Year: 2023

The first large-scale battery to be built at an Australian coal site has been switched on in Victoria's Latrobe Valley, east of Melbourne. The 150-megawatt battery is at the site of the former Hazelwood power station in the southern Australian state of Victoria. The station was built in the 1960s and closed in 2017. The new battery was officially opened Wednesday and has the ability to power about 75,000 homes for an hour during the evening peak. The decommissioned coal plant produced 10 times more electricity, but the battery’s operators aim to increase its generating capacity over time. The Latrobe Valley has been the center of Victoria's coal-fired power industry for decades, but the region is changing. The new battery will store power generated by offshore wind farms and is…

U.S. security officials say the U.S. Energy Department and several other federal agencies have been hacked by a Russian cyber-extortion gang. Homeland Security officials said Thursday the agencies were caught up in the hacking of MOVEit  Transfer, a file-transfer program that is popular with governments and corporations. The Energy Department said two of its entities were “compromised” in the hack. The Russia-linked extortion group CI0p, which claimed responsibility for the hacking, said last week on the dark web site that its victims had until Wednesday to negotiate a ransom or risk having sensitive information dumped online.  It added that it would delete any data stolen from governments, cities and police departments. Jen Easterly, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said while the intrusion was “largely an opportunistic one”…

An announcement by YouTube that it will no longer remove content containing misinformation on the U.S. 2020 presidential election has some experts divided. In a June blog post, YouTube said it was ending its policy — enforced since December 2020 — that removed tens of thousands of videos that falsely claimed the 2020 election was impaired by "widespread fraud, errors or glitches." "We find that while removing this content does curb some misinformation, it could also have the unintended effect of curtailing political speech without meaningfully reducing the risk of violence or other real-world harm," the post said. The Google-owned platform says the move is to support free speech, but some experts in tech and disinformation say it could allow harmful content to again be easily shared. "The message that…

Suspected state-backed Chinese hackers used a security hole in a popular email security appliance to break into the networks of hundreds of public and private sector organizations globally, nearly a third of them government agencies including foreign ministries, the U.S. cybersecurity firm Mandiant said Thursday. “This is the broadest cyber espionage campaign known to be conducted by a China-nexus threat actor since the mass exploitation of Microsoft Exchange in early 2021,” Charles Carmakal, Mandiant's chief technical officer, said in an emailed statement. That hack compromised tens of thousands of computers globally. In a blog post Thursday, Google-owned Mandiant expressed “high confidence” that the group exploiting a software vulnerability in Barracuda Networks' Email Security Gateway was engaged in “espionage activity in support of the People’s Republic of China.” It said the…

Chinese manufacturers of electric vehicles are stepping up their push to dominate the European market. As Amy Guttman reports from London, they are making progress in Britain, where car shoppers are eager to buy the lower-cost electric cars that Chinese automakers are offering. ...

Microsoft Founder Bill Gates was in China on Thursday for what he said were meetings with global health and development partners who have worked with his charitable foundation. "Solving problems like climate change, health inequity and food insecurity requires innovation," Gates tweeted. "From developing malaria drugs to investing in climate adaptation, China has a lot of experience in that. We need to unlock that kind of progress for more people around the world." Gates said global crises stifled progress in reducing death and poverty in children and that he will next travel to West Africa because African countries are particularly vulnerable "with high food prices, crushing debt, and increasing rates of TB and malaria." Reuters, citing two people familiar with the matter, said Gates would meet with Chinese President Xi…

Experts are raising concerns that a recent Cambodian government order allocating around $1 million to a local company for a facial recognition technology project could pave the way for the technology to be used against citizens and human rights defenders. The order, signed by Prime Minister Hun Sen and released in March in a recent tranche of government documents, would award the funds to HSC Co. Ltd., a Cambodian company led by tycoon Sok Hong that has previously printed Cambodian passports and installed CCTV cameras in Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital. The Oct. 17 order appears to be the first direct indication of Cambodia’s interest in pursuing facial recognition, alarming experts who say such initiatives could eventually be used to target dissenters and build a stronger surveillance state similar to China’s.…

Chinese authorities are cracking down on political and fraud cases driven by deepfakes, created with face- and voice-changing software that tricks targets into believing they are video chatting with a loved one or another trusted person. How good are the deepfakes? Good enough to trick an executive at a Fuzhou tech company in Fujian province who almost lost $600,000 to a person he thought was a friend claiming to need a quick cash infusion. The entire transaction took less than 10 minutes from the first contact via the phone app WeChat to police stopping the online bank transfer when the target called the authorities after learning his real friend had never requested the loan, according to Sina Technology. Despite the public's outcry about such AI-driven fraud, some experts say Beijing…

