Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg faces tough questions on Capitol Hill this week following revelations that the Trump-affiliated political firm Cambridge Analytica accessed the data of as many as 87 million users of the social media site during the 2016 election. VOA’s Congressional correspondent Katherine Gypson looks at the questions lawmakers have been waiting to ask Zuckerberg and the next steps they may take.
…

Social media giant Facebook is starting to notify 87 million of its users whether their personal data was harvested without their knowledge by Cambridge Analytica, the Britain-based voter profiling company U.S. President Donald Trump’s campaign hired to target likely supporters in 2016.

Facebook believes most of the affected users, more than 70 million, are in the United States, but there are also more than a million each in the Philippines, Indonesia and Britain.

The company has apologized for the security breach, with Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledging the company made a “huge mistake” by not more closely monitoring use of the data and not taking a broad enough view of the company’s responsibilities.

Facebook allowed a British researcher to create an app on Facebook on which about 200,000 users divulged personal information that academic Alexsandr Kogan subsequently shared with Cambridge Analytica.  The number of affected Facebook users multiplied exponentially, however, because of the data collected from all the friends, relatives and acquaintances the 200,000 had online Facebook contact with.

Cambridge Analytica says it only had data for 30 million Facebook users.

Zuckerberg is meeting privately with lawmakers in Washington about the controversy and then testifying publicly Tuesday and Wednesday before two congressional committees.

Facebook is sending a notice to all of its 2.2 billion users with a link to see what apps they use and instructions on how they can, if they wish, shut off third-party access to their apps.

 
…

Congress has plenty of questions for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who will testify on Capitol Hill Tuesday and Wednesday about the company’s ongoing data-privacy scandal and how it failed to guard against other abuses of its service.

 

Facebook is struggling to cope with the worst privacy crisis in its history – allegations that a Trump-affiliated data mining firm may have used ill-gotten user data to try to influence elections. Zuckerberg and his company are in full damage-control mode, and have announced a number of piecemeal technical changes intended to address privacy issues.

 

But there’s plenty the Facebook CEO hasn’t yet explained. Here are five questions that could shed more light on Facebook’s privacy practices and the degree to which it is really sorry about playing fast and loose with user data – or just because its practices have drawn the spotlight.

 

QUESTION 1: You’ve said you should have acted years ago to protect user privacy and guard against other abuses. Was that solely a failure of your leadership, or did Facebook’s business model or other factors create an obstacle to change? How can you ensure that Facebook doesn’t make similar errors in the future?

 

CONTEXT: Zuckerberg controls 59.7 percent of the voting stock in Facebook. He is both chairman of the board and CEO. He can’t be fired, unless he fires himself. “At the end of the day, this is my responsibility,” he told reporters on a conference call last week. He also admitted to making a “huge mistake” in not taking a broad enough view of Facebook’s responsibility in the world.

 

Zuckerberg, however, has been apologizing for not doing better on privacy for 11 years . In the current crisis, neither he nor chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg have clarified exactly how Facebook developed such a huge blind spot, much less how it can prevent history from repeating itself.

 

POSSIBLE FOLLOW-UP: Does Facebook need a chief privacy officer with the authority to take action on behalf of users?

 

QUESTION 2: Who owns user data on Facebook, the company or the users? If it’s the latter, why shouldn’t Facebook allow people to opt out of being targeted by ads?

 

CONTEXT: Facebook collects data on its own (your likes, which ads you click on, etc.); keeps data you share yourself (photos, videos, messages); and correlates data from outside sources to data on its platform (email lists from marketers, and until recently, information from credit agencies).

 

Who owns what is a difficult question to answer, and Facebook clearly hasn’t been good at explaining it. While you can download everything the company knows about you, it doesn’t really allow you to take “your” data to a rival.

Sandberg told Today’s Savannah Guthrie that given Facebook’s ad-driven business model, you can’t currently avoid data mining of your public profile information. (You can opt not to see the resulting targeted ads , though.) Allowing that, Sandberg said, would effectively require Facebook to turn into a “paid product” that charges users.

POSSIBLE FOLLOW-UP: Don’t other businesses allow some users to opt out of ads? Why can’t Facebook charge users who want ad-free experiences the way Hulu and YouTube do?

QUESTION 3: Facebook has made connecting with others and sharing information dead simple. Why haven’t you put similar effort into making your privacy controls equally easy to use?

 

CONTEXT: Facebook has updated its privacy settings seven times in the last decade, each time aimed at making them simpler to use.

 

The latest update was on March 28. On April 4, the company announced new technical changes designed to close loopholes that allowed third parties overbroad access to user data.

 

Facebook makes many pieces of information your profile public by default; to lock them down, you have to change those settings yourself.

 

POSSIBLE FOLLOW-UP: Does this legacy suggest the government needs to step in with clear and universal privacy rules?

 

QUESTION 4: Did Facebook threaten legal action against the Guardian newspaper in the U.K. regarding its reporting on the Cambridge Analytica scandal?

 

CONTEXT: John Mulholland, editor of the Guardian US, tweeted in March that Facebook had threatened to sue to stop publication of its story that broke the Cambridge Analytica scandal in mid-March. Neither the Guardian nor Facebook have commented further.

 

POSSIBLE FOLLOW-UP: Do you still stand behind Facebook’s actions here?

QUESTION 5: Have you spoken with critics, including some former Facebook investors and colleagues, who argue that the company’s service has become an addictive and corrosive force in society?

 

CONTEXT: Sean Parker, Facebook’s first president, said Facebook specializes in “exploiting” human psychology and may be harming our children’s brains. An early investor in Facebook, Roger McNamee compared Facebook to an addictive substance such as nicotine and alcohol.

 

Brian Acton, a co-founder of WhatsApp (acquired by Facebook in 2014), recently recommended that people should delete their Facebook accounts . Chamath Palihapitiya, an early vice president at Facebook, said Facebook’s tools are “ripping apart the social fabric.”

 

POSSIBLE FOLLOW-UP:  If not, why not?

 
…

Despite a global abundance of food, a United Nations report says 815 million people, 11 percent of the world’s population, went hungry in 2016. That number seems to be rising.

Poverty is not the only reason, however, people are experiencing food insecurity.

