Dhaka, Oct 13 (UNB) – Posts, Telecommunications and Information Technology Minister Mustafa Jabbar on Friday said ‘Made in Bangladesh’ mobile phones are our national pride.

The minister came up with the remarks after inaugurating a newly setup mobile phone factory of ‘Five Star’ brand owned by Al Amin Brothers in Chhoydana area of Gazipur on Friday.

The minister said, “At present local mobile manufacturers are penetrating in our market with over 70 percent stake and these phone sets are being produced here.”

This is the fruits of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s Digital Bangladesh initiative, he claimed. 

“Unemployment is a big challenge in our country, but the local manufacturers are utilizing their skills,” he added.

Among others, Gazipur City Corporation Mayor Md Jahangir Alam, BTRC Chairman Md Jahirul Haque and BTRC Commissioner Aminul Hasan were present at the innagural ceremony.

San Francisco, Sep 27 (AP/UNB) — Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is off to a slow start in his mission to bring virtual reality to the masses, so perhaps it's appropriate his company's next VR headset will be called Quest.

The headset from Facebook's Oculus division will be a stand-alone device that won't require a smartphone or a connection to a personal computer to create artificial worlds.

The Quest won't be available until next spring, although Zuckerberg unveiled the new headset at an Oculus conference held Wednesday in San Jose, California.

Priced at $399, the Quest will cost twice as much as the less powerful, stand-alone Oculus Go released earlier this year. But it's the same price as the Oculus Rift that tethers users to a PC.

Zuckerberg eventually hopes to have 1 billion people using virtually reality, but he acknowledged Wednesday that Facebook may not have even reached 1 percent of that goal more than four years after paying $2 billion to buy Oculus.

That implies fewer than 10 million people are using Oculus products, and recent data from the research firm International Data Corp. shows the still-nascent VR market has been losing momentum.

Shipments of VR headsets dropped 34 percent from last year during the April-June period, according to IDC. But the Oculus Go and a copycat, budget-priced headset from China's Xiaomi fared reasonably well, IDC said, with 212,000 devices shipped. That was even though they weren't available for the entire second quarter.

For all of 2018, IDC predicts shipments of VR headsets and devices built for a similar technology known as augmented reality will increase 31 percent from last year to 4.2 million.

That's still a relatively small number for a form of technology that has been drawing major investments from Facebook and other industry heavyweights such as Google, Microsoft, Sony, Samsung and Apple.

As he was last year when he announced the Oculus Go, Zuckerberg is counting on the Quest to widen VR's appeal. VR so far has attracted people interested in playing video games on them, but Zuckerberg believes it's only a matter of time before outside developers introduce other applications that will help lure people into buy one of Oculus' three different headsets to enter artificial realms.

"This is the basic roadmap," Zuckerberg said after showing off the Quest. "This is what we need to do for VR to succeed and get to the future we want."

Dhaka, Sept 16 (UNB) – Popular smartphone brand Xiaomi on Sunday introduced two more models--Redmi 6 and Redmi 6A-- in Bangladesh market.

Redmi 6 and Redmi 6A feature the Helio P22 and Helio A22 chipsets respectively, both of which bring the 12nm process to a new segment, said a press release.

Redmi 6A is the successor to Redmi 5A, being the bestselling Android phone globally in the first quarter of 2018, according to Counterpoint Research.

Sanket Agarwal, head of overseas expansion in Indian subcontinent, said, "At Xiaomi, we always thrive to push our boundaries and make higher level innovation accessible to all our users at honest pricing."

"With the only smartphones in its segment with 12nm architecture, we hope Redmi 6A and Redmi 6 will be worthy successors in the market with their performance,” he added.

Redmi 6A comes in 2GB + 16GB variant for Tk 9,999 and it will go on sale on nationwide on 17th September.

New York, Sep 16 (AP/UNB) — Facebook and other companies routinely track your online surfing habits to better target ads at you. Two web browsers now want to help you fight back in what's becoming an escalating privacy arms race.

New protections in Apple's Safari and Mozilla's Firefox browsers aim to prevent companies from turning "cookie" data files used to store sign-in details and preferences into broader trackers that take note of what you read, watch and research on other sites.

Lance Cottrell, creator of the privacy service Anonymizer, said Apple's effort was particularly significant, as it takes aim at a technique developed by tracking companies to override users' attempts to delete their cookies.

Safari makes these protections automatic in updates coming Tuesday to iPhones and iPads and a week later to Mac computers. Firefox has similar protections on Apple mobile devices and is rolling out them out to personal computers in the coming months.

To get the protections, you'll have to break your habit of using Google's Chrome browser, which by some estimates has more than half of the worldwide browser usage. Safari and Firefox have less than 20 percent combined.

Even then, Safari and Firefox can't entirely stop tracking. For starters, they won't block tracking when you're using Facebook or Google itself. Nor can they help much when you use phone or tablet apps, unless the app happens to embed Safari, as Twitter's iPhone app does.

But Will Strafach, a mobile security expert who is designing data security tools for phones, said imperfect protection is better than no protection. He notes that burglars can still break down a door, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't bother locking it.

Cookies and other trackers can be used by companies to keep track of who you are as you move from website to website. The companies can build a digital profile as you, say, read about Democratic or Republican viewpoints, buy a particular brand of pet food or indulge in the entire season of "Keeping Up With The Kardashians."

News, video and other third-party sites use Google and Facebook cookies to customize ads to your hobbies and interests, rather than hawking products you might never buy. That's why you might see an ad for shoes soon after searching for them elsewhere.

