A Washington-based software developer is recruiting other techies to combat the spread of the new coronavirus in his native Ethiopia, following the lead of countries such as China and South Korea with early experience in what is now a global pandemic.“We need an army of tech volunteers to help the Ethiopian Ministry of Health collect, analyze and report to the agency so that we can assist them in the time of need,” Mike Endale wrote in The 38-year-old Endale came to the United States in 2000 and is a principal in BlenCorp, a small information technology firm in Washington. Its portfolio includes projects for the District of Columbia and federal governments, business, industry and advisory groups. Endale said the volunteers, mostly from the United States, Canada and Europe, are writing open-source code to create tools that could be used to raise public awareness of coronavirus risks and for contact tracing. “How do you push information out to the public? Things need to be built,” he said, citing social media messenger bots for Facebook, WhatsApp and other platforms. He added that some volunteers are working on an emergency response for contact tracing, which identifies an infected person and follows up with those who might have been near that person.Software’s role in the coronavirus public health emergency has bumped up against privacy concerns. In China, South Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong, governments are using GPS phone tracking software to track people’s movement, retrace the movement of an infected person before diagnosis or to make sure a patient does not break quarantine, according to the Morning Brew business newsletter. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit watchdog for civil liberties in the digital world, last week laid out principles for “data collection and digital monitoring of potential carriers of COVID-19.” It said data collection “privacy intrusions” should be proportionate, science-based, transparent and finite, ending after the crisis has been contained.Endale acknowledged privacy concerns in gathering information for Ethiopia’s government. But, he said, “the data collection part is administered by the folks in the health ministry. … They house the data. We’re just building the tools.”
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No more rallies. No more door-knocking. And no more in-person fundraisers, raking in dollars from dozens of millionaires at once.  
The coronavirus has disrupted American life, and the 2020 presidential campaign is no exception. Amid calls for social distancing to stop the pandemic’s spread, President Donald Trump and Democrats Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders have had little choice but to call off large-scale public events in favor of politicking online and over the airwaves.  
Gone are the rope lines, selfies with supporters and entourages of traveling press. They’re being replaced — for now — with tools of the digital world: tele-town halls, virtual fundraisers and live streamed speeches from candidates’ homes, sometimes with awkward results.  
The abrupt shift has infused the contest with an added degree of uncertainty.  
With control of the White House at stake, candidates have been forced to ditch well-honed strategies in favor of untested tactics. There are doubts about whether they will be able to continue raising crucial cash as unemployment soars and the economy sputters. There are also concerns that a virtual campaign could foster the spread of misinformation and maybe even force the cancellation of the major party conventions this summer.  
“Nobody’s had to put together a general election strategy in the circumstances we face today,” Anita Dunn, Biden’s senior adviser, told The Associated Press. “I like to say every election is different. This election is really, really, really different.”
Digital advertising and online outreach were always going to play a major role in the election. But no one could anticipate that tactile politics would be completely put on hold.  
Since events halted earlier this month, Sanders has held a virtual rally featuring rocker Neil Young and appeared via live stream for a “fireside chat.” But any momentum he’s sought to build has been sapped, as Biden, the former vice president, has won a string of contests that put the nomination within his grasp.
Sanders’ campaign did not respond to a request for comment.  
The pause has provided Biden the opportunity to retool his campaign, which was running on fumes before his massive win in South Carolina last month reset the race. But he lacks the robust digital operation that Sanders and Trump have. And his early experiments in online campaigning have had mixed results.  
Biden aimed to appear presidential during a live stream Tuesday night, when he won primaries in Florida, Illinois and Arizona. Standing before a podium with an austere backdrop from his home state of Delaware, he called on the nation to put politics aside to fight the coronavirus because it “doesn’t care if you’re a Democrat or a Republican.”
Yet an earlier event was marred by technical glitches. At one point, Biden wandered off-camera. The campaign later apologized for the difficulties, and Rob Flaherty, Biden’s digital director, acknowledged live stream technology is “one of the things that we’re struggling with.”
“He’s the best retail politician in the entire world, right? So how do we build systems where he can go out and meet people, still talk to people, get those one-on-one engagements, and also make people feel like they’re a part of something?” Flaherty said.
The campaign is also looking into adopting the use of Slack, a popular group communication platform, now that staffers are working from home.  
Trump, too, is not immune from the effects. Though the Republican has the megaphone of the presidency, his dismissive early response to the virus and denials that a pandemic was spreading have been largely panned.  
At the same time, he’s being denied the ability to hold the freewheeling rallies that are a staple of his presidency and that allow him to blow off steam, attack rivals and often shift the media narrative.  
As campaign offices have emptied out and workers telecommute from home, trainings for his reelection effort are now being done virtually, as are all voter contacts.
Tim Murtaugh, the communications director for Trump’s reelection campaign, said the campaign is “best equipped” for the pivot to virtual campaigning. But no amount of technology can replicate the arena rallies that have served as mass organizing and communication events for his reelection.
Murtaugh said the campaign hopes to roll out “live and interactive” events with surrogates online in the coming days. Still, don’t expect to see Trump participating in them.  
Murtaugh said that as Trump and Vice President Mike Pence hold televised briefings daily, the campaign’s role is to amplify their message.
“Americans want to see that their president and their government is on the case,” he said.
While Biden has called for the country to come together for a moment of bipartisanship to address the crisis, other Democrats are itching to use Trump’s handling of it as an election-year attack.  
“Using Trump’s own words and actions to remind people of his failures while he tries to rewrite history is essential,” tweeted David Plouffe, Barack Obama’s former campaign manager.
So far, at least, a political committee affiliated with Trump’s reelection has opted against taking the same course. America First Action, a super PAC sanctioned by Trump, has postponed plans to spend millions attacking Biden in TV ads while the crisis in ongoing.  
Another area of uncertainty is whether any of the contenders will still be able to rake in gobs of money, the lifeblood of any campaign.  
With big-dollar events on hold, the candidates and the parties could struggle to bring in large checks. The financial uncertainty could also depress grassroots donations from those who give small amounts online.  
“We have to be thoughtful about how we ask people for money,” Flaherty said. “We’re moving into a space where the economy is going to be tougher.”  
Not everyone is concerned, though.  
“Any Democratic Party official who’s agonizing over what type of fundraising we do or what type of convention we’re going to have should get out of group therapy, go to JoeBiden.com and make a donation,” said Robert Zimmerman, a prominent New York donor and Democratic National Committee member who said he would be fine casting his ballot for Biden during a virtual convention. “The pandemic that we’re facing and the threat it represents puts everything in the proper perspective.”
But it’s not just the presidential candidates who will have to grapple with this new reality. Down-ballot candidates could find the shift to an all-digital campaign particularly challenging because many of them are running on much thinner budgets and have less money to spend on ads and staff to make up for the loss of in-person interaction.
“If you have no money, and you’re dependent on meeting people out in organic environments, the challenges you now face are huge,” said Kelly Dietrich, CEO of the National Democratic Training Committee, a group that trains Democrats who want to run for office or work on a campaign.  
Even well-funded players in the presidential race are feeling the pinch. And the holding pattern gripping the contest is delaying on-the-ground organizing efforts that will be key to winning battleground states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Florida.  
“Everyone is hitting pause and thinking about how we engage in field activities and organizing. Hopefully we’ll get to a place where that can happen,” said Guy Cecil, chairman of Priorities USA, the largest outside Democratic group. “But the reality is that until we see changes, we’re just going to have to put those things on hold.”
