Category: Technology

Scientists in Alaska are developing a cloud-based approach to storing and analyzing data about volcanoes, in hopes of increasing the speed with which they can predict eruptions. Phil Dierking has our story. (Camera and Produced by: Philip Dierking) ...

Taipei — During China's top legislative meetings this year, which wrapped up Monday, Chinese leader Xi Jinping ordered the military to develop what he called "new quality combat capabilities,” a phrase analysts say highlights a focus on the use of artificial intelligence, high-tech and intelligent warfare. It also could signal, they say, plans to build forces of unmanned ships and submarines to support military operations. Speaking at a gathering of the People’s Liberation Army or PLA and Armed Police Force delegates to the National People's Congress late last week about “new quality combat capabilities,” Xi called on the military to deepen its reforms and promote innovation to enhance strategic capabilities in emerging areas. During the meeting, six representatives from the military spoke about a range of topics from defense capabilities in…

Once used mainly by law enforcement, ordinary citizens now have access to smaller, cheaper versions of body cameras to help them feel safe in dangerous situations. Julie Taboh shows us how in this week’s episode of LogOn.  ...

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NEW YORK — Former President Donald Trump said Monday that he still believes TikTok poses a national security risk but is opposed to banning the hugely popular app because doing so would help its rival, Facebook, which he continues to lambast over his 2020 election loss. Trump, in a call-in interview with CNBC's "Squawk Box," was asked about his comments last week that seemed to voice opposition to a bill being advanced by Congress that would effectively ban TikTok and other ByteDance apps from the Apple and Google app stores as well as U.S. web hosting services. "Frankly, there are a lot of people on TikTok that love it. There are a lot of young kids on TikTok who will go crazy without it," Trump told the hosts. "There's a lot…

Beijing, China — China has intensified efforts to block software that enables internet users to access banned websites during a top political meeting this week, a leading provider of firewall-leaping software told AFP. Beijing operates some of the world's most extensive censorship over the internet, with web users in mainland China unable to access everything from Google to news websites without using a virtual private network (VPN).  And as thousands of delegates gather in Beijing this week for the annual "Two Sessions" meeting, VPN software has increasingly struggled to circumvent the censorship while outages have become much more frequent, even when compared to previous sensitive political events. "Currently, there is increased censorship due to political meetings in China," a representative of the Liechtenstein-based service Astrill — one of the most popular…

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BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS — Microsoft said Friday it's still trying to evict the elite Russian government hackers who broke into the email accounts of senior company executives in November and who it said have been trying to breach customer networks with stolen access data. The hackers from Russia's SVR foreign intelligence service used data obtained in the intrusion, which Microsoft disclosed in mid-January, to compromise some source-code repositories and internal systems, the software giant said in a blog and a regulatory filing. A company spokesperson would not characterize what source code was accessed and what capability the hackers gained to further compromise customer and Microsoft systems. Microsoft said Friday that the hackers stole “secrets” from email communications between the company and unspecified customers — cryptographic secrets such as passwords, certificates and authentication…

Although NASA has delayed the launch of a crewed mission to orbit the moon until 2025 at the earliest, four selected astronauts are training in preparation for the first such journey in more than 50 years. VOA’s Kane Farabaugh caught up with the crew of Artemis II during training and has more from San Diego. ...

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LONDON — Europeans scrolling their phones and computers this week will get new choices for default browsers and search engines, where to download iPhone apps and how their personal online data is used. They're part of changes required under the Digital Markets Act, a set of European Union regulations that six tech companies classed as “gatekeepers” — Amazon, Apple, Google parent Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft and TikTok owner ByteDance — will have to start following by midnight Wednesday. The DMA is the latest in a series of regulations that Europe has passed as a global leader in reining in the dominance of large tech companies. Tech giants have responded by changing some of their long-held ways of doing business — such as Apple allowing people to install smartphone apps outside of its…

Washington — Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram were back up on Tuesday after a more than two-hour outage that was caused by a technical issue and impacted hundreds of thousands of users globally. The disruptions started at around 10:00 a.m. ET (1500 GMT), with many users saying on rival social media platform X they had been booted out of Facebook and Instagram and were unable to log in. "We are aware of the incident and at this time, we are not aware of any specific malicious cyber activity at this time," a spokesperson for the White House National Security Council said. At the peak of the outage, there were more than 550,000 reports of disruptions for Facebook and about 92,000 for Instagram, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com. "Earlier today, a technical…

The World Bank says digital entrepreneurship is paving the way for economic empowerment across Nigeria and reducing poverty through internet access. In a January report, the Bank says internet access reduced extreme poverty by 7% in the West African country. But it noted a digital gender gap where women are less likely than men to have internet access. Gibson Emeka reports from Abuja in this report narrated by Mary Alice Salinas. ...

