Category: News

The group known as the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots says fully autonomous lethal weapons that can strike selected targets are no longer within the realm of science fiction. The coalition says it wants pre-emptive action taken to ban them. Government experts will spend the next two weeks discussing the issue at a meeting of the U.N. Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons. The Campaign to stop Killer Robots - a coalition of 65 non-government organizations - says the world is running out of time to prevent these systems from becoming a dangerous reality. Campaign co-founder Richard Moyes warns the world is moving closer to situations where machine intelligence, instead of humans, may make life and death decisions on the battlefield. “We need humans involved in these processes and it needs…

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is set to testify publicly Tuesday before a group of U.S. senators after apologizing for the way his company handled data for millions of users. He is due to appear before a joint hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee and Senate Commerce Committee, and on Wednesday will go before House lawmakers. Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley said users "deserve to know how their information is shared and secure," and that he wants to explore with Zuckerberg ways to balance safety with innovation. Zuckerberg met privately with lawmakers in Washington on Monday and released written testimony saying the social media network should have done more to prevent itself and the data of its members from being misused. "We didn't take a broad enough view of our responsibility,…

Facebook users in Southeast Asia, particularly the Philippines, were especially exposed to recent data privacy breaches due to high user numbers and the popularity of an app at the core of the problem, analysts believe. According to Facebook figures, the data of 1.175 million users in the Philippines may have been “improperly shared” with London-based voter profiling firm Cambridge Analytica. That estimate is the second highest, single-country total after the United States. Indonesia ranks third at around 1.1 million people exposed to data breaches. Vietnam was ninth with 427,000. Filipinos had also enjoyed a personality quiz app that spread fast due to the sharing of results, said Renato Reyes, secretary general of the Bagong Alyansang Makabaya alliance of social causes in Manila. The app is suspected as a source of…

Apple on Monday said it had achieved its goal of powering all of the company's facilities with renewable energy, a milestone that includes all of its data centers, offices and retail stores in 43 countries. The iPhone maker also said nine suppliers had recently committed to running their operations entirely on renewable energy sources like wind and solar, bringing to 23 the total number to make such a pledge. Major U.S. corporations such as Apple, Wal-Mart and Alphabet have become some of the country's biggest buyers of renewable forms of energy, driving substantial growth in the wind and solar industries. Alphabet's Google last year purchased enough renewable energy to cover all of its electricity consumption worldwide. Costs for solar and wind are plunging thanks to technological advances and increased global…

On the eve of an expected grilling by U.S. lawmakers, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg once again apologized for inadequately protecting the data of millions of social media platform users and highlighted steps the firm is taking to prevent a repeat. In multiple interviews with news media outlets and in prepared remarks to be delivered on Capitol Hill, Zuckerberg on Monday acknowledged that the tools Facebook provides to promote human interconnectedness were exploited for ill or nefarious purposes.   “It was my mistake, and I’m sorry,” Zuckerberg said in testimony released ahead of Tuesday’s appearance before the Senate Judiciary and Commerce committees and Wednesday’s appearance before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.   “I started Facebook, I run it, and I’m responsible for what happens here,” Zuckerberg added.  …

Social media giant Facebook is starting to notify 87 million of its users whether their personal data was harvested without their knowledge by Cambridge Analytica, the Britain-based voter profiling company U.S. President Donald Trump's campaign hired to target likely supporters in 2016. Facebook believes most of the affected users, more than 70 million, are in the United States, but there are also more than a million each in the Philippines, Indonesia and Britain. The company has apologized for the security breach, with Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledging the company made a "huge mistake" by not more closely monitoring use of the data and not taking a broad enough view of the company's responsibilities. Facebook allowed a British researcher to create an app on Facebook on which about 200,000…

Congress has plenty of questions for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who will testify on Capitol Hill Tuesday and Wednesday about the company's ongoing data-privacy scandal and how it failed to guard against other abuses of its service.   Facebook is struggling to cope with the worst privacy crisis in its history - allegations that a Trump-affiliated data mining firm may have used ill-gotten user data to try to influence elections. Zuckerberg and his company are in full damage-control mode, and have announced a number of piecemeal technical changes intended to address privacy issues.   But there's plenty the Facebook CEO hasn't yet explained. Here are five questions that could shed more light on Facebook's privacy practices and the degree to which it is really sorry about playing fast and loose…

Despite a global abundance of food, a United Nations report says 815 million people, 11 percent of the world’s population, went hungry in 2016. That number seems to be rising. Poverty is not the only reason, however, people are experiencing food insecurity. “Increasingly we’re also seeing hunger caused by the displacement related to conflict, natural disaster as well, but particularly there’s been an uptick in the number of people displaced in the world,” said Robert Opp, director of Innovation and Change Management at the United Nations World Food Program. Humanitarian organizations are turning to new technologies such as AI, or artificial intelligence, to fight global food insecurity. WATCH: Global Hunger Is Rising — Artificial Intelligence Can Help “What AI offers us right now, is an ability to augment human capacity.…

Despite a global abundance of food, a United Nations report says 815 million people, 11 percent of the world's population, went hungry in 2016. Advances in technology and artificial intelligence can help feed them, but there are challenges that keep first world technologies from reaching the developing world. VOA's Elizabeth Lee explains. ...

The next generation of life-saving robots could be inspired by cockroaches. Faith Lapidus explains how. ...

Facebook violates its users' privacy rights through the use of its facial recognition software, according to consumer groups led by the Electronic Privacy Information Center. Their complaint to the federal government focuses on the use of Facebook software that identifies people in photographs that are uploaded to its site. A complaint filed Friday by a coalition of consumer organizations with Federal Trade Commission said the social media giant "routinely scans photos for biometric facial matches without the consent of the image subject." The complaint says the company tries to improve its facial recognition prowess by deceptively encouraging users the participate in the process of identifying people in photographs. "This unwanted, unnecessary, and dangerous identification of individuals undermines user privacy, ignores the explicit preferences of Facebook users, and is contrary to…

The European Union said Friday Facebook has told it that up to 2.7 million people in the 28-nation bloc may have been victim of improper data sharing involving political data-mining firm Cambridge Analytica. EU spokesman Christian Wigand said EU Justice Commissioner Vera Jourova will have a telephone call with Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg early next week to address the massive data leaks. The EU and Facebook will be looking at what changes the social media giant needs to make to better protect users and how the U.S. company must adapt to new EU data protection rules. Wigand said that EU data protection authorities will discuss over the coming days ``a strong coordinated approach'' on how to deal with the Facebook investigation. Separately, Italy's competition authority opened an investigation Friday into…

Amazon is spending millions of dollars on lobbying as the global online retailer seeks to expand its reach into a swath of industries that President Donald Trump’s broadsides haven’t come close to hitting. Trump’s attacks over the last week targeted what Amazon is best known for: rapidly shipping just about any product you can imagine to your door. But the company CEO Jeff Bezos founded more than two decades ago is now a sprawling empire that sells groceries in brick-and-mortar stores, hosts the online services of other companies and federal offices in a network of data centers, and even recently branched into health care. Amazon relies on a nearly 30-member in-house lobbying team that’s four times as large as it was three years ago as well as outside firms to…

About 1 percent of the world's population lives with the mental condition called bipolar disorder, characterized by swings between elevated and depressed moods. In most cases, timely interaction with psychotherapists, family and friends can alleviate the symptoms. Researchers in Denmark say modern technology can help by keeping track of a patient's symptoms and summoning help quickly when needed. VOA's George Putic reports. ...