YCLOAK

The desperate effort this week to find two hikers who disappeared at the bottom of the Grand Canyon represented the National Park Service’s most extensive use yet of drones in a search-and-rescue mission.

 

The Grand Canyon is the only national park with its own fleet of unmanned aircraft for locating people who have gotten lost, stranded, injured or killed. Under a program that began last fall, it has five drones and four certified operators.

 

While the aerial search for the two hikers came up empty, it threw a spotlight on technology that can enter crevices and other rugged spots unreachable by foot while sparing searchers the dangers of going up in a helicopter.

Beautiful and dangerous

 

With its steep cliffs, nearly 2,000 square miles and mesmerizing views, the Grand Canyon can be as dangerous as it is captivating. 

Rangers were confronted with 1,200 medical emergencies, 293 search-and-rescue missions and 17 deaths in 2016, a year in which the park had nearly 6 million visitors. Last summer, a 35-year-old Yelp executive tripped while hiking, fell backward and was found dead 400 feet below.

 

“Our historic model was to take the helicopter to look and see,” said Grand Canyon chief ranger Matt Vandzura. But now, drones can offer “that same close look but without putting any people at risk. It has dramatically increased our ability to keep our people safe.”

 

The drones are about 18 inches across and 10 inches high, with a battery life of about 20 minutes. Drone operators watch the video in real time and then analyze it again at the end of the day. 

Missing hikers

 

The aircraft were used Monday through Wednesday in the search for LouAnn Merrell, 62, and her step grandson, Jackson Standefer, 14. The park also sent out three ground search teams of about 20 people in all, an inflatable motorboat and a helicopter.

 

Merrell and Standefer vanished last weekend after losing their footing while crossing a creek near the North Rim. They were on a hike with Merrell’s husband, Merrell Boot Co. co-founder Randy Merrell, and the boy’s mother. 

 

The park soon scaled back the operation and stopped using the drones but continued the search. In a statement, the hikers’ families backed the decision and said they were “still praying for a miracle.”

 

Drones used before

 

In November, after a visitor drove off a cliff and died, drones were sent in to examine the trees and brush and make sure it was safe for a helicopter to fly in and lift the car out.

 

The next month, rangers used a drone to locate a woman who had jumped to her death. Then they rappelled down to retrieve the body.

 

The dangers of flying choppers in the canyon were illustrated in 2003, when a Park Service helicopter experienced a mechanical failure and crash-landed on the North Rim. Those aboard suffered only minor injuries; the helicopter was totaled.

 

Other national parks use drones, but for wildlife research. The use of private drones is prohibited in national parks. 

 

James Doyle, a spokesman for the park service’s Intermountain region, said other national parks would probably seek their own drone fleets, too. He said the Grand Canyon’s extreme topography, it is a mile deep, makes it a perfect candidate.

 

“It’s a wonderful tool for the unfortunate situation we just found ourselves in at Grand Canyon,” Doyle said. 
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Silicon Valley is not the only place to find the next Mark Zuckerberg. Nearly 9,000 tech startups call New York City home, and their offerings reflect the unique needs of the most populous city in the U.S. VOA’s Tina Trinh reports from the NY Tech Day event in New York.
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The pressure was on for Abdul Gouda and his classmates at George Mason University: not only did their graduation depend on the success of their project, but so did the hopes of impossibly cute 10-year-old girl.

 

Fifth-grader Isabella Nicola wanted to play the violin, but she was born with no left hand and a severely abbreviated forearm. Her music teacher at Island Creek Elementary in Fairfax County had built her a prosthetic allowing her to move the bow with her left arm and finger the strings with her right — the opposite of how violin is usually taught. But the prosthetic was heavy and he thought there might be a better option. He reached out to Mason, his alma mater.

 

As it happened, Gouda and his four teammates in the bioengineering department were in the market for a project — students are required to take on a capstone project their senior year, and their initial idea had fallen through.

 

Still, Gouda admitted some hesitation at the outset.

 

“It’s sort of a lot of pressure,” he said. “You’ve got this young girl whose counting on you and you’re expected to deliver.”

 

The team — Gouda, Mona Elkholy, Ella Novoselsky, Racha Salha and Yasser Alhindi — developed multiple prototypes throughout the year. There was a fair amount of literature on similar projects that helped them get a good start, but Isabella’s case is unique to her, and the project included plenty of trial and error.

 

Isabella communicated easily with the group and provided feedback, especially about the weight. The first came in at 13 ounces; the final version shaved an ounce or two off of that after feedback from Isabella.

 

The team enlisted a music professor at Mason, Elizabeth Adams, who provided feedback on what Isabella would need to play the violin with some finesse.

 

On Thursday, Isabella received her final prosthetic, built from a 3-D printer, and hot pink (at her request) with “Isabella’s attachment” emblazoned on the forearm.

 

She played some scales as she adjusted the fit, and even a few bars of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.”

 

“Oh my gosh, that’s so much better,” Isabella said as she tried out the new prosthetic.

 

And the team had a surprise for her, a plug-in attachment designed to let her grip a handlebar and ride a bicycle.

 

“I feel very blessed that I have this amazing group of people,” Isabella said.

 

Isabella had her heart set on playing music when the school began offering strings lessons in fourth grade.

