Category: Technology

Imagine if your dog or cat could use words to let you know when they’re angry, lonely or in pain. Well now they can, thanks to an innovative communication tool that’s helping them express themselves more effectively. VOA’s Julie Taboh has more. Camera: Adam Greenbaum            Produced by: Julie Taboh, Adam Greenbaum   ...

The United States Justice Department has in recent months escalated its antitrust probe on Apple Inc., The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday citing people familiar with the matter.   Reuters had previously reported the Justice Department opened an antitrust probe into Apple in 2019.  The Wall Street Journal report said more litigators have now been assigned, while new requests for documents and consultations have been made with all the companies involved.  The probe will also look at whether Apple's mobile operating system, iOS, is anti-competitive, favoring its own products over those of outside developers, the report added.  The Justice Department declined to comment, while Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.  ...

Billionaire Elon Musk said Wednesday that he anticipates finding a CEO for Twitter “probably toward the end of this year." Speaking via a video call to the World Government Summit in Dubai, Musk said making sure the platform can function remained the most important thing for him. “I think I need to stabilize the organization and just make sure it’s in a financial healthy place,” Musk said when asked about when he'd name a CEO. “I’m guessing probably toward the end of this year would be good timing to find someone else to run the company.” Musk, 51, made his wealth initially on the finance website PayPal, then created the spacecraft company SpaceX and invested in the electric car company Tesla. In recent months, however, more attention has been focused…

On Colorado's northeastern plains, where the pencil-straight horizon divides golden fields and blue sky, a farmer named Danny Wood scrambles to plant and harvest proso millet, dryland corn and winter wheat in short, seasonal windows. That is until his high-tech Steiger 370 tractor conks out.  The tractor's manufacturer doesn't allow Wood to make certain fixes himself, and last spring his fertilizing operations were stalled for three days before the servicer arrived to add a few lines of missing computer code for $950.  "That's where they have us over the barrel, it's more like we are renting it than buying it," said Wood, who spent $300,000 on the used tractor.  Wood's plight, echoed by farmers across the country, has pushed lawmakers in Colorado and 10 other states to introduce bills that…

ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of social media platform TikTok, has dramatically upped its U.S. lobbying effort since 2020 as U.S.-China relations continue to sour and is now the fourth-largest Internet company in spending on federal lobbying as of last year, according to newly released data. Publicly available information collected by OpenSecrets, a Washington nonprofit that tracks campaign finance and lobbying data, shows that ByteDance and its subsidiaries, including TikTok, the wildly popular short video app, have spent more than $13 million on U.S. lobbying since 2020. In 2022 alone, Fox News reported, the companies spent $5.4 million on lobbying. Only Amazon.com ($19.7 million) and the parent companies of Google ($11 million) and Facebook ($19 million) spent more, according to OpenSecrets. In the fourth quarter of 2022, ByteDance spent $1.2…

After seeing promising results in Eastern Europe, Google will initiate a new campaign in Germany that aims to make people more resilient to the corrosive effects of online misinformation. The tech giant plans to release a series of short videos highlighting the techniques common to many misleading claims. The videos will appear as advertisements on platforms like Facebook, YouTube or TikTok in Germany. A similar campaign in India is also in the works. It's an approach called prebunking, which involves teaching people how to spot false claims before they encounter them. The strategy is gaining support among researchers and tech companies.  “There's a real appetite for solutions,” said Beth Goldberg, head of research and development at Jigsaw, an incubator division of Google that studies emerging social challenges. “Using ads as…

An uncrewed Russian supply ship docked at the International Space Station has lost cabin pressure, the Russian space corporation reported Saturday, saying the incident doesn't pose any danger to the station's crew. Roscosmos said the hatch between the station and the Progress MS-21 had been locked so the loss of pressure didn't affect the orbiting outpost. "The temperature and pressure on board the station are within norms and there is no danger to health and safety of the crew," it said in a statement. The space corporation didn't say what may have caused the cargo ship to lose pressure. Roscosmos noted that the cargo ship had already been loaded with waste before its scheduled disposal. The craft is set to be undocked from the station and deorbit to burn in…

