When Stephen Dennis was raising his two sons in the 1980s, he never heard the phrase “screen time,” nor did he worry much about the hours his kids spent with technology. When he bought an Apple II Plus computer, he considered it an investment in their future and encouraged them to use it as much as possible.

Boy, have things changed with his grandkids and their phones and their Snapchat, Instagram and Twitter.

“It almost seems like an addiction,” said Dennis, a retired homebuilder who lives in Bellevue, Washington. “In the old days you had a computer and you had a TV and you had a phone but none of them were linked to the outside world but the phone. You didn’t have this omnipresence of technology.”

Today’s grandparents may have fond memories of the “good old days,” but history tells us that adults have worried about their kids’ fascination with new-fangled entertainment and technology since the days of dime novels, radio, the first comic books and rock n’ roll.

“This whole idea that we even worry about what kids are doing is pretty much a 20th century thing,” said Katie Foss, a media studies professor at Middle Tennessee State University. But when it comes to screen time, she added, “all we are doing is reinventing the same concern we were having back in the `50s.”

True, the anxieties these days seem particularly acute — as, of course, they always have. Smartphones have a highly customized, 24/7 presence in our lives that feeds parental fears of antisocial behavior and stranger danger.

What hasn’t changed, though, is a general parental dread of what kids are doing out of sight. In previous generations, this often meant kids wandering around on their own or sneaking out at night to drink. These days, it might mean hiding in their bedroom, chatting with strangers online.

Less than a century ago, the radio sparked similar fears.

“The radio seems to find parents more helpless than did the funnies, the automobile, the movies and other earlier invaders of the home, because it can not be locked out or the children locked in,” Sidonie Matsner Gruenberg, director of the Child Study Association of America, told The Washington Post in 1931. She added that the biggest worry radio gave parents was how it interfered with other interests — conversation, music practice, group games and reading.

In the early 1930s a group of mothers from Scarsdale, New York, pushed radio broadcasters to change programs they thought were too “overstimulating, frightening and emotionally overwhelming” for kids, said Margaret Cassidy, a media historian at Adelphi University in New York who authored a chronicle of American kids and media.

Called the Scarsdale Moms, their activism led the National Association of Broadcasters to come up with a code of ethics around children’s programming in which they pledged not to portray criminals as heroes and to refrain from glorifying greed, selfishness and disrespect for authority.

Then television burst into the public consciousness with unrivaled speed. By 1955, more than half of all U.S. homes had a black and white set, according to Mitchell Stephens, a media historian at New York University.

The hand-wringing started almost as quickly. A 1961 Stanford University study on 6,000 children, 2,000 parents and 100 teachers found that more than half of the kids studied watched “adult” programs such as Westerns, crime shows and shows that featured “emotional problems.” Researchers were aghast at the TV violence present even in children’s programming.

By the end of that decade, Congress had authorized $1 million (about $7 million today) to study the effects of TV violence, prompting “literally thousands of projects” in subsequent years, Cassidy said.

That eventually led the American Academy of Pediatrics to adopt, in 1984, its first recommendation that parents limit their kids’ exposure to technology. The medical association argued that television sent unrealistic messages around drugs and alcohol, could lead to obesity and might fuel violence. Fifteen years later, in 1999, it issued its now-infamous edict that kids under 2 should not watch any television at all.

The spark for that decision was the British kids’ show “Teletubbies,” which featured cavorting humanoids with TVs embedded in their abdomens. But the odd TV-within-the-TV-beings conceit of the show wasn’t the problem — it was the “gibberish” the Teletubbies directed at preverbal kids whom doctors thought should be learning to speak from their parents, said Donald Shifrin, a University of Washington pediatrician and former chair of the AAP committee that pushed for the recommendation.

Video games presented a different challenge. Decades of study have failed to validate the most prevalent fear, that violent games encourage violent behavior. But from the moment the games emerged as a cultural force in the early 1980s, parents fretted about the way kids could lose themselves in games as simple and repetitive as “Pac-Man,” `’Asteroids” and “Space Invaders.”

Some cities sought to restrict the spread of arcades; Mesquite, Texas, for instance, insisted that the under-17 set required parental supervision . Many parents imagined the arcades where many teenagers played video games “as dens of vice, of illicit trade in drugs and sex,” Michael Z. Newman, a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee media historian, wrote recently in Smithsonian.