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Not everyone who wanted to buy the bank cards stolen from Southeast Asian owners would pay the same price: The higher the amount of money left on the card, the higher the price. That’s according to Technisanct, a cybersecurity company based in India, which said it found the data for hundreds of thousands of cards for sale online, taken from citizens in the six largest nations in Southeast Asia.The card theft comes as statistics show cybercrime is on the rise across all the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, prompting local calls for more stringent regulations and protocols to fight the trend. “The results are alarming as it seems no one is aware that such a huge volume of payment card details, including the CVV (card verification value) and PIN, are available,” said Nandakishore Harikumar, chief executive officer of Technisanct.The company said its researchers found that more than 300,000 stolen card accounts were being sold on the internet last month. It said the accounts belonged to customers in Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. FILE – An interior view of the Interpol Global Complex for Innovation (IGCI) Cyber Fusion Centre, which brings together cybersecurity experts, is seen in Singapore, April 13, 2015.The leaked information is just the latest instance of a region-wide trend, and ASEAN is paying the price. IBM Security commissioned research, released in the 2019 Cost of a Data Breach Report, which assessed impacts for the global economy.Between 2018 and 2019, the ASEAN region saw a cost increase in all of the key indicators measured by the researchers, namely the average size of data breaches, the average total cost, and the average cost per piece of data that is breached. Exploiting COVID-19The leak also coincides with what security researchers say is an increase in global cyberfraud by criminals exploiting the COVID-19 virus emergency. Hackers this month went after the website of the U.S. Health and Human Services Department, as well as targeting the increasing number of people now working from home with unsecured wireless internet. Southeast Asians’ increasing awareness of cyberthreats in recent years has led to increasing regulation aimed at increasing data protection. This year, Singapore criminalized “doxxing,” which refers to posting other people’s personal information online, usually to threaten or embarrass them. Indonesia has proposed its first-ever data privacy law, which includes punishment of up to seven years in jail and $5 million in fines for sharing private data without consent.Vietnam already had a cybersecurity law but has released new subsidiary regulations under that law with further guidelines. They include specifics about when websites must take down information considered to be violating the law, and which organizations must store data domestically.”Vietnam witnessed an increase in the number of cyberattacks and data leakages in 2019, and the country has been among the top targets for cyberattacks in recent years,” Pho Duc Giang, director at PwC Vietnam Cybersecurity Services Company, said. “To leverage on growing business opportunities in the digital economy’s booming period, Vietnam enterprises need to actively prepare for new challenges by adapting and complying with up-to-date” standards, he said. Security recommendationsSuch standards go beyond what is required by the law. Security researchers recommend companies and individuals think more carefully about their behavior on the internet.They can use software to manage their passwords —so they don’t have to memorize ones that are easy for hackers to crack—as well as change the passwords for devices like their wireless routers and smart plugs, rather than use the default settings set by the manufacturer.And as employees are working from home to combat the coronavirus, there are reports that hackers have been sending phishing emails posing as managers seeking employee log-in credentials, or as officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention offering information. During this emergency and beyond, the recommendations for better online behavior could be useful both inside and outside Southeast Asia. 
 
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A father in quarantine on a Marine base in California was able to attend his daughter’s wedding hundreds of kilometers away in Arizona. He did so through a “telepresence robot,” directing its movements, mingling with guests and watching from the sidelines as his daughter danced at the wedding party.
With more people worldwide severely curtailing their movements to fight the coronavirus, they are also getting creative about how to still be part of big moments in their lives. Among the thousands of people stuck on the Grand Princess cruise ship when it faced the coronavirus quarantine was Joel Young, a lighting contractor. He passed the time in his small cabin playing video games. He hoped to be home in Arizona for one thing — his daughter’s wedding.    Then he was quarantined in San Diego.   “When I called her and talked to her, and told her that I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to be able to make it, there were a lot of tears there,”  he said.Friends and colleagues rallied and found Young a way to be there by using a robot telepresence that is controlled remotely by the user. It was shipped to his mother’s house in Phoenix. They called it the “Papabot,” and put a tie on it.   
“With this device, it allows me to control what I’m looking at, where I’m going,” he said. The outdoor wedding went beautifully. Young didn’t get to walk his daughter down the aisle as planned, but he was there mingling with guests, watching her happiness from the sidelines.   “You meet a challenge, you find the best solution you can. And you accept what it is, and you move on,”  he said.
 
As the world struggles with the new normal of living through a pandemic, technology helped one father be where he was needed.      
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School closures caused by the coronavirus pandemic mean many parents are trying to come up with ways to educate and entertain their children at home. While there are many online options, some parents worry about too much screen time. VOA’s Elizabeth Lee has the details on a couple of applications that combine the physical and digital so students learning at home get the best of both worlds.
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School closures caused by the coronavirus pandemic are creating stress for many parents trying to teach and entertain their children at home. While many online educational options provide help, some parents worry about too much screen time while their kids are away from school. General view of a sign outside the Parkside Community Primary School in Borehamwood as the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) continues, in Borehamwood, Britain, March 18, 2020.“If you’re wasting your time on YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, that’s the bad kind of screen time that we want to eliminate,” said David Drobik, co-founder of Vividbooks, an application that uses augmented reality to make physics concepts come to life. His app is among those that aim to combine the real and digital worlds to help children stay mentally active and engaged. Augmented reality physicsTraditional physics textbooks, Drobik said, contain illustrations, diagrams and lots of text to describe concepts that might be easier to understand if explained through a more visual medium.“Physics has a lot of caveats and a lot of concepts that are very visual in the sense that if you apply a digital layer with an animation that explains different concepts, it’s much easier to explain rather than having to read a lot of text,” Drobik said. Through a desktop or mobile device, a user first prints out Vividbooks pages. Once in the app, holding the mobile device over a Vividbooks page will animate what is on the page on the screen of the device.“The device recognizes the image on the worksheet, and that’s how it knows that it should play a certain type of animation,” Drobik said.Certain pages include sound when explaining concepts such as how a steam engine works or the mechanical properties of gases with the sound of blowing up a balloon. Other topics include energy, optics, Newton’s law and friction. An empty classroom is seen at a closed school in Paris, March 16, 2020. The app is currently available only for Apple mobile devices. Web and Android versions are expected in June. During the pandemic, parents can access Vividbooks pages for free. The target age range for the product is 10 to 12 years old. The company plans to add chemistry and biology content and to expand the material for a wider age range.Creativity and imagination Another app attempts to avoid the passivity that causes many children and young adults to be glued to screens.“Technology is great. It’s all around us and there’s so many fantastic things out there,” Martin Horstman, founder of Tink Digital, the company that created the app DoodleMatic, said. But, he added, the way children use it can be passive.Horstman considers social media and video games to be passive because the user is consuming other people’s ideas.He developed DoodleMatic so that users 6 years old and older could express their own ideas by combining real-world skills with technology.With the software, a user designs and draws a game on paper, using specific colors that tell the app whether something is an avatar, a goal, a hazard, or is something that can make an object move. The user then takes a photo of the picture with a mobile device through the app, and what was on paper becomes a video game.Through trial and error, young game developers learn how to avoid past mistakes and develop more complex games, which Horstman said can teach important life skills.“We believe strongly that creativity and imagination is such an important skill for every career path that you might end up taking,” Horstman said.Kids can design and animate two games for free. A package costs $29.99, which includes markers, design ideas and a code providing access to create 1,000 additional animated games.
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Chinese social video app TikTok named the initial members of a U.S.-focused content moderation committee to advise on its policies on Wednesday, as it faces U.S. scrutiny over data-sharing and censorship concerns.The council, which it announced in October, will meet every few months to give “unvarnished views” and advice on content moderation policies and evaluate the company’s actions.TikTok, owned by Beijing-based tech giant ByteDance, has made a series of bids to boost transparency as it faces scrutiny from U.S. lawmakers over its data security practices and concerns it engages in censorship at the behest of the Chinese government.The company, which has been criticized after former guidelines to suppress users’ content based on their physical appearance were leaked to media outlets, has also come under pressure to curb misinformation ahead of the U.S. presidential election and during the coronavirus pandemic.A Reuters search found TikTok videos repeating debunked false claims, including that the coronavirus might have come from a bioweapons ‘super laboratory.’The company has said U.S. user data is stored in the United States and that China does not have jurisdiction over content outside China.TikTok said its ‘Content Advisory Council,’ will grow to about a dozen members.The council’s first meeting at the end of March will focus on topics around “platform integrity, including policies against misinformation and election interference.”The group will be chaired by Dawn Nunziato, a professor at George Washington University Law School and co-director of the Global Internet Freedom Project.The other six founding members include Hany Farid, an expert on deepfakes and digital image forensics, tech ethicist David Ryan Polgar, and experts on issues from child safety to voter information.Last week, TikTok announced it had set up a “transparency center” in Los Angeles to show regulators and the public how it how it reviews content.In November, the U.S. government launched a national security review of TikTok owner Beijing ByteDance Technology Co’s $1 billion acquisition of U.S. social media app Musical.ly. Two senators have also introduced a bill to ban federal employees from using TikTok on government-issued phones.Facebook Inc is currently in the process of creating an independent oversight board to review appealed content decisions. In 2016, Twitter Inc formed a ‘Trust and Safety Council’ of groups and experts to provide advice.
