Threads, a text-based app built by Meta to rival Twitter, is live.

The app, billed as the text version of Meta’s photo-sharing platform Instagram, became available Wednesday night to users in more than 100 countries — including the U.S., Britain, Australia, Canada and Japan. Despite some early glitches, 30 million people had signed up before noon on Thursday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Threads.

New arrivals to the platform include celebrities like Oprah, pop star Shakira and chef Gordon Ramsay — as well as corporate accounts from Taco Bell, Netflix, Spotify, The Washington Post and other media outlets.

Threads, which Meta says provides “a new, separate space for real-time updates and public conversations,” arrives at a time when many are looking for Twitter alternatives to escape Elon Musk’s raucous oversight of the platform since acquiring it last year for $44 billion. But Meta’s new app has also raised data privacy concerns and is notably unavailable in the European Union.

Here’s what you need to know about Threads.

How Can I Use Threads?

Threads is now available for download in Apple and Google Android app stores for people in more than 100 countries.

Threads was built by the Instagram team, so Instagram users can log into Threads through their Instagram account. Your username and verification status will carry over, according to the platform, but you will also have options to customize other areas of your profile — including whether or not you want to follow the same people that you do on Instagram.

Because Threads and Instagram are so closely linked, it’s also important to be cautious of account deletion. According to Threads’ supplemental privacy policy, you can deactivate your profile at any time, “but your Threads profile can only be deleted by deleting your Instagram account.”

Can I Use Threads If I Don’t Have An Instagram Account?

For now, only Instagram users can create Threads accounts. If you want to access Threads, you will have to sign up for Instagram first.

While this may receive some pushback, VP and research director at Forrester Mike Proulx said making Threads an extension of Instagram was a smart move on Meta’s part.

“It’s piquing [user] curiosity,” Proulx said, noting that Instagram users are getting alerts about their followers joining Threads — causing more and more people to sign up. “That’s one of the reasons why Threads got over 10 million people to sign up in just a seven hour period” after launching.

How Is Threads Similar To Twitter?

Threads’ microblogging experience is very similar to Twitter. Users can repost, reply to or quote a thread, for example, and can see the number of likes and replies that a post has received. “Threads” can run up to 500 characters — compared with Twitter’s 280-character threshold — and can include links, photos and videos up to five minutes long.

In early replies on Threads, Zuckerberg said making the app “a friendly place” will be a key to success — adding that that was “one reason why Twitter never succeeded as much as I think it should have, and we want to do it differently.”

Is Twitter Seeking Legal Action Against Meta?

According to a letter obtained by Semafor on Thursday, Twitter has threatened legal action against Meta over Threads. In the letter, which was addressed to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and dated Wednesday, Alex Spiro, an attorney representing Twitter, accused Meta of unlawfully using Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property by hiring former Twitter employees to create a “copycat” app.

Meta spokesperson Andy Stone responded to the report of Spiro’s letter on Threads Thursday afternoon, writing, “no one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee.”

Musk hasn’t directly tweeted about the possibility of legal action, but he has replied to several snarky takes on the Threads launch. The Twitter owner responded to one tweet suggesting that Meta’s app was built largely through the use of the copy and paste function, with a laughing emoji.

Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino has also not publicly commented on Wednesday’s letter, but seemingly appeared to address Threads’ launch in a Thursday tweet — writing that “the Twitter community can never be duplicated.”

Hasn’t This Been Done Before?

The similarities of Meta’s new text-based app suggests the company is working to directly challenge Twitter. The tumultuous ownership has resulted in a series of unpopular changes that have turned off users and advertisers, some of whom are searching for Twitter alternatives.

Threads is the latest Twitter rival to emerge in this landscape following Bluesky, Mastodon and Spill.

How Does Threads Moderate Content?

According to Meta, Threads will use the same safety measures deployed on Instagram — which includes enforcing Instagram’s community guidelines and providing tools to control who can mention or reply to users.

Content warnings — on search queries ranging from conspiracy theory groups to misinformation about COVID-19 vaccinations — also appear to be similar to Instagram.

What Are The Privacy Concerns?

Threads could collect a wide range of personal information — including health, financial, contacts, browsing and search history, location data, purchases and “sensitive info,” according to its data privacy disclosure on the App Store.

Threads also isn’t available in the European Union right now, which has strict data privacy rules.

Meta informed Ireland’s Data Privacy Commission, Meta’s main privacy regulator for the EU, that it has no plans yet to launch Threads in the 27-nation bloc, commission spokesman Graham Doyle said. The company said it is working on rolling the app out to more countries — but pointed to regulatory uncertainty for its decision to hold off on a European launch.

What’s The Future For Threads?

Success for Threads is far from guaranteed. Industry watchers point to Meta’s track record of starting standalone apps that were later shut down — including an Instagram messaging app also called “Threads” that shut down less than two years after its 2019 launch, Proulx notes.

Still, Proulx and others say the new app could be a significant headache for Musk and Twitter.

“The euphoria around a new service and this initial explosion will probably settle down. But it is apparent that this alternative is here to stay and will prove to be a worthy rival given all of Twitter’s woes,” technology analyst Paolo Pescatore of PP Foresight said, noting that combining Twitter-style features with Instagram’s look and feel could drive user engagement.

Threads is in its early days, however, and much depends on user feedback. Pescatore believes the close tie between Instagram and Threads might not resonate with everyone. The rollout of new features will also be key.

 
…

Tens of millions of people have signed up for Meta’s new app, Threads, as it aims to challenge competitor platform Twitter.

Threads launched on Wednesday in the United States and in more than 100 other countries.

In a Thursday morning post on the platform, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said 30 million people had signed up.

“Feels like the beginning of something special, but we’ve got a lot of work ahead to build out the app,” he said in the post.

Threads is a text-based version of Meta’s social media app Instagram. The company says it provides “a new, separate space for real-time updates and public conversations.”

The high number of sign-ups is likely an indication that users are looking for an alternative to Twitter, which has been stumbling since Elon Musk bought it last year. Meta appears to have taken advantage of rival Twitter’s many blunders in pushing out Threads.

Like Twitter, Threads features short text posts that users can like, re-post and reply to. Posts can be up to 500 characters long and include links, photos and videos that are up to five minutes long, according to a Meta blog post.

Unlike Twitter, Threads does not include any direct message capabilities.

“Let’s do this. Welcome to Threads,” Zuckerberg wrote in his first post on the app, along with a fire emoji. He said the app had 10 million sign-ups in the first seven hours.

Kim Kardashian, Shakira and Jennifer Lopez are among the celebrities who have joined the platform, as well as politicians like Democratic U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Brands like HBO, NPR and Netflix have also set up accounts.

Threads is not yet available in the European Union because of regulatory concerns. The 27-country bloc has stricter privacy rules than most other countries.

Threads launched as a standalone app, but users can log in using their Instagram credentials and follow the same accounts.

Analysts have said Threads’ links to Instagram may provide it with a built-in user base — potentially presenting yet another challenge to beleaguered Twitter. Instagram has more than 2 billion active users per month.

Twitter’s new CEO Linda Yaccarino appeared to respond to the debut of Threads in a Twitter post Thursday.

“We’re often imitated — but the Twitter community can never be duplicated,” she said in the post that did not directly mention Threads.

Some information in this report came from The Associated Press and Reuters.
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Europe’s workhorse Ariane 5 rocket blasted off for a final time on Wednesday, with its farewell flight after 27 years of launches coming at a difficult time for European space efforts.   

Faced with soaring global competition, the continent has unexpectedly found itself without a way to independently launch heavy missions into space due to delays to the next-generation Ariane 6 and Russia withdrawing its rockets. 

The 117th and final flight of the Ariane 5 rocket took place around 2200 GMT on Wednesday from Europe’s spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. 

The launch had been postponed twice. It was originally scheduled on June 16, but was called off because of problems with pyrotechnical lines in the rocket’s booster, which have since been replaced. 

Then Tuesday’s launch was delayed by bad weather. 

The Wednesday night flight went off without a hitch, watched by hundreds of spectators, including former French Justice Minister Christiane Taubira, and was greeted with applause. 

Marie-Anne Clair, the director of the Guiana Space Centre, told AFP that the final flight of Ariane 5 was “charged with emotion” for the teams in Kourou, where the rocket’s launches have punctuated life for nearly three decades. 

The final payload on Ariane 5 is a French military communications satellite and a German communications satellite.  

The satellite “marks a major turning point for our armed forces: better performance and greater resistance to jamming,” French Minister of the Armed Forces Sebastien Lecornu tweeted.  

Though it would become a reliable rocket, Ariane 5 had a difficult start. Its maiden flight exploded moments after liftoff in 1996. Its only other such failure came in 2002. 

Herve Gilibert, an engineer who was working on Ariane 5 at the time, said the 2002 explosion was a “traumatic experience” that “left a deep impression on us”. 

But the rocket would embark on what was ultimately a long string of successful launches.  

The initial stumbles had “the positive effect of keeping us absolutely vigilant,” Gilibert said. 

Reputation for reliability

Ariane 5 earned such a reputation for reliability that NASA trusted it to launch the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope in late 2021. 

The rocket’s second-last launch was in April, blasting the European Space Agency’s Juice spacecraft on its way to find out whether Jupiter’s icy moons can host alien life. 

Daniel Neuenschwander, the ESA’s head of human and robotic exploration, said that in commercial terms, Ariane 5 had been “the spearhead of Europe’s space activities.” 

The rocket was able to carry a far bigger load than its predecessor Ariane 4, giving Europe a competitive advantage and allowing the continent to establish itself in the communication satellite market. 

While waiting for Ariane 6, whose first launch was initially scheduled for 2020, Europe had been relying on Russia’s Soyuz rockets to get heavy-load missions into space. 

