Tens of millions of merchants and users in India are struggling to make online transactions and use several popular services after the nation's central bank seized control of Yes Bank, the fourth largest lender in the country. From a report: The emergency takeover of the private sector bank has taken off several financial startups that rely on it for facilitating services such as processing QR codes, point-of-sale terminals as well as transactions of UPI-based payments. Leading payments app PhonePe, owned by e-commerce giant Walmart, has been inaccessible to tens of millions of its users since Thursday evening (local time). The startup said in a statement that it was working to restore its services, and has solved some of the issues for its merchant partners. [...]

New Delhi took over Yes Bank midnight on Thursday, after the Reserve Bank of India said it had no alternative but to implement measures to replace the private sector firm's board and temporarily restrict withdrawals and suspend all other transactions for 30 days. Yes Bank has struggled for months to raise capital to improve its financials. According to NPCI, Yes Bank is the technology banking partner for ticketing platforms Cleartrip, MakeMyTrip, and RedBus, telecom operator Airtel, food-delivery startup Swiggy, movie ticketing business BookMyShow and PVR, Microsoft's chat service Kaizala, as well as several other Flipkart properties including the marquee service, fashion platforms Jabong, and Myntra.

Facebook filed a lawsuit this week against Namecheap, claiming the domain name registrar has refused to cooperate in an investigation into a series of malicious domains that have been registered through its service and which impersonated the Facebook brand. ZDNet reports: Christen Dubois, Director and Associate General Counsel at Facebook, said today that Facebook engineers tracked down 45 suspicious Facebook lookalike domains registered through Namecheap, which had the owners' details hidden through the company's WhoisGuard side-service. Some of the sample domains included the likes of instagrambusinesshelp.com, facebo0k-login.com, and whatsappdownload.site. Dubois said lookalike domains like these -- which abuse the Facebook brand -- are often used for phishing, fraud, and scams.

"We sent notices to Whoisguard between October 2018 and February 2020, and despite their obligation to provide information about these infringing domain names, they declined to cooperate," Dubois said. "We don't want people to be deceived by these web addresses, so we've taken legal action," the Facebook exec said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Twitter said on Thursday it is banning posts that "dehumanize" people because they have a disease or disability or because of their age, a step that happens to correspond to an explosion of tweets about the spreading coronavirus. The company told Reuters that the policy change was not a reaction to the outbreak of the virus, which causes the respiratory disease COVID-19, but was part of its continual effort to update its rules against hateful conduct.

"We couldn't have predicted that this would happen in terms of the coronavirus," Jerrel Peterson, Twitter's head of trust and safety policy, said in a phone interview. Twitter's hateful conduct policy already bans attacking or threatening others on the basis of categories such as race, sexual orientation, age, disability or serious disease. This update will mean that those attacks do not need to be targeted to an individual or specific group. Now, even "if it's a tweet that doesn't have an @mention that likens a group based on their age, disability or disease to viruses or microbes or maggots, something that's less than human, that can be in violation of our policy now," Peterson said. Twitter went on to say that any offending tweets must be removed. Tweets sent before Thursday would also need to be deleted, but would not directly result in account suspensions, it said.