This time, some experts were more sympathetic to kids. Games could relieve anxiety and fed the age-old desire of kids to “be totally absorbed in an activity where they are out on an edge and can’t think of anything else,” Robert Millman, an addiction specialist at the New York Hospital-Cornell University Medical Center, told the New York Times in 1981. He cast them as benign alternatives to gambling and “glue sniffing.”

Initially, the internet — touted as an “information superhighway” that could connect kids to the world’s knowledge — got a similar pass for helping with homework and research. Yet as the internet began linking people together, often in ways that connected previously isolated people, familiar concerns soon resurfaced.

Sheila Azzara, a grandmother of 12 in Fallbrook, California, remembers learning about AOL chatrooms in the early 1990s and finding them “kind of a hostile place.” Teens with more permissive parents who came of age in the `90s might remember these chatrooms as places a 17-year-old girl could pretend to be a 40-year-old man (and vice versa), and talk about sex, drugs and rock `n’ roll (or more mundane topics such as current events).

Azzara still didn’t worry too much about technology’s effects on her children. Cellphones weren’t in common use, and computers — if families had them — were usually set up in the living room. But she, too, worries about her grandkids.

“They don’t interact with you,” she said. “They either have their head in a screen or in a game.”
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Science fiction has long teased consumers about a future where robots are our personal assistants. But it’s no longer science fiction. The recent spike in consumer-grade “smart speakers” that respond to users’ voice commands has been given a face — with the help of a self-navigating robot that listens to its owner’s commands. Arash Arabasadi has more.
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The U.S. space agency NASA is offering a public challenge, with a lofty $750,000 reward, to anyone who can find ways to turn carbon dioxide into compounds that would be useful on Mars.

Calling it the “CO2 Conversion Challenge,” NASA scientists say they need help finding a way to turn a plentiful resource like carbon dioxide into a variety of useful products in order to make trips to Mars possible.

Carbon dioxide is one resource that is readily abundant within the Martian atmosphere.

Scientists say astronauts attempting space travel to Mars will not be able to bring everything they need to the red planet, so will have to figure out ways to use local resources once they get there to create what they need.

“Enabling sustained human life on another planet will require a great deal of resources and we cannot possibly bring everything we will need. We have to get creative,” said Monsi Roman, program manager of NASA’s Centennial Challenges program.

She said if scientists could learn to transform “resource like carbon dioxide into a variety of useful products, the space — and terrestrial — applications are endless.”

Carbon and oxygen are the molecular building blocks of sugars.

On Earth, plants can easily and inexpensively turn carbon dioxide and water into sugar. However, scientists say this approach would be difficult to replicate in space because of limited resources, such as energy and water.

NASA says the competition is divided into two phases. During the first phase, individuals or teams would submit a design and description of their proposal, with up to five teams winning $50,000 each. In the second phase, the finalists would build and present a demonstration of their proposals, with the winning individual or team earning $750,000.

Those who are up for the challenge need to register by Jan. 24, 2019, and then officially apply by Feb. 28, 2019.
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A key opponent of high-tech, automated weapons known as “killer robots” is blaming countries like the U.S. and Russia for blocking consensus at a U.N.-backed conference, where most countries wanted to ensure that humans stay at the controls of lethal machines.

Coordinator Mary Wareham of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots spoke Monday after experts from dozens of countries agreed before dawn Saturday at the U.N. in Geneva on 10 “possible guiding principles” about such “Lethal Automated Weapons Systems.”

Point 2 said: “Human responsibility for decisions on the use of weapons systems must be retained since accountability cannot be transferred to machines.”

Wareham said such language wasn’t binding, adding that “it’s time to start laying down some rules now.”

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres welcomed the principles and expressed hopes the countries who signed on “can build upon this achievement,” according to a statement from his spokesman.

Wareham said delegates had just “kicked the can down the road” until the next meeting on LAWS in November. The “usual suspects” including the United States, Russia, Israel and South Korea — joined unexpectedly by Australia, she said — were behind an effort to keep the text from being more binding.

