High gas prices and poor fuel economy led to the decline of sport utility vehicle sales in the United States in the mid-2000s, a time when customers preferred smaller, more affordable cars, some with new electric motor technology. But now, SUV’s have made a comeback, as VOA’s Kane Farabaugh reports on the floor of the Nation’s Largest Auto Show in Chicago.
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In the U.S. and around the world, many poor people don’t have access to smartphones. But a Silicon Valley company is offering phones to customers in the U.S. and Mexico who pay in installments. If they don’t pay, the phone is turned off remotely. VOA’s Michelle Quinn reports.
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Ride-hailing giant Uber’s full-year net loss widened to $4.5 billion in 2017 as the company endured a tumultuous year that included multiple scandals, a lawsuit alleging the theft of trade secrets and the replacement of its CEO.
The results also showed that Uber cut its fourth-quarter net loss by 25 percent from the third quarter as new CEO Dara Khosrowshahi moves to make the company profitable ahead of a planned initial public stock offering sometime next year.
The full-year loss grew from $2.8 billion in 2016, a year with results skewed by a gain from the sale of Uber’s unprofitable business in China. Uber also said its U.S. ride-hailing market share fell from 82 percent at the start of last year to 70 percent in the fourth quarter. Uber said the share has now stabilized.
Gross revenue for the year rose 85 percent over 2016, to $37 billion.
For the fourth quarter, Uber’s net loss was $1.1 billion, down from $1.46 billion it lost in the third quarter. Bookings from fares rose 14 percent to just over $11 billion for the quarter.
While the losses are significant, the results still are positive for Uber with revenue rising and losses falling in three of four quarters in 2017, said Rohit Kulkarni, managing director of SharesPost, a research group focused on privately held companies.
The numbers show that Uber under Khosrowshahi is on a path toward profitability and a sustainable economic model, Kulkarni said. “If you draw that out further, a year from now, this could be a significant IPO waiting to happen,” he said.
Uber considers adjusted earnings before taxes as a better indicator of its financial performance rather than net earnings based on Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, which include losses for accounting purposes. On an adjusted basis, excluding stock-based compensation, legal costs, taxes and depreciation, the company lost $2.2 billion for the full year. The fourth-quarter adjusted loss was $475 million, down from $606 million to in the third quarter.
San Francisco-based Uber Technologies Inc.’s results are difficult to report because only pieces are released. Khosrowshahi detailed them on a conference call with investors Tuesday, and the company made some results public by giving them to a website called The Information.
A person briefed on the results provided some numbers and confirmed the accuracy of The Information’s story to The Associated Press on Wednesday. The person didn’t want to be identified because Uber remains a private company.
Last year was a particularly bad one for Uber with its reputation tarnished by the company’s acknowledgement of rampant sexual harassment within its ranks, a yearlong cover-up of a major computer break-in, and the use of duplicitous software to thwart government regulators.
CEO Travis Kalanick was ousted in June and replaced by Khosrowshahi in August.
Earlier this month Uber ended the autonomous vehicle trade secrets lawsuit filed by Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo for a payment of Uber stock valued by Waymo at $245 million.
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Even though the U.S. Postal Service delivers about 46 percent of the world’s total mail, competition is getting tougher every day. The post office is turning to technology to stay current. VOA’s Elizabeth Lee shows how the USPS is using virtual and augmented realities, along with email, to attract business.
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Leaders of U.S. national security and law enforcement agencies said Tuesday the U.S. private sector has been helpful in efforts to keep the country safe.
While the leaders did not name companies, industry sectors or what specific help has been provided, they did discuss the challenges of monitoring social media.
The comments may reflect a shift in what law enforcement has seen as the technology industry’s adversarial approach when it comes to fighting crimes and addressing national security issues.
The most notable example of this tension was support by tech industry groups for Apple’s battle with law enforcement over breaking the encryption of an iPhone used by the man who killed 14 people in the 2015 terrorist attack in San Bernardino, California.
‘Forward-leaning engagement’
At a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing Tuesday, Dan Coats, director of National Intelligence, said the U.S. government has received more support from those in the private sector “who are beginning to recognize ever more the issues that are faced with the material that comes through their processes.”
Christopher Wray, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, referred to the help from the private sector as a “more forward-leaning engagement.”
“So, it’s teamwork within the intelligence community and then partnership with the private sector, which is, I think, the other big change I’ve noticed — is a lot more forward-leaning engagement with the private sector in terms of trying to share information and raise awareness on their end,” said Wray, also speaking at the hearing.
“Because at the end of the day, we can’t fully police social media, so we have to work with them so that they can police themselves a little bit better as well,” Wray added.
Gates: Be careful of arrogance
Separately, Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, said in an interview that tech firms need to be careful of being too arrogant when working in realms outside their businesses or they’ll face the kind of government intervention his firm experienced in its antitrust dispute.
“The tech companies have to be careful that they’re not trying to think their view is more important than the government’s view, or than the government being able to function in some key areas,” said Gates in an interview with Axios.
