University of Maryland researchers came to a recently held energy summit in Washington DC to show how air-conditioning technology could also be made more efficient. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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“Hackers,” whether they’re Wikileaks or malicious computer coders, have a bad reputation. But there are also hackers who are simply trying to create a more user-friendly world. Think of them as New Age do-it-yourselfers.
And they have playgrounds where they do their hacking.
Hacker Safe Spaces
Tinkerers around the world are starting to come together at so-called hacker spaces, to share tools and camaraderie. These hacker spaces include a member-financed club in a warehouse in Oakland, California called Ace Monster Toys.
Jose’s full time work is as an architect, but in his spare time, he hangs out at Ace Monster Toys so he can use big “toys” like a buzz saw.
He hacks guitars out of old wood, including one created entirely from triangular scraps of highly-prized purple heartwood that a carpenter had thrown away after completing a project.
Different rooms, different tech
Rachel McCrafty, an artist, designer, and maker whose real name is Rachel Sadd, runs Ace Monster Toys. She says Jose’s work represents the heart of what they do here.
“That he made something epically beautiful out of trash,” she says, “that’s the essence, to me, of hacking.”
She says Ace is a great place to hack, tinker and collaborate on a variety of projects.
There’s a textile room, where quilt squares made in the beginner’s sewing class are displayed on one wall. The highlight is the club’s professional sewing machine.
In another part of the building, it’s more high-tech. Software engineer Walt joins Jason, a sound engineer, to experiment with Jason’s latest “toy.” It’s a programmable music cube he’s developed that flashes green and yellow as it changes pitch, all in a clear cube that’s no bigger than the palm of your hand.
Upstairs at an electrician’s table, red lights flash as part of a baton-sized gizmo for scaring pets away from cars. Kam, its creator, is a salesman for a semiconductor equipment maker. He says that he’s learned new ways to program gadgets, thanks to other Ace Club members.
In fact, the people who hack here say that one of the best things about this place, is the people who hack here.
“Whenever I run into problems, people here help me,” Kam says. “They are very nice people. Very helpful.”
McCrafty says she planned it that way.
“Our teachers are volunteers, our tool stewards are volunteers, our board members serve as volunteers. They’re just incredibly generous.”
A cooperative space
The club’s 150 members pay monthly dues to cover the building’s rent, and to get their hands on cool stuff, like a 3-D desktop printer, and a monster-sized laser cutter that can cleanly cut wood into the curvy front of an electric guitar, or make something as delicate as a paper octopus. Members can use the tools anytime, day or night. McCrafty says it works out, thanks to rules that emphasize communication and respect.
“Respect yourself. Be safe. Respect the space,” she says. “Respect the people you’re sharing with.”
These values pay off, as they did for Owen and Arun. The young entrepreneurs are here every day, all day, using computers in the club’s shared office space. They’re programming Amazon’s virtual assistant Alexa to be a virtual banking expert that readily answers financial questions.
By hanging out at Ace, Owen says they’ve learned more about how a high-tech probability model can enhance Alexa’s virtual banking expertise.
“It was actually our friend, Walt. We had just met him then, and he said, ‘Hey, I couldn’t help but overhear, you guys were talking about a Bayesian classifier. Let me tell you how I use that in my current job.'”
Looking around at his fellow hackers, Owen added, “So I think it’s pretty critical that we’re in a space where people are generous with their time, they’re super motivated and working on their own projects. It just creates these chance encounters.”
It all makes this hackerspace greater than the sum of its parts, or its members, all of them offering unique ways for people to “play” together.
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McDonald’s has started testing mobile order-and-pay after acknowledging the ordering process in its restaurants can be “stressful.”
The company says it will gather feedback from the test before launching the option nationally toward the end of the year. It says mobile order-and-pay is now available at 29 stores in Monterey and Salinas, California, and will expand to 51 more locations in Spokane, Washington, next week.
The rollout comes as customers increasingly seek out convenience through options like online ordering or delivery. McDonald’s CEO Steve Easterbrook has noted the initial stages of visiting can be “stressful,” and the chain is making changes to improve the overall customer experience. That includes introducing ordering kiosks, which McDonald’s says can help ease lines at the counter and improve the accuracy of orders – another frustration for customers. Easterbrook has also talked about the potential of delivery.
With its mobile order-and-pay option, McDonald’s says customers place an order on its app then go to a restaurant and “check in” to select how they want to get their food. That could be at the counter, in the drive-thru, or with curbside delivery, where an employee brings out orders to a designated space. Orders are prepared once customers check in at the restaurant.
Starbucks has already found success using its mobile app and loyalty program to encourage people to visit more often and spend more when they do. The chain has also said its mobile order-and-pay option was so popular that it caused congestion at pick-up counters last year, leading some customers who walked into stores to leave without buying anything. Starbucks said it is working on fixing those issues.
It’s not clear whether McDonald’s will be able to get the same level of usage for its mobile app and order-and-pay option. Since coffee tends to be more of a daily habit, for instance, people may be more willing to download an app for it on their phones.
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Those encrypted messaging apps you may have been using to avoid prying eyes had a major flaw that could have allowed access to hackers, according to a cybersecurity firm.
According to Check Point Software Technologies, both Telegram and WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, were vulnerable.
The company said it withheld the information until the security holes were patched, saying “hundreds of millions” of users could have been compromised.
The vulnerability involved infecting digital images with malicious code that would have been activated upon clicking the pic. That, according to Check Point, could have made accounts susceptible to hijacking.
“This new vulnerability put hundreds of millions of WhatsApp Web and Telegram Web users at risk of complete account take over,” Check Point head of product vulnerability Oded Vanunu said in a news release. “By simply sending an innocent looking photo, an attacker could gain control over the account, access message history, all photos that were ever shared, and send messages on behalf of the user.”
Both apps tout so-called end-to-end encryption to ensure privacy, but according to Check Point, that made it hard to spot malicious code.
Patching the vulnerability involved blocking the code before the messages were encrypted.
WhatsApp claims to have more than one billion users, while Telegram has more than 100 million.
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Hacking means tinkering, whether with computers, woodworking or really anything. Tinkerers around the world come together at hacker-spaces, to share tools, camaraderie and expertise. Shelley Schlender takes us to a hacker space in Oakland, California, called Ace Monster Toys, where members lend each other a “hacking” hand.
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Visitors to Bangalore, India, these days can see street art, have beer at local microbreweries or take an Uber ride to a distant neighborhood to meet with venture capitalists about a recent startup that grabbed their attention.
