Category: Technology

U.N. rights chief Volker Turk on Saturday urged Twitter's new owner, Elon Musk, to make respect for human rights central to the social network after he sacked around half the company's employees. Reports of Musk laying off the platform's entire human rights team were "not, from my perspective, an encouraging start," Turk said in an open letter. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights said he was writing with "concern and apprehension about our digital public square and Twitter's role in it.” He warned against propagating hate speech and misinformation and highlighted the need to protect user privacy. Musk, the richest person in the world, took control of the platform a week ago in a contentious deal. After completing his mammoth $44 billion acquisition, Musk quickly set about dissolving…

Twitter on Saturday launched a subscription service for $7.99 a month that includes a blue check now given only to verified accounts as new owner Elon Musk overhauls the platform's verification system just ahead of the U.S. midterm elections. In an update to Apple iOS devices, Twitter said users who "sign up now" can receive the blue check next to their names "just like the celebrities, companies and politicians you already follow." So far, verified accounts do not appear to be losing their checks. Anyone being able to get the blue check could lead to confusion and the rise of disinformation ahead of Tuesday's elections if impostors decide to pay for the subscription and co-opt the names of politicians and election officials. Along with widespread layoffs that began Friday, many…

Twitter began widespread layoffs Friday as new owner Elon Musk overhauls the company, raising grave concerns about chaos enveloping the platform and its ability to fight disinformation just days ahead of the U.S. midterm elections. The speed and size of the cuts also opened Musk and Twitter to lawsuits. At least one was filed Thursday in San Francisco alleging Twitter has violated federal law by not providing fired employees the required notice. The company had told workers by email that they would find out Friday if they had been laid off. It did not say how many of the roughly 7,500 employees would lose their jobs. Musk blames activists for drop in advertising Musk didn't confirm or correct investor Ron Baron at a Friday conference in New York when he…

Twitter Inc temporarily closed its offices on Friday after telling employees they would be informed by email later in the day about whether they are being laid off. The move follows a week of uncertainty about the company's future under new owner Elon Musk. The social media company said in an email to staff it would tell them by 9 a.m. Pacific time on Friday (12 p.m. EDT/1600 GMT) about staff cuts. "In an effort to place Twitter on a healthy path, we will go through the difficult process of reducing our global workforce on Friday," said the email sent on Thursday, seen by Reuters. Musk, the world's richest person, is looking to cut around 3,700 Twitter staff, or about half the workforce, as he seeks to slash costs and…

A new U.N. report finds agricultural automation can boost global food production and be a boon for small-scale farmers in developing countries. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, FAO, has just released The State of Food and Agriculture 2022 report. The report’s authors said automation is rapidly changing the face of agriculture. New technologies, they say, are quickly leaving behind some of the old larger-type tractors and large machinery in ways that could benefit small holders in developing countries. Parallels can be drawn with the introduction of cellphones. The World Bank, among other observers, notes African and other developing countries can harness digital technologies to boost their economies by advancing from landlines to smartphones. FAO said automation can play an important role in making food production more efficient and more…

The U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of protections for abortion rights has intensified scrutiny of the personal data that technology firms collect. For women who live in states where most abortions are now illegal, their smartphones and devices could be used against them. Tina Trinh reports. Camera: Saqib Ul Islam, Greg Flakus ...

Small farmers produce about one-third of the world's food. Yet they lack global visibility and face many obstacles getting their crops to larger markets.  A new app is helping to change that for some farmers in Africa. VOA’s Julie Taboh has more. Camera, production: Adam Greenbaum ...

Santa Clara, California-based chip producer Marvell Technology has confirmed that it is eliminating research and development staffs in China – the third U.S. chipmaker that has done so this year as the U.S.-China tech rivalry intensifies. Observers say this will hobble China’s chip ambitions and worsen its talent shortfall in the field of designing and manufacturing cutting-edge computer chips. “China is definitely going to be at a loss when it comes to American companies like Marvell essentially redesigning their workforce, because China still hasn't reached a point where it's able to pump out the same level of chip talent as America or the UK or Israel,” Abishur Prakash, a co-founder at Center for Innovating the Future (CIF) in Canada told VOA over the phone. China becoming off-limits These tech giants…

On Oct. 4, Elon Musk reversed himself and offered to honor his original proposal to buy Twitter for $44 billion — a deal he had spent the previous several months trying to wriggle out of. He posted a video of himself arriving at Twitter headquarters Wednesday, and Thursday evening new outlets announced the deal had been completed and Musk had fired at least two top Twitter executives. If the case has your head spinning, here's a quick guide to the major events in the saga featuring the billionaire Tesla CEO and the social platform. January 31: Musk starts buying shares of Twitter in near-daily installments, amassing a 5% stake in the company by mid-March. March 26: Musk, who has tens of millions of Twitter followers and is active on the…