Gates cited Apple’s iPhone battle with the government, criticizing “their view that even a clear mass-murdering criminal’s communication should never be available to the government.”
“There’s no question of ability,” he said about unlocking the iPhone. “It’s the question of willingness.”
He also cited companies’ “enthusiasm about making financial transactions anonymous and invisible.”
Microsoft’s consent decree with the U.S. Justice Department came to an end in 2011, a result of the government’s settlement with the software giant in its antitrust case.
Remarks on Trump administration
On Tuesday, Gates and his wife, Melinda, issued their foundation’s annual letter.
In terms of the Trump administration, Gates wrote that while “we disagree with this administration more than the others we’ve met with, we believe it’s still important to work together whenever possible. We keep talking to them because if the U.S. cuts back on its investments abroad, people in other countries will die, and Americans will be worse off.”
Melinda Gates wrote that the president is a role model of “American values in the world.” She continued, “I wish our president would treat people, and especially women, with more respect when he speaks and tweets.”
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A new service that sends virtual images of the day’s mail to inboxes, before snail mail arrives in actual mailboxes, is now a reality in the United States.
“Informed Delivery” is the latest way the United States Postal Service (USPS) is trying to stay competitive.
“Informed Delivery is a way for you to receive an email every single day of all the digital images of all your mail,” explained David Rupert, media relations specialist at USPS. Rupert said his digital images arrive around 9 a.m. each day.
Though the USPS delivers about 46 percent of the world’s total mail, it is battling email, text messages, online advertising, television and other delivery services for consumers’ attention and business.
“In a digital world, more and more people are having their bills delivered online, paying them on line. And that’s starting to cut into the overall letter volume, as well as the handwritten letter and the notes that we used to send. The reality is, we’re not doing that anymore. That’s not just a U.S. trend, that’s a worldwide trend,” Rupert said.
WATCH: USPS Enters Digital, Virtual, Augmented Worlds to Attract Customers
Battling that trend also means using virtual and augmented technology in advertising, often called “junk” mail.
“What you can do is to take your cellphone, and you can take a mail piece, and it will interact with that mail piece,” Rupert described.
If there is a special digital code on an ad, consumers can scan it with their mobile device and an animated, augmented reality ad will appear. An advertiser can also send a cardboard virtual reality headset along with a code for mobile phone users to scan. What shows up is a VR ad that can be inserted into the headset for a 360-degree experience.
Virtual and augmented reality advertising are getting mixed results from consumers.
“Not all junk mail [pieces] are junk mail. You can find some good [things] within the junk mail. It’s a good idea. We’ll see how it works out,” said consumer Victor Teah.
“For some, that might be fun. But for me, I wouldn’t have any use for it,” consumer Jocelyn Coatney said.
Informed Delivery has broader appeal.
“I think I would like that a lot, especially with checks and things coming in, and things coming in from grandkids. That would be a nice service,” said Coatney.
Rupert added: “We don’t want to be a world leader on technology, but we certainly want to make our services relevant to you — in your home and in your neighborhood.”
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Bill and Melinda Gates say they’re concerned about some of President Donald Trump’s policies and statements. Here are some excerpts from their recent interview with The Associated Press:
Giving pledge
Bill Gates says he’s met with Trump twice since he took office. The Microsoft co-founder hasn’t asked Trump to sign “The Giving Pledge,” a movement Gates founded that asks billionaires to commit to donating most of their wealth to charity.
“We’ve never had a direct conversation about that,” Gates said. “It’s always a voluntary thing, and as I do dinners, I meet with a lot of people but never discussed it with him.”
Women, minorities
Melinda Gates, who left her job at Microsoft to raise their three children before turning to the foundation full-time, has lately embraced her role as a public figure more boldly. She called out Trump’s behavior, including what she described as his habit of using Twitter to attack women and minority groups.
“Those kinds of comments just don’t belong in the public discourse,” Melinda Gates said.
Tax overhaul
Bill Gates is among the billionaires who have advocated for more taxes on the wealthy. He says Trump’s tax overhaul mostly benefits corporations.
“We’ve in a broad sense said taxes should be more progressive, and this was not a move toward being more progressive.”
Feminism
Melinda Gates says some of Trump’s comments about women have troubled her, but his rejection of the “feminist” label has not.
“Some men have trouble — and some women, quite frankly — have trouble embracing that term and what it means, so that honestly doesn’t bother me. It’s more the specific comments he’s made over and over again about specific people or minorities or women that just do not reflect the values I see across the United States.”
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In the dense tropical rainforests of the Minkebe national park in northern Gabon, conservationists are hoping a new weapon can help them win a war against elephant poaching. VOA’s Mariama Diallo reports.
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You’ve seen apps and toys that promise to teach your child to code. Now enter the robots.
At the CES electronics show in January, coding robots came out in force. One convention hall area was packed with everything from chip-embedded, alphabet-like coding blocks to turtle-like tanks that draw on command.
Of course, no one can really say how well these coding bots teach kids, or even whether learning to code is the essential life skill that so many in the tech industry claim. After all, by the time today’s elementary-school kids are entering the workforce, computers may well be programming themselves.