Gone are the days of a city dominated by call centers and American visa seekers.
“There’s an artisanal hot dog place there,” Sean Blagsvedt, founder of online job portal Babajob, said of a nearby neighborhood, speaking over his plate of salmon sashimi. “You have a bazillion 20-something tech people who don’t like to cook and suddenly have a [large amount] of money to start paying for interesting food. … You saw the same things in San Francisco.”
A wide variety of dining options, nightlife and other activities has blossomed alongside the tech industry in “India’s Silicon Valley.”
Bangalore was rated the most dynamic city in the world, two spots ahead of California’s Silicon Valley — which isn’t a city but was ranked as one — by the JLL City Momentum Index this year. The index looks at more than 100 cities around the world, rated by their “ability to embrace technological change, absorb rapid population growth and strengthen global connectivity.”
Not looking abroad
Call centers and outsourced IT workers still make up a part of Bangalore, but a vibrant crowd of modern, enthusiastic, tech-minded people has grown to dominate the city — and for most of them, the promise of “a better life” abroad is not on their radar.
Bangalore, however, has been attracting Americans and Europeans to start companies in India for Indians. And this phenomenon is hardly new.
Blagsvedt, who is also Babajob’s CEO, moved to Bangalore from his hometown of Seattle, Washington, when he was 28 to work with Microsoft. Although Blagsvedt enjoyed his work, he felt compelled to work more directly with Indians, for Indians.
“I always had this nagging thing, like, am I doing enough to address the inequity that I saw, am I doing enough to make the best use of my skills, to try to do something important to make a difference?” he said.
After reading a study that said to get out of poverty, one needed to either change jobs or start a successful business, Blagsvedt was inspired to change how people found those positions.
“If only we could find a way to digitize all the jobs, make it accessible to people who don’t use computers, and digitize the social network, then we might be able to catalyze the escape from poverty for a lot of people,” he said.
Twelve years, a successful company and a family later, Blagsvedt is “more Bangalorean than me!” according to an Indian on his team, Akshay Chaturvedi.
In the past 10 years, however, it’s not just Americans and Europeans with humanitarian motivations who are starting companies in Bangalore.
Indians, even those who paid for American educations and planned to pay off those debts with American jobs, have seen the increasing opportunity back home.
‘A lot of vibrancy’
“[There is] a lot of young talent trying to build solutions that are uniquely India on almost every sector, whether that’s health services, education, digital media, even financial inclusion,” said Vani Kola, a venture capitalist who has been in Bangalore for 10 years after working in Silicon Valley. “I see a lot of vibrancy with respect to opportunity for building unique companies with unique solutions for India.”
And Indians have taken advantage of that opportunity. The number of startups in Bangalore rivals those in the top tech cities around the world. In 2015, San Francisco research firm Compass rated Bangalore as the second fastest-growing startup ecosystem in the world, and it was the only Asian city besides Singapore to place in the top 20 startup ecosystems.
Chaturvedi is one such person who, after completing a fellowship in the United States, returned to India, specifically Bangalore, to join the world of unique Indian startups.
“I can’t imagine my life without startups,” Chaturvedi told VOA. “Everything I do — I’m touched by a startup at least 20 times a day. Every single dinner I order by some food tech startup.”
In the days after we spoke with him at Babajob, Chaturvedi quit to work on his own startup — Leverage, an online platform for higher education services.
Although the question of the future of H1-B visas, a visa most often granted to IT workers from India, is on the minds of American companies that employ them, Bangalore seems less concerned.
“When students studied there, I said, ‘Look, there’s a lot of opportunity calling in India — can’t I do something here?’ That, I think, was a trend that was already there for the last few years,” Chaturvedi said. “And now [the] Indian economy seems to be strong and the opportunity from startups seems very viable in India.”
Fewer seeking H1-Bs
Blagsvedt holds a stronger opinion, saying that H1-B visas are exploitative, and that the rise of opportunity in Bangalore has limited the number of people desperate for those options.
“They haven’t raised that minimum salary in 22 years,” Blagsvedt said. “Now you tell me where you can hire a five-year programmer in Silicon Valley for $65,000 [a year]. You just can’t. And what does that guy have as recourse? If he doesn’t like the job, his visa is sponsored fully … he can’t complain, he can’t even switch jobs!”
Blagsvedt and Chaturvedi both said that in the Bangalore startup ecosystem, they had heard no talk, or worry, about the proposed changes to the U.S. visa program.
Chaturvedi did admit, however, that any threats to the H1-B program “would have been far scarier 10 years back.”
In today’s Bangalore, any widespread panic that Silicon Valley might imagine simply hasn’t taken hold.
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Mariana Costa Checa, a Peruvian entrepreneur, runs a coding boot camp for women in Peru, many of whom have no formal education.
She attended the South by Southwest conference and festivals in Austin, Texas, as part of a Peruvian contingent showing its work and sharing the challenges of starting an enterprise.
Entrepreneurship is one of the main themes at South by Southwest, which also includes artists, musicians, elected officials and company representatives.
Costa Checa spoke to VOA about overcoming challenges, including misconceptions of poverty.
“I grew up with a whole set of concepts around what getting a job entails, how to behave at work,” she said. “I realized if you grow up in a context where you’ve never seen someone working in an office, in a formal sector, then you don’t have that basis. … That entails a series of challenges in how to prepare someone to not only get a job, but be able to sustain a career.”
But helping underserved communities means truly understanding their conditions, she said.
“Much more goes into making a decision than just the sort of consumer aspect,” Costa Checa said. “A lot of it is the stress of poverty.”
Costa Checa was joined by Vania Masias, founder of D1 Asociacion Cultural, a dance program for at-risk youth in Lima.
Also attending was Isabel Medem, whose startup provides and services portable toilets in Peru’s poorest households.
Like other entrepreneurs here, she took a gamble.
“We didn’t know how long we would be around,” said Medem. “We didn’t know whether the model would be successful. So it was really, like, ‘Six months — we’ll just try and see.’ ”
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The mysterious Facebook blogger kept dishing up alleged government secrets. One day it was a shadowy faction looting cash from Uganda’s presidential palace with impunity. The next was a claim that the president was suffering from a debilitating illness.
For authorities in a country that has seen just one president since 1986, the critic who goes by Tom Voltaire Okwalinga is an example of the threat some African governments see in the exploding reach of the internet – bringing growing attempts to throttle it.
