While our fossil fuel-dependent civilization keeps releasing greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, scientists are racing to find a viable method for lowering the emission of the most harmful one — carbon dioxide. It can be captured and stored underground, or it can be turned into a harmless rock. The price is steep, but the cost of not doing something could be higher. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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A U.S. judge ruled on Thursday that Twitter could move forward with a lawsuit that aims to free technology companies to speak more openly about surveillance requests they receive from the U.S. government.
U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland, California, said in a written order that the U.S. government had failed to show the kind of “clear and present danger” that could possibly justify restraints on the right of Twitter to talk about surveillance requests.
“The government’s restrictions on Twitter’s speech are content-based prior restraints subject to the highest level of scrutiny under the First Amendment,” Rogers wrote.
The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees certain rights including freedom of speech.
Twitter filed the lawsuit in 2014 after revelations by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden about the extent of U.S. spying.
The detail that tech companies can provide about U.S. national security requests is limited, so that companies can release the number of requests only within a range, such as 0-499 in a six month period.
Rogers scheduled a hearing in Twitter’s case for next month.
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Microsoft is laying off thousands of employees in a shake-up aimed at selling more subscriptions to software applications that can be used on any internet-connected device.
Most of the people losing their jobs work in sales and are located outside the U.S. The Redmond company confirmed that it began sending the layoff notices Thursday, but declined to provide further specifics, except that thousands of sales jobs would be cut.
“Like all companies, we evaluate our business on a regular basis,” Microsoft said in a statement. “This can result in increased investment in some places and, from time to time, redeployment in others.”
Microsoft Corp. employs about 121,500 people worldwide. Nearly 71,600 of them work in the U.S.
Software subscriptions
The job cuts are part of Microsoft’s shift away from its traditional approach of licensing its Office software and other programs for a one-time fee tied to a single computer. The company is now concentrating on selling recurring subscriptions for software accessible on multiple devices, a rapidly growing trend known as “cloud computing.”
That part of Microsoft’s operations has been playing an increasingly important role, especially among corporate and government customers, since Satya Nadella replaced Steve Ballmer as the company’s CEO in 2014.
Microsoft’s “commercial cloud” segment is on a pace to generate about $15 billion in annual revenue. More than 26 million consumers subscribe to Microsoft’s Office 365 service that includes its Word, Excel and other popular programs. That number has more than doubled in the past two years.
Meanwhile, revenue from licensing of Microsoft’s Windows operating system has been increasing by 5 percent or less in the past three quarters.
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Without adequate power, even the best smartphone or laptop can quickly become useless. It’s a simple concept that’s often taken for granted in industrialized nations. But not in the developing world where basic internet access is a challenge.
“You have a very large population of people who are not on the electrical grid, so you can’t bring them internet access if you can’t also solve issues around energy access,” said Paul Garnett, director of Microsoft’s Affordable Access Initiatives. “Companies who are starting out in the internet access space are ending up in the energy access space, and vice versa.”
Two years ago, Microsoft launched the Affordable Access Initiative (AAI), which recently doled out $75,000 to $100,000 to 10 firms working to bridge the digital divide. Each firm also receives Microsoft’s cloud services and software.
Andy Bogdan Bindea, CEO of California-based Sigora International, knows a thing or two about the challenges of bringing power to developing countries. Sigora’s electrification efforts in Haiti made it one of this year’s grant winners. The company works to build solar-powered, mini electricity grids in the country’s most remote regions.
“It is a very, very difficult place to work in, logistically. It costs about 28 percent extra to bring any kind of equipment into the country,” said Bogdan Bindea, “It takes us 12 hours to get from the capital to our pilot project, which is 100 miles away … nine hours if you drive like a maniac.”
Through the partnership with Microsoft, Bogdan Bindea hopes to expand Sigora’s offerings, building a web portal for instance, so customers can pay for internet access and online content using digital wallets.
“More than anything, a company like ours needs names like Microsoft, needs partners like Microsoft” said Bogdan Bindea.
Access to the internet is as essential a need as food, shelter and clothing these days. More than half of the world’s population, 3.9 billion people, are stranded along the digital divide, according to the International Telecommunication Union.
Picosoft is a startup in Kathmandu and one of this year’s AAI grant winners. The company uses untapped TV frequencies or “white space”, to provide internet access to schools in the remote, mountainous regions of Nepal.
“One of the great things about TV white space frequencies is they are in the broadcast bands, and therefore the signals that are transmitted over those frequencies travel over very long distances,” Garnett said.
SunCulture was another one of this year’s grant winners. The Kenya-based startup offers solar-powered irrigation kits to smallholder farmers across Africa. Working with Microsoft, team members plan to build a digital platform for farmers that will provide data on crops, collected from connected sensors and cameras in the field.
“Internet is a conduit to other services in the markets that we work in,” said Samir Ibrahim, SunCulture CEO and co-founder.
