YCLOAK

Vietnamese lawmakers have approved a new cybersecurity law that human rights activists say will stifle freedom of speech.

The law will require online content providers such as Google and Facebook to remove content deemed offensive by authorities within 24 hours, and store the personal data of its customers on servers based in Vietnam, and to open offices in the Communist-run country.

Clare Agar, Amnesty International’s director of global operations, issued a statement denouncing Tuesday’s passage of the law. Agar said “the online space was a relative refuge” within Vietnam’s “deeply repressive climate” where people could go to share ideas and opinions “with less fear of censure by the authorities.”

The new law now means “there is no safe place left,” Agar said.

The United States and Canada urged Vietnam to delay passage of the bill, citing concerns it could pose “obstacles to Vietnam’s cybersecurity and digital innovation future.” 

The Vietnam Digital Communication Association says the law could reduce the country’s gross domestic product by 1.7 percent, and wipe out 3.1 percent of foreign investment.

Vo Trong Viet, the head of the government’s defense and security committee, acknowledged that requiring content providers to open data centers inside Vietnam would increase their costs, but said it was necessary ensure the country’s cybersecurity.
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The Boring Company, based in California, is close to opening its first exciting venture – a 3.2 kilometer underground tunnel designed to convince Californians that traveling underground at high speed may solve their state’s ubiquitous traffic jams. It is the brainchild of Elon Musk, the U.S. billionaire who founded the electric car company Tesla and the rocket company SpaceX. VOA’s George Putic has more.
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The Federal Communications Commission’s repeal of the United States’ net neutrality rules — which mandated internet service providers to not discriminate in their handling of internet traffic — took effect Monday, reigniting fears from internet freedom advocates of potential manipulation of consumers’ internet access.

The FCC voted in December to overturn its net neutrality rule, first put in place by the Obama administration in 2015. With its repeal, the door is now open for internet service providers to block content, slow data transmission, and create “fast lanes” for consumers who pay premiums.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, a staunch critic of net neutrality, wrote Sunday that while he “support[s] a free an open internet,” the overturning of the Obama-era rule will allow the FTC [Federal Trade Commission] to “once again be able to protect Americans consistently across the internet economy.”

In 2004, then-FCC Chairman Michael Powell announced the commission’s support of what he called the “four internet freedoms,” including the freedom of consumers to access content. Since 2005, the FCC had enforced net neutrality rules in some regard, with the support of both Republican and Democratic chairmen. In 2015, the regulations were codified into law. 

“We’re actually in a brave new world where no protections for a free internet currently exist, whereas they have for the majority of the history of the internet,” Tim Karr, senior director of strategy and communications of media watchdog Free Press, told VOA on Monday. 

Karr said based on the prior actions of internet service providers, he feared we could see restrictions placed on such free internet access.

In 2007, the Associated Press reported that telecommunications giant Comcast was stifling connection to file-sharing websites such as BitTorrent. In 2011, fellow communication company Verizon blocked the download of Google Wallet, a payment app, on its mobile devices.

Verizon spokesman Rich Young told VOA that the company “strongly supports open internet rules,” and the recent FCC decision does not change the company’s support of full internet access.

Since the December FCC decision, two states — Washington and Oregon — have passed their own net neutrality laws, whereas governors of five other states — Hawaii, New Jersey, New York, Montana and Vermont — have issued executive orders mandating that internet service providers for government agencies abide by net neutrality regulations.

In May, the U.S. Senate voted 52-47 to reinstate the FCC’s 2015 net neutrality rules. Every Democratic senator voted for the proposal, as did three Republicans: John Kennedy of Louisiana, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.

The bill is now in the House of Representatives, where outgoing Speaker Paul Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican, has not yet announced any plans to bring the bill to the floor for a vote.

Congressman Mike Doyle, a Pennsylvania Democrat, filed a petition in May to force a vote on the matter. Doyle spokesperson Matt Dinkel said of the 218 signees for the petition needed to force a vote, the petition currently has 170.

“If enough representatives sign the discharge petition to bring the bill to the floor, odds are that it will pass,” Dinkel told VOA.
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Despite astonishing advances in robotics, today’s machines often struggle to accomplish what insects do routinely. So robotics researchers are taking advantage of nature’s billions of years of experience. They are learning from bees to build flying machines that can learn and navigate their environments. VOA’s Steve Baragona has more.
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Drones guided by artificial intelligence to catch boats netting fish where they shouldn’t were among the winners of a marine protection award on Friday and could soon be deployed to fight illegal fishing, organizers said.

The award-winning project aims to help authorities hunt down illegal fishing boats using drones fitted with cameras that can monitor large swaths of water autonomously.

Illegal fishing and overfishing deplete fish stocks worldwide, causing billions of dollars in losses a year and threatening the livelihoods of rural coastal communities, according to the United Nations.

The National Geographic Society awarded the project, co-developed by Morocco-based company ATLAN Space, and two other innovations $150,000 each to implement their plans as it marked World Oceans Day on Friday.

The aircraft can cover a range of up to 700 km (435 miles) and use artificial intelligence (AI) technology to drive them in search of fishing vessels, said ATLAN Space’s founder, Badr Idrissi.

“Once (the drone) detects something, it goes there and identifies what it’s seeing,” Idrissi told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone.

Idrissi said the technology, which is to be piloted in the Seychelles later this year, was more effective than traditional sea patrols and allowed coast guards to save money and time.

From satellites tracking trawlers on the high seas to computer algorithms identifying illegal behaviors, new technologies are increasingly coming to the aid of coast guards worldwide.

AI allows the drones to check a boat’s identification number, establish whether it is fishing inside a protected area or without permit, verify whether it is known to authorities and count people on board, Idrissi said.

If something appears to be wrong, it can alert authorities.

Other winners were Marine Conservation Cambodia, which uses underwater concrete blocks to impede the use of bottom-dragged nets, and U.S.-based Pelagic Data Systems, which plans to combat illegal fishing in Thailand with tracking technologies.

