Highlights: Huawei sues US government over product ban in the North American country The company is seeking a declaratory judgment that the restrictions targeting Huawei “are unconstitutional.” It is also seeking a permanent injunction against these restrictions Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. has filed a complaint against the US government in a federal court against the ban on the sales of company products imposed by the Congress. The case is filed challenging the constitutionality of Section 889 of the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which gives power to the government to impose prohibition on certain telecommunications and video surveillance services or equipment it deems is putting national security on risk. The US government has banned Huawei from selling networking equipment, alleging the company for spying on US citizens on behalf of China. Through this action, Huawei seeks a declaratory judgment that the restrictions targeting Huawei “are unconstitutional,” and a permanent injunction against these restrictions. “The US Congress has repeatedly failed to produce any evidence to support its restrictions on Huawei products. We are compelled to take this legal action as a proper and last resort. This ban not only is unlawful, but also restricts Huawei from engaging in fair competition, ultimately harming U.S. consumers. We look forward to the court's verdict, and trust that it will benefit both Huawei and the American people,” Guo Ping, Huawei Rotating Chairman, said in a statement. The lawsuit was filed in a US District Court in Plano, Texas. According to the complaint, Section 889 of the 2019 NDAA not only bars all US Government agencies from buying Huawei equipment and services, but also bars them from contracting with or awarding grants or loans to third parties who buy Huawei equipment or services, without any executive or judicial process. Huawei says that this violates the Bill of Attainder Clause and the Due Process Clause as well as the Separation-of-Powers principles enshrined in the US Constitution, because Congress is both making the law, and attempting to adjudicate and execute it. Song Liuping, Huawei's Chief Legal Officer, stressed that Section 889 is based on “numerous false, unproven, and untested propositions.” “Contrary to the statute's premise, Huawei is not owned, controlled, or influenced by the Chinese government. Moreover, Huawei has an excellent security record and program. No contrary evidence has been offered,” Song added. John Suffolk, Huawei’s Global Cyber Security & Privacy Officer said that the company is proud because it’s the most open, transparent, and scrutinised company in the world. “If this law is set aside, as it should be, Huawei can bring more advanced technologies to the United States and help it build the best 5G networks. Huawei is willing to address the US Government's security concerns. Lifting the NDAA ban will give the US Government the flexibility it needs to work with Huawei and solve real security issues,” Guo Ping added. Interestingly, the case comes a month after US charged the Chinese tech company with bank fraud, Iran sanctions violations and stolen trade secrets. A 13-count indictment was filed in New York where the Justice Department claimed Huawei had misled a global bank as well as the US authorities about its relationship with two subsidiaries, Skycom Tech and Huawei Device USA Inc to conduct business in Iran. The company was also charged with ten counts of stealing trade secrets and obstructing justice in a separate case. Related Read: Huawei says it shipped over 200 million smartphones in 2018 globally Photo Caption: (From Left to Right) Guo Ping, Rotating Chairman of Huawei, Dr.Song Liuping,Senior Vice President and the Chief Legal Officer for Huawei, John Suffolk, Senior Vice President and Global Cyber Security & Privacy Officer (GSPO) for Huawei, Glen D. Nager, Partner at Jones Day, Lead Counsel of this action, Dr.Yang Chaobin, President of Huawei’s 5G Product Line, Li Dafeng, Executive Member of the Supervisory Board, Director of the ICT Infrastructure Managing Board Office. (Source: Huawei)
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Highlights: Researchers set a new internet speed record with the Marea undersea cable. They used 16QAM modulation toolkit to modulate the lasers being sent. This enabled bumping up data transfer speed up to 26.2 terabits per second. The internet, as we know it, might seem intangible since it’s a digital domain but it is actually enabled via cables. To be specific, long and heavy undersea cables allow users around the world to access the internet. These cables connect different countries, and continents, together to facilitate data transfer. One of these cables called Marea runs from Virgin Beach in the US to Balboa, Spain and it has apparently set a new internet speed record by transferring data at an unprecedented rate. As per a media release, Infinera, a transport network solutions company, employed its new experimental tool-kit called 16QAM modulation toolkit to modulate the lasers being sent via the cable. These generated signals were transferred at speeds of up to 26.2 terabits per second, which is said to be over 20 percent of what the cable was expected to be capable of. The new method will be presented at the upcoming Optical Fiber Conference and Exposition in March, in the USA. The transatlantic cable Marea is funded in part by Microsoft Telxius, and Facebook, and holds the record for the highest-capacity cable crossing the Atlantic Ocean. It became operational last year and consists of eight pair of optic fibers, each pair of which can carry 20 terabytes of data per second, which, in layman terms converts to the capability of streaming over 4 million HD videos at once. “In an optical fiber, it’s desirable to carry more data per second, which we call the fiber capacity, and also to be able to send the signal over longer distances, which we call the optical reach,” says Dr Pierre Mertz, an author on the study. “In simple terms, if you try to push the limits of fiber capacity you will reduce the reach. “ As per the media release, the challenging part was bumping up the data transfer speed to such an extent that they were operating close to the Shannon Limit. The Shannon limit is the theoretical data transfer rate for a communication channel. Via Related Reads: ISRO chairman says India to soon get more than 100 Gbps internet speeds with the launch of three new satellites 
