Twitter says it’s ending its iconic 140-character limit — and giving nearly everyone 280 characters. Users tweeting in Chinese, Japanese and Korean will still have the original limit. That’s because writing in those languages uses fewer characters. The company says 9 percent of tweets written in English hit …
In the same affluent, suburban city where Google built its headquarters, Tes Saldana lives in a crowded but tidy camper she parks on the street. She concedes it’s “not a very nice living situation,” but it also is not unusual. Until authorities told them to move, more than a dozen …
Indonesia on Monday vowed to block Facebook’s WhatsApp Messenger within 48 hours if the service did not ensure that obscene Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) images were removed. WhatsApp, which is widely used in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation, said message encryption prevented it from monitoring the animated graphics …
Snapchat faced a worldwide outage for at least four hours on Monday, prompting a flood of complaints on rival mobile application Twitter a day before posting its third quarterly earnings as a public company. “We’re aware of the issue and working on a fix,” Snapchat said on its support Twitter …
Technology can hopefully reverse some of the harm caused to the planet by industrialisation and help end disease and poverty, but artificial intelligence (AI) needs to be controlled, physicist Stephen Hawking said on Monday. Hawking, a British cosmologist who was diagnosed with motor neuron disease aged 21, said technology could …
Rustlers, the villains in countless Wild West movies, are a very real threat to ranchers and farmers today. In Britain, sheep farmers are resorting to technology to protect their flocks. Faiza Elmasry reports on some high tech ways farmers are tracing their animals. Faith Lapidus narrates. …
As private and public transportation slowly shifts to electric propulsion, fans of Formula One car racing wonder whether the thrill of roaring turbocharged engines and the smell of burning car tires will someday be replaced by the subdued sleep-inducing whine of electric motors. But Formula E cars keep gathering fans …
A growing amount of the waste in the world is out-of-date electronics. And inside all of our devices are a lot of valuable metals, and also some dangerously toxic ones. All that stuff needs to be handled with care, and Indonesia is working to make sure it doesn’t end up …
The extent to which technology is always watching us is on stark display at a new London exhibit called “The Glass Room.” It allows visitors to see just how much of their lives is always available online. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports. …
Authorities in Afghanistan are temporarily blocking WhatsApp and Telegram social media services in the country, citing security concerns, officials confirmed Friday. An official at the Afghan Telecommunications Regulatory Authority, ATRA, told VOA the social media tools will be suspended for 20 days. The decision follows a request from state security …
Hybrid cars are slowly working their way into car markets, and there are waiting lists for Elon Musk’s new all-electric Tesla Model 3. But as popular as these cars are, they have the natural limitations of their batteries. But an answer may be in sight. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports. …
U.S. President Donald Trump’s @realdonaldtrump Twitter account was deactivated by a Twitter Inc employee whose last day at the company was Thursday, and the account was down for 11 minutes before it was restored, the social media company said. “We have learned that this was done by a Twitter customer-support …
Mexico City has updated its 911 emergency app to send earthquake alerts to residents’ smartphones following last month’s magnitude 7.1 temblor that killed 369 people, including 228 in the capital, authorities announced Thursday. Mayor Miguel Angel Mancera said users of the free 911 CDMX app can get sound and vibration …
A trial change to the Facebook news feed in Cambodia and other small countries is stirring criticism of the U.S. tech giant, which champions interconnectivity and openness, but is famously opaque when it comes to how its own product makes critical decisions about information sharing. Their rollout of dramatic trial …
Google is partnering with AutoNation, the country’s largest auto dealership chain, in its push to build a self-driving car. AutoNation said Thursday that its dealerships will provide maintenance and repairs for Waymo’s self-driving fleet of Chrysler Pacifica vehicles. The agreement will include additional models when Waymo brings them on line. …
The hackers who upended the U.S. presidential election had ambitions well beyond Hillary Clinton’s campaign, targeting the emails of Ukrainian officers, Russian opposition figures, U.S. defense contractors and thousands of others of interest to the Kremlin, according to a previously unpublished digital hit list obtained by The Associated Press. The …
Facebook reported better-than-expected quarterly profit and revenue on Wednesday as it pushed further into video advertising, showing no sign of financial damage from the controversy over how Russia used the social network in an attempt to sway voters in the 2016 U.S. election. The company’s shares, which hit a record …
Women in Saudi Arabia have scorned the government’s decision to grant citizenship to a female robot who, unlike them, does not need a male guardian or have to cover her head in public. Social media was abuzz with questions about whether the robot, Sophia, who was unveiled at a technology …
Gu Xiaomeng, a 24-year-old primary school teacher in the eastern Chinese city of Suzhou, says she’s excited about the new iPhone X, set to go on sale Friday. The challenge for Apple Inc is to persuade her to actually buy one. “I’m definitely interested, but don’t currently plan to get …
Attorneys for Twitter, Facebook and Google on Tuesday told U.S. lawmakers that Russian entities used their platforms to sow discord and disinformation during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, but downplayed the magnitude of those efforts. “Foreign actors used fake accounts to place ads in Facebook and Instagram that reached millions …
Apple is offering a nifty way to unlock its new iPhone X — just stare at it. Face ID, Apple’s name for its facial-recognition technology, replaces the fingerprint sensor found on other models. How well does it work — not just technically, but in everyday use? After all, it’s much …
There’s a short but not-so-simple question facing Vietnam’s technology startup fans: Now, what? The communist country was not immune to the startup craze that swept the globe, but much of the early period was spent talking about tech and all the local potential. In what could be called the next …
An organization that has been helping find people missing from the 1990s Balkan conflict has now expanded to tackle the cases of millions of missing people around the world. The International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), based in the Netherlands, will use the latest DNA technology to identify bodies and …
Trash and tires floating in a river are easy to see. But there’s a lot of harmful water pollution that isn’t visible to the naked eye. Researchers in Switzerland are testing a robotic version of a sea monster that’s helping them get a better look at what’s floating in the …
More than 50,000 people were killed in Brazil in 2015, which puts it on the list of the most murder-prone countries in the world. To protect themselves, Brazilians are crowd sourcing their safety, using cell phones to alert each other when violence breaks out. VOA’s Kevin Enochs. …
More than 19 million Americans are still without home internet access…that according to the Federal Communication Commission. In Garrett County, Maryland, local leaders came up with an innovative plan to provide access to their community…VOA’s Lesya Bakalets reports on a creative approach to getting hard to reach customers on line. …