“The innovations from the three winning teams have the potential to greatly increase sustainable fishing in coastal systems,” National Geographic Society’s chief scientist Jonathan Baillie said in a statement.

Much of the world’s fish stocks are overfished or fully exploited, according the U.N. food agency, and fish consumption rose above 20 kilograms per person in 2016 for the first time.

Global marine catches have declined by 1.2 million tons a year since 1996, according to The Sea Around Us, a research initiative involving the University of British Columbia and the University of Western Australia.
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North Korea’s senior leadership has been exploiting loopholes in international sanctions to obtain the U.S. technology that Pyongyang uses to conduct “destructive cyber operations,” according to a global cyberthreat intelligence company.

Recorded Future, based in Massachusetts, found that while export bans and restrictions are somewhat effective in keeping North Korea from acquiring technology for its nuclear weapons program, sanctions fail when it comes to regulating computer products from entering into North Korea.

“Because of the globalized nature of technology production and distribution, the traditional export control is not really working for [computer] technology,” said Priscilla Moriuchi, one of the authors of “North Korea Relies on U.S. Technology for Internet Operations.” “It may work quite well for ballistic missile parts or fissile material, but the system is not designed to limit technology transfer, and it’s not optimized for that.”

​Upcoming summit

In the report, Moriuchi and her co-author, Fred Wolens, call for a “globally robust unified effort to impose comprehensive sanctions” on North Korea, warning that without this Pyongyang “will be able to continue its cyberwarfare operations unabated with the aid of Western technology.”

The report was released days before North Korean leader Kim Jung Un and U.S. President Donald Trump are scheduled to meet in Singapore for a summit focused on ending the North’s nuclear weapons program in exchange for economic incentives and security guarantees.

But some consider North Korea’s cyberthreat capabilities as damaging as the threat of its nuclear weapons, Morgan Wright, a former a senior adviser in the U.S. State Department Antiterrorism Assistance Program, wrote in The Hill.

Even as advance teams prepared for the June 12 summit, North Korean cyberattacks continued, Moriuchi told Cyberscoop. On May 28, it reported the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI released a joint alert about Hidden Cobra, which is associated with North Korea’s hacking activities.

FireEye, a Silicon Valley cybersecurity company, detected cyberattacks by Lazarus, the North Korean hacking effort responsible for stealing millions of dollars from the Bangladesh Central Bank in 2016. Lazarus is also believed responsible for the 2014 Sony Picture’s hack and last year’s WannaCry ransomware attack.

​Defining ‘luxury goods’

How did U.S. technology reach North Korea? Part of the answer lies in “international inconsistencies in the definition of the term ‘luxury goods,’” according to the Recorded Future report. The U.S. “effort to restrict technology exports at the national and international level” has not reaped results because of “varied definitions by nations and [their] inconsistent implementations,” said Moriuchi, a former East Asia analyst for the National Security Agency.

While the United Nations did not include electronics in Resolution 2321, which covered exports to North Korea, when it was issued in 2016, each member nation was allowed to interpret luxury goods. The U.S. has defined luxury goods to include laptop computers, digital music players, large flat-screen televisions and electronic entertainment software. China, in particular, does not “honor the luxury goods listed by other countries when it exports to” North Korea, according to the report.

US exports OK

Another factor is that for seven years in the period spanning 2002 to 2017, “the United States allowed the exportation of ‘computer and electronic products’ to North Korea,” according to the report. The total for those seven years was more than $430,000 of legal exports, and according to Recorded Future, “at its peak in 2014, the U.S. exported $215,862 worth of computers and electronic products to North Korea.”

The Recorded Future report, citing the U.S. Department of Commerce (DOC), said that category includes “computers, computer peripherals (including items like printers, monitors and storage devices), communications equipment (such as wired and wireless telephones), and similar components for these products.”

Much of that equipment remains in use, according to Recorded Future, and North Korea’s ruling elites, including party, military, and intelligence leaders and their families, have long been known to use products manufactured by U.S. companies such as Apple, Microsoft and IBM to access the internet.

A third element in how the U.S. tech went astray is what the report called North Korea’s “sophisticated sanctions evasion operation, which uses intermediaries and spoofs identities online.”

As an example, the study points to North Korea’s shell company Glocom with which Pyongyang “used a network of Asian-based front companies to buy computer components from electronic resellers, and the payment was even cleared through a U.S. bank account.” The United Nations found that Glocom was tied to Pan Systems Pyongyang, whose director, Ryang Su Nyo, reports to Liaison Office 519 in the North Korean intelligence agency’s Reconnaissance General Bureau.

​Just like us

North Korea’s elites surfed and browsed just like users outside North Korea until recently when the Recorded Future researchers found “a stark change” in the elite’s usage patterns as they “migrated almost completely” from Facebook, Google and Instagram “to their Chinese equivalents — Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu,” and over the course of a few months “dramatically increased” their use of internet obfuscation services, such as virtual private networks (VPN), virtual private servers (VPS), transport layer security (TLS) and the Onion Router (Tor).

While tracking the change in activity from December 2017 to April 2018, researchers found “the overwhelming presence of American hardware and software on North Korea networks and in daily use by senior North Korean leaders.”

While U.S. exporters are responsible for understanding and adhering to export regulations, the study indicates even the implementation of robust compliance procedures were insufficient in preventing banned U.S. computer products from reaching North Korea.

U.S. export enforcement rests with the Office of Foreign Asset Control, the Office of Export Enforcement and Homeland Security Investigations. The U.S. is one of the only countries that enforces its export laws outside of its national boundaries, placing federal agents in foreign countries to work with local authorities.

Widespread international sanctions were imposed beginning in 2006, when North Korea conducted its first nuclear weapons test. In response, the U.N. passed two resolutions (Resolution 1695 and 1718) banning a broad range of exports to North Korea by any U.N. member states. The U.N. subsequently expanded those sanctions through a number of resolutions that prohibit and restrict exporting items ranging from missile material to oil to North Korea.

