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Social Media: How Millennials Are Impacting the Future of Communication

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Email was once at the forefront of convenience. Used as a way to quickly send messages and share files from anywhere in the world, it was — and, for many, still is — a primary tool to communicate with friends, family, and colleagues.

However, a Business Insider’s Intelligence report shows that, over the past several years, the proliferation of chat apps, SMS, and social messaging platforms has largely displaced this more traditional form of online messaging.

In 2016, instant messaging and texting (e.g. SMS and chat apps) made up 35% of communication, globally, according to Deloitte, up from 29% in 2014.

Meanwhile, email accounted for 22% of communication in 2016, down from 29% in 2014. And as these communication channels enhance their capabilities and add more functionality, the threat to email’s sustainability will increase.

But is email the next legacy technology to fall prey to obsolescence? The short answer is no. However, it’s worth looking more closely at shifting user behavior when it comes to online communication — whether it’s at home, on-the-go, or in the workplace.

Hand-Held Communication
The saturation of premium smartphones in many mature markets, and the existence of mobile-first economies such as China, means that mobile devices are everywhere.
This gives users immediate and consistent access to other people and businesses with the touch of a button through means like social media, chat apps, and email.

Global MAU
Among these three modes of communication, chat apps are making the biggest waves, largely because they over-index in terms of total number of users and engagement rates. For context, chat apps like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger rival email hosts like Google in terms of users, with each reporting over 1 billion people using their services at least once each month.
Moreover, combined, the top four chat apps boast more than 3 billion monthly active users globally, surpassing the top four social networks.

This proliferation is beginning to impact the way people communicate, not only with each other, but with businesses, too.

Chat apps are altering consumer behavior. The wide adoption of chat apps and texting is remodeling the way people communicate online, including via email. A study by Adobe found that almost 70% of respondents believe text messaging is resulting in shorter, less formal emails.

Customer Service 2
Chat apps are replacing email as the preferred mode of business-to-consumer interaction. More and more millennials — those between 18 and 34 years old — are finding that chat apps are a more reliable and convenient way to reach brands and service providers, according to an Ovum survey of millennials in the US and Germany.

Around half of respondents noted they preferred to interact with a service provider via chat for several reasons, including the desire to achieve a swift resolution to a problem and the idea that they don’t have to use a separate service or app to achieve this resolution.

Communication in The Workplace
Several trends that have emerged over the past 18 months or so point to the decline of email as the primary mode of communication in the workplace.

These range from an overall shift in user behaviour to the widespread adoption of chat apps, which boast a growing list of functions and capabilities.

The emergence of less formal, more engaging modes of workplace communication is most obvious in the adoption apps like Slack and the growing trend in using social networking apps such as Facebook Workplace. Chat apps are proving successful in the workplace for several reasons:

Chat apps are convenient. Chat apps support quick and easy-to-access communication, and enable businesses and users to communicate with those who may not have an email address. For instance, many doctors in Brazil use WhatsApp to converse with patients, schedule appointments, and share test results.

They are used as a collaboration tool. Chat apps like Slack offer employees the ability to engage with multiple colleagues at one time as well as instantly upload and share documents and files without having to leave the app, potentially enhancing productivity.

They enable businesses to monitor workplace communication. Some chat apps enable businesses to retain and read employees’ correspondence, and gather statistics on the frequency, volume, and times of conversations.

Security
Internet security is increasingly becoming a priority for both businesses and consumers as threats from hackers become more prevalent.

A survey of 1,250 registered US voters showed that a decisive 84% of respondents consider personal data protection very important, according to Purple Insights.

Chat apps provide an appealing alternative to email by offering superior data security. For example, following Hillary Clinton’s notorious email scandal, her staff began utilizing Signal, a highly secure chat app that encrypts data automatically. And while not all chat apps provide the same level of security as Signal offers, a majority of the big-name apps provide varying degrees of data and communication security for consumers. Here are a few examples of such apps:

WhatsApp supports end-to-end encryption, which makes it extremely difficult for anyone other than the participants of an interaction to gain access to messages’ contents. In fact, the technology is “about one of the best safeguards you can have in place,” according to health data attorney Katie Kenney.

Snapchat, the popular image-sharing app, offers ephemeral messaging, meaning that messages, photos, and videos disappear after being viewed or after a certain amount of time.

Other chat apps offer users the ability to opt in to encryption. That’s because artificial intelligence (AI) powered virtual assistants and software require access to the information users are putting into their messages in order to work. However, these chat apps also recognize the importance of personal security. A compromise is to allow users to choose when they encrypt their messages.

Here are two examples:
Google Allo, Google’s new chat app with baked-in Google Assistant lets users choose to turn on end-to-end encryption for their correspondence. However, turning on this feature comes at the loss of Google Assistant.

Facebook Messenger recently added support for opt-in ephemeral messaging, called Secret Messages.