 

“I’ve never told her no. I told her we would try. There was no guarantee the school would be able to do an adaptation,” said her mother, Andrea Cabrera. “Through these little miracles, it kept going forward.”

 

Isabella never had any doubt it would come together.

 

“I felt right away that I’d be able to play,” she said. “I’ve always had perseverance.”
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A Bavarian startup is developing a five-seat “flying taxi” after successful test flights over Germany of a smaller version of the electric jet, the company said Thursday.

Munich-based Lilium, backed by investors who include Skype co-founder Niklas Zennstrom, said the planned five-seater jet, which will be capable of vertical takeoff and landing, could be used for urban air taxi and ride-sharing services.

In flight tests, a two-seat prototype executed maneuvers that included a midair transition from hover mode, like a drone, to wing-borne flight, like a conventional aircraft, Lilium said.

Potential competitors to Lilium Jet include much bigger players such as Airbus, the maker of commercial airliners and helicopters, which aims to test a prototype self-piloted, single-seat “flying car” later in 2017.

Slovakian firm to take orders

Slovakian firm AeroMobil said at a car show in Monaco on Thursday that it would start taking pre-orders for a hybrid flying car that can drive on roads. It said it planned production beginning in 2020.

But makers of “flying cars” still face hurdles, including convincing regulators and the public that their products can be used safely. Governments are still grappling with regulations for drones and driverless cars.

Lilium said its jet, with a range of 300 kilometers (190 miles) and cruising speed of 300 kph (185 mph), is the only electric aircraft capable of both vertical takeoff and jet-powered flight.

“We have solved some of the toughest engineering challenges in aviation to get to this point,” Daniel Wiegand, Lilium co-founder and chief executive, said in a statement.

The jet, whose power consumption per kilometer is comparable to that of an electric car, could offer passenger flights at prices comparable to those of normal taxis but with speeds five times faster, Lilium said.

Lilium, founded in 2014 by four graduates from the Technical University of Munich, is unusual on the German startup scene, which is dominated by e-commerce firms largely based in Berlin and self-financed engineering firms dotted around the country.

It raised $11.4 million (10.6 million euros) in 2016 from Zennstrom-led venture firm Atomico Partners and e42, the investment arm of entrepreneur Frank Thelen, a juror on the German investment reality TV show “Lion’s Den.”

Two-seat ‘multicopter’

Other potential rivals include crowd-funded eVolo, a firm based near Mannheim that has said it expects to receive special regulatory approval for its two-seat “multicopter” with 18 rotors to be used as flying taxis in pilot projects by 2018.

Terrafugia, based outside the U.S. city of Boston and founded a decade ago by Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduates, aims to build a mass-market flying car, while U.S.-Israeli firm Joby Aviation has said it is working on a four-seater drone.

Google, Tesla and Uber have also reportedly shown interest in the new technology.
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A scaled-down, two-man U.S.-Russian crew blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Thursday for a six-hour ride to the International Space Station, a NASA TV broadcast showed.

A Russian Soyuz capsule carrying NASA astronaut Jack Fischer, 43, and Russian cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin, 58, lifted off at 1:13 p.m. local time/3:13 a.m. EDT (0713 GMT) with a rare empty third seat. Russia is scaling back space station staffing until its long-delayed science laboratory is flown to the orbiting outpost next year.

On the job toilet training

Fischer and Yurchikhin were scheduled to reach the $100 billion space station, which orbits about 250 miles (400 km) above Earth, at 9:23 a.m. EDT (1323 GMT).

Fischer said he suspects the biggest challenge he faces in his first voyage into space will be learning how to use the station’s zero-gravity toilet.

“It’s all about suction, it’s really difficult,” Fischer  said in a NASA interview before launch. “You just can’t train for that on the ground, so I approach my space-toilet activities with respect, preparation and a healthy dose of sheer terror.”

U.S. astronaut closing in on record

The rookie astronaut will be sharing the station with two seasoned veterans.

Soyuz crewmate Yurchikhin has made four previous spaceflights. Station commander Peggy Whitson, 57, in the midst of her third long-duration mission, is due on Monday to beat the 534-day record for cumulative time spent in space by a U.S. astronaut.

She is expected to receive a congratulatory phone call on Monday from U.S. President Donald Trump, NASA said on Wednesday.

Whitson, who flew to the station in November along with Russian cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy and French astronaut Thomas Pesquet, will remain aboard with Fischer and Yurchikhin until September.

 
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A pet can provide comfort and companionship for an elderly person or someone who is disabled. But in the future that pet may be a robotic animal that uses artificial intelligence to interact with humans. The British company that developed the cute android says it would provide emotional support and interaction. VOA’s Deborah Block tells us more about it.
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Facebook on Wednesday pulled aside the curtain on a secretive unit headed by a former chief of the Pentagon’s research arm, disclosing that the social media company is studying ways for people to communicate by thought and touch.

Facebook launched the research shop, called Building 8, last year to conduct long-term work that might lead to hardware products. In charge of the unit is Regina Dugan, who led a similar group at Alphabet’s Google and was previously director of the U.S. Defense Department’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA.

Dugan told software developers at Facebook’s annual F8 conference that the company was modeling Building 8 after DARPA, a government office founded in the 1950s that gave the world the internet and the miniaturized GPS receivers used in consumer devices.

Any hardware rollouts are years away, Dugan said in a speech. Potential products could, if successful, be a way for Facebook to diversify beyond its heavy reliance on advertising revenue.

