Many people enjoy playing video games but take for granted that they can hold and easily operate game controllers. Now Microsoft is making it possible for disabled gamers to join in the fun. Tina Trinh reports.
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Top Twitter and Facebook executives will defend their companies before U.S. lawmakers on Wednesday, with Facebook insisting it takes election interference seriously and Twitter denying its operations are influenced by politics.
But no executive from Alphabet’s Google is expected to testify, after the company declined the Senate Intelligence Committee’s request to send one of its most senior executives, frustrating lawmakers.
Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, appearing alongside Twitter Chief Executive Jack Dorsey, will say that her company’s efforts to combat foreign influence have improved since the 2016 U.S. election, according to written testimony released Tuesday.
“The actions we’ve taken in response … show our determination to do everything we can to stop this kind of interference from happening,” Sandberg said.
The company is getting better at finding and removing “inauthentic” content and now has more than 20,000 people working on safety and security, she said.
Technology executives have repeatedly testified in Congress over the past year, on the defensive over political influence activity on their sites as well as concerns about user privacy.
The Senate Intelligence Committee has been looking into efforts to influence U.S. public opinion for more than a year, after U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that Kremlin-backed entities sought to boost Republican Donald Trump’s chances of winning the White House in 2016.
Moscow has denied involvement.
Google offered to send its chief legal officer, Kent Walker, to Wednesday’s hearing, but he was rejected by the committee, which said it wanted to hear from corporate decision-makers.
’Don’t understand the problem’
Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina, the committee’s Republican chairman, said he expected the hearing would focus on solutions to the problem of foreign efforts to influence U.S. elections and sow political discord, with a jab at Google.
“You don’t understand the problem if you don’t see this as a large effort from whole of government and the private sector,” Burr told reporters at the Senate.
Google said Walker would be in Washington on Wednesday and be available to meet with lawmakers. On Tuesday it released written “testimony” describing the company’s efforts to combat influence operations.
Twitter’s Dorsey also will testify at a House of Representatives hearing on Wednesday that the company “does not use political ideology to make any decisions,” according to written testimony also made public Tuesday.
Dorsey will appear before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, addressing Republican concerns about how the social media platform polices content.
“From a simple business perspective and to serve the public conversation, Twitter is incentivized to keep all voices on the platform,” Dorsey said.
Conservative Republicans in Congress have criticized social media companies for what they say are politically motivated practices in removing some content, a charge the companies have repeatedly rejected.
Trump faulted Twitter on July 26, without citing any evidence, for limiting the visibility of prominent Republicans through a practice known as shadow banning.
Democratic Representative David Cicilline of Rhode Island blasted Wednesday’s hearing and his Republican colleagues, calling claims of political bias baseless.
“There is no evidence that the algorithms of social networks or search results are biased against conservatives. It is a made-up narrative pushed by the conservative propaganda machine to convince voters of a conspiracy that does not exist,” Cicilline said.
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As legislators prepare to grill Silicon Valley executives over Russian hacking ahead of midterm elections, some observers say the debate over expanded government oversight is far from over.
On Tuesday, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey met with legislators in Washington ahead of Wednesday morning’s hearing, where Dorsey and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg will answer questions about cybersecurity before the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the committee’s ranking Democrat, told The Washington Post that the hearing aims to “to sound the alarm that what happened in 2016, as we’ve seen, was not a one-off.”
In recent weeks, Microsoft reported that it had disabled six Russian-launched websites masquerading as U.S. think tanks and Senate sites. Facebook and the security firm FireEye revealed influence campaigns, originating in Iran and Russia, that led the social network to remove 652 impostor accounts, some targeting Americans. The office of Republican Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania said hackers tied to a “nation-state” had sent phishing emails to old campaign email accounts.
Hacking attempts
Newly reported attempts at infiltration and social media manipulation — which Moscow officially denies — point to Russia’s continued interest in meddling in U.S. politics. While observers say there is no clear evidence of Kremlin efforts to disrupt midterms, it nonetheless appears hackers outside the American political system are probing for a way in.
“What’s interesting about this is that the Russians have shown here that they are not at all partisan in this,” said David Sanger of The New York Times, who first reported on Microsoft’s account of the latest attacks, in which company officials seized website domains created by the Kremlin-linked hacker group known as Fancy Bear or APT28 — the same group that federal investigators and private cybersecurity firms blamed for the 2016 election hack.
The phony sites, designed to emulate the Hudson Institute and International Republican Institute, surreptitiously routed users to pages built by hackers to steal passwords and log-in credentials. The aim, Sanger said, is to disrupt institutions that challenge Moscow or Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“They are pursuing their own national interests, going after think tanks that have taken positions that the Russians find uncomfortable or threatening, whether it’s the use of sanctions or promotion of democracy or pursuit of kleptocrats,” Sanger told VOA.
The extent to which Microsoft coordinated with federal investigators to thwart the latest attack wasn’t clear, he said.
“I’m not sure whether they gave the government an advance heads up, but the nature of cyber now is that you hear about these [attacks from the] companies before you hear about them from government,” Sanger added.
In recent months, legislators on both sides of the aisle have expressed willingness to regulate how U.S. tech companies safeguard themselves against intrusions. But analyst Ben Nimmo of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab says the Microsoft takedown bodes well for the tech sector’s independent ability to prevent attacks.
“This is something we’ve seen over the last couple of months — tech companies have been much more forward-leaning in their attempts to prevent this kind of interference,” Nimmo told VOA.
“We had Microsoft coming out up front and saying we’ve just stopped this attack, and they actually attributed it directly to Fancy Bear, which is very striking that they’re actually confident in making that direct attribution. A couple of weeks ago, we had Facebook coming out and exposing a number of inauthentic accounts, which had some connections with the troll farm in St. Petersburg,” he added, referring to the Internet Research Agency linked to the 2016 U.S. election hack. “About a month before that, we had Twitter coming out and releasing a list of handles that it had traced back to the troll farm.”
A troll farm is a group of people who attempt to create disruption in an online community by posting comments online that are deliberately inflammatory or provocative.
US, European action
With all of the recent activity on the platform side, Nimmo said the question is “what are we going to see on the government level?”
More specifically, what can the West can do in order to pressure the Russian government — and does the West have the political will to do it? If nothing else, the latest attacks are likely to embolden U.S. and European lawmakers to pass additional sanctions.
“Although I think we need to fully understand the scope of this activity that Microsoft has reported, it clearly demonstrates that Russia is not in any way pulling back from the techniques that it used in 2016,” said Alexander Vershbow, a distinguished fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, and a former NATO deputy secretary general.
“If anything, it’s broadening its target to include conservative think tanks and organizations like the Hudson Institute, and so I think you can say right now, at a minimum, it would give momentum to congressional efforts to tighten the sanctions even further,” added Vershbow, who also has been a U.S. ambassador to Russia, South Korea and NATO. “It may also strengthen the hand of administration officials as they consult with Europe in trying to push the Europeans to tighten their sanctions as well.”
Retired Marine General Jim Jones, former national security adviser during the Obama administration, said although sanctions can be effective in the short term, long-term national security depends on safeguarding the cyber infrastructure itself.