“The value that SunCulture provides and the value of our company isn’t in the things that we sell to farmers, it is in the connected experience and the relationship we build with them,” said Ibrahim. “So internet for us is a conduit to build the relationships with farmers so we can continue to develop solutions for them.”
Microsoft’s AAI grant winners may have clinched the prize, but Garnett says the real gains can’t be counted in dollars and cents.
“The bigger value that the relationship delivers is really the network and the mentorship, helping companies to adapt and evolve their business models,” said Garnett.
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France will stop selling gasoline and diesel cars by 2040.
The move, announced by the country’s ecology minister Nicolas Hulot, is part of a plan to meet emissions targets set forth in the Paris climate accord.
“We are announcing an end to the sale of petrol and diesel cars by 2040,” Hulot said, adding that it would be a “veritable revolution.”
Saying the goal would be “tough” to accomplish, he added that French carmakers such as Peugeot-Citroen and Renault would be able to handle the changes. France is the biggest manufacturer of electric cars sold in Europe.
France is the latest country to focus on electric cars. India has said it wants all cars sold there to be electric by 2030. Norway has said it will stop selling gasoline and diesel cars by 2025, and Germany is aiming to have 1 million electric cars on its roads by 2020.
In 2016, the largest market in the world for electric cars was China, where more than 500,000 were sold.
On Wednesday, Volvo announced it would stop producing cars with conventional engines by 2019.
According to the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association (ACEA), only 3.6 percent of cars sold in Western Europe in 2016 were hybrid or electric.
Hulot said getting conventional cars off the road was important to “public health” as several French cities, including Paris and Lyon have recurring issues with air pollution. Hulot said the move was part of the country’s plan to be carbon neutral by 2050.
To that end, he announced last month that France would no longer give licenses for oil and gas exploration in France and its overseas territories.
“One of the symbolic acts of the plan is that France, which previously had made the promise to divide its greenhouse gas emissions by four by 2050, has decided to become carbon neutral by 2050 following the U.S. decision,” Hulot said.”The carbon neutral objective will force us to make the necessary investments.”
Last month, U.S. President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. would withdraw from the Paris pact saying it would be unfair to American businesses and too expensive for taxpayers.
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A team of Afghan teenage girls who were denied a visa to participate in a robotics contest in Washington say they will not be deterred and have sent their home-made robot to the contest. While disappointed, the girls are glad their robot will be part of the competition. Bezhan Hamdard narrates this report by Khalil Noorzai and Mohammad Ahmadi of VOA’s Afghan service.
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While the public contemplates how to protect large computer systems, such as banks and voting machines, from hacking, experts warn that another critical part of the data-based world may be vulnerable. Robots are rapidly entering everyday life, and they also rely on a connection to the internet and thus are potentially open to malware. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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Swedish carmaker Volvo says it is phasing out the internal combustion engine in favor of electric motors by 2019.
Volvo, which is Chinese owned, is the first traditional carmaker to announce the move.
“This announcement marks the end of the solely combustion engine-powered car,” said Volvo’s president Håkan Samuelsson in a statement Wednesday. “People increasingly demand electrified cars, and we want to respond to our customers’ current and future needs.”.
The company, which made a name for itself for emphasizing passenger safety, said it will offer five electric cars between 2019 and 2021. Three will be branded as Volvo and the others will be labeled as Polestar, the company’s high-end brand.
The company said it will also offer plug-in hybrid or other hybrid-type cars, some of which do use a small gas engine along with a rechargeable battery.
The company says it will continue to make pure combustion engine cars launched prior to 2019.
Geely, the Chinese company which has owned Volvo since 2010, was likely an impetus for the move as electric vehicles have been eagerly adopted in China due to high levels of air pollution.
According to Center for Automotive Research at Germany’s University of Duisberg-Essen, the country is home to half the world’s electric cars. China has said it wants 5 million electric cars on Chinese roads by 2020.
Electric carmaker Tesla recently announced it was in talks to build a plant near Shanghai.
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Singapore has a near-perfect approach to cybersecurity, but many other rich countries have holes in their defenses and some poorer countries are showing them how it should be done, a U.N. survey showed on Wednesday.
Wealth breeds cybercrime, but it does not automatically generate cybersecurity, so governments need to make sure they are prepared, the survey by the U.N. International Telecommunication Union (ITU) said.
“There is still an evident gap between countries in terms of awareness, understanding, knowledge and finally capacity to deploy the proper strategies, capabilities and programmes,” the survey said.
The United States came second in the ITU’s Global Cybersecurity Index, but many of the other highly rated countries were small or developing economies.
The rest of the top 10 were Malaysia, Oman, Estonia, Mauritius, Australia, Georgia, France and Canada. Russia ranked 11th. India was 25th, one place ahead of Germany, and China was 34th.
The ranking was based on countries’ legal, technical and organizational institutions, their educational and research capabilities, and their cooperation in information-sharing networks.
