A cat who lost his back legs when he was hit by a train got a new lease on life by getting new prosthetic limbs. They were designed by engineering students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison using a 3D printer. VOA’s Deborah Block has more.
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Billionaire Richard Branson is moving Virgin Galactic’s winged passenger rocket and more than 100 employees from California to a remote commercial launch and landing facility in southern New Mexico, bringing his space tourism dream a step closer to reality.
Branson said Friday at a news conference that Virgin Galactic’s development and testing program has advanced enough to make the move to the custom-tailored hangar and runway at the taxpayer-financed Spaceport America facility near the town of Truth or Consequences.
Virgin Galactic CEO George Whitesides said a small number of flight tests are pending. He declined to set a specific deadline for the first commercial flight.
An interior cabin for the company’s space rocket is being tested, and pilots and engineers are among the employees relocating from California to New Mexico. The move to New Mexico puts the company in the “home stretch,” Whitesides said.
The manufacturing of the space vehicles by a sister enterprise, The Spaceship Company, will remain based in the community of Mojave, California.
Taxpayer backing
Taxpayers invested more than $200 million in Spaceport America after Branson and then-Gov. Bill Richardson, a Democrat, pitched the plan for the facility, with Virgin Galactic as the anchor tenant.
Virgin Galactic’s spaceship development has taken far longer than expected and had a major setback when the company’s first experimental craft broke apart during a 2014 test flight, killing the co-pilot.
Branson thanked New Mexico politicians and residents for their patience over the past decade. He said he believes space tourism — once aloft — is likely to bring about profound change.
“Our future success as a species rests on the planetary perspective,” Branson said. “The perspective that we know comes sharply into focus when that planet is viewed from the black sky of space.”
Branson described a vision of hotels in space and a network of spaceports allowing supersonic, transcontinental travel anywhere on earth within a few hours. He indicated, however, that building financial viability comes first.
“We need the financial impetus to be able to do all that,” he said. “If the space program is successful as I think … then the sky is the limit.”
Gushing passenger
In February, a new version of Virgin Galactic’s winged craft SpaceShipTwo soared at three times the speed of sound to an altitude of nearly 56 miles (99 kilometers) in a test flight over Southern California, as a crew member soaked in the experience.
On Friday, that crew member, Beth Moses, recounted her voyage into weightlessness and the visual spectacle of pitch-black space and the earth below.
“Everything is silent and still and you can unstrap and float about the cabin,” she said. “Pictures do not do the view from space justice. … I will be able to see it forever.”
The company’s current spaceship doesn’t launch from the ground. It is carried under a special plane to an altitude of about 50,000 feet (15,240 meters) before detaching and igniting its rocket engine.
“Release is like freefall at an amusement park, except it keeps going,” Moses said. “And then the rocket motor lights. Before you know it, you’re supersonic.”
First commercial flight may be this year
The craft coasts to the top of its climb before gradually descending to earth, stabilized by “feathering” technology in which twin tails rotate upward to increase drag on the way to a runway landing.
Branson previously has said he would like to make his first suborbital flight this year as one of the venture’s first passengers on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing on July 20. But he made no mention of timelines on Friday.
Pressed on the timeframe, Whitesides said he anticipates the first commercial flight within a year.
Three people with future space-flight reservations were in the audience.
“They’ve been patient, too,” Branson said. “Space is hard.”
Hundreds of potential customers have committed as much as $250,000 up front for rides in Virgin’s six-passenger rocket, which is about the size of an executive jet.
Virgin not alone
Other Branson’s plans have gradually advanced amid a broader surge in private investment in space technology with cost-saving innovations in reusable rockets and microsatellite technology.
Amazon tycoon Jeff Bezos announced Thursday that his space company, Blue Origin, will send a robotic spaceship to the moon with aspirations for another ship that could bring people there along the same timeframe as NASA’s proposed 2024 return. Bezos has provided no details about launch dates.
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The question comes up over and over, with extremist material, hate speech, election meddling and privacy invasions. Why can’t Facebook just fix it?
It’s complicated, with reasons that include Facebook’s size, its business model and technical limitations, not to mention years of unchecked growth. Oh, and the element of human nature.
The latest revelation: Facebook is inadvertently creating celebratory videos using extremist content and auto-generating business pages for the likes of Islamic State and al-Qaida. The company says it is working on solutions and the problems are getting better. That is true, but critics say better is not good enough when mass shootings are being live-streamed and online mobs are spreading rumors that lead to deadly violence.
“They have been frustratingly slow in dealing with everything from child sexual abuse to terrorism, white supremacy, bullying, nonconsensual porn” and things like allowing advertisers to target categories such as “Jew hater,” simply because some users had listed the term as an “interest,” said Hany Farid, a digital forensics expert at the University of California, Berkeley.
As new problems crop up, Facebook’s formula has been to apologize and promise to make changes, sometimes also noting that it did not anticipate how malicious actors could so readily misuse its platform. More recently, the company has also emphasized just how much it is improving, both technically in its use of artificial intelligence to detect problems and in terms of focusing more money and effort on fixing them.
“After making heavy investments, we are detecting and removing terrorism content at a far higher success rate than even two years go,” Facebook said Wednesday in response to the revelations about the auto-generated pages. “We don’t claim to find everything, and we remain vigilant in our efforts against terrorist groups around the world.”
It has seen some success. In late 2016, CEO Mark Zuckerberg infamously dismissed as “pretty crazy” the idea that fake news on his service could have swayed the election. He later backtracked, and since then the company has reduced the amount of misinformation shared on its service, as measured by several independent studies.
Zuckerberg has also, by and large, avoided similar gaffes by conceding mistakes and delivering apologies to the public and to lawmakers.
‘Stuck with all this garbage’
But even as the company bats down one problem, others pop up. The reason for that might be baked into its DNA. And that’s not just because its business model relies on as many people as possible using it as much as possible, leaving behind personal details that can then be targeted by advertisers.