The latest innovation in artificial intelligence is photo-realistic video created from just a few words. Deana Mitchell has the story. ...

London — The European Union leveled its first antitrust penalty against Apple on Monday, fining the U.S. tech giant nearly $2 billion for breaking the bloc's competition laws by unfairly favoring its own music streaming service over rivals. Apple banned app developers from "fully informing iOS users about alternative and cheaper music subscription services outside of the app," said the European Commission, the 27-nation bloc's executive arm and top antitrust enforcer. "This is illegal, and it has impacted millions of European consumers," Margrethe Vestager, the EU's competition commissioner, said at a news conference. Apple behaved this way for almost a decade, which meant many users paid "significantly higher prices for music streaming subscriptions," the commission said. The 1.8 billion-euro fine follows a long-running investigation triggered by a complaint from Swedish streaming…

washington — Speaking Mandarin and promoting love for China, countless videos of foreign-looking women made with artificial intelligence started popping up on Chinese social media platforms around the Lunar New Year earlier this month. The avatars in the videos are created with online images that are stolen, reproduced and repurposed so that even the women in real life recognize themselves in the videos. Olga Loiek is one of those women. She’s a 20-year-old Ukrainian who studies cognitive science at the University of Pennsylvania. A couple of months ago, Loiek started a YouTube channel where she talks about mental health and shares her philosophies about life. However, shortly after that, she started receiving messages from followers telling her that they had seen her on Chinese social media. There, she's not Olga Loiek…

WASHINGTON — U.S. security officials are bracing for an onslaught of fast-paced influence operations, from a wide range of adversaries, aimed at impacting the country’s coming presidential election. FBI Director Christopher Wray issued the latest warning about attempts to meddle with American voters as they decide whom to support when they go to the polls come November, telling a meeting of security professional Thursday that technologies such as artificial intelligence are already altering the threat landscape. “This election cycle, the U.S. will face more adversaries moving at a faster pace and enabled by new technology,” Wray said. “Advances in generative AI [artificial intelligence], for instance, are lowering the barrier to entry, making it easier for both more and less sophisticated foreign adversaries to engage in malign influence while making foreign influence…

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Artificial intelligence touches nearly every aspect of our digital lives, but there are few laws governing its use. In this episode of our web series about AI, VOA’s Tina Trinh looks at how lawmakers and tech developers are making rules for something that is changing nearly every day. ...

washington — Rights advocates are urging international social media platforms to do more to prevent Chinese authorities from obtaining the personal information of users. The call comes after two popular Chinese social media influencers alleged on X and YouTube that police in China were investigating their followers and had called some in for questioning. Social media platforms such as X and YouTube and thousands of websites — from The New York Times to the BBC and VOA — are blocked in China by the country's Great Firewall. But increasingly, even as social controls tighten under the leadership of Xi Jinping, many in China are using virtual private networks to access X, YouTube and other sites for news, information and opinions not available in China. Li Ying, who is also known online…

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The latest innovation in artificial intelligence is photorealistic video created from just a few words. Deana Mitchell has the story in this week’s episode of LogOn. ...

STATE DEPARTMENT — With a science and technology agreement between the United States and People’s Republic of China due to expire Tuesday, the State Department said it is negotiating to "amend, extend, and strengthen protections within" the agreement but declined to specify if the U.S. would extend the deal. “We are not able to provide information at this time on specific U.S. negotiating positions or on whether the agreement will be extended past its current expiration date,” a State Department spokesperson told VOA. The Science and Technology Cooperation Agreement is a framework for U.S. governmental collaborations with China in science and technology.   U.S. officials have said the STA provides consistent standards for government-to-government scientific cooperation between the U.S. and China.   While the agreement supports scientific collaboration in areas that…

SHANGHAI — Two prominent Chinese bloggers in exile said that police were investigating their millions of followers on international social media platforms, in an escalation of Beijing’s attempts to clamp down on critical speech even outside of the country’s borders. Former state broadcaster CCTV journalist Wang Zhi’an and artist-turned-dissident Li Ying, both Chinese citizens known for posting uncensored Chinese news, said in separate posts Sunday that police were interrogating people who followed them on social media, and urged followers to take precautions such as unfollowing their accounts, changing their usernames, avoiding Chinese-made phones and preparing to be questioned. Li Ying, known as Teacher Li, came to prominence as a source of news about the White Paper protests, a rare moment of anti-government protests in mainland China in 2022. Teacher Li's account…