Suvastu Tech

A university in Canada has developed a tablet with a flexible screen that can rolled up. "We were inspired by ancient scrolls because their form allows for a more natural, uninterrupted experience of long visual timelines." says Dr Roel Vertegaal. Meanwhile, major technology brands are racing to be the first to bring such flexible technology to the market.                             

Moscow: The International Space Station crew on Thursday was repairing a small "leak" most likely caused by a collision with a small meteorite, the head of the Russian space agency said, adding the incident presented no danger. "Overnight and in the morning there was an abnormal situation -- a pressure drop, an oxygen leak at the station," Roscosmos chief Dmitry Rogozin was quoted as saying by Russian news agencies. "A micro fracture was found, most likely it is damage from the outside. The design engineers believe it is the result of a micrometeorite," he said. He said the fracture was found on the Soyuz ship that brought astronauts to the ISS in June for a six-month mission and is currently docked with the space station. The fracture will be patched from the inside, he said. NASA confirmed the problem, saying it consisted of a "minute pressure leak" and that the crew was repairing it. "The leak has been isolated to a hole ab...

                            LONDON: Facebook is rolling out its Watch video service globally one year after it launched in the United States with original entertainment news and sports content to compete with platforms like Alphabet Inc’s YouTube. Facebook’s Head of Video Fidji Simo said Watch was gaining real momentum in a crowded marketplace because it was built on the notion that watching videos could be a social activity. “Every month more than 50 million people in the U.S. come to watch videos for at least a minute on Watch, and total time spent watching video on Facebook Watch has increased by 14 times since the start of 2018,” she told reporters. “With Watch ... you can have a two-way conversation about the content with friends, other fans or even the creatives themselves.” Facebook said eligible creators would be able to make money from their videos using its Ad Breaks service in Britain...

WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump on Wednesday renewed his attacks on technology companies and platforms, including Twitter Inc, Facebook Inc and Alphabet Inc´s Google, saying they were "trying to silence" people and suggesting, without evidence, that their activities may be illegal. "I think that Google and Facebook and Twitter treat conservatives and Republicans very unfairly," Trump told reporters at the White House. "I think it´s a very serious problem because they´re really trying to silence a very large part of this country, and those people don´t want to be silenced. It´s not right. It´s not fair. It may not be legal, but we´ll see.We just want fairness," Trump added.

                        Washington: For the first time in five decades, a NASA astronaut candidate has resigned from training, the US space agency said Tuesday. Robb Kulin resigned from NASA effective August 31 for personal reasons, spokeswoman Brandi Dean said, declining to provide further details. It's not an easy gig to get -- some 18,000 people routinely seek the 12 spots that open each year. Kulin, who joined his class sounding upbeat, is the first would-be astronaut to leave training since a resignation in 1968.

                             Yangon: Facebook banned Myanmar's army chief and removed other pages tied to the country's military on Monday after a UN probe called for him to be prosecuted for genocide over a crackdown on Rohingya Muslims. "We are banning 20 Burmese individuals and organizations from Facebook - including Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, commander-in-chief of the armed forces," the social media giant said in a statement on its site, adding that it wants to prevent them from using the service to "further inflame ethnic and religious tensions".

                                  WASHINGTON: Twitter Inc’s chief executive will testify before a US House of Representatives committee on September 5, the panel said on Friday, after some Republicans raised concerns about social media companies removing content from conservatives. The House Energy and Commerce Committee “intends to ask tough questions about how Twitter monitors and polices content,” Republican Representative Greg Walden, the panel’s chairman, said in a statement. “We look forward to Mr. Dorsey being forthright and transparent regarding the complex processes behind the company’s algorithms and content judgment calls,” Walden said. On Friday, President Donald Trump accused social media companies of silencing “millions of people” in an act of censorship, but without offering evidence to support the claim. “Social Media Giants are silencing millions of people. Can’t ...

TAMPA: Two years after launching from Florida, a NASA spacecraft is closing in on an ancient asteroid, Bennu, for a sample of space dust that could reveal clues to the start of life in the solar system. The spacecraft, OSIRIS-REx, has even snapped its first, blurry pic of the cosmic body, which is about the size of a small mountain, about 500 yards (meters) in diameter. The spacecraft is designed to circle Bennu, and reach out with a robotic arm to "high-five" its surface, then return the sample it collects to Earth in 2023. The first images of Bennu were taken on August 17 at a distance of 1.4 million miles (2.3 million kilometers) from the $800 million spacecraft. "This is the closest we have even been to Bennu," said Dante Lauretta, OSIRIS-REx principal investigator at the University of Arizona, Tucson. "This is significant in that we are now in the vicinity of the asteroid, closer than we have ever been even during the close appro...

