ShinyShiny snippets: Meta to cut another 10,000 jobs
Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has announced that it will cut 10,000 jobs. It comes months after the tech giant laid off 11,000 employees in November 2022. Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said the cuts would be “tough”, and formed part of a “year of restructuring”.In addition to the 10,000 jobs being lost, 5,000 open roles at the company will be left unfilled. Mr Zuckerberg told staff the recruitment team would be one of those first affected by the cuts. BBC
UK security minister Tom Tugendhat has asked the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) to look into TikTok after governments around the world have begun banning it from their work phones. The Chinese-owned video sharing app is increasingly under the European and US microscope over security and data privacy, with concerns it could be used to promote pro-Beijing views or gather user data. The EU Commission and more than half of US states and Congress have already introduced a ban over concerns around potential cyberattacks. Sky News
Meta’s head of commerce and financial technologies Stephane Kasriel posted on Twitter that the company will sunset its NFT and digital collectibles features on Instagram and Facebook. This short-lived product only began testing with select Instagram creators last May, plus some Facebook users in June. By July, Meta expanded NFT support on Instagram for creators in 100 countries. Less than a year later, Meta is moving on from NFTs. “We’re winding down digital collectibles (NFTs) for now to focus on other ways to support creators, people, and businesses,” Kasriel wrote in a Twitter thread.
The heat generated by a washing-machine-sized data centre is being used to heat a Devon public swimming pool. The computers inside the white box are surrounded by oil to capture the heat – enough to heat the pool to about 30C 60% of the time, saving Exmouth Leisure Centre thousands of pounds. The data centre is provided to the council-run centre free of charge. Start-up Deep Green charges clients to use its computing power for artificial intelligence and machine learning. Founder Mark Bjornsgaard said the company would also refund the leisure centre’s electricity costs for running the “digital boiler” – and seven other England pools had signed up to the scheme. BBC
Oppo is expected to debut its Oppo Find X6 series later this month, and fresh leaks have given us our best look yet at the high-end entry in the upcoming line, the Find X6 Pro. Unfortunately, said leaks have also arrived alongside disappointing news concerning the availability of the Find X6 series. According to serial tipster Ice Universe, the Oppo’s Find X6 Pro won’t be sold globally, meaning it’s unlikely to surface in the US or UK any time soon. In response to Ice Universe’s claim, another leaker, Max Jambor, tweeted that the Find X6 Pro likewise “won’t be sold anywhere in Europe.” Tech Radar
