Month: September 2018

Facebook and Twitter executives are insisting at two congressional hearings Wednesday they are aggressively trying to identify foreign actors who want to inflict damage on the U.S. before the November midterm elections. Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg told the Senate Intelligence Committee her company…

Ben Judah is the author of This Is London and Fragile Empire, a contributing writer at Politico, and an expert at the Hudson Institute. His think tank project on modern-day kleptocracy was recently targeted in a cyberattack that Microsoft has linked to the Fancy Bear…

Amazon.com is in talks with Chile to house and mine massive amounts of data generated by the country's giant telescopes, which could prove fertile ground for the company to develop new artificial intelligence tools. The talks, which have been little reported on so far and…

Twitter's CEO says the company is not biased against Republicans or Democrats and is working on ways to ensure that debate is healthier on its platform.   In prepared testimony released ahead of a House hearing Wednesday, Jack Dorsey says he wants to be clear…

Russia on Tuesday said it has officially warned US internet giant Google against meddling in next Sunday's local elections by posting opposition leader Alexei Navalny's videos calling for mass protests. Representatives of Russia's electoral commission, the Prosecutor-General's Office and the state internet watchdog at a…

Science fiction has long teased consumers about a future where robots are our personal assistants. But it's no longer science fiction. The recent spike in consumer-grade "smart speakers" that respond to users' voice commands has been given a face — with the help of a…

The U.S. space agency NASA is offering a public challenge, with a lofty $750,000 reward, to anyone who can find ways to turn carbon dioxide into compounds that would be useful on Mars. Calling it the “CO2 Conversion Challenge,” NASA scientists say they need help…

A key opponent of high-tech, automated weapons known as "killer robots" is blaming countries like the U.S. and Russia for blocking consensus at a U.N.-backed conference, where most countries wanted to ensure that humans stay at the controls of lethal machines.   Coordinator Mary Wareham…

Britt’Nee Brower grew up in a largely Inupiat Eskimo town in Alaska’s far north, but English was the only language spoken at home. Today, she knows a smattering of Inupiaq from childhood language classes at school in the community of Utqiagvik. Brower even published an…

President Donald Trump’s administration wants to shut down U.S. government radio stations that announce official time, a service in operation since World War II. WWV and WWVB in the state of Colorado and WWVH on the island of Kauai in the mid-Pacific state of Hawaii,…

California lawmakers have voted to make net neutrality state law, becoming the latest of several states to approve such measures. The move by state legislators is a rejection of the Trump administration’s repeal of national net neutrality rules that did not allow internet service providers…