Dutch ASML said on Thursday it had been the victim of corporate espionage in 2015 involving employees from countries including China but said it had not been the target of any “national conspiracy.”

ASML said the perpetrators took “large files” on memory sticks from its Silicon Valley software subsidiary that develops software for machine optimization. It said it had since taken action to make such theft much more difficult.

Following publication of a story in Dutch daily newspaper Financieele Dagblad (FD) that said ASML had been struck by Chinese espionage, the company took issue with that label. “The suggestion that we were somehow victim of a national conspiracy is wrong,” CEO Peter Wennink said in a statement.

“We resent any suggestion that this event should have any implication for ASML conducting business in China. Some of the individuals (involved) happened to be Chinese nationals,” he added.

The Dutch company welcomed a Sino-European agreement earlier this week, which promised that Beijing would no longer force foreign companies to share sensitive know-how when operating in China.

“Can we prudently do business in China? Yes of course. This was a rotten apple,” ASML said in an earlier statement.

ASML is the dominant maker of lithography systems, used to trace out the circuitry of semiconductor chips.

Its sales to China more than doubled to 1.8 billion euros ($2 billion) in 2018 as Beijing drives growth of its domestic semiconductor industry, now accounting for about a sixth of ASML’s total sales.

California case

The FD story was based in part on ASML sources and in part on documents from the Santa Clara, California Superior Court that showed six former ASML employees, all with Chinese names, breached their employment contract by sharing information on ASML software processes with a company called XTAL Inc.

The FD reported that XTAL, which makes electrical design automation for semiconductor systems, is a subsidiary of a China-based company called Dongfang Jingyuan, which it said in turn has ties to the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology.

In its reaction, ASML said XTAL’s funding came from “South Korea and China.” It said the aim of the theft was to create a competing product and sell it to an existing ASML customer in South Korea.

The company confirmed the FD’s report that the court had awarded ASML $223 million in damages.

“It is unclear to what extent these damages can be collected from the now bankrupt company XTAL,” ASML said.

ASML shares slipped 1.5 percent by 1210 GMT to the bottom of a flat European technology index.

ASML’s major customers include Samsung of South Korea, TSMC of Taiwan and Intel of the United States.

The Dutch intelligence agency has included warnings in its annual threat assessments for the past several years, saying that China is targeting tech companies in the Netherlands, as it does in other countries, for intellectual property theft.

In a reaction, the intelligence agency AIVD said it could not comment on individual cases.

“In a broader sense, the greatest threat of economic espionage comes from China,” it said in an email to Reuters. “The Netherlands is an attractive target, other countries are interested in our information in science and technical expertise.”
…

Amazon challenged its retail rivals to raise their wages and improve benefits, saying the competition will help everyone.

CEO and founder Jeff Bezos said in a letter to shareholders Thursday that as Amazon grows, so does the size of its “failed experiments.”

He said Amazon is willing to continue to take risks and learn from its failures, while simultaneously supporting successful areas of its business like its third-party sellers and retail locations.

Bezos named the Fire phone as a failure, but Echo and Alexa as successes.

He also touted third-party sales of $160 billion and Amazon Go stores, saying Amazon is “excited about the future.”
…

The world will need new breakthroughs to tackle the growing threat of climate change. Whoever comes up with them stands to make a lot of money. And the places where those entrepreneurs do business will reap the benefits. Greentown Labs outside Boston, Massachusetts, wants to play a major role in spawning new clean technology. VOA’s Steve Baragona went to have a look.
…

Facebook says it is rolling out a wide range of updates aimed at combatting the spread of false and harmful information on the social media site.

The updates will limit the visibility of links found to be significantly more prominent on Facebook than across the web as a whole. The company is also expanding its fact-checking program with outside expert sources, including The Associated Press, to vet videos and other material posted on Facebook.

Facebook groups will also be more closely monitored to prevent the spread of fake information.

The company has been facing criticism for the spread of extremism and misinformation on its flagship site and on Instagram. Congress members questioned a company representative Tuesday about how Facebook prevents violent material from being uploaded and shared on the site.
…

The top U.S. diplomat for cybersecurity policy has praised Germany’s draft security standards for next generation mobile networks, which he said could effectively shut out China’s Huawei.

Rob Strayer said Wednesday the standards published last month were a “positive step.”

They call for mobile providers to use “trustworthy” telecom equipment suppliers that comply with national security regulations covering secrecy of communications and data protection.

The U.S. has been lobbying European allies to ban Huawei from new 5G networks over concerns China’s communist leaders could force the company to use its equipment for cyberespionage.

While no European countries have issued blanket bans, Strayer said a “risk-based” approach to evaluating telecom suppliers, including their relationship with their national government, would “lead inevitably” to banning Huawei.
…

The live-streamed video of the Christchurch, New Zealand, mosque shooting last month highlighted the continuing struggle by social media companies to police extremist content on their platforms. Facebook and Google representatives told U.S. lawmakers Tuesday the effort to balance free speech with oversight of white supremacist content is ongoing. VOA’s congressional correspondent Katherine Gypson has more from Capitol Hill.
…

Futuristic electric flying taxis like those seen in the movie “Blade Runner” could offer a more sustainable – and much faster – way to travel long distances than traditional car journeys, academics at the University of Michigan said on Tuesday.

