The U.S. “remains deeply concerned with China’s long-standing restrictions on freedom of expression online,” a State Department official said Thursday, reacting to Google’s reported plan to relaunch its search engine in China.

“We strongly object to all efforts by China to force U.S. companies to block or censor online content as a condition for market access,” the official said.

Google shut down its Chinese search engine in 2010, citing government attempts to “limit free speech on the web.” But a company whistle-blower who spoke to the online publication The Intercept said Google was in the advanced stages of launching a custom Android search app in China that will comply with the Communist Party’s censorship policies on human rights, democracy, free speech and religion. 

The Intercept cited internal Google documents and people familiar with the rollout. The publication said the project, code-named Dragonfly, has been in development since 2017. It said the project began to progress more quickly following a December meeting between Google CEO Sundar Pichai and a senior Chinese government official.

According to the documents obtained by The Intercept, Google said it would automatically filter websites blocked by China’s so-called Great Firewall. Banned websites will be removed from the first page of search results with the disclaimer: “Some results may have been removed due to statutory requirements.”

Empty searches

The documents also say that Google’s app will “blacklist sensitive queries” by returning no results when people search for certain words or phrases.

“We provide a number of mobile apps in China … [to] help Chinese developers and have made significant investments in Chinese companies like JD.com. But we don’t comment on speculation about future plans,” a Google spokesman told VOA in a statement in response to the alleged plans.

China has 772 million internet users — more than any other country — and hundreds of millions of potential users who are not yet connected to the internet.

China’s top internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China, has not commented on the plans.

U.S. Senator Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican and former presidential candidate, posted on Twitter that Google’s reported plans to set up “a censored search engine” in China were “very disturbing” and could help China “suppress the truth.”

VOA’s Nike Ching at the State Department contributed to this report.
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One day after Facebook shut down 32 fake social media accounts that spewed politically divisive messages, U.S. lawmakers were warned that Russian efforts to confuse and polarize the American people are as robust and pernicious as ever. VOA Senate correspondent Michael Bowman reports both Republican and Democratic lawmakers are concerned.
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The U.S. Congress is sending President Donald Trump legislation that would force technology companies to disclose if they allowed countries like China and Russia to examine the inner workings of software sold to the U.S. military.       

The legislation, part of the Pentagon’s spending bill, was drafted after a Reuters investigation last year found software makers allowed a Russian defense agency to hunt for vulnerabilities in software used by some agencies of the U.S. government, including the Pentagon and intelligence services.      

The final version of the bill was approved by the Senate in a 87-10 vote on Wednesday after passing the House last week. The spending bill is expected to be signed into law by Trump.      

Security experts said allowing Russian authorities to probe the internal workings of software, known as source code, could help Moscow discover vulnerabilities they could exploit to more easily attack U.S. government systems.      

The new rules were drafted by Democratic Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire.

“This disclosure mandate is the first of its kind, and is necessary to close a critical security gap in our federal acquisition process,” Shaheen said in an emailed statement.

“The Department of Defense and other federal agencies must be aware of foreign source code exposure and other risky business practices that can make our national security systems vulnerable to adversaries,” she said.   

Disclosure + database   

The law would force U.S. and foreign technology companies to reveal to the Pentagon if they allowed cyber adversaries, like China or Russia, to probe software sold to the U.S. military.      

Companies would be required to address any security risks posed by the foreign source code reviews to the satisfaction of the Pentagon, or lose the contract.      

The legislation also creates a database, searchable by other government agencies, of which software was examined by foreign states that the Pentagon considers a cyber security risk.      

It makes the database available to public records requests, an unusual step for a system likely to include proprietary company secrets.       

Tommy Ross, a senior director for policy at the industry group The Software Alliance, said software companies had concerns that such legislation could force companies to choose between selling to the U.S. and foreign markets.

“We are seeing a worrying trend globally where companies are looking at cyber threats and deciding the best way to mitigate risk is to hunker down and close down to the outside world,” Ross told Reuters last week.

A Pentagon spokeswoman declined to comment on the legislation.      

Source code revealed

In order to sell in the Russian market, technology companies including Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co, SAP SE and McAfee have allowed a Russian defense agency to scour software source code for vulnerabilities, the Reuters investigation found last year.      

In many cases, Reuters found that the software companies had not informed U.S. agencies that Russian authorities had been allowed to conduct the source code reviews. In most cases, the U.S. military does not require comparable source code reviews before it buys software, procurement experts have told Reuters.

The companies had previously said the source code reviews were conducted by the Russians in company-controlled facilities, where the reviewer could not copy or alter the software. The companies said those steps ensured the process did not jeopardize the safety of their products.      

McAfee announced last year that it no longer allows government source code reviews. Hewlett Packard Enterprise has said none of its current software has gone through the process.      

