CNN – Social Media/Technology

By Samantha Murphy Kelly, CNN Business Many parents and children struggled with remote learning throughout the pandemic. Samantha Lucero had a very different experience with one of her kids. “When the pandemic first hit, online school was a bit messy for everyone,” Lucero, a stay-at-home mother from Colorado Springs, told CNN Business. “But my older

By Diksha Madhok, CNN Business WhatsApp blocked 2 million accounts of Indian users in a month to prevent harmful behavior, the company said in its first ever compliance report published under the country’s strict new information technology rules. Under the new rules, which came into effect in May, social media companies have to publish a

By Diksha Madhok, CNN Business This is turning out to be a landmark week for Indian startups. Digital payments firm Paytm is planning to raise as much as 166 billion rupees ($2.2 billion) in an initial public offering in Mumbai, according to a draft prospectus filed on Friday. This comes just two days after food

By Laura He, CNN Business Xiaomi has surpassed Apple to become the world’s second biggest smartphone maker for the first time ever, according to market research firm Canalys. The Chinese company took 17% of worldwide smartphone shipments for the second quarter of 2021, behind Samsung’s 19%, Canalys said in a report published on Thursday. Compared

By Brian Fung, CNN Business Facebook said Thursday it has disrupted a group of Iranian hackers who created fake social media profiles and sent targeted, malicious links to victims in an attempt to spy on Western defense contractors and military personnel. The campaign has apparent links to the Iranian government. The hackers ran a sophisticated

By Jackie Wattles, CNN Business The mystery bidder who put up a whopping $28 million for an 11-minute joy ride to the edge of space alongside Jeff Bezos will not make the trip, Bezos’ rocket company Blue Origin announced Thursday. Blue Origin said in a press release that the person, who asked to remain anonymous

By Samantha Murphy Kelly, CNN Business Clippy hasn’t had an easy life. Microsoft’s iconic but polarizing virtual assistant first appeared in Windows 97 as a small paper clip to help Microsoft Office users. It was given the boot by Office 2007. Earlier this year, it resurfaced for one day as an animated sticker in Microsoft

By Chris Isidore, CNN Business The US Consumer Product Safety Commission says Amazon is selling hazardous products to its customers. The federal safety watchdog is suing Amazon to stop. Among the products cited in the suit are carbon monoxide detectors that fail to alarm, numerous children’s pajamas that could catch fire and nearly 400,000 hair

By Chauncey Alcorn, CNN Business Millennials and Gen Zers in the United States may not think the “laughing” emoji 😂 is cool anymore, but a majority of emoji users around the world disagree, according to a new study. The “laugh out loud” 😂face is officially the world’s most popular emoji, according to researchers from Adobe

By Sara Ashley O’Brien, CNN Business Shared rides were a key part of how the founders of Uber and Lyft envisioned disrupting transportation. Back in 2014, the companies raced each other to be first to announce their carpooling options, with the promise of creating a more efficient service that’s also more affordable for riders. Then

By Diksha Madhok, CNN Business Twitter is under enormous pressure in India this year. But even before the country rolled out strict new rules for tech firms, the company was hit by a wave of requests from the government to remove content or provide user data. Indian authorities submitted more requests for account information from

By Clare Duffy, CNN Business Most major social media platforms have tried a version of Snapchat’s Stories, but Twitter is the first to admit its experiment with disappearing content failed. The company announced Wednesday that it will kill off Fleets, its disappearing posts product, on August 3 — less than a year after introducing it

By Clare Duffy, CNN Business Your smartphone breaks. The repair costs too much money. So you give up and buy a new device. That this happens so often is no coincidence. Many big device manufacturers have increasingly designed products to make them difficult to repair without specialized equipment and instructions — and have limited the

By Brian Fung, CNN Business Facebook said Wednesday that recently appointed Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan should recuse herself from all future decision-making about the agency’s lawsuit to break up the social media company. In a formal petition before the FTC, Facebook alleged that Khan’s work investigating Big Tech on behalf of the House

By Jackie Wattles, CNN Business Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Richard Branson have a combined net worth of $400 billion, roughly the size of the GDP of the entire nation of Ireland. And all three men have decided to put vast sums of their wealth into chasing their space travel dreams, creating a modern space

By Chris Isidore, CNN Business Billionaires Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos are ready start offering trips to outer space. But only other billionaires — or perhaps millionaires — need apply. If you’re a space enthusiast without six figures of disposable income to spend on a trip to go where few tourists have gone before, you’ll

By Michelle Toh, CNN Business Shein, a fast fashion website that has emerged as a fierce competitor to Zara, is making its return to India — indirectly, at least — after being swept up in a crackdown on Chinese tech companies last year. The Chinese company’s platform was banished from the country as part of

By Diksha Madhok, CNN Business India’s biggest tech IPO is here. Food delivery startup Zomato is looking to raise almost $1.3 billion this week in an initial public offering in Mumbai, the company said in a recent regulatory filing. That would set a new record for the biggest technology offering in India, according to data

By Brian Fung, Zachary Cohen and Geneva Sands, CNN Business REvil, the ransomware gang that attacked meat supplier JBS Foods this spring and a major IT software vendor this month, has mysteriously vanished from the internet, according to cybersecurity experts tracking the group. Websites and other infrastructure belonging to the cybercriminal gang, which is believed

By Brian Fung and Clare Sebastian, CNN Business The most critical moment in a ransomware negotiation usually comes long before the victim and the hackers discuss a price. By the time the two sides start talking, the hackers have already gained significant control of a company’s network, most likely securing access to sensitive account data,

By Charles Riley and Saskya Vandoorne, CNN Business France’s antitrust regulator has fined Google nearly $600 million and given the company two months to come up with proposals on how to pay publishers for their content or face more punishment. The regulator said in a statement on Tuesday that Google had disregarded several injunctions related

By Michelle Toh, CNN Business Chinese regulators have cleared the way for Tencent to take complete control of Sogou, a major search engine that could help the tech firm take on market leader Baidu. The approval is a welcome blessing from Chinese regulators who have been cracking down hard recently on internet giants, shaking the

By Clare Duffy, CNN Business Microsoft on Monday announced that it’s buying cybersecurity firm RiskIQ to help companies better protect themselves as ransomware and other cyber attacks become increasingly disruptive. Microsoft said the acquisition will help its customers address the unique risks created by remote work and relying on cloud computing amid “the increasing sophistication

By Diksha Madhok, CNN Business Indians on Twitter — from top politicians to business executives — are celebrating one of the women who flew to the edge of space along with Richard Branson. Sirisha Bandla, who is the vice president of government affairs and research operations at Virgin Galactic, roared into the sky over New

By Laura He, CNN Business China’s crackdown on Big Tech just keeps growing. The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) — the country’s powerful internet watchdog — this weekend proposed that any company with data on more than one million users must seek the agency’s approval before listing its shares overseas. It also proposed companies must