The Chinese telecom giant Huawei has consistently claimed it does not actively partner with the Chinese government in gathering intelligence on individuals within China, but a report by The Washington Post this week showing the company appears to have marketed surveillance technology to government customers calls the company’s assertions into question.

The report comes as major parts of the large company’s operations remain severely restricted by sanctions imposed by the United States under former President Donald Trump, which were renewed, and in some cases tightened, by President Joe Biden.

The newspaper obtained more than 100 PowerPoint presentations that were briefly posted to a public page of the company’s website. The trove of documents suggests the company was marketing various surveillance-related services, including voice recognition technology, location tracking and facial-recognition-based area surveillance.

The presentations indicate the company also marketed systems meant to monitor prisons, like those in which China is currently believed to be holding an untold number of Uyghurs in the Western province of Xinjiang. The system tracked prisoners’ labor productivity, as well as their time spent in reeducation classes and data that might indicate the effectiveness of those classes.

Additionally, the materials appeared to market workplace surveillance tools, meant to monitor employees’ workplace performance and to spot workers who spend time resting or using personal electronics on the clock.

Huawei denial

In a statement provided to VOA, a Huawei spokesperson said, “Huawei has no knowledge of the projects mentioned in The Washington Post report.”

It continued, “Like all other major service providers, Huawei provides cloud platform services that comply with common industry standards. Huawei does not develop or sell systems that target any specific group of people and we require our partners comply with all applicable laws, regulations and business ethics. Privacy protection is our top priority and we require that all parts of our business comply with all applicable laws and regulations in the countries and regions where we operate.”

The Post, in its article, noted the company’s official watermark appeared on the pages of the PowerPoint presentation, and that several included a page noting a “Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd.” copyright.

Electronic security experts said the revelation of the PowerPoint presentations linking Huawei to state security wasn’t surprising, despite the company’s denials.

“Huawei has been closely linked to the security services from the start,” Jim Lewis, senior vice president and director of the Strategic Technologies Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told VOA.

Lewis said the warnings about the company have been coming from American officials since George W. Bush was president but had not been taken seriously until the past few years, when China became more aggressive about asserting itself on the world stage.

“What’s changed is the audience,” Lewis said. Between China’s and [Chinese President] Xi Jinping’s behavior, people are willing to hear now about the problems with Huawei in a way they weren’t before.”

Punishing sanctions

The United States has, for several years, been warning that Huawei represents a security risk to the interests of the U.S. and its allies. Despite the company’s claims to the contrary, U.S. officials say they believe the company has close ties to Chinese state security agencies and that its telecommunications products could be used to gather information on, or disrupt the activities of, China’s rivals.

Officials also point to a law in China that obligates private companies to cooperate with government agencies in the collection of data deemed important to state security.

In 2019 and 2020, the U.S. began aggressively moving against Huawei on a number of fronts.

The Trump administration fought against the company’s effort to market the networking equipment necessary to roll out 5G wireless technology. 5G is the next generation of mobile connectivity and is expected to greatly enhance the ability of internet-connected devices to communicate, facilitating everything from self-driving vehicles to remote surgery.

The U.S. declared, among other things, it would cease sharing intelligence with allies who allow Huawei to supply critical pieces of their nations’ telecommunications infrastructure, arguing the company presented too much of a security risk.

As a result, a number of countries have barred the company’s technology from their 5G systems and others, including Britain, have begun the expensive process of removing Huawei equipment that already had been installed.

Smartphone setback

Until recently, Huawei was one of the biggest sellers of smartphones in the world and enjoyed near-complete dominance in the Chinese market. Other sanctions levied against the company, however, have severely damaged that business.

The U.S. barred firms from licensing or selling the company technology critical to some of its products. That included Google, which in 2019 said it would no longer license its Android operating system — the world’s most popular — for use in new phones made by the company.

Intel and Qualcomm, two major makers of microchips, were banned from selling their most advanced technology to Huawei. The ban extended to contract chipmakers, like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp., the world’s largest.

The result has been a drastic decline in the sale of Huawei smartphones, both globally and within China.

“The core of their devices business was smartphones, and their market share has just continued to decline,” Ryan Reith, a vice president with International Data Corporation, told VOA.

Reith said the prospects for recovery do not look good for the company’s smartphone business.

“We don’t see any way that the brand itself turns around,” he said. “So, it’s probably on its way out.”
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The U.S. space agency NASA says its Parker Solar Probe this week became the first spacecraft to enter the Sun’s atmosphere, also known as the corona. 

The space agency announced the news Tuesday at a press conference during a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in New Orleans. 

In a statement, NASA scientists said the probe actually entered the Sun’s corona April 18, but it took until now to get the data and examine it to confirm it had accomplished its mission. 

NASA said while the Sun doesn’t have a solid surface, it does have a superheated corona made of solar material bound to the Sun by gravity and magnetic forces. The point at which those forces are too weak to contain material ejected from the sun is considered the edge of the corona, an area scientists call the Alfvén critical surface. 

NASA says the Parker probe crossed this boundry about 13 million kilometers above the surface of the sun. Until they were able to examine the data from the probe, scientists were not exactly sure where the area was. 

The scientists say during the flyby, which lasted only a few hours, the solar probe passed into and out of the corona several times. The data it gathered in doing so proved what some had predicted — that the Alfvén critical surface isn’t shaped like a smooth ball, but has it has spikes and valleys that wrinkle the surface. 

The Parker Solar Probe was launched in 2018 and was intended to exactly what it is doing: flying closer to the sun than any spacecraft has done before. NASA scientists compare what the probe has accomplished to landing on the moon. As the mission continues, the agency says, it will help scientists uncover critical information about Earth’s closest star and its influence on the solar system. 

A paper on the achievement was also published Tuesday in the scientific journal Physical Review Letters. 

Some information for this report was provided by the Associated Press.
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China’s advances in quantum computing will give a new advantage to its armed forces, already the world’s third strongest, analysts say.

Quantum refers to a type of computing that lets high-powered machines make calculations that are too complex for ordinary devices. 

The concept discovered by American physicist Richard Feynman in 1980 has two key military uses, the think tank International Institute for Strategic Studies said in a 2019 paper. It can decrypt encoded messages and send cryptographic keys that intercept otherwise secure communication chains, the study says.

“I think the challenge is basically in the dual civilian-military strategy of China where the government will enlist the private sector into its military modernization program,” said Alexander Vuving, professor at the Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, in Hawaii. “Also, the government of China spends a lot of money in research and development.”

China’s name surfaced last month when IT consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton said that within a decade Chinese “threat groups will likely collect data that enables quantum simulators to discover new economically valuable materials, pharmaceuticals, and chemicals.” 

China on the move

It’s unclear how far Chinese researchers have advanced quantum computing, but the Pentagon’s 2021 report to Congress on China says the Asian superpower “continues its pursuit of leadership in key technologies with significant military potential.”

China’s 14th Five-Year Plan, an economic blueprint, prioritizes quantum technology among other new fields, the report to Congress adds, and it intends to install satellite-enabled, global “quantum-encrypted communications capability” by 2030.

Quantum could help detect submarines and stealth aircraft among other “military vehicles,” said Heather West, a senior research analyst with market research firm IDC in the U.S. state of Massachusetts. Quantum computing can break “classical algorithms” to check on another country’s military, she told VOA.

The University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei last year made the first “definitive demonstration” of exploiting quantum mechanics for computations that would be “prohibitively slow on classical computers,” the science journal Nature reported. Google and NASA had claimed “quantum supremacy” in 2019. 

