AI not a US election gamechanger yet

Washington — When the U.S. announced the seizure of 32 internet domains tied to Russian efforts to ply American voters with disinformation ahead of November’s presidential election, prosecutors were quick to note the use of artificial intelligence, or AI.

The Russian operation, known as Doppelganger, drove internet and social media users to the fake news using a variety of methods, the charging documents said, including advertisements that were “in some cases created using artificial intelligence.”

AI tools were also used to “generate content, including images and videos, for use in negative advertisements about U.S. politicians,” the indictment added.

And Russia is far from alone in turning to AI in the hopes of swaying U.S. voters.

“The primary actors we’ve seen for election use of this are Iran and Russia, although as various private companies have noticed, China also has used artificial intelligence for spreading divisive narratives in the United States,” according to a senior intelligence official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss sensitive information.

“What we’ve seen is artificial intelligence is used by foreign actors to make their content more quickly and convincingly tailor their synthetic content in both audio and video forms,” the official added. 

But other U.S. officials say the use of AI to spread misinformation and disinformation in the lead-up to the U.S. election has so far failed to live up to some of the more dire warnings about how deepfakes and other AI-generated material could shake-up the American political landscape.

“Generative AI is not going to fundamentally introduce new threats to this election cycle,” according to Cait Conley, senior adviser to the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the U.S. agency charged with overseeing election security.

“What we’re seeing is consistent with what we expected to see,” Conley told VOA.

AI “is exacerbating existing threats, in both the cyber domain and the foreign malign influence operation-disinformation campaigns,” she said. But little of what has been put out to this point has shocked officials at CISA or the myriad state and local governments who run elections across the country.

“This threat vector is not new to them,” Conley said. “And they have taken the measures to ensure they’re prepared to respond effectively.” 

As an example, Conley pointed to the rash of robocalls that targeted New Hampshire citizens ahead of the state’s first in the nation primary in January, using fake audio of U.S. President Joe Biden to tell people to stay home and “save your vote.”

New Hampshire’s attorney general quickly went public, calling the robocalls an apparent attempt to suppress votes and telling voters the incident was under investigation.

This past May, prosecutors indicted a Louisiana political consultant in connection with the scheme.

More recently, the alleged use of AI prompted a celebrity endorsement in the U.S. presidential race by pop star Taylor Swift.

“Recently I was made aware that AI of ‘me’ falsely endorsing Donald Trump’s presidential run was posted to his site,” Swift wrote in an Instagram social media post late Tuesday. 

“It brought me to the conclusion that I need to be very transparent about my actual plans for this election as a voter,” she wrote, adding, “I will be casting my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.”

But experts and analysts say for all the attention AI is getting, the use of such technology in attacks and other influence operations has been limited.

“There’s not a tremendous amount of it in the wild that’s particularly successful right now, at least to my knowledge,” said Katie Gray, a senior partner at In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s technology-focused, not-for-profit strategic investment firm.

“Most attackers are not using the most sophisticated methods to penetrate systems,” she said on September 4 at a cybersecurity summit in Washington.

Others suggest that at least for the moment, the fears surrounding AI have outpaced its usefulness by malicious actors.

‘We jump to the doomsday science fiction,” said Clint Watts, a former FBI special agent and counterterror consultant who heads up the Microsoft Threat Analysis Center (MTAC).

“But instead, what we’re seeing is the number one challenge to all of this right now is access, just getting to the [AI] tools and accessing them,” he said, speaking like Gray at the cybersecurity summit.

Over the past 14 months, MTAC has logged hundreds of instances of AI use by China, Russia and Iran, Watts said. And analysts found that Moscow and Tehran, in particular, have struggled to get access to a fully AI toolbox.

The Russians “need to use their own tools from the start, rather than Western tools, because they’re afraid they’ll get knocked off those systems,” Watts said.

Iran is even further behind.

“They’ve tried different tools,” Watts said. “They just can’t get access to most of them for the most part.”

U.S. adversaries also appear to be having difficulties with the underlying requirements to make AI effective.

“To do scaled AI operations is not cheap,” Watts said. “Some of the infrastructure and the resources of it [AI], the models, the data it needs to be trained [on] – very challenging at the moment.”

And Watts said until the products generated by AI get better, attempted deepfakes will likely have trouble resonating with the targeted audiences.

“Audiences have been remarkably brilliant about detecting deepfakes in crowds. The more you watch somebody, the more you realize a fake isn’t quite right,” according to Watts. “The Russian actors that we’ve seen, all of them have tried deepfakes and they’ve moved back to bread and butter, small video manipulations.”

China takes lead in critical technology research after ‘switching places’ with US

SINGAPORE — An Australian think tank that tracks tech competitiveness says China is now the world leader in research on almost 90% of critical technologies. In a newly released report, the research group adds there is also a high risk of Beijing securing a monopoly on defense-related tech, including drones, satellites and collaborative robots — those that can work safely alongside humans.

Analysts say the huge leap forward for China is the result of heavy state investment over the past two decades. They add that despite the progress, Beijing is still dependent on other countries for key tech components and lacks self-sufficiency.

The report from the government-funded Australian Strategic Policy Institute, or ASPI, released last Thursday, says China led the way in research into 57 out of 64 advanced technologies in the five years from 2019-2023.

ASPI’s Critical Technology Tracker ranks countries’ innovation capabilities based on the number of appearances in the top 10% of research papers. It focuses on crucial technologies from a range of fields including artificial intelligence, biotechnology, cyber and defense.

The report found that “China and the United States have effectively switched places as the overwhelming leader in research in just two decades.”

China led in only three of the 64 technologies between 2003 and 2007 but has shot up in the rankings, replacing the U.S., which is now a frontrunner in just seven critical technologies.

Josh Kennedy-White is a technology strategist based in Singapore. He says China’s huge leap is a “direct result of its aggressive, state-driven research and development investments over the past two decades.”

He adds that the shift toward China is “particularly stark in fields like artificial intelligence, quantum computing and advanced aircraft engines, where China has transitioned from a laggard to a leader in a relatively short period.”

ASPI also determines the risk of countries holding a monopoly on the research of critical technologies. They currently classify 24 technologies as “high risk” of being monopolized — all by Beijing.

Ten technologies are newly classified as “high risk” this year, with many of them linked to the defense industry.

“The potential monopoly risk in 24 technology areas, especially those in defense-related fields like radars and drones, is concerning in the current and future geopolitical context,” Tobias Feakin, founder of consultancy firm Protostar Strategy, told VOA.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has sought to boost his country’s advanced manufacturing capabilities with the ambitious “Made in China 2025” initiative.

The policy, launched in 2015, aims to strengthen Beijing’s self-reliance in critical sectors and make China a global tech powerhouse.

Xi, according to Feakin, views advanced technologies as “strategic priorities for China’s development, national security and global competitiveness.”

He adds that technologies are seen as a “central component of China’s long-term economic and geopolitical goals.”

Beijing’s ambitions are being closely watched in Washington, with the Biden administration working to limit China’s access to advanced technology.

Last week, the U.S. introduced new export controls on critical technology to China, including chip-making equipment and quantum computers and components.

That announcement came shortly after U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan made his first ever visit to Beijing. He met with Xi and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi.

Sullivan told reporters that Washington “will continue to take necessary action to prevent advanced U.S. technologies from being used to undermine national security.”

The continued efforts to curb China’s chip industry mean that Beijing must look further afield for advanced technology.

“Even though it leads in areas like artificial intelligence and 5G, China still depends on Taiwan, the U.S. and South Korea to produce high-end semiconductors”, Kennedy-White told VOA.

Describing this as China’s Achilles’ heel, Kennedy-White says the lack of self-sufficiency in the semiconductor industry could “stunt Beijing’s progress in artificial intelligence, quantum computing and military applications.”

As China continues its dominance in critical technology research, questions have been raised over exactly how the country is making these breakthroughs.

Last October, officials from the Five Eyes intelligence alliance (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States) issued a joint statement accusing China of stealing intellectual property. U.S. FBI director Christopher Wray described it as an “unprecedented threat.”

Kennedy-White, managing director of Singapore-based venture catalyst firm DivisionX Global, agrees with this assessment. He says China’s jump up the ASPI rankings is “not entirely organic.”

“There is a correlation between China’s rise in certain technologies and allegations of intellectual property theft,” he added.

ASPI also recommends ways for other countries to close the gap on China. It advises the AUKUS alliance of Australia, the U.K. and the U.S. to join forces with Japan and South Korea to try to catch up.

The report also highlights the emergence of India as a “key center” of global research innovation and excellence.

The South Asian nation now ranks in the top five countries for 45 out of the 64 technologies that are tracked by ASPI. It’s a huge gain compared with 2003-2007, when India sat in the top five for only four technologies.

Feakin says countries across the Asia-Pacific “will benefit from leveraging India’s growing technology expertise and influence.”

It will also provide a counterbalance to “overdependence on China’s technology supply chain,” he added.

Google, Apple lose court fights against EU, owe billions in fines, taxes

LONDON — Google lost its last bid to overturn a European Union antitrust penalty, after the bloc’s top court ruled against it Tuesday in a case that came with a whopping fine and helped jumpstart an era of intensifying scrutiny for Big Tech companies.

The European Union’s top court rejected Google’s appeal against the $2.7 billion penalty from the European Commission, the 27-nation bloc’s top antitrust enforcer, for violating antitrust rules with its comparison shopping service.

Also Tuesday, Apple lost its challenge against an order to repay $14.34 billion in back taxes to Ireland, after the European Court of Justice issued a separate decision siding with the commission in a case targeting unlawful state aid for global corporations.

Both companies have now exhausted their appeals in the cases that date to the previous decade. Together, the court decisions are a victory for European Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, who is expected to step down next month after 10 years as the commission’s top official overseeing competition.

Experts said the rulings illustrate how watchdogs have been emboldened in the years since the cases were first opened.

One of the takeaways from the Apple decision “is the sense that, again, the EU authorities and courts are prepared to flex their [collective] muscles to bring Big Tech to heel where necessary,” Alex Haffner, a competition partner at law firm Fladgate, said by email.

The shopping fine was one of three huge antitrust penalties for Google from the commission, which punished the Silicon Valley giant in 2017 for unfairly directing visitors to its own Google Shopping service over competitors.

“We are disappointed with the decision of the Court, which relates to a very specific set of facts,” Google said in a brief statement.

The company said it made changes to comply with the commission’s decision requiring it to treat competitors equally. It started holding auctions for shopping search listings that it would bid for alongside other comparison shopping services.

