Technology

French author Annie Ernaux won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory”, the award-giving body said on Thursday. Ernaux, whose work is mostly autobiographical, is 82. The prize is awarded by the Swedish Academy and is worth 10 million Swedish crowns ($914,704). …

CALIFORNIA: Meta-owned messaging platform WhatsApp is testing a new tool that will bar users from taking screenshots of media/messages that are marked as ‘view once’ content. According to a report by WaBetaInfo, WhatsApp has started rolling out a new beta version 2.22.22.3 for the messaging platform on Android. The new tool that prevent users from taking screenshot and screen recording …

STRASBOURG: The EU parliament on Tuesday passed a new law requiring USB-C to be the single charger standard for all new smartphones, tablets and cameras from late 2024. The measure, which EU lawmakers adopted with a vote 602 in favour, 13 against, will — in Europe at least — push Apple to drop its outdated Lightning port on its iPhones …

WASHINGTON: Billionaire Elon Musk has proposed to go ahead with his original offer of $44 billion to take Twitter Inc private, two sources familiar with the matter said on Tuesday, signalling an end to a bitter legal battle that was about to go to trial. The agreement puts the world’s richest person in charge of one of the most influential …

ISLAMABAD: Popular short-video sharing platform TikTok has launched a new initiative to create awareness about how parents can monitor and control their children’s in-app experience, the company has said in a statement. With its #FamilyFirst initiative, the platform aimed to create awareness on how parents can use ‘Family Pairing Feature’ to monitor activities on their children’s accounts including DMs, notifications, …

The biggest software upgrade in the short history of crypto has fulfilled its promise to wipe out more than 99 per cent of the electricity used by the second-biggest cryptocurrency, experts have told AFP. That is no mean feat, given that the Ethereum blockchain was burning through about as much electricity as New Zealand. Sceptics had expected glitches with the upgrade, known …

Apple Inc’s iPhone exports from India crossed $1 billion in five months since April, Bloomberg News reported on Tuesday, reflecting the tech giant’s growing bet on the South Asian nation amid New Delhi’s push for local manufacturing. The outbound shipments of India-made iPhones, mainly to Europe and the Middle East, are set to reach $2.5bn in the 12 months through March 2023, almost …

India has lost contact with its Mars orbiter, eight years after the low-cost probe made it the first Asian nation with a spacecraft circling the red planet, its space agency said. Although “designed for a life-span of six months as a technology demonstrator, the Mars Orbiter Mission has lived for about eight years in the Martian orbit with a gamut of significant …

Swedish scientist Svante Paabo won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discoveries “concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution”, the award-giving body said on Monday. The prize, arguably among the most prestigious in the scientific world, is awarded by the Nobel Assembly of Sweden’s Karolinska Institute and is worth 10 million Swedish crowns ($900,357). It …

TikTok is due to enter a partnership with Los Angeles-based TalkShopLive to launch its live shopping platform in North America by outsourcing its operation, the Financial Times reported on Saturday citing two people familiar with the operations. The companies are still finalizing the arrangements, the FT report said, adding that no contracts have been signed so far. TikTok did not immediately respond …