The state-run China Daily news website said in September the country had “achieved a series of breakthroughs in quantum technology including the world’s first quantum satellite, a 2,000-km quantum communication line between Beijing and Shanghai, and the world’s first optical quantum computing machine prototype.” China Daily did not mention military use.

China has alarmed other countries in the past by merging civilian and military infrastructure, part of a Military-Civil Fusion Development Strategy that makes it hard for the outside world to judge when academic research will become an asset of the People’s Liberation Army.

Although quantum computing worldwide remains at a “nascent stage,” multiple countries are in a race to develop it, Vuving said. He points to the United States, India, Japan and Germany, in addition to China. Any frontrunners are unlikely to last long, he said, as rivals would quickly copy their breakthroughs.

Multiple countries at risk?

The Booz Allen Hamilton report says many organization leaders and chief information security officers “lack insight into the practical importance of quantum computing and how to manage related risks.”

“They don’t know how and when the technology might become useful — and how it might shape the behavior of threat actors such as China, a persistent cyber adversary of government and commercial organizations globally and a major developer of quantum-computing technology,” the report says.

The People’s Liberation Army maintains the world’s third-strongest armed forces after the United States and Russia, according to the GlobalFirePower.com database. Japan, Taiwan and other Southeast Asian countries fret particularly over the expansion of the PLA Navy in disputed tracts of sea. Washington has stepped up military movement in the same seas since 2019 to monitor China’s activities.

“Taiwan, the United States or the European Union are all likely targets for China to launch quantum computing attacks as long as countries do not have robust quantum cryptography to defend,” said Chen Yi-fan, assistant professor of diplomacy and international relations at Tamkang University in Taiwan.

China is already suspected of using cyberattacks against Taiwan, a self-ruled island that Beijing says is part of its territory.

In the military realm outside China, quantum computing forms part of the AUKUS military technology sharing deal among Australia, the U.K. and the U.S. announced in September over Beijing’s objections.

In August 2020, the White House, National Science Foundation and Department of Energy announced it would award $625 million over five years for quantum R&D, the National Defense Industrial Association says.

“We’re seeing a lot of research and development going into the Department of Defense in the U.S.,” West said. “I don’t think they would be pouring the money into it if they didn’t think there was that potential.”

Researchers in Singapore, a well-off city-state, and Taiwan, a world tech hub, are exploring quantum technology as well. 

Smaller countries couldn’t compete with China’s quantum computing resources, said Carl Thayer, emeritus professor of politics at the University of New South Wales in Australia. They would need engineers, technicians and money, he said.

“That’s for the big boys, for the people with money, sophistication, knowledge. Other countries could toy around, but they wouldn’t have the ability to go very far with it, I think,” Thayer said.

 
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U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris on Monday unveiled a White House plan to build 500,000 new electric vehicle (EV) charging stations across the country, part of President Joe Biden’s goal of making the vehicles more accessible for both local and long-distance trips. 

Harris made the announcement during a ceremony at an EV charging facility in suburban Maryland outside the U.S. capital, Washington.

“There can be no doubt: The future of transportation in our nation and around the world, is electric,” Harris said, adding that the nation’s ability to manufacture, charge and repair electric vehicles will help determine the health of U.S. communities, the strength of the nation’s economy and the sustainability of the planet. 

The EV Charging Plan takes $5 billion from the infrastructure law signed last month and allocates it to states to build a nationwide network of charging stations. The law also provides an additional $2.5 billion for local grants to support charging stations in rural areas and in disadvantaged communities. 

In a statement, the White House also announced it will establish on Tuesday a Joint Office of Energy and Transportation, leveraging the resources from each of the departments to implement the EV charging network and other electrification provisions in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. 

The White House says the goal of the plan is to speed up the adoption of electric vehicles for consumers and commercial fleets. They network as planned would reduce emissions and help meet the goal of net-zero emissions by no later than 2050.

Biden has established another ambitious goal of having electric vehicles account for 50% of all vehicles sold in the U.S. by 2030. Last year, industry experts said sales of fully electric vehicles accounted for about 2% of vehicles sold in the U.S. 

Some information for this report came from The Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse. 

 
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The United States, Australia and Japan said Sunday they will jointly fund the construction of an undersea cable to boost internet access in three tiny Pacific countries, as the Western allies seek to counter rising Chinese influence in the region.

The three Western allies said they would develop the cable to provide faster internet to Nauru, Kiribati and the Federated States of Micronesia.

“This will support increased economic growth, drive development opportunities, and help to improve living standards as the region recovers from the severe impacts of COVID-19,” a joint statement from the United States, Japan and Australia said.

The three allies did not specify how much the project will cost.

The development of the undersea cable is the latest funding commitment from the Western allies in the telecommunications sector of the Pacific.

The United States and its Indo-Pacific allies are concerned that cables laid by the People’s Republic of China could compromise regional security. Beijing has denied any intent to use commercial fiber-optic cables, which have far greater data capacity than satellites, for spying.

Australia in 2017 spent about A$137 million ($98.2 million) to develop better internet access for the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea. 
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A self-driving flying taxi. A super-fast land-based transport vehicle. A sustainable floating city.

Science fiction, or the wave of the future?

The “Futures” exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, open Nov. 20, 2021, through July 6, 2022, gives visitors a peek at what may happen in the years to come.

The exhibit opened as part of the 175th anniversary of the Smithsonian and is being held at the Arts and Industries Building, which reopened in November after being closed for almost two decades.

With more than 150 ideas, innovations, technologies and artifacts, the exhibit invites visitors to think about the kind of future in which they want to live.

It also provides food for thought by looking back to past innovations, like an 1800s experimental telephone and a spacesuit-testing android.

The exhibit was designed by the Lab of Rockwell Group, an architecture and exhibit design firm in New York.

“The exhibition opens up many different possible forms that the future can take, capturing a number of small glimpses of conceivable futures,” said David Tracy, director of creative technology at Rockwell.

The company designed cutting-edge installations called beacons that contain multiple- choice questions that “prompt people’s imaginations and get them to think about the kind of future they want to see,” Tracy told VOA. 

To answer the questions, people use hand gestures or hover over an answer, Tracy said, which also provides “health and safety measures, since you don’t have to touch a screen.”

Not surprisingly, there are more questions than answers.

It’s difficult for people “to imagine how the future may be different and the technologies that might make it different,” said Jane McGonigal, director of game research and development at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, California.

McGonigal provided the questions for visitors to ponder “to help them imagine the future more vividly and optimistically,” she said during an interview with VOA. 

Questions include, “When might moon tourism become a real reality?” Another looks at what the future might be like if meat doesn’t come from an animal but is grown in a laboratory. 

Visitor Raj Goel from New York got a taste of what that might be like as he peered into a display that was set up like a deli counter with possible food in the future. 

Goel said he’s concerned about meat being grown in a lab. But he said he liked the idea of mushrooms being used as a sort of meatless meat. 

“It’s supposed to taste like bacon and would be a lot healthier,” he said.

Goel said “Futures” makes him feel a bit like he’s walked into a science fiction movie.

“It’s like a giant arcade of futuristic toys and ideas,” he told VOA. 

Those ideas include a BioSuit, a skintight spacesuit that provides astronauts with greater mobility, and an environmentally friendly cleaning system that washes clothes using water from wetlands.

Human remains can also be put to good ecological use. 

A biodegradable underground burial capsule offers a sustainable way to use human remains to grow a tree.

With concern over climate change, cleaner transportation ideas are presented.

