In a breakthrough achievement, astronomers have taken the first ever image of a black hole, international media report said. The black hole is located in a distant galaxy.

The black hole is 500 million trillion km away from the earth and was photographed by a network of eight telescopes across the world, BBC reported.

It has a mass 6.5 billion times that of the Sun and it is one of the heaviest black holes that astronomer think exists.

FLORIDA: Scientists have caught a female python in Florida Everglades that was more than 17 feet long, weighed 140 pounds and contained 73 developing eggs.

The snake is the largest python ever removed from Big Cypress National Preserve, a 729,000-acre expanse of swampland west of Miami in South Florida, according to a statement.

Facebook statement on the Big Cypress National Preserve’s says, “using male pythons with radio transmitters allows the team to track the male to locate breeding females. The team not only removes the invasive snakes, but collects data for research, develop new removal tools, and learn how the pythons are using the Preserve.

The team tracked one of the sentinel males with the transmitter and found this massive female nearby.”

KATHMANDU: Minister for Communications and Information Technology Gokul Baskota has asserted that the government is preparing for the implementation of 5G soon. He said that the expansion of ‘4G’ technology was accorded highest priority by the government.

Minister Baskota said that the recently held Nepal Investment Summit had also emphasized on the development and expansion of information and technology in the country.

Inaugurating the Nepal Mobile Congress-2019 organized here today by the Chinese telecommunication giant Huawei, Minister Banskota said the government was working towards making Nepal a digital country.

Seeking cooperation from all sectors to achieve the vision of ‘Digital Nepal’, Baskota sought support from investors, private sectors in development, and expansion of information and technology.

According to the Minister, the government was seeking investment in information technology and launch a new information and technology act to end the existing hassles, if any, prevailing at the policy-level.

“Nepal is paving its path towards Nepal digital economy. Information Technology would be optimally employed in education, health, agriculture, tourism, forest, irrigation and energy sector,” the Minister observed.

Reminding that Prime Minister KP Oli had instructed to bring into effect the digital framework within five years, Minister Baskota expressed his confidence that Nepal would make a stride in the field of information and technology.

Huawei, which has been working in Nepal since 1999, has its presence in more than 170 countries across the globe.

The four-day event showcases the works carried out by the Chinese telecom giant.

Huawei’s Executive Chief for Nepal, Denny Deng, urged all sides for digital economy and shared about the activities of the Huawei.

CHENNAI: Saying that the popular Chinese video app TikTok has been encouraging pornography, an Indian court has ordered a ban on the video app.

According to news carried by Indian media, the Madras High Court has also directed the media from telecasting videos made using the app.

The court while hearing a petition maintained that children using TikTok were vulnerable to exposure to sexual predators. The app that allows users to create and share short videos with special effects has over 54 million monthly active users in India.

SAN FRANCISCO: The news of Facebook user data being publicly exposed has brought a new height of security of Facebook.  Security researchers have uncovered more instances of Facebook user data being publicly exposed on the internet, further underscoring its struggles as it deals with a slew of privacy and other problems.

UpGuard, the research based company said that the data, which included user names and passwords, came from two different Facebook apps that stored their data publicly on Amazon’s cloud services. Facebook said the databases have been taken down.

The databases were from a Mexico-based media company called Cultura Colectiva, which included more than 540 million records — like user comments and likes — and from an app called At the Pool. The researchers said passwords stored for At the Pool were “presumably” for the app and not for Facebook. Still, storing them publicly could put people at risk if they used the same passwords across different accounts.

While the At the Pool data collection was not as large as that for Cultura Colectiva, UpGuard said it included plain text passwords for 22,000 users. The app itself shut down in 2014, and UpGuard said it is not known how long the user details were exposed.

The discovery comes a little over a year after Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal , in which the data mining firm affiliated with Donald Trump got personal data on millions of Facebook users.

“As Facebook faces scrutiny over its data stewardship practices, they have made efforts to reduce third party access. But as these exposures show, the data genie cannot be put back in the bottle,” UpGuard wrote in its blog post. “Data about Facebook users has been spread far beyond the bounds of what Facebook can control today.”

MUMBAI: The messaging platform WhatsApp said it has launched a service for Indians to check the reality of information on its platform ahead of national elections beginning this month.

It said the service was launched in an attempt to combat fake news, Reuters reported.

In a statement issued on Tuesday, WhatsApp said it was working with local startup Proto. It will be classifying messages send by users as true, false, misleading or disputed.

HAVANA: Google has signed a deal with Cuban telecoms monopoly ETECSA on to work toward improving internet traffic exchange between their two networks and connectivity on the island.

Internet laggard Cuba has sought to increase web access in recent years, introducing cyber cafes, Wi-Fi hotspots and mobile internet, but users still complain of the cost, sluggish connection and spotty coverage.

Google and ETECSA signed a memorandum of understanding to begin the negotiation of a so-called “peering agreement” that would create a cost-free and direct connection between their two networks.

This would enable faster access to content hosted on the tech giant’s servers, in a country where information is tightly controlled, and reduce costs for Cuba which would no longer have to pay for an intermediary.

“The implementation of this internet traffic exchange service is part of the strategy of ETECSA for the development and computerization of the country,” Google and ETECSA said in a joint news release, read out at a news conference in Havana.

The peering would be implemented “when technical conditions allow it,” they said. That means the establishment of a physical connection between Cuba’s network and a Google “point of presence”, the closest ones being in South Florida, Mexico and Colombia.

The agreement creates a joint working group of engineers to figure out how to implement this.