“Increasingly we’re also seeing hunger caused by the displacement related to conflict, natural disaster as well, but particularly there’s been an uptick in the number of people displaced in the world,” said Robert Opp, director of Innovation and Change Management at the United Nations World Food Program.

Humanitarian organizations are turning to new technologies such as AI, or artificial intelligence, to fight global food insecurity.

WATCH: Global Hunger Is Rising — Artificial Intelligence Can Help

“What AI offers us right now, is an ability to augment human capacity. So, we’re not talking about replacing human beings and things. We’re talking about doing more things and doing them better than we could by just human capacity alone,” Opp said.

Analyze data, get it to farmers

Artificial intelligence can analyze large amounts of data to locate areas affected by conflict and natural disasters and assist farmers in developing countries. The data can then be accessed by farmers from their smartphones.

“The average smartphone that exists in the world today is more powerful than the entire Apollo space program 50 years ago. So just imagine a farmer in Africa who has a smartphone has much more computing power than the entire Apollo space program,” said Pranav Khaitan, engineering lead at Google AI.

“When you take your special data and soil mapping data and use AI to do the analysis, you can send me the information. So in a nutshell, you can help me [know] when to plant, what to plant, how to plant,” said Uyi Stewart, director of Strategy Data and Analytics in Global Development of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

“When you start combining technologies, AI, robotics, sensors, that’s when we see magic start to happen on farms for production, to increase crop yields,” said Zenia Tata, vice president for Global Impact Strategy at XPRIZE, an organization that creates incentivized competitions so innovative ideas and technologies can be developed to benefit humanity.

“It all comes down to developing these techniques and making it available to these farmers and people on the ground,” Khaitan said.

Breaking down barriers

However, the developing world is often the last to get new technologies.

As Stewart said, “815 million people are hungry and I can bet you that nearly 814 million out of the 815 million do not have a smartphone.”

Even when the technology is available, other barriers still exist.

“A lot of these people that we talked about that are hungry, they don’t speak English, so when we get insights out of this technology how are we going to pass it onto them?” Stewart said.

While it may take time for new technologies to reach the developing world, many hope such advances will ultimately trickle-down to farmers in regions that face food insecurity.

“You’ve invented the technology. The big investments have gone in. Now you’re modifying it, which brings the cost down as well,” said Teddy Bekele, vice president of Ag Technology at U.S.-based agribusiness and food company Land O’Lakes.

“So, I think three to four years maybe we’ll have some of the things we have here to be used there [in the developing world] as well,” Bekele predicted.

Those who work in humanitarian organizations said entrepreneurs must look outside their own countries to adapt the new technologies to combat global hunger, or come up with a private, public model. Farmers will need the tools and training so they can harness the power of artificial intelligence to help feed the hungry in the developing world.

This story was written by Elizabeth Lee​.
…

The next generation of life-saving robots could be inspired by cockroaches. Faith Lapidus explains how.
…

Mark Zuckerberg has apologized for what he calls a “breach of trust” regarding the exploitation of as many as 87 million users’ data by Cambridge Analytica. Questions are swirling in Washington as the CEO of Facebook prepares to testify before Congress. But, whether the hearings will bring about real change around privacy rights remains to be seen. Tina Trinh reports.
…

Hackers have attacked networks in a number of countries, including data centers in Iran where they left the image of a U.S. flag on screens along with a warning: “Don’t mess with our elections,” the Iranian IT ministry said Saturday.

“The attack apparently affected 200,000 router switches across the world in a widespread attack, including 3,500 switches in our country,” the Communication and Information Technology Ministry said in a statement carried by Iran’s official news agency IRNA.

The statement said the attack, which hit internet service providers and cut off web access for subscribers, was made possible by a vulnerability in routers from Cisco, which had earlier issued a warning and provided a patch that some firms failed to install over the Iranian new year holiday.

A blog published Thursday by Nick Biasini, a threat researcher at Cisco’s Talos Security Intelligence and Research Group, said: “Several incidents in multiple countries, including some specifically targeting critical infrastructure, have involved the misuse of the Smart Install protocol. … As a result, we are taking an active stance, and are urging customers, again, of the elevated risk and available remediation paths.”

On Saturday evening, Cisco said those postings were a tool to help clients identify weaknesses and repel a cyber attack.

Iran’s IT Minister Mohammad Javad Azari-Jahromi posted a picture of a computer screen on Twitter with the image of the U.S. flag and the hackers’ message. He said it was not yet clear who had carried out the attack.

Azari-Jahromi said the attack mainly affected Europe, India and the United States, state television reported.

“Some 55,000 devices were affected in the United States and 14,000 in China, and Iran’s share of affected devices was 2 percent,” Azari-Jahromi was quoted as saying.

In a tweet, Azari-Jahromi said the state computer emergency response body MAHER had shown “weaknesses in providing information to (affected) companies” after the attack, which was detected late on Friday in Iran.

Hadi Sajadi, deputy head of the state-run Information Technology Organization of Iran, said the attack was neutralized within hours and no data was lost.

The story was written by Reuters.
…

Facebook violates its users’ privacy rights through the use of its facial recognition software, according to consumer groups led by the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

Their complaint to the federal government focuses on the use of Facebook software that identifies people in photographs that are uploaded to its site.

A complaint filed Friday by a coalition of consumer organizations with Federal Trade Commission said the social media giant “routinely scans photos for biometric facial matches without the consent of the image subject.”

The complaint says the company tries to improve its facial recognition prowess by deceptively encouraging users the participate in the process of identifying people in photographs.

“This unwanted, unnecessary, and dangerous identification of individuals undermines user privacy, ignores the explicit preferences of Facebook users, and is contrary to law in several state and many parts of the world.”

The groups maintain there is little users can do to prevent images of their faces from being in a social media system like Facebook’s. They contend facial scanning can be abused by authoritarian governments, a key argument considering Facebook may be required to provide user information to governments.

The complaint is the latest in a string of privacy-related issues the FTC is already investigating, including charges it allowed the personal information of 87 million users to be improperly harvested by Cambridge Analytica, the British consulting firm which was hired by U.S. President Donald Trump during his 2016 presidential campaign.

