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 is "now blocking millions of attempts to register false accounts each and every day" and is "making progress on fake news." She said the company's recent efforts are "starting to pay off" but added "We cannot stop interference by ourselves." Sandberg said Facebook is "working with outside experts, industry partners and governments, including law enforcement, to share information about threats and prevent abuse" to avert further interference in American elections. Social media companies are under pressure over foreign meddling in U.S. elections, the spread of…

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 (ATP28) hacking unit associated with Russian military intelligence. Judah spoke the Voice of America about the attack on the various right-leaning think tanks, Senate groups, and the current similarities between Moscow and Washington’s political climates. Question: What happened at the Hudson Institute? Why was your research targeted? Ben Judah: There is a lot I can’t discuss due to security procedures in place. But what happened is that Microsoft revealed that a series of think tanks and conservative organizations had been targeted by Russian hackers, including, specifically, the…

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 which were described to Reuters by Chilean officials and an astronomer, are aimed at fueling growth in Amazon.com's cloud computing business in Latin America and boosting its data processing capabilities. President Sebastian Pinera's center-right government, which is seeking to wean Chile's $325 billion economy from reliance on copper mining, announced last week it plans to pool data from all its telescopes onto a virtual observatory stored in the cloud, without giving a timeframe. The government talked of the potential for astrodata innovation, but did not…

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 about one thing: "Twitter does not use political ideology to make any decisions, whether related to ranking content on our service or how we enforce our rules.''   The testimony comes as some Republicans say conservatives have been censored on social media and have questioned the platform's algorithms. Dorsey will testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Wednesday afternoon on that subject, following a morning hearing before the Senate intelligence committee on foreign interference in social media.   At the Senate hearing, Twitter…

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 meeting alleged Navalny uses Google's services to disseminate illegal information and warned that the company may be prosecuted if it does not act to stop this. A Google spokeswoman declined to give a specific comment, telling AFP in an emailed statement that the company "reviews all valid requests from government institutions." Central Election Commission member Alexander Klyukin said the commission had sent an official letter to Larry Page, the CEO of Google's parent company Alphabet, regarding Navalny's use of YouTube. The fierce Kremlin critic has…

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 self-navigating robot that listens to its owner's commands. Arash Arabasadi has more. ...

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 finding a way to turn a plentiful resource like carbon dioxide into a variety of useful products in order to make trips to Mars possible. Carbon dioxide is one resource that is readily abundant within the Martian atmosphere. Scientists say astronauts attempting space travel to Mars will not be able to bring everything they need to the red planet, so will have to figure out ways to use local resources once they get there to create what they need. “Enabling sustained human life on another…

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 of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots spoke Monday after experts from dozens of countries agreed before dawn Saturday at the U.N. in Geneva on 10 "possible guiding principles" about such "Lethal Automated Weapons Systems."   Point 2 said: "Human responsibility for decisions on the use of weapons systems must be retained since accountability cannot be transferred to machines."   Wareham said such language wasn't binding, adding that "it's time to start laying down some rules now."   U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres welcomed the principles…

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 Inupiaq coloring book last year featuring the names of common animals of the region. But she hopes to someday speak fluently by practicing her ancestral language in a daily, modern setting. The 29-year-old Anchorage woman has started to do just that with a new Inupiaq language option that recently went live on Facebook for those who employ the social media giant’s community translation tool. Launched a decade ago, the tool has allowed users to translate bookmarks, action buttons and other functions in more than 100…

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, send out signals that allow millions of clocks and watches to be set either manually or automatically. WWVB continuously broadcasts digital time codes, using very long electromagnetic waves at a frequency of 60 kilohertz, which are automatically received by timekeeping devices in North America, keeping them accurate to a fraction of a second. “If you shut down these stations, you turn off all those clocks,” said Don Sullivan, who managed the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) stations between 1994 and 2005. ​GPS not…

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 to discriminate in their handling of internet traffic. Net neutrality was first put in place by the Obama administration in 2015. When it was repealed, it opened the door for internet service providers to block content, slow data transmission, and create “fast lanes” for consumers who pay premiums. If California Governor Jerry Brown signs net neutrality into law, the state could possibly face a legal fight from the Federal Communications Commission, which has declared that states cannot pass their own net neutrality rules. Analysts say…