Apple says its tests show that some popular websites are embedded with more than 70 such trackers. Many of these are from Facebook and Google, which are expected to command a combined 57 percent of the $107 billion U.S. digital advertising market this year, according to the research group eMarketer.

Though general awareness of data collection has grown in the wake of Facebook's Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal , how trackers work behind the scenes remains a mystery to many people.

Ghostery and other products have long offered tracking protection. The browsers are now trying to incorporate that directly so you don't have to go looking for browser add-ons.

Safari will try to automatically distinguish cookies that are useful from ones that are there just to track you. Apple notes that cookies can appear in unexpected places, such as sites that embed "like" and "share" buttons. Now, those cookies will be blocked until you click on one of those buttons, in which case you'll be prompted for permission to allow the tracking. If you don't, your "like" won't register.

Safari is also attacking a technique developed to circumvent cookie deletions. Through "fingerprinting," a company can identify you through your computer's characteristics, such as browser type and fonts installed. Your new cookie can then be tied to your old profile. Safari will now limit the technical details it sends.

Firefox has an anti-tracking feature that also tries to distinguish tracking cookies from useful ones. It's on by default only on Apple's mobile devices. Mozilla is testing a broader rollout for personal computers, though its plans for Android are not yet known. For now, you need to turn it on or use a private-browsing mode, which gets more aggressive at killing cookies, including useful ones.

For PCs, Firefox also has an optional add-on, called Facebook Container, to segregate your Facebook activity from everything else. Think of it as a wall that prevents Facebook from accessing its data cookie as you surf elsewhere. A version is available for other trackers, too, but requires configuration on your part.

None of the Firefox tools, though, address fingerprinting.

Unsurprisingly, advertisers aren't happy.

In a statement, Interactive Advertising Bureau executive Dennis Buchheim said that even as browsers makers feel pressured to deliver privacy-centric features, they should consider the importance of advertising in enabling free services.

The new Safari and Firefox tools don't block ads. But without cookies, websites might get paid a lot less for them, said Jed Williams, chief innovation officer at the Local Media Association, an industry group for news publishers.

Apple and Mozilla are able to push the boundaries on privacy because neither depends on advertising. Google makes most of its money from selling ads.

Facebook and Google declined comment on the Safari and Firefox tools. But Google said its Chrome browser offers tools to control and delete cookies and set preferences for certain websites. Google says users can also decline personalization and get generic ads instead, though tracking continues in the background while using the company's services.

Cupertino, Sep 13 (AP/UNB) — Apple unveiled three new iPhones on Wednesday, including its biggest and most expensive model yet, as the company seeks to widen the product's appeal amid slowing sales.

CEO Tim Cook showed off the iPhone XS Max, which has a bigger screen than the one on last year's dramatically designed model , the iPhone X. It'll cost about $1,100, topping the iPhone X, which at $1,000 seemed jaw-dropping at the time. An updated iPhone X, now called the XS, stays at $1,000.

As with the iPhone X, both new phones have screens that run from edge to edge, an effort to maximize the display without making the phone too awkward to hold. The screen needs no backlight, so black would appear as truly black rather than simply dark. The Max model looks to be about the size of the iPhone 8 Plus, though the screen size is much larger.

The iPhone XS Max, which will be available on Sept. 21 — with orders open the week before — represents Apple's attempt to feed consumers' appetite for increasingly larger screens as they rely on smartphones to watch and record video and to take photos wherever they are.

By making more expensive iPhones, Apple has been able to boost its profits despite waning demand as people upgrade phones less frequently. IPhones fetched an average price of $724 during the April-June period, a nearly 20 percent increase from a year earlier.

Apple also showed off a cheaper iPhone, called the iPhone XR. It has a traditional, lower-quality screen and an aluminum body; it's physically smaller than the iPhone 8 Plus but has a bigger screen. It'll cost roughly $750 and come out on Oct. 26.

All three new models join the iPhone X in getting rid of the home button to make room for more screen. They will have facial-recognition technology to unlock the device.

Although it didn't sell quite as analysts anticipated, the iPhone X still emerged as the most popular in Apple's line-up, according to Cook. That emboldened the company to aim an even more expensive device at the affluent households that tend to gravitate to its products, especially in the U.S. and Europe.

For everyone else, many of whom are still using iPhones they purchased several years ago, there's the XR.

"I am going to go out on a limb and say the XR is going to become Apple's top-selling iPhone," said analyst Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights. "It is a smart strategy to keep more people in the Apple ecosystem and get even more people to come into it."

The next major update to the iOS will be released next Tuesday, followed a week later by a Mac software update. Both will be free to install.

Apple also announced updates that push its Apple Watch further into medical device territory. It has a larger screen and a built-in heart sensor that the company said can detect irregular heart rates and perform an electrocardiogram. The latter feature has been cleared by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the company said.

Ben Wood of CCS Insight said getting U.S. regulatory clearance for that is a milestone that underscores the company's leadership in health and fitness. Typically, smartwatches are marketed as consumer devices, not medical ones needing clearance.

These features will be available to U.S. customers later this year, but Apple did not say when it would make it to the rest of the world.

In addition, Apple said the Series 4 Apple Watch will also be able to detect when someone falls — and can tell the difference between a trip and a fall. If it detects a fall and the user doesn't respond in a minute, it'll automatically call for help. This feature may be especially attractive to older people or those with elderly parents worried about falling when no one is around to help.