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Friday, 28 September 2018

The Park Commemorates 50 Years With A Star-Studded Event In New Delhi

The Park Hotels recently celebrated their golden jubilee. The Park, New Delhi, marked the 50 years landmark with a party, which was held at the property on September 22, 2018. This celebration was hosted by Priya Paul, Chairperson Apeejay Surrendra Park Hotels Ltd. and the star-studded event saw many eminent personalities in attendance, including Maneka Gandhi, Amar Singh, Amitabh Kant, Rohit Bahl, Suhel Seth to name a few. The celebration marked 50 years to the inauguration of the group’s first hotel The Park Kolkata, which was opened on November 1, 1967, by Jit Paul and Surrendra Paul. The Park Hotels’ 50 year celebrations continue across India and will culminate at The Park Vishakhapatnam, which also turns 50 in 2018. The programme, spread across multiple venues of The Park, New Delhi, included music and dance performances by top national and international bands and ensembles, including Eshsaan, Loy and Friends and Arjun Kanungo.

The emcee for the night was MTV VJ Clince Varghese, who has hosted more than 400 shows through the course of his career. Speaking on the occasion, Priya Paul, Chairperson, Apeejay Surrendra Park Hotels Ltd. said, “50 years is an important milestone and I am grateful to everyone who has been part of The Park Hotels incredible journey. Our remarkable success is due to our solid foundation and values. Our vision of ‘Leadership Through Differentiation’ is manifested by each of our 15 hotels across India. My outstanding team and I look forward to creating more anything but ordinary experiences for customers and creating more value for our stakeholders.” The menu, which was especially curated for the night, had an eclectic mix of various cuisines and also included a number of The Park’s signature dishes, created by the hotel’s chefs working in properties around the country.

^{Arjun Kanungo performs at The Park, New Delhi}

From sushi, caviar and truffles to lamb racks, the southern street treats as well as The Park’s signature wood fired thin crust pizzas, along with biryanis and haleems, the menu had something for everyone. The menu also featured a long list of delectable desserts. The Park specialises in luxury boutique hotels and has properties in all major Indian cities, including Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Navi Mumbai, New Delhi and Visakhapatnam.

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Burn It All Down – The New York Times

Bupa fined after employee puts details of half a million customers up for sale on dark web

Bupa has been fined £175,000 after an employee stole details of more than half a million customers and put them up for sale on the dark web.

The employee from the UK-based healthcare group stole the information of 547,000 customers and offered it for sale online, said the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).

The data included names, dates of birth, email addresses and nationality, and came from a system holding records on 1.5 million people.

“Bupa failed to recognise that people’s personal data was at risk and failed to take reasonable steps to secure it,” said Steve Eckersley, the ICO’s director of investigations.

“Our investigation found material inadequacies in the way Bupa safeguarded personal data.

“The inadequacies were systemic and appear to have gone unchecked for a long time. On top of that, the ICO’s investigation found no satisfactory explanation for them.”

It is unclear whether the information was successfully sold.

Following a cyber attack in October 2015, the ICO fined TalkTalk a record £400,000 after 15,656 individuals’ bank account details and sort codes were stolen due to lax security.

Bupa and the ICO received 198 complaints about the incident and the rogue employee was sacked.

Sussex Police also issued a warrant for his arrest.

A spokesperson for Bupa told Sky News: “We accept this decision by the ICO and have cooperated fully with its investigation. We take our responsibility for protecting customer information very seriously.

“We have since introduced additional security measures to help prevent the recurrence of such an incident, reinforced our internal controls and increased our customer checks.”

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Mozilla pushes PayPal to make Venmo transactions private by default – TechCrunch

Earlier this year, the FTC settled with PayPal over the company’s handling of privacy disclosures in its peer-to-peer payments app Venmo, but Mozilla doesn’t think the changes Venmo made as a result went far enough. This week, Mozilla says it delivered a petition signed by 25,000 Americans asking Venmo to set transactions shared in its app to private by default, instead of public.

As Mozilla explains, “millions of Venmo users’ spending habits are available for anyone to see. That’s because Venmo transactions are currently public by default — unless users manually update their settings, anyone, anywhere can see whom they’re sending money to, and why.”

Many Venmo users likely feel that it’s not very dangerous to share through Venmo’s feed – a key feature of its popular payments app – that they paid back a friend for part of the dinner, drinks or some concert tickets, for example.

But a Berlin-based researcher, Hang Do Thi Duc, recently studied the risks associated with this sort of over-sharing.

Do Thi Duc analyzed more than 200 million public Venmo transactions made in 2017 by accessing the data through a public API. This allowed her to see the names, dates and transactions of Venmo users. She found that a lot could actually be gleaned from this data, including users’ drug habits in some cases, as well as their relationships, junk food habits, location, daily routines, personal finances, rent payments and more.

In other words, while the individual transaction itself may seem harmless, in aggregate these transactions can be very revealing about the person in question.

Mozilla says it, along with Ipsos, also polled 1,009 Americans how they felt about Venmo’s “public by default” nature. 77% said they didn’t think that should be the case, and 92% said they don’t support Venmo’s justifications for making them public. (It thinks sharing is fun, basically.)