Several firms are working to develop car-sized vertical takeoff and landing aircraft (VTOLs) that can lift passengers above congestion, cruise at over 100 miles per hour (160 km), and land in small spaces within crowded urban centers.

The vehicles could slash greenhouse gas emissions in half for three people on a 100-km (62-mile) trip, said researchers, though much of the savings come by assuming passengers will be more willing to share their space than they are in cars.

“It was very surprising to see that VTOLs were competitive with regard to energy use and greenhouse gas emissions in certain scenarios,” said Gregory Keoleian, from the university’s Center for Sustainable Systems, in a statement.

“VTOLs with full occupancy could outperform ground-based cars for trips from San Francisco to San Jose or from Detroit to Cleveland, for example.”

Academics working with researchers at the carmaker Ford found that VTOLs require a large amount of energy to take-off and climb but they were more efficient than cars once cruising.

As a result, they produced more emissions than land vehicles over short trips of the type which account for most journeys, but were more efficient over longer distances, according to the study in the journal Nature Communications.

Researchers also argued each seat in a flying taxi is likely to be sold separately, as is the case with planes, meaning they would normally be fully occupied unlike cars which have an average occupancy of about between one and two people.

A flying taxi holding one pilot and three passengers could make a 100-km trip in about 27 minutes, said researchers.

It would produce about 52 percent less greenhouse gas per passenger than two petrol-powered vehicles making the same journey by road, they calculated, and 6 percent less than two electric cars.

However, if the VTOL had just one occupant, the emissions savings would be reduced to 35 percent compared to one petrol car and would be 28 percent higher than one electric vehicle.

Despite the appeal of flying cars, it is “a fantasy” to imagine they could offer sustainable mass transport, said Jemilah Magnusson of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy.

“A much more efficient and easier way to improve the state of long-distance car travel is to provide public transit options and to provide incentives for people to not drive solo in their cars,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

The University of Michigan study did not offer a timeline of when to expect VTOLs to take passengers on their first flights.
…

Facebook says it will use artificial intelligence to help find profiles of people who have died so their friends and family members won’t get, for instance, painful reminders about their birthdays.

The social network said Tuesday that it is also adding a “tributes” section to accounts that have been memorialized, that is, designated as belonging to someone who has died. Friends and family members will be able to write posts and share photos in this section to remember their loved one.

Facebook is also tightening its rules around who can memorialize an account. Until now, anyone could do this by sending the company proof that someone had died, such an obituary. Now, it will have to be a friend or family member.

The company made the changes in response to users’ experiences with seeing their loved ones’ profiles pop up on Facebook after they had died. Sometimes, the company said people might not be ready to memorialize a person’s profile immediately after their death — it can feel like a big step they are not ready to take. Facebook says it will use AI to prevent that profile from showing up in places it might cause distress, such as in birthday reminders.

Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, whose husband died unexpectedly in 2015, is one of those users. She said seeing tributes to her late husband on Facebook have helped her cope with her grief.

“I want his memory to stay alive,” she said. “Remember specific and wonderful things.”
…

Virgin Galactic’s first test passenger received her commercial astronaut wings from the U.S. aviation regulator on Tuesday after flying on the company’s rocket plane to evaluate the customer experience in February.

Virgin Galactic’s chief astronaut instructor, Beth Moses, who is a former NASA engineer, became the first woman to fly to space on a commercial vehicle when she joined pilots David Mackay and Mike Masucci on SpaceShipTwo VSS Unity.

The wings were presented to the three-person crew at the 35th Space Symposium in Colorado by the Federal Aviation Administration’s associate administrator for commercial space, Wayne Monteith.

“Commercial human space flight is now a reality,” he said.

The February test flight nudged Richard Branson’s space travel company closer to delivering suborbital flights for the more than 600 people who have paid Virgin Galactic about $80 million in deposits. Branson has said he hopes to be the first passenger on a commercial flight in 2019.

The 90-minute flight, during which passengers will be able to experience a few minutes of weightlessness and see the Earth’s curvature, costs $250,000 — a price that the company said will increase before it falls.

Jeff Bezo’s Blue Origin and Elon Musk’s SpaceX are also in the space tourism race. Blue Origin has launched its New Shepard rocket to space, but its trips have not yet carried humans.

SpaceX last year named Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa as its first passenger on a voyage around the moon, tentatively scheduled for 2023.

Moses, who as a NASA engineer worked on the assembly of the International Space Station, is designing a three-day training program for Virgin Galactic’s future space tourists.

“I gleaned a lot of firsthand information that we can roll into the design and then also into the training,” she said on her return to earth in Mojave, California, in February.

The passengers, some of whom have been signed up since 2004, will train in a mock-up cabin at New Mexico’s Spaceport America before their flights.