“The fact is that it’s the majority that wants it, but you know, it’s the Convention on Conventional Weapons — and this is where, it’s about consensus and … a small minority of states — or even a single one can hold back the desires of the majority,” Wareham said.

Amandeep Gill, an Indian diplomat who chaired last week’s meeting of experts, expressed satisfaction about the outcome, while cautioning that such systems should not be “anthropomorphized,” or attributed with human qualities. He insisted that they were not like “Iron Man and Terminator.”
…

At one of An Nguyen’s old jobs in Hanoi, she had a daily ritual: When she wanted to log in to the computer, she had to answer a cybersecurity question such as “What is spear phishing?” or “How does malware work?”

Nguyen did not work in the technology industry, but this was her employer’s way of making sure that all staff had at least a basic understanding of good cyber awareness.

Vietnam could use more people like Nguyen, according to security professionals. They say the country’s small businesses, in particular, do not realize how big a threat they face from hackers or other sources of data breaches.

“Cybersecurity for us, sometimes we are too confident — or maybe we are ignorant,” Nguyen, who has since started her own business, said regarding Vietnamese apathy toward computer security. “So we don’t care much about that.”

But small and medium enterprises (SMEs) should care, cyber professionals say, especially considering the factors that make security risks even more acute in Vietnam. These include the Southeast Asian country’s widespread use of pirated software, the high internet penetration among a tech-loving society without the IT support to match, and the love-hate relationship with China.

There are two kinds of people, said Vu Minh Tri, vice president of cloud services at the gaming company VNG, deploying a favorite global cliche — those who have been hacked, and those who do not know that they have been hacked.

“There is a very true saying that there is no company, or no organization, or no computer not impacted by malware,” Tri said. “There’s only organizations, computers, or people not aware the computer is impacted. So all are impacted. It’s just a matter of whether you’re aware or not.”

A new wrinkle in the story comes from neighboring China, with some cyber-attacks believed to be related to its Belt and Road Initiative, which aims to connect many countries from Asia to Europe through infrastructure projects. Research from the security firm Fireeye suggests Chinese hackers may be used either to defend Beijing’s partners in the Belt and Road, such as Cambodia, or to target those that do not play ball, like Malaysia.

Vietnam has taken a cautious approach to the initiative, with some scholars expressing concern about risks like burdensome loans and over-reliance on China. The Southeast Asian country also has reason to worry about potential cyber fallout. In one famous case, Chinese internet protocol addresses were suspected in the 2016 hack of Vietnamese airports, where screens displayed messages challenging Hanoi’s claims in the South China Sea.

“In this digital era, Asia Pacific region has become the largest digital market in the world, creating tremendous business opportunities for SMEs,” Jason Kao, director of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation’s SME crisis management center, told small businesses at a Ho Chi Minh City workshop his office sponsored last week.

But not enough of these small and medium-sized enterprises are paying attention to online security, Kao warned.

“Since more businesses use computers to connect their customers and store data, cyber-attacks and data leaks can cause serious harm,” he said.

The cost burden is understandable, though, he added.

On the one hand, a small business might be too little to attract the unwanted attention of hackers. On the other hand, they might be too small to bear the expense of insuring or guarding against attacks.

“As we talk about cost and benefit, we know that we have to buy insurance contracts, we know that we have to protect ourselves,” Nguyen said. “But we don’t have enough resources.”

That is the reason ripped software remains popular in Vietnam, earning it a spot among countries to watch in the U.S. Trade Representative’s report on intellectual property. Thanks to this pirated software, overseas hackers can access Vietnamese computers, which they use in denial of service attacks – sending so many requests to target websites that the sites become overloaded and shut down.

At the same time Vietnam lacks the information technology specialists who can alleviate some of these dangers. By one estimate, the country could face a shortage of one million IT staffers by 2020.

In the meantime, security advisers offer some basic reminders to increase safety online. Do not click on links, in emails or otherwise, if they are even slightly questionable. Use strong passwords and do not reuse them across different accounts. And of course, avoid pirated software.
…

Britt’Nee Brower grew up in a largely Inupiat Eskimo town in Alaska’s far north, but English was the only language spoken at home.

Today, she knows a smattering of Inupiaq from childhood language classes at school in the community of Utqiagvik. Brower even published an Inupiaq coloring book last year featuring the names of common animals of the region. But she hopes to someday speak fluently by practicing her ancestral language in a daily, modern setting.