San Francisco: Facebook on Wednesday said it has suspended more than 400 of thousands of applications it has investigated to determine whether people´s personal information was being improperly shared. Applications were suspended "due to concerns around the developers who built them or how the information people chose to share with the app may have been used," vice president of product partnerships Ime Archibong said in a blog post. Apps put on hold at the social network were being scrutinized more closely, according to Archibong. The app unit launched in March by Facebook stemmed from the Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal. Facebook admitted that up to 87 million users may have had their data hijacked by Cambridge Analytica, which was working for Donald Trump´s 2016 presidential campaign. Archibong said that a myPersonality app was banned by the social network for not agreeing to an audit and "because it´s clear that they shared inf...

Messaging service WhatsApp, after joining hands with tech-giant Google, has stated that it will delete old chats stored on Google Drive if not refreshed before November 12 as the messages saved on the Drive will be “free of cost” starting November 12. WhatsApp has informed its users about this information in an email issued recently. The email states that users can, after November 12, create a backup of their chats and media saved on Google Drive without utilizing any Google storage limit. So to say, users will soon be able to save all their WhatsApp data on Google Drive without having to worry about the allotted Google Drive quota. In order to back up your WhatsApp data manually on Google Drive, follow these steps: 1. Open WhatsApp. 2. Go to Menu and click on Settings. 3. Tap on Chats. 4. Go to the backup option. You can see your last backup date here and also choose to back up your data.

With Samsung Galaxy Note 9 launch just a couple of days away, reports have started pouring in about the Samsung Galaxy S10 too. According to the reports, Samsung plans to launch Galaxy S10 early next year. It is being considered Samsung’s most exciting Galaxy phone in years. People are very excited about Samsung’s upcoming Galaxy S10. The smartphone is expected to feature a new design that shrinks the bezels above and below the display to push Samsung closer to achieving the all-screen phone. It’s also expected to be the first Samsung phone with an ultrasonic fingerprint sensor embedded under the display. That means instead of fumbling around on the back of the phone, you’ll be able to unlock it simply by placing your finger on the screen. South Korean electronics giant Samsung unveiled the new Galaxy Note 9 smartphone Thursday, its latest effort to address flagging sales of the high-functioning gadgets. Boosting the power and the price, Samsun...

Washington -Russian government hackers tried to hijack the websites of conservative US think tanks, Microsoft said Tuesday, raising fresh alarms over widening efforts by Moscow to sow discord in US politics. The tech giant announced that it had shut down last week six fake internet domains that were set up by the notorious "Fancy Bear" hacking shop, controlled by the Russian armed forces´ GRU intelligence agency, that mimicked the pages of two think tanks as well as the US Senate. The fake, lookalike websites were aimed at diverting users from the real ones in order to siphon off email and passwords, Microsoft said. It was a significant expansion of the "Fancy Bear" activities, which, since the 2016 presidential race, had targeted mainly candidates and their campaigns, political parties, and voting systems. It came amid heightened concerns that Russians are attempting to meddle in the upcoming congressional elections in November, in which Pres...

Chengdu: Mahdi Shariff, an entrepreneur appearing on Forbes 30Under30 List, has said that he wants to work with Pakistan's IT firms. In a meeting with Pakistan’s Consul General to Chengdu, Shariff said; "We will be delighted to explore Pakistan’s big market" The CG Muhammad Mudassir Tipu underlined that Pakistan was putting a lot of emphasis on strengthening and expanding its IT sector.The meeting took place on the sidelines of Forbes Innovation Summit held in Chengdu this week. He added; "Pakistan’s financial, banking, and industrial sectors are rapidly growing necessitating demands of automation and digitization of economy. We have a huge pool of talented and smart people and some very good universities which are training our students to embrace the challenges of modernity and globalization. The landscape of our IT industry is changing gradually becoming consistent with global parameters. We will be happy to have members of China’s IT indu...

SAN FRANCISCO: lawsuit filed in federal court here accuses Google of invading people´s privacy by tracking the whereabouts of smartphones users despite "location history" settings being turned off. The suit filed Friday by a California man seeks unspecified damages along with class-action status to represent all US iPhone or Android smartphone users who turned off location history in order not to have their movements logged by Google. "Google expressly represented to users of its operating system and apps that the activation of certain settings will prevent the tracking of users´ geolocations," the lawsuit read. "This representation was false." The suit accuses Google of violating privacy law, and cites a news report last week confirmed by university researchers. Google did not respond to a request for comment. After the report, Alphabet-owned Google modified its support page to read that turning off location history off ...