Elon Musk became Twitter Inc's new owner on Thursday, firing top executives he had accused of misleading him and providing little clarity over how he will achieve the lofty ambitions he has outlined for the influential social media platform. The CEO of electric car maker Tesla Inc TSLA.O has said he wants to "defeat" spam bots on Twitter, make the algorithms that determine how content is presented to its users publicly available, and prevent the platform from becoming an echo chamber for hate and division, even as he limits censorship. Yet Musk has not offered details on how he will achieve all this and who will run the company. He has said he plans to cut jobs, leaving Twitter's approximately 7,500 employees fretting about their future. He also said on…

The United States is trying to make it easier for companies and organizations to bolster their cybersecurity in the face of growing attacks aimed at crippling their operations, stealing their data or demanding ransom payments. Officials with the Department of Homeland Security and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) rolled out their new Cybersecurity Performance Goals on Thursday, describing them as a critical but voluntary resource that will help companies and organizations make better decisions. "Really what these cybersecurity performance goals present is a menu of options to advance one's cybersecurity," Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told reporters, describing the rollout as a "watershed moment" for cybersecurity. "They are accessible, they are easy to understand, and they are identified according to the cost that each would entail, the complexity…

Elon Musk is telling Twitter advertisers he is buying the platform to "help humanity" and doesn't want it to become a "free-for-all hellscape" where anything can be said with no consequences. The message to advertisers posted Thursday on Twitter came a day before Musk's deadline for closing his $44 billion deal to buy the social-media company and take it private. "The reason I acquired Twitter is because it is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence," Musk wrote, in an unusually-long message for the billionaire Tesla CEO who typically projects his thoughts in one-line tweets He continued: "There is currently great danger that social media will splinter…

More frequent and severe droughts in Africa are hampering food production, especially in arid parts of the continent, where farmers struggle to eke out a living. A water retention system developed in the United States is helping African farmers fight the trend and improve crop yields in drought-affected areas. Under the scorching sun in the Ulilinzi village of southeastern Kenya, farmers are engaging in unique land preparations. They are installing in the ground specially designed polyethylene membranes that look like clear covers, to prevent the loss of moisture and nutrients from the soil. Exacerbated by drought from climate change, the sandy soil in this area, like in most arid and semi-arid areas, has made it nearly impossible to produce abundant crops. However, this new water retention technology developed in the…

As the U.S. military considers China’s military strength in the Indo-Pacific region, the U.S. Navy is turning to driverless ships to multiply its forces. VOA’s Jessica Stone takes us along for a closer look at this military innovation. Camera: Keith Lane ...

More frequent and severe droughts in Africa are hampering food production, especially in arid parts of the continent where farmers struggle to eke out a living. A water retention system developed in the U.S. is helping African farmers fight the trend and improve crop yields in drought-affected areas. Juma Majanga reports from Kibwezi, Kenya.   ...

The Biden administration's announcement earlier this month that it would ban the transfer of advanced U.S. semiconductor technology to China continues to reverberate through global markets. The ruling by the Department of Commerce affects not only U.S. firms that sell to China but any company whose products contain American semiconductor technology. In mainland China, according to Bloomberg News, officials from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology have been summoning executives from domestic semiconductor manufacturers to assess how being deprived of high-tech manufacturing tools from overseas would impact their businesses. And companies that rely on imports of high-end semiconductors are assessing the viability of their businesses going forward. In the U.S., semiconductor companies and other tech firms that count China among their largest single markets are facing potentially severe damage…

Solar panels have mushroomed on rooftops and on the ground in many parts of the world. But they also can be placed on bodies of water. As VOA’s chief national correspondent Steve Herman reports, the floating solar technology has taken off on a large scale in Asia and Europe and is now beginning to heat up in North America. ...

More and more, people are installing video doorbells and surveillance cameras in and around their homes to protect against unwanted intruders. But while many consumers feel the devices provide some peace of mind, some observers are concerned that they trigger personal biases toward those captured on camera. VOA’s Julie Taboh has this report. Michelle Quinn contributed. ...

Who said there is nothing new under the sun?  One of the hottest innovations for the non-polluting generation of electricity is floating photo-voltaics, or FPV, which involves anchoring solar panels in bodies of water, especially lakes, reservoirs and seas. Some projects in Asia incorporate thousands of panels to generate hundreds of megawatts. FPV got a head start in Asia and Europe where it makes a lot of economic sense with open land highly valued for agriculture. The first modest systems were installed in Japan and at a California winery in 2007 and 2008.   On land, a one-megawatt projects requires between one and 1.6 hectares.   Floating solar projects are even more attractive when they can be built on bodies of water adjacent to hydropower plants with existing transmission lines.  Most of…

Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s visit to Silicon Valley this week comes as the Biden administration is promoting more investment in technology but also enacting more restrictions on selling technology to businesses in China. Michelle Quinn reports. ...