The 29-year-old Anchorage woman has started to do just that with a new Inupiaq language option that recently went live on Facebook for those who employ the social media giant’s community translation tool. Launched a decade ago, the tool has allowed users to translate bookmarks, action buttons and other functions in more than 100 languages around the globe.

For now, Facebook is being translated into Inupiaq only on its website, not its app.

“I was excited,” Brower says of her first time trying the feature, still a work in progress as Inupiaq words are slowly added. “I was thinking, ‘I’m going to have to bring out my Inupiaq dictionary so I can learn.’ So I did.”

Facebook users can submit requests to translate the site’s vast interface workings — the buttons that allow users to like, comment and navigate the site — into any language through crowdsourcing. With the interface tool, it’s the Facebook users who do the translating of words and short phrases. Words are confirmed through crowd up-and-down voting.

Besides the Inupiaq option, Cherokee and Canada’s Inuktut are other indigenous languages in the process of being translated, according to Facebook spokeswoman Arielle Argyres.

“It’s important to have these indigenous languages on the internet. Oftentimes they’re nowhere to be found,” she said. “So much is carried through language — tradition, culture — and so in the digital world, being able to translate from that environment is really important.”

The Inupiaq language is spoken in northern Alaska and the Seward Peninsula. According to the University of Alaska Fairbanks, about 13,500 Inupiat live in the state, with about 3,000 speaking the language.

Myles Creed, who grew up in the Inupiat community of Kotzebue, was the driving force in getting Inupiaq added. After researching ways to possibly link an external translation app with Facebook, he reached out to Grant Magdanz, a hometown friend who works as a software engineer in San Francisco. Neither one of them knew about the translation tool when Magdanz contacted Facebook in late 2016 about setting up an Inupiatun option.

Facebook opened a translation portal for the language in March 2017. It was then up to users to provide the translations through crowdsourcing.

Creed, 29, a linguistics graduate student at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, is not Inupiat, and neither is Magdanz, 24. But they grew up around the language and its people, and wanted to promote its use for today’s world.

“I’ve been given so much by the community I grew up in, and I want to be able to give back in some way,” said Creed, who is learning Inupiaq.

Both see the Facebook option as a small step against predictions that Alaska’s Native languages are heading toward extinction under their present rate of decline.

“It has to be part of everyone’s daily life. It can’t be this separate thing,” Magdanz said. “People need the ability to speak it in any medium that they use, like they would English or Spanish.”

Initially, Creed relied on volunteer translators, but that didn’t go fast enough. In January, he won a $2,000 mini grant from the Alaska Humanities Forum to hire two fluent Inupiat translators. While a language is in the process of being translated, only those who use the translation tool are able to see it.

Creed changed his translation settings last year. But it was only weeks ago that his home button finally said “Aimaagvik,” Inupiaq for home.

“I was really ecstatic,” he said.

So far, only a fraction of the vast interface is in Inupiaq. Part of the holdup is the complexity of finding exact translations, according to the Inupiaq translators who were hired with the grant money.

Take the comment button, which is still in English. There’s no one-word-fits-all in Inupiaq for “comment,” according to translator Pausauraq Jana Harcharek, who heads Inupiaq education for Alaska’s North Slope Borough. Is the word being presented in the form of a question, or a statement or an exclamatory sentence?

“Sometimes it’s so difficult to go from concepts that don’t exist in the language to arriving at a translation that communicates what that particular English word might mean,” Harcharek said.

Translator Muriel Hopson said finding the right translation ultimately could require two or three Inupiaq words.

The 58-year-old Anchorage woman grew up in the village of Wainwright, where she was raised by her grandparents. Inupiaq was spoken in the home, but it was strictly prohibited at the village school run by the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs, Hopson said.

She wonders if she’s among the last generation of Inupiaq speakers. But she welcomes the new Facebook option as a promising way for young people to see the value Inupiaq brings as a living language.

“Who doesn’t have a Facebook account when you’re a millennial?” she said. “It can only help.”
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President Donald Trump’s administration wants to shut down U.S. government radio stations that announce official time, a service in operation since World War II.

