TECHNOLOGY

Kenya will use Alphabet Inc’s system of balloons to beam high-speed Internet access in hopes of connecting more of its rural population to the web, its ICT minister said. Known as Project Loon, the technology was developed by Alphabet’s X, the company’s innovation lab. It was used by U.S. telecom operators to provide connectivity to more than 250,000 people in Puerto Rico ...

Google has secured several of the UK’s largest recruitment services for a local version of its jobs-hunting tool. Reed, Guardian Jobs, Haymarket and Totaljobs.com are among those providing listings, in addition to global sites such as LinkedIn and Glassdoor. The facility automatically shows the “freshest and most relevant” openings based on a user’s location when they type relevant terms into Google ...

Sophia, the famous humanoid robot, has finally met Ethiopia’s prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, after her lost body parts were found. A bag containing some parts of the robot was lost at Frankfurt airport last week, leading to the cancellation of a press conference scheduled to take place on Friday at the Ethiopian National Museum and dinner with Abiy on the same day. ...

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is now worth $150bn (£113bn), according to the Bloomberg Billionaire Index. Jeff Bezos’s net worth has increased by over $60bn in the last 12 months, which makes him the world’s richest man. This places his worth higher than that of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, who has previously topped the rich lists – even at his peak ...

Graphic videos showing children being abused remain on Facebook despite numerous requests to have them removed, an undercover film has suggested. Moderators also do not remove posts that violate hate speech and routinely ignore posts from children who may be under-age. The allegations are made in a Channel 4 Dispatches documentary. Facebook said mistakes had been made and the staff ...

Nissan has admitted that it has uncovered falsified data from car exhaust emissions tests at most of its Japanese factories. The firm did not disclose how many cars were involved, but said emissions and fuel economy tests had “deviated from the prescribed testing environment”. The carmaker added that inspection reports had been “based on altered measurement values”. Nissan pledged there ...

THE POOR MOBILE NETWORK SERVICES IN ASSIN SOUTH COMMUNITIES, A HUMBLE CALL TO RENOWNED POLITICIANS TO GIVE BACK TO SOCIETY. As an avid writer, I do the very best I know how – the very best I can; and I mean to keep on doing so until the end. That’s my activism. My constituency deserves the best. The youths can ...

Uganda’s major telecom operators, including the local division of South Africa’s MTNGroup, said they will ask customers to pay a new government tax on social media accounts before they can access them. Last month, Uganda’s parliament passed new laws that introduced a new tax on use of so called Over The Top (OTT) services: communications platforms offered over the traditional telecom ...

Sophia, the famous artificial intelligence (AI) humanoid robot, arrived in Ethiopia on Friday, but was unable to have a scheduled dinner with the prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, after a bag containing some of her parts went missing at the Frankfurt Airport, en route to Addis Ababa. Designed by Hong Kong firm Hanson Robotics, Sophia has been programmed to speak Amharic, ...

Rwanda unveiled its first locally built car at Volkswagen’s new factory in the capital, Kigali, on Wednesday. The Polo is the first model being made at the site and the German automaker plans to reach annual production of 5,000 cars in the first phase, by also building its Passat, Tiguan, Amarok and Teramont models. Volkswagen, which is Europe’s biggest carmaker, ...