Among them, the Virgin Hyperloop, a futuristic transport tube that could become a new mode of train-like transportation and have “a lower environmental impact than other modes of mass transportation,” Virgin said on its hyperloop website. The system could propel passenger or cargo pods at speeds of more than 1,000 kilometers per hour, Virgin said, three times faster than high-speed rail. 

Another possible innovation is an autonomous flying machine. 

The Bell Nexus company has an idea for a flying taxi, especially for use in crowded cities. 

The air taxi, powered by hybrid-electric propulsion, resembles a helicopter and has six tilting round fans that enable it to take off and land vertically from a rooftop or a launch pad.

The interactive displays were especially popular with visitors. 

A robotic art installation called “Do Nothing with Al” mimics the slow moves of a person standing in front of it. The idea is to encourage people to slow down and relax in this era of technological overload.

“It’s really fascinating,” said Jan Myers from Denver. “It reminds me of a human torso with needles,” she said, as she moved back and forth, watching the robot follow her movements. 

At a portal called “Hi! How r u?” visitors can strike up holographic conversations by using an avatar to leave personal messages for people in the future. They can also interact in real time with people at a paired portal site in Doha, Qatar.

Tracy said he hoped the exhibit “empowered visitors with a sense of optimism about our future.” 

Goel said he was encouraged “because many things I saw here made me think the future is bright.” 

 
…

A software vulnerability exploited in the online game Minecraft is rapidly emerging as a major threat to internet-connected devices around the world.

“The internet’s on fire right now,” said Adam Meyers, senior vice president of intelligence at the cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike. “People are scrambling to patch and there are … all kinds of people scrambling to exploit it.”

In the 12 hours since the bug’s existence was disclosed, he said Friday morning, it had been “fully weaponized,” meaning that malefactors have developed and distributed tools to exploit.

The flaw may be the worst computer vulnerability discovered in years. It opens a loophole in software code that is ubiquitous in cloud servers and enterprise software used across industry and government. It could allow criminals or spies to loot valuable data, plant malware or erase crucial information, and much more.

“I’d be hard-pressed to think of a company that’s not at risk,” said Joe Sullivan, chief security officer for Cloudflare, whose online infrastructure protects websites from malicious actors. Untold millions of servers have it installed, and experts said the fallout would not be known for several days.

Amit Yoran, CEO of the cybersecurity firm Tenable, called it “the single biggest, most critical vulnerability of the last decade” — and possibly the biggest in the history of modern computing.

The vulnerability, dubbed “Log4Shell,” was rated 10 on a scale of one to 10 by the Apache Software Foundation, which oversees development of the software. Anyone with the exploit can obtain full access to an unpatched computer that uses the software.

New Zealand’s computer emergency response team was among the first to report that the flaw was being “actively exploited in the wild” just hours after it was publicly reported Thursday and a patch released.

The vulnerability, in open-source Apache software used to run websites and other web services, was discovered Nov. 24 by the Chinese tech giant Alibaba, the foundation said.

Finding and patching the software could be a complicated task. While most organizations and cloud providers should be able to update their web servers easily, the same Apache software is also often embedded in third-party programs, which often can only be updated by their owners.

Yoran, of Tenable, said organizations need to presume they’ve been compromised and act quickly.

The flaw’s exploitation was apparently first discovered in Minecraft, an online game hugely popular with kids and owned by Microsoft.

Meyers and security expert Marcus Hutchins said Minecraft users had been using it to execute programs on the computers of other users by pasting a short message in a chat box.

Microsoft said it had issued a software update for Minecraft users. “Customers who apply the fix are protected,” it said.

Researchers reported finding evidence the vulnerability could be exploited in servers run by companies such as Apple, Amazon, Twitter and Cloudflare.

Cloudflare’s Sullivan said there we no indication his company’s servers had been compromised. Apple, Amazon and Twitter did not immediately respond to requests for comment. 
…

As the two-day virtual Summit for Democracy hosted by President Joe Biden wrapped up on Friday, the U.S., Australia, Denmark and Norway announced an export control program to monitor and restrict the spread of technologies used to violate human rights. The U.S. is also launching programs to support independent media and anti-corruption efforts and defend free and fair elections. White House Bureau Chief Patsy Widakuswara has more.
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Robotic vacuum cleaners halted in their tracks. Doorbell cameras stopped watching for package thieves, though some of those deliveries were canceled anyway. Netflix and Disney movies were interrupted, and The Associated Press had trouble publishing the news.

A major outage in Amazon’s cloud computing network Tuesday severely disrupted services at a wide range of U.S. companies for hours, raising questions about the vulnerability of the internet and its concentration in the hands of a few firms. 

How did it happen? 

Amazon has said nothing about exactly what went wrong. The company limited its communications Tuesday to terse technical explanations on an Amazon Web Services dashboard and a brief statement delivered via spokesperson Richard Rocha that acknowledged the outage had affected Amazon’s own warehouse and delivery operations but said the company was “working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.” It didn’t immediately respond to further questions Wednesday. 

The incident at Amazon Web Services mostly affected the eastern U.S., but still impacted everything from airline reservations and auto dealerships to payment apps and video streaming services to Amazon’s own massive e-commerce operation. 

What is AWS? 

Amazon Web Services is a cloud-service operation — it stores its customers’ data, runs their online activities and more — and a huge profit center for Amazon. It holds roughly a third of the $152 billion market for cloud services, according to a report by Synergy Research Group — a larger share than its closest rivals, Microsoft and Google, combined. 

It was formerly run by Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, who succeeded founder Jeff Bezos in July. 

Too many eggs in one basket? 

Some cybersecurity experts have warned for years about the potentially ugly consequences of allowing a handful of big tech companies to dominate key internet operations. 

“The latest AWS outage is a prime example of the danger of centralized network infrastructure,” said Sean O’Brien, a visiting lecturer in cybersecurity at Yale Law School. “Though most people browsing the internet or using an app don’t know it, Amazon is baked into most of the apps and websites they use each day.” O’Brien said it’s important to build a new network model that resembles the peer-to-peer roots of the early internet. Big outages have already knocked huge swaths of the world offline, as happened during an October Facebook incident.

Even under the current model, companies do have some options to split their services between different cloud providers, although it can be complicated, or to at least make sure they can move their services to a different region run by the same provider. Tuesday’s outage mostly affected Amazon’s “US East 1” region. 

“Which means if you had critical systems only available in that region, you were in trouble,” said Servaas Verbiest, lead cloud evangelist at Sungard Availability Services. “If you heavily embraced the AWS ecosystem and are locked into using solely their services and functions, you must ensure you balance your workloads between regions.” 

Hasn’t this happened before? 

Yes. The last major AWS outage was in November 2020. There have been numerous other disruptive and lengthy internet outages involving other providers. In June, the behind-the-scenes content distributor Fastly suffered a failure that briefly took down dozens of major internet sites including those of CNN and The New York Times, plus the British government home page. Another that month affected provider Akamai during peak business hours in Asia in June.

In the October outage, Facebook — now known as Meta Platforms — blamed a “faulty configuration change” for an hourslong worldwide outage that took down Instagram and WhatsApp in addition to its titular platform. 

What about the government? 

It was unclear how, or whether, Tuesday’s outage affected governments, but many of them also rely on Amazon and its rivals. 

Among the most influential organizations to rethink its approach of depending on a single cloud provider was the Pentagon, which in July canceled a disputed cloud-computing contract with Microsoft that could eventually have been worth $10 billion. It will instead pursue a deal with both Microsoft and Amazon and possibly other cloud service providers such as Google, Oracle and IBM. 