But Russia withdrew space cooperation with Europe in response to sanctions imposed over Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.  

The number of launches from Kourou fell from 15 in 2021 to six last year. 

Another blow came in December, when the first commercial flight of the next-generation Vega C light launcher failed. Last week, another problem was detected in the Vega C’s engine, likely pushing its return further into the future. 

Attention shifts to new rocket 

The launcher market has been increasingly dominated by billionaire Elon Musk’s U.S. firm SpaceX, whose rockets are now blasting off once a week. 

Lacking other options, the ESA was forced to turn to rival SpaceX’s Falcon 9 for the successful launch of its Euclid space telescope on Saturday.  

The ESA will also use a SpaceX rocket to launch satellites for the EarthCARE observation mission. 

It remains unclear how the agency will launch the next round of satellites for the European Union’s Galileo global navigation system. 

At the Paris Air Show earlier this month, ESA chief Josef Aschbacher acknowledged that these were “difficult times,” adding that everyone was “working intensely” to get Ariane 6 and Vega-C ready.  

Ariane 6 was unveiled on a launch pad in Kourou earlier this month ahead of an ignition test of its Vulcain 2.1 rocket engine. 

Because the new rocket requires less staffing and maintenance, 190 out of 1,600 positions are being cut at the Kourou spaceport. 
…

Facebook behemoth Meta officially launched Threads, its text-based rival to Twitter, on Wednesday — but its release in Europe has been delayed over data privacy concerns. 

Threads is the biggest challenger yet to Elon Musk-owned Twitter, which has seen a series of potential competitors emerge but not yet replace one of social media’s most iconic companies, despite its epic struggles. 

The app went live on Apple and Android app stores at 2300 GMT with accounts already active for celebrities such as Shakira and Jack Black, as well as media outlets including The Hollywood Reporter, Vice and Netflix. 

“Let’s do this. Welcome to Threads,” wrote Meta chief executive and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in his first post on the new platform, which will run with no ads for now. 

The app was introduced as a clear spin-off of Instagram, offering it a built-in audience of more than 2 billion users and thus sparing it the challenge of starting from scratch. 

Zuckerberg is widely understood to be taking advantage of Musk’s chaotic ownership of Twitter to push out the new product, which the company hopes will become the go-to communication channel for celebrities, companies and politicians. 

“It’s as simple as that: if an Instagram user with a large number of followers such as a Kardashian or a Bieber or a Messi begins posting on Threads regularly, a new platform could quickly thrive,” strategic financial analyst Brian Wieser said on Substack. 

Analyst Jasmine Engberg from Insider Intelligence said Threads only needs one out of four Instagram monthly users “to make it as big as Twitter.” 

“Twitter users are desperate for an alternative, and Musk has given Zuckerberg an opening,” she added. 

Musk and Zuckerberg are known to be bitter rivals — and have even offered to meet each other in a fighting cage to wrestle it out. 

This came after a Meta executive reportedly told employees that Threads would be like Twitter, but “sanely run.” 

Instagram chief Adam Mosseri told users that Threads was intended to build “an open and friendly platform for conversations.” 

“The best thing you can do if you want that too is be kind,” he said. 

Under Musk, Twitter has seen content moderation reduced to a minimum with glitches and rash decisions scaring away celebrities and major advertisers. 

Musk hired advertising executive Linda Yaccarino to steady the ship, but she has not been spared his whimsy. 

The Tesla tycoon said last week that he was limiting access to Twitter to ward off AI companies from “scraping” the site to train their technology. 

Musk then angered Twitter’s most devoted aficionados by declaring that access to its TweetDeck product — which allows users to view a fast flow of tweets at once — would be for paying customers only. 

 EU ‘many months’ away 

Threads owner Meta has its legion of critics too, especially in Europe, and despite Instagram’s massive user base, they could slow the site’s development. 

The company formerly known as Facebook is criticized mainly for its handling of personal data — the essential ingredient for targeted ads that help it rake in billions of dollars in profits every quarter. 

Mosseri said he regretted that the EU launch was delayed, but if Meta had waited for regulatory clarity from Brussels, Threads would remain “many, many, many, months away.” 

“I was worried that our window would close, because timing is important,” he added to Platformer, a tech news site. 

According to a source close to the matter, Meta was wary of a new law called the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which sets strict rules for the world’s “gatekeeper” internet companies. 

One rule restricts platforms from transferring personal data between products, as would potentially be the case between Threads and Instagram.   

Meta was caught out for doing just that after it bought the messaging app WhatsApp, and European regulators will be on high alert to ensure that the company doesn’t do so illegally with Threads. 

Another original idea for Threads, making it interoperable with other Twitter rivals such as Mastodon, is also on hold for now, but not abandoned. 

“Soon, you’ll be able to follow and interact with people on other fediverse platforms,” the app told users. 

The so-called fediverse would see different platforms of all kinds and sizes enabled to communicate with one another. 
…

In India, a recent court judgement that dismissed a legal petition by Twitter challenging the federal government’s orders to block tweets and accounts is a setback for free speech, according to digital rights activists.  

The Karnataka High Court, which delivered its judgement last week, also imposed a fine of $ 61,000 on the social media company for its delay in complying with the government’s takedown orders.  

“The order sets a dangerous precedent for curbing online free speech without employing procedural safeguards that are meant to protect users of online social media platforms,” Radhika Roy, a lawyer and spokesperson for the digital rights organization, Internet Freedom Foundation, told VOA.  

Twitter’s lawsuit filed last year was seen as an effort to push back against strict information technology laws passed in 2021 that allow the government to order the removal of social media posts.  

The government has defended the regulations, saying they are necessary to combat online misinformation in the interest of national security, among other reasons, and says social media companies must be accountable. Critics say the rules enable the government to clamp down on online comments that authorities consider critical.   

In court, Twitter argued that 39 orders of the federal government to take down content went against the law. It is not known which content it referred to, but media reports have said that many of these contained political content and dissenting views against farm laws that sparked a massive farmers protest in 2020.  

The government told the court the content was posted by “anti-India campaigners.” 

The court ruled that the government has the power to block not just tweets, but entire accounts as well.   

“I would disagree with that. The court had an opportunity to ensure that while illegal speech is taken down, free speech for individuals is not restricted,” Nikhil Pahwa, founder of MediaNama, a digital news portal told VOA. “But the court has reiterated that the government has full authority to censor whatever they want and whatever they deem illegal and that is a challenge for free speech in India.”  

The government has welcomed the decision of the Karnataka High Court. “Honourable court upholds our stand. Law of the land must be followed,” Minister of Communications, Electronics & Information Technology, Ashwini Vaishnaw, said in a tweet. 

Twitter had also told the court the grounds for taking down content had not been spelled out by the government and that those whose tweets or accounts were blocked had not been informed. But the court said that the user did not necessarily have to be informed. 

Digital rights activists say this raises concerns because there is no way to ascertain whether the government’s takedown requests are legal.   

“This excessive power (of blocking whole accounts) coupled with the lack of transparency surrounding the blocking orders, spells trouble for any entity whose content has the potential of being deemed unfavourable to the government,” according to Roy.   

Pahwa said the fine imposed by the court on Twitter would also discourage social media companies from going to court to protect their users right to free speech. “We are at a moment of despair for free speech in India. This does not bode well for users who might be critical of the government and its actions and inactions leading up to next year’s general elections,” according to Pahwa. 

Expressing concerns that India is moving towards imposing greater restrictions on online speech, Roy says that “the Karnataka judgement ends up perpetuating the misuse of laws restricting free speech rather than countering its rampant abuse.”  

Last month, Jack Dorsey, who stepped down as chief executive in 2021, said that during his tenure, Twitter had been issued with threats of a shutdown down in India and raids at the homes of its employees if it refused to agree to takedown requests. The government dismissed his comments as an “outright lie.”  

Twitter has said that India ranked fourth among countries that requested removal of content last year — behind Japan, Russia and Turkey. 

India, with an estimated 24 million Twitter users, is one of the largest markets for the social media company.  

Under Elon Musk, the company has complied with takedown orders. Musk, who met Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his visit to the United States last month, has said the company has no choice “but to obey local government laws” in any country or it risks getting shut.  
…

Elon Musk spent the weekend further alienating Twitter users with more drastic changes to the social media giant, and he is facing a new challenge as tech nemesis Mark Zuckerberg prepares to launch a rival app this week.

Zuckerberg’s Meta group, which owns Facebook, has listed a new app in stores as “Threads, an Instagram app”, available for pre-order in the United States, with a message saying it is “expected” this Thursday.

The two men have clashed for years but a recent comment by a Meta executive suggesting that Twitter was not run “sanely” irked Musk, eventually leading to the two men offering each other out for a cage fight.

Since buying Twitter last year for $44 billion, Musk has fired thousands of employees and charged users $8 a month to have a blue checkmark and a “verified” account.

On the weekend, he limited the posts readers could view and decreed that nobody could look at a tweet unless they were logged in, meaning external links no longer work for many.

He said he needed to fire up extra servers just to cope with the demand as artificial intelligence (AI) companies scraped “extreme levels” of data to train their models.

But commentators have poured scorn on that idea and marketing experts say he has massively alienated both his user base and the advertisers he needs to get profits rolling.

In another move that shocked users, Twitter announced Monday that access to TweetDeck, an app that allows users to monitor several accounts at once, would be limited to verified accounts next month.

John Wihbey, an associate professor of media innovation and technology at Northeastern University, told AFP that plenty of people wanted to quit Twitter for ethical reasons after Musk took over, but he had now given them a technical reason to leave too.

