Month: March 2019

The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots warns chances of achieving a U.N. treaty banning the development, production and use of fully autonomous lethal weapons, also known as killer robots, are looking increasingly remote.  Experts from some 80 countries are attending a weeklong meeting to discuss the prospect of negotiating an international treaty.  Representatives from about 80 countries have been meeting on lethal autonomous weapons systems since 2014.  They have to decide by November to begin negotiations on a new treaty to regulate killer robots.  Nobel peace laureate Jody Williams says Russia has been in the forefront of a group of countries, including the United States and Australia, trying to block movement in this direction.  At the opening session, she tells VOA that Russia argued for drastically limiting discussions on the…

Apple attempted to reintroduce itself on Monday as an entertainment and financial services company that also makes iPhones as it launched a streaming television service, a credit card and an online gaming arcade. The world's second-most valuable technology company lifted the curtain on a television and movie service called Apple TV+ that will stream original television shows and movies to a television-watching app for users of its 1.4 billion gadgets worldwide, as well as owners of smart TVs and other devices. But Apple, known in the tech industry for keeping its products secret until they are finished, left out key pricing details for several of its new services, unnerving investors and sending its shares down slightly. The move could be seen as a first step to challenging streaming video leaders…

The head of Ethiopian Airlines said "many questions on the B-737 MAX airplane remain without answers" and he pledged "full and transparent cooperation to discover what went wrong." "Until we have answers, putting one more life at risk is too much," CEO Tewolde Gebremariam said Monday in a statement. "Immediately after the crash and owing to the similarity with the Lion Air Accident, we grounded our fleet of Max 8s. Within days, the plane had been grounded around the world. I fully support this," Gebremariam said. A March 10 Ethiopian Airlines crash and Indonesia's Lion Air crash in October were both Boeing 737 MAX 8 planes. Everyone on board the two flights was killed. The Ethiopian Airlines flight data recorders revealed that there were "clear similarities" between the two doomed…

Michael R. Wessel is a commissioner of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a U.S. government organization that investigates the national security implications of trade and economic relationship between the U.S. and China. He recently discussed with VOA his concerns about China’s race to 5G, the next generation of wireless connectivity being built worldwide. With a 5G network, users will be able to send and receive more data in less time, which could have implications for self-driving cars, smart cities and other technologies.     Q: How much does it matter which country is first to fully functioning 5G?   Wessel: It does matter. First mover advantage is crucial in any new technology, but it is particularly important in 5G because it is foundational for cutting-edge innovation and applications…

The Democratic-led U.S. House of Representatives will vote in April on a bill to reinstate landmark net neutrality rules repealed by the Federal Communications Commission under President Donald Trump.  House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland said in a letter to colleagues on Thursday, seen by Reuters, that lawmakers would vote on the "Save the Internet Act" during the week of April 8.  The bill mirrors an effort last year to reverse the FCC's December 2017 order that repealed rules approved in 2015 that barred providers from blocking or slowing internet content or offering paid "fast lanes."  The reversal of net neutrality rules was a win for internet providers like Comcast Corp., AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc., but opposed by content and social media companies like Facebook Inc., Amazon.com Inc.  and Alphabet Inc.  The bill would repeal the order introduced by FCC Chairman Ajit Pai,…

Facebook left millions of user passwords readable by its employees for years, the company said Thursday, an acknowledgement it offered after a security researcher posted about the issue online. By storing passwords in readable plain text, Facebook violated fundamental computer-security practices. Those call for organizations and websites to save passwords in a scrambled form that makes it almost impossible to recover the original text. “There is no valid reason why anyone in an organization, especially the size of Facebook, needs to have access to users' passwords in plain text,” said cybersecurity expert Andrei Barysevich of Recorded Future. Facebook said there is no evidence its employees abused access to this data. But thousands of employees could have searched them. The company said the passwords were stored on internal company servers, where…

European Union regulators have hit Google with a 1.49 billion euro ($1.68 billion) fine for abusing its dominant role in online advertising. It's the third time the commission has slapped Google with an antitrust penalty, following multibillion-dollar fines resulting from separate probes into two other parts of the Silicon Valley giant's business.   The EU's competition commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, announced the results of the long-running probe of Google's AdSense advertising business at a news conference in Brussels on Wednesday.   "Today's decision is about how Google abused its dominance to stop websites using brokers other than the AdSense platform," Vestager said.   The commission found that Google and its parent company, Alphabet, breached EU antitrust rules by imposing restrictive clauses in contracts with websites that used AdSense, preventing Google rivals…

A robotics company hopes to bring a robot into every home and business, using a proprietary robotic platform—that can be programmed and tweaked for a wide variety of users and uses. Deana Mitchell takes a look at one of the world's most customizable robots. It's called Misty. ...

U.S. President Donald Trump has accused social media outlets, including Facebook, Google and Twitter, of being biased, and suggested that the situation needs scrutiny. In answer to a reporter at the White House Tuesday, Trump said digital platforms tend to suppress Republican and conservative views. VOA's Zlatica Hoke reports. ...

Google on Tuesday unveiled a video-game streaming platform called Stadia, positioning itself to take on the traditional video-game business. The platform will store a game-playing session in the cloud and lets players jump across devices operating on Google's Chrome browser and Chrome OS, such as Pixel phones and Chromebooks. Google didn't say how much its new service will cost, whether it will offer subscriptions or other options, or what games will be available at launch — all key elements to the success of a new video-game platform. It said only that Stadia will be available in late 2019.  Google made the announcement at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Some industry watchers were expecting a streaming console, but Google's platform centers squarely on the company's cloud infrastructure. “The new…

U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday accused social media platforms Facebook, YouTube and Twitter of favoring his Democratic opponents over him and his fellow Republicans. "But fear not, we will win anyway, just like we did before! #MAGA," he said in a tweet. MAGA refers to Trump's 2016 campaign slogan, "Make America Great Again." Facebook and Twitter declined to comment. Alphabet's Google, which owns YouTube, did not immediately comment. The president and other conservatives have repeatedly complained that these big tech platforms treat them unfairly. Trump has previously accused Twitter of restricting the visibility of prominent U.S. Republicans, without any providing evidence, and the avid social media user has promised to investigate the company's practices. Trump and other conservatives say Twitter targets fellow Republicans with a practice dubbed "shadow banning,"…

In Thailand's election "war room," authorities scroll through thousands of social media posts, looking for violations of laws restricting political parties' campaigning on social media that activists say are among the most prohibitive in the world. The monitors are on the look-out for posts that "spread lies, slander candidates, or use rude language," all violations of the new electoral law, said Sawang Boonmee, deputy secretary-general of the Election Commission, who gave a Reuters team an exclusive tour of the facility. When they find an offending post, on, for example, Facebook, they print it out, date-stamp it, and file it in a clear plastic folder, to be handed over to the Election Commission and submitted to Facebook for removal. "When we order content to be removed, we'll reach out to the…

A city in South Korea, which has the world's highest smartphone penetration rate, has installed flickering lights and laser beams at a road crossing to warn "smartphone zombies" to look up and drivers to slow down, in the hope of preventing accidents. The designers of the system were prompted by growing worry that more pedestrians glued to their phones will become casualties in a country that already has some of the highest road fatality and injury rates among developed countries. State-run Korea Institute of Civil Engineering and Building Technology (KICT) believes its system of flickering lights at zebra crossings can warn both pedestrians and drivers. In addition to red, yellow and blue LED lights on the pavement, "smombies" - smartphone zombies - will be warned by laser beam projected from…