Dhaka, Apr 28 (UNB)- The fishermen and commuters around the Bay of Bengal will be able to communicate with a wider range of mobile network as Grameenphone has recently improved its deep-sea network capacity.

Grameenphone is providing this deep-sea network coverage from the point of Cox’s Bazar, Kuakata, Char Kukrimukri in Bhola and Char Montaz in Patuakhali and up to 38 km from the Bangladesh coastline.

Deputy CEO and CMO Yasir Azman said “The coastal region and the Bay of Bengal is an essential contributor to the national economy. People who depend on the sea for their livelihood also play important role in providing food in our homes. Their safety is very important and we believe that the network development will play a significant role for their security.”

The network development is aimed to help the bread earners and commuters of sea and keep them safe with prompt communication.

Currently, mariners use high frequency radios to communicate with each other and the mainland.

San Francisco, Apr 27 (AP/UNB) — When a robot "dies," does it make you sad? For lots of people, the answer is "yes" — and that tells us something important, and potentially worrisome, about our emotional responses to the social machines that are starting to move into our lives.

For Christal White, a 42-year-old marketing and customer service director in Bedford, Texas, that moment came several months ago with the cute, friendly Jibo robot perched in her home office. After more than two years in her house, the foot-tall humanoid and its inviting, round screen "face" had started to grate on her. Sure, it danced and played fun word games with her kids, but it also sometimes interrupted her during conference calls.

White and her husband Peter had already started talking about moving Jibo into the empty guest bedroom upstairs. Then they heard about the "death sentence" Jibo's maker had levied on the product as its business collapsed. News arrived via Jibo itself, which said its servers would be shutting down, effectively lobotomizing it.

"My heart broke," she said. "It was like an annoying dog that you don't really like because it's your husband's dog. But then you realize you actually loved it all along."

The Whites are far from the first to experience this feeling. People took to social media this year to say teary goodbyes to the Mars Opportunity rover when NASA lost contact with the 15-year-old robot. A few years ago, scads of concerned commenters weighed in on a demonstration video from robotics company Boston Dynamics in which employees kicked a dog-like robot to prove its stability.

Smart robots like Jibo obviously aren't alive, but that doesn't stop us from acting as though they are. Research has shown that people have a tendency to project human traits onto robots, especially when they move or act in even vaguely human-like ways.

Designers acknowledge that such traits can be powerful tools for both connection and manipulation. That could be an especially acute issue as robots move into our homes — particularly if, like so many other home devices, they also turn into conduits for data collected on their owners.

"When we interact with another human, dog, or machine, how we treat it is influenced by what kind of mind we think it has," said Jonathan Gratch, a professor at University of Southern California who studies virtual human interactions. "When you feel something has emotion, it now merits protection from harm."

The way robots are designed can influence the tendency people have to project narratives and feelings onto mechanical objects, said Julie Carpenter, a researcher who studies people's interaction with new technologies. Especially if a robot has something resembling a face, its body resembles those of humans or animals, or just seems self-directed, like a Roomba robot vacuum.

"Even if you know a robot has very little autonomy, when something moves in your space and it seems to have a sense of purpose, we associate that with something having an inner awareness or goals," she said.

Such design decisions are also practical, she said. Our homes are built for humans and pets, so robots that look and move like humans or pets will fit in more easily.

Some researchers, however, worry that designers are underestimating the dangers associated with attachment to increasingly life-like robots.

Longtime AI researcher and MIT professor Sherry Turkle, for instance, is concerned that design cues can trick us into thinking some robots are expressing emotion back toward us. Some AI systems already present as socially and emotionally aware, but those reactions are often scripted, making the machine seem "smarter" than it actually is.

"The performance of empathy is not empathy," she said. "Simulated thinking might be thinking, but simulated feeling is never feeling. Simulated love is never love."

Designers at robotic startups insist that humanizing elements are critical as robot use expands. "There is a need to appease the public, to show that you are not disruptive to the public culture," said Gadi Amit, president of NewDealDesign in San Francisco.

His agency recently worked on designing a new delivery robot for Postmates — a four-wheeled, bucket-shaped object with a cute, if abstract, face; rounded edges; and lights that indicate which way it's going to turn.

It'll take time for humans and robots to establish a common language as they move throughout the world together, Amit said. But he expects it to happen in the next few decades.

But what about robots that work with kids? In 2016, Dallas-based startup RoboKind introduced a robot called Milo designed specifically to help teach social behaviors to kids who have autism. The mechanism, which resembles a young boy, is now in about 400 schools and has worked with thousands of kids.

It's meant to connect emotionally with kids at a certain level, but RoboKind co-founder Richard Margolin says the company is sensitive to the concern that kids could get too attached to the robot, which features human-like speech and facial expressions.

So RoboKind suggests limits in its curriculum, both to keep Milo interesting and to make sure kids are able to transfer those skills to real life. Kids are only recommended to meet with Milo three to five times a week for 30 minutes each time.

Dhaka, Apr 25 (UNB) - Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) is going to deactivate additional SIMs of those who have more than 15 against one national identity (NID) card from early Friday.

The telecom regulator has identified a total of 2,049,927 such SIM cards and those will be deactivated within six hours after 12am, BTRC Senior Assistant Director Jakir Hossain Khan told UNB on Thursday.

