Google on Friday threatened to make its search engine unavailable in Australia if the government went ahead with plans to make tech giants pay for news content. Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison quickly hit back, saying “we don’t respond to threats.” “Australia makes our rules for things you can do in Australia,” Morrison told reporters in Brisbane. “That’s...
Category: <span>Technology</span>
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Gaming firms fined nearly £7m for restricting European sales
Valve, owner of online PC gaming platform Steam, and five other publishers have been fined a total of €7.8m (£6.9m) for restricting cross-border sales of PC video games. So-called geo-blocking means games are locked, so that a cheaper licence intended for less well-off European countries cannot be used elsewhere. That stopped gamers “shopping around” for...
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China says it is a ‘victim’ after Twitter locks embassy account
China says that it is a “victim” of misinformation after Twitter restricted the account of the Chinese embassy in the United States. The retort comes after Twitter (TWTR) temporarily locked the account of the Chinese embassy over a tweet it posted defending Beijing’s treatment of Uyghurs. The post, which was made earlier this month, claimed...
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Trump administration slams China’s Huawei, halts shipments from Intel and others
The Trump administration notified Huawei suppliers, including chipmaker Intel, that it is revoking certain licenses to sell to the Chinese company and intends to reject dozens of other applications to supply the telecommunications firm, people familiar with the matter told Reuters. The action – likely the last against Huawei Technologies under Republican President Donald Trump...
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China’s Huawei backtracks after filing for patent to identify Uyghur faces
Chinese technology company Huawei is backtracking on a patent application it filed for a facial recognition system intended to identify Uyghurs from other Chinese ethnicities. Filed in July 2018 by Huawei and the government-affiliated Chinese Academy of Sciences, the patent application said the “identification of pedestrian attributes is very important” in facial recognition technology. “The...
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New Zealand central bank says it was not a specific target of cyberattack
New Zealand’s central bank said on Monday a cyberattack that breached its data systems also affected other users of a third-party application and that it was not a specific target of the hack. The Reserve Bank of New Zealand (RBNZ) said a file-sharing service provided by California-based Accellion was illegally accessed. RBNZ Governor Adrian Orr...
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Nvidia’s $40 billion Arm acquisition to be investigated by UK competition regulator
The U.K.’s competition watchdog, the Competition and Markets Authority, announced Wednesday that it plans to investigate Nvidia’s proposed acquisition of British chip designer Arm. Nvidia announced plans to buy the Cambridge-headquartered company from SoftBank for $40 billion last September and critics have been calling on governments and regulators to probe the deal ever since. The...
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Windows 10 is rumored to be getting a major redesign
Microsoft is rumored to be working on a major redesign of Windows 10 that could bring big changes to the way the PC operating system looks and functions. Windows 10 could use a refresh. Aside from twice-annual tweaks, Windows 10 been mostly unchanged since its release in 2015. Six years is long in the tooth...
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Game of Thrones games maker Lin Qi dies ‘after poisoning’
Chinese gaming tycoon Lin Qi, who died on Christmas Day, was poisoned, Shanghai police say. Qi, 39, was the chairman and chief executive of games developer Yoozoo, best known for the Game of Thrones: Winter Is Coming strategy game. The Shanghai police statement pointed to one of Mr Lin’s colleagues – identified only by his...
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Zoom’s Eric Yuan became one of the world’s richest people in 2020 due to pandemic
Nearly one year after the World Health Organization discovered the coronavirus, many people are still staying home from offices, schools, movie theaters, stadiums, churches and restaurants. A lot of the socialization that would be happening in those places in 2020 is happening over video calls. And you can’t talk about that aspect of life without...