Science & Tech

MNA Science & Tech Desk: The shortage of housing in California’s Silicon Valley has gotten so severe that Facebook Inc on Friday proposed taking home-building into its own hands for the first time with a plan to construct 1,500 units near its headquarters. The growth of Facebook, Alphabet Inc’s Google and other tech companies has strained neighborhoods in the San Francisco Bay area that were not prepared for an influx of tens of thousands of workers during the past decade. Home prices and commute times have risen. Tech companies have responded with measures such as internet-equipped buses for employees with ...

MNA Science & Technology Desk: The cabinet on Monday approved a proposal for constitution of the Bangladesh Communication Satellite Company (BCSC) Limited to smoothly operate the country’s first-ever Bangabandhu Satellite-1. The approval came at the regular weekly cabinet meeting held at Bangladesh Secretariat with Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in the chair, reported news agency. Briefing reporters after the meeting, Cabinet Secretary Mohammad Shafiul Alam said Bangladesh is going to join the Satellite Club very soon as the process for launching the country’s first-ever satellite named “Bangabandhu Satellite-1” has almost been completed. “The satellite will be launched into the space very ...

MNA Science & Technology Desk: Facebook Inc said on Friday it was changing the computer algorithm behind its News Feed to limit the reach of people known to frequently blast out links to click-bait stories, sensationalist websites and misinformation. Facebook said the change would reduce the influence of a “tiny group” of people it has identified who share vast amounts of low-quality public posts daily. Only about 0.1 percent of people who share more than 50 posts a day fall into that category, the company said. The change would affect only links shared by those people, not their photos or ...

MNA Science & Technology Desk: Facebook said Tuesday it now counts two billion active monthly users, as the social giant’s founder Mark Zuckerberg highlighted his new mission — not just connecting people, but helping them find common ground. “As of this morning, the Facebook community is now officially 2 billion people!” Zuckerberg wrote in a post marking the milestone. “We’re making progress connecting the world, and now let’s bring the world closer together,” he wrote. “It’s an honor to be on this journey with you.” Facebook’s announcement came as it works to redefine its purpose, led by Zuckerberg who traveled ...

MNA Science & Technology Desk: With its army of salespeople and vast network of outlets, Oppo has exploded in popularity to overtake global giants Apple and Samsung in China’s market — and now it has its eye on the West. Oppo began life selling DVD players in the in the southern manufacturing hub of Dongguan a little more than a decade ago and only broke into the handset market in 2011. But with an aggressive marketing strategy and concentration on bricks-and-mortar stores in small and medium-sized cities — rather than relying on online customers — sales have soared. Last year ...

MNA Science & Technology Desk: Amazon is going to acquire upscale US grocer Whole Foods Market, in a deal that underscores the online giant’s growing influence in the economy. The purchase in one fell swoop gives Amazon, which until now has operated almost entirely on the internet, a big presence in the brick-and-mortar world on Main Street, with more than 450 stores in the US, Canada and Britain. In the $13.7 billion, all-cash deal, Amazon will buy the Texas-based champion of organic and specialty food for $42 a share. Whole Foods’ shares traded in the mid-$30 range for May and ...

MNA Science & Technology Desk: Facebook has introduced disaster maps to help organizations address critical gap in information they often face while responding to natural disasters, reported news agency. Based on the aggregated location information users have chosen to share with Facebook, three types of map — location density map, movement map and safety check map — are to be provided during disaster response efforts. “We can help response organizations paint a more complete picture of where affected people are located to determine where resources like food, water and medical supplies are needed and where people are out of harm’s ...

MNA Science & Tech Desk: A free-speech institute on Tuesday sent a letter to President Donald Trump demanding the prolific tweeter unblock certain Twitter (TWTR.N) users on grounds the practice violates the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Trump’s @realDonaldTrump account recently blocked a number of accounts that replied to his tweets with commentary that criticized, mocked or disagreed with his actions. Twitter users are unable to see or respond to tweets from accounts that block them. The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University in New York said in its letter that the blocking suppressed speech in a public ...

MNA Science & Tech Desk: Mobile phone operator Robi has launched country’s first Islamic mobile package ‘Noor’ with special call rate and attractive Islamic services. Robi has decided to deposit the revenue generated from the Noor package in a shariah compliant bank to avoid application of interest. Noor subscribers will enjoy a call rate of 7 paisa/10 second between themselves while they have to pay 20.775 paisa/10 sec while talking to other operators. However, Noor customers can enjoy special call rate of 1 paisa/sec to all local numbers by recharging Tk 29. They can also avail all the existing rate-cutter ...

