In the next few months, the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) will mandate telecom operators to show the KYC-registered name of all incoming callers using Indian phone numbers. Currently, a trial for this is ongoing in Haryana alone.

The feature, known as Caller Name Presentation (CNAP), will use the same technology that telecom operators such as Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel use to flag certain calls as “Suspected” or “Suspicious,” but instead of those words, the caller ID will display the name a number was registered with.

The move has been proposed since 2022 as a key step in fighting fraud and spam calls, by allowing users to screen calls before they answer them. The move is aggressive — countries that have mandated CNAP, like Qatar, have only done so for corporates placing calls. The feature will be enabled by default, and users might have the choice to disable seeing the KYC name of people from whom they receive calls, with the corollary — concealing one’s name from call recipients — being available only to restricted line facility users, like Ministers and top government officials.

Anti-spam move

With the move, the DoT and the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), which released recommendations earlier this year on the facility at the former’s request, said that scammers and spam callers would find it harder to have their calls answered, especially now that all call recipients would be able to screen to whom a certain incoming call’s number corresponds.

The Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI), which supported the move, expressed reservations during a 2022 consultation by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India. “Under CNAP, there may be genuine cases wherein some users are not keen to share their name,” the industry body said in a filing. COAI represents Airtel, Jio, and Vi.

Other industry groups and one civil society organisation, the Internet Freedom Foundation, raised privacy concerns, particularly for women. 

However, the DoT pushed ahead, as this would only disclose the identities of people placing a call, and not expose the identities of people being called; Truecaller, a popular service that provides crowdsourced identity information for incoming calls, allows users to look up a number’s registered owner without receiving a call from them. The DoT did not respond to a questionnaire on the progress of the Haryana pilot, where operators are testing their systems to ensure that the KYC-registered names can be retrieved from their databases and displayed to call recipients in time.

On by default

In 2024, TRAI dismissed these privacy concerns, and pointed out in its recommendations that a facility called Caller Line Identification Restriction (CLIR) permitted users to withhold their identity if needed. This facility is available to top government officials, Ministers, the President, and intelligence agencies. CLIR masks the number from which an individual’s phone call is coming.

“The DoT, which had sought TRAI’s recommendations on this issue, and is overseeing the pilot in Haryana, sought a key modification to TRAI’s recommendations: while the telecom regulator recommended an opt-in approach, where users would sign up for CNAP, DoT said it should be enabled by default. TRAI received this feedback as a so-called “back-reference,” a formal request to amend its recommendations, and “noted” the input, clearing the way for CNAP’s rollout on most smartphones, with feature handsets as an issue that DoT said would be looked into by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY). 

OpenAI must produce millions of anonymized chat logs from ChatGPT users in its high-stakes copyright dispute with the New York Times and other news outlets, a federal judge in Manhattan ruled.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Ona Wang in a decision made public on Wednesday said that the 20 million logs were relevant to the outlets’ claims and that handing them over would not risk violating users’ privacy. The judge rejected OpenAI’s privacy-related objections to an earlier order requiring the artificial intelligence startup to submit the records as evidence.

“There are multiple layers of protection in this case precisely because of the highly sensitive and private nature of much of the discovery,” Wang said.

An OpenAI spokesperson on Wednesday cited an earlier blog post from the company’s Chief Information Security Officer Dane Stuckey, which said the Times’ demand for the chat logs “disregards long-standing privacy protections” and “breaks with common-sense security practices.”

OpenAI has separately appealed Wang’s order to the case’s presiding judge, U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein.

Spokespeople for the New York Times did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A group of newspapers owned by Alden Global Capital’s MediaNews Group is also involved in the lawsuit. MediaNews Group executive editor Frank Pine said in a statement on Wednesday that OpenAI’s leadership was “hallucinating when they thought they could get away with withholding evidence about how their business model relies on stealing from hardworking journalists.”

The case, originally brought by the Times in 2023, is one of many brought by copyright owners against tech companies including OpenAI, Microsoft and Meta Platforms for using their material without permission to train their AI systems. The news outlets argued in their case against OpenAI that the logs were necessary to determine whether ChatGPT reproduced their copyrighted content, and to rebut OpenAI’s assertion that they “hacked” the chatbot’s responses to manufacture evidence.

