Micro max Canvas Blaze 4 G+ smartphone listed online

HIGHLIGHTS

Micro max Canvas Blaze 4 G+ has a 4.5-inch display, Android 5.1 OS, 1 GHz quad-core processor, 1 GB RAM, 8 GB internal storage, 32 GB micro SD card support, 8 M rear camera, 2 MP front camera, 1,750 m Ah battery

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Micro max has listed its Canvas Blaze 4 G+ budget smartphone on its official website, adding another 4 G-enabled handset to its portfolio. However, the company has not revealed the price of the new device yet.
The all-new Micro max Canvas Blaze 4 G+ has a 4.5-inch PIS display with 480 x 854 p resolution and runs on Android 5.1 Lollipop operating system. The device packs a 1 GHz quad-core Mediate MT 6735 M processor with 1 GB RAM under the hood and comes with 8 GB internal storage and up to 32 GB micro SD card support.

On the back, Micro max Canvas Blaze 4 G+ sports an 8 MP camera, while a 2 MP camera is placed in front. The smartphone supports Cat 4 LITE download speeds. The smartphone's 1,750 m Ah battery delivers talk time of up to 5 hours, according to the official website.
Micro max has added keyboards with support for regional languages, First Touch menu for access to commonly-used apps, and an 'App Bazaar' to download apps in local languages.

Fighter kite

Fighter kites are kites used for the sport of kite fighting. Traditionally most are small, unstable single line flat kites where line tension alone is used for control, and an abrasive line is used to cut down other kites.

Kite fighting is done in many countries, but is particularly associated with Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Vietnam, Korea, Thailand, and the slums of Brazil.

Kite fighting

Fighter kite

When the kite is flown with the line taut, the kite is deformed by the wind pressure, giving it a degree of stability. When the line tension is reduced, either by letting out more line or by the flyer moving into wind, the kite will begin to become unstable and begin to rock from side to side, or in extreme cases even spin. By reapplying tension at the right moment, the kite will move in the direction that the flyer requires.

Although a spool that allows rapid winding and release of line is used, often the flyer will fly the kite by holding the line itself, with one or more assistants to help manage the slack line between the flyer and the spool.

Materials

In most traditional fighter kite manufacture, the skins of kites are made from a lightweight thin paper and the spars are usually made from a lightweight and flexible wood, usually bamboo.

In modern American fighters, the kite skins are made from a variety of synthetic materials – mylar, aircraft insulation , nylon, and polyester sheeting. The spine may still be bamboo, but often along with the bow is constructed of fiberglass or carbon fiber

Facebook investigated over market-power abuse claims

The country's federal cartel office suspects the social network's privacy terms violate data protection laws.It is looking into whether Facebook's "dominance" means those terms also constituted an abuse of market power. The formal probe is the first of its kind the social network has faced.

Facebook said it was confident it complied with the law."Dominant companies are subject to special obligations," said Andreas Mundt, the president of the 

cartel office."These include the use of adequate terms of service as far as these are relevant to the market.

"For advertising-financed internet services such as Facebook, user data are hugely important.

"For this reason, it is essential to also examine under the aspect of abuse of market power whether the consumers are sufficiently informed about the type and extent of data collected."His investigation would focus on Facebook's US operation, as well as its German and Irish subsidiaries, the cartel office said in a statement released on Wednesday.

It said Facebook was dominant in the social media market and relied on advertising revenues generated on the basis of a "large amount of personal user data".And users had to agree to this collection of data as a condition of their being able to use the network.

"It is difficult for users to understand and assess the scope of the agreement accepted by them," it said.

"There is considerable doubt as to the admissibility of this procedure, in particular under applicable national data protection law."If there is a connection between such an infringement and market dominance, this could also constitute an abusive practice under competition law."

A Facebook representative said: "We are confident that we comply with the law, and we look forward to working with the Federal Cartel Office to answer their questions."

The German authorities are working in "close contact" with the European Commission, the competition authorities of the other EU member states and data and consumer protection officers.

European Commission spokesman Ricardo Cardoso said the EU executive shared the view of the German cartel office that the mere infringement of data protection rules by a dominant company did not automatically amount to a competition violation.

"However, it cannot be excluded that a behaviour that violates data protection rules could also be relevant when investigating a possible violation of EU competition rules," he added, while declining specific comment on the new case.

Speaking in Germany in January, the European commissioner for competition Margrethe Vestager said her agency was taking a harder look at whether the collection of vast amounts of consumer data by big internet companies violated competition rules.

Kiddle search engine for children causes controversy

Kiddle was registered in 2014 and is powered by Google safe search but has no connection with the tech giant.Other words blocked by the site include lesbian and gay, a decision which has angered the campaign group Stonewall.Kiddle says search results are "handpicked and checked" by its editors.

Other apparent search anomalies include the blocking of the term circumcision but not of FGM (female genital mutilation), suicide but not self-harm, the actress Pamela Anderson but not Fifty Shades of Grey.Kiddle's parent company is not named on the website but one of its early testers blogged that it was set up by the Russian founder of a site called Freaking News.A form on the site invites users to submit suggested additional key words for blocking.

Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender terms also yield no results because the site "cannot guarantee the safety" of such searches."Young people regularly use the internet to find information on LGBT issues," a Stonewall spokesperson said."Attempting to stop young people finding safe and age-appropriate content of this nature will force many young lesbian, gay, bi and trans people to seek it elsewhere. This can take individuals down inappropriate avenues which might put them at risk.

"Kiddle should rethink its approach to blocking valuable LGBT advice and information."Kiddle told the BBC it had received complaints "from parents and teachers" before the terms were blocked during early tests."Most LGBT sites have forums and user generated content. Even one picture of a half naked man posted as an avatar on such sites (after the site has been vetted) is enough to turn away most parents," the firm said.It added that it had blocked the term "sex education" because of the illustrations contained within many sites hosting such material."What is OK for a child of 12 may not be OK for a child of five," it said.

