The United States, Australia and Japan said Sunday they will jointly fund the construction of an undersea cable to boost internet access in three tiny Pacific countries, as the Western allies seek to counter rising Chinese influence in the region.

The three Western allies said they would develop the cable to provide faster internet to Nauru, Kiribati and the Federated States of Micronesia.

“This will support increased economic growth, drive development opportunities, and help to improve living standards as the region recovers from the severe impacts of COVID-19,” a joint statement from the United States, Japan and Australia said.

The three allies did not specify how much the project will cost.

The development of the undersea cable is the latest funding commitment from the Western allies in the telecommunications sector of the Pacific.

The United States and its Indo-Pacific allies are concerned that cables laid by the People’s Republic of China could compromise regional security. Beijing has denied any intent to use commercial fiber-optic cables, which have far greater data capacity than satellites, for spying.

Australia in 2017 spent about A$137 million ($98.2 million) to develop better internet access for the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea. 
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A self-driving flying taxi. A super-fast land-based transport vehicle. A sustainable floating city.

Science fiction, or the wave of the future?

The “Futures” exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, open Nov. 20, 2021, through July 6, 2022, gives visitors a peek at what may happen in the years to come.

The exhibit opened as part of the 175th anniversary of the Smithsonian and is being held at the Arts and Industries Building, which reopened in November after being closed for almost two decades.

With more than 150 ideas, innovations, technologies and artifacts, the exhibit invites visitors to think about the kind of future in which they want to live.

It also provides food for thought by looking back to past innovations, like an 1800s experimental telephone and a spacesuit-testing android.

The exhibit was designed by the Lab of Rockwell Group, an architecture and exhibit design firm in New York.

“The exhibition opens up many different possible forms that the future can take, capturing a number of small glimpses of conceivable futures,” said David Tracy, director of creative technology at Rockwell.

The company designed cutting-edge installations called beacons that contain multiple- choice questions that “prompt people’s imaginations and get them to think about the kind of future they want to see,” Tracy told VOA. 

To answer the questions, people use hand gestures or hover over an answer, Tracy said, which also provides “health and safety measures, since you don’t have to touch a screen.”

Not surprisingly, there are more questions than answers.

It’s difficult for people “to imagine how the future may be different and the technologies that might make it different,” said Jane McGonigal, director of game research and development at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, California.

McGonigal provided the questions for visitors to ponder “to help them imagine the future more vividly and optimistically,” she said during an interview with VOA. 

Questions include, “When might moon tourism become a real reality?” Another looks at what the future might be like if meat doesn’t come from an animal but is grown in a laboratory. 

Visitor Raj Goel from New York got a taste of what that might be like as he peered into a display that was set up like a deli counter with possible food in the future. 

Goel said he’s concerned about meat being grown in a lab. But he said he liked the idea of mushrooms being used as a sort of meatless meat. 

“It’s supposed to taste like bacon and would be a lot healthier,” he said.

Goel said “Futures” makes him feel a bit like he’s walked into a science fiction movie.

“It’s like a giant arcade of futuristic toys and ideas,” he told VOA. 

Those ideas include a BioSuit, a skintight spacesuit that provides astronauts with greater mobility, and an environmentally friendly cleaning system that washes clothes using water from wetlands.

Human remains can also be put to good ecological use. 

A biodegradable underground burial capsule offers a sustainable way to use human remains to grow a tree.

With concern over climate change, cleaner transportation ideas are presented.

Among them, the Virgin Hyperloop, a futuristic transport tube that could become a new mode of train-like transportation and have “a lower environmental impact than other modes of mass transportation,” Virgin said on its hyperloop website. The system could propel passenger or cargo pods at speeds of more than 1,000 kilometers per hour, Virgin said, three times faster than high-speed rail. 

Another possible innovation is an autonomous flying machine. 

The Bell Nexus company has an idea for a flying taxi, especially for use in crowded cities. 

The air taxi, powered by hybrid-electric propulsion, resembles a helicopter and has six tilting round fans that enable it to take off and land vertically from a rooftop or a launch pad.

The interactive displays were especially popular with visitors. 

A robotic art installation called “Do Nothing with Al” mimics the slow moves of a person standing in front of it. The idea is to encourage people to slow down and relax in this era of technological overload.

“It’s really fascinating,” said Jan Myers from Denver. “It reminds me of a human torso with needles,” she said, as she moved back and forth, watching the robot follow her movements. 

At a portal called “Hi! How r u?” visitors can strike up holographic conversations by using an avatar to leave personal messages for people in the future. They can also interact in real time with people at a paired portal site in Doha, Qatar.

