Month: March 2019

A U.S. government-led group is working with chipmaker Intel and Cray to develop and build the nation's fastest computer by 2021 for conducting nuclear weapons and other research, officials said Monday. The Department of Energy and the Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago said they were working on a supercomputer dubbed Aurora with Intel, the world's biggest supplier of data center chips, and Cray, which specializes in the ultra-fast machines.  The $500 million contract for the project calls on the companies to deliver a computer with so-called exaflop performance — that is, being able to perform 1 quintillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000) calculations per second. If the project succeeds, Aurora would represent nearly an order of magnitude leap over existing machines that feature so-called petaflop performance, capable of doing 1 quadrillion (1,000,000,000,000,000) calculations a second.  It also heightens the stakes in a race in which…

Facebook is continuing to work to remove all video of the mass shooting in New Zealand which the perpetrator livestreamed Friday, the company said Sunday. "We will continue working directly with New Zealand Police as their response and investigation continues,” Mia Garlick of Facebook New Zealand said in a statement Sunday. Garlick said that the company is currently working to remove even edited versions of the original video which do not contain graphic content, "Out of respect for the people affected by this tragedy and the concerns of local authorities." In the 24 hours following the mass shooting, which left 50 people dead, Facebook removed 1.5 million videos of the attack, of which 1.2 million were blocked at upload, the company said. Facebook's most recent comments follow criticism of the…

They built their services for sharing, allowing users to reach others around the world. Now they want people to hold back.     Facebook and other social media companies battled their own services on Friday as they tried to delete copies of a video apparently recorded by the gunman as he killed 49 people and wounded scores of others in the attack on two New Zealand mosques Friday.     The video was livestreamed on the suspect's Facebook account and later reposted on other services.     According to news reports, Facebook took down the livestream of the attack 20 minutes after it was posted and removed the suspect's accounts. But people were able to capture the video and repost it on other sites, including YouTube, Twitter and Reddit.     YouTube has tweeted…

Facebook Inc said on Thursday Chief Product Officer Chris Cox will leave the social media network after 13 years, adding to a recent string of high-profile exits. Also departing is WhatsApp Vice President Chris Daniels, Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said in a blog post. The company does not immediately plan to appoint anyone to fill Cox's role in the near term, he said. Cox, among the first Facebook hires, gained oversight of WhatsApp and Instagram following the exits of their founders. In September, Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger resigned as chief executive officer and chief technical officer of the photo-sharing app owned by Facebook. Jan Koum, the co-founder of WhatsApp, left in April last year. "As Mark has outlined, we are turning a new page in our…

The United States' top general said on Thursday that the Chinese military was benefiting from the work Alphabet Inc's Google was doing in China, where the technology giant has long sought to have a bigger presence. "The work that Google is doing in China is indirectly benefiting the Chinese military," Marine General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. "We watch with great concern when industry partners work in China knowing that there is that indirect benefit," he said. "Frankly, 'indirect' may be not a full characterization of the way it really is, it is more of a direct benefit to the Chinese military." Last year Google said it was no longer vying for a $10 billion cloud computing contract…

Instagram is back up after suffering a partial outage for more than several hours, the photo-sharing social network platform said in a tweet, but its parent Facebook Inc.’s app still seemed to be down for some users around the globe. Certain users had trouble in accessing widely used Instagram, Whatsapp and Facebook apps earlier Wednesday, in one of the longest outages faced by the company in the recent past. “Anddddd... we’re back,” Instagram tweeted: Facebook did not provide an update. Social media users in parts of United States, Japan and some parts Europe were affected by the outage, according to DownDetector’s live outage map. Facebook users, including brand marketers, expressed their outrage on Twitter with the #facebookdown hashtag. “Ya’ll, I haven’t gotten my daily dosage of dank memes and I…

Facebook says it is aware of outages on its platforms including Facebook, Messenger and Instagram, and is working to resolve the issue. According to downdector.com, which monitors websites, the outages started around 12 p.m. E.T. on Wednesday in parts of the U.S., including the East and West Coast, parts of Europe and elsewhere. Both Facebook's desktop site and app appeared to be affected. Some users saw a message that said Facebook was down for ``required maintenance.'' Facebook did not say what was causing the outages, which were still occurring as of 2:15 p.m. E.T., or which regions were affected. ...

Spotify has filed a complaint with European Union antitrust regulators against Apple, saying the iPhone maker unfairly limits rivals to its own Apple Music streaming service.  Spotify, which launched a year after the 2007 launch of the iPhone, said on Wednesday that Apple's control of its App Store deprived consumers of choice and rival providers of audio streaming services to the benefit of Apple Music, which began in 2015.  Central to Spotify's complaint, filed with the European Commission on Monday, is what it says is a 30 percent fee Apple charges content-based service providers to use Apple's in-app purchase system (IAP).  Forced to raise price Horacio Gutierrez, Spotify's general counsel, said the company was pressured into using the billing system in 2014, but then was forced to raise the monthly fee of its premium service from 9.99 to 12.99 euros, just as Apple Music launched…

Google, Amazon and Apple have capitalized on technology that makes virtual personal assistants possible.  Now a new application allows the user to have a virtual conversation with a video recording of a real person.  How does that work and why is it needed?  VOA’s Elizabeth Lee explains. ...

One of General Motors' first self-driving test vehicles is going on display at an automotive history museum in suburban Detroit. The Henry Ford history attraction announced Tuesday that it has acquired a modified pre-production Chevrolet Bolt electric vehicle. The GM-donated vehicle originally made its debut testing on the streets of San Francisco in 2016. Now it will be displayed at the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation in Dearborn.   The camera- and sensor-equipped vehicle is the first autonomous car to be added to The Henry Ford collection. It'll be next to a 1959 Cadillac El Dorado at the "Driving America" exhibit, which chronicles the history of the automobile.   The Henry Ford President and CEO Patricia Mooradian says self-driving capabilities "will fundamentally change our relationship with the automobile." She…

At the ripe old age of 30 and with half the globe using it, the World Wide Web is facing growing pains with issues like hate speech, privacy concerns and state-sponsored hacking, its creator says, trumpeting a call to make it better for humanity. Tim Berners-Lee on Tuesday joined a celebration of the Web and reminisced about his invention at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, starting with a proposal published on March 12, 1989. It opened the way to a technological revolution that has transformed the way people buy goods, share ideas, get information and much more. It’s also become a place where tech titans scoop up personal data, rival governments spy and seek to scuttle elections, and hate speech and vitriol have thrived — taking the Web…