“Cybersecurity is an ecosystem where laws, organizations, skills, cooperation and technical implementation need to be in harmony to be most effective,” the survey said.
“The degree of interconnectivity of networks implies that anything and everything can be exposed, and everything from national critical infrastructure to our basic human rights can be compromised.”
The crucial first step was to adopt a national security strategy, but 50 percent of countries have none, the survey said.
Among the countries that ranked higher than their economic development was 57th-placed North Korea, which was let down by its “cooperation” score but still ranked three spots ahead of much-richer Spain.
The smallest rich countries also scored badly – Andorra, Liechtenstein, Monaco and San Marino were all well down the second half of the table. The Vatican ranked 186th out of 195 countries in the survey.
But no country did worse than Equatorial Guinea, which scored zero.
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The Ukrainian software firm at the center of a cyber attack that spread around the world last week said on Wednesday that computers which use its accounting software are compromised by a so-called “backdoor” installed by hackers during the attack.
The backdoor has been installed in every computer that wasn’t offline during the cyber attack, said Olesya Bilousova, the chief executive of Intellect Service, which developed M.E.Doc, Ukraine’s most popular accounting software.
Last week’s cyber attack spread from Ukraine and knocked out thousands of computers, disrupting shipping and shut down a chocolate factory in Australia as it reached dozens of countries around the world.
Ukrainian politicians were quick to blame Russia for a state-sponsored hack, which Moscow denied, while Ukranian cyber police and some experts say the attack was likely a smokescreen for the hackers to install new malware.
The Ukrainian police have seized M.E.Doc’s servers and taken them offline. On Wednesday morning they advised every computer using M.E.Doc software to be switched off. M.E.Doc is installed in around 1 million computers in Ukraine, Bilousova said.
“… the fact is that this backdoor needs to be closed. There was a hacking of servers,” Bilousova told reporters.
“As of today, every computer which is on the same local network as our product is a threat. We need to pay the most attention to those computers which weren’t affected (by the attack). The virus is on them waiting for a signal. There are fingerprints on computers which didn’t even use our product.”
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A British hospital trust misused patient data when it shared information with Google for work on a smartphone app to help detect kidney injuries, a British data protection watchdog said Monday.
The Royal Free NHS Trust failed to comply with the Data Protection Act when it passed on personal information of around 1.6 million patients to Google’s DeepMind.
“There’s no doubt the huge potential that creative use of data could have on patient care and clinical improvements, but the price of innovation does not need to be the erosion of fundamental privacy rights,” Elizabeth Denham, head of the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), said in a statement.
The data was provided in a medical trial that integrated information from existing systems used by the Royal Free to alert clinicians when signs of deterioration in a patient with Acute Kidney Injury (AKI) were found.
The investigation found that many patients did not know their data was being used as part of a test.
“We accept the ICO’s findings and have already made good progress to address the areas where they have concerns,” the trust said in a statement.
As a result, the trust has signed a document agreeing to make change to the way it handles data.
Although the ICO’s findings related to the hospital, Google’s artificial intelligence arm has also taken responsibility, admitting it underestimated the complexity of Britain’s state-run National Health Service and the rules around patient data.
“We were almost exclusively focused on building tools that nurses and doctors wanted, and thought of our work as technology for clinicians rather than something that needed to be accountable to and shaped by patients, the public and the NHS as a whole,” Google DeepMind said in a statement.
“We got that wrong, and we need to do better.”
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A solar-powered drone backed by Facebook that could one day provide worldwide internet access has quietly completed a test flight in Arizona after an earlier attempt ended with a crash landing.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s long-term plan for the drone, called Aquila, is to have it and others provide internet access to 4 billion people around the world who are currently in the dark.
“When Aquila is ready, it will be a fleet of solar-powered planes that will beam internet connectivity across the world,” he wrote on Facebook.
The drone’s second flight was completed in May at Yuma Proving Ground, The Yuma Sun reported.
The drone flew with more sensors, new spoilers and a horizontal propeller stopping system to help it better land after the crash in December. It was in the air for an hour and 46 minutes and elevated 3,000 feet (910 meters).
The drone flew with the engineering team watching a live stream from a helicopter chasing the drone, said Martin Luis Gomez, Facebook’s director of aeronautical platforms.
The team was thrilled with the outcome, Gomez said.
“The improvements we implemented based on Aquila’s performance during its first test flight made a significant difference in this flight,” he said.
The drone weighs about 1,000 pounds (450 kilograms) and has a longer wingspan than a Boeing 747.
The drone runs mostly on autopilot, but there are manned ground crews to manage certain maneuvers.
“We successfully gathered a lot of data to help us optimize Aquila’s efficiency,” Zuckerberg said. “No one has ever built an unmanned airplane that will fly for months at a time, so we need to tune every detail to get this right.”
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Samsung Electronics said Sunday it will start selling refurbished versions of the Galaxy Note 7 smartphone this week in South Korea.