Tracy said he hoped the exhibit “empowered visitors with a sense of optimism about our future.” 

Goel said he was encouraged “because many things I saw here made me think the future is bright.” 

 
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As the two-day virtual Summit for Democracy hosted by President Joe Biden wrapped up on Friday, the U.S., Australia, Denmark and Norway announced an export control program to monitor and restrict the spread of technologies used to violate human rights.

“We focused on the need to empower human rights defenders” and ensure that technology “is used to advance democracies to lift people up, not to hold them down,” Biden said during his closing remarks.

The Export Controls and Human Rights Initiative seeks to address the problem of authoritarian governments misusing dual-use technologies to surveil and hack into the communications of political opponents, journalists, activists and minority communities.

The signees will work to develop a voluntary, written code of conduct intended to use human rights criteria to guide export licensing policy and practices, according to the White House.

The goal is to achieve a stronger agreement involving more governments to better control licenses for these technologies that can be used to violate human rights, said a senior administration official in a briefing to reporters.

“To make sure that these technologies are used for good and not for ill,” the official said.

These restrictions are needed, said Brett Bruen, director of global engagement during the Obama administration and president of the consulting firm Global Situation Room.

“If indeed democratic ideals or, at the very least, less violation of human rights norms is what we are going to require and expect from countries around the world, then there have to be some consequences,” he said.

The U.S. has taken action recently to put NSO, an Israeli company and maker of the Pegasus spyware, on a list of restricted companies. Pegasus was used to infect the smartphones of journalists and officials, essentially turning them into spying devices, allowing the user to read the targets’ messages and files, track their location, even turn on their cameras without their knowledge.

Initiative for Democratic Renewal

During the summit, leaders were encouraged to make pledges and commitments to bolster democracy and human rights.

For its part, the U.S. announced the establishment of the Presidential Initiative for Democratic Renewal, a series of foreign assistance initiatives of up to $424.4 million in the coming year, subject to congressional approval.

The initiative includes funds to support independent media, strengthen anti-corruption efforts, empower reformers, labor unions and marginalized groups, and advance technology that supports democracy and defends free and fair elections.

Transparency International, a global civil society organization working in the fight against corruption, said the summit’s initial outcomes are promising, but more needs to be done.

“Other countries did not step up and commit to specific commitments the way the U.S. has, and so that is a concern,” Gary Kalman, director of Transparency International’s U.S. office, told VOA. “What are they actually going to come up with? They have a little bit more time; the U.S. government is giving them until January to come back with commitments.” 

But Bruen said $424.4 million would barely meet the needs of bolstering democracy globally and characterized it as “regifting.”

“These are initiatives and monies that have been allocated already, generally, for democracy, for the rule of law and human rights,” Bruen said. “They [the Biden administration] get to repurpose them for a new announcement but what we’re not seeing here are really substantial sums that are being put on the table.”

Democracy is also under attack by the global rise of populism, white supremacy and extremism, said U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.

“Polarization is undermining democratic institutions. Science and reason are under siege,” Guterres said. “All of this is eroding trust between people and democratic leaders and institutions.”

An in-person summit is planned, a year from now.
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As the two-day virtual Summit for Democracy hosted by President Joe Biden wrapped up on Friday, the U.S., Australia, Denmark and Norway announced an export control program to monitor and restrict the spread of technologies used to violate human rights. The U.S. is also launching programs to support independent media and anti-corruption efforts and defend free and fair elections. White House Bureau Chief Patsy Widakuswara has more.
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A software vulnerability exploited in the online game Minecraft is rapidly emerging as a major threat to internet-connected devices around the world.

“The internet’s on fire right now,” said Adam Meyers, senior vice president of intelligence at the cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike. “People are scrambling to patch and there are … all kinds of people scrambling to exploit it.”

In the 12 hours since the bug’s existence was disclosed, he said Friday morning, it had been “fully weaponized,” meaning that malefactors have developed and distributed tools to exploit.

The flaw may be the worst computer vulnerability discovered in years. It opens a loophole in software code that is ubiquitous in cloud servers and enterprise software used across industry and government. It could allow criminals or spies to loot valuable data, plant malware or erase crucial information, and much more.

“I’d be hard-pressed to think of a company that’s not at risk,” said Joe Sullivan, chief security officer for Cloudflare, whose online infrastructure protects websites from malicious actors. Untold millions of servers have it installed, and experts said the fallout would not be known for several days.