The National Security Agency earlier this year awarded Amazon a contract with a potential estimated value of $10 billion to be the sole manager of the NSA’s own migration to cloud computing. The contract is known by its agency code name “Wild and Stormy.” The General Accountability Office in October sustained a bid protest by Microsoft, finding that certain parts of the NSA’s decision were “unreasonable,” although the full decision is classified. 
…

While the COVID-19 pandemic lingers on, one might not know it by looking at 2021’s most searched items on Google. 

According to the list released by Google Wednesday, “NBA” was the most searched term in the U.S., but it’s unclear why. 

Other most searched topics were rapper DMX, who died; Gabby Petito, an apparent murder victim who died during a cross-country trip with her boyfriend Brian Laundrie, who was also on the most searched list. Laundrie was declared a person of interest in Petito’s death, but he died of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound. 

Also on the list is Kyle Rittenhouse, who was acquitted last month of killing two protesters and wounding a third during unrest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 2020. 

The most searched news item was “mega millions” as people were curious about record-sized lottery jackpots. 

The most searched person was Kyle Rittenhouse, the most searched actor was Alec Baldwin, who was involved in a shooting death on a movie set, and the most searched athlete was Tiger Woods, who was severely injured in a car accident earlier in the year, Google said. 

The most searched movie was Black Widow, and the most searched musician/band was rapper Travis Scott. Scott was recently the subject of interest as 10 people were killed and hundreds more wounded at one of his concerts in November. 

While 2020 searches were dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic, it barely registered on this year’s list. “COVID vaccine near me” was the most popular “near me” search, with “COVID testing near me” coming in at number two.
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A major outage disrupted Amazon’s cloud services on Tuesday, temporarily knocking out streaming platforms Netflix and Disney+, Robinhood, a wide range of apps, and Amazon.com Inc.’s e-commerce website as consumers shopped ahead of Christmas. 

“Many services have already recovered; however, we are working towards full recovery across services,” Amazon said on its status dashboard. 

Amazon’s Ring security cameras, mobile banking app Chime and robot vacuum cleaner maker iRobot, which use Amazon Web Services (AWS), reported issues, according to their social media pages. 

Trading app Robinhood and Walt Disney’s streaming service Disney+ and Netflix were also down, according to Downdetector.com. 

“Netflix, which runs nearly all of its infrastructure on AWS, appears to have lost 26% of its traffic,” said Doug Madory, head of internet analysis at analytics firm Kentik. 

Amazon said the outage was related to network devices and linked to application programming interface, or API, which is a set of protocols for building and integrating application software. 

Downdetector.com showed more than 24,000 incidents of people reporting issues with Amazon, including Prime Video and other services. The outage tracking website collates status reports from a number of sources, including user-submitted errors, on its platform. 

Users began reporting issues around 10:40 a.m. ET on Tuesday, and the outage might have affected a larger number of users. 

Amazon has experienced 27 outages over the past 12 months related to its services, according to web tool-reviewing website ToolTester. 

In June, websites including Reddit, Amazon, CNN, PayPal, Spotify, Al Jazeera Media Network and The New York Times were hit by a widespread hourlong outage linked to U.S.-based content delivery network provider Fastly Inc., a smaller rival of AWS.

 
…

Two computer scientists at the University of Maryland have developed a new artificial intelligence system that evolves to detect and evade internet censorship in repressive countries. VOA’s Julie Taboh has more.
…

Rohingya refugees from Myanmar are suing Meta Platforms Inc, formerly known as Facebook, for $150 billion over allegations that the social media company did not take action against anti-Rohingya hate speech that contributed to violence. 

A U.S. class-action complaint, filed in California on Monday by law firms Edelson PC and Fields PLLC, argues that the company’s failures to police content and its platform’s design contributed to real-world violence faced by the Rohingya community. In a coordinated action, British lawyers also submitted a letter of notice to Facebook’s London office. 

Facebook did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment about the lawsuit. The company has said it was “too slow to prevent misinformation and hate” in Myanmar and has said it has since taken steps to crack down on platform abuses in the region, including banning the military from Facebook and Instagram after the February 1 coup. 

Facebook has said it is protected from liability over content posted by users by a U.S. internet law known as Section 230, which holds that online platforms are not liable for content posted by third parties. The complaint says it seeks to apply Burmese law to the claims if Section 230 is raised as a defense. 

Although U.S. courts can apply foreign law to cases where the alleged harms and activity by companies took place in other countries, two legal experts interviewed by Reuters said they did not know of a successful precedent for foreign law being invoked in lawsuits against social media companies where Section 230 protections could apply. 

Anupam Chander, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, said that invoking Burmese law wasn’t “inappropriate.” But he predicted that “It’s unlikely to be successful,” saying that “It would be odd for Congress to have foreclosed actions under U.S. law but permitted them to proceed under foreign law.” 

More than 730,000 Rohingya Muslims fled Myanmar’s Rakhine state in August 2017 after a military crackdown that refugees said included mass killings and rape. Rights groups documented killings of civilians and burning of villages. 

Myanmar authorities say they were battling an insurgency and deny carrying out systematic atrocities. 

In 2018, U.N. human rights investigators said the use of Facebook had played a key role in spreading hate speech that fueled the violence. A Reuters investigation hat year, cited in the U.S. complaint, found more than 1,000 examples of posts, comments and images attacking the Rohingya and other Muslims on Facebook. 

The International Criminal Court has opened a case into the accusations of crimes in the region. In September, a U.S. federal judge ordered Facebook to release records of accounts connected to anti-Rohingya violence in Myanmar that the social media giant had shut down. 

The new class-action lawsuit references claims by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, who leaked a cache  of internal documents this year, that the company does not police abusive content in countries where such speech is likely to cause the most harm. 

The complaint also cites recent media reports, including a Reuters report last month, that Myanmar’s military was using fake social media accounts to engage in what is widely referred to in the military as “information combat.” 
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In the shadows of the coronavirus pandemic, violence against women has been on the rise around the world, including in South Africa, where half of the country’s women report at least one incident of violence in their lifetime. Now, a local tech company has developed an alarm system to help stop the abuse. For VOA, Linda Givetash reports from Johannesburg. Camera – Zaheer Cassim.
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In the shadows of the coronavirus pandemic, violence against women has been on the rise around the world, including in South Africa, where half of the country’s women report at least one incident of violence in their lifetime. Now, a local tech company has developed an alarm system to help stop the abuse.

A click of a button could save a woman’s life. That’s what South African firm Afri-Tec Technologies hopes to achieve with its alert app.

Gender-based violence has become so rampant during coronavirus lockdowns, President Cyril Ramaphosa has called it the country’s “second pandemic.”

Afri-Tec presents its app as one solution, allowing users to discretely alert friends, family and authorities that they are in danger.

“We’re not saying that our tech or our solution is the silver bullet. But it certainly is one of the pieces of this big puzzle that can make a difference. And I think COVID became a catalyst for a lot of people to adopt, a lot more people to adopt technology. And hence, why we felt creating a technological solution,” says AB Moosa, the CEO of Afri-Tec Technologies. 

The South African Police Service says more than 10,000 people were raped between April and June this year.

Another 15,000 cases of domestic violence were reported in the same period.

Organizations providing support to survivors say those figures don’t paint a full picture as many more cases go unreported.

The lack of data about the crisis is another solution Afri-Tec plans to provide with the information it collects from users.