Until Thursday, Facebook had not said how many accounts had been harvested by Cambridge Analytica. Facebook has also been hesitant to explain how the company’s product might have been used by Russian-supported entities to affect the U.S. presidential election outcome.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is scheduled to testify next week before two congressional committees.
…

The European Union said Friday Facebook has told it that up to 2.7 million people in the 28-nation bloc may have been victim of improper data sharing involving political data-mining firm Cambridge Analytica.

EU spokesman Christian Wigand said EU Justice Commissioner Vera Jourova will have a telephone call with Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg early next week to address the massive data leaks.

The EU and Facebook will be looking at what changes the social media giant needs to make to better protect users and how the U.S. company must adapt to new EU data protection rules.

Wigand said that EU data protection authorities will discuss over the coming days “a strong coordinated approach” on how to deal with the Facebook investigation.

Separately, Italy’s competition authority opened an investigation Friday into Facebook for allegedly misleading practices following revelations that the social network sold users’ data without consent.

Authority chairman Giovanni Pitruzzella told Sky News24 that the investigation will focus on Facebook’s claims on its home page that the service is free, without revealing that it makes money off users’ data.

The investigation comes as Italian consumer advocate group Codacons prepares a U.S. class action against Facebook on behalf of Italians whose data was mined by Cambridge Analytica. Codacons said just 57 Italians downloaded the Cambridge Analytica app, but that an estimated 214,000 Italians could be affected because the data mined extended to also the users’ friends.

A top Facebook privacy official is scheduled to meet with the authority later this month.

This story was earlier corrected to show that the EU call will take place with Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg not with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
…

Amazon is spending millions of dollars on lobbying as the global online retailer seeks to expand its reach into a swath of industries that President Donald Trump’s broadsides haven’t come close to hitting.

Trump’s attacks over the last week targeted what Amazon is best known for: rapidly shipping just about any product you can imagine to your door. But the company CEO Jeff Bezos founded more than two decades ago is now a sprawling empire that sells groceries in brick-and-mortar stores, hosts the online services of other companies and federal offices in a network of data centers, and even recently branched into health care.

Amazon relies on a nearly 30-member in-house lobbying team that’s four times as large as it was three years ago as well as outside firms to influence the lawmakers and federal regulators who can help determine its success. The outside roster includes a retired congressman from Washington state who was a senior member of the powerful House Appropriations Committee when he stepped down.

Overall, Amazon spent $15.6 million on lobbying in 2017.

“Amazon is just not on an even playing field,” Trump told reporters Thursday aboard Air Force One. “They have a tremendous lobbying effort, in addition to having The Washington Post, which is as far as I’m concerned another lobbyist. But they have a big lobbying effort, one of the biggest, frankly, one of the biggest.”

Bezos owns the Post. He and the newspaper have previously declared that Bezos isn’t involved in any journalistic decisions.

Earlier in the week, Trump alleged that Amazon is bilking the U.S. Postal Service for being its “delivery boy,” a doubtful claim about a contract that’s actually been judged profitable for the post office. And he has charged that Amazon pays “little or no taxes,” a claim that may have merit. Matthew Gardner, a senior fellow at the left-leaning Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, said in February that Amazon “has built its business model on tax avoidance.” Amazon reported $5.6 billion of U.S. profits in 2017 “and didn’t pay a dime of federal income taxes on it,” according to Gardner.

The company declined to comment on Trump’s remarks and did not immediately respond to a request for comment about its lobbying operations.

Amazon has grown rapidly since it launched in 1995 as a site that sold books. It has changed the way people buy paper towels, diapers or just about anything else. And its ambitions go far beyond online shopping: its Alexa voice assistant is in tablets, cars and its Echo devices; it runs the Whole Foods grocery chain; the company produces movies and TV shows and it designs its own brands of furniture and clothing.

The company is in the midst of launching an independent business with JPMorgan Chase and Berkshire Hathaway that is seeking to lower health care costs for employees at the three companies. Given the three players’ outsize influence the alliance has the potential to shake up how Americans shop for health care and the initiative sent a shudder through the industry when it was announced in January.

Amazon Web Services is angling for a much larger share of the federal government’s market for cloud computing, which allows massive amounts of data to be stored and managed on remote servers. The CIA signed a $600 million deal with Amazon in 2013 to build a system to share secure data across the U.S. intelligence community.

A partner of Amazon Web Services, the Virginia-based Rean Cloud LLC, in February scored what appeared to be a lucrative cloud computing contract from the Pentagon. But the contract, initially projected to be worth as much as $950 million, was scaled back to $65 million after Amazon’s competitors complained about the award.

Lobbying disclosure records filed with the House and Senate show Amazon is engaged on a wide variety of other issues, from trade to transportation to telecommunications. The company also lobbied lawmakers and federal agencies on the testing and operation of unmanned aerial vehicles. Amazon has been exploring the use of drones for deliveries, but current federal rules restrict flying beyond the operator’s line of sight.

The $15.6 million Amazon spent on lobbying last year was $2.6 million more than in 2016, according to the disclosure records. The bulk of the money — $12.8 million — went for Amazon’s in-house lobbying team. The nearly 30-member unit is led by Brian Huseman, who worked previously as chief of staff at the Federal Trade Commission and a Justice Department trial attorney.

As most large corporations do, Amazon also employs outside lobbying firms — as many as 14 in 2017.

In Amazon’s corner is former Washington congressman Norm Dicks of the firm Van Ness Feldman. Dicks was serving as the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee when he ended his 36-year congressional career in 2013. He represented the company on information technology matters and “issues related to cloud computing usage by the federal government,” according to the records, which show Van Ness Feldman earned $160,000 from Amazon last year.

Amazon brought aboard four new firms in 2017, according to the records. Newcomers Ballard Partners, BGR Government Affairs, Brownstein Hyatt, and McGuireWoods Consulting lobbied for Amazon on transportation, taxes, drones and other issues.

This story was written by the Associated Press.
…

Robots are constantly adding new skills to their repertoire. In Italy, the first dedicated interactive service robot, “Robby the hotel concierge” and his brother, “Cayuki the car salesman,” are taking the country by storm with their technological efficiencies. In Finland, another kind of robot – “Elias” is thrilling classrooms with his language and dancing skills. As VOA’s Mariama Diallo reports, the next generation of robots is ready to serve, educate and entertain the masses.
…

China is turning artificial intelligence, face scanning, and other Big Data systems into new tools domestically to enhance the communist party’s command and control systems.