And he added that Musk’s decision to sack thousands of workers meant it had long been expected that the site would become “technically unusable”.

‘Remarkably bad’

Musk has said he wants to make Twitter less reliant on advertising and boost income from subscriptions.

Yet he chose advertising specialist Linda Yaccarino as his chief executive recently, and she has spoken of going into “hand-to-hand combat” to win back advertisers.

“How do you tell Twitter advertisers that your most engaged free users potentially will never see their ads because of data caps on their usage,” tweeted Justin Taylor, a former marketing executive at Twitter.

Mike Proulx, vice president at market research firm Forrester, said the weekend’s chaos had been “remarkably bad” for both users and advertisers.

“Advertisers depend on reach and engagement yet Twitter is currently decimating both,” he told AFP.

He said Twitter had “moved from stable to startup” and Yaccarino, who remained silent over the weekend, would struggle to restore its credibility, leaving the door open to Twitter’s rivals to suck up any cash from advertisers.

‘Open secret’

The technical reasons Musk gave for limiting the views of users immediately brought a backlash.

Many social media users speculated that Musk had simply failed to pay the bill for his servers.

French social data analyst Florent Lefebvre said AI firms were more likely to train their models on books and media articles than social network content, which “is of much poorer quality, full of mistakes and lacking in context”.

Yoel Roth, who stepped down as Twitter’s head of security weeks after Musk took over, said the idea that data scraping had caused such performance problems that users needed to be forced to log in “doesn’t pass the sniff test”.

“Scraping was the open secret of Twitter data access,” he wrote on the Bluesky social network — another Twitter rival.

“We knew about it. It was fine.”

 
…

U.S. President Joe Biden says he wants every American to have access to high-speed internet. VOA’s Julie Taboh has our story about the United States’ more than $40 billion-dollar investment to expand the service.
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STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN — Sweden on Monday ordered four companies to stop using a Google tool that measures and analyzes web traffic, as doing so transfers personal data to the United States. One company was fined the equivalent of more than $1.1 million. 

Sweden’s privacy protection agency, the IMY, said it had examined the use of Google Analytics by the firms following a complaint by the Austrian data privacy group NOYB (none of your business), which has filed dozens of complaints against Google across Europe. 

NOYB asserted that the use of Google Analytics for web statistics by the companies resulted in the transfer of European data to the United States in violation of the EU’s data protection regulation, the GDPR. 

The GDPR allows the transfer of data to third countries only if the European Commission has determined they offer at least the same level of privacy protection as the EU. A 2020 EU Court of Justice ruling struck down an EU-U.S. data transfer deal as being insufficient. 

The IMY said it considers the data sent to Google Analytics in the United States by the four companies to be personal data and that “the technical security measures that the companies have taken are not sufficient to ensure a level of protection that essentially corresponds to that guaranteed within the EU.” 

It fined telecommunications firm Tele2 $1.1 million and online marketplace CDON $27,700.  

Grocery store chain Coop and Dagens Industri newspaper had taken more measures to protect the data being transferred and were not fined. 

Tele2 had stopped using Google Analytics of its own volition, and the IMY ordered the other companies to stop using it. 

IMY legal adviser Sandra Arvidsson, who led the investigation, said the agency has the rulings “made clear what requirements are placed on technical security measures and other measures when transferring personal data to a third country, in this case the United States.’ 

NYOB welcomed the IMY’s ruling. 

“Although many other European authorities (e.g., Austria, France and Italy) already found that the use of Google Analytics violates the GDPR, this is the first financial penalty imposed on companies for using Google Analytics,” it said in a statement. 

At the end of May, the European Commission said it hoped to conclude by the end of the summer a new legal framework for data transfers between the EU and the United States. 

The RGPD, in place since 2018, can lead to penalties of up to $21.8 million, or 4% of a company’s global revenue. 
…

Airline passengers who have endured tens of thousands of weather-related flight delays this week could face a new source of disruptions starting Saturday, when wireless providers are expected to power up new 5G systems near major airports.

Aviation groups have warned for years that 5G signals could interfere with aircraft equipment, especially devices using radio waves to measure distance from the ground and which are critical when planes land in low visibility.

Predictions that interference would cause massive flight groundings failed to come true last year, when telecom companies began rolling out the new service. They then agreed to limit the power of the signals around busy airports, giving airlines an extra year to upgrade their planes.

The leader of the nation’s largest pilots’ union said crews will be able to handle the impact of 5G, but he criticized the way the wireless licenses were granted, saying it had added unnecessary risk to aviation.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg recently told airlines that flights could be disrupted because a small portion of the nation’s fleet has not been upgraded to protect against radio interference.

Most of the major U.S. airlines say they are ready. American, Southwest, Alaska, Frontier and United say all of their planes have height-measuring devices, called radio altimeters, that are protected against 5G interference.

The big exception is Delta Air Lines. Delta says 190 of its planes, which include most of its smaller ones, still lack upgraded altimeters because its supplier has been unable to provide them fast enough.

The airline does not expect to cancel any flights because of the issue, Delta said Friday. The airline plans to route the 190 planes carefully to limit the risk of canceling flights or forcing planes to divert from airports where visibility is low because of fog or low clouds.

The Delta planes that have not been retrofitted include several models of Airbus jets. The airline’s Boeing jets have upgraded altimeters, as do all Delta Connection planes, which are operated by Endeavor Air, Republic Airways and SkyWest Airlines, the airline said.

JetBlue did not respond to requests for comment but told The Wall Street Journal it expected to retrofit 17 smaller Airbus jets by October, with possible “limited impact” some days in Boston.

Wireless carriers including Verizon and AT&T use a part of the radio spectrum called C-Band, which is close to frequencies used by radio altimeters, for their new 5G service. The Federal Communications Commission granted them licenses for the C-Band spectrum and dismissed any risk of interference, saying there was ample buffer between C-Band and altimeter frequencies.

When the Federal Aviation Administration sided with airlines and objected, the wireless companies pushed back the rollout of their new service. In a compromise brokered by the Biden administration, the wireless carriers then agreed not to power up 5G signals near about 50 busy airports. That postponement ends Saturday.

AT&T declined to comment. Verizon did not immediately respond to a question about its plans.

Buttigieg reminded the head of trade group Airlines for America about the deadline in a letter last week, warning that only planes with retrofitted altimeters would be allowed to land under low-visibility conditions. He said more than 80% of the U.S. fleet had been retrofitted, but a significant number of planes, including many operated by foreign airlines, have not been upgraded.

“This means on bad-weather, low-visibility days in particular, there could be increased delays and cancelations,” Buttigieg wrote. He said airlines with planes awaiting retrofitting should adjust their schedules to avoid stranding passengers.

Airlines say the FAA was slow to approve standards for upgrading the radio altimeters and supply-chain problems have made it difficult for manufacturers to produce enough of the devices. Nicholas Calio, head of the Airlines for America, complained about a rush to modify planes “amid pressure from the telecommunications companies.”

Jason Ambrosi, a Delta pilot and president of the Air Line Pilots Association, accused the FCC of granting 5G licenses without consulting aviation interests, which he said “has left the safest aviation system in the world at increased risk.” But, he said, “Ultimately, we will be able to address the impacts of 5G.”
…

Elon Musk announced Saturday that Twitter would temporarily restrict how many tweets users could read per day, in a move meant to tamp down on the use of the site’s data by artificial intelligence companies. 

The platform is limiting verified accounts to reading 6,000 tweets a day. Non-verified users — the free accounts that make up the majority of users — are limited to reading 600 tweets per day.  

New unverified accounts would be limited to 300 tweets. 

The decision was made “to address extreme levels of data scraping” and “system manipulation” by third-party platforms, Musk said in a tweet Saturday afternoon, as some users quickly hit their limits. 

“Goodbye Twitter” was a trending topic in the United States following Musk’s announcement. 

Twitter would soon raise the ceiling to 8,000 tweets per day for verified accounts, 800 for unverified accounts and 400 for new unverified accounts, Musk said. 

Twitter’s billionaire owner did not give a timeline for how long the measures would be in place.  

The day before, Musk had announced that it would no longer be possible to read tweets on the site without an account. 

Much of the data scraping was coming from firms using it to build their AI models, Musk said, to the point that it was causing traffic issues with the site. 

In creating AI that can respond in a human-like capacity, many companies feed them examples of real-life conversations from social media sites. 

“Several hundred organizations (maybe more) were scraping Twitter data extremely aggressively, to the point where it was affecting the real user experience,” Musk said.  

“Almost every company doing AI, from startups to some of the biggest corporations on Earth, was scraping vast amounts of data,” he said.  

“It is rather galling to have to bring large numbers of servers online on an emergency basis just to facilitate some AI startup’s outrageous valuation,” he said. 

Twitter is not the only social media giant to have to wrangle with the rapid acceleration of the AI sector. 

In mid-June, Reddit raised prices on third-party developers that were using its data and sweeping up conversations posted on its forums. 

It proved a controversial move, as many regular users also accessed the site via third-party platforms and marked a shift from previous arrangements where social media data had generally been provided for free or a small charge.
…

If you logged onto social media over the past few months, you may have seen it – a video of the Russian Embassy on a gray, overcast day in Washington with the sounds of passing cars and buses in the background.

A man’s voice asks in English, “Do you want to change your future?” Russian subtitles appear on the bottom of the screen and the narrator makes note of the first anniversary of “Russia’s further invasion of Ukraine.”

As somber music begins to play, the camera pans to the left and takes the viewer down Wisconsin Avenue, to the Adams Morgan Metro station and on through Washington, ending at FBI headquarters, a few blocks from the White House.

“The FBI values you. The FBI can help you,” FBI Assistant Director Alan Koehler says as the video wraps up, Russian subtitles still appearing on the screen. “But only you have the power to take the first step.”