“We’re also putting AI systems behind our app to be able to then hopefully predict trends of what’s going to happen. So, empower police stations, empower private security, power NGOs, to then be able to have a proactive, rather than reactive response to this challenge,” said Moosa.

People without smartphones can still use the alert system.

The company has designed a panic button that looks like a USB stick as well as a wristwatch that provide the same response.

Social workers say these interventions will make a big difference — but more is still needed.

“We need to target families, ask why is this happening? Is it a tradition? Is it your family history? Is that your background? And if so, how can we change it? And ultimately, we need to pay attention to our children. What are we teaching them?” asks Lisha Stevens, a social worker at the Nisaa Institute for Women’s Development in Johannesburg.

Advocates like Stevens say the public as a whole need to be educated on what gender-based violence is and how to respond to it.

“How do we break the cycle with my attitude, my view of what gender-based violence is? I’m a neighbor, I see this happening. I close my door and I go inside. So, where’s the disconnect that we need to understand?” said Stevens.

Witnesses of violence can report incidents to police, or via a national hotline, or nonprofits — and they can do so anonymously.

If more people intervened, Stevens believes it could be life-changing for victims and help shift the culture so that gender-based violence is no longer the norm. 
…

As the world races to vaccinate billions more people against COVID-19 while the virus’ new omicron variant spreads, India is testing using drones to deliver vaccines to people in mountainous Jammu and Kashmir, where more than 70% of the population lives in rural areas.

It typically takes a couple hours by road to deliver vaccines from one of the region’s main medical centers in Jammu to a hospital located in Marh, a village in mountains nearby. Last month, officials said the delivery took just 20 minutes by the “Octacopter” drone.

Doctors say immunization campaigns have long been challenged by the region’s mountains and weather, which can thwart efforts to reach those living in remote areas.

Director of Health Services Jammu, Dr. Renu Sharma, told VOA that the trial last month delivering 200 doses gave hope that drones could be a useful delivery option.

“If the project is given [approved] it will be very helpful for remote areas especially in Jammu division given the difficult terrain,” Sharma said.

Other parts of Kashmir remain inaccessible for vehicles at times, making drones a better option.

“The areas like Sikardar, Safaid Aab, and Marno are challenging especially in winters. It takes us six to eight hours on foot from Dawar to reach to these areas,” Bashir Ahmad Peroo, a health worker from Gurez area, told VOA.

A spokesperson for the Directorate of Health Services Kashmir, Dr. Mir Mushtaq, told VOA that doctors now often stock enough medicine in the summer to last the local population all winter. Drones could help bolster supplies during the cold months.

Its creators say the Octacopter can carry a payload of 10 kilograms, with a range of 20 kilometers, and a maximum speed of 36 kph.

India’s CSIR-National Aerospace Laboratories developed the Octocopter drones and the country’s minister of state for science and technology, Dr. Jitendra Singh, said they hope they will be able to deliver more than just COVID-19 vaccines, including medical supplies, equipment, and critical packages to remote communities.

Indian health statistics indicate more than 4,400 people have died from coronavirus in Jammu and Kashmir, and doctors say since late last month there has been a rise in the number of new positive tests each day, making the vaccination campaign ever more important. 

 
…

Apple Inc. iPhones of at least nine U.S. State Department employees were hacked by an unknown assailant using sophisticated spyware developed by the Israel-based NSO Group, according to four people familiar with the matter.

The hacks, which took place in the last several months, hit U.S. officials either based in Uganda or focused on matters concerning the East African country, two of the sources said.

The intrusions, first reported here, represent the widest known hacks of U.S. officials through NSO technology.

Previously, a list of numbers with potential targets including some American officials surfaced in reporting on NSO, but it was not clear whether intrusions were always tried or succeeded.

Reuters could not determine who launched the latest cyberattacks.

NSO Group said in a statement Thursday that it did not have any indication their tools were used but canceled access for the relevant customers and would investigate based on the Reuters inquiry.

“If our investigation shall show these actions indeed happened with NSO’s tools, such customer will be terminated permanently and legal actions will take place,” said an NSO spokesperson, who added that NSO will also “cooperate with any relevant government authority and present the full information we will have.”

NSO has long said it only sells its products to government law enforcement and intelligence clients, helping them to monitor security threats, and is not directly involved in surveillance operations.

Officials at the Uganda Embassy in Washington did not comment. A spokesperson for Apple declined to comment.

A State Department spokesperson declined to comment on the intrusions, instead pointing to the Commerce Department’s recent decision to place the Israeli company on an entity list, making it harder for U.S. companies to do business with them.

NSO Group and another spyware firm were “added to the Entity List based on a determination that they developed and supplied spyware to foreign governments that used this tool to maliciously target government officials, journalists, businesspeople, activists, academics, and embassy workers,” the Commerce Department said in an announcement last month.

Easily identifiable

NSO software is capable of not only capturing encrypted messages, photos and other sensitive information from infected phones, but also turning them into recording devices to monitor surroundings, based on product manuals reviewed by Reuters.

Apple’s alert to affected users did not name the creator of the spyware used in this hack.

The victims notified by Apple included American citizens and were easily identifiable as U.S. government employees because they associated email addresses ending in state.gov with their Apple IDs, two of the people said.

They and other targets notified by Apple in multiple countries were infected through the same graphics processing vulnerability that Apple did not learn about and fix until September, the sources said.

Since at least February, this software flaw allowed some NSO customers to take control of iPhones simply by sending invisible yet tainted iMessage requests to the device, researchers who investigated the espionage campaign said.

The victims would not see or need to interact with a prompt for the hack to be successful. Versions of NSO surveillance software, commonly known as Pegasus, could then be installed.

Apple’s announcement that it would notify victims came on the same day it sued NSO Group last week, accusing it of helping numerous customers break into Apple’s mobile software, iOS.

In a public response, NSO has said its technology helps stop terrorism and that they’ve installed controls to curb spying against innocent targets.

For example, NSO says its intrusion system cannot work on phones with U.S. numbers beginning with the country code +1.

But in the Uganda case, the targeted State Department employees were using iPhones registered with foreign telephone numbers, said two of the sources, without the U.S. country code.

Uganda has been roiled this year by an election with reported irregularities, protests and a government crackdown. U.S. officials have tried to meet with opposition leaders, drawing ire from the Ugandan government. Reuters has no evidence the hacks were related to current events in Uganda.

A senior Biden administration official, speaking on condition he not be identified, said the threat to U.S. personnel abroad was one of the reasons the administration was cracking down on companies such as NSO and pursuing new global discussion about spying limits.

The official added that the government has seen “systemic abuse” in multiple countries involving NSO’s Pegasus spyware.

Sen. Ron Wyden, who is on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said: “Companies that enable their customers to hack U.S. government employees are a threat to America’s national security and should be treated as such.”

Historically, some of NSO Group’s best-known past clients included Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Mexico.

The Israeli Ministry of Defense must approve export licenses for NSO, which has close ties to Israel’s defense and intelligence communities, to sell its technology internationally.

In a statement, the Israeli Embassy in Washington said that targeting American officials would be a serious breach of its rules.

“Cyber products like the one mentioned are supervised and licensed to be exported to governments only for purposes related to counter-terrorism and severe crimes,” an embassy spokesperson said. “The licensing provisions are very clear and if these claims are true, it is a severe violation of these provisions.” 

 
…

To make Black history more accessible, an Oakland, California man designed his own augmented reality app. Matt Dibble has the story.
…

Newly named Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal has emerged from behind the scenes to take over one of Silicon Valley’s highest-profile and politically volatile jobs. 