The party’s methods of surveillance and increasing use of technology present an interesting contrast with the ongoing scandal concerning the scraping and manipulation of Facebook data. In fact, analysts argue, the scandal and its after-effects will seriously impact China’s efforts to extend its surveillance systems to other countries.

In China, facial recognition and artificial intelligence are being used to stop jaywalkers and to control the number of sheets of toilet paper a person can obtain when using public toilets. Authorities in the southern city of Shenzhen recently began using the combined technology of facial recognition, mobile networks, and social media apps to send offenders fines in real time.

And that is just a portion of the state’s growing tech-infused control.

China’s capabilities also allow it to monitor business and political activities across numerous countries that are using Chinese technology platforms, including telecom equipment, payment systems, internet software and engineering standards.

Growing reach

The number of countries and markets using Chinese technology platforms is growing by the day, analysts said.

“Based on its (China’s) oversight of the platforms, it gives Chinese companies an advantage and that gives Chinese citizens an advantage and it means that China can more easily project power in the countries that are using platforms by Chinese companies,” James Grimmelmann, a professor at Cornell Law School told VOA. “If you then add China’s ability to compile data from them and use them for surveillance purposes, you can easily see how this turns into a technique for political influence, how this turns into a technique for espionage.”

The Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal involves the use of personal data collected from 87 million people for the purpose of political manipulation in the United States and other countries.

Coming amid growing concerns about alleged Russian manipulation of U.S. elections and controversies surrounding the use of fake news, analysts say the scandal will result in massive regulatory changes in areas like privacy and monopoly of data by a few companies.

And the backlash could be seen across several countries where Chinese companies have gained a foothold by building elaborate telecom and internet infrastructure.

Alex Capri, a senior fellow at the department of analytics and operations of NUS Business School in Singapore, cited the case of Malaysia, where Chinese Internet giant Alibaba is closely integrated with a vast section of local business through its e-commerce platform.

“A lot of people look at Alibaba as almost an emissary of the communist state. So that makes a lot of people very nervous in terms of the amount of control and certainly the lack of privacy of data,” he said. “That is something that governments are going to be struggling with now and into the future in Asia when dealing with these big Chinese e-commerce platforms.”

There are signs that Malaysia and other countries may do to China what Beijing has long done to foreign businesses, namely demand that servers used by foreign companies are physically located in their jurisdiction. Once implemented, Chinese social media and e-commerce platforms could lose much of the business edge they enjoy at present.

European challenge

Chinese companies have been keen to extend their reach to Europe with not just physical infrastructure construction but also data and telecom networks. They will now have to follow the European Union’s new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which comes into effect May 25.

The GDPR would be a challenge to Chinese companies accustomed to standards in which ordinary people enjoy few access rights. The new European law makes it compulsory for foreign companies doing business in the European Union to keep the data of EU residents secure and make it available to any such resident who demands it.

“If an EU citizen, EU resident, asks Alibaba to provide this information with all the information that they have in their database, Alibaba has to abide. If they don’t, they will get into some discussion, or conversation or trouble with the EU authorities,” Kersi Porbunderwalla, secretary general of Copenhagen Compliance said.

China unaffected

China is likely to remain immune to the wave of regulatory changes that are expected to sweep through the developed world following the Facebook scandal, Capri pointed out.

“The Chinese model, which essentially says, ‘Look, the state has to have access to all of this data, the State has to mandate that you turn over this data that is requested, the State also needs to get the encryption keys to your programs,” he said.

He said the Communist Party is unlikely to bring in major regulatory changes to protect privacy because that would mean cutting off data access for itself.
…

Facebook’s acknowledgement that the personal data of most of its 2.2 billion members has probably been scraped by “malicious actors” is the latest example of the social network’s failure to protect its users’ data.

Not to mention its seeming inability to even identify the problem until the company was embroiled in scandal.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg told reporters Wednesday that Facebook is shutting down a feature that let people search for Facebook users by phone number or email address. Although that was useful for people who wanted to find others on Facebook, it turns out that unscrupulous types also figured out years ago that they could use it identify individuals and collect data off their profiles.

The scrapers were at it long enough, Zuckerberg said, that “at some point during the last several years, someone has probably accessed your public information in this way.”

The only way to be safe would have been for users to deliberately turn off that search feature several years ago. Facebook had it turned on by default.

Several investigations

“I think Facebook has not been clear enough with how to use its privacy settings,” said Jamie Winterton, director of strategy for Arizona State University’s Global Security Initiative. “That, to me, was the failure.”

The breach was a stunning admission for a company already reeling from allegations that the political data-mining firm Cambridge Analytica inappropriately accessed data on as many as 87 million Facebook users to influence elections.

Over the past few weeks, the scandal has mushroomed into investigations across continents, including a probe by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. Zuckerberg himself will be questioned by Congress for the first time Tuesday.

“The FTC looked the other way for years when consumer groups told them Facebook was violating its 2011 deal to better protect its users. But now the Cambridge Analytica scandal has awoken the FTC from its long digital privacy slumber,” said Jeffrey Chester, executive director for the Washington-based privacy nonprofit Center for Digital Democracy.

Problem found after Cambridge Analytica

Neither Zuckerberg nor his company has identified those who carried out the data scraping. Outside experts believe they could have been identity thieves, scam artists or shady data brokers assembling marketing profiles.

Zuckerberg said the company detected the problem in a data-privacy audit started after the Cambridge Analytica disclosures, but didn’t say why the company hadn’t noticed it — or fixed it — earlier.

Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday on when it discovered the data scraping.

In his call with reporters Wednesday, Zuckerberg said the company had tried “rate limiting” the searches. This restricted how many searches someone can conduct at one time from a particular IP address, a numeric designation that identifies a device’s location on the internet. But Zuckerberg said the scrapers circumvented that defense by cycling through multiple IP addresses.

Public information useful 

The scraped information was limited to what a user had chosen to make public — which, depending on a person’s privacy settings, could be a lot — as well as what Facebook requires people to share. That includes full name, profile picture and listings of school or workplace networks.