WWV and WWVB in the state of Colorado and WWVH on the island of Kauai in the mid-Pacific state of Hawaii, send out signals that allow millions of clocks and watches to be set either manually or automatically.

WWVB continuously broadcasts digital time codes, using very long electromagnetic waves at a frequency of 60 kilohertz, which are automatically received by timekeeping devices in North America, keeping them accurate to a fraction of a second.

“If you shut down these stations, you turn off all those clocks,” said Don Sullivan, who managed the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) stations between 1994 and 2005.

​GPS not good enough

Some argue the terrestrial time signal have been rendered obsolete by the government’s Global Positioning System, whose satellites also transmit time signals, but users disagree, noting GPS devices must have an unobstructed view of a number of satellites in space to properly function.

“Sixty kilohertz permeates in a way GPS can’t,” Sullivan told VOA, explaining that WWVB’s very low frequency signal can be received inside buildings and it is an important backup to GPS in case adversaries attempt to interfere with the satellite radio-navigation system.

WWV and WWVH broadcast on a number of shortwave frequencies, meaning their signals can be received globally.

The Trump administration proposes, in its Fiscal 2019 budget to Congress, cutting $26.6 million and 136 jobs from NIST’s fundamental measurements, quantum science and measurement dissemination activities.

The budget document acknowledges that in addition to synchronizing clocks and watches, the time signals are also used in appliances, cameras and irrigation controllers.

“It’s crazy,” Sullivan said of the proposed cut. “It’s absolutely insane.”

NIST officials say they cannot comment on budget matters. The White House referred questions about NIST’s funding to the Office of Management and Budget, which has not responded to an inquiry from VOA.

Oldest continuously operating radio station

WWV, the oldest continuously operating radio station in the United States, first went on the air from Washington in 1919, conducting propagation experiments and playing music. In the early years, it also transmitted — via Morse code — news reports prepared by the Agriculture Department.

The station subsequently was moved to Maryland and then to Colorado in 1966. WWV has been a frequency standard since 1922 and has disseminated official U.S. time since 1944.

All of the NIST stations rely on extremely precise atomic clocks for the accuracy of their time signals.

WWV, at two minutes past every hour, also transmits a 440 hertz note (A above middle C), something it has done since 1936, allowing musicians to tune their pianos and other instruments.

All three stations retain a huge following worldwide, according to Sullivan.

WWV and WWVH broadcasts can also be heard by telephone and about 2,000 calls are received daily, according to NIST. (To listen to the broadcasts by phone, dial +1-303-499-7111 for WWV and +1-808-335-4363 for WWVH.)

The telephone time-of-day service also is used to synchronize clocks and watches, and for the calibration of stopwatches and timers (although slightly less accurate than radio reception). 

Tom Kelly, an amateur radio operator in the state of Oregon, has launched a petition to try to save the stations. His goal is to collect 100,000 online signatures from U.S. residents by September 15 that would compel a response from the White House.

Kelly’s petition calls the stations “an instrumental part in the telecommunications field, ranging from broadcasting to scientific research and education,” noting their transmissions of marine storm warnings, GPS satellite health reports and specific information about solar activity and radio propagation conditions.

Britain, China, Germany, Japan and Russia also have very low frequency time transmissions, but their stations are too distant to automatically set clocks in the United States.

Among other proposed cuts for NIST are its environmental measurement projects measuring the impact of aerosols on pollution and climate change and gas reference materials used by industry to reduce costs of complying with regulations and the Urban Dome research grants for determining how to measure greenhouse gas emissions for cities and across regions.
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U.S. Senator Orrin Hatch on Thursday added to the growing push in Washington to have the Federal Trade Commission rekindle an antitrust investigation of Alphabet Inc’s Google.

Hatch, the Republican chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, sent a letter to FTC Chairman Joseph Simons recounting several news reports that identified complaints about Google’s anti-competitive conduct and privacy practices.

Alphabet shares were little changed after the release of the letter. The company declined to comment.

Lawmakers from both major parties and Google’s rivals have said this year they see an opening for increased regulation of large technology companies under the FTC’s new slate of commissioners.

