Mahbub Rabbani

Mahbub Rabbani covers consumer technology for Tech BD — phones, apps, operating systems and the platforms most of the country uses daily. He writes the site’s how-to guides, and tends to judge a product by what it costs to live with rather than what it costs to buy.

Technology

Bangladesh’s first woman programmer is 74 and still shipping software: Shaheda Mustafiz on NCR in 1976, the country’s first ATM code, and the men who asked “can she do it?”

She trained in software architecture at NCR in the US in 1975, joined its Dhaka office as systems manager in 1976 when no woman worked in…

8 Mar 2023

Technology

Bangladesh launches a “national mobile browser” called Tarjani — what a government browser is for, and the questions to ask before you install one

Launched on 7 March by the ICT Division and built under a Bangladesh Computer Council project by Live Technologies, Tarjani is a free…

7 Mar 2023

Technology

Your Facebook account is the most valuable thing you own online. Here is the ten-minute checklist that stops most of the ways it gets stolen

Identity theft, blackmail with private photos, phishing links dressed as prizes, and creative work reposted as someone else’s — the four…

25 Feb 2023

Technology

Facebook gives creators a comment manager: search comments by name and date, sort praise from abuse, and hide the worst before anyone sees it

In the Professional Dashboard, a new Comment Manager lets pages and professional-mode profiles filter comments by sentiment, find a…

10 Feb 2023

Technology

Is the smart speaker listening? Yes, always — what Alexa, Google Nest and HomePod actually keep, and how to delete it

A VPNOverview report says voice assistants listen continuously and send what they capture to their makers. The truth is more specific: the…

6 Feb 2023

Technology

Walton signs Harman at CES: the sound system behind BMW and JBL is coming to a Bangladeshi television

At a private showcase in Las Vegas, Walton Hi-Tech Industries signed Samsung’s audio subsidiary Harman to tune the sound of its televisions…

24 Jan 2023

Technology

Microsoft moves live caption translation and other Teams features behind a $10 “Premium” wall — and adds AI meeting notes to sweeten it

From February, live translated captions, custom Together Mode scenes, virtual-appointment SMS reminders and meeting watermarks move from…

13 Jan 2023

Technology

CES is back at full size after two pandemic years — and for the first time there is a Bangladeshi stand: Walton, selling “Made in Bangladesh” to America

The Consumer Electronics Show opened on Thursday in Las Vegas with 100,000 visitors expected over four days, 710 start-ups, 2.6 million…

5 Jan 2023

Technology

Ten ways to make a slow Windows PC faster without spending a taka — and the one upgrade that beats all of them

Updates, start-up programs, visual effects, OneDrive sync, ReadyBoost, the paging file, disk space, malware, too many tabs, and a plain…

3 Jan 2023

Technology

The Argentina-France final broke Google's 25-year traffic record, Twitter's tweet rate and Toffee's viewer count

"It was like the whole world was searching about one thing," said Sundar Pichai. 24,400 tweets a second after Mbappé's second goal, and…

19 Dec 2022

Technology

A working Apple-1 with Steve Jobs's handwriting goes to auction: the $666.66 board that started it all

RR Auction of Boston is selling one of the roughly 200 boards Jobs and Wozniak assembled in 1976, still running after 46 years, with…

10 Dec 2022

Technology

Info-Sarkar 3 closes: fibre to 2,600 unions, 1.09 lakh government offices online, and a "10 crore high-speed users" claim examined

The five-year Bangladesh-China project that put optical fibre into union parishads ended on 22 November. What it built, why a Gaibandha ISP…

22 Nov 2022