But hackers and scam artists could then use that information, and combine it with other data in circulation, to pull hoaxes on people, plant malware on their computers or commit other mischief.

Having access to such a massive amount of data could also pose national security risks, Winterton said.

A foreign entity could conceivably use such information to influence elections or stir up discord, exactly what Russia is alleged to have done, using Facebook and other social media, in the 2016 presidential elections.

Oversharing

Privacy advocates have long been critical of Facebook’s penchant for pushing people to share more and more information, often through pro-sharing default options.

While the company offers detailed privacy controls — users can turn off ad targeting, for example, or face recognition, and post updates that no one else sees — many people never change their settings, and often don’t even know how to.

The company has tried to simplify its settings multiple times over the years, most recently this week.

Winterton said that for individual Facebook users, worrying about this data scraping won’t do much good, after all, the data is already out there. But she said it might be a good time to “reflect on what we are sharing and how we are sharing it and whether we need to.”

“Just because someone asks us information, it doesn’t mean we have to give it to them if we are not comfortable,” she said.

She added that while she no longer has a Facebook account, when she did she put her birth year as 1912 and her hometown as Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Neither is true.

This story was written by the Associated Press
…

A Brazilian judge has ordered that Facebook Inc pay 111.7 million reais ($33.4 million) for failing to cooperate with a corruption investigation, federal prosecutors said on Thursday, prompting Facebook to say it was exploring “all legal options.”

The judge fined Facebook for failing to give access in 2016 to WhatsApp messages exchanged by individuals under investigation for defrauding the healthcare system of Brazil’s Amazonas state, the prosecutors said in a statement. In an emailed comment sent to Reuters, Facebook called the fine groundless.

“Facebook cooperates with law enforcement. In this particular case we have disclosed the data required by applicable law,” the statement said. “We understand this fine lacks grounds, and are exploring all legal options at our disposal.”

According to federal police, a Brazilian judge ordered in April 2016 that Facebook give authorities access to the WhatsApp messages in question.

The fine amounted to 1 million reais plus interest for every day Facebook did not comply with the order, beginning when it took effect in mid-June 2016, and ending when the corruption investigation was made public that September, police said.

Through the probe known as “Operacao Maus Caminhos,” or “Operation Bad Paths,” federal police exposed the embezzlement of tens of millions of reais of public funds.

This story was written by VOA News
…

Virtual reality, or VR, is finding more applications as the technology matures. It is no longer only used for gaming or entertainment. One Austin-based company, Blue Goji, is using VR to improve health by making cardiovascular workouts more fun.

The company featured its prototype Infinity treadmill at Austin’s South By Southwest.

The treadmill is paired with a virtual reality headset worn by the user. Before starting the treadmill, the user is hooked up to a belt to prevent falls while running on the treadmill and playing a VR game.

The fully immersive experience transports the user into a virtual world where he or she can be racing against virtual people.

“You have much more motivation to actually get running and do something that pushes your limits. It was pretty cool,” said Leonardo Mattiazzi, who tested the Infinity treadmill. He said it took the boredom out of running inside without actually going anywhere.

Motion sickness less likely

In addition to encouraging better cardiovascular health, the active use of virtual reality also helps solve a common problem while wearing a VR headset said Blue Goji’s marketing associate, Kyra Constam.

“A lot of VR experiences cause motion sickness because there’s a disconnect in the brain, just psychologically. You’re moving in the game, but you’re not moving in real life, and we have come up with the solution. When you’re moving on the treadmill and you’re moving in the game, it mitigates that motion sickness, and you really get full immersion without all of the negative side effects.”

Constam added that any disorientation usually goes away quickly.

However, users who tested the Infinity treadmill wearing the VR headset each had a different experience.

“Pretty quickly you adjust to it,” said Mattiazzi, who took 10 seconds to adjust to running in the virtual world.

VR learning curve

“All I could think of when I was doing it was if my wife was doing this, she would have been barfing all over that because it’s interesting how the brain works. Going downhill, it felt like I was on a roller coaster,” said first time user Mark Sackler, who added, “I don’t get motion sickness easily, but I got a little, felt a little queasy at one point when I was out of control. So it’s surprisingly realistic.”

“There’s a bit of a learning curve for VR in general. I believe that the first time you do it is definitely going to be the most disorienting time, and the more you do it, the more you get used to it,” Constam said.

The cost for the hardware and software is fairly steep at $12,000. However, Constam said the virtual reality treadmill is ideal for high-end gyms, rehabilitation centers and physical therapy clinics. Blue Goji plans to make the Infinity treadmill ready for the public in 2019.
…

Australia’s Privacy Commissioner said on Thursday she had opened a formal investigation into social media giant Facebook Inc after the company confirmed data from 300,000 Australian users may have been used without authorization.

The investigation will consider whether Facebook has breached Australia’s privacy laws, Privacy Commissioner Angelene Falk said in a statement.

Facebook said on Wednesday that the personal information of up to 87 million users, mostly in the United States, may have been improperly shared with political consultancy Cambridge Analytica, up from a previous news media estimate of more than 50 million.
…

Police say a woman shooter entered YouTube headquarters in California Tuesday and wounded at least three people before dying of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Mike O’Sullivan reports, the shooter’s motive is unknown.
…

A woman who believed she was being suppressed by YouTube and told her family members she “hated” the company opened fire at YouTube’s headquarters in California, wounding three people before taking her own life, police said.

Investigators do not believe Nasim Aghdam specifically targeted the three victims when she pulled out a handgun and fired off several rounds in a courtyard at the company’s headquarters south of San Francisco on Tuesday, police said.

But a law enforcement official with knowledge of the investigation told The Associated Press that Aghdam had a longstanding dispute with the company. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the case, said Aghdam used the name “Nasime Sabz” online.

A website in that name decried YouTube’s policies and said the company was trying to “suppress” content creators.

“Youtube filtered my channels to keep them from getting views!” one of the messages on the site said. “There is no equal growth opportunity on YOUTUBE or any other video sharing site, your channel will grow if they want to!!!!!”

Aghdam “hated” YouTube and was angry that the company stopped paying her for videos she posted on the platform, her father, Ismail Aghdam, told the Bay Area News Group.

On Monday, he called police to report his daughter missing after she didn’t answer the phone for two days and warned officers that she might go to YouTube, he said.