The Note 7 was recalled last year because its batteries would overheat and catch fire. The refurbished versions will use different batteries.
The new Galaxy Note FE phone, built with unused components of the Note 7, will cost $611, a significant drop in price from the Note 7’s price tag of nearly $1,000.
Samsung recalled the Note 7 less than a month after its launch when reports of the phone’s batteries catching fire emerged.
The company released another Note 7 with replaced batteries, but those batteries also overheated and Samsung discontinued the Note 7.
Earlier this year, the tech giant released the results of an investigation that determined the phone fires were the result of flaws in the design and production of batteries supplied by two battery makers.
Close to 3 million Note 7s were returned to Samsung, prompting environmental groups to urge the South Korean company to reuse the electronics parts of the Note 7 to reduce waste.
“The latest launch of the Galaxy Note FE … has a significant meaning as an environment-friendly project that minimized the waste of resources,” Samsung said in a statement.
Samsung said it has not decided if it will sell the Note FE internationally.
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Samsung Electronics said Sunday its recalled Galaxy Note 7 phones will be recycled and sold starting this week in South Korea.
The Galaxy Note FE phone, using unused parts in the recalled Note 7 smartphones, will go on sale in South Korea Friday at 700,000 won ($611), about three quarters of its original price.
The company said the supply will be limited to 400,000 units. Overseas sales plans will be determined later, it said in a statement.
Samsung said the Note FE has “perfect safety.”
Black eye for Samsung
The original Note 7 was one of the biggest black eyes in Samsung’s history. When it was launched in August 2016, the Note 7 was Samsung’s answer to Apple’s upcoming iPhone. It was also one of the most expensive Samsung phones with the price starting at $850.
But after reports emerged that its batteries were prone to overheat and catch fire, Samsung recalled the phone in less than a month of its launch and released another one with replaced batteries. But the second batch also tended to overheat, prompting Samsung to discontinue the Note 7.
The debacle dealt a blow to Samsung’s corporate image. Aviation authorities around the world banned the pricy phone on flights and photos of scorched Note 7s circulated on social media. Samsung spent billions of dollars to recall the Note 7 and fix its damaged brand.
Earlier this year, the company released the investigation results and blamed flaws in design and production of batteries supplied by two battery makers.
Environmentalists urged reuse of parts
After Samsung recalled millions of Note 7 phones, environmental activists have pressured the South Korean tech giant to reuse the electronics parts to reduce waste. Samsung said the Note FE is part of its efforts to minimize waste.
The Note FE, short for “Fan Edition,” features the screen measuring 5.7 inches (14.48 centimeters) diagonally and the stylus pen.
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Ukraine has blamed Russian security services for a massive cyberattack that started in the last week in Ukraine and eventually spread to computers across the world.
Ukraine’s security agency, the SBU, said in a statement Saturday the attack bore resemblances to past hacks of Ukrainian infrastructure by the Russian security services.
“The available data, including those obtained in cooperation with international antivirus companies, give us reason to believe that the same hacking groups are involved in the attacks, which in December 2016 attacked the financial system, transport and energy facilities of Ukraine, using TeleBots and BlackEnergy,” the statement said.
Russia has denied involvement in the recent attack that halted operations at large companies and government agencies in more than 60 countries around the world. The hackers encrypted data on infected machines and demanded a ransom to give it back to its owner.
Europol Director Rob Wainwright called Tuesday’s hack “another serious ransomware attack.” He said it bore resemblances to the previous “WannaCry” hack, but it also showed indications of a “more sophisticated attack capability intended to exploit a range of vulnerabilities.”
The WannaCry hack sent a wave of crippling ransomware to hospitals across Britain in May, causing the hospitals to divert ambulances and cancel surgeries. The program demanded a ransom to unlock access to files stored on infected machines.
Researchers eventually found a way to thwart the hack, but only after about 300 people had already paid the ransom.
The most recent hack has been largely contained, but now some researchers are questioning the motivation behind the attack. They say it may not have been designed to collect a ransom, but instead to simply destroy data.
“There may be a more nefarious motive behind the attack,” Gavin O’Gorman, an investigator with U.S. antivirus firm Symantec, said in a blog post. “Perhaps this attack was never intended to make money [but] rather to simply disrupt a large number of Ukrainian organizations.”
Russian anti-virus firm Kaspersky Lab similarly noted that the code used in the hacking software wouldn’t have allowed its authors to decrypt the stolen data after a ransom had been paid.
“It appears it was designed as a wiper pretending to be ransomware,” Kapersky researchers Anton Ivanov and Orkhan Mamedov wrote in a blog post. “This is the worst case news for the victims – even if they pay the ransom they will not get their data back.”
The computer virus used in the attack includes code known as Eternal Blue, a tool developed by the NSA that exploited Microsoft’s Windows operating system, and which was published on the internet in April by a group called Shadowbrokers. Microsoft released a patch in March to protect systems from that vulnerability.
