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Airtel is India’s fastest mobile network, offering average total download speeds of 6.15Mbps, according to network coverage mapping company OpenSignal’s first public report into the Indian telecommunications market. Airtel topped both the 4G download speed and 3G download speed categories, at 11.53Mbps and 4.77Mbps, respectively, while Jio took home the 4G availability gong and Vodafone India won in the 4G latency and 3G latency categories. OpenSignal drew […]

LafargeHolcim is close to announcing that its chief executive will step down following an internal investigation into a plant the Swiss-French cement company operated in Syria until September 2014. Eric Olsen’s expected departure would make him the highest-profile casualty of the controversy surrounding a Lafarge cement plant that the company continued operating as Syria descended into civil war. Human rights groups have alleged the company helped finance […]

Microsoft has launched IoT Central, a fully managed “IoT-as-a-service” offering to assist enterprises with the deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) applications without the need for in-house expertise. IoT Central aims to lower the barrier of entry to deploying IoT solutions in the enterprise, with a spokesperson from Microsoft telling ZDNet that the company “has a history of simplifying complicated technologies and bringing [them] to the masses”, […]

When North Korean traders give Li Jian long lists of the goods they want to buy, he checks the items against a 236-page Chinese translation of the UN sanctions imposed after Kim Jong Un’s regime conducted a sixth nuclear weapons test in September.  “If it’s on the sanctions list, we can’t provide it,” Mr Li said from his office in downtown Dandong, the Chinese border city through which […]

The 5G-Safe project, which aims to reduce traffic accidents, is currently being coordinated in Europe. This involves the development of new vehicular network solutions and the local road weather and safety services they enable, in support of drivers, road operators and autonomous vehicle management systems. The new services will require no action from motorists while driving — data will be gathered and warnings will be sent to […]

Is open source technology a disruptive innovation force in the Clayton Christensen sense of the term — meaning it starts out serving the underserved or unserved, and works its way up to eventually chase the market leaders upstream? Photo: Joe McKendrick It certainly meets that definition, in that it has made powerful solutions available to the smallest and budget-tight players, and, yes, many open source solutions have […]

A confocal microscopic image of wet spun microfibres with Shewanella oneidensis bacteria (green: living bacteria; red: dead bacteria). Credit: Patrick Kaiser Microbial fuel cells exploit the metabolism of bacteria in order to generate electricity. A new type of biofilm developed in Bayreuth could soon make this relatively young technology considerably more effective, more stable, and easier to use. A research team at the University of Bayreuth has […]

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The open call for the exit of United States from the Paris climate deal by none other than the head of the Environmental Protection Agency has shocked environmentalists. This is the first time a high-ranking Trump administration official such as EPA Chief Scott Pruitt has gone public with a call to scrap the historic agreement, which has been endorsed by more than 200 countries. Paris deal aims to […]

Finance ministers and central bankers from around the world have dropped a pledge to resist protectionism, in a further sign that the new US administration’s stance on trade is shifting the global debate.  The group from International Monetary Fund member countries issued a statement on Saturday saying they would “promote a level playing field in international trade” but did not reiterate a previous commitment to “resist all […]

LastPass has resolved a number of issues with its two-factor authentication (2FA) implementation, after being alerted to the issues by Salesforce security researcher Martin Vigo. The company said the problems are now resolved, and users do not have to take any action. “To exploit this issue, an attacker would have needed to take several steps to bypass Google Authenticator,” LastPass said in a blog post. “First, the […]

The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) has warned overseas organisations selling to Australia that noncompliance with the proposed GST Low Value Goods legislation amendment may result in their websites being blocked. The comments were made in response to a question posed by the Senate Economics Legislation Committee on Friday, which is looking into the Treasury Laws Amendment (GST Low Value Goods) Bill 2017 that will see goods under […]

The weekly EIA report showed a surprise rise in gasoline inventories and a further rise in oil production, which rattled oil bulls. Image: Shutterstock 22 April 2017 Big commodity swings have been witnessed during the past month, not least in the farm sector where bloated global stocks and the prospect of another bumper year — weather permitting — have led to heavy selling by hedge funds […]

