BERLIN: Police in the German state of Lower-Saxony will soon use their networks of Facebook “friends” to find missing persons and hunt out suspected criminals, according to the state’s interior minister.
BERLIN: There is a bright side to the plunge in solar panel prices that has brought down some US and German manufacturers which relied too heavily on subsidies for green energy - solar power costs have fallen faster than anyone thought possible.
• Think you’re funny?
• Social platform for business ideas
• Health care profession resources
• Android tablet for kids
• Books with 3D animations
• UAE blocks fake phones
• Data Privacy Day
• If hacked, notify broker
LOS ANGELES: A glimpse beyond our solar system reveals the neighborhood just outside the sun’s influence is different and stranger than expected, scientists reported Tuesday.
NEW YORK: Google, Facebook and other big tech companies are jointly designing a system for combating e-mail scams known as phishing.
JOHANNESBURG: Young people tweeting from Blackberries and iPhones are driving the growth of Twitter in Africa, with South Africans by far the most vociferous, according to new research published Thursday.
TOKYO: A major earthquake is far more likely to hit Tokyo in the next few years than the government predicts, researchers at the University of Tokyo said on Monday, warning companies and individuals to be prepared for such an event.
PADANG, Indonesia: Indonesian police say a civil servant who posted “God does not exist” on Facebook faces a maximum penalty of five years behind bars for blasphemy.
ANKARA: A hospital in southern Turkey on Saturday was attempting the world’s first triple limb transplant, attaching two arms and one leg to a 34-year-old man, the country’s state-run news agency reported.
WELLINGTON: New Zealand police broke through electronic locks and cut their way into a mansion safe room to arrest the alleged kingpin of an international Internet copyright theft case and seize millions of dollars worth of cars, artwork and other goods.
LOS ANGELES: Wael Ghonim doesn't like being called an activist. The 31-year-old Google employee says he's no different than other Egyptians who took part in the 2011 protests spurred by a Facebook page he created that forced then-President Hosni Mubarak to step down.
WELLINGTON, New Zealand: New Zealand police raided several homes and businesses linked to the founder of Megaupload.com, a giant file-sharing site shut down by US authorities, on Friday and seized guns, millions of dollars, and nearly $5 million in luxury cars, officials said.
WASHINGTON: US Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid on Friday postponed a showdown vote in his chamber on the PIPA online anti-piracy bill that pits Hollywood against Silicon Valley.
WASHINGTON: They came from Mars, not in peace, but in pieces.
Scientists are confirming that 15 pounds of rock collected recently in Morocco fell to Earth from Mars during a meteorite shower last July.
LONDON: In just five years, Twitter has evolved from a 140-character punch line into a universal, all-purpose newswire, free and open to almost anyone, throbbing with the pulse of the planet in real time.
NEW YORK: An exhibit of American Indian art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art throws the connection between art and collector into unusually sharp relief.
LONDON: British scientists have found scores of fossils the great evolutionary theorist Charles Darwin and his peers collected but that had been lost for more than 150 years.
BEIJING: China will be more open about the often secretive workings of the government and ruling Communist Party in the coming year, although strict controls over the Internet would remain in place, a senior propaganda official said Wednesday.
SAN FRANCISCO: Google is focusing on the importance of protecting personal information in an unusual marketing campaign for a company that has been blasted for its own online privacy lapses and practices. The educational ads will start appearing Tuesday in dozens of US newspapers, including The New York Times, USA Today, and The Wall Street Journal, as well as in magazines including Time and the New Yorker.
LAS VEGAS: Sure, today’s phones can deliver the sound of a heartbeat. But how would you like to actually feel the throbbing? A few companies want to replace the crude vibration motors in today’s phones and tablets with something that provides a much wider range of sensations, allowing you to feel the rumble of a Harley or the reverberation of a shotgun blast.
OTTAWA: The Canadian government, bowing to the power of Twitter and Facebook, said on Friday it would end a ban on reporting early election results before polls close across the country.
LONDON: A new molecule has been detected in the earth’s atmosphere which could help produce a cooling effect, scientists said, but it remains to be seen whether it can play a major role in tackling global warming.
WASHINGTON: An international team of scientists says it has figured out how to slow global warming in the short run and prevent millions of deaths from dirty air: Stop focusing so much on carbon dioxide.
NEW DELHI: For the first time, Indian prosecutors are taking Google, Yahoo, Facebook and other networking sites to court for refusing to remove material considered insulting to Indian leaders and major religious figures.
LAGOS, Nigeria: A nationwide strike and demonstrations have unleashed years of pent-up frustrations in Nigeria over its kleptocratic leaders, and the rage has grown even stronger across social media this week.
WASHINGTON: The US Department of Homeland Security's command center routinely monitors dozens of popular websites, including Facebook, Twitter, Hulu, WikiLeaks and news and gossip sites including the Huffington Post and Drudge Report, according to a government document.
FRESNO, California: Northern California scientists say they have found a possible explanation for the honey bee die-off: A parasitic fly that hijacks the bees’ bodies and causes them to abandon hives.
BEIJING: A computerized ticketing system in China that was created to help millions of migrant workers buy train tickets home for the Chinese New Year holiday crashed within minutes of its launch, angering thousands of Chinese on Thursday.
