British Prime Minister Theresa May and French President Emmanuel Macron are joining forces in order to crack down on tech companies, ensuring they step up their efforts to combat terrorism online.

Britain and France face similar challenges in fighting homegrown Islamist extremism and share similar scars from deadly attacks that rocked London, Manchester, Paris and Nice.

May traveled to Paris on Tuesday to hold talks on counterterrorism measures and Britain’s departure from the European Union.

She said major internet companies had failed to live up to prior commitments to do more to prevent extremists from finding a “safe space” online. Macron urged other European countries, especially Germany, to join the effort to fight Islamist extremist propaganda on the Web.

The campaign includes exploring the possibility of legal penalties against tech companies if they fail to take the necessary action to remove unacceptable content, May said.

After the Islamic State group recruited hundreds of French fighters largely through online propaganda, France introduced legislation ordering French providers to block certain content, but it acknowledges that any such effort must reach well beyond its borders. Tech-savvy Macron has lobbied for tougher European rules, but details of his plans remain unclear.

Britain already has tough measures, including a law known informally as the Snooper’s Charter, which gives authorities the powers to look at the internet browsing records of everyone in the country.

Among other things, the law requires telecommunications companies to keep records of all users’ Web activity for a year, creating databases of personal information that the firms worry could be vulnerable to leaks and hackers.
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Fake news, propaganda and disinformation has always existed. What sets today apart from years gone by is its rapid dissemination and global reach, experts say. 

Concerns raised by the instant propagation of fake news in the digital age and the harmful impact it has on the credibility and independence of journalism, democratic values and human rights were examined by a panel of experts Tuesday at a side event of the United Nations Human Rights Council.

“It is interesting how the perception of the term fake news has evolved and been manipulated because it described fabricated, inflammatory content, which very often is distributed through social media,” said Thomas Hajnoczi, Austrian Ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva.

He said this posed dangers because “in our digital age, every individual has access to the internet where fake stories can be read by millions around the globe, and for many it is always hard to know what is true and what is incorrect.”

Eileen Donahoe, executive director of the Center for International Governance Innovation at Stanford University and former U.S. ambassador to the Human Rights Council, called digital technology a force for good.

She said it has played “a very positive role in facilitating the free flow of information, access to information, blossoming of freedom of expression globally.

“It has also made possible the democratization of the means of distributing media and information.  And, it just generally has been a positive force for the human rights movement.”

However, Donahoe warned that there were many forces working in the opposite direction and there was no guarantee that digital technology “would be a net force for good.”

She singled out emerging dangers from the so-called weaponization of information in the post-Brexit, post-U.S. presidential election world.

“It can be a very potent force in undermining democratic discourse and disrupting democratic processes, and that fake news … itself destroys the quality of discourse in democracy and undermines the relationship between citizens and their government,” Donahoe said.

Speaking from personal experience, Rasha Abdulla, associate professor in the Journalism and Mass Communication department at the American University of Cairo, agreed.

She said that in the past few weeks, her government has been blocking websites, particularly news websites.

“Right now, we are estimating that between 53 and 57 websites, mostly news websites, independent websites, have been blocked.

“So, if you block sources to proper independent journalism, you are only left with fake news. I mean, where else are you going to get the news,” Abdulla said.

Social media groups such as Facebook, Twitter and Google have come under increasing criticism for producing and swiftly disseminating fake news on their sites.

Peter Cunliffe-Jones, chairman of the International Fact-Checking Network, an umbrella organization for independent nonpartisan fact-checking organizations, noted that tech companies have been coming under a lot of pressure — particularly in the U.S. election — to put the brakes on fake news.

“We have been seeing since then, Google, Twitter, Facebook and other platforms starting to work on strategy to tackle, themselves, the fake news problem at their level,” he said.

For example, he said that Facebook has agreed in several countries to work with independent nonpartisan fact-checking organizations to examine disputed claims of fake news signaled by Facebook users.

“We are living in what I think of as an age of information hysteria,” said David Kaye, U.N. special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression. “The easiest way to deal with information we do not like is to censor it, to shut it down, to block a website.”

He called censorship a lazy way to deal with information we do not like.

“I think there is a growing dissatisfaction with freedom of expression and it is simply reflected by states. I am not saying that fake news, or whatever we want to call it — disinformation or propaganda — is not a problem,” said Kaye. “But what I am saying is that we should not be moving toward solutions … that are all about prohibition and censorship.”
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Apple Inc. offered a $1 billion bond dedicated to financing clean energy and environmental projects on Tuesday, the first corporate green bond offered since President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris climate agreement.