But his prior lack of name recognition, coupled with a solid technical background, appears to be what some big company backers were looking for to lead Twitter out of its current morass. 

A 37-year-old immigrant from India, Agrawal comes from outside the ranks of celebrity CEOs, which include the man he’s replacing, Jack Dorsey, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg or SpaceX and Tesla’s Elon Musk. Those brand-name company founders and leaders have often been in the news — and on Twitter — for exploits beyond the day-to-day running of their companies.

Having served as Twitter’s chief technology officer for the past four years, Agrawal’s appointment was seen by Wall Street as a choice of someone who will focus on ushering Twitter into what’s widely seen as the internet’s next era — the metaverse. 

Agrawal is a “‘safe’ pick who should be looked upon as favorably by investors,” wrote CFRA Research analyst Angelo Zino, who noted that Twitter shareholder Elliott Management Corp. had pressured Dorsey to step down. 

Elliott released a statement Monday saying Agrawal and new board chairman Bret Taylor were the “right leaders for Twitter at this pivotal moment for the company.” Taylor is president and chief operating officer of the business software company Salesforce. 

Agrawal joins a growing cadre of Indian American CEOs of large tech companies, including Sundar Pichai of Google parent Alphabet, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella and IBM’s Arvind Krishna. 

He joined San Francisco-based Twitter in 2011, when it had just 1,000 employees, and has been its chief technical officer since 2017. At the end of last year, the company had a workforce of 5,500. 

Agrawal previously worked at Microsoft, Yahoo and AT&T in research roles. At Twitter, he’s worked on machine learning, revenue and consumer engineering and helping with audience growth. He studied at Stanford and the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. 

While Twitter has high-profile users like politicians and celebrities and is a favorite of journalists, its user base lags far behind old rivals like Facebook and YouTube and newer ones like TikTok. It has just over 200 million daily active users, a common industry metric.

As CEO, Agrawal will have to step beyond the technical details and deal with the social and political issues Twitter and social media are struggling with. Those include misinformation, abuse and effects on mental health. 

Agrawal got a fast introduction to life as CEO of a high-profile company that’s one of the central platforms for political speech online. Conservatives quickly unearthed a tweet he sent in 2010 that read “If they are not gonna make a distinction between muslims and extremists, then why should I distinguish between white people and racists.”

As some Twitter users pointed out, the 11-year-old tweet was quoting a segment on “The Daily Show,” which was referencing the firing of Juan Williams, who made a comment about being nervous about Muslims on an airplane.

Twitter did not immediately respond to a message for comment on the tweet. 
…

Twitter founder and CEO Jack Dorsey is stepping down as the company’s leader.  

In a news release, Twitter said Dorsey would be replaced by Parag Agrawal, who has been the company’s chief technology officer since 2017. The move is effective immediately.  

“I’ve decided to leave Twitter because I believe the company is ready to move on from its founders. My trust in Parag as Twitter’s CEO is deep. His work over the past 10 years has been transformational. I’m deeply grateful for his skill, heart, and soul. It’s his time to lead,” Dorsey said in a statement.

Dorsey made his resignation official in a tweet Monday and attached a letter with an explanation of why he was leaving.  

“not sure anyone has heard but, I resigned from Twitter,” he wrote.

On Sunday, Dorsey tweeted “I love twitter.”

Dorsey, 45, founded the microblogging platform in 2006 and was CEO until 2008 when he was pushed aside only to return to the top spot in 2015.  

Last year, Elliott Management, a major stakeholder in the company, wanted Dorsey to choose between being CEO of Twitter or CEO of Square, a digital payment company he founded.  

Twitter’s stock rose on the news, but trading of the shares was suspended.

Some information in this report came from Reuters.
…

Australia’s government said Sunday it will introduce legislation to unmask online trolls and hold social media giants like Facebook and Twitter responsible for identifying them.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison, whose conservative coalition government faces an election in the first half of 2022, said the law would protect Australians from online abuse and harassment.

“The online world should not be a wild west where bots and bigots and trolls and others can just anonymously go around and harm people and hurt people, harass them and bully them and sledge them,” Morrison told reporters.

“That is not what can happen in the real world, and there is no case for it to be able to be happening in the digital world.”

Attorney General Michaelia Cash said the legislation, reportedly to be introduced to parliament by early 2022, is needed to clarify that the social media platforms, and not the users, were responsible for defamatory comments by other people.

Confusion had been sown by a High Court ruling in September that found Australian media, as users managing their own pages on a social network, could be held liable for defamatory third-party comments posted on their pages, Cash said.

Under the planned Australian legislation, the social media companies themselves would be responsible for such defamatory content, not the users, she said.

It would also aim to stop people making defamatory comments without being identified, she said.

“You should not be able to use the cloak of online anonymity to spread your vile, defamatory comments,” the attorney general said.

The legislation would demand that social media platforms have a nominated entity based in Australia, she said.

The platforms could defend themselves from being sued as the publisher of defamatory comment only if they complied with the new legislation’s demands to have a complaints system in place that could provide the details of the person making the comment, if necessary, Cash said.

People would also be able to apply to the High Court for an “information disclosure order” demanding a social media service provide details “to unmask the troll,” the attorney general said.

In some cases, she said, the “troll” may be asked to take down the comment, which could end the matter if the other side is satisfied.

Australia’s opposition leader Anthony Albanese said he would support a safer online environment for everyone.

But he said the government had failed to propose action to stop the spread of misinformation on social media and accused some of the government’s own members of spreading misinformation about COVID and vaccinations.
…

China was behind one of the biggest hacks of all time, quietly stealing email and data from organizations, according to the U.S. and other nations’ governments. Experts say China-orchestrated attacks on strategic targets have increased in recent years. Michelle Quinn reports.

Producer: Michelle Quinn. Camera: Michael Burke.
…

Apple says it is suing Israeli NSO Group, maker of the controversial Pegasus spyware. 

Apple will be the second company to sue NSO after Facebook, now Meta, sued over similar concerns that Pegasus was targeting WhatsApp users. Meta owns WhatsApp. The case is still working its way through the courts. 

Apple says the spyware specifically targeted its users. It also wants to prevent NSO from using any Apple product or service, which would be a massive blow to the company that sells governments the ability to hack iPhones and Android phones in order to gain full access. 

Apple says it has created a software patch to protect devices from Pegasus. 

The Cupertino, California-based company says it is seeking undisclosed damages it says it incurred because of NSO. It says it would donate any award money to organizations that investigate and expose spyware.

One such company, Citizen Lab, was central in uncovering how Pegasus worked. 

“This is Apple saying: If you do this, if you weaponize our software against innocent users, researchers, dissidents, activists or journalists, Apple will give you no quarter,” Ivan Krstic, head of Apple security engineering and architecture, said in an interview Monday with the New York Times. 

Earlier this month, the U.S. put NSO along with three other software companies on a blacklist that places severe restrictions on their ability to do business in the U.S. 

It said the companies “developed and supplied spyware to foreign governments” and that the spyware was used “to maliciously target government officials, journalists, businesspeople, activists, academics and embassy workers.” 

NSO did not immediately comment on the lawsuit, but has previously said it takes precautions to prevent the abuse of its products. 

The pressure against NSO appears to be working, as many news outlets reported the company was at risk of defaulting on its loans. 

Some information in this report comes from Reuters. 
…

The shutdown of internet access via mobile phone networks that began Saturday dragged on for a fourth day Tuesday. The government said in a statement the shutdown is in the interest of national defense and public security and will last until around 10 p.m. tonight.

