Families At Risk From Poor Security On Kids’ Mobile Devices Warns McAfee

Forbes

Families and children are at risk from the poorer security on kids’ mobile devices than the protections on their parents’ warns cybersecurity software vendor McAfee in a new report.

“Children’s mobile devices are less protected globally. While the majority of parents (56 percent) use passwords to protect mobile devices, only 41% of children and teens do, creating safety risks,” McAfee cautioned.

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Explainer: Why Europe’s mobile telecom market is ripe for consolidation

Reuters

STOCKHOLM/MILAN, Feb 24 (Reuters) – Talk of consolidation among European mobile carriers has grown louder with several executives voicing support as cut-throat price wars drive up debt and limit funds for 5G network upgrades.

While Spain’s Telefonica (TEF.MC) has been raising the topic of mergers for years, it has been joined only recently by the likes of Vodafone (VOD.L) and Norway’s Telenor (TEL.OL). read more

The subject is likely to be high on the agenda when top telecom executives gather later this month at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, with Britain’s Vodafone noting that the need for fast, reliable networks highlighted by the pandemic had helped regulators realise the value of investment.

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Google’s Area 120 debuts Checks, an AI-powered privacy compliance solution for mobile apps

Tech Crunch

A team at Google is today launching a new product for mobile app developers called Checks which leverages AI technology to identify possible privacy and compliance issues within apps, amid a rapidly changing regulatory and policy landscape. The freemium solution will be offered to both Android and iOS app developers of all sizes, who will be able to have their apps analyzed then receive a report with actionable insights about how to address the problems that are found.

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Mark Zuckerberg wants to build a voice assistant that blows Alexa and Siri away

Vox

Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, has shifted its long-term strategy away from its social media apps to focus on the metaverse, a virtual world where people wearing augmented/virtual reality headsets can talk to each others’ avatars, play games, hold meetings, and otherwise engage in social activities.

That’s created a lot of questions, such as what this means for a company that has been focused on social media for nearly two decades, whether Meta will be able to achieve its new goal of building a metaverse future, and what that future will look like for the billions of people who use Meta’s products every day. On Wednesday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed some answers during a keynote speech about the company’s latest developments in AI.

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Almost 100,000 new mobile banking Trojan strains detected in 2021

ZDNet

Researchers have found almost 100,000 new variants of mobile banking Trojans in just a year.

As our digital lives have begun to center more on handsets rather than just desktop PCs, many malware developers have shifted part of their focus to the creation of mobile threats.

Many of the traditional infection routes are still workable — including phishing and the download and execution of suspicious software — but cyberattackers are also known to infiltrate official app stores, including Google Play, to lure handset owners into downloading software that appears to be trustworthy.

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India’s 2nd largest mobile firm Airtel invests in blockchain adtech Aqilliz

Ledger Insights

Today telecoms firm Bharti Airtel which boasts 350 million mobile subscribers, announced a strategic investment in blockchain startup Aqilliz. The adtech was a spinoff of public blockchain Zilliqa, and started with an ad tracking solution.

With Google’s plans to remove cookies from the Chrome web browser, Aqilliz developed a federated learning solution that uses both permissioned and public blockchain to enable advertisers and publishers to share data in a privacy-preserving manner. Airtel intends to use it.

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Google Chrome is killing off its Android Lite Mode

Tech Radar

As the cost of cellular data plans has decreased significantly in recent years, Google has revealed its plans to discontinue its Lite Mode feature in Google Chrome on Android.

First released back in 2014 under the name “Data Saver”, the feature was later rebranded as “Lite Mode” in 2019 and was designed to help those with slow or limited data connections.

When enabled on an Android smartphone, Lite Mode would send some of a user’s web traffic through Google’s own servers before it was downloaded on their device. If pages loaded slowly, the search giant’s servers would simplify them so that less data would be downloaded to a user’s device.

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Africa – Mobile Gaming, Cryptos Fastest Growing Globally

AllAfrica

For the longest time, most African parents have viewed video gaming as a waste of time and resources. As a result, African gamers mainly played on consoles and computers in gaming joints and cyber cafes.

However, in the last five years, the video game market has lucratively shifted as many Africans enjoy the games and even have gaming consoles on their computers at home. The Coronavirus pandemic kept many people locked indoors, and gaming became one of the most preferred activities to kill boredom during the lockdown.

The video game market has also localised the content to the continent, with most characters, languages and assets adopting some African characteristics. The games are hitting home!

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Mobile World Congress 2022: AI and IoT to Take the Spotlight

IoT World Today

Mobile World Congress, the largest mobile tech trade conference in the world, will go on as planned this year despite a still-surging Omicron variant. The Barcelona conference will not see the likes of Lenovo and Sony as several high profile names opted to pull out. However, AWS, Huawei, Nokia, Intel and others are expected to attend. MWC was canceled in 2020 and had a shrunken showing in 2021.

This year’s event runs from Feb. 28 to March 3. It will see a flurry of new product and technology announcements, as well as a new focus on the Metaverse, and the application of advanced AI in telecoms.

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