Iran is likely to expand its cyberespionage activities as its relations with Western powers worsen, the European Union digital security agency said Monday.

Iranian hackers are behind several cyberattacks and online disinformation campaigns in recent years as the country tries to strengthen its clout in the Middle East and beyond, a Reuters Special Report published in November found.

This month the European Union imposed its first sanctions on Iran since world powers agreed to a 2015 nuclear deal with Tehran, in a reaction to Iran’s ballistic missile tests and assassination plots on European soil.

“Newly imposed sanctions on Iran are likely to push the country to intensify state-sponsored cyber threat activities in pursuit of its geopolitical and strategic objectives at a regional level,” the European Union Agency for Network and Information Security (ENISA) said in a report.

A senior Iranian official rejected the report, saying “these are all part of a psychological war launched by the United States and its allies against Iran.”

ENISA lists state-sponsored hackers as among the highest threats to the bloc’s digital security.

It said that China, Russia and Iran are “the three most capable and active cyber actors tied to economic espionage.” Iran, Russia and China have repeatedly denied U.S. allegations that their governments conduct cyberattacks.

A malicious computer worm known as Stuxnet that was used to attack a uranium enrichment facility at Iran’s Natanz underground nuclear site a decade ago is widely believed to have been developed by the United States and Israel.

When Washington imposed sanctions on several Iranians in March 2018 for hacking on behalf of the Iranian government, Iran’s foreign ministry denounced the move as “provocative, illegitimate, and without any justifiable reason.”

In November, the United States indicted two Iranians for launching a major cyberattack using ransomware known as SamSam and sanctioned two others for helping exchange the ransom payments from Bitcoin digital currency into rials.

Cyber activities are expected to increase in coming months, particularly if Iran fails to keep the EU committed to a 2015 landmark nuclear deal, ENISA said.
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Facebook on Monday laid out plans for an independent content oversight board with the power to overturn company decisions on user posts, aimed at addressing concerns over misinformation and abusive behavior on the platform.

The board’s 40 members would select cases to review as the world’s largest social media network tries to crack down on harassment, incitement of violence and the spread of false information without infringing freedom of speech.

Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has said that Facebook should not make such decisions, but defer to an independent body of technology and human rights experts free of commercial influences.

Facebook will select inaugural members for three-year terms, but they will independently decide on future membership, Facebook proposed in a draft charter.

Details about the board’s makeup and appeals process will be finalized after a series of workshops over the next six months, wrote Nick Clegg, Facebook recently appointed head of global affairs, in a blog post introducing the charter.

At a news conference in Brussels, Clegg also said the company will strengthen rules and safeguards around political advertisements to prevent foreign interference in elections, including those in Europe this year.

Facebook has faced pressure from regulators and the public after last year’s revelation that British consultancy Cambridge Analytical had improperly acquired data on millions of U.S. users to target election advertising.

Fears about misinformation and interference have intensified with elections due this year for the European Parliament and several EU countries including Belgium and Finland.

“We will require those wanting to run political and issue ads to be authorized, and we will display a ‘paid for by’ disclaimer on those ads,” Clegg said.

Clegg, a former British deputy prime minister hired by Facebook in October last year, said the new tools to be launched in late March aim to help protect the integrity of European Union elections due to be held this spring.

Facebook said the transparency tools for electoral ads would be expanded globally before the end of June, while the tools would be in launched in India in February before its elections and in Ukraine and Israel before polls in both.

“We now have more than 30,000 people working on safety and security across the company, three times as many as we had in 2017,” the company said in a statement.

The new tools are similar to those adopted for the U.S. mid-term elections, Clegg said, with all political ads stored in a publicly searchable library for up to seven years.

This will contain information such as the amount of money spent and the number of impressions displayed, who paid for them and the demographics of those who saw them, including age, gender and location.

The new tools will also cover ‘issue ads’ which do not explicitly back one candidate or political party but which focus on highly politicized topics like immigration.

Defense Centers

Facebook said it would also set up two new regional operations centers focused on monitoring election-related content in its Dublin and Singapore offices.

“These teams will add a layer of defenses against fake news, hate speech and voter suppression,” it said Clegg also addressed allegations that Facebook sells user data, saying this was not the case.

“Selling people’s information to advertisers would not only be the wrong thing to do, it would undermine the way we do business, because it would reduce the unique value of our service to advertisers,” he said.

Facebook has no plans to swap its ads-only business model for a fee-paying service, Clegg said, responding to calls by some as a way to stave off privacy issues.

