The interim budget is expected to have “interesting features”, possibly including measures to tackle the farm crisis as well as tax benefits for the middle class, as it reaches out to key constituencies ahead of this summer’s general elections. The nature of tax concessions that may be announced on Friday is not clear but sources …

In hindsight, AT&T’s Time Warner acquisition looks pretty good. The business, now renamed WarnerMedia, gave AT&T a few things to crow about in its fourth-quarter earnings released Wednesday. They include WarnerMedia’s operating income growth of 33.2 percent, a popular slate of films like the blockbuster Aquaman and strong digital subscriber growth for HBO. Offsetting that positive news, however, were continued …

The IBM Q System One model doesn’t look like a computer. It looks like a conceptual art series of plates being held together with fishing lines suspended from a ceiling. The whole contraption is encased in half-inch-thick glass created by Milan-based Goppion, which made the protective displays for the Mona Lisa and the Crown Jewels. Bob Sutor, an IBM veteran …

Frequent bailers take note: Movie theater subscription service Sinemia is reducing your monthly gotta-use-my-tickets stress by adding the ability to carry over one ticket per person per month to all plans. In other words, if you’ve got a six-person family plan, everyone gets that rollover option. It also means that if February’s full of meh movies but March’s cinematic cup runneth …

Health-app maker Cardiogram on Wednesday launched a feature that lets users monitor a loved one’s wearable data across Android and iOS devices. Cardiogram breaks down heart rate data from the Apple Watch, Google’s Wear OS devices, and Garmin watches to help users understand their health, sleep patterns, stress levels and fitness. The app’s new cross-platform feature, called Family Mode, lets users …

Mozilla should concede defeat to Chrome and adopt Google’s browser technology, a Microsoft executive suggested Friday, provoking rebuttals over the weekend that Firefox’s independence is now more important than ever. Chrome is built atop Google’s Chromium open-source software project, which lets anyone else use the code for their own projects, modify it and offer their changes back. With Chrome’s dominance …

A hacking tool enabled the United Arab Emirates’ government to spy on iPhone users with just a text message, according to a Wednesday report by Reuters.   Called Karma, the tool let spies steal photos, messages, emails and location data from iPhones by uploading victims’ email accounts or phone numbers to an automated system, the report said. The cyberattack worked …

Qualcomm may be facing fire for its licensing practices, but it managed to reach an interim agreement with one previously resistant handset maker. The company on Wednesday said Huawei, the world’s second-biggest smartphone company, has signed a short-term licensing agreement with Qualcomm. The deal, reached in Qualcomm’s fiscal first quarter that ended Dec. 30, runs through the company’s fiscal third …

Australia: It’s time to gird your loins for the arrival of 5G. The next generation of mobile connectivity is hitting milestone after milestone as it rolls out across the world, ready to bring super fast speeds, low ping times and ubiquitous connectivity to devices around the world.  The latest milestone comes from Optus, which on Thursday announced its big plans …

Using your AirPods ($165 at eBay) with a Mac isn’t too great a chore, but it’s not as seamless as having them automatically connect to your iPhone ($899 at Amazon). If you use your AirPods frequently while working or watching videos on your Mac, then you need to know about two apps that make it simple and guarantee you won’t …