Australia’s Defense Department will remove surveillance cameras made by Chinese Communist Party-linked companies from its buildings, the government said Thursday after the U.S. and Britain made similar moves. The Australian newspaper reported Thursday that at least 913 cameras, intercoms, electronic entry systems and video recorders developed and manufactured by Chinese companies Hikvision and Dahua are in Australian government and agency offices, including the Defense Department and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Hikvision and Dahua are partly owned by China's Communist Party-ruled government. Australian Defense Minister Richard Marles said his department is assessing all its surveillance technology. “Where those particular cameras are found, they’re going to be removed,” Marles told Australian Broadcasting Corp. “There is an issue here and we’re going to deal with it.” Asked about Australia's decision,…

Last November, Northeastern University student Andre Neto Caetano watched the live, late-night launch of NASA’s Artemis 1 from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on a cellphone placed on top of a piano in the lobby of the hotel where he was staying in California. “I had, not a flashback, but a flash-forward of seeing maybe Artemis 4 or something, and COBRA, as part of the payload, and it is on the moon doing what it was meant to do,” Caetano told VOA during a recent Skype interview. Artemis 1 launched the night before Caetano and his team of scholars presented their Crater Observing Bio-inspired Rolling Articulator (COBRA) rover project at NASA’s Breakthrough, Innovative, and Game Changing (BIG) Idea Challenge. The team hoped to impress judges assembled in the remote California…

The Australian government will examine surveillance technology used in offices of the defense department, Defense Minister Richard Marles said Thursday, amid reports the Chinese-made cameras installed there raised security risks. The move comes after Britain in November asked its departments to stop installing Chinese-linked surveillance cameras at sensitive buildings. Some U.S. states have banned vendors and products from several Chinese technology companies. "This is an issue and ... we're doing an assessment of all the technology for surveillance within the defense (department) and where those particular cameras are found, they are going to be removed," Marles told ABC Radio in an interview. Opposition lawmaker James Paterson said Thursday his own audit revealed almost 1,000 units of equipment by Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology and Dahua Technology, two partly state-owned Chinese firms,…

Former Twitter executives conceded Wednesday they made a mistake by blocking a story about Hunter Biden, the son of U.S. President Joe Biden, from the social media platform in the run-up to the 2020 election, but adamantly denied Republican assertions they were pressured by Democrats and law enforcement to suppress the story. "The decisions here aren't straightforward, and hindsight is 20/20," Yoel Roth, Twitter's former head of trust and safety, testified to Congress. "It isn't obvious what the right response is to a suspected, but not confirmed, cyberattack by another government on a presidential election." He added, "Twitter erred in this case because we wanted to avoid repeating the mistakes of 2016." The three former executives appeared before the House Oversight and Accountability Committee to testify for the first time…

A global ransomware outbreak has scrambled servers belonging to the U.S. state of Florida's Supreme Court and several universities in the United States and Central Europe, according to a Reuters analysis of ransom notes posted online to stricken servers. Those organizations are among more than 3,800 victims of a fast-spreading digital extortion campaign that locked up thousands of servers in Europe over the weekend, according to figures tallied by Ransomwhere, a crowdsourced platform that tracks digital extortion attempts and online ransom payments and whose figures are drawn from internet scans. Ransomware is among the internet's most potent scourges. Although this extortion campaign was not sophisticated, it drew warnings from national cyber watchdogs in part because of the speed of its spread. Ransomwhere did not name individual victims, but Reuters was…

Former Twitter employees are expected to testify next week before the House Oversight Committee about the social media platform's handling of reporting on President Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden. The scheduled testimony, confirmed by the committee Monday, will be the first time the three former executives will appear before Congress to discuss the company's decision to initially block from Twitter a New York Post article regarding Hunter Biden's laptop in the weeks before the 2020 election. Republicans have said the story was suppressed for political reasons, though no evidence has been released to support that claim. The witnesses for the February 8 hearing are expected to be Vijaya Gadde, former chief legal officer; James Baker, former deputy general counsel; and Yoel Roth, former head of safety and integrity. The hearing…