“We want Facebook to be a universal service. We believe that anyone should be able to connect to anyone else. The best way to do this is to offer the service for free — and that’s what the advertising model allows us to do,” he said.
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Blockchain technology – a high-tech way to securely manage and protect data – is best-known as the driver of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin. Now, a U.S. coffee importer is using it to improve the lives of coffee farmers and some of the poorest communities in Central America. Faith Lapidus reports.
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India’s southern Kochi city in Kerala state is among the world’s most innovative airports, completely powered by solar energy. Winner of the United Nations Champions of the Earth Award for Entrepreneurial Vision in 2018, the project is testimony to India’s ambitions of rapidly scaling up the use of solar power to reduce its carbon emissions. Anjana Pasricha has this report.
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Called the “greenest office building in the world,” the Bullitt Center in Seattle, Washington, generates its own electricity and its own water, collected from rain falling on the roof. Opened on Earth Day in 2013, the Bullitt Center has been nicknamed a “Living Building.” Natasha Mozgovaya visited the green building to see for herself what makes it so unusual. Anna Rice narrates her report.
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The world of work is going through a major transformation. Technological advances are creating new jobs and at the same time leaving many people behind as their skills are no longer needed. A new study by the International Labor Organization’s Global Commission on the Future of Work addresses the many uncertainties arising from this new reality.

The International Labor Organization agrees artificial intelligence, automation and robotics will lead to job losses, as people’s skills become obsolete. But it says these same technological advances, along with the greening of economies also will create millions of new jobs.

Change is coming

The co-chair of the ILO Global Commission on the Future of Work, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, says these advances offer many opportunities. But he warns people must harness the new technologies for the world of work and not be allowed to control the future shape of work.

“In the 20th century, we established that labor is not a commodity. In the 21st century, we must also ensure that labor is not a robot. We propose a human in command type of approach ensuring that technology frees workers and improves work rather than reducing their control,” he said.

Ramaphosa says change is inevitable and will happen whether people like it or not.

“We believe that we would rather be ahead of the curve rather than behind it and get the developments that are unfolding to shape us and to lead us. We need to be ahead so that we can shape the type of world of work that we want to see,” he said.

Human-centered conversation

In its study, the 27-member commission has adopted a human-centered approach. At this time of unprecedented change, ILO Director-General Guy Ryder says having people at the heart of this debate is critical for achieving a decent future of work.

“I think people, families, countries around the world are indeed grappling with the challenges and the opportunities of transformative change at work and the ambition of our commission … is, in a very concise and a very clear, and I think above all an action oriented way to try to set out a road map of how we can indeed seize the opportunities and deal satisfactorily with those challenges,” Ryder said.

Ten recommendations

After 15 months of work, the commission has come up with 10 recommendations for attaining decent and sustainable work. They include a call for a universal labor guarantee to protect workers’ rights, an adequate living wage and a safe workplace.

The commission proposes social protection measures from birth to old age. It says technological change must be managed to boost decent work. It says the gender gap should be closed and equality achieved in the workplace.

Ryder says the report puts a heavy emphasis on life-long learning and the renewal of skills throughout one’s working life.

“With the rapidity of change being what it is at work today,” he said, “it is simply not realistic to believe that the skills that we acquire at the beginning of our lives in our education, what we tend to think of as a period of our education will serve us throughout a working life. I mean, the shelf life of skills acquired at the beginning is a lot shorter than working life is going to be.”

Ryder notes the future number of jobs or the future of employment will not be determined alone by the autonomous forward march of technology. He says that will depend on the choices of policymakers.

The commission study indicates it is reasonable to assume that humans and robots will be able to live in harmony with one another — if humans are put in control of the forward application of technology.
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Robots aren’t replacing everyone, but a quarter of U.S. jobs will be severely disrupted as artificial intelligence accelerates the automation of existing work, according to a new Brookings Institution report.

The report, published Thursday, says roughly 36 million Americans hold jobs with “high exposure” to automation — meaning at least 70 percent of their tasks could soon be performed by machines using current technology. Among those most likely to be affected are cooks, waiters and others in food services; short-haul truck drivers; and clerical office workers.

“That population is going to need to upskill, reskill or change jobs fast,” said Mark Muro, a senior fellow at Brookings and lead author of the report.

Muro said the timeline for the changes could be “a few years or it could be two decades.” But it’s likely that automation will happen more swiftly during the next economic downturn. Businesses are typically eager to implement cost-cutting technology as they lay off workers.

Some economic studies have found similar shifts toward automating production happened in the early part of previous recessions — and may have contributed to the “jobless recovery” that followed the 2008 financial crisis.

But with new advances in artificial intelligence, it’s not just industrial and warehouse robots that will alter the American workforce. Self-checkout kiosks and computerized hotel concierges will do their part.

Most jobs will change somewhat as machines take over routine tasks, but a majority of U.S. workers will be able to adapt to that shift without being displaced.

The changes will hit hardest in smaller cities, especially those in the heartland and Rust Belt and in states like Indiana and Kentucky, according to the report by the Washington think tank. They will also disproportionately affect the younger workers who dominate food services and other industries at highest risk for automation.

Some chain restaurants have already shifted to self-ordering machines; a handful have experimented with robot-assisted kitchens.

Google this year is piloting the use of its digital voice assistant at hotel lobbies to instantly interpret conversations across a few dozen languages. Autonomous vehicles could replace short-haul delivery drivers. Walmart and other retailers are preparing to open cashier-less stores powered by in-store sensors or cameras with facial recognition technology.

“Restaurants will be able to get along with significantly reduced workforces,” Muro said. “In the hotel industry, instead of five people manning a desk to greet people, there’s one and people basically serve themselves.”