Officers in Mountain View — about 30 miles (48 kilometers) from YouTube’s headquarters — found her sleeping in her car in a parking lot around 2 a.m. Tuesday but let her go after she refused to answer their questions. Aghdam didn’t appear to be a threat to herself or others, police spokeswoman Katie Nelson said.

Nelson would not say whether officers had been warned that Aghdam might have been headed to YouTube headquarters.

Earlier Tuesday, law enforcement said the shooting was being investigated as a domestic dispute but did not elaborate. It was not immediately clear why police later said the people shot were not specifically targeted.

One of the victims — a 36-year-old man — was in critical condition, a spokesman for San Francisco General Hospital said. A 32-year-old woman was in serious condition and a 27-year-old woman in fair condition, the spokesman said.

YouTube employee Dianna Arnspiger said she was on the building’s second floor when she heard gunshots, ran to a window and saw the shooter on a patio outside.

“It was a woman and she was firing her gun. And I just said, `Shooter,’ and everybody started running,” Arnspiger said.

She and others hid in a conference room for an hour while another employee repeatedly called 911 for updates.

The world’s biggest online video website is owned by Silicon Valley giant Google, but company officials said it’s a tight-knit community. The headquarters has more than a thousand engineers and other employees in several buildings. Originally built in the late 1990s for the clothing retailer Gap, the campus south of San Francisco is known for its sloped green roof of native grasses.

Inside, Google several years ago famously outfitted the office with a 3-lane red slide for workers to zoom from one story to another.

“Today it feels like the entire community of YouTube, all of the employees, were victims of this crime,” said Chris Dale, a spokesman for YouTube.

YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki said in a tweet the company would “come together to heal as a family.”

Officers and federal agents responding to multiple 911 calls swarmed the company’s campus sandwiched between two interstates in the San Francisco Bay Area city of San Bruno.

Zach Vorhies, 37, a senior software engineer at YouTube, said he was at his desk working on the second floor of one of the buildings on the campus when the fire alarm went off.

He got on his skateboard and approached a courtyard, where he saw the shooter yelling, “Come get me.” He said the public can access the courtyard where he saw the shooter without any security check during working hours.

There was somebody lying nearby on his back with a red stain on his stomach that appeared to be from a bullet wound.

He said he realized it was an active shooter incident when a police officer with an assault rifle came through a security door. He jumped on his skateboard and took off.

Officers discovered one victim with a gunshot wound when they arrived and then found the shooter with what appeared to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound several minutes later, San Bruno Police Chief Ed Barberini said. He said two additional gunshot victims were later located at an adjacent business.
…

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will testify before a congressional committee about the privacy scandal that has rocked the social media company.

The House and Energy and Commerce Committee announced Wednesday Zuckerberg will testify on April 11 about the British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, which obtained data on tens of millions of Facebook users that could be used to influence voters in U.S. elections. The firm was hired by U.S. President Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, which paid the firm nearly $6 million.

Committee chairman Greg Walden and ranking Democrat Frank Pallone said the hearing hopes to “shed light on critical consumer data privacy issues and help all Americans better understand what happens to their personal information online.” The panel is the first of three congressional committees that have asked Zuckerberg to testify.

Zuckerberg’s upcoming testimony comes after senior Facebook officials failed to answer questions during a private meeting with congressional staffers about how the company and third-party software developers use and protect consumer data.

It remains unclear if Congress or the administration will take any action against Facebook, but the company is well-positioned to counter any efforts to regulate it.

The social media giant has a large lobbying operation to advance its interests in Washington. Documents filed with the House and Senate shows Facebook spent more than $17 million in2017, much of it on an in-house lobbying team that is comprised of former Republican and Democratic political aides. The company lobbied on a variety of issues, including potential changes to government surveillance programs and on corporate tax issues.
…

It’s been 45 years since men last set foot on the Moon. The year was 1972. Back then, the fastest commercially available microprocessor could handle a maximum of 16 kilobytes of memory. Today the average smartphone can crunch several millions of kilobytes. But huge leaps in computing power have not been matched by similar advances in space travel. VOA’s George Putic has more.
…

Several Silicon Valley leaders called for increased gun control on Tuesday afternoon after a woman at the headquarters of YouTube shot and wounded three people before taking her own life.

Tech companies have largely avoided the topic of gun control in the United States, but they have previously pushed for progressive stances on other hot-topic issues, ranging from climate change to same-sex marriage and comprehensive immigration reform. At least three major chief executives took up gun control after the shooting.

“We can’t keep being reactive to this, thinking and praying it won’t happen again at our schools, jobs, or our community spots,” tweeted Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey. “It’s beyond time to evolve our policies.”

Joining Dorsey were Uber Technologies CEO Dara Khosrowshahi and Box CEO Aaron Levie, who respectively sent tweets on Tuesday saying #EndGunViolence and #NeverAgain, two Twitter hashtags commonly used by proponents of gun control.

“On behalf of the team at @Uber, sending support to everyone @YouTube and @Google, and gratitude to the heroic first responders,” Khosrowshahi tweeted. “Another tragedy that should push us again to #EndGunViolence”

Emergency calls reporting gunfire in San Bruno, California, at the headquarters of Alphabet’s YouTube began to pour in early Tuesday afternoon, according to the city of San Bruno. Authorities have not released the identities of the suspected shooter or the victims.

The tweets on Thursday could be an indication that Silicon Valley may soon weigh in on the epidemic of mass killings by firearms in the United States.

“Incredibly sad to see the YouTube shooting today,” Levie tweeted. “Our thoughts are with our Google friends and their families. #NeverAgain”

Sundar Pichai and Susan Wojcicki, the CEOs of Google and YouTube respectively, also issued statements on Tuesday while avoiding the topic of gun control.

“There are no words to describe how horrible it was to have an active shooter @YouTube today,” Wojcicki said. “Our deepest gratitude to law enforcement & first responders for their rapid response. 

Our hearts go out to all those injured & impacted today. We will come together to heal as a family.”

Other tech leaders expressed sympathy for the employees of YouTube on social media on Tuesday without referencing gun control. Those included Apple CEO Tim Cook, Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff and Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg.