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Technology and spirituality normally don’t go together. But at a recent conference in San Francisco there were tips on how to use technology to achieve more inner peace. Deana Mitchell went to see if it was possible.
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Technology and spirituality normally don’t go together. But at a recent conference in San Francisco there were tips on how to use technology to achieve more inner peace. Deana Mitchell went to see if it was possible.
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A virtual library housing censored articles from around the world has been created within the hugely popular video game Minecraft by press freedom group Reporters Without Borders (RSF).   Minecraft, with its signature pixelated graphics, enables players to build entire universes from Lego-like digital blocks, either alone or with others online.   RSF said it had put work by banned, exiled or killed journalists in five countries — Egypt, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Russia and Vietnam — on an open server, making it available for players to view despite local censorship laws.   “In these countries, where websites, blogs and free press in general are strictly limited, Minecraft is still accessible by everyone,” the group said in a press release.   “These articles are now available again within Minecraft, hidden from government surveillance technology inside a computer game. The books can be read by everyone on the server, but their content cannot be changed,” it said.   In May last year, Minecraft said 176 million copies of the game have been sold since its launch a decade ago.   The project, announced on Thursday to mark the World Day Against Cyber Censorship, is called the “Uncensored Library” and takes the form of a large neoclassical-style building in the game.   RSF said the library was growing, with more texts being added both in English and their original language.   Already available in the game are articles by slain Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi and from Egyptian online newspaper Mada Masr, which has been blocked in the North African country since 2017. 
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Motion capture technology is no longer just available for filmmakers and video game makers to transform human actors into other creatures. With the smartphone and other technologies, anyone can have their movements captured and analyzed to learn about how the body is moving for better physical performance and to avoid injuries.  VOA’s Elizabeth Lee has the details. 
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Apple Inc said late on Friday it will close all its retail stores, except those in Greater China, for the next two weeks to minimize the risk of coronavirus transmission.”We will be closing all of our retail stores outside of Greater China until March 27,” Apple CEO Tim Cook wrote in a letter posted on the company’s website.”In all of our offices, we are moving to flexible work arrangements worldwide outside of Greater China,” he added. “That means team members should work remotely if their job allows.”Apple reopened all 42 of its branded stores in China on Friday.The company’s donations to the global coronavirus response, to help treat those who are sick and to help lessen the economic and community impacts, reached $15 million on Friday, Cook wrote in the letter.More than 138,000 people have been infected worldwide and over 5,000 have died, according to a Reuters tally of government announcements.
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Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said Friday he is stepping down from the company’s board to focus on philanthropy.Gates was Microsoft’s CEO until 2000 and since then has gradually scaled back his involvement in the company he started with Paul Allen in 1975.He transitioned out of a day-to-day role in Microsoft in 2008 and served as chairman of the board until 2014.The billionaire announced Friday that he’s leaving the Microsoft board entirely as well as his seat on the board of Berkshire Hathaway, the conglomerate headed by fellow billionaire Warren Buffett.Gates said he plans to dedicate more time to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He will also remain a technology adviser to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and other company leaders.
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The Pentagon is reconsidering its awarding of a major cloud computing contract to Microsoft after rival tech giant Amazon protested what it called a flawed bidding process.U.S. government lawyers said in a court filing this week that the Defense Department “wishes to reconsider its award decision” and take another look at how it evaluated technical aspects of the companies’ proposals to run the $10 billion computing project.The filing doesn’t address Amazon’s broader argument that the bidding was improperly influenced by President Donald Trump’s dislike of Amazon and its CEO, Jeff Bezos. Bezos owns The Washington Post, a news outlet with which Trump has often clashed.Amazon Web Services is a market leader in providing cloud computing services and had long been considered a leading candidate to run the Pentagon’s Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure project, known as JEDI. The project will store and process vast amounts of classified data, allowing the U.S. military to improve communications with soldiers on the battlefield and use artificial intelligence to speed up its war planning and fighting capabilities.Amazon sued the Pentagon after Microsoft won the contract in October. Work on the project has been halted as the lawsuit proceeds.The judge who is presiding over the bid protest in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims said earlier this month that Amazon’s challenge likely had merit on some technical grounds involving pricing.The Pentagon is asking her for 120 days to reconsider “certain aspects” of its decision. Amazon said in a statement it is pleased the government is taking correction action if it “fully insulates the re-evaluation from political influence and corrects the many issues affecting the initial flawed award.”Wedbush analyst Dan Ives said one possible outcome is that the Pentagon could end up splitting the award between Microsoft and Amazon, or with other vendors. That would move the project forward and get it out of the courts, he said.
 
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Two Republican senators on Thursday introduced a bill aimed at banning federal employees from using Chinese social media app TikTok on their government-issued phones, amid growing national security concerns around the collection and sharing of data on U.S. users with China’s government.The bill by Senators Josh Hawley and Rick Scott comes as several U.S. agencies that deal with national security and intelligence issues including the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security have banned employees from using the app.It is also the latest attempt to rein in technology companies by Hawley, who has repeatedly clashed with big tech companies and has a notably nuanced and aggressive approach when questioning tech executives in congressional hearings.”TikTok is owned by a Chinese company that includes Chinese Communist Party members on its board, and it is required by law to share user data with Beijing,” Hawley said. ”
The app has been rapidly growing in popularity among U.S. teenagers and allows users to create short videos. About 60% of TikTok’s 26.5 million monthly active users in the United States are between the ages of 16 and 24, the company said last year.In November, the U.S. government launched a national security review of TikTok owner Beijing ByteDance Technology Co’s $1 billion acquisition of U.S. social media app Musical.TikTok has been on the defensive as lawmakers and law enforcement agencies  take a closer look at its data security practices amid concerns it engages in censorship at the behest of the Chinese government.  The company previously said U.S. user data is stored in the United States and that China does not have jurisdiction over content that is not in China.A TikTok spokesman told Reuters last week Hawley’s concerns were unfounded and that the company is increasing its dialogue with lawmakers to explain its policies. The spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for further comment.In November, Hawley unveiled a bill that would bar companies from China, Russia or other countries that present national security concerns from transferring Americans’ data back within their borders — where it could be used to spy on the United States.The bill also prevented the companies from collecting data that isn’t necessary to the operation of their business, such as phone contacts or location in the case of TikTok.
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The US needs a top-level cybersecurity coordinator and a better strategy of “deterrence” to protect against hackers and other cyber threats, a congressionally mandated commission said Wednesday.Defense in cyberspace requires a series of government reforms and policies to strike back at attackers, according to the report by the Cyberspace Solarium Commission.The bipartisan panel which included lawmakers and private sector experts made more than 80 recommendations ranging from reforms in the executive and legislative branches to better cooperation with allies to secure cyberspace.”The reality is that we are dangerously insecure,” said a statement from Senator Angus King and Representative Mike Gallagher, co-chairs of the panel which took its name from an Eisenhower-era foreign policy project.”Your entire life — your paycheck, your health care, your electricity — increasingly relies on networks of digital devices that store, process and analyze data. These networks are vulnerable, if not already compromised.”Panel members described the required effort as equivalent to preventing another 9/11 attack.The panel recommended the establishment of White House cabinet-level “national cyber director” to direct coordination within government and the private sector.Additionally, the panel cited the need for a stronger deterrence strategy to demonstrate that attackers in cyberspace would pay a price.”Deterrence is possible in cyberspace,” the report said.”Today most cyber actors feel undeterred, if not emboldened, to target our personal data and public infrastructure… through our inability or unwillingness to identify and punish our cyber adversaries, we are signaling that interfering in American elections or stealing billions in US intellectual property is acceptable.”It said the US government and private sector must  “defend themselves and strike back with speed and agility.”The commission said cyber defense should rely on a “layered” strategy that imposes costs on attackers.”A key, but not the only, element of cost imposition is the military instrument of power,” the report said.”The United States must maintain the capacity, resilience, and readiness to employ cyber and non-cyber capabilities across the spectrum of engagement from competition to crisis and conflict.”
