Technology

COLOMBO: Sri Lanka’s lawmakers on Wednesday passed a bill to regulate online content, the speaker of the parliament announced, a law which opposition politicians and activists allege will muzzle free speech. The Online Safety Bill proposes jail terms for content that a five-member commission considers illegal and making social media platforms such as Alphabet’s Google, Meta’s Facebook and X, formerly …

Netflix on Tuesday blew past Wall Street subscriber estimates in the fourth quarter, driven by a strong slate of shows that included the final season of the long-running royal drama “The Crown” and David Fincher’s original film, “The Killer.” The company reported it added 13.1 million subscribers in the December quarter, its largest-ever fourth-quarter subscriber growth, handily exceeding projected gains …

KARACHI: The Sindh High Court (SHC) on Wednesday ordered authorities concerned to ensure undisrupted internet services across the country until elections 2024.  The orders were passed by the Sindh High Court while hearing a plea against frequent disruption of internet services in Pakistan. The Interior Ministry, IT Ministry and Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) were made respondents in the plea. The high court …

The Japan government launched a third major round of auctions on Friday to select operators for two new offshore wind power areas capable of generating 1.05 gigawatts (GW) in the northern part of the country. One area is in the southern side of the Japan Sea off Aomori prefecture, near Tsugaru city and the town of Ajigasawa which will have …

WASHINGTON: Nasa has re-established contact with its tiny helicopter on Mars, the US space agency said on Saturday, after an unexpected outage prompted fears that the hard-working craft had finally met its end. Ingenuity, a drone about 1.6 feet tall, arrived on Mars in 2021 aboard the rover Perseverance and became the first motorised craft to fly autonomously on another …

A four-man crew including Turkiye’s first astronaut arrived at the International Space Station (ISS) early on Saturday for a two-week stay in the latest such mission arranged entirely at commercial expense by Texas-based startup company Axiom Space. The rendezvous came about 37 hours after the Axiom quartet’s Thursday evening liftoff in a rocketship from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape …

NASA has re-established contact with its tiny helicopter on Mars, the US space agency said Saturday, after an unexpected outage prompted fears that the hard-working craft had finally met its end. Ingenuity, a drone about 1.6 feet (0.5 meters) tall, arrived on Mars in 2021 aboard the rover Perseverance and became the first motorized craft to fly autonomously on another …

Japan on Saturday became only the fifth nation to achieve a soft lunar landing, but its “Moon Sniper” spacecraft was running out of power due to a solar battery problem. After a nail-biting 20-minute descent, space agency JAXA said its Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) had touched down and communication had been established. But without the solar cells functioning, …

PARIS: It was impossible to see through the snow and fog on the Antarctic seas but expedition leader Ian Strachan knew his ship was approaching a true behemoth: the world’s biggest iceberg lay somewhere ahead. “Then the clouds lifted, and we could see this expansive — almost abstract — white line that extended each way across the horizon,” he told …