Heena Sharma Blog

Content creators have criticised new Terms of Service from Google-owned YouTube that gives the company power to terminate account access for users if it deems the account is "no longer commercially viable". The video sharing platform started sending out the emails to users last week to notify about the upcoming changes to its terms of service to come into effect from December 10. "YouTube may terminate your access, or your Google account's access to all or part of the Service if YouTube believes, in its sole discretion, that provision of the Service to you is no longer commercially viable," the new YouTube terms of service read. "We will notify you with the reason for termination or suspension by YouTube," it added. The move hasn't gone well with content creators. The new terms of service have also left users baffled. "Y'all, tell @YouTube this isn't okay. This affects everybody, including you're favorite content cr

Google has started combining G Suite users' Gmail photos with their Google account profile photos. "We are combining the Gmail photo with the Google account profile photo for G Suite users. Now, when you go to change this setting in Gmail, you'll be directed to the 'About me' section of your Google profile settings to set your profile picture," the company said in a statement on Monday. Currently, profile pictures set in Gmail are only displayed in Gmail. This means a profile picture in Gmail may be different than the Google account profile photo, which can make it difficult to know which picture will be displayed where. This new change simplifies things by allowing a user to set a single profile picture in one place and then displaying that single photo across all Google apps. "When you visit Settings > General > My Picture in Gmail on the web, you will be directed to change your picture in the 'About me' section of your Goog

Google on Tuesday celebrated 30 years of World Wide Web (WWW) with a doodle. English scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the WWW in 1989 and wrote the first web browser in 1990. Working at CERN, Switzerland, Berners-Lee laid out the basic concepts of the WWW in a proposal which included ideas like HTML, URL and HTTP. In a document titled "Information management: a proposal", he envisioned the use of hypertext to link documents. The WWW, commonly known as the Web, is an information space where documents and other web resources are identified by Uniform Resource Locators (URLs). The first web browser was released in 1991 -- first to the research institutions and then to the general public on the Internet in the same year. The WWW is the primary tool billions of people today use to interact on the Internet. In addition to text, web pages may contain images, video, audio and software components that are rendered in the user's web browser as coherent pages of

Google-owned video sharing platform YouTube has announced that it will no longer recommend videos that "come close to" violating its community guidelines, such as conspiracy or medically inaccurate videos. The video sharing platform will no longer recommend videos "claiming the earth is flat, or making blatantly false claims about historic events like 9/11", NBC News reported on Monday. The original blog post from YouTube, published on January 25, said videos the site recommends, usually after a user has viewed one, would no longer lead to similar videos and instead would "pull in recommendations from a wider set of topics". YouTube said in the post that the action is meant to "reduce the spread of content that comes close to - but doesn't quite cross the line of - violating" its community policies. The change will not affect the videos' availability. And if users have subscribed to a channel that, for instance, produces c

The growing popularity of social media platforms has seen an upsurge in viral trends -- some fun, but some fatal to human life. Be it the ice bucket challenge or the latest # Birdboxchallenge -- these have swept the Internet as netizens from all around the globe join in to perform certain situations, dances, voices or even speeches for entertainment. IANS gives a lowdown on the popular challenges that have taken over social media over the past few years: * #10yearchallenge: The latest entry to the growing list of viral challenges on social media is the 10-Year Challenge, which has caught the attention of many. In this, a person is required to share his recent image alongside a 10-year-old photograph to see the difference. From Hollywood to Bollywood and the local neighbourhood, everyone took a moment to rewind the clock and compare their looks. * #Birdboxchallenge: This originated from streaming website Netflix's film "Bird Box", starring Sandra Bullock

Excessive use of social media platforms like Facebook can make its users take decisions as bad as drug addicts tend to do, a new study suggests. "Around one-third of humans on the planet are using social media, and some of these people are displaying maladaptive, excessive use of these sites," said lead author of the study Dar Meshi, Assistant Professor at Michigan State University in the US. "I believe that social media has tremendous benefits for individuals, but there's also a dark side when people can't pull themselves away. We need to better understand this drive so we can determine if excessive social media use should be considered an addiction," Meshi added. For the study, published in the Journal of Behavior Addictions, the researchers had 71 participants take a survey that measured their psychological dependence on Facebook, similar to addiction. Questions on the survey asked about users' preoccupation with the platform, thei

Facebook has launched in the US free online education programme CodeFWDTo to increase the numbers of underrepresented and female students interested in pursuing computer programming. "We're working on a number of initiatives like CodeFWD to widen the pipeline of diverse talent studying computer science so the next generation of tech innovators reflects and incorporates diverse perspectives, building a future that benefits us all," Lauryn Ogbechie, Education Partnerships Director at Facebook, said in a statement on Tuesday. Created in partnership with connected toys maker Sphero, CodeFWD by Facebook, has been designed for both English and Spanish speakers. It is a three-step programme where educators and organisations introduce computer programming to 4th to 8th grade students. With the first module "I do", CodeFWD prepares educators to introduce the basics of computer programming to their students, even as they may be discovering the concept

It goes on to declare that no one at Google reads the emails, except in cases where the user had granted the consent or when it is required as a security measure Technology News : After it was discovered that third-party apps for Gmail were allegedly accessing users' private emails, Google has responded to the backlash. The company has clarified through its blog post that it does not scan emails to target ads, and the third-party apps are mandated to accurately represent themselves to request relevant data, Cnet reported. It goes on to declare that no one at Google reads the emails, except in cases where the user had granted the consent or when it is required as a security measure. Read our full coverage on Google