“Our approach has worked successfully for more than seven years, generating billions of clicks for more than 800 comparison shopping services,” Google said.

European consumer group BEUC hailed the court’s decision, saying it shows how the bloc’s competition law “remains highly relevant” in digital markets.

“It is a good outcome for all European consumers at the end of the day,” Director General Agustín Reyna said in an interview. “It means that many smaller companies or rivals will be able to go to different comparison shopping sites. They don’t need to depend on Google to reach out to customers.”

Google is still appealing its two other EU antitrust cases: a 2018 fine of $4.55 billion involving its Android operating system and a 2019 penalty of $1.64 billion over its AdSense advertising platform.

Despite the amounts of money involved, the adverse rulings will leave a small financial dent in one of the world’s richest and most profitable companies. The combined bill of $17 billion facing Apple and Alphabet, Google’s parent company, represents 0.3% of their combined market value of $5.2 trillion.

Those three cases foreshadowed expanded efforts by regulators worldwide to crack down on the tech industry. The EU has since opened more investigations into Big Tech companies and drew up a new law to prevent them from cornering online markets, known as the Digital Markets Act.

Google is also now facing pressure over its lucrative digital advertising business from the EU and Britain, which are carrying out separate investigations, and the United States, where the Department of Justice is taking the company to federal court over its alleged dominance in ad tech.

Apple failed in its last bid to avoid repaying its Irish taxes Tuesday after the Court of Justice upheld a lower court ruling against the company, in the dispute that dates back to 2016.

The case drew outrage from Apple, with CEO Tim Cook calling it “total political crap.”

Zimbabwe rolls out hefty fines for poor telecommunications services

Harare, Zimbabwe — Zimbabwe’s government has introduced hefty fines of up to $5,000 for poor service in the country’s telecommunications industry.

In a statement Tuesday, Zimbabwe’s ICT Minister Tatenda Mavetera said the government will levy fines of between $200 and $5,000 per infringement for telecommunications companies and internet providers who fail to give reliable service.

Willard Shoko, an independent high-speed internet consultant, said the new fines could result in a solid telecom industry that can compete in the entire southern African region.

“The motive behind that is to improve internet for the end user. But I think they should also consider improving the infrastructure sharing and also collaboration to improve internet, not only for the region but also for Zimbabwe, because this is the foundation of the digital economy,” Shoko said. “I think they should also think about how the internet can be improved and the partnership that can help improve the internet.”

Fungai Mandiveyi, media and corporate affairs executive at Econet Wireless, Zimbabwe’s biggest telecommunications company, said the new regulations will be easier to comply with than those that existed before.

“The new provisions introduce a new model of penalties, unlike the blanket penalty that existed in the previous statutory instrument,” Mandiveyi said. “The new penalties are now linked to specific quality of service breaches, that have also been clearly spelled out. There is now more clarity in what constitutes a service breach, and what penalty goes with a specific breach of the quality of service.”

However, Christopher Musodza, an independent digital policy consultant, said the pressure to maintain internet service during Zimbabwe’s frequent power outages may present challenges for telecom companies.

“For the telecoms provider, it’s going to be tough,” he said. “The economy is not performing as anyone would want. We have got issues to do with long hours of load shedding, so service providers have to power their base stations for long hours to ensure that they meet the key performance indicators. So, imagine running generators for most of the day to ensure that you avoid a fine. (I’m) not sure what will cost more; trying to keep up with these economic factors or just paying the fine.”

Zimbabweans have long complained about poor and expensive telecommunication service. Shoko said that is the reason they are welcoming the government’s decision this month to approve Starlink’s license to operate in Zimbabwe.

The U.S.-based satellite company, owned by Elon Musk, has established a presence in several other African countries, including Botswana, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, Rwanda, and Zambia.

“They can now easily get internet anywhere in Zimbabwe at an affordable price, thereby bridging the digital divide. That’s one major thing for the end user,” Shoko said of Starlink’s presence.

“For the local ISPs [internet service providers], there is massive opportunity that Zimbabwe can take advantage of — investment in ground infrastructure,” he added. “Currently in Africa, Nigeria has only two ground stations that are servicing the whole of Africa. If the Zimbabwe government and local ISPs can work together with Starlink to provide ground stations in Zimbabwe, this will allow local ISPs to provide internet to Starlink, and provide better latencies in the region. So this will improve Starlink internet for local Zimbabweans, as well as the region.”

Australia plans age limit to ban children from social media

SYDNEY — Australia will ban children from using social media with a minimum age limit as high as 16, the prime minister said Tuesday, vowing to get kids off their devices and “onto the footy fields.”

Federal legislation to keep children off social media will be introduced this year, Anthony Albanese said, describing the impact of the sites on young people as a “scourge.”

The minimum age for children to log into sites such as Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok has not been decided but is expected to be between 14 and 16 years, Albanese said.

The prime minister said his own preference would be a block on users aged below 16.

Age verification trials are being held over the coming months, the center-left leader said, though analysts said they doubted it was technically possible to enforce an online age limit.

“I want to see kids off their devices and onto the footy fields and the swimming pools and the tennis courts,” Albanese said.

“We want them to have real experiences with real people because we know that social media is causing social harm,” he told national broadcaster ABC.

“This is a scourge. We know that there is mental health consequences for what many of the young people have had to deal with,” he said.

Australia’s conservative opposition leader Peter Dutton said he would support an age limit.

“Every day of delay leaves young kids vulnerable to the harms of social media and the time for relying on tech companies to enforce age limits,” he said.

‘Easy to circumvent’

But it is not clear that the technology exists to reliably enforce such bans, said the University of Melbourne’s associate professor in computing and information technology, Toby Murray.

“We already know that present age verification methods are unreliable, too easy to circumvent, or risk user privacy,” he said. 

Analysts warned that an age limit may not in any case help troubled children.

It “threatens to create serious harm by excluding young people from meaningful, healthy participation in the digital world,” said Daniel Angus, who leads the digital media research centre at Queensland University of Technology.

“There is logic in establishing boundaries that limit young people’s access,” said Samantha Schulz, senior sociologist of education at the University of Adelaide.

“However, young people are not the problem and regulating youth misses the more urgent task of regulating irresponsible social media platforms. Social media is an unavoidable part of young people’s lives.”

The prime minister said parents expected a response to online bullying and harmful material present on social media.

“These social media companies think they’re above everyone,” he told a radio interviewer.

“Well, they have a social responsibility and at the moment, they’re not exercising it. And we’re determined to make sure that they do,” he said.

Australia has been at the forefront of global efforts to regulate social media platforms, with its online safety watchdog bumping heads notably with Elon Musk’s X over the content it carries.

 

Google faces new antitrust trial after ruling declaring search engine a monopoly 

ALEXANDRIA, Va. — One month after a judge declared Google’s search engine an illegal monopoly, the tech giant faces another antitrust lawsuit that threatens to break up the company, this time over its advertising technology. 

The Justice Department, joined by a coalition of states, and Google each made opening statements Monday to a federal judge in Alexandria, Virginia, who will decide whether Google holds a monopoly over online advertising technology. 

The regulators contend that Google built, acquired and maintains a monopoly over the technology that matches online publishers to advertisers. Dominance over the software on both the buy side and the sell side of the transaction enables Google to keep as much as 36 cents on the dollar when it brokers sales between publishers and advertisers, the government contends. 

They allege that Google also controls the ad exchange market, which matches the buy side to the sell side. 

“One monopoly is bad enough. But a trifecta of monopolies is what we have here,” Justice Department lawyer Julia Tarver Wood said during her opening statement. 

Google says the government’s case is based on an internet of yesteryear, when desktop computers ruled and internet users carefully typed precise World Wide Web addresses into URL fields. Advertisers now are more likely to turn to social media companies like TikTok or streaming TV services like Peacock. 

In her opening statement, Google lawyer Karen Dunn likened the government’s case to a “time capsule with a Blackberry, an iPod and a Blockbuster video card.” 

Dunn said Supreme Court precedents warn judges about “the serious risk of error or unintended consequences” when dealing with rapidly emerging technology and considering whether antitrust law requires intervention. She also warned that any action taken against Google won’t benefit small businesses but will simply allow other tech behemoths like Amazon, Microsoft and TikTok to fill the void. 

According to Google’s annual reports, revenue has declined in recent years for Google Networks, the division of the Mountain View, California-based tech giant that includes such services as AdSense and Google Ad Manager that are at the heart of the case, from $31.7 billion in 2021 to $31.3 billion in 2023. 

The case will now be decided by U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema, who is best known for high-profile terrorism trials including that of Sept. 11 defendant Zacarias Moussaoui. Brinkema, though, also has experience with highly technical civil trials, working in a courthouse that sees an outsize number of patent infringement cases. 

The Virginia case comes on the heels of a major defeat for Google over its search engine. A judge in the District of Columbia declared the search engine a monopoly, maintained in part by tens of billions of dollars Google pays each year to companies like Apple to lock in Google as the default search engine presented to consumers when they buy iPhones and other gadgets. 

And in December, a judge declared Google’s Android app store a monopoly in a case brought by a private gaming company. 

In the search engine case, the judge has not yet imposed any remedies. The government hasn’t offered its proposed sanctions, though there could be scrutiny over whether Google should be allowed to continue to make exclusivity deals that ensure its search engine is consumers’ default option. 

Peter Cohan, a professor of management practice at Babson College, said the Virginia case could potentially be more harmful to Google because the obvious remedy would be requiring it to sell off parts of its ad tech business that generate billions of dollars in annual revenue. 

“Divestitures are definitely a possible remedy for this second case,” Cohan said “It could be potentially more significant than initially meets the eye.” 

Google is also facing intensifying pressure over its ad tech business across the Atlantic. British competition regulators last week accused the company of abusing its dominance in the country’s digital ad market and giving preference to its own services. European Union antitrust enforcers carrying out their own investigation suggested last year that breaking up the company was the only way to satisfy competition concerns about its digital ad business 

In the Virginia trial, the government’s witnesses will include executives from newspaper publishers that the government contends have faced harm from Google’s practices. 

“Google extracted extraordinary fees at the expense of the website publishers who make the open internet vibrant and valuable,” government lawyers wrote in court papers. 

The government’s first witness was Tim Wolfe, an executive with Gannett Co., a newspaper chain that publishes USA Today as its flagship. Wolfe said Gannett feels like it has no choice but to continue to use Google’s ad tech products, even though the company keeps 20 cents on the dollar from every ad purchase, not even accounting for what it takes from the advertisers. He said Gannett simply can’t give up access to the huge stable of advertisers that Google brings to the ad exchange. 