Like Snapchat, users can allot a set amount of time their messages can be viewed before they’re deleted permanently. As with Google Allo, Messenger requires access to user data to power the increasing number of functions users can access within the app, such as location information and data within messages.

In the workplace, though, businesses still face serious risk to enterprise security by implementing chat apps. Viruses, spam, malware and phishing attacks, data leakage, and inappropriate use are among some of risks associated with employing chat apps in the workplace.

Why Email Won’t Die
Despite current trends, email maintains an entrenched position as a trusted form of communication among consumers. Because of this, email will persist as a legacy mode of communication, both within the workplace and between private correspondence, much as using pen and paper has since the proliferation of the internet. In fact, we project that it’ll be at least five years before most of the younger generation of users join the workforce and further diminish email’s relevance in the workplace.


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Nigeria CommunicationsWeek believes that technology makes life more exciting and helps improve the lives of people around Nigeria and indeed the world. So since 2007, we have devoted our energy to independent reportage of technology and how they affect lives.

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AI Slows Down some Experienced Software Developers, Study Finds

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Contrary to popular belief, using cutting-edge artificial intelligence tools slowed down experienced software developers when they were working in codebases familiar to them, rather than supercharging their work, a new study found.

AI research nonprofit METR conducted the in-depth study, on a group of seasoned developers earlier this year while they used Cursor, a popular AI coding assistant, to help them complete tasks in open-source projects they were familiar with.

Before the study, the open-source developers believed using AI would speed them up, estimating it would decrease task completion time by 24%. Even after completing the tasks with AI, the developers believed that they had decreased task times by 20%. But the study found that using AI did the opposite: it increased task completion time by 19%.

The study’s lead authors, Joel Becker and Nate Rush, said they were shocked by the results: prior to the study, Rush had written down that he expected “a 2x speed up, somewhat obviously.”

The findings challenge the belief that AI always makes expensive human engineers much more productive, a factor that has attracted substantial investment into companies selling AI products to aid software development.

AI is also expected to replace entry-level coding positions. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, recently told Axios that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white collar jobs in the next one to five years.

Prior literature on productivity improvements has found significant gains: one study found using AI sped up coders by 56%, another study found developers were able to complete 26% more tasks in a given time.

But the new METR study shows that those gains don’t apply to all software development scenarios. In particular, this study showed that experienced developers intimately familiar with the quirks and requirements of large, established open source codebases experienced a slowdown.

Other studies often rely on software development benchmarks for AI, which sometimes misrepresent real-world tasks, the study’s authors said.

The slowdown stemmed from developers needing to spend time going over and correcting what the AI models suggested.

“When we watched the videos, we found that the AIs made some suggestions about their work, and the suggestions were often directionally correct, but not exactly what’s needed,” Becker said.

The authors cautioned that they do not expect the slowdown to apply in other scenarios, such as for junior engineers or engineers working in codebases they aren’t familiar with.

Still, the majority of the study’s participants, as well as the study’s authors, continue to use Cursor today.

The authors believe it is because AI makes the development experience easier, and in turn, more pleasant, akin to editing an essay instead of staring at a blank page.

“Developers have goals other than completing the task as soon as possible,” Becker said. “So they’re going with this less effortful route.”

 


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Firm Uncovers $500K Crypto Heist Through Malicious Packages

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Kaspersky GReAT (Global Research and Analysis Team) experts have discovered open-source packages that download the Quasar backdoor and a stealer designed to exfiltrate cryptocurrency. The malicious packages are intended for the Cursor AI development environment, which is based on Visual Studio Code — a tool used for AI-assisted coding.

The malicious open-source packages are extensions hosted in the Open VSX repository that claim to provide support for the Solidity programming language. However, in practice, they download and execute malicious code on users’ devices.

During an incident response, a blockchain developer from Russia reached out to Kaspersky after installing one of these fake extensions on his computer, which allowed attackers to steal approximately $500,000 worth of crypto assets.

The threat actor behind these packages managed to deceive the developer by making the malicious package rank higher than the legitimate one. The attacker achieved this by artificially inflating the malicious package’s downloads count to 54,000.

After installation, the victim gained no actual functionality from the extension. Instead, malicious ScreenConnect software was installed on the computer, granting threat actors remote access to the infected device.

Using this access, they deployed the open-source Quasar backdoor along with a stealer that collects data from browsers, email clients, and crypto wallets. With these tools, the threat actors were able to obtain the developer’s wallet seed phrases and subsequently steal cryptocurrency from the accounts.

After the malicious extension downloaded by the developer was discovered and removed from the repository, the threat actor republished it and artificially inflated its installation count to a higher number – 2 million, compared to 61,000 for the legitimate package. The extension was removed from the platform following a request from Kaspersky.