“From everyone at Apple, we send our sympathy and support to the team at YouTube and Google, especially the victims and their families,” Cook said in a tweet.
…

Facebook, expanding its response to people using the platform improperly, said Tuesday that it had deleted hundreds of Russian accounts and pages associated with a “troll factory” indicted by U.S. prosecutors for fake activist and political posts in the 2016 U.S. election campaign.

Facebook said many of the deleted articles and pages came from Russia-based Federal News Agency, known as FAN, and that the social media company’s security team had concluded that the agency was technologically and structurally intertwined with the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency.

Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg told Reuters in an exclusive interview that the agency “has repeatedly acted to deceive people and manipulate people around the world, and we don’t want them on Facebook anywhere.”

Massive data collection

The world’s largest social media company is under pressure to improve its handling of data after disclosing that information about 50 million Facebook users wrongly ended up in the hands of political consultancy Cambridge Analytica, which worked on then-Republican candidate Donald Trump’s campaign.

The removed accounts and pages were mainly in Russian, and many had little political import, the company said. Previously Facebook focused on taking down fake accounts and accounts spreading fake news. The new policy will include otherwise legitimate content spread by those same actors, Zuckerberg said.

“It is clear from the evidence that we’ve collected that those organizations are controlled and operated by” the Internet Research Agency, he added.

In February, the agency known as IRA was among three firms and 13 Russians indicted by U.S. special counsel Robert Mueller on charges they conspired to tamper in the presidential campaign and support Trump while disparaging Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.

Russian media organization RBC last year reported that FAN and IRA once shared the same street address and had other connections. One of the people that it said made decisions at FAN was indicted by Mueller’s office, which is investigating U.S. intelligence agency conclusions that Moscow tried to undermine the democratic process. Russia denies interfering in the elections.

Ban accounts

Facebook disclosed in September that Russians used Facebook to meddle in U.S. politics, posting on the social network under false names in the months before and after the 2016 elections.

Zuckerberg said Tuesday that improved machine learning had helped find connections between the latest posts and IRA. He and Facebook security officials said the company would do the same when they find more legitimate content being pushed out by groups exposed as manipulators.

“We’re going to execute and operate under our principles,” Zuckerberg said. “We don’t allow people to have fake accounts, and if you repeatedly try to set up fake accounts to manipulate things, then our policy is to ban all of your accounts.”

Zuckerberg said that the standard is high for such retribution toward news organizations and that state-owned media by itself was fine.

The company decided to root out as much as it can of IRA, which was involved with posts including sponsoring fake pages that were pro-Trump, pro-border security and protesting police violence against minorities, among other topics.

The expanded response could provoke a backlash from Russian internet regulators.

Last October, Google followed up on reported connections between FAN and IRA by removing FAN stories from its search index. Media regulator Roskomnadzor asked Google for an explanation, saying that it needed to protect free speech.

Google then reinstated FAN, according to reports at the time. Facebook officials said its accounts and pages in question had 1 million unique followers on Facebook and 500,000 on Instagram, mainly in Russia, Ukraine, and nearby countries such as Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan.

Zuckerberg, who founded Facebook in his college dorm room in 2004, personally kept quiet about the Cambridge Analytica data leak for four days before apologizing and outlining steps that he said would help protect personal data.

The 33-year-old billionaire plans to testify before U.S. lawmakers to explain Facebook’s privacy policies, a first for him, a source said last week, although he has so far not committed to doing the same for U.K. lawmakers.

Multiple investigations

Britain’s data protection authority, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and 37 U.S. state attorneys general are investigating Facebook’s handling of personal data.

Zuckerberg initially downplayed Facebook’s ability to sway voters, saying days after the U.S. elections that it was a “pretty crazy idea” that fake news stories had an influence.

Eventually, though, Facebook’s security staff concluded that the social network was being used by spies and other government agents to covertly spread disinformation among rivals and enemies.

Critics including U.S. Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, have complained Facebook moved too slowly to investigate and counter information warfare. 

Facebook stepped up efforts to shutter fake accounts before a national election last year in France, and has said it will work with election authorities around the world to try to prevent meddling in politics.

The company, which is now one of the main ways politicians advertise to voters, plans to start a public archive showing all election-related ads, how much money was spent on each one, the number of impressions each receives and the demographics of the audience reached.

Facebook is on track to bring that data to U.S. voters before congressional elections in November, Zuckerberg said Tuesday. Facebook plans to send postcards by U.S. mail to verify the identities and location of people who want to purchase U.S. election-related advertising.
…

Autonomous cars should be required to meet standards on their ability to detect potential hazards, and better ways are needed to keep their human drivers ready to assume control, U.S. auto safety and technology experts said after fatal crashes involving Uber Technologies and Tesla vehicles.

Automakers and tech companies rely on human drivers to step in when necessary with self-driving technology. But in the two recent crashes, which involved vehicles using different kinds of technologies, neither of the human drivers took any action before the accidents.

Driverless cars rely on lidar, which uses laser light pulses to detect road hazards, as well as sensors such as radar and cameras. There are not, however, any standards on the systems, nor do all companies use the same combination of sensors, and some vehicles may have blind spots.

Queue the music for the human driver — music that drivers often find difficult to hear.

“Humans don’t have the ability to take over the vehicle as quickly as may be expected” in those situations, said self-driving expert and investor Evangelos Simoudis.

In the Uber crash last month, the ride-services company was testing a fully driverless system intended for commercial use when the prototype vehicle struck and killed a woman walking across an Arizona road. Video of the crash, taken from inside the vehicle, shows the driver at the wheel, seemingly looking down and not at the road. Just before the video stops, the driver looks upward toward the road and suddenly looks shocked.

In the Tesla incident last month, which involved a car that any consumer can buy, a Model X vehicle was in semi-autonomous Autopilot mode when it crashed, killing its driver. The driver had received earlier warnings to put his hands on the wheel, Tesla said.

Some semi-automated cars, like the Tesla, employ different technologies to help drivers stay in their lane or maintain a certain distance behind the vehicle in front. Those systems rely on alerts — beeping noises or a vibrating steering wheel — to get drivers’ attention.

‘Immature technology’

Duke University mechanical engineering professor Missy Cummings said the recent Uber and Tesla crashes show the “technology they are using is immature.”

