technology news
Check Point Software Partners Strathmore University to Promote Digital Skills in Kenya
Sourced from Business News Daily Cybersecurity solutions company, Check Point Software has announced that its education initiative has partnered with Strathmore University in Kenya to provide a comprehensive cybersecurity curriculum to students, bridging the digital skills gap and also creating a safer local cyber landscape. According to research, the number of unfilled cybersecurity roles now stands at 4.07 million professionals globally. What causes alarm for those within the security market across Africa is that the ICT courses across a range of disciplines are still underdeveloped, as well as the skills required to operate, support and understand the complexities of next-generation technologies and threats. Introducing the Check Point SecureAcademy To keep up with the current thr...
Spotify Removes its 10,000-Song Library Limit
Sourced from Forbes. Spotify has finally removed its 10,000-song cap on library sizes, now allowing users to add as much music as they’d like to their personal libraries. Fixing an issue that has irritated music-lovers on the service for years. With more than 50-million songs available to customers to stream at any time, until today, there was a hard limit of 10,000 songs that users could save to their own “Your Music” collections on Spotify for easy access. This is no more. After today, you can add as many songs as you like to your Liked Songs on @Spotify I’ve been working with a small team on the refactoring necessary to pull this off for a while now. Very happy to see this finally out. https://t.co/1nSExF5o3V — Felipe O. Carvalho (@_Felipe) May 26, 2020 Users have been requesting ...
Why South African Enterprises Will Benefit The Most from 5G Technology
Over the past forty years, the mobile industry has introduced a new generation of technology every decade. The enhanced capabilities introduced by 5G technology are valuable for business because of the potential to directly impact on core operations, unlocking much-needed efficiencies, and enhancing productivity, to an extent that we have not seen before. Key capabilities offer big benefits to business Prior to 5G, mobile technologies were primarily focussed on the individual consumer. The benefits to business have been indirect, particularly across Africa, where the coverage of fixed-line infrastructure could not provide the mass connectivity needed to impact on core operations. 5G was designed with the needs of the enterprise in mind, and its key capabilities — Enhanced Mobile Broadband ...
New IoT System Could Detect Future Virus Outbreaks
Sourced from Getty Images. IoT sensors that monitor body temperature in real-time and are implemented at a large scale could provide geolocation data that would allow potential quarantine areas to be rapidly identified. Through this, the idea is to shut down emerging viruses before a pandemic could take hold. IoT security firm WISeKey says it is working on such a solution. “Using the network of billions of interconnected smart IoT sensors, we can detect the spread of viruses by combining the anonymized digital identity with the behaviour of a person,” the firm says in a press release. Importantly, the company claims its solution can be fully secured and trusted. A question of privacy /* custom css */ .tdi_3_c05.td-a-rec-img{ text-align: left; }.tdi_3_c05.td-a-rec-img img{ margin: 0 a...
How Lenovo is Pursuing Sustainable Supercomputers
The Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) in Munich, Germany, contains no ordinary supercomputer. Sure, it has thousands of servers, or nodes, stacked in rows in a windowless vault with technicians working diligently on huge data crunching conundrums for research organisations; running simulations to try and better predict future natural disasters like tsunamis and earthquakes. But it is eerily quiet. Almost too quiet. The familiar whir of hot air being whooshed away by power-hungry computers is almost entirely absent. Where are all the fans? Almost all gone, as it turns out. The LRZ SuperMUC NG, which uses massive arrays of Lenovo’s ThinkSystem SD650 servers, requires nearly no fans at all – just those for cooling the power supply units and in the in-row-chillers on every eighth row. As a r...
How Lockdown has Highlighted the Benefits of Remote Banking
Sourced from Innovation Village. The advantages of digital transacting over other modes of banking have been highlighted by the lockdown. Although banking remotely has been gaining ground in South Africa long before the lockdown, the limitations on physical movement imposed by the lockdown have given online and mobile banking a significant boost. The current environment will most likely see more people opt for digital banking platforms. This is confirmed by a recent Nielsen syndicated study on the impact of COVID-19 on consumer behaviour in South Africa, which reports that 37% of South Africans say they are shopping and transacting more online. “Apart from being more convenient, digital banking and shopping are cheaper than traditional channels. The lockdown and its effect on the economy h...