One example of Building 8’s work so far, Dugan said, was an attempt to improve technology that allows people to type words using their minds.

“It sounds impossible, but it’s closer than you may realize,” Dugan said.

Using brain implants, people can already type eight words a minute, she said. Facebook’s goal, working with researchers at several U.S. universities, is to make the system non-invasive, as well as fast enough so that people can type 100 words a minute just by thinking.

Possible uses include helping disabled people and “the ability to text your friend without taking out your phone,” she said.

Another Building 8 project, she said, was trying to advance the ability to communicate through touch only, an idea with roots in Braille, a writing system for the blind and visually impaired.

A video played at the conference showed two Facebook employees talking to each other through touch. As one employee, Frances, wore an electronic device on her arm, the other, Freddy, used a computer program to send pressure changes to her arm.

“If you ask Frances what she feels,” Dugan said, “she’ll tell you that she has learned to feel the acoustic shape of a word on her arm.”

In December, Facebook signed a deal with 17 universities including Harvard and Princeton to allow swifter collaboration on projects with Dugan’s team.
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Khailee Ng wanted name brand clothes. So, as a suburban teenager in Malaysia, he shoplifted.

He could have continued with his criminal life, he said, but took a different route. Ng started to build web pages because it was a better way to make money, he told a crowd at F8, Facebook’s developer conference in San Jose, California, this week.  

“It’s depressing when your only natural talent is shoplifting,” he said.  

More than 4,000 developers from all over the world have gathered at the conference to hear about Facebook’s newest technologies such as augmented reality and virtual reality.

But the social networking giant also paid homage to the work of international developers and entrepreneurs.

In his keynote address Tuesday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said 80 percent of developers building apps on Facebook are international. To that end, the company is hosting meetings in more than 40 cities worldwide for watching the conference.

One advantage entrepreneurs in developing countries have is that the existing industries are not mature, said Peng Zhang, founder and president of GeekPark, an incubator and media company in China. Of the startups in China worth more than $1 billion, two-thirds are focused on improving traditional industries, he said.

“There are huge gaps,” he said.

A Malaysian journey

Ng described his journey from suburban teen shoplifter to web developer, to founder of two companies – a news site and an e-commerce firm – which he sold. He bought a ticket to Silicon Valley to find out more about the tech industry.

Now Ng is a managing partner at 500 Startups, an investment and incubator firm that has invested in more than 1,800 companies worldwide.

Beyond telling his personal story, Ng said there are key steps to making tech entrepreneurship more accessible for people worldwide. One is investing in local entrepreneurs building businesses who don’t necessarily match the pattern of the Silicon Valley startup founder.

“If our tunnel vision only goes for the pedigree path, we will not be able to complete the entire spectrum of human potential,” he said.

Testing ideas in Peru

Gary Urteaga, a Peruvian entrepreneur, told his own story of trying and testing company ideas. Inspired by the success of Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, the Chinese online commerce firm, Urteaga co-founded Cinepapaya, a way for people to buy movie tickets and find out about movie showings. It was bought late last year by Fandango.

Now Urteaga is the vice president of business development at Fandango Latam and an investor. He says the next opportunity is in solving problems people have worldwide.

“If we develop and solve the problems of security, education, health and water, then we can create the next billion-dollar companies,” he said.

 
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Every now and then scientists stumble upon a discovery that opens up new possibilities for research and lead to solutions for existing problems. Researchers at the University of Maryland say a fiery phenomenon called blue whirl could someday help clean up oil spills on water.
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When Mark Pavlyukovskyy, founder of a do-it-yourself computer kit maker, was looking for investors last year, he wanted someone who knew the Chinese market.

Turns out, Pavlyukovskyy didn’t have to go to Beijing or Shanghai. Chinese venture capitalists are everywhere in Silicon Valley.

Last year, Pavlyukovskyy, a Ukrainian-born American entrepreneur working in San Francisco, raised $2.1 million from nine investors, including a Chinese firm based in the Valley.

“We’re looking not just for financial capital, but interpersonal capital with expertise and knowledge of the education market in China,” said Pavlyukovskyy. His company, Piper, sells a $299 augmented reality computer kit that children assemble themselves. Now, Piper is in schools in Hong Kong. Over 150,000 kits have been distributed around the world.

For the past decade, Silicon Valley money flowed to China as the communist country opened its markets and companies sought to expand there. That cross-border investing reversed as Chinese companies started to look outside their borders for investment opportunities. While Chinese investors have made their impact felt in the U.S. real estate, energy and transportation sectors, it was only in recent years they turned to tech.

Chasing U.S. innovation

Now, Chinese investors are pouring money into Silicon Valley deals, where it might take longer to see a return on an investment than in commercial real estate but where the potential to strike it big is higher.

“This is the very beginning,” said David Cao, who came from Singapore as a programmer before founding F50, a full-service investment firm, in 2014.

Fueling the Chinese capital is a perception that the majority of innovation is still coming out of the U.S., and that China is playing catch-up, said Chris Evdemon, who in 2014 opened Sinovation, the U.S. arm of Chuangxin, one of China’s leading early-stage venture firms. There are now 38 startups in his portfolio, which includes firms specializing in internet-of-things, robotics and education technology.

