Tag Archives: netflix

Facebook, Snapchat join chorus of companies condemning George Floyd death, racism

(Reuters) – Facebook Inc and Snap Inc became the latest U.S. companies condemning racial inequality in the United States as violent protests flared up across major cities over the death of George Floyd, an unarmed black man who died while in police custody in Minneapolis last week.

The two tech companies stood with Intel Corp, Netflix Inc and Nike Inc in taking a public stance against Floyd’s death – voicing concerns about discrimination against African-Americans.

“We stand with the Black community – and all those working towards justice in honor of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and far too many others whose names will not be forgotten,” Facebook’s Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post late Sunday.

He said the social network will commit $10 million to organizations that are working on racial justice.

The arrest of Floyd, 46, was captured by an onlooker’s cell phone video that went viral and showed a police officer restraining him while pressing his knee on Floyd’s neck as he moaned: “Please, I can’t breathe.”

His death caused yet another round of outrage across the nation on the treatment of African-Americans by police officers, polarizing the country politically and racially as states begin to ease lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I am heartbroken and enraged by the treatment of black people and people of color in America,” Snapchat Chief Executive Officer Evan Spiegel said in an internal memo.

“We must begin a process to ensure that America’s black community is heard throughout the country.”

On Friday, Nike flipped its iconic slogan to raise awareness about racism.

“For Once, Don’t Do It. Don’t pretend there’s not a problem in America. Don’t turn your back on racism,” the company said in a video that has over six million views and was shared by celebrities and rival Adidas AG.

(Reporting by Neha Malara in Bengaluru; Additional reporting by Uday Sampath; Editing by Sweta Singh, Bernard Orr)

Netflix streams some educational films on YouTube for free

(Reuters) – Netflix Inc said on Friday it had made some documentary features and series, including Our Planet and Explained, available on the company’s YouTube channel for free at the request of teachers.

The move comes as the coronavirus outbreak has forced educational institutions to shut down, and confined millions of students to their homes, compelling schools and colleges to tap virtual tools to keep the classes running.

The decision to make some content free on YouTube is a rare exception to Netflix’s marketing strategy, which otherwise charges a monthly subscription fee from users to avail its services.

While the COVID-19 pandemic has driven an internet boom, boosting shares of Netflix, the company faces tightening competition from Apple TV+ and Disney+, which has attracted more than 50 million paid users globally.

“For many years, Netflix has allowed teachers to screen documentaries in their classrooms. However, this isn’t possible with schools closed,” the company said in a blog post https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/free-educational-documentaries, explaining the move.

(Reporting by Munsif Vengattil in Bengaluru; Editing by Aditya Soni)

Two Major Cyber Attacks disrupt service on major sites

An attendee looks at a monitor at the Parsons booth during the 2016 Black Hat cyber-security conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S

By Jim Finkle and Dustin Volz

(Reuters) – Cyber attacks targeting the internet infrastructure provider Dyn disrupted service on major sites such as Twitter and Spotify on Friday, mainly affecting users on the U.S. East Coast.

It was not immediately clear who was responsible and Gillian Christensen of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said the agency was “investigating all potential causes.”

Dyn said it had resolved one attack, which disrupted operations for about two hours, but disclosed a second attack a few hours later that was causing further disruptions.

In addition to the social network Twitter and music-streamer Spotify, the discussion site Reddit, hospitality booking service Airbnb and The Verge news site were among the companies whose services were reported to be down.

Amazon.com Inc’s web services division, one of the world’s biggest cloud computing companies, also disclosed an outage that lasted several hours on Friday morning. Amazon could not immediately be reached for comment.

The attacks were the latest in an increasingly menacing string of distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attacks disrupting internet sites by overwhelming servers with web traffic.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security warned on Oct. 14 that hackers were using a powerful new approach to launch these campaigns – infecting routers, printers, smart TVs and other connected devices with malware that turns them into “bot” armies that can launch DDoS attacks.

“We have begun monitoring and mitigating a DDoS attack against our Dyn Managed DNS infrastructure,” the company said on its website. “Our engineers are continuing to work on mitigating this issue.”

Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at Dyn, told Reuters he was not sure if the outages at Dyn and Amazon were connected.

“We provide service to Amazon but theirs is a complex network so it is hard to be definitive about causality at the moment,” he said.

Dyn is a Manchester, New Hampshire-based provider of services for managing domain name servers (DNS), which act as switchboards connecting internet traffic. Requests to access sites are transmitted through DNS servers that direct them to computers that host websites.

Dyn’s customers include some of the world’s biggest corporations and Internet firms, such as Pfizer, Visa, Netflix and Twitter, SoundCloud and BT.

(Reporting By Jim Finkle in Boston and Dustin Volz in Washington; Additional reporting by Eric Auchard in Frankurt and Malathi Nayak in New York, Jeff Mason in Washington; Editing by Bill Trott)