Microsoft is fusing ChatGPT-like technology into its search engine Bing, transforming an internet service that now trails far behind Google into a new way of communicating with artificial intelligence. The revamping of Microsoft's second-place search engine could give the software giant a head start against other tech companies in capitalizing on the worldwide excitement surrounding ChatGPT, a tool that's awakened millions of people to the possibilities of the latest AI technology. Along with adding it to Bing, Microsoft is also integrating the chatbot technology into its Edge browser. Microsoft announced the new technology at an event Tuesday at its headquarters in Redmond, Washington. Microsoft said a public preview of the new Bing was to launch Tuesday for users who sign up for it, but the technology will scale to millions…

Google is girding for a battle of wits in the field of artificial intelligence with "Bard," a conversational service aimed at countering the popularity of the ChatGPT tool backed by Microsoft. Bard initially will be available exclusively to a group of "trusted testers" before being widely released later this year, according to a Monday blog post from Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Google's chatbot is supposed to be able to explain complex subjects such as outer space discoveries in terms simple enough for a child to understand. It also claims the service will also perform other more mundane tasks, such as providing tips for planning a party, or lunch ideas based on what food is left in a refrigerator. Pichai didn't say in his post whether Bard will be able to…

As Russia’s targeted attacks on the Ukrainian energy infrastructure continue, Ukraine is forced to rethink its energy future. While inventing ways to quickly restore and improve the resilience of its energy system, Ukraine is also looking for green energy solutions. Anna Chernikova has the story from Irpin, one of the hardest-hit areas of the Kyiv region. Camera: Eugene Shynkar. ...

U.S. educators are debating the merits and risks of a new, free artificial intelligence tool called ChatGPT, which students are using to write passable high school essays. So far, there isn’t a reliable way to catch cheating. Matt Dibble has the story. ...

The war in Ukraine has left thousands of wounded soldiers, many of whom require the latest technologies to heal and return to normal life. For VOA, Anna Chernikova visited a rehabilitation center near Kyiv, where cutting edge technology and holistic care are giving soldiers hope. (Myroslava Gongadze contributed to this report. Camera: Eugene Shynkar )        ...

Cybersecurity agencies in Europe are warning of ransomware attacks exploiting a two-year-old computer bug as Italy experienced widespread internet outages.  The Italian premier's office said Sunday night the attacks affecting computer systems in the country involved "ransomware already in circulation" in a product made by cloud technology provider VMware.  A Friday technical bulletin from a French cybersecurity agency said the attack campaigns target VMware ESXi hypervisors, which are used to monitor virtual machines.  Palo Alto, California-based VMware fixed the bug back in February 2021, but the attacks are targeting older, unpatched versions of the product.  The company said in a statement Sunday that its customers should take action to apply the patch if they have not already done so.  "Security hygiene is a key component of preventing ransomware attacks," it…

Chatbots spouting falsehoods, face-swapping apps crafting porn videos, and cloned voices defrauding companies of millions — the scramble is on to rein in AI deepfakes that have become a misinformation super spreader. Artificial Intelligence is redefining the proverb "seeing is believing," with a deluge of images created out of thin air and people shown mouthing things they never said in real-looking deepfakes that have eroded online trust. "Yikes. (Definitely) not me," tweeted billionaire Elon Musk last year in one vivid example of a deepfake video that showed him promoting a cryptocurrency scam. China recently adopted expansive rules to regulate deepfakes but most countries appear to be struggling to keep up with the fast-evolving technology amid concerns that regulation could stymie innovation or be misused to curtail free speech. Experts warn…

Jurors on Friday cleared Elon Musk of liability for investors' losses in a fraud trial over his 2018 tweets falsely claiming that he had funding in place to take Tesla private. The tweets sent the Tesla share price on a rollercoaster ride, and Musk was sued by shareholders who said the tycoon acted recklessly in an effort to squeeze investors who had bet against the company. Jurors deliberated for barely two hours before returning to the San Francisco courtroom to say they unanimously agreed that neither Musk nor the Tesla board perpetrated fraud with the tweets and in their aftermath. "Thank goodness, the wisdom of the people has prevailed!" tweeted Musk, who had tried but failed to get the trial moved to Texas on the grounds jurors in California would…