As per the latest BTRC decision, a subscriber is allowed to register maximum 15 SIM cards against his/her NID card.

BTRC Chairman Md Jahurul Haque said this move will ensure subscriber-friendly services and bring discipline in the telecom sector, expressing the hope that people will be able to receive better telecommunication services without any hindrance.

On June 20, 2016, BTRC fixed 20 SIMs to be registered against one NID card and later it reduced the number to five on August, 2017.

On October 24, 2017, the commission revised its decision and set the number at 15.

subscriber can know how many SIM cards have been registered against his/her NID by dialing *16001# or by sending a SMS to 16001 typing the last four digits of the NID card.

New Delhi, Apr 25(AP/UNB) — An Indian court on Wednesday lifted its ban on Chinese social media video-sharing app TikTok on the condition that the platform popular with teenagers would not be used to host obscene videos.

Justices N. Kirubakaran and S.S. Sundar warned TikTok that any video on the app violating conditions would be considered contempt of court.

India is a major market for social media platforms given its population of 1.3 billion people.

In a statement, TikTok welcomed the court decision and said it is committed to enhancing its safety features.

The Madras High Court in southern India imposed the ban on the mobile app earlier this month, expressing concern over pornographic content being made available through such apps.

The ban was challenged by the Chinese company ByteDance, which owns the app.  Bytedance approached the Supreme Court to remove the ban, but the case was referred back to the High Court in Tamil Nadu state.

Muthukumar, an Indian who filed a petition in the court, said that TikTok encouraged pedophiles because the contents were very disturbing. Muthukumar, who uses one name, said the children who used the mobile application were vulnerable and may get exposed to sexual predators.

Apple and Google are expected restore the app soon.

Bytedance has stated that it remains "very optimistic" about the Indian market and plans to invest $1 billion in the country over the next three years, the Press Trust of India news agency reported.

In an interview with PTI, Helena Lersch, ByteDance's director of international public policy, said the company already has a content moderation team in India and that it is strengthening the team further.

San Francisco, Apr 25 (AP/UNB)  — Facebook said it expects a fine of up to $5 billion from the Federal Trade Commission, which is investigating whether the social network violated its users' privacy.

The company set aside $3 billion in its quarterly earnings report Wednesday as a contingency against the possible penalty but noted that the "matter remains unresolved."

The one-time charge slashed Facebook's first-quarter net income considerably, although revenue grew 26% in the period. The FTC has been looking into whether Facebook broke its own 2011 agreement promising to protect user privacy.

Investors shrugged off the charge and sent the company's stock up more than 9% to almost $200 in after-hours trading. EMarketer analyst Debra Aho Williamson, however, called it a "significant development" and noted that any settlement is likely to go beyond a mere dollar amount.

"(Any) settlement with the FTC may impact the ways advertisers can use the platform in the future," she said.

Facebook has had several high-profile privacy lapses in the past couple of years. The FTC has been looking into Facebook's involvement with the data-mining firm Cambridge Analytica scandal since last March. That company accessed the data of as many as 87 million Facebook users without their consent.

The 2011 FTC agreement bound Facebook to a 20-year privacy commitment; violations could subject Facebook to fines of $41,484 per violation per user per day. The agreement requires that Facebook's users give "affirmative express consent" any time that data they haven't made public is shared with a third party.

The now-defunct Cambridge Analytica, which provided political data services to the 2016 Trump campaign and others, had wide access to normally private user data. It exploited a Facebook loophole that allowed it to see the data of people's friends, and not just people who explicitly permitted access when they took a personality quiz. While Facebook did have controls in place that allowed people to restrict such access, they are found buried in the site's settings and are difficult to find.

In addition to the FTC investigation, Facebook faces several others in the U.S. and Europe, including one from the Irish Data Protection Commission , and others in Belgium and Germany . Ireland is Facebook's lead privacy regulator for Europe. The FTC is also reportedly looking into how it might hold CEO Mark Zuckerberg accountable for the company's privacy lapses.

The social network said its net income was $2.43 billion, or 85 cents per share in the January-March period. That's down 51% from $4.99 billion, or $1.69 per share, a year earlier, largely as a result of the $3 billion charge.

Revenue grew 26% to $15.08 billion from a year earlier. Excluding the charge, Facebook earned $1.89 per share. Analysts polled by FactSet expected earnings of $1.62 per share and revenue of $14.98 billion.

The company cautioned during a conference call with analysts that it faces "ad targeting headwinds" in the second half of this year. That includes developments such as Europe's new privacy regulation that could impair hurt the company's ability to target ads. Facebook also plans to launch a long-promised "clear history" tool that will let users delete their web-browsing tracks from Facebook's data records while also blocking the social network from tracking the links they click going forward.

Zuckerberg, meanwhile, doubled down on his long-term vision to turn Facebook into a "privacy-focused platform " modeled after its encrypted messaging app WhatsApp. Analysts have questioned the company's ability to make money if its focus shifts to private communications. But Zuckerberg said the company doesn't currently use the content of messages for ad targeting anyway.

Facebook's monthly user base on its flagship service grew 8% to 2.38 billion. Daily users grew 8% to 1.56 billion. The company said about 2.7 billion people used Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, or Messenger each month and 2.1 billion people used at least one of its services daily.