Elon Musk said Saturday his rocket company, SpaceX, would continue to fund its Starlink internet service in Ukraine, citing the need for "good deeds," a day after he said it could no longer afford to do so. Musk tweeted: "the hell with it … even though starlink is still losing money & other companies are getting billions of taxpayer $, we'll just keep funding ukraine govt for free." Musk said Friday that SpaceX could not indefinitely fund Starlink in Ukraine. The service has helped civilians and military stay online during the war with Russia. Although it was not immediately clear whether Musk's change of mind was genuine, he later appeared to indicate it was. When a Twitter user told Musk "No good deed goes unpunished," he replied "Even so, we…

In a remote village in India, a siren can be heard from the local temple every night at 7 p.m. — signaling the commencement of a daily “digital detox.” For the next 90 minutes, the population of 3,000 in Sangli district’s Mohityanche Vadgaon lays aside all the electronic gadgets in the vicinity, including mobile phones and television sets. The second siren goes off at 8:30 p.m., indicating the end of the intermission. Until then, the villagers are encouraged to focus on activities such as reading, studying and engaging in verbal conversation with one another. Proponents of the initiative carried out at a village in the Maharashtra state of India say it is the solution to the “screen addiction” afflicting residents in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic and brings back…

Cybersecurity experts say that the October 10 attack on at least 14 U.S. airport websites, including those in Los Angeles and Chicago, appears to be the work of the Russian hacking group Killnet. As Mike O'Sullivan reports, the disruptions were a minor inconvenience for airline passengers, but experts say they highlight a major threat. ...

The websites for some major U.S. airports went down early Monday in an apparent coordinated denial-of-service attack, although officials said flights were not affected.  The attacks followed a call by a shadowy group of pro-Russian hackers that calls itself Killnet for coordinated denial-of-service attacks on the targets. The group published a target list on its Telegram channel.  "We noticed this morning that the external website was down, and our IT and security people are in the process of investigating," said Andrew Gobeil, a representative for Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. "There has been no impact on operations."  Portions of the public-facing side of the Los Angeles International Airport website were also disrupted, spokesperson Victoria Spilabotte said. "No internal airport systems were compromised and there were no operational disruptions."  Spilabotte said the…

China Saturday criticized the latest U.S. decision to tighten export controls that would make it harder for China to obtain and manufacture advanced computing chips, calling it a violation of international economic and trade rules that will “isolate and backfire” on the U.S. “Out of the need to maintain its sci-tech hegemony, the U.S. abuses export control measures to maliciously block and suppress Chinese companies,” said Foreign Ministry representative Mao Ning. “It will not only damage the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese companies, but also affect American companies’ interests,” she said. Mao also said that the U.S. “weaponization and politicization” of science and technology as well as economic and trade issues will not stop China’s progress. She was speaking after the U.S. on Friday updated export controls that included…

U.S. President Joe Biden signed an executive order Friday designed to allay European concerns that U.S. intelligence agencies are illegally spying on them. It promises strengthened safeguards against data collection abuses and creates a forum for legal challenges.  The order builds on a preliminary agreement Biden announced in March with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in a bid to end a yearslong battle over the safety of EU citizens' data that tech companies store in the U.S. However, the European privacy campaigner who triggered the battle wasn't satisfied that it resolved core issues and warned of more legal wrangling.  The reworked Privacy Shield "includes a robust commitment to strengthen the privacy and civil liberties safeguards for signals intelligence, which should ensure the privacy of EU personal data," Commerce…

The Biden administration on Friday published a sweeping set of export controls, including a measure to cut China off from certain semiconductor chips made anywhere in the world with U.S. tools, vastly expanding its reach in its bid to slow Beijing's technological and military advances.  The rules, some of which go into effect immediately, build on restrictions sent in letters earlier this year to top toolmakers KLA Corp., Lam Research Corp. and Applied Materials Inc., effectively requiring them to halt shipments of equipment to wholly Chinese-owned factories producing advanced logic chips.  The raft of measures could amount to the biggest shift in U.S. policy toward shipping technology to China since the 1990s.   If effective, they could set China's chip manufacturing industry back years by forcing American and foreign companies that…

The tumultuous saga of Elon Musk's on-again, off-again purchase of Twitter took a turn toward a conclusion Tuesday after the mercurial Tesla CEO proposed to buy the company at the originally agreed-on price of $44 billion.  Musk made the proposal in a letter to Twitter that the company disclosed in a filing Tuesday with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. It came less than two weeks before a trial between the two parties was scheduled to start in Delaware.  In a statement, Twitter said it intends to close the transaction at $54.20 per share after receiving the letter from Musk.  Trading in Twitter's stock, which had been halted for much of the day pending release of the news, resumed late Tuesday and soared 22% to close at $52.  Musk's proposal…