Year: 2018

It may surprise you that cement is responsible for 7 percent of the world's carbon emissions. That's because it takes a lot of heat to produce the basic powdery base of cement that eventually becomes concrete. But it turns out that simple fibers from carrots could not only reduce that carbon footprint but also make concrete stronger. VOA's Kevin Enochs reports. ...

Facebook announced Friday that it had removed 82 Iranian-linked accounts on Facebook and Instagram. A Facebook spokesperson answered VOA’s questions about its process and efforts to detect what it calls “coordinated inauthentic behavior” by accounts pretending to be U.S. and U.K. citizens and aimed at U.S. and U.K. audiences. Q: Facebook’s post says there were 7 “events hosted.” Any details about where, when, who? A: Of seven events, the first was scheduled for February 2016, and the most recent was scheduled for June 2018. One hundred and ten people expressed interest in at least one of these events, and two events received no interest. We cannot confirm whether any of these events actually occurred. Some appear to have been planned to occur only online. The themes are similar to the…

Far-right extremists have ramped up an intimidating wave of anti-Semitic harassment against Jewish journalists, political candidates and others ahead of next month's U.S. midterm elections, according to a report released Friday by a Jewish civil rights group. The Anti-Defamation League's report says its researchers analyzed more than 7.5 million Twitter messages from Aug. 31 to Sept. 17 and found nearly 30 percent of the accounts repeatedly tweeting derogatory terms about Jews appeared to be automated "bots." But accounts controlled by real-life humans often mount the most "worrisome and harmful" anti-Semitic attacks, sometimes orchestrated by leaders of neo-Nazi or white nationalist groups, the researchers said. "Both anonymity and automation have been used in online propaganda offensives against the Jewish community during the 2018 midterms," they wrote. Billionaire philanthropist George Soros was…

Facebook says it has removed 82 pages, accounts and groups linked to Iran from its service and from Instagram for spreading misinformation. The company says the accounts were targeting U.S. and U.K. citizens and typically represented themselves to be American or British citizens, posting about politically charged topics such as race relations and opposition to President Donald Trump. Facebook said Friday that a manual review of the accounts linked them to Iran. Facebook has traditionally relied heavily on automated checks to detect misinformation and other bad behavior on its service. The company has already disclosed that it found and removed similar activity originating in Iran in August. The removals come less than two weeks before the U.S. midterm elections. ...

British regulators slapped Facebook on Thursday with a fine of 500,000 pounds ($644,000) — the maximum possible — for failing to protect the privacy of its users in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. At the same time, European Union lawmakers demanded an audit of Facebook to better understand how it handles information, reinforcing how regulators in the region are taking a tougher stance on data privacy compared with U.S. authorities. Britain’s Information Commissioner Office found that between 2007 and 2014, Facebook processed the personal information of users unfairly by giving app developers access to their information without informed consent. The failings meant the data of some 87 million people was used without their knowledge. “Facebook failed to sufficiently protect the privacy of its users before, during and after the unlawful processing…

Google is abandoning plans to establish a campus for tech startups in Berlin after protests from residents worried about gentrification. The internet giant confirmed reports Thursday it will sublet the former electrical substation in the capital's Kreuzberg district to two charitable organizations, Betterplace.org and Karuna. Google has more than a dozen so-called campuses around the world. They are intended as hubs to bring together potential employees, startups and investors. Protesters had recently picketed the Umspannwerk site with placards such as "Google go home." Karuna, which helps disadvantaged children, said Google will pay 14 million euros ($16 million) toward renovation and maintenance for the coming five years. Google said it will continue to work with startups in Berlin, which has become a magnet for tech companies in Germany in recent years.…

Campaigners in a bohemian district of Berlin celebrated Wednesday after Internet giant Google abandoned strongly-opposed plans to open a large campus there. The US firm had planned to set up an incubator for start-up companies in Kreuzberg, one of the older districts in the west of the capital. But the company's German spokesman Ralf Bremer announced Wednesday that the 3,000 square-metre (3,590 square-yard) space — planned to host offices, cafes and communal work areas, would instead go to two local humanitarian associations. Bremer did not say if local resistance to the plans over the past two years had played a part in the change of heart, although he had told the Berliner Zeitung daily that Google does not allow protests dictate its actions. "The struggle pays off," tweeted "GloReiche Nachbarschaft",…