The case of ZTE

The Recorded Future report mentions Chinese manufacturer ZTE (Zhongxing Telecommunications Equipment) as a case where the implementation of export regulation failed, pointing out that the U.S. had the chance to enforce its export laws when the company was under Export Administration Regulation (EAR), a dense set of laws regulating exports.

ZTE was initially placed on the so-called Entities List for violating U.S. sanctions for selling products containing U.S. goods to Iran and North Korea in March 2016. For two years, the company and the U.S. government attempted to reach an agreement over penalties and how to verify that ZTE had stopped violating U.S. sanctions.

The Department of Commerce (DOC) ended the negotiations and imposed a denial order that banned U.S. companies from selling to ZTE for seven years.

In May, the DOC lifted the denial order, which would have put ZTE out of business, and allowed ZTE to purchase components from U.S. companies. The move came after threats of a trade war and Trump’s intervention.

Moriuchi said if the U.S. had let ZTE fail, it would have sent “a huge message to the rest of the world that there is no [company] too big to fail” and that “the U.S. government takes export control very seriously.”

In the end, “an opposite message ended up being sent with the administration’s deal with China, and that there are companies too big to fail especially if that company … has significant interest with the United States,” she said, adding the case demonstrated that “you can circumvent U.S. export control as a company and in the end, survive.”

The U.S. enforces its export laws through the DOC and regulates them through EAR, which not only restricts commercial goods and technologies from reaching hostile countries but also regulates the re-export of U.S. goods and technologies from one foreign country to another.

Until 2008, U.S. sanctions prohibiting exports to North Korea were implemented through the Trading with the Enemy Act, through which the U.S. government banned any exports to designated countries including North Korea.

Subsequently, the Obama administration issued the North Korea Sanctions Regulations and a number of Executive Orders (13551, 13570, 13687, and 13722) to further prohibit various measures, including exports of “goods, services or technology to North Korea.”

Additionally, numerous U.S. sanctions were imposed against North Korea under Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign, especially in 2017 during Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles tests, which also saw the U.N. issue new sanctions.

VOA’s Christy Lee contributed to this report.
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Growing up on Mount Boutmezguida in southwest Morocco on the edge of the Sahara desert, Khadija Ghouate never imagined that the fog enveloping the nearby peaks would change her life.

For hours every day and often before sunrise, Ghouate and other women from nearby villages would walk 5 km (3 miles) to fetch water from open wells, with girls pulled out of school to help and at risk of violence on the lonely treks.

But with groundwater levels dropping due to overuse, drought and climate change, the challenge to get enough water daily was becoming harder, and almost half of people in the local area sold up and quit rural life after generations for the city.

As the future of the traditional Berber region by Mount Boutmezguida floundered, a mathematician whose family came from the area had a eureka moment gleaned from living overseas – using fog to make water.

Now Ghouate’s village is connected to the world’s largest functioning fog collection project, alleviating the need to collect water that fell mainly on women, and with state-of-the-art equipment setting an example for other projects globally.

“You always had to go to the wells, always be there, mornings, evenings,” said Ghouate, a mother-of-three, as she prepared lunch for her family, showing off the tap in her home.

“But now water has arrived in our house. I like fog a lot.

The project, running since 2015 after nine years of surveys and tests, was founded by the Moroccan non-government organization Dar Si Hmad, which works to promote and preserve local culture, history, and heritage.

It was the brainchild of mathematician and businessman Aissa Derhem whose parents were originally from Mount Boutmezguida where the slopes are covered in mist on average 130 days a year.

Derhem first came across fog collection when he learned of one of the world’s first projects – in Chile’s Atacama Desert – while he living in Canada in the 1980s studying for his PhD.

But it was not until visiting his parents’ village years later that he realized the mountainous location, situated at the edge of the Sahara and about 35 km (22 miles) from the Atlantic Ocean, was perfect for fog.

Ideal Location

Mist accumulates in coastal areas where a cold sea current, an anticyclone and a land obstacle, such as a mountain range, combine.

“When the sea water evaporates, the anticyclone … stops it from becoming rain, and when it hits the mountain, that’s where it can be gathered,” Derhem told the Thomson Reuters Foundation, looking out from the top of Mount Boutmezguida besides a small building used as a fog observatory and tool deposit.

“If we look at the planet, we see this happening in all tropical regions … In Chile and Peru in Latin America. The Kalahari desert in Africa. In Western Australia. Around the Thar desert in India and in California,” he listed as examples.

Developed in South America in the 1980s, fog collection projects have since spread globally to countries including Guatemala, Ghana, Eritrea, Nepal and the United States.

In Morocco, Dar Si Hmad has built a system of nets stretching about 870 square metres – about 4.5 tennis courts.

These nets are hung between two poles and when wind pushes the fog through the mesh, water droplets are trapped, condense and fall into a container at the bottom of the unit with pipes connecting the water to reservoirs.

Derhem hopes the success of the Mount Boutmezguida scheme can help other areas in West Africa and in North Africa – where the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) says fresh water resources are among the world’s lowest.

Studies show climate change impacting water patterns globally and Derhem said in Morocco levels have dropped to about 500 cubic meters a person a year from about 1,500 cubic meters a person in the 1960s on calculations based on government figures.

Challenges Too

The principles behind fog collection are simple, and throughout nature examples exist of creatures capturing moisture from the air in the most arid conditions, ranging from beetles in the Namib Desert to lizards in the Australian outback.

But creating a water collection project on a large scale comes with challenges, as the research and development, as well as the infrastructure and technology involved in expanding and developing fog collection projects, can be costly.

The project at Mount Boutmezguida, however, has been a trailblazer for other projects due to its equipment, according to its founders.

The original nets used were insufficiently resistant to the high winds and tore but a partnership with the German non-profit Water Foundation allowed Dar Si Hmad to develop a stronger net.

The CloudFisher was described by the WaterFoundation as the first maintance-free fog collector that can withstand wind speeds of up 120 kph with flexible troughs following the movement of the net in the wind.