“In a not so distant future, the country that first succeeds in reaching complete cybersecurity will be able to cause even more serious disorders,” Jones told VOA. “That’s the essence of cyberwar in our century.”
For individuals targeted by foreign hackers, such as the Hudson Institute’s Russian kleptocracy expert Ben Judah, no amount of new sanctions or malware detection will be enough.
“Be careful of what you keep on your computer and on your phone,” Judah told VOA. “Have sensitive information? Use pen and paper.”
Following Wednesday morning’s Senate hearing, Twitter CEO Dorsey will appear solo before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, where he’ll be asked to address allegations of political censorship.
This story originated in VOA’s Russian Service. Original reporting contributed by Natalia Antonova and Jela De Franceschi. Some information is from AP.
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Amazon.com is in talks with Chile to house and mine massive amounts of data generated by the country’s giant telescopes, which could prove fertile ground for the company to develop new artificial intelligence tools.
The talks, which have been little reported on so far and which were described to Reuters by Chilean officials and an astronomer, are aimed at fueling growth in Amazon.com’s cloud computing business in Latin America and boosting its data processing capabilities.
President Sebastian Pinera’s center-right government, which is seeking to wean Chile’s $325 billion economy from reliance on copper mining, announced last week it plans to pool data from all its telescopes onto a virtual observatory stored in the cloud, without giving a timeframe. The government talked of the potential for astrodata innovation, but did not give details.
The government did not comment on companies that might host astrodata in the computing cloud.
Amazon executives have been holding discussions with the Chilean government for two years about a possible data center to provide infrastructure for local firms and the government to store information on the cloud, an official at InvestChile, the government’s investment body, told Reuters.
For at least some of that time, the talks have included discussion about the possibility of Amazon Web Services (AWS) hosting astrodata, astronomer Chris Smith said, based on email exchanges he was part of between AWS and Chilean Economy Ministry officials over the last six months. Smith was at the time mission head of AURA observatory, which manages three of the U.S. federally-funded telescope projects in Chile.
Jeffrey Kratz, AWS’s General Manager for Public Sector for Latin American, Caribbean and Canada, has visited Chile for talks with Pinera. He confirmed the company’s interest in astrodata but said Amazon had no announcements to make at present.
“Chile is a very important country for AWS,” he said in an email to Reuters. “We kept being amazed about the incredible work on astronomy and the telescopes, as real proof points on innovation and technology working together.”
“The Chilean telescopes can benefit from the cloud by eliminating the heavy lifting of managing IT,” Kratz added.
AWS is a fast-growing part of Amazon’s overall business. In July it reported second-quarter sales of $6.1 billion, up by 49 percent over the same period a year ago, accounting for 12 percent of Amazon’s overall sales.
Star-gazing to shoplifting
Chile is home to 70 percent of global astronomy investment, thanks to the cloudless skies above its northern Atacama desert, the driest on Earth. Within five years, the South American country will host three of the world’s four next-generation, billion-dollar telescopes, according to Smith.
He and Economy Ministry officials leading the Chilean initiative to store astrodata in the cloud saw potential in more Earth-bound matters.
The particular tools developed for the astrodata project could be applicable for a wide variety of other uses, such as tracking potential shoplifters, fare-evaders on public transport and endangered animals, Julio Pertuze, a ministry official, told Reuters at the event announcing Chile’s aim to build a virtual observatory on the cloud.
Smith added that the same technology could also be applied to medicine and banking to spot anomalies in large datasets.
Amazon, whose founder and largest shareholder Jeff Bezos is well known for his interest in space, already provides a cloud platform for the Hubble Telescope’s data and the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research in Australia.
As Amazon explores the potential in Chile’s astrodata, tech rival Google, owned by Alphabet, is already a member of Chile’s Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, which will be fully operational in Cerro Pachon in 2022. Google also has a data center established in the country.
Justin Burr, senior PR associate for AI and Machine learning at Google, declined to comment on any Google plans around astrodata or its involvement in other telescope projects.
Separately, a Google spokeswoman said last week that the company will announce expansion plans for its Chilean data center on Sept. 12.
Giant database
Smith said that what the Chileans are calling the Astroinformatics Initiative — to harness the potential of astrodata — could enable Amazon Web Services access to the research that astronomers are doing on projects like the LSST.
“We are going to have to go through a huge database of billions of stars to find the three stars that an astronomer wants,” Smith said, adding that was not too different from searching a database of billions of people to find the right profile for a targeted advertisement.
“So a tool that might get developed in LSST or the astronomical world could be applicable for Amazon in their commercial world.”
Since speaking to Reuters, Smith has moved on from his job heading AURA to a new position at the U.S. National Science Foundation.
Amazon’s role in the astrodata project would also give it an entry into a market where it is seeking to expand. Amazon — which controls nearly one-third of the global cloud computing business, ahead of rivals Microsoft and Google — has struggled to lure public institutions in Latin America, including research facilities, to store their data online instead of on physical machines.
AWS declined to provide any information on the size of its regional business in Latin America.
Economy Minister Jose Ramon Valente said at last week’s announcement, “Chile has enormous potential in its pristine skies not only in the observation of the universe but also in the amount of data that observation generates.”
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Twitter’s CEO says the company is not biased against Republicans or Democrats and is working on ways to ensure that debate is healthier on its platform.
In prepared testimony released ahead of a House hearing Wednesday, Jack Dorsey says he wants to be clear about one thing: “Twitter does not use political ideology to make any decisions, whether related to ranking content on our service or how we enforce our rules.”
The testimony comes as some Republicans say conservatives have been censored on social media and have questioned the platform’s algorithms. Dorsey will testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Wednesday afternoon on that subject, following a morning hearing before the Senate intelligence committee on foreign interference in social media.
At the Senate hearing, Twitter and Facebook plan to tell the intelligence panel that they are aggressively working to root out foreign actors who want to influence U.S. elections. Lawmakers are especially concerned about the upcoming midterm elections after Russia used social media accounts to try to influence the 2016 election.
To address concerns about bias, Dorsey offers an explanation of how Twitter uses “behavioral signals,” such as the way accounts interact and behave on the service. Those signals can help weed out spam and abuse.
He says such behavioral analysis “does not consider in any way” political views or ideology.
Dorsey says the San Francisco-based company is also “committed to help increase the collective health, openness, and civility of public conversation, and to hold ourselves publicly accountable towards progress.”
He says the company has continued to identify accounts that may be linked to a Russian internet agency that was indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller earlier this year. The indictment detailed an elaborate plot by Russians to disrupt the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Dorsey says Twitter has so far suspended 3,843 accounts the company believes are linked to the agency, and has seen recent activity.
Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s No. 2 executive, is also planning to detail efforts to take down material linked to the Russian agency, including the removal of 270 Facebook pages that targeted Russian speakers around the world. Sandberg says in prepared testimony for the Senate panel that the company’s overall understanding of the Russian activity in 2016 is still limited “because we do not have access to the information or investigative tools” that the U.S. government has.