OpenAI countered that turning over the logs would disclose confidential user information and that “99.99%” of the transcripts have nothing to do with the infringement allegations.

Wang had said in her initial order to produce the chats that OpenAI users’ privacy would be protected by the company’s “exhaustive de-identification” and other safeguards. Wang reiterated on Wednesday that the company’s measures would “reasonably mitigate associated privacy concerns.”

Wang ordered OpenAI to produce the logs within seven days of removing users’ identifying information.

Meta Platforms has hired Alan Dye, Apple’s longtime head of human interface design, a spokesperson for Apple confirmed on Wednesday, as the Facebook owner accelerates efforts to build AI-powered consumer devices.

Dye, who will join Meta as chief design officer on December 31, started at Apple in 2006 and has led its human interface design team since 2015.

During his tenure, he helped shape the look and feel of Apple’s flagship products, including the Vision Pro headset, iPhone X and Apple Watch, and oversaw major redesigns of its operating systems and apps.

Meta’s poaching of Dye underscores its push to expand consumer hardware beyond its smart glasses, as the company bets on the consumer wearables market and create a broader product lineup beyond social networking.

Meta currently has partnerships with EssilorLuxottica brands Ray-Ban and Oakley to make AI-powered smart glasses.

Bloomberg News first reported the development, adding that veteran designer Stephen Lemay will succeed Dye.

“Steve Lemay has played a key role in the design of every major Apple interface since 1999,” CEO Tim Cook said in a statement.

The move comes amid an intensifying talent war in Silicon Valley, where tech giants are competing to secure top talent to gain an edge in the AI race.

Meta has been aggressively hiring and striking deals with startups as it seeks to position itself ahead of rivals in developing next-generation hardware and software experiences.

Dye’s departure adds to a string of senior exits at Apple in recent months, including longtime Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams and AI chief John Giannandrea.

Nvidia on Wednesday published new data showing that its latest artificial intelligence server can improve the performance of new models – including two popular ones from China – by 10 times.

The data comes as the AI world has shifted its focus from training AI models, where Nvidia dominates the market, to putting them to use for millions of users, where Nvidia faces far more competition from rivals such as Advanced Micro Devices and Cerebras.

Nvidia’s data focused on what are known as mixture-of-expert AI models. The technique is a way of making AI models more efficient by breaking up questions into pieces that are assigned to “experts” within the model.

That exploded in popularity this year after China’s DeepSeek shocked the world with a high-performing open source model that took less training on Nvidia chips than rivals in early 2025. Since then, the mixture-of-experts approach has been adopted by ChatGPT maker OpenAI, France’s Mistral and China’s Moonshoot AI, which in July released a highly-ranked open source model of its own.

Meanwhile, Nvidia has focused on making the case that while such models might require less training on its chips, its offerings can still be used to serve those models to users.

Nvidia on Wednesday said that its latest AI server, which packs 72 of its leading chips into a single computer with speedy links between them, improved the performance of Moonshot’s Kimi K2 Thinking model by 10 times compared to the previous generation of Nvidia servers, a similar performance gain to what Nvidia has seen with DeepSeek’s models.

Nvidia said the gains primarily came from the sheer number of chips it can pack into servers and the fast links between them, an area where Nvidia still has advantages over its rivals. Nvidia competitor AMD is working on a similar server packed with multiple powerful chips that it has said will come to market next year.

Sify Infinit Spaces, set to become India’s first listed data center operator, sees AI driving demand for computing power but is tempering future investments to avoid over-exposure to a potential bubble, its chief executive said.

The surge in artificial intelligence technologies, which require massive computing power, has spurred unprecedented growth in data centers worldwide, including India. But Sify Infinit will keep expansion “responsible and calculated” to ensure it matches sustainable demand, CEO Sharad Agarwal told Reuters in an interview late November.

The company, whose parent Sify Technologies was among India’s first private internet providers and a key player in the early internet boom, now aims to diversify beyond hyperscalers – large cloud service providers – by expanding its client base to banks, financial services, e-commerce, and media firms.