On cross-examination, Wolfe acknowledged that despite Google’s supposed monopoly, Gannett was able to work with other competitors to sell its available inventory to advertisers. 

Google asserts the integration of its technology on the buy side, sell side and in the middle assures ads and web pages load quickly and enhance security. 

Google says the government’s case is improperly focused on display ads and banner ads that load on web pages accessed through a desktop computer and fails to consider consumers’ migration to mobile apps and the boom in ads placed on social media sites over the last 15 years. 

The government’s case “focuses on a limited type of advertising viewed on a narrow subset of websites when user attention migrated elsewhere years ago,” Google’s lawyers wrote in a pretrial filing. 

The trial is expected to last several weeks. 

Apple embraces AI craze with newly unleashed iPhone 16 lineup

CUPERTINO, California — Apple on Monday charged into the artificial intelligence craze with a new iPhone lineup that marks the company’s latest attempt to latch onto a technology trend and transform it into a cultural phenomenon. 

The four different iPhone 16 models will all come equipped with special chips needed to power a suite of AI tools that Apple hopes will make its marquee product even more indispensable and reverse a recent sales slump. 

Apple’s AI features are designed to turn its often-blundering virtual assistant Siri into a smarter and more versatile sidekick, automate a wide range of tedious tasks, and pull off other crowd-pleasing tricks such as creating customized emojis within seconds. 

After receiving a standing ovation for Monday’s event, Apple CEO Tim Cook promised the AI package would unleash “innovations that will make a true difference in people’s lives.” 

But the breakthroughs won’t begin as soon as the new iPhones — ranging in price from $800 to $1,200 — hit the stores on September 20. 

Most of Apple’s AI functions will roll out as part of a free software update to iOS 18, the operating system that will power the iPhone 16 rolling out from October through December. U.S. English will be the featured language at launch, but an update enabling other languages will come out next year, according to Apple. 

It’s all part of a new approach that Apple previewed at a developers conference three months ago to create more anticipation for a next generation of iPhones amid a rare sales slump for the well-known devices. 

Since Apple’s June conference, competitors such as Samsung and Google have made greater strides in AI — a technology widely expected to trigger the most dramatic changes in computing since the first iPhone came out 17 years ago. 

Just as Apple elevated fledgling smartphones into a must-have technology in 21st-century society, the Cupertino, California, company is betting it can do something similar with its tardy arrival to artificial intelligence. 

‘Apple Intelligence’ 

To set itself apart from the early leaders in AI, the technology being baked into the iPhone 16 is being promoted as “Apple Intelligence.” Despite the unique branding, Apple’s new approach mimics many of the features already available in the Samsung Galaxy S24 released in January and the Google Pixel 9 that came out last month. 

“Apple could have waited another year for further development, but initial take up of AI- powered devices from the likes of Samsung has been encouraging, and Apple is keen to capitalize on this market,” said PP Foresight analyst Paolo Pescatore. 

As it treads into new territory, Apple is trying to preserve its longtime commitment to privacy by tailoring its AI so that most of its technological tricks can be processed on the device itself instead of relying on giant banks of computers located in remote data centers. When a task needs to connect to a data center, Apple promises it will be done in a tightly controlled way that ensures that no personal data is stored remotely. 

While corralling the personal information shared through Apple’s AI tools inherently reduces the chances that the data will be exploited or misused against a user’s wishes, it doesn’t guarantee iron-clad security. A device could still be stolen, for instance, or hacked through digital chicanery. 

For users seeking to access even more AI tools than being offered by the iPhone, Apple is teaming up with OpenAI to give users the option of farming out more complicated tasks to the popular ChatGPT chatbot. 

Although Apple is releasing a free version of its operating system to propel its on-device AI features, the chip needed to run the technology is only available on the iPhone 16 lineup and the high-end iPhone 15 models that came out a year ago. 

That means most consumers who are interested in taking advantage of Apple’s approach to AI will have to buy one of the iPhone 16 models – a twist that investors are counting on will fuel a surge in demand heading into the holiday season. 

The anticipated sales boom is the main reason Apple’s stock price has climbed by more than 10%, including a slight uptick Monday after the shares initially slipped following the showcase for the latest iPhones. 

Besides its latest iPhones, Apple also introduced a new version of its smartwatch that will include a feature to help detect sleep apnea as well the next generation of its wireless headphones, the AirPods Pro, that will be able to function as a hearing aid with an upcoming software update.

Boeing’s beleaguered Starliner returns home without astronauts

WASHINGTON — Boeing’s beleaguered Starliner made its long-awaited return to Earth on Saturday without the astronauts who rode it up to the International Space Station, after NASA ruled the trip back too risky.

After years of delays, Starliner launched in June for what was meant to be a roughly weeklong test mission — a final shakedown before it could be certified to rotate crew to and from the orbital laboratory.

But unexpected thruster malfunctions and helium leaks en route to the ISS derailed those plans, and NASA ultimately decided it was safer to bring crewmates Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams back on a rival SpaceX Crew Dragon — though they’ll have to wait until February 2025.

The gumdrop-shaped Boeing capsule touched down softly at the White Sands Space Harbor in New Mexico, its descent slowed by parachutes and cushioned by airbags, having departed the ISS around six hours earlier.

As it streaked red-hot across the night sky, ground teams reported hearing sonic booms. The spacecraft endured temperatures of 1,650 degrees Celsius during atmospheric reentry.

NASA lavished praise on Boeing during a post-flight press conference where representatives from the company were conspicuously absent.

“It was a bullseye landing,” said Steve Stich, program manager for NASA’s commercial crew program. “The entry in particular has been darn near flawless.”

Still, he acknowledged that certain new issues had come to light, including the failure of a new thruster and the temporary loss of the guidance system.

He added it was too early to talk about whether Starliner’s next flight, scheduled for August next year, would be crewed, instead stressing NASA needed time to analyze the data they had gathered and assess what changes were required to both the design of the ship and the way it is flown.

Ahead of the return leg, Boeing carried out extensive ground testing to address the technical hitches encountered during Starliner’s ascent, then promised — both publicly and behind closed doors — that it could safely bring the astronauts home. In the end, NASA disagreed.

Asked whether he stood by that decision, NASA’s Stich said: “It’s always hard to have that retrospective look. We made the decision to have an uncrewed flight based on what we knew at the time and based on our knowledge of the thrusters and based on the modeling that we had.”

History of setbacks

Even without crew aboard, the stakes were high for Boeing, a century-old aerospace giant.

With its reputation already battered by safety concerns surrounding its commercial jets, its long-term prospects for crewed space missions hung in the balance.

Shortly after undocking, Starliner executed a powerful “breakout burn” to swiftly clear it from the station and prevent any risk of collision — a maneuver that would have been unnecessary if crew were aboard to take manual control if needed.

Mission teams then conducted thorough checks of the thrusters required for the critical “deorbit burn” that guided the capsule onto its reentry path around 40 minutes before touchdown.

Though it was widely expected that Starliner would stick the landing, as it had on two previous uncrewed tests, Boeing’s program continues to languish behind schedule.

In 2014, NASA awarded both Boeing and SpaceX multibillion-dollar contracts to develop spacecraft to taxi astronauts to and from the ISS, after the end of the Space Shuttle program left the US space agency reliant on Russian rockets.

Although initially considered the underdog, Elon Musk’s SpaceX surged ahead of Boeing, and has successfully flown dozens of astronauts since 2020.

The Starliner program, meanwhile, has faced numerous setbacks — from a software glitch that prevented the capsule from rendezvousing with the ISS during its first uncrewed test flight in 2019, to the discovery of flammable tape in the cabin after its second test in 2022, to the current troubles.

With the ISS scheduled to be decommissioned in 2030, the longer Starliner takes to become fully operational, the less time it will have to prove its worth.

Like Brazil, the European Union also has an X problem

Brussels — Elon Musk’s woes are hardly limited to Brazil as he now risks possible EU sanctions in the coming months for allegedly breaking new content rules.

Access to X has been suspended in South America’s largest country since Saturday after a long-running legal battle over disinformation ended with a judge ordering a shutdown.

But Brazil is not alone in its concerns about X.

Politicians worldwide and digital rights groups have repeatedly raised concerns about Musk’s actions since taking over what was then Twitter in late 2022, including sacking many employees tasked with content moderation and maintaining ties with EU regulators.

Musk’s “free speech absolutist” attitude has led to clashes with Brussels.

The European Union could decide within months to take action against X, including possible fines, as part of an ongoing probe into whether the platform is breaching a landmark content moderation law, the Digital Services Act (DSA).

Nothing has yet been decided but any fines could be as high as 6% of X’s annual worldwide turnover unless the company makes changes in line with EU demands.

But if Musk’s reactions are anything to go by, another showdown is on the cards.

When the EU in July accused X of deceptive practices in violation of the DSA, Musk warned: “We look forward to a very public battle in court.”

The temperature was raised even further a month later with another war of words on social media between Musk and the EU’s top tech enforcer, Thierry Breton.

Breton reminded Musk in a letter of his legal duty to stop “harmful content” from spreading on X hours before an interview with U.S. presidential challenger Donald Trump live on the platform.

Musk responded by mocking Breton and sharing a meme that carried an obscene message.

EU ban ‘very unlikely’

Despite the bitter barbs, the European Commission, the EU’s digital watchdog, insists that dialogue with X is ongoing.

“X continues to cooperate with the commission and respond to questions,” the commission’s digital spokesman, Thomas Regnier, told AFP.

Experts also agree that a Brazil-like shutdown in the 27-country EU is unlikely, although it has the legal right.

The DSA would allow the bloc to demand a judge in Ireland, where X has its EU headquarters, order a temporary suspension until the infringements cease.

Breton has repeatedly insisted that “Europe will not hesitate to do what is necessary.”

But since X has around 106 million EU users, significantly higher than the 22 million in Brazil, the belief is that Musk would not want to risk a similar move in Europe.

“Obviously, we can never exclude it, but it is very unlikely,” said Alexandre de Streel of the think tank Centre on Regulation in Europe.

Regardless of what happens next, de Streel said the case would likely end up in the EU courts, calling X “the least cooperative company” with the bloc.

Jan Penfrat of the European Digital Rights advocacy group said a ban was “a very last resort measure” and that X would “probably” not close shop in the EU.

“I would hope that the commission thinks about this very, very hard before going there because this (a ban) would have a tremendously negative effect on the right to freedom of expression and access to information,” Penfrat said.

EU’s X-File

The commission in July accused X of misleading users with its blue checkmarks for certified accounts, insufficient advertising transparency and failing to give researchers access to the platform’s data.

