News

International, Trending i-Centric Admin 2022

WhatsApp and its new draconian lack-of-privacy policies

Facebook reportedly aims to monetise WhatsApp by allowing businesses to contact their clients via the platform, even sell them products directly using the service.

You may have noticed a highly controversial development by the popular messenger WhatsApp concerning new Privacy Terms, which users are requested to agree to or walk – Their way or the highway. We first got wind of these new terms in October 2020, through reliable sources in Mountain View. We have since gathered that under these new terms WhatsApp will capture your other contact details, logs of how long and how often you use WhatsApp, information about how you interact with other users, websites you frequently visit, businesses you frequently communicate with (through WhatsApp for Business).

The main reason behind this move is that WhatsApp, through parent company Facebook Inc. wants to increase its revenue through advertising. Facebook reportedly aims to monetise WhatsApp by allowing businesses to contact their clients via the platform, even sell them products directly using the service. They will be sharing your information with businesses – specific to your interest – businesses will in turn share adverts or products – again specific to your interest and these businesses will pay Facebook a fee. Easy money at the expense of your privacy. Truth is, this was actually the main reason behind Facebook’s decision to acquire WhatsApp back in February 2014 at a reported figure of $16 billion ($4 billion in cash and $12 billion remaining in Facebook shares). In a perfect world Facebook should be extending a portion of income generated under this new development to users who agree to these terms, and they did put that into consideration albeit briefly.

Contrary to what has been thrown around, WhatsApp will NOT read your chats, and they have continued to categorically deny this misconception. Not agreeing to these new terms will mark the end of you and WhatsApp from 8th February 2021. While the platform will not be deleted from your device, you will not be able to use it until you agree to these terms. Previous chats and associated files will NOT be deleted from your device as their hope is that you eventually succumb to these new terms.

Alternative Messenger Platforms

While most people have opted for Telegram, we recommend Signal. Following this announcement by WhatsApp last Wednesday, Signal garnered 2 million downloads in 24 hours. Signal is similar to WhatsApp, it does everything WhatsApp does and is more secure. WhatsApp actually uses Signal’s encryption technology. Encryption is a form of security which means if you sent the message “How are you?”, it is transmitted over the network as “jfadc rydfx hyshs?”, at the receiving end it is decrypted back to “How are you?”.

Signal is an open-source platform, meaning it is free. The only feature you will not find on Signal that is popular with WhatsApp is the ability to post a “Status”, which is not important to some users.

Author

Kevin Maika, Managing Consultant, i-Centric
Email: kevin.maika@icentric.co.bw

Microsoft Updates i-Centric Admin 2022

Microsoft: enterprises have upgraded windows 10 just once a year from the start

The company’s decision to extend support for the fall editions of Windows 10 Enterprise and Education reflects an upgrade cadence companies have already been following.

When Microsoft extended support for Windows 10 Enterprise and Education – making it much easier for organizations to upgrade the OS just once a year – it simply bowed to a reality that had been in place since the operating system’s debut in 2015, according to a company document.

In a corner of a September 2018 document titled “Joint FAQs” and labelled “For Partner Use Only,” Microsoft acknowledged that many of its larger customers had been on an annual upgrade cadence since their beginnings with Windows 10. The FAQ was a companion to a Sept. 6, 2018 announcement of a change to Windows 10’s support, the third that year.

“All future feature updates of Windows 10 Enterprise and Education editions with a targeted release month of September (starting with 1809) will be supported for 30 months from their release date,” wrote Jared Spataro, a Microsoft executive, in the post to a company blog. “This will give customers with longer deployment cycles the time they need to plan, test, and deploy.”

Before Spataro’s missive, all Windows 10 SKUs (stock-keeping units) were allowed 18 months of free support.

As Computerworld wrote in this FAQ here and here and here, the 30-month support extension for enterprises meant that annual-and-just-annual feature upgrades were eminently doable. By exclusively deploying each fall’s upgrade, even the least agile organizations could slow down Microsoft’s Windows-as-a-service tempo.

Turns out that they were so desperate to get out from under Microsoft’s mandated upgrade-every-six-months pace that they’d been doing yearly from the get-go.

“With the six-month release cadence, not every customer could test every release,” Microsoft said in the FAQ for partners. “In fact, we saw strong customer adoption of 1607, with many customers then adopting 1709 and skipping 1703 altogether.”

Customers who adopted 1607, whether by upgrading from the original 1507 release (shown in the table) or first deploying Windows 10 with 1607 (more likely), jumped over April 2017’s 1703 and landed on 1709 sometime after the latter’s October 2017 launch.

From there it’s a guess, as Microsoft published the FAQ four months after 1803 and three and a half months before 1809 was ready for even the most daring. One possibility is that enterprises on 1709 upgraded to 1809 even in the face of that version’s disastrous debut and resulting re-release.

Source: computerworld.com

Cloud Computing, International i-Centric Admin 2022

Conclusion of legal row over Apple’s abandoned Irish datacentre fuels site takeover hopes.

The conclusion of the four-year legal wrangle over the decision to grant Apple planning permission for an €850 datacentre in County Galway, Ireland, has reignited hopes that some other tech firm might acquire the site and build a server farm there instead.

The Irish Supreme Court confirmed that it had dismissed an appeal against the decision to award Apple planning permission for the project in Athenry on 11 April 2019.

According to local media reports, the appeal was unanimously denied by a panel of five judges, who also ruled out referring the matter on for further deliberation by the European Court of Justice, leaving the objectors few, if any, additional legal avenues to explore.

As previously reported by Computer Weekly, the Supreme Court confirmed in early March that it had reached a verdict in the case, but was reserving its judgment until a later date, before making its thoughts on the matter public last week.

The appeal, lodged by two longstanding objectors to the project, Allan Daly and Sinead Fitzpatrick, centred on the whether the independent planning chiefs at An Bord Pleanála were right give Apple the go-ahead for the project in 2015.

In the objectors’ view, an insufficient assessment of the project’s environmental impact had been conducted before permission was granted, given that Apple had alluded to the fact that additional data halls could be built on the site in due course, above and beyond those outlined in the original planning brief.

Before it was dismissed by the Supreme Court, the appeal had also been turned down by the Irish High Court.

While all this played out in the courts, Apple was unable to press ahead with any kind of construction at the site, and in May 2018 confirmed that it would not pursue the project any further. At the time of writing, the tech company remains the registered owner of the site.

In a statement on his Facebook page, Ciarán Cannon, Irish state minister at the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, said he is now confident that the various legal issues pertaining to the site are resolved and it will not take long for another tech firm to take it over.

“The way is now clear for a major investment and in a world where data storage requirements are going through the roof, I am convinced this site will be developed sooner rather than later,” wrote Cannon.

“This is a site owned by Apple, with all the necessary infrastructure in place and with full planning permission. Sites like this are very rare internationally.”

Source: ComputerWeekly.com