“This is an arms race, and that means we need to be ever more vigilant,” Sandberg says.
There is expected to be an empty seat at the Senate intelligence panel’s witness table reserved for Larry Page, the CEO of Google’s parent company, Alphabet. The company declined to send Page and offered another executive instead; the committee said no.
Only Dorsey was invited to the House hearing after specific Republican concerns about bias on Twitter. President Donald Trump has charged that some Republicans have been “shadow banned” because of the ways that some search results have appeared.
The company has denied that charge, but conservatives have continued to push the issue ahead of the 2018 elections.
“Sadly, conservatives are too often finding their voices silenced,” House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy said in a statement when the hearing was announced. “We all agree that transparency is the only way to fully restore Americans’ trust in these important public platforms.”
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Science fiction has long teased consumers about a future where robots are our personal assistants. But it’s no longer science fiction. The recent spike in consumer-grade “smart speakers” that respond to users’ voice commands has been given a face — with the help of a self-navigating robot that listens to its owner’s commands. Arash Arabasadi has more.
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A key opponent of high-tech, automated weapons known as “killer robots” is blaming countries like the U.S. and Russia for blocking consensus at a U.N.-backed conference, where most countries wanted to ensure that humans stay at the controls of lethal machines.
Coordinator Mary Wareham of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots spoke Monday after experts from dozens of countries agreed before dawn Saturday at the U.N. in Geneva on 10 “possible guiding principles” about such “Lethal Automated Weapons Systems.”
Point 2 said: “Human responsibility for decisions on the use of weapons systems must be retained since accountability cannot be transferred to machines.”
Wareham said such language wasn’t binding, adding that “it’s time to start laying down some rules now.”
Members of the LAWS conference will meet again in November.
Britt’Nee Brower grew up in a largely Inupiat Eskimo town in Alaska’s far north, but English was the only language spoken at home.
Today, she knows a smattering of Inupiaq from childhood language classes at school in the community of Utqiagvik. Brower even published an Inupiaq coloring book last year featuring the names of common animals of the region. But she hopes to someday speak fluently by practicing her ancestral language in a daily, modern setting.
The 29-year-old Anchorage woman has started to do just that with a new Inupiaq language option that recently went live on Facebook for those who employ the social media giant’s community translation tool. Launched a decade ago, the tool has allowed users to translate bookmarks, action buttons and other functions in more than 100 languages around the globe.
For now, Facebook is being translated into Inupiaq only on its website, not its app.
“I was excited,” Brower says of her first time trying the feature, still a work in progress as Inupiaq words are slowly added. “I was thinking, ‘I’m going to have to bring out my Inupiaq dictionary so I can learn.’ So I did.”
Facebook users can submit requests to translate the site’s vast interface workings — the buttons that allow users to like, comment and navigate the site — into any language through crowdsourcing. With the interface tool, it’s the Facebook users who do the translating of words and short phrases. Words are confirmed through crowd up-and-down voting.
Besides the Inupiaq option, Cherokee and Canada’s Inuktut are other indigenous languages in the process of being translated, according to Facebook spokeswoman Arielle Argyres.
“It’s important to have these indigenous languages on the internet. Oftentimes they’re nowhere to be found,” she said. “So much is carried through language — tradition, culture — and so in the digital world, being able to translate from that environment is really important.”
The Inupiaq language is spoken in northern Alaska and the Seward Peninsula. According to the University of Alaska Fairbanks, about 13,500 Inupiat live in the state, with about 3,000 speaking the language.
Myles Creed, who grew up in the Inupiat community of Kotzebue, was the driving force in getting Inupiaq added. After researching ways to possibly link an external translation app with Facebook, he reached out to Grant Magdanz, a hometown friend who works as a software engineer in San Francisco. Neither one of them knew about the translation tool when Magdanz contacted Facebook in late 2016 about setting up an Inupiatun option.
Facebook opened a translation portal for the language in March 2017. It was then up to users to provide the translations through crowdsourcing.
Creed, 29, a linguistics graduate student at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, is not Inupiat, and neither is Magdanz, 24. But they grew up around the language and its people, and wanted to promote its use for today’s world.
“I’ve been given so much by the community I grew up in, and I want to be able to give back in some way,” said Creed, who is learning Inupiaq.
Both see the Facebook option as a small step against predictions that Alaska’s Native languages are heading toward extinction under their present rate of decline.
“It has to be part of everyone’s daily life. It can’t be this separate thing,” Magdanz said. “People need the ability to speak it in any medium that they use, like they would English or Spanish.”
Initially, Creed relied on volunteer translators, but that didn’t go fast enough. In January, he won a $2,000 mini grant from the Alaska Humanities Forum to hire two fluent Inupiat translators. While a language is in the process of being translated, only those who use the translation tool are able to see it.
Creed changed his translation settings last year. But it was only weeks ago that his home button finally said “Aimaagvik,” Inupiaq for home.
“I was really ecstatic,” he said.
So far, only a fraction of the vast interface is in Inupiaq. Part of the holdup is the complexity of finding exact translations, according to the Inupiaq translators who were hired with the grant money.
Take the comment button, which is still in English. There’s no one-word-fits-all in Inupiaq for “comment,” according to translator Pausauraq Jana Harcharek, who heads Inupiaq education for Alaska’s North Slope Borough. Is the word being presented in the form of a question, or a statement or an exclamatory sentence?
“Sometimes it’s so difficult to go from concepts that don’t exist in the language to arriving at a translation that communicates what that particular English word might mean,” Harcharek said.
Translator Muriel Hopson said finding the right translation ultimately could require two or three Inupiaq words.
The 58-year-old Anchorage woman grew up in the village of Wainwright, where she was raised by her grandparents. Inupiaq was spoken in the home, but it was strictly prohibited at the village school run by the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs, Hopson said.
She wonders if she’s among the last generation of Inupiaq speakers. But she welcomes the new Facebook option as a promising way for young people to see the value Inupiaq brings as a living language.
“Who doesn’t have a Facebook account when you’re a millennial?” she said. “It can only help.”
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President Donald Trump’s administration wants to shut down U.S. government radio stations that announce official time, a service in operation since World War II.
WWV and WWVB in the state of Colorado and WWVH on the island of Kauai in the mid-Pacific state of Hawaii, send out signals that allow millions of clocks and watches to be set either manually or automatically.
WWVB continuously broadcasts digital time codes, using very long electromagnetic waves at a frequency of 60 kilohertz, which are automatically received by timekeeping devices in North America, keeping them accurate to a fraction of a second.
“If you shut down these stations, you turn off all those clocks,” said Don Sullivan, who managed the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) stations between 1994 and 2005.
GPS not good enough
Some argue the terrestrial time signal have been rendered obsolete by the government’s Global Positioning System, whose satellites also transmit time signals, but users disagree, noting GPS devices must have an unobstructed view of a number of satellites in space to properly function.
“Sixty kilohertz permeates in a way GPS can’t,” Sullivan told VOA, explaining that WWVB’s very low frequency signal can be received inside buildings and it is an important backup to GPS in case adversaries attempt to interfere with the satellite radio-navigation system.
