Way forward for 5G networks

A couple of months ago, the heads from 18 small British telecoms companies met at a London bank to discuss investment, strategy, and mergers. In the meeting, they were asked if they thought the Chinese could eavesdrop through back doors in Huawei equipment all 18 hands went up. One of the bankers then asked, if…

Huawei reports strong sales growth despite sanctions

Huawei has reported sales surge by 18 per cent  compared to 19.5 per cent in 2018, shrugging off the intense effort by Trump administration to weaken the Chinese technology group and shut it out of western markets, as it shipped 240m smartphones in 2019 up from 206m the previous year. After the US banned exports…

TikTok’s content moderation

TikTok, the Chinese owned app, which has amassed over 1billion monthly users in three years, had build teams to moderate its streams of viral videos amid concerns that users are being expose to the kind of toxic content that has plagued YouTube and Facebook.  TikTok will outsource decisions on what videos are acceptable to teams…

China tech companies dictating standards for Facial recognition

Chinese tech companies are at an advanced stage of shaping facial recognition and surveillance standards at the UN, as they aspire to dominate markets in the developing world for their designs. China Telecom, ZTE, Dahua are among companies proposing global standards in the UN’s International Telecommunication Union (ITU) for facial recognition, video monitoring, city and…

Face scans mandatory for new mobile phone users in China

  A regulation announced in September 2019, was due to come into effect on Sunday when all people in China are required to have their faces scanned when registering new mobile phone services, as the authorities seek to verify the identities of hundreds of millions of internet users. China has for years been trying to…

Social-media influencers income soars

The Average price of a sponsored photo on Instagram has leaped from £104 ($134) t0 £1, 276 ($1, 6742 in 2019. Brands are willing to pay more to sponsor posts, videos, stories and blogs too. “Digital marketing is the equivalent of word of mouth but there will always be a mix between that and traditional…

Facebook agrees to settle Cambrige Analytica fine

Facebook has dropped its year-long appeal against a £500, 000 fine imposed by the UK’s data watchdog for its failure to protect users’ information in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, without accepting any admission of liability. The payment comes amidst intense scrutiny of Facebook’s role in the democratic process, with a fresh dispute emerging over the…

1, 400 WhatsApp account hacked

Over 100  Human rights activists, journalists, prominent lawyers, religious figures and political dissidents had their smartphones hacked by spyware that  exploited the vulnerability in WhatsApp, according to the Facebook owned messaging service in May 2019. The victims of the attack were only contacted by WhatsApp yesterday. Their smartphones were targeted through WhatsApp’s call function by…

Google’s search engine growth slowing down?

Google’s search engine growth is slowing down at an alarming rate according to the technology company as paid clicks on advertisements –crucial to Google’s revenues- were up just 1 per cent in the third quarter of this year compared with previous three months after decades of double digit growth suggesting that the users are increasingly…

Google makes fundamental changes by introducing Bert

Google, the world’s most popular search engine,  is adopting artificial intelligence in its ranking algorithm. The change which Google explains as the most significant revision in at least five year, uses a new form of language analysis to understand users’ queries better and will affect its responses to one in `10 searches , according to…