TECH NEWS

Beijing, China | AFP | China launched a rover early Saturday morning destined to land on the far side of the moon, a global first that would boost Beijing’s ambitions to become a space superpower. The Chang’e-4 lunar probe mission — named after the moon goddess in Chinese mythology — …

Rome, Italy | AFP | Italy’s competition authority has fined Facebook 10 million euros ($11.3 million) for selling users’ data without informing them and “aggressively” discouraging users from trying to limit how the company shares their data. Facebook “misleadingly gets people to sign up… without informing them in an immediate …

Montreal, Canada | AFP | Canada on Thursday defended its arrest of an executive of Chinese tech giant Huawei on a US extradition request after markets wobbled on fears of fresh friction between Washington and Beijing. With China demanding the release of Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou, Canadian Prime …

Montreal, Canada | AFP |  Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Thursday that politics played no part in the arrest of a top executive of Chinese tech giant Huawei, who was detained on a US extradition request. “I can assure everyone that we are a country (with) an independent judiciary,” …

London, United Kingdom | AFP | UK mobile phone operator O2 and Japan’s SoftBank said Thursday that tens of millions of their customers were unable to use data due to a glitch with sofware made by Sweden’s Ericsson. The outage wreaked havoc across Britain, with millions of drivers unable to …

Ottawa, Canada | AFP | Beijing on Wednesday protested the arrest in Canada of Chinese national Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of global telecommunications giant Huawei, and urged her immediate release as she faces extradition to the United States. “At the request of the US side, the Canadian side …

Washington, United States | AFP | North Korea has expanded a key long-range missile base in the months since a summit between the country’s leader Kim Jong Un and US President Donald Trump, according to satellite images published by CNN on Wednesday. The two men met in Singapore in June …

London, United Kingdom | AFP | Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg pushed back Wednesday against emails showing the social media giant offering Netflix and other popular apps preferential access to people’s data even after it had tightened its privacy rules. A British parliamentary committee investigating whether the social media behemoth was …

Brussels, Belgium | AFP | The European Union launched Wednesday a system for member countries to alert each other to online disinformation spread by opponents such as Russia to undermine next year’s key elections. The bloc also urged Facebook and other social media platforms to follow through on pledges to …

London, United Kingdom | AFP |  A British parliamentary committee accused Facebook on Wednesday of giving companies such as Netflix preferential access to users’ data even after it tightened its privacy rules in 2014-15. The UK parliament’s select media committee published more than 200 pages of internal Facebook emails it …