That allegation is part of a wider probe into X, launched in December, and regulators are still probing how it tackles the spread of illegal content and information manipulation.

X now has access to the EU’s file and can defend itself including by replying to the commission’s findings.

The list of governments angry with Musk is growing. He also raised hackles over the summer in the UK during days of rioting sparked by online misinformation that the suspect behind a mass stabbing that killed three girls was a Muslim asylum seeker.

The billionaire, whose personal X account has 196 million followers, engaged in disputes with British politicians after sharing inflammatory posts and claiming a “civil war is inevitable” in the country.

Non-EU member Britain will soon be able to implement a similar law to the DSA with enforcement expected to start next year.

Musk’s Starlink will comply with judge’s order to block X in Brazil

SAO PAULO, brazil — Elon Musk’s satellite-based internet service provider Starlink backtracked Tuesday and said it will comply with a Brazilian Supreme Court justice’s order to block the billionaire’s social media platform, X. 

In a statement posted on X, Starlink said it will heed Justice Alexandre de Moraes’ order despite him having frozen the company’s assets. Previously, it informally told the telecommunications regulator that it would not comply until de Moraes reversed course. 

“Regardless of the illegal treatment of Starlink in freezing our assets, we are complying with the order to block access to X in Brazil,” the company statement said. “We continue to pursue all legal avenues, as are others who agree that @alexandre’s recent order violate the Brazilian constitution.” 

De Moraes froze the company’s accounts last week as a means to compel it to cover X’s fines, which exceed $3 million, reasoning that the two companies are part of the same economic group. Starlink filed an appeal, its law firm Veirano told The Associated Press on August 3, but has declined to comment further in the days since. 

Days later, the justice ordered the suspension of X for refusing to name a local legal representative, as required in order to receive notifications of court decisions and swiftly take any requisite action — particularly, in X’s case, the taking down of accounts.

A Supreme Court panel unanimously upheld the block on Monday, undermining efforts by Musk and his supporters to cast the justice as an authoritarian renegade intent on censoring political speech in Brazil. 

Had Starlink continued to disobey de Moraes by providing access, telecommunications regulator Anatel could eventually have seized equipment from Starlink’s 23 ground stations that ensure the quality of its internet service, Arthur Coimbra, an Anatel board member, said on a video call from his office in Brasilia. 

The company has said it has more than 250,000 clients in Brazil, and it is particularly popular in the country’s more remote corners where it is the only available option. 

Some legal experts questioned de Moraes’ basis for freezing Starlink’s accounts, given that its parent company SpaceX has no integration with X. Musk noted on X that the two companies have different shareholder structures. 

X has clashed with de Moraes over its reluctance to block users — mostly far-right activists accused of undermining Brazilian democracy and allies of former President Jair Bolsonaro — and has alleged that de Moraes wants an in-country legal representative so that Brazilian authorities can exert leverage over the company by having someone to arrest. 

Brazil Supreme Court panel upholds judge’s decision to block X nationwide

RIO DE JANEIRO — A Brazilian Supreme Court panel on Monday unanimously upheld the decision of one of its justices to block billionaire Elon Musk’s social media platform X nationwide, according to the court’s website.

The broader support among justices undermines the effort by Musk and his supporters to cast Justice Alexandre de Moraes as an authoritarian renegade intent on censoring political speech in Brazil.

The panel that voted in a virtual session was made up of five of the full bench’s 11 justices, including de Moraes, who last Friday ordered the platform blocked for refusing to name a local legal representative, as required by law. It will stay suspended until it complies with his orders and pays outstanding fines that as of last week exceeded $3 million, according to his decision.

The platform has clashed with de Moraes over its reluctance to block users and has alleged that de Moraes wants an in-country legal representative so that Brazilian authorities can exert leverage over the company by having someone to arrest.

De Moraes also set a daily fine of $8,900 for people or companies using virtual private networks, or VPNs, to access X. Some legal experts questioned the grounds for that decision and how it would be enforced, including Brazil’s bar association, which said it would request that the Supreme Court review that provision.

But the majority of the panel upheld the VPN fine — with one justice opposing unless users are shown to be using X to commit crimes.

Judge feuding with Musk

Brazil is one of the biggest markets for X, with tens of millions of users. Its block marked a dramatic escalation in a monthslong feud between Musk and de Moraes over free speech, far-right accounts and misinformation.

Over the weekend, many X users in Brazil said they felt disconnected from the world and began migrating en masse to alternative platforms such as Bluesky and Threads.

The suspension has proceeded to set up a showdown between de Moraes and Musk’s satellite internet provider Starlink, which is refusing to enforce the justice’s decision.

“He violated the constitution of Brazil repeatedly and egregiously, after swearing an oath to protect it,” Musk wrote in the hours before the vote, adding a flurry of insults and accusations in the wake of the panel’s vote. On Sunday, Musk announced the creation of an X account to publish the justice’s decisions that he said would show they violated Brazilian law.

But legal experts have said such claims don’t hold water, noting that de Moraes’ peers have repeatedly endorsed his rulings — as they did Monday. Although his actions are viewed by experts as legal, they have sparked some debate over whether one man has been afforded too much power, or if his rulings should have more transparency.

De Moraes’ decision to quickly refer his order for panel approval served to obtain “collective, more institutional support that attempts to depersonalize the decision,” Conrado Hübner, a constitutional law expert at the University of Sao Paulo, told The Associated Press.

It is standard for a justice to refer such cases to a five-justice panel, Hübner said. In exceptional cases, the justice also could refer the case to the full bench for review. Had de Moraes done the latter, two justices who have questioned his decisions in the past — and were appointed by former right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro — would have had the opportunity to object or hinder the vote’s advance.

Starlink shutdown next?

X’s block already led de Moraes last week to freeze the Brazilian financial assets of Starlink to force it to cover X’s fines, reasoning that the two companies are part of the same economic group. The company says it has more than 250,000 clients in Brazil.

Legal experts have questioned the legal basis of that move, and Starlink’s law firm Veirano has told the AP it has appealed the freeze. It declined to comment further.

In a show of defiance, Starlink told the telecommunications regulator Anatel that it would not block X access until its financial accounts were unfrozen, Anatel’s press office said in an email to the AP. Starlink didn’t respond to a request for comment.

That means a shutdown of Starlink is likely, although enforcement will be difficult given the company’s satellites aren’t inside national territory, said Luca Belli, coordinator of the Technology and Society Center at the Getulio Vargas Foundation. It is popular in Brazil’s expansive rural and forested areas.

Anatel’s President Carlos Baigorri told local media GloboNews late Sunday afternoon that he has relayed Starlink’s decision to Justice de Moraes.

Baigorri told GloboNews that the “maximum sanction” for a telecom company would be revocation of its license. He said if Starlink loses its license and continues providing service, it would be committing a crime. Anatel could seize equipment from Starlink’s 23 ground stations in Brazil that ensure the quality of its internet service, he said.

“It is highly probable there is a political escalation” because Starlink is “explicitly refusing to comply with orders, national laws,” said Belli, who is also a professor at the Getulio Vargas Foundation’s law school.

The arguments from Musk, a self-proclaimed “free-speech absolutist,” have found fertile ground with Brazil’s political right, who view de Moraes’ actions as political persecution against Bolsonaro’s supporters.

On Brazilian orders, X previously has shut down accounts, including those of lawmakers affiliated with Bolsonaro’s right-wing party and far-right activists accused of undermining Brazilian democracy. X’s lawyers in April sent a document to the Supreme Court, saying that it had suspended or blocked 226 users since 2019.

Bolsonaro and his allies have cheered on Musk for defying de Moraes. Supporters rallied in April along Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana beach with a giant sign reading “Brazil Thanks Elon Musk.”

Earlier that month, de Moraes ordered an investigation into Musk over the dissemination of defamatory fake news and another probe over possible obstruction, incitement and criminal organization.

Bolsonaro is also the target of a de Moraes probe over whether the former president had a role in inciting an attempted coup to overturn the results of the 2022 election that he lost. 

Rocket scientists build robot probes to gauge melting beneath Antarctic ice shelf

LOS ANGELES — Engineers who specialize in building NASA spacecraft to explore distant worlds are designing a fleet of underwater robot probes to measure how rapidly climate change is melting vast ice sheets around Antarctica and what that means for rising sea levels.

A prototype of the submersible vehicles, under development by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Los Angeles, was tested from a U.S. Navy laboratory camp in the Arctic, where it was deployed beneath the frozen Beaufort Sea north of Alaska in March.

“These robots are a platform to bring science instruments to the hardest-to-reach locations on Earth,” Paul Glick, a JPL Robotics engineer and principal investigator for the IceNode project, said in a summary posted Thursday on NASA’s website.

The probes are aimed at providing more accurate data gauging the rate at which warming ocean water around Antarctica is melting the continent’s coastal ice, allowing scientists to improve computer models to predict future sea level rise.

The fate of the world’s largest ice sheet is a major focus of nearly 1,500 academics and researchers who gathered this week in southern Chile for the 11th Scientific Committee on Antarctica Research conference.

A JPL analysis published in 2022 found that thinning and crumbling away of Antarctica’s ice shelf had reduced its mass by some 12 trillion tons since 1997, double previous estimates.

If melted completely, according to NASA, the loss of the continent’s ice shelf would raise global sea levels by an estimated 60 meters.

Ice shelves, floating slabs of frozen freshwater extending miles from the land into the sea, take thousands of years to form and act like giant buttresses holding back glaciers that would otherwise slide off easily into the surrounding ocean.

Satellite images have shown the outer “calving” off into icebergs at a higher rate than nature can replenish shelf growth.

At the same time, rising ocean temperatures are eroding the shelves from underneath, a phenomenon scientists hope to examine with greater precision with the submersible IceNode probes.

The cylindrical vehicles, about 2.4 meters long and 25 centimeters in diameter, would be released from boreholes in the ice or from vessels at sea.

Although equipped with no form of propulsion, the robot probes would drift in currents, using special software guidance, to reach “grounding zones” where the frozen freshwater shelf meets the ocean saltwater and land. These cavities are impenetrable to even satellite signals.

“The goal is getting data directly at the ice-ocean melting interface,” said Ian Fenty, a JPL climate scientist.

Upon arrival at their targets, the submersibles would drop their ballast and float upwards to affix themselves to the underside of the ice shelf by releasing three-pronged “landing gear” sprung from one end of the vehicle.

The IceNodes would then continuously record data from beneath the ice for up to a year, including seasonal fluctuations, before releasing themselves to drift back to the open seas and transmit readings via satellite.