Amit Yoran, CEO of the cybersecurity firm Tenable, called it “the single biggest, most critical vulnerability of the last decade” — and possibly the biggest in the history of modern computing.

The vulnerability, dubbed “Log4Shell,” was rated 10 on a scale of one to 10 by the Apache Software Foundation, which oversees development of the software. Anyone with the exploit can obtain full access to an unpatched computer that uses the software.

New Zealand’s computer emergency response team was among the first to report that the flaw was being “actively exploited in the wild” just hours after it was publicly reported Thursday and a patch released.

The vulnerability, in open-source Apache software used to run websites and other web services, was discovered Nov. 24 by the Chinese tech giant Alibaba, the foundation said.

Finding and patching the software could be a complicated task. While most organizations and cloud providers should be able to update their web servers easily, the same Apache software is also often embedded in third-party programs, which often can only be updated by their owners.

Yoran, of Tenable, said organizations need to presume they’ve been compromised and act quickly.

The flaw’s exploitation was apparently first discovered in Minecraft, an online game hugely popular with kids and owned by Microsoft.

Meyers and security expert Marcus Hutchins said Minecraft users had been using it to execute programs on the computers of other users by pasting a short message in a chat box.

Microsoft said it had issued a software update for Minecraft users. “Customers who apply the fix are protected,” it said.

Researchers reported finding evidence the vulnerability could be exploited in servers run by companies such as Apple, Amazon, Twitter and Cloudflare.

Cloudflare’s Sullivan said there we no indication his company’s servers had been compromised. Apple, Amazon and Twitter did not immediately respond to requests for comment. 
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Robotic vacuum cleaners halted in their tracks. Doorbell cameras stopped watching for package thieves, though some of those deliveries were canceled anyway. Netflix and Disney movies were interrupted, and The Associated Press had trouble publishing the news.

A major outage in Amazon’s cloud computing network Tuesday severely disrupted services at a wide range of U.S. companies for hours, raising questions about the vulnerability of the internet and its concentration in the hands of a few firms. 

How did it happen? 

Amazon has said nothing about exactly what went wrong. The company limited its communications Tuesday to terse technical explanations on an Amazon Web Services dashboard and a brief statement delivered via spokesperson Richard Rocha that acknowledged the outage had affected Amazon’s own warehouse and delivery operations but said the company was “working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.” It didn’t immediately respond to further questions Wednesday. 

The incident at Amazon Web Services mostly affected the eastern U.S., but still impacted everything from airline reservations and auto dealerships to payment apps and video streaming services to Amazon’s own massive e-commerce operation. 

What is AWS? 

Amazon Web Services is a cloud-service operation — it stores its customers’ data, runs their online activities and more — and a huge profit center for Amazon. It holds roughly a third of the $152 billion market for cloud services, according to a report by Synergy Research Group — a larger share than its closest rivals, Microsoft and Google, combined. 

It was formerly run by Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, who succeeded founder Jeff Bezos in July. 

Too many eggs in one basket? 

Some cybersecurity experts have warned for years about the potentially ugly consequences of allowing a handful of big tech companies to dominate key internet operations. 

“The latest AWS outage is a prime example of the danger of centralized network infrastructure,” said Sean O’Brien, a visiting lecturer in cybersecurity at Yale Law School. “Though most people browsing the internet or using an app don’t know it, Amazon is baked into most of the apps and websites they use each day.” O’Brien said it’s important to build a new network model that resembles the peer-to-peer roots of the early internet. Big outages have already knocked huge swaths of the world offline, as happened during an October Facebook incident.

Even under the current model, companies do have some options to split their services between different cloud providers, although it can be complicated, or to at least make sure they can move their services to a different region run by the same provider. Tuesday’s outage mostly affected Amazon’s “US East 1” region. 

“Which means if you had critical systems only available in that region, you were in trouble,” said Servaas Verbiest, lead cloud evangelist at Sungard Availability Services. “If you heavily embraced the AWS ecosystem and are locked into using solely their services and functions, you must ensure you balance your workloads between regions.” 

Hasn’t this happened before? 

Yes. The last major AWS outage was in November 2020. There have been numerous other disruptive and lengthy internet outages involving other providers. In June, the behind-the-scenes content distributor Fastly suffered a failure that briefly took down dozens of major internet sites including those of CNN and The New York Times, plus the British government home page. Another that month affected provider Akamai during peak business hours in Asia in June.

In the October outage, Facebook — now known as Meta Platforms — blamed a “faulty configuration change” for an hourslong worldwide outage that took down Instagram and WhatsApp in addition to its titular platform. 

What about the government? 

