Technology

Hackers appear to have compromised and published private messages from at least 81,000 Facebook users’ accounts. The perpetrators told the BBC Russian Service that they had details from a total of 120 million accounts, which they were attempting to sell, although there are reasons to be sceptical about that figure.   Facebook said its security had not been compromised.   ...

 NASA’s Parker Solar Probe is now closer to the sun than any spacecraft has ever gotten.   Parker on Monday surpassed the record of 26.6 million miles (43 million kilometers) set by Helios-2 back in 1976. And it will keep getting closer to the sun until it flies through the corona, or outer atmosphere, for the first time next week, ...

MIT scientists have developed a method to mass produce robots no bigger than a cell that could be used to monitor conditions inside an oil or gas pipeline, or to search out disease while floating through the bloodstream.   The key to making such tiny devices, which the team calls “syncells” (short for synthetic cells), in large quantities lies in ...

Offering its over two billion monthly users new ways to express themselves, Facebook has introduced new music features, including an option to add a song to photos and videos they share to Facebook Stories.   “And, we’re bringing it to News Feed, too!,” Facebook said in a statement on Wednesday, adding that users would soon be able to add songs ...

Google said Thursday it fired 48 employees in the past two years, including 13 “senior” executives, as a result of sexual harassment allegations, citing “an increasingly hard line” on inappropriate conduct.   The US tech giant issued the statement from chief executive Sundar Pichai in response to a New York Times report that one senior Google employee, Android creator Andy ...

Britain’s Information Commissioner (ICO) has slapped Facebook with a fine of £500,000, the maximum possible, for its behaviour in the Cambridge Analytica scandal.   The ICO’s investigation found that between 2007 to 2014, Facebook processed the personal information of users unfairly by giving app developers access to their information without informed consent.  The fine was the maximum allowed under the ...

From virtual reality police training programmes to gun-toting drones and iris scanners, a public security expo in China showed the range of increasingly high-tech tools available to the country’s police.   The exhibition, which ran Tuesday to Friday in Beijing, emphasised surveillance and monitoring technology just as the Communist government’s domestic security spending has skyrocketed.  Facial-recognition screens analysing candid shots ...

Facebook on Tuesday announced an overhaul of its Messenger smartphone app in an effort to simplify the service for its 1.3 billion monthly global users.   The social network began rolling out a redesigned version featuring three tabs instead of nine, saying it was “going back to its roots” seven years after the standalone app’s launch.  “We build one feature ...

Salty water just below the surface of Mars could hold enough oxygen to support the kind of microbial life that emerged and flourished on Earth billions of years ago, researchers reported. In some locations, the amount of oxygen available could even keep alive a primitive, multicellular animal such as a sponge, they reported in the journal Nature Geosciences.   “We ...

Search engine giant Google has created a new Doodle on its homepage celebrating the life of Bangladeshi poet, columnist and journalist Shamsur Rahman on the occasion of his 89th birth anniversary, UNB reports.   Shamsur Rahman (23 October 1929 – 17 August 2006) who emerged in the latter half of the 20th century wrote more than sixty books of poetry ...