Nepal to use Chinese internet bandwidth from today, completes groundwork

Nepal will receive internet bandwidth from China today, ending the Himalayan nation’s sole dependence on India for connecting to the cyberspace.

State-owned telecom company Nepal Telecom (NT) said that all the groundwork has been completed to formally connect Nepal with Chinese bandwidth from January 12.

“The process of acquiring internet bandwidth from China has been completed.

The commercial operation of the Nepal- China optical fibre link will begin from Friday, said Prativa Baidhya, spokesperson for NT.

However, NT did not disclose the actual volume of Chinese internet bandwidth that Nepal will receive.

The details will be made public after a formal inauguration tomorrow, she added.

In December 2016, NT had reached an agreement with China Telecom to acquire internet bandwidth. NT had begun the test transmission of the project from the first week of September last year.

With successful test transmission, Nepal will now be commercially connected with Chinese bandwidth, according to the official.

Chinese internet will be supplied via Rasuwagadhi gateway, according to sources at NT.

As the use of Internet has been increasing rapidly in the country, Chinese internet bandwidth is taken as an alternative source for Nepal to meet the ever-increasing bandwidth demand, she said.

The commercial operation of the Chinese bandwidth project will end Nepal’s sole dependence on India for internet bandwidth.

Nepal is currently linked to the global internet connectivity through Indian telecom operators via different optical fibre connections in Biratnagar, Bhairahawa and Birgunj, among others, the Himalayan Times reported.

Besides ending the monopoly of bandwidth supply, the Chinese Internet gateway is also expected to facilitate service providers in Nepal to establish bandwidth connection with other countries via China.

Though NT is purchasing limited volume of the Internet from China in the first phase, the company will increase the volume of Chinese internet gradually in the coming days.

Apple, Android or Windows: Why smartphones, laptops face ‘hacking’ risks

Less than a week into 2018 and we may have already seen the year’s biggest technology story. Researchers have identified a security flaw in the computer processors made by three of the world’s biggest chip designers, Intel, AMD and ARM, and a second flaw in Intel chips. This means that almost every smartphone, tablet, laptop and business computer in the world could be vulnerable to having sensitive data including passwords stolen. The cloud servers that store websites and other internet data are also at risk.

This is one of the biggest cybersecurity vulnerabilities we’re ever seen in terms of the potential impact to personal, business and infrastructure computer systems. What’s more, because the flaw is located in such a fundamental part of the computer, there’s no way to know whether or not a machine has been targeted and what data might have been accessed.

Both the main flaw (Spectre), and the Intel-only flaw (Meltdown) have been created by a design technique intended to enhance the chips’ performance known as “speculative execution”. The problem means hackers can access parts of the computer’s memory that should be inaccessible. Sensitive data including passwords, email, documents and photos could all be at risk.

Most cyber attacks involve finding a flaw in a computer’s software that allows hackers to access the machine’s memory or operating system. For example, in 2017 an attack known as “WannaCry” exploited a flaw in older versions of Windows. It affected around 300,000 computers in 150 countries and had a devastating effect on businesses and organisations including the UK’s National Health Service (NHS).

But the Spectre and Meltdown flaws could let hackers cut through all the layers of software to violate the very heart of a computer, the processor chip that powers its fundamental workings. Because similar designs are used by all the major chip makers, almost every computer in the world could be affected, from Apple iPhones and Android devices, to MacBooks, large desktop PCs and internet servers.

The process is also so fundamental that it doesn’t create any log of its operations, meaning there is no record of whether a particular chip has been hacked or not. This makes it harder to spot cyber attacks at an early stage in order to prevent them happening again, or to investigate what data might have been accessed or stolen.

Luckily, tech companies have already begun releasing software patches that they say will solve the problems without a significant impact on performance. But some have claimed any fix could dramatically slow down computer processing speed. We will have to wait to see the long-term impact.

Responsible disclosure

The story also raises an important issue about the responsible disclosure of such security flaws. Reports suggest the industry has known of the problem for months but only limited details have been disclosed so far. You could argue that consumers have the right to know about such flaws as soon as they are discovered so they can try to protect their data. Of course, the problem is this could end up fuelling cyber attacks by also making hackers aware of the flaw.

In the past, this debate has forced tech companies to use the law to prevent researchers disclosing security problems. For example, scientists from the University of Birmingham faced a legal injunction from car manufacturer Volkswagen stopping them publishing details of flaws in car keyless entry systems.

The preferred route is “responsible disclosure”. When researchers discover a problem, they tell a small number of relevant people who can then work on a solution. The manufacturer can then reveal the problem to the public once the solution is ready, minimising the potential for hacking and damage to the company’s share price.

