High costs of extracting greenhouse gases from thin air could tumble with new technologies that can help to combat climate change, scientists said on Thursday.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sifting through drone footage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Google’s principles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Always a US astronaut in orbit

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

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

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

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

Climate change

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

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

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

Back to the moon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

lawmakers.

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

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

On Wednesday he said it had received data from Kogan.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Embarrassed but vindicated

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

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

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

On other matters, Nix was less apologetic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Expanding market

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

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

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

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

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

Venture capitalists watching

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The company advised users to change their passwords.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 
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Three astronauts from the International Space Station have safely returned to Earth after completing a five-month mission. 

American Scott Tingle, Russian Anton Shkaplerov and Japan’s Norishige Kanai touched down at 12:39 UTC Sunday in Kazakhstan.

Shkaplerov, who was the first to be helped out of the Russian Soyuz space capsule, said, “We are a bit tired but happy with what we have accomplished and happy to be back on Earth. We are glad the weather is sunny.”

The trio will undergo medical tests in the Kazakh city of Karaganda before flying on to Moscow or Houston. 

Shkaplerov will return to Moscow with a football he brought back from the space station. He and another cosmonaut were filmed practicing with the ball aboard the ISS. The Russian news agency Tass reported that the ball will be used in the opening game of the World Cup later this month. 

Three astronauts, Americans Drew Feustel and Ricky Arnold and Russian Oleg Artemyev, remain on the ISS. They will be joined by three others who will take off Wednesday from the Baikonur complex in Kazakhstan.
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The government Papua New Guinea is considering blocking Facebook while it investigates how to best to regulate the social networking site. Critics say the move would be authoritarian.

Authorities in Papua New Guinea, or PNG, say Facebook has become a magnet for illegal and unsavory activity. The government is considering a temporary ban on the site while it works out the best way to regulate the social media platform.

Only about 10 percent of the nearly 7 million people in PNG use Facebook, but some officials have become increasingly agitated by content being posted online.They have asked experts to help in their search for the best way to impose controls on the social media site.

PNG Communications Minister, Sam Basil, says illegal use of Facebook must be curbed.

“Defamatory publications or the fake news, identity theft and, of course, unidentified Facebook users. Most of those users are the ones that are really breaching all the laws in terms of posting pornography materials and, of course, posting fake news,” he said.

But critics believe the government’s attempts to muzzle Facebook are an attack on free speech. They believe that ministers are motivated by a desire to silence those who expose official corruption and wrongdoing online.

Lawrence Stephens, the chairman of Transparency International PNG, says a temporary ban of Facebook would be a draconian move.

“To talk about stopping this for a month whilst someone, somewhere does an analysis of what we should be able to see sounds pretty authoritarian and pretty worrying,” said Stephens.

The move to temporarily ban Facebook comes as PNG prepares to host the 2018 Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation, or APEC, leaders’ summit later this year.

PNG is a South Pacific nation and is Australia’s closest neighbor.
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Birds and airplanes share the sky, so inevitably collisions occur. But airport authorities try to limit those encounters because bird strikes cause costly damage to jet engines and can lead to crashes. Some airports employ trained dogs, others use loud noises to frighten birds away. A company in the Netherlands says its robotic predator Robird is much more efficient. VOA’s George Putic has more.
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Google says it will not extend a contract into next year to help the U.S. military analyze drone videos following complaints from company employees.

U.S. media reports said Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc., told Google employees about the decision Friday. The development was first reported by tech publication Gizmodo.

Google employees say the tech giant will continue to work on the Maven Project until the contract ends next March. The military project uses artificial intelligence to increase defense capabilities, including using artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze aerial drone imagery.

Thousands of Google employees signed a petition urging the company to cancel the contract, arguing that helping the military would violate Google’s motto of “Don’t be evil.”

Reuters reports that several hundred Google employees had planned to hold a public rally in San Francisco in July to protest the military contract.

Google had earlier defended the company’s involvement in the project saying it was limited to helping the military with nonoffensive tasks and said the project would help save lives.

Google says it will soon release new company guidelines related to the ethical uses of AI.
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Outside Facebook’s annual shareholders meeting Thursday, a lone protester paced on the sidewalk, carrying a U.S. flag and a sign that read “Zuckerberg destroys shareholder value.”

Above, a small plane pulled a banner that read “You Broke Democracy.”

Inside, Facebook shareholders offered both praise and criticism of the company’s leadership.

The social media giant has been in a constant spotlight over how foreign actors used its service to try to influence elections worldwide. It suffered a double blow when it was revealed that 87 million users’ information had gone to a political consulting firm without the users’ knowledge. 

The company continues to face inquiries from federal and state regulators about privacy and user data issues. And Mark Zuckerberg, its chief executive, recently testified in front of the European Parliament after appearing in front of Congress on the issues.