Bill Gates, Microsoft Corp's co-founder, is set to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping on Friday during his visit to China, two people with knowledge of the matter said. The meeting will mark Xi's first meeting with a foreign private entrepreneur in recent years. The people said the encounter may be a one-on-one meeting. A third source confirmed they would meet, without providing details. The sources did not say what the two might discuss. Gates tweeted on Wednesday that he had landed in Beijing for the first time since 2019 and that he would meet with partners who had been working on global health and development challenges with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The foundation and China's State Council Information Office, which handles media queries on behalf of the Chinese…

EU lawmakers on Wednesday voted for tougher landmark draft artificial intelligence rules that include a ban on the use of the technology in biometric surveillance and for generative AI systems like ChatGPT to disclose AI-generated content. The lawmakers agreed to the amendments to the draft legislation proposed by the European Commission which is seeking to set a global standard for the technology used in everything from automated factories to bots and self-driving cars. Rapid adoption of Microsoft-backed OpenAI's ChatGPT and other bots has led top AI scientists and company executives including Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to raise the potential risks posed to society. "While Big Tech companies are sounding the alarm over their own creations, Europe has gone ahead and proposed a concrete response to the risks…

European Union antitrust regulators took aim at Google's lucrative digital advertising business in an unprecedented decision ordering the tech giant to sell off some of its ad business to address competition concerns. The European Commission, the bloc's executive branch and top antitrust enforcer, said that its preliminary view after an investigation is that “only the mandatory divestment by Google of part of its services” would satisfy the concerns. The 27-nation EU has led the global movement to crack down on Big Tech companies, but it has previously relied on issuing blockbuster fines, including three antitrust penalties for Google worth billions of dollars. It's the first time the bloc has ordered a tech giant to split up keys of business. Google can now defend itself by making its case before the…

Amazon.com said cloud services offered by its unit Amazon Web Services were recovering after a big disruption on Tuesday affected websites of the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority and The Boston Globe, among others. Several hours after Downdetector.com started showing reports of outages, Amazon said many AWS services were fully recovered and marked resolved. "We are continuing to work to fully recover all services," AWS' status page showed. Tuesday's impact stretching from transportation to financial services businesses underscores adoption of Amazon's younger Lambda service and the degree to which many of its cloud offerings are crucial to companies in the internet age. According to research in the past year from the cloud company Datadog, more than half of organizations operating in the cloud use Lambda or rival services, known as…

A "final Beatles record", created with the help of artificial intelligence, will be released later this year, Paul McCartney told the BBC in an interview broadcast on Tuesday. "It was a demo that John (Lennon) had, and that we worked on, and we just finished it up," said McCartney, who turns 81 next week. The Beatles -- Lennon, McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr -- split in 1970, with each going on to have solo careers, but they never reunited. Lennon was shot dead in New York in 1980 aged 40 while Harrison died of lung cancer in 2001, aged 58. McCartney did not name the song that has been recorded but according to the BBC it is likely to be a 1978 Lennon composition called "Now And Then". The…

India threatened to shut Twitter down unless it complied with orders to restrict accounts critical of the government's handling of farmer protests, co-founder Jack Dorsey said, an accusation Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government called an "outright lie." Dorsey, who quit as Twitter CEO in 2021, said on Monday that India also threatened the company with raids on employees if it did not comply with government requests to take down certain posts. "It manifested in ways such as: 'We will shut Twitter down in India', which is a very large market for us; 'we will raid the homes of your employees', which they did; And this is India, a democratic country," Dorsey said in an interview with YouTube news show Breaking Points. Deputy Minister for Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar, a top…

A three-year-old startup company is leading Kenya into the world of high-tech manufacturing, building a workforce capable of making semiconductors and nanotechnology products that operate modern devices from mobile phones to refrigerators.  Anthony Githinji is the founder of Semiconductors Technologies Limited, or STL, located in Nyeri, about a three hours' drive from Nairobi.  He brought his know-how to Kenya from the United States, where he started work in 1997 on semiconductors — materials that conduct electricity and are used in thousands of products.  He said the biggest barrier to entry in any high-tech business is finding a workforce with the right skills. In deciding to start a business in Kenya, his country of origin, Githinji said a meeting with the vice-chancellor of Dedan Kimathi University of Science and Technology, also…

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Monday that he will appoint a scientific advisory body in the coming days that will include outside experts on artificial intelligence, and said he is open to the idea of creating a new U.N. agency that would focus on AI. “I would be favorable to the idea that we could have an artificial intelligence agency, I would say, inspired by what the International Atomic Energy Agency is today,” Guterres said of the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency. He said he does not have the authority to create an IAEA-like agency — that is up to the organization’s 193-member states. But he said it has been discussed and he would see it as a positive development. “What is the advantage of the IAEA — it is a…

A three-year-old startup company is leading Kenya into the world of high-tech manufacturing, building a sophisticated workforce capable of making the semiconductors and nanotechnology products that operate modern devices from mobile phones to refrigerators. VOA's Africa correspondent Mariama Diallo visited the plant and has this story. ...