WWV and WWVH broadcast on a number of shortwave frequencies, meaning their signals can be received globally.
The Trump administration proposes, in its Fiscal 2019 budget to Congress, cutting $26.6 million and 136 jobs from NIST’s fundamental measurements, quantum science and measurement dissemination activities.
The budget document acknowledges that in addition to synchronizing clocks and watches, the time signals are also used in appliances, cameras and irrigation controllers.
“It’s crazy,” Sullivan said of the proposed cut. “It’s absolutely insane.”
NIST officials say they cannot comment on budget matters. The White House referred questions about NIST’s funding to the Office of Management and Budget, which has not responded to an inquiry from VOA.
Oldest continuously operating radio station
WWV, the oldest continuously operating radio station in the United States, first went on the air from Washington in 1919, conducting propagation experiments and playing music. In the early years, it also transmitted — via Morse code — news reports prepared by the Agriculture Department.
The station subsequently was moved to Maryland and then to Colorado in 1966. WWV has been a frequency standard since 1922 and has disseminated official U.S. time since 1944.
All of the NIST stations rely on extremely precise atomic clocks for the accuracy of their time signals.
WWV, at two minutes past every hour, also transmits a 440 hertz note (A above middle C), something it has done since 1936, allowing musicians to tune their pianos and other instruments.
All three stations retain a huge following worldwide, according to Sullivan.
WWV and WWVH broadcasts can also be heard by telephone and about 2,000 calls are received daily, according to NIST. (To listen to the broadcasts by phone, dial +1-303-499-7111 for WWV and +1-808-335-4363 for WWVH.)
The telephone time-of-day service also is used to synchronize clocks and watches, and for the calibration of stopwatches and timers (although slightly less accurate than radio reception).
Tom Kelly, an amateur radio operator in the state of Oregon, has launched a petition to try to save the stations. His goal is to collect 100,000 online signatures from U.S. residents by September 15 that would compel a response from the White House.
Kelly’s petition calls the stations “an instrumental part in the telecommunications field, ranging from broadcasting to scientific research and education,” noting their transmissions of marine storm warnings, GPS satellite health reports and specific information about solar activity and radio propagation conditions.
Britain, China, Germany, Japan and Russia also have very low frequency time transmissions, but their stations are too distant to automatically set clocks in the United States.
Among other proposed cuts for NIST are its environmental measurement projects measuring the impact of aerosols on pollution and climate change and gas reference materials used by industry to reduce costs of complying with regulations and the Urban Dome research grants for determining how to measure greenhouse gas emissions for cities and across regions.
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California lawmakers have voted to make net neutrality state law, becoming the latest of several states to approve such measures.
The move by state legislators is a rejection of the Trump administration’s repeal of national net neutrality rules that did not allow internet service providers to discriminate in their handling of internet traffic.
Net neutrality was first put in place by the Obama administration in 2015. When it was repealed, it opened the door for internet service providers to block content, slow data transmission, and create “fast lanes” for consumers who pay premiums.
If California Governor Jerry Brown signs net neutrality into law, the state could possibly face a legal fight from the Federal Communications Commission, which has declared that states cannot pass their own net neutrality rules.
Analysts say other states are watching how California will handle the issue. If the home of Silicon Valley finalizes the new law, that could encourage other states to do the same or encourage national politicians to re-enact national protections.
Jonathan Spalter, president/CEO of the broadband industry group USTelecom, said in a statement that consumers want a “single, national approach to keeping our internet open,” instead of a “confusing patchwork of conflicting requirements.”
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Microsoft will begin requiring its contractors to offer their U.S. employees paid leave to care for a new child.
It’s common for tech firms to offer generous family leave benefits for their own software engineers and other full-time staff, but paid leave advocates say it’s still rare to require similar benefits for contracted workers such as janitors, landscapers, cafeteria crews and software consultants.
“Given its size and its reach, this is a unique and hopefully trailblazing offering,” said Vicki Shabo, vice president at the National Partnership for Women and Families.
The details
The new policy affects businesses with at least 50 U.S.-based employees that do substantial work with Microsoft that involves access to its buildings or its computing network. It doesn’t affect suppliers of goods. Contractors would have to offer at least 12 weeks of leave to those working with the Redmond, Washington-based software giant; the policy wouldn’t affect the contractors’ arrangements with other companies. Leave-takers would get 66 percent of regular pay, up to $1,000 weekly.
The policy announced Thursday rolls out over the next year as the company amends its contracts with those vendors. That may mean some of Microsoft’s costs will rise to cover the new benefits, said Dev Stahlkopf, the company’s corporate vice president and general counsel.
“That’s just fine and we think it’s well worth the price,” she said.
Microsoft doesn’t disclose how many contracted workers it uses, but it’s in the thousands.
The new policy expands on Microsoft’s 2015 policy requiring contractors to offer paid sick days and vacation.
Other companies such as Facebook have also committed to improve contractor benefits amid unionization efforts by shuttle drivers, security guards and other contract workers trying to get by in expensive, tech-fueled regions such as the San Francisco Bay Area and around Washington’s Puget Sound.
Facebook doesn’t guarantee that contract workers receive paid parental leave, but provides a $4,000 new child benefit for new parents who don’t get leave. A much smaller California tech company, SurveyMonkey, announced a paid family leave plan for its contract workers earlier this year.
Washington state law
Microsoft said its new policy is partially inspired by a Washington state law taking effect in 2020 guaranteeing eligible workers 12 weeks paid time off for the birth or adoption of a child. The state policy, signed into law last year, follows California and a handful of other states in allowing new parents to tap into a fund that all workers pay into. Washington will also require employers to help foot the bill, and will start collecting payroll deductions next January.
A federal paid parental leave plan proposed by President Donald Trump’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, could rely on a similar model but has gained little traction.
“Compared to what employers are doing, the government is way behind the private sector,” said Isabel Sawhill, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who has urged the White House and Congress to adopt a national policy.
Sawhill said it is “very unusual and very notable” that Microsoft is extending family leave benefits to its contract workers. Microsoft already offers more generous family leave benefits to its own employees, including up to 20 weeks fully paid leave for a birth mother.
Pushing the feds
Microsoft’s push to spread its employee benefits to a broader workforce “sends a message that something has to happen more systematically at the federal level,” said Ariane Hegewisch, a program director for employment and earnings at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. Until then, she said, it’s helpful that Microsoft seems willing to pay contracting firms more to guarantee their workers’ better benefits.
“Paid family leave is expensive and they acknowledge that,” Hegewisch said. Otherwise, she said, contractors with many employees of child-bearing age could find themselves at a competitive disadvantage to those with older workforces.
Republican state Sen. Joe Fain, the prime sponsor of the measure that passed last year, said Microsoft’s decision was “a really powerful step forward.”
By applying the plan to contractors and vendors around the country, “it really creates a pressure for those state legislatures to make a similar decision that Washington made.”
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U.S. Senator Orrin Hatch on Thursday added to the growing push in Washington to have the Federal Trade Commission rekindle an antitrust investigation of Alphabet Inc’s Google.
