Netflix and Nvidia  dropped by -5% and -6%, respectively. While all eyes would be on Facebook after it reports its earnings after Tuesday’s market close, Wall Street analysts have their expectations at $1.85 adjusted earnings per share on revenue of $13.8 billion (as reported by Bloomberg).On Monday, Facebook shares fell by  -2.2% .  

Twitter beat earnings and revenues expectations in Q3, even with  monthly active users lower than the previous quarter. The social networking platform generated a $789 million profit, including one-time gains, compared to a net loss of $21 million in the year-ago period.Twitter claims the drop is due to its cleaning up the platform by removal of abusive users and fake accounts. Its daily users however was up +9% in the past quarter, according to Twitter.

Google parent Alphabet (Nasdaq: GOOGL) is set to report earnings Thursday after the closing bell and the stock has hit a technical support level ahead of the report. Like the rest of the tech sector, Google has been trending lower over the last few months and it is testing its 52-week moving average.In this case though, Google has another support level in addition to the moving average. Over the last two years, all of the major dips in the stock can be connected with one trendline.

Blockchain’s immutable ledger is what makes digital currencies tick.While the Ethereum blockchain software has an existing API for “commonly used random-access functions”, including frequent activities like monitoring transaction statuses and checking wallet balances, it doesn’t offer API endpoints “for easy access to all of the data stored on-chain”. BigQuery’s features allow users to glean insights from the Ethereum blockchain that were previously unobtainable.

WhatsApp banned more than 100,000 user accounts in Brazil, as parent company Facebook is taking a step further in curbing hate speech, abuse and misinformation ahead of an election in the nation. Facebook indicated that deleting malicious messages/fake news on its main social networking platform is easier than doing so on WhatsApp, since the latter encrypted and nearly impossible to monitor. According to a Bloomberg report, a WhatsApp spokesperson wrote in an email, “We have cutting-edge technology to detect spam that identifies accounts with abnormal behavior so that they can’t be used to spread spam or misinformation," and added, "We are also taking immediate legal measures to prevent companies from sending mass messages via WhatsApp and have already banned accounts associated with those companies."  

Thirty million people have been affected by a massive hack of Facebook, with the attackers gaining access to millions of victims' highly sensitive personal data. Article Found Here on Business Insider

On Wednesday, Facebook-owned messenger-cum-video calling app WhatsApp revealed that it has fixed a bug that let hackers get access to users’ applications when they answered an incoming video call.This announcement comes after technology websites ZDnet and The Register  first wrote about the issue and mentioned that it was fixed by Facebook in early October. Acquired by Facebook in 2014 for $19 billion, WhatsApp is an immensely popular platform for people to connect with family, friends and business contacts.

Instagram is flexing its muscles against online bullies, to protect users' well-being. On Tuesday, the Facebook-owned photo-sharing website announced that it will apply a new machine learning tool that can proactively identify bullying in photos and captions and then feed them into the website’s Community Operations team for human review.The technology is expected to detect bullying gestures such as comparing and ranking images/captions (e.g., on a split-screen, a person being compared with an image in a negative or demeaning way could get flagged). Even earlier in the year, Instagram expressed its grave concerns about online bullying and harassment, and said that it will delete bullying posts/comments.  

Is Google upping its game against other FAANG members?The search giant is rapidly proliferating its hardware business, as it is set to launch its latest gadgets – a smartphone, a smart speaker and a tablet computer. What’s  making the most noise among its new offerings is the Google Pixel 3, a premium Android-powered device, which is touted by some as a potential rival to the iPhoneXs. Pixel 3 is expected to come with Google's latest Android software Android 9 Pie, and with screens that expand till the edges of the phones. The Home Hub will be Google's new smart speaker, which might be a potential competitor to Amazon's own Echo Show device and the Facebook Portal home camera. The Pixel Slate is also slated to be be unveiled today its new tablet computer.

“"While we are working to support the US government with our cloud in many areas, we are not bidding on the JEDI contract because first, we couldn't be assured that it would align with our AI Principles and second, we determined that there were portions of the contract that were out of scope with our current government certifications," Google's statement said. The company is however open to a bidding for a part of it if the DOD employs more cloud computing companies' services for the program.But the Pentagon suggests that splitting the contract among multiple providers might make the project too complex and adversely affect the data migration process. In the past, Google’s employees have been vocal about not supporting any contract with the U.S. government that might in any way contribute to warfare technology.

The private information of over 500,000 Google users was accessible to 438 application development companies, and Google chose not to tell anyone for over 6 months. The search giant, now a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc (GOOGL), has decided phase out the consumer-level services of its floundering social networking platform Google+, which was the source of the breach, over the next several months.The company reports that the compromised information included birthdates, profile photos, email addresses, and gender, all of which was made accessible due to a bug in their software rather than a malicious attack. The long-avoided disclosure was made in a blog post by Google earlier today.