“Almost everything Facebook has designed has been designed for good people. People who are nice to each other, who have birthdays to celebrate, who have new puppies and generally like to treat others well,” said Siva Vaidhyanathan, director of the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia. “Basically Facebook is made for a better species than ours. If it were made for golden retrievers, everything would be great.”
But if just 1% of the 2.4 billion people on Facebook want to do terrible things to others, that’s 24 million people.
“Every couple of weeks, we hear about Facebook knocking down troublesome pages, making promises about hiring more people, building AI and so on,” Vaidhyanathan said. “But at Facebook’s scale, none of that will matter. We are basically stuck with all this garbage.”
Chris Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook, called for a breakup of the social media giant in a Thursday op-ed. Vaidhyanathan also thinks strong government regulation could be the answer, such as laws that “limit companies’ ability to suck up all our data and use it to target advertising.”
“We really should be addressing the back end of Facebook,” he said. “That’s what you have to attack.”
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France welcomed Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg on Friday with a threat of sweeping new regulation.
With Facebook under fire on multiple fronts, Zuckerberg is in Paris to show that his social media giant is working hard to limit violent extremism and hate speech shared online.
But a group of French regulators and experts who spent weeks inside Facebook facilities in Paris, Dublin and Barcelona say the company isn’t working hard enough.
Just before Zuckerberg met French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris, the 10 officials released a report calling for laws allowing the government to investigate and fine social networks that don’t take responsibility for the content that makes them money.
The French government wants the legislation to serve as a model for Europe-wide management of social networks. Several countries have introduced similar legislation, some tougher than what France is proposing.
To an average user, it seems like the problem is intractable. Mass shootings are live-streamed, and online mobs are spreading rumors that lead to deadly violence. Facebook is even inadvertently creating celebratory videos using extremist content and auto-generating business pages for the likes of the Islamic State group and al Qaida.
The company says it is working on solutions, and the French regulators praised Facebook for hiring more people and using artificial intelligence to track and crack down on dangerous content.
But they said Facebook didn’t provide the French officials enough information about its algorithms to judge whether they were working, and that a “lack of transparency … justifies an intervention of public authorities.”
The regulators recommended legally requiring a “duty of care” for big social networks, meaning they should moderate hate speech published on their platforms. They insist that any law should respect freedom of expression, but did not explain how Facebook should balance those responsibilities in practice.
After meeting Macron, Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post that he welcomed governments taking a more active role in drawing up regulations for the internet. He made similar remarks earlier this year but has been vague on what kind of regulation he favors.
Facebook faces “nuanced decisions” involving content that is harmful but not illegal and the French recommendations, which set guidelines for what’s considered harmful, “would create a more consistent approach across the tech industry and ensure companies are held accountable for enforcing standards against this content,” Zuckerberg said.
The regulators acknowledged that their research didn’t address violent content shared on private chat groups or encrypted apps, or on groups like 4chan or 8chan, where criminals and extremists and those concerned about privacy increasingly turn to communicate.
Facebook said Zuckerberg is in France as part of meetings around Europe to discuss future regulation of the internet. Facebook agreed to embed the French regulators as an effort to jointly develop proposals to fight online hate content.
Zuckerberg’s visit comes notably amid concern about hate speech and disinformation around this month’s European Parliament elections.
Next week, the leaders of France and New Zealand will meet tech leaders in Paris for a summit seeking to ban acts of violent extremism and terrorism from being shown online.
Facebook has faced challenges over privacy and security lapses and accusations of endangering democracy — and it came under criticism this week from its own co-founder.
Chris Hughes said in a New York Times opinion piece Thursday that it’s time to break up Facebook. He says Zuckerberg has turned Facebook into an innovation-suffocating monopoly and lamented the company’s “slow response to Russian agents, violent rhetoric and fake news.”
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Nike wants to meet your feet.
The sneaker seller will launch a foot-scanning tool on its app this summer that will measure and remember the length, width and other dimensions of customers’ feet after they point a smartphone camera to their toes. The app will then tell shoppers what size to buy each of its shoes in, which Nike hopes will cut down on costly online returns as it seeks to sell more of its goods through its websites and apps.
But Nike will also get something it has never had before: a flood of data on the feet of regular people, a potential goldmine for the shoemaker, which says it will use the information to improve the design of its shoes. Nike mainly relies on the feet of star athletes to build its kicks.
“Nikes will become better and better fitting shoes for you and everyone else,” said Michael Martin, who oversees Nike’s websites and apps.
Nike won’t sell or share the data to other companies, Martin says. And he says shoppers don’t have to save the foot scans to their Nike accounts. But if they do, they’ll only have to scan their feet once and Nike’s apps, websites and stores will know their dimensions every time they need to buy sneakers. Workers at Nike stores will also be equipped with iPods to do the scanning, replacing those metal sizing contraptions.
The challenging part for Nike is convincing people they need to measure their feet in the first place. Most think they already know what their shoe size is, says Brad Eckhart, who was an executive at shoe store chain Finish Line and is now a principal at retail consultancy Columbus Consulting,
But Nike says it gets half a million complaints a year from customers related to fit and sizing. And it admits what many shoppers have already suspected: Each of its shoe styles fit differently, even if they are in the same size. A leather sneaker may be tighter and require a bigger size. Knit ones may be more forgiving. And shoelaces can throw everything off.
Shoe size is “effectively a lie,” said Martin. “And it’s a lie that we’ve perpetuated.”
Matt Powell, a sports industry analyst at NPD Group Inc., says the tool might be most valuable for people who want to run or play basketball in their sneakers, since the wrong fit can cause injury. But Powell says most people buy sneakers just to walk around in.
Still, finding the right size is a problem for shoppers: “There really is no industry standard for what is a size 10,” Powell said.
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U.S. communications regulators are rejecting a Chinese telecom company’s application to provide service in the U.S. due to national-security risks amid an escalation in tensions between the two countries.