SAP did not respond to requests for comment on the legislation. HPE and McAfee spokespeople declined further comment.    
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3-D printers are being used extensively in industry, research, teaching and hobbies, printing with metal, plastic and even edible material such as dough. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh are experimenting with another kind of 3-D printing — with yarn. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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Google declined Wednesday to confirm reports that it plans to launch a censored version of its search engine in China, where its main search platform was previously blocked, along with its YouTube video platform.

“We provide a number of mobile apps in China … [to] help Chinese developers, and have made significant investments in Chinese companies like JD.com. But we don’t comment on speculation about future plans,” a Google spokesperson told VOA in a statement.

The first report on the possible rollout came from The Intercept, and online news publication, which cited internal Google documents and people familiar with the purported plan.

The Intercept said the project, code-named Dragonfly, has been in development since last year. It said the project began to progress more quickly following a December meeting between Google CEO Sundar Pichai and a senior Chinese government official.

Search terms regarding democracy, human rights and peaceful protests will be among those blacklisted in the new search engine app, the report said. It added the search engine had already been demonstrated to Chinese government officials.

The report said a final version could be introduced within six to nine months, pending approval of Chinese officials.

China’s top internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China, has not commented on the reported plans.

U.S. Senator Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican and former U.S. presidential candidate, posted on Twitter that Google should be given the “benefit of the doubt” but that the reported plans were still “very disturbing.”

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3D printers are being used extensively in industry, research, teaching and hobbies, printing with metal, plastic and even edible material such as dough. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, are experimenting with another kind of 3D printing – with yarn. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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A U.S. federal judge has blocked a Texas man from putting plans on the internet showing people how to make their own plastic guns right in their homes as President Donald Trump questioned whether the action should have been approved by his administration to begin with. It’s a controversy drawing comments from states, the Senate, and President Trump himself. VOA’s Bill Gallo reports.
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How long does it take a robotic hand to learn to juggle a cube?

About 100 years, give or take.

That’s how much virtual computing time it took researchers at OpenAI, the nonprofit artificial intelligence lab funded by Elon Musk and others, to train its disembodied hand. The team paid Google $3,500 to run its software on thousands of computers simultaneously, crunching the actual time to 48 hours. After training the robot in a virtual environment, the team put it to a test in the real world.

The hand, called Dactyl, learned to move itself, the team of two dozen researchers disclosed this week. Its job is simply to adjust the cube so that one of its letters — “O,” “P,” “E,” “N,” “A” or “I” — faces upward to match a random selection.

Ken Goldberg, a University of California, Berkeley robotics professor who isn’t affiliated with the project, said OpenAI’s achievement is a big deal because it demonstrates how robots trained in a virtual environment can operate in the real world. His lab is trying something similar with a robot called Dex-Net, though its hand is simpler and the objects it manipulates are more complex.

“The key is the idea that you can make so much progress in simulation,” he said. “This is a plausible path forward, when doing physical experiments is very hard.”

Dactyl’s real-world fingers are tracked by infrared dots and cameras. In training, every simulated movement that brought the cube closer to the goal gave Dactyl a small reward. Dropping the cube caused it to feel a penalty 20 times as big.

The process is called reinforcement learning. The robot software repeats the attempts millions of times in a simulated environment, trying over and over to get the highest reward. OpenAI used roughly the same algorithm it used to beat human players in a video game, Dota 2.

In real life, a team of researchers worked about a year to get the mechanical hand to this point.

Why?

For one, the hand in a simulated environment doesn’t understand friction. So even though its real fingers are rubbery, Dactyl lacks human understanding about the best grips.

Researchers injected their simulated environment with changes to gravity, hand angle and other variables so the software learns to operate in a way that is adaptable. That helped narrow the gap between real-world results and simulated ones, which were much better.

The variations helped the hand succeed putting the right letter face up more than a dozen times in a row before dropping the cube. In simulation, the hand typically succeeded 50 times in a row before the test was stopped.

OpenAI’s goal is to develop artificial general intelligence, or machines that think and learn like humans, in a way that is safe for people and widely distributed.

Musk has warned that if AI systems are developed only by for-profit companies or powerful governments, they could one day exceed human smarts and be more dangerous than nuclear war with North Korea.
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Efforts to influence U.S. voters ahead of the 2018 midterm elections in November appear to be well underway, though private companies and government officials are hesitant to say who, exactly, is behind the recently discovered campaigns.

Facebook announced Tuesday it had shut down 32 Facebook and Instagram accounts because they were “involved in coordinated inauthentic behavior.”

Specifically, the social media company said it took down eight Facebook pages, 17 Facebook profiles, and seven Instagram accounts, the oldest of which were created in March 2017.

Facebook said the entities behind the accounts ran some 150 ads for about $11,000 on Facebook and Instagram, paid for with U.S. and Canadian currency.