 
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A SpaceX cargo ship arrived at the International Space Station on Monday, delivering the company’s 20th batch of gear and treats.The Dragon capsule reached the orbiting lab after launching late Friday night. NASA astronauts Andrew Morgan and Jessica Meir used the station’s robot arm to capture the spacecraft.The 4,300-pound (1,950-kilogram) shipment contains science experiments and equipment, as well as special goodies for the three-person crew aloft for months: grapefruit, tomatoes, Skittles, Reese’s Pieces and Hot Tamales.This is the last of SpaceX’s original-style Dragons. All future ones are designed to carry either cargo or crew, and will dock automatically rather than require robot-arm assistance. SpaceX has been sending up station cargo since 2012 and plans to start launching NASA astronauts this spring.From 260 miles (418 kilometers) up, Meir congratulated SpaceX on its many milestones, including the fact this is the third flight for this particular Dragon. Spacecraft and rocket recycling, she noted, is “the more sustainable approach that will be paramount to the future of spaceflight.”The Dragon will remain at the orbiting lab for a month before returning to Earth with science specimens.
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In March 2012, a 25-year-old Russian computer whiz named Yevgeny Nikulin sat with several others in a conference room in a hotel in eastern Moscow. A video taken by a Ukrainian named Oleksandr Ieremenko showed them discussing plans for an Internet cafe business and other matters.In an earlier part of the video, Ieremenko, 19, drives to the hotel to meet the group, which he calls a “summit of bad [expletives].”That same month, according to U.S. prosecutors, Nikulin broke into a social media company engineer’s computer a half a world away, in California — and allegedly stole the usernames and passwords used by tens of millions of people to access their LinkedIn accounts. Some of that data was put up for sale on a notorious Russian hacker forum that June.These details and other evidence were contained in pretrial motions prosecutors filed this week ahead of the opening of Nikulin’s trial in U.S. federal court in San Francisco. Jury selection is scheduled to begin Monday.The case against Nikulin, who was arrested in 2016 in Prague and extradited to the United States in 2018, is the latest example of a Russian citizen facing prosecution in the United States for cybercrimes. It’s a trend that has infuriated the Russian Foreign Ministry, which complains that the United States is “hunting” Russians around the globe.But the pretrial motions add yet more evidence of the web of relationships among Russia’s cyber underworld, allegedly tying Nikulin, now 32, to people who have been charged with even bigger, more serious hacks. That includes a hacker who allegedly worked for Russian intelligence to steal hundreds of millions of Yahoo user credentials — possibly used in the 2016 hack of the U.S. Democratic National Committee, according to cyberexperts.Nikulin, who was examined by court-ordered psychologists last year amid concerns about his mental health, has pleaded not guilty to the charges.Arkady Bukh, one of Nikulin’s lawyers, said prosecution lawyers appeared to be trying to pressure Nikulin to plead guilty ahead of the trial — particularly, he said, since the conviction rate for such cybercases is high.Nikulin, however, has refused his lawyer’s counsel to change his plea to guilty.’Zhenya’ from MoscowAccording to prosecutors’ evidence, the video showing Nikulin, Ieremenko and others was from a hard drive seized by Ukrainian authorities who raided Ieremenko’s home in Kyiv, and the homes of several other alleged Ukrainian hackers, in November 2012.An FBI affidavit said photographs found on the hard drive included photos that said “Zhenya from Moscow” — a diminutive form of the name Yevgeny.The U.S. Secret Service obtained the hard drive as part of an investigation into hacks of several business newswires, a scheme that involved selling unreleased corporate information to stock traders who then made trades based on the nonpublic information.Ieremenko, now 27, was implicated in that scheme, but he gained wider notoriety in 2019 when U.S. authorities indicted him and another Ukrainian in connection with a similar scam that traded on corporate earnings reports stolen from a database of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Ieremenko is believed to be in Russia.According to the trial motions, Nikulin worked closely with Ieremenko in 2012, sharing hacked passwords and coding tips, using Skype accounts. A Skype address they tied to Nikulin — dex.007 — was used to send Ieremenko a link containing the password to one of Nikulin’s accounts on a domain hosting site, along with stolen LinkedIn credentials.’Reporting on the spot’The video, one of eight copied from Ieremenko’s hard drive, was shot on March 18 or 19, 2012. In it, the person making the video narrates it, saying: “In short, we are reporting on the spot. Now, here at this Vega Izmailovo Hotel, there will be a f****** summit of bad motherf*****s,” according to the U.S. transcript submitted in the court record.Nikulin also worked closely with another Russian, Nikita Kislitsin, who was indicted in the United States in 2014 on conspiracy charges related to the hack of another, lesser-known social media company called Formspring. Kislitsin’s indictment, which was under seal since being filed, was unsealed earlier this week.U.S. prosecutors say that, three months after the Moscow meeting, Nikulin himself stole 30 million user credentials from  Formspring and utilized some of those credentials when he hacked into the LinkedIn engineer’s computer.According to the court documents, the FBI used “court-ordered electronic interceptions” — phone and email taps — to track Nikulin in 2012 and 2013.U.S. investigators discovered overlap with another Russian, Aleksei Belan, under investigation in connection with a separate hack: the theft of user credentials from the Internet giant Yahoo, beginning in 2013.FILE – A cyclist rides past a Yahoo sign at the company’s headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif., July 19, 2016. The Yahoo hack announced in December 2016 exposed personal details from all of the company’ user accounts.Yahoo eventually revealed all 3 billion of its users had had their credentials compromised in what is today considered one of the largest data breaches in the history of the internet.Prosecutors said the FBI, which had obtained a court-authorized warrant to search Belan’s e-mail and tap his phones, found that Belan, along with Kislitsin, purchased the Formspring passwords in July 2012.That same year, Belan was put on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list for cyberthieves. The following year, he was arrested in Greece at the request of U.S. authorities. But he avoided being extradited and escaped back into Russia, according to U.S. and European authorities.In 2014, according to previous U.S. documents, Belan was recruited by Russia’s main intelligence and security agency, the Federal Security Service (FSB) and its cyberunit, known as the Center for Information Security.Belan, according to the 2016 Yahoo hack indictment, was ordered by the FSB cyberunit to conduct the breach of Yahoo accounts.In all, U.S. officials charged four people with the Yahoo breach, including two FSB officers. Those officers themselves were later arrested by the FSB itself and charged with state treason, allegedly for passing classified intelligence to U.S. agencies.One, Sergei Mikhailov, pleaded not guilty to the Russian charges and was sentenced last year to 22 years in prison. The other, Dmitry Dokuchaev, pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate with investigators. He was handed a six-year sentence.In December 2016, in response to the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia had tried to meddle in the presidential election won by Donald Trump that year, the administration of outgoing President Barack Obama announced sweeping sanctions against Belan and another Russian, who also allegedly had ties to Russian intelligence, Yevgeny Bogachev.The interference, according to U.S. intelligence, included the hack of the U.S. Democratic National Committee and the theft of emails that were later leaked publicly during the election campaign. U.S. officials, and cyberanalysts, have said the FSB was among those responsible for the hack, and that the stolen Yahoo credentials may been used to trick victims into letting hackers steal their emails.Kislitsin connectionsA further illustration of the web of ties among Russia’s cyber underground comes in the case of Kislitsin, who attended the March 2012 meeting in Moscow with Nikulin and Ieremenko.Kislitsin, according the U.S. prosecutors, allegedly partnered with Belan to get the Formspring data from Nikulin in July 2012.The following year, in 2013, Kislitsin met with an official from the U.S. Justice Department to discuss “research into the [cyber]underground,” according to Group IB, a prominent Russian cybersecurity and research firm.Kislitsin was joined in the meeting with the Justice Department official by representatives from Group IB, according to a Group IB statement provided to RFE/RL.Group IB later hired Kislitsin, and he is currently listed as the “head of network security” for the company.Asked for comment about the newly unsealed charges, which include conspiracy and trafficking in stolen user names and passwords, against Kislitsin, Group IB said that they predated his employment.”The information that has become public contains only allegations, and no findings have been made that Nikita Kislitsin has engaged in any wrongdoing,” the company said in the statement to RFE/RL.The company also said that after the 2013 meeting with the Justice Department official, “neither Group-IB nor Nikita Kislitsin has been officially approached with any additional questions.”And there’s one other connection involving Kislitsin. He previously worked as editor in chief for a well-known Russian cybermagazine called Hacker, where the ex-FSB officer Dokuchaev worked for him, writing under his nickname, Forb.’I want to hack the prison’Nikulin was arrested in Prague in October 2016 after his entrance into the country a few days earlier triggered a notification among Czech law enforcement.He and his lawyers strenuously fought the U.S. request for his extradition. Ultimately, he was sent to the United States in March 2018, prompting an angry statement from the Russian Foreign Ministry, which called it “a conscious, politically motivated step by the Czech side aimed at undermining the constructive basis of bilateral cooperation.”While in U.S. custody, Nikulin was reported by prison authorities as behaving strangely, prompting a judge to order a psychological examination. He was later deemed competent to stand trial.”He is refusing to accept a guilty plea, and this is another example of his mental condition,” Bukh told RFE/RL.The evidence that will be introduced in the trial also included other less significant but revealing comments, including a transcript of a phone conversation Nikulin had with a woman named Anya in November 2018.In the conversation, Nikulin complained that he had not received food, books or magazines, as he requested. He also joked with Anya.”I want to hack the prison,” he is quoted as saying. “The rules here are stupid.”This story was first published by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
