If cancer is suspected in a patient, surgeons, in most cases, would have to cut some of the suspected tissue out and test it. Getting the results could be a long process. A new invention called a MasSpec Pen could cut the wait time to just seconds. VOA’s Elizabeth Lee reports from Austin, Texas, where the pen was created.
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Lawmakers in Washington peppered Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg with tough questions this week about his firm’s handling of user data and privacy. They also suggested new ways they or others might regulate internet firms. Michelle Quinn reports.
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Facebook says it will stop spending money to fight a proposed California ballot initiative aimed at giving consumers more control over their data.

The measure, known as the “California Consumer Privacy Act,” would require companies to disclose upon request what types of personal information they collect about someone and whether they’ve sold it. It also would allow customers to opt out of having their data sold.

The company made the announcement Wednesday as chief executive Mark Zuckerberg underwent questioning from Congress about the handling of user data.

Pressure has mounted on Facebook to explain its privacy controls following revelations that a Republican-linked firm conducted widespread data harvesting.

Facebook had donated $200,000 to a committee opposing the initiative in California — part of a $1 million effort by tech giants to keep it off the November ballot.

Facebook said it ended its support “to focus our efforts on supporting reasonable privacy measures in California.”

Proponents of the ballot measure applauded the move.

“We are thrilled,” said Mary Ross, president of Californians for Consumer Privacy.

The California Chamber of Commerce and other groups are fighting to keep the measure off the ballot through the “Committee to Protect California Jobs.” Google, AT&T, Verizon and Comcast also contributed $200,000 each to that effort in February.

Committee spokesman Steve Maviglio said the measure would hurt the California economy.

“It is unworkable and requires the internet in California to operate differently — limiting our choices, hurting our businesses, and cutting our connection to the global economy,” he said.
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A data leak that enabled political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica to access personal information from about 87 million Facebook users has generated an uproar and concerns over online privacy and the power of the major internet platforms. On VOA’s Plugged In with Greta Van Susteren experts explore the issue and next steps to better protect user privacy while also preserving internet openness. VOA’s Jesusemen Oni has more.
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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told lawmakers Wednesday the internet sector will need some form of regulation.

After weathering heated questions from two Senate panels, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg returned to Capitol Hill Wednesday to face more questions from the House Energy and Commerce Committee about the social media platform’s transparency and user privacy.

Zuckerberg said it “is inevitable that there will need to be some regulation” of internet companies, an idea that has been floated by Republican and Democratic lawmakers.

While it is not clear what that regulation would look like, lawmakers have said they want better protections after data breaches affected tens of millions of users.

Zuckerberg cautioned lawmakers to be careful about what they propose, as larger companies like Facebook have more resources to comply with regulations than smaller ones.

In Senate testimony Tuesday, he promised to submit proposals for regulating social media companies and work with lawmakers to craft legislation.

Zuckerberg was called to testify on Capitol Hill this week after news emerged that the personal data of some 87 million Facebook users had been harvested without their knowledge by Cambridge Analytica, a British voter profiling company that U.S. President Donald Trump’s campaign hired to target likely supporters in 2016.

The CEO said his data was included in the personal information that ended up in hands of Cambridge Analytica. 

On Tuesday, Zuckerberg promised to better protect Facebook users. The social media mogul spoke with pride about Facebook’s ability to connect people for the common good but admitted the company has not been proactive in safeguarding its users from misuse of data or those sowing malign messages.

“I started Facebook, I run it. And I’m responsible for what happens here,” Zuckerberg said.

Earlier this week, Facebook began notifying 87 million users, most of them in the United States, whose personal data may have been mined by Cambridge Analytica.

Zuckerberg pledged Facebook will scrutinize and, when necessary, block other firms from gaining access to the platform and empower its 2.2 billion users to wall off their apps from third parties.

Senators also sought assurances that Facebook and other social media platforms are blocking fake profiles originating in Russia that spread divisive messages to sow discord during and after the 2016 U.S. election.