Hatch, the Republican chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, sent a letter to FTC Chairman Joseph Simons recounting several news reports that identified complaints about Google’s anti-competitive conduct and privacy practices.
Alphabet shares were little changed after the release of the letter. The company declined to comment.
Lawmakers from both major parties and Google’s rivals have said this year they see an opening for increased regulation of large technology companies under the FTC’s new slate of commissioners.
Google’s critics say that ongoing European antitrust action against the web search leader and this year’s data privacy scandal involving Facebook Inc and political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica demonstrate their concerns about the unchecked power of the tech heavyweights. About 90 percent of search engine queries in the United States flow through Google.
Facebook and Twitter executives are expected to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee on September 5 about their efforts to deter foreign campaigns from spreading misinformation online ahead November’s midterm elections. Lawmakers have criticized Alphabet for not scheduling a top executive, such as Chief Executive Larry Page, for the hearings.
In 2013, the FTC closed a lengthy investigation of Google after finding insufficient evidence that consumers were harmed by how the company displayed search results from rivals. President Donald Trump accused Google’s search engine on Tuesday of promoting negative news articles and hiding “fair media” coverage of him.
Trump’s economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, later said the White House was “taking a look” at Google, and that the administration would do “some investigation and some analysis,” without providing further details.
Earlier this year, Representative Keith Ellison, a Democrat, and Representative Todd Rokita, a Republican, sent separate letters asking the FTC to probe Google.
Simon, the new Republican chairman of the FTC, said in July the agency would keep a close eye on big tech companies that dominate the internet.
An FTC representative was not immediately available for comment.
Hatch, at event hosted by reviews website and Google rival Yelp Inc in May, said moves made by “an entrenched monopolist” deserve extra skepticism.
“They may well be used, not to further consumer welfare, but to foreclose competitors,” he said, according to prepared remarks.
Yelp, a local-search service, said in a statement that Hatch’s letter was “heartening to see” as it underscored the bipartisan plea for FTC scrutiny of Google.
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Germany announced a new agency on Wednesday to fund research on cybersecurity and to end its reliance on digital technologies from the United States, China and other countries.
Interior Minister Horst Seehofer told reporters that Germany needed new tools to become a top player in cybersecurity and shore up European security and independence.
“It is our joint goal for Germany to take a leading role in cybersecurity on an international level,” Seehofer told a news conference with Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen. “We have to acknowledge we’re lagging behind, and when one is lagging, one needs completely new approaches.”
The agency is a joint interior and defense ministry project.
Germany, like many other countries, faces a daily barrage of cyberattacks on its government and industry computer networks.
However, the opposition Greens criticized the project. “This agency wouldn’t increase our information technology security, but further endanger it,” said Greens lawmaker Konstantin von Notz.
The agency’s work on offensive capabilities would undermine Germany’s diplomatic efforts to limit the use of cyberweapons internationally, he said. “As a state based on the rule of law, we can only lose a cyberpolitics arms race with states like China, North Korea or Russia,” he added, calling for “scarce resources” to be focused on hardening vulnerable systems.
Germany and other European countries also worry about their dependence on U.S. technologies. This follows revelations in 2012 by U.S. NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden of a massive spying network, as well as the U.S. Patriot Act which gave the U.S. government broad powers to compel companies to provide data.
“As a federal government we cannot stand idly by when the use of sensitive technology with high security relevance are controlled by other governments. We must secure and expand such key technologies of our digital infrastructure,” Seehofer said.
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More than a dozen human rights groups have sent a letter to Google urging the company not to offer censored internet search in China, amid reports it is planning to again provide the service in the giant market.
The joint letter dated Tuesday calls on CEO Sundar Pichai to explain what Google is doing to safeguard users from the Chinese government’s censorship and surveillance.
It describes the censored search engine service, codenamed “Dragonfly,” as representing “an alarming capitulation by Google on human rights.”
“The Chinese government extensively violates the rights to freedom of expression and privacy; by accommodating the Chinese authorities’ repression of dissent, Google would be actively participating in those violations for millions of internet users in China,” the letter says.
In a statement, Google said it has “been investing for many years to help Chinese users, from developing Android, through mobile apps such as Google Translate and Files Go, and our developer tools. But our work on search has been exploratory, and we are not close to launching a search product in China.”
The expression of concern by the rights groups follows a letter earlier this month signed by more than a thousand Google employees protesting the company’s secretive plan to build a search engine that would comply with Chinese censorship. The letter called on executives to review ethics and transparency at the company.
Google had previously complied with censorship controls starting in 2006 as it sought a toehold in the booming Chinese economy. But it exited the Chinese search market in 2010 under unrelenting pressure from human rights groups and some shareholders to leave.
The letter, signed by groups including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Reporters Without Borders, said China’s controls over the internet have only strengthened since then amid an overall crackdown on civil liberties and freedom of expression.
“It is difficult to see how Google would currently be able to relaunch a search engine service in China in a way that would be compatible with the company’s human rights responsibilities under international standards, or its own commitments,” the letter said.
According to online news site The Intercept, Google created a custom Android app that will automatically filter out sites blocked by China’s so-called “Great Firewall.”
Google co-founder Sergey Brin was born in the Soviet Union in 1973 and lived there until age 6 when his family fled. He has said his experience with a repressive regime shaped his and the company’s views.
However, Pichai, who became CEO in 2015 when Google became part of parent Alphabet, has said he wants Google to be in China serving Chinese users.
In December, Google announced it was opening an artificial intelligence lab in Beijing, and in June, Google invested $550 million in JD.com, a Chinese e-commerce platform that is second only to Alibaba in the country. The companies said they would collaborate on retail solutions around the world without mentioning China, where Google services including Gmail and YouTube are blocked.
Off a dusty path in the capital city, flanked by chickens roosting in the grass, one of Cameroon’s most successful digital startups is capitalizing on its success to foster a new generation of entrepreneurs.
Founded in 2013, Kiro’o Games has grown to become Central Africa’s first major video games studio. It draws on African mythology rather than Hollywood for inspiration, as in its fantasy role-playing game “Aurion: Legacy of the Kori-Odan.”
Today, Kiro’o’s online educational platform Rebuntu, launched in June last year, trains young Cameroonians to navigate obstacles in real-life business.
“Our generation has the duty to bring something really new that will finally generate growth,” said Olivier Madiba, founder and chief executive officer of Kiro’o.
Subscribers pay 10,000 Central African francs ($17.50) to access a digital training manual, featuring cartoons and advice on how to find good projects, hire the right staff and secure investor funding.
They can also seek online and in-person mentoring from Kiro’o staff.
In volatile Central Africa, better known for conflict, disease and poverty, training locals to set up international companies may seem like mission impossible.
Unlike neighboring states, Cameroon has been relatively stable for decades, but is blighted by high youth unemployment.
Many young people with professional education are forced to take up lower-skilled jobs such as farming, driving taxis and running market stalls.
But Kiro’o digital communications head William Fankam believes there is another way: create your own work.
“We are wall-breakers,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation, adding that the gaming team is determined not to let the region’s challenges halt their progress.