"Since Kiddle results are either handpicked and checked by our editors or filtered by Google safe search, you know you get kid-oriented results without any explicit content. In case some bad words are present in a search query, our guard robot will block the search," Kiddle states on its website.

Google self-driving car hits a bus

It is not the first time one of Google's famed self-driving cars has been involved in a crash, but it may be the first time it has caused one.Google is to meet with California's Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) to discuss the incident, and determine where the blame lies.

On 14 February the car, travelling at 2mph (3km/h), pulled out in front of a public bus going 15mph (24km/h).

The human in the Google vehicle reported that he assumed the bus would slow down to let the car out, and so he did not override the car's self-driving computer.The crash happened in Mountain View, near Google's headquarters.In a statement, Google said: "We clearly bear some responsibility, because if our car hadn't moved, there wouldn't have been a collision.

"That said, our test driver believed the bus was going to slow or stop to allow us to merge into the traffic, and that there would be sufficient space to do that."The company's self-driving cars have clocked up well over a million miles across various states in the US, and until now have only reported minor "fender benders" - the American slang for a small collision.

In all of those cases, other road users were to blame.

Google releases a monthly report detailing the testing of its self-driving technology.

Ahead of the February report's publication, due Tuesday, a traffic incident filing wasmade public by the DMV.

A setback

"The Google AV [autonomous vehicle] test driver saw the bus approaching in the left side mirror but believed the bus would stop or slow to allow the Google AV to continue," the report read.

"Approximately three seconds later, as the Google AV was re-entering the centre of the lane it made contact with the side of the bus."The Google AV was operating in autonomous mode and travelling at less than two mph, and the bus was travelling at about 15mph at the time of contact."The car's movements were made more complex, the report said, by the presence of sandbags on the road.

Google said it had now refined its self-driving algorithm.

"From now on, our cars will more deeply understand that buses (and other large vehicles) are less likely to yield to us than other types of vehicles, and we hope to handle situations like this more gracefully in the future."If the DMV considers the Google car to be at fault for the collision, it could be seen as a setback for the company's ambitious autonomous vehicle plans.

The bus crash came just four days after a legal breakthrough for the self-driving project - the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration told Google it would likely give the self-driving computer the same legal treatment as a human driver.That decision would pave the way for self-driving cars without any typical controls, such as a steering wheel or pedals.

WhatsApp to end Blackberry OS support

The company said it wanted to focus development "on the mobile platforms the vast majority of people use".Facebook-owned WhatsApp, which is used by a billion people worldwide, will stop working on the named operating systems by December 2016.But it will still work on Blackberry's latest smartphone which runs Android.

Legacy

Most of the operating systems that WhatsApp is dropping support for are legacy operating systems, which are no longer updated or installed on new devices.

The exception is Blackberry 10, which was launched in January 2013 and is still being developed by Blackberry."We are also planning version 10.3.4 for later this year with even more security improvements," the firm said in January 2016.

However, the operating system has failed to gain traction with smartphone users and now accounts for less than 1% of the market.

There had been speculation that the handset-maker would wind down support for Blackberry 10 after it released a smartphone running Android, and closed its "Built for Blackberry" programme for app developers.But the firm has insisted: "We're not abandoning the loyal customers who have contributed to our success."

The full list of operating systems WhatsApp will stop supporting is:

Android 2.1 and Android 2.2

Blackberry OS 7 and earlier

Blackberry 10

Nokia S40

Nokia Symbian S60

Windows Phone 7.1

"While these mobile devices have been an important part of our story, they don't offer the kind of capabilities we need to expand our app's features in the future,"WhatsApp said in a blogpost.

"When we started WhatsApp in 2009... about 70 percent of smartphones sold at the time had operating systems offered by BlackBerry and Nokia."

Baidu apps found to be 'leaking' personal data

Millions of Chinese people are believed to have been affected by the data leaks, said security experts at the University of Toronto.The data reveals where people are, search terms, sites visited and the ID numbers of devices they own.

Baidu said it had tackled the problems with the insecure computer code.

'Shoddy design'

The code is found in a software development kit that can be used to create apps for Android phones and programs for Windows.Baidu itself used it to make web browsers for Android and Windows and many other firms have used the kit too.Apps and browsers made using the Baidu kit have been downloaded hundreds of millions of times, said researchers at Toronto's Citizen Lab in the report. As part of a long-running research project, the Lab has focussed on privacy and personal data use in China. Last year the team found shortcomings in the Alibaba browser.

The latest report found several security and privacy shortcomings in the Baidu code.Some data, including GPS coordinates and search terms, is sent in plain text.In addition, the protections added to other forms of information, such as unique device IDs, could easily be broken.Poor protection of apps made with the kit also made users "susceptible" to fake updates that could give an attacker access to a phone or a Windows computer.

"The transmission of personal data without properly implemented encryption can expose a user's data to surveillance," said the authors in their report.Worryingly, they added, users would have no warning that the data was being transmitted or gathered."The leakage of such user data is particularly problematic for individuals who use these applications and their devices to engage in politically sensitive communications," said the report."It's either shoddy design or it's surveillance by design," Ron Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab, told Reuters.Fixed?Citizen Lab said that Baidu had fixed some of the bugs in the code since it had first been told about them in November last year.

However, it added, the poor encryption scheme was still being used on sensitive data.Baidu said it was collecting the data about users for commercial purposes. Occasionally, it said, it shared the data with partners.It added that the information was not handed over wholesale to the Chinese authorities.

It said it "only provides what data is lawfully requested by duly constituted law enforcement agencies".