VOA talked to some Burkinabes on the streets of Ouagadougou to ask how the shutdown was affecting them and what they thought of the government’s decision.

Alexi Sawadogo, a physician, spoke outside a bank on one of the city’s busy boulevards. He said he was there to check his account balance as the shutdown meant he could no longer do so online. 

“It disconnects us from our friends who are outside the country, with whom we communicate regularly,” he says. He notes that he understands that it is because of the French convoy that was blockaded in the north, but says insecurity is not a valid reason and that the government needs to review its strategy. 

The shutdown has come in the wake of protests in recent days that have blocked a French military supply convoy that is attempting to travel from Ivory Coast to Niger. Protesters say they want an end to French military intervention in the regional war against Islamist militants. 

There have also been protests against the government’s handling of security, after a terrorist group believed to be associated with al-Qai da killed more than 50 military police in an assault on a base in northern Burkina Faso on November 14th. 

Ali Dayorgo, a university student, said the shutdown has affected his ability to work and learn the latest news.

He says he doesn’t understand why the shutdown is happening, but he hears the voice of the Burkinabe youth. “I feel the anger of the youth,” he expressed, adding that even if he doesn’t join protests against insecurity, he supports them.

A funeral for some of the victims of the attack is taking place in Ouagadougou today. 

Drabo Mahamadou is the national executive secretary of the “Save Burkina Faso Movement,” one of the protest groups that is calling for President Roch Kabore to resign. He said they have called on the population to attend Tuesday’s funeral and to attend a protest on Saturday.

He says, because the government is insensitive to pain, we are calling on the population to come out en masse on the 27th. We want [protesters] to prove that this government is not helping Burkina Faso. It is the government that is causing harm to the Burkinabé people.

A government spokesperson could not be reached for comment.

Eloise Bertrand is a research fellow at the University of Portsmouth who focuses on Burkina Faso. She thinks the restrictions on the internet are unwise; pointing out that “this shutdown may well backfire against the government. We can see that civil society groups and stakeholders who were not really involved in protests against the French convoy are annoyed and angered by this internet shutdown.”

Reports suggest the French military convoy is now waiting in the town of Zinaire, about 30 kilometers north of the capital. Protests are also said to be taking place in the town.

With the demonstrations continuing, it remains to be seen if the government will lift the internet shutdown tonight. Further protests are scheduled for Saturday.
…

A Sydney restaurant is using a Chinese-made, multi-lingual hospitality robot to address chronic staff shortages as Australia’s economy begins to recover from COVID-19 lockdowns and border closures. 

The robot waiter is programmed to know the layout of the tables and delivers food from the kitchen. It is also multi-lingual, programmed to communicate in English and Mandarin. The so-called BellaBot is built by the Chinese firm PuduTech. 

Each machine costs about $17,000. They can be leased for $34 per day for each device, or the equivalent of two hours’ wages for restaurant staff. The devices are in use in other Australian restaurants and imports into Australia appear to be unaffected by recent trade tensions between the two countries. 

Liarne Schai, the co-owner of the Matterhorn Restaurant in Sydney, is delighted with her new mechanical staff member. 

“Ah, love the robot. Love the robot, she makes my life a lot easier. It is like a tower that has got four trays. It will carry eight of our dinner plates in one go. She is geo-mapped to the floor (customer names, location of tables, etc.) The robot knows where all our tables are,” Schai said.  

Australia’s hospitality workforce has traditionally relied on international students. They have, however, been restricted from entering after Australia closed its borders to most foreign nationals in March 2020 in an effort to curb the spread of the coronavirus.  

Labor shortages are affecting not only hospitality in Australia, but a range of industries from construction to information technology.  

Liarne Schai says she has tried for months without success to recruit workers. 

“It is the biggest issue we have at the moment. We have been running ads for chefs, for waiters, for kitchen hands for six months and we have had zero applicants. We are offering above award wages, we are offering bonuses, we are offering everything you can think of to attract appropriate staff and I am not even getting inappropriate staff, or untrained staff. I am just getting nobody.” 

Labor shortages should ease when Australia reopens its borders to foreign nationals, but analysts expect many vacancies will remain unfilled.  

Employer groups have demanded that Australia increase its intake of migrant workers. 

Australia’s official unemployment rate stands at 5.2%.   

But with more than 700,000 Australians without a job, there are calls for the government to boost domestic training programs and wages. 
…

Australian mining billionaire Andrew Forrest’s philanthropic organization will help 18 small news publishers in the country to negotiate collectively with Google and Facebook to secure licensing deals for the supply of news content.

Forrest’s Minderoo Foundation on Monday said it would submit an application with the country’s competition regulator, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), allowing the publishers to bargain without breaching competition laws.

Forrest, Australia’s richest man, is the chairman and the largest shareholder of iron ore miner Fortescue Metals Group. He has a net worth of around A$27.2 billion ($19.7 billion), according to the Australian Financial Review.

Facebook and Alphabet Inc’s Google have been required since March to negotiate with Australian media outlets for content that drives traffic and advertising to their websites. If they don’t, the government may take over the negotiation.

Both companies have since struck licensing deals with most of Australia’s main media companies, but they have not entered into agreements with many small firms. The federal government is scheduled to begin a review of the law’s effectiveness in March.

Frontier Technology, an initiative of Minderoo, said it would assist the publishers.

“Small Australian publishers who produce public interest journalism for their communities should be given the same opportunity as large publishers to negotiate for use of their content for the public benefit,” Emma McDonald, Frontier Technology’s director of policy, said in a statement.

Google and Facebook did not immediately respond to requests seeking comment.

The 18 small publishers include online publications that attract multicultural audiences and focus on issues at a local or regional level, McDonald said.

The move comes after ACCC late last month allowed a body representing 261 radio stations to negotiate a content deal.

News organizations, which have been losing advertising revenue to online aggregators, have complained for years about the big technology companies using content in search results or other features without payment.
…

Frustrated with slow or no action, some Americans are using Bluetooth trackers to retrieve stolen items themselves. It’s a risky strategy that isn’t endorsed by police and could put users in harm’s way, as VOA’s Veronica Balderas Iglesias reports.
…

As researchers at U.S space agency NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory prepare for the 16th flight of Ingenuity, the Mars helicopter, the team has used recently downloaded data from the Mars mission to create the best video yet of one of Ingenuity’s previous flights. 

The 1.8-kilogram aircraft arrived on the planet packed away on NASA’s Perseverance rover when it landed on Mars in February. Originally designed to be a simple demonstration project to prove flight was possible in the thin Martian atmosphere, the aircraft has far exceeded expectations and has completed 15 flights. 

JPL scientists say Ingenuity’s 16th flight is scheduled to take place no earlier than Saturday. In the meantime, they have been examining the video footage taken by Perseverance of the helicopter’s 13th flight on September 4, which they say provides the most detailed look yet of the Martian aircraft in action. 

The Ingenuity team said the helicopter is providing NASA with data to guide the Perseverance rover. They said the 2 minutes, 40.5 seconds Flight 13 was one of Ingenuity’s most complicated. It involved flying into varied terrain within a geological feature known as the “Séítah” and taking images of an outcrop from multiple angles for the rover team. 

The images, taken from an altitude of 8 meters, complement those collected during Ingenuity’s previous flights, providing valuable insight for Perseverance scientists and rover drivers. 