Facebook Inc said on Wednesday that company moderators during the last quarter removed 8.7 million user images of child nudity with the help of previously undisclosed software that automatically flags such photos. The machine learning tool rolled out over the last year identifies images that contain both nudity and a child, allowing increased enforcement of Facebook's ban on photos that show minors in a sexualized context. A similar system also disclosed Wednesday catches users engaged in "grooming," or befriending minors for sexual exploitation. Facebook's global head of safety Antigone Davis told Reuters in an interview that the "machine helps us prioritize" and "more efficiently queue" problematic content for the company's trained team of reviewers. The company is exploring applying the same technology to its Instagram app. Under pressure from regulators…

The head of Apple on Wednesday endorsed tough privacy laws for both Europe and the U.S. and renewed the technology giant's commitment to protecting personal data, which he warned was being "weaponized" against users.   Speaking at an international conference on data privacy, Apple CEO Tim Cook applauded European Union authorities for bringing in a strict new data privacy law this year and said the iPhone maker supports a U.S. federal privacy law.   Cook's remarks, along with comments due later from Google and Facebook top bosses, in the European Union's home base in Brussels, underscore how the U.S. tech giants are jostling to curry favor in the region as regulators tighten their scrutiny.   Data protection has become a major political issue worldwide, and European regulators have led the…

The technology used in space missions can be expensive but it has some practical benefits here on Earth. Case in point: the thousands of high resolution images taken from the surface of Mars, collected by the two Mars rovers – Spirit and Opportunity. Now researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, are using the same technology to analyze air pollution here on our planet. VOA’s George Putic reports. ...

The controversy over the death of Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi has shined a harsh light on the growing financial ties between Silicon Valley and the world's largest oil exporter. As Saudi Arabia's annual investment forum in Riyadh — dubbed "Davos in the Desert" — continues, representatives from many of the kingdom's highest-profile overseas tech investments are not attending, joining other international business leaders in shunning a conference amid lingering questions over what role the Saudi government played in the killing of a journalist inside their consulate in Turkey. Tech leaders such as Steve Case, the co-founder of AOL, and Dara Khosrowshahi, the chief executive of Uber, declined to attend this week's annual investment forum in Riyadh. Even the CEO of Softbank, which has received billions of dollars from Saudi…

Technological solutions to prevent land corruption require resources, but they do not have to be expensive, land rights experts said Tuesday. Satellite imagery, cloud computing and blockchain are among technologies with the potential to help many of the world's more than 1 billion people estimated to lack secure property rights. But they can be expensive and require experts to be trained. That's where low-tech solutions such as Cadastre Registry Inventory Without Paper (CRISP) can be useful, said Ketakandriana Rafitoson, executive director of global anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International (TI) in Madagascar. CRISP helps local activists in Madagascar, one of the world's poorest countries, document land ownership using tablets with fingerprint readers and built-in cameras, which cost $20 a day to rent. Users can take pictures of ID cards, location agreements, photos of landowners, their neighbors and any witnesses who were present during land demarcation, Rafitoson…

Apple’s new iPhone XR has most of the features found in the top-of-the-line iPhone XS Max, but not its $1,100 price tag. The XR offers the right trade-offs for just $750. For something cheaper, you’ll need to look in the iPhone history bin. Older models are still quite good. If you’re shopping for a new phone, it pays to think hard about what you really want and what you’re willing to pay for it. Improvements over the previous generation tend to be incremental, but can add up over time — and so do the sums you’ll pay for them. IPHONE 7 ($449) The big jump in iPhone cameras came a generation earlier with the iPhone 6S, when Apple went from 8 megapixels to 12 megapixels in resolution. With the iPhone…