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Facebook decided Friday to allow a type of paid political message that had sidestepped many of the social network’s rules governing political ads. Its policy change came days after presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg exploited a loophole to run such humorous messages promoting his campaign on the accounts of popular Instagram personalities followed by millions of younger people. The change involves what Facebook calls branded content'' — sponsored items posted by ordinary users who are typically paid by companies or organizations. Advertisers pay the influential users directly to post about their brand. No money for FacebookFacebook makes no money from such posts and does not consider them advertising. As a result, branded content isn't governed by Facebook's advertising policies, which require candidates and campaigns to verify their identity with a U.S. ID or mailing address and disclose how much they spent running each ad. Until Friday, Facebook tried to deter the use of paid posts through influential users as political messages. Specifically, it barred political campaigns from using a tool designed to help advertisers run branded posts on Facebook and Instagram, which is owned by Facebook. Friday's rule change will now allow campaigns in the U.S. to use this tool, provided they've been authorized by Facebook to run political ads and disclose who paid for the sponsored posts. Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a Democratic presidential candidate, speaks during his campaign launch of "Mike for Black America," at the Buffalo Soldiers National Museum, Feb. 13, 2020, in Houston.The Bloomberg campaign took the unconventional step of paying social media influencers — individuals with huge followings — to post Bloomberg memes using their Instagram accounts. Different versions of the sponsored posts from the Bloomberg campaign ran on more than a dozen influential Instagram accounts, each of which has millions of followers. That effort skirted many of the rules that tech companies have imposed on political ads to safeguard U.S. elections from malicious foreign and domestic interference and misinformation. Online political ads have been controversial, especially after it was revealed Russia used them to try to influence the 2016 presidential election. In response, Facebook has rolled out rules to prevent a repeat of that, though it has declined to fact-check political ads and refuses to ban even blatantly false messages. The Bloomberg campaign's memes showed the 78-year-old candidate, in a tongue-in-cheek awkward fashion, chatting with popular social media influencers with names likeTank Sinatra,asking them to help him raise his profile among younger folk. Can you post a meme that lets everyone know I’m the cool candidate?” Bloomberg wrote in one of the exchanges posted by an account called F Jerry, which has nearly 15 million followers on Instagram. The candidate then sent a photo of him wearing baggy chino shorts, an orange polo and a zip-up vest. F Jerry’s account then replied, Ooof that will cost like a billion dollars.'' Bloomberg responded by asking where to send the money. Looking to broaden audienceWith the sponsored posts, Bloomberg's campaign said it was reaching those who might not be normally interested in the day-to-day developments of politics. You want to engage people at every platform and you want them to feel like they’re not just getting a canned generic statement,” campaign spokeswoman Sabrina Singh said of the campaign’s strategy. The campaign declined to say how much it paid for the sponsored posts, or if it had more of them in the works. The posts did not appear in Facebook’s ad transparency library, which catalogs the political ads that campaigns buy directly from Facebook or Instagram and tells users how much was spent on them. Bloomberg’s campaign told The Associated Press on Thursday that Instagram does not require the campaign to disclose that information on the sponsored posts it ran earlier this week. 
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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg plans to throw his support behind international reforms that would require Silicon Valley tech giants to pay more tax in Europe.
    
The billionaire social network founder is due to meet members of the European Union’s executive Commission in Brussels and speak at the Munich Security Conference in Germany.
    
Zuckerberg is expected to tell the conference on Saturday that he’s backing plans for digital tax reform on a global scale proposed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
    
According to an excerpt of his speech provided in advance, Zuckerberg will say, “I understand that there’s frustration about how tech companies are taxed in Europe.”
    
Zuckerberg will tell the conference that he’s glad that that the OECD is looking at tax reform, which Facebook also wants.
“And we accept that may mean we have to pay more tax and pay it in different places under a new framework,” Zuckerberg will reportedly say.
    
The OECD plans would require digital and internet companies, including social media platforms, to pay more tax in countries where they have significant consumer-facing activities and generate profits.
    
The current system for taxing multinationals is based on where they are physically located, which sees internet companies such as Facebook pay the majority of their tax in the United States.
    
The situation is even more complicated in the European Union, where multinationals largely pay taxes on business done across the region in the one country that serves as their EU base, often a low-tax haven.
    
Tech companies have faced criticism for not paying enough tax in come countries. The U.S., meanwhile, has criticized the OECD plans, arguing they discriminate against big Silicon Valley companies.
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A federal judge in Washington has halted, for now, a major U.S. Defense Department cyber contract, blocking Microsoft Corp. from working on the Pentagon’s JEDI cloud-computing initiative pending the resolution of a lawsuit brought by rival Amazon.com.In October, Microsoft was awarded the Pentagon’s Joint Enterprise Defense infrastructure (JEDI) cloud contract, which has an estimated worth of around $10 billion over the next decade. The JEDI project will process and store classified data to provide the U.S. military improved communications with soldiers in the field as well as artificial intelligence to speed up war planning and fighting capabilities.By November, Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud computing division, filed a lawsuit alleging the Defense Department unfairly judged its bid for the contract. Amazon believes the process was tainted by U.S. President Donald Trump’s animosity towards Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s Chief Executive Officer and owner of The Washington Post newspaper, which Trump has regularly accused of bias against him.FILE – This April 12, 2016 file photo shows the Microsoft logo in Issy-les-Moulineaux, outside Paris, France.Court of Federal Claims Judge Patricia Campbell-Smith said the JEDI contract cannot continue to be enacted “until further order of the court.” Judge Campbell-Smith’s full opinion was sealed.While Amazon scored at least a preliminary victory, it is required to create a $42 million security fund that will be used to pay for any damages if the court later finds the injunction was improper.Earlier this week, Amazon asked the U.S. Court of Federal Claims to allow them to question Trump and top Pentagon leaders, including former defense secretary James Mattis and Defense Secretary Mark Esper about any political interference from the White House in the awarding of the contract.“We believe that we will ultimately be able to move forward with the work to make sure those who serve our country can access the new technology they urgently require,” said Microsoft’s spokesman Frank Shaw, adding that he is disappointed by the ruling and believes the Pentagon’s decision-making process was fair.
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Organizers of the world’s biggest mobile technology fair insisted Thursday that they canceled the annual Mobile World Congress due to health and safety concerns over the virus outbreak in China. But the Spanish government disagreed, hinting that there was another motive for the cancellation.
“This is indeed a very difficult situation and a very difficult decision that we have taken,” Mats Granryd, director general of the GSMA, told reporters in Barcelona on Thursday, a day after they canceled the event.
“Our priorities have been very clear and very simple: The first is health and safety of everyone involved in the show and the second priority is the reputation of the MWC and this event here in Barcelona,” he said.
The decision to scrap the Feb. 24-27 event in Barcelona was taken after dozens of tech companies and wireless carriers dropped out over the COVID-19 virus, including major companies like Ericsson, Nokia, Sony, Amazon, Intel and LG. The companies cited concerns for the safety of staff and visitors.