Venmo didn’t respond to Mozilla’s petition directly, we understand.

“We delivered our petition to Venmo’s offices in person, and spoke with the team briefly,” says Sara Haghdoosti, Mozilla’s Director of Advocacy. “Venmo declined to provide a statement that we could share with our petition signers. We hope that Venmo will take the views of the over 25,000 people who signed the petition — and the results of our recent poll — in account in future decisions,” she say.

Venmo, however, tells TechCrunch via a spokesperson that it takes its users’ trust seriously.

“Venmo was designed for sharing experiences with your friends in today’s social world, and the newsfeed has always been a big part of this,” the spokesperson said. “The safety and privacy of Venmo users and their information is always a top priority. Our users trust us with their money and personal information, and we take this responsibility and applicable privacy laws very seriously,” they added.

The company also pointed out it takes several steps to ensure some level of user protection, including not making sensitive transactions public, never publishing dollar amounts, and allowing users to control the publicity of the item, even after the fact.

As part of the FTC settlement, Venmo also had to make other changes, as well. The company now has to explain to new and existing users how to limit the visibility of transactions through the use of privacy settings.

We recently saw this in the updated Venmo app, in fact.

Users are walked through a tutorial that spells out how you can change settings to make transactions private by default, or any time you choose.

Mozilla’s petition comes at a time when PayPal has been weighing whether to change the default in Venmo from public to private, according to a report from Bloomberg last month.

Thanks to large-scale scandals like Cambridge Analytica and others involving user data being overexposed, timed alongside the rollout of new privacy regulations like Europe’s GDPR, many companies are reviewing their data-protection policies.

Venmo’s casual over-sharing now feels like a holdover from an earlier, more naive time on the web, and it wouldn’t be surprising if it decided to later adjust the app’s settings to match where consumer sentiment is headed today.

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SwiftKey on Android now has two-way translation baked in. Qué bien – TechCrunch

The Internet is of course amazing if you want to send messages across borders. But different languages can still put a wrinkle in your conversational flow, even with all the handy translation apps also on tap to help turn zut alors into shucks!

So Microsoft-owned SwiftKey is probably still onto something with a new feature launching today in its Android app that bakes two-way translation right into the keyboard — which should save a lot of tedious copy-pasting, at least if you’re frequently conversing across language barriers.

It’s not clear whether the translation feature will be coming to SwiftKey on iOS too (we’ve asked and will update with any additional details).

Microsoft Translator is the underlying technology powering the core linguistic automagic. So SwiftKey’s parent is intimately involved in this feature addition.

Microsoft’s tech does continue to exist in a standalone app form too, though. And that app is getting a cross-promotional push, via the SwiftKey addition, with the company touting an added benefit for users if they install Microsoft Translator — as the keyboard translation feature will then work offline.

(SwiftKey had some 300M active users at the time of its acquisition by Microsoft, three years ago, so the size of that promotional push for Translator is potentially pretty large.)

The translation option is being added to SwiftKey via a relatively recently launched Toolbar that lets users customize the keyboard — such as by adding stickers, location or calendar.

To access the Toolbar (and the various add-ons nested within it) users tap on the ‘+’ in the upper left corner.

With translation enabled, users of the next word predicting keyboard can then switch between input and output languages to turn incoming missives from one of more than 60 languages into another tongue at the tap of a button, as well as translate their outgoing replies back the other way without needing to know how to write in that other language.

Supported languages include Italian, Spanish, Germany, Russian and Turkish, to name a few.

And while the machine translation technology is doing away with the immediate need for human foreign language expertise, there’s at least a chance app users will learn a bit as they go along — i.e. as they watch their words get rendered in another tongue right before their eyes.

As tech magic goes, translation is hard to beat. Even though machine translation can often still be very rough round the edges. But here, for helping with everyday chatting on mobiule messaging apps, there’s no doubt it will be a great help.

Commenting on the new feature in a statement, Colleen Hall, senior product manager at SwiftKey, said: “The integration of Microsoft Translator into SwiftKey is a great, natural fit, enhancing the raft of language-focused features we know our users love to use.”

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Microsoft will end support for Skype Classic in November – TechCrunch

This summer, Microsoft pushed off the inevitable end of Skype Classic (7.0) support after a fair bit of user backlash. Nearly a month after the original September deadline, the company announced today that it’s going to pull the plug in November — for real this time.

The company is killing Skype 7 support on the desktop on November 1, following suit for mobile and tablets two weeks later on the 15th. The initial delay was motivated by vocal users unhappy by the changes brought on by Skype 8 in the name of simplification.

One user went so far as to launch a Change.org petition asking Microsoft to “Keep the desktop version of Skype alive for professional users.” The petition has since racked up in excess of 1,000 signatures, demanding the company keep enterprise features lost in the shuffle.

For its part, Microsoft says that it’s listening and responding to the outcry over abandoned features.

“We’re continuing to work on your most requested features,” the company writes in an update to the original announcement. “Recently we launched call recording and have started to roll out the ability to search within a conversation. You’ll soon be able to add phone numbers to existing contacts, have more control over your availability status, and more.”

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