Now collected water is filtered and combined with underground water before being distributed to villages on the grid with homes paying for water through a pre-paid system.

The initial pilot project served five villages. At present, the 870 square metres of nets installed reach about 140 families – 14 villages – while a second set of nets is being built.

“Fog is like aeroplanes at the start. At the beginning they were only little toys but, with some effort, things have changed … but it needs investment,” said Derhem.

“Along the coast, there is three times as much fog as there is available on Mount Boutmezguida. The government spends millions for water desalination processes. This is something that is worth exploring.”

For with dry wells comes anxiety and risk but also the unraveling of traditional livelihoods and communities.

Mohamed Zabour, president of the local municipality, said more than 60 percent of the inhabitants of the region live without running water in their homes.

Between 2004 and 2014, 2,000 of the 5,000 local residents moved to cities.

“Our region is rich but it needs infrastructure. And water is one of the priorities,” said Zabour.

“If we don’t find a solution in the next 10 years, it’s going to be a catastrophe … It’s going to be like a desert. Empty.”

For Ghouate, the fog scheme has improved village life.

“When we were kids, we didn’t even know what it meant to need water  … Now there is less rain and if I still had to go to the wells, I wouldn’t find much water now,” she said. “Everything is about water, everything. I don’t have to worry about it anymore.”
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Facebook said a software bug led some users to post publicly by default regardless of their previous settings. The bug affected as many as 14 million users over several days in May.

 

The problem, which Facebook said it has fixed, is the latest privacy scandal for the world’s largest social media company.

 

It said the bug automatically suggested that users make new posts public, even if they had previously restricted posts to “friends only” or another private setting. If users did not notice the new default suggestion, they unwittingly sent their post to a broader audience than they had intended.

 

Erin Egan, Facebook’s chief privacy officer, said the bug did not affect past posts. Facebook is notifying users who were affected and posted publicly during the time the bug was active, advising them to review their posts.

 

The news follows recent furor over Facebook’s sharing of user data with device makers, including China’s Huawei. The company is also still recovering from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which a Trump-affiliated data-mining firm got access to the personal data of as many as 87 million Facebook users.

 

Jonathan Mayer, a professor of computer science and public affairs at Princeton University, said on Twitter that this latest privacy gaffe “looks like a viable Federal Trade Commission/state attorney general deception case.” That’s because the company had promised that the setting users set in their most recent privacy preferences would be maintained for future posts. In this case, this did not happen for several days.

 

Facebook’s 2011 consent decree with the FTC calls for the company to get “express consent” from users before sharing their information beyond what they established in their privacy settings. Even if the bug was an accident on Facebook’s part, Mayer said in an email that the FTC can bring enforcement action for privacy mistakes.

 

Facebook, which has 2.2 billion users, says the bug was active from May 18 until May 27. While the company says it stopped the error on May 22, it was not able to change all the posts back to their original privacy parameters until later.

 

The mistake happened when the company built a new way for people to share “featured items” on their profiles. These items, which include posts and photo albums, are automatically public. In the process of creating this feature, Facebook said it accidentally made the suggested audience for all new posts public.

 

When people post to Facebook, the service suggests a default distribution for their posts based on past privacy settings. If someone made all posts “friends only” in the past, it will set their next post to “friends only” as well. People can still manually change the privacy level of the posts — anywhere from “public” to “only me” — and this was the case while the bug was active as well.
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High costs of extracting greenhouse gases from thin air could tumble with new technologies that can help to combat climate change, scientists said on Thursday.

Carbon Engineering, a Canadian-based clean energy company, outlined the design of a large industrial plant that it said could capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at a cost of between $94 and $232 a ton.

That is well below past estimates of about $600 a ton by the American Physical Society, said David Keith, a Harvard University physics professor and the founder of Carbon Engineering who led the research.

“I hope to show that this as a viable energy industrial technology, not something that is a magic bullet … but something that is completely doable,” he told Reuters of the peer-reviewed study published in the journal Joule.

Carbon Engineering, which has about 40 employees and produces about a ton of carbon dioxide a day from an experimental plant. The technology makes synthetic fuels using only air, water and renewable power.

Keith said an industrial-scale plant could make fuel at a dollar a liter. That would be competitive in California, where low carbon fuel standards to cut pollution from cars and trucks mean high prices.

He said some investors were interested. An industrial plant, costing hundreds of millions of dollars, could capture a million tons of carbon dioxide a year, equivalent to emissions by 250,000 cars.

Other experts welcomed the study as a step to clear up huge uncertainties about the costs of “direct air capture.”

U.N. reports indicate that governments may have to deploy such novel technologies this century to remove carbon from nature and bury it to limit global warming under the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

“Direct air capture is a politically promising route for carbon dioxide removal,” said Oliver Geden, of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.

And an air capture plant could be built almost anywhere. It would not threaten farmland, unlike options of planting vast forests which soak up carbon dioxide, he said.

Climeworks, a Swiss company and Carbon Engineering’s main rival, also told Reuters it was hoping to cut its production price to $100 a ton in the next 5-10 years, from about $600 now. It sells carbon dioxide to greenhouses as an airborne fertilizer to grow tomatoes or cucumbers.

Jan Wurzbacher, a founder of Climeworks, said more and more governments are likely to jack up penalties on carbon emissions to limit floods, storms and rising seas in coming years, making the technology more viable.

The World Bank says Sweden has the highest carbon taxes, currently 1,150 Swedish crowns ($133) a ton.
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Google won’t do artificial intelligence work for weapons, the company said Thursday.  

The company will not work on “technologies that cause or are likely to cause overall harm,” wrote Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, in a blog post.

 

Google has come under fire in recent months for its contract with the U.S. Department of Defense to use AI for sifting through drone footage. AI is a field of study whereby a computer or technology is able to do things typically associated with human behavior, such as make decisions, plan and learn.

 

Google and other tech firms have been bringing the advances in AI to fields such as medicine, natural disaster planning, energy, transportation and manufacturing.