But experts like Jeff Gray, a computer science professor at the University of Alabama and an adviser to the nonprofit coding education group Code.org, say kids can derive other benefits from coding robots and similar toys. They can, for instance, learn “persistence and grit” when the toys inevitably do something unintended, he says.
So if you’re in the market for a coding robot that teaches and maybe even entertains, here’s a look at four that were on display at CES. But beware: None of them are cheap.
CUBETTO
London-based Primo Toys, the makers of this mobile wooden block, believes kids can learn coding concepts at age 3 before they can even read. And they don’t even need a screen.
The “Cubetto” block on wheels responds to where chip-embedded pieces are put on a wooden board. Different colors represent different commands – for example, to “go straight” or “turn left.”
Kids can bunch together a number of commands into what’s called a function and can also make Cubetto repeat actions in a loop.
Pros: Good for parents who want to avoid more screens
Cons: Doesn’t offer an immediate path to real coding
Price: $226
ROOT
Root Robotics’ flattish, hexagonal droid has downward-facing scanners, magnetic wheels, touch-reactive panels, lights, motion sensors, and a pen-grabbing hole in the center of its body.
Controlling it does require a screen.
The Cambridge, Massachusetts, company also claims kids don’t need to be able to read and can start playing with Root at age 4.
Root draws, moves, sees and reacts to touch and various other commands. Kids can use Root to start drawing lines and progress to creating snowflake-like mathematical patterns called fractals.
Co-founder Zee Dubrovsky says his daughter began coding with Root at age 4, and progressed up to the point where her robot drew her name on a whiteboard in school.
Pros: Sturdy frame; kids can progress from graphical block-based codes to text coding
Cons: Requires lots of clean, flat surface area, preferably whiteboards. Root has three difficulty levels, some of which wade into deeper math, so parental time commitment could be considerable. The Kickstarter-launched company has taken a while to ship items, so delivery could be delayed
Price: $199
Shipping: June 2018 (although the company has been working to fulfill Kickstarter orders since May 2017)
COZMO
This bundle of personality on wheels debuted in 2016. It now comes with an app called Code Lab, which allows kids to drag and drop blocks of code that control its movements and animations. They can even access facial and object recognition functions enabled by Cozmo’s front-facing camera.
Cozmo, recommended for kids aged 8 and up, looks like a little tractor and can pick up interactive cubes, which are included.
Part of its appeal are the twitches and tweets that make it seem like an energetic pet, according to Boris Sofman, the CEO and co-founder of Cozmo maker Anki, based in San Francisco.
Pros: Its expressive eyes and movements make it seem like a little R2-D2
Cons: Because it’s so full of personality, there might be a disconnect between programming it to do things and just letting it be itself
Price: $180
EVO
This dome-shaped, wheeled dynamo about the height of a few fingers looks for direction right out of the box – and comes equipped to follow around any finger placed before its frontal camera.
“We want kids to immediately engage with a robot,” says Nader Hamda, founder and CEO of Evo’s maker, Redondo Beach, California-based Ozobot.
The robot makes sounds, flashes lights, moves and can sense and react to its environment.
An app helps kids – aged 8 and up – program Evo to do what they want. The bot’s downward facing scanners also let it follow lines drawn on regular paper, some of which embody coding instructions. For instance, blue-black-blue gets it to speed up; green-red-green-red tells it to spin.
Pros: It’s cheaper than other coding bots
Cons: It doesn’t do quite as much as other bots
Price: $89
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Plastic foam, plywood and some other plastic parts could make the difference between life and death.
These are the materials that make up a delivery drone created by DASH Systems. The California company also describes its lightweight aircraft as an unmanned aerial vehicle or glider.
It can be used to deliver up to 20 kilograms of food, medicine or other essential supplies to people in need in areas that traditional shipping and delivery companies cannot reach. And because it’s made of low-cost materials, it’s disposable, so there is no worry about getting it back.
“Many times, we found that during times of crisis or humanitarian need, it’s very, very difficult to get supplies into remote regions,” said Joel Ifill, chief executive officer and co-founder of DASH Systems.
“Couple that with reduced or destroyed infrastructure. Those are the areas and circumstances under which this system really shines,” said DASH Systems co-founder Joe Caravella.
The system’s aim is targeted, precision delivery. There is a built-in Global Positioning System device that provides enough accuracy to land the vehicle in the courtyard of a hospital.
“You can always fly an airplane overhead, so we help bridge that gap. Using our technology, you can throw a package out of an airplane and have it land right at the area of use,” Ifill said.
The DASH Systems delivery drone will go to places too dangerous or remote for other global shipping services such as FedEx or DHL.
“So, for instance, a delivery in South Sudan or Puerto Rico — oftentimes every traditional carrier will say no. Organizations are willing to pay the fair market value for those trips. They just do not have the solution,” said Ifill.
Ifill thought of this solution while working on smart bombs at a previous job.