The company has broken down barriers in education, with its game designers managing to acquire expertise despite a lack of specialized training in Cameroon.
And it has also overcome the obstacle of financing, Fankam said, developing its own model to raise funds from investors.
The entrepreneurs’ training program aims to share Kiro’o’s pioneering approach with others, he added.
That may seem counter-intuitive in a competitive environment, but in Cameroon, there is a need to stimulate a dynamic and creative business community, he said.
“We realized we can’t evolve alone,” he said. “We want to create an ecosystem where we’ll have many startups with different services which would have an impact on the Cameroonian economy, and wider in Africa.”
In just over a year, about 1,000 Cameroonians have signed up for the training.
The Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications has paid inscription fees for more than 800 of them, who are looking to set up technology-focused businesses.
‘Impossible Dream’
Kenneth Fabo, who runs JeWash, a home dry-cleaning and ironing service in Douala and Yaounde, said the program is helping him devise a crowdfunding strategy to grow his business.
“They taught us a certain method that helped us prepare to fund-raise effectively,” he said, describing how he received training to ensure the business is managed transparently and responsibly in a way that reassures investors.
Kiro’o Games – despite its unique selling point as an African company producing culturally relevant video games – struggled to raise money at the start, said Madiba.
“All conventional investors, the banks, the businesses, rejected our project,” said Madiba, whose childhood ambition was to make computer games. “So we decided to invent our own fundraising process.”
Through a combination of tactics including YouTube videos, a campaign on creative funding platform Kickstarter and tapping non-conventional backers like the Cameroonian diaspora, the group went on to raise 130 million francs ($227,000) from nearly 90 international investors – “a dream that everyone told us was impossible,” said Madiba.
Arielle Kitio Tsamo, founder of CAYSTI, an initiative that trains youth in technology, and winner of the 2018 Norbert Segard Foundation prize for African innovation, said her company had benefited from the Kiro’o support.
“They helped us structure our business model,” she said, adding the scheme also connected her with government partners.
Business Against Poverty
Efforts to motivate entrepreneurs and share knowledge are vital in Cameroon, where the education system does not provide such training, said Steve Tchoumba, business development manager at ActivSpaces, an incubator and accelerator for tech startups.
It provides temporary office space, as well as business coaching and links with mentors and investors, and has also set up partnerships with schools and universities.
“We want to motivate youth to consider entrepreneurship – and specifically technological entrepreneurship – as a potential way of poverty alleviation,” said Tchoumba.
“For every company that is created, there is income for the country, there’s employment for the youth,” he said.
Tchoumba particularly hopes to foster social businesses that can bring wider benefits to local communities.
Multinational companies are also showing interest in West Africa’s startup scene.
Since 2017, Google has been running Launchpad Accelerator Africa, a training program for promising startups. In June, it began accepting applications from Cameroon, Senegal and Ivory Coast, among others.
Despite promising developments, many of the African incubators that have sprung up in the past five years have limited resources, World Bank private-sector specialist Alexandre Laure noted in a blog earlier this year.
Challenges include a lack of basic business necessities, such as a reliable power supply, with sub-Saharan Africa having the world’s lowest household electrification rate.
Kiro’o’s Madiba admits dealing with power cuts and other fundamental problems is tough, but says the group’s resilience has spurred it on to greater things.
“When we started we were just passionate — but at a certain point we became a symbol of something, and we didn’t anticipate this,” he said, referring to the frequent emails he receives from Cameroonians struggling to set up a business.
Many tell him they do not give up because Kiro’o shows that success is possible.
“It’s not only a job — you are building a legacy,” said Madiba.
($1 = 572.4500 CFA francs)
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It’s been around for decades, but, unlike regular 3D, virtual reality (VR) has yet to make a big impact in the movie industry, something a maker of Hollywood animations believes can change – if the films are good enough.
Eric Darnell, who co-wrote and directed the “Madagascar” movies, showed his own VR film at the Venice Film Festival this week, “Crow: The Legend,” in which the viewer is immersed in the story of a mythical bird that has to fly to the sun to bring back warmth to the Earth.
With a voice cast that includes Oprah Winfrey, John Legend and “Crazy Rich Asians” star Constance Wu, “Crow” is hardly an amateur affair, but Darnell’s Baobab Studios will be giving the movie away rather than selling it, as a way to generate interest in the medium.
“I don’t expect it’s going to be today or six months even,” he said of when VR might go mainstream.
“The technology has to get better, headsets have to get cheaper, the content has to get better and that’s at least as important as anything else,” Darnell told Reuters. “It’s a chicken and an egg thing. You can make all the great headsets you can but if there’s not great content … what’s the point?”
Darnell said he was attracted to VR after becoming “a little bit stale” making regular animation.
“When I put a VR headset on, it just blew me away and it reminded me of the first time I saw computer animation back in the early 80s … (That) launched a whole career for me and so when I put that headset on it reminded me of what I felt like
back then.”
In “Crow”, based on a native American legend, the viewer wears a VR helmet and hand-controllers to join the bird on its adventure, using the hands to send waves of virtual energy to help it on its way.
“I think the way we are really going to get there is by putting the viewer inside the story,” Darnell said. “Not just playing a story for them, putting them inside the story so that other characters recognize that the viewer is there and that it means something to them, that you are in their world.”
The Venice Film Festival runs from Aug. 29 to Sept 8.
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A small Swiss company won $31 million in new investment on Tuesday to suck carbon dioxide from thin air as part of a fledgling, costly technology that may gain wider acceptance from governments in 2018 as a way to slow climate change.
Climeworks AG, which uses high-tech filters and fans to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at a cost of about $600 a ton, raised the money from investors including Zurich Cantonal Bank.
“It’s all about cost reductions,” Jan Wurzbacher, a co-founder and co-CEO of Climeworks, told Reuters of how the company would use the funds.
Extracting vast amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere could help to limit global warming, blamed for causing more heatwaves, wildfires, floods and rising sea levels.
The company says it has a long-term “vision” of capturing one percent of man-made carbon dioxide emissions by 2025.
But that is a far off. Its capacity is just 1,000 tons of carbon dioxide a year while global emissions totalled 32.5 billion tons in 2017, according to the International Energy Agency.
And costs are now too high.
In June, however, Climeworks’ main rival, Canadian-based Carbon Engineering, outlined the design of a plant that it said could extract carbon dioxide from the air for perhaps as little as $94 a ton.
That could make the technology more feasible if governments jack up penalties for carbon emissions this century. In a European market, carbon emissions prices are now about 21 euros a ton.
Climework’s industrial plant in Switzerland now sells carbon dioxide to nearby greenhouses as an airborne fertilizer for tomatoes or cucumbers. It also has a project in Iceland where the gas is buried deep underground.
After the new round, investments in Climeworks’s technology total about $50 million, it said. The company has expanded to 60 employees from 30 since the start of 2017.
A draft U.N. scientific report, due for publication in October about ways to achieve the goals of the 2015 Paris climate agreement, is likely to boost such “carbon dioxide removal” (CDR) technologies.
