Technology

Australia’s prime minister lambasted social media on Thursday as “a coward’s palace”, saying platforms should be treated as publishers when defamatory comments by unidentified people are posted, pouring fuel on a raging debate over the country’s libel laws. Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s comments suggest he would favour making companies like Facebook Inc liable for defamation with regards to some content …

PARIS: Hundreds of millions of people were unable to access Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp for more than six hours on Monday, underscoring the world’s reliance on platforms owned by the Silicon Valley giant. But what actually caused the outage? What does Facebook say happened? In an apologetic blog post, Santosh Janar­dhan, Facebook’s vice president of infrastructure, said that “configuration changes on the …

PostEx, a Pakistani fintech and logistics startup, has announced that it has raised $1.5 million in seed funding from leading institutional investors. The startup said its initiative was aimed at solving challenges around cash on delivery with instant and upfront payments “by scaling its one-stop shop for financing and logistics solutions for e-commerce platforms”. The round was led by MSA …

KARACHI: The Sindh High Court on Monday summoned officials of the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP), Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan (SECP), Ministry of Finance and Federal Investigation Agency (FIA), asking them to come up with comments and suggestions as to how cryptocurrency can be allowed and regulated in Pakistan. The two-judge bench headed by Justice Mohammad Karim Khan …

What to do when Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are unavailable? Order nuggets. Or at least that’s what Twitter did. The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority at 9:50pm on Monday said that Facebook services had been affected internationally due to an outage. As of 3:15am on Tuesday, at the time this report was published, the social media services were still offline. Twitter, however, was …

Former Facebook employee and whistleblower Frances Haugen is expected to tell US Congress on Tuesday that the company faces little oversight and liken the social media giant to tobacco companies that for decades denied that smoking damaged health, according to testimony seen by Reuters. “When we realized tobacco companies were hiding the harms it caused, the government took action. When we …

Facebook blamed a “faulty configuration change” for a nearly six-hour outage on Monday that prevented the company’s 3.5 billion users from accessing its social media and messaging services such as WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger. The company, in a blog post published late on Monday, did not specify who executed the configuration change and whether it was planned but said that its systems were back …

WASHINGTON: Facebook on Sunday dismissed as “ludicrous” suggestions it contributed to the US Capitol riot on January 6, a charge the social media giant expects will be leveled in an upcoming whistleblower interview. Facebook’s vice president of policy and global affairs Nick Clegg also vehemently pushed back at the assertion its platforms are “toxic” for teens, days after a tense recent congressional …

For Pakistan to increase its informational technology (IT)/information technology-enabled services (ITeS) exports, one of the most critical things is good quality IT/ITeS workers as our exports are directly proportional to the number of quality IT professionals we produce. Pakistan’s IT/ITeS exports are growing at a remarkable rate of 45 per cent per year. These exports are much needed as they …

BERLIN: A joint European-Japanese spacecraft got its first glimpse of Mercury as it swung by the solar system’s innermost planet while on a mission to deliver two probes into orbit in 2025. The BepiColombo mission made the first of six flybys of Mercury at 11:34pm on Friday, using the planet’s gravity to slow the spacecraft down. After swooping past Mercury …