The video, put out by the FBI’s Washington Field Office, first appeared as a posting on the field office’s Twitter account on February 24. Another five versions started the same day as paid advertisements on Facebook and Instagram, costing the bureau an estimated $5,500 to $6,500.

That money may seem like a pittance for a government agency with an annual budget of more than $10 billion, but it was not the first nor the last time the FBI spent money to court Russian officials.

The video is part of an expansive, long-running campaign by the FBI to use social media advertisements to recruit disgruntled Russian officials stationed across the United States and beyond, in part to sniff out Americans who have betrayed their country in order to aid Moscow.

A VOA analysis finds the FBI has paid tens of thousands of dollars, at minimum, to multiple platforms for social media ads targeting Russian officials, with the pace of such ad buys increasing just before and then after Moscow launched its latest invasion of Ukraine.

Multiple former U.S. counterintelligence officials who spoke to VOA about the FBI’s efforts described the advertising as money well spent.

The FBI wants to find well-placed Russian officials who can “help identify where American spies may be,” said Douglas London, a three-decade veteran of the CIA’s Clandestine Service.

“It seeks Russian agents to catch and convict American spies and Russian illegals,” he told VOA, describing the mission as a part of the bureau’s DNA.

Another veteran CIA official, Jim Olson, agreed, telling VOA the goal of the FBI’s outreach to Russian officials is unmistakable.

“I call that hanging out the shingle,” said Olson, a former counterintelligence chief.

“For every American traitor, every American spy, there are members of that intelligence service who know the identity of that American or know enough about what the production is to give us a lead in doing the identification,” Olson said.

‘All available tools’

The FBI declined to comment directly on its decision to spend several thousand dollars to run the two-minute-long video as an ad on Facebook and Instagram, simply saying it “uses a variety of means” to gather intelligence.

“The FBI will evaluate all available tools to protect the national security interests of the United States,” the FBI’s Washington Field Office told VOA in an email. “And we will use all legal means available to locate individuals with information that can help protect the United States from threats to our national security.”

Some of the FBI’s earlier forays into social media advertising did get some public attention, first in October 2019 and then again in March of last year.

However, a review of publicly available data indicates the bureau’s use of social media for counterintelligence is more expansive than previously understood.

According to data in the Meta Ad Library, which contains information on Facebook and Instagram ads dating back to May 2018, the FBI and its field offices have so far spent just under $40,000 on ads targeting Russian speakers, generating as many as 6.9 million views.

While most of the ads targeted specific locations, like Washington and New York, some were seen much further afield, getting views across much of the United States and even in countries like Spain, Poland, Nigeria, France and Croatia.

It would also appear the FBI’s paid ads ran on platforms other than Meta.

Nicholas Murphy, a 20-year-old second-year student at Georgetown University in Washington, was in his dorm room last March searching for news about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine when he saw an ad on YouTube, the video-sharing social media platform owned by Google.

“[It was] just text with a kind of a strange like background to it … all in Russian,” said Murphy, a Park City, Utah, native who does not speak Russian and who used a translator app to decipher the ad.

“At the time I didn’t know if it was coming from the Russian government, if it was coming from our government, if it was kind of propaganda, if it was fake,” Murphy told VOA. “It conjured up a lot of thoughts about Russian influence over Facebook ads in the [2016 U.S.] election.”

Murphy said he came across the ad another two to three times over the ensuing weeks. And, it turned out, he was not alone. A handful of other students were also starting to see some of the ads, including a couple of classmates in a Russian literature class.

Just how many ads the FBI paid to run on YouTube, or via Google, is unclear.

A search of Google’s recently launched Ad Transparency Center shows the FBI paid to run the Russian language version of its two-minute-long video most recently on April 28. But the database only shows information for the past 30 days and Google says it does not share information on advertiser spending.

It is also unclear whether the FBI paid to run any ads on Twitter in addition to pushing out information through its own Twitter accounts. Twitter responded to an email from VOA requesting information with its now standard poop emoji.

The FBI itself refused to provide details regarding the scope of its social media advertising efforts although the Washington Field Office did acknowledge to VOA via email that it uses “various social media platforms.”

The Washington Field Office also defended its use of social media advertising despite indications that the ads themselves, like the one seen by Georgetown University student Nicholas Murphy, do not always reach the intended audience.

“The FBI views these efforts as productive and cost effective,” the FBI’s Washington Field Office told VOA. The office declined to be more specific about whether any spies have been identified as a result of the ads.

“Russia has long been a counterintelligence threat to the U.S. and the FBI will continue to adapt our investigative and outreach techniques to counter that threat and others,” it said. “We will use all legal means available to locate individuals with information that can help protect the United States from threats to our national security.”

The Russian Embassy in Washington did not respond to calls or emails from VOA seeking comment about the FBI’s use of social media advertisements to target Russian officials in the U.S. But Russian Ambassador Anatoly Antonov did respond to a March 2022 article by The Washington Post about FBI efforts to send ads to cell phones outside the Russian Embassy in Washington.

“Attempts to sow confusion and organize desertion among the staff of @RusEmbUSA are ridiculous,” Antonov was quoted as saying in a tweet by the embassy’s Twitter account.

Some former U.S. counterintelligence officials, though, argue Russia has reason to be worried.

“I think people will come out of the woodwork,” said Olson, the former CIA counterintelligence chief.

FBI agents “see what we all see, and that is that there must be a subset of Russian intelligence officers, SVR officers, GRU officers, who are disillusioned by what’s going on,” he told VOA.

“I think some good Russians are embarrassed, shocked, ashamed of what Putin is doing in Ukraine, killing brother and sister Slavs. And I think that there will be people who would like to strike back against that.”

London, the longtime CIA Clandestine Services official and author of The Recruiter: Spying and the Lost Art of American Intelligence, likewise believes the FBI’s persistent efforts to reach disgruntled Russians on social media will pay off.

“Generally, the Russians who have worked with us have done so out of patriotism … they were upset with the government,” he said.

And the Russian officials that the FBI hopes to reach just need a bit of nudge.

“They’re aiming this at Russians who are already there mentally but just haven’t crossed,” London said, adding it is not a coincidence that many of the FBI ads show Russians exactly how to get in touch, whether via encrypted communication apps like Signal or by walking right up to the bureau’s front door.

“They’re not doing metaphors here,” he said. “They don’t want anything subject to interpretation.”

Even the language used by the FBI appears to be designed to build trust.

“It’s very much not native,” according to Bradley Gorski, with Georgetown University’s Department of Slavic Languages.

But given the overall quality of the language in the ads, Gorski said it is quite possible all of it is intentional.

“It might be a canny strategy on their part,” he said of the FBI. “If they are reaching out to Russian speakers and want to both communicate with them but let them know who is communicating with them is not a Russian speaker, but is a sort of American doing their best, then this kind of outreach with a little bit stilted, though correct, Russian might communicate that actually better than fully native sort of fluent speech.”

Whether the FBI’s spending on social media advertisements is achieving the desired results is hard to gauge. Public metrics such those provided by social media companies like Meta can give a sense of how many people are seeing the ads, and where they are, but do not shed much light on who is ultimately interacting with the ads to the point of a response.

When pressed, FBI officials tell VOA only that the bureau views the ad campaigns as productive.

Others agree.

“Relative to the hardcore military aid the U.S. has provided, that’s a small chunk of change,” said Jason Blazakis, a senior research fellow at The Soufan Center, a global intelligence firm.

And Blazakis, who also directs the Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, thinks the FBI’s social media ads might be having an impact even if few Russian officials ever come forward with information.

“Part of it is also messaging to the broader Russian public,” he told VOA, pointing to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “There is this influence operational component to it, part of this PR [public relations] battle that is happening on the periphery of the conflict.”
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Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. said Friday that a cybersecurity incident involving one of its IT hardware suppliers has led to the leak of the vendor’s company data. 

“TSMC has recently been aware that one of our IT hardware suppliers experienced a cybersecurity incident that led to the leak of information pertinent to server initial setup and configuration,” the company said. 

TMSC confirmed in a statement to Reuters that its business operations or customer information were not affected following the cybersecurity incident at its supplier Kinmax. 

The TSMC vendor breach is part of a larger trend of significant security incidents affecting various companies and government entities. 

Victims range from U.S. government departments to the UK’s telecom regulator to energy giant Shell, all affected since a security flaw was discovered in Progress Software’s MOVEit Transfer product last month. 

TSMC said it has cut off data exchange with the affected supplier following the incident.
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LA PAZ, BOLIVIA – Chinese and Russian companies will invest more than $1.4 billion in the extraction of lithium in Bolivia, one of the countries with the largest reserves of the mineral used in electric car batteries, the government in La Paz said Friday.  

China’s Citic Guoan and Russia’s Uranium One Group — both with a major government stake — will partner with Bolivia’s state-owned YLB to build two lithium carbonate processing plants, Bolivian President Luis Arce said at a public event.  

Lithium is often described as the “white gold” of the clean-energy revolution, a highly coveted component of mobile phones and electric car batteries.  

“We are consolidating the country’s industrialization process,” Arce said.

Bolivia, which claims to have the world’s largest deposits, in January also signed an agreement with Chinese consortium CBC to build two lithium battery plants.  

The country’s energy ministry said in a statement that each of the two new plants would have the capacity to produce up to 25,000 metric tons of lithium carbonate per year.  

Construction will begin in about three months.  

China and Russia are among Bolivia’s main lithium buyers.  

Lithium is mostly mined in Australia and South America. 
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Meta Platforms’ Oversight Board on Thursday called for the suspension of Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen for six months, saying a video posted on his Facebook page had violated Meta’s rules against violent threats.