Since 2015 about a dozen African countries have had wide-ranging internet shutdowns, often during elections. Rights defenders say the blackouts are conducive to carrying out serious abuses.
The internet outages also can inflict serious damage on the economies of African countries that desperately seek growth, according to research by the Brookings Institution think tank.
Uganda learned that lesson. In February 2016, amid a tight election, authorities shut down access to Facebook and Twitter as anger swelled over delayed delivery of ballots in opposition strongholds. During the blackout, the police arrested the president’s main challenger. Over $2 million was shed from the country’s GDP in just five days of internet restrictions, the Brookings Institution said.
The shutdowns also have “potential devastating consequences” for education and health, says the Mo Ibrahim Foundation, an organization founded by a mobile phone magnate that monitors trends in African governance.
As more countries gain the technology to impose restrictions, rights observers see an urgent threat to democracy.
“The worrying trend of disrupting access to social media around polling time puts the possibility of a free and fair electoral process into serious jeopardy,” said Maria Burnett, associate director for the Africa division of Human Rights Watch.
In the past year, internet shutdowns during elections have been reported in Gabon, Republic of Congo and Gambia, where a long-time dictator cut off the internet on the eve of a vote he ultimately lost.
In Uganda, where the opposition finds it hard to organize because of a law barring public meetings without the police chief’s authorization, the mysterious blogger Okwalinga is widely seen as satisfying a hunger for information that the state would like to keep secret. His allegations, however, often are not backed up with evidence.
It is widely believed that Uganda’s government has spent millions trying to unmask Okwalinga. In January an Irish court rejected the efforts of a Ugandan lawyer who wanted Facebook to reveal the blogger’s identity over defamation charges.
“What Tom Voltaire Okwalinga publishes is believable because the government has created a fertile ground to not be trusted,” said Robert Shaka, a Ugandan information technology specialist. “In fact, if we had an open society where transparency is a key pillar of our democracy there would be no reason for people like Tom Voltaire Okwalinga.”
In 2015, Shaka himself was arrested on suspicion of being the blogger and charged with violating the privacy of President Yoweri Museveni, allegations he denied. While Shaka was in custody, the mystery blogger kept publishing.
“Who is the editor of Facebook? Who is the editor of all these things they post on social media? Sometimes you have no option, if something is at stake, to interfere with access,” said Col. Shaban Bantariza, a spokesman for the Ugandan government.
Although the government doesn’t like to impose restrictions, the internet can be shut down if the objective is to preserve national security, Bantariza said.
In some English-speaking territories of Cameroon where the locals have accused the central government of marginalizing their language in favor of French, the government has shut down the internet for several weeks.
Internet advocacy group Access Now earlier estimated that the restrictions in Cameroon have cost local businesses more than $1.39 million.
“Internet shutdowns – with governments ordering the suspension or throttling of entire networks, often during elections or public protests – must never be allowed to become the new normal,” Access Now said in an open letter to internet companies in Cameroon, saying the shutdowns cut off access to vital information, e-financing and emergency services.
In Zimbabwe, social media is a relatively new concern for the government following online protests launched by a pastor last year. Aside from blocking social media at times, the government has increased internet fees by nearly 300 percent.
In Ethiopia, where a government-controlled company has a monopoly over all telecom services, internet restrictions have been deeply felt for months. The country remains under a state of emergency imposed in October after sometimes deadly anti-government protests. Restrictions have ranged from shutting down the internet completely to blocking access to social media sites.
Just 30 days of internet restrictions between July 2015 and July 2016 cost Ethiopia’s economy over $8 million, according to figures by the Brookings Institution. The country has been one of Africa’s fastest-growing economies.
Ethiopia’s government insists social media is being used to incite violence, but many citizens are suspicious of that stance.
“What we are experiencing here in Ethiopia is a situation in which the flow of information on social media dismantled the traditional propaganda machine of the government and people begin creating their own media platforms. This is what the government dislikes,” said Seyoum Teshome, a lecturer at Ethiopia’s Ambo University who was jailed for 82 days last year on charges of inciting violence related to his Facebook posts.
“The government doesn’t want the spread of information that’s out of its control, and this bears all the hallmarks of dictatorship,” Seyoum said.
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Facebook barred software developers on Monday from using the massive social network’s data to create surveillance tools, closing off a process that had been exploited by U.S. police departments to track protesters.
Facebook, its Instagram unit and rival Twitter came under fire last year from privacy advocates after the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said in a report that police were using location data and other user information to spy on protesters in places such as Ferguson, Missouri.
In response to the ACLU report, the companies shut off the data access of Geofeedia, a Chicago-based data vendor that said it works with organizations to “leverage social media,” but Facebook policy had not explicitly barred such use of data in the future.
“Our goal is to make our policy explicit,” Rob Sherman, Facebook’s deputy chief privacy officer, said in a post on the social network on Monday. He was not immediately available for an interview.
The change would help build “a community where people can feel safe making their voices heard,” Sherman said.
Racially charged protests broke out in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson in the aftermath of the August 2014 shooting of black teenager Michael Brown by a white police officer.
In a 2015 email message, a Geofeedia employee touted its “great success” covering the protests, according to the ACLU report based on government records.
Representatives of Geofeedia could not immediately be reached for comment on Monday. The company has worked with more than 500 law enforcement agencies, the ACLU said.
Geofeedia Chief Executive Officer Phil Harris said in October that the company was committed to privacy and would work to build on civil rights protections.
Major social media platforms including Twitter and Alphabet Inc’s YouTube have taken action or implemented policies similar to Facebook’s, said Nicole Ozer, technology and civil liberties policy director at the ACLU of Northern California.
Ozer praised the companies’ action but said they should have stopped such use of data earlier. “It shouldn’t take a public records request from the ACLU for these companies to know what their developers are doing,” she said.
It was also unclear how the companies would enforce their policies, said Malkia Cyril, executive director of the Center for Media Justice, a nonprofit that opposes government use of social media for surveillance.
Inside corporations, “is the will there, without constant activist pressure, to enforce these rules?” Cyril said.
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So what was the FBI doing at the South by Southwest Conference and Festivals in Austin, Texas, primarily known for music, movies and interactive media?
James Baker, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s general counsel, took the stage at a hotel in Austin, Texas, on Monday to present a human face to the issues of encryption and cyber security. He talked about the quandaries law enforcement grapples with in the digital age.
The FBI has been in the center of a maelstrom over Wikileaks disclosures about CIA practices, foreign government election tampering and whether President Donald Trump was subject to a wiretap when he was a presidential candidate.
