Category: Technology

Google is planning a return to China. But the project is shrouded in secrecy, and employees are demanding transparency. According to a report by The New York Times on Thursday, August 16, a petition calling for more oversight and accountability in the project racked up more than 1,000 signatures. Reuters reported this month, the app is a bid to win approval from Beijing to provide a mobile search engine in China. However, employees are concerned the app would support China's restrictions on free expression and ultimately violate the company's 'don't be evil' code of conduct. The petition, seen by Reuters says, "We urgently need more transparency, a seat at the table and a commitment to clear and open processes: Google employees need to know what we're building." The company declined…

After long resisting change, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey wants to revamp the "core" of the service to fight rampant abuse and misinformation. But it's not clear if changing that essence — how it rewards interactions and values popularity — would even work.   Though Dorsey was scant on details, what is certain is that the move will require huge investments for a company that doesn't have the same resources that Google and Facebook have to throw at the problem. Any change is likely to affect how users engage with Twitter and hurt revenue, testing the patience of both users and investors.   "Social networks have a history of ... well-intentioned but badly designed efforts to fix this," said Nate Elliott, principal at marketing research firm Nineteen Insights.   Twitter isn't…

Outfielder Rolando Rodriguez from Panama heard a reporter's question, but he doesn't speak English. So Georgia shortstop Tai Peete helped him out, pecking the words into Google Translate to ask about how young baseball players are sharing technology during the Little League World Series. "It was easier than expected,'' Rodriguez said of the language barrier, speaking through an interpreter. So goes life in the International Grove, the dorms where 16 teams all are staying during the double-elimination tournament in pursuit of a world title. Apps and even video games are making it easier for the boys to communicate and get to know each other — making smartphones a key part rather than a distraction during their moment of a lifetime. Eight teams are from U.S. states while the other teams…

The rise of information sharing in the digital age has made it easier to disseminate knowledge, but it also brings with it heightened risks: from hackers stealing our information, to launching cyberwarfare and even potentially weaponizing legitimate platforms. This week on "Plugged In," VOA Contributor Greta Van Susteren explores these challenges and how they are impacting global cybersecurity. VOA's Elizabeth Cherneff has more. ...

Greta Van Susteren talks to technology journalist Kara Swisher about cybersecurity and privacy. ...

One American university is putting electronic voice-controlled assistants in every student housing room on campus. Saint Louis University recently announced it will equip every student living space with Amazon’s Alexa system. The school in St. Louis, Missouri, will place about 2,300 Echo Dot “smart” devices in all student dorms and other university housing. Officials said the university will be the first in the world to put the devices in every student living space. The devices and the Alexa service are being provided at no costs to students. The Amazon Echo is a speaker with the ability to listen and “talk” to users and can perform some operations. The Alexa assistant competes with similar systems made by Google and Apple. Devices linked to the systems have become increasingly popular in homes…

How do you know if a piece of art is real or fake? Ask a scientist. At New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, chemistry, physics and geology are all playing a part in the detective work of determining whether a work of art is original or a forgery. Now teens are learning the tricks of that trade as well. Tina Trinh has more. ...

India will send a manned flight into space by 2022, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced Wednesday as part of India's independence day celebrations. He said India will become the fourth country after Russia, the United States and China to achieve the feat and its astronaut could be a man or a woman. The space capsule that will transport India's astronauts was tested a few days earlier. Rakesh Sharma was the first Indian to travel in space, aboard a Soviet rocket in 1984. As part of its own space program, India successfully put a satellite into orbit around Mars in 2014. India won independence from British colonialists in 1947. Modi's 80-minute speech, broadcast live from the historic Red Fort in New Delhi, comes months before national elections.  Modi listed his government's…

Tesla's board named a special committee of three directors on Tuesday to evaluate possibly taking the electric carmaker private, although it said it had yet to see a firm offer from the company's chief executive, Elon Musk. The Silicon Valley billionaire last week said on Twitter he wants to take Tesla private at $420 a share, valuing it at $72 billion, and that funding was "secured." That earlier tweet triggered investor lawsuits and an investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission into the accuracy of his statement, according to multiple media reports. Musk on Monday gave his most detailed vision of how a take-private deal could work, but shares ended flat, indicating investor skepticism. The shares were last down 1 percent at $352.88 on Tuesday. Musk said Monday he…

The world will soon have its first batch of commercially available 3D-printed concrete homes. A consortium of the Dutch municipality of Eindhoven, Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), and three private firms has joined forces to build five of these unique homes in the hub city of Eindhoven in the Netherlands. VOA’s Julie Taboh has more. ...

