Tech

The world’s biggest mobile phone showcase will not happen this year. The organizer of MWC Barcelona, the largest showcase for mobile technology, has canceled the event less than two weeks before its scheduled opening after major exhibitors pulled out over concerns about the coronavirus outbreak. The cancelation highlights the global ramifications of the spread of the virus as well as governments’ responses to it, including imposing restrictions on travelers from mainland China. John Hoffman, chief executive of GSM Association (GSMA), which organizes the annual event, said Wednesday it has canceled the tech conference “because the global concern regarding the coronavirus outbreak, travel conc

On January 22, four days before the Lunar New Year, a village in southeastern China held a banquet. Some 3,000 people, or half the village’s population, showed up.  It was a blast. Then the villagers found out that one family among them had returned from the central city of Wuhan and brought with it a new strain of coronavirus that has killed at least 1,100 people worldwide since it was first reported in December. The banquet took place two days after the Chinese government declared the coronavirus outbreak a national emergency, and authorities at all levels were tracking and restricting the movements of people from Wuhan. The family slipped through all measures of screening and, according

The US Department of Justice (DOJ) has charged four members of the Chinese military over a 2017 hacking into one of America’s largest credit reporting agencies and stealing the personal data of around half of all US citizens. The alleged hack of Atlanta-headquartered Equifax also allowed the hackers, determined by the DOJ to be members of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), to obtain trade secrets related to the company’s database designs. “This was an organized and remarkably brazen criminal heist of sensitive information of nearly half of all Americans,” US General Attorney William Barr, unveiling the nine-count indictment, said on Monday. The four individuals alleged to have committed th

We've all had those heart-stopping moments, “Where's my phone?!” Is it on the back seat of the taxi disappearing into traffic, or did I leave it at home? Maybe I haven't lost everything. For more than a decade, we have been tethered to a flat piece of metal and glass that is now central to our lives – combining communications (voice and text), photography, music, videos, news, web search and dozens of other seemingly essential apps into one indispensable device we have to carry everywhere. The smartphone hasn’t changed much since Apple revolutionized mobile telephones with a touch screen version in 2007. In fact, the decade of the 2010s saw only incremental innovations in smartphones, or gim

The man who spent $4.57 million to have a meal with Warren Buffett finally got to enjoy his sit-down with the legendary investor.  Chinese cryptocurrency entrepreneur Justin Sun Yuchen had to postpone the lunch with the Berkshire Hathaway chairman last year because of a kidney stones issue. When they finally met, it was for dinner.  Sun's $4.57 million bid was enough to win the opportunity at a charity auction in June last year but postponed it, first citing health issues and then apologizing to the public for overhyping the plan to dine with one of the world’s richest people. Sun thanked Buffett for his dinner, wisdom and vision. “$4.56 million for a $515.05 dinner was money well spent! Th

A court ruling in Canada could put a stop on the freewheeling political posts in the country on WeChat, a WhatsApp-like super app popular among Chinese communities.  A Toronto construction worker, Wu Jian, was sued for defamation and ordered by the court to pay more than $38,000 after he posted a series of comments directed at a local community leader, Simon Zhong Xinsheng, in a WeChat political discussion group.  Justice Penny J. Jones of the Ontario Court of Justice said Wu’s comments on Zhong were malicious falsehoods. “The evidence before the court is that none of the defamatory statements made about Mr Zhong in the WeChat posts are true,” Jones wrote in her judgment.  WeChat has been a

The British government approved the limited use of Huawei Technologies’ equipment in the country’s roll-out of 5G mobile infrastructure on Tuesday, opening the door to rival European telecommunications gear suppliers Ericsson and Nokia. While that action imposes a cap on Huawei’s market share in Britain, it throws a lifeline to the embattled Chinese telecoms giant amid the Trump administration’s accusations that the company’s equipment poses a national security threat. It could also serve as a model for other European governments, including Germany, as they prepare to make similar decisions over their deployment of 5G – the next-generation mobile technology that will help power advances such

China faces another embarrassment in its drive to build home-grown technology after one of the country’s leading research institutes suspended a senior computer scientist for making false claims. The prestigious Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing said it had suspended lab scientist Liu Lei after his false claim that a programming language he helped develop was made entirely in China. The school said it would investigate Liu. The scandal adds to a series of blows to China’s ambition to reduce its dependence on imported technology, including software and computer chips.  The prospect of state funding for domestic innovation has led to a number of ex

In southern China, there is an ancient form of black magic known as Gu. According to folklore, a small poisonous creature similar to a worm could be grown in a pot and used to control a person’s mind. Now a team of researchers in Shenzhen have created a robot worm that could enter the human body, move along blood vessels and hook up to neurons. “In a way it is similar to Gu,” said Xu Tiantian, a lead scientist for the project at the Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. “But our purpose is not developing a biological weapon. It’s the opposite,” she added. In recent years, science labs around the world have produced many micro-bots. So far, they have mostly

Shanghai is rolling out a drug collection terminal equipped with facial recognition technology for medicine buyers in an effort to stem abuse. At the new terminals, pharmacists and buyers of controlled medicines – such as those containing sedatives and psychotropic substances – will be asked to verify their identities by scanning their faces at pharmacies or hospitals, local media reported on Wednesday. The system, which scans both pharmacists and patients, is designed to flag potential and high-risk abusers as well as prevent health care professionals from colluding with patients in obtaining drugs illegally.  The move is expected to prevent potential abusers from obtaining prescription med