Baker steered clear of those topics. Instead, he focused on an issue near to the heart of the tech-focused attendees: encryption of devices.
Still fresh in the audience’s minds was the San Bernardino, California, terror attack in 2015 that led to a standoff between law enforcement and Apple over one of the iPhones used by one of the attackers.
The FBI sought Apple’s help in getting access to the mobile phone. Apple balked, arguing that strong encryption was important to protect privacy. In the end, the government dropped its legal efforts to force Apple to open the phone and reportedly found other ways into the device.
But the case highlighted disagreements within American society, Baker said. In the last three months of 2016, the FBI received more than 2,000 devices from law enforcement agencies seeking access. The FBI had no solutions in nearly half of the devices.
“This is happening all the time,” he said. “It’s impeding investigations.”
While the questioner Jeffrey Herbst, chief executive of Newseum, spoke to Baker, audience members asked questions on Sli.do, a web-based Q&A and polling platform for live events.
Their focus showed an interest in the FBI’s greater maelstrom: “Is there any evidence that foreign governments tried to impact the campaign?” asked one questioner.
Baker did not address any questions on the issue but spoke broadly about security in the digital age.
“We have to do a better job at explaining the cost of having better encryption,” Baker said.
He suggested that lawmakers might break down the complex topic of encryption and look for areas where they can make progress, such as carving out new rules for devices law enforcement has in its possession to allow access. “What we don’t want to do is wait for an event to happen,” he said.
In the end, Baker said that the American people need to hold the FBI accountable and be skeptical about what it does, but also invest the time to understand the issues.
“The FBI has to deal with the reality of what is,” he said. “Not what we wish it to be.”
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As the director of the Carter Center’s Conflict Resolution Program, Lebanese-born Hrair Balian had a problem at the onset of the war in Syria in 2011.
“There really was a shortage of reliable information of developments on the ground,” he told VOA in an interview at the Atlanta headquarters of the Carter Center. “All we were seeing was propaganda.”
The widely used quote, “The first casualty when war comes is truth,” is evident today in Syria, where journalists have been killed and others forced or frightened out of the country.
Despite a gap in media coverage, however, a then-enterprising intern discovered reliable information was available, hiding in plain sight, due largely to the fact the Syrian conflict unfolded in a part of the world where many are connected, digitally.
“Syrians, and people in the Middle East in general, are two to four times more likely to share information about politics, and religious views online,” said that former intern, Christopher McNaboe, citing a Pew Research Center study on social media habits of those living in the Middle East.
“In the case of Syria, there’s just too much. Videos, Facebook posts, tweets, blogs, photos, you name it…Syrians are very active and passionate about getting information out,” he said.
“One of the first things we started seeing online was the announcement of defections. As the conflict turned violent, people started defecting from the Syrian security forces. And they did so online.”
McNaboe began documenting where those defections occurred in Syria, who the defectors aligned with, and who was joining them. It was information that started to give Balian a better understanding of the growing complexities of the conflict.
“Through this process, we’ve been able to document the formation of over 7,000 opposition armed groups in Syria. Not all of them remain active to this day.”
From a laptop computer, McNaboe demonstrates how he has compiled and charted the information, using different colored dots on an interactive map to show the positions of a variety of groups engaged in the conflict, over different periods of time. This interactive map allows users to watch the evolution of the conflict and the changing front lines of the war. Almost all of the information that helps illustrate the map is culled from the volume of material publicly available on social media.
“The information available online ranges anywhere from political statements, and defections, and armed group formations, to footage of the actual fighting, and humanitarian relief efforts; you name it,” says McNaboe.
“I think the Syrian conflict represents a major paradigm shift, a major change in the way in which conflict plays out,” he adds. “Previous conflicts did not take place in connected environments like Syria. There wasn’t YouTube. There wasn’t Twitter.”
Watching and documenting the information in that connected environment is now McNaboe’s full-time job as director of the Syria Conflict Mapping Project at the Carter Center, which former President Jimmy Carter says has been particularly useful for humanitarian organizations.
“So when the United Nations needs to find the best avenue to take in relief supplies, we can tell them which way to go,” he told VOA in a recent, exclusive interview.
The Carter Center also shares some of its Syria maps and reports publicly, making them available to non-profit organizations, governments and the news media.
“We give the same information to The New York Times, and to The Economist magazine, and other notable news media, so they can be accurate when they describe the location of folks inside Syria,” Carter says.
Accuracy was part of Carter’s motivation to share the information with Russian President Vladimir Putin when his forces entered Syria in 2015.
“When he got ready to join in, and bomb, factions within Syria, I wanted to make sure he would bomb the right ones or at least he knew what he was bombing,” Carter said. “So I sent him a message through his embassy and told him we have this capability within Syria to tell you where people are located; do you want to have that? So the next day I got a response from him, ‘Yes, I would like to have your maps.’ So we sent our maps, on a current basis, to President Putin.”
McNaboe says the intention was to engage in “direct and frank contact with the Russian government” and put the Russians on notice the Carter Center could monitor their targets in Syria; but, he stresses there is limited military value in the information the center compiles and shares.
“If you were analyzing exactly where an armed group were announcing themselves, maybe you could act upon it, but it’s unlikely that it would be timely enough for actual military action,” he says. “What we report on publicly, things like front lines, are widely known; but, we analyze and structure the data in ways so that we can get insights to the bigger trends in the conflict.”
McNaboe says the information the Carter Center gathers is based on material publicly available to anyone with the means to compile and understand it.
“Any participant in the Syrian conflict, almost everybody has engaged online,” he says.
“It happens that with these kinds of transmissions, the people are very eager to identify themselves,” Carter told VOA.
Despite any perceived military or intelligence value of the information, McNaboe says the Carter Center doesn’t share information they believe would put people at risk.
“If you are a combatant in the conflict and you don’t know where the front lines are, our information is not going to help you too much,” McNaboe says. “So we are careful about what we make totally public. We want our effort to pursue peace and support peace efforts, and do everything it can to reduce the risk to any civilian or participant in the conflict.”
A conflict now entering its seventh year, at a time when more U.S. military forces are joining the fight on the ground, engaged in a war with no clear end in sight.
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While Peru is best known for the ancient Inca city, Machu Picchu, for certain aspiring entrepreneurs, it’s also home to innovative, social enterprises. But doing good isn’t always enough when it comes to launching a startup in developing nations like Peru. VOA reporter Tina Trinh met with entrepreneurs who say they had to overcome their misconceptions of poverty.
