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"The coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict on social media platforms has come under scrutiny from the UK government and Brussels, as tech firms including X and Meta were urged to deal with a surge in violent and misleading content on their sites. In the UK, the technology secretary summoned social media executives on Wednesday to demand the removal from their platforms of violent content related to the Hamas attacks on Israel."

"Especially at voting time, fears grow of TikTok 'disinformation' threatening democracy. Politicians and their paymasters are terrified that they can no longer control the supply of information to the public, thanks to platforms like Facebook and TikTok. With Thailand's general election only a few months away, the Election Commission of Thailand (ECT) is battling to take back control of information through self-censorship of the TikTok video-sharing platform. Ostensibly, this is to keep young voters on the government's straight and narrow path."

"The governor of Utah, Spencer Cox, has signed sweeping social media legislation requiring explicit parental permissions for anyone under 18 to use platforms such as TikTok, Instagram and Facebook. He also signed a bill prohibiting social media companies from employing techniques that could cause minors to develop an "addiction" to the platforms."

"TikTok has been fined £12.7m for illegally processing the data of 1.4 million children under 13 who were using its platform without parental consent, Britain's data watchdog said. The information commissioner said the China-owned video app had done "very little, if anything" to check who was using the platform and remove underage users, despite internal warnings the firm was flouting its own terms and conditions."

"The role of social media platforms and messaging apps in Sunday's political violence in Brasília is under the spotlight after experts highlighted their use by Jair Bolsonaro supporters to question the presidential election result and organise the protests. Facebook and Instagram's owner, Meta, has said it will take down content that praises the storming of government buildings in Brazil's capital, amid claims that tech firms had not done enough to head off the attacks or quell disinformation."

"Decentralized storage platforms break apart the users' files and distribute them across multiple nodes on their network. Since the data is scattered across multiple nodes, there is no single point of failure."

""The abhorrent racist abuse directed at England players last night has absolutely no place on Twitter," the social network said on Monday morning. A Facebook spokesperson said similarly: "No one should have to experience racist abuse anywhere, and we don't want it on Instagram." But the statements bore little relation to the experience of the company's users. On Instagram, where thousands left comments on the pages of Marcus Rashford, Bukayo Saka and Jadon Sancho, supportive users who tried to flag abuse to the platform were surprised by the response."

"The world's biggest social networks say racism isn't welcome on their platforms, but a combination of poor enforcement and weak rules have allowed hate to flourish."

"Shoppers are being deceived because social media platforms and messaging apps are not doing enough to prevent a "cottage industry of fraudsters" soliciting fake reviews, according to Amazon. Fake reviews have become one of the most persistent scourges of online retailers, and some analysts think that about one in seven reviews in the UK are not the real deal, with blame often directed at groups that proliferate on Facebook. Last year Amazon alone blocked 200m fake reviews. Dharmesh Mehta, head of the company's customer trust team, said this avalanche of misinformation was harming consumers, who were being "deceived about what products they should or shouldn't be buying"."

"In the last year or so, though, the rise of AI has upended that equation. For many publishers and platforms, having their data crawled for training data felt less like trading and more like stealing. "What we found pretty quickly with the AI companies," Stubblebine says, "is not only was it not an exchange of value, we're getting nothing in return. Literally zero." When Stubblebine announced last fall that Medium would be blocking AI crawlers, he wrote that "AI companies have leached value from writers in order to spam Internet readers." "

" With more than 40% of the world's estimated 7,000 languages "endangered and at risk of extinction", an army of tiny publishers is fighting an unsung battle to save them. UK press Diglot Books is one of them, and this week took on the might of Amazon to get its Cornish children's story out to readers. Told by the internet giant that Matthew and the Wellington Boots (Matthew ha'n Eskisyow Glaw in Cornish, or Kernewek) would not be made available through Kindle Direct Publishing because it was in a language that is "not currently supported" by the platform, Diglot petitioned the retailer."

"As smart as they are, doctors can't compete with the volume of knowledge that a robot can retain. In an effort to join the best of both worlds - human experience with robotic data - a number of companies are developing telemedicine robots that not only allow doctors to reach out to patients miles or continents away, but can offer immediate information and advice that draws from volumes of medical research and case studies. In January the FDA approved the telepresence platform RP-Vita, developed by iRobot and InTouch Health. Now seven hospitals across North America have enlisted the services of RP-Vita, bringing us one step closer to robotics-augmented healthcare."

"So over the weekend, when protesters were expected to rally for the third time, Facebook was inaccessible to locals, who had been using the platform to organise. People also had problems accessing Facebook's Instagram service. Israeli VPN service Hola posted a statement saying it saw a surge of about 200,000 users from Vietnam on its system over the weekend, using it to access Facebook."

"Security Analysis of Emerging Smart Home Applications demonstrates how Samsung's SmartThings platform may be especially vulnerable to hackers. "

"A new study released this month in First Monday uncovers more than 4,000 unique keywords censored over the last year and a half on Chinese instant messaging platforms. Focusing on Skype and the microblogging service Sina Weibo, the researchers cultivated their keyword list using reverse-engineering techniques such as packet sniffing, which captures and analyzes packets of data as they pass through a network."

"OpenRemote is an open-source Internet of Things platform that could help spur smarter homes and cities. "

The Treasury's decision to close the education ICT agency Becta by November, cutting £80m from this financial year's government budget, has dismayed its 240 staff - and some teachers who found its work especially useful because it provided a central platform for standardising on technology.

"With news that the 15 million Twitter users in the UK can now be targeted at individual postcode levels, the micro-blogging platform is selling its advertising opportunities as ultra-geographically precise, and therefore ultra-cost effective. "The key benefit of geo-targeting is that it enables advertisers, or in this case political parties, the ability to reach users in specific regions, metropolitan areas and now postcodes," Twitter said in a blog post. "

"Regin is a tool capable of infecting and compromising entire networks, not just individual computers, as security companies Symantec and Kaspersky Labs detailed in their technical reports published on Sunday and Monday. It's not only a computer virus or malware, but also a toolkit or platform that can be used for different purposes, depending on the needs of the attackers. It can collect passwords, retrieve deleted files, and even take over entire networks and infrastructures, according to researchers. "

"Marlinspike's Textsecure has an impeccable reputation as a secure platform, and Whatsapp founder Jan Koum attributes his desire to add security to his users' conversations to his experiences with the surveillance state while growing up in Soviet Ukraine. However, without any independent security audit or (even better) source-code publication, we have to take the company's word that it has done the right thing and that it's done it correctly."

"This is where Google's Project Shield comes through: sites pre-register with Google to "reverse proxy" their traffic through Google's cloud platform. By making a change in DNS, publishers can route all their traffic through Google. This means that a DDoS attack has to be sufficiently robust as to take down Google's cloud (much harder than taking down a WordPress install on a rack in a commodity hosting provider)"