Last July, Hawaii representative and long-shot presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard sued Google for infringing on her free speech when it briefly suspended her campaign's advertising account after the first Democratic debate in June. On Wednesday, California's Central District Court rejected the suit outright. TechCrunch reports: Gabbard's campaign, Tulsi Now, Inc., asked for $50 million in damages from Google for "serious and continuing violations of Tulsi's right to free speech." In the suit, her campaign claimed that Google "helps to run elections" through political advertising and search results -- an argument District Judge Stephen Wilson firmly rejected. In dismissing the case, Wilson writes that what Gabbard "fails to establish is how Google's regulation of its own platform is in any way equivalent to a governmental regulation of an election." When it comes to Google, "an undisputedly private company," the First Amendment's free speech protections do not apply. A week ago, another California court reached the same conclusion in a case that right-wing group PragerU brought against YouTube.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Moments after Iran announced that a top adviser to Iran's Supreme Leader had died as a result of the coronavirus, the government blocked access to the Persian version of Wikipedia. The restrictions remained in place for 24 hours, though an oversight by the government meant that while the desktop version of the site was blocked, the mobile version remained available. Access to the Farsi version of Wikipedia was restored on Tuesday, but social media sites like Twitter and Facebook remain restricted inside the country as of Wednesday, as the government seeks to control the spread of information and keep a grip on the narrative around the increasingly deadly outbreak. Netblocks, a digital rights advocacy group that tracks internet disruptions around the world, said that there has also been widespread internet disruptions at night in certain parts of the country, including Qom, where the outbreak is believed to have originated. Tehran's police force created a "coronavirus defense base" to monitor "misinformation and the spread of fear." So far, the police have already arrested 24 people and a further 118 internet users were "talked to and let go" with warnings.

The country also released 54,000 prisoners in an effort to halt the spread of the virus. "The inmates were temporarily allowed out of jail after testing negative for the coronavirus and posting bail," reports Motherboard. "The government is also deploying hundreds of thousands of health workers across the country to stop the deadly outbreak."

Scientists monitoring the movements of the worst locust outbreak in Kenya in 70 years are hopeful that a new tracking program they will be able to prevent a second surge of the crop-ravaging insects. From a report: The UN has described the locust outbreak in the Horn of Africa, and the widespread breeding of the insects in Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia that has followed, as "extremely alarming." The UN's Food and Agriculture Organization has warned that an imminent second hatch of the insects could threaten the food security of 25 million people across the region as it enters the cropping season. Kenneth Mwangi, a satellite information scientist, based at the Intergovernmental Authority on Development climate prediction and applications centre, based in Nairobi, said researchers were running a supercomputer model to predict breeding areas that may have been missed by ground monitoring. These areas could become sources of new swarms if not sprayed.

"The model will be able to tell us the areas in which hoppers are emerging," said Mwangi. "We will also get ground information. These areas can become a source of an upsurge, or a new generation of hoppers. It becomes very difficult and expensive to control, which is why we are looking to prevent an upsurge. The focus will be on stopping hoppers becoming adults, as that leads to another cycle of infestation. We want to avoid that. We want to advise governments early, before an upsurge happens." So far, the supercomputer, funded by $45 million of UK aid as part of its Weather and Climate Information Services for Africa programme, has successfully forecast the movement of locusts using data such as wind speed and direction, temperature, and humidity. The model has achieved 90% accuracy in forecasting the future locations of the swarms, Mwangi said.

Drive down any U.S. interstate and there's a good chance you will see a pun or a funny reference on the next electronic message board you spot. From a report: Such messages have become ubiquitous across the country lately. But besides getting a snicker, what's behind these roadside bits, and are they making drivers behave any differently? They are known as Dynamic Message Signs, and they usually remind drivers about speed limits or traffic delays. Though the technology has been around for decades, in recent years states across the country have been taking a different tack with their messaging in a bid for more eyeballs.

A recent message that was flashing out across Illinois expressways is a perfect example of this. It read, "Got The Munchies? Get Food Delivered. Don't Drive High!" Since Illinois legalized marijuana this year, transportation officials have been trying to get people to avoid driving stoned, so why not appeal to a stoner's love for snacking? Elmo Bruggink, an Illinois tourist from the Netherlands, weighed in on the message. His home country is a place that has long been dealing with drivers who smoke weed, but Bruggink said officials haven't tried humor yet.