But these advances have also led to ethical concerns about the kinds of decisions being made without human input.

“How AI is developed and used will have a significant impact on society for many years to come,” Pichai wrote. “As a leader in AI, we feel a special responsibility to get this right.”

 

Sifting through drone footage

In recent months, more than 4,000 Google employees signed a petition calling for the cancellation of the company’s contract with the Department of Defense as part of the DoD’s Project Maven initiative. They joined other critics in raising alarms that the project could lead to the use of autonomous weapons.

 

Last week, a Google executive reportedly told employees that the company would not seek to renew its Project Maven contract with the military.  

Kirk Hanson, the executive director of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, which counts Google as a financial supporter, said Google’s contract highlights a larger debate about AI and military applications.

“Until we have trust that those systems will not make mistakes, we’re going to have a lot of doubts about the use of artificial intelligence for autonomous weapons,” Hanson said.

 

Google will continue some work for the military, Pichai said.

 

“We want to be clear that while we are not developing AI for use in weapons, we will continue our work with governments and the military in many other areas,” he said. “These include cybersecurity, training, military recruitment, veterans’ healthcare, and search and rescue.”
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Google will not allow its artificial intelligence software to be used in weapons or unreasonable surveillance efforts under new standards for its business decisions in the nascent field, the Alphabet unit said Thursday.

The restriction could help Google management defuse months of protest by thousands of employees against the company’s work with the U.S. military to identify objects in drone video.

Google instead will seek government contracts in areas such as cybersecurity, military recruitment and search and rescue, Chief Executive Sundar Pichai said in a blog post Thursday.

“We want to be clear that while we are not developing AI for use in weapons, we will continue our work with governments and the military in many other areas,” he said.

Breakthroughs in the cost and performance of advanced computers have carried AI from research labs into industries such as defense and health in the last couple of years. Google and its big technology rivals have become leading sellers of AI tools, which enable computers to review large datasets to make predictions and identify patterns and anomalies faster than humans could.

But the potential of AI systems to pinpoint drone strikes better than military specialists or identify dissidents from mass collection of online communications has sparked concerns among academic ethicists and Google employees.

A Google official, requesting anonymity to discuss the sensitive issue, said the company would not have joined the drone project last year had the principles already been in place. The work comes too close to weaponry, even though the focus is on non-offensive tasks, the official said Thursday.

Google plans to honor its commitment to the project through next March, a person familiar with the matter said last week.

More than 4,600 employees petitioned Google to cancel the deal sooner, with at least 13 employees resigning in recent weeks in an expression of concern.

A nine-employee committee drafted the AI principles, according to an internal email seen by Reuters.

The Google official described the principles as a template that any software developer could put into immediate use. Though Microsoft and others released AI guidelines earlier, the AI community has followed Google’s efforts closely because of the internal pushback against the drone deal.

Google’s principles

Google’s principles say it will not pursue AI applications intended to cause physical injury, that tie into surveillance “violating internationally accepted norms of human rights,” or that present greater “material risk of harm” than countervailing benefits.

“The clear statement that they won’t facilitate violence or totalitarian surveillance is meaningful,” University of Washington technology law professor Ryan Calo tweeted Thursday.

Google also called on employees and customers developing AI “to avoid unjust impacts on people,” particularly around race, gender, sexual orientation, and political or religious belief.

The company recommended that developers avoid launching AI programs likely to cause significant damage if attacked by hackers because existing security mechanisms are unreliable.

Pichai said Google reserved the right to block applications that violated its principles. The Google official acknowledged that enforcement would be difficult because the company cannot track each use of its tools, some of which can be downloaded free of charge and used privately.

Google’s decision to restrict military work has inspired criticism from members of Congress. Representative Pete King, a New York Republican, tweeted Thursday that Google not seeking to extend the drone deal “is a defeat for U.S. national security.”
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As the internet continues to revolutionize communications, the next world-changing technology may already be here. Blockchain, a way of recording data and automatically storing it on computers around the world, has the potential to change everything from collecting crime scene evidence to creating new digital currencies. VOA’s Jill Craig visited a blockchain hackathon in Memphis, Tennessee, to learn more.
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Major changes could be ahead for the International Space Station but there will always be an American astronaut in orbit, NASA’s new boss said Wednesday.

The space agency is talking with private companies about potentially taking over the space lab after 2025, but no decision will made without the other 21 countries that are partners in the project, NASA Administrator James Bridenstine said in his first briefing with reporters.

President Donald Trump’s recent budget requests have put discussions about the station’s future “on steroids,” he said. Under Trump’s 2019 proposed budget, U.S. funding for the space station would end by 2025. The U.S. has spent more than $75 billion on the space station.

Options include splitting the station into different segments or reducing its size by breaking it up and discarding one part.

Always a US astronaut in orbit

But no matter what happens, there won’t be any gap when Americans aren’t in space, Bridenstine vowed. It won’t be as it was after the Apollo moon program closed or even the retirement of the space shuttle fleet, which has forced NASA to pay Russia to ferry astronauts to the station.

“There are kids graduating from high school this month, that their entire lives, we’ve had an astronaut in space,” Bridenstine said. “And we want that to live on in perpetuity forever. No gaps.”

Companies are interested in running the station and “there’s a range of options” that are just now being examined, he said.

The first station piece was launched in 1998. The complex was essentially completed with the end of the shuttle program in 2011. It is about the size of a six-bedroom house, complete with two bathrooms, a gym and a 360-degree bay window. It usually has a crew of six.

Climate change

In wide-ranging remarks, the former Oklahoma Republican congressman said he generally supports NASA’s Earth science missions, including missions that monitor heat-trapping carbon dioxide. He said at least three climate science satellites that the Trump administration had tried to cancel earlier in budget proposals “could all end up in very good shape” and that he supported them in Congress, crossing party lines.

“We’re going forth with missions that are going to do carbon monitoring,” he said, ticking off a couple of projects. “We’re committed to that.”