Tesla's handling of Chief Executive Elon Musk's proposal to take the carmaker private and its failure to promptly file a formal disclosure has raised governance concerns and sparked questions about how companies use social media. Musk stunned investors last Tuesday by announcing on Twitter that he was considering taking Tesla private in a potential $72 billion transaction and that "funding" had been "secured." Tesla's shares closed up 11 percent before retrenching after the Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) had asked Tesla why Musk announced his plans on Twitter and whether his statement was truthful. Musk provided no details of his funding until Monday, when he said in a blog on Tesla's website that he was in discussions with Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund…

Even if you have “Location History” off, Google often stores your precise location. Here’s how to delete those markers and some best-effort practices that keep your location as private as possible. But there’s no panacea, because simply connecting to the internet on any device flags an IP address that can be geographically mapped. Smartphones also connect to cell towers, so your carrier knows your general location at all times. To prevent further tracking For any device: Fire up your browser and go to myactivity.google.com. (You’ll need to be logged into Google) On the upper left drop-down menu, go to “Activity Controls.” Turn off both “Web & App Activity” and “Location History.” That should prevent precise location markers from being stored to your Google account. Google will warn you that some…

A meteor shower lit up the skies above eastern Bosnia Saturday night, giving star gazers a rare opportunity to see a display of shooting stars with the naked eye. “I think that everybody should see this,” said Miralem Mehic, a Bosnian from an international group of star gazers who watched the light show at the Sand Pyramids, an area of naturally occurring sand columns, near the town of Foca. The so-called Perseids meteor shower returns to the skies every August and are best viewed in the northern hemisphere in isolated areas where there is little light pollution. They arise when the Earth passes through the debris of Comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle, which was discovered in 1862. Meteors are parts of rock and dust that hit the Earth’s atmosphere, heat up and glow.…

A NASA spacecraft rocketed toward the sun Sunday on an unprecedented quest to get closer to our star than anything ever sent before. The Parker Solar Probe will fly straight through the wispy edges of the corona, or outer solar atmosphere, that was visible during last August’s total solar eclipse. It eventually will get within 3.8 million (6 million kilometers) of the sun’s surface, staying comfortably cool despite the extreme heat and radiation, and allowing scientists to vicariously explore the sun in a way never before possible. No wonder scientists consider it the coolest, hottest mission under the sun, and what better day to launch to the sun than Sunday as NASA noted. “Fly baby girl, fly!!” project scientist Nicola Fox of Johns Hopkins University tweeted just before liftoff. She…

Samsung's new smartphone illustrates the limits of innovation at time when hardware advances have slowed. The new phone, the Galaxy Note 9, will be faster and will last longer without a recharge. But while earth-shattering new features are in short supply, it will carry an earth-shattering price tag: $1,000. The minor improvements reflect a smartphone industry that has largely pushed the limits on hardware. Major changes tend to come every few years rather than annually, and this isn't the year for anything revolutionary in the Note. The new phone will get some automatic photo editing and a stylus that can serve as a remote control. But the highlights will be a bigger battery, a faster processor and improved cellular speeds. "You don't see massive breakthroughs anymore from a hardware perspective,"…

Unmanned aerial vehicles, commonly referred to as drones, can become an important tool for farmers around the world within the next 10 years. Researchers at Texas A&M University in College Station are looking at different applications of precision farming with drone technology. VOA's Elizabeth Lee has the details. ...

If you've ever spent a lot of time in front of a computer, you've probably come away bleary eyed. That's because you don't blink as much when you are working on a computer, which could lead to dry eyes. With the popularity of video games and online activities, dry eye is becoming increasingly common in children and teens glued to their screens. The condition can cause permanent eye damage, but fortunately, as VOA's Carol Pearson reports, there's an app for that. ...