Highlights: PUBG Mobile India Series 2019 finals is on March 10. 20 teams will battle it out at GMC Balayogi Indoor Stadium in Hyderabad. You can also watch the livestream at PUBG Mobile’s official YouTube channel. It’s time! The first official open-to-all PUBG Mobile tournament hosted in India is nearing its end and the grand final of the tourney will take place on March 10 at GMC Balayogi Indoor Stadium, Hyderabad. Sponsored by OPPO, the PUBG Mobile India Series 2019 follows the success of the PUBG Mobile Campus Championship in October, which was aimed at college students. A press note says that the PUBG Mobile India Series had over 400,000 games in four rounds of in-game and online qualifiers, featuring some of the top PUBG Mobile clans such as RIP, PAiN, SouL, 8bit and Oxy. “With India Series 2019, we set out with the objective of making esports accessible to all segments of the PUBG Mobile fanbase by keeping it open-to-all. After launching India Series in January, we received a massive 575,000 registrations, out of which the top 80 have made it to the finals,” Aneesh Aravind, General Manager, Tencent Games, India, said in a statement. The tournament was open to all Indians who had a PUBG Mobile account above level 20. Over 2,000 teams were selected for the playoffs and from that lot, 20 best teams will fight it out at the finals. The winning team will walk away with Rs 30 lakh, the first runners-up will be awarded Rs 10 lakh and the team on the third spot will get Rs 5 lakh as the prize money. The 20 teams who will battle it out in the finals are: S0UL, The Punishers, Gods Reign, Oxygen Alpha, Team INF, Maximus Alpha, Team FireFrost, SQUAD99, Team 2EZ4, IMT Immortals, NSD_, Funky Monkey, ARROW, No Mercy, The Dreamers, BSUD, BackFromSeverny, SL4Y, The Beast Squad and RIP Official. There are prizes for different categories as well. “The MVP” award will be given to the player with maximum number of MVP, “The Exterminators” award will be given to the team with maximum kills and “The Healers” to the team with the highest number of revives. In the individual awards, “The Redeemer” will be awarded to the player with highest amount of health restored, “The Lone Ranger” award will be felicitated upon the player with the maximum survival time and “The Rampage Freak” will be given to the player for the maximum number of kills in one game. Each of these categories would receive a cash prize of Rs 50,000. PUBG Mobile India Series live stream Those who want to catch the action live, free limited passes to attend the finals can be availed at www.pubgmobile.in later this week. Those who want to follow the action while at home can visit PUBG Mobile’s YouTube channel and Facebook page. The live broadcast will start at 1PM on March 10. Related Read: PUBG playing man narrowly escapes death, drinks acid instead of water
Highlights: PUBG confirms that it is reworking its in-game maps. Erangel is the first map that will be updated. Players expect the loot balance to be tweaked for good weapon distribution on the map. PUBG was first released in March 2017 for PC, with Erangel as its first map. There haven’t been any drastic changes to it since its inception, except for multiple bug fixes and some minor additions like the addition of trees and buildings to areas that were too unsheltered. Recently, a leaked map image suggested that the company is working on a big overhaul for the map and now, the game developers have fessed up that there are some considerable changes coming to the map. In a blog post, the company confirms that it is working on new ways to balance loot and otherwise improve the maps, starting with Erangel. “We understand that loot balance is a very important part of the game but also recognize that the map layout is just as important, so we’re working hard to ensure that any changes made to either will feel good when completed. We plan to start testing several potential changes to Erangel soon, and will share our plans for these tests in the coming weeks,” says PUBG Corp. Loot is one of the issues players of the game have frequently asked the company to make adjustments to. There have been complains about the loot algorithm being unbalanced as gamers face difficulty in finding good weapons and ammunition, even in places with many structures like Pochinki or Novo. Some other changes to the game might include texture overhaul and addition of cover, compounds and new buildings to some areas of the map. As for the previously leaked image of the new Erangel map that fanned the rumours is said to be “just a snapshot in time” and such images “rarely represent the entire plan or scope of what’s being worked on.” Do note that while Erangel for PUBG PC gets reworked, there’s a high chance that the same map could be made better for the Mobile version of the game as well. Related Reads: PUBG Mobile might soon let you play as a zombie PUBG playing man narrowly escapes death, drinks acid instead of water 