When told that a Pew Research poll out Wednesday said that 63 percent of Americans said NASA’s top priority should be monitoring key parts of Earth’s climate, Bridenstine said “good” and reiterated his acceptance of human-caused climate change as a threat to national security and the globe.

Back to the moon

Bridenstine also said he hopes NASA will put some kind of small robotic landers on the moon next year, followed at some later date by humans. Astronauts should use the moon as a “proving ground” for future missions to Mars, especially checking out potential health issues for living far away from Earth for a long time. He said he worried about balance, vision, bone loss and heart issues that have been reported with space station astronauts.

“We do not want to go to Mars and have our astronauts to be marshmallows on the surface of Mars,” Bridenstine said. “The moon is our best opportunity to be successful when we go to Mars.”
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Passenger jets of the future will be safer, lighter, faster, more fuel-efficient and … windowless.

So predicts Emirates Airlines chief Tim Clark. The Dubai-based airline has already introduced virtual windows in the first-class suites of its newest planes. 

Instead of being able to see out a conventional window, the passengers will be able to enjoy the view on a full display of windows that will project live camera feeds on a high-definition screen. 

Clark said the images are “so good, it’s better than with the natural eye.”

Clark told the BBC that the ultimate goal was to have a completely windowless plane. 

“Now you have a fuselage which has no structural weaknesses because of windows. The aircraft are lighter, the aircraft could fly faster, they’ll burn less fuel and fly higher,” he said.

But Emirates’ experiment has raised concerns that might not win it the votes of safety regulators. Some passengers have expressed concerns of possibly feeling claustrophobic on windowless planes. 
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The former head of Cambridge Analytica admitted on Wednesday his firm had received data from the researcher at the center of a scandal over Facebook users’ personal details, contradicting previous testimony to

lawmakers.

Cambridge Analytica, which was hired by Donald Trump in 2016, has denied its work on the U.S. president’s successful election campaign made use of data allegedly improperly harvested from around 87 million Facebook users.

Former chief Alexander Nix, in earlier testimony to parliament’s media committee, also denied the political consultancy had ever been given data by Aleksandr Kogan, the researcher linked to the scandal.

On Wednesday he said it had received data from Kogan.

“Of course, the answer to this question should have been ‘yes,'” Nix said, adding that he thought he was being asked if Cambridge Analytica still held data from the researcher.

He denied deliberately misleading British lawmakers and said the company had deleted the data, which had been of no use.

The committee is investigating fake news, and focusing on the role of Cambridge Analytica and Facebook in the 2016 Brexit vote as well as the Trump election.

In lengthy, and often testy, questioning by lawmakers, Nix apologized for an undercover film in which he said Cambridge Analytica’s online campaign played a decisive role in Trump’s election win.

But he defended the now-defunct consultancy’s reputation and said he felt victimized.

Cambridge Analytica said after the film was broadcast by Channel 4 television in March that the comments did not “represent the values or operations of the firm.”

Lawmakers asked Nix to return to face questions about inconsistencies in his evidence.

Kogan had told lawmakers he did give Cambridge Analytica the data.

Facebook says Kogan harvested it by creating an app on the platform that was downloaded by 270,000 people, providing access not only to their own but also their friends’ personal data.

Facebook said Kogan then violated its policies by passing the data to Cambridge Analytica.

Embarrassed but vindicated

Nix apologized for his comments in the film, saying he had been foolish and had made exaggerated claims in order to attract what he thought was a potential client.

“It’s not only deeply embarrassing, but it’s something I regret enormously,” he said.

Nix said that Channel 4 had heavily edited the footage to portray him in a worse light. “All Mr Nix’s comments carried in our reports were used in context, including any caveats,” the broadcaster said in a statement.

On other matters, Nix was less apologetic.

He said that he was vindicated in saying Cambridge Analytica had not been involved in the Brexit campaign by a report by the Electoral Commission, and that whistleblower Christopher Wylie had lied about the consultancy’s involvement in Brexit.

Wylie had told the committee that Cambridge Analytica played a pivotal role in the campaign.

On Wednesday he told Channel 4: “I actually backed up everything I said with documents. I am quite comfortable standing by the statements that I made.”

Nix denied a story in the Financial Times that he had withdrawn $8 million from Cambridge Analytica before its collapse last month.

Asked about a Guardian report that a Cambridge Analytica employee visited Wikileaks founder Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy in 2017, he said he had been unaware of the meeting.
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A surge in participation by startup companies this week, at a highlight of Asia’s biggest annual tech event, shows an increased reliance on young entrepreneurs to come with the IT industry’s strongest ideas for connected devices and artificial intelligence.

The InnoVEX segment of Taipei Computex 2018 brought together 388 startups, a term usually defined as founder-owned firms of three to five years old. That number is a jump from 272 at the same event a year ago. Venture capitalists, including at least one with half a billion dollars in investment funds, evaluated them one-on-one and at formal pitching events.

Startups are catching attention as inventors of Internet-of-things technology because there’s no market leader yet, said Jamie Lin, founding partner of AppWorks Ventures, a startup accelerator in Taipei. That technology refers to software and hardware that let computers or phones communicate with everyday devices such as cameras and alarm systems.

Some connections run on artificial intelligence, which means computerized processing of the data collected from those devices. That can mean making human-like decisions.

“Computers continue to morph and there are no dominant players in IoT,” Lin said. “That’s why they need startups and that’s what makes the show relevant.”

In software, by contrast, Google and Microsoft dominate markets worldwide. Apple and Samsung, among others, lead in smartphones.

Coinciding with the tech show this week, Lin’s accelerator, another like it and a Japanese venture capital firm are all holding their own events in Taipei this week for startups.

Expanding market

More than 20 billion things will be connected to the internet by 2020, up from 8.4 billion connected last year, market research firm Gartner forecasts. The number will pick up especially as 5G wireless services speed up connections.

By next year, Gartner anticipates, startup firms working with artificial intelligence will overtake Amazon, Google, Microsoft and IBM in “driving the artificial intelligence economy” for businesses.

