The National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) in line with the National Cyber Security Awareness Month (NCSAM) has commenced a four-day awareness campaign to inform and ensure citizens are safe and secured online. The four-day awareness campaign summit which began on Monday is themed "Cyber-Aware Citizenry: A Foundation of the Digital Economy" and will share simple tips and easy resources to help people ensure safety and security online throughout the campaign. The Director-General, NITDA, Kashifu Inuwa explained that the cybersecurity awareness summit was aimed at empowering Nigerians in efforts to enable them to protect their cyberspace, especially as the level of cyberattacks is on the increase.

Transparent Wood May Serve As Viable Alternative To Glass - Research

Research by scientists suggests that designed ‘transparent wood’ could replace conventional glass in the future, and might trickle down to windows and mobile phones. The innovation developed using wood from the balsa tree, which is native to South and Central America, and created by the University of Maryland and University of Colorado claims to be five times more thermally efficient than glass. The team from the two universities, which set out to find a greener alternative to conventional glass treated balsa wood in an oxidizing bath that bleaches it of nearly all visibility and then penetrated it with a synthetic polymer called polyvinyl alcohol (PVA), creating a product that is virtually transparent.

Minister Orders NIPOST To Halt New Charges

The Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Isa Pantami, has directed the Nigerian Postal Service to put on hold the implementation of the new charges on courier and logistics companies with immediate effect.

Stripe, an online payments platform company has recently announced its acquisition of Nigeria-based online and offline payment service, Paystack for a whopping $200Mn (N9.2Bn), making it one of the largest technology Nigeria-based startup acquisitions in the history of our nation. Paystack is a payment platform that has a customer base of about 60,000, the company currently processes over half of all online transactions in Nigeria. Paystack is expected to still continue its operations independently despite its acquisition by Stripe.

Microsoft has disclosed that it has experienced a significant outage of its cloud-based office services including meeting software, Teams, Outlook, and office, making them inaccessible by users worldwide. The company made this known in a series of tweets, saying the outage was following update on the service, adding that it is investigating the cause of the software outage. "We’re investigating an issue affecting access to multiple Microsoft 365 services. We’re working to identify the full impact and will provide more information shortly.

MTN Launches e-SIM Services In Nigeria

Telecommunication giant, MTN Nigeria has on Wednesday commenced a trial of embedded Subscriber Identity Modules (e-SIM) services, making it the first company to launch this in West Africa.