“We will be verifying the identity of any advertiser who’s running a political ad,” Zuckerberg said. “And we’re also going to do that for [Facebook user] pages … that will make it significantly harder for Russian interference efforts or other inauthentic efforts to spread misinformation through the network.”

Vermont Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy noted that misuse of Facebook extends far beyond the United States, saying that Facebook has been used to spread hate speech against Burma’s Rohingya minority.

“Recently U.N. investigators blamed Facebook for playing a role in inciting possible genocide in Myanmar, and there has been genocide there,” Leahy said.

“We’re working on this,” Zuckerberg responded. “We’re hiring dozens of more Burmese language content reviewers. Because hate speech is very language-specific, it’s hard to [detect] it without people who speak the local language, and we need to ramp up our effort there dramatically.”

Facebook faces a backlash from some consumer groups. Members of #DeleteFacebook gathered outside Tuesday’s hearing on Capitol Hill.

“We knew that they had your data, but the extent of what is being breached is a concern for me. What do they know about my children and my grandchildren?” said a woman who identified herself as Alison.

Lawmakers pledged to hold separate hearings focusing on Cambridge Analytica in the near future.
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Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said on Tuesday his company would step up efforts to block hate messages in Myanmar as he faced questioning by the U.S. Congress about electoral interference and hate speech on the platform.

Facebook has been accused by human rights advocates of not doing enough to weed out hate messages on its social-media network in Myanmar, where it is a dominant communications system.

“What’s happening in Myanmar is a terrible tragedy, and we need to do more,” Zuckerberg said during a 5-hour joint hearing of the Senate Commerce Committee and Senate Judiciary Committee.

More than 650,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled Myanmar’s Rakhine state into Bangladesh since insurgent attacks sparked a security crackdown last August.

United Nations officials investigating a possible genocide in Myanmar said last month that Facebook had been a source of anti-Rohingya propaganda.

Marzuki Darusman, chairman of the U.N. Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, said in March that social media had played a “determining role” in Myanmar.

“It has … substantively contributed to the level of acrimony and dissension and conflict … within the public. Hate speech is certainly of course a part of that. As far as the Myanmar situation is concerned, social media is Facebook, and Facebook is social media,” he said.

Zuckerberg said Facebook was hiring dozens more Burmese-language speakers to remove threatening content.

“It’s hard to do it without people who speak the local language, and we need to ramp up our effort there dramatically,” he said, adding that Facebook was also asking civil society groups to help it identify figures who should be banned from the network.

He said a Facebook team would also make undisclosed product changes in Myanmar and other countries where ethnic violence was a problem.
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Dumping sewage into a local river is common practice in some of America’s older cities.  With the benefits of modern engineering, cities like Washington D.C. will soon be able to divert hundreds of millions of liters of raw sewage every day to wastewater treatment plants instead of a river.  Arash Arabasadi reports.
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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified on Capitol Hill for the first time Tuesday, answering lawmakers’ concerns about the social media giant’s failure to protect the private information of as many 87 million users worldwide from Trump-affiliated political firm Cambridge Analytica. VOA’s Congressional correspondent Katherine Gypson has more from a key day in the internet privacy debate on Capitol Hill.
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After weathering heated questions from two Senate panels, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg returns to Capitol Hill on Wednesday to face more questions from a House committee about the social media platform’s transparency and user privacy.

Lawmakers want better protections after data breaches that affected tens of millions of users.

WATCH: Facebook hearing

​”There was clearly a breach of consumer trust and a likely improper transfer of data,” Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican, said.

“It was my mistake, and I’m sorry,” Zuckerberg said moments later.

Senators demanded action from the Facebook CEO. 

“If you and other social media companies do not get your act in order, none of us are going to have any privacy,” the top Democrat on the Commerce Committee, Bill Nelson of Florida, said. “If Facebook and other online companies will not or cannot stop the privacy invasions, then we are going to have to — we, the Congress.”

Zuckerberg was called to testify after news emerged that the personal data of millions of Facebook users had been harvested without their knowledge by Cambridge Analytica, a British voter profiling company that U.S. President Donald Trump’s campaign hired to target likely supporters in 2016.