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Before Donald Trump’s election, Laurence Berland viewed political protest as a sort of curiosity. He was in a good place to see it: San Francisco’s Mission District, once an immigrant enclave in the country’s heartland of radicalism that is increasingly populated by people like him — successful tech workers driving up rents while enjoying a daily commute to Silicon Valley on luxury motor coaches.
Berland regarded the activism of his adopted city with a mix of empathy and bemusement, checking out Occupy Wall Street demonstrations and protests against the gentrification of his own neighborhood. But now there is less distance between him and activists on the street.
On a recent day, Berland stood with about 100 others — from software engineers like himself to those who work in tech company cafeterias — outside a downtown museum for a rally against Trump. A clipboard-carrying organizer approached Berland to ask if he wanted to join a network of grassroots activists, but Berland waved him away. He had already signed up.
In the place that fought against the Vietnam War and for gay rights and, more recently, has been roiled by dissent over the technology industry’s impact on economic inequality, an unlikely alliance has formed in the left’s resistance against Trump. Old-school, anti-capitalist activists and new-school, free-enterprise techies are pushing aside their differences to take on a common foe.
For years, these two strands of liberal America have been at each other’s throats. There’ve been protests against evictions of those who can’t afford the Bay Area’s ever-soaring rents. And think back, not so long ago, to the raucous rallies to block those fancy buses shuttling tech workers from city neighborhoods to the Silicon Valley campus of Google, where Berland once worked.
Cat Brooks, a Black Lives Matter activist in Oakland, has seen the toll the tech industry has taken on some. Her daughter’s elementary school teacher just moved to a distant suburb after her rent skyrocketed, and Brooks thinks more tech money must find its way into local communities. She nevertheless welcomes the infusion of new energy to the protest arena.
“It’s not about the business of we were here first,” Brooks said. “We’re about the business of how can we support? Division at this time is not helpful.”
The tech industry opposition started when Trump imposed his initial travel ban on immigrants and refugees from seven majority-Muslim nations. The industry prides itself on its openness to immigrants, who comprise about one-quarter of the U.S. technology and science workforce and include the founders of iconic institutions.
Nearly 100 tech companies, including Google, Facebook and Uber, filed a court brief urging suspension of the ban, while Google co-founder Sergey Brin, a Russian immigrant, joined protests at San Francisco International Airport. That was followed by an unprecedented company-wide walkout at Google and now, on March 14, nationwide rallies are planned for a “Tech Stands Up” day of protest.
“People whose pedigree is knocking on doors and calling representatives and waving signs are getting together with people who design apps,” said Ka-Ping Yee, a software engineer from Canada who is a legal permanent resident of the U.S. and who works at a startup to help immigrants send cash home. “People are working with people who do really, really different things because they realize it’s an emergency.”
After the election he helped create an online pledge, signed by thousands of technology workers, against building databases for any potential Muslim registries or to aid deportations of immigrants.
Some aren’t so sure about sharing the streets because they don’t think they share the same goals.
Franki Velez, an Iraq War veteran on disability, stood outside an Oakland rental office recently with other longtime activists and renters fighting eviction. There was not a technology worker in sight, and she worried that they are missing the point anyway. They want to change, but preserve, a system that’s benefited them, she said, while protesters like her want to tear the system down and start from scratch.
“They don’t understand it’s a colonial system that’s never meant to be reformed,” she said.
Still, while their approaches can be strikingly different, Velez’s causes are increasingly being adopted by people not like her.
Velez’s group marched to a Wells Fargo branch to hand over a demand that the bank stop investing in the Dakota Access Pipeline. Two hours later, in the comfortable Silicon Valley suburb of Campbell, biotech executive Michael Clark drew cheers after telling a gathering of anti-Trump activists that he’d closed his Wells Fargo account to protest the pipeline.
Clark grew up in New Hampshire and then in Silicon Valley, when his mother took a job at Apple in the 1990s. He always considered himself a political independent, a moderate. But Trump’s election horrified him and, with a friend who runs a gourmet chocolate shop, he founded a chapter of the national liberal group “Indivisible” in Campbell.
“The country has moved so much to the right that puts me in the middle with people I wouldn’t have previously been aligned with,” Clark said. “It’s interesting that someone like me is on the same side as a lot of socialists.”
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Humankind wastes a lot of energy, but thanks to new technologies, it is increasingly affordable to harvest and use it. At a recent energy summit in Washington, one of the participating commercial firms exhibited photovoltaic cells that turn waste heat into electricity. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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Sharing services are a growing trend in 21st economies. In London, the Spacehop website provides a marketplace where people who have unused living spaces can meet those looking for short-term work places. VOA’s Faiza Elmasry has more. Faith Lapidus narrates.
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Humankind wastes a lot of energy, but thanks to new technologies, it is increasingly affordable to harvest and use it. At a recent energy summit in Washington, one of the participating commercial firms exhibited photovoltaic cells that turn waste heat into electricity. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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Cars with no steering wheel, no pedals and nobody at all inside could be driving themselves on California roads by the end of the year, under proposed new state rules that would give a powerful boost to the fast-developing technology.
For the past several years, tech companies and automakers have been testing self-driving cars on the open road in California. But regulators insisted that those vehicles have steering wheels, foot controls and human backup drivers who could take over in an emergency.
On Friday, the state Department of Motor Vehicles proposed regulations that would open the way for truly driverless cars.
Under the rules, road-testing of such vehicles could begin by the end of 2017, and a limited number could become available to customers as early as 2018, provided the federal government gives the necessary permission.
Other states allow tests
Currently, federal automobile standards require steering wheels, though Washington has shown a desire to encourage self-driving technology.
While a few other states have permitted such testing, this is a major step forward for the industry, given California’s size as the most populous state, its clout as the nation’s biggest car market and its longtime role as a cultural trendsetter.
The proposed regulations also amount to the most detailed regulatory framework of any state.
“California has taken a big step. This is exciting,” said Bryant Walker Smith, a law professor at the University of South Carolina who tracks government policy on self-driving cars.
Rules maybe ready by year’s end
The rules are subject to a public hearing and a comment period and could change. Regulators hope to put them in effect by December.
The proposal is more than two years overdue, reflecting complex questions of safety and highly advanced technology.
“We don’t want to race to meet a deadline,” said Bernard Soriano, a leader of the motor vehicle agency’s self-driving program. “We want to get this right.”