“Actually, I felt bad about essentially making technology that was designed to harm and kill people. So, I wondered what else could I do with the technology of a smart bomb, something that can launch from an airplane and land within inches. And I thought, ‘Why can’t I use that same technology to deliver packages and goods?’ ”
DASH Systems says its unmanned glider is unlike other methods of delivery to remote places that have been developed thus far.
“There are a variety of parachute-type systems where you can drop things out of airplanes. We’re hoping to improve the whole operation, both with deploying it at the right time and then guiding the package to where it needs to be, to be more accurate than anything currently on the market,” said Caravella.
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It has been called a delivery drone, an unmanned aerial vehicle or even a glider. It can be used to deliver essential supplies to areas traditional shipping and delivery companies cannot go to. Elizabeth Lee has details from Los Angeles.
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Billionaire CEO Elon Musk is off to a big 2018. He’s chief executive of both SpaceX and Tesla. His space-travel company launched off the planet and into orbit a roadster from his electric car company. It was the latest milestone for an executive who looks to revolutionize space travel and technology. Arash Arabasadi reports.
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Astronomers say a new instrument, now being tested on one of the telescopes in Chile’s Atacama desert, will greatly enhance their ability to search for earthlike planets. VOA’s George Putic has more.
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Ride-sharing giant Uber and the self-driving car company Waymo have agreed to settle their legal battle over allegedly stolen trade secrets.
The surprise agreement Friday came as lawyers for the companies prepared to wrap up the first week of the case’s jury trial in San Francisco, California.
As part of the agreement, Uber will pay $245 million worth of its own shares to Waymo.
Waymo sued Uber last year, saying that one of its former engineers who later became the head of Uber’s self-driving car project took with him thousands of confidential documents.
After the lawsuit was filed, Uber fired the employee and fell behind on its plans to roll out self-driving cars in its ride-sharing service.
Waymo, a company hatched from Google, says the settlement also includes an agreement that Uber cannot use Waymo confidential information in its technology.
“We have reached an agreement with Uber that we believe will protect Waymo’s intellectual property now and into the future. We are committed to working with Uber to make sure that each company develops its own technology,” Waymo said in a statement.
Uber’s new CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, expressed regret for the company’s actions in a statement Friday.
“While we do not believe that any trade secrets made their way from Waymo to Uber, nor do we believe that Uber has used any of Waymo’s proprietary information in its self-driving technology, we are taking steps with Waymo to ensure our Lidar and software represents just our good work,” Khosrowshahi said in a statement.
Lidar is a laser-based system that helps self-driving cars to navigate their surroundings.
The trial so far included testimony from former Uber chief executive Travis Kalanick, who denied any attempt to steal trade secrets from Waymo.
Uber has faced a series of recent struggles, including public accusations of sexual harassment at the company and accusations it used software to thwart government regulators.
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Engineers at Russia’s top nuclear research facility have been detained after they attempted to mine bitcoin on its computers, Russian news agencies reported Friday.
Several employees at the Russian Federal Nuclear Center in the city of Sarov have been detained after making “an attempt to use the work computing facilities for personal ends, including for so-called mining,” a spokeswoman for the center, Tatiana Zalesskaya, told Interfax news agency.
“Their activities were stopped in time,” she added.
“The bungling miners have been detained by the competent authorities. As far as I know, a criminal case has been opened regarding them,” she added, without saying how many were detained.
The center is overseen by Rosatom, the Russian nuclear agency, and works on developing nuclear weapons.
Such attempts “at our enterprises will be harshly put down, this activity technically has no future and is punishable as a crime,” the center’s spokeswoman said.
In 2011, the center switched on a new supercomputer with a capacity of 1 petaflop, which at the time made it the twelfth most powerful in the world, Russian television reported.
During the Cold War, Sarov was a top-secret city in the Nizhny Novgorod region, about 500 kilometers (300 miles) east of Moscow. Its Soviet-era name was Arzamas-16.
The center was the birthplace of the Soviet Union’s first nuclear weapons.
Sarov is still a closed city whose inhabitants are subject to travel restrictions.
Vladimir Putin visited the nuclear research center in 2012 while campaigning for president.
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YouTube has temporarily suspended all ads from video star Logan Paul’s channels after what it calls a pattern of behavior unsuitable for advertisers.
In an emailed statement, YouTube said that the videos on Paul’s channels are also “broadly damaging to the broader creator community.”
Last month, Paul posted video of himself in a forest near Mount Fuji in Japan near what appeared to be a body hanging from a tree. YouTube suspended the 22-year-old at the time for violating its policies. But Paul returned, and has since posted a video of himself using a Taser on dead rats. That video is still up, with an age restriction.
An email sent to Paul’s merchandise company for comment was not immediately answered Friday. YouTube is owned by Google parent company Alphabet.
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Twitter says it had first quarterly profit in history and returned to revenue growth in the fourth quarter.
Its stock increased in pre-market trading Thursday.
Though the results beat Wall Street’s cautious expectations, they don’t solve the company’s broader problems.
It’s been dealing with abuse, fake accounts and attempts by Russian agents to spread misinformation. The troubles have been compounded by stagnant user growth.
