Hashtag Trending – Social media now part of U.S. visa application; Amazon employs flying drones; Windows users need to update

U.S. wants your social media account, Amazon to start drone delivery, NSA and Microsoft urge users to install a critical system update.

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That’s all the news that’s trending today. It’s Thursday, June 6th, and I’m your host, Tom Li.

Trending on LinkedIn, U.S. Visa applicants now must provide their social media accounts as part of their application. This allows the screening personnel to profile a visitor or immigrant based on his photos, locations, travel history, and intimate personal details. Hina Shamsi, director of the American Civil liberties Union’s National Security Project, says that this is a dangerous breach of privacy with no indication to its effectiveness in enhancing national security. The U.S. issued over 10 million Visas in 2017 — that’s a lot of background checks.

Trending on Reddit, Amazon plans on rolling out its self-driving drones to deliver packages in the coming months. These electric drones have a 5lb payload and are fully electric. They will start delivering packages by air and use AI image recognition to avoid people and obstacles in transit. Jeff Wilke, Amazon chief executive officer of its worldwide division. said that he’s the safety issue has been fully covered.

Lastly, trending on Reddit, the NSA and Microsoft are both urging Windows users to update their systems. This is in response to the Bluekeep vulnerability discovered three weeks ago, which exploits a flaw in the Remote Desktop Service that allowed arbitrary code execution. Attackers can abuse this weakness and deliver all kinds of attacks. Microsoft has already issued patches to Windows XP and 2008 following its discovery and encourages all system admins to install the patch.

That’s all the tech news that’s trending right now. Hashtag Trending is a part of the ITWC Podcast network. Add us to your Alexa Flash Briefing or your Google Home daily briefing. I’m Tom Li, thanks for listening.

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Jim Love, Chief Content Officer, IT World Canada

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Tom Li
Tom Li
Telecommunication and consumer hardware are Tom's main beats at IT World Canada. He loves to talk about Canada's network infrastructure, semiconductor products, and of course, anything hot and new in the consumer technology space. You'll also occasionally see his name appended to articles on cloud, security, and SaaS-related news. If you're ever up for a lengthy discussion about the nuances of each of the above sectors or have an upcoming product that people will love, feel free to drop him a line at tli@itwc.ca.

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