Moses told Reuters she aims for customers to arrive in space “not wondering what noise they just heard or being surprised by the G they just felt.”

Virgin Galactic’s Branson will also receive the annual Space Achievement Award at the symposium in recognition of the company’s two crewed test flights, the first from U.S. soil since the final Space Shuttle mission in 2011.
…

Two U.S. senators introduced a bill on Tuesday to ban online social media companies like Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. from tricking consumers into giving up their personal data.

|

The bill from Mark Warner, a Democrat, and Deb Fischer, a Republican, would also ban online platforms with more than 100 million monthly active users from designing addicting games or other websites for children under age 13.

The bill takes aim at practices that online platforms use to mislead people into giving personal data to companies or otherwise trick them. The so-called “dark patterns” were developed using behavioral psychology.

“Misleading prompts to just click the ‘OK’ button can often transfer your contacts, messages, browsing activity, photos, or location information without you even realizing it,” Fischer said in a statement issued by both senators.

Restrictions on how social media companies collect information about users could hurt their ability to sell advertisements, a key source of profit.

A website aimed at tracking dark patterns identifies behavior, such as a website or app showing that a user has new notifications when they do not.

Warner said in an interview on CNBC that the legislation could be included in a federal privacy bill that lawmakers in the Senate Commerce Committee are drafting. Congress has been expected to take up privacy legislation after California passed a strict privacy law that goes into effect next year.

Warner noted that Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, Google and others have expressed support for privacy regulation.

“The platform companies are now going to have an opportunity to put their money where their mouth is, to see if they support this legislation and other approaches,” he said.

The bill would bar companies from choosing groups of people for behavioral experiments unless the companies get informed consent.

Under the terms of the bill, social media companies would create a professional standards body to create best practices to deal with the issue. The Federal Trade Commission, which investigates deceptive advertising, would work with the group.

Facebook, Google, Twitter and other free online services rely on advertising for revenue, and use data collected on users to more effectively target those ads.

 
…

U.S. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said on Tuesday a Democratic bid to restore the 2015 net neutrality rules is “dead on arrival in the Senate.”

The U.S. House of Representatives is set to vote later on Tuesday on a Democratic plan to reinstate the Obama-era rules and overturn a December 2017 decision by the Federal Communications Commission to reverse the rules and hand sweeping authority to internet providers to recast how Americans access the internet.

The bill mirrors an effort last year to reverse the FCC’s order, approved on a 3-2 vote, that repealed rules barring providers from blocking or slowing internet content or offering paid “fast lanes.”

The reversal of net neutrality rules was a win for internet providers such as Comcast Corp, AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc., but was opposed by companies like Facebook Inc., Amazon.com Inc and Alphabet Inc.

On Monday, the White House told Congress that if the bill were approved, President Donald Trump’s advisers would recommend he veto it. The White House “strongly opposes” the measure that would “return to the heavy-handed regulatory approach of the previous administration,” it said in a statement.

The bill would repeal the order introduced by FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, bar the FCC from reinstating it or a substantially similar order and reinstate the 2015 net neutrality order. The House will also consider a series of amendments.

Representative Mike Doyle, a Democrat, said Tuesday the bill “puts a cop on the beat to make sure our internet service providers aren’t acting in an unjust, unreasonable or discriminatory way.”

 
…

A congressional hearing on online hate turned into a vivid demonstration of the problem Tuesday when a YouTube livestream of the proceedings was bombarded with racist and anti-Semitic comments.

YouTube disabled the live chat section of the streaming video about 30 minutes into the hearing because of what it called “hateful comments.”

The incident came as executives at Google and Facebook appeared before the House Judiciary Committee to answer questions about the companies’ role in the spread of hate crimes and the rise of white nationalism in the U.S. 

They were joined by leaders of such human rights organizations as the Anti-Defamation League and the Equal Justice Society.

Neil Potts, Facebook director of public policy, and Alexandria Walden, counsel for free expression and human rights at Google, condemned the spread of hate crimes and defended company policies that prohibit material that incites violence or hate.

“There is no place for terrorism or hate on Facebook,” Potts testified. “We remove any content that incites violence.”

The hearing was prompted by the mosque shootings last month in Christchurch, New Zealand, that left 50 people dead. The gunman livestreamed the attacks on Facebook and published a long post online that espoused white supremacist views. 

But controversy over white nationalism and hate speech has dogged online platforms such as Facebook and Google’s YouTube for years. 

In 2017, following the deadly violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, tech giants began banishing extremist groups and individuals espousing white supremacist views and support for violence. In March, Facebook extended its ban to white nationalists.

Despite the ban, accounts such as one with the name Aryan Pride were still visible as of late Monday. The account read: “IF YOUR NOT WHITE friend ur own kind cause Im not ur friend.”

On Wednesday a Senate subcommittee will hold a hearing on allegations that companies such as Facebook, Google and Twitter are biased against conservatives, an allegation leveled by political figures from President Donald Trump on down. 

The companies have denied any such bias.

 
…