And with a prominent executive leaving shortly, and the CEO splitting its time with another company, Twitter’s now facing questions about just who is minding the store.
Twitter has said it’s dealing with the problems. The company has introduced a slew of new measures to weed out abusive accounts. Still, critics say the company is playing whack-a-mole with its problems, with often inadequate responses.
The International Rescue Committee has announced Project Core — a $1 million job training program for refugees in Germany.
The IRC is collaborating with computer giant Intel to to equip at least 1,000 migrants with “critical skills in information and communications technology and other in-demand sectors of the German economy.”
“It is exciting and encouraging to see that opportunities are being extended to refugees living in the country,” IRC President David Miliband said.
He thanked Intel for its cooperation and commitment.
“The work we will do together epitomizes the power of partnerships to develop the right solutions and create meaningful impact,” Miliband said.
The IRC says more than 1.5 million refugees have arrived in Germany since 2015, seeking asylum from war, terrorism, poverty, and little hope their lives will get better if they stayed home.
The IRC says it has worked with the German government and civil organizations, sharing its expertise in educating child refugees and others in ways they can contribute to their new communities.
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The International Rescue Committee on Wednesday announced the creation of Project Core, a $1 million job training program for refugees in Germany.
The IRC said it would collaborate with computer giant Intel to equip at least 1,000 migrants with “critical skills in information and communications technology and other in-demand sectors of the German economy.”
“It is exciting and encouraging to see that opportunities are being extended to refugees living in the country,” IRC President David Miliband said.
He thanked Intel for its cooperation and commitment. “The work we will do together epitomizes the power of partnerships to develop the right solutions and create meaningful impact,” he said.
The IRC said more than 1.5 million refugees had arrived in Germany since 2015, seeking asylum from war, terrorism and poverty, and having little hope their lives would have improved if they stayed home.
The IRC said it has worked with the German government and civil organizations, sharing its expertise in educating refugee children and others in ways they can contribute to their new communities.
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A social media monitoring tool used by the Boston Police Department to identify potential threats swept up the posts of people using the hashtag #MuslimLivesMatter and a lawmaker’s Facebook update about racial inequality, according to a report released Wednesday by the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts.
The ACLU says in a report based on documents obtained through a public records request that the police department’s use of Geofeedia to mine the internet appears to have had little benefit to public safety while unfairly focusing on groups such as Muslims. Boston police say the ACLU’s conclusions are misguided and that the program helped police successfully monitor events that could lead to demonstrations or crowds and threaten security.
“Our main focus in all of this is public safety, not targeting speech, not targeting people’s political affiliations,” said Lt. Det. Michael McCarthy. “And quite frankly, to have the ACLU to even make that insinuation is not only insulting, but it’s completely misinformed,” he said.
Boston police used Geofeedia for two weeks in 2014 and again for more than a year starting in January 2015, according to the documents. The department’s use of the program became public in late 2016 after it solicited bids to spend $1.4 million for another social media monitoring software.
Police later dropped those plans amid backlash from groups like the ACLU.
The now-defunct location-based program allowed officials to set up email alerts for when certain keywords were used on social media. The alerts were vetted by analysts in the department’s Boston Regional Intelligence Center and the data was discarded once it was determined it wasn’t a potential public safety issue, McCarthy said.
Geofeedia was used by police departments across the country until social media companies cut off access to its data after concerns raised by the ACLU of northern California in 2016. The software was also widely used by companies interested in what their customers were saying about them online, and news organizations for reporting.
The documents show Boston police searched for keywords they identified as “Islamic extremist terminology,” including words like “ISIS” and “caliphate” as well as Arabic words such as “ummah,” which means “community.”
In the wake of the killing of three Muslim students near the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, police also tracked the hashtag #muslimlivesmatter, according to the report. After unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, over the fatal shooting of a black man by a while police officer, police searched for the terms like “protest” and “Ferguson.”
The ACLU and the Boston-based Muslim Justice League say the tracking of common Arabic words, like “ummah,” is troubling. The ACLU said posts captured by the program that mentioned “ISIS” were either jokes or references to issues in the news.
“The Boston Police Department should never conduct surveillance targeting political speech or religious expression, but that’s exactly what their own records show they did when they used this social media monitoring software,” said Kade Crockford, co-author of the report and director of the group’s Technology for Liberty Program.
McCarthy said police didn’t target individuals, but chose keywords in response to events happening around the country or based on information from federal law enforcement. In the wake of the Chapel Hill shooting, for example, there were concerns about possible demonstrations or backlash against the Muslim community, he said.
“If we weren’t diligent in our efforts to provide safe events for those participating and attending … then we wouldn’t be doing our job as police officers,” he said.
Among those whose social media use prompted an alert was then-City Councilor Tito Jackson, for a 2014 Facebook post about homelessness and poverty that mentioned Ferguson, according to the report. City council was unaware at the time that police were using the Geofeedia program, Jackson said.