In this case, a researcher at Google who found the flaws seems to have alerted Intel in June 2017, and the two companies had been planning on announcing a fix. But details of the flaw were then published by technology website The Register, forcing the firms to reveal what they knew earlier than planned, and hitting Intel’s share price. While this kind of revelation arguably undermines responsible disclosure, the counter argument is that it forces manufacturers to fix the problem faster.

FB wants your nude photos to prevent ‘revenge porn’: Why it raises doubts

Facebook’s latest attempt to tackle the non-consensual sharing of sexual pictures (often known as “revenge porn”) appeared so wrong-headed that at first, it seemed like a joke. But the social network has made clear its system of asking users to send in explicit images that they don’t want to appear on the site is a real pilot programme being tested in Australia.

Facebook’s motivation is right and proper: to help women (and men) worried that their ex-partners may shame or manipulate them by uploading sexual images taken during the relationship. This unwanted sharing can have devastating consequences. Even the threat that the images could be shared can be used by controlling, violent abusers to force their victims into line, as has been recognized by a new Scottish law to criminalize this.

To prevent people falling victim to this practice, users are urged to use Facebook’s Messenger app to send themselves any pictures at risk of being shared. Facebook will then “hash” the image, creating a numerical fingerprint of it. The picture itself can then be deleted and Facebook has said images will not be stored permanently on their servers. When another Facebook user uploads a picture, it will be run through the database of hashes. If it matches an image in the database, it will be blocked and cannot be posted or shared on Facebook.

Would this work? If a picture uploaded by a vengeful ex is identical to the one uploaded by their frightened victim then yes, it will be blocked. But there is nothing to stop the ex-uploading it to another site and linking to it on Facebook, even if it wouldn’t appear on Facebook itself.

But what if the ex-realizes why they have been blocked and changes the picture slightly? Hashes work for identical pictures. Alex Stamos, chief security officer for Facebook, said that simple changes like re-sizing should not fool the hash. It’s not clear whether cropping it, adding a filter or scribbling on the background will create a different hash that will fail to match.

And failure isn’t the only problem. What if sharing the images on Facebook actually makes it more likely that they will become public?

The security implications surrounding this are significant. First, just sending an image is a risk. The user is creating a copy of the photo that could be hacked or intercepted, especially if their phone or computer is stolen. Then there is the possibility of human error by the user. It seems likely at least some people will accidentally send the images to someone else in their contact list instead of to themselves.

Finally, there is the enormous issue of how far we can trust Facebook and its staff. This is a small pilot and is likely to be run to tight standards. But further issues will likely appear if it is scaled up. In order to create a hash, the picture has to be seen by a member of Facebook’s staff. Antigone Davis, Facebook’s global head of safety, says the images will only be seen by “a specially trained representative from our community operations team”. Doubtless in the pilot, these people will be well vetted.

But if this was to be rolled out to Facebook’s billion-strong community of users, this team would have to be enormously expanded. The mind-bending work of ill-paid, ill-trained and replaceable community moderators has been well documented. These people, tempted by the idea of a first-rung on a career as a fashionable company, can be traumatized by the endless viewing of horrific pictures of animal cruelty, car crashes, and sexual violence, and often burn out within months.

Can Facebook guarantee that these photos, trustingly uploaded by desperate people trying to break free from damaging relationships, will only be seen by responsible staff? Or will they, over time, be farmed out to subcontractors, trainees and people who are themselves damaged by constant exposure to violence and sex online. However good Facebook’s own security is, there would be little to stop a disgruntled, bored or malicious employee simply taking pictures of their screen with their phone and uploading them to another site.

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Then there is the corporation itself. The company has a long history of controversial changes to its terms and conditions, including how they use and retain users’ data, even after people have quit the platform. They have fought court cases brought by revenge porn victims who feel failed by the system, in one case by a British 14-year-old.

This is a well-meaning initiative, but it’s just not clear that we can trust this commercial organization to make the right decisions about how they hold this most sensitive data. Stamos has complained that the company gets criticised for imperfect solutions. It’s true that partial solutions are better than none, and that pre-emptive solution is better than clean-ups when the damage is done. But this is a solution that carries its own risk.

Agriculture no longer main rural income source

Non-farm activities, not agriculture, generated more than two-thirds of the income in rural areas. But this hasn’t translated into a significant rise in employment opportunities in these areas or bridged disparities in worker productivity, a discussion paper floated by agriculture economist and NITI Aayog member Ramesh Chand said.