MNA Science & Tech Desk: Mobile messaging service WhatsApp helps teenagers communicate better and to openly express themselves with their peers than in their classrooms, a study has claimed. The findings showed that WhatsApp groups allow teenagers to express themselves in ways that they cannot at school, helping them develop closer and more open relationships with their classmates. “The group chats are based on trust among the members of the group, and this enhances the possibility to be in contact,” Arie Kizel from University of Haifa in Israel, was quoted as saying to nocamels.com — an Israeli Innovation news website ...

MNA Science & Tech Desk: Facebook’s dreams of pushing original videos may be delayed, but that’s doing little to stop its ever-growing ambitions, reported news agency. Facebook has landed deals with a slew of “millennial-focused” internet media companies, including BuzzFeed, Vox Media, ATTN and The Dodo operator Group Nine Media.  The material would include both short clips under 10 minutes (owned by the individual providers) and longer videos over 20 minutes (owned by Facebook), and they’d naturally have ad breaks. You’d initially find the videos exclusively on Facebook’s website and apps, but they’d eventually migrate to other sites. Not surprisingly, ...

MNA Science & Technology Desk: Facebook, the proud parent of Instagram and Messenger, wants to bring together its various apps into a more cohesive experience. The social networking site is rolling out a new feature that consolidates Facebook, Messenger and Instagram notifications on the Facebook app. While this aims to encourage users to stay on Facebook’s services longer, it will also make it a tad easier to check your notifications and get rid of those annoying red badges at the same place. Facebook said it’s “conducting a very small test” to make it easier for people to switch between their ...

MNA Science & Technology Desk: Social media app WhatsApp on Wednesday encountered an outage with users worldwide reporting problems accessing the service. Issues with the Facebook-owned app, which is used by 1 billion people worldwide, included sending and receiving messages and logging in. According to monitoring website Down Detector, hundreds of people complained about the outage from Malaysia to Spain, which appeared to have started on late Wednesday evening. Some users took to Twitter, threatening they would migrate to rival messaging services because of the second outage in as many weeks. Users in Germany and some other European countries also ...

MNA Science & Tech Desk: At least 30 users in Bangladesh have reported being affected by a ransomware that recently caused havoc across the globe. According to the Crime Research and Analysis Foundation (CRAF), a total of 30 personal computers were affected by the WannaCry ransomware. CRAF collected the data from the number of complaints they received. About 150 countries were affected in the attack, with over 200,000 victims and 100,000 organizations including hospitals and other services also reporting being infected. The attack was stopped on Sunday by a British cyber security expert who accidentally stumbled upon the malware’s domain ...

MNA Science & Tech Desk: A large-scale cyber-attack affected nearly one hundred countries and held tens of thousands of computers ransom throughout the day on Friday. Antivirus provider Avast reported that at least 75,000 computers had been infected by the crippling malware and that the “WanaCrypt0r 2.0,” as it is called, ransomware had been detected in 99 countries. More than a dozen hospitals in England and major companies, including FedEx and Spain’s largest telecom, were targeted Friday. U.S. companies were being warned to gird against the threat, which reportedly blocked access to computers in exchange for a ransom. At least ...

MNA Science & Tech Desk: Bangladesh Telecommunications Company Limited (BTCL) has introduced call centre “16402” to hear any query regarding internet of Union Information Centre (UIC), reported news agency. “The call centre has been opened to offer modern and time-befitting services to the UIC entrepreneurs,” said a BTCL statement today (Wednesday). As part of building “digital Bangladesh” by the government, BTCL has extended optical fiber cable network to Union Parishad level and connected over 1000 UICs with two Mbps internet. The UIC entrepreneurs are requested to call “16402” or to send email to complain@btcl.com.bd, secybtcl@btcl.com.bd, gmptr@btcl.com.bd, gmutr@btcl.com.bd, detelex@btcl.com.bd for any ...

MNA Science & Tech Desk: The Grameenphone Board of Directors has appointed Michael Foley as the company’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO). The appointment will be effective from May 26. The company also appointed Yasir Azman as Deputy CEO, Grameenphone said in a press release. Azman will remain as Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), while taking on extended responsibilities for the digital and commercial strategy within GP and Telenor’s Emerging Asia Cluster. Petter-B Furberg, who has served as interim CEO since October 2016, will remain with Grameenphone as the chairman of Grameenphone’s Board of Directors. Foley, a Canadian by birth, has been ...