“We thought we should put some capital to work and see if we can be a great go-to market,” said Evdemon.

Chinese investors, particularly traditional media groups, are interested in firms specializing in virtual reality and augmented reality technologies, which might enhance digital entertainment. Other areas of interest for Chinese backers include robotics, artificial intelligence and technologies that focus on the financial, health and education markets. There are now more than 30 Chinese incubators in Silicon Valley.

Strategic U.S.-developed tech

But this wave of Chinese investment has called into question whether advanced technologies that are seen as critical to U.S. strategic interests are, instead, going to a competitor. A recent Pentagon report raised concerns about whether the Chinese government and Chinese investors in Silicon Valley were gaining access to key technologies through these investments.

Those concerns did not gain much attention at a recent cross-border investment summit held by F50 in Menlo Park. Instead, investors talked about how Chinese investors have become more savvy, with an emphasis on working with Silicon Valley companies to test their ideas in the U.S. first, before thinking about the Chinese market.

“I don’t see any barriers anymore between the two ecosystems,” said Evdemon. “I’m enjoying seeing wall gardens disappear.”
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In the science fiction series Star Trek, a doctor can use a handheld device called a “tricorder” to check a person’s vital signs and diagnose illness. What once was imagined is now a reality. The Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE challenged scientists to develop a “tricorder-like” device to improve health care globally. The winners were recently announced in Los Angeles.
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Facebook’s annual developer conference F8 kicks off this week in San Jose, California, at a time when the social network giant faces more competition in the United States and around the globe.

Developers from Brazil, France, India and Mexico are to gather Tuesday and Wednesday at F8, looking for new tools and features for Facebook’s biggest products — its flagship social network, Instagram, the mobile photo sharing service; and WhatsApp, the instant messaging service Facebook acquired in 2014.

Facebook is expected to show new features for all its main products and woo developers and businesses to make greater use of its services. It’s a technical gabfest, but one that Facebook executives use to unveil new features and talk about the firm’s future. The name of the conference — F8 — comes from Facebook’s tradition of hosting eight-hour hackathons.

While thousands are expected to gather at a convention center in downtown San Jose, elsewhere, in more than 45 cities worldwide, developers will meet to watch Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s opening speech Tuesday morning. The challenge Facebook faces is two-fold — to find more users, and give them more to do.

With 1.9 billion users, Facebook is coming up against the natural limits of its growth. It already reaches more than 20 percent of the 7 billion people on the planet. In the U.S., Canada and Europe, its user growth has been somewhat flat for several years. Competitors such as Snapchat, whose parent company Snap recently went public, are popular with teens and 20-somethings.

“There are no more users to tap into in mature countries,” said Brian Blau, research vice president at research firm Gartner. That leaves the rest of the world, where Facebook continues to grow quickly.

Facebook has worked through an initiative called internet.org to expand global connectivity through programs such as Aquila, a solar-powered drone that delivers wi-fi, and Free Basics, which offers access to websites and other services. While the company said last year that it has helped connect more than 40 million people worldwide, Facebook has stumbled in some of these efforts, such as in India.

Ads

Facebook’s other big challenge is to deliver more services and features to its existing users so they spend more time during the day in Facebook’s world and, therefore, see more advertisements.

To that end, the conference’s events include sessions on advertisements, games, virtual reality and augmented reality, mixing the digital and virtual realms.

Messenger

One thing Facebook will likely focus on is offering developers more features for Messenger, its homegrown messaging service, Blau said. The company may decide to allow Messenger, which already has more than 1.2 billion users, to be more independent from Facebook itself, competing against big global messaging systems such as Kik, WeChat, Line and others.

“If you think about it, Facebook’s mission has always been around community and communication and online social activities,” Blau said. “And providing communication to people who don’t have that is a way to do it.”
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Traditionally built houses in old Europe are vulnerable to earthquakes, which again was demonstrated last August when a 6.2 magnitude quake devastated an area in central Italy. Italian engineers are researching ways to minimize the damage. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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The impact of automation on U.S. jobs is open to debate. Robots have displaced millions of manufacturing workers, and automation is getting cheaper and more common, raising concerns it will eventually supplant far more workers in the services sector of the economy, which includes everything from truck driving to banking. 

University of Virginia Darden School of Business Professor Ed Hess says we are just starting to see automation’s impact. “It is going to be broad and it is going to be deep,” he said, adding that “tens of millions” of jobs could be at risk.

Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show 5 million U.S. manufacturing jobs have disappeared already.

While some politicians blame trade for the job losses, most economists say automation is mainly to blame as robots do routine factory tasks previously done by humans. 

Hess calls self-driving cars and trucks a threat to millions of human jobs, and says fast-food workers are also vulnerable, as companies install electronic kiosks to take restaurant orders. McDonalds says displaced workers will be reassigned to other tasks.

The professor says research shows nearly half of U.S. jobs could be automated, including retail store clerks, doctors who scan X-rays for disease, administrative workers, legal staffers, and middle managers.

Future of jobs

Starting more than a century ago, advancing technology changed the United States from an agrarian to a manufacturing economy. Displaced farm hands eventually found factory work, but the transition took years. This new transition may also take a time because, Hess says, “We’re not going to anywhere produce the number of jobs that we automate.”

But 50 years of experience in banking shows that while automation may change the industry, it does not necessarily end jobs for humans. 