Shareholders sound off 

Facebook shareholders provided another sort of oversight. Many expressed their displeasure by selling shares in March after it was disclosed that Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm, obtained user data without their knowledge. Facebook shares have more than recovered since then, rising 2 percent Thursday to $191.78, which was up 26 percent from the company’s three-month low of $152 in March. 

“We didn’t do enough to see how people could abuse these tools,” Zuckerberg told the shareholders.

“The main thing we need to do right now is take a broader view of our responsibility to the community we serve,” he said.

Investors applauded Zuckerberg several times during the meeting. And they followed the company’s advice and appeared to vote down shareholder proposals, including one that would change the voting power of company shares. Currently, Zuckerberg, 34, and insiders hold a class of stock that gives them more than 60 percent of the voting power. 

Shareholders also appeared to vote against other proposals such as requiring the company to report on its gender pay gap and a content report that would show how the company enforces its terms of service worldwide. (Official results of the tally will be posted in the next several days.)

Despite the defeats, shareholder proposals are worthwhile, said Natasha Lamb, managing partner at Arjuna Capital, an activist investment firm behind two proposals.

They “send a signal to management, send a signal to the board,” she said.

Diversity of ideas 

Amid the applause, there was also sharp criticism. 

“We contend that Facebook’s poor stewardship of user data is tantamount to a human rights violation,” said Christine Jantz, chief investment officer at Northstar Asset Management.

Another investor asked what Facebook was doing to understand political bias among its employees and how that affects decisions about content on the site.

Zuckerberg said the company was “committed to being a platform for all ideas.” 

The company ended the meeting, but not before a shareholder pleaded, “Engage with us on these issues. We are on the same team.” 

Company leaders said they would.

Deana Mitchell contributed to this report.
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In today’s energy-hungry world, scientists are constantly revisiting every renewable resource looking for ways to increase efficiency. One researcher in the Netherlands believes even gravity can be harnessed to produce free electricity on a scale sufficient to power small appliances. VOA’s George Putic has more.
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A U.S. federal judge on Wednesday dismissed two lawsuits by Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab that sought to overturn bans on the use of the security software maker’s products in U.S. government networks.

The company said it would seek to appeal the decision, which leaves in place prohibitions included in a funding bill passed by Congress and an order from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

The bans were issued last year in response to allegations by U.S. officials that the company’s software could enable Russian espionage and threaten national security.

“These actions were the product of unconstitutional agency and legislative processes and unfairly targeted the company without any meaningful fact finding,” Kaspersky said in a statement.

U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly in Washington said Kaspersky had failed to show that Congress violated constitutional prohibitions on legislation that “determines guilt and inflicts punishment” without the protections of a judicial trial.

She also dismissed the effort to overturn the DHS ban for lack of standing. Kaspersky Lab and its founder, Eugene Kaspersky, have repeatedly denied wrongdoing and said the company would not help any government with cyber espionage.

The company filed the lawsuits as part of a campaign to refute allegations that it was vulnerable to Kremlin influence, which had prompted the U.S. government bans on its products.

That effort includes plans to open a data center in Switzerland, where the company will analyze suspicious files uncovered on the computers of its tens of millions of customers in the United States and Europe.
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A Canadian accused of helping Russian intelligence agents break into email accounts as part of a massive 2014 data breach at Yahoo was sentenced Tuesday to five years in prison and ordered to pay a $250,000 fine.

Karim Baratov, who pleaded guilty in November 2017 in San Francisco, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office said.

Baratov, a Canadian citizen born in Kazakhstan, was arrested in Canada in March 2017 at the request of U.S. prosecutors. He later waived his right to fight a request for his extradition to the United States.

Lawyers for Baratov in a court filing had urged a sentence of 45 months in prison, while prosecutors had sought 94 months.

“This case is about a young man, younger than most of the defendants in hacking cases throughout this country, who hacked emails, one at a time, for $100 a hack,” the defense lawyers wrote in a May 19 court filing.

Verizon Communications Inc., the largest U.S. wireless operator, acquired most of Yahoo’s assets in June 2017.

The U.S. Justice Department announced charges in March 2017 against Baratov and three others, including two officers in Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), for their roles in the 2014 hacking of 500 million Yahoo accounts. Baratov is the only one of the four who has been arrested. Yahoo in 2016 said cyberthieves might have stolen names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth and encrypted passwords.

Gmail targets

When FSB officers learned that a target had a non-Yahoo webmail account, including through information obtained from the Yahoo hack, they worked with Baratov, who was paid to break into at least 80 email accounts, prosecutors said, including numerous Alphabet Inc. Gmail accounts.

Federal prosecutors said in a court filing “the targeted victims were of interest to Russian intelligence” and included “prominent leaders in the commercial industries and senior government officials (and their counselors) of Russia and countries bordering Russia.”

Prosecutors said FSB officers Dmitry Dokuchaev and Igor Sushchin directed and paid hackers to obtain information and used Alexsey Belan, who is among the FBI’s most-wanted cybercriminals, to breach Yahoo.
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