“We’re still in the very early stages of our investigation and don’t have all the facts — including who may be behind this,” Facebook said in a blog post. “It’s clear that whoever set up these accounts went to much greater lengths to obscure their true identities than the Russian-based Internet Research Agency (IRA) has in the past.”

Effort to spark confrontations

At least 290,000 accounts followed the fake pages, most of which appeared to target left-wing American communities in an effort to spark confrontations with the far right, according to an analysis done by the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab.

“They appear to have constituted an attempt by an external actor — possibly, though not certainly, in the Russian-speaking world,” the Digital Forensic Research Lab said in its own post.

It said similarities to activity by Russia’s IRA included “language patterns that indicate non-native English and consistent mistranslation, as well as an overwhelming focus on polarizing issues at the top of any given news cycle with content that remained emotive rather than fact-based.”

Facebook’s announcement came the same day top U.S. officials warned the country is now in “a crisis mode.”

“Our democracy itself is in the crosshairs,” Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said at a National Cybersecurity Summit, citing Russian interference in the 2016 presidential elections.

“It is unacceptable, and it will not be tolerated,” Nielsen said. “The United States possesses a wide range of response options — some of them seen, others unseen — and we will no longer hesitate to use them to hold foreign adversaries accountable.”

Homeland Security officials said they had been in touch with Facebook about the fake accounts and applauded the move to take them down. The White House also praised Facebook’s actions.

“We applaud efforts by our private sector partners to combat an array of threats that occur in cyberspace, including malign influence,” NSC spokesman Garrett Marquis told VOA.

Nielsen, who did not comment on the Facebook announcement directly, also said officials were “dramatically ramping up” efforts to protect U.S. election systems with the help of a new Election Task Force.

She also announced the launch of a National Risk Management Center to make it easier for the government to work with private sector companies to counter threats in cyberspace.

U.S. President Donald Trump, who has at times cast doubt on findings by the U.S. intelligence community regarding Russian interference in the 2016 election, chaired a meeting of his National Security Council on election security on Friday, with the White House promising continued support to safeguard the country’s election systems.

Vice President Mike Pence, speaking Tuesday at a Homeland Security-sponsored summit, echoed that, saying, “Any attempt to interfere in our elections is an affront to our democracy, and it will not be allowed.”

Pence assured the audience that the White House did not doubt Russia’s attempts to influence U.S. elections, saying, “Gone are the days when America allows our adversaries to cyberattack us with impunity.”

“We’ve already done more than any administration in American history to preserve the integrity of the ballot box,” he added. “The American people demand and deserve the strongest possible defense, and we will give it to them.”

Hackers targeted congressional campaigns

Less than two weeks ago, Microsoft said hackers had targeted the campaigns of at least three congressional candidates in the upcoming election.

Tom Burt, Microsoft’s vice president for customer security and trust, refused to attribute the attacks, but said the hackers used tactics similar to those used by Russian operatives to target the Republican and Democratic parties during their presidential nominating conventions in 2016.

Late last week, The Daily Beast reported one of the targets of the attack was Missouri Democratic senator Claire McCaskill, who has been highly critical of Russia and is facing a tough re-election campaign.

Until recently, both U.S. government and private sector officials had said they had not been seeing the same pace of attacks or influence campaigns that they saw in the run-up to the 2016 election.

“I think we’re not seeing that same conduct,” Monika Bickert, head of Facebook’s product policy and counterterrorism, said during an appearance earlier this month at the Aspen Security Forum. “But we are watching for that activity.”

Still, many officials and analysts said it was likely just a matter of time before Russia would seek to strike again.

“I think we have been clear across the entire administration that even though we aren’t seeing this level of activity directed at elections, we continue to see Russian information operations directed at undermining our democracy,” Homeland Security undersecretary Chris Krebs said.

Facebook said it was sharing what it knows because of a connection between the “bad actors” behind the Facebook and Instagram pages and some protests that are planned next week in Washington, D.C.

Facebook also canceled an event posted by one of the accounts — a page called “Resisters” — calling for a counterprotest to a “Unite the Right” event scheduled for August in Washington, D.C.

U.S. lawmakers’ reactions

Key U.S. lawmakers applauded Facebook’s actions Tuesday, though they warned more still needs to be done.

“The goal of these operations is to sow discord, distrust and division in an attempt to undermine public faith in our institutions and our political system,” Sen. Richard Burr, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a statement. “The Russians want a weak America.”

“Today’s announcement from Facebook demonstrates what we’ve long feared — that malicious foreign actors bearing the hallmarks of previously identified Russian influence campaigns continue to abuse and weaponize social media platforms to influence the U.S. electorate,” Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said in a statement.

