Microsoft bans cryptocurrency ads on Bing; calls it a risk for its users

After Facebook and Google, Microsoft has now banned advertisements showing cryptocurrencies and related products from its Bing search engine.

"Because cryptocurrency and related products are not regulated, we have found them to present a possible elevated risk to our users with the potential for bad actors to participate in predatory behaviours, or otherwise scam consumers," Melissa Alsoszatai-Petheo, Advertiser policy manager at Microsoft, said in a blog post on Wednesday.

"To help protect our users from this risk, we have made the decision to disallow advertising for cryptocurrency, its related products, and un-regulated binary options," she added.

Bing Ads will implement this change globally in June, with enforcement rolling out in late June to early July.

Google in March announced that it would ban advertisements for cryptocurrencies and other "speculative financial products" across its ad platforms.

Using AI, Nasa discovers another solar system like ours; has 8 planets

A solar system with as many planets as our own has been discovered with the help of NASA's Kepler space telescope and artificial intelligence, the US space agency said.

"Our solar system now is tied for most number of planets around a single star," NASA said in a statement yesterday.

However, none of the planets are expected to be hospitable to life.

The eight-planet system -- the largest known outside of ours -- orbits a star called Kepler 90 some 2,545 light-years away.

"The Kepler-90 star system is like a mini version of our solar system," said Andrew Vanderburg, an astronomer at the University of Texas at Austin.

"You have small planets inside and big planets outside, but everything is scrunched in much closer."

The newly identified planet, Kepler-90i, is a rocky planet like Earth, but orbits its star once every 14.4 days, meaning a full year there is the same as two weeks on Earth.

"Kepler-90i is not a place I'd like to go visit, though," said Vanderburg.

"Its surface is likely far too hot."

NASA calculated its average temperature at about 426 degree Celsius -- as hot as Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun.

Scientists found it by using machine learning from Google.
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400 mysterious ancient stone structures discovered in Saudi Arabian desert

Scientists have discovered about 400 previously undocumented stone structures known as 'Gates' in Saudi Arabia with the help of Google Earth imagery.

While Saudi Arabia is largely thought of as barren mountains and desert, it was also home to an immense number of archaeological sites that were yet to be identified, recorded and mapped, said David Kennedy, researcher at University of Western Australia.

"You can not see them in any intelligible way at the ground level but once you get up a few hundred feet, or with a satellite even higher, they stand out beautifully," Kennedy said.

The structures look like flat field gates from top in the images obtained from Google Earth.

"I refer to them as Gates because when you view them from above they look like a simple field gate lying flat, two upright posts on the sides, connected by one or more long bars," he said.

They do not look like structures where people would have lived nor do they look like animal traps or for disposing of dead bodies. It is a mystery as to what their purpose would have been, researchers said.
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Microsoft to release Office 2019 next year with better mobile linking power

Microsoft has announced that Office 2019 would be available in the second half of 2018.

The 2019 suite is said to be for people who don't want their apps and services in the cloud, the CNN reports.
The suite will include the standard apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, and server versions of Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint and Skype for Business.

The company, at its Microsoft Ignite conference in Orlando, Florida, said that Office 2019 will include more IT features and server upgrades to improve usability, voice and security,

The apps will also come with better linking capabilities for mobile devices, such as pressure sensitivity and tilt effects.

The last major update to the suite was Microsoft Office 2016, which came out in 2015.
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In pics: Nasa captures the brightest solar flare in over a decade

Two high-intensity solar flares were emitted today, the second of which was the most intense recorded since the start of this sun cycle in December 2008, NASA said.

These radiation flares, which can disrupt communications satellites, GPS and power grids by reaching the upper Earth atmosphere, were detected and captured by the US Space Agency's Solar Dynamics Observatory.

According to the Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC), these so-called category X eruptions disrupted high-frequency radio communications for one hour on the Earth's side facing the sun and low-frequency communications used in navigation.

The two eruptions occurred in an active region of the sun where an eruption of average intensity occurred on September 4. The current cycle of the sun, which began in December 2008, saw the intensity of solar activity decline sharply, opening the way to the "solar minimum."
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Isro to launch new 'eye in the sky'

Remember the ‘eye in the sky’ that helped soldiers to successfully carry out the ‘surgical strike’ against terrorist posts on the Jammu & Kashmir border last September?

Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) is strengthening this eye by launching a satellite in the Cartosat-2 series later this month.

The primary mission objective is providing high-resolution scenes of spot imagery.

It will be launched via Isro’s trusted PSLV workhorse, PSLV-C38 in this case, from Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh, to an altitude of 500 km. It will be  seventh Cartosat satellite from the space body.

The project has been allocated Rs 160 crore; the satellite is expected to help preparation of high-resolution maps, with a Panchromatic camera. Apart from pictures, it can also record videos.

Military use apart, it would be useful for urban and rural applications, coastal land use and regulation, utility management and various related applications.

The future Earth Observation programme envisages continuity of a thematic series of satellites — Resourcesat, Cartosat, Oceansat, RISAT, INSAT —  for land, water and meteorological applications.

A Geo Imaging Satellite  is also envisaged in geostationary orbit, to enable real-time imaging.

Cartosat-1, first in the series of Cartosat earth observation satellites, was launched in May 2005, in the PSLV-C6 launch vehicle, followed by Cartosat-2 in January 2007.
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