However, speculations are rife that the move might have been spurred by a Wall Street Journal report that indicates that Google did not publicly disclose a bug infiltrating Google+ user accounts. According to the WSJ article, Google's legal and policy team told senior executives at the company that disclosing the security loophole could lead to "immediate regulatory interest."Google, on the other hand, said in a statement provided to CNN Business, "Every year, we send millions of notifications to users about privacy and security bugs and issues," and added, "Whenever user data may have been affected, we go beyond our legal requirements and apply several criteria focused on our users in determining whether to provide notice.”.  

Called Portal (and the larger Portal+), the device comes with a touchscreen and has a user detection system that follows the user anywhere they move across a room, allowing one-to-one/group video chats and providing voice assistant features.While the camera itself doesn't move, it is equipped with a 140-degree purview including panning and zooming softwares. Having faced major privacy issues in recent times – including the Cambridge Analytica scandal and this month’s hacking of 50 million accounts on its social networking site – Facebook is trying to assure that the Portal has privacy build into "every layer" (according to Facebook's VP of hardware Rafa Camargo’s comments to CNN Business). For Portal, Facebook is also integrating third-party features such as Amazon's Alexa voice assistant for playing music and controlling connected devices.

Snap Inc. shares increased +3.2% in pre-market trading , following reports of CEO Evan Spiegel’s profitability projection for 2019 along with his plans to avoid past mistakes for the company. In a leaked 15-page memo, reported by online news service Cheddar, Spiegel indicated to employees that Snapchat  is on track to achieve targets at a “sustainable pace “ and would avoid overly aggressive strategies of the past.The company will now take “time to rest and reassess.” He also said, “We improved goal-setting across our teams with OKR processes that provide share visibility into the progress we are making against our priorities.

Facebook announced that it has not found any evidence (as yet) of its cyber attackers accessing third party sites via Facebook Login. This follow’s Friday’s revelations by the company that hackers exploited a loophole in the “View As” feature on the social networking platform and as a result got access to information of over 50 million of users.Many apps including Tinder, Spotify and Airbnb let people access their services through Facebook Login credentials. Hackers might not have misused other apps while infiltrating Facebook data, but the attack potentially puts the users of the third-party apps at risk.

Google’s advertising business will have a new leader. Sridhar Ramaswamy ,Senior Vice President of Ads & Commerce at Google, is leaving the company to join venture capital firm Greylock Partners.Raghavan was a vice president of engineering for Google's Cloud apps. Google and Facebook together rake in 60% of U.S. digital ad spending last year, according to research firm eMarketer. Last quarter, Google parent company Alphabet's 86 percent of $32.65 billion in revenue was attributed to its advertising segment.

Hackers got access to 50 million user accounts on Facebook, the company announced Friday. Exploiting a vulnerability in the“View As” feature on the social networking website, the cyber attackers got hold of 50 million users’ access tokens - digital keys which allow people stay logged in without having to re-enter their password into the website.Facebook became suspicious of a sudden spike in website usage on Sept. 16., following which it started probing into the matter. The company has reset the affected 50 million token keys.  In addition, it has reset the keys  for another 40 million accounts (that used the “View As” feature) as a precautionary measure.

 Facebook unveiled its new virtual reality headset called The Oculus Quest. The product will have some of the functionality of Oculus Rift alongwith the mobility of Oculus Go - which means, Quest will not need a PC to work.In 2014, Facebook bought Oculus VR for $3 billion. Other tech companies such as Snap (which acquired virtual reality software firm PlayCanvas) and Alphabet's Google (with sells Daydream View headsets) are also trying to secure their spots in  the 'new reality' space.

Twitter wants to get serious about reining in dehumanizing language and abusive tweets. While its ban on “hateful conduct” might be able to curb attacks directed at religion, gender, sexual orientation or race of individuals,  there are apparently other categories that might not fall under the purview of the aforementioned rule but are nonetheless important to address with regards to protecting people's dignity.In a blog, Twitter wrote about "dehumanizing language" by referring to scholars like Susan Benesch who explain that dehumanization includes referring to people as things such as insects, despised animals, bacteria, and more. Twitter wants to implement stricter rules to delete or prohibit on its platform any language or threat that dehumanizes any individual.

Instagram founders are leaving their company. Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger founded the photo-sharing app back in 2010.Instagram’s success is evident in its user numbers running into tens of millions and a growth reportedly faster than Facebook itself. But now, Systrom, Instagram's CEO, and Krieger, its chief technology officer, have decided to take some “time off”  to explore their “curiosity and creativity again," according to Systrom’s post late Monday.