The first Automatic Teller Machines, or ATMs, were installed 50 years ago, and there are now 420,000 in the United States. International Monetary Fund analysis shows the number of human tellers did not drop, but rose slightly.

“Humans were doing mostly service and routine types of tasks that could be converted into more automated tasks,” Tremont Capital Group’s Sam Ditzion said. But “the humans then became far more valuable in customer service and in sales in these branches.”

In a Skype interview, Ditzion said that while automation can be “scary,” the oversight of ATMs created new kinds of work for “tens of thousands of people.”

Automation grows

A report by Redwood Software and the Center for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) says surging investment and falling prices will help robotics grow.

Redwood’s software handles business processes that are repetitive, rule-bound and tedious.

CEBR Economist David Whitaker says as growing fleets of robots take over mundane tasks, higher productivity could bring higher wages for some human workers. He says people who want to stay employed must hone skills that robots can’t handle, such as unpredictable work or the need for an emotional human connection.

One example, according to Alex Bentley of Blue Prism software, is a program that helps law firms examine visa applications. The robot enters data but gets help from a human partner with problems such as missing information. Bentley says some human jobs have been lost, but in other cases displaced workers move within the firm to new work, particularly jobs that are “customer-centric.”

U.S. Senator Chris Coons says Germany and other nations use training programs to help their citizens get and keep jobs in a changing economy. The Democrat says America’s competitors invest six times what the U.S. does in skills development and workforce training, while Washington has slashed funding for such programs. Coons and a Republican colleague, Senator Thom Tillis, are seeking more help for schools, companies, workers and government agencies operating programs to upgrade the workforce.

New opportunities

While workers need to make some changes, philosopher and professor Ed Freeman of UVA’s Darden School of Business says companies also need to rethink their basic purpose. He says businesses must do more than just maximize value for shareholders.

“I need red blood cells to live,” he said. “It doesn’t follow that the purpose of my life is to make red blood cells. Companies need profits to live, it doesn’t follow that the purpose of a company is to make profits. We have to think through this idea about what purpose is in business.”

Freeman says he is “optimistic” because many jobs, such as creating applications for smartphones that would have been unimaginable a few years ago, are creating thousands of opportunities. He is also encouraged by his many students who, he says, bring new ideas, passion and energy to the task of starting businesses that will create new kinds of jobs.

Freeman is convinced that the problem isn’t the tsunami of lost jobs, it is the lack of “really good ideas” for creating a safety net for people who will lose jobs to automation.

Many experts worry about growing levels of automation — particularly advanced forms known as artificial intelligence — hurting employment for U.S. workers.

But U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin says it will be “50 or 100 years” before artificial intelligence takes American jobs. In an interview with Mike Allen of AXIOS, Mnuchin said, “I think we are so far away from that, [it is] not even on my radar screen.”
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Wi-Fi is very simply a way to send information via short-range radio. That can be a problem, though, when a lot of people are using the same open network at the same time. But a relatively new technology using light bulbs could help relieve that overwhelmed Wi-Fi network. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Hackers released documents and files Friday that cybersecurity experts said indicated the U.S. National Security Agency had accessed the SWIFT interbank messaging system, allowing it to monitor money flows among some Middle Eastern and Latin American banks.

The release included computer code that could be adapted by criminals to break into SWIFT servers and monitor messaging activity, said Shane Shook, a cyber security consultant who has helped banks investigate breaches of their SWIFT systems.

The documents and files were released by a group calling themselves The Shadow Brokers. Some of the records bear NSA seals, but Reuters could not confirm their authenticity.

The NSA could not immediately be reached for comment.

 

Holes in Windows

Also published were many programs for attacking various versions of the Windows operating system, at least some of which still work, researchers said.

In a statement to Reuters, Microsoft, maker of Windows, said it had not been warned by any part of the U.S. government that such files existed or had been stolen.

“Other than reporters, no individual or organization has contacted us in relation to the materials released by Shadow Brokers,” the company said.

The absence of warning is significant because the NSA knew for months about the Shadow Brokers breach, officials previously told Reuters. Under a White House process established by former President Barack Obama’s staff, companies were usually warned about dangerous flaws.

Bangladesh heist

Shook said criminal hackers could use the information released Friday to hack into banks and steal money in operations mimicking a heist last year of $81 million from the Bangladesh central bank.

“The release of these capabilities could enable fraud like we saw at Bangladesh Bank,” Shook said.

The SWIFT messaging system is used by banks to transfer trillions of dollars each day. Belgium-based SWIFT downplayed the risk of attacks employing the code released by hackers Friday.

SWIFT said it regularly releases security updates and instructs client banks on how to handle known threats.

“We mandate that all customers apply the security updates within specified times,” SWIFT said in a statement.

SWIFT said it had no evidence that the main SWIFT network had ever been accessed without authorization.

It was possible that the local messaging systems of some SWIFT client banks had been breached, SWIFT said in a statement, which did not specifically mention the NSA.

When cyberthieves robbed the Bangladesh Bank last year, they compromised that bank’s local SWIFT network to order money transfers from its account at the New York Federal Reserve.

NSA and SWIFT

The documents released by the Shadow Brokers on Friday indicate that the NSA may have accessed the SWIFT network through service bureaus. SWIFT service bureaus are companies that provide an access point to the SWIFT system for the network’s smaller clients and may send or receive messages regarding money transfers on their behalf.

