Year: 2023

Virgin Galactic rocketed to the edge of space with its first tourists Thursday, including a former British Olympian who bought his ticket 18 years ago and a mother-daughter duo from the Caribbean. The space plane glided back to a runway landing at Spaceport America in the New Mexico desert, after a brief flight that gave passengers a few minutes of weightlessness. Cheers erupted from families and friends watching from below when the craft's rocket motor fired after it was released from the plane that had carried it aloft. The rocket ship reached about 88 kilometers high. Richard Branson's company expects to begin offering monthly trips to customers on its winged space plane, joining Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin and Elon Musk's SpaceX in the space tourism business. Virgin Galactic passenger Jon…

China will require all mobile app providers in the country to file business details with the government, its information ministry said, marking Beijing's latest effort to keep the industry on a tight leash.  The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) said late on Tuesday that apps without proper filings will be punished after the grace period that will end in March next year, a move that experts say would potentially restrict the number of apps and hit small developers hard.  You Yunting, a lawyer with Shanghai-based DeBund Law Offices, said the order is effectively requiring approvals from the ministry. The new rule is primarily aimed at combating online fraud but it will impact all apps in China, he said.  Rich Bishop, co-founder of app publishing firm AppInChina, said the…

The White House on Wednesday said it had launched a multimillion-dollar cyber contest to spur use of artificial intelligence to find and fix security flaws in U.S. government infrastructure, in the face of growing use of the technology by hackers for malicious purposes.   "Cybersecurity is a race between offense and defense," said Anne Neuberger, the U.S. government's deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging technology. "We know malicious actors are already using AI to accelerate identifying vulnerabilities or build malicious software," she added in a statement to Reuters. Numerous U.S. organizations, from health care groups to manufacturing firms and government institutions, have been the target of hacking in recent years, and officials have warned of future threats, especially from foreign adversaries.   Neuberger's comments about AI echo those…

U.S. President Joe Biden is planning Wednesday to impose restrictions on U.S. investments in some high-tech industries in China. Biden’s expected executive order could again heighten tensions between the U.S., the world’s biggest economy, and No. 2 China after a period in which leaders of the two countries have held several discussions aimed at airing their differences and seeking common ground. The new restrictions would limit U.S. investments in such high-tech sectors in China as quantum computing, artificial intelligence and advanced semi-conductors, but apparently not in the broader Chinese economy, which recently has been struggling to advance. In a trip to China in July, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told Chinese Premier Li Qiang, “The United States will, in certain circumstances, need to pursue targeted actions to protect its national security.…

The company whose name became synonymous with remote work is joining the growing return-to-office trend. Zoom, the video conferencing pioneer, is asking employees who live within a 50-mile radius of its offices to work onsite two days a week, a company spokesperson confirmed in an email. The statement said the company has decided that "a structured hybrid approach – meaning employees that live near an office need to be onsite two days a week to interact with their teams – is most effective for Zoom." The new policy, which will be rolled out in August and September, was first reported by the New York Times, which said Zoom CEO Eric Yuan fielded questions from employees unhappy with the new policy during a Zoom meeting last week. Zoom, based in San…

U.S. police reform advocates have long argued that police-worn body cameras will help reduce officers' excessive use of force and work to build public trust. But the millions of hours of footage that so-called "body cams" generate are difficult for police supervisors to monitor. As Shelley Schlender explains, artificial intelligence may help. ...

Pope Francis on Tuesday called for a global reflection on the potential dangers of artificial intelligence (AI), noting the new technology's "disruptive possibilities and ambivalent effects."   Francis, who is 86 and said in the past he does not know how to use a computer, issued the warning in a message for the next World Day of Peace of the Catholic Church, falling on New Year's Day.   The Vatican released the message well in advance, as it is customary.   The pope "recalls the need to be vigilant and to work so that a logic of violence and discrimination does not take root in the production and use of such devices, at the expense of the most fragile and excluded," it reads.   "The urgent need to orient the…

Two to tech groups on Monday backed TikTok Inc in its lawsuit seeking block enforcement of a Montana state ban on use of the short video sharing app before it takes effect on January 1. NetChoice, a national trade association that includes major tech platforms, and Chamber of Progress, a tech-industry coalition, said in a joint court filing that "Montana's effort to cut Montanans off from the global network of TikTok users ignores and undermines the structure, design, and purpose of the internet." TikTok, which is owned by China's ByteDance, filed a suit in May seeking to block the first-of-its-kind U.S. state ban on several grounds, arguing it violates the First Amendment free speech rights of the company and users. ...

The use of sophisticated spyware to hack into the devices of journalists and human rights defenders during a period of conflict in Armenia has alarmed analysts. A joint investigation by digital rights organizations, including Amnesty International, found evidence of the surveillance software on devices belonging to 12 people, including a former government spokesperson. The apparent targeting took place between October 2020 and December 2022, including during key moments in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, Amnesty reported. The region has been at the center of a decades-long dispute between Azerbaijan and Armenia, which have fought two wars over the mountainous territory. Elina Castillo Jiménez, a digital surveillance researcher at Amnesty International's Security Laboratory, told VOA that her organization’s research — published earlier this year — confirmed that at least a dozen public figures…

A mother is suing the city of Detroit, saying unreliable facial recognition technology led to her being falsely arrested for carjacking while she was eight months pregnant.  Porcha Woodruff was getting her two children ready for school the morning of February 16 when a half-dozen police officers showed up at her door to arrest her, taking her away in handcuffs, the 32-year-old Detroit woman said in a federal lawsuit. "They presented her with an arrest warrant for robbery and carjacking, leaving her baffled and assuming it was a joke, given her visibly pregnant state," her attorney wrote in a lawsuit accusing the city of false arrest.  The suit, filed Thursday, argues that police relied on facial recognition technology that should not be trusted, given "inherent flaws and unreliability, particularly when…