WhatsApp | Common News Update

Jun62020 by adminNo Comments

WhatsApp gets a raw deal from India in payments

By Andy MukherjeeMoney is many things, but it’s not fake news. So why block WhatsApp from spreading it around? India is the laboratory of choice for Western tech firms to test out their mobile payment capabilities so they can be rolled out from Bangladesh to Nigeria. Facebook Inc. CEO Mark Zuckerberg entered the fray two years ago by enabling the popular messaging service WhatsApp to send and receive money in India. But the beta version, limited to 1 million users, keeps getting blocked from becoming a full-fledged service. Meanwhile, rivals such as Alphabet Inc.’s Google Pay, Walmart Inc.-owned PhonePe and Softbank Group Corp.-backed Paytm are dominating India’s mobile transfers landscape. The troika led with 75 million, 60 million and 30 million customers transacting last month, respecti

Feb82020 by adminNo Comments

WhatsApp pay gets NPCI nod to expand UPI project to 10 million users

Finance

Bengaluru: Facebook-owned instant messaging platform WhatsApp has received permission from the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) to expand its pilot United Payment Interface (UPI) services to 10 million users, according to Nandan Nilekani, the architect of unique identity database Aadhaar and UPI. Nikelani was speaking at an IIT Industry Conclave event on Friday. WhatsApp’s payment feature, called WhatsApp Pay, is designed to run on UPI — developed by the NPCI — which allows users to pay others or do business transactions through their bank accounts. WhatsApp has been running a pilot for one million users and has struggled to get a full-fledged licence since the rollout of the project in 2018. On Friday, a media report said that NPCI has allowed WhatsApp to increase that to 10

Jan312020 by adminNo Comments

WhatsApp to stop working on millions of phones

Technology

Messaging service WhatsApp will no longer work on millions of smartphones from 1 February.Android and iPhone devices which only support outdated operating systems will no longer be able to run the Facebook-owned app. WhatsApp said the move was necessary in order to protect the security of its users. Smartphones using Android 2.3.7 and older, and iPhone iOS 8 or older, are those affected by the update. The operating systems that WhatsApp is dropping support for are legacy operating systems, which are no longer updated or installed on new devices.Most users will simply be able to update their operating systems in order to continue using the messaging service. WhatsApp: Indians among those 'targeted' by spyware Facebook's Sir Nick Clegg criticised over What...

Jan222020 by adminNo Comments

Saudi crown prince’s WhatsApp linked to Bezos phone hack

World

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates -- The cellphone of Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos was hacked in what appeared to be an attempt by Saudi Arabia's crown prince to "influence, if not silence" the newspaper's reporting on the kingdom, two U.N. human rights experts said Wednesday. The U.N. experts called for an “immediate investigation” by the United States into a report commissioned by Bezos that showed the billionaire technology mogul's phone was likely hacked after he received an MP4 video file sent from Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's WhatsApp account after the two men exchanged phone numbers during a dinner in Los Angeles in 2018. The video file was sent to Bezos' phone five months before Saudi critic and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi was killed by Saudi

Jan42020 by adminNo Comments

Record 100 billion WhatsApp messages sent on New Year’s Eve

Technology

More than 100 billion messages were sent using WhatsApp on New Year's Eve, setting a new record.The Facebook-owned service said it was the highest number sent in a single day in the app's 10-year history. In the UK alone, more than 900 million WhatsApp messages were sent as people welcomed the start of 2020.The company said more than 12 billion of the messages sent globally were picture messages.The app, which has more than 1.5 billion active users, was bought by Facebook in 2014 for around £14.5bn. Advertisement WhatsApp's end-to-end encryption means messages and calls cannot be intercepted by others, including the company itself. This has been a source of controversy, with concerns raised by Britain's hom