Tag: technews

The Amsterdam Center for Entrepreneurship (ACE) is planning to launch a €150mn fund later this year to further expand its support to startups spinning out of academia. Established in 2008, ACE is the city’s university incubator with four academic stakeholders: the University of Amsterdam, the Vrije Universiteit, the University of Applied Sciences, and Amsterdam UMC. Its mission is to help students and academics build a company. For this reason, ACE offers two types of programmes: the Explore Programme, which provides the business and entrepreneurship fundamentals; and the Incubator Programme, which targets early-stage startups that are ready to grow their businesses…

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This article was originally published on .cult by Patrick Helm. .cult is a Berlin-based community platform for developers. We write about all things career-related, make original documentaries, and share heaps of other untold developer stories from around the world. Once, there was a little online quiz with 10 questions. Each question displayed a tiny method and one had to guess if it was defined in the Ruby core language, or within the Rails framework. Neither Matz nor DHH scored 10/10. Yukihiro Matsumoto, also known as Matz, is the creator of the Ruby language. David Heinemeier Hanson, aka DHH, invented the…

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It might come as a bit of a surprise but those things that you stick in your ears regularly could do with the occasional cleaning.

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Looking to send someone flowers this Valentine’s Day? The best flowery delivery services offer same-day delivery options, gift baskets, and a variety of vibrant bouquets.

Sometimes you may need to remove the Meta Quest 3’s facial interface for cleaning. Luckily, it’s a very quick and easy process that we’ll explain here.

The CEOs of Meta, Snap, Discord, X and TikTok testified at a high-stakes Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on child exploitation online. During the hearing, Mark Zuckerberg, Evan Spiegel, Jason Citron, Linda Yaccarino and Shou Chew spent hours being grilled by lawmakers about their records on child safety. 

The hearing was the first time Spiegel, Citron and Yaccarino testified to Congress. Notably, all three were subpoenaed by the committee after refusing to appear voluntarily, according to lawmakers. Judiciary Committee Chair Senator Dick Durbin noted that Citron “only accepted services of his subpoena after US Marshals were sent to Discord’s headquarters at taxpayers’ expense.”

The hearing room was filled with parents of children who had been victims of online exploitation on social media. Many members of the audience silently held up photos of their children as the CEOs entered the room, and Durbin kicked off the hearing with a somber video featuring victims of child exploitation and their parents.

“Discord has been used to groom, abduct and abuse children,” Durbin said. “Meta’s Instagram helped connect and promote a network of pedophiles. Snapchat’s disappearing messages have been co-opted by criminals who financially extort young victims. TikTok has become a quote platform of choice for predators to access, engage and groom children for abuse. And the prevalence of CSAM on X has grown as the company has gutted its trust and safety workforce.”

During the hearing, many of the senators shared personal stories of parents whose children had died by suicide after being exploited online. “Mr. Zuckerberg, you and the companies before us — I know you don’t mean it to be so — but you have blood on your hands,” Senator Lindsey Graham said in his opening remarks. The audience applauded. 

While years of similar hearings have so far failed to produce any new laws, there is growing bipartisan support in Congress for new safety regulations. As Tech Policy Press points out, there are currently more than half a dozen bills dealing with children’s online safety that have been proposed by senators. These include the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which would require platforms to create more parental control and safety features and submit to independent audits, and COPPA 2.0, a revised version of the 1998 Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act, which would bar companies from collecting or monetizing children’s data without consent.

Senators have also proposed a number of bills to address child exploitation, including the EARN IT Act, currently in its third iteration since 2020, and the STOP CSAM Act. None of these have advanced to the Senate floor for a vote. Many of these bills have faced intense lobbying from the tech industry, though some companies in attendance said they are open to some aspects of the legislation.

Zuckerberg suggest a different approach, saying he supported age verification and parental control requirements at the app store level, which would effectively shift the burden to Apple and Google. Meta has come under particular pressure in recent months following a lawsuit from 41 states for harming teens’ mental health. Court documents from the suit allege that Meta turned a blind eye to children under 13 using its service, did little to stop adults from sexually harassing teens on Facebook and that Zuckerberg personally intervened to stop an effort to ban plastic surgery filters on Instagram.

Developing…

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/senate-tells-social-media-ceos-they-have-blood-on-their-hands-for-failing-to-protect-children-170411884.html?src=rss