Excitement around ChatGPT — an easy to use AI chatbot that can deliver an essay or computer code upon request and within seconds — has sent schools into panic and turned Big Tech green with envy. The potential impact of ChatGPT on society remains complicated and unclear even as its creator Wednesday announced a paid subscription version in the United States. Here is a closer look at what ChatGPT is (and is not): Is this a turning point?   It is entirely possible that November's release of ChatGPT by California company OpenAI will be remembered as a turning point in introducing a new wave of artificial intelligence to the wider public.   What is less clear is whether ChatGPT is actually a breakthrough with some critics calling it a brilliant…

Zimbabwe plans to build "Zim Cyber City," a modern capital expected to cost up to $60 billion in raised funds and include new government buildings and a presidential palace. Critics are blasting the plan as wasteful when more than half the population lives in poverty and the government has let the current capital, Harare, fall apart. Columbus Mavhunga reports from Mount Hampden, Zimbabwe. Camera: Blessing Chigwenhembe ...

Zimbabwe plans to build "Zim Cyber City," a modern capital expected to cost up to $60 billion in raised funds and include new government buildings and a presidential palace. Critics are blasting the plan as wasteful when more than half the population lives in poverty and the government has let the current capital, Harare, fall apart. Columbus Mavhunga reports from Mount Hampden, Zimbabwe. Camera: Blessing Chigwenhembe ...

Boeing bid farewell to an icon on Tuesday, delivering its final 747 jumbo jet as thousands of workers who helped build the planes over the past 55 years looked on.  Since its first flight in 1969, the giant yet graceful 747 has served as a cargo plane, a commercial aircraft capable of carrying nearly 500 passengers, a transport for NASA's space shuttles, and the Air Force One presidential aircraft. It revolutionized travel, connecting international cities that had never before had direct routes and helping democratize passenger flight.  But over about the past 15 years, Boeing and its European rival Airbus have introduced more profitable and fuel efficient wide-body planes, with only two engines to maintain instead of the 747's four. The final plane is the 1,574th built by Boeing in…

The maker of ChatGPT is trying to curb its reputation as a freewheeling cheating machine with a new tool that can help teachers detect if a student or artificial intelligence wrote that homework. The new AI Text Classifier launched Tuesday by OpenAI follows a weeks-long discussion at schools and colleges over fears that ChatGPT's ability to write just about anything on command could fuel academic dishonesty and hinder learning. OpenAI cautions that its new tool – like others already available – is not foolproof. The method for detecting AI-written text "is imperfect and it will be wrong sometimes," said Jan Leike, head of OpenAI's alignment team tasked to make its systems safer. "Because of that, it shouldn't be solely relied upon when making decisions," Leike said. Teenagers and college students…

China says it is “deeply concerned” over reports that the United States is moving to further restrict sales of American technology to Huawei, a tech company that U.S. officials have long singled out as a threat to national security for its alleged support of Beijing’s espionage efforts. As first reported by the Financial Times, the U.S. Department of Commerce has informed American firms that it will no longer issue licenses for technology exports to Huawei, thereby isolating the Shenzen-based company from supplies it needs to make its products. The White House and Commerce Department have not responded to VOA’s request for confirmation of the reports. But observers say the move may be the latest tactic in the Biden administration’s geoeconomics strategy as it comes under increasing Republican pressure to outcompete…

For New York teacher Michael Flanagan, the pandemic was a crash course in new technology — rushing out laptops to stay-at-home students and shifting hectic school life online. Students are long back at school, but the technology has lived on, and with it has come a new generation of apps that monitor the pupils online, sometimes round the clock and even on down days shared with family and friends at home. The programs scan students' online activity, social media posts and more — aiming to keep them focused, detect mental health problems and flag up any potential for violence. "You can't unring the bell," said Flanagan, who teaches social studies and economics. "Everybody has a device." The new trend for tracking, however, has raised fears that some of the apps…