Tim Rawlins, director of the Britain-based cybersecurity consultancy NCC Group, says the attacks continue to happen because people have not been keeping up with effectively patching their computers.
“This is a repeat WannaCry type of outbreak and it really comes down to the fact that people are not focusing on what they should be focusing on, the very simple premise of patching your systems,” Rawlins told VOA.
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Ukraine has blamed Russian security services for a massive cyber attack that started in the last week in Ukraine and eventually spread to computers across the world.
Ukraine’s security agency, the SBU, said in a statement Saturday the attack bore resemblances to past hacks of Ukrainian infrastructure by the Russian security services.
“The available data, including those obtained in cooperation with international antivirus companies, give us reason to believe that the same hacking groups are involved in the attacks, which in December 2016 attacked the financial system, transport and energy facilities of Ukraine, using TeleBots and BlackEnergy,” the statement said.
Russia has denied involvement in the recent attack that halted operations at large companies and government agencies in more than 60 countries around the world. The hackers encrypted data on infected machines and demanded a ransom to give it back to its owner.
Europol Director Rob Wainwright called Tuesday’s hack “another serious ransomware attack.” He said it bore resemblances to the previous ‘WannaCry’ hack, but it also showed indications of a “more sophisticated attack capability intended to exploit a range of vulnerabilities.”
The WannaCry hack sent a wave of crippling ransomware to hospitals across Britain in May, causing the hospitals to divert ambulances and cancel surgeries. The program demanded a ransom to unlock access to files stored on infected machines.
Researchers eventually found a way to thwart the hack, but only after about 300 people had already paid the ransom.
The most recent hack has been largely contained, but now some researchers are questioning the motivation behind the attack. They say it may not have been designed to collect a ransom, but instead to simply destroy data.
“There may be a more nefarious motive behind the attack,” Gavin O’Gorman, an investigator with U.S. antivirus firm Symantec, said in a blog post. “Perhaps this attack was never intended to make money [but] rather to simply disrupt a large number of Ukrainian organizations.”
Russian anti-virus firm Kaspersky Lab similarly noted that the code used in the hacking software wouldn’t have allowed its authors to decrypt the stolen data after a ransom had been paid.
“It appears it was designed as a wiper pretending to be ransomware,” Kapersky researchers Anton Ivanov and Orkhan Mamedov wrote in a blog post. “This is the worst case news for the victims – even if they pay the ransom they will not get their data back.”
The computer virus used in the attack includes code known as Eternal Blue, a tool developed by the NSA that exploited Microsoft’s Windows operating system, and which was published on the internet in April by a group called Shadowbrokers. Microsoft released a patch in March to protect systems from that vulnerability.
Tim Rawlins, director of the Britain-based cybersecurity consultancy NCC Group, says the attacks continue to happen because people have not been keeping up with effectively patching their computers.
“This is a repeat WannaCry type of outbreak and it really comes down to the fact that people are not focusing on what they should be focusing on, the very simple premise of patching your systems,” Rawlins told VOA.
When Goktug Yilmaz, a game developer in Ankara, Turkey, wanted help with his business, he turned to Y Combinator, a prestigious startup accelerator firm in Mountain View, California.
Yilmaz recently completed Y Combinator’s first free online course, called Startup School. He was among 7,000 founders from more than 140 countries who participated.
“You talk, you get feedback,” he said, about why he wanted to be part of Startup School. “Just seeing this process would help us get better on focusing on our goals.”
Y Combinator is known for its competitive twice-yearly program that brings companies to Mountain View, California, for 10 intensive weeks of training and advice. Founders receive mentoring from its alumni network that includes such companies as Airbnb, Dropbox, Reddit and Instacart.
YC arrangement for startups
As part of the arrangement, YC, as it is known, invests $120,000 in each startup for 7 percent of common stock. The program culminates in Demo Day, when participants give their pitches to a room full of potential investors.
Since it was founded in 2005, Y Combinator has worked with more than 4,000 founders.
But just 2 percent of applicants make it into Y Combinator’s program. Yilmaz was one of those who tried but didn’t make it.
Then, Yilmaz heard about Y Combinator’s effort to expand its reach with Startup School. He signed up.
Steven Pham, who helps run Startup School, said the firm wanted to reach entrepreneurs beyond Silicon Valley.
“Internet access has been only something people have access to very recently in a lot of these markets,” Pham said. “In a lot of these communities where startups are super, super early, we wanted to get in there and help them learn best practices … best ways to think about building their product, best ways to think about sales strategies and market.”
The demand for Startup School surprised Y Combinator, Pham said. More than 13,000 companies and nearly 20,000 founders applied. The firm had to limit the first class to 3,000 companies and about 7,000 founders so that it could provide enough alumni advisers.
Ti Zhao, a Y Combinator alumnus, was a mentor to 30 companies during Startup School.