The offering comes over a year after Apple issued its first green bond of $1.5 billion — the largest issued by a U.S. corporation — as a response to the 2015 Paris agreement.

Apple said its second green bond is meant to show that businesses are still committed to the goals of the 194-nation accord.

“Leadership from the business community is essential to address the threat of climate change and protect our shared planet,” said Lisa Jackson, Apple’s vice president of environment, policy and social initiatives.

Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook was one of several CEOs who directly appealed to Trump to keep the United States in the pact before he made his decision.

The tech giant said proceeds from the green bond sales will be used to finance renewable energy, energy efficiency at Apple facilities and in its supply chain and procuring safer materials for its products.

The offering also includes a specific focus on helping Apple meet a goal of greening its supply chain and using only renewable resources or recycled material, reducing its need to mine rare earth materials.

Last year, Apple allocated $442 million to 16 different projects from renewable energy to recycling from its first bond offer.

One of the projects it funded was a robotic system called Liam to take apart junked iPhones and recover valuable materials that can be recycled, such as silver and tungsten — an attempt to address criticism that Apple’s products, while sleek and

seamless in design, are so tightly constructed that their components can be difficult to take apart.

Although green bonds comprise a small fraction of the overall bond market, demand has grown significantly as investors seek lower-carbon investments.

In 2016, $81 billion of green bonds were issued, double the number from 2015, according to the Climate Bonds Initiative, an organization that promotes the use of green bonds.

Governments are also embracing the use of green bonds as a way to meet a 2015 pledge by world leaders to limit global warming this century to below 2 degrees Celsius.

 
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General Motors says it has built 130 self-driving Chevrolet Bolt electric cars at a factory in suburban Detroit.

The cars are equipped with GM’s second-generation self-driving software and equipment. They will join 50 self-driving Bolts that are already being tested in San Francisco; Scottsdale, Arizona; and the Detroit area.

CEO Mary Barra says GM is the first automaker to assemble self-driving vehicles in a mass-production facility. GM has been building self-driving Bolts at its Orion Assembly Plant since January.

Barra says GM eventually plans to place the self-driving Bolts in ride-hailing fleets in major U.S. cities, but she gave no target date. She says the new vehicles will help GM accelerate its testing in urban environments.
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Augmented reality is slowly entering everyday life, and Swiss researchers say it can be used to study children’s behavior. A new app for tablet computers helps them study whether playing computer games can lead to something called augmented creativity. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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Two cybersecurity firms said they have uncovered malicious software that they believe caused a December 2016 Ukraine power outage, warning that the malware could be easily modified to harm critical infrastructure operations

around the globe.

ESET, a Slovakian anti-virus software maker, and Dragos Inc, a U.S. critical-infrastructure security firm, on Monday released detailed analyses of the malware, known as Industroyer or Crash Override. They said they had also issued private alerts to governments and infrastructure operators in a bid to help them defend against the threat.

They said they did not know who was behind the December Ukraine cyberattack. Ukraine has blamed Russia, though officials in Moscow have repeatedly denied blame.

Still, the security firms warned there could be more attacks using the same approach, either by the group that built the malware or copycats who modify the malicious software.

“The malware is really easy to re-purpose and use against other targets. That is definitely alarming,” said ESET malware researcher Robert Lipovsky. “This could cause wide-scale damage to infrastructure systems that are vital.”

Dragos founder Robert M. Lee said the malware is capable of attacking power systems across Europe and could be leveraged against the United States “with small modifications.”

It is capable of causing outages of up to a few days in portions of a nation’s grid, but is not potent enough to bring down a country’s entire grid, Lee said.

With modifications, the malware could attack other types of infrastructure including local transportation providers, water and gas providers, Lipovsky said.

Industroyer is only the second piece of malware uncovered to date that is capable of disrupting industrial processes without the need for hackers to manually intervene after gaining remote access to the infected system.

The first, Stuxnet, was discovered in 2010 and is widely believed by security researchers to have been used by the United States and Israel to attack Iran’s nuclear program.

A spokesman for Ukraine’s state cyber police said it was not clear whether the malware was used in the December 2016 attack because the security firms had not provided authorities with the samples they had analyzed.

Representatives with Ukraine’s state-run Computer Emergency Response Team, which advises businesses on defending against cyberattacks, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The Kremlin and Russia’s Federal Security Service did not immediately reply to requests for comment.