Hydroxychloroquine Trials for COVID-19 Suspended by WHO
Sourced from Getty Images. The World Health Organization (WHO) announced that it is pausing clinical trials on the use of the controversial malaria drug, hydroxychloroquine, to treat patients with COVID-19. This was one of four experimental treatments being investigated by the organization and has been under intense scrutiny for some time after it was championed by tech mogul Elon Musk and US President Donald Trump. “The executive group has implemented a temporary pause of the hydroxychloroquine arm within the Solidarity trial while the safety data is reviewed by the data safety monitoring board,” says Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO director-general, during a press briefing. This “Solidarity trial” is the WHO’s global investigation into experimental treatments for COVID-19 – including hyd...
Ericsson Launches a Digital Learning Programme for Students
In response to how the global COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted education and learning around the world, Ericsson has joined the UNESCO-led Global Education Coalition by launching Ericsson Educate – a digital programme delivering online learning content focused on improving digital skills for students in secondary schools and universities. Now more than ever, being digitally connected is vital to maintaining a sense of normalcy during the current circumstances. Education is one critical sector particularly affected by the global COVID-19 pandemic, with around 1.2 billion students and youth around the world unable to attend traditional education institutions. This has placed a huge demand for comprehensive online education programs on governments and education institutions alike. The Ericsson...
Hackers Release New Jailbreak that Unlocks Every iPhone
Sourced from Macworld. A renowned iPhone hacking team has released a new ‘Jailbreak’ tool that unlocks every iPhone, even the most recent models running the latest iOS 13.5. For as long as Apple has kept up its walled garden approach to iPhones by only allowing apps and customization that it approves, hackers have tried to break free from what they call the “jail” – hence the term “Jailbreak.” This allows customising their phones as they see fit. Load whatever apps they want, even change things like issues with iPhone batteries. Hackers do this by finding a previously undisclosed vulnerability in iOS that break through some of the many restrictions that Apple puts in place to prevent access to the underlying software. Apple says it does this for security. But jailbreakers say breaking thro...
6 Tech Companies Make Remote Working a Permanent Option
The world has been changed by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Almost all points of what we used to know are in some ways now different. These changes will no doubt last as long as the pandemic, and many will last even longer. In the world of work, the transition from offices to home has been a worldwide reality. Now, six of the world’s largest tech companies have revealed that these advents of working-from-home may be a permanent fixture. At least for the foreseeable future. These tech companies include: Facebook Mark Zuckerberg says that as many as 50% of Facebook employees could be working remotely within the next five to 10 years. Facebook’s CEO pitched the idea as both of a matter of satisfying employee desires and also in an effort to establish a “more broad-based economic prosperit...
Why Getting Students Online Poses a Major Challenge
The COVID-19 lockdown has forced many schools, colleges and educational institutions to rapidly switch to online learning. Although there are many advanced online learning platforms available, the one critical factor that still remains is reliable connectivity to online learning platforms. The reality is that only a small percentage of homes in South Africa are covered by uncapped fibre connectivity. This is where mobile data connectivity is the only option. There has been ongoing lobbying of mobile networks led by various educational organisations such as the National Association of Social Change Entities in Education as well as the DG Murray Trust. The current reality, however, is that learning institutions are forced to provide data connectivity to learners. Last week, the U...
Uganda Starts Mass Production of its First Smartphone
Sourced from Gadgets Africa. Uganda will begin manufacturing its first smartphones through SIMI – a brand of smartphone makers that are said to have the average customer specifically in mind. The phones currently focus on one major aspect, battery life. The ‘regular’ non-smartphones can last up to at least two weeks and can charge via Solar power too. The smartphones have a battery capacity of at least two days. Currently, SIMI has the capacity to make 2000 phones a day. SIMI has already flagged off an 18,000 phone consignment that Uganda is exporting to Morocco sometime soon. The company also wants to involve university students in the development of apps and software for the handsets. Together with the production of the smartphones comes new regulations in the country, where phone import...