Until now, such CDR has often been bundled with other more exotic and risky “geoengineering” technologies such as spraying chemicals into the upper atmosphere to dim sunlight.
But the draft by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, seen by Reuters, categorizes CDR for the first time as “mitigation,” the mainstream term used for cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
($1 = 0.9957 Swiss francs)
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U.S. President Donald Trump said Tuesday that Google, Twitter and Facebook were “treading on very, very troubled territory” and warned them to “be careful.”
Trump made the comments just hours after igniting controversy with a series of early-morning tweets claiming Google search results are “rigged” to turn up news unfavorable to the president’s administration.
The president asserted that people were complaining about biased results from social media searches.
“We have literally thousands and thousands of complaints coming in,” the president said. “You just can’t do that.”
In response to a reporter’s question in the Oval Office, Trump singled out Google, Facebook and Twitter for criticism and said, “You can’t do that to people.”
“Google is really taking advantage of a lot of people,” the president said. “They better be careful.”
Google responded to Trump’s earlier criticism by saying its search engine is not used to promote any political agenda.
The company’s statement Tuesday said, “We never rank search results to manipulate political sentiment.” It also said its major goal was to give users “the most relevant answers in a matter of seconds.”
‘Hiding information’
In the early-morning tweets, Trump said Google was “suppressing” conservative voices and “hiding information” that would be more flattering to the president. He also said, “This is a very serious situation — will be addressed!”
Trump tweeted that a search for “Trump news” “shows only the viewing/reporting of Fake New Media [sic]. In other words, they have it RIGGED, for me & others, so that almost all stories & news is BAD.”
In addition, the president said 96 percent of those search results were from “National Left-Wing Media.” He did not cite a source for that statistic.
New York Times reporter Adam Satariano wrote Tuesday that Trump might have based his claims on comments that Fox Business Network host Lou Dobbs made late Monday. Dobbs reported on comments by the conservative website PJ Media, which said it had conducted an “unscientific study” showing 96 percent of Google search results for the word “Trump” came from what it called “left-leaning sites.”
Questioned later in the day about the president’s allegations, White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow told reporters, “We’re taking a look at it.”
U.S. Representative Ted Lieu, a California Democrat who is a frequent critic of the president, responded to Trump’s comments by tweeting, “House Judiciary Committee held two hearings on this issue … Private companies can do whatever they want with speech. What would be illegal is government regulating speech content or speech algorithms.”
Zach Graves, director of technology and innovation policy at the R Street Institute, a think tank in Washington, said PJ Media had drawn flawed conclusions about Google in its unscientific study.
Results ‘not surprising’
“I think the mistake they make is not understanding how search engine algorithms typically work,” Graves told VOA on Tuesday. He said one of the ways the sites are ranked in search results is the number of other web pages that link to it — a measure of how well-used a site is and how many other sites trust its information.
“With that in mind,” Graves said, “it’s not surprising at all that these big popular media outlets” such as CNN, The New York Times and Fox News “are outranking more niche conservative platforms like Hot Air, the Blaze, and so on.”
Data from media analysis firm Alexa.com, a subsidiary of media giant Amazon, show that 303,995 other sites link to The New York Times — the term is “backlink” — while CNN has 210,373 backlinks and Fox News has 76,164. The conservative Wall Street Journal has 128,015 backlinks, while PJ Media itself has 3,807.
“The interpretation is that there’s some kind of conspiracy, that Google’s coming in and manipulating these results for political reasons,” Graves said. “I think the correct interpretation is that this is a natural byproduct of the metrics that the algorithm uses.”
He added, however, that he thought Google would do itself a favor to be more transparent about its search algorithm and reach out to conservative groups to assuage their concerns about bias.
VOA’s Steve Herman contributed to this report.
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Photo-sharing app Instagram’s more than 1 billion users will now be able to evaluate the authenticity of accounts, weeks after parent Facebook Inc rolled out similar measures in a bid to weed out fake accounts on its social media platform.
Instagram said on Tuesday it will launch the “About This Account” feature that will allow users to see the advertisements an account is running, the country where the account is located, username changes in the past year as well as other details.
“Keeping people with bad intentions off our platform is incredibly important … that means trying to make sure the people you follow and the accounts you interact with are who they say they are, and stopping bad actors before they cause harm,” Instagram co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Mike Krieger said.
Instagram also said it will allow the use of third-party apps such as DUO Mobile and Google Authenticator for two-factor authentication to help users securely log in to their accounts.
Two-factor authentication adds an extra layer of security on top of usernames and passwords by prompting users for information they have access to.
Earlier this month, Facebook introduced this feature for users who managed pages with a large U.S. following, seeking to make it harder to administer a page using a fake or compromised account.
These features will be broadly available in the coming weeks, the photo-sharing app said in a blog post.
Starting Tuesday, Instagram will allow accounts with a large reach to request verification through a feature within the app, it said.
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While Tesla grapples with internal issues like production delays, a sometimes-erratic CEO and a recent about-face on whether to go private, its rivals are moving aggressively into the luxury electric vehicle space.
In the next few days, German competitors Mercedes-Benz and Audi, the luxury arm of Volkswagen, are both showing off production-ready electric sport-utility vehicles aimed at Tesla’s Model X.
Meanwhile Jaguar Land Rover offers the I-Pace electric SUV while further out, Porsche is taking on Tesla’s Model S high performance luxury car with the Taycan, expected to reach the market in late 2019.
The established carmakers have multiple motives. They need zero driving emissions vehicles to meet tougher greenhouse gas limits coming into effect in Europe in 2021. Diesel is in the doghouse. And China, a major market, is pushing hard for more electrics.
But the new models will also aim to win back some of the luxury customers drawn away by Tesla’s electric vehicles at a time when the company is consumed by multiple distractions . Its CEO, Elon Musk, took to Twitter on Aug. 7 to abruptly announce he had secured funding to take his company private, only to turn around 17 days later to say that Tesla would remain public . The electric carmaker is also facing financial pressure, with a $230 million debt payment that’s due in November on top of the $920 million that must be paid off three months later. And it has only recently hit production targets for its Model 3 mass-market vehicle.
In the meantime, its rivals — who had emphasized diesel and hybrids — are finally rolling out the leading edge of what they say will be a slew of all-electric models. Their latest offerings are “the vanguard” of more to come, said Ferdinand Dudenhoeffer, director of the Center for Automotive Research at the University of Duisburg-Essen.
“By 2020, Tesla must stabilize itself or be overtaken,” he said.
The new entrants challenge what has been one of Tesla’s key selling points: range. The EQC sport utility crossover from Daimler AG’s luxury brand Mercedes, for instance, should go up to 500 kilometers (300 miles) on a single charge. That’s comparable to Tesla’s SUV, the Model X, which has a range of up to 295 miles. The EQC, to be unveiled outside of Stockholm on Sept. 4, is the first in the Mercedes EQ sub-brand that bundles the company’s efforts in electric, connected and autonomous driving. Media representatives didn’t provide a price ahead of the unveiling.
