Hackers who penetrated the business networks of U.S. energy and nuclear companies in recent weeks were working for the Russian government according to a report in a prominent newspaper.

The Washington Post reported late Saturday that anonymous U.S. government officials confirmed the hackers were working for the Russian government.

The officials told The Post the Russians’ motive is not clear because the operations of the affected companies were not disrupted.

One U.S. official, however, said he viewed the cyberattack as “a reconnaissance effort,” to figure out points of entry into the companies. 

“That’s what all cyber bad guys do,” the official said.

The attacks on the business and administrative systems of the companies were confirmed last week when the U.S. Department of Energy said it was helping the firms defend against the intrusions.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the FBI had alerted the energy companies in late June that unidentified hackers were targeting the nuclear, power and critical infrastructure sectors.

The agencies said that at no time was there any risk to public safety.

News of the Russian government hacking into U.S. energy and nuclear companies follows the information that Russia mounted a hacking campaign designed to interfere with the recent U.S. presidential election.
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The shortage of housing in California’s Silicon Valley has gotten so severe that Facebook Inc. on Friday proposed taking homebuilding into its own hands for the first time with a plan to construct 1,500 units near its headquarters.

The growth of Facebook, Alphabet Inc.’s Google and other tech companies has strained neighborhoods in the San Francisco Bay area that were not prepared for an influx of tens of thousands of workers during the past decade. Home prices and commute times have risen.

Tech companies have responded with measures such as internet-equipped buses for employees with long commutes.

Facebook has offered at least $10,000 in incentives to workers who move closer to its offices.

Those steps, though, have not reduced complaints that tech companies are making communities unaffordable, and they have mostly failed to address the area’s housing shortage.

“The problem with Silicon Valley is you don’t have enough supply to keep up with the demand,” said Sam Khater, deputy chief economist at real estate research firm CoreLogic.

With Facebook’s construction plan, the company said it wanted to invest in Menlo Park, the city some 45 miles (72 km) south of San Francisco where it moved in 2011.

The company said it wants to build a “village” that will also have 1.75 million square feet of office space and 125,000 square feet of retail space.

“Part of our vision is to create a neighborhood center that provides long-needed community services,” John Tenanes, Facebook’s vice president for global facilities, said in a statement.

The 1,500 Facebook housing units would be open to anyone, not just employees, and 15 percent of them would be offered at below market rates, the company said.

Facebook said it expects the review process to take two years.

Alphabet has taken a smaller step, buying 300 modular apartment units for short-term employee housing, the Wall Street Journal reported last month.

Menlo Park Mayor Kirsten Keith said in an interview that there were concerns about whether the Facebook plan would increase traffic, a subject the city’s planning department would study.

She said, though, that Facebook’s plan fits with the city’s own long-term plan for development, and that the city was excited about the additional housing.

Facebook’s Tenanes said the density of the proposed development could also entice spending on transit projects.

“The region’s failure to continue to invest in our transportation infrastructure alongside growth has led to congestion and delay,” he said.
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The U.S. Department of Energy said on Friday it is helping U.S. firms defend against a hacking campaign that targeted power companies including at least one nuclear plant, saying the attacks have not impacted electricity generation or the grid.

News of the attacks surfaced a week ago when Reuters reported that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Federal Bureau of Investigation issued a June 28 alert to industrial firms, warning them of hacking targeting the nuclear, power and critical infrastructure sectors.

“DOE is working with our government and industry partners to mitigate any impact from a cyber intrusion affecting entities in the energy sector,” a Department of Energy representative said in an email to Reuters. “At this time, there has been no impact to systems controlling U.S. energy infrastructure. Any potential impact appears to be limited to administrative and business networks.”

It was not clear who was responsible for the hacks. The joint report by the DHS and the FBI did not identify the attackers, though it described the hacks as “an advanced persistent threat,” a term that U.S. officials typically but not always use to describe attacks by culprits.

Dozen U.S. power companies attacked

The DOE discussed its response to the attacks after Bloomberg News reported on Friday that the Wolf Creek nuclear facility in Kansas was among at least a dozen U.S. power firms breached in the attack, citing current and former U.S. officials who were not named.

A representative with the Wolf Creek Nuclear Operating Corp. declined to say if the plant was hacked, but said it continued to operate safely.

“There has been absolutely no operational impact to Wolf Creek. The reason that is true is because the operational computer systems are completely separate from the corporate network,” company spokeswoman Jenny Hageman said via email.

A separate Homeland Security technical bulletin issued on June 28 included details of code used in a hacking tool that suggest the hackers sought to use the password of a Wolf Creek employee to access the network.

Hageman declined to say if hackers had gained access to that employee’s account. The employee could not be reached for comment.

Tainted emails

The June 28 alert said that hackers have been observed using tainted emails to harvest credentials to gain access to networks of their targets.

“Historically, cyber actors have strategically targeted the energy sector with various goals ranging from cyber espionage to the ability to disrupt energy systems in the event of a hostile conflict,” the report said.

David Lochbaum, a nuclear expert at the nonprofit group Union of Concerned Scientists, said reactors have a certain amount of immunity from cyber attacks because their operation systems are separate from digital business networks. But over time it would not be impossible for hackers to potentially do harm.

“Perhaps the biggest vulnerability nuclear plants face from hackers would be their getting information on plant designs and work schedules with which to conduct a physical attack,” Lochbaum said.

DOE shares information

The DOE said it has shared information about this incident with industry, including technical details on the attack and mitigation suggestions.