Google’s critics say that ongoing European antitrust action against the web search leader and this year’s data privacy scandal involving Facebook Inc and political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica demonstrate their concerns about the unchecked power of the tech heavyweights. About 90 percent of search engine queries in the United States flow through Google.

Facebook and Twitter executives are expected to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee on September 5 about their  efforts to deter foreign campaigns from spreading misinformation online ahead November’s midterm elections. Lawmakers have criticized Alphabet for not scheduling a top executive, such as Chief Executive Larry Page, for the hearings.

In 2013, the FTC closed a lengthy investigation of Google after finding insufficient evidence that consumers were harmed by how the company displayed search results from rivals. President Donald Trump accused Google’s search engine on Tuesday of promoting negative news articles and hiding “fair media” coverage of him.

Trump’s economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, later said the White House was “taking a look” at Google, and that the administration would do “some investigation and some analysis,” without providing further details.

Earlier this year, Representative Keith Ellison, a Democrat, and Representative Todd Rokita, a Republican, sent separate letters asking the FTC to probe Google.

Simon, the new Republican chairman of the FTC, said in July the agency would keep a close eye on big tech companies that dominate the internet.

An FTC representative was not immediately available for comment.

Hatch, at event hosted by reviews website and Google rival Yelp Inc in May, said moves made by “an entrenched monopolist” deserve extra skepticism.

“They may well be used, not to further consumer welfare, but to foreclose competitors,” he said, according to prepared remarks.

Yelp, a local-search service, said in a statement that Hatch’s letter was “heartening to see” as it underscored the bipartisan plea for FTC scrutiny of Google.
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Germany announced a new agency on Wednesday to fund research on cybersecurity and to end its reliance on digital technologies from the United States, China and other countries.

Interior Minister Horst Seehofer told reporters that Germany needed new tools to become a top player in cybersecurity and shore up European security and independence.

“It is our joint goal for Germany to take a leading role in cybersecurity on an international level,” Seehofer told a news conference with Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen. “We have to acknowledge we’re lagging behind, and when one is lagging, one needs completely new approaches.”

The agency is a joint interior and defense ministry project.

Germany, like many other countries, faces a daily barrage of cyberattacks on its government and industry computer networks.

However, the opposition Greens criticized the project. “This agency wouldn’t increase our information technology security, but further endanger it,” said Greens lawmaker Konstantin von Notz.

The agency’s work on offensive capabilities would undermine Germany’s diplomatic efforts to limit the use of cyberweapons internationally, he said. “As a state based on the rule of law, we can only lose a cyberpolitics arms race with states like China, North Korea or Russia,” he added, calling for “scarce resources” to be focused on hardening vulnerable systems.

Germany and other European countries also worry about their dependence on U.S. technologies. This follows revelations in 2012 by U.S. NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden of a massive spying network, as well as the U.S. Patriot Act which gave the U.S. government broad powers to compel companies to provide data.

“As a federal government we cannot stand idly by when the use of sensitive technology with high security relevance are controlled by other governments. We must secure and expand such key technologies of our digital infrastructure,” Seehofer said.
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More than a dozen human rights groups are urging Google not to offer censored internet search in China, amid reports it is planning to again provide the service in the giant market.

A joint letter Tuesday calls on CEO Sundar Pichai to explain what Google is doing to safeguard users from the Chinese government’s censorship and surveillance.

It describes the company’s secretive plan to build a search engine that would comply with Chinese censorship as representing “an alarming capitulation by Google on human rights.”

“The Chinese government extensively violates the rights to freedom of expression and privacy; by accommodating the Chinese authorities’ repression of dissent, Google would be actively participating in those violations for millions of internet users in China,” the letter says.

In a statement, Google said it has “been investing for many years to help Chinese users, from developing Android, through mobile apps such as Google Translate and Files Go, and our developer tools. But our work on search has been exploratory, and we are not close to launching a search product in China.”

In the U.S., President Donald Trump and other conservatives have lobbed charges of censorship at Google and other U.S. tech companies, though they haven’t provided evidence. On Tuesday, Trump claimed that Google had rigged search results about him “so that almost all stories & news is BAD.” A top adviser said the White House is “taking a look” at whether Google should face federal regulation. The companies deny the accusations.