Many economists find that automation has an overall positive effect on the labor market, said Matias Cortes, an assistant professor at York University in Toronto who was not involved with the Brookings report. It can create economic growth, reduce prices and increase demand while also creating new jobs that make up for those that disappear.

But Cortes said there’s no doubt there are “clear winners and losers.” In the recent past, those hardest hit were men with low levels of education who dominated manufacturing and other blue-collar jobs, and women with intermediate levels of education who dominated clerical and administrative positions.

In the future, the class of workers affected by automation could grow as machines become more intelligent. The Brookings report analyzed each occupation’s automation potential based on research by the McKinsey management consulting firm. Those jobs that remain largely unscathed will be those requiring not just advanced education, but also interpersonal skills and emotional intelligence.

“These high-paying jobs require a lot of creativity and problem-solving,” Cortes said. “That’s going to be difficult for new technologies to replace.”

 
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Amazon’s long search for a new headquarters location — nicknamed HQ2 — came to an end in November 2018, as the company decided to open offices in New York City and Crystal City in Northern Virginia. And while the opening of HQ2 is still months away, Natasha Mozgovaya visited the original Amazon HQ in Seattle.
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The Federal Aviation Administration said on Wednesday that 43 flights into New Jersey’s Newark Liberty International Airport were required to hold after drone sightings at a nearby airport Tuesday, while nine flights were diverted.

The incident comes as major U.S. airports are assessing the threat of drones and have been holding meetings to address the issue.

The issue of drones impacting commercial air traffic came to the fore after London’s second busiest airport, Gatwick Airport, was severely disrupted in December when drones were sighted on three consecutive days.

An FAA spokesman said that Tuesday’s event lasted for 21 minutes. The flights into Newark, the 11th busiest U.S. airport, were suspended after a drone was seen flying at 3,500 feet over nearby Teterboro Airport, a small regional airport about 17 miles (27.3 kilometers) away that mostly handles corporate jets and private planes.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates Newark and Teterboro airports, as well as New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, said Wednesday that it hosted a working session with the FAA, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies last week “to review and enhance protocols for the rapid detection and interdiction of drones.” It declined to discuss specifics for security reasons.

The Port Authority added that it is “committed to continuing our collaboration with the FAA and federal and state law enforcement partners to protect against any and all drone threats to the maximum extent possible.”

The Chicago Department of Aviation said Wednesday it is working closely with the FAA and law enforcement “to ensure safe and secure operations at both O’Hare and Midway” but would not discuss drone preparations.

The FAA declined to comment on meetings with major airports, but said it has been in “close coordination” with security agency partners “to address drone security challenges.”

Drone sightings, rules

The drone sightings at London’s Gatwick Airport last month resulted in about 1,000 flights being canceled or diverted and affected 140,000 passengers.

The U.S. Congress last year gave the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security new powers to disable or destroy threatening drones after officials raised concerns about the use of drones as potential weapons.

United Airlines, the largest carrier at Newark, said Tuesday that the impact to its operations had been minimal.

The FAA initially said it had reports of two drones on Tuesday evening, but it since clarified to say it had two reports of one drone in northern New Jersey airspace.

Earlier this month, the U.S. Transportation Department proposed rules that would allow drones to operate over populated areas and end a requirement for special permits for night use, long-awaited actions that are expected to help speed their commercial use.

There are nearly 1.3 million registered drones in the United States and more than 116,000 registered drone operators.

Officials say there are hundreds of thousands of additional drones that are not registered.
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Jeff Bezos’ rocket company, Blue Origin, has launched NASA experiments into space on a brief test flight.

The New Shepard rocket blasted off Wednesday from West Texas, hoisting a capsule containing the experiments. The eight experiments were exposed to a few minutes of weightlessness, before the capsule parachuted down. The rocket also landed successfully, completing its fourth spaceflight.

This was Blue Origin’s 10th test flight, all precursors to launching passengers by year’s end. The capsules have six windows, one for each customer. Blue Origin isn’t taking reservations just yet. Instead, the Kent, Washington, company is focusing on brief research flights.

Wednesday’s flight lasted just over 10 minutes, with the capsule reaching 66 miles high, or 107 kilometers, well within the accepted boundary of space.

Bezos is the founder of Amazon.

 
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Cameras and alarms keep offices and warehouses safe worldwide. But a new kind of security guard is making the rounds looking for anything that is unusual. Michelle Quinn reports.
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American tech giant Google has opened a new office in Berlin that it says will give it the space to expand in the German capital.

CEO Sundar Pichai said Tuesday the space means Google could more than double the number of Berlin employees to 300. Google currently has 1,400 employees in Germany.

Pichai says “the city has long been a capital of culture and media. Now it’s also home to a fast-growing startup scene and an engine for innovation.”

Google has faced regulatory headwinds in Europe, and was fined 50 million euros ($57 million) Monday in France for alleged violations of European data privacy rules.

Google Central Europe vice president Philipp Justus didn’t directly address the fine, but said Google’s committed to transparency and clarity on what data is collected and how it’s used.
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