The board, which is funded by Meta but operates independently, said the company erred in leaving up the video and ordered its removal from Facebook.

Meta, in a written statement, agreed to take down the video but said it would respond to the recommendation to suspend Hun Sen after a review.

A suspension would silence the prime minister’s Facebook page less than a month before an election in Cambodia, although critics say the poll will be a sham due to Hun Sen’s autocratic rule.

The decision is the latest in a series of rebukes by the Oversight Board over how the world’s biggest social media company handles rule-breaking political leaders and incitement to violence around elections.

The company’s election integrity efforts are in focus as the United States prepares for presidential elections next year.

The board endorsed Meta’s 2021 banishment of former U.S. President Donald Trump – the current front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination – after the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol Hill riot, but criticized the indefinite nature of his suspension and urged more careful preparation for volatile political situations overall.

Meta reinstated the former U.S. president earlier this year.  

Last week, the board said Meta’s handling of calls for violence after the 2022 Brazilian election continued to raise concerns about the effectiveness of its election efforts.

Hun Sen’s video, broadcast on his official Facebook page in January, showed the prime minister threatening to beat up political rivals and send “gangsters” to their homes, according to the board’s ruling.

Meta determined at the time that the video fell afoul of its rules, but opted to leave it up under a “newsworthiness” exemption, reasoning that the public had an interest in hearing warnings of violence by their government, the ruling said.

The board held that the video’s harms outweighed its news value.
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Geoffrey Hinton, one of the so-called godfathers of artificial intelligence, on Wednesday urged governments to step in and make sure that machines do not take control of society.

Hinton made headlines in May when he announced he had quit Google after a decade of work to speak more freely on the dangers of AI, shortly after the release of ChatGPT captured the imagination of the world.

The highly respected AI scientist, who is based at the University of Toronto, was speaking to a packed audience at the Collision tech conference in the Canadian city.

The conference brought together more than 30,000 startup founders, investors and tech workers, most looking to learn how to ride the AI wave and not hear a lesson on its dangers.

“Before AI is smarter than us, I think the people developing it should be encouraged to put a lot of work into understanding how it might try and take control away,” Hinton said.

“Right now there are 99 very smart people trying to make AI better and one very smart person trying to figure out how to stop it taking over and maybe you want to be more balanced,” he said.

AI could deepen inequality, says Hinton

Hinton warned that the risks of AI should be taken seriously despite his critics who believe he is overplaying the risks.

“I think it’s important that people understand that this is not science fiction, this is not just fearmongering,” he insisted. “It is a real risk that we must think about, and we need to figure out in advance how to deal with it.”

Hinton also expressed concern that AI would deepen inequality, with the massive productivity gain from its deployment going to the benefit of the rich, and not workers.

“The wealth isn’t going to go to the people doing the work. It is going to go into making the rich richer and not the poorer and that’s very bad for society,” he added.

He also pointed to the danger of fake news created by ChatGPT-style bots and said he hoped that AI-generated content could be marked in a way similar to how central banks watermark cash money.

“It’s very important to try, for example, to mark everything that is fake as fake. Whether we can do that technically, I don’t know,” he said.

The European Union is considering such a technique in its AI Act, a legislation that will set the rules for AI in Europe, which is being negotiated by lawmakers.

‘Overpopulation on Mars’

Hinton’s list of AI dangers contrasted with conference discussions that were less over safety and threats, and more about seizing the opportunity created in the wake of ChatGPT.

Venture Capitalist Sarah Guo said doom and gloom talk of AI as an existential threat was premature and compared it to “talking about overpopulation on Mars,” quoting another AI guru, Andrew Ng.

She also warned against “regulatory capture” that would see government intervention protect the incumbents before it had a chance to benefit sectors such as health, education or science.

Opinions differed on whether the current generative AI giants, mainly Microsoft backed OpenAI and Google, would remain unmatched or whether new actors will expand the field with their own models and innovations.

“In five years, I still imagine that if you want to go and find the best, most accurate, most advanced general model, you’re probably going to still have to go to one of the few companies that have the capital to do it,” said Leigh Marie Braswell of venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins.

Zachary Bratun-Glennon of Gradient Ventures said he foresaw a future where “there are going to be millions of models across a network much like we have a network of websites today.”
…

PHNOM PENH, CAMBODIA — Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, a devoted and very active user of Facebook — on which he has posted everything from photos of his grandchildren to threats against his political enemies — said Wednesday that he would no longer upload to the platform and would instead depend on the Telegram app to get his messages across. 

Telegram is a popular messaging app that also has a blogging tool called “channels.” In Russia and some neighboring countries, it is actively used both by government officials and opposition activists for communicating with mass audiences. Telegram played an important role in coordinating unprecedented anti-government protests in Belarus in 2020, and it currently serves as a major source of news about Russia’s war in Ukraine. 

Hun Sen, 70, who has led Cambodia for 38 years, is listed as having 14 million Facebook followers, though critics have suggested a large number of them are merely “ghost” accounts purchased in bulk from so-called “click farms,” an assertion the long-serving prime minister has repeatedly denied. The Facebook accounts of Joe Biden and Donald Trump by comparison boast 11 million and 34 million followers, respectively, though the United States has about 20 times the population of Cambodia. 

Hun Sen officially launched his Facebook page on September 20, 2015, after his fierce political rival, opposition leader Sam Rainsy, effectively demonstrated how it could be used to mobilize support. Hun Sen is noted as a canny and sometimes ruthless politician, and he has since then managed to drive his rival into exile and neutralize all his challengers, even though Cambodia is a nominally democratic state. 

Controversial remarks

Hun Sen said he was giving up Facebook for Telegram because he believed the latter would be more effective for communicating. In a Telegram post on Wednesday, he said it would be easier for him to get his message out when traveling in other countries that officially ban Facebook use, such as China, the top ally of his government. Hun Sen has 855,000 followers so far on Telegram, where he appears to have started posting in mid-May. 

It is possible, however, that Hun Sen’s social media loyalty switch has to do with controversy about remarks he posted earlier this year on Facebook that in theory could see him get at least temporarily banned from the platform very soon. 

In January, speaking at a road construction ceremony, he decried opposition politicians who accused his ruling Cambodian People’s Party of stealing votes. 

“There are only two options. One is to use legal means and the other is to use a stick,” the prime minister said. “Either you face legal action in court, or I rally [the Cambodian] People’s Party people for a demonstration and beat you up.” His remarks were spoken on Facebook Live and kept online as a video. 

Perhaps because of heightened consciousness about the power of social media to inflame and trigger violence in such countries as India and Myanmar, and because the remarks were made ahead of a general election in Cambodia this July, complaints about his words were lodged with Facebook’s parent company, Meta. 

Facebook’s moderators declined to recommend action against Hun Sen, judging that his position as a national leader made his remarks newsworthy and therefore not subject to punishment despite their provocative nature. 

However, the case was forwarded in March to Meta’s Oversight Board, a group of independent experts that is empowered to render an overriding judgment that could limit Hun Sen’s Facebook activities. They are expected to issue a decision on Thursday. The case is being closely watched as an indicator of where Facebook will draw the line in countries with volatile political situations. 

Hun Sen said his Facebook account would remain online, but that he would no longer actively post to it. He urged people looking for news from him to check YouTube and his Instagram account as well as Telegram and said he had ordered his office to establish a TikTok account to allow him to communicate with his country’s youth.
…

U.S. President Joe Biden says he wants to make sure that every American has access to high-speed internet. VOA’s Julie Taboh has our story about the United States’ more than $40 billion-dollar investment to expand the service. (Videographer:  Adam Greenbaum; Produced by Julie Taboh, Adam Greenbaum)    
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Since the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT launched last fall, a torrent of think pieces and news reports about the ins and outs and ups and downs of generative artificial intelligence has flowed, stoking fears of a dystopian future in which robots take over the world.  

While much of that hype is indeed just hype, a new report has identified immediate risks posed by apps like ChatGPT. Some of those present distinct challenges to journalists and the news industry.  

Published Wednesday by New York University’s Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, the report identified eight risks related to generative artificial intelligence, or AI, including disinformation, cyberattacks, privacy violations and the decay of the news industry.  

The AI debate “is getting a little confused between concerns about existential dangers versus what immediate harms generative AI might entail,” the report’s co-author Paul Barrett told VOA. “We shouldn’t get paralyzed by the question of, ‘Oh my God, will this technology lead to killer robots that are going to destroy humanity?'” 

The systems being released right now are not going to lead to that nightmarish outcome, explained Barrett, who is the deputy director of the Stern Center.  

Instead, the report — which Barrett co-authored with Justin Hendrix, founder and editor of the media nonprofit Tech Policy Press — argues that lawmakers, regulators and the AI industry itself should prioritize addressing the immediate potential risks.  

Safety concerns

Among the most concerning risks are the human-level threats that artificial intelligence may pose to the safety of journalists and activists.  

Doxxing and smear campaigns are already among the many threats that journalists face online over their work. Doxxing is when someone publishes private or identifying information about someone — such as their address or phone number — on the internet.  

But now with generative AI, it will likely be even easier to dox reporters and harass them online, according to Barrett.  

“If you want to set up a campaign like that, you’re going to have to do a lot less work using generative AI systems,” Barrett said. “It’ll be easier to attack journalists.”  

Propaganda easy to make

Disinformation is another primary risk that the report highlights, because generative AI makes it easier to churn out propaganda.  

The report notes that if the Kremlin had access to generative AI in its disinformation campaign surrounding the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Moscow could have launched a more destructive and less expensive influence operation.  

Generative AI “is going to be a huge engine of efficiency, but it’s also going to make much more efficient the production of disinformation,” Barrett said.  