“It is clear that much more work needs to be done before the midterm elections to harden our defenses, because foreign bad actors are using the exact same playbook they used in 2016,” Schiff added.
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Twitter’s share price fell more than 20 percent Friday after the social media giant reported a drop in active users. 

Twitter said it had 335 million monthly users in the second quarter of the year, which was down a million from the amount of monthly users in the first quarter of the year, and below the 339 million users Wall Street was expecting.

Twitter said that the number of monthly users could continue to fall next quarter as the company continues to ban accounts that violate its terms of service and as it makes other accounts less visible.

The company says it is putting the long-term stability of its platform above user growth. However, the move has made it more difficult for investors to value the company, as they rely on data pertaining to the platform’s potential user reach.

Shares in Twitter tumbled 20.5 percent to close at $34.12 Friday. The fall in the share price came despite Twitter’s report of higher than expected revenue. During the last quarter, Twitter posted a profit of $100 million, marking the company’s third consecutive profitable quarter.

The drop in Twitter’s share price came a day after Facebook lost 19 percent of its value. Facebook said Thursday that slower user growth in big markets and increased spending to improve privacy would hit margins for years, leading to the company’s worst trading day since it went public in 2012.

Both Twitter and Facebook have been under pressure from regulators in several countries to protect user data as well as stamp out hate speech and misinformation.
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Google launched a network of free Wi-Fi hotspots in Nigeria on Thursday, part of its effort to increase its presence in Africa’s most populous nation.

The U.S. technology firm, owned by Alphabet Inc, has partnered with Nigerian fiber cable network provider 21st Century to provide its public Wi-Fi service, Google Station, in six places in the commercial capital Lagos, including the city’s airport.

Internet penetration is relatively low in Nigeria. Some 25.7 percent of the population made use of the internet in 2016, according to World Bank data.

The poor internet infrastructure is a major challenge for businesses operating in the country, which is Africa’s largest oil producer. Broadband services are either unreliable or unaffordable to many of Nigeria’s 190 million inhabitants.

“We are rolling out the service in Lagos today but the plan is to quickly expand to other locations,” Anjali Joshi, Google’s vice president for product management, told Reuters in Lagos.

The company said it aimed to collaborate with internet service providers to reach millions of Nigerians in 200 public spaces across five cities by the end of 2019.

It said it would generate cash from the service in Nigeria by placing Google adverts in the login portal. Google did not disclose the amount invested in the new Nigeria service.

The technology firm said it planned to share revenues with its partners to help them maintain and deploy the Wi-Fi service but did not disclose the expected advertising revenue split.

Nigeria is the fifth country to launch Google Station.

Similar services have been launched in India, Indonesia, Mexico and Thailand.

The service is aimed at countries with rapidly expanding populations. The United Nations estimates Nigeria will be the world’s third most populous nation, after China and India, by 2050.

“A lot of people who found data to be too expensive for them to use, are using it,” said Joshi. “In India, we have tens of millions of users, and close to a million in Mexico.”

Africa’s rapid population growth, falling data costs and heavy adoption of mobile phones has made it an attractive investment prospect for technology companies. But many do not disclose how profitable the continent’s markets are, or if they make the companies money at all.

Nigerian Vice President Yemi Osinbajo welcomed efforts to improve internet connectivity in a speech at a Google conference in Lagos on Thursday.

“Access to information means that the gap in equality and exclusion are bridged,” said Osinbajo who earlier this month met Google’s chief executive, Sundar Pichai, at the company’s Silicon Valley headquarters.

Last year, Google announced plans to train 10 million Africans in online skills within five years.
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Facebook shares dived nearly 20 percent early Thursday after it signaled it expects weaker growth, pushing the Nasdaq decisively lower.

About 25 minutes into trading, the tech-rich Nasdaq Composite Index was at 7,840.20, down 1.2 percent, falling from Wednesday’s record close.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 0.6 percent to 25,572.77, while the broad-based S&P 500 dipped 0.3 percent to 2,838.03.

The Facebook results shifted the market’s attention from Wednesday’s pledge by President Donald Trump and European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker on trade that had boosted markets.

Investors fled Facebook after the social network reportedly sharply higher profit and revenue, but signaled it expects slower user growth, partly due to the effect of data privacy scandals.

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg also cautioned that profitability would be hit by additional spending to secure the network.

Other technology companies retreated, including Google parent Alphabet, Netflix and Amazon, which is scheduled to report results after the market closes Thursday.

Facebook was not the only company to fall after results. Ford sank 4.1 percent and Mattel shed 4.4 percent, while American Airlines climbed 3.7 percent.

In other developments, computer chip company Qualcomm advanced 4.5 percent as it dropped a $43 billion bid to acquire Dutch rival NXP on Thursday after failing to win approval from antitrust authorities in China.

US shares of NXP fell 5.6 percent.
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