Artificial intelligence, also known by its abbreviation AI, will reach a market value of $1.2 trillion per year by 2020 as investment triples between now and then, Forrester Research said.

“There’s a process, which is experimental — error and trial, error and trial – so there’s no one with a ready solution, and AI is so broad that one that can do it all,” said Tracy Tsai, a Gartner research VP in Taipei.

“With AI startups, they say ‘I’m focused, I just do some part of it and I do it well, and I do it attentively,’” she said. “For companies looking for a full solution, if you can show your part works, then they use it.”

Venture capitalists watching

Venture capital firms at the three-day InnoVEX show Wednesday watched a spread of mostly Asian startups with software and hardware ideas focused largely on connected devices. Healthcare and the management of drones were among the fields that companies said they could help with AI.

The show offered chances for startups to pitch their ideas to venture capital firms and accelerators, which are programs that show young firms how to improve their businesses.

Startup promotion authorities from 13 countries, including France and the Netherlands, also scanned the exhibition hall for Asian firms that might complement their own.

“What we care about the most is whether these startups or smaller firms have technology, so if it’s a just a business model only, they aren’t suitable for us,” said Amanda Liu, CEO of the Taiwan government-backed business accelerator StarFab. Her accelerator takes 10 to 15 of every 100 applicants. “They need to have products and their core competence must come from technology.”

Taiwanese firms are good at altering hardware specs, Liu said, and for technology ideal for businesses rather than individual consumers, Liu said. Taiwan positioned itself decades ago as a high-tech hardware manufacturing hub for much of the world.

Qara was one AI-dependent startup at InnoVEX. The 4-year-old South Korean developer with $1 million in venture capital funding uses an AI algorithm to predict the movement of stock and cryptocurrency markets. It has earned revenues of $1.5 million and reports a profit.

“Anyone can see the predictions powered by AI,” said Qara’s global CEO Katie Bomi Son. In terms of accuracy, she said, “Some are from 70, or between 70 to 90. Most of our information [comes] from the machine.”

Qara counts mostly companies as clients but it’s looking for a way to monetize the free app for common users.
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Facebook has admitted that it had a data sharing agreement with four Chinese technology companies, including one considered a national security threat by the U.S. intelligence community, raising new concerns about the social media giant’s handling of its consumer’s personal information.

The admission by the U.S.-based social media giant Tuesday came two days after The New York Times revealed that Facebook had struck special data-sharing deals with as many as 60 device makers, including Huawei, Lenovo, OPPO and TCL, to make it easier for Facebook users to access their accounts on a wide array of devices.

U.S. intelligence officials have raised concerns for years about Huawei, fearing the Chinese government could demand access to data stored on their devices or servers. The concerns prompted the U.S. military to ban the sale of Huawei smartphones on its bases.

Francisco Varela, Facebook’s vice president of mobile partnerships, said Tuesday that the data sharing deals with Huawei and the other Chinese companies “were controlled from the get-go.”

Facebook has been under intense criticism after it was disclosed that tens of millions of users’ personal information was accessed by the British-based political consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica. The company has also been under fire after revealing in September that Russians, using fake names, used social media to try to influence voters ahead of the 2016 U.S. election.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is investigating whether Facebook violated a 2011 consent agreement over a previous ruling that found Facebook had misled consumers over its data-use policies.

 
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In and around the Mekong Delta, school children will spend this summer moving rainbow-colored blocks and cartoon animals around a screen to get an early taste of computers in a program backed by Google.

The tech company is paying for Vietnamese students to learn some introductory programming, along the way perhaps earning some goodwill from Vietnamese officials who are taking an increasingly strict view toward global internet firms.

The Mekong Community Development Center will run the classes, which make use of Scratch, a very basic computer language that lets children create their own virtual games.

“To support Vietnam’s development in the direction of the Industrial Revolution 4.0 in the most effective and practical way, Google is focused on developing projects to build and raise awareness and capacity in information technology in Vietnam,” said Ha Lam Tu Quynh, who is the director of communications and public relations in charge of Vietnam at Google Asia Pacific. “We believe children in particular will be the best creators of the future.”

She was referring to a tech revolution that has been a buzz word around the Communist country, encompassing all kinds of new tech, from the internet of things, to big data analysis.

Google, which did not disclose how much it is spending, is far from alone in stressing its corporate social responsibility, allowing firms to do good or look good, or both. It would not hurt to earn some goodwill with Vietnam, which has been overhauling its legislative and regulatory system in a way that has not always gone over well with tech companies. 

Last year the Southeast Asian country pressed local advertisers to boycott Facebook and Google’s YouTube because they had permitted content critical of the state. In a more recent example, the National Assembly is debating a draft law on cyber security that would require businesses to store data inside the borders and delete online information that is deemed objectionable.

The U.S. embassy in Hanoi expressed “concerns about Vietnam’s proposed cyber security law, including the impact of localization requirements and restrictions on cross-border services for the future development and growth of Vietnam’s economy.”

Also contributing to the child-friendly computer lessons, with laptops and technical support, is the Dariu Foundation, which focuses on micro-finance and education for low-income people in Vietnam, Myanmar, and India. Nguyen Van Hanh, the director of the Dariu Foundation, noted that roughly 65 percent of those now in primary school will be doing jobs someday that do not exist right now, citing data from the World Economic Forum.

“With all of the economic and social changes brought on by technology, we do not know exactly the kind of skills children will need in order to develop and become citizens who contribute positively to the world in the future through work,” he said in discussing his group’s participation in the Scratch classes. “However, we can be sure that today’s children need to be equipped with many skills to adapt to the challenges and the requirements of the digital era.”

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology invented the simple Scratch language so that computer programming would be more widely accessible. First-time programmers do not type dense lines of code, but rather use logic to design things like animation and games, dragging colorful objects and command labels around the software interface. Even an 8-year-old can do it, and in fact they do.

So will 1,200 public school students in the Vietnamese metropolis of Ho Chi Minh City and the nearby delta provinces of Vinh Long and Tien Giang.