Tesla says its technology is statistically proven to save lives through better driving. In a response to Reuters on Tuesday, Tesla said drivers have a “responsibility to maintain control of the car” whenever they enable Autopilot and need to be ready to respond to “audible and visual cues.”

An Uber spokesperson said, “safety is our primary concern every step of the way.”

A consumer group, Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, says a bill on self-driving cars now stalled in the U.S. Senate is an opportunity to improve safety, quite different from the bill’s original intent to quickly allow testing of self-driving cars without human controls on public roads. The group has proposed amending the bill, the AV START Act, to set standards for those vehicles — for instance, requiring a “vision test” for automated vehicles to test what their different sensors actually see.

The group believes the bill should also cover semi-automated systems like Tesla’s Autopilot — a lower level of technology than what is included in the current proposed legislation.

Other groups have also put forth proposals on self-driving cars, including requiring the vehicles and even semi-automated systems to meet performance targets, greater transparency and data from makers and operators of the vehicles, increased regulatory oversight, and better monitoring of and engagement with human drivers.

Role of drivers

Others want to focus on the human driver. In November, Consumer Reports magazine called on automakers for responsible labeling “to help consumers fully understand” their vehicles’ autonomous functions.

Jake Fisher, Consumer Reports’ head of automotive testing, said human drivers “are bad at paying attention to automation and this technology is not capable of reacting to all types of emergencies.

“It’s like being a passenger with a toddler driving the car,” he said.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is doing tests using semi-automated vehicles including models from Tesla, Volvo, Jaguar Land Rover and General Motors Co. The aim is to see how drivers use semi-autonomous technology — some watch the road with their hands above the wheel, others do not — and which warnings get their attention.

“We just don’t know enough about how drivers use any of these systems in the wild,” said MIT research scientist Bryan Reimer.

Timothy Carone, an autonomous systems expert and professor at Notre Dame University’s Mendoza College of Business, said autonomous technology’s proponents must “find the right balance so the technology is tested right, but it isn’t hampered or halted.”

“Because in the long run it will save lives,” he said.
…

Bread and chocolate are staples of the American diet. And a scientific team in California is working hard to make sure the plants they’re made from are as robust as possible. They’re using a recently discovered bacterial gene-editing tool called CRISPR to create more pest-resistant crops.

CRISPR is a feature of the bacterial defense system. The microbes use it like a molecular pair of scissors, to precisely snip out viral infections in their DNA.

Scientists at the Innovative Genomics Institute in Berkeley, California, are using CRISPR to manipulate plant DNA. Managing director, Susan Jenkins, says the technique is so much faster and precise than other plant transformation methods, it will likely increase the speed of creating new plant varieties by years, if not decades. “What CRISPR is going to allow,” she explains, “is for us to go in and make these changes, and then within one generation of the plant actually have the trait we want.”

Rust-resistant wheat

 

While CRISPR speeds up plant breeding, Jenkins says it’s not a magic wand — changing a plant takes a lot of steps. She points to the Institute’s efforts to develop a wheat variety that resists a fungal rust that can reduce yields by nearly 50 percent.

First, scientists had to figure out just which gene was making the wheat vulnerable to fungal rust. Then they used CRISPR to remove that gene.

“So in this case, we use CRISPR to actually knock out a gene that is in the wheat,” Jenkins says. And because “snipping out” a gene does not add foreign material to a plant, last week, the USDA ruled that gene-changing methods like this do not require special regulatory approval.

 

Plant transformation expert Myeong-Je Cho says they started with a single gene-edited rust-resistant wheat cell, and grew it in the lab into wheat “clones” for further testing. After just over a year, some clones are now stalks of wheat, and Cho adds, “we have grownup plants in the greenhouse,” complete with normal stalks and robust seed heads.

While the Institute introduced no foreign genetic material into the wheat, CRISPR technology can also be used to introduce genes, even genes from other species, as is done with more traditional GMO crops. However, in standard GMO techniques, scientists use a “shotgun” approach to force new genes into a plant’s DNA in random places. Then, they choose which random change is most likely to grow healthy plants. In contrast, CRISPR is used when scientists want to add a specific gene at a specific location in the DNA. CRISPR offers that level of precision.

Protecting cacao trees

The bacterial gene known as Cas9 evolved to snip viruses out of bacterial DNA. Now Institute scientists want to use it to fight a virus that’s attacking cacao trees in West Africa.

The swollen shoot virus evolved in other plants, then, half a century ago, “jumped species” to cacao trees, which it can kill in just three years. So Jenkins says, the Institute is working to add virus resistance to cacao tree DNA, by inserting the Cas9 resistance gene. After all, she says, “If the bacteria have already evolved this to fight this viral infection, we are just going to take that mechanism and put it directly into the plant.”

 

The Institute plans to start growing cacao trees resistant to swollen shoot virus within a year. That is fast, according to Institute Science Director, Brian Staskawicz. He points out, “What this technology can do is to allow us work with the elite cultivars of a plant and basically change them for drought resistance and cold tolerance and disease resistance in a more rapid fashion than classical plant breeding.”

 

Staskawicz says that modifying cacao tree DNA is an exciting project from a technical standpoint, because cacao plants are unusually difficult to clone and genetically transform.

Public attitudes towards genetically modified crops

However, some challenges will go beyond whether the changes are technically possible. Those other challenges become evident at the Diablo Farmer’s market near Berkeley, where vendors like chocolatier Eli Curtis pride themselves on selling craft, organic foods. Curtis suspects we could increase cocoa yields by helping farmers be better stewards of wild cacao trees. He’s not sure consumers will like the idea of gene-edited chocolate, but if CRISPR leads to more pest-resistant crops, he says, “I definitely understand the value. But I also understand consumer apprehension.”

 

Nevertheless, Staskawicz says we need faster plant-breeding techniques like CRISPR because we are in a race, one we need to win, because there are currently 7.3 billion people on earth.

“By 2050 there are going to be nine billion people, and the estimates are that we actually need to increase food production by 70 percent. So we are going to need a way to actually increase the yield of these plants to feed the population of the world.”

CRISPR can help do that. He and his team hope, within a decade, CRISPR’d crops may be ingredients in many things, including bread and chocolate.
…