There are few things more difficult for parents than finding out that their child has a serious illness or disability with a genetic cause. Sadly, it is a scenario that Arab parents have often faced because many congenital conditions are more common in the Middle East than in other parts of the world. Recent work by the Centre for Arab Genomic Studies in Dubai, a division of […]

As her email mess was growing, Hillary Clinton scheduled the first national TV interview of her campaign with Brianna Keilar of CNN. It went poorly. But wait. It now turns out that Clinton aide Huma Abedin had meant “Bianna,” not “Brianna” when she disclosed her belated intent to a communications aide. She wanted what she figured would be a non-threatening session with Yahoo! News’ Bianna Golodryga, who […]

The conventional wisdom says that the days of the mainframe are numbered, but it just might be that a new generation of apps will breathe new life into it. A state-of-the-mainframe survey by Syncsort shows that the mainframe market as ever is experiencing some shrinkage, but also that there are some grounds for optimism. Syncsort has been working on mainframes since 1968 and has customers in more […]

The mountain-sized 2014 JO25 asteroid safely avoided Earth in its close flyby on April 19 but left behind a heap of data for researchers to analyze. Besides sparking avid discussions on how humanity would perish in a big asteroid collision, the event provided astronomers with the perfect opportunity to study the enormous space rock and gather as much information as possible on the general characteristics of asteroids. This […]

Around 10,000 scientists and their supporters marched through London on Saturday — one of more than 500 demonstrations worldwide celebrating “robustly funded and publicly communicated science as a pillar of human freedom and prosperity”. As the London demonstrators marched from the Science Museum to Parliament Square, they waved hundreds of colourful placards made in labs and homes across Britain, with messages ranging from “Nature isn’t fooled by […]

Photo He was the only man I saw when we entered the nearly empty village in northern Iraq, which had just recently been liberated from the Islamic State. The first thing he did when he approached our car was ask my colleague for a light. That’s when I noticed the pack of cigarettes sticking out of Mohamed Ahmed Saleh’s shirt pocket. Just over a week after the […]

Researchers found that certain search terms revealed AI bias. Credit: Princeton University In debates over the future of artificial intelligence, many experts think of the new systems as coldly logical and objectively rational. But in a new study, researchers have demonstrated how machines can be reflections of us, their creators, in potentially problematic ways. Common machine learning programs, when trained with ordinary human language available online, can […]

The Power of Networks: Six Principles that Connect Our Lives • By Christopher G. Brinton and Mung Chiang • Princeton University Press • 310 pages • ISBN: 978-0-691-17071-8 • £27.95 We don’t normally think of our lives this way, but each of us is enmeshed in myriad networks — the real-life one of people, social media like Twitter and Facebook, and technical networks (internet, cellular). According to […]

The top 100 start-ups in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) together have raised over $1.42 billion in funding and each has raised more than $500,000 individually, according to new research. Following a record year of more than $870 million in startup investment, analysts MAGNiTT published a report into the backgrounds of the founders of MENA’s most successful start-ups. It said the 100 start-ups, including the […]

Data-driven analytics applications are eating the world and transforming every domain. But the world is also being eaten up in a different way by several non-sustainable practices. On Earth Day, we look at what we know about the relation between big data and the environment: how big data is used to measure sustainability and inform action, and what is the impact they have on the environment as […]

It’s been a busy week: Samsung and Google partnered on special version of Google Play Music and White House staffers’ favorite secure messaging app might not be that secure. Oh, and Facebook wants you to talk and listen your skin. Luckily, we’ve kept up for you. Each week, we round up the latest app news, along with a few of our favorite new and updated products, to […]

BOSTON Officials of two large California public retirement systems said Friday they are voting against nine of 15 Wells Fargo & Co directors up for election at the bank’s annual meeting next week, citing the bank’s phony-account scandal. Leaders of the largest U.S. state pension system, known as CalPERS, said in an email it is voting about 13.9 million shares against the bank nominees, including its chairman, […]

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