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"China is home to the world's largest population of digital natives, totaling more than 75 million people - that's almost twice as many as the U.S., which has more than 41 million."

"If you were born around the turn of the 21st century, you've probably had to endure someone calling you a "digital native" at least once. At first, this kind of sounds like a good thing to be-raised without the taint of the offline world, and so imbued with a kind of mystic sixth sense about how the Internet should be."

"India's government has ordered that all online news, social media and video streaming platforms such as Netflix and Amazon Prime are to be subject to state regulation, raising fears of increased censorship of digital media. The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, which regulates and censors print newspapers, television, films and theatre, will also have jurisdiction, under the new order, over digital news and entertainment platforms in India."

"So what happens when we outsource part of our memory to an external device? Does it enable us to squeeze more and more out of life, because we aren't as reliant on our fallible brains to cue things up for us? Are we so reliant on smartphones that they will ultimately change how our memories work (sometimes called digital amnesia)? Or do we just occasionally miss stuff when we don't remember the reminders?"

"A collaboration between Oxford University, The Education University of Hong Kong, Reading University and Durham University has found "no evidence to suggest abstaining from social media has a positive effect on an individual's well-being." The researchers noted that this contrasts popular beliefs about the benefits of digital detoxes. Moreover, this international study found that those who took a break from social media didn't replace online socializing with face-to-face, voice, or email interactions, as the researchers had expected. Taking a break from social media therefore led to reduced overall interaction and loneliness as social media was not replaced with forms of socializing."

As our connectivity increases, we're seeing a growing number of cases of law enforcement using social media and other digital tools to help solve crimes. A study from Accenture, a global management and consulting agency, showed that 72 percent of respondent citizens believe that social media can help in crime investigations and in the prosecution of offenders.

"IDFC Bank has launched an app called Aadhaar Pay that aims to help millions of its citizens without a smartphone to pay for their purchases digitally with just their fingerprint.  Merchants will be able to download the app on their Android smartphones and attach a fingerprint scanner device. To make payments, buyers will only have to choose their bank name, input their unique Aadhaar number and scan their fingerprint, which acts as a password to make the payment directly from their bank account linked to their Aadhaar card."

"That's right, two thirds of the digital image is interpolated by the processor in the conversion from RAW to JPG or TIF. It's reality but not as we know it. For obvious commercial reasons camera manufacturers are careful to reconstruct the digital image in a form that mimics the familiar old photograph and consumers barely noticed a difference in the resulting image, but there are very few limitations on how the RAW data could be handled and reality could be reconstructed in any number of ways."

"We may be only just starting to understand how digital democracy can help address the crisis of legitimacy that is affecting different levels of the political process."

"Encryption is the digital lock which gives us the security to trust our financial data and inner-most thoughts to the cloud, and without which everything, and I mean everything, in our digital lives might be exposed. "

"If the eCNY is successful, it will give the central bank new powers, including novel types of monetary policy to help the economy grow. In one possibility that economists have discussed, a central bank could program its digital currency to slowly lose value so that consumers are encouraged to spend it immediately."

""The code reasonably attempts to address the bargaining power imbalance between digital platforms and Australian news businesses," he said. Google's search engine not as good as its competitors for news, research finds Read more "It also recognises the important role search plays, not only to consumers but to the thousands of Australian small businesses that rely on search and advertising technology to fund and support their organisations." The code, which is currently before the parliament, would facilitate negotiations between media companies and digital platforms - currently just Facebook and Google - for payment for content. If an agreement cannot be reached, then it goes to an arbiter for resolution."

"Assigning female genders to digital assistants such as Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa is helping entrench harmful gender biases, according to a UN agency."

"Chinese consumers are increasingly standing up to Internet giants for their digital privacy in an unprecedented way. China is in the early stages of setting up a data protection regulatory system. The Cyber Security Law, effective Jun 1, 2017, included for the first time a set of data protection provisions in the form of national-level legislation. The 2018 e-Commerce Law incorporated data privacy protections for consumers such as the "right to be forgotten", similar to the EU's General Data Protection Regulation."

"An online self-help programme that helps people sleep better is more effective than face-to-face psychological therapy, a study involving over 7,000 NHS patients has found. Sleepio, a six-week digital treatment for insomnia, helped 56% of users beat the condition, whereas the success rate in NHS Improving access to psychological therapy (Iapt) services is 50%."

"Early Saturday morning after hours of negotiations, the bloc agreed on the broad terms of the Digital Services Act, or DSA, which will force tech companies to take greater responsibility for content that appears on their platforms. New obligations include removing illegal content and goods more quickly, explaining to users and researchers how their algorithms work, and taking stricter action on the spread of misinformation. Companies face fines of up to six percent of their annual turnover for non-compliance. "

"A report by investigators from the Digital Forensic Lab, a global network of digital forensic researchers run by US-based thinktank the Atlantic Council, reveals how pro-Russian Facebook pages in Mali coordinated support for anti-democracy protests and the Wagner group, a controversial Russian private military contractor that was invited into the unstable country last year after the overthrow of President Bah N'daw by the military."

"I don't trust it, David! It's the whole Lord of the Rings vibe - "one app to rule them all", which famously didn't work out great for Middle-earth. A lot of people have concerns, myself included. It's why there was a backlash to Meta - which provides Facebook and WhatsApp - trying to launch a digital currency. I think there's a broader issue of digital literacy here: when we give up our permissions to a super app, do we really know what we're agreeing to?"

"Landsem's digital detective skills would help pivot the Norwegian approach to digital image-based abuse. In 2017, she discovered several nude images of Nora Mørk, a handball player on the national team. The case kickstarted a national debate and, in the summer of 2021, Norway made the spread of intimate images a crime punishable with up to one year of imprisonment - two if the abuse is "systematic" or "organised.""