In one important change from prior drafts, once a manufacturer declares its technology is road-ready, it can put its cars on the market. That self-certification approach mirrors how federal officials regulate standard cars, and represents a big victory for such major players as Waymo, Google’s self-driving car project.
Also under the proposed regulations, any driverless car still must be remotely monitored and able to pull itself over safely in an emergency.
Consumer Watchdog objects
A Waymo spokesman had no immediate comment. The chief skeptic of the technology, California-based Consumer Watchdog, said the proposal does not protect the public.
“The new rules are too industry-friendly,” Consumer Watchdog’s John Simpson said in a statement.
The technology is developing quickly. More than a year ago, a Waymo prototype with no steering wheel or pedals drove a blind man on city streets in Texas.
Are they safer?
Supporters say the cars may one day be far safer than those with humans at the wheel, since the machinery won’t drive distracted, drunk or drowsy.
During road-testing in California, self-driving cars with human backup drivers are believed to have caused a few collisions.
A year ago, Waymo reported that during the 424,331 miles its cars had driven themselves, a human driver intervened 11 times to avoid a collision. In an update earlier this year, Waymo said its fleet had driven 636,868 miles in autonomous mode; it did not say how many crashes were avoided.
In all, 27 companies have Department of Motor Vehicles permits to test on California roads.
Waymo was able to legally put its prototype on the road in Texas because state law there does not prohibit a fully driverless car. Other states have explicitly invited the technology onto its roads, including Michigan, whose governor signed a bill in December that allows the public testing of cars with no driver.
In the meantime, the industry has been lobbying the U.S. Transportation Department and Congress for rule changes that could speed the introduction of truly driverless cars.
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A Facebook group consisting of thousands of U.S. Marines and Marine veterans has shared nude photographs of women, including fellow Marines, through social media, prompting the U.S. military to launch an investigation into the incident.
The commandant of the Marine Corps, General Robert Neller, told reporters Friday at the Pentagon that when female Marines are subjected to cyberbullying, presumably by other Marines, it “undermines everything” the military branch stands for, as it protects and serves the country.
“There is no honor in denigrating a fellow Marine in any way, shape or form,” Neller said.
The general said fewer than 10 victims have come forward, but evidence provided by a reporter suggested that around 30 women have been victimized by the cyberbullying scandal.
Marine officials say they were informed about the Facebook site that is sharing the nude photos, known as the “Marines United” community page, on January 30. On February 1, the Marine Corps had the site taken down, but learned later about a link to Google Drive files that contained the nude photos. Some of the photos shared were taken without the women’s knowledge.
Neller said an investigation into the incident by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) is under way. In addition, Neller said the Marine Corps is setting up a task force to see what actions can be taken, and to come up with practices that both prevent this violation in the future and prevent the “subculture that gave rise to this.”
Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis released a statement Friday calling the “lack of respect for the dignity and humanity” of fellow military members “unacceptable and counter to unit cohesion.”
“We will not excuse or tolerate such behavior if we are to uphold our values and maintain our ability to defeat the enemy on the battlefield,” added Mattis, a former Marine general.
Neller told reporters he will testify on Capitol Hill about the incident next week. He also has planned to visit Camp Lejeune, in eastern North Carolina, one of the largest Marine bases on the U.S. East Coast.
Marine officials said they are working to ensure the victims’ privacy is protected as the investigation continues. There are reports that some Marines have continued to share the nude photos, despite the ongoing investigation.
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Movie stars, tech moguls and music artists are among those converging in Austin, Texas, starting this week, as part of South by Southwest Conference and Festivals.
Known by its shorthand SXSW, the nine-day event, now in its 31st year, mixes music, film, comedy and digital entertainment, as well as technology and politics.
The event in the Texas capital, normally a low-key tech hub, has become an important nexus where the already successful mix with the aspiring. New movies premiere, music acts perform and startups pitch their wares. Twitter gained traction at SXSW in 2007, putting up flat-panel screens in the hallways.
But not every new tech or its CEO can call SXSW experience a success. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg struggled through his keynote interview in 2008. Meerkat, a video streaming app that took off in SXSW 2015, quickly faded.
This year, among the actors, musicians and tech celebrities, Buzz Aldrin, the former astronaut who walked on the moon in 1969, will speak about human space exploration.
U.S. government officials and American politicians also come to mingle with the celebrities and tech executives. At last year’s SXSW, President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama spoke to the festival-goers.
FBI Director James Comey was expected to speak at this year’s event, but he canceled. In his place, James Baker, the FBI’s general counsel, is scheduled to discuss the “intersection of national security, technology and First Amendment rights.”
On Sunday, Joe Biden, the former U.S. vice president, will speak about his work on cancer research as part of the Biden Cancer Initiative.
The intersection of politics and technology is one major theme this year, with SXSW organizers creating a “Tech Under Trump” series of discussions. Topics include immigration, self-driving cars and the effects that artificial intelligence may have on jobs. One panel, “Startup investing in the Trump years,” will look at how the Trump administration could affect the investment landscape.
Some panels tout how technology can be used to achieve goals such as helping people seeking faith. Yasmin Green, head of research and development at Jigsaw — a technology incubator that is part of Alphabet, Google’s parent company — will discuss how technology can be used to fight extremism.
Other sessions focus on bleaker possibilities, like how technology can potentially hurt people, such as robots taking jobs.
Ultimately, SXSW this year, as in the past, is a giant party with thousands of people looking for the next big thing.
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Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife are expecting their second child.
In a Facebook post, Zuckerberg says his wife Priscilla Chan is pregnant with a girl. The couple already has a 1-year-old daughter.
In his post, Zuckerberg writes that he’s happy his first daughter, Max, will have a sister. Zuckerberg says he grew up with three sisters and they taught him to learn from smart, strong women. He also says his wife grew up with two sisters.
Zuckerberg says he and his wife can’t wait to welcome the baby and do their best to raise another strong woman.
If the tech industry is drawing one lesson from the latest WikiLeaks disclosures, it’s that data-scrambling encryption works, and the industry should use more of it.
Documents purportedly outlining a massive CIA surveillance program suggest that CIA agents must go to great lengths to circumvent encryption they can’t break. In many cases, physical presence is required to carry off these targeted attacks.
“We are in a world where if the U.S. government wants to get your data, they can’t hope to break the encryption,” said Nicholas Weaver, who teaches networking and security at the University of California, Berkeley. “They have to resort to targeted attacks, and that is costly, risky and the kind of thing you do only on targets you care about. Seeing the CIA have to do stuff like this should reassure civil libertarians that the situation is better now than it was four years ago.”