But the Spanish government said in a statement Thursday it “believes it is not public health reasons in Spain that have motivated the cancellation.”
“There is no public health reason to not hold events of this type in our country,” the government added. It did not say what reasons it thought were behind the decision.
Spain has only two people infected with the virus, neither of whom is in Barcelona.
Barcelona Mayor Ada Colau, sitting alongside Granryd, also said, “neither in Barcelona, Catalonia or Spain does any health concern exist today. There is no local reason” to cancel.
Granryd said the decision had nothing to do with the trade differences between China and the U.S., as suggested by one reporter who noted that some of those that had canceled were at events in Amsterdam.
“Absolutely not. Everyone I have spoken to, this is a health and safety issue concern, concern of travel, concern of having to put business-critical resources in quarantine for 14 days so it has nothing to do with anything else than the force majeure situation of having coronavirus disease spreading on the planet,” Granryd said.
John Hoffman, chief executive of GSMA, emphasized they were dealing with “business-critical people,” including 8,000 CEOs. He said “there was grave concern on disrupting their business not only now but into the future.”
Granryd said GSMA could not discuss the costs of the cancellation, as it was “early days.”
“It’s not about money,” he added.
Hoffman said they had considered a scaled-down event but “all of our buyers have indicated they would not attend.”
He said they looked at the data Wednesday and concluded that the “vast majority of those who planned to attend were not going to be there.”
He said it was not possible to postpone the event because it was impossible to know when the situation would change.
Describing it as “a very dark day,” Hoffman said that the group nevertheless looked forward to hosting the event again in Barcelona in 2021. Barcelona city hall and the national government welcomed this.
The show was originally expected to draw more than 100,000 visitors from about 200 countries, including 5,000-6,000 from China.
The decision stands to be a major economic blow to the city, which has been hosting the event for 14 years.
Colau said “the local impact will be very substantial” and that authorities will consult with those sectors affected to see how they can reduce the financial pain.
The show normally represents a huge source of revenue for hotels, restaurants and taxi companies. Authorities have estimated the show would generate 473 million euros ($516 million) and more than 14,000 part-time jobs for the local economy. 
 
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Social media giant Facebook on Wednesday removed two unconnected networks of accounts, pages, and groups “engaging in foreign or government interference,” one originating in Russia and the other one in Iran, both of which have alleged ties to intelligence services.Calling the behavior “coordinated” and “inauthentic,” Facebook’s head of security policy, Nathaniel Gleicher, said both operations were acting on “behalf of a government or foreign actor.”The Russian network primarily targeted Ukraine and its neighboring countries, while the Iranian operation focused mainly on the United States.The people behind the groups and accounts “coordinated with one another and used fake accounts to misrepresent themselves, and that was the basis for our action,” the social-media company said.In total, 78 accounts, 11 pages, 29 groups, and four Instagram accounts originating in Russia were removed.Facebook’s investigation “found links to Russian and military intelligence services” within the Russian network.The people behind the network would pose as citizen journalists and tried to contact policymakers, journalists, and other public figures in the region.They would post content in Russian, English, and Ukrainian “about local and political news including public figures in Ukraine, Russian military engagement in Syria, alleged SBU (Ukrainian Security Service) leaks related to ethnic tensions in Crimea and the downing of the Malaysian airliner in Ukraine in 2014.”Similarly, six Facebook and five Instagram accounts were removed originating in Iran that engaged in “coordinated inauthentic behavior.”Some tried contacting public figures and they shared posts on such topics as the U.S. elections, Christianity, U.S.-Iran relations, U.S. immigration policy, and criticism of U.S. policies in the Middle East.About 60 people had followed one or more of the Iran-based Instagram accounts, the media company said. 
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Samsung on Tuesday unveiled a new foldable phone, the Galaxy Z Flip, its second attempt to sell consumers on phones with bendable screens and clamshell designs.The company announced the phone at the start of a product event in San Francisco. The new phone can unfold from a small square upward into a traditional smartphone form, and will go on sale Feb. 14 starting at $1,380.Samsung’s first foldable phone, the Galaxy Fold, finally went on sale last September after delays and reports of screens breaking. The Fold, which carries a price tag of nearly $2,000, folds at a vertical crease rather than horizontally as a flip-phone design would. Motorola has also taken the flip-phone approach with its new $1,500 Razr phone.The foldable phones represent manufacturers’ attempt to energize a market where sales have slowed. Many consumers are holding onto old phones longer, in part because new phone features offer increasingly marginal benefits. But these foldable models come with higher price tags and are likely to appeal for now mostly to tech enthusiasts and others at the forefront of technology.For everyone else, Samsung offers its S series. As the 2020s kick off, the South Korean company showed off the Galaxy S20, S20 Plus and S20 Ultra at an event in San Francisco, skipping directly to the 20s from its S10 series.The S20 phones are designed to take high-quality pictures in dark settings, Samsung product manager Mark Holloway said. The phones can take both video and photos at the same time, using artificial intelligence to zero in on the best moments to capture the still images.Samsung’s renewed focus on the camera follows Apple, whose iPhone 11 phones last fall offered an additional lens for wider-angle shots and combined multiple shots with software to improve low-light images. Google’s Pixel phones also offer a similar low-light feature.Samsung’s S phones already offer the wider angle and some features for low-lighting – but Samsung says the new phones will focus on high-resolution photos and the ability to zoom in 30 to 100 times, depending on the model.The S20 phones are expected to come out in March. Samsung didn’t immediately announce prices. Last year’s main S10 model went for $900 in the U.S. at launch. For all models, Samsung plans to make versions compatible with next-generation cellular networks, known as 5G, though it’s still an early technology that consumers typically won’t need yet.As people packed into San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts for Samsung’s launch event, they passed a team taking remote temperatures in the security line, likely a precaution to check for the coronavirus. Samsung also offered hand sanitizer stations and face masks inside the event lobby.
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The earliest fans of the internet wondered if it could be a democratizing technology, giving all people access to information, regardless of their income, social status, or level of freedom under their governments. Today another computer technology — artificial intelligence — raises similar questions, depending on whether it will bring benefits for all, or worsen the inequality already in place.A new report, jointly released by Google, INSEAD business school, and Adecco recruiters, tackles those questions by ranking nations and cities based on how well they attract people to their workforce by investing in technology like AI. Asian nations shot up the Global Talent Competitiveness Index in 2020 compared to 2019, particularly developing nations. That has led observers to a two-pronged conclusion marked by cautious optimism: on the one hand, poorer nations can use this technology to get ahead; on the other hand, if people become complacent, the technological advantage could stay in rich nations.“As talent becomes increasingly fluid and mobile, some early AI adopters could leverage this to become more talent competitive,” Bruno Lanvin, executive director of global indices at INSEAD, said, “however there are also signs that the ubiquity of AI is amplifying current imbalances and inequalities.”Most large nations in Asia improved their rankings this year, including China, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Indonesia. The index assigns nations a score for each of dozens of indicators, such as how much technical education and training they provide, the amount of technology transfer they enable, and the level of social mobility.The reason observers have drawn mixed conclusions from the index is that there is opportunity for developing nations to improve, but it is limited. For instance Malaysia got higher marks this year because it does a good job of matching workforce needs with talent. However the report authors say it “would benefit from higher tolerance and greater opportunities for minorities and immigrants.”Residents walk down a street in Kyoto, Japan, a nation whose investment in artificial intelligence helped it climb three spots in the Global Talent Competitiveness Index. (VOA News)What the authors call most “worrying,” though, is the risk of a widening gap between rich and poor in terms of which nations are best preparing to use artificial intelligence. Rich city-state Singapore is the only Asian nation to break the top 10 of the index released last month. In the part of the study focused on cities, high-income Tokyo and Hong Kong are the best performing in the region.Developing nations are able to make some progress because, at a lower level, technology is accessible and cheap. India and the Philippines, for instance, have become global call centers and IT outsourcing hubs, and it is relatively easy for their citizens to pick up basic coding skills regardless of their income.However when technology needs move beyond just coding skills, more investment and resources help. Artificial intelligence, in particular, relies on massive amounts of data to be input and computer power to crunch the data. Nations and companies that amass that data, and the highly-paid professionals who can understand it, have such an advantage that it might become too hard for others to catch up in the future.“AI also will affect people’s jobs and change the nature of work,”Kent Walker, senior vice president of Google, said. “We need to anticipate these changes and take steps to prepare for them.”Google has exactly such an AI advantage. It has been able to collect many photos to input into and improve its image recognition algorithms, for instance, at a level that would be hard for other companies to match.The authors released the global talent index in hopes of highlighting the digital divide, as well as providing recommendations on how to solve it. They say to prevent people from being left behind, developing nations can focus on vocational training and lifelong learning, and not just for lower-skilled tech jobs like coding. People can learn to do work that is complemented — not replaced — by robots; machines may be able to move a syringe into position, but patients will still want human nurses to oversee the injection, for instance.“The human role in the world of work is being augmented by technology rather than substituted by it,” Alain Dehaze, CEO of the Adecco Group, said.At a government level, nations should agree on the rules and principles that guide AI research and uses, such as the need for data protection, the report said. That would increase the odds that new technologies are advanced in the interest of humans.