The video was captured by the rover’s two-camera Mastcam-Z. One video clip of Flight 13 shows most of Ingenuity’s flight profile. The other provides a closeup of takeoff and landing, which was acquired as part of a science observation intended to measure the dust plumes generated by the helicopter. 

Justin Maki, JPL’s Mastcam-Z principal operator, said the video shows the value of the camera system, and while the helicopter is little more than a speck in the wide view, “It gives viewers a good feel for the size of the environment that Ingenuity is exploring.” 

Ingenuity’s performance will guide how future missions will be designed and how those missions will utilize aircraft to help determine where rovers should go and where they cannot. 

Aside from solar batteries, a camera and a transmitter, Ingenuity carries no scientific instruments. 
…

After making a promise on Twitter, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has sold about 900,000 shares of the electric car maker’s stock, netting over $1.1 billion that will go toward paying tax obligations for stock options. 

The sales, disclosed in two regulatory filings late Wednesday, will cover tax obligations for stock options granted to Musk in September. He exercised options to buy just over 2.1 million shares for $6.24 each. The company’s stock closed Wednesday at $1,067.95 per share.  

The transactions were “automatically effected” as part of a trading plan adopted on Sept. 14 to sell options that expire next year, according to forms filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. That was nearly two months before he floated the idea of the sale on Twitter. 

After the transactions, Musk still owns about 170 million Tesla shares. 

Musk was Tesla’s largest shareholder as of June, owning about 17% of the company, according to data provider FactSet. He’s the wealthiest person in the world, according to Forbes, with a net worth of around $282 billion, most of it in Tesla stock. 

Last weekend, Musk said he would sell 10% of his holdings in the company, worth more than $20 billion, based on the results of a poll he conducted on Twitter. The sale tweets caused a sell off of the stock Monday and Tuesday, but it recovered some on Wednesday. The shares were up 2.6% to $1,096 in extended trading Wednesday, and they have risen more than 50% this year. 

Wedbush Analyst Daniel Ives said it appears Musk will start selling shares as the year ends. “The question will be for investors if he sells his full 10% ownership stake over the coming months or is it done piece-by-piece during 2022,” Ives wrote in a note to investors. 

Ives calculated that Musk has about $10 billion in taxes coming due on stock options that vest next summer. 

The sometimes abrasive and unpredictable Musk said he proposed selling the stock as some Democrats have been pushing for billionaires to pay taxes when the price of the stocks they hold goes up, even if they don’t sell any shares. However, the wording on unrealized gains, also called a “billionaires tax,” was removed from President Joe Biden’s budget, which is still being negotiated.  

“Much is made lately of unrealized gains being a means of tax avoidance, so I propose selling 10% of my Tesla stock,” he tweeted Saturday afternoon. “Do you support this?” 

Tesla does not pay Musk a cash salary, but has received huge stock options. “I only have stock, thus the only way for me to pay taxes personally is to sell stock,” Musk tweeted. 

Tesla Inc. is based in Palo Alto, California, although Musk has announced it will move its headquarters to Texas. 
…

The United States and China surprised the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow on Wednesday with a joint declaration to take action to limit global warming over the next decade.

The declaration came as delegates entered the final hours of negotiations to agree on a final text at the conference that will outline how the world will limit global warming to less than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

China and the United States are the world’s two biggest polluters, and scientists say their future actions are critical in the fight against climate change. The absence of Chinese leader Xi Jinping from the summit last week was strongly criticized by U.S. President Joe Biden.

U.S. climate envoy John Kerry told reporters in Glasgow on Wednesday that the joint declaration builds on statements made by both countries in April.

“We also expressed a shared desire for success at this COP on mitigation, adaptation, support and, frankly, all of the key issues which will result in the world raising ambition and being able to address this crisis. Now, with this announcement, we’ve arrived at a new step, a road map for our present and future collaboration on this issue,” Kerry said at a press conference.

“The United States and China have no shortage of differences, but on climate, cooperation is the only way to get this job done. This is not a discretionary thing, frankly. This is science. It’s math and physics that dictate the road that we have to travel,” Kerry added.

China’s chief climate negotiator, Xie Zhenhua, echoed those sentiments.

“Climate change is a challenge, a common challenge, faced by humanity,” Xie told reporters. “It bears on the well-being of future generations. Now, climate change is becoming increasingly urgent and severe, making it a future challenge into an existential crisis. In the area of climate change, there is more agreement between China and the U.S. than divergence, making it an area with huge potential for our cooperation. We are two days away from the end of the Glasgow COP, so we hope that this joint declaration can make a China-U.S. contribution to the success of COP26.”

Among the joint pledges were cooperation on controlling methane emissions, tackling illegal deforestation, enhancing renewable energy generation and speeding up financial support for poorer nations. But the declaration did not include many specific dates or targets.

Cautious welcome

After the joint declaration, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres tweeted, “I welcome today’s agreement between China and the USA to work together to take more ambitious #ClimateAction in this decade. Tackling the climate crisis requires international cooperation and solidarity, and this is an important step in the right direction.”

Climate activists offered a cautious welcome to the declaration.

“This announcement comes at a critical moment at COP26 and offers new hope that with the support and backing of two of the world’s most critical voices, we may be able to limit climate change to 1.5 degrees,” Genevieve Maricle, director of U.S. climate policy action at the World Wildlife Fund, wrote in an email to VOA. “But we must also be clear-eyed about what is still required if the two countries are to deliver the emission reductions necessary in the next nine years. 1.5C-alignment will require a whole-of-economy response.”

Momentum

The joint declaration has given new momentum to the negotiations as delegates try to agree on a final text, officially known as the “cover decision,” by the end of the conference on Friday. The text details how parties to the COP26 summit will limit global warming to no more than 1.5 degrees C in Earth’s average temperatures above pre-industrial levels — the target agreed on at the Paris climate summit in 2015.

The first draft text of the decision, published Wednesday, urges countries to “revisit and strengthen” their targets on cutting emissions before the end of 2022. It says rich countries should go beyond the pledge to pay poorer nations $100 billion a year. The draft text calls on governments to phase out coal and fossil fuels, but with no fixed dates.

The COP26 host, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, urged delegates to “grasp the opportunity.”

“We’re now finding things are tough, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. It doesn’t mean that we can’t keep 1.5 alive,” Johnson said. “I think with sufficient energy and commitment, and with leaders from around the world now ringing up their negotiators and asking them to move in the ways that they know they can move and should move, I still think we can achieve it. But I’m not going to pretend to you that it is by any means a done deal.”

Jennifer Morgan, executive director of Greenpeace International, told VOA that the language of the draft text was weak.

“This is not a plan to address the climate emergency. It’s a bit like a pledge and a wink and a hope,” Morgan said. “Countries need to commit to actually come back to increase and strengthen their targets and their actions. That’s clearly one thing. The text does include that coal will be phased out and fossil fuel subsidies will be phased out. I think optimally, you would have dates by which time they would be phased out, but it’s important that they’re there.”

Climate finance

Delegates are also negotiating how much — and quickly — richer nations should pay poorer countries to help them deal with the impact of climate change and de-carbonize their economies. While richer countries are responsible for the majority of greenhouse gas emissions, developing countries tend to suffer greater impacts of climate change. A pledge first made in 2009 by richer nations to pay $100 billion annually — and renewed at the Paris climate summit in 2015 — has still not been fulfilled.

“It’s very frustrating to see countries that have spent six years conspicuously patting themselves on the back for signing that promissory note in Paris, quietly edging towards default now that vulnerable nations and future generations are demanding payment here now in Glasgow,” Johnson said Wednesday.
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