Category: Science & Technology

Facebook cancelled an Indian-origin student’s internship after he exposed a serious privacy flaw in the social media giant’s messenger service, a media report said. Aran Khanna’s application, Marauder’s Map, used data from Facebook Messenger to map users’ location when they sent messages, Boston.com reported here last week.

The computer science and math student at Harvard University in Massachusetts, US, posted about his app on social media sites Reddit and Medium in May this year and soon it went viral.

The app caught the attention of Facebook and Khanna was asked to disable it. However, before it was disabled, the extension was downloaded more than 85,000 times and “shared on over 200 publications”, according to Khanna.

About a week later, Facebook released a Messenger app update to provide users “full control over when and how you share your location information”. Facebook cancelled Khanna’s summer internship, saying he did not meet the high ethical standards expected from the interns.

The student accepted another internship with a tech start-up in Silicon Valley and later detailed the experience in a case study titled ‘Facebook’s Privacy Incident Response: A study of geolocation sharing on Facebook Messenger’ in the Harvard Journal of Technology Science.

Two Indian tech tycoons, Wipro chairman Azim Premji and HCL co-founder Shiv Nadar are in the Forbes’ first ever list of the 100 richest people in the technology field, dominated by Americans with Microsoft founder Bill Gates at the top.

Two Indian-Americans tech czars, Romesh Wadhwani, CEO and chairman of Symphony Technology Group, and Bharat Desai, co-founder of IT consulting and outsourcing company Syntel also figure on the list released last week.

Premji, 70, with a net worth of $17.4 billion is ranked 13th on the list followed by Shiv Nadar, 70, in the 14th spot with $14.4 billion. Wadhwani, 67, is ranked 73rd with a net worth of $2.8 billion while Desai, 62, with $2.5 billion is in the 82nd spot.

Premji’s Wipro, India’s third-largest outsourcer, reported a 10 percent rise in revenues to $1.9 billion in the last quarter, on the back of new business from clients such as ABB and Philip Morris, the magazine noted. Nadar, Forbes noted, has diversified into healthcare with HCL Avitas, a new firm in partnership with John Hopkins Medicine International, which has opened 10 clinics in Delhi.

Wadhwani has a degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology and a PhD from Carnegie Mellon. His Symphony Technology Group is a collection of 20 companies spanning big data, analytics and software.

Syntel, co-founded by Desai and his wife Neerja Sethi, now generates over $900 million in revenue, has a market cap of over $3 billion and more than 24,500 employees across the globe. While 51 American billionaires are on the list, tech barons from Asia made a strong showing as well, with 33 people hailing from that region. Forty of the 100 live in California.

Bill Gates, who’s also the world’s richest man, ranks number one among tech tycoons, with a net worth of $79.6 billion. Number two on the list is Larry Ellison, founder of database software firm Oracle, with a net worth estimated at $50 billion.

The third richest on the list is Jeff Bezos with a net worth of $47.8 billion followed by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in the fourth place with $41.2 billion. Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are ranked fifth and sixth respectively.

Altogether, the world’s 100 richest tech billionaires are worth $842.9 billion. Just seven women made the list, the wealthiest of whom is Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Steve Jobs, with an estimated net worth of $21.4 billion.

Nearly all of the 100 are self-made billionaires: 94 made their own luck, 3 inherited their fortunes, and 3 have inherited fortunes but have been actively expanding them.

With the elevation of Pichai, 43, as the CEO of Google, Indian Tech managers have been drawing unique attention in the international media. The Wall Street Journal reported Pichai’s appointment is a reminder that the CEOs of some of the world’s most recognisable tech companies share origins from India. One of the reasons for Indian managers’ success is that they are future oriented, a leading American financial daily has said, with Google’s Sunder Pichai joining the fast expanding club of Indian-origin CEOs.

“Indian managers are future-oriented, and had a paradoxical blend of genuine personal humility and intense professional will,” the Journal said, citing a recent study by Southern Hampshire University. “These leaders achieved extraordinary results and built great organisations without much hoopla,” the daily said as it listed out the Indian origin executives that are heading top companies in the US.

“Nowhere, perhaps, is that more starkly on display than at Microsoft. Since taking over as CEO, Satya Nadella managed to achieve what had once seemed impossible: to make Silicon Valley like Microsoft again. He did so by embracing collaboration and not treating rivals products as enemies–in some ways the opposite of his often-flamboyant predecessor, Steve Ballmer,” the daily reported.

While Indian managers are not in many cases the founders of the companies they lead, they are respected managers who have held numerous positions in their companies, working up the ranks, it said. Adobe chief Shantanu Narayen, 53, according to the daily, has been described by colleagues as quiet but incredibly competitive. Since becoming CEO in 2007, he has led a dramatic transformation at the company, it added.

Sanjay Jha, the 52-year-old CEO of chipmaker Globalfoundries, had previously run Motorola Mobility and had served for years as a senior executive of Qualcomm, it said. In another article, The Wall Street Journal said Pichai’s ascent reflects his ability to create strong products, including Google’s Chrome browser and later the Chrome operating system.

But it also shows his ability to identify competitive pressures, manage others and smooth over differences, both internally and with Google’s business partners, it said. At Google, Pichai showed a flair for championing challenging but strategically important projects such as the Chrome browser, which today has 45 percent market share globally, according to research firm Statcounter, up from one percent in early 2009.

For many Americans, going online is an important way to connect with friends and family, shop, get news and search for information. Yet today, 15% of U.S. adults do not use the internet, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of survey data.

The size of this group has changed little over the past three years, despite recent government and social service programs to encourage internet adoption. But that 15% figure is substantially lower than in 2000, when Pew Research first began to study the social impact of technology. That year, nearly half (48%) of American adults did not use the internet.

A 2013 Pew Research survey found some key reasons that some people do not use the internet. A third of non-internet users (34%) did not go online because they had no interest in doing so or did not think the internet was relevant to their lives. Another 32% of non-internet users said the internet was too difficult to use, including 8% of this group who said they were “too old to learn.” Cost was also a barrier for some adults who were offline – 19% cited the expense of internet service or owning a computer.

The latest Pew Research analysis also shows that internet non-adoption is correlated to a number of demographic variables, including age, educational attainment, household income, race and ethnicity, and community type.

Seniors are the group most likely to say they never go online. About four-in-ten adults ages 65 and older (39%) do not use the internet, compared with only 3% of 18- to 29-year-olds. Household income and education are also indicators of a person’s likelihood to be offline. A third of adults with less than a high school education do not use the internet, but that share falls as the level of educational attainment increases. Adults from households earning less than $30,000 a year are roughly eight times more likely than the most affluent adults to not use the internet.

Rural Americans are about twice as likely as those who live in urban or suburban settings to never use the internet. Racial and ethnic differences are also evident. One-in-five blacks and 18% of Hispanics do not use the internet, compared with 14% of whites and only 5% of English-speaking Asian-Americans – the racial or ethnic group least likely to be offline.

Despite some groups having persistently lower rates of internet adoption, the vast majority of Americans are online. Over time, the offline population has been shrinking, and for some groups that change has been especially dramatic. For example, 86% of adults 65 and older did not go online in 2000; today that figure has been cut in half. And among those without a high school diploma, the share not using the internet dropped from 81% to 33% in the same time period.