“I spoke out about their 2016 plan to spend $1.4 million on a social media surveillance system in part because I worried that the tool would be used to track people not because they did something wrong but because of their political views,” he said.
“Little did I know that that had already happened,” he said.
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Russian cyberspies pursuing the secrets of military drones and other sensitive U.S. defense technology tricked key contract workers into exposing their email to theft, an Associated Press investigation has found.
What ultimately may have been stolen is uncertain, but the hackers clearly exploited a national vulnerability in cybersecurity: poorly protected email and barely any direct notification to victims.
The hackers known as Fancy Bear, who also intruded in the U.S. election, went after at least 87 people working on militarized drones, missiles, rockets, stealth fighter jets, cloud-computing platforms or other sensitive activities, the AP found.
Employees at both small companies and defense giants like Lockheed Martin Corp., Raytheon Co., Boeing Co., Airbus Group and General Atomics were targeted by the hackers. A handful of people in Fancy Bear’s sights also worked for trade groups, contractors in U.S.-allied countries or on corporate boards.
“The programs that they appear to target and the people who work on those programs are some of the most forward-leaning, advanced technologies,” said Charles Sowell, a former senior adviser to the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence, who reviewed the list of names for the AP. “And if those programs are compromised in any way, then our competitive advantage and our defense is compromised.”
“That’s what’s really scary,” added Sowell, who was one of the hacking targets.
The AP identified the defense and security targets from about 19,000 lines of email phishing data created by hackers and collected by the U.S.-based cybersecurity company Secureworks, which calls the hackers Iron Twilight. The data is partial and extends only from March 2015 to May 2016. Of 87 scientists, engineers, managers and others, 31 agreed to be interviewed by the AP.
Most of the targets’ work was classified. Yet as many as 40 percent of them clicked on the hackers’ phishing links, the AP analysis indicates. That was the first step in potentially opening their personal email accounts or computer files to data theft by the digital spies.
One click and ‘I had been had’
James Poss, who ran a partnership doing drone research for the Federal Aviation Administration, was about to catch a taxi to the 2015 Paris Air Show when what appeared to be a Google security alert materialized in his inbox. Distracted, he moved his cursor to the blue prompt on his laptop.
“I clicked on it and instantly knew that I had been had,” the retired Air Force major general said. Poss says he realized his mistake before entering his credentials, which would have exposed his email to the hackers.
Hackers predominantly targeted personal Gmail, with a few corporate accounts mixed in.
Personal accounts can convey snippets of classified information, whether through carelessness or expediency. They also can lead to other more valuable targets or carry embarrassing personal details that can be used for blackmail or to recruit spies.
Drone consultant Keven Gambold, a hacking target himself, said the espionage could help Russia catch up with the Americans. “This would allow them to leapfrog years of hard-won experience,” he said.
He said his own company is so worried about hacking that “we’ve almost gone back in time to use stand-alone systems if we’re processing client proprietary data — we’re FedEx’ing hard drives around.”
Campaigns, drones
The AP has previously reported on Fancy Bear’s attempts to break into the Gmail accounts of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, American national security officials, journalists, and Kremlin critics and adversaries around the world. U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded the hackers worked for the Kremlin and stole U.S. campaign emails to tilt the 2016 election toward Donald Trump.
But the hackers clearly had broader aims. Fifteen of the targets identified by the AP worked on drones — the single-largest group of weapons specialists.
Countries like Russia are racing to make better drones as the remote-control aircraft have moved to the forefront of modern warfare. They can fire missiles, hunt down adversaries, or secretly monitor targets for days — all while keeping human pilots safely behind computer controls.
The U.S. Air Force now needs more pilots for drones than for any other single type of aircraft, a training official said last year. Drones will lead growth in the aerospace industry over the next decade, with military uses driving the boom, the Teal Group predicted in November. Production was expected to balloon from $4.2 billion to $10.3 billion.
So far, though, Russia has nothing that compares with the new-generation U.S. Reaper, which has been called “the most feared” U.S. drone. General Atomics’ 5,000-pound mega-drone can fly more than 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) to deliver Hellfire missiles and smart bombs. It has seen action in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.
The hackers went after General Atomics, targeting a drone sensor specialist. He did not respond to requests for comment.
They also made a run at the Gmail account of Michael Buet, an electronics engineer who has worked on ultra-durable batteries and high-altitude drones for SunCondor, a small South Carolina company owned by Star Technology and Research. Such machines could be a useful surveillance tool for a country like Russia, with its global military engagements and vast domestic border frontier.
“This bird is quite unique,” said Buet. “It can fly at 62,000 feet [18,600 meters] and doesn’t land for five years.”
Space plane secrets
The Russians also appeared eager to catch up in space, once an arena for Cold War competition in the race for the moon. They seemed to be carefully eyeing the X-37B, an American unmanned space plane that looks like a miniature shuttle but is shrouded in secrecy.
In a reference to an X-37B flight in May 2015, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin invoked the vehicle as evidence that his country’s space program was faltering. “The United States is pushing ahead,” he warned Russian lawmakers.