Zuckerberg promised to better protect Facebook users. The social media mogul spoke with pride about Facebook’s ability to connect people for the common good but admitted the company has not been proactive in safeguarding its users from misuse of data or those sowing malign messages.

“I started Facebook, I run it. And I’m responsible for what happens here,” Zuckerberg said.

Earlier this week, Facebook began notifying 87 million users, most of them in the United States, whose personal data may have been mined by Cambridge Analytica.

Zuckerberg pledged Facebook will scrutinize and, when necessary, block other firms from gaining access to the platform and empower its 2.2 billion users to wall off their apps from third parties.

Senators also sought assurances that Facebook and other social media platforms are blocking fake profiles originating in Russia that spread divisive messages to sow discord during and after the 2016 U.S. election.

“We will be verifying the identity of any advertiser who’s running a political ad,” Zuckerberg said. “And we’re also going to do that for [Facebook user] pages … that will make it significantly harder for Russian interference efforts or other inauthentic efforts to spread misinformation through the network.”

Vermont Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy noted that misuse of Facebook extends far beyond the United States, saying that Facebook has been used to spread hate speech against Burma’s Rohingya minority.

“Recently U.N. investigators blamed Facebook for playing a role in inciting possible genocide in Myanmar, and there has been genocide there,” Leahy said.

“We’re working on this,” Zuckerberg responded. “We’re hiring dozens of more Burmese language content reviewers. Because hate speech is very language-specific, it’s hard to [detect] it without people who speak the local language, and we need to ramp up our effort there dramatically.”

Until now, social media companies have been largely self-regulating. Several senators said Congress must consider steps to protect users of the platforms.

“What do we tell our constituents, given what’s happened here, why we should let you self-regulate?” South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham asked.

“My position is not that there should be no regulation,” Zuckerberg said. “I think the real question, as the internet becomes more important in people’s lives, is: What is the right regulation?”

The Facebook CEO promised to submit proposals for regulating social media companies and work with lawmakers to craft legislation.

Facebook faces a backlash from some consumer groups. Members of #DeleteFacebook gathered outside Tuesday’s hearing on Capitol Hill.

“We knew that they had your data, but the extent of what is being breached is a concern for me. What do they know about my children and my grandchildren?” said a woman who identified herself as Alison.

Lawmakers pledged to hold separate hearings focusing on Cambridge Analytica in the near future.
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Isaac Asimov’s influential “Foundation” science fiction novels about the collapse and resurgence of a galactic empire are heading to Apple as a television drama series, a company spokeswoman said on Tuesday.

The series is the latest step the iPhone maker has taken to acquire original programming as it seeks to rival more established outlets such as Netflix Inc, Time Warner’s HBO and Amazon.com’s Amazon Studios.

It is unclear when Apple’s shows will be released, and where viewers will be able to see them. The company has not said if it will distribute them through its own iTunes Store, where it sells shows and films by other companies, or on another platform.

David S. Goyer, screenwriter of blockbusters “The Dark Night” and “Batman Begins,” and Josh Friedman, the writer of Steven Spielberg’s 2005 sci-fi adaptation “War of the Worlds,” have been charged to bring Asimov’s work to the TV screen.

Hollywood’s attempts over the past two decades to bring the Russian-American author and scientist’s saga of humans living on planets scattered throughout the Milky Way galaxy to either television or the big screen have so far never come to fruition.

The “Foundation” series began as several short stories published between 1942 and 1950, and was later developed into a trilogy of novels published from 1951 to 1953. It won a Hugo Award, the top awards for science fiction and fantasy writing, in 1966 as best all-time series, the only time the award has been handed out.

Apple has already ordered two seasons of a drama about a morning TV program starring Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston, as well as a remake of Spielberg’s 1980 sci-fi anthology series “Amazing Stories.”
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The group known as the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots says fully autonomous lethal weapons that can strike selected targets are no longer within the realm of science fiction. The coalition says it wants pre-emptive action taken to ban them. Government experts will spend the next two weeks discussing the issue at a meeting of the U.N. Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons.