It was unclear how, or whether, Tuesday’s outage affected governments, but many of them also rely on Amazon and its rivals. 

Among the most influential organizations to rethink its approach of depending on a single cloud provider was the Pentagon, which in July canceled a disputed cloud-computing contract with Microsoft that could eventually have been worth $10 billion. It will instead pursue a deal with both Microsoft and Amazon and possibly other cloud service providers such as Google, Oracle and IBM. 

The National Security Agency earlier this year awarded Amazon a contract with a potential estimated value of $10 billion to be the sole manager of the NSA’s own migration to cloud computing. The contract is known by its agency code name “Wild and Stormy.” The General Accountability Office in October sustained a bid protest by Microsoft, finding that certain parts of the NSA’s decision were “unreasonable,” although the full decision is classified. 
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While the COVID-19 pandemic lingers on, one might not know it by looking at 2021’s most searched items on Google. 

According to the list released by Google Wednesday, “NBA” was the most searched term in the U.S., but it’s unclear why. 

Other most searched topics were rapper DMX, who died; Gabby Petito, an apparent murder victim who died during a cross-country trip with her boyfriend Brian Laundrie, who was also on the most searched list. Laundrie was declared a person of interest in Petito’s death, but he died of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound. 

Also on the list is Kyle Rittenhouse, who was acquitted last month of killing two protesters and wounding a third during unrest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 2020. 

The most searched news item was “mega millions” as people were curious about record-sized lottery jackpots. 

The most searched person was Kyle Rittenhouse, the most searched actor was Alec Baldwin, who was involved in a shooting death on a movie set, and the most searched athlete was Tiger Woods, who was severely injured in a car accident earlier in the year, Google said. 

The most searched movie was Black Widow, and the most searched musician/band was rapper Travis Scott. Scott was recently the subject of interest as 10 people were killed and hundreds more wounded at one of his concerts in November. 

While 2020 searches were dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic, it barely registered on this year’s list. “COVID vaccine near me” was the most popular “near me” search, with “COVID testing near me” coming in at number two.
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A major outage disrupted Amazon’s cloud services on Tuesday, temporarily knocking out streaming platforms Netflix and Disney+, Robinhood, a wide range of apps, and Amazon.com Inc.’s e-commerce website as consumers shopped ahead of Christmas. 

“Many services have already recovered; however, we are working towards full recovery across services,” Amazon said on its status dashboard. 

Amazon’s Ring security cameras, mobile banking app Chime and robot vacuum cleaner maker iRobot, which use Amazon Web Services (AWS), reported issues, according to their social media pages. 

Trading app Robinhood and Walt Disney’s streaming service Disney+ and Netflix were also down, according to Downdetector.com. 

“Netflix, which runs nearly all of its infrastructure on AWS, appears to have lost 26% of its traffic,” said Doug Madory, head of internet analysis at analytics firm Kentik. 

Amazon said the outage was related to network devices and linked to application programming interface, or API, which is a set of protocols for building and integrating application software. 

Downdetector.com showed more than 24,000 incidents of people reporting issues with Amazon, including Prime Video and other services. The outage tracking website collates status reports from a number of sources, including user-submitted errors, on its platform. 

Users began reporting issues around 10:40 a.m. ET on Tuesday, and the outage might have affected a larger number of users. 

Amazon has experienced 27 outages over the past 12 months related to its services, according to web tool-reviewing website ToolTester. 

In June, websites including Reddit, Amazon, CNN, PayPal, Spotify, Al Jazeera Media Network and The New York Times were hit by a widespread hourlong outage linked to U.S.-based content delivery network provider Fastly Inc., a smaller rival of AWS.

 
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Two computer scientists at the University of Maryland have developed a new artificial intelligence system that evolves to detect and evade internet censorship in repressive countries. VOA’s Julie Taboh has more.
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Rohingya refugees from Myanmar are suing Meta Platforms Inc, formerly known as Facebook, for $150 billion over allegations that the social media company did not take action against anti-Rohingya hate speech that contributed to violence. 

A U.S. class-action complaint, filed in California on Monday by law firms Edelson PC and Fields PLLC, argues that the company’s failures to police content and its platform’s design contributed to real-world violence faced by the Rohingya community. In a coordinated action, British lawyers also submitted a letter of notice to Facebook’s London office. 

Facebook did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment about the lawsuit. The company has said it was “too slow to prevent misinformation and hate” in Myanmar and has said it has since taken steps to crack down on platform abuses in the region, including banning the military from Facebook and Instagram after the February 1 coup. 

