The Head of Payment Systems at the Central Bank of Egypt (CBE), Ehab Nasr, said the CBE works within a large team in the government regarding digital transformation under the umbrella of the National Council of Payments. “The bank works within a general framework to produce a national payment card Meza card . We aim to increase the number of this card s users to about 20 million over the next two years, and provide 1m acceptance points within three years,” Nasr told Daily News Egypt.

A group of young Japanese snap selfies as they knock back a few drinks on a Friday night. But the backdrop to their photos is a mechanical claw stuffed with trash. They have chosen one of the more unusual spots in Tokyo for an after-work tipple: a local waste facility and incinerator.

A newly discovered FaceTime bug lets people hear and even see those they are reaching out to on iPhones even if the other person hasn’t answered their phone. When a phone number is dialed on FaceTime — the iPhone’s internet-based voice and video calling feature — the caller can swipe up from the bottom of the screen and tap an option to add a person, according to video demonstrations.

Huawei officially launched its 5G multi-mode chipset Balong 5000 , along with the first commercial 5G device powered by the company, the Huawei 5G CPE Pro. Together, these two new products are considered to have the world s fastest wireless connections, as the Chinese state-owned company seeks to outpace its competitors in the 5G race. The Balong 5000 chipset supports a broad range of 5G products in addition to smartphones, including home broadband devices, vehicle-mounted devices, and 5G modules. Adopting the new Wi-Fi 6 technology, the Huawei 5G CPE Pro delivers speeds of up to 4.8 gigabits per second (Gbps).

Researchers at 360 s Threat Intelligence Centre (360 TIC) identified attacks carried out by a group called DarkHydrus advanced persistent threat (APT), against targets in the Middle East of political value, luring them with Excel documents laced with malicious VBA code (macro). Macro are disabled by default in the Microsoft Office suite for security reasons, and they do not run unless the user enables the feature manually, but the written-in-Arabic Excel documents created by the DarkHydrus group enable macro, then the group do several additional steps to drop a backdoo

Amazon announced that customers in Egypt can currently purchase e-reader Kindle devices as they are now available on the online retail and marketplace souq.com. The Kindle comes in two models, Kindle, and Kindle Oasis-which is the advanced version of Amazon s e-reader devices.

Space debris is a bit like space itself: We know it s up there, but beyond that there s so much we know we don t know. The statistics are fun, though, if a little misleading. It s a bit of a safari crunching the numbers, but here goes. Since 1957, the year the Soviet Union sent Sputnik into space, there have been 4,900 space launches. So far so good.

The Chinese giant, Huawei, will introduce its MateBook X Pro laptop into Egyptian market, as the tech firm is seeking to rule out Apple s MacBook Pro from the market. The laptop has a 14in screen squeezed into a 12in laptop frame, a discrete graphics processing unit (GPU), and a camera which pops up from beneath the keyboard. The new thin and light laptop follows Huawei s 2017 MateBook X, and looks strikingly familiar to Apple s top-of-the-line notebook. With an aluminum body, the company has improved the notebook s features, which impressed the audience in the Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2018, where the laptop was officially released.

Pristol Braille Technology, a British tech company, plans to launch a new e-reader for the visually impaired people that would enhance their reading experience and spare them from lugging around hefty Braille books. The device, called Canute 360, will be available for customers by the end of the year, Bristol announced. The device is a desktop e-reader which will support all six-dot Braille codes, and will include 360 cells, and three page-navigation buttons. It was originally developed for educational purposes.

Here comes a total lunar eclipse and supermoon, all wrapped into one. The moon, Earth and sun will line up this weekend for the only total lunar eclipse this year and next. At the same time, the moon will be ever so closer to Earth and appear slightly bigger and brighter than usual _ a supermoon. "This one is particularly good," said Rice University astrophysicist Patrick Hartigan. "It not only is a supermoon and its a total eclipse, but the total eclipse also lasts pretty long. Its about an hour."

LG Electronics announced its strategy for 2019 which focuses on customer satisfaction, especially the after-sales service which is a key factor for buyers of electronic devices in Egypt, as LG is looking forward to acquiring a larger market share. LG will also invest $15m in Egypt, the most populated Arab country with millions of customers. The company s investments in Egypt are estimated at $240m. In 2018, LG Egypt exports reached about $200m.