Washington: In a breakthrough that experts say will help feed the growing global population in the coming decades, scientists Thursday revealed they have cracked the full genome of wheat for the first time. Wheat feeds more than a third of the global human population, providing more protein than meat in the human diet and making about one-fifth of calories consumed by people. But it is harder to grow in hot, dry weather, and these challenging conditions are expected to intensify as the planet warms due to climate change. Experts say the world needs more disease-resistant varieties and breeds that can grow with less water in a warmer environment. "This will greatly speed up our efforts on identification of agriculturally important wheat genes, including those that would help to combat major fungal diseases," said Kostya Kanyuka a functional genomics scientist at Rothamsted Research. "This will also be hugely and immediately beneficial for wheat ...

KARACHI: Pakistan's Marham - a healthcare platform that helps people find, book appointments, and consult with doctors online - has been selected to participate in Google's Demo Day Asia competition, scheduled to take place in Shanghai in September. The selection, from hundreds of submissions from founders in different countries across Asia-Pacific, in industries as diverse as agriculture, entertainment and healthcare, was a difficult task, Google said in a statement issued Thursday. It was hard to narrow down this impressive field, but after much painstaking deliberation, out of 305 qualifying applications, 10 enteries were selected for the final, it said. The finalists are: ● Marham from Pakistan is a healthcare platform that helps people find, book appointments, and consult with doctors online. ● DycodeX from Indonesia develops Internet of Things solutions for livestock farming. ● FreightExchange from Australia is an online platform for f...

WASHINGTON: Researchers have discovered a new security flaw that could let hackers pry information from supposedly secure virtual vaults in Intel chips, the company warned on Tuesday. Intel said software updates are already available and it did not appear anyone had taken advantage of the "Foreshadow" vulnerability, which has been likened to troubling "Meltdown" and "Spectre" flaws exposed in computer chips early this year. "If used for malicious purposes, this class of vulnerability has the potential to improperly infer data values from multiple types of computing devices," Intel said on its website. "Intel has worked with operating system vendors, equipment manufacturers, and other ecosystem partners to develop platform firmware and software updates that can help protect systems from these methods," it said. The "Meltdown" and "Spectre" flaws roiled the Silicon Valley chip maker, prompting a ...

ISLAMABAD: The Senate’s Committee on Cabinet Division on Wednesday took a strong notice of fake and contempt content on the social media and directed the Federal Investigation Authority (FIA) for crackdown to stop the misuse of social media. The meeting of the Senate’s committee was held here with its Chairman Talha Mehmood in the chair on Wednesday in which briefing was taken from the FIA and Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) on the campaign against politicians on social media. The FIA told the committee that a crackdown had started to stop the misuse of social media and cases were being registered under the Cyber Crime Act by registering an FIR. The PTA officials told the committee that it had appointed focal persons for monitoring the websites, Facebook, WhatsApp, Daily Motion, YouTube and other social media applications, who were in contact with the PTA. The PTA officials told the committee that guidelines were also issued to the focal persons about th...

Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk said on Monday he was in talks with the Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund and other investors to take the electric automaker private. United States' market regulators last week reportedly asked the company to explain Musk's claim in an August 7 Twitter post that financing for a deal to take Tesla private had been “secured". But Musk said on Monday he had “no question” that the Saudis would finance such a transaction following a July 31 meeting. The transaction would be structured with equity so as not to burden Tesla with crushing debt, Musk added. He also revealed that the Saudi fund had been insisting that Musk take the company private for the past two years. "Going back almost two years, the Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund has approached me multiple times about taking Tesla private," he wrote. "Obviously, the Saudi sovereign fund has more than enough capital needed to execute on such a transacti...

Tech companies could face fines of up to Aus$10 million (US$7.3 million) if they fail to hand over customer information or data to Australian police under tough cyber laws unveiled Tuesday. The government is updating its communication laws to compel local and international providers to co-operate with law enforcement agencies, saying criminals were using technology, including encryption, to hide their activities. The legislation, first canvassed by Canberra last year, will take into account privacy concerns by “expressly” preventing the weakening of encryption or the introduction of so-called backdoors, Cyber Security Minister Angus Taylor said. Taylor said over the past year, some 200 operations involving serious criminal and terrorism-related investigations were negatively impacted by the current laws. “We know that more than 90 percent of data lawfully intercepted by the Australian Federal Police now uses some form of encryption,” he added in a statement. ...

Google wants to know where you go so badly that it records your movements even when you explicitly tell it not to. An investigation found that many Google services on Android devices and iPhones store your location data even if you’ve used a privacy setting that says it will prevent Google from doing so. Computer-science resear­chers at Princeton confirmed these findings at the AP’s request. For the most part, Google is upfront about asking permission to use your location information. An app like Google Maps will remind you to allow access to location if you use it for navigating. If you agree to let it record your location over time, Google Maps will display that history for you in a “timeline” that maps out your daily movements. Storing your minute-by-minute travels carries privacy risks and has been used by police to determine the location of suspects such as a warrant that police in Raleigh, North Carolina, served on Google last year to find devices near ...