The Federal Communications Commission on Thursday voted unanimously, 5-0 across party lines, to reject China Mobile International USA Inc.’s long-ago filed application. The Commerce Department had recommended that denial last year.
The company, which the FCC says is ultimately owned by the Chinese government, applied in 2011 to provide international phone service in the U.S.
The Trump administration has been pushing against China in several ways. It has been pressuring allies to reject Chinese telecom equipment for their networks, citing security risks from Chinese telecom giant Huawei.
The U.S. and China are also in the middle of high-stakes trade talks.
Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes says it’s time to break up the social media behemoth.
He says in a New York Times opinion piece that CEO Mark Zuckerberg has allowed a relentless focus on growth to crush competitors and “sacrifice security and civility for clicks.”
Hughes says Facebook is a monopoly and should be forced to spin off WhatsApp and Instagram. He says future acquisitions should be banned for several years
Hughes roomed with Zuckerberg at Harvard and left Facebook in 2007 to campaign for Barack Obama.
He says he liquidated his Facebook shares in 2012, the year he became publisher of The New Republic.
Last year, Hughes published a book advocating a universal basic income. In 2017, Forbes put his net worth at more than $400 million.
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Earlier this month, officials from a group of 30 countries agreed to take a more coordinated approach to secure the next generation of fast mobile communication networks, known as 5G. The United States and others worry that technology companies located in countries with governments like China’s could be subject to state influence, making the networks insecure. Elizabeth Lee reports on the security concerns over 5G, and what it means to consumers.
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A senior U.S. State Department official said there is no need for President Donald Trump to sign an executive order to explicitly ban Chinese telecommunication company Huawei from taking part in the buildout of the U.S. 5G networks.
The four largest U.S. telecom carriers — Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint — have agreed not to use Huawei in any part of their 5G networks, said Ambassador Robert Strayer, deputy assistant secretary of state for cyber and international communications and information policy.
Strayer spoke with VOA about U.S. 5G policy and security concerns over Huawei. He also said the United States will only use trusted vendors, including South Korea’s Samsung, Sweden’s Ericsson and Finland’s Nokia, in the buildout of the U.S. 5G networks.
WATCH: Is 5G Chinese Technology a Threat to US National Security?
The following is an edited excerpt of the interview:
VOA: VOA broadcasts to many countries in Africa and Asia. These are places eager to develop their economies with high-tech communications. What does the U.S. say to those countries, which are eager for 5G and see the most attractive equipment and financing packages for those networks are all Chinese? If countries resist the Huawei offer, how many years back does that set their 5G networks? What would be the alternatives?
Deputy Assistant Secretary Robert Strayer: All around the world, we’re all very excited to see the promise of 5G technology. It’s going to empower things like telemedicine, autonomous vehicles, autonomous manufacturing, and including autonomous transportation networks in general.
So it’s going to be very important that network be incredibly secure because of all the critical infrastructure that’s going to ride on top of it. We know that there are a number of vendors besides Chinese technology vendors that are providing the equipment, the underlying infrastructure for 5G networks.
Those include Samsung in South Korea, Ericsson in Sweden and Nokia in Finland. So we believe those are trusted vendors.
We have grave concerns about the Chinese vendors because they can be compelled by the National Intelligence Law in China as well as other laws in China to take actions that would not be in the interests of the citizens of other countries around the world. Those networks could be disrupted or their data could be taken and be used for purposes that would not be consistent with fundamental human rights in those countries.
VOA: But it’s going to be a difficult choice. China is offering a great deal, in some cases 0% interest loans, 20-year payment plans, and what are the alternative plans like? Is there an analogy that you have that can show how turning down that kind of offer for something like 5G is actually in their long-term interest?
Strayer: We think that there should be commercially reasonable terms applied to financing deals. There’s obviously private financing available from telecom companies, but there are also a number of multinational, multilateral development banks providing potential sources of financing for infrastructure deals around the world.
We don’t think that countries need to adhere to, be left with only the predatory lending terms that are often offered by the Chinese Development Bank and other financing mechanisms that the Chinese companies are offering. Zero percent interest for 20 years is not commercially reasonable. It comes with huge strings attached. In fact, many of these things aren’t even transparent enough for countries to know what they’re signing up to.
We’re encouraging countries to think carefully about how they will move into 5G, make sure that they’re applying and signing up to financing terms that are commercially reasonable and ones that they can pay back in the long term.
We know of stories, of course, of ports being used as collateral in some of these financing deals, so countries could lose access to their very critical infrastructure under the terms of some of these deals. So we think that while 5G has huge promise and we should move quickly to it, we’re not in any way slowing ourselves down by going with vendors that are more trustworthy, and under financing conditions that are probably concessionary but are not at the level of some of these deals that are in no way reasonable in any type of commercial sense.
VOA: If Washington is asking other countries to ban Huawei from their 5G networks, why hasn’t the U.S. done so? I mean, the president has not signed an executive order on a comprehensive ban on Huawei, not just in the government, but in the private sector as well. Is the U.S. credibility at stake? How certain are you that the U.S. will ban Huawei equipment from its 5G network?
Strayer: So in our view, we don’t need to have a legal mechanism to ban Huawei in our private sector networks. The four largest U.S. telecom carriers have already agreed that they will not use Huawei or ZTE in any part of their 5G networks and they’re not using it in their 4G networks. So we don’t think that we need a legal tool to force them to do so. In addition, last year in the National Defense Law that was enacted at the end of the year, the government was prohibited — our U.S. government is prohibited from using these high-risk vendors.
VOA: Chinese Vice Premier Liu He is coming to Washington this week for the latest round of trade negotiation with the U.S. There are allegations against Huawei for stealing U.S. intellectual property. How should Huawei and 5G be discussed in the bilateral trade talks? Could they be hurdles for the two nations to reach a deal?
Strayer: I just want to be very clear that everything we’re talking about with countries around the world is about a national security threat that we see facing now, and that we think could have significant economic implications for them as well.