In January, a new law gave consumers the power to stop companies collecting their personal information. The law, known as the California Consumer Privacy Act (or the CCPA), can be a powerful tool for privacy, but it comes with a catch: Consumers who want to exercise their CCPA rights must contact every data broker individually, and there are more than a hundred of them. But now they have an easier option. From a report: On Thursday, a startup called DoNotPay unveiled a service it calls Digital Health that automates the data-deletion process. Priced at $3 a month, the service will contact more than 100 data brokers on your behalf and demand they delete your and your family's personal information. It will also show you the types of data the brokers have collected -- such as phone number or location info -- and even initiate legal proceedings if the firms fail to comply. The monthly fee also gives subscribers access to DoNotPay's other automated avenging services, like appealing parking tickets in any city, claiming compensation for poor in-flight Wi-Fi, and Robo Revenge, which sues robocallers.

A major electronics manufacturer for defense and communications markets was knocked offline after a ransomware attack, TechCrunch reported Thursday. From the report: A source with knowledge of the incident told TechCrunch that the defense contractor paid a ransom of about $500,000 shortly after the incident in mid-January, but that the company was not yet fully operational. California-based Communications & Power Industries (CPI) makes components for military devices and equipment, like radar, missile seekers and electronic warfare technology. The company counts the U.S. Department of Defense and its advanced research unit DARPA as customers. The company confirmed the ransomware attack. "We are working with a third-party forensic investigation firm to investigate the incident. The investigation is ongoing," said CPI spokesperson Amanda Mogin. "We have worked with counsel to notify law enforcement and governmental authorities, as well as customers, in a timely manner."

Dan Luu, writing in a blog post: The sleight of hand that's happening when someone says that we can keep software simple and compatible by making everything handle text is the pretense that text data doesn't have a structure that needs to be parsed4. In some cases, we can just think of everything as a single space separated line, or maybe a table with some row and column separators that we specify (with some behavior that isn't consistent across tools, of course). That adds some hassle when it works, and then there are the cases where serializing data to a flat text format adds considerable complexity since the structure of data means that simple flattening requires significant parsing work to re-ingest the data in a meaningful way. Another reason commands now have more options is that people have added convenience flags for functionality that could have been done by cobbling together a series of commands. These go all the way back to v7 unix, where ls has an option to reverse the sort order (which could have been done by passing the output to tac).

[...] Over time, more convenience options have been added. For example, to pick a command that originally has zero options, mv can move and create a backup (three options; two are different ways to specify a backup, one of which takes an argument and the other of which takes zero explicit arguments and reads an implicit argument from the VERSION_CONTROL environment variable; one option allows overriding the default backup suffix). mv now also has options to never overwrite and to only overwrite if the file is newer. mkdir is another program that used to have no options where, excluding security things for SELinux or SMACK as well as help and version options, the added options are convenience flags: setting the permissions of the new directory and making parent directories if they don't exist. If we look at tail, which originally had one option (-number, telling tail where to start), it's added both formatting and convenience options For formatting, it has -z, which makes the line delimiter null instead of a newline. Some examples of convenience options are -f to print when there are new changes, -s to set the sleep interval between checking for -f changes, --retry to retry if the file isn't accessible.

Google Assistant is able to read web pages and news articles on Android devices worldwide today, a company spokesperson said. From the report: You can trigger the feature by simply saying "Hey Google, read it" or "Hey Google, read this page." If you land on a webpage in a language you don't understand, Google Assistant is also able to read and translate 42 languages into your preferred language. Both reading and translation work on Android phones version 5 and above. Google Assistant reading text speaks with a different voice than the average Google Assistant. Members of the Google Assistant team said reading in a more natural voice is important for longform content. In recent years, teams working on Google Assistant and Amazon's Alexa have created neural networks capable of generating voices with more humanlike sounds and intonations.

