TECH NEWS

Washington, United States | AFP | As many as 500 million guests Marriott International hotels may have been victims of a hack of the chain’s reservation database, the company announced Friday. Marriott said it was alerted on September 8 that there had been an attempt to hack their reservation database …

Shanghai, China | AFP | Facial recognition will be deployed at a marathon on Sunday in China to crack down on cheating, state media said, after a half-marathon was blighted by widescale flouting of the rules. Running and marathons are fast becoming popular in China, with participants sporting the latest …

San Francisco, United States | AFP | Google said Wednesday it was expanding its “virtual” telecommunication service that was limited to select Android-powered smartphones to a wider range of devices, including iPhones. Freshly renamed “Google Fi” service aims to take on traditional carriers by letting people pay based on how …

Hong Kong, China | AFP | The Chinese scientist who claims to have created the world’s first genetically-edited babies defended the highly controversial procedure Wednesday, but announced a halt to the trial following an international outcry. He Jiankui told a packed Hong Kong biomedical conference he was “proud” to have …

San Francisco, United States | AFP | A former Facebook employee on Tuesday went public with a memo saying the company is failing to include black people in its workforce and on the social network. Mark Luckie said that he shared the message with all Facebook employees around the world …

Oslo, Norway | AFP | Seven European consumer groups filed complaints against Google with national regulators Tuesday, accusing the internet giant of covertly tracking users’ movements in violation of an EU regulation on data protection. The complaints cited a study by the Norwegian Consumer Council that concluded the Internet giant …

  Kolkata, India | AFP |  A passenger was taken off an Indian plane and detained for questioning after he posted a photo of himself on Snapchat alongside the word “terrorist”, officials said Tuesday. Yogvedant Poddar, 21, was removed from the Jet Airways flight after a passenger spotted him typing …

Pasadena, United States | AFP | Cheers and applause erupted at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on Monday as a $993 million unmanned lander, called InSight, touched down on the Red Planet and managed to send back its first picture. The high-drama landing of the waist-high spacecraft capped a nearly seven …

Hong Kong, China | AFP | A scientist in China claims to have created the world’s first genetically-edited babies, a move that would be a ground-breaking medical first but which has generated a barrage of criticism. Chinese university professor He Jiankui posted a video on YouTube saying that the twin …

Washington, United States | AFP | Facebook said Tuesday users were having trouble accessing the social network and its other applications such as Instagram, but did not explain the cause of the outages. It was the second instance in the past two weeks in which technical issues appeared to affect …