Spotify is introducing its audio service in 80 markets across Asia, Africa and the Caribbean in coming days, expanding the company’s potential market by some 1 billion people. From a report: The steps announced Monday will nearly double Spotify’s geographic footprint and add regions where streaming music is in its infancy. The company already operates in 93 countries or territories. Spotify…
Tag: Middle East
Telegram Adds 25 Million New Users In Just 72 Hours
According to founder and CEO Pavel Durov, Telegram gained 25 million new users in the last 72 hours as it smashed past the 500 million active monthly user mark. Android Police reports: For comparison, the app averaged around 1.5 million new users per day in 2020, which was impressive enough already. Durvov says that this is down to his company’s simple…
How the US Military Buys Location Data from Ordinary Apps
Joseph Cox, reporting for Motherboard at Vice: The U.S. military is buying the granular movement data of people around the world, harvested from innocuous-seeming apps, Motherboard has learned. The most popular app among a group Motherboard analyzed connected to this sort of data sale is a Muslim prayer and Quran app that has more than 98 million downloads worldwide. Others include…
Iranian Hackers Found Way Into Encrypted Apps, Researchers Say
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Iranian hackers, most likely employees or affiliates of the government, have been running a vast cyberespionage operation equipped with surveillance tools that can outsmart encrypted messaging systems — a capability Iran was not previously known to possess, according to two digital security reports released Friday. The operation not only targets…
Looking edgewise into the Milky Way
Here are a few shots of the edgewise view into our Milky Way galaxy – with bright Jupiter and fainter Saturn also in the scene – plus a few Perseid meteors. These are from earlier this month, when the moon was less bright in the evening sky. Source: https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/photos-summer-milky-way-aug-2020…
Locust Swarms Are Getting So Big That We Need Radar To Track Them
The desert locust upsurge is yet another of 2020’s horrors. From a report: In June, remote sensing analyst Raj Bhagat noticed a strange signal on India’s weather radar. It looked like a small band of rain near Delhi, moving southwest, but Bhagat was convinced it was a locust swarm. “People began to report it,” he says, referring to sightings on the…
Worldwide PC Shipments Grew Due To Work-From-Home Arrangements
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: The PC industry bounced back in the second quarter of 2020 after its weakest quarter in years mostly due to shelter-in-place orders prompted by the coronavirus pandemic. According to both Gartner and IDC, PC shipments grew year-over-year in the second quarter — the former says shipments totaled 64.8 million units (a 2.8 percent…
Google Scrapped Cloud Initiative in China, ‘Sensitive Markets’
Google abandoned plans to offer a major new cloud service in China and other politically sensitive countries due in part to concerns over geopolitical tensions and the pandemic, Blloomberg reported Wednesday, citing two employees familiar with the matter, revealing the challenges for U.S. tech giants to secure business in those markets. From a report: In May, the search giant shut down…
Images: Solar eclipse wows stargazers in Africa, Asia, Middle East
Stargazers in Africa, Asia and parts of the Middle East looked to the skies this weekend to witness a partial social eclipse. Source: https://phys.org/news/2020-06-images-solar-eclipse-wows-stargazers.html…