TECHNOLOGY

Google’s parent company Alphabet has asked its North American staff to work from home to reduce the potential spread of the coronavirus. Last week the tech giant sent a memo to staff recommending that employees in Washington state work from home. It has now expanded that request to all of its almost 100,000 workers across 11 office in the US ...

Ethiopia’s parliament, the House of Peoples’ Representatives (HoPR), has passed a law aimed at combating fake news and curbing hate speech. The passage comes three months after the cabinet led by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, approved it and forwarded it to the house. It is known as the Hate Speech and Misinformation Law and was approved with a majority vote, ...

Sony became the latest exhibitor to withdraw from Mobile World Congress on Monday, following in the footsteps of LG, Ericsson, Amazon and Nvidia. The companies have all pulled out of the show, which is due to be held in Barcelona at the end of this month, due to fears over coronavirus outbreak. In a statement, Sony said its press conference, where it’s expected to show off its latest Xperia ...

The National Cybersecurity advisor Dr Albert Antwi-Boasiako says Ghana has much to do in order to be able to defend itself from any attack in its cyberspace. According to Dr Antwi-Boasiako, the fact that individuals and even organizations fall for the simplest of scams speaks to how much work is required in securing the country’s cyberspace. Starr News’ Ibrahim Alhassan ...

Chinese phone maker Huawei will work with Dutch digital mapping company TomTom to put maps on its phones, Reuters reports. A TomTom spokesperson told Reuters that the deal closed “some time ago,” but it became public late last week. While TomTom maintains self-branded apps on iOS and Android, Reuters describes Huawei building its own apps with TomTom’s maps, traffic information, and navigation tools. TomTom has previously ...

Venture capital investment in UK tech companies surged by 44% in 2019, meaning that growth in the country’s technology sector continues to outpace that of the US, China, Germany, and France. New data prepared for the government’s Digital Economy Council shows that around £10.1bn ($13.2bn) was invested in companies in the sector last year, which accounts for around a third ...

A New York-based technology company sold Chinese-made surveillance equipment to the US government while falsely claiming the products were made in the United States — a scheme that directly undermined national security, federal prosecutors have alleged. Aventura Technologies, based in the Long Island town of Commack, for years sold surveillance cameras and other equipment used on US military installations, prosecutors ...

Facebook’s Libra cryptocurrency must not go ahead until the firm proves it is safe and secure, according to a report by the G7 group. In a blow to the social media giant, the world’s biggest economies warned cryptocurrencies such as Libra pose a risk to the global financial system. The draft report outlines nine major risks posed by such digital currencies. It ...

The Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Christopher Wray has warned criminals involved in business email compromise (BEC) schemes that they will be arrested no matter where they carry out their illegal activities from. His comments were captured in an FBI statement released in the aftermath of 281 arrests worldwide relating to a month-long multi-agency effort to disrupt ...

A study conducted by IBM has revealed that 12 of the largest economies will need to be retrained or reskilled as a result of Artificial Intelligence and intelligent automation. The Institute for Business Value (IBV) study states that the time it takes to close a skills gap through training has increased by more than 10 times in just four years. ...