Cuba is currently connected to the internet via a fibre-optic cable from Venezuela that went live in 2013, while much of its web infrastructure on the island is Chinese. Earlier this week, Cuba and Russia signed a memorandum of understanding on increasing cooperation in telecommunications.

Google has been working to expand its business in Cuba for years although analysts say it will have to work hard to gain the government’s trust.

“The signing of this memorandum evidences that the interest of U.S companies in developing businesses with ETECSA remains,” the Google, ETECSA news release read.

Google set up a small pilot display center in Havana and signed a deal in 2016 granting internet users quicker access to its branded content.

Former Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt met Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel twice last year, in June in Havana and in Google’s New York office in September.

Google’s attempts to enter the Cuban market come as it faces blowback from employees and human rights activists over attempts to expand in another Communist-run state, China, amid concerns it could comply with that country’s internet censorship and surveillance policies.

Google has said it has not committed to any policies as it explores offering more services in China.

Whether due to the U.S. embargo, lack of cash or concerns over the free flow of information, the internet was largely available to the public in Cuba only at tourist hotels until 2013.

(Agencies)

NEW DELHI: Facebook Inc. has claimed that it is taking steps to reduce the spread of false information on its platform ahead of India’s general election.

Samidh Chakrabarti, director of Facebook’s Product Management for Civic Integrity division, said that Facebook has put the Indian elections a “top priority,” and put in a “tremendous amount of efforts over the last two years” to prepare for the polls.

He informed that Facebook listed a variety of measures it is taking, from blocking fake accounts to employing third-party fact-checking organizations, through the campaign and voting, with polling scheduled to take place in stages from April 11 to May 19.

He said Facebook has partnered with Indian media organizations to check and flag false stories in English, Hindi and some other regional Indian languages.

India has the highest number of Facebook users in the world, with more than 300 million. That is about a third of the 900 million people eligible to vote in 2019.

The elections will be held in seven phases to ensure proper security and manageable logistics across the country of 1.3 billion people. (Agencies)

SYDNEY: Australia is considering tough measures in regulating Facebook and Google in order to safeguard personal information.

Australia’s government will introduce measures to increase fines for breaches, strengthen disclosure policies and embolden its privacy regulator to crack down on data misuse, according to a statement Sunday.

“They need to stop hate content and they need to do the right thing with people’s information,” Prime Minister Scott Morrison said in a statement.

The Australian plan comes amid mounting pressure for social media platforms to remove offensive and extremist content after 50 people died in last week’s attacks on two mosques in New Zealand. The shooting were live-streamed.

The measures will increase the penalty for serious or repeated data-breaches from A$2.1 million ($1.49 million) to A$10 million. Companies could also be charged three times the value of any benefit gained or 10 percent of the company’s annual domestic turnover, whichever is greater.

Social media and online companies will also be called on to stop using or disclosing an individual’s information upon request, and face tighter rules on protecting the personal information of children and vulnerable groups.

The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner will also receive new powers to issue infringement notices to those who do not cooperate in resolving minor breaches.

Next week’s federal budget will also provide the regulator with a A$25 million funding boost over three years to investigate breaches and oversee online privacy rules.

The policies will be made through amendments to the Privacy Act. Legislation will be drafted for consultation in the second half of 2019.

SAN FRANCISCO: Facebook left hundreds of millions of user passwords readable by its employees for years, the company acknowledged Thursday after a security researcher exposed the lapse.

By storing passwords in readable plain text, Facebook violated fundamental computer-security practices. Those call for organizations and websites to save passwords in a scrambled form that makes it almost impossible to recover the original text.

There is no valid reason why anyone in an organization, especially the size of Facebook, needs to have access to users’ passwords in plain text,” said cyber security expert Andrei Barysevich of Recorded Future.

Facebook said there is no evidence its employees abused access to this data. But thousands of employees could have searched them. The company said the passwords were stored on internal company servers, where no outsiders could access them. Even so, some privacy experts suggested that users change their Facebook passwords.

The incident reveals yet another huge and basic oversight at a company that insists it is a responsible guardian for the personal data of its 2.3 billion users worldwide.

Facebook said it will likely notify “hundreds of millions” of Facebook Lite users, millions of Facebook users and tens of thousands of Instagram users that their passwords were stored in plain text.

Facebook Lite is a version designed for people with older phones or low-speed internet connections. It is used primarily in developing countries.

Last week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg touted a new ”privacy-focused vision ” for the social network that would emphasize private communication over public sharing. The company wants to encourage small groups of people to carry on encrypted conversations that neither Facebook nor any other outsider can read.

The fact that the company couldn’t manage to do something as simple as encrypting passwords, however, raises questions about its ability to manage more complex encryption issues — such in messaging — flawlessly.
Facebook said it discovered the problem in January. But security researcher Brian Krebs wrote that in some cases the passwords had been stored in plain text since 2012. Facebook Lite launched in 2015 and Facebook bought Instagram in 2012.

The problem, according to Facebook, wasn’t due to a single bug. During a routine review in January, it says, it found that the plain text passwords were unintentionally captured and stored in its internal storage systems. This happened in a variety of circumstances — for example, when an app crashed and the resulting crash log included a captured password.

Facebook’s normal procedure for passwords is to store them encoded, the company noted Thursday in its blog post.

That’s good to know, although Facebook engineers apparently added code that defeated the safeguard, said security researcher Rob Graham. “They have all the proper locks on the doors, but somebody left the window open,” he said.

(Agencies)