We are not talking about this in the context of trade. And I would just mention, too, that the concerns we have about Huawei that are well-documented are related to corruption, related to the theft of intellectual property, and related to defying sanctions, and using basically money-laundering schemes, have raised great concern about that company itself, but they’re not part of our trade discussions.
VOA: Is the U.S. lagging China in developing 5G infrastructure?
Strayer: No. We think we’re leading the world. By the end of this year, we’ll have 90 trials rolled out across the United States. We’ve already seen them being rolled out by Verizon and AT&T. We think we are actually leading the world in this field and we’re using only vendors from those three countries I mentioned that are trusted vendors, not the ones in China.
VOA: Thank you for talking to VOA.
Strayer: Thank you.
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U.S. law enforcement officials announced on Wednesday the indictment of two Israeli operators of a website that referred hundreds of thousands of users to underground internet marketplaces to purchase drugs, weapons and other illegal products.
Tal Prihar, 37, an Israeli citizen living in Brazil, and Michael Phan, 34, who lives in Israel, were indicted by a federal grand jury in Western Pennsylvania with money laundering in connection with operating DeepDotWeb, a website that served as a gateway to the Darkweb, the internet’s dark underbelly where users can purchase and exchange illegal products.
Prihar was arrested by French authorities in Paris Monday and faces likely extradition to the U.S. Phan was arrested on Monday in Israel and faces charges there. Prosecutors declined to say whether they’ll seek Phan’s extradition to the U.S.
The two Israeli nationals operated DeepDotWeb from 2013 to late last month when it was taken down by the FBI, collecting more than $15 million in commissions for directing users to various marketplaces such as the now defunct AlphaBay.
The users, in turn, purchases hundreds of millions of dollars worth of illegal drugs, firearms, malicious software, hacking tools, and stolen financial information and credit cards, according to prosecutors.
About 24 percent of all orders on AlphaBay, which was one of the largest Darkweb marketplaces before it was seized by the FBI in 2017, were associated with an account created through a referral link provided by DeepDotWeb.
Scott W. Brady, the U.S. attorney for Western Pennsylvania, said DeepDotWeb’s takedown represents a major blow to the Darknet economy.
“This is the single most significant law enforcement disruption of the Darknet to date,” Brady said at a press conference in Pittsburgh. “While there have been successful prosecutions of various Darknet marketplaces, this prosecution is the first to attack the infrastructure supporting the Darknet itself.”
Darknet marketplaces operate on Tor, a computer network that facilitates anonymous communication and transactions over the internet. Tor marketplaces can’t be found via a Google search. To access a marketplace, a user needs the site’s exact .onion url, a top level domain suffix designating an anonymous service reachable via the Tor network.
To address this problem, DeepDotWeb provided pages of hyperlinks to various marketplaces such as AlphaBay Market and Hansa Market, allowing users to navigate the marketplaces and collecting a commission each time a user made a purchase.
Google’s self-driving car spinoff, Waymo, is teaming up with Lyft in Arizona to attempt to lure passengers away from ride-hailing market leader Uber.
The alliance announced Tuesday will allow anyone with the Lyft app in the Phoenix area to summon one of the 10 self-driving Waymo cars that will join the ride-hailing service by end of September.
Waymo’s robotic vehicles will still have a human behind the wheel to take control in case something goes awry with the technology. But their use in Lyft’s service could make more people feel comfortable about riding in self-driving cars.
Self-driving to a profit
Both Lyft and Uber consider self-driving cars to be one of the keys to turning a profit, something neither company has done so far. Meanwhile, Waymo has been slowly expanding its own ride-hailing service in the Phoenix area that so far has been confined to passengers who previously participated in free tests of its self-driving technology.
“We’re committed to continuously improving our customer experience, and our partnership with Lyft will also give our teams the opportunity to collect valuable feedback,” Waymo CEO John Krafcik wrote in a blog post.
Lyft President John Zimmer described the Waymo partnership as “phenomenal” in a Tuesday conference call. Uber didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The new threat to Uber is emerging as the San Francisco company pursues an initial public offering of stock that could raise $9 billion when the deal is completed later this week. Lyft raked in more than $2 billion in its own IPO in March, only to see its stock fall nearly 20% below its offering price amid concerns about its ability to make money, a challenge magnified by another loss of $1.1 billion during the first three months of the year.
Waymo invests in both
Waymo’s corporate parent, Alphabet Inc., is in line to be among the biggest winners in Uber’s IPO just as it was in the Lyft IPO. Alphabet owns a 5% stake in Uber that will be worth as much as $3.6 billion if Uber realizes its goal of selling its stock for as much as $50 per share. It also holds a 5% stake in Lyft that is currently worth $761 million.
Despite their financial ties, Waymo and Uber have had an acrimonious relationship since becoming entangled in a thorny case of alleged high-tech theft.
Waymo accused Uber of orchestrating a scheme to steal some of its autonomous driving technology. That came after Uber’s former CEO Travis Kalanick began to suspect Waymo was planning to use its self-driving cars in a rival ride-hailing service.
The two sides settled that dispute last year in a deal that required Uber to give Alphabet another bundle of stock that was worth $245 million at the time the truce was reached.
The agreement also requires Uber to submit to reviews by a software expert to ensure it isn’t misusing any of Waymo’s technology in its effort to build its own self-driving cars, a process that recently uncovered some potentially “problematic” issues, according to discloses made as part of Uber’s IPO. Uber warned the problems could require it to pay a licensing fee to Waymo or delay its efforts to introduce self-driving cars in its service.
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Imagine a robot that can learn to walk by itself in about five minutes. Researchers at the University of Southern California have developed a robotic leg that can do just that with potential applications that range from helping in disaster areas to outer space. VOA’s Elizabeth Lee has the details.
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Google CEO Sundar Pichai is expected to showcase much-anticipated updates to the company’s hardware lines and artificial intelligence.
Google will also likely address privacy updates as concerns about data sharing continue to plague the tech industry. Facebook dedicated much of its own conference last week to addressing privacy.