Ampere has unveiled the industry's first 80-core ARM-based 64-bit server processor today in a bid to outdo Intel and Advanced Micro Devices in datacenter chips. From a report: Ampere announced today that it has begun providing samples of the Ampere Altra processor for modern cloud and edge computing datacenters. The Ampere Altra processor runs on 210 watts and is targeted at such server applications as data analytics, artificial intelligence, database, storage, telco stacks, edge computing, web hosting, and cloud-native applications. Intel dominates about 95.5% of the server chip market with its x86-based processors, and AMD has the rest. But Ampere is targeting power-efficient, high-performance, and high-memory capacity features. Renee James, former president of Intel and CEO of Ampere, said in an interview with VentureBeat that the chip is faster than a 64-core AMD Epyc processor and Intel's 28-core high-end Xeon "Cascade Lake" chip.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz: If you look beyond the memes, cat videos, and quirky acronyms (TIL, OP, ELI5) you'll find a treasure trove of resources that will help you quickly get acquainted with the topics that have long eluded you. For me, even though I worked on Wall Street for nearly 15 years, Reddit is the first place I turn when I have a question about money. To me, here's what makes good financial advice: objectivity, accuracy, and relatability. With an alien mascot named Snoo, an impossibly sprawling site structure, and user anonymity, Reddit may seem like an unlikely place for the serious business of money. But in fact, it has each of these qualities in spades.

According to Amazon's Alexa, Reddit is the sixth most popular site in the US; the site reported 430 million active users at the end of 2019. Reddit is organized into niche communities (known as subreddits that begin with "r/") with their own guidelines, norms, and moderators covering both mainstream (r/kpop) and obscure (r/namenerds for new parents seeking inspiration) topics. Because users self-select to be active in these communities, Redditors are known to be passionate and have been described as "offbeat, quirky, and anti-establishment." All these qualities make it a great place for conversations about money. Consider the subreddit Frugal Living (r/Frugal), which shows what allows Reddit to offer better financial advice than many of those other sites: the Redditor community. Frugal Living's mission statement is to "understand the resources that we have, and [how to spend] them wisely and deliberately" and this subreddit contains actionable tips on eking out that last bit of toothpaste, warnings that Amazon Day is pure marketing, and why you shouldn't pay for scientific journals. These posts offer encouragement, collaboration, and a relatability that's hard to find in the traditional financial press, no matter your financial situation. [...] One final word of warning: no matter whether financial advice comes from the front page of the internet or the front page of the Wall Street Journal, it's incumbent upon the buyer to scrutinize the details, lead with skepticism, and, when appropriate, consult with professionals. Some of the communities that might help you get started, as mentioned in the article, include: Personal Finance, Frugal Living, Investing, Financial Independence / Retire Early, and Stocks.

Greg Kogan, writes in a blog post: The Maersk Triple-E Class container ship is 1,300 feet long, carries over 18,000 containers across 11,000 miles between Europe and Asia, and... Its entire crew can fit inside a passenger van. As a former naval architect and a current marketing consultant to startups, I found that the same principle that lets a 13-person crew navigate the world's largest container ship to a port halfway around the world without breaking down also applies to startups working towards aggressive growth goals: Simple systems have less downtime.

Ships contain simple systems that are easy to operate and easy to understand, which makes them easy to fix, which means they have less downtime. An important quality, considering that "downtime" for a ship could mean being stranded thousands of miles from help. Take the ship's steering system, for instance. The rudder is pushed left or right by metal rods. Those rods are moved by hydraulic pressure. That pressure is controlled by a hydraulic pump. That pump is controlled by an electronic signal from the wheelhouse. That signal is controlled by the autopilot. It doesn't require a rocket scientist or a naval architect to find the cause of and solution to any problem.

France's top court ruling opens the way for Uber drivers to be reclassified as employees, the country's highest court ruled on Wednesday, the latest in a wave of rulings globally to grant more rights to gig workers. From a report: The Cour de Cassation in Paris said Uber drivers can't build a clientele, don't set rates or decide on terms and conditions, itineraries are imposed and destinations unknown to them. The top court said the fact that Uber "unilaterally determines its terms and rules" are all indications that drivers are more like employees of the company than self-employed. "The existence of a relationship of subordination between the company Uber and the driver when connecting to the digital platform" makes the "driver's self-employed status merely fictitious," the Cour de Cassation wrote.

