Tech Weekender: Major platforms like Amazon and Zomato faced disruptions, A toolkit that scans your phone for Pegasus, Some tips to keep you safe from Spyware and more

Several major digital platforms such as Amazon, Zomato, and Myntra, among others, faced temporary disruptions on July 22 connected to content distribution network Akamai. This is the second major internet outage to hit the world since June. The last one was reported on June 8. The outage affected airlines including Delta, and online stores such as Amazon and Myntra, food delivery apps such as Zomato, payment apps such as PayTm, and OTT platforms like Disney + Hotstar, games like Call of Duty, along with a host of banks whose pages were not loading, tracking website Down Detector reported. Other Akamai websites that were down were PlayStation Network and Steam.

Twitter is experimenting with new ways to help people react to a conversation. The micro-blogging site is testing the Reddit-like feature to downvote on replies. Twitter says the experiment is being performed to find out the type of replies that users find relevant in a conversation. It clarified that a downvote is “not a dislike button” and are visible only to the user. Those who are a part of the experiment will see an upvote and downvote button next to the heart/ like button. Select users might also see a thumbs up/ thumbs down button instead.

The British development studio that created Sackboy and LittleBigPlanet 3 has now been bought by Chinese game conglomerate Tencent for $1.27 billion. Besides bringing Sackboy to life for Sony PlayStation, Sumo Digital also assisted IO Interactive on Hitman 2, made the Xbox One exclusive Crackdown 3, supported development for Sonic and Sega All-Stars racing, and has had a hand in major titles that have been released over the last decade.

Spyware is a type of malware designed to infiltrate, monitor and extract data from your devices. These nasty bugs wriggle their way into your smartphone or any other smart device and lay there, silently collecting information without your knowledge. Here are some tips to keep your safe from Spyware.

The Mobile Verification Toolkit (MVT) developed by Researchers at Amnesty International can be used to detect if Pegasus Spyware has targeted your phone, Techcrunch reported. The toolkit that was developed by Amnesty to enable users to check for malicious apps that may have infected their devices can be used to find out if the Pegasus spyware developed by Israel’s NSO Group to snoop in on journalists, ministers, and businessmen, has extracted data from your phone too.

Twitter privacy policy for user data handling has been updated. The microblogging site has announced that the new privacy policy will come into place starting August 19. The changes are primarily around Twitter Spaces, its payments, etc. One of the biggest changes made is around Twitter Spaces. The company states that it will produce audio transcriptions of the conversations that take place on Spaces. Twitter will use these transcriptions for review purposes in case they violate any of Twitter’s rules. The company also said that these transcriptions will be used to make improvements to the way the feature works.