Highlights: Mark Zuckerberg says he wants to build more secure Facebook He laid down principles that privacy-focused social networking would follow. The CEO also took subtle dig at Apple and China accusing them of dishonouring users’ privacy. The year 2018 brought a lot of bad news for Facebook. The company was mired in several user data privacy related controversies, but now the company seems to be looking forward to building a secure social networking platform across all its apps, or atleast that is the message in Mark Zuckerberg's 3200-word letter addressed to people questioning the company’s ability to provide a secure way of communication. The letter is Zuckerberg's "Privacy-Focused Vision for Social Networking”. “My focus for the last couple of years has been understanding and addressing the biggest challenges facing Facebook. This means taking positions on important issues concerning the future of the internet. In this note, I’ll outline our vision and principles around building a privacy-focused messaging and social networking platform. There’s a lot to do here, and we’re committed to working openly and consulting with experts across society as we develop this,” Zuckerberg said in his letter. Zuckerberg wants readers of the letter to know that he believes that a privacy-focused communications platform will become more important than today’s open platforms because privacy gives people the freedom to connect more naturally. In his letter, the executive also laid out the steps taken by the company to provide a secure atmosphere for people to communicate with each other. He laid out some principles that Facebook would follow while designing and implementing a secure platform where “people can be confident what they say to each other stays secure and their messages and content won’t stick around forever.” “This is the future I hope we will help bring about,” he said. He also recognised that he may not have people’s support in what he plans to do. “I understand that many people don’t think Facebook can or would even want to build this kind of privacy-focused platform — because frankly we don’t currently have a strong reputation for building privacy protective services, and we’ve historically focused on tools for more open sharing. But we’ve repeatedly shown that we can evolve to build the services that people really want, including in private messaging and stories,” Zuckerberg said. On the relevance of public social networks, the CEO said that these will continue to play an important part in people’s lives, that is, for connecting with everyone they know, discovering new people, ideas and content, and giving people a voice more broadly. He noted that since people also want to interact privately, Facebook sees this as an opportunity to build a simpler platform that’s focused on privacy first. “We plan to build this the way we’ve developed WhatsApp: focus on the most fundamental and private use case — messaging — make it as secure as possible, and then build more ways for people to interact on top of that, including calls, video chats, groups, stories, businesses, payments, commerce, and ultimately a platform for many other kinds of private services,” he explained. On end-to-end encryption, Zuckerberg said that the need is imperative, however, the company also has a responsibility towards the society. “...there are real safety concerns to address before we can implement end-to-end encryption across all of our messaging services. Encryption is a powerful tool for privacy, but that includes the privacy of people doing bad things. When billions of people use a service to connect, some of them are going to misuse it for truly terrible things like child exploitation, terrorism, and extortion,” the CEO highlighted. He vowed to work with the governments, but shared an instance where the encryption had his employee sent to jail. Highlighting the need for encryption to safeguard users’ data and misuse, Zuckerberg said that governments often make unlawful demands for data. “...and while we push back and fight these requests in court, there’s always a risk we’ll lose a case — and if the information isn’t encrypted we’d either have to turn over the data or risk our employees being arrested if we failed to comply,” he added. Finally, putting emphasis on secure data storage, Zuckerberg said the company is willing to be banned in countries that object to its new focus on privacy. Although he did not directly take the name of any country or company, but the part of his letter that focused on data storage had an undertone targeting China and rival Apple. Facebook and Apple have been at loggerheads over privacy and the top executives of both Apple and Facebook have traded barbs over the issue. In the letter, Zuckerberg subtly took a dig at China as well as Apple. By doing this, he may lose a good chance of expanding business in the South Asian country where Facebook has been trying hard to make inroads. For those who don’t know, Apple’s Chinese iCloud partner, Guizhou-Cloud Big Data (GCBD), cut a deal with the state-run China Telecom last year, according to which all user data was moved to the latter’s servers. This raised privacy concerns as people thought of a possibility that the Chinese government could gain access to it. “People want to know their data is stored securely in places they trust. There’s an important difference between providing a service in a country and storing people’s data there. As we build our infrastructure around the world, we’ve chosen not to build data centers in countries that have a track record of violating human rights like privacy or freedom of expression,” Zuckerberg said. “If we build data centers and store sensitive data in these countries, rather than just caching non-sensitive data, it could make it easier for those governments to take people’s information,” he added. He says that the best way to protect the most sensitive data is not to store it at all, “which is why WhatsApp doesn’t store any encryption keys and we plan to do the same with our other services going forward.” Related Read: Facebook lobbied in India, US, UK and multiple other countries against data privacy laws: Report
