia, Japan, Singapore, and Pakistan. The entities blocked in Pakistan are related to t...

Instagram’s  head, Adam Mosseri, will testify before America’s top lawmakers in a senate subcommittee hearing in early December about the platform's harmful impact on young users, CNN reports. Mosseri is the most high-profile executive from Meta, as Facebook is now called, to agree to testify since Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen released hundreds of internal company docu...

India may ban private cryptocurrencies and launch a central bank digital currency, according to a parliament bulletin released on Tuesday. The Cryptocurrency and Regulation of Official Digital Currency Bill, 2021, is among the proposed laws that will be taken up when the parliament meets for its winter session starting November 29. According to the bulletin, the bill seeks “To create a facilitativ...

Britain has passed a law requiring new houses and buildings to install electric vehicle charging points from next year, BBC reports . This will see up to 145,000 charging points installed across the country each year. New supermarkets, workplaces and buildings undergoing major renovations will also come under the new law. The UK is switching to EVs, with petrol and diesel car sales banned from 203...

Brazil has seen an alarming acceleration in the destruction of its Amazon rain forests, fresh data from the country’s National Institute for Space Research shows, Deutsche Welle reports . The data shows a rapid reversal in the slowdown in the rate of deforestation—increasing by 22 percent in just the last year—in the south American nation, ever since president Jair Bolsonaro came to office in 2019...

A coalition of America’s top justice officials—comprising several state attorney generals—is leading a nationwide investigation into how Instagram knowingly harms children. Meta Platforms, formerly known as Facebook, is providing and promoting Instagram to children and young adults despite knowing that such use is associated with physical and mental health harms, according to a statement from Maur...

US President Joe Biden’s administration is offering funding to drug companies including Pfizer and Moderna to expand mRNA Covid-19 vaccine capacity by a billion doses by the second half of 2022, Bloomberg reports. Announced on Wednesday, the plan is also aimed at building the capacity to address any future pandemic, according to Bloomberg . Oxfam and others have accused the world’s biggest drug co...

Pfizer , BioNTech and Moderna—three of the world’s biggest Covid vaccine makers—are making an estimated $1000 every second in profits even as the world’s poorest go unvaccinated, according to a press release from Oxfam, a UK-based non-profit development organisation. The estimate is based on a report by the People’s Vaccine Alliance. The Alliance has 80 members including the African Alliance, Glob...

Paradigm , a crypto-focused VC firm, has raised a $2.5 billion fund, the industry’s largest to date. It is bigger than the $2.2 billion crypto fund Andreessen Horowitz announced in June. It cements Paradigm’s position as a leading crypto investor, The Information points out. “We’ve immersed ourselves in the frontier of protocol research and the culture of Web3,” Paradigm’s partners Fred Ehrsam and...

Technology is not just an enabler, it has become central and strategic to banking. New financial products, such as buy now pay later, are becoming all the rage. The idea of open banking is also catching up, with pieces of software called open application program interfaces allowing third-party fintech startups to provide innovative financial products and services built around established banks. In...

SoftBank Group may invest as much as $10 billion in India next year, chief executive Rajeev Misra said in a virtual conference on Thursday, TechCrunch reports. SoftBank, which returned to Flipkart with a fresh investment this year, has already invested $3 billion in Indian companies this year. In India, the group will look for the right companies at the right valuations to invest between $5 billio...

The US and China made a surprise joint announcement on Wednesday at the ongoing COP26 UN climate summit, pledging to work together to find concrete measures to combat climate change, Bloomberg reports. The two sides agreed to accelerate their efforts to cut emissions—including methane gas—and curb illegal deforestation, China’s special climate envoy Xie Zhenhua told reporters, according to Bloombe...

DoorDash , a US food delivery giant, is acquiring Finland based Wolt in an all-stock deal worth €7 billion, or $8.1 billion, the company said in a press release. The acquisition “will accelerate our product development, bring greater focus to each of our markets and improve the value we provide to consumers, merchants, as well as Dashers and couriers around the world,” Tony Xu, co-founder and CEO...

America and Japan have reopened their borders, easing entry bans imposed due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The US has reopened its borders to fully vaccinated travellers, ending restrictions imposed by former President Donald Trump in March 2020 that had affected non-US citizens from over 30 countries, BBC reported on Monday. Ending a de facto ban on foreign visitors due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Japa...

Apple has recruited another former Tesla engineer to build its electric car team, Bloomberg reported on Sunday. The latest hire is Christopher Moore, a software engineer, who will report to Stuart Bowers, another former Tesla executive who joined Apple last year. Bowers had led Tesla’s Autopilot team before leaving Tesla in mid-2019, according to Bloomberg . Meanwhile , Tesla’s founder and the wor...