The paper, released on Wednesday, found that in the four decades from 1970-71 to 2011-12, rural output increased almost seven times (at constant prices) and the rural economy turned more non-agricultural, with the share of agriculture in rural income reduced to 39 percent. But rural employment did not even double during this period.

“In fact, employment growth decelerated over time and reached a negative range after 2004-05,” the paper, Changing Structure of Rural Economy of India, Implications for Employment and Growth, said.

More than half the value added in the manufacturing sector in India was contributed by rural areas, it said.

The paper said there was de-feminization of the rural workforce between 2004-05 and 2011-12 as women workers withdrew from agriculture in large numbers. Most women workers who withdrew from farm work and stayed back at home belonged to agricultural labor households, whose economic conditions are usually not good. “Clearly, women in agricultural labor households do not prefer to go for farm work,” the report said.

Workers moving out of agriculture to the rural labor force were largely getting absorbed in construction activities, it added. The report said lack of required skills and technical knowledge were the main barrier for rural workers wanting to enter manufacturing.

It said the services sector has played a major role in the structural transformation of the economy but its achievements during the recent years were mainly concentrated in urban areas. In rural areas, this sector witnessed a deceleration in output as well as employment after 2004-05.

Citing a United Nations report, the paper observed that population projections indicated India would continue to be predominantly rural till 2050, after which urban population was estimated to overtake rural population.

Vodafone, Idea to sell their tower biz to ATC for Rs 7,850 crore

Telecom majors Vodafone India and Idea Cellular have agreed to sell their respective tower businesses in India to ATC Telecom Infrastructure Private (ATC TIPL) for Rs 7850 crore or $1.2 billion. The two operators have about 20,000 towers.

Vodafone and Idea are in the process of merging operations to create the largest mobile operator in the country.

While Idea Cellular would get Rs 4,000 crore, Vodafone would get Rs 3,850 crore if the tower deal goes through prior to their merger. 

The purchase would give ATC, which operates almost 150,000 communications sites globally, an additional 20,000 towers in a country with more than 1 billion mobile-phone subscribers.

The standalone tower businesses of Vodafone India and Idea are pan-Indian passive telecommunication infrastructure businesses, comprising a combined portfolio of approximately 20,000 towers with a combined tenancy ratio of 1.65x as at June 30, 2017,” said a joint statement from Idea and Vodafone.

“Both Vodafone India and Idea as customers, and ATC as a mobile network infrastructure provider have agreed to treat each other as long-term preferred partners, subject to existing arrangements. The parties will work together to further the expansion of high-speed mobile networks in India,” it added.

Idea on Monday reported a consolidated net loss of Rs 1,106.8 crore for the second quarter of the current fiscal.

 It was decided that post-merger Vodafone India will own 45.1% of the merged entity after it transfers about 4.9% to promoters of Idea and/or their affiliates for Rs3,874 crore.

The agreement is expected to be completed during the first half of 2018.

Earlier this year, Vodafone India and Idea had agreed to merge their operations to create the country’s largest telecom operator worth of more than $23 billion with a 35 per cent market share.

The combined entity of Vodafone India and Idea Cellular, which are currently India’s number 2 and 3, respectively, would dislodge Bharti Airtel to counter the bruising price war in the worlds second-largest telecom market.

Delhi smog: Decision on odd-even today, air quality severe as schools reopen

The Delhi government on Saturday put on hold the odd-even traffic rationing system from Monday saying it would approach the National Green Tribunal (NGT) and request that women drivers and two-wheelers be exempted, hours after the green court okayed the scheme but with only emergency vehicles exempted, in a major move to curb rising pollution.

According to Safar (System of Air Quality and Weather Forecasting And Research), Delhi’s air quality stood at “severe” on Monday, with PM10 readings at 645 microgrammes per cubic meter and PM2.5 at 416 microgrammes per cubic meter. Tuesday’s forecast for the city also remains severe, although with a dip in PM10 and PM2.5 particle readings. Three days from now, Safar forecasts the air quality in the capital to be “very poor”. 

Delhi meanwhile continued to wrestle with toxic air on Saturday as the level of pollutants were in the severe category for the fifth successive day. The US-based passenger carrier United Airlines temporarily suspended its Newark-IGI airport flights due to concerns over poor air quality in New Delhi.

Also Read: Escaping the gas chamber: Helpless residents now start Quit Delhi campaign

Earlier in the day, the NGT gave the go-ahead to the odd-even scheme from November 13-17 and said there will be no exemptions for women, two-wheelers, and government vehicles.

After the NGT order, the Delhi government said it will approach the top green court again on Monday and request that exemptions be given for women drivers and two-wheelers, and subject to its decision, the government will “consider implementing it again”.