Apple will now allow push notifications to be used for advertising, so long as users agree to receive the ads first. From a report: Apple updated its App Store guidelines today with a change to its traditionally strict restrictions around push notifications. Apple has long banned apps from using notifications for "advertising, promotions, or direct marketing purposes," but that changes today. Apps can now send marketing notifications when "customers have explicitly opted in to receive them." Users must also be able to opt out of receiving the ads.

couchslug writes: Physical commuting has a horrific and enormously expensive carbon footprint. It's costly in lives (auto and other transportation accidents, pollution) and wasted time (billions of hours every year) better spent doing something else. What software and hardware features would your ideal telework systems incorporate to minimize physical interaction? How can we use technology to avoid costly, wasteful and sometimes dangerous meatspace gatherings? What don't you like about existing options? I'd like to add that telecommuting is becoming a popular option for businesses trying to protect their workers amid the coronavirus outbreak. Earlier this week, Cisco said it saw traffic for its Webex remote meeting software in Asian countries increase by 400 percent since the outbreak began, and free signup rates in impacted countries have increased 700 percent or more.

Do you have a favorite remote work software? Let us know what you like/dislike about it below.

An Amazon employee at the company's Seattle headquarters has tested positive for the novel coronavirus, and has subsequently been sent to quarantine. CNET reports: The online retail giant has about 55,000 employees in the Seattle area, and reportedly said people working in close contact with the affected person have been notified. The employee went home sick on Feb. 25 and hasn't returned to work since, according to a message sent to Amazon employees seen by The Seattle Times. Amazon learned Tuesday that the employee had tested positive for the virus. So far, a total of nine deaths have been reported in Washington, with 27 confirmed cases in the state. There are more than 100 cases in 15 states as of Tuesday night.

The PlayStation 2 is celebrating its 20th anniversary as it launched in Japan on March 4, 2000. "It was released in the U.S., Europe and the rest of the world a year later and would go on to become the best-selling console of all time," reports GiveMeSport. From the report: To put this into context, its main rivals at the time, Microsoft's Xbox and Nintendo's GameCube, would sell 25 million and 22 million consoles worldwide respectively on their first release versus Sony PS2's 155 million! It certainly helped that the PS2 was able to release such memorable games like RockStar Games 'Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas', which sold 17.3 million copies. Other games included 'Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater', which was part of PlayStation's iconic series that was set in the 1960s during the Cold War. Not to mention there was zombie filled 'Resident Evil' franchise and the terrifying 'Silent Hill'.

The success of the PS2 was widely due to Ken Kutaragi. His big idea in the latest round of console battles at the time was to add in a DVD player compatibility with the PS2. DVDs were the latest new format to view movies on at the time and an entry-level price for a DVD Player was $700. The other unique selling point was the backward compatibility; with some exceptions you could play your favorite PlayStation games on the new PS2. Kris Naudus from Engadget writes about how the PlayStation 2 was the first game console she ever bought -- "a big deal at a time when I was only making $135 a week," she. says. Her favorite feature? It could play DVDs.

Since it was founded in March 2006, there has been only one type of post possible on Twitter: a tweet. But starting today, the 280-character post is being joined by an ephemeral South American cousin: the fleet. That's what Twitter is calling these new, more fleeting tweets -- posts that appear in a separate timeline above the main timeline for 24 hours before disappearing. From a report: In other words, yes, Twitter is finally doing Snapchat Stories, and the implementation looks nearly identical to Instagram's version of the feature. "Twitter is for having conversations about what you care about," Mo Aladham, a Twitter group product manager, said in a blog post. "But, some of you tell us that you're uncomfortable to tweet because tweets are public, feel permanent, and have public counts (retweets and likes). We want to make it possible for you to have conversations in new ways with less pressure and more control, beyond tweets and direct messages. That's why starting today in Brazil, we're testing fleets, a new way to start conversations from your fleeting thoughts."