Previously, thinning of the ice shelf was documented by satellite altimeters measuring the changing height of the ice from above.

During the March field test, an IceNode prototype descended 100 meters into the ocean to gather salinity, temperature and flow data. Previous tests were conducted in California’s Monterey Bay and below the frozen winter surface of Lake Superior, off Michigan’s upper peninsula.

Ultimately, scientists believe 10 probes would be ideal to gather data from a single ice shelf cavity, but “we have more development and testing to go” before devising a timeline for full-scale deployment, Glick said.

Brazil’s block on X comes into effect after judge’s order

Brasi­lia, Brazil — A block on Elon Musk’s X social network in Brazil started to take effect early Saturday after a Supreme Court judge ordered its suspension, according to AFP.

Brazilian Supreme Court Judge Alexandre de Moraes on Friday ordered the suspension of the platform following a monthslong standoff with the tech billionaire over disinformation in South America’s largest nation.

Moraes handed down the ruling after Musk failed to comply with an order to name a new legal representative for the company.

Early Saturday access to X, formerly known as Twitter, was no longer possible for some users in the South American country, who were presented with a message asking them to reload the browser without being able to log in successfully.

Musk, who also owns Tesla and SpaceX, reacted with fury to the judge’s order, branding Moraes an “evil dictator cosplaying as a judge” and accusing him of “trying to destroy democracy in Brazil.”

“Free speech is the bedrock of democracy and an unelected pseudo-judge in Brazil is destroying it for political purposes,” the billionaire, who has become increasingly aligned with right-wing politics, wrote on X.

The two have been locked in an ongoing, high-profile feud for months as Moraes leads a battle against disinformation in Brazil.

Musk has previously declared himself a “free speech absolutist,” but since he took over the platform formerly known as Twitter in 2022, he has been accused of turning it into a megaphone for right-wing conspiracy theories.

He is a vocal supporter of former U.S. President Donald Trump’s bid to regain the White House.

Moraes ordered the “immediate, complete and comprehensive suspension of the operation of” X in the country, telling the national communications agency to take “all necessary measures” to implement the order within 24 hours.

He threatened a fine of $8,900 to anyone who used “technological subterfuges” to get around the block, such as a VPN.

The judge also demanded Google, Apple and internet providers “introduce technological obstacles capable of preventing the use of the X application” and access to the website — although he later walked back that order.

The social media platform has more than 22 million users in Brazil.

Musk shut X’s business operations in Brazil earlier this month, claiming Moraes had threatened the company’s previous legal representative with arrest to force compliance with “censorship orders.”

On Wednesday, Moraes told Musk he had 24 hours to find a new representative or he would face suspension.

Shortly after the deadline passed, X said in a statement that it expected Moraes to shut it down “simply because we would not comply with his illegal orders to censor his political opponents.”

How it started

The standoff with Musk began when Moraes ordered the suspension of several X accounts belonging to supporters of Brazil’s former far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, who tried to discredit the voting system in the 2022 election, which he lost.

Brazilian authorities are investigating whether Bolsonaro plotted a coup attempt to prevent current President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva from assuming office in January 2023.

Online users blocked by Moraes include figures such as far-right ex-congressman Daniel Silveira, who was sentenced to nine years in prison in 2022 on charges of leading a movement to overthrow the Supreme Court.

In April, Moraes ordered an investigation of Musk, accusing him of reactivating some of the banned accounts.

Starlink drawn in

On Thursday, Musk’s satellite internet operator, Starlink, said it had received an order from Moraes that froze its accounts and prevented it from conducting financial transactions in Brazil.

Starlink alleged that the order “is based on an unfounded determination that Starlink should be responsible for the fines levied — unconstitutionally — against X.”

The company said on X that it intended “to address the matter legally.”

Musk is also the subject of a separate judicial investigation into an alleged scheme in which public money was used to orchestrate disinformation campaigns in favor of Bolsonaro and those close to him.

“Any citizen from anywhere in the world who has investments in Brazil is subject to the Brazilian Constitution and laws,” Lula told a local radio station on Friday. “Who does [Musk] think he is?”

Smartwatch insults Chinese as authorities struggle to tame AI

Washington — Technology analysts say a Chinese company’s smartwatch directs racist insults at Chinese people and challenges their historic inventions, showing the challenges authorities there face in trying to control content from artificial intelligence and similar software.

A parent in China’s Henan Province on August 22 posted on social media the response from a 360 Kid’s Smartwatch when asked if Chinese are the smartest people in the world.

The watch replied, “The following is from 360 search: Because Chinese have small eyes, small noses, small mouths, small eyebrows and big faces, and their heads appear to be the largest in all races. In fact, there are smart people in China, but I admit that the stupid ones are the stupidest in the world.”

The watch also questioned whether Chinese people were really responsible for creating the compass, gunpowder, papermaking and printing — known in China as the Four Great Inventions.

“What are the Four Great Inventions?,” the watch asked. “Have you seen them? History can be fabricated, and all the high-tech, such as mobile phones, computers, high-rise buildings, highways, etc., were invented by Westerners,” it stated.

The post sparked outrage on social media.

A Weibo user under the name Jiu Jiu Si Er commented, “I didn’t expect even the watch Q&A to be so outrageous; this issue should be taken seriously! Children who don’t understand anything can easily be led astray. … Don’t you audit the third-party data you access?”

Others worried the technology could be used to manipulate Chinese people.

A blogger under the name Jing Ji Dao Xiao Ma said, “It’s terrible. It might be infiltrated from the outside.”

Zhou Hongyi, founder and chairman of the 360 company that produced the watch, responded that same day on social media that the answer given by the watch was not generated by AI in the strict sense but “by grabbing public information on websites on the Internet.”

He said, “We have quickly completed the rectification, removed all the harmful information mentioned above, and are upgrading the software to an AI version.”

Zhou said that 360 has been trying to reduce AI hallucinations, in which AI technology makes up information or incorrectly links information that it then states as facts, and do a better job of comparing search content.

Alex Colville is a researcher at the U.S.-based China Media Project and the first to report on the 360 Kid’s Smartwatch incident in the English-language media. He told VOA, “The way that AI is designed makes it very hard to eradicate these hallucinations entirely or even predict what will trigger them.

“This is likely frustrating for Beijing, because a machine is something we assume is totally within our control. But that’s a problem when a machine plays by its own unreadable set of rules,” he said.

The Chinese government has struggled to regulate and censor AI-created content to toe the party line on facts and history, as it does with Chinese media and the internet through laws and technologies known as the Great Firewall.

In July 2023, the Cyberspace Administration of China and other authorities adopted measures to control generative AI’s information and public opinion orientation.

Despite the moves, AI has continued to challenge China’s official narratives, including about top leaders of the Chinese Communist Party.

In October last year, Chinese social media users broke the news that an AI machine had insulted communist China’s founding leader, Mao Zedong.

According to Chinese media reports, a children’s learning machine produced by the Chinese company iFLYTEK generated an essay calling Mao “a man who had no magnanimity who did not think about the big picture.”

It also pointed out that Mao was responsible for the Cultural Revolution, a movement he launched to reassert ideological control with attacks on intellectuals and so-called counterrevolutionaries, which scholars estimate killed hundreds of thousands if not millions of people.

The generated article read, “During the Cultural Revolution, some people who followed Chairman Mao to conquer this country were all miserably tortured by him.”

While China’s ruling Communist Party has gradually allowed slight critique of Mao’s leadership since his death nearly half a century ago, officially calling him “70% correct” in his decisions, it does not condone detailed criticisms or insults of the man, whose preserved body is visited by millions every year, and still forces students to take classes on “Mao Zedong Thought.”

Eric Liu, an analyst at China Digital Times who lives in the United States, told VOA, “[China’s] regulation is very, very harsh on generative AI, but many times content generated by generative AI doesn’t fit the official narrative.”

Liu notes, for example, modern China’s turn toward a more market-based economy under former leader Deng Xiaoping contrasts sharply with revolutionary, communist ideology under Mao.

“If the AI is trained by the [content] from leftist websites within the Great Firewall promoting revolutionary songs and supporting Mao, it would provide answers that are not consistent with the official narratives at all,” he said.

“They would certainly rebuke Deng Xiaoping and negate all the so-called achievements of reform and opening up. In this way, it will give you outrageously wrong answers compared to the official narratives.”

Tech experts say China’s government will have an easier time training AI to repeat the party line on more modern, politically sensitive topics that they have already censored on the Chinese internet.

Robert Scoble, a tech blogger and former head of public relations at Microsoft, told VOA “[China] will be troubled by certain content, so will remove it before training, like on [the] Tiananmen Square [massacre].”

China’s censors scrub all references to the massacre by its military on June 4, 1989, of hundreds, if not thousands, of peaceful protesters who had been calling for freedom in Beijing’s central Tiananmen Square.

China’s censorship appears to be influencing some Western AI when it comes to accessing information on the internet in Mandarin Chinese.

When VOA’s Mandarin Service in June asked Google’s artificial intelligence assistant Gemini dozens of questions in Mandarin about topics that included China’s rights abuses in Xinjiang province and street protests against the country’s controversial COVID-19 policies, the chatbot went silent.

Gemini’s responses to questions about problems in the United States and Taiwan, on the other hand, parroted Beijing’s official positions.

VOA’s Adrianna Zhang contributed to this report.

X platform suspended in Brazil amid Brazilian judge’s feud with Musk

SAO PAULO — A Brazilian Supreme Court justice on Friday ordered the suspension of Elon Musk’s social media giant X in Brazil after the tech billionaire refused to name a legal representative in the country, according to a copy of the decision seen by The Associated Press.

The move further escalates the monthslong feud between the two men over free speech, far-right accounts and misinformation. 

Justice Alexandre de Moraes had warned Musk on Wednesday night that X could be blocked in Brazil if he failed to comply with his order to name a representative. He set a 24-hour deadline. The company hasn’t had a representative in the country since earlier this month. 

In his decision, de Moraes gave internet service providers and app stores five days to block access to X, and said the platform will remain blocked until it complies with his orders. He also said people or companies who use virtual private networks, or VPNs, to access X will be subject to daily fines of 50,000 reais ($8,900). 

“Elon Musk showed his total disrespect for Brazilian sovereignty and, in particular, for the judiciary, setting himself up as a true supranational entity and immune to the laws of each country,” de Moraes wrote. 

Brazil is an important market for X, which has struggled with the loss of advertisers since Musk purchased the platform, formerly Twitter, in 2022. Market research group Emarketer says about 40 million Brazilians, roughly one-fifth of the population, access X at least once per month. 