Rumors suggest that Google may unveil a mid-range Pixel phone as a cheaper option to the flagship model currently on sale for $800.
Pichai has a keynote scheduled Tuesday at the company’s annual I/O conference for software developers in Mountain View, California.
Google says more than 7,000 developers will attend. The conference is focused on updates for the computer engineers that build apps and services on top of Google technology. I/O has also become a stage to announce new consumer products.
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When Google launched its now distinctive digital assistant in 2016, it was already in danger of being an also-ran.
At the time, Amazon had been selling its Echo smart speaker, powered by its Alexa voice assistant, for more than a year. Apple’s Siri was already five years old and familiar to most iPhone users. Google’s main entry in the field up to that point was Google Now, a phone-bound app that took voice commands but didn’t answer back.
Now the Google Assistant – known primarily as the voice of the Google Home smart speaker – is increasingly central to Google’s new products. And even though it remains commercially overshadowed by Alexa, it keeps pushing the boundaries of what artificial intelligence can accomplish in everyday settings.
For instance, Google last year announced an Assistant service called Duplex, which it said can actually call up restaurants and make reservations for you. Duplex isn’t yet widely available yet outside of Google’s own Pixel phones in the U.S. Alexa and Siri so far offer nothing similar.
Google is expected to announce updates and expansions to its AI Assistant at its annual developer conference Tuesday.
Although voice assistants have spread across smartphones and into cars and offices, they’re currently most commonly found in the home, where people tend to use them with smart speakers for simple activities such as playing music, setting timers and checking the weather. Amazon’s Echo devices maintain a strong lead in the market, according to eMarketer ; the firm estimates that 63% of all U.S. smart speaker users will talk to an Amazon device this year, compared to 31% that will use Google. Apple’s HomePod is a mere afterthought, lumped in the “other” category which has a combined 12%.
More broadly, though, the competition is much more difficult to assess. Google claims the Assistant is now available across more than a billion devices, although many of those are smartphones whose owners may never have uttered the Assistant’s wake-up phrase, “OK Google.”
Google Assistant doesn’t record users commands by default – differing from Alexa – but recording must be turned on to access some of Assistant’s features, including a popular one that allows it to recognize different users by voice.
Amazon and Google may one-up each other on different metrics, but the real measurement is how well they’ve achieved those own goal, said Gartner analyst Werner Goertz.
Amazon’s deep ties in shopping make Alexa the go-to assistant for adding items to your grocery list or putting in a quick re-order of dish soap. Google’s decades of deep search technology make it the leader in looking up or answering questions you might have and personalizing its responses based on what else Google knows about you from your previous searches, your movements or your web browsing.
All that, of course, reinforces Google’s key advertising business, which is based on showing you ads targeted to your interests.
At first, the Assistant on Home mostly just acted as a vocal search engine; it could also carry out a few additional tasks like starting your Spotify playlists. Over time, however, it has added dozens of languages, partnered with more than 1,500 smart home companies to control lights, locks and TVs and learned to identify members of any given household by voice.
It’s also expanded the number of apps and other companies it works with and moved into Google Maps as a way to send text messages while driving.
Both Google and Amazon plan further expansions. Last year, Amazon unveiled a number of home gadgets with Alexa built in, including a “smart” microwave. At the CES gadget show this year, it showed off a phone-connected device that brings Alexa to cars.
Google countered with updates to its expanding Android Auto system, which got Assistant capability last year.
As Assistant and Alexa get smarter, faster and more personalized, analysts expect their reach to become broader and more ubiquitous. The speakers, said eMarketer analyst Victoria Petrock, are “getting people used to talking to their devices.” Eventually, she says, if you can speak to your microwave and TV and lights directly, you won’t need the speakers – except maybe to play music.
In these emerging areas Google is hoping to outflank rivals with its strong inroads with Android smartphones and cars. But it faces competition in many of these areas not just from Amazon, but also Apple and Microsoft.
Google I/O kicks off at 10 a.m. Tuesday in Mountain View, California. The company is expected to announce a less expensive Pixel phone and updates to its smart home devices.
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Alphabet’s Google is set to roll out a dashboard-like function in its Chrome browser to offer users more control in fending off tracking cookies, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday, citing people familiar with the matter.
Cookies are small text files that follow internet users and are used by advertisers to target consumers on the specific interests they have displayed while browsing.
While Google’s new tools are not expected to significantly curtail its ability to collect data, it would help the company press its sizable advantage over online-advertising rivals, the newspaper said.
Google’s 3 billion users help make it the world’s largest seller of internet ads, capturing nearly a third of all revenue, ahead of rival Facebook’s 20%, according to research firm eMarketer.
Total digital ad spending in the United States will grow 19% to nearly $130 billion in 2019, according to eMarketer.
Google has been working on the cookies plan for at least six years, in stops and starts, but accelerated the work after news broke last year that personal data of Facebook users was improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica.
The company is mostly targeting cookies installed by profit-seeking third parties, separate from the owner of the website a user is actively visiting, the Journal said.
Apple in 2017 stopped majority of tracking cookies on its Safari browser by default and Mozilla’s Firefox did the same a year later.
Google did not immediately respond to a Reuters’ request for comment.
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Microsoft announced an ambitious effort it says will make voting secure, verifiable and subject to reliable audits. Two of the three top U.S elections vendors have expressed interest in potentially incorporating the open-source software into their proprietary voting systems.
The software kit is being developed with Galois, an Oregon-based company separately creating a secure voting system prototype under contract with the Pentagon’s advanced research agency, DARPA.
Dubbed “ElectionGuard,” the Microsoft kit will be available this summer, the company says, with early prototypes ready to pilot for next year’s general elections. CEO Satya Nadella announced the initiative Monday at a developer’s conference in Seattle.