Less than two weeks later, Fancy Bear tried to penetrate the Gmail account of a senior engineer on the X-37B project at Boeing.
Fancy Bear has also tried to hack into the emails of several members of the Arlington, Virginia-based Aerospace Industries Association, including its president, former Army Secretary Eric Fanning. It went after Lt. Gen. Mark Shackelford, who has served in the military and aerospace industry as a corporate board member. He has been involved with major weapons and space programs like SpaceX, the reusable orbital rocket company founded by billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk.
Cloud-based services
Along another path, the hackers chased people who work on cloud-based services, the off-site computer networks that enable collaborators to easily access and juggle data.
In 2013, the CIA signed a $600 million deal with web giant Amazon to build a system to share secure data across the U.S. intelligence community. Other spy services followed, and the government cleared them last year to move classified data to the cloud at the “secret” level — a step below the nation’s most sensitive information.
Fancy Bear’s target list suggests the Russians have noticed these developments.
The hackers tried to get into the Gmail accounts of a cloud compliance officer at Palantir and a manager of cloud platform operations at SAP National Security Services, two companies that do extensive government work. Another target was at Mellanox Federal Systems, which helps the government with high-speed storage networks, data analysis and cloud computing. Its clients include the FBI and other intelligence agencies.
FBI ‘triaging’
Yet of the 31 targets reached by the AP, just one got any warning from U.S. officials.
“They said we have a Fancy Bear issue we need to talk about,” said security consultant Bill Davidson. He said an Air Force cybersecurity investigator inspected his computer shortly after the 2015 phishing attempt but found no sign that it succeeded. He believes he was contacted because his name was recognized at the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, where he used to work.
The FBI declined to give on-the-record details of its response to this Russian operation. Agency spokeswoman Jillian Stickels said the FBI does sometimes notify individual targets. “The FBI takes … all potential threats to public and private sector systems very seriously,” she said in an email.
However, three people familiar with the matter — including a current and a former government official — previously told the AP that the FBI knew the details of Fancy Bear’s phishing campaign for more than a year.
Pressed about notification in that case, a senior FBI official, who was not authorized to publicly discuss the hacking operation because of its sensitivity, said the bureau was overwhelmed by the sheer number of attempted hacks. “It’s a matter of triaging to the best of our ability the volume of the targets who are out there,” he said.
A Pentagon spokeswoman, Heather Babb, said she could release no details about any Defense Department response, citing “operational security reasons.” But she said the department recognizes the evolving cyber threat and continues to update training and technology. “This extends to all of our workforce — military, civilian and contractor,” she added.
Safeguarding systems
The Defense Security Service, which protects classified U.S. technology and trains industry in computer security, focuses on safeguarding corporate computer networks. “We simply have no insight into or oversight of anyone’s personal email accounts or how they are protected or notified when something is amiss,” spokeswoman Cynthia McGovern said in an email.
Contacted by the AP, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, Airbus and General Atomics did not respond to requests for comment.
Jerome Pearson, a space system and drone developer, acknowledged that he has not focused on security training at his company, Star Technology, where Buet has consulted. “No, we really haven’t done that,” he said with a nervous laugh. “We may be a little bit remiss in that area.” He said they may do training for future contracts.
Cybersecurity experts say it’s no surprise that spies go after less secure personal email as an opening to more protected systems. “For a good operator, it’s like hammering a wedge,” said Richard Ford, chief scientist at the Forcepoint cybersecurity company. “Private email is the soft target.”
Some officials were particularly upset by the failure to notify employees of cloud computing companies that handle data for intelligence agencies. The cloud is a “huge target for foreign intelligence services in general —they love to get into that shared environment,” said Sowell, the former adviser to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
“At some point, wouldn’t someone who’s responsible for the defense contractor base be aware of this and try to reach out?” he asked.
Even successful hacks might not translate into new weapons for Russia, where the economy is weighed down by corruption and international sanctions.
However, experts say Russia, while still behind the U.S., has been making more advanced drones in recent years. Russian officials have recently been bragging as their increasingly sophisticated drones are spotted over war zones in Ukraine and Syria.
At a 2017 air show outside Moscow, plans were announced for a new generation of Russian combat drones.
Rogozin, the deputy prime minister, boasted that the technological gap between Russia and the United States “has been sharply reduced and will be completely eliminated in the near future.”
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Just days after the announcement that the 4,400 year old tomb of a high-ranking priestess had been found in Egypt, comes word of an even older discovery in the country, from about 100 million years ago. Faith Lapidus tells us about the new species of dinosaur found in the western Egyptian desert.
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A second patient has been treated in a historic gene editing study in California, and no major side effects or safety issues have emerged from the first man’s treatment nearly three months ago, doctors said Tuesday.
Gene editing is a more precise way to do gene therapy, and it aims to permanently change someone’s DNA to try to cure a disease.
In November, Brian Madeux, 44, became the first person to have gene editing inside the body for a metabolic disease called Hunter syndrome that’s caused by a bad gene. Through an IV, he received many copies of a corrective gene and a genetic tool to put it in a precise spot in his DNA.
