Nairaland Forum

Uyo – Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is to visit Akwa Ibom in next month, the Niger Delta Young Professionals, a non governmental group, has said.

Facebook is a social networking service launched in February, 2004, with over one billion active users.

The Chairman of the Niger Delta Young Professional, Mr Moses Siasia, made the announcement when he paid a courtesy visit on Gov. Godswill Akpabio of Akwa Ibom on Friday.

Siasia said that Zuckerberg had been invited as one of the guest speakers during his groups youth economic summit, scheduled to hold in Uyo from May 28 to May 29.

The chairman said that young professionals from the Niger Delta were coming together to promote entrepreneurship, looking at economic challenges in the area.

Siasia commended Akpabio for transforming the state through infrastructure such as good roads, healthcare and education.

Responding, Akpabio told the group to put in their best in their chosen professions, adding that success could only come with hard work.

The governor pledged his support towards the hosting of the summit, commending the youths for not engaging in militancy. (NAN)

Facebook is a place where you can share pictures of cute animals and fun activities. Now there’s a browser extension that lets you encode those images with secret, hard-to-detect messages.

That’s the idea behind Secretbook, a browser extension released this week by 21-year-old Oxford University computer science student and former Google intern Owen-Campbell Moore. With the extension, anyone — you, your sister, a terrorist — could share messages hidden in JPEG images uploaded to Facebook without the prying eyes of the company, the government or anyone else noticing or figuring out what the messages say. The only way to unlock them is through a password you create.

“The goal of this research was to demonstrate that JPEG steganography can be performed on social media where it has previously been impossible,” Campbell-Moore tells Danger Room. He says he spent about two months spread out over the last year working on the extension as a research project for the university.

The extension is only available for the Google Chrome browser — Campbell-Moore cites its developer tools and popularity — and the messages are restricted to 140 characters. Less certain is what Facebook thinks; a spokesman declined to comment. But it’s still the first time anyone’s managed to figure out how to automate digital steganography — the practice of concealing messages inside computer files — through Facebook, the world’s biggest social media platform. Unlike cryptography, which uses ciphertext to encrypt messages, steganographic messages are simply hidden where no one would think to look.

For an image, that could be a bunch of pixels or electronic 1s and 0s. In Facebook’s case, they can be hidden among the tons of images uploaded to the site daily.

It wasn’t easy developing the extension. “Many tools for steganography in JPEGs have existed in the past although they have always required that the images are transmitted exactly as they are,” Campbell-Moore says.

http://www.punchng.com/i-punch/nigeria-a-country-with-an-ailing-website/

Nigeria, the self-acclaimed giant of Africa, has no functional official web portal. The website of the Federal Government of Nigeria, www.nigeria.gov.ng, is ailing.

For several weeks running, the web portal has been in a bad shape with no information other than the picture of President Goodluck Jonathan clad in his traditional Ijaw attire, smiling and waving at the supposed guests who get disappointed after visiting the blank website.

The information on the website reads, “Welcome to the Federal Republic of Nigeria’s web portal. This web portal will be uploaded shortly. For more information, email: webmaster@nigeria.gov.ng. Powered by the Federal Ministry of Information.”

A mail sent to the e-mail address, seeking enquiry and clarifications on the development, was also not replied as at the time of filing this report.

The poor African countries, including Zimbabwe, Republic of Congo, Burundi, Liberia and Guinea-Bissau, own and maintain functional websites and use them for the propagation of business and investment opportunities, relationships with various economic and political organisations as well as development partners from different parts of the world.

Even South Sudan, which is the newest nation on the continent, takes the issue of online presence seriously. The Government of South Sudan, under President Salva Kiir Mayardit, updates the site frequently with its activities. The last of such was the country’s plans to export oil through Djibouti via Ethiopia.

However, one wonders why presidential advisers and assistants own and maintain websites with adequate social media plug-ins and good visual resolution while the nation’s website, which is supposed to serve as a gateway to the rest of the world and a one-stop site for every information about Nigeria, its people and culture, is left unattended to.

But there is a twist to this! A Google search, by our correspondent, of the name of the Minister of Information, Labaran Maku, whose ministry is saddled with the responsibility of managing the website, shows that he might not even own a website as none could be attributable to him.

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Got a tech idea and want to make a fortune before you're out of your teens? Just do it, is the advice of the London schoolboy who's just sold his smartphone news app to Yahoo for a reported $30 million.

The money is there, just waiting for clever new moves, said 17-year-old Nick D'Aloisio, who can point to a roster of early backers for his Summly app that includes Yoko Ono and Rupert Murdoch.


"If you have a good idea, or you think there's a gap in the market, just go out and launch it because there are investors across the world right now looking for companies to invest in," he told Reuters in a telephone interview late on Monday.

The terms of the sale, four months after Summly was launched for the iPhone, have not been disclosed and D'Aloisio, who is still studying for school exams while joining Yahoo as its youngest employee, was not saying. But technology blog AllThingsD said Yahoo paid roughly $30 million.

D'Aloisio said he was the majority owner of Summly and would now invest the money from the sale, though his age imposes legal limits for now on his access to it.

"I'm happy with that and working with my parents to go through that whole process," he said.

D'Aloisio, who lives in the prosperous London suburb of Wimbledon, highlights the support of family and school, which gave him time off, but also, critically, the ideas that came with enthusiastic financial backers.

He had first dreamt up the mobile software while revising for a history exam two years ago, going on to create a prototype of the app that distils news stories into chunks of text readable on small smartphone screens.

He was inspired, he said, by the frustrating experience of trawling through Google searches and separate websites to find information when revising for the test.

Trimit was an early version of the app, which is powered by an algorithm that automatically boils down articles to about 400 characters. It caught the eye of Horizons Ventures, a venture capital firm owned by Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing, which put in $250,000.

That investment attracted other celebrity backers, among them Hollywood actor Ashton Kutcher, British broadcaster Stephen Fry, artist Ono, the widow of Beatle John Lennon, and News Corp media mogul Murdoch.

That all added up to maximum publicity when Summly launched in November 2012, but the backers brought more than just cash for an app that has been downloaded close to a million times.

"It's been super-exciting, (the investors) found out about it in 2012 once the original investment from Li Ka-shing had gone public," said D'Aloisio. "They all believed in the idea, but they all offered different experiences to help us out."

His business has worked with around 250 content publishers, he said, such as News Corp's Wall Street Journal. People reading the summaries can easily click through to the full article, driving traffic to newspaper websites.

"The great deal about joining Yahoo is that they have a lot of publishers, they have deals with who we can work with now," D'Aloisio said.

He taught himself to code at age 12 after Apple's App Store was launched, creating several apps including Facemood, a service which analyzed sentiment to determine the moods of Facebook users, and music discovery service SongStumblr.

He has started A-levels - English final school exams - in maths, physics and philosophy, and plans to continue his studies while also working at Yahoo's offices in London. He aims to go to university to study humanities.

Although he has created an app worth millions, D'Aloisio says he is not a stereotyped computer geek.

"I like playing sport," he said. "I'm a bit of a design enthusiast, and like spending time with my girlfriend and mates."