Nintendo on Thursday rolled out its first smartphone game after years of refusing to stray from a consoles-only policy as it tries to better compete with rivals. 

The Japanese company has struggled as Sony and Microsoft outpaced it in console sales, while the three companies are also fighting off a trend toward cheap -- even free -- downloadable games for smartphones and other mobile devices.

Google's artificial intelligence (AI) program AlphaGo has been awarded the highest Go grandmaster rank, reserved for those whose ability at the ancient board game borders on "divinity", South Korea's Go Association said Tuesday.

The association announced the award before the final game of AlphaGo's five-match series with South Korean grandmaster Lee Se-Dol, with the computer currently holding an unassailable 3-1 advantage.

President Barack Obama made a pilgrimage Friday to SXSW -- the tech world's Davos and Woodstock rolled into one -- making a government recruitment pitch even as he fanned a row over encryption.

Obama traveled to Austin, Texas, ostensibly to open a "pipeline" of programmers, developers and other tech whiz kids to enter government service.

For 32-year-old banker Hani, it was always a nightmare riding in Cairo's battered taxis through traffic gridlock and thick exhaust fumes that sputter out of rickety vehicles.

But with the arrival of ride-hailing apps Uber and Careem, Hani now travels with ease across the vast city of 25 million -- notorious for its dusty streets and polluted air.

Google's computer program AlphaGo defeated its human opponent, South Korean Go champion Lee Sedol, on Wednesday in the first face-off of a historic five-game match.

AlphaGo's victory in the ancient Chinese board game is a breakthrough for artificial intelligence, showing the program developed by Google DeepMind has mastered one of the most creative and complex games ever devised.

A website created by two young Jordanians in a coffee shop six years ago has become the most popular site in Arabic, highlighting a vast vacuum: less than 1 percent of the Internet is written in the language spoken by 4.5 percent of the world's population.

The growth of Mawdoo3.com — Arabic for "subject" — is part of a steep rise in Internet use in the Arab world in recent years, along with an Arabic content publishing frenzy in which governments, independent journalists and Islamic militants also compete for page views.

The bane of "ransomware" used by hackers to hold data hostage was expected to begin striking a small number of Mac computers on Monday.

Researchers at U.S. computer security firm Palo Alto Networks said that they alerted Apple over the weekend to the discovery of malicious code they named "KeRanger" crafted to infect Mac computers and deny people access to their own pictures, documents and other digital data until money is paid.

Ray Tomlinson, the U.S. programmer credited with inventing email in the 1970s and choosing the "@" symbol for the messaging system, died at the age of 74, his employer said Sunday. 

Tomlinson invented direct electronic messages in 1971. Before his invention, users could only write messages to others on a limited network.

He's the name behind the world's first electric supercar, winning international plaudits for his ingenuity. But for Croatia's 28-year-old Mate Rimac, it all started as a hobby in his garage.

A keen techie since high school, Rimac was racing an old BMW when he blew the engine and decided to turn the car into an electric one starting with pieces he bought on the Internet.

As Apple's legal battle with the FBI over encryption heads toward a showdown, there appears little hope for a compromise that would placate both sides and avert a divisive court decision.

The FBI is pressing Apple to develop a system that would allow the law enforcement agency to break into a locked iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino attackers, a demand the tech company claims would make all its devices vulnerable.