Delhi government had decided to implement the odd-even scheme for five days from November 13 to 17.

The NGT, in its order, also said that in future the odd-even scheme should automatically come into force if the PM2.5 and PM10, particles in the air with a diameter less than 2.5 and 10mm respectively, go above the 300 and 500 units for 48 hours.

The tribunal directed that odd-even should be implemented “right away” without waiting for 48 hours, in case PM2.5 and PM10 go beyond 400 and 700 units respectively.

The NGT also asked the city government to reconsider the four-times hike in the parking fee.

“The odd-even will go on. No exemption of any kind to anyone, including two-wheelers, women, public officers or politicians, except essential services,” NGT chairperson Justice Swatanter Kumar said on Saturday.

He said only CNG vehicles, emergency services such as ambulance and fire, and vehicles carrying waste shall be exempted.

The Tribunal disapproved all the exemptions that were given by the city government during the previous two phases of odd-even in January and April 2016. The exemptions were given to women, two-wheelers, vehicles carrying children in school uniforms and VVIPs.

The odd-even traffic plan is among the remedies that have to come into force in accordance with the Graded Response Action Plan (GRAP) to deal with air pollution.

After NGT’s order, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal held a meeting and decided not to go ahead with the third phase without exemptions, pointing to concerns over “women security” and “insufficient public transport”.

“At the moment we are calling it off. We will again approach the NGT and will ask them to allow exemptions to women and two-wheelers,” Delhi Transport Minister Kailash Gahlot said here.

“This government gives the highest priority to the safety and security of women.”

“Further, this government feels that considering the large number of two-wheelers in Delhi, unless an adequate number of buses are available, implementation of odd-even will cause great hardship to such persons. This is not feasible to arrange such a large number of buses at this stage,” a Delhi government statement said.

Also Read: Delhi smog hits railways: 69 trains delayed, 22 rescheduled, 8 canceled

The NGT’s order came a day after it questioned the efficacy of the odd-even scheme and sought details about the earlier implementation.

On Saturday, the air quality in Delhi-NCR region showed slight improvement towards the afternoon but the pollution levels shot up again later.

Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) recorded that Delhi’s average AQI at 7 p.m. was 445 (on a scale of 0 to 500) while the PM2.5 hovered around 442 units, considered “severe”.

Ghaziabad was the most polluted region in NCR region AQI of 497 at 7 p.m. while PM2.5 reached a dangerous 945 units — 37 times the safe limit.

The average AQI in Delhi-NCR combined was 442 with PM2.5 recorded at 440 units.

“There has been some improvement. We are hoping it would get better tomorrow (Sunday),” Environment Pollution Control Authority (EPCA) chairperson Bhure Lal told IANS.

According to System of Air Quality and Weather Forecasting And Research (SAFAR), Delhi’s air is set to improve from ‘severe’ to ‘very poor’ on Sunday.

India Meteorological Department (IMD) has also predicted rains in Delhi on November 13 and 14. This, say, experts, will help in markedly improving the air quality of Delhi-NCR.

Environment Minister Harsh Vardhan asked residents of the national capital not to panic and said air quality has been improving over the last two days.

Twitter expands character limit to 280 for users

Twitter on Wednesday said that users can use 280 characters now — instead of the earlier limit of 140 characters — to express their views on the platform.

For India and the Indian diaspora, the update will apply to the six regional languages supported on the platform — Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi and Tamil, Twitter said.

This is part of Twitter’s move to allow most of its users to tweet using 280 characters.

Japanese, Korean, and Chinese will continue to have 140 characters because cramming is not an issue in these languages, Twitter said in a blog post.

Twitter had 330 million monthly users at the end of September 2017 quarter. It does not divulge country-specific numbers.

In September, Twitter launched a test that expanded the 140-character limit.

“Twitter saw when people needed to use more than 140 characters, they Tweeted more easily and more often,” Twitter Product Manager Aliza Rosen said in the blogpost. She added that Twitter is making this change after listening and observing a problem its global community was facing in terms of tweeting.

It’s out: WhatsApp officially rolls out ‘Delete for Everyone’ feature

WhatsApp on Tuesday announced it has officially rolled out its most anticipated feature ‘Delete for Everyone’ that allows its over one billion users revoke their messages in case they sent those to a wrong person or a group.

“Starting today you can now delete messages you sent by mistake a” whether to one person or an entire group,” WhatsApp said in a statement.

Here’s how it works.

Tap and hold on the message, choose “Delete,” and then “Delete for everyone.”

