Urgent.News

What's breaking now, across thousands of outlets.

Tuesday, 18 August 2026 Reading Room

Tech

WhatsApp, Telegram & others need user's consent before they are added by unknown contact to chat group or channel

New safeguards.

mothership.sg ·

WhatsApp, Telegram & others need user's consent before they are added by unknown contact to chat group or channel

Singapore's Singapore Police Force (SPF) has announced new anti-scam measures for online messaging and social media platforms, including WhatsApp and Telegram, requiring them to obtain user consent before unknown contacts can join chat groups or channels. The measures, set to be implemented by January 31, 2027, will also involve displaying risk indicators and allowing users to block suspicious accounts.

The SPF introduced these Code of Practice (COP) guidelines to combat the growing number of scam cases on messaging platforms, such as WhatsApp and Telegram, which accounted for 23% of total scam cases in 2025. The new rules will be enforced by the Online Criminal Harms Act (OCHA) Office, which can issue penalties of up to S$10 million for non-compliance.

Written by urgent.news from Mothership's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.

Read the original at mothership.sg →

More in Tech

RDS High Availability and credential rotation without downtime

I got an AWS question and implemented it to make sure that the option is correct. A critical financial application runs on RDS for PostgreSQL.

  • Amazon RDS Multi-AZ deployment ensures high availability with <60-second failover.
  • AWS Secrets Manager automates 30-day database credential rotation without downtime.
  • RDS Proxy maintains database connections, enabling seamless credential updates.

·dev.to

Implementing Feature Management in .NET: The Lazy Way

Microsoft did the hard work so you don't have to. The Microsoft.FeatureManagement library integrates directly with .NET's configuration and dependency injection systems, which means you can get…

  • Microsoft released Microsoft.FeatureManagement library for .NET
  • Library integrates with .NET configuration and DI systems
  • Feature flags configured in appsettings.json with IsEnabledAsync check

·dev.to

You Can Finally Buy a Fairphone In the US

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Your iPhone, SamsungGalaxy, andGoogle Pixel have a 1-year warranty. Unless you cough up extra dough for an extended service plan, you'll pay a hefty fee…

  • Fairphone now available for purchase in the US
  • Features modular design with 12 replaceable parts
  • Priced at $650, available on Amazon and Fairphone.com

·mobile.slashdot.org

More from Tuesday 18 August →