“Spotting compromised open-source packages with the naked eye is becoming increasingly difficult. Threat actors are using increasingly creative tactics to deceive potential victims, even developers who have a strong understanding of cybersecurity risks — particularly those working in the blockchain development field.

As we expect adversaries to continue targeting developers, it is recommended that even experienced IT professionals deploy dedicated security solutions to safeguard sensitive data and prevent financial losses,” commented Georgy Kucherin, Security Researcher with Kaspersky’s Global Research and Analysis Team.

The threat actor behind the attack published not only malicious Solidity extensions but also another NPM package, solsafe, which also downloads ScreenConnect. A few months earlier, three additional malicious Visual Studio Code extensions were released — solaibot, among-eth, and blankebesxstnion — all of them have already been removed from the repository.


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NITDA Reaffirms Commitment to 95% Digital Literacy by 2030, as UBEC Pledges Collaboration

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DG NITDA, Kashifu Inuwa CCIE (left), receiving an award for an Ambassador of Basic Education from the ES UBEC, Hajia Aisha Garba (right)
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Kashifu Inuwa CCIE, the Director General of the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), has reaffirmed the Federal Government’s unwavering commitment to achieving 95% digital literacy across Nigeria by the year 2030, with an ambitious milestone of 70% by 2027.

This disclosure was made in total alignment with the present administration’s priority areas of reforming the economy for sustained inclusive growth and accelerating diversification through industrialisation, digitisation, creative arts, manufacturing, and innovation.

Making this known during a collaborative meeting hosted by the Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC), Inuwa highlighted the government’s strategic prioritisation of human capital development as central to its national transformation agenda.

“We started this journey in 2023 when President Bola Ahmed Tinubu came on board and he made it clear that economic diversification and inclusivity are part of the administration’s agenda,” he noted.

“And the president outlined this in 8 priority areas to achieve the vision, with priority number 7 specifically focused on accelerating industrialisation, digitisation, creative arts, manufacturing, and innovation,” he added.

Recognising the importance of digital fluency in achieving this agenda, he stated that NITDA is committed to investing in the digital empowerment of citizens through the development of the National Digital Literacy Framework (NDLF), a strategic blueprint aligned with international best practices.

He added that to tailor the framework to Nigeria’s specific needs, 6 core competency areas were incorporated to include device and software operations, information and data literacy, communication and collaboration, content creation, safety, and problem solving.

He explained that the framework would address all levels of digital fluency, from basic, intermediate to advanced levels, to make digital skills accessible to every Nigerian, from primary school pupils to working professionals.

According to Inuwa, despite data limitations, NITDA estimates that Nigeria’s digital literacy rate currently stands at 50%, up from 44% in 2021, based on extrapolations from the World Bank’s Better Life Report.

The NITDA DG disclosed that the agency has been working closely with the Nigerian Educational Research and Development Council (NERDC) in developing a curriculum for digital literacy, which can be infused into formal education. Stating that the visit is a continuation of NITDA’s ongoing engagements with key education stakeholders, including the Federal Ministry of Education, the National Universities Commission (NUC), and the Nigerian Educational Research and Development Council (NERDC), all aimed at advancing digital literacy across all levels of learning.

Inuwa also revealed ongoing collaborations with global platforms such as Coursera to train teachers using AI-powered lesson generation tools and provide scalable online training.

It is worth recalling that late last year, NITDA partnered with the Nasarawa State University in collaboration with CISCO in launching the Digital Learning for NSUK (DL4NSUK) initiative to enhance digital literacy in tertiary institutions, and equipping graduates with the skills needed to be digitally proficient and globally competitive.

While stressing that the entire process, from curriculum development to classroom delivery, would require a whole-of-government and whole-of-society approach, Inuwa said, “This is not a journey we can walk alone; we must bring everyone on board, education stakeholders, technology providers, state governments, and international partners.”

In response to the DG’s remarks, UBEC Executive Secretary, Hajiya Aisha Garba, confirmed that the Commission has officially received the digital literacy curriculum developed by NITDA and NERDC and has commenced internal review processes.

She acknowledged the curriculum as robust and forward-looking but stressed the need for simplification to suit early learners and teachers, citing challenges such as curriculum overload, limited teacher capacity, and inadequate infrastructure as key barriers to effective implementation.

She pledged that UBEC, in partnership with the State Universal Basic Education Board (SUBEB), will lead efforts to equip schools with computers and solar-powered infrastructure to support real learning.

“We’re committed to working with NITDA and NERDC to refine the curriculum, train teachers, and ensure effective delivery. Let us align the technical vision with grassroots realities to make a lasting impact,” she concluded.

To formalise the implementation of the meeting’s resolutions, a joint inter-agency committee was established to develop strategic plans that will ensure the effective rollout of the digital literacy initiative, to equip young Nigerians with the essential digital skills required to thrive in an increasingly dynamic and technology-driven global landscape.


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