More encryption
Four years ago is when former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed details of huge and secret U.S. eavesdropping programs. To help thwart spies and snoops, the tech industry began to protectively encrypt email and messaging apps, a process that turns their contents into indecipherable gibberish without the coded “keys” that can unscramble them.
The NSA revelations shattered earlier assumptions that internet data was nearly impossible to intercept for meaningful surveillance, said Joseph Lorenzo Hall, chief technologist at the Washington-based civil-liberties group Center for Democracy & Technology. That was because any given internet message gets split into a multitude of tiny “packets,” each of which traces its own unpredictable route across the network to its destination.
The realization that spy agencies had figured out that problem spurred efforts to better shield data as it transits the internet. A few services such as Facebook’s WhatsApp followed the earlier example of Apple’s iMessage and took the extra step of encrypting data in ways even the companies couldn’t unscramble, a method called end-to-end encryption.
Challenges for authorities
In the past, spy agencies like the CIA could have hacked servers at WhatsApp or similar services to see what people were saying. End-to-end encryption, though, makes that prohibitively difficult. So the CIA has to resort to tapping individual phones and intercepting data before it is encrypted or after it’s decoded.
It’s much like the old days when “they would have broken into a house to plant a microphone,” said Steven Bellovin, a Columbia University professor who has long studied cybersecurity issues.
Cindy Cohn, executive director for Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group focused on online privacy, likened the CIA’s approach to ” fishing with a line and pole rather than fishing with a driftnet.”
Encryption has grown so strong that even the FBI had to seek Apple’s help last year in cracking the locked iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino attackers. Apple resisted what it considered an intrusive request, and the FBI ultimately broke into the phone by turning to an unidentified party for a hacking tool – presumably one similar to those the CIA allegedly had at its disposal.
On Wednesday, FBI Director James Comey acknowledged the challenges posed by encryption. He said there should be a balance between privacy and the FBI’s ability to lawfully access information. He also said the FBI needs to recruit talented computer personnel who might otherwise go to work for Apple or Google.
Government officials have long wanted to force tech companies to build “back doors” into encrypted devices, so that the companies can help law enforcement descramble messages with a warrant. But security experts warn that doing so would undermine security and privacy for everyone. As Apple CEO Tim Cook pointed out last year, a back door for good guys can also be a back door for bad guys. So far, efforts to pass such a mandate have stalled.
Still a patchwork
At the moment, though, end-to-end encrypted services such as iMessage and WhatsApp are still the exception. While encryption is far more widely used than it was in 2013, many messaging companies encode user data in ways that let them read or scan it. Authorities can force these companies to divulge message contents with warrants or other legal orders. With end-to-end encryption, the companies wouldn’t even have the keys to do so.
Further expanding the use of end-to-end encryption presents some challenges. That’s partly because encryption will make it more difficult to perform popular tasks such as searching years of emails for mentions of a specific keyword. Google announced in mid-2014 that it was working on end-to-end encryption for email, but the tools have yet to materialize beyond research environments.
Instead, Google’s Gmail encrypts messages in transit. But even that isn’t possible unless it’s adopted by the recipient’s mail system as well.
And encryption isn’t a panacea, as the WikiLeaks disclosures suggest.
According to the purported CIA documents, spies have found ways to exploit holes in phone and computer software to grab messages when they haven’t been encrypted yet. Although Apple, Google and Microsoft say they have fixed many of the vulnerabilities alluded to in the CIA documents, it’s not known how many holes remain open.
“There are different levels where attacks take place, said Daniel Castro, vice president with the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. “We may have secured one level (with encryption), but there are other weaknesses out there we should be focused on as well.”
Cohn said people should still use encryption, even with these bypass techniques.
“It’s better than nothing,” she said. “The answer to the fact that your front door might be cracked open isn’t to open all your windows and walk around naked, too.”
If this week’s WikiLeaks document dump is genuine, it includes a CIA list of the many and varied ways the electronic device in your hand, in your car, and in your home can be used to hack your life.
It’s simply more proof that, “it’s not a matter of if you’ll get hacked, but when you’ll get hacked.” That may be every security expert’s favorite quote, and unfortunately they say it’s true. The WikiLeaks releases include confidential documents the group says exposes “the entire hacking capacity of the CIA.”
The CIA has refused to confirm the authenticity of the documents, which allege the agency has the tools to hack into smartphones and some televisions, allowing it to remotely spy on people through microphones on the devices.
Watch: New Generation of Hackable Internet Devices May Always Be Listening
WikiLeaks also claimed the CIA managed to compromise both Apple and Android smartphones, allowing their officers to bypass the encryption on popular services such as Signal, WhatsApp and Telegram.
For some of the regular tech users, news of the leaks and the hacking techniques just confirms what they already knew. When we’re wired 24-7, we are vulnerable.
“The expectation for privacy has been reduced, I think,” Chris Coletta said, “… in society, with things like WikiLeaks, the Snowden revelations … I don’t know, maybe I’m cynical and just consider it to be inevitable, but that’s really the direction things are going.”
The internet of things
The problem is becoming even more dangerous as new, wired gadgets find their way into our homes, equipped with microphones and cameras that may always be listening and watching.
One of the WikiLeaks documents suggests the microphones in Samsung smart TV’s can be hacked and used to listen in on conversations, even when the TV is turned off.
Security experts say it is important to understand that in many cases, the growing number of wired devices in your home may be listening all the time.
“We have sensors in our phones, in our televisions, in Amazon Echo devices, in our vehicles,” said Clifford Neuman, the director of the Center for Computer Systems Security, at the University of Southern California. “And really almost all of these attacks are things that are modifying the software that has access to those sensors, so that the information is directed to other locations. Security practitioners have known that this is a problem for a long time.”
Neuman says hackers are using the things that make our tech so convenient against us.
“Certain pieces of software and certain pieces of hardware have been criticized because, for example, microphones might be always on,” he said. “But it is the kind of thing that we’re demanding as consumers, and we just need to be more aware that the information that is collected for one purpose can very easily be redirected for others.”
Tools of the espionage trade
The WikiLeaks release is especially damaging because it may have laid bare a number of U.S. surveillance techniques. The New York Times says the documents it examined lay out programs called “Wrecking Crew” for instance, which “explains how to crash a targeted computer, and another tells how to steal passwords using the autocomplete function on Internet Explorer.”