“People kind of have this idea of Silicon Valley as where the startups are at and it’s really cool for me to see so many diverse companies from so many places around the world,” she said.
Online pitches
Startup School culminates with Presentation Day, when entrepreneurs around the world make their pitches online. The aim isn’t necessarily to woo investors but to present a prototype of an idea in a clear and succinct way.
It included pitches from war-torn Syria, where one group is teaching children how to create circuits.
Others applied technology to fields such as transportation, travel and education. SocialEyeze, based in Sudan, is trying to help the blind engage on social media more easily.
“I’ve learned many useful skills, and those skills appeared in the modifications we made on our solution,” Hussam Eldeen Hassan with Socialeyeze said.
In the end, about 56 percent of the first Startup School class, or 1,580 firms, completed the course.
Y Combinator plans to expand the number of companies it can include when it does Startup School again, currently slated for early next year.
“In Startup School, we made a bunch of friends from the online chat,” Yilmaz said. “We are probably going to continue those friendships with other founders.”
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The U.S government warned industrial firms this week about a hacking campaign targeting the nuclear and energy sectors, the latest event to highlight the power industry’s vulnerability to cyberattacks.
Since at least May, hackers used tainted “phishing” emails to “harvest credentials” so they could gain access to networks of their targets, according to a joint report from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The report provided to the industrial firms was reviewed by Reuters Friday. While disclosing attacks, and warning that in some cases hackers succeeded in compromising the networks of their targets, it did not identify any specific victims.
Industry looking into intrusions
“Historically, cyber actors have strategically targeted the energy sector with various goals ranging from cyber espionage to the ability to disrupt energy systems in the event of a hostile conflict,” the report said.
Homeland Security and FBI officials could not be reached for comment on the report, which was dated June 28. The report was released during a week of heavy hacking activity.
A virus dubbed “NotPetya” attacked Tuesday, spreading from initial infections in Ukraine to businesses around the globe. It encrypted data on infected machines, rendering them inoperable and disrupting activity at ports, law firms and factories.
On Tuesday the energy-industry news site E&E News reported that U.S. investigators were looking into cyber intrusions this year at multiple nuclear power generators.
Reuters has not confirmed details of the E&E News report, which said there was no evidence safety systems had been compromised at affected plants.
Worry since 2016
Industrial firms, including power providers and other utilities, have been particularly worried about the potential for destructive cyber attacks since December 2016, when hackers cut electricity in Ukraine.
U.S. nuclear power generators PSEG, SCANA Corp and Entergy Corp said they were not affected by the recent cyberattacks. SCANA’s V.C. Summer nuclear plant in South Carolina shut down Thursday because of a problem with a valve in the non-nuclear portion of the plant, a spokesman said.
Another nuclear power generator, Dominion Energy, said it does not comment on cyber security.
Two cyber security firms said June 12 that they had identified the malicious software used in the Ukraine attack, which they dubbed Industroyer, warning that it could be easily modified to attack utilities in the United States and Europe.
Industroyer is the second piece of malware uncovered to date that is capable of disrupting industrial processes without the need for hackers to manually intervene.
The first, Stuxnet, was discovered in 2010 and is widely believed by security researchers to have been used by the United States and Israel to attack Iran’s nuclear program.
The U.S. government report said attackers conducted reconnaissance to gain information about the individuals whose computers they sought to infect so that they create “decoy documents” on topics of interest to their targets.
In an analysis, it described 11 files used in the attacks, including malware downloaders and tools that allow the hackers to take remote control of victims’ computers and travel across their networks.
Chevron Corp, Exxon Mobil Corp and ConocoPhillips, the three largest U.S. oil producers, declined to comment on their network security.
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Many businesses still struggled Friday to recover hopelessly scrambled computer networks, collateral damage from a massive cyberattack that targeted Ukraine three days ago.
The Heritage Valley Health System couldn’t offer lab and diagnostic imaging services at 14 community and neighborhood offices in western Pennsylvania. DLA Piper, a London-based law firm with offices in 40 countries, said on its website that email systems were down; a receptionist said email hadn’t been restored by the close of business day.
Dave Kennedy, a former Marine cyberwarrior who is now CEO of the security company TrustedSec, said one U.S. company he is helping is rebuilding its entire network of more than 5,000 computers.
“It hit everything, their backups, servers, their workstations, everything,” he said. “Everything was just nuked and wiped.”
Kennedy added, “Some of these companies are actually using pieces of paper to write down credit card numbers. It’s crazy.”
Some attacks are unreported
The cyber attack that began Tuesday brought even some Fortune 1000 companies to their knees, experts say. Kennedy said a lot more “isn’t being reported by companies who don’t want to say that they are hit.”
The malware, which security experts are calling NotPetya, was unleashed through Ukraine tax software, called MeDoc. Customers’ networks became infected downloading automatic updates from its maker’s website. Many customers are multinationals with offices in the eastern European nation.