Crash Override can be detected if a utility specifically monitors its network for abnormal traffic, including signs that the malware is searching for the location of substations or sending messages to switch breakers, according to Lee, a former U.S. Air Force cyber warfare operations officer.

Malware has been used in other disruptive attacks on industrial targets, including the 2015 Ukraine power outage, but in those cases human intervention was required to interfere with operations.

ESET said it had been analyzing the malware for several months and had held off on going public to preserve the integrity of investigations into the power system hack.

It said it last week shared samples with Dragos, which said it was able to independently verify that it was used in the Ukraine grid attack.
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Researchers say they’ve discovered a worrying breed of power grid-wrecking software, saying the program was likely responsible for a brief blackout that hit Kyiv, Ukraine, late last year.

Slovakia-based computer security company ESET and Maryland-based Dragos, Inc. said in a report published Monday that the malicious software has the ability to control the switches and circuit breakers – a nightmare scenario for those charged with keeping the lights on.

Policymakers have long ranked malware that can remotely sabotage industrial computers among some of the world’s most dangerous threats because of its potential to deal immense damage across the internet.

The researchers stopped just short of blaming the malware for the Ukrainian power outage on December 17, 2016.

Ukrainian officials didn’t immediately return a message seeking comment on the report.
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The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday ruled in favor of Microsoft Corp in its bid to

fend off class action claims by Xbox 360 owners who said the popular video game console gouges discs because of a design defect.

The court, in a 8-0 ruling, overturned a 2015 decision by the San Francisco- based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that allowed console owners to appeal the dismissal of their class action lawsuit by a federal judge in Seattle in 2012.

Typically parties cannot appeal a class certification ruling until the entire case has reached a conclusion. But the 9th Circuit allowed the console owners to voluntarily dismiss their lawsuit so they could immediately appeal the denial of a class certification.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing on behalf of the court, said such a move was not permitted because a voluntary dismissal of a lawsuit is not a final decision and thus cannot be appealed.

The Xbox console owners filed a proposed class action against Microsoft in federal court in 2011, saying the design of the console was defective and that its optical disc drive could not withstand even small vibrations.

The company said class certification was improper because just 0.4 percent of Xbox owners reported disc scratches, and that misuse was the cause.
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Do you ever wonder what could be done with all of those street views and Instagram photos of your favorite city? Well, a group of technical experts has taken all that data and turned it into an amazingly detailed 3D city map. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Anyone who has waited on a long, snaking line to get into a fashion exhibit at a top museum knows just how popular they’ve become — and more broadly, how fashion is increasingly seen as a form of artistic and cultural expression.

Google is acknowledging this reality by expanding its Google Art Project — launched in 2011 to link users with art collections around the world, online — to include fashion.

The new initiative, “We Wear Culture,” which launched Thursday, uses Google’s technology to connect fashion lovers to collections and exhibits at museums and other institutions, giving them the ability to not only view a garment, but to zoom in on the hem of a dress, examine a sleeve or a bit of embroidery on a gown up close, wander around an atelier, or sit down with Metropolitan Museum of Art costume restorers.

The project partners with more 180 cultural institutions, including the Met’s Costume Institute, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, Japan’s Kyoto Costume Institute, and the Musee des Arts Decoratifs in Paris. It comprises over 30,000 garments.

The site also offers specially curated exhibits. You can click your way to, for example, a curated photo exhibit on Tokyo Street Style, or an exploration of women’s gowns in the 18th century. You can search by designer, or by their muse — examining, say, Marilyn Monroe’s love of Ferragamo stiletto heels, via the Museo Salvatore Ferragamo in Florence, Italy.

At a preview demonstration this week, Amit Sood, director of the Google Cultural Institute and designer of the Google Art Project (now called Google Arts & Culture) explained that he wasn’t initially clued into the possibilities for fashion, because at the tech giant, “we all wear hoodies.”

But, he said, collaborating with an institution like the Met showed him that

“art and fashion have a long history together.” The idea behind the new project, he said, is to tell the story — or rather, the multiple stories — behind fashion.

There are several virtual reality films included in the project. A 360-degree video displays the Met’s conservation studio, with conservators explaining how they keep delicate clothing strong enough for display — one of them explaining, for example, how the team uses needles designed for eye surgeons.

It is the ultimate fragility of clothes, though, that makes the project appealing to museum curators, explained Andrew Bolton, the Costume Institute’s head curator — whereas many garments are too delicate to be permanently displayed, digitizing a collection makes it viewable forever. The Costume Institute has provided 500 of the objects on display, noted Loic Tallon, the Met’s chief digital officer.

