For whatever reason, working from home has tended to suffer from something of an image problem over the years. Take how "The Simpsons" depicted it back in 1995: Homer bends the rules so he can do his job as a nuclear safety inspector from home but his laziness and the lack of supervision in his living room almost causes a nuclear meltdown at the power plant. Yet while office banter about home workers slacking off has stubbornly persisted, the remarkable technological changes in communications of the last two decades combined with rapidly evolving social attitudes around a so called "work-life balance" have helped make telecommuting a reality for millions of people.

Minister of State for Military Production Mohamed Saeed el-Assar, and President of Cairo University Gaber Nassar inaugurated on Sunday a solar power station with a capacity of 660 kilowatts to feed 13 buildings in the university campus and the building of the Arab Council for Postgraduate Studies.

A court in Switzerland has convicted a man on several counts of defamation after he “liked” libelous comments on the social media platform. The court in Zurich found that the man indirectly endorsed and further distributed the comments by using the ubiquitous Facebook (FB, Tech30) “like” button.

How long has our species been around? New fossils from Morocco push the evidence back by about 100,000 years. The bones, about 300,000 years old, were unearthed thousands of miles from the previous record-holder, found in fossil-rich eastern Africa. The new discovery reveals people from an early stage of our species’ evolution, with a mix of modern and more primitive traits.

Facebook said it wanted to make its social media platform a “hostile environment” for terrorists in a statement issued after attackers killed seven people in London and prompted Prime Minister Theresa May to demand action from internet firms.

Indian mining conglomerate Adani has approved plans for the contentious Carmichael coal mine project in northeast Australia, despite warnings from environmentalists that it will further damage the Great Barrier Reef. “We are still facing activists. But we are committed to this project. We are committed to regional Queensland and we are committed to addressing energy poverty in India,” Chairman Gautam Adani said Tuesday.

Mostafa Meisami has given up on the farming life, trading his old job raising cattle for a better-paying gig ferrying commuters through the notoriously traffic-clogged streets of the Iranian capital Tehran.

President Donald Trump may abandon US pledges to reduce carbon emissions, but global economic realities ensure he is unlikely to reverse the accelerating push to adopt cleaner forms of energy.

Syria was a provocation against Syrian President Bashar Assad. Speaking at an economic forum in St. Petersburg on Friday, Putin strongly reaffirmed Russia’s view that Assad’s forces weren’t responsible for a fatal chemical attack in Syria in April.

In November, Ahmed Zaki, an Egyptian journalist based in London, wrote a post on his Facebook account that went viral telling of how a private conversation with a friend resulted in him receiving online ads pertaining to his conversation. According to Zaki, he and his friend were speaking of a rare disease that his friend had, after which he found ads promoting medicines to treat this specific disease on his Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram accounts. Zaki believes his conversation was recorded using his phone's microphones. In January 2016, Zaki posted about a tablet he bought from online shopping company Amazon.

Details about the new anniversary iPhone are starting to emerge, and here's a big one: The price is likely to start at about $1,000. Following independent reports for Nikkei, FastCompany and famed Apple analyst Ming Chi-Kuo, Goldman Sachs has become the fourth major source to state the so-called iPhone 8 will be the most expensive phone Apple has ever made, Forbes reports.

A Google artificial intelligence program defeated a Chinese grand master at the ancient board game Go on Tuesday, a major feather in the cap for the firm’s AI ambitions as it looks to woo Beijing to gain re-entry into the country. In the first of three planned games in the eastern water town of Wuzhen, the AlphaGo program held off China’s world number one Ke Jie in front of Chinese officials and Google parent Alphabet’s (GOOGL.O) chief executive Eric Schmidt.

In celebration of the World Information Society Day, the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS) issued a statement regarding the current local status of communication technology. The press release aimed at focusing on the importance of information and communication technologies (ICT); meanwhile, it also monitored the evident increase in general awareness regarding the benefits of ICT. The World Information Society Day is celebrated on 17 May of each year on the occasion of the establishment the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). The global day was adopted by the UN General Assembly in March 2006.

