Technology

    The EU hit Google with a record 2.4-billion-euro anti-trust fine Tuesday for favoring its own shopping service, in a fresh assault on a US tech giant that risks the wrath of President Donald Trump. Hard-charging European Commission competition chief Margrethe Vestager said Google had abused its market dominance as the world’s most popular search engine to give illegal advantage to its Google Shopping service. What Google has done is illegal under EU antitrust rules. It denied other companies the chance to compete on the merits and to innovate, Denmark’s Vestager told a news conference. And most importantly, it denied European consumers a genuine choice of services and the full benefits of innovation. Google now has 90 days to end this conduct or face further penalty paymen...

    One of the world's five internet registries is considering a proposal that will penalise any country that prevents its citizens from having access to the internet by banning them from receiving any new IP addresses. Every time your device tries to access the internet, it is assigned an IP address. There are five regional internet registries in the world that are tasked with managing and allocating IP address blocks across all the countries in their region. Together, they form an essential part of the backbone of the internet, working together with ICANN, which manages IP addresses and the internet's Domain Name System (DNS) to keep the internet stable. The African Network Information Center (AFRINIC) is in charge of allocating IP addresses across the African continent, and...

    Facebook Inc said on Thursday it suspended 30,000 accounts in France as the social network giant steps up efforts to stop the spread of fake news, misinformation and spam. The move, which comes 10 days before the first round of a hotly contested French presidential election, is among the most aggressive yet by Facebook to move against accounts that violate its terms of service, rather than simply respond to complaints, reports the Reuters. Facebook is under intense pressure in Europe as governments across the continent threaten new laws and fines unless the company moves quickly to remove extremist propaganda or other content that violates local laws. The pressure on social media sites including Twitter, Google's YouTube and Facebook has intensified in the run-up to the el...

    A judge has ordered a North Carolina woman to pay $500,000 in damages after she wrote a false post on social media about an acquaintance and her deceased son. In a Facebook post she penned in November 2015, Jacquelyn Hammond, in reference to a woman she knew wrote I didn’t get drunk and kill my kid, according to a lawsuit cited by WKYC. The target of the malicious Facebook post, Davyne Dial, lost her child decades ago in a gun accident involving another boy. But Dial had nothing to do with her son’s death, so she sued. I think people today don’t recognize the importance of their words, Charlotte attorney Missy Owen told the news station. Just because it is very easy to get your words out there does not mean you should. Because there was no truth to Hammond’s Facebook post,...

    Apple has updated its iPad line, dropping the Air branding as it boosts the specs on its mid-tier product. The new hardware launches alongside another colour for the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus, and an unusually timed announcement of a new video app, Clips. Starting at £339 for a 32GB model with wifi only, and rising to £559 for a 128GB model with 4G, the new iPad, an update to the iPad Air 2, solidifies Apple’s intentions to split the line into three: an expensive iPad Pro, available in two sizes, for those needing a laptop replacement; a cheap iPad mini for those needing a small portable tablet; and the iPad sitting in between the two. The new iPad sees its innards bumped from an A8X chip to the A9, previously used in the iPhones 6S and SE. The more-powerful A9X chip, introduced...

    People of a certain age will remember the Ask Jeeves search engine and, more importantly, what fun it was to type in rude questions to see what the long-suffering butler might say. Jeeves may no longer be around, but now everyone with an iPhone or iPad has something similar with Apple's voice assistant, Siri. Siri has been on hand to help since 2010 and, like Jeeves before her, it's also possible to have a little fun with her . For example, if you ask Siri to borrow some money, she'll sagely reply with, Neither a borrower nor a lender be. Sometimes, however, the harmless Siri fun can stray into something more serious and potentially harmful. iPhone users have been taking to Twitter recently telling others to say the number 108 to Siri, adding things like, You'll thank me l...

    Scientists at NASA have proposed that launching a giant magnetic shield into space to protect Mars from solar winds could give the Red Planet its atmosphere back and make it habitable for humans. Mars now appears to be a cold desert world and it has no global magnetic field. The cold temperatures and thin atmosphere on the red Planet do not allow liquid water to exist at the surface for long. But it might not have been always so. Scientists believe that the Red Planet once had a thick atmosphere necessary to maintain liquid water, and a warmer, potentially habitable climate. It is the collapse of the protective magnetic field billions of years ago that eventually made Mars what it is today cold and arid. In a presentation at the Planetary Science Vision 2050 Workshop in Wa...

    North Korea has up to 5,000 tonnes of chemical weapons, South Korean experts said Friday, including the toxin used to assassinate its leader’s half-brother. Traces of VX  a nerve agent listed as a weapon of mass destruction by the United Nations  were detected on swabs from the face and eyes of Kim Jong-Nam, who was poisoned at Kuala Lumpur’s international airport last week, Malaysian police said Friday. Malaysian detectives are holding three people women from Indonesia and Vietnam, and a North Korean man but want to speak to seven others, four of whom are believed to have fled to Pyongyang. South Korea’s defence ministry said in its 2014 Defence White Paper that the North began producing chemical weapons in the 1980s and estimated that it has about 2,500 to 5,000 tonnes i...

    Nasa A huddle of seven worlds, all close in size to Earth, and perhaps warm enough for water and the life it can sustain, has been spotted around a small, faint star in the constellation of Aquarius. The discovery, which has thrilled astronomers, has raised hopes that the hunt for alien life beyond the solar system can start much sooner than previously thought, with the next generation of telescopes that are due to switch on in the next decade. It is the first time that so many Earth-sized planets have been found in orbit around the same star, an unexpected haul that suggests the Milky Way may be teeming with worlds that, in size and firmness underfoot at least, resemble our own rocky home. The planets closely circle a dwarf star named Trappist-1, which at 39 light years a...

    WhatsApp is making a radical update to its app, turning it for the first time into a platform for passively consuming content, similar to the way people scroll through their Facebook or Instagram newsfeeds and it’s a move that could finally usher in a money-making system like advertising. WhatsApp’s new Status feature, being rolled out on Monday, will let users share photos, GIFs or videos overlaid with drawings, emojis and a caption that will be visible to selected friends for 24 hours, before disappearing. If this sounds familiar, that’s because it’s exactly like Snapchat’s hugely successful Stories feature, launched three years ago, which lets users share similarly ephemeral timelines. The move probably shouldn’t be surprising. Facebook, which owns WhatsApp, saw its oth...