“If you hack the service bureau, it means that you also have access to all of their clients, all of the banks,” said Matt Suiche, founder of the United Arab Emirates-based cybersecurity firm Comae Technologies, who has studied the Shadow Broker releases and believes the group has access to NSA files.

The documents posted by the Shadow Brokers include Excel files listing computers on a service bureau network, user names, passwords and other data, Suiche said.

“That’s information you can only get if you compromise the system,” he said.

Cris Thomas, a prominent security researcher with the cybersecurity firm Tenable, said the documents and files released by the Shadow Brokers show “the NSA has been able to compromise SWIFT banking systems, presumably as a way to monitor, if not disrupt, financial transactions to terrorists groups.”

Thwarting terrorists

Since the early 1990s, interrupting the flow of money from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and elsewhere to al-Qaida, the Taliban, and other militant Islamic groups in Afghanistan, Pakistan and other countries has been a major objective of U.S. and allied intelligence agencies.

Mustafa Al-Bassam, a computer science researcher at University College London, said on Twitter that the Shadow Brokers documents show that the “NSA hacked a bunch of banks, oil and investment companies in Palestine, UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, Yemen, more.”

He added that NSA “completely hacked” EastNets, one of two SWIFT service bureaus named in the documents that were released by the Shadow Brokers.

Reuters could not independently confirm that EastNets had been hacked. And EastNets, based in Dubai, denied it had been hacked in a statement, calling the assertion “totally false and unfounded.” 

EastNets ran a “complete check of its servers and found no hacker compromise or any vulnerabilities,” according to a statement from EastNets’ chief executive and founder, Hazem Mulhim.

Snowden documents

In 2013, documents released by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden said the NSA had been able to monitor SWIFT messages.

The agency monitored the system to spot payments intended to finance crimes, according to the documents released by Snowden.

Reuters could not confirm whether the documents released Friday by the Shadow Brokers, if authentic, were related to NSA monitoring of SWIFT transfers since 2013.

Some of the documents released by the Shadow Brokers were dated 2013, but others were not dated. The documents released by the hackers did not clearly indicate whether the NSA had actually used all the techniques cited for monitoring SWIFT messages.
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Apple is joining the fiercely competitive race to design self-driving cars, raising the possibility that a company that has already re-shaped culture with its iPhone may try to transform transportation, too.

 

Ending years of speculation, Apple’s late entry into a crowded field was made official Friday with the disclosure that the California Department of Motor Vehicles had awarded a permit for the company to start testing its self-driving car technology on public roads in the state.

 

The permit covers three vehicles — all 2015 Lexus RX 450h hybrid SUVs — and six individual drivers. California law requires people to be in a self-driving car who can take control if something goes wrong.

 

Apple Goes Mobile … In a New Way

 

Apple confirmed its arrival in the self-driving car market, but wouldn’t discuss its intentions. Its interest in autonomous vehicle technology, however, has long been clear .

 

The Cupertino, California, company pointed to a statement that it issued in December. “Apple is investing heavily in machine learning and autonomous systems,” the company said then. “There are many potential applications for these technologies, including the future of transportation.”

 

Apple released that statement after Steve Kenner, a former Ford Motor executive who is now Apple’s director of product integrity, notified federal regulators of the company’s interest in self-driving cars in a letter.

 

Like others, Apple believes self-driving cars could ease congestion and save millions of people who die annually in traffic accidents often caused by drunk or distracted motorists.

 

Self-driving cars could also be a lucrative new market. And Apple has been searching for its next act for a while, one that will take it beyond its mainstay phones, tablets and personal computers.

 

A Next Big Thing

 

Although iPhone’s ongoing popularity has helped Apple remain the world’s most valuable company, the company hasn’t had a breakthrough product since the 2010 debut of the iPad, currently in the throes of a three-year sales slump. The dry spell has raised doubts as to whether Apple lost some of its trend-setting magic with the death of co-founder Steve Jobs in 2011.

 

Apple will be vying against 29 other companies that already have California permits to test self-driving cars. The list includes major automakers, including Ford, General Motors, BMW, Volkswagen and Tesla, as well as one of its biggest rivals in technology, Google, whose testing of self-driving cars has been spun off into an affiliate called Waymo.

 

Since Google began its work on self-driving vehicles eight years ago, Waymo’s fleet of self-driving cars has logged more than 2 million miles on the road.

 

That means Apple has a long way to catch up in self-driving technology. But it has often been a follower in markets that it eventually revolutionized. It wasn’t the first to introduce a digital music player, smartphone, or tablet before its iPod, iPhone and iPad came out.

 

Deep Pockets

 

With $246 billion in cash, Apple also could easily afford to buy technology that accelerates its development of self-driving cars. There has been recurring speculation that Apple might eventually acquire Tesla, which has a market value of about $50 billion. Neither Apple nor Tesla has given any inkling that they’re interested in joining forces, though.

 

Speculation about Apple’s interest in expanding into automobiles began swirling in 2015 amid media reports that the company had begun secretly working on building its own electric car under the name project “Titan.” Apple never confirmed the existence of Titan, which is now believed to be dead.
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The so-called “Mother of All Bombs,” may be the biggest conventional weapon in the U.S. arsenal, but it’s not the biggest non-nuclear bomb in the world.