Farmers find it difficult to recognise signs of crop diseases quickly enough to protect the crops. Recently in Tanzania some farmers started to use a device directly in the field to find viruses before they spread. The device is invented by a British technology company called Oxford Nanopore, and it analyses the DNA from plants, identifing the information of viruses DNA in the infected plants, making it easier for farmers to change to more resistant crops for common viruses in their area.

In the latest example that internet dominance is as fragile as an eggshell, a photo of a regular egg dethroned Kylie Jenner s birth-announcement post and became the most liked photo ever on Instagram with a new record of more than 26 million likes. The photo of the egg was posted to an account called @world_record_egg on 4 January, with caption says Let s set a world record together and get the most liked post on Instagram. Beating the current world record held by Kylie Jenner! We got this.

The world s oceans are heating up at an accelerating pace as global warming threatens a diverse range of marine life and a major food supply for the planet, researchers said Thursday. The findings in the US journal Science, led by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, debunk previous reports that suggested a so-called pause in global warming in recent years.

Egypt ranks towards the bottom of a list of countries for Internet connection quality and speed, according to tests carried out by Speedtest, Akamai Technologies and OpenSignal, the three top agencies measuring Internet quality, with some results showing Internet speeds in Egypt to be slowing down. This is in spite of increases in the number of Internet subscribers and the launch of infrastructure projects to raise Internet quality. The results come at a time when the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology has announced its readiness to provide 5G Internet services in the country.

Per Gartner, the world s leading information technology research and advisory company, estimates that cybercrime is expected to cost the world $6tn by 2021, and corporations are spending more money each year on security products and applications, related to protecting customer data and proprietary information. In 2019, worldwide spending on information security products and services is forecasted to grow by 8.7% to $124bn. Mega corporations such as Facebook, Under Armour and Marriott had millions of customer records stolen last year, which has caused significant harm to the companies reputation. Moreover, even small businesses were targeted by cybercriminals. In fact, they were the target of half of the attacks.

Abu Dhabi International Airport announced on Monday activating Super-Fi service that will increase internet upload and download speeds for the travelers at the airport. Super-Fi sees upload and download speeds of up to 200mbps per user, among the fastest airport internet services available in the world. The move comes as part of Abu Dhabi Airports commitment to customer experience and digitalisation strategies. The Super-Fi internet access has been installed and tested throughout the airport s three terminals. It will now provide millions of travelers with improved online connectivity.

German authorities on Tuesday said a 20-year-old hacker had confessed to stealing and leaking private data from hundreds of politicians, including Chancellor Angela Merkel, because he was “annoyed” by some of their public statements. The young German, who lives with his parents, was taken into custody after police searched the family home in the western state of Hesse on Sunday.

A Chinese lunar rover landed on the far side of the moon on Thursday, in a global first that boosts Beijing’s ambitions to become a space superpower. The Chang’e-4 probe touched down and sent a photo of the so-called “dark side” of the moon to the Queqiao satellite, which will relay communications to controllers on Earth, China’s national space agency said on its website.

Half of the factories in the industrial cities are “air polluting,” Egypt’s Ministry of Environment said on Sunday, adding that 20 percent of the vehicles whose emissions have been measured are “violators,” as well as 59 percent of the public buses belonging to the Public Transport Authority (PTA). The Ministry of Environment has received about 6,200 complaints of water pollution in various governorates, it said in a report, adding that it is working on controlling air and water pollution, with some plans and procedures having already been implemented.

2018 was a year full of news reports about exposing users personal information of big names in technology industries, either through hackers or third-party developers like what happened in Cambridge Analyticas case, in which the political consulting firm harvested profile information of over 50 million Facebook users. The big tech companies usually have legal agreements to enable users to use their service, most people do not read them however. During Mark Zuckerbergs testimony before Congress over the Cambridge Analyticas scandal, one of the representatives had a printed copy of Facebooks agreement terms to use the service—it was pretty thick. Here is a simple explanation of the information that big tech firms usually collect.