Meanwhile, Apple announced plans last year to open a data center in mainland China with ties to the country’s government, raising concerns about the security of iCloud accounts that store personal information from Apple customers who live in mainland China, even when they’re traveling outside the country. Other major technology companies, including Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM, already had similar deals to run data centers in mainland China to remain in the good graces of the country’s Communist government.

Google employees protest

The rights groups’ expression of concern over a Chinese search engine from Google follows a letter earlier this month from more than a thousand Google employees protesting the China plans. The letter called on executives to review ethics and transparency at the company.

Google had previously complied with censorship controls starting in 2006 as it sought a toehold in the booming Chinese economy. But it exited the Chinese search market in 2010 under unrelenting pressure from human rights groups and some shareholders.

Tuesday’s letter, signed by groups including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Reporters Without Borders, said China’s controls over the internet have only strengthened since then amid an overall crackdown on civil liberties and freedom of expression. The letter said it would be difficult for Google to relaunch a search engine “in a way that would be compatible with the company’s human rights responsibilities under international standards, or its own commitments.”

Investing in China

According to online news site The Intercept, Google created a custom Android app that will automatically filter out sites blocked by China’s so-called “Great Firewall.”

Google co-founder Sergey Brin was born in the Soviet Union in 1973 and lived there until age 6 when his family fled. He has said his experience with a repressive regime shaped his and the company’s views.

However, Pichai, who became CEO in 2015, has said he wants Google to be in China serving Chinese users.

In December, Google announced it was opening an artificial intelligence lab in Beijing, and in June, Google invested $550 million in JD.com, a Chinese e-commerce platform that is second only to Alibaba in the country. The companies said they would collaborate on retail solutions around the world without mentioning China, where Google services including Gmail and YouTube are blocked.
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Off a dusty path in the capital city, flanked by chickens roosting in the grass, one of Cameroon’s most successful digital startups is capitalizing on its success to foster a new generation of entrepreneurs.

Founded in 2013, Kiro’o Games has grown to become Central Africa’s first major video games studio. It draws on African mythology rather than Hollywood for inspiration, as in its fantasy role-playing game “Aurion: Legacy of the Kori-Odan.”

Today, Kiro’o’s online educational platform Rebuntu, launched in June last year, trains young Cameroonians to navigate obstacles in real-life business.

“Our generation has the duty to bring something really new that will finally generate growth,” said Olivier Madiba, founder and chief executive officer of Kiro’o.

Subscribers pay 10,000 Central African francs ($17.50) to access a digital training manual, featuring cartoons and advice on how to find good projects, hire the right staff and secure investor funding.

They can also seek online and in-person mentoring from Kiro’o staff.

In volatile Central Africa, better known for conflict, disease and poverty, training locals to set up international companies may seem like mission impossible.

Unlike neighboring states, Cameroon has been relatively stable for decades, but is blighted by high youth unemployment.

Many young people with professional education are forced to take up lower-skilled jobs such as farming, driving taxis and running market stalls.

But Kiro’o digital communications head William Fankam believes there is another way: create your own work.

“We are wall-breakers,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation, adding that the gaming team is determined not to let the region’s challenges halt their progress.

The company has broken down barriers in education, with its game designers managing to acquire expertise despite a lack of specialized training in Cameroon.

And it has also overcome the obstacle of financing, Fankam said, developing its own model to raise funds from investors.

The entrepreneurs’ training program aims to share Kiro’o’s pioneering approach with others, he added.

That may seem counter-intuitive in a competitive environment, but in Cameroon, there is a need to stimulate a dynamic and creative business community, he said.

“We realized we can’t evolve alone,” he said. “We want to create an ecosystem where we’ll have many startups with different services which would have an impact on the Cameroonian economy, and wider in Africa.”

In just over a year, about 1,000 Cameroonians have signed up for the training.

The Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications has paid inscription fees for more than 800 of them, who are looking to set up technology-focused businesses.

‘Impossible Dream’

Kenneth Fabo, who runs JeWash, a home dry-cleaning and ironing service in Douala and Yaounde, said the program is helping him devise a crowdfunding strategy to grow his business.

“They taught us a certain method that helped us prepare to fund-raise effectively,” he said, describing how he received training to ensure the business is managed transparently and responsibly in a way that reassures investors.