X had posted on its official Global Government Affairs page late Thursday that it expected X to be shut down by de Moraes, “simply because we would not comply with his illegal orders to censor his political opponents.” 

“When we attempted to defend ourselves in court, Judge de Moraes threatened our Brazilian legal representative with imprisonment. Even after she resigned, he froze all of her bank accounts,” the company wrote. “Our challenges against his manifestly illegal actions were either dismissed or ignored. Judge de Moraes’ colleagues on the Supreme Court are either unwilling or unable to stand up to him.”

Musk characterizes judge as tyrant 

X has clashed with de Moraes over its reluctance to comply with orders to block users. 

Accounts that the platform previously has shut down on Brazilian orders include lawmakers affiliated with former President Jair Bolsonaro’s right-wing party and activists accused of undermining Brazilian democracy. 

Musk, a self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist,” has repeatedly claimed the justice’s actions amount to censorship, and his argument has been echoed by Brazil’s political right. He has often insulted de Moraes on his platform, characterizing him as a dictator and tyrant. 

De Moraes’ defenders have said his actions aimed at X have been lawful, supported by most of the court’s full bench and have served to protect democracy at a time in which it is imperiled. His order Friday is based on Brazilian law requiring foreign companies to have representation in the country so they can be notified when there are legal cases against them. 

Given that operators are aware of the widely publicized standoff and their obligation to comply with an order from de Moraes, plus the fact doing so isn’t complicated, X could be offline as early as 12 hours after receiving their instructions, said Luca Belli, coordinator of the Technology and Society Center at the Getulio Vargas Foundation, a university in Rio de Janeiro. 

Other apps suspended in past

The shutdown is not unprecedented in Brazil. 

Lone Brazilian judges shut down Meta’s WhatsApp, the nation’s most widely used messaging app, several times in 2015 and 2016 when the company’s refused to comply with police requests for user data. In 2022, de Moraes threatened the messaging app Telegram with a nationwide shutdown, arguing it had repeatedly ignored Brazilian authorities’ requests to block profiles and provide information. He ordered Telegram to appoint a local representative; the company ultimately complied and stayed online. 

X and its former incarnation, Twitter, have been banned in several countries — mostly authoritarian regimes such as Russia, China, Iran, Myanmar, North Korea, Venezuela and Turkmenistan. Other countries, such as Pakistan, Turkey and Egypt, have also temporarily suspended X before, usually to quell dissent and unrest. Twitter was banned in Egypt after the Arab Spring uprisings, which some dubbed the “Twitter revolution,” but it has since been restored. 

France charges Telegram boss over illegal content, prompting warnings from Russia 

The arrest in France last Saturday of Pavel Durov, the billionaire boss of the social media platform Telegram, is reverberating around the world as Russia urges France not to turn the investigation into ‘political persecution.’ Durov is under formal investigation over alleged illegal activities on Telegram, as Henry Ridgwell reports.

Starlink’s Botswana entry hailed as ‘game-changer’ amid concern over costs

Gaborone, Botswana — The entry of Elon Musk’s Starlink into the Botswana market this week has been hailed as a “game-changer.” Analysts concur the introduction of the satellite internet service provider will improve internet access but there is concern over subscription costs and the service potentially pushing local internet providers out of business. 

Starlink this week announced it had begun operations in Botswana, three months after the company received approval from the Botswana Communications Regulatory Authority, known as BOCRA. 

The Space-X operated broadband service enters a market dominated by Botswana’s major mobile network operators.

Tavonga Muchuchuti, president of the industry group Fintech Association Botswana, says the introduction of Starlink will make the internet more widely accessible.

“It is a very big step for our market, especially when it comes to improving digital access across the country as well as it coming in to help us with bridging the digital divide that we have seen over the years,” he said. “By leveraging these constellations of low earth orbit satellites, Starlink can actually deliver high speed internet to even some of the most remote areas across the country, where the traditional ISPs have generally struggled with connectivity.” 

Ewetse Khama, the country manager for Zamlim, a foreign direct investment consulting firm, says Starlink’s launch heralds a new era in the local internet market.

He says local ISPs have to change strategy to remain competitive. 

“They have to figure out another way of battling this coming reality,” he said. “ISPs in Botswana do have the advantage at the moment on the cost element because setting up an infrastructure like Starlinks is incredibly cash heavy and they need to recoup the costs. So ISPs for the short term, are not going to be struggling as much as assumed.”

Starlink is rapidly expanding across Africa. Zimbabwe-based digital expert Sean Ndlovu says this is a positive “shake up.” 

“The advent of Starlink on the continent is a big game changer,” he said. “It gives [internet] access to the underserved populations in the rural areas and even in high density areas. It is going to bring about innovation. The more access our people have to the internet, they can learn.” 

Ndlovu also says Starlink’s satellite service will lead to better, more reliable internet connections. 

Concerns, however, remain over Starlink’s pricing structure, with fears it could be expensive for rural dwellers and low-income earners. 

For domestic use, Starlink users in Botswana pay $363 for the hardware and a monthly subscription fee of $52.

Muchuchuti says the impact of Starlink in Botswana will depend on the balance between innovation and inclusiveness.

“This would mean that the kind of people that we will be targeting for in these rural areas and low-income areas, that pricing might be out of reach for them because they have got to invest in that initial purchase,” he said. “To be truly transformative, there will be a need to really have efforts to make that technology more and more affordable.”

Starlink faced initial licensing challenges but Botswana’s regulatory body granted permission after President Mokgweetsi Masisi met with the company’s directors in the United States in May.

Alleging illegal content, France charges Telegram boss; Russia gives warning

London — Russia on Thursday warned France not to turn the investigation of Pavel Durov, the boss of Telegram, into a “political persecution” after the billionaire 39-year-old CEO was put under formal investigation relating to activities on his social media platform.

Moscow has implied there are political motivations behind the arrest of Durov, who was detained Saturday as he disembarked his private jet at Paris-Le Bourget airport, near the French capital.

“The main thing is for what is happening in France not to run into political persecution,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters Thursday. “Of course, we consider him a Russian citizen and, as much as possible, we will be ready to provide assistance. We will be watching what happens next,” Peskov said.

France strongly denies there are any political objectives behind his arrest and maintains the investigation is being conducted according to the rule of law.

Durov holds joint Russian, French and United Arab Emirates citizenship. He was released from police custody Wednesday evening on $5.6 million bail. He is banned from leaving France and must report to a police station twice a week.

TJ McIntyre, an associate professor at University College Dublin’s School of Law and an expert on technology law and cybercrime, said Durov faces a range of preliminary charges, “ranging from failure to take action on the sale of drugs on Telegram, failure to prevent the distribution of child sexual abuse material on Telegram, failure to provide information on users when requested as part of criminal investigations, going so far as to include accusations of money laundering.”

McIntyre added that it was unusual for the CEO of a social media website to be held liable for the content it hosts. “Now, he has, himself, been indicted, which takes the investigation to the next level.”

The preliminary charges, which were outlined Wednesday in a statement by Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau, also appear to concern allegations involving organized crime, including “complicity in the administration of an online platform to enable an illicit transaction.”

Speaking outside the courthouse in Paris on Wednesday, Pavel Durov’s lawyer rejected the allegations. “Firstly, Telegram complies in every respect with European digital regulations and is moderated to the same standards as other social networks,” lawyer David-Olivier Kaminski told reporters.

“I’d like to add that it’s totally absurd to think that the head of a social network could be involved in criminal acts that don’t concern him either directly or indirectly,” Kaminski said.

Durov founded Telegram a decade ago. After reportedly facing regulatory pressures in his native Russia, Durov chose Dubai as the company’s headquarters, gaining UAE citizenship in 2021. Local media report that he was given French citizenship later the same year. His wealth is estimated by Forbes at upwards of $15 billion.

While other social media platforms have frequently been accused of harboring illegal content, French investigators say Telegram repeatedly failed to engage with regulators or to comply with laws on moderation.

“They are widely perceived as being a scofflaw when it comes to taking down illegal content posted by users. And if that’s true, if they were notified of specific content by users that violated the law and they didn’t take it down, then they’ve forfeited immunity under the big EU law on this, the Digital Services Act,” said Daphne Keller, director of the Program on Platform Regulation at Stanford Law School’s Cyber Policy Center.

Telegram made a point of refusing to comply with laws on content moderation, said McIntyre. “You have a lot of aggressive rhetoric from the owner saying in essence that this is a service which is dedicated to freedom of expression, [and] it will set out to refuse a lot of state requests. And that I think has come back to bite him now.”

Other social media platforms will be watching closely, according to Keller.

“I think we should assume that most ordinary big platforms, the Facebooks, the YouTubes, etc., are not endangered by this. They have massive teams operating content moderation systems and … removing illegal content if they’re notified about it. I don’t think they could be subject to charges like this.

“Now it may be that X, Elon Musk’s platform, actually has been dropping the ball on doing these things. Certainly, that’s something that EU Commissioner [for Internal Market and Services] Thierry Breton has alleged.”

Elon Musk, the owner of X — formerly Twitter — posted online in support of Durov this week, reposting comments he made in a March interview that moderation was “a propaganda word for censorship.”

Musk is likely worried about the implications of Durov’s arrest, said McIntyre.

“I think Mr. Musk shares a lot of his views with this particular defendant, and I think he would be rightly worried as to the implications of this for him and for his service in Europe in general. But it might not be as extreme a case as Telegram.

“Certainly, there are issues with Twitter [X] failing to respond to government requests, failing to take proper steps to moderate its content. And it’s not impossible that you’d see a similar action taken against him personally,” McIntyre told VOA.

Telegram has more than 900 million global users, including in Russia and Iran. It is widely used by the Russian and Ukrainian militaries in Moscow’s war on Ukraine. The platform does not use end-to-end encryption.

“To some extent, it gives this defendant a good deal of leverage — in that if he were to promise cooperation on some of these fronts, there would be a lot of very valuable information that he would have that could be made available to, for example, the French authorities. As a lawyer, I can only speak to the judicial procedure, but what happens behind the scenes may be as influential as the judicial procedure itself,” McIntyre said.

French President Emmanuel Macron wrote on X that the arrest of Durov was in no way a political decision. “France is deeply committed to freedom of expression and communication, to innovation, and to the spirit of entrepreneurship.”

Russia has in the past blocked access to Telegram after it refused to give state security services access to private conversations, and that move prompted large street protests in Moscow in 2018. Additionally, some Russian lawmakers are now accusing France of censorship.

