Lukman Shobowale

Harare - President Robert Mugabe's spokesperson George Charamba has said that opposition protests in Harare last week "crossed a line" - and the authorities won't tolerate them any more. Speaking on state television's 20:00 evening news bulletin, Charamba called the anti-government protests "nonsense" and said of the opposition: "Let everyone be warned - opposition or wherever - that the government will not tolerate this anymore." "Let them test the authority of the state [if they go ahead with another march on Friday] and then they will realise that until and unless you keep within the lawful confines of the law the full might of the state will visit on your recklessness."  Eight years after post-election violence rocked some of Zimbabwe's rural areas, the southern African country is fast descending back into unrest, this time concentrated mostly in the capital. Zimbabweans say they're protesting corruption and mismana...

Protests against the rule of Zimbabwe’s ageing president, Robert Mugabe, have become commonplace in recent months. In one of the latest incidents on Aug. 24, police used tear gas and water cannons  to disperse  a “Mugabe Must Go” protest in the capital Harare. In April,  Evan Mawarire , an unknown pastor, inadvertently started a wave of online activism when he started the #ThisFlag movement in a pleading Facebook post. Within hours, copycats had appeared online and the ZANU-PF regime found itself party to an upsurge in online and offline criticism. Since then social media activism in Zimbabwe has ignited.  WhatsApp , a mobile messaging service that is frequently subscribed to in a prepaid form in Zimbabwe, has been widely used as a tool to mobilise. It accounts  for 34%  of all mobile data use in Zimbabwe.  Facebook  reports 260,000 daily users, of 890,000 Zimbabweans online, but this only accounts for  3% of mobile broadband usage...

The hit cybersecurity-focused TV show “ Mr. Robot ,” a psychological thriller popular among the tech crowd for its  relatively accurate portrayal of hacking,  is now a mobile game. Released by  Telltale Games  in association with NBCUniversal, and developed by  Night School Studio  in collaboration with Universal Cable Productions, the game is played through the fictional E-Corp messaging app, allowing players to communicate in real time with characters in the show. The game continues the show’s technically correct naming scheme, too. While episodes of the show are often titled with names referencing video files, like .avi or .flv, for example, the iOS game is called Mr. Robot: 1.51exfiltrati0n.ipa — the .ipa referring to the iOS application archive file format. On Google Play, the file is named Mr. Robot:1.51exfiltrati0n.apk, referencing the Android app file format instead. (Gotta love these little details.) The game itself takes place...

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is living at least a few years out ahead of anyone reading this post – the founding executive told an audience in Rome ( via Verge ) today that he hopes to demonstrate his home’s artificial intelligence system, which controls things like air conditioning, lighting and more based on things like face and voice recognition. Zuckerberg’s  computerized domestic assistant was his “personal challenge” for this year , an annual goal the CEO sets for himself and makes public. Past challenges have included learning Mandarin, and the more modest goal of reading two books every month, which for someone with Zuck’s free time, might actually have been more difficult to achieve than creating a  non-destructive HAL 9000  for his sole personal use. Here’s why his challenge this year isn’t necessarily a personal Waterloo for Zuckerberg: he has the help of “all these Facebook engineers who are doing all this awesome AI work in speech recognition, face reco...

After a  failed attempt to go social with Ping  in 2010, Apple may have a renewed sense of excitement over the social space, according to a report from  Bloomberg . Sources told Bloomberg that Apple is working on a video recording/editing app that would be similar in functionality to Snapchat, though there’s no mention of disappearing or self-destructing content in the report. Instead, the app is supposed to be easy to use with one hand for video recording, and users will be able to swipe between various filters or add drawings. The main goal is that users will be able to create and edit videos within a minute. One of the filters is said to be an Instagram-sized square, instead of the native rectangle on the iPhone, though Apple’s camera software already has that functionality built in. So…? The ultimate hope is that people would use the app, which is being built by the same folks who built iMovie and Final Cut Pro, to create the content to share with other soci...

Who decides who’s cool? Snapchat refuses to recommend accounts for fear of feeling heavy-handed. Maybe it learned from Twitter, whose old one-size-fits-none suggested user list immediately made it noisy, impersonal and ruled by an oligarchy. But Instagram is betting that algorithmically personalized suggestions could make its  new ephemeral slideshow Stories feature  addictive… even if your friends are boring. Today, atop the Explore tab, Instagram will start showing some users a bar of Stories from accounts you could follow, with the feature rolling out to everyone soon. Based on who you follow and the topics you care about, the tailored recommendations will make it easy to add someone new to your Home feed’s Stories section. The suggestions are sure to get plenty of attention because Explore is surprisingly popular. Instagram says 100 million people visit it every day — the first time it’s revealed a stat about Explore. That’s one-fifth of Instagram’s 500 million ...

Coal Country Is Wary of Hillary Clinton’s Pledge to Help By  CORAL DAVENPORT AUG. 28, 2016 Continue reading the main story Share This Page Share Tweet Email More Save Photo A train yard near a power plant in Cleveland, Va., on Wednesday.   Credit Mike Belleme for The New York Times LEBANON, Va. — As Kevin Widener was growing up on his family’s tobacco farm in the rolling hills of southwest Virginia in the 1990s, lawmakers and lawyers in Washington were waging a war on smoking. In 2006, as part of a larger program to help failing  tobacco farmers , the federal government purchased the Widener homestead, and a separate legal settlement with the tobacco industry paid for Mr. Widener to attend community college, the start of a successful transition to nursing. His mother, Sheila Snapp, now unemployed and surviving on government disability payments, was not so successful. “The tobacco money made a big difference for my son,” Ms. Snapp said while w...