Nadella said the project’s software, provided free of charge as part of Microsoft’s Defending Democracy Program, would help “modernize all of the election infrastructure everywhere in the world.” Microsoft also announced a cut-rate Office 365 application suite for political parties and campaigns for what it charges nonprofits. Both Microsoft and Google provide anti-phishing email support for campaigns.
Three little-known U.S. companies control about 90 percent of the market for election equipment, but have long faced criticism for poor security, antiquated technology and insufficient transparency around their proprietary, black-box voting systems. Open-source software is inherently more secure because the underlying code is easily scrutinized by outside security experts.
Two of the leading vendors, Election Systems & Software of Omaha, Nebraska, and Hart InterCivic of Austin, Texas, both expressed interest in partnering with Microsoft for ElectionGuard. A spokeswoman for a third vendor, Dominion Voting Systems of Denver, said the company looks forward to “learning more” about the initiative.
Anyone with an existing voting system or developing a new one will be able to incorporate the ElectionGuard development kit — at the state or local level in the U.S. or national level for jurisdictions abroad.
“It can be used with a ballot-marking device. It can be used with an optical scanner, on hand-marked paper ballots,” said Josh Benaloh, a senior cryptographer at Microsoft Research and key contributor to the ElectionGuard project.
Benaloh helped produce a National Academies of Science report last year that called for an urgent overhaul of the rickety U.S. election system, which faced serious threats from Russian hackers who in 2016 attempted to infiltrate voting administration systems in several states.
That report called for all U.S. elections to be held on human-readable paper ballots by 2020. It also advocated a specific form of routine post-election audits intended to ensure that votes are accurately counted. While U.S. officials say there is no evidence of hackers tampering with election results, experts say systems used by millions of U.S. voters remain susceptible to tampering.
One election official who has been in informal conversations with the ElectionGuard project leaders is Dean Logan, who runs elections for Los Angeles County, the nation’s most populous, and is building an open-source voting system for it.
Election integrity activist Susan Greenhalgh of the National Election Defense Coalition said she hoped the project would encourage innovative thinking at the level that elections are actually managed.
ElectionGuard aims to provide “end-to-end” verification of voting in two ways, Benaloh said. First, it lets voters confirm that their votes are accurately recorded.
Second, the unique coded tracker it produces registers an encrypted version of the vote that keeps the ballot choice itself secret while ensuring votes are accurately counted. Outsiders such as election watchdog groups, political parties, journalists and voters themselves can verify online that votes were properly counted without being altered.
The system would also allow for reliable post-election audits and recounts. Microsoft executives say they also plan to build a prototype voting system for reference.
A spinoff of Galois called Free & Fair developed the sophisticated post-election audits , known as “risk-limiting,” for Colorado, which was the first U.S. state to require the audits recommended in the National Academies of Sciences report.
ElectionGuard is not designed to work with internet voting schemes — which experts consider too easily hackable — and does not currently work with vote-by-mail systems.
ES&S told The Associated Press via email that it was excited to partner with Microsoft and “still exploring the potentials” for incorporated the software kit its voting systems.
Hart InterCivic, the No. 3 vendor, said it planned a pilot project with Microsoft to “incorporate ElectionGuard functionality as an additional feature” layered over its core platform.
A spokeswoman for Dominion, the No. 2 vendor, said “We are very interested in learning more about the initiative and being able to review the various prototypes that are being planned, along with hearing more about other federally-supported efforts in the elections space.”
Edgardo Cortes, a former Virginia elections commissioner now with New York University’s Brennan Center, welcomed additional private sector support for election systems.
“I think it’ll take a while to catch on and see how beneficial (ElectionGuard) ends up being,” he said. “But I think it certainly does have a great deal of potential.”
Columbia University will be partnering with Microsoft to audit the pilots.
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Virtual Reality had a fantastic year in 2016, with the release of several anticipated VR glasses, including the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive. Gaming and technology fairs presented the new toys proudly, but the boom quickly declined, leaving the technology to only niche applications. Now, a southeastern Chinese city has opened an entertainment park that intends to show VR’s potential as a future technology. Markus Meyer-Gehlen reports.
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An innovative Czech company is changing the way we think of light, by capturing and transforming it in ways that save money and generally make the world a more beautiful place. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Lightweight, cheap to make and easier to send into outer space. Academics in the U.S. are developing an inflatable robot with money from the American space agency, NASA. NASA says the blow-up technology can handle the cosmos and existence back here on Earth. Arash Arabasadi has more.
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European and American investigators have broken up one of the world’s largest online criminal marketplaces for drugs, hacking tools and financial-theft wares in raids in the United States, Germany and Brazil.
Three German men, ages 31, 22 and 29, were arrested after the raids in three southern states on allegations they operated the so-called “Wall Street Market” darknet platform, which hosted about 5,400 sellers and more than 1 million customer accounts, Frankfurt prosecutor Georg Ungefuk told reporters in Wiesbaden on Friday.
A Brazilian man, the site’s alleged moderator, was also charged.
The three Germans, identified in U.S. court documents as Tibo Lousee, Jonathan Kalla and Klaus-Martin Frost, face drug charges in Germany on allegations they administrated the platform where cocaine, heroin and other drugs, as well as forged documents and other illegal material, were sold.
They have also been charged in the United States with conspiring to launder money and distribute illegal drugs, according to a criminal complaint filed in Los Angeles federal court.
“The charges filed in Germany and the United States will significantly disrupt the illegal sale of drugs on the darknet,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Ryan White told reporters in Germany. “We believe that Wall Street Market recently became the world’s largest darknet marketplace for contraband including narcotics, hacking tools, illegal services and stolen financial data.”
Two-year operation
Ungefuk said Wall Street Market was at least the second biggest, refusing to name others for fear of jeopardizing other investigations.
In the nearly two-year operation involving European police agency Europol and authorities in the Netherlands as well as the U.S. and Germany, investigators pinpointed the three men as administrators of the platform on the darknet. It is part of the internet often used by criminals that is hosted within an encrypted network and accessible only through anonymity-providing tools, such as the Tor browser.