Volkswagen’s Audi will show off its e-tron in San Francisco on Sept. 17. It offers more than 400 kilometers (248 miles) on a single charge. The company says the e-tron should be able to use high-speed charger facilities — if they’re available — to charge in less than 30 minutes. The German price will be around 80,000 euros ($93,000) and it should go on sale near the end of the year in Europe, and next year in the U.S.
The Porsche Taycan will also pose a stiff challenge to Tesla’s Model S in terms of range: Porsche claims it can load enough power for 400 kilometers (248 miles) in just 15 or 20 minutes. The company hasn’t announced a price. The I-Pace, whose price starts at $69,500 before local and federal incentives, offers 292 miles (470 kilometers) under the tougher European Union standard. The Model S, meanwhile, has a range of up to 335 miles.
The starting price for Tesla’s Model X is around $80,700 while the Model S is around $74,500.
Not that Tesla is standing still while the competition laps it. Musk has said the company intends to develop a Model Y, a small SUV to be unveiled in the first half of next year — a growing sales category that other carmakers have been piling into as fast as they can.
But Tesla’s ambitions go way beyond the luxury electric vehicle market. That’s the whole point of the Model 3, which is aimed at the mass market with a starting price of $35,000 and an EPA range of 310 miles. But there, too, the company must go head to head with rivals. They include the BMW i3 with a starting price of $44,500 and an EPA range of 114 miles; the Nissan Leaf with a starting price of $30,000 and an EPA range of 151 miles; and the Chevrolet Bolt with a starting price of $37,495 and an EPA range of 238 miles. Nissan promises a longer range version of the Leaf for 2019 and in 2020, Volkswagen plans to launch a compact version of its all-electric ID lineup.
Tesla’s Supercharger network has a big advantage over competitors. The company’s website says it has 1,332 fast-charging stations with 10,901 charging units worldwide. Electric cars made by other manufacturers can’t use Tesla stations and public and private charging stations are sporadic. European carmakers are rolling out their own fast-charging highway network through a joint venture, but only a few stations are up and running.
Chris Hopson, manager of North American light vehicle forecasting for IHS Markit, said that established manufacturers are going electric not just in response to Tesla, “but because of a whole host of other things, with Tesla in mind.” New electrics serve “not just to alleviate some of sales going to Tesla but to also to grab hold of the ongoing trend globally toward electric vehicles.”
The electric push also comes in the wake of Volkswagen’s 2015 diesel scandal. The company’s illegal rigging of vehicles to cheat on emissions testing helped turn consumers off diesels. Falling diesel sales numbers make it harder for European car makers to meet lower fleet emissions requirements coming into force in the EU in 2021.
China is also pushing for more electric vehicles through regulation, requiring carmakers to ensure 10 percent of their fleets are electrics in 2019. Regulations limit foreign brands to about 4 percent of the market, with Tesla owning half that. Other carmakers such as BMW, Ford and GM work with local partners.
Analysts James J. Albertine and Derek J. Glynn said they do not see competition as a threat to Tesla, “but a validation of electric vehicle technology that will grow the global electric vehicle demand pie, of which Tesla is likely to maintain a significant share.”
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The ocean has untold wonders waiting to be discovered. A U.S. company has developed an improved, ultra-deep diving submersible craft to search for them. It will take a 5-person crew as deep as 4000-meters, with the wreck of the Titanic its first deep sea destination. If the craft can withstand the staggering water pressure found several kilometers below the surface, it can explore the riches of an unknown world. VOA’s Julie Taboh has more.
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Toyota will invest half a billion dollars into ride-sharing giant Uber as part of a deal for the two companies to work together on developing self-driving vehicles.
Toyota, one of the world’s largest car makers, is seen as lagging behind other companies, including General Motors and Google’s Waymo, in the autonomous-vehicle race.
Uber has already begun testing self-driving vehicles, but was forced to remove hundreds of autonomous cars from the road in March after one of its test vehicles struck and killed a pedestrian on a street in Tempe, Arizona.
The deal between Uber and Toyota is an indication that Uber does not want to go it alone in creating the complex, autonomous driving systems.
Self-driving cars have always been important to Uber, which sees them as a way to reduce the cost of carrying passengers. Former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick had insisted on developing a proprietary self-driving system, however current CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has been working to develop more partnerships for the company.
Uber has been doing safety evaluations since the March crash that killed a 49-year-old woman as she walked her bicycle across the street. The company took a step in July toward relaunching its vehicle testing in Pittsburgh, putting its self-driving cars back on the road in manual mode.
Toyota has been cautious in its approach to self-driving vehicles and has focused on partial autonomous systems. However, the company says it plans to begin testing self-driving electric cars around 2020.
Both companies aim to work together to solve the huge challenge of how to design and mass produce self-driving cars, which use computers, cameras and sensors to guide the vehicles.
Proponents of the new technology argue that self-driving cars will prove to be safer than human drivers because the cars will not get distracted and will obey all traffic laws.
Critics have expressed concern about the technology’s safety, including the ability of the autonomous technology to deal with unpredictable events.
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The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots is urging the United Nations to begin talks on a legally binding treaty to ban the use and development of lethal autonomous weapons systems. Representatives from more than 70 countries are attending a weeklong meeting of the Convention on Conventional Weapons, or CCW, to recommend future work on this issue.
The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots is a global coalition of 76 organizations in 32 countries. Members include Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Mines Action Canada and the Nobel Women’s Initiative. It began in April 2013 to pre-emptively ban lethal autonomous weapons systems, better known as killer robots.
Activists say momentum is building for states to negotiate a ban on the devices when the CCW holds its annual meeting in late November; however, the recommendation for further action is required during the current CCW meeting.
Since the last meeting in April, the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots reports 26 countries have joined the call for a ban. It says China is agreeable to a partial ban on the use of these weapons, though not on their development, and Russia has announced its support for a non-binding agreement.
Mary Wareham of Human Rights Watch, the coordinator of the campaign, says this is putting pressure on the United States and other countries to support a ban on fully autonomous weapons.
“All of the ingredients are there for states to take action now,” Wareham said. “It is just a matter of who is willing to be the bad guy and try and block this, and that is what we will know at the end of the week. … The CCW operates by consensus, and it is always an awkward thing to witness. We will find out on Friday if any country wants to block the consensus for the proposed mandate.”
The proposed mandate is to negotiate a legally binding agreement by the end of 2019. During the last meeting, France, Israel, Russia, Britain and the United States emerged as potential spoilers — they all explicitly rejected moves to prohibit these weapons systems.
Activists say legally binding arrangements must be enacted to ensure human control over lethal fully autonomous weapons. To do otherwise, they say, would violate international ethical standards. They say it is not possible to hold killer robots accountable for acts that would amount to war crimes if triggered by a human.
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A Russian artist is going back to the roots of photography, rejecting the digital trappings and the assembly-line convenience of the modern age, by designing and creating wooden cameras the way they were built a hundred years ago. Combining craftsmanship with the principles of old school photography, some consider his creations art forms in themselves. And as VOA’s Julie Taboh reports, his wooden cameras, and the unique photographs he takes with them, are attracting buyers from around the world.
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