MNA Editorial Desk: India has successfully launched a new communication satellite for South Asia from Sriharikota space centre on Friday. The satellite, funded entirely by India, is aimed at helping regional countries boost their telecommunication and broadcasting services. Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Bangladesh, Nepal and Bhutan will benefit from this satellite. But Pakistan has opted out from the initiative. Built by the Indian Space Research Organization, its latest communication satellite GSAT-9 called SAS rode piggyback on the 50-m-tall rocket Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV-F09) with the indigenous cryogenic powering the Upper Stage. The GSLV-F09 blasted off at 4:57pm in clear ...

MNA Science & Tech Desk: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that he will be hiring 3,000 additional employees over the next year to remove violent videos. “Over the last few weeks, we’ve seen people hurting themselves and others on Facebook — either live or in video posted later. It’s heartbreaking, and I’ve been reflecting on how we can do better for our community,” Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post on Wednesday. “If we’re going to build a safe community, we need to respond quickly. We’re working to make these videos easier to report so we can take the right action ...

MNA Science & Technology Desk: Early humans probably reached North America 130,000 years ago — 115,000 years earlier than previously thought, said a study. The findings, published in the journal Nature, are based on analysis of bones and teeth of a mastodon discovered in an an Ice Age site in San Diego, California. “The evidence we found at this site indicates that some hominin species was living in North America 115,000 years earlier than previously thought,” said Judy Gradwohl, President and CEO of the San Diego Natural History Museum. The fossil remains were discovered by museum paleontologists during routine paleontological ...

MNA Science & Technology Desk: Samsung will this week offer an unusually early software update for its newly-released Galaxy S8 phone, it said Monday after some consumers complained of red-tinted screens. The Galaxy S8 started over-the-counter sales in the US and its home market but South Korean users who pre-ordered the phones complained their screens displayed an unusually reddish hue. Online images of their phones went viral on social media but Samsung denied a hardware flaw and maintained that users could manually adjust the colour range according to their preferences. As more users voiced doubts, Samsung said Monday that a ...

MNA Science & Tech Desk: People massed in the US capital and around the world on Saturday to support science and evidence-based research – a protest partly fueled by opposition to President Donald Trump’s threats of budget cuts to agencies funding scientists’ work. At the main March for Science, protesters gathered at Washington’s National Mall to hear speakers laud science as the force moving humanity forward, and rail against policymakers they say are ignoring fact and research in areas including climate change. Besides the Washington march, organizers said more than 600 satellite marches were taking place globally in a protest ...

MNA Science & Tech Desk: Some Facebook users, whose accounts were blocked by the social media authorities during their drive against fake accounts, are getting their accounts back as the social media giant started blocking accounts from Friday. It said “accounts made up inauthentic likes and comments that appear to come from accounts located in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and a number of other countries.” Following that, many Facebook users in the country found their accounts blocked. And yet no government agencies in Bangladesh could provide exact numbers of the unblocked accounts in the country. According to the government information, ...

MNA Science & Technology Desk: A day after the selfie craze inside a running train led to the deaths of several youths, the Eastern Railways authorities appealed to passengers to be careful and issued guidelines. A railway spokesman said they have already launched campaigns in print, television and social media to make passengers aware of the risks of using phones while travelling. In a horrific turn of events, a youth fell from a running train between Bali and Liluah railway stations while trying to click a selfie on Thursday night. Four of his friends were hit by another train while ...

MNA Science & Technology Desk: Dhaka has got the second largest number of people on the Facebook among global cities with 16 million active Facebook users. According to a report titled ‘Digital in 2017 Global Overview’ conducted by ‘We Are Social and Hootsuite’, the percentage of the total monthly active users is 0.9 per cent of the total monthly active users of the social networking site across the globe. Bangkok topped the list with 30 million active Facebook users while Mexico City third. More than half of the world’s population now uses the internet, says the report. As per their ...

MNA Science & Tech Desk: State Minister for ICT Division Zunaid Ahmed Palak said Google authorities have agreed to take necessary measures to launch Google Merchant Account in Bangladesh. Google said this when the state minister met a team of Google authorities led by its Senior Council (Public Policy) Wilson L. White at the Silicon Valley in the USA, said an ICT Division handout. Palak said many Bangladeshi youths are now working in the IT sector with fame, but they cannot transfer their earned money as Google Merchant Account has not been introduced in Bangladesh. At the meeting, Wilson said ...

MNA Science & Technology Desk: Tarana Halim, State Minister for Posts and Telecommunications, said Facebook authorities will delete the fake accounts registered using the names of members of parliament (MPs) and VVIP personalities of Bangladesh. “Once we provide the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) of those fake accounts of MPs and VVIPs to Facebook authorities, they’ll shut down those,” Tarana said to journalists. She made the remarks at a press briefing in Secretariat on Monday after returning from a meeting with Facebook authorities in Singapore. “We will now send a letter to the parliament speaker for identifying the URL of the ...