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Have you ever stored something in the cloud and wondered where that data goes?  You might be surprised to learn it’s in a quiet residential community about 30 miles outside the capital city of Washington, where people jog or walk their dogs around human-made lakes, children’s teams practice on soccer fields, and teens play pick-up basketball on community courts.  The majority of the world’s internet traffic passes through the town of Ashburn in Loudoun County, Virginia, home to one of the world’s major internet exchanges.  “It’s amazing when you think about the amount of fiber that’s in the ground,” says Buddy Rizer, executive director of economic development for Loudoun County. “Both sides of the road pretty much have fiber troughs in them. And now we’re putting some fiber in the middle of the roads as well. We want to continue to build on that fiber network.”Seventy percent of the world’s internet traffic passes through all of that fiber. That’s why Ashburn is known as Data Center Alley. The Silicon Valley of the east. The cloud capital of the world. Pretty much any email sent or received anywhere around the globe passes through this town. If you’ve got something stored in the cloud, it’s probably in one of the 100-plus data centers located in Loudoun County.”A lot of people, they think about the cloud and their eyes go up. Well, it’s not really up,” Rizer says. “The cloud is based somewhere and, by and large, the cloud has been based here in Loudoun County, Virginia, in the data centers, the 18-million-square-feet of data centers that we have on the ground here.”It all started when America Online moved to Ashburn back in the 1990s. AOL brought fiber and power infrastructure with it. MAE-East, one of the world’s first internet exchanges, moved to Loudoun in the late ’90s after first forming in 1992.”It was a couple guys who got together over some beers and decided that they were going to allow one another to pass traffic back and forth across the different networks that they’d been creating,” says John Day, vice president of sales and leasing for Sabey Data Centers.    Other companies followed, each new addition contributing to the creation of the most dense fiber network anywhere in the world. Tech titans like Amazon and Google now have a presence in Loudoun. Northern Virginia’s appeal includes reasonably priced land, low-cost-but-dependable electricity, access to water to help cool the equipment, and a skilled, educated population.Data centersToday, the internet is basically housed in the data centers located in the Washington-area suburb, which is the biggest data center market in the world.”The internet itself is really comprised of these peering points that are housed inside data centers. So without data centers, you wouldn’t really have the internet,” Day says. “The infrastructure that powers the internet wouldn’t be around if it weren’t for the data centers that it lives in.”Companies want their information technology infrastructure close to those peering points. So they often turn to third parties like Sabey Data Centers to host them. Sabey’s client list is confidential, but it includes one of the five biggest cloud providers in the world.Data centers provide power, cooling and connectivity. Back-up generators ensure the power never runs out. The buildings themselves are hardened and have cooling capabilities that allow for the release of waste heat generated by the IT equipment.The data centers ensure the computer applications used by their clients are up and running around the clock, whether it’s a bank, insurance company, or e-commerce website.”They want to ensure that all of their customers, wherever they are, can get to it through the internet,” Day says.Return on investmentSecurity is tight. There’s a lot of privileged information to protect. With non-descript exteriors, data centers aren’t flashy. But they are quietly raking in the bucks for the Virginia county, which expects to take in $320 million in local tax revenue from data centers this year.”A single family home is not a moneymaker for a community like ours,” Rizer says. “For every dollar they take in services, we don’t get the corresponding amount of money back. Data centers, for every dollar we spend on them, we get about $15 dollars back, which is a great return on our investment.”Rizer expects the data center business to keep booming in his county and elsewhere. Across the United States, IT infrastructure isn’t expected to catch up with demand until sometime late in the 2020s.
 
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Images of a reborn Princess Leia, or a youthful Robert DeNiro are bewitching illusions for movie-goers. But concern that the same technology could be weaponized to incite chaos in an election is leading to “deepfake” bans on social media, and a race to develop detection tools. Matt Dibble reports.
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Germany’s closely watched impending decision on whether and to what extent to allow Huawei, the Chinese tech giant, to enter its next generation telecommunications infrastructure may yield a result as early as Tuesday, sources tell VOA.The decision “is imminent,” says Emily Haber, German ambassador to the United States, in answer to a question raised by VOA Monday afternoon concerning the German government’s stance with regard to Huawei.“Any decision we take will factor in the relevance of the trustworthiness of the provider,” Haber added.VOA has since learned from diplomatic sources that “imminent” could mean as early as Tuesday February 11th when German lawmakers convene in Berlin.Jacob F. Kirkegaard, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Peterson Institute for International Economics, thinks Germany could end up following Britain’s precedence and reach a compromise solution “between Merkel’s permissive ‘few limits suggestion and the more restrictive line called for by many backbench MPs, led by Norbert Roettgen,” Kirkegaard told VOA.Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel is seen as wanting to work with Beijing in order to secure German business interests in China, while Roettgen, also a member of the governing Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and chairman of the influential Foreign Affairs Committee in the Bundestag, has made  no secret of his mistrust of Huawei.Roettgen pinned his tweet from November 23rd following a CDU vote in which he declared the unanimous vote a huge victory and an unambiguous declaration of where CDU stands on this issue.Unser #Initiativantrag zu #5G wurde beim #cdupt19 einstimmig beschlossen – ein Riesenerfolg! Die Debatte kommt in den #Bundestag. Klare Position der @CDU gegen Einfluss ausländischer Staaten in deutsche kritische Infrastruktur & für eine europäische Lösung! pic.twitter.com/W3uvLAxWJU— Norbert Röttgen (@n_roettgen) November 23, 2019CDU position “against foreign influence in critical German infrastructure” as well as its determination to find a European solution are “clear,” he tweeted, “next comes the parliamentary debate” which could take place Tuesday in Berlin, sources tell VOA.In Kirkegaard’s opinion, Germany could also impose a ceiling on Huawei’s market share and attempt to prevent the company from supplying “core network” components, a measure Britain has recently announced, in spite of Washington’s strong objection.He nonetheless points out that given the 5G technology’s largely “cloud”-based feature, it remains “technically unclear” how core and peripheral distinction could be meaningfully established.Should the German parliament vote Huawei out of Germany’s 5G telecommunications infrastructure, it would be a huge surprise to many, including Kirkegaard. Should it happen, it would constitute a “huge defeat for Merkel,” he says, even as Merkel’s party is thrown into turmoil as her designated successor Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer announced her decision to step down as chairman of the CDU on Monday.It remains to be seen whether the latest development within the CDU could affect the German parliament’s debate on Huawei.Speaking along with the German ambassador at an event hosted by the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies Monday afternoon, Piotr Wilczek, Poland’s ambassador to the United States, said “there’s been a big effort” on the part of all EU countries “to provide Brussels with our positions” on the issue of Huawei.“Now we’re in the process of discussing this in more detail,” Wilczek said, in answer to VOA’s question on his country’s position with regard to Huawei. “Poland and I believe Romania are the only countries that have signed a declaration with the United States, stating just that we’ll be very careful in choosing providers and providers should be very reliable,” he added, without naming any company by name.“This is a very complicated issue … a difficult decision,” he says, “because it’s about the quality of services, of various providers; we know some of them are very much advanced, and some of them are not so much advanced but perhaps more reliable.”Earlier, Norbert Roettgen, the German lawmaker who has openly expressed his concerns about Huawei, stated that when it comes to which providers to be let in, “You don’t just need technical certainty, you need the suppliers to be politically trustworthy, too.” A bill that Roettgen helped draft requires that any company designated as “untrustworthy” be excluded “from both the core and peripheral networks.”Roettgen tweeted on February 8 that the United States and the EU “could team up to counter China’s 5G dominance.”  “We share the same security concerns and should cooperate to expand alternatives.”  He added that “but to do so, we must know that tariffs against Brussels are off the table.  Partners don’t threaten one another,” in a reference to tariffs U.S. President Donald Trump has said he would impose on a number of European imports, including on German automobiles.The #USA & EU could team up to counter #China’s #5G dominance. We share the same security concerns & should cooperate to expand 🇪🇺 alternatives. But to do so we must know that tariffs against Brussels are off the table. Partners don’t threaten one another. https://t.co/ZPvZFKWNYq— Norbert Röttgen (@n_roettgen) February 8, 2020Huawei has repeatedly denied that it is beholden to the Chinese government and its political demands. China’s top envoy to Berlin has made it clear that Beijing “will not stand idly by” should Germany’s decision on Huawei turns out to be unfavorable to Beijing. “If Germany were to make a decision that led to Huawei’s exclusion from the German market, there will be consequences,” Wu Ken is quoted as saying. Whichever way Germany decides, its decision likely will have significant impact on the other European Union countries. Political influence aside, the fact that Germany takes up about 30% of the EU’s 5G market is “enough for pan-EU operators to follow its lead,” according to the Peterson Institute’s Kirkegaard.