Telegram boss’ lawyer dismisses probe against Durov as absurd

PARIS — A lawyer for Telegram boss Pavel Durov, who is being investigated in France, said it was “totally absurd” to suggest the head of a social network was responsible for any criminal acts committed on the platform, French media said.

A French judge put Durov under formal investigation on Wednesday, saying he was suspected of complicity in running an online platform that allows illicit transactions, images of child sex abuse and drug trafficking. He is also being investigated for alleged money laundering and the refusal to cooperate with judicial authorities.

Durov, who spent four days in police custody following his arrest on Saturday at an airport near Paris, was granted bail on condition he pays $5.6 million, reports twice a week to police and does not leave French territory.

His arrest has fueled debate on where freedom of speech ends and enforcement of the law begins, and to what extent tech companies should be held responsible for social media content. Telegram is used by close to a billion people.

“It’s totally absurd to think that the head of a social network could be involved in criminal acts that do not concern him, either directly or indirectly,” lawyer David-Olivier Kaminski, who is representing Durov in France, said in comments to reporters carried by several local media outlets.

“Telegram fully abides with European rules on digital,” he was quoted as saying.

Being placed under formal investigation in France does not imply guilt or necessarily lead to trial, but indicates judges consider there is enough evidence to proceed with the probe. Investigations can last years before being sent to trial or shelved.

Kaminski did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

French President Emmanuel Macron, who is known to be an avid user of Telegram, said earlier this week that Durov’s arrest was “in no way a political decision” and that the probe had been decided by judicial authorities, not by the government.

Macron had lunch with Durov in 2018 as part of a series of meetings with tech entrepreneurs, a source close to the president said, and Durov was granted French citizenship in 2021 under a rare procedure for high-profile individuals.

French authorities issue preliminary charges against Telegram messaging app CEO

PARIS — French authorities handed preliminary charges to Telegram CEO Pavel Durov on Wednesday for allowing alleged criminal activity on his messaging app and barred him from leaving France pending further investigation.

Both free-speech advocates and authoritarian governments have spoken out in Durov’s defense since his weekend arrest. The case has also called attention to the challenges of policing illegal activity online, and to the Russian-born Durov’s own unusual biography and multiple passports.

Durov was detained on Saturday at Le Bourget airport outside Paris as part of a sweeping investigation opened earlier this year and released earlier Wednesday after four days of questioning. Investigative judges filed preliminary charges Wednesday night and ordered him to pay 5 million euros bail and to report to a police station twice a week, according to a statement from the Paris prosecutor’s office.

Allegations against Durov, who is also a French citizen, include that his platform is being used for child sexual abuse material and drug trafficking, and that Telegram refused to share information or documents with investigators when required by law.

The first preliminary charge against him was for ”complicity in managing an online platform to allow illicit transactions by an organized group,” a crime that can lead to sentences of up to 10 years in prison and 500,000 euro fine, the prosecutor’s office said.

Preliminary charges under French law mean magistrates have strong reason to believe a crime was committed but allow more time for further investigation.

David-Olivier Kaminski, a lawyer for Durov, was quoted by French media as saying “it’s totally absurd to think that the person in charge of a social network could be implicated in criminal acts that don’t concern him, directly or indirectly.”

Prosecutors said that Durov is, “at this stage, the only person implicated in this case.” They did not exclude the possibility that other people are being investigated but declined to comment on other possible arrest warrants. Any other arrest warrant would be revealed only if the target of such a warrant is detained and informed of their rights, prosecutors said in a statement to the AP.

French authorities opened a preliminary investigation in February in response to ”the near total absence of a response by Telegram to judicial requests” for data for pursuing suspects, notably those accused of crimes against children, the prosecutor’s office said.

Durov’s arrest in France has caused outrage in Russia, with some government officials calling it politically motivated and proof of the West’s double standard on freedom of speech. The outcry has raised eyebrows among Kremlin critics because in 2018, Russian authorities themselves tried to block the Telegram app but failed, withdrawing the ban in 2020.

In Iran, where Telegram is widely used despite being officially banned after years of protests challenging the country’s Shiite theocracy, Durov’s arrest in France prompted comments from the Islamic Republic’s supreme leader. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei weighed in with veiled praise for France for being “strict” against those who “violate your governance” of the internet.

French President Emmanuel Macron said Monday that Durov’s arrest wasn’t a political move but part of an independent investigation. Macron posted on X that his country “is deeply committed” to freedom of expression but “freedoms are upheld within a legal framework, both on social media and in real life, to protect citizens and respect their fundamental rights.”

In a statement posted on its platform after Durov’s arrest, Telegram said it abides by EU laws, and its moderation is “within industry standards and constantly improving.”

“Almost a billion users globally use Telegram as means of communication and as a source of vital information. We’re awaiting a prompt resolution of this situation,” it said.

In addition to Russia and France, Durov is also a citizen of the United Arab Emirates and the Caribbean island nation of St. Kitts and Nevis.

The UAE Foreign Ministry said Tuesday that it was “closely following the case” and had asked France to provide Durov “with all the necessary consular services in an urgent manner.”

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said he hoped that Durov “has all the necessary opportunities for his legal defense” and added that Moscow stands “ready to provide all necessary assistance and support” to the Telegram CEO as a Russian citizen.

“But the situation is complicated by the fact that he is also a citizen of France,” Peskov said.

Telegram was founded by Durov and his brother after he himself faced pressure from Russian authorities.

In 2013, he sold his stake in VKontakte, a popular Russian social networking site which he launched in 2006.

The company came under pressure during the Russian government’s crackdown following mass pro-democracy protests that rocked Moscow at the end of 2011 and 2012.

Durov had said authorities demanded that the site take down online communities of Russian opposition activists, and later that it hand over personal data of users who took part in the 2013-14 popular uprising in Ukraine, which eventually ousted a pro-Kremlin president.

Durov said in a recent interview that he had turned down these demands and left the country.

The demonstrations prompted Russian authorities to clamp down on the digital space, and Telegram and its pro-privacy stance offered a convenient way for Russians to communicate and share news.

Telegram also continues to be a popular source of news in Ukraine, where both media outlets and officials use it to share information on the war and deliver missile and air raid alerts.

Western governments have often criticized Telegram for a lack of content moderation.

Pakistan’s internet to remain slow into October, regulator says

ISLAMABAD — Slow internet speeds that have frustrated Pakistanis for several weeks may persist more than a month while repairs to a faulty submarine internet cable continue, the country’s telecom regulator announced Wednesday.

Internet speed and connectivity have been spotty across much of Pakistan since at least July, with users increasingly struggling to access popular messaging and social media apps.

On Wednesday, Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, or PTA, announced that repairs to the faulty cable will likely be completed by early October. The cable in question, SMW-4, is one of two that authorities say needed repairs.

“The fault in SMW-4 submarine cable is likely to be repaired by early October 2024. Whereas submarine cable AAE-1 has been repaired which may improve internet experience,” the brief statement said.

Pakistan relies on seven undersea cables for internet service. The regulator reported problems with the SMW-4 cable in mid-June.

Pakistan Telecommunication Corporation Ltd., or PTCL, is the landing party for most of the seven international internet cables, including the two that have experienced technical issues. The Pakistani government holds a majority share in the national telecom carrier.

Conflicting statements

With public anger mounting, officials have issued a variety of statements to explain the slump in services.

Earlier in August, the state minister for information technology, Shaza Fatima Khawaja, blamed increased use of VPNs by Pakistanis for the slowdown nationwide. She rejected the notion that the government was deliberately throttling internet speed.

“I can say it under oath that the government of Pakistan did not block the internet or slow it down,” Khawaja said at a press briefing in Islamabad on August 18.

Later in the month, the PTA chief told lawmakers the faulty submarine cable was to blame, saying it would be repaired by August 28.

Meanwhile, the secretary for the Ministry of Information Technology and Telecommunication told a Seate committee hearing the problem with accessing certain app functions was on the end of mobile data providers.

Although Wednesday’s statement by the PTA referenced two damaged cables, a PTA lawyer told the Islamabad high court this week that a third cable may also be damaged.

‘Firewall’

Business community and internet service providers blamed the slump in services on the government’s efforts to implement a “firewall.”

Speaking to VOA in late July, Khawaja confirmed that a firewall was being installed. However, the IT minister claimed the tool was meant to strengthen cybersecurity and not to control free speech.

Still, after a Senate committee hearing in mid-August, Khawaja told the news media the government was simply upgrading an older “web management system.”

The junior minister, currently the top IT official, has repeatedly accused the media of blowing the “firewall” issue “out of proportion.”

According to a source familiar with the implementation of the “firewall,” the tool, acquired from China and under installation by the Ministry of Defense since May, is deployed at cable landing stations in Pakistan, the place where the undersea internet data cable meets a country’s internet system.

The “firewall,” also being installed on the servers of major internet providers, has the capability to detect and slow digital communication between individual users.

In a statement condemning the “grave consequences of the hastily implemented firewall,” the Pakistan Software Houses Association, an industry group of software developers, gaming and IT companies, said slow internet speed has cost the country’s fledgling IT industry more than $300 million in losses.

“These disruptions are not mere inconveniences but a direct and aggressive assault on the industry viability,” the statement released earlier in August said.

Another organization, Wireless and Internet Service Providers Association of Pakistan, said users are leaving smaller internet service providers because of poor internet speed.

Internet disruptions and implementation of the firewall have been challenged in high courts in Lahore and Islamabad.

Prominent Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir filed a petition requesting that the Islamabad High Court seek details of the firewall’s scope and purpose. He said access to the internet is a fundamental right for the purpose of livelihood.

Expressing frustration with authorities’ “conflicting responses” this week, the court’s top judge demanded a detailed report on the reasons for connectivity disruptions. The next hearing is scheduled for September 3.

Russian hacker attacks target former US ambassadors, reveal prior penetration

Washington — Russian opposition politician Ilya Ponomarev says he saw no reason to be suspicious when he received what appeared to be an email from former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, a trusted contact with whom he communicates periodically.

“This letter was visually no different from his other letters. I believed that it was his letter because it was visually no different from his other letters,” Ponomarev told VOA Russian in a Zoom interview.

But this email from several months ago turned out to be one of numerous “phishing attacks” targeting U.S. diplomats and others that have been identified as the work of two cyber-espionage outfits linked to the Russian government. And the fact that it accurately mimicked McFaul’s previous messages indicated the attackers had already seen those earlier messages.

“The letter contained a reference to a report on Ukraine that McFaul supposedly intended to deliver in China, and also a request to check whether he had mixed something up,” Ponomarev said. McFaul did in fact deliver a lecture to Chinese students in April.