“He’s doing well and we were approved to go ahead with the second patient, who also is doing well,” said Dr. Paul Harmatz of UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland, who treated both men for the same disease.
At a medical conference in San Diego, Harmatz reported safety results for the first six weeks after Madeux’s treatment. Sangamo Therapeutics, the company that makes the gene editing tool called zinc finger nucleases, said more safety information and initial results on effectiveness should come by midyear.
Problems faded
Madeux had dizziness, cold sweats and weakness four days after the treatment but they went away on their own in a day, Harmatz said. Madeux also had a severe cough and a partially collapsed lung, but these were deemed unrelated to the gene therapy because he had had similar problems previously.
It was important that there were no signs of harm to his liver.
“That’s the big worry,” because changes in the liver might mean the immune system was fighting the treatment and possibly undermining its effectiveness, Harmatz said.
The liver results were welcome news after some other recent reports caused alarm. A prominent gene therapy scientist, Dr. James Wilson of the University of Pennsylvania, published two studies reporting liver and other serious problems in monkeys and piglets that were given experimental gene therapies. Several had to be euthanized.
The animal studies tested very high intravenous doses of a therapy that used a certain virus to carry the gene into cells. Relatives of this virus are widely used in human gene therapies, but Wilson said he did not believe that the results in animals had any bearing on use of lower doses, different types of the virus, or therapies given in different ways such as a shot.
Neuromuscular disorders
The results might mean it will be harder to develop gene therapies for some neuromuscular disorders — higher doses in the animal studies were thought necessary to get the therapy into the brain and throughout muscles.
The Sangamo study that Madeux is in used much lower doses of a different type of the virus.
Wilson said it was important to the field that any safety concerns be published quickly. He helped lead a very early gene therapy experiment that killed a teen in 1999, putting some other studies on hold for years.
An editorial in the journal HumanGeneTherapy, which published one of Wilson’s animal studies, said gene therapy experiments should not stop, because that might deprive patients of potentially lifesaving treatments.
In the last year, the first gene therapies were approved in the United States to treat cancer and an inherited form of blindness.
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From mowing the grass and cleaning windows to making deliveries at hotels and hospitals, even child and elder care, robots of all shapes and sizes are doing things humans have been doing for years.
These types of machines can also do things humans cannot.
“It can work all day, 24 hours a day, and it doesn’t get emotional. It’s always welcoming with a smile,” said Simon Wang of the Beijing Canny Unisboro Technology Co. Ltd.
He said the machines’ ability to work around the clock makes them cheaper than hiring a human employee.
“It will be the cheapest member of your team for sure,” said Steve Cousins of Savioke, a company that makes hotel and hospital delivery robots for rent around the world.
A Chinese-made, Mandarin-speaking robot named UU is already working in the service industry. He dances, tells jokes and provides information.
“For example, it can be a shopping center, hotel, restaurant, some convention centers, galleries as a guide…,” Wang said, adding the UU robot is already working in China “in a hospital setting, in a clinic, to diagnose problems and to answer some medical questions.”
Adapting technology
Adapting technology to perform humans’ work is nothing new.
“Go back to ploughs or go back to tractors, those are the beginning of adding technology to work to make workers more productive. A spreadsheet is not smarter than you, but it is faster at calculations. It’s just different, and so when you put a spreadsheet in an accountant’s hands, you make that accountant much, much more productive. The same thing with robots,” Cousins said.
Robots are getting smarter. A demonstration at the Consumer Electronics Show last month showed a robot playing the English word game Scrabble against a human opponent, and winning.
“Its (the robot’s) main point is not to replace people’s jobs. It is to help people do really complicated work,” said Hu Ji Ping of the Industrial Technology Research Institute.
In addition to doing complicated work, robots are also doing dull, dirty and dangerous work.
A robot called RoboMantis can do unsavory work, so a person does not have to be in those situations.
“Confined spaces, refinery tank cleaning, things like that where you can really take advantage of a robot that can go in and work for hours on end without endangering a human in those situations,” said Chris Thayer of California-based Motiv Robotics that makes the RoboMantis.
Robots can also do work that is so repetitive, such as in agriculture, that no one wants to do it, Thayer said.
“…picking, maintenance, a lot of things of that kind, caring for the plants themselves in a certain very specific way that needs to be done, and they aren’t getting those workers in regardless of seasonal, not seasonal, whatever it may be. It’s just a labor shortage,” Thayer said.
“I guess there are people who do just put a plug in a hole one after the other, all day long. Those people have already been replaced by robots, and those were pretty horrible jobs anyway,” said Cousins.
Wang said bosses love robots, but they are not a threat to people, yet.
“Robots will free people up to do more specialized work that can only be learned by a human’s intellect,” Wang said. “I don’t think a robot will completely replace a human’s mind currently or in the next 10 years, I haven’t found this kind of danger.”
The consensus among technologists: Robots are here to assist and not to replace. However, humans may have to continue to learn more specialized skills to stay ahead of what a robot can do.
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