Technology

SHENZHEN: Chinese telecoms giant Huawei said on Thursday it has petitioned a US court to overturn a ban that prevents carriers in rural America from tapping an $8.5-billion federal fund to purchase the company´s equipment. Huawei´s petition said the ban — imposed last month against the company and its Chinese rival ZTE on national security grounds — failed to substantiate …

  PARIS: France’s central bank will next year launch a call for projects to develop a digital currency, its governor said Wednesday, as concern grows among EU governments over new currencies planned by Facebook and others. “We want to start running experiments rapidly and will launch a call for projects before the end of the first quarter of 2020,” said …

SAN FRANCISCO: Google chief executive Sundar Pichai will assume the CEO role at parent firm Alphabet in a shakeup at the top of the Silicon Valley titan, the company said Tuesday. Pichai will take over from Larry Page, a co-founder of the internet firm, at the parent company which includes Google as well as units focusing on “other bets” in …

SAN FRANCISCO: Four employees fired by Google ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday said Tuesday they were seeking a federal investigation into their dismissal, which they claimed was in retaliation for their labor organization efforts. The dismissal of the group dubbed the “Thanksgiving Four” on social media highlighted deepening tensions at Google, which had stated the employees violated data security policies. …

SAN FRANCISCO: A university student in California has filed a class-action lawsuit against video app TikTok, which she accuses of harvesting large amounts of user data and storing it in China. “TikTok clandestinely has vacuumed up and transferred to servers in China vast quantities of private and personally-identifiable user data,” the court filing said. Misty Hong, a student in Palo …

OTTAWA: Chinese tech giant Huawei, facing US criminal charges and economic sanctions, is planning to relocate its telecommunications research from the United States to Canada, founder Ren Zhengfei said in an interview published on Tuesday. Speaking with the Globe and Mail newspaper at Huawei’s headquarters in Shenzhen, Ren said the company is also considering building new factories in Europe to make fifth-generation …

Elon Musk is going on trial on Tuesday for his troublesome tweets in a defamation case pitting the billionaire against a British diver he allegedly branded a paedophiles. The Tesla CEO will be called to testify early in the case in Los Angeles federal court to explain what he meant when he called Vernon Unsworth, who helped rescue youth soccer …

Internet and television services provided by Stormfiber were restored after the company recovered from the damage caused by a fire that had broken out in its head office, the company said in a statement. In a statement, released on Monday, the internet and television service provider, powered by Cybernet, said: “As of last evening, internet service through our DR site was successfully …

PARIS: Scientists have been on a global search for the wild relatives of our food crops, hoping to bolster their defences against disease and climate change, a study showed Tuesday. Humans have domesticated wild plants for some 10,000 years to provide food but in doing so they have bred out many of their natural defences, leaving them — and us …

BRUSSELS: The European Commission said Monday it had begun a “preliminary investigation” into how Facebook and Google collect personal data and what they do with it. “The Commission has sent out questionnaires as part of a preliminary investigation into Google´s and Facebook´s data practices,” a Commission spokeswoman told AFP. “These investigations concern the way data is gathered, processed, used and …