The malware spread so quickly, worming its way automatically through interconnected private networks, as to be nearly unstoppable. What saved the world from digital mayhem, experts say, was its limited business-to-business connectivity with Ukrainian enterprises, the intended target.
Had those direct connections been extensive — on the level of a major industrial nation — “you are talking about a catastrophic failure of all of our systems and environments across the globe. I mean it could have been absolutely terrifying,” Kennedy said.
Microsoft said NotPetya hit companies in at least 64 nations, including Russia, Germany and the United States. Victims include drug giant Merck & Co. and the shipping company FedEx’s TNT subsidiary. Trade in FedEx stock was temporarily halted Wednesday.
Danish shipping giant still struggling
One major victim, Danish shipping giant A.P. Maersk-Moller, said Friday that its cargo terminals and port operations were “now running close to normal again.” It said operations had been restored in Spain, Morocco, India, Brazil, Argentina and Lima, Peru, but problems lingered in Rotterdam, the Netherlands; Elizabeth, New Jersey; and Los Angeles.
An employee at an international transit company at Lima’s port of Callao told The Associated Press that Maersk employees’ telephone system and email had been knocked out by the virus — so they were “stuck using their personal cellphones.” The employee spoke on condition of anonymity because he’s not authorized to speak to reporters.
Back in Ukraine, the pain continued. Officials assured the public that the outbreak was under control, and service has been restored to cash machines and at the airport.
But some bank branches remain closed as information-technology professionals scrambled to rebuild networks from scratch. One government employee told the AP she was still relying on her iPhone because her office’s computers were “collapsed.” She, too, was not authorized to talk to journalists.
Security researchers now concur that while NotPetya was wrapped in the guise of extortionate “ransomware” — which encrypts files and demands payment — it was really designed to exact maximum destruction and disruption, with Ukraine the clear target.
FBI joins investigation
Computers were disabled there at banks, government agencies, energy companies, supermarkets, railways and telecommunications providers.
Ukraine’s government said Thursday that the FBI and Britain’s National Crime Agency were assisting in its investigation of the malware.
Suspicion for the attack immediately fell on hackers affiliated with Russia, though there is no evidence tying Vladimir Putin’s government to the attack.
Relations between Russia and Ukraine have been tense since Moscow annexed the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine in 2014. Pro-Russian fighters still battle the government in eastern Ukraine.
U.S. intelligence agencies declined to comment about who might be responsible for the attack. The White House did not immediately respond to questions seeking its reaction to the attack.
Russian hackers blamed before
Experts have blamed pro-Russian hackers for major cyberattacks on the Ukrainian power grid in 2015 and 2016, assaults that have turned the eastern European nation into the world’s leading cyber warfare testing ground.
A disruptive attack on the nation’s voting system ahead of 2014 national elections is also attributed to Russia.
Robert M. Lee, CEO of Dragos Inc. and an expert on cyberattacks on infrastructure including Ukraine’s power grid, said the rules of cyber espionage appear to be changing, with sophisticated actors — state-sponsored or not — violating what had been established norms of avoiding collateral damage.
Besides NotPetya, he pointed to the May ransomware dubbed “WannaCry,” a major cyberassault that some experts have blamed on North Korea.
“I think it’s absolutely reprehensive if we do not have national-level leaders come out and make very clear statements,” he said, “that this is not activity that can be condoned.”
Biodiesel made from microalgae could power buses and trucks and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 80 percent, Chilean scientists said, possibly curbing pollution in contaminated cities like Santiago.
Experts from the department of Chemical Engineering and Bioprocesses at Chile’s Catholic University said they had grown enough algae to fragment it and extract the oil which, after removing moisture and debris, can be converted into biofuel.
“What is new about our process is the intent to produce this fuel from microalgae, which are microorganisms,” researcher Carlos Saez told Reuters.
Most of the world’s biodiesel, which reduces dependence on petroleum, is derived from soybean oil. It can also be made from animal fat, canola or palm oil.
Saez said a main challenge going forward would be to produce a sufficient volume of microalgae. A wide variety of fresh and salt water algaes are found in Chile, a South American nation with a long Pacific coast.
The scientists are trying to improve algae growing technology to ramp up production at a low cost using limited energy, Saez said.
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As technology has become part of our daily life, it’s increasingly been used to intimidate victims of domestic violence. In Australia, an organization is helping victims discover smart devices abusers might be using to invade their privacy and control them from afar. As Faiza Elmasry has the story. VOA’s Faith Lapidus narrates.
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France is known worldwide for its wine, food and culture, but under its new president, the French are aiming to be the new global hub for tech startups.
President Emmanuel Macron has said he wants to build a version of Silicon Valley in France. His administration has launched pro-business initiatives that are loosening government restrictions and encouraging entrepreneurs to launch their startups in the country.