That title goes to Russia’s “Father of All Bombs,” which is reportedly four times heavier than the 10,300-kilogram Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB), the official name of the U.S. GBU-43/B.

FOAB is also quite a different kind of bomb. While the MOAB is conventional, the FOAB is thermobaric, meaning it uses oxygen in the atmosphere to increase the damaging effects.

According to Business Insider, the FOAB explodes in midair with a “fuel-air mixture” that, according to the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, creates an intense “pressure wave” as well as a vacuum that “ruptures the lungs.”

Even if the fuel does not ignite, it’s highly toxic and likely deadly to anyone coming into contact with it, the DIA wrote.

The blast radius of the FOAB is around 300 meters, with an explosion equivalent to 44 tons of TNT, Reuters reported.

On Thursday, the U.S. military used its MOAB for the first time on the battlefield, dropping it on tunnels in Afghanistan that were reportedly used by Islamic State terrorists.
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CIA Director Mike Pompeo defended the need for secrecy in United States government agencies tasked with keeping the country safe. In a public discussion Thursday, he warned against celebrating individuals who steal U.S. classified documents and make them public, like Edward Snowden and Julian Assange. Pompeo said Americans should realize these “whistleblowers” act in their own interest and sometimes in the interest of a hostile country. Zlatica Hoke reports.
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk says the company plans to unveil an electric semi-truck in September.

 

Musk tweeted the announcement Thursday. He offered no other details about the semi, such as whether it will be equipped with Tesla’s partially self-driving Autopilot mode.

 

Musk also said the company plans to unveil a pickup truck in 18 to 24 months.

 

Tesla currently sells two electric vehicles, the Model S sedan and Model X SUV. Its lower-cost Model 3 electric car is due out by the end of this year.

 

But Musk revealed last summer that the Palo Alto, California-based company is working on several more vehicles, including the semi and a minibus.

 

Tesla shares rose nearly 3 percent in late trading Thursday in response to Musk’s tweet.
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Microsoft Corp said on Thursday it had received at least a thousand surveillance requests from the U.S. government that sought user content for foreign intelligence purposes during the first half of 2016.

The amount, shared in Microsoft’s biannual transparency report, was more than double what the company said it received under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) during the preceding six-month interval, and was the highest the company has listed since 2011, when it began tracking such government surveillance orders.

The scope of spying authority granted to U.S. intelligence agencies under FISA has come under renewed scrutiny in recent weeks, sparked in part by evolving, unsubstantiated assertions from President Donald Trump and other Republicans that the Obama White House improperly spied on Trump and his associates.

Microsoft said it received between 1,000 and 1,499 FISA orders for user content between January and June of 2016, compared to between 0 and 499 during both January-June 2015 as well as the second half of 2015.

The number of user accounts impacted by FISA orders fell during the same period, however, from between 17,500 and 17,999 to between 12,000 and 12,499, according to the report.

The U.S. government only allows companies to report the volume of FISA requests in wide bands rather than specific numbers.

FISA orders, which are approved by judges who sit on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, are tightly guarded national security secrets. Even the existence of a specific FISA order is rarely disclosed publicly.

The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that the FBI obtained a FISA order to monitor the communications of former Trump advisor Carter Page as part of an investigation into possible links between Russia and Trump’s presidential campaign.

Parts of FISA will expire at the end of the year, unless U.S. lawmakers vote to reauthorize it. Privacy advocates in Congress have been working to attach new transparency and oversight reforms to any FISA legislation, and to limit government searches of American data that is incidentally collected during foreign surveillance operations.

Microsoft also for the first time published a national security letter, a type of warrantless surveillance order used by the FBI.

Other technology companies, including Twitter Inc and Yahoo Inc, have also disclosed national security letters in recent months under a transparency measure of the USA Freedom Act that was enacted into law by the U.S. Congress in 2015.
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Facebook said on Thursday it is taking action against tens of thousands of fake accounts in France as the social network giant seeks to demonstrate it is doing more to halt the spread of spam as well as fake news, hoaxes and misinformation.

The Silicon Valley-based company is under intense pressure as governments across Europe threaten new laws unless Facebook moves quickly to remove extremist propaganda or other content illegal under existing regulation  

Social media sites including Twitter, Google’s YouTube and Facebook also are under scrutiny for their potential to be used to manipulate voters in national elections set to take place in France and Germany in coming months.

In a blog post, Facebook said it was taking action against 30,000 fake accounts in France, deleting them in some, but not all, cases. It said its priority was to remove fake accounts with high volumes of posting activity and the biggest audiences.

“We’ve made improvements to recognize these inauthentic accounts more easily by identifying patterns of activity — without assessing the content itself,” Shabnam Shaik, a Facebook security team manager, wrote in an official blog post.

For example, the company said it is using automated detection to identify repeated posting of the same content or an increase in messages sent by such profiles.

Also on Thursday, Facebook took out full-page ads in Germany’s best-selling newspapers to educate readers on how to spot fake news.

In April, the German cabinet approved proposed new laws to force social networks to play a greater role in combating online hate speech or face fines of up to 50 million euros ($53 million).  

These actions by Facebook follow moves the company has taken in recent months to make it easier for users to report potential fraud amid criticism of the social network’s role in the spread of hoaxes and fake news during the U.S. presidential elections.