You have seven minutes to delete the message after it’s sent.

This feature is rolling out for users around the world on the latest versions of iPhone, Android, Windows Phone as well as desktop.

“Both you and the message recipient must be using the latest version of WhatsApp for the message to be successfully deleted,” WhatsApp said.

WhatsApp was working on this feature for almost a year.

You can now delete messages for everyone or just for yourself.

Also Read : Recalling sent messages: How Whatsapp ‘Delete for All’ feature works

“Deleting messages for everyone allows you to delete specific messages you have sent to either a group or an individual chat. This is particularly useful if you sent a message to the wrong chat or if the message you sent contains a mistake,” WhatsApp said in its FAQ.

Messages you successfully delete for everyone will be replaced with “This message was deleted” in your recipients’ chats.

Similarly, if you see “This message was deleted” in a chat, it means that the sender deleted their message for everyone.

WhatsApp has over 200 million monthly active users in India and 1.2 billion users worldwide.

Alert! Your Android phone shares activity info with Google, apps: Report

An Android-based smartphone can reveal a user’s physical activities to Google and other apps installed on the phone, according to the Independent.

The activity information is monitored, processed and disclosed by hosts of sensors inside the mobile device. This information is then accessed by ‘Activity Recognition’ permission incorporated in Android devices that in a fraction of seconds concludes the type of activity, the report said.

For example, if you are walking from the metro station to office, the Activity Recognition permission gets information from location sensor, gyroscope, proximity and other sensors to locate your real-time location and understand the kind of activity i.e. walk, and based on the computations it reveals the estimated time to the user on their screen.

“The Activity Recognition API is built on top of the sensors available in a device,” the Independent quoted Google as saying.

“The Activity Recognition API automatically detects activities by periodically reading short bursts of sensor data and processing them using machine learning models,” the report added.

“Device sensors provide insights into what users are currently doing. However, with dozens of signals from multiple sensors and slight variations in how people do things, detecting what users are doing is not easy,” the report further added.

The Activity Recognition processes the information collected from sensors to understand activity. For each activity, the API automatically rates the likelihood out of 100 and higher the number, the better is the chance that you are actually doing that activity.

This information is then shared with phone apps. The Activity Recognition permission is usually found hidden under ‘Other’ permissions and, therefore, goes unnoticed by users.

There is no way to disable the API but permissions can be accessed for each app by going to the app setting. Any app using the Activity Recognition permissions can be disabled if you do not want that particular app to know your activity details.

OnePlus 5T leak hints slim bezels, 18:9 screen: Here’s speculations roundup

China-based smartphone maker OnePlus is reportedly working on the next iteration of its current year flagship OnePlus 5. Dubbed as ‘OnePlus 5T’, the upcoming smartphone’s image render has been leaked by Evan Blass on Twitter.

In a photo post uploaded on Twitter by Evan Blass, a famous tipster known for sharing inside information in the technology space, the upper front side of the still unconfirmed OnePlus 5T is revealed. Based on the image, it can be assumed that the phone will sport super slim bezels on sides and marginally slim bezels on top compared to its predecessor.

Based on earlier reports, the OnePlus 5T is also believed to sport a big 6-inch Optic AMOLED screen in 18:9 aspect ratio format with FHD+ resolution. Just like other smartphones with ultra-wide screens, the OnePlus 5T is reported to sport a fingerprint scanner on the back that will allow the phone to accommodate a big screen on the front with small bezels.

Recently, an online technology information portal, Android Authority, released OnePlus 5T’s purported picture render that showed the phone from an angle revealing the almost similar build but with a new widescreen and no fingerprint scanner on the front.

The smartphone’s benchmark report on Antutu hints at the specification of the upcoming device. According to the benchmark report, the OnePlus 5T might not see major changes under the hood and is reported to run on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor, coupled with 8 GB RAM and 128 GB internal storage. However, the report also hints that the new phone would sport an upgraded dual camera set-up with 20-megapixel lenses powering both the sensors this time, instead of the 20+16 MP setup that was there in OnePlus 5. Also, with a 6-inch screen in 18:9 aspect ratio, the resolution will take a bump to FHD+ and the phone will house a bigger battery than its predecessor. 

OnePlus CEO Pete Lau on October 25 tweeted an image of the soon-to-be-launched OnePlus 5T. Before the launch of OnePlus 5 also, the company’s CEO used the same trick to highlight the imaging prowess of the smartphone’s camera.

The upcoming smartphone is believed to carry a $549 price tag, according to third-party e-store Oppomart. The store listed OnePlus 5T on its portal and also put it on pre-orders with shipping date marked as end of November.