“The tradition has been in Europe and in France to invest in big, traditional companies and not specifically [in] tech startups. So we will dedicate a €10 billion fund to the investment in tech startups in France,” said Mounir Mahjoubi, France’s Secretary of State for Digital Affairs.
Both public and private investments will factor into Macron’s vision of France as a “country of unicorns” — the term popularly used for tech startups valued at $1 billion or more, said Mahjoubi, who recently was in New York City for “La French Touch” conference, where he discussed France’s strategy for attracting the tech world’s best and brightest.
In the French tech world, all eyes are on the privately financed Station F, which is set to open this summer in Paris. Billed as the world’s biggest startup campus, the 34,000-square-meter space already has major tech companies like Microsoft, Facebook and Ubisoft signed on. The companies will develop their products, as well as host and mentor startup founders in incubator programs. One thousand individual startups are expected to set up shop at Station F.
Seeking global appeal
Silicon Valley has attracted tech talent from all over the world. Now France hopes to do the same for those beyond its borders. Initiatives like the “French Tech Ticket” and more recent “French Tech Visa” are designed to bring startup founders, employees and investors to the country through a combination of mentorships, grants and subsidized work spaces. The French Tech Visa fast-tracks a process for participants to obtain a renewable, four-year residence permit.
Not to be left out are the locals in France’s poorer, outer suburbs, the banlieue. The new administration is aiming for social diversity through inclusion initiatives that foster entrepreneurship, said Mahjoubi.
“We decided to create hubs in the private area[s] of France,” said Mahjoubi. “There might be entrepreneurs over there that believe that it’s not for them, because they couldn’t afford to not having a salary for a year of entrepreneurship … we created the condition so they could receive money from the state, to have a salary during these 12 months [to] push their project to the highest level they can.”
Unemployment at 9.5 percent
The encouragement of entrepreneurship is a novel sentiment in a country where traditional attitudes and strict labor laws have long dominated work culture. With a national unemployment rate of 9.5 percent, venturing out on one’s own to start a business can seem too risky.
But with the success of French unicorns like ride-sharing service BlaBlaCar and network provider Sigfox, attitudes appear to be shifting; 68 percent of French people aged 18 to 25 aspire to run their own business one day, according to a 2015 Ernst & Young survey.
“I think the ecosystem, the government, have done a very good job to do some marketing about entrepreneurship and I think it’s very important because when we compare our situation to the U.S., in the U.S. there is a lot of storytelling, everyone is super enthusiast[ic] and it brings a momentum that is super beneficial,” said François Wyss, co-founder of French startup DataBerries.
Funding available
Wyss and his co-founders recently secured $16 million in their first round of funding for his digital marketing startup.
“There is a lot of funding now in France, so it’s great. We have the chance to have world-class engineers, which are far cheaper than in the U.S. So a lot of companies are developing their core product and R&D in France before exporting it overseas,” said Wyss.
“French tech is all about having roots in France and having a vision for the world,” said Mahjoubi. “The French tech startup scene is an international startup scene.”
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Facebook Inc. said Thursday that it had completed a second test of an unmanned aircraft designed to someday beam internet access to remote parts of the planet, and unlike in the first test, the drone did not crash.
Facebook plans to develop a fleet of drones powered by sunlight that will fly for months at a time, communicating with each other through lasers and extending internet connectivity to the ground below.
The company called the first test, in June 2016, a success after it flew above the Arizona desert for 1 hour, 36 minutes, three times longer than planned. It later said the drone had also crashed moments before landing and had suffered a damaged wing.
The second test occurred on May 22, Martin Luis Gomez, Facebook’s director of aeronautical platforms, said in a blog post. The aircraft flew for 1 hour, 46 minutes before landing near Yuma, Arizona, with only “a few minor, easily repairable dings,” he said.
Facebook engineers had added “spoilers” to the aircraft’s wings to increase drag and reduce lift during the landing approach, Gomez said.
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Malawi and the United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF) launched an air corridor Thursday to test the effectiveness of drones in humanitarian emergencies and other development uses, the first project of its kind in Africa.
Landlocked Malawi, which suffers periodic crop failures and is prone to floods, is frequently in need of food and other aid, and limited road access in many of its rural areas makes it difficult to get help to needy communities.
“Drone technology has many potential applications. … One that we have already tested in Malawi is to transport infant blood samples to laboratories for HIV testing,” UNICEF Malawi Resident Representative Johannes Wedenig said at the launch in Kasungu, 100 km (60 miles) from the capital Lilongwe.
The test corridor is centered at the Kasungu Aerodrome, with a 40-kilometer radius and focusing on three areas: generating aerial images of crisis situations, using drones to extend Wi-Fi or mobile phone signals across difficult terrain in emergencies, and delivering low-weight emergency supplies.
“The launch of the testing corridor is particularly important to support transportation and data collection where land transport infrastructure is either not feasible or difficult during emergencies,” Malawian Minister of Transport Jappie Mhango told Reuters.
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