Making a pitch to young users, the site also features YouTube personality Ingrid Nilsen in short videos, in which she explains the evolution of the hoodie, the choker, or colorful Japanese “Sukajan” jackets.
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Science is worthless if it isn’t motivated by basic human values and the desire to help people, Apple CEO Tim Cook told graduates of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Friday, urging them to use their powers for good.

In a commencement address, Cook — who as Apple’s chief executive since 2011 has overseen the rollout of the iPhone 7 and the Apple Watch — said the company is constantly looking for ways to combine tech with a sense of humanity and compassion.

“Whatever you do in your life, and whatever we do at Apple, we must infuse it with the humanity that we are born with,” said Cook, who previously served as chief operating officer and headed the Macintosh division.

“That responsibility is immense. But so is the opportunity,” he said.

Cook said Apple wants to make products that help people. As examples, he cited iPhone technology that can help a blind athlete run a marathon and an iPad that connects an autistic child to the world around them.

“When you keep people at the center of what you do, it can impact,” he said.

Cook said he isn’t worried about artificial intelligence giving computers the ability to think like humans.

“I’m more concerned about people thinking like computers without values or compassion or concern for the consequences,” he said. “That is what we need you to help us guard against. Because if science is a search in the darkness, then the humanities are a candle that shows us where we have been and the danger that lies ahead.”

Cook also urged graduates to resist becoming cynical.

“The internet enabled so much and empowered so many, but it can also be a place where basic rules of decency are suspended and pettiness and negativity thrive,” he said.

“Don’t let that noise knock you off course. Don’t get caught up in the trivial aspects of life. Don’t listen to trolls, and don’t become one. Measure impact in humanity; not in the likes, but the lives you touch and the people you serve.”
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Japanese internet, solar and technology company SoftBank Group Corp. is buying robotics pioneer Boston Dynamics from Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent.

Terms of the deal, announced Friday, including when it might close, were not disclosed.

Tokyo-based SoftBank, which offers the chatty childlike Pepper companion robot, said the purchase underlines how robotics is a key part of its business.

Boston Dynamics makes various robots, including Big Dog and Spot, which are complex machines that walk and trot on four legs. Another is Atlas, which walks on two legs like a human. Atlas has arms and can open doors and lift items. Some were designed for military purposes.

Under Friday’s deal, SoftBank is also buying from Alphabet a company called Schaft that develops biped robots. Schaft’s roots are in a research lab at the University of Tokyo.

Pepper has expressive arms but wheels for legs and does little more than sing songs and answer basic questions, and can’t do any heavy lifting. Often it fails to understand even simple speech and will keep asking you to repeat sentences.

Speculation had been growing recently that Google might want to sell Boston Dynamics. Alphabet said it remains committed to robotics, such as connecting human-like motor skills, including hand-eye coordination, to machines so they can process images, speech, text and draw pictures.

It is also interested in research on helping robots learn from what they “experience,'”Alphabet said in a statement.

“Robotics as a field has great potential, and we’re happy to see Boston Dynamics and Schaft join the SoftBank team to continue contributing to the next generation of robotics,'”it said.

SoftBank Chief Executive Masayoshi Son said robots will help solve problems that have been beyond human capabilities.

“Smart robotics are going to be a key driver of the next stage of the Information Revolution,'”he said.

“I am thrilled to welcome them to the SoftBank family and look forward to supporting them as they continue to advance the field of robotics and explore applications that can help make life easier, safer and more fulfilling,'”Son said of Boston Dynamics and Schaft.

Japan, with its longtime culture of cartoons like “Astro Boy,'”has a soft spot for cute robots. Various companies, including automakers Toyota Motor Corp. and Honda Motor Co., have developed entertainment robots, designed to do nothing more than keep people company.

But interest around the world is growing in the potential of robotics and artificial intelligence for everyday products like safer cars and connected home appliances.

SoftBank bought British semiconductor company ARM Holdings, an innovator in the “internet of things,'”last year. The first carrier to offer the Apple iPhone in Japan, SoftBank includes U.S. carrier Sprint and Yahoo Japan in its group business.

Son drew attention for hobnobbing with U.S. President Donald Trump late last year and promising to create jobs and invest in the U.S.

Marc Raibert, CEO of Boston Dynamics, said he looked forward to working with SoftBank on creating technology for “a smarter and more connected world.”

“We share SoftBank’s belief that advances in technology should be for the benefit of humanity,'”he said.
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