Kiro’o Games – despite its unique selling point as an African company producing culturally relevant video games – struggled to raise money at the start, said Madiba.

“All conventional investors, the banks, the businesses, rejected our project,” said Madiba, whose childhood ambition was to make computer games. “So we decided to invent our own fundraising process.”

Through a combination of tactics including YouTube videos, a campaign on creative funding platform Kickstarter and tapping non-conventional backers like the Cameroonian diaspora, the group went on to raise 130 million francs ($227,000) from nearly 90 international investors – “a dream that everyone told us was impossible,” said Madiba.

Arielle Kitio Tsamo, founder of CAYSTI, an initiative that trains youth in technology, and winner of the 2018 Norbert Segard Foundation prize for African innovation, said her company had benefited from the Kiro’o support.

“They helped us structure our business model,” she said, adding the scheme also connected her with government partners.

Business Against Poverty

Efforts to motivate entrepreneurs and share knowledge are vital in Cameroon, where the education system does not provide such training, said Steve Tchoumba, business development manager at ActivSpaces, an incubator and accelerator for tech startups.

It provides temporary office space, as well as business coaching and links with mentors and investors, and has also set up partnerships with schools and universities.

“We want to motivate youth to consider entrepreneurship – and specifically technological entrepreneurship – as a potential way of poverty alleviation,” said Tchoumba.

“For every company that is created, there is income for the country, there’s employment for the youth,” he said.

Tchoumba particularly hopes to foster social businesses that can bring wider benefits to local communities.

Multinational companies are also showing interest in West Africa’s startup scene.

Since 2017, Google has been running Launchpad Accelerator Africa, a training program for promising startups. In June, it began accepting applications from Cameroon, Senegal and Ivory Coast, among others.

Despite promising developments, many of the African incubators that have sprung up in the past five years have limited resources, World Bank private-sector specialist Alexandre Laure noted in a blog earlier this year.

Challenges include a lack of basic business necessities, such as a reliable power supply, with sub-Saharan Africa having the world’s lowest household electrification rate.

Kiro’o’s Madiba admits dealing with power cuts and other fundamental problems is tough, but says the group’s resilience has spurred it on to greater things.

“When we started we were just passionate — but at a certain point we became a symbol of something, and we didn’t anticipate this,” he said, referring to the frequent emails he receives from Cameroonians struggling to set up a business.

Many tell him they do not give up because Kiro’o shows that success is possible.

“It’s not only a job — you are building a legacy,” said Madiba.

($1 = 572.4500 CFA francs)
…

It’s been around for decades, but, unlike regular 3D, virtual reality (VR) has yet to make a big impact in the movie industry, something a maker of Hollywood animations believes can change – if the films are good enough.

Eric Darnell, who co-wrote and directed the “Madagascar” movies, showed his own VR film at the Venice Film Festival this week, “Crow: The Legend,” in which the viewer is immersed in the story of a mythical bird that has to fly to the sun to bring back warmth to the Earth.

With a voice cast that includes Oprah Winfrey, John Legend and “Crazy Rich Asians” star Constance Wu, “Crow” is hardly an amateur affair, but Darnell’s Baobab Studios will be giving the movie away rather than selling it, as a way to generate interest in the medium.

“I don’t expect it’s going to be today or six months even,” he said of when VR might go mainstream.

“The technology has to get better, headsets have to get cheaper, the content has to get better and that’s at least as important as anything else,” Darnell told Reuters. “It’s a chicken and an egg thing. You can make all the great headsets you can but if there’s not great content … what’s the point?”

Darnell said he was attracted to VR after becoming “a little bit stale” making regular animation.

“When I put a VR headset on, it just blew me away and it reminded me of the first time I saw computer animation back in the early 80s … (That) launched a whole career for me and so when I put that headset on it reminded me of what I felt like

back then.”

In “Crow”, based on a native American legend, the viewer wears a VR helmet and hand-controllers to join the bird on its adventure, using the hands to send waves of virtual energy to help it on its way.

“I think the way we are really going to get there is by putting the viewer inside the story,” Darnell said. “Not just playing a story for them, putting them inside the story so that other characters recognize that the viewer is there and that it means something to them, that you are in their world.”

The Venice Film Festival runs from Aug. 29 to Sept 8.
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