It has also begun working with outside fact-checking organizations to flag stories with disputed content, and removed financial incentives that help spammers to cash in by generating advertising revenue from clicks on false news stories.

 
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Austin Russell, now 22, was barely old enough to drive when he set out to create a safer navigation system for robot-controlled cars. His ambitions are about to be tested.

 

Five years ago, Russell co-founded Luminar Technologies, a Silicon Valley startup trying to steer the rapidly expanding self-driving car industry in a new direction. Luminar kept its work closely guarded until Thursday, when the startup revealed the first details about a product Russell is touting as a far more powerful form of “lidar,” a key sensing technology used in autonomous vehicles designed by Google, Uber and major automakers.

 

Lidar systems work by bouncing lasers off nearby objects and measuring the reflections to build up a detailed 3-D picture of the surrounding environment. The technology is similar to radar, which uses radio waves instead of lasers.

 

Russell says Luminar’s version, consisting of its own patented hardware and software, will provide 50 times more resolution and 10 times the range of current lidar systems. Those improvements, he said, will enable self-driving cars to be sold on the mass market more quickly.

 

Thiel backbone

 

During an interview in an empty warehouse on a San Francisco pier where Luminar has been testing its lidar, Russell wasn’t shy about making big claims for its technology. “When you see your vehicle is powered by Luminar, you will know you will be safer,” he said. “We need to get to the point where humans don’t have to constantly baby-sit and take control” of autonomous cars.

 

If Luminar’s lidar lives up to its promise, some of the world’s biggest technology and auto companies may have been upstaged by a precocious entrepreneur who says he memorized all the periodic table of the elements when he was 2 years old. By the time he turned 11, Russell says he was tinkering with supercomputers.

 

Like another technology prodigy — Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg — Russell won the early support of PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, who became a billionaire after investing $500,000 in Facebook during the company’s infancy.

 

One of Luminar’s early investors is a venture capital firm backed by Thiel and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. Russell also dropped out of Stanford University after just three months when he won a Thiel fellowship, which pays students $100,000 to work on promising ideas instead of pursuing a degree.

 

Cost or safety?

 

Also like Zuckerberg, Russell is CEO of his company. Most of Luminar’s roughly 150 employees are older than him, including his former mentor in photonics, 45-year-old Jason Eichenholz, now the company’s chief technology officer. Russell’s father, a former commercial real estate specialist, is the company’s chief financial officer.

 

Now Russell will have to prove he has indeed invented something revolutionary.

 

While lidar is a key component in self-driving clears, some believe Luminar may be working on the wrong problem. The big issue for lidar systems these days is cost, not safety, said Alex Lidow, CEO of Efficient Power Conversion, which supplies chips for lidar. The systems currently cost thousands of dollars apiece.

 

“You don’t need the resolution that would allow a car to stop before a bug hits its windshield,” Lidow said. “The question comes down to, what is the exact right amount of information for the car to make exactly the right decision all the time?”

 

Luminar plans to being manufacturing 10,000 lidar units at a 50,000-square-foot plant in Orlando, Florida, this year. Russell won’t disclose what they’ll cost. About 100 of the lidar systems will be tested by four makers of autonomous cars that Luminar isn’t identifying. The partners include technology companies and automakers, Russell said.

 

The lidar landscape

 

Luminar will be competing against other lidar suppliers such as Velodyne and Quanergy Systems, which have each raised $150 million so far. Velodyne’s backers include Ford Motor, which invested $75 million last summer .

 

By comparison, Luminar has raised $36 million, some of which has been used to set up its headquarters on a former Silicon Valley ranch that used to be home for a collection of vintage military tanks.

 

Waymo, a company spun off from Google’s early work on self-driving cars, also looms as an imposing competitor. It hopes to sell its technology, which includes a lidar system, to automakers.

 

One sign of lidar’s importance: Waymo has accused Uber of stealing its technology in a high-profile legal battle. Uber has denied the allegations , contending it is designing its own superior lidar system.

 

Waymo’s lidar has a solid track record so far. Its self-driving cars have logged more than 2 million miles in autonomous mode on city streets without being involved in a major traffic accident. Most of the roughly three dozen accidents that Google had reported through last year were fender benders.

 

Russell isn’t impressed. “It’s very easy to build an autonomous vehicle that is safe 99 percent of the time,” he said. “It’s that other 1 percent that’s the tricky part.”

 

 
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Apple has hired a team of biomedical engineers as part of a secret initiative, initially envisioned by late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, to develop sensors to treat diabetes, CNBC reported citing three people familiar with the matter.

An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment.

The engineers are expected to work at a nondescript office in Palo Alto, California, close to the corporate headquarters, CNBC said.

The news comes at the time when the line between pharmaceuticals and technology is blurring as companies are joining forces to tackle chronic diseases using high-tech devices that combine biology, software and hardware, thereby jump-starting a novel field of medicine called bioelectronics.

Last year, GlaxoSmithKline and Google parent Alphabet unveiled a joint company aimed at marketing bioelectronic devices to fight illness by attaching to individual nerves.

U.S. biotech firms Setpoint Medical and EnteroMedics Inc. have already shown early benefits of bioelectronics in treating rheumatoid arthritis and suppressing appetite in the obese.

Other companies playing around the idea of bioelectronics include Medtronic Plc, Proteus Digital Technology, Sanofi SA and Biogen.

 
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