That bears implications for press freedom and media literacy, since studies indicate that exposure to misinformation and disinformation is linked to reduced trust in the media.  

Generative AI may also exacerbate financial issues plaguing newsrooms, according to the report. 

If people ask ChatGPT a question, for instance, and are happy with the summarized answer, they’re less likely to click on other links to news articles. That means shrinking traffic and therefore ad dollars for news sites, the report said.  

But artificial intelligence is far from all bad news for the media industry.  

For example, AI tools can help journalists research by scraping PDF files and analyzing data quickly. Artificial intelligence can also help fact-check sources and write headlines.  

In the report, Barrett and Hendrix caution the government against allowing this new industry to make the same mistakes as were made with social media platforms.  

“Generative AI doesn’t deserve the deference enjoyed for so long by social media companies,” they write.  

They recommend the government enhance federal authority to oversee AI companies and require more transparency from AI companies.  

“Congress, regulators, the public — and the industry, for that matter — need to pay attention to the immediate potential risks,” Barrett said. “And if the industry doesn’t move fast enough on that front, that’s something Congress needs to figure out a way to force them to pay attention to.” 
…

The commission that enforces rules for U.S. elections is not regulating AI-generated deepfakes in political advertising ahead of the 2024 presidential election. Deana Mitchell has the story.
…

Robot makers who want to explore the oceans are looking to one of Earth’s most successful sea creatures for design inspiration. Steve Baragona reports.
…

Just a dot on the horizon at first, the bug-like and surprisingly quiet electrically-powered craft buzzes over Paris and its traffic snarls, treating its doubtless awestruck passenger to privileged vistas of the Eiffel Tower and the city’s signature zinc-grey rooftops before landing him or her with a gentle downward hover. And thus, if all goes to plan, could a new page in aviation history be written.

After years of dreamy and not always credible talk of skies filled with flying, nonpolluting electric taxis, the aviation industry is preparing to deliver a future that it says is now just around the corner.

Capitalizing on its moment in the global spotlight, the Paris region is planning for a small fleet of electric flying taxis to operate on multiple routes when it hosts the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games next summer. Unless aviation regulators in China beat Paris to the punch by greenlighting a pilotless taxi for two passengers under development there, the French capital’s prospective operator — Volocopter of Germany — could be the first to fly taxis commercially if European regulators give their OK.

Volocopter CEO Dirk Hoke, a former top executive at aerospace giant Airbus, has a VVIP in mind as his hoped-for first Parisian passenger — none other than French President Emmanuel Macron.

“That would be super amazing,” Hoke said, speaking this week at the Paris Air Show, where he and other developers of electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft — or eVTOLs for short — competed with industry heavyweights for attention.

“He believes in the innovation of urban air mobility,” Hoke said of Macron. “That would be a strong sign for Europe to see the president flying.”

But with Macron aboard or not, those pioneering first flights would still be just small steps for the nascent industry that has giant leaps to make before flying taxis are muscling out competitors on the ground.

The limited power of battery technology restricts the range and number of paying passengers they can carry, so eVTOL hops are likely to be short and not cheap at the outset.

And while the vision of simply beating city traffic by zooming over it is enticing, it also is dependent on advances in airspace management. Manufacturers of eVTOLs aim in the coming decade to unfurl fleets in cities and on more niche routes for luxury passengers, including the French Riviera. But they need technological leaps so flying taxis don’t crash into each other and all the other things already congesting the skies or expected to take to them in very large numbers — including millions of drones.

Starting first on existing helicopter routes, “we’ll continue to scale up using AI, using machine-learning to make sure that our airspace can handle it,” said Billy Nolen of Archer Aviation Inc. It aims to start flying between downtown Manhattan and Newark’s Liberty Airport in 2025. That’s normally a 1-hour train or old-fashioned taxi ride that Archer says its sleek, electric 4-passenger prototype could cover in under 10 minutes.

Nolen was formerly acting head of the Federal Aviation Administration, the U.S. regulator that during his time at the agency was already working with NASA on technology to safely separate flying taxis. Just as Paris is using its Olympic Games to test flying taxis, Nolen said the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics offer another target for the industry to aim for and show that it can fly passengers in growing numbers safely, cleanly and affordably.

“We’ll have hundreds, if not thousands, of eVTOLs by the time you get to 2028,” he said in an interview with The Associated Press at the Paris show.

The “very small” hoped-for experiment with Volocopter for the Paris Games is “great stuff. We take our hats off to them,” he added. “But by the time we get to 2028 and beyond … you will see full-scale deployment across major cities throughout the world.”

Yet even on the cusp of what the industry portrays as a revolutionary new era kicking off in the city that spawned the French Revolution of 1789, some aviation analysts aren’t buying into visions of eVTOLs becoming readily affordable, ubiquitous and convenient alternatives to ride-hailing in the not-too-distant future.

And even among eVTOL developers who bullishly talked up their industry’s prospects at the Paris show, some predicted that rivals will run dry of funding before they bring prototypes to market.

Morgan Stanley analysts estimate the industry could be worth $1 trillion by 2040 and $9 trillion by 2050 with advances in battery and propulsion technology. Almost all of that will come after 2035, analysts say, because of the difficulty of getting new aircraft certified by U.S. and European regulators.

“The idea of mass urban transit remains a charming fantasy of the 1950s,” said Richard Aboulafia of AeroDynamic Advisory, an aerospace consultancy.

“The real problem is still that mere mortals like you and I don’t get routine or exclusive access to $4 million vehicles. You and I can take air taxis right now. It’s called a helicopter.”

Still, electric taxis taking to Paris’ skies as Olympians are going faster, higher and stronger could have the power to surprise — pleasantly so, Volocopter hopes.

One of the five planned Olympic routes would land in the heart of the city on a floating platform on the spruced-up River Seine. Developers point out that ride-hailing apps and E-scooters also used to strike many customers as outlandish. And as with those technologies, some are betting that early adopters of flying taxis will prompt others to try them, too.

“It will be a total new experience for the people,” said Hoke, Volocopter’s CEO. “But twenty years later someone looks back at what changed based on that and then they call it a revolution. And I think we are at the edge of the next revolution.”
…

The Transportation Safety Board of Canada has opened an investigation into the implosion of the Titan, the underwater sea vessel that imploded with five people onboard as it was traveling to the wreckage of the Titanic, the British ocean liner that sank in the North Atlantic in 1912 after striking an iceberg.

The submersible vessel was the property of OceanGate Expeditions, a U.S.-based company. Its support ship, Polar Prince, however, is a Canadian-flagged ship.

“The Transportation Safety Board of Canada (TSB) is launching an investigation into the fatal occurrence involving the Canadian-flagged vessel Polar Prince and the privately operated submersible Titan,” the board said in a statement Friday, raising questions about the safety of the ill-fated excursion. The board said a team of investigators has been sent to St. John’s, Newfoundland, to gather information and conduct interviews.

U.S. officials said they too, were opening an investigation.

“The U.S. Coast Guard has declared the loss of the Titan submersible to be a major marine casualty and will lead the investigation. The NTSB has joined the investigation and will contribute to their efforts. The USCG is handling all media inquiries related to this investigation,” the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board said Friday in a tweet.

The Polar Prince lost contact with the Titan an hour and 45 minutes after the submersible began its descent Sunday.

Responders rushed equipment to where remains of the Titan were found. Five major fragments of the 6.7-meter Titan were located in the debris field left from its disintegration, including the vessel’s tail cone and two sections of the pressure hull, U.S. Coast Guard officials said. No mention was made of whether human remains were sighted.

OceanGate Expeditions said in a statement the five people on the vessel were company CEO Stockton Rush, Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood, Hamish Harding, and Paul-Henri Nargeolet.

Since the submersible went missing with an approximately four-day air supply, questions about it its safety have grown.

“I know there are also a lot of questions about how, why and when did this happen,” said Rear Adm. John Mauger of the First Coast Guard District. “Those are questions we will collect as much information as we can about now.”

According to an Associated Press report, David Lochridge, a former OceanGate director of marine operations, raised questions in 2018 about the methods the company used to insure the structural viability of the hull.

Filmmaker James Cameron, who directed the 1997 Academy Award-winning film Titanic and who has made several dives to the ocean liner’s wreckage aboard other deep-sea submersibles, said in an interview with the BBC that he was sure an “extreme catastrophic event” had happened when he heard the submersible had lost communication and navigation.

“For me, there was no doubt,” he said.

He told the BBC the news about the air supply and underwater noises were a “prolonged and nightmarish charade” to provide false hope to the families of the passengers. Cameron said that once a remotely operated vehicle reached the depth of the vessel, it was likely to be found “within hours … probably within minutes.”

Arthur Loibl, a passenger on the Titan two years ago, described his trip to the Titanic as a “kamikaze operation.” The retired German businessman said, “Imagine a metal tube a few meters long with a sheet of metal for a floor. You can’t stand. You can’t kneel. Everyone is sitting close to or on top of each other.”

Scientist and journalist Michael Guillen, who survived an expedition in 2000 that ran into some challenges, said, “We need to stop, pause and ask this question, why do you want to go to the Titanic and how do you get there safely?”

Some information is from The Associated Press and Reuters.
…

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi met with U.S. and Indian technology executives in Washington on Friday, the final day of a state visit where he agreed to new defense and technology cooperation and addressed challenges posed by China. 

U.S. President Joe Biden rolled out the red carpet for Modi on Thursday, declaring after about 2-1/2 hours of talks that their countries’ economic relationship was “booming.” Trade has more than doubled over the past decade. 

Biden and Modi gathered with CEOs including Apple’s Tim Cook, Google’s Sundar Pichai and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella. 

