Hashtag Trending – YouTube fights dislike mobs; IT companies fight hate speech; Chinese programmer steals a million

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YouTube looking to shut down dislike mobs; IT companies are curbing hate speech; Baking system loophole loses a million to Chinese bank programmer.

Trending on Google, YouTube is looking to experiment with ways to deal with dislike mobs, groups of people who bombard a video on a specific agenda unrelated to the video’s content. In a video to Creator Insider members, Tom Leung, Director of Project Management at YouTube, said YouTube is considering removing the dislike button altogether in addition to a few other alternatives. While Leung said that they’ve lightly considered the option, he doesn’t like removing the dislike button as it’s not as democratic and unfair to actual dislikes. YouTube’s own 2019 Rewind video was hit with a massive dislike bomb not too long ago, which could be what drove the company to finally take action.

The internet may be a little safer from illegal hate speech in 2019. According to the European Union, its fourth review of the Code of Conduct against racism and intolerance shows that IT companies are now assessing 89 per cent of flagged content within 24 hours and removing 72 per cent of the illegal hate speech. This is a large improvement from 40 per cent and 28 per cent respectively when the code was first launched in 2016. Out the companies, Facebook led the pack by assessing 92.6 per cent of the cases in less than 24 hours.

Trending on Reddit, a senior programmer for a Chinese bank withdrew US$1milion using a bug in the bank’s trading program. Huaxia Bank’s trading program had a major flaw in that it didn’t record transactions that occurred on midnight. Qin Qisheng, a 43-year-old former programmer for the bank, capitalized on his knowledge of this loophole and withdrew US$1million over the course of a year. When he was discovered, he claimed that he was only testing the bank’s security systems and that all the money were resting in his personal account. While the bank hilariously accepted his excuse, the authorities were less than lenient and sentenced Qin to 10 years in jail.

That’s all the tech news that’s trending right now. Hashtag Trending is a part of the ITWC Podcast network. Please also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts. I’m your host Tom Li. Thanks for listening!

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Jim Love, Chief Content Officer, IT World Canada
Tom Li
Tom Li
Telecommunication and consumer hardware are Tom's main beats at IT Business. 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 [email protected].

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