“We’ve seen the dot-com bubble, we’ve seen the subprime crisis, and we have seen quite a few cycles in the past. We are able (to cut) through the reality and ‘bubble-ness’ of a technological development,” Agarwal said.

He said AI is not a technology bubble, but warned that herd mentality could spur overbuilding and create a capacity glut.

India’s data center capacity is expected to more than triple to 4.7 gigawatt by 2030, from 1.3 GW in April 2025, driven by rising cloud adoption and AI workloads, according to market research firm Mordor Intelligence.

The Kotak Private Equity-backed company, which runs 14 data centers across India and has 11 more under development, had filed draft papers in October for a 37 billion rupee ($410.87 million) initial public offering.

Its projects have two- to three-year lead times, which gives the company room to adjust if sentiment cools, Agarwal said.

Hyperscalers such as Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft still dominate data-capacity demand, but edge data centers, or smaller, local hubs, are gaining traction, he said, as streaming and entertainment consumption grows in non-metro cities.

Sify has begun building an edge data center in the eastern port city of Visakhapatnam. The city has recently drawn investments from Reliance, Adani, and Google.

The excitement is palpable at Chennai’s Snapchat Creator Connect. With the place teeming with Gen-Z, the buzz is on how content and social media trends can shape societal narratives.

The numbers tell a story: 90 percent of their user base in India is between 13 and 34. At 250 million active users currently, Snapchat’s focus on visual storytelling, short videos and AR is clearly targeted at the young Indian. And now, with viral sensation, musician Asal Kolaar, they hope to strengthen their connect with regional players and culture.

In the middle of all this action is Saket Jha Saurabh, Director and Head of AR & Content Partnerships, Snap Inc. “The south – particularly Tamil Nadu – has great history, with music, movies and culture. We feel there is a huge opportunity, and this is the beginning of a long journey with creators.”

Chennai’s Snapchat Creator Connect
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement

That journey filled with pictures, because, as Saket puts it, “the Gen-Z generation thinks in visuals.” “They send a photo of a dish to communicate that they have arrived at a place,” he explains, adding that 76 percent of users in Chennai use AR lenses in the app. “We call it lenses, not filters. We did a AR lens featuring a 70s look that was a huge hit..”

How does the increased use and misuse of Artificial Intellience (AI) play out in all this? “AI is fused into our product. We equip the user with AI-led benefits, to ease content creation and personalise it for them. However, if people misuse it to create deepfakes, we will take action against them and pull down their account,” he says.

Despite the existence of multiple chat and social media platforms, Snapchat thrives because it is relaxed, he says. “Here, creators tend to do well if they are just being themselves. Most other platforms are about being on-stage and choosing the best version of yourself. Here, we encourage people to put the real you out there.”

Russia has blocked access to the U.S. children’s gaming platform Roblox, accusing it of distributing extremist materials and “LGBT propaganda”.

Announcing the move on Wednesday, the communications watchdog Roskomnadzor said Roblox was “rife with inappropriate content that can negatively impact the spiritual and moral development of children”.

A Roblox spokesperson said in an emailed comment to Reuters: “We respect the local laws and regulations in the countries where we operate and believe Roblox provides a positive space for learning, creation and meaningful connection for everyone.”

The spokesperson said Roblox has “a deep commitment to safety and we have a robust set of proactive and preventative safety measures designed to catch and prevent harmful content on our platform.”

Roblox, which averaged 151.5 million daily active users in the third quarter of this year, has been banned by several countries including Iraq and Turkey over concerns about predators exploiting the platform to abuse children.

Roskomnadzor has a long track record of restricting access to Western media and tech platforms that it deems to be hosting content that breaches Russian laws.

Last year, language-learning app Duolingo deleted references to what Russia calls “non-traditional sexual relations” after being warned by the watchdog about publishing LGBT content.

In 2023, Russia designated what it called the “international LGBT movement” as extremist and those supporting it as terrorists, paving the way for serious criminal cases against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people and their advocates.

In August this year, Russia began limiting some calls on WhatsApp, owned by Meta Platforms, and on Telegram, accusing the foreign-owned platforms of refusing to share information with law enforcement in fraud and terrorism cases. Roskomnadzor last week threatened to block WhatsApp completely.