Also present were Sam Altman of OpenAI, NASA astronaut Sunita Williams, and Indian tech leaders including Anand Mahindra, chairman of Mahindra Group, and Mukesh Ambani, chairman of Reliance Industries, the White House said. 

“Our partnership between India and the United States will go a long way, in my view, to define what the 21st century looks like,” Biden told the group, adding that technological cooperation would be a big part of that partnership. 

Observing that there were a variety of tech companies represented at the meeting from startups to well established firms, Modi said: “Both of them are working together to create a new world.” 

Modi, who has appealed to global companies to “Make in India,” will also address business leaders at the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts. The CEOs of top American companies, including FedEx, MasterCard and Adobe, are expected to be among the 1,200 participants.  

Not ‘about China’ 

The backdrop to Modi’s visit is the Biden administration’s attempts to draw India, the world’s most populous country at 1.4 billion and its fifth-largest economy, closer amid its growing geopolitical rivalry with Beijing. 

Modi did not address China directly during the visit, and Biden mentioned China only in response to a reporter’s question, but a joint statement included a pointed reference to the East and South China seas, where China has territorial disputes with its neighbors. 

Farwa Aamer, director for South Asia at the Asia Society Policy Institute, in an analysis note described that as “a clear signal of unity and determination to preserve stability and peace in the region.” 

Alongside agreements to sell weapons to India and share sensitive military technology, announcements this week included several investments from U.S.-firms aimed at spurring semiconductor manufacturing in India and lowering its dependence on China for electronics. 

White House national security spokesperson John Kirby said the challenges presented by China to both Washington and New Delhi were on the agenda but insisted the visit “wasn’t about China.” 

“This wasn’t about leveraging India to be some sort of counterweight. India is a sovereign, independent state,” Kirby said at a news briefing, adding that Washington welcomes India becoming “an increasing exporter of security” in the Indo-Pacific. 

“There’s a lot we can do in the security front together. And that’s really what we’re focused on,” Kirby said.  

Some political analysts question India’s willingness to stand up to Beijing over Taiwan and other issues, however. Washington has also been frustrated by India’s close ties with Russia while Moscow wages war in Ukraine.  

Diaspora ties 

Modi attended a lunch on Friday at the State Department with Vice President Kamala Harris, the first Asian American to hold the No. 2 position in the White House, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken. 

In a toast, Harris spoke of her Indian-born late mother, Shyamala Gopalan, who came to the United States at age 19 and became a leading breast cancer researcher. 

“I think about it in the context of the millions of Indian students who have come to the United States since, to collaborate with American researchers to solve the challenges of our time and to reach new frontiers,” Harris said. 

Modi praised Gopalan for keeping India “close to her heart” despite the distance to her new home, and he called Harris “really inspiring.” 

On Friday evening, Modi will address members of the Indian diaspora, many of whom have turned out at events during the visit to enthusiastically fete him, at times chanting “Modi! Modi! Modi!” despite protests from others. 

Activists have called for the Biden administration to publicly call out what they describe as India’s deteriorating human rights record under Modi, citing allegations of abuse of Indian dissidents and minorities, especially Muslims. Modi leads the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party and has held power since 2014. 

Biden said he had a “straightforward” discussion with Modi about issues including human rights, but U.S. officials emphasize that it is vital for Washington’s national security and economic prosperity to engage with a rising India. 

Asked during a rare press conference on Thursday what he would do to improve the rights of minorities including Muslims, Modi insisted “there is no space for any discrimination” in his government.
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Titans of business, fashion, entertainment and more made the guest list for Thursday’s big White House dinner in honor India’s Narendra Modi, with the likes of designer Ralph Lauren, filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan and tennis legend Billie Jean King rubbing shoulders with tech leaders from Apple, Google and Microsoft. 

Shyamalan powered past reporters as he arrived, declaring it was “lovely” to be at the White House. Lauren revealed he’d designed first lady Jill Biden’s off-shoulder green gown for the occasion, calling her style “chic and elegant.” And violinist Joshua Bell, part of the after-dinner entertainment, said the evening was a “little different than anything I’ve done before.” 

“I’ll skip out and practice for half an hour” during dinner, he reported. 

Saris and sequins were prominent among those attending the splashy event, with a guest list of about 400 names heavy with prominent Indian Americans. Politicians of both parties also made the cut, notably including Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise. 

Other notables on the guest list included social media influencer Jay Shetty, big Democratic donors including Florida lawyer John Morgan and civil rights activist Martin Luther King III. The CEO contingent included Apple’s Tim Cook, Google’s Sundar Pichai and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella. 

Guests were to dine on a plant-based menu of millet, mushrooms and strawberry shortcake, catering to the vegetarian tastes of the prime minister. For guests wanting something more, there was roast sea bass available on request. 

Despite deep differences over human rights and India’s stance on Russia’s war in Ukraine, President Joe Biden extended to Modi the administration’s third invitation for a state visit. It included the state dinner, a high diplomatic honor that the U.S. reserves for its closest allies. 

Biden hopes all the pomp and attention being lavished on Modi — from the thousands who gathered on the White House lawn to cheer his arrival in the morning to the splashy dinner at the end of the day — will help him firm up relations with the leader of a country the U.S. believes will be a pivotal force in Asia for decades to come. 

Guests were riding trolley cars down to a pavilion erected on the White House south grounds decorated in the green and saffron colors of India’s flag. 

Despite concerns about backsliding on democracy in India, Representative Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., said she was attending to send the message that the nation of 1.4 billion people is important and “we must call out some of the real issues that are threatening the viability of democracy in all of our countries.” 

A group of more than 70 lawmakers, organized by Jayapal, wrote to Biden this week urging him to raise concerns about the erosion of religious, press and political freedoms with Modi. 

Jayapal, who praised Modi’s leadership skills, told The Associated Press earlier that Modi “has the ability to move India and the people in his party back to the values that we have held so dear as a country.” 

Pichai said he looked forward to the dinner as “an exciting time for U.S.-India relations.” 

“I think we have two countries which have a lot of shared foundations, large democratic systems and values,” Pichai said earlier Thursday in an interview. He cited technology as one area of mutual interest between the nations. “So I think it’s an exciting opportunity. I’m glad there is a lot of investment in a bilateral relationship.” 

Jill Biden enlisted California-based chef Nancy Curtis to help in the kitchen. Curtis specializes in plant-based cooking and said the menu “showcases the best of American cuisine seasoned with Indian elements and flavors.” She said she used millet because India is leading an international year of recognition for the grain. 

The dinner featured a salad of marinated millet, corn and compressed watermelon, stuffed Portobello mushrooms and saffron risotto, and a strawberry shortcake infused with cardamom and rose syrup. 

Lotus flowers, which are native to Asia and featured in Indian design, were visible throughout the pavilion, along with saffron-hued floral arrangements that differed from table to table. 

“We hope guests feel as if someone has set that table just for them — because we have,” the first lady said as she and her staff previewed the setup. 

After-dinner entertainment was from Bell; Penn Masala, a South Asian a cappella group founded by students at the University of Pennsylvania; and the U.S. Marine Band Chamber Orchestra. 

India was last honored with a state visit in 2009, when President Barack Obama pulled out all the stops for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. More than 300 guests attended what was the first big social event of the new administration. 

But it made headlines worldwide after a celebrity-seeking husband and wife were admitted, even though they were not invited, and were able to interact with both leaders. 

The embarrassing episode led the White House and U.S. Secret Service, which protects the president and the executive mansion, to overhaul its clearance and security procedures. 

 
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Kenyan video gamers are joining forces to advocate for bringing to Africa more world-class gaming servers that provide greater stability and control. Apart from South Africa, many African countries lack servers, placing players at a disadvantage and discouraging many from joining esports. Mohammed Yusuf has more from Nairobi.
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Artificial intelligence is changing how wildlife reserves prevent poaching, with smart cameras, drones, and other technology helping rangers protect endangered species. Kate Bartlett and Zaheer Cassim report from Limpopo, South Africa. Video editor: Jason Godman.
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A submarine on a tourism expedition to explore the wreckage of the Titanic has gone missing off the coast of southeastern Canada, according to the private company that operates the vessel.

OceanGate Expeditions said in a brief statement on Monday that it was “mobilizing all options” to rescue those on board the vessel. It was not immediately clear how many people were missing.

The U.S. Coast Guard did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Media reports said the Coast Guard has launched search-and-rescue operations.

“We are deeply thankful for the extensive assistance we have received from several government agencies and deep sea companies in our efforts to reestablish contact with the submersible,” OceanGate said in a statement.

The company is currently operating its fifth Titanic “mission” of 2023, according to its website, which was scheduled to start last week and finish on Thursday.

The expedition, which costs $250,000 per person, starts in St. John’s, Newfoundland, before heading out approximately 400 miles into the Atlantic to the wreckage site, according to OceanGate’s website.

In order to visit the wreck, passengers climb inside Titan, a five-person submersible, which takes about two hours to descend to the Titanic.

The British passenger ship famously sunk in 1912 on its maiden voyage after striking an iceberg, killing more than 1,500 people. The story has been immortalized in non-fiction and fiction books as well as the 1997 blockbuster movie “Titanic.”

 
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The Dutch government is soon to join the United States and Japan in rolling out new semiconductor export control measures aimed at keeping sensitive technology away from China due to concern for potential misuse, the country’s economic affairs minister told reporters on a visit to Washington.

The measures are likely to further restrict sales to China by Netherlands-based ASML, maker of the world’s most advanced chip-printing machines, which last year disclosed the “unauthorized misappropriation of data” by a now former employee in China.

The United States in October 2022 announced its own export control measures affecting advanced computing integrated circuits and certain semiconductor manufacturing items.