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Amazon wants to depose President Donald Trump over the tech company’s losing bid for a $10 billion military contract.
The Pentagon awarded the cloud computing project to Microsoft in October. Amazon later sued, arguing that Trump’s interference and bias against the company harmed Amazon’s chances of winning the contract.The company said in a federal court filing in Washington on Monday that Trump has a “well-documented personal animus towards” Amazon, its CEO Jeff Bezos and The Washington Post, which Bezos owns. Amazon says that Trump is the only who can testify about the “totality of his conversations and the overall message he conveyed” about the bidding process.Amazon is also asking to depose Defense Secretary Mark Esper, former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and other government officials in its filing Monday with the U.S. Court of Federal Claims. The Pentagon didn’t immediately return an emailed request for comment Monday.
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Cyborgs, trolls and bots can fill the internet with lies and half-truths. Understanding them is key to learning how misinformation spreads online.As the 2016 election showed, social media is increasingly used to amplify false claims and divide Americans over hot-button issues including race and immigration. Researchers who study misinformation predict it will get worse leading up to this year’s presidential vote. Here’s a guide to understanding the problem:MISINFORMATION VS. DISINFORMATIONPolitical misinformation has been around since before the printing press, but the internet has allowed falsehoods, conspiracy theories and exaggerations to spread faster and farther than ever.Misinformation is defined as any false information, regardless of intent, including honest mistakes or misunderstandings of the facts. Disinformation, on the other hand, typically refers to misinformation created and spread intentionally as a way to confuse or mislead.Misinformation and disinformation can appear in political ads or social media posts. They can include fake news stories or doctored videos. One egregious example of disinformation from last year was a video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that was slowed down to make her sound as if she were slurring her words.Research indicates that false claims spread more easily than accurate ones, possibly because they are crafted to grab attention.Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology analyzed more than 126,000 stories, some true and some false, that were tweeted millions of times from 2006 through the end of 2016. They found that misleading or incorrect stories traveled six times faster — and reached more people.Online misinformation has been blamed for deepening America’s political polarization and contributing to distrust in government. The risks were highlighted in 2016 when Russian trolls created fake accounts to spread and amplify social media posts about controversial issues.WAR OF THE BOTS AND CYBORGSThe disposable foot soldiers in this digital conflict are bots. In the social media context, these autonomous programs can run accounts to spread content without human involvement.Many are harmless, tweeting out random poems or pet photos. But others are up to no good and designed to resemble actual users.One study by researchers at the University of Southern California analyzed election-related tweets sent in September and October 2016 and found that 1 in 5 were sent by a bot. The Pew Research Center concluded in a 2018 study that accounts suspected of being bots are responsible for as many as two-thirds of all tweets that link to popular websites.While flesh-and-blood Twitter users will often post a few times a day, about a variety of subjects, the most obvious bots will tweet hundreds of times a day, day and night, and often only on a specific topic. They are more likely to repost content rather than create something original.And then there’s the cyborg, a kind of hybrid account that combines a bot’s tirelessness with human subtlety. Cyborg accounts are those in which a human periodically takes over a bot account to respond to other users and to post original content. They are more expensive and time consuming to operate, but they don’t give themselves away as robots.“You can get a lot from a bot, but maybe it’s not the best quality,” said Emilio Ferrara, a data science researcher at the University of Southern California who co-wrote the study on Twitter bots. “The problem with cyborgs is they are much harder to catch and detect.”SPOT THE BOTSBots can be hard to spot, even for the best researchers.“We have 12 ways that we spot a bot, and if we hit seven or eight of them we have pretty high confidence,” said Graham Brookie, director of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that studies connections between social media, cybersecurity and government.Nonetheless, Brookie recalled the case of a Twitter account from Brazil that was posting almost constantly — sometimes once per minute — and displayed other bot-like characteristics. And yet, “It was a little grandma, who said, ‘This is me!’”Their prevalence and the difficulty of identifying them has made bots into a kind of digital bogeyman and transformed the term into an insult, used to dismiss other social media users with different opinions.Michael Watsey, a 43-year-old New Jersey man who often tweets his support for President Donald Trump, said he has been repeatedly called a Russian bot by people he argues with online. The accusations prompted Twitter to temporarily suspend his account more than once, forcing him to verify he is a human.“All I’m trying to do is uses my First Amendment right to free speech,” he said. “It’s crazy that it’s come to this.”TROLLS AND SOCK PUPPETSThe word troll once referred to beasts of Scandinavian mythology who hid under bridges and attacked travelers. Now it also refers to people who post online to provoke others, sometimes for their own amusement and sometimes as part of a coordinated campaign.Sock puppets are another oddly named denizen of social media, in this case a type of imposter account. While some users may use anonymous accounts simply to avoid identifying themselves, sock-puppet accounts are used by the owner to attack their critics or praise themselves. In October, Utah Sen. Mitt Romney acknowledged operating a secret Twitter account under the name “Pierre Delecto,” which he used to defend himself against criticism.FAKED VIDEOS: DEEP, CHEAP AND SHALLOWDeepfakes are videos that have been digitally created with artificial intelligence or machine learning to make it appear something happened that did not. They are seen as an emerging threat, as improvements in video editing software make it possible for tricksters to create increasingly realistic footage of, say, former President Barack Obama delivering a speech he never made, in a setting he never visited. They are expensive and difficult to create — especially in a convincing way.Facebook announced last month that it would ban deepfake videos — with exceptions for satire. Beginning in March, Twitter will prohibit doctored videos, photography and audio recordings “likely to cause harm.” Material that is manipulated but isn’t necessarily harmful may get a warning label. And YouTube bans “deceptive uses of manipulated media” that could pose serious risk of harm.By contrast, shallowfakes, cheapfakes or dumbfakes are videos that have been doctored using more basic techniques, such as slowing down or speeding up footage or cutting it.Examples include a doctored video posted by Britain’s Conservative Party before December’s U.K. election that made it seem like a Labour Party official was struggling to respond to a question about Brexit.Because they’re easy and inexpensive to make, cheapfakes can be every bit as dangerous as their fancier cousin, the deepfake.“Deepfakes are getting more realistic and easier to do,” said John Pavlik, a journalism professor at Rutgers University who studies how technology and the internet are changing communication habits. “But you don’t have to have special software to make these simpler ones.”Researchers who study Americans’ changing media habits recommend that people turn to a variety of sources and perspectives for their news, use critical thinking when evaluating information on social media, and think twice about reposting viral claims. Otherwise, they say, misinformation will continue to flow, and users will continue to spread it.“The only solution,” Ferrara said, “is education.” 
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