Transactions were conducted using cryptocurrencies, and the suspects took commissions ranging from 2% to 6%, Ungefuk said.
The site trafficked documents such as identity papers and driver’s licenses. But an estimated 60% or more of the business was drug-related, he said.
Caught during ‘exit scam’
Authorities swept in quickly after the platform was switched into a “maintenance mode” April 23, and the suspects allegedly began transferring funds used on the platform to themselves in a so-called “exit scam,” Ungefuk said.
The U.S. Department of Justice said the administrators took about $11 million in the exit scam from escrow and user accounts.
The U.S. identified a fourth defendant as Marcos Paulo De Oliveira-Annibale, 29, of Sao Paulo, Brazil. It was not clear if he had been arrested, and federal police in Brazil wouldn’t comment.
Annibale, who went by the moniker “MED3LIN” online, faces federal drug distribution and money laundering charges in the United States for allegedly acting as a moderator on the site in disputes between vendors and their customers. He also allegedly promoted Wall Street Market on prominent websites such as Reddit, the Justice Department said.
Brazilian authorities searched his home Thursday after investigators linked his online persona to pictures he posted of himself years ago, U.S. officials said.
Impact will be short-lived
A University of Manchester criminology researcher who follows activity on dark web markets, Patrick Shortis, said the takedown was widely anticipated after Annibale leaked his credentials and the market’s true internet address online.
Knocking out Wall Street Market is unlikely to have a lasting impact on online criminal markets, though law enforcement officials make it clear they are going after sellers and customers, Shortis said.
In Los Angeles, two drug suppliers were arrested, and authorities confiscated about $1 million cash, weapons and drugs in raids. They were only identified by their online monikers, “Platinum45” and “Ladyskywalker,” and characterized as “major drug traffickers” dealing methamphetamine and fentanyl.
Other darknet busts
After the first big takedown of such a marketplace, Silk Road in 2013, it took overall trade about four to five months to recuperate, Shortis said. And after law enforcement took out Hansa and AlphaBay in 2017, it took about a month, he said.
Shortis said one threat he does see to the market, in the short term at least, are so-called denial of service cyberattacks that effectively knock web servers offline by flooding them with traffic.
“An extortionist is currently targeting Empire and Nightmare, who are both in the running to replace Wall Street as the top market,” he said.
The raids in Germany culminated Thursday with the seizure of servers, while federal police confiscated 550,000 euros ($615,000) in cash, Bitcoin and Monero cryptocurrencies, hard drives, and other evidence in multiple raids.
Because of the clandestine nature of the operation and the difficulty of tracing cryptocurrencies, Ungefuk said it was difficult to assess the overall volume of business conducted by the darknet group. But he said that “we’re talking about profits in the millions at least.”
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Cybersecurity officials from dozens of countries on Friday proposed a set of principles to ensure the safety of next generation mobile networks amid concerns over the use of gear made by China’s Huawei.
The non-binding proposals were published at the end of a two-day meeting in Prague to discuss the security of new 5G networks.
The U.S. has been lobbying allies to ban Huawei from 5G networks over concerns China’s government could force the company to give it access to data for cyberespionage. Huawei, the world’s biggest maker of telecom infrastructure equipment, has denied the allegations.
The proposals reflected security concerns, with some wording that also appeared to be aimed at raising the bar for Chinese suppliers. The document said “security and risk assessment of vendors and network technologies” should be taken into account, as well as “the overall risk of influence on a supplier by a third country,” especially its “model of governance.”
“Security and risk assessments of vendors and network technologies should take into account rule of law,” it said.
U.S. officials have urged their allies to take into account the laws and legal system of a country where a 5G supplier is based, saying that China’s lack of independent judiciary means companies have no legal options if they don’t want to comply with Beijing’s orders.
The European Commission has also recommended that EU countries factor in the legal systems of the countries where 5G suppliers are headquartered.
At the meeting in Prague, the cybersecurity officials came mainly from countries that are strategic allies, including European Union member states, the United States and its Asia-Pacific allies including Australia, Japan and South Korea and Singapore. NATO and European Union officials also participated but China and Russia were not present.
Europe has become a key battleground in the war over whether to ban Huawei, with countries gearing up to deploy the new networks, starting with the auction of radio frequencies this year.
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Vietnam is used to being an order taker. Companies such as Nokia and Samsung Electronics use the Southeast Asian country’s cheap labor to assemble consumer electronics for export. Those investments from abroad have slowly handed Vietnam the supplies, parts and know-how needed for local companies to make their own smartphones.
In a bellwether case, a unit of the Vingroup property and retail conglomerate began selling phones in December with plans to join a Spanish technology firm in escalating production over the next two years, according to domestic media reports.
Vingroup should expect a stronger than ever onshore supply chain plus abundant labor, analysts in Vietnam say, but must appeal better than its predecessors, mostly written off as failures, to the domestic market where shoppers tend to prefer foreign brands.
“I would say that there’s more and more bits and pieces that are being produced in Vietnam as the Taiwanese and Koreans and everybody else moves their parts supply here,” said Frederick Burke, partner with the law firm Baker McKenzie in Ho Chi Minh City.
Brisk sales of a locally made phone would push Vietnam’s low-wage, contract-reliant economy up the value chain.
Qphones out, Bphones in
Vietnamese developers have launched a handful of mobile phones over the past decade under brands such as Qphone and Mobiistar. A lot have faded or folded because of poor marketing or lack of knowledge about what consumers want, said Thanh Vo, senior analyst with the market research firm IDC Indochina in Ho Chi Minh City.
In 2015, handset builder and software firm BKAV Corp. came out with what consumers and analysts describe as Vietnam’s first qualified success.
BKAV’s first devices, the Bphone and Bphone 2, got poor reviews, domestic news website VietNamNet Bridge said in a report in October. But its $314 Bphone 3 released last year won praise among experts for its processing speed and water resistance “contrary to all predictions,” the report said.