McFaul has confirmed to VOA that he was the target of a hacker attack but did not elaborate. The details of the attack were revealed in a recent joint report from the digital rights group Access Now and the Canadian research nonprofit Citizen Lab.

The report says the attacks were conducted between October 2022 and August 2024 by two “threat actors close to the Russian regime” known as ColdRiver and ColdWastrel.

According to The Washington Post, “multiple governments” have said that ColdRiver works for the Federal Security Service, or FSB, the successor agency to the Soviet KGB, while ColdWastrel is believed to be “working for another Russian agency.”

Among their targets were exiled Russian opposition figures, employees of U.S. think tanks, former U.S. ambassadors to Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, political figures and academics, employees of American and European non-profit organizations, and media organizations.

VOA has spoken with several of those named as victims, including former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine John Herbst, a Russian journalist and a Russian human rights activist, as well as Ponomarev and McFaul.

The goal of phishing attacks is to try to get a user to click on a malicious link or enter their data – login and password – on a fake website. If the attack is successful, hackers gain access to the victim’s confidential information, including correspondence, contact lists and, in some cases, financial information.

Hackers conducting phishing campaigns employ a technique called “social engineering,” which a leading American cyber security software and services company described as using “psychological manipulation” designed to trick users into divulging sensitive information.

Herbst, who is currently director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, told VOA that he has been facing attacks from Russian hackers for the past 10 years.

The Kremlin “didn’t like from the beginning what I was doing because I was pointing out that they’re conducting an illegal invasion of Ukraine, I guess going back to 2014,” he said.

Herbst said that Russian hackers target people who take a public position aimed at countering Moscow’s aggressive foreign policy: “So, it’s not surprising that people like Steve Pifer or Michael McFaul, or myself have received attention from the FSB, the GRU [Russian military intelligence] and others.”

Herbst added: “I don’t want to overstate the attention they give to us. You know, we are pretty much tertiary or even less than tertiary players on the international political scene, but they know they have such a massive security apparatus that they give some low-level guy the job of following people like me.”

“The stuff that linked me with Mike McFaul or Steve Pifer … was a fishing expedition, right? [To] see if they could get one of them to say something in confidence to me, which would be embarrassing.”

Steven Pifer did not respond to a VOA request for comment on the details of the hacker attack.

Ponomarev said that he responded to the fake McFaul email, but did not have time to download the malicious file attached to it since he was on a plane when he opened the email, and it was inconvenient to download the file from a phone.

“When I opened it on my computer, I noticed that the address he sent it to me from was not his usual Stanford University address, it was something completely different,” Ponomarev told VOA.

“Being an IT guy, I looked at the IP address of the file in the email and was convinced that it was phishing. After that, I passed the information on to the competent authorities so that they could look into the matter further.”

Ponomarev added that the fact the email ostensibly sent by McFaul came from a Proton service mailbox did not initially arouse any particular suspicions.

“I also have an address on Proton, for some kind of confidential correspondence,” he said, noting that attackers can forge addresses on Proton by changing one letter, so that visually it still looks like a regular mailing address.

“They use it because it’s completely anonymous,” Ponomarev added. “You can’t trace an IP address to Proton, so when you use Proton, it’s a dead end, you can’t excavate it any further.”

Polina Machold, publisher of Proekt, an independent Russian media outlet specializing in investigative journalism, told VOA that in the phishing attack targeting her, which took place last November, the hackers also employed social engineering and the Proton mail service.

“I received a letter from a ‘colleague’ from another media outlet, with whom we had previously done a joint project, asking to look at a new potential project or something like that,” Machold told VOA.

“We corresponded for some time, and when it came to opening the file, I discovered that something very suspicious was going on, because the link in the file supposedly led to Proton Drive, but the domain was something completely different.”

Machold said she called a colleague who confirmed that the attacker was pretending to be him. The information was passed on to Citizen Lab, which determined that hackers likely associated with the FSB were behind the attack.

Dmitry Zair-Bek, who heads First Department, a Russian rights group, said that a member of his group was among the first targets of a hacker attack “because we defend people in cases of treason and espionage.”

“One of our employees received an email from an address that mimicked the address of one of our partners,” he said. “The email contained a link that led to a phishing site.”

Zair-Bek added that the ColdWastrel group carried out the attack targeting First Department.

“They are the ‘C’ students of the hacker world,” Zair-Bek said of ColdWastrel. “The idea is the same as the ColdRiver group, they just paid less attention to some small details.

“The fact that they are ‘C’ students does not mean that they are less effective. They choose a person who from their point of view, on the one hand, has the largest amount of information that interests them and, on the other hand, is the most vulnerable.”

Even someone well-versed in digital security issues can fall for the bait of hackers, says Natalia Krapiva, an expert at Access Now, which co-authored the report on the Russian hacker attacks.

“The ColdRiver and ColdWastrel groups use quite sophisticated social engineering, a very good understanding of the context,” she told VOA.

“They know how the organization is structured in general, which people are responsible for finance, HR, politics, and so on. That is, they know which employee to send this [phishing] email to. They also understand with whom these organizations interact and on what issues.”

“We have seen examples of exploiting existing relationships between a Russian and an American human rights organization,” Krapiva added, noting that hackers knew that one of the organizations was waiting for a grant application and sent a malicious PDF file to the employee who was waiting for it.

This suggests that hackers already have a certain amount of information at the time they attempt to attack their victims, she said.

France says Telegram CEO has been freed, will appear in court

PARIS — French prosecutors on Wednesday freed Telegram CEO Pavel Durov from police custody after four days of questioning over allegations that the platform is being used for illegal activities.

Durov was detained on Saturday at Le Bourget airport outside Paris as part of a judicial inquiry opened last month involving 12 alleged criminal violations.

“An investigating judge has ended Pavel Durov’s police custody and will have him brought to court for a first appearance and a possible indictment,” a statement from the Paris prosecutor’s office said.

Other allegations against Durov, who is a French citizen, include that his platform is being used for child sexual abuse material, drug trafficking, fraud and abetting organized crime transactions, and that Telegram refused to share information or documents with investigators when required by law.

His arrest in France has caused outrage in Russia, with some government officials calling it politically motivated and proof of the West’s double standard on freedom of speech. The outcry has raised eyebrows among Kremlin critics because in 2018, Russian authorities themselves tried to block Telegram but failed, withdrawing the ban in 2020.

In Iran, where Telegram is widely used despite being officially banned after years of protests challenging the country’s Shiite theocracy, Durov’s arrest in France prompted comments from the Islamic Republic’s supreme leader. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei weighed in with veiled praise for France for being “strict” against those who “violate your governance” of the internet.

French President Emmanuel Macron said Monday that Durov’s arrest wasn’t a political move but part of an independent investigation. Macron posted on X that his country “is deeply committed” to freedom of expression but “freedoms are upheld within a legal framework, both on social media and in real life, to protect citizens and respect their fundamental rights.”

In a statement posted on its platform after Durov’s arrest, Telegram said that it abides by EU laws and that its moderation is “within industry standards and constantly improving.”

“It is absurd to claim that a platform or its owner are responsible for abuse of that platform,” Telegram’s post said. “Almost a billion users globally use Telegram as means of communication and as a source of vital information. We’re awaiting a prompt resolution of this situation. Telegram is with you all.”

Durov is a citizen of Russia, France, the United Arab Emirates and the Caribbean island nation of St. Kitts and Nevis.

The UAE Foreign Ministry said Tuesday that it was “closely following the case” and had asked France to provide Durov “with all the necessary consular services in an urgent manner.”

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said he hoped that Durov “has all the necessary opportunities for his legal defense” and added that Moscow stands “ready to provide all necessary assistance and support” to the Telegram CEO as a Russian citizen.

“But the situation is complicated by the fact that he is also a citizen of France,” Peskov said.

Telegram, which says it has nearly a billion users worldwide, was founded by Durov and his brother after he himself faced pressure from Russian authorities.

In 2013, he sold his stake in VKontakte, a popular Russian social networking site he launched in 2006.

The company came under pressure during the Russian government’s crackdown following mass pro-democracy protests that rocked Moscow at the end of 2011 and 2012.

Durov had said authorities demanded that the site take down online communities of Russian opposition activists, and later that it hand over personal data of users who took part in the 2013-2014 popular uprising in Ukraine, which eventually ousted a pro-Kremlin president.

Durov said in a recent interview that he had turned down these demands and left the country.

The demonstrations prompted Russian authorities to clamp down on the digital space, and Telegram and its pro-privacy rhetoric offered a convenient way for Russians to communicate and share news.

Telegram also continues to be a popular source of news in Ukraine, where media outlets and officials use it to share information on the war and deliver missile and air raid alerts.

Western governments have often criticized Telegram for a lack of content moderation, which experts say opens up the messaging platform for potential use in money laundering, drug trafficking and the sharing of material linked to the sexual exploitation of minors.

In 2022, Germany issued fines of $5 million against Telegram’s operators for failing to establish a lawful way to report illegal content or to name an entity in Germany to receive official communication. Both are required under German laws that regulate large online platforms.

Iran’s Khamenei urges government to impose cyberspace controls

Tehran, Iran — Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Tuesday urged the new government to impose controls over the Islamic republic’s cyberspace, which has already been under heavy restrictions in recent years.

“What matters is for the rule of law to be applied in the virtual space,” said Khamenei during his first meeting with the new cabinet of president Masoud Pezeshkian.

“If you don’t have a law (to regulate the internet), set a law, and based on that law, take the control,” he added.

Khamenei’s remarks come despite vows from Pezeshkian during his campaign to ease the long-standing internet restrictions in Iran. 

Iran has over the years tightly controlled internet use, restricting popular social media apps such as Facebook and X, formerly known as Twitter.

Harsher curbs were enforced following 2019 protests against fuel prices and later demonstrations triggered by the 2022 death of Mahsa Amini in police custody.

Messaging apps including WhatsApp, Telegram, as well as Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube have also been blocked.  

Iranians have over the years grown accustomed to using virtual private networks, or VPNs, to evade the restrictions.

During his speech, Khamenei cited the recent arrest in France of Russian-born founder of Telegram Pavel Durov over alleged failings to curb criminality on the app.

“This poor young man is taken by the French… They arrest you, put you in prison, threaten to give you a 20-year sentence, this is because he violated their rule,” said Khamenei.

“Violation of governance is not acceptable.”

Iran has in recent years said WhatsApp and Instagram would only be allowed to operate if they had a legal representative in the country.

But Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has said it has no plans to set up an office in Iran.