Tesla Inc's board said it was evaluating taking the company private, a day after Chief Executive Elon Musk surprised shareholders with the idea of launching the biggest leveraged buyout of all time. In a statement on Tesla's website on Wednesday, six of Tesla's nine directors said the board had met several times over the last week to discuss such an idea and was "taking the appropriate next steps to evaluate this." Musk said on Twitter on Tuesday that he was considering taking the loss-making electric car-maker private at $420 a share, which would value a deal at more than $70 billion. He said funding was "secured," without elaborating. Tesla said on Wednesday the discussions had addressed the issue of how to fund such a deal, but gave no details. The…

After several social media outlets banned alt-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and his show InfoWars earlier this week, Twitter announced it would be keeping Jones, sparking backlash from users. “We didn’t suspend Alex Jones or Infowars yesterday. We know that’s hard for many but the reason is simple: he hasn’t violated our rules,” Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey wrote. Jones, who has become notorious for hosting The Alex Jones Show on InfoWars, has more than 860,000 followers on Twitter. On Monday, sites such as YouTube and Facebook banned Jones and his pages from their platforms, claiming that Jones’s videos violated the sites’ hate speech guidelines. Jones has repeatedly used language incendiary towards Muslim and transgender people, and in July he appeared to threaten to shoot U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who…

Today’s robots can be programmed to do many things – from vacuuming floors to assembling cars. But teaching them to recognize and correct a mistake is much harder to do. A group of scientists, led by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, is trying to solve that problem. VOA’s George Putic has more. ...

The United States has some incredible natural geological features: towering mesas, tall spires of limestone rock, erupting geysers and gravity-defying stone sculptures. Faith Lapidus reports on efforts to ensure that if and when gravity starts to win, land managers are not taken by surprise. ...

Facebook says it has suspended working with Boston-based analytics firm Crimson Hexagon until it can determine how the firm collects and shares Facebook and Instagram user data. Facebook announced the suspension Friday. The Wall Street Journal was the first to report the suspension and said that one of Crimson Hexagon’s clients is a Russian nonprofit with ties to the Kremlin. Facebook said that Crimson Hexagon is cooperating with the investigation and there is no evidence that Crimson Hexagon obtained Facebook or Instagram information inappropriately. "We don’t allow developers to build surveillance tools using information from Facebook or Instagram," Facebook said in a statement Friday. "We take these allegations seriously and have suspended these apps while we investigate." Chris Bingham, Crimson Hexagon’s, chief technology officer, said in a blog Friday his…

For years denim jeans have been finished in foreign factories where workers use manual and automated techniques such as scraping with sandpaper or other abrasives to make the jeans appear worn and more comfortable to wear. But things are changing in the fashion world. As VOA's Mariama Diallo reports, fashion companies are going digital to speed up the design and manufacturing process. ...

WhatsApp has announced changes for its 200 million users in India following the spread of viral messages via the app that resulted in deadly mob attacks. India's government has threatened to take WhatsApp to court, saying "...the medium used for such propagation cannot evade responsibility and accountability."  The information technology ministry said, "If they remain mute spectators they are liable to be treated as abettors and thereafter face consequent legal action."   The Facebook-owned messaging app said it will limit Indian users' ability to forward messages, allowing only five contacts at a time to receive them. The firm said it will also remove the quick forward button placed next to media messages. Both moves are designed to make stop the mass forwards that have resulted in the mob attacks. India…

If there can be driverless cars on the road, why not driverless boats on the water? Faith Lapidus has details of a team building a robotic boat, and what they want it to do. ...

Hackers targeted the campaigns of at least three candidates running for Congress in the upcoming 2018 U.S. elections, but the attacks were detected and thwarted, a Microsoft executive said Thursday. The attempted attacks tried to use a fake Microsoft domain as a landing page for phishing attacks, said Tom Burt, Microsoft vice president for customer security and trust. He refused to name which candidates were targeted, citing privacy concerns. “They were all people who, because of their positions, might have been interesting targets from an espionage standpoint, as well as an election disruption standpoint,” Burt told an audience at the annual Aspen Security Forum in Aspen, Colorado. He also did not identify the source of the phishing attacks, though the tactic was similar to those used by Russian operatives to…

President Donald Trump lashed out Thursday after Brussels hit US tech giant Google with a record fine, and warned he would no longer allow Europe to take "advantage" of the United States. "I told you so! The European Union just slapped a Five Billion Dollar fine on one of our great companies, Google," Trump tweeted in reaction to the 4.34 billion euro penalty imposed on Google for abusing the dominance of its mobile operating system. "They truly have taken advantage of the US, but not for long!" he said. In announcing the fine on Wednesday, EU Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager accused Google of using the Android system's near-stranglehold on smartphones and tablets to promote the use of its own Google search engine while shutting out rivals. The decision, which followed…

For more than 30 years, doctors have worked to save people's arms and legs. VOA's Carol Pearson reports, saving a limb after an accident or infection can take an entire team of specialists at a limb preservation center. ...