Vinsmart signed an agreement in July with BQ of Spain to launch four smartphones under the Vsmart brand in December, the Vietnam Investment Review reported. Vingroup, which is run by Vietnam’s richest person Pham Nhat Vuong, plans to make up to 5 million handsets a year by 2021, the Financial Times reported.
Vingroup did not answer a request for comment for this report.
Nation of factories
Foreign investment in Vietnamese manufacturing is fueling economic growth of 6% to 7% every year. The GDP rose nearly 7.1% in 2018, the highest in 11 years. Among the engines, Samsung, LG Electronics, Nokia and Intel are all making “multibillion-dollar investments” in Vietnam, business consultancy Dezan Shira & Associates says. Exports of electronics had exceeded $40 billion by 2017.
Five years ago, just 2% of the value added to made-in-Vietnam electronics was local, Burke said. That percentage, he said, is higher now. The Vsmart phones will probably still use parts from offshore, he said, but find a solid local supply chain as well.
The Bphone 3s run on Qualcomm Snapdragon processors and use Gorilla Glass covers by Corning. Both suppliers are American.
Labor for domestic phones will be intensely local, Vo said.
“From my experience, Vingroup will pay the high salaries to recruit the human resources from other competitors,” he said.
Hesitant consumers
Economic growth will help expand the middle class to about one-third of Vietnam’s 96 million people by next year, the Boston Consulting Group estimates. Some of that new wealth in the country where just about everyone, including fishermen and garbage collectors, carries a smartphone has gone toward high-end phones by Apple and Samsung.
“I am not interested in Vietnamese phones, since the Bphone was unveiled a few years ago, and the quality is not good,” said Phuong Hong, a 10-year iPhone user in Ho Chi Minh City.
But consumers who normally buy relatively cheap handsets made by Chinese firms such as Oppo and Huawei might consider a local brand in the same price range, Burke said.
Because consumers normally pick smartphones for their design and price rather than country of origin, Vietnamese vendors must step up their marketing and figure out before production what domestic shoppers want, Vo said. Vietnamese are looking for phones as cheap as $200, he added.
“We’ve seen many people try and many people fail, so one has to take a view on whether Vietnamese really want to buy a Vinsmart phone rather than a Samsung phone or an Apple phone, for example,” said Kevin Snowball, chief executive officer with PXP Vietnam Asset Management in Ho Chi Minh City.
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Nearly two weeks after a fiery explosion during a ground test of its new crew capsule, SpaceX confirmed Thursday that the vehicle was destroyed, but neither the company nor NASA, its primary customer, have publicly acknowledged the nature of the mishap.
Instead, Hans Koenigsmann, vice president of flight reliability for California-based Space Exploration Technologies Corp., known as SpaceX, continued to refer to the accident simply as an “anomaly,” jargon for when something goes wrong.
The April 20 accident occurred at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station as SpaceX was about to test eight emergency thrusters designed to propel the capsule, dubbed Crew Dragon, to safety from atop the rocket in the event of a launch failure.
“Just prior, before we wanted to fire the (thrusters), there was an anomaly and the vehicle was destroyed,” Koenigsmann told reporters Thursday at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. “There were no injuries. SpaceX had taken all safety measures prior to this test, as we always do.”
The news conference was called ahead of Friday’s scheduled launch of an unmanned resupply mission to the International Space Station using a cargo-only capsule built by SpaceX, the private rocket venture of billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk.
When pressed about the accident, Koenigsmann declined to say whether an explosion or fire was involved. NASA has likewise declined to describe the mishap.
A leaked video of the accident, which a NASA contractor has acknowledged as authentic in an internal memo obtained by the Orlando Sentinel newspaper, showed the capsule blasting to smithereens. A pall of smoke was also widely observed from a distance at the time of the ill-fated test.
SpaceX’s reluctance to describe in plain terms what happened to the capsule was at odds with NASA’s long history of transparency surrounding accidents involving its human spaceflight program.
The Crew Dragon had been scheduled to carry U.S. astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the space station in a test mission in July, although April’s accident, as well as some vehicle design hitches, are likely to push that launch to later in the year or into 2020.
“It’s certainly not great news for the schedule overall, but I hope we can recover,” Koenigsmann said.
The destroyed vehicle was one of six such capsules built or in late production by SpaceX, and the first flown into space. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched it without crew to the space station in March for a six-day visit before returning to Earth, splashing down safely in the Atlantic for retrieval.
Koenigsmann said initial data from the accident showed the mishap occurred during activation of the emergency thrusters, which SpaceX calls the SuperDraco system.
“We have no reason to believe there is an issue with the SuperDracos themselves,” Koenigsmann said, adding that the engines have been tested nearly 600 times in the past.
NASA has been awarded $6.8 billion to SpaceX and rival Boeing Co to develop separate capsule systems to fly astronauts to space, but both companies have faced technical challenges and delays.
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The hugely popular social media site Facebook has banned Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and several others for hate speech.
Facebook said Thursday that the individuals violated its policy against instigating violence.
“Individuals and organizations who spread hate or attack or call for the exclusion of others on the basis of who they are have no place on Facebook … regardless of ideology,” a spokeswoman said.
They are also barred from Facebook’s photo-sharing site, Instagram.
Facebook did not say whether any specific posts from those named led to the ban.
Jones is best known for theories claiming the government was behind the 9/11 terror attacks and that the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Connecticut in 2012 was a hoax.
He angrily responded to the ban, saying Facebook had “defamed” him.
Another far-right commentator banned, Paul Joseph Watson, has been accused of racism and intense hatred of Muslims.
He said he did not break any of Facebook’s rules and called on like-minded commentators to pressure the Trump administration to take action on their behalf.
Farrakhan, the veteran leader of the black nationalist group Nation of Islam, has long been accused of anti-Semitism and black separatism. He has not responded to the Facebook ban.
Other far-right personalities barred from Facebook are Paul Nehlen, Laura Loomer and Milo Yiannopoulos.
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