The Campaign to stop Killer Robots – a coalition of 65 non-government organizations – says the world is running out of time to prevent these systems from becoming a dangerous reality.

Campaign co-founder Richard Moyes warns the world is moving closer to situations where machine intelligence, instead of humans, may make life and death decisions on the battlefield.

“We need humans involved in these processes and it needs to be a substantial engagement that allows sort of human ethical judgment and human moral engagements with the decision about the use of force…From my perspective, I think there is a real risk in thinking that violence and killing people can ever be a really clean business,” said Moyes. “I think…we should be very wary about thinking that machines and computers can solve that.”

Campaign co-founder Mary Wareham tells VOA autonomous weapons systems with decreasing levels of human control are currently in use and development by six countries – the United States, China, Israel, South Korea, Russia and Britain. She says the U.S. is the most advanced.”

“I think all of them have commented that these weapons systems, the fully autonomous weapons systems, lethal autonomous weapons systems, do not exist yet,” said Wareham. “That is the common refrain that we hear in the room; but, there is acknowledgement that this is the direction that it could head in.”   

Human Rights Watch – a founding member of the campaign – has said previously that precursors to killer robots include armed drones.  

The campaign says the government experts have made some progress in identifying key issues of concern regarding autonomy in weapons systems. It says 22 countries are calling for a ban on fully autonomous weapons and many others agree some human control must be retained over future weapons systems.  

The activists say they are heartened by the increasing number of countries that have expressed interest in negotiating a new international law on killer robots. The campaign says it wants member states to conclude a legally binding treaty “prohibiting the development, production, and use of fully autonomous weapons systems by the end of 2019.”

 
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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is set to testify publicly Tuesday before a group of U.S. senators after apologizing for the way his company handled data for millions of users.

He is due to appear before a joint hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee and Senate Commerce Committee, and on Wednesday will go before House lawmakers.

Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley said users “deserve to know how their information is shared and secure,” and that he wants to explore with Zuckerberg ways to balance safety with innovation.

Zuckerberg met privately with lawmakers in Washington on Monday and released written testimony saying the social media network should have done more to prevent itself and the data of its members from being misused.

“We didn’t take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake. It was my mistake, and I’m sorry,” Zuckerberg said.Zuckerberg was called to testify after news broke last month that personal data of millions of Facebook users had been harvested without their knowledge by Cambridge Analytica, a British voter profiling company that U.S. President Donald Trump’s campaign hired to target likely supporters in 2016.

WATCH:  Video report on Facebook Data Breach

Cambridge Analytica connection

Prior to 2016, Facebook allowed a British researcher to create an app on Facebook on which about 200,000 users divulged personal information that was subsequently shared with Cambridge Analytica. The number of affected Facebook users multiplied exponentially because the app also collected data about friends, relatives and acquaintances of everyone who installed it.

Cambridge Analytica said it had data for 30 million of Facebook’s 2.2 billion users.

On Capitol Hill, U.S. lawmakers signaled they want action, not just contrition, from social media executives.

“If we don’t rein in the misuse of social media, none of us are going to have any privacy anymore,” the top Democrat on the Senate Commerce Committee, Bill Nelson of Florida, told reporters after meeting privately with Zuckerberg Monday.

Meanwhile, Facebook announced it is starting to notify tens of millions of users, most of them in the United States, whose personal data may have been harvested by Cambridge Analytica.

New cyber firewalls

The social media giant is also empowering all its users to shut off third-party access to their apps and is setting up cyber “firewalls” to ensure that users’ data is not unwittingly transmitted by others in their social network.

For years, Congress took a largely “hands-off” approach to regulating the internet. Some analysts believe that is about to change after the Facebook data breach, as well as a cascade of revelations about Russian cyber-meddling.

“At this point in time, it’s really up to Congress and the federal agencies to step up and take some responsibility for protecting privacy, for regulating Facebook as a commercial service which it clearly is,” Marc Rotenberg, president of the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center, told VOA. “We’ve gone for many years in the United States believing that self-regulation could work — that Facebook and the other tech giants could police themselves, but I think very few people still believe that.”

 
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