Steve Grobman, chief of the Intel Security Group, says that’s bad not only because it can be done, but also because so-called “bad actors” now know it can be done. Soon enough, he warns, we could find our own espionage tools being used against us.
“We also do need to recognize the precedents we set, so, as offensive cyber capabilities are used … they do give the blueprint for how that attack took place. And bad actors can then learn from that,” he said.
So how can tech-savvy consumers remain safe? Security experts say they can’t, and to remember the “it’s not if, but when” rule of hacking.
The best bet is to always be aware that if you’re online, you’re vulnerable.
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New U.S. solar installations nearly doubled last year, but slowing demand for both residential and large-scale systems, falling panel prices and concerns about looming federal tax reform are still dampening investor appetite for the sector.
Solar installations soared 97 percent to 14.8 gigawatts in 2016, according to a report released Thursday by Wood Mackenzie and the Solar Energy Industries Association. The technology is cheaper than ever, with panel prices dropping 40 percent last year, and many utilities procuring solar on the basis of cost alone.
But the dramatic drop in panel prices has hampered solar manufacturers’ profits and ramped up competition for utility-scale contracts among developers, companies said in recent weeks while reporting fourth-quarter results. Add in a slowdown in the residential market, tax reform pushed by U.S. President Donald Trump, climbing interest rates and falling oil prices, and stock market investors remain skittish about solar.
2017 a transition year
Credit Suisse analyst Andrew Hughes said in a client note on Thursday that the key risk to his “outperform” rating on shares of residential solar player Sunrun was “investor sentiment, which in a rising interest rate and falling oil price market obscured by tax policy uncertainty remains tepid.”
The MAC Global Solar Energy index, which tracks shares of solar power companies, slid 43 percent in 2016. The index has recovered to gain nearly 8 percent so far this year but remains 65 percent below its year-ago level.
U.S. module manufacturers and project developers SunPower and First Solar Inc are both viewing 2017 as a transition year for their businesses, they said after reporting in February losses for the fourth quarter of last year.
SunPower Chief Executive Tom Werner in a conference call predicted “intense competition for the forseeable future in mainstream power plants,” adding that some companies were selling panels at below cash cost.
A slowdown is forecast
Indeed, the solar industry report released Thursday forecasts a slowdown in the market this year after last year’s boom. Utility systems accounted for more than 10.5 GW of the total in 2016, but are not expected to exceed 10 GW again until 2021, the report said.
The 2016 boom was largely due to a rush by developers to claim a federal tax credit for solar systems that had been expected to expire at the end of the year. The five-year extension of that credit, however, has allowed projects to be pushed into this year and beyond.
Though Trump has not called for ending tax credits for solar and other renewable energy, he has expressed doubts about the role of clean power sources.
Home installations are growing
On the solar residential side, installations grew 19 percent to 2.6 GW last year, down from 66 percent growth in 2015. Growth has slowed in major markets like California, where many of the households most interested in solar have already put up panels.
Tesla, which acquired residential market leader SolarCity late last year, said last month that it deployed 201 megawatts of solar in the fourth quarter, a more than 20 percent drop from the same period a year earlier.
SolarCity rival Sunrun reported a quarterly profit that topped Wall Street estimates due to cost cuts, but said growth would be substantially slower in 2016. System deployments rose 40 percent in 2016, but are expected to rise just 15 percent this year, Sunrun said.
“While it may be slowing, it is still growing. That is an important piece of the story,” Abigail Ross Hopper, president of the Solar Energy Industries Association, said in an interview. “Some of that resetting is to be expected.”
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With the broad release of Google Assistant last week, the voice-assistant wars are in full swing, with Apple, Amazon.com, Microsoft and now Alphabet’s Google all offering electronic assistants to take your commands.
Siri is the oldest of the bunch, and researchers including Oren Etzioni, chief executive officer of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Seattle, said Apple has squandered its lead when it comes to understanding speech and answering questions.
But there is at least one thing Siri can do that the other assistants cannot: speak 21 languages localized for 36 countries, a very important capability in a smartphone market where most sales are outside the United States.
Microsoft Cortana, by contrast, has eight languages tailored for 13 countries. Google’s Assistant, which began in its Pixel phone but has moved to other Android devices, speaks four languages. Amazon’s Alexa features only English and German. Siri will even soon start to learn Shanghainese, a special dialect of Wu Chinese spoken only around Shanghai.
The language issue shows the type of hurdle that digital assistants still need to clear if they are to become ubiquitous tools for operating smartphones and other devices.
Speaking languages natively is complicated for any assistant. If someone asks for a football score in Britain, for example, even though the language is English, the assistant must know to say “two-nil” instead of “two-nothing.”
At Microsoft, an editorial team of 29 people works to customize Cortana for local markets. In Mexico, for example, a published children’s book author writes Cortana’s lines to stand out from other Spanish-speaking countries.
“They really pride themselves on what’s truly Mexican. [Cortana] has a lot of answers that are clever and funny and have to do with what it means to be Mexican,” said Jonathan Foster, who heads the team of writers at Microsoft.
Google and Amazon said they plan to bring more languages to their assistants but declined to comment further.
At Apple, the company starts working on a new language by bringing in humans to read passages in a range of accents and dialects, which are then transcribed by hand so the computer has an exact representation of the spoken text to learn from, said Alex Acero, head of the speech team at Apple. Apple also captures a range of sounds in a variety of voices. From there,
an acoustic model is built that tries to predict words sequences.
Then Apple deploys “dictation mode,” its text-to-speech translator, in the new language, Acero said. When customers use dictation mode, Apple captures a small percentage of the audio recordings and makes them anonymous. The recordings, complete with background noise and mumbled words, are transcribed by humans, a process that helps cut the speech recognition error
rate in half.
After enough data has been gathered and a voice actor has been recorded to play Siri in a new language, Siri is released with answers to what Apple estimates will be the most common questions, Acero said. Once released, Siri learns more about what real-world users ask and is updated every two weeks with more tweaks.
But script-writing does not scale, said Charles Jolley, creator of an intelligent assistant named Ozlo. “You can’t hire enough writers to come up with the system you’d need in every language. You have to synthesize the answers,” he said. That is years off, he said.
The founders of Viv, a startup founded by Siri’s original creators that Samsung acquired last year, is working on just that.
“Viv was built to specifically address the scaling issue for intelligent assistants,” said Dag Kittlaus, the CEO and co-founder of Viv. “The only way to leapfrog today’s limited functionality versions is to open the system up and let the
world teach them.”
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