JERUSALEM: Computer hackers published details of thousands of active Israeli credit cards after breaking into Israeli websites, the chief executive of Israel’s largest card company said on Tuesday.
SEATTLE: Here’s another reason for holdouts to join the social media site Facebook: It’s a great place to find a kidney.
JEDDAH: Social media sites are becoming the new turf where ideas and personalities are clashing.
LOS ANGELES: Fans of the clean, inviting look of the iPhone, iPad and other blockbuster Apple products are legion, and that includes Queen Elizabeth II.
LOS ANGELES: Celebrities may want to resist the urge to send a stream of consciousness on Twitter in the new year after so many of them tweeted their way into trouble on everything from boxer briefs to breast-feeding in 2011.
BOSTON: Hackers affiliated with the Anonymous group published hundreds of thousands of e-mail addresses belonging to subscribers of private intelligence analysis firm Strategic Forecasting Inc. along with thousands of customer credit card numbers.
SEATTLE: Scientists in Alaska are investigating whether local seals are being sickened by radiation from Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear plant.
One of the nation’s most widely planted crops — a genetically engineered corn plant that makes its own insecticide — may be losing its ability to kill a major pest.
TORONTO: Interested in sharing more personal moments of life to a small group of friends rather than a large network? An app called Path could help.
LONDON: Hackers on Sunday claimed to have stolen 200 GB of e-mails and credit card data from United States security think tank Stratfor, promising a weeklong Christmas-inspired assault on a long list of targets.
BEIJING: More Chinese cities are requiring users of Twitter-like microblog services to register with their real names, state media said Thursday, in a move likely to deter many online voices.
WASHINGTON: Hackers in China broke through the computer defenses of the US Chamber of Commerce last year and were able to access information about its operations and its 3 million members, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday.
• Much ado about nothing
• Smartphones trump client PCs
• US youth shun science, math
MOSCOW: After more than two decades of drilling in Antarctica, Russian scientists have reached the surface of a gigantic freshwater lake hidden under miles of ice for some 20 million years — a lake that may hold life from the distant past and clues to the search for life on other planets.
Successful companies are always trying to consider how to expand their offerings and find new income streams. Often they will simply try to recreate a model that has already worked for them.
When I was first asked to write about how I use information and communication technology (ICT) in my business, my first instinct was to reply that, “We don’t use ICT.
Buying accessories for Apple’s devices in the Kingdom is a profoundly depressing experience. Most stores sell only the basics in covers, chargers, styluses, earbuds and screen protectors.
PCs have gone from desktop to laptop to netbook and now there are Ultrabooks. It's good to explain that the Ultrabook name is a trademark of Intel, but these mobile PCs are manufactured under many brands. All Ultrabooks are thin and light with long battery life.
Consumers in the Kingdom have just recently become interested in online shopping. Unfortunately, it isn't the safest time to take out a credit card and start making Internet purchases. Criminals have become aware that cracking the databases of online shops is a great way to get lots of personal information including credit card numbers — earning themselves a lot of publicity and potentially a lot of money.
• Tablet designed for PC gaming
• Immersive HD gaming machine
• Multidevice, take along headset
• Space, the final frontier
What we have seen in the last year within the PC industry are significant improvements in processing speed and increased capacities with regards to memory and battery life. The benefits of these have been utilized by consumers to create and store more high definition content including movies, pictures and music.
In October, ABI research predicted that there would be 29 billion apps downloaded in 2011, up from nine billion in 2010. That’s a lot of apps for a lot of things.
• QR codes used by spammers
• Ultra-high-speed communication
• Tablet users spend
Limit toxic eWaste exports
Brainlab, a German leading provider of software-driven medical technology that supports targeted, less-invasive treatment, has announced the launch of its new system: Curve Image Guided Surgery.
After more than seven years of planning, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) initiated a process last week that could trigger a dramatic expansion of the Internet. ICANN has begun accepting applications for new generic top-level domains (gTLDs).
Rats! According to UnderstandingBigNumbers.com, there are about five billion rats on the planet. The Times puts the number of rats in Britain at between 65 and 80 million. Officials estimate the total number of rats in the French capital at eight million — or four rats for every Parisian. Many sources claim that China has a rat population of two billion. Rat infestations are a global problem.
At Desert Designs, a lifestyle store in Alkhobar, Saudi Arabia, our products focus on Islamic and Arabian art, artifacts and heritage. Our goal however, is to integrate these treasures into a modern day lifestyle.
NEW YORK: Apple Inc. on Thursday launched its attempt to make the iPad a replacement for a satchel full of textbooks by starting to sell electronic versions of a handful of standard high-school books.
At January's Consumer Electronics Show, Ericsson put forward some ideas which demonstrate how the company is planning to move away from selling consumer hardware after its break with Sony. For years Ericsson has been active in the Saudi telecommunication sector and back in November the company signed a new deal with Saudi Telecom (STC) under which the Ericsson Service Delivery Platform (SDP) will be used by STC to provide new multimedia services to consumers and businesses in the Kingdom. Arun Bhikshesvaran, Ericsson Group's global chief marketing officer (CMO) spoke with Arab News about how the company is utilizing its technologies to realize the goal of a Networked Society where everyone and everything everywhere is connected in real time.
• Environmental Monitoring System