The initiative “Programming the Future with Google,” also includes digital training for 30 local school teachers, will run from now through August.
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A security breach at family networking and genealogy website MyHeritage leaked the data of over 92 million users, the company said in a blog posted on Monday.

The breach took place on Oct. 26 last year, and consisted of the email addresses and hashed passwords of users who signed up to the website up to the date of the breach, according to the blog post.

The company said it learned about the breach on Monday, when its chief information security officer was notified by a security researcher who found a file with the email addresses and hashed passwords on a private server outside of MyHeritage.

MyHeritage said no other data was found on the server, and that there was no evidence of data in the file being used.

Information about family trees and DNA data are stored on separate systems and were not a part of the breach, the blog said.

MyHeritage said it was investigating the breach and taking steps to engage an independent cybersecurity company to review the incident.

The company advised users to change their passwords.

Israel’s MyHeritage helps families around the world find their history with family tree tools, DNA tests, and a library of historical records. 
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Babies cry, and they cry a lot. And every time they do, parents, unsure of why their baby is crying go through a checklist – hungry, tired, teething? But the guessing game may be over – a neuropsychologist from California has developed a smartphone app that translates baby cries, making it easier for parents to understand their child’s needs. Ksenia Turkova has more.
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Experts warn that spending too much time with smartphones is eroding our family and social life. The world’s biggest smartphone manufacturer, Apple, has heard that warning… and has announced new features for iPhones that will help people get back their lives. At its annual conference, now going on in San Jose, California June 4 – 8, Apple also unveiled a host of small improvements including a bit of augmented reality. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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India is the global host of the 2018 World Environment Day. Highlighting its theme “Beat Plastic Pollution,” environmentalists will urge everyone, from those in government, industry as well as ordinary citizens, to reject the so-called ‘single-use plastic’ items which are slowly choking the planet’s waters and the animals that live in them. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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Microsoft on Monday said it will buy software development platform GitHub, in a deal worth $7.5 billion which will blend two opposite corporate cultures.

The tech giant, based in Washington state, is a heavyweight in terms of software whose source codes are not openly available or modifiable, exactly the counter of GitHub’s philosophy.

Created in 2008, GitHub allows developers to cooperatively manage software and has more than 28 million users around the world.

“Microsoft is a developer-first company, and by joining forces with GitHub we strengthen our commitment to developer freedom, openness and innovation,” Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella said in a statement.

“We recognize the community responsibility we take on with this agreement and will do our best work to empower every developer to build, innovate and solve the world’s most pressing challenges.”

The veteran tech firm said it “will acquire GitHub for $7.5 billion in Microsoft stock.”

Subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory review, the deal is expected to be finalized by the end of the year, Microsoft said in a statement on its website.

“GitHub will retain its developer-first ethos and will operate independently to provide an open platform for all developers in all industries,” Microsoft said.

“Developers will continue to be able to use the programing languages, tools and operating systems of their choice for their projects — and will still be able to deploy their code to any operating system, any cloud and any device.”

Microsoft has begun moving towards an open source software culture, proposing for example Linux on its Windows Azure cloud service. It also started a training program with Linux and others.

Microsoft Corporate Vice President Nat Friedman, founder of Xamarin and an open source veteran, will become GitHub CEO.

GitHub’s current chief executive, Chris Wanstrath, will move to Microsoft as a technical fellow to work on strategic software initiatives.

Writing on The GitHub Blog, Wanstrath said that he “could have never imagined” news of such a merger, when open source and business were considered as different “as oil and water” a decade ago.

But he said Microsoft and GitHub have already collaborated on projects, and “their vision for the future closely matches our own.”

He said “both believe that software development needs to become easier, more accessible, more intelligent, and more open, so more people can become developers and existing developers can spend more time focusing on the unique problems they’re trying to solve.”

In April, Microsoft reported that its earnings rose 35 percent to $7.4 billion in the fiscal third quarter, with revenue up 16 percent to $26.8 billion.

Earnings were lifted by gains in its core cloud computing operations for business.

Microsoft said the GitHub acquisition is expected to have a negative impact on 2019 earnings but positive beginning in 2020.
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Facebook is pushing back against a media report saying that it provided extensive information about its users and their friends to third parties like phone makers.

 

The New York Times reported Sunday that Facebook struck data-sharing deals with at least 60 device makers, including Apple and Amazon, raising more concerns about what users give up when they use Facebook.

 

Facebook says it disagrees with reporting by the paper regarding software it rolled out 10 years ago that helped get Facebook on to devices like iPhones. Ime Archibong, vice president of product partnerships, said in blog post that Facebook has maintained tight control over the technology, known as application programming interfaces, or APIs, and that it is not aware of any abuse by the companies that it teamed with.

 

The Times report says Facebook allowed the companies access to the data of friends of the user without their explicit consent, a practice that landed the company in the crosshairs of Congress during the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

 

Some device makers, according to The Times, could get personal information from those friends even though they were under the impression that they had barred any sharing if their data.

 

Archibong said that the companies it partnered with had signed agreements that prevented people’s Facebook information from being used for any purpose other than to recreate Facebook-like experiences. And friends’ information was only accessible on devices when people made a decision to share their information with those friends, he said.

 

The APIs now in question, according to Archibong, are very different from those used by Cambridge Analytica. Facebook suspended Cambridge Analytica in light of allegations that it had improperly harvested personal data from as many as 87 million Facebook accounts and used the material in Donald Trump’s presidential election campaign. Cambridge Analytica has since been dissolved.

 

Facebook announced in April that it was winding down access to the device-integrated APIs because fewer people rely on them today. To date, Facebook has ended 22 such partnerships with technology companies.

 

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg appeared before Congress in April to answer questions about data the company provided to third parties about their users. Late last month, he testified before European Union lawmakers, where he apologized for the way the social network has been used to produce fake news, interfere in elections and sweep up people’s personal data.

 

Shares slipped less than 1 percent at the opening bell Monday.

 
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