Facebook has said it is protected from liability over content posted by users by a U.S. internet law known as Section 230, which holds that online platforms are not liable for content posted by third parties. The complaint says it seeks to apply Burmese law to the claims if Section 230 is raised as a defense. 

Although U.S. courts can apply foreign law to cases where the alleged harms and activity by companies took place in other countries, two legal experts interviewed by Reuters said they did not know of a successful precedent for foreign law being invoked in lawsuits against social media companies where Section 230 protections could apply. 

Anupam Chander, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, said that invoking Burmese law wasn’t “inappropriate.” But he predicted that “It’s unlikely to be successful,” saying that “It would be odd for Congress to have foreclosed actions under U.S. law but permitted them to proceed under foreign law.” 

More than 730,000 Rohingya Muslims fled Myanmar’s Rakhine state in August 2017 after a military crackdown that refugees said included mass killings and rape. Rights groups documented killings of civilians and burning of villages. 

Myanmar authorities say they were battling an insurgency and deny carrying out systematic atrocities. 

In 2018, U.N. human rights investigators said the use of Facebook had played a key role in spreading hate speech that fueled the violence. A Reuters investigation hat year, cited in the U.S. complaint, found more than 1,000 examples of posts, comments and images attacking the Rohingya and other Muslims on Facebook. 

The International Criminal Court has opened a case into the accusations of crimes in the region. In September, a U.S. federal judge ordered Facebook to release records of accounts connected to anti-Rohingya violence in Myanmar that the social media giant had shut down. 

The new class-action lawsuit references claims by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, who leaked a cache  of internal documents this year, that the company does not police abusive content in countries where such speech is likely to cause the most harm. 

The complaint also cites recent media reports, including a Reuters report last month, that Myanmar’s military was using fake social media accounts to engage in what is widely referred to in the military as “information combat.” 
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In the shadows of the coronavirus pandemic, violence against women has been on the rise around the world, including in South Africa, where half of the country’s women report at least one incident of violence in their lifetime. Now, a local tech company has developed an alarm system to help stop the abuse.

A click of a button could save a woman’s life. That’s what South African firm Afri-Tec Technologies hopes to achieve with its alert app.

Gender-based violence has become so rampant during coronavirus lockdowns, President Cyril Ramaphosa has called it the country’s “second pandemic.”

Afri-Tec presents its app as one solution, allowing users to discretely alert friends, family and authorities that they are in danger.

“We’re not saying that our tech or our solution is the silver bullet. But it certainly is one of the pieces of this big puzzle that can make a difference. And I think COVID became a catalyst for a lot of people to adopt, a lot more people to adopt technology. And hence, why we felt creating a technological solution,” says AB Moosa, the CEO of Afri-Tec Technologies. 

The South African Police Service says more than 10,000 people were raped between April and June this year.

Another 15,000 cases of domestic violence were reported in the same period.

Organizations providing support to survivors say those figures don’t paint a full picture as many more cases go unreported.

The lack of data about the crisis is another solution Afri-Tec plans to provide with the information it collects from users.

“We’re also putting AI systems behind our app to be able to then hopefully predict trends of what’s going to happen. So, empower police stations, empower private security, power NGOs, to then be able to have a proactive, rather than reactive response to this challenge,” said Moosa.

People without smartphones can still use the alert system.

The company has designed a panic button that looks like a USB stick as well as a wristwatch that provide the same response.

Social workers say these interventions will make a big difference — but more is still needed.

“We need to target families, ask why is this happening? Is it a tradition? Is it your family history? Is that your background? And if so, how can we change it? And ultimately, we need to pay attention to our children. What are we teaching them?” asks Lisha Stevens, a social worker at the Nisaa Institute for Women’s Development in Johannesburg.

Advocates like Stevens say the public as a whole need to be educated on what gender-based violence is and how to respond to it.

“How do we break the cycle with my attitude, my view of what gender-based violence is? I’m a neighbor, I see this happening. I close my door and I go inside. So, where’s the disconnect that we need to understand?” said Stevens.

Witnesses of violence can report incidents to police, or via a national hotline, or nonprofits — and they can do so anonymously.

If more people intervened, Stevens believes it could be life-changing for victims and help shift the culture so that gender-based violence is no longer the norm. 
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In the shadows of the coronavirus pandemic, violence against women has been on the rise around the world, including in South Africa, where half of the country’s women report at least one incident of violence in their lifetime. Now, a local tech company has developed an alarm system to help stop the abuse. For VOA, Linda Givetash reports from Johannesburg. Camera – Zaheer Cassim.
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