The U.S. said the measures were aimed at items that “could provide direct contributions to advancing military decision making” such as “designing and testing weapons of mass destruction (WMD), producing semiconductors for use in advanced military systems, and developing advanced surveillance systems that can be used for military applications and human rights abuses.”

The U.S. subsequently asked allies including Japan and the Netherlands, which play key roles in the semiconductor supply chain, to introduce similar measures.

“The main concern is [the chip-making technology] will be used in military products,” Micky Adriaansens, Netherlands’ minister of economic affairs and climate, told a group of journalists on June 8 at the Dutch Embassy in Washington.

Adriaansens acknowledged that the negotiations with Washington have not been easy.

“To be honest, the conversation has been intense, and is still intense,” she said. “But we agreed already upon the main issues, with a good [mutual] understanding of what is the right thing to do.”

Adriaansens said those understandings still have to be translated into regulations but that her country understands the importance of the measures.

“We realize that we, the U.S., the Netherlands, Japan and Korea, are very strong in the semicon[ductor] value chain, supply chain, and we have a responsibility there,” the minister said, echoing a statement made by Japan’s trade minister in March.

Japan also takes steps

Tokyo announced its own measures on March 31, saying that beginning in July, Japan will restrict 23 types of semiconductor manufacturing equipment from being exported to China. “We are fulfilling our responsibility as a technological nation to contribute to international peace and stability,” Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry Yasutoshi Nishimura told reporters.

At the center of the Netherlands’ semiconductor export control deliberations is ASML, a Dutch company with its headquarters in Veldhoven, about an hour and a half’s drive southeast of Amsterdam. The company was known as Advanced Semiconductor Materials Lithography in its early years but is now known as ASML.

Europe’s biggest high-tech firm by market capitalization, ASML is the world’s largest supplier of photolithography machines, which are used to produce computer chips.

Its flagship products are the EUV, or extreme ultraviolet, and DUV, or deep ultraviolet, lithography machines that use advanced light technology to shrink and then print tiny patterns down to the nanometer level on silicon wafers, a critical and essential component of the semiconductor manufacturing process.

Since 2019, ASML’s world-exclusive EUV machines have been on the Netherlands’ export control list, meaning they cannot be sold to China without government approval. In a statement issued in March, the company said it understood that the new export controls could be applied to its less-advanced DUV machines and other products as well.

While Taiwan is its top customer, ASML has more than 1,000 employees working in 12 office buildings in major Chinese cities including Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen. Last year, sales to China made up 14% of the company’s total net systems sales.

In its 2022 annual report, released on February 15 this year, the company disclosed that it had experienced “unauthorized misappropriation of data relating to proprietary technology by a (now) former employee in China.” The incident may have led to the violation of certain export control regulations, the report said.

The company said a comprehensive internal review has since been launched, but the nature and extent of the data that was misappropriated has not been publicly disclosed.

Report mentions possible leak

Another possible leak of the company’s proprietary information that happened in China was disclosed in the previous year’s annual report.

“Early in 2021, we became aware of reports that a company associated with XTAL, Inc., against which ASML had obtained a damage award for trade secret misappropriation in 2019 in the USA, was actively marketing products in China that could potentially infringe on ASML’s IP rights,” said the 2021 report.

The second company was identified as Beijing-based DongFang JingYuan Electron, which was established in 2014 at about the same time as XTAL and controlled by the same people.

ASML’s annual report said the company had shared its concerns with the Chinese authorities and was monitoring the situation closely.

In its case against XTAL, ASML told the court that a former Chinese employee working at an ASML subsidiary in the United States had stolen 2 million lines of source code for critical software. It said the theft was conducted on behalf of both XTAL and DongFang.

ASML’s representatives told the court that it took XTAL only two years to replicate a technology that ASML had spent $100 million and a decade developing, as first reported by Bloomberg. XTAL, which ASML’s attorneys described in court proceedings as essentially the same as DongFang JingYuan, then tried to sell the technology to South Korea-based Samsung, a longtime client of ASML.

In late March, ASML CEO Peter Wennink met with China’s newly installed minister of commerce in Beijing. China is “firmly committed to high-level openness, willing to create favorable conditions for multinationals such as ASML to do business in China,” Wang Wentao, the newly minted commerce minister, told the visiting CEO.

“We hope ASML will affirm and strengthen its confidence in trading and investing in China and make proactive contributions to Sino-Dutch collaboration in trade and economics,” Wang continued.

It isn’t clear whether the two sides discussed the intellectual property infringement issues described in ASML’s 2021 and 2022 annual reports or if they did, what remedies Beijing may have proposed.

‘Relentless pursuit’

Asked how the company plans to fend off future attempts to steal its trade secrets, a company spokesperson told VOA that ASML is committed to “relentless pursuit of individuals or entities that violate or threaten to violate our [intellectual property] in any way.”

While less well known for semiconductor manufacturing than Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp. or U.S.-based Intel, ASML is often viewed as Europe’s most valuable high-tech company, likely key to the Netherlands’ winning the bid to be the seat of NATO’s newly established Innovation Fund.
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In early June, sporadic but serious service disruptions plagued Microsoft’s flagship office suite — including the Outlook email and OneDrive file-sharing apps — and cloud computing platform. A shadowy hacktivist group claimed responsibility, saying it flooded the sites with junk traffic in distributed denial-of-service attacks.

Initially reticent to name the cause, Microsoft has now disclosed that DDoS attacks by the murky upstart were indeed to blame.

But the software giant has offered few details — and did not immediately comment on how many customers were affected and whether the impact was global. A spokeswoman confirmed that the group that calls itself Anonymous Sudan was behind the attacks. It claimed responsibility on its Telegram social media channel at the time. Some security researchers believe the group to be Russian.

Microsoft’s explanation in a blog post Friday evening followed a request by The Associated Press two days earlier. Slim on details, the post said the attacks “temporarily impacted availability” of some services. It said the attackers were focused on “disruption and publicity” and likely used rented cloud infrastructure and virtual private networks to bombard Microsoft servers from so-called botnets of zombie computers around the globe.

Microsoft said there was no evidence any customer data was accessed or compromised.

While DDoS attacks are mainly a nuisance — making websites unreachable without penetrating them — security experts say they can disrupt the work of millions if they successfully interrupt the services of a software service giant like Microsoft on which so much global commerce depends.

It’s not clear if that’s what happened here.

“We really have no way to measure the impact if Microsoft doesn’t provide that info,” said Jake Williams, a prominent cybersecurity researcher and a former National Security Agency offensive hacker. Williams said he was not aware of Outlook previously being attacked at this scale.

“We know some resources were inaccessible for some, but not others. This often happens with DDoS of globally distributed systems,” Williams added. He said Microsoft’s apparent unwillingness to provide an objective measure of customer impact “probably speaks to the magnitude.”

Microsoft dubbed the attackers Storm-1359, using a designator it assigns to groups whose affiliation it has not yet established. Cybersecurity sleuthing tends to take time — and even then can be a challenge if the adversary is skilled.

Pro-Russian hacking groups including Killnet — which the cybersecurity firm Mandiant says is Kremlin-affiliated — have been bombarding government and other websites of Ukraine’s allies with DDoS attacks. In October, some U.S. airport sites were hit. Analyst Alexander Leslie of the cybersecurity firm Recorded Future said it’s unlikely Anonymous Sudan is located as it claims in Sudan, an African country. The group works closely with Killnet and other pro-Kremlin groups to spread pro-Russian propaganda and disinformation, he said.

Edward Amoroso, NYU professor and CEO of TAG Cyber, said the Microsoft incident highlights how DDoS attacks remain “a significant risk that we all just agree to avoid talking about. It’s not controversial to call this an unsolved problem.”

He said Microsoft’s difficulties fending of this particular attack suggest “a single point of failure.” The best defense against these attacks is to distribute a service massively, on a content distribution network for example.

Indeed, the techniques the attackers used are not old, said U.K. security researcher Kevin Beaumont. “One dates back to 2009,” he said.

Serious impacts from the Microsoft 365 office suite interruptions were reported on Monday June 5, peaking at 18,000 outage and problem reports on the tracker Downdetector shortly after 11 a.m. Eastern time.

On Twitter that day, Microsoft said Outlook, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business were affected.

Attacks continued through the week, with Microsoft confirming on June 9 that its Azure cloud computing platform had been affected.

On June 8, the computer security news site BleepingComputer.com reported that cloud-based OneDrive file-hosting was down globally for a time.

Microsoft said at the time that desktop OneDrive clients were not affected, BleepingComputer reported.
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U.S. security officials say the U.S. Energy Department and several other federal agencies have been hacked by a Russian cyber-extortion gang.

Homeland Security officials said Thursday the agencies were caught up in the hacking of MOVEit  Transfer, a file-transfer program that is popular with governments and corporations.

The Energy Department said two of its entities were “compromised” in the hack.

The Russia-linked extortion group CI0p, which claimed responsibility for the hacking, said last week on the dark web site that its victims had until Wednesday to negotiate a ransom or risk having sensitive information dumped online.  It added that it would delete any data stolen from governments, cities and police departments.

Jen Easterly, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said while the intrusion was “largely an opportunistic one” that was superficial and caught quickly, her agency was “very concerned about this campaign and working on it with urgency.”

Reuters reports that the Britain’s Shell Oil Company, the University of Georgia, Johns Hopkins University and the Johns Hopkins Health System were also among those targeted in the hacking campaign. The Associated Press quoted a senior CISA official as saying U.S. military and intelligence agencies were not affected.

MOVEit said it is working with the federal agencies and its other customers to help fix their systems.

Information for this report was provided by The Associated Press and Reuters.  
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