Egypt has prepared the wireless frequencies needed for telecommunications companies in the country to deliver 4G mobile broadband networks, a key step in the long-delayed introduction of high speed telecoms services. “We are now ready to hand over 4G mobile frequencies to any company that is ready … we are waiting for companies to finish preparations to receive the frequencies,” Communications Minister Yasser al-Qady told Reuters on Sunday.

First, we'd better explain bitcoin. It's a crypto-what? Bitcoin is what's called a cryptocurrency. There are pictures of bitcoin, but they don't physically exist. You couldn't bite on one to test its value, as you might if you were a cartoon cowboy. The coins are "mined" using computers, and yet they don't get spat out like the winnings at a casino. They are data, strings of code. The "crypto" in cryptocurrency refers to the use of cryptography to secure a currency and protect the privacy of those who use it. If you're in law enforcement, protecting privacy is good and bad - bad when it concerns criminals like ransomware hackers. After all, you'd want to bring them to book, but you can't if you don't know their identities. Fortunately, cryptocurrencies, as with most technologies, are imperfect. Cryptography is often used to keep secrets. But when it comes to bitcoin, it's more about transparency, making every transaction traceable. It's one reason why governments love cryptocurrencies. They would like to adopt some of the underlying technology in everyday financial operations. But governments also loath cryptocurrencies. While the transactions are traceable, the people making the transactions might not be - they may hide behind fake names or use sophisticated digital clearing houses to wash dodgy earnings.

Cyber security researchers have found evidence they say could link North Korea with the WannaCry cyber attack that has infected more than 300,000 computers worldwide as global authorities scrambled to prevent hackers from spreading new versions of the virus. A researcher from South Korea’s Hauri Labs said on Tuesday their own findings matched those of Symantec (SYMC.O) and Kaspersky Lab, who said on Monday that some code in an earlier version of the WannaCry software had also appeared in programs used by the Lazarus Group, identified by some researchers as a North Korea-run hacking operation.

An IP address is like a fingerprint. When you browse the internet or send emails, you leave your IP address like smudges on a glass door. The question is whether it's acceptable for Germany's federal authorities to register and store IP addresses belonging to all the people who visit their websites. The German Federal Court (BGH) will rule on that question on Tuesday (16.4.2017). Patrick Beyer, a lawyer and member of the Pirate Party in the state of Schleswig-Holstein, sued the federal government in early 2008.

After making a first version available to developers at the end of March 2017, Google is gearing up to offer owners of Nexus (latest generations) and Pixel devices a first beta edition of the upcoming version of its Android mobile operating system.

Music lovers by-and-large agree that there is nothing that can trump the sound of the original instruments built by Antonio Giacomo Stradivari in the late 17th and early 18th century in the Italian town of Cremona. Just over 600 original Stradivarius violins still exist. The master also built numerous violoncellos and violas besides guitars and harps. People have researched and speculated, trying to find out what makes the special tonal qualities of a Stradivarius. There are ample possible explanations: is it, for instance, the special quality of the wood? The trees which the master used for his wood grew during a small ice age in the decades before Stradivari was born. The growth rings in the wood were narrower and the fabric of the wood was denser than in later years as a result.

Are these good times for astrophysics and space exploration? You've spoken about President Kennedy's support for the Apollo mission and that when Nixon cut the funding, the mission was dead. And now President Trump has just recently signed new legislation in support of NASA. Trump says he wants the US to be the first on Mars and that NASA should continue its work. How confident do you feel about that? J. Richard Gott: Time will tell. Realize that I saw Apollo 11 take off. I went to see it, and it was the most amazing thing. Now if you had asked people in 1969 when we would be landing on Mars, they would have all said 1985. 1985! And [Wernher] von Braun had plans to land astronauts on Mars by 1982. Nixon cancelled the program after it landed on the moon; he just cut it off.