Highlights: A man in MP is said to have accidentally consumed acid as he was playing PUBG. While PUBG could be blamed for being the reason, it could be a case of smartphone addiction. PUBG has been blamed for being addictive multiple times in the past. PUBG has gripped gamers worldwide. Combining the battle royale genre with good gameplay mechanics, the game has garnered over 30 million daily active players. However, it has also been blamed multiple times of being addictive and causing problems for people, at least in India. A new report from ToI again links PUBG with addiction as a 25-year-old man from Madhya Pradesh is said to have consumed acid instead of water while playing the game. As per the report, an unnamed person from Chhindwara, MP, was sitting in his courtyard, playing PUBG. He was so engrossed in the game that he accidentally picked up a bottle of acid and drank it, mistaking it for water. The incident is said to have taken place about a month ago and the man was rushed to a hospital where Dr Maman Gogiya treated him. However, his condition worsened and he was taken to Nagpur but was brought back as his condition didn’t improve. Dr. Gogiya reportedly operated on him and said, “There were ulcers in his stomach that had created an obstruction. When his condition did not improve in Nagpur, his family brought him back here. He was not able to eat anything and lost 5-6 kilograms in just a few days.” Fortunately, the patient has recovered and is doing fine now as his stitches were removed on March 3. It’s easy to blame PUBG for being the reason for how the man ended up drinking acid accidentally instead of water. However, there are many things to consider here since the doctor who treated him said that the patient was “glued to” his phone, even while recovering. “But even during treatment, he was busy playing some or the other game on his phone. And when he was not playing games, he would be watching movies on his phone,” the doctor told TOI. Considering the doctor’s statement, one could argue that the problem here is not of PUBG addiction of smartphone addiction. Smartphone addiction is a very real thing. As per a study, it can not only damage interpersonal skills among Indian teens, but also have a significant negative health impact and harmful psychological effect on Indian adolescents. Companies manufacturing phones and operating system for these phones know about the detrimental health effects of being glued to them all the time. Thus, there are tools that help people discover if they are spending too much time in front of a screen. Google has Digital Wellbeing apps that help regulate time spent with your phone while apple has Screen Time for the same. There are multiple third party apps as well to help with digital addiction/moderation. Related Reads: PUBG Mobile might soon let you play as a zombie PUBG Mobile version 0.11.1 update to add new India Bonus Challenge, enable exchange of BC for UC: Report 
Highlights: Images of Microsoft’s Chromium-based Edge web browser have surfaced online. They reveal the upcoming browser’s design, which is quite similar to Chrome. The design could be similar as the developers are working on internal features instead of focussing on the user interface. Back in December last year, Microsoft announced that it is using Google’s Chromium to bring better web compatibility to its Edge browser. Since then, there have been no major announcements as to where the development has reached or when it would be announced for everyone. Neowin has published some screenshots of the new Chromium-based Edge browser and reports that the company has been working on it internally for months. Apparently, the company has two separate channels to test the browser, a Dev channel that is said to be updated weekly and a Canary channel, which is updated daily. As per the images, the overall design is similar to Microsoft Edge, however, there are some noticeable changes to the user interface that impart a Chrome-like design to it. The screenshots embedded in this article are said to represent the current interface of the browser. The default search bar in the new tab is of Microsoft’s Bing and the background image is of the search engine’s image of the day. There is a most visited section on the bottom and an option to toggle a personalised feed pulled from Microsoft News has also been added. As per the report, the current option in Edge to view all your tabs and set aside the currently open tabs has been removed from the Chromium-based version of the browser. Additionally, the screenshots show off some settings and options that are being tested like extension support, a new tab view option, and sync. From the images, it seems like the current extensions for Microsoft Edge are supported and the report states that many extensions compiled from their Chrome Web Store listing are also present. The extensions and profile picture is placed on the immediate right of the address bar, same as Chromium, and the extension store is said to be accessible from within the browser, while extensions are currently installed through the Microsoft Store. The screenshots do suggest that the Chromium-powered Microsoft Edge, codenamed "Anaheim," is quite similar to Chrome in terms of design. However, as it is with almost all projects that are based on open source software, the current state of the user interface could change drastically over time. This is because it has been a few months since the new web browser's development started. The devs working on it are most likely focussed on setting the groundwork for the browser instead of focussing on its user interface, which, right now, seems to directly pulled from Chromium. The UI of the browser is most likely to change over time, along with its functionality, but it should not take Microsoft as much time as it took for them to reach to the current mature state of Edge browser. Chromium acts as a framework with everything already in place to quickly get a browser up and running, however, it is on a company that chooses to use it to whether or not make changes to its UI. Knowing Microsoft, the final version of Anaheim might end up more closely resembling the current Edge than Chrome. Related Reads: Microsoft Edge now adopting Chromium open source for better web compatibility Microsoft's Lite OS is reportedly aimed at dual-screen and Chrome OS-powered devices