“Security professionals from government and industry are working closely to share information so energy system operators can defend their systems,” the agency representative said. Earlier, the FBI and DHS issued a joint statement saying “There is no indication of a threat to public safety” because the impact appears limited to administrative and business networks.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has not received any notifications of a cyber event that has affected critical systems at a nuclear plant, said spokesman Scott Burnell.

A nuclear industry spokesman told Reuters last Saturday that hackers have never gained access to a nuclear plant.
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A senior Facebook official met with Pakistan’s interior minister on Friday to discuss a demand the company prevent blasphemous content or be blocked.

The meeting comes after a Pakistani counter-terrorism court sentenced a 30-year-old man to death for making blasphemous comments on Facebook, part of a wider crack-down.

Joel Kaplan, Facebook’s vice president of public policy, met Interior Minister Nisar Ali Khan, who offered to approve a Facebook office in Pakistan, which has 33 million users of the network.

Khan said Pakistan believes in freedom of expression, but that does not include insulting Islam or stoking religious tensions.

“We cannot allow anyone to misuse social media for hurting religious sentiments,” Khan said.

Facebook called the meeting “constructive.”

“Facebook met with Pakistan officials to express the company’s deep commitment to protecting the rights of the people who use its service, and to enabling people to express themselves freely and safely,” the company said in an email.

“It was an important and constructive meeting in which we raised our concerns over the recent court cases and made it clear we apply a strict legal process to any government request for data or content restrictions.”

Pakistan’s social media crack-down is officially aimed at weeding out blasphemy and shutting down accounts promoting terrorism, but civil rights activists say it has also swept up writers and bloggers who criticize the government or military.

One of five prominent writers and activists who disappeared for nearly three weeks this year later told a U.N. human rights event in March that Pakistan’s intelligence agencies had kidnapped him and tortured him in custody.

Others’ families said right-wing and Islamist parties had filed blasphemy accusations against them to punish them for critical writings.

Anything deemed insulting to Islam or the Prophet Muhammad carries a death penalty in Pakistan, and sometimes a mere allegation can lead to mob violence and lynchings. Right groups say the law is frequently abused to settle personal scores.

In April, a Pakistani university student, Mashal Khan, was beaten to death by a mob after being accused of blasphemous content on Facebook. Police arrested 57 people accused in the attack and said they had found no evidence Khan committed blasphemy.
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South Australia has picked Tesla to install the world’s largest grid-scale battery, which would be paired with a wind farm provided by France’s Neoen, in a major test of the reliability of large-scale renewable energy use.

South Australia, the fifth-biggest state with a population of 1.7 million, has raced ahead of the rest of the country in turning to wind power. Its shutdown of coal-fired plants has led to outages across the eastern part of the nation, driving up energy prices.

The drawback to South Australia’s heavy reliance on renewables has been an inability to adequately store that energy, leading to vulnerabilities when the wind doesn’t blow.

The project is designed to have a storage capacity of 129 megawatt-hours, which is enough to light up 30,000 homes, a Tesla spokesman told Reuters.

100 days or it’s free

Under the terms of the agreement, Tesla must deliver the 100-MW battery within 100 days of a contract being signed or it’s free, matching a commitment made by Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk in a Twitter post in March.

“There will be a lot of people that will look at this, ‘did they get it done within 100 days? Did it work?’” Musk told reporters in South Australia’s capital city of Adelaide. “We are going to make sure it does.”

The 100-day deadline will begin within a few weeks, a political source said, after a connectivity agreement is reached between South Australia, Telsa, Neoen and the Australian Energy Market Operator.

Musk and a spokesman for South Australia Premier Jay Weatherill declined to reveal the cost of the project.

Musk said a failure to deliver the project in time would cost his company “$50 million or more,” without elaborating.

Lithium ready 

The battery, designed to provide emergency back-up power if a shortfall in energy is predicted, will be built on site in South Australia, a spokesman for the state government said.

Tesla said in a statement that upon completion by December 2017, the system would be the largest lithium-ion battery storage project in the world, overtaking an 80 megawatt-hour power station at Mira Loma in Ontario, Calif., also built using Tesla batteries.

The neighboring state of Victoria is also seeking 100 megawatt-hour battery capacity, to be installed by January.

Lithium-ion batteries have been in widespread use since about 1991, but mostly on a small scale, such as in laptops and cell phones.

A typical lithium-ion battery can store 150 watt-hours of electricity in 1 kilogram of battery, representing more than double the capacity of nickel batteries.

Its proponents have been pushing to use lithium batteries on a grander scale.

“For lithium technology to take off on a global scale, they clearly need the storage capacity to make sure renewables can deliver 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” said Adrian Griffin, a geologist who specializes in lithium extraction.

Dozens of companies from 10 countries, including privately owned Lyon Group, working with U.S. power company AES Corp, had expressed interest in the South Australian project.
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Street violence and gang shootings are on the rise in many big cities worldwide. Brazil’s Rio de Janeiro sees an average of 15 gun battles a day, and innocent bystanders are often caught in the crossfire. But people in Rio can now avoid street violence thanks to several smartphone apps. VOA’s Zlatica Hoke has more.
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While our fossil fuel-dependent civilization keeps releasing greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, scientists are racing to find a viable method for lowering the emission of the most harmful one — carbon dioxide. It can be captured and stored underground, or it can be turned into a harmless rock. The price is steep, but the cost of not doing something could be higher. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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A U.S. judge ruled on Thursday that Twitter could move forward with a lawsuit that aims to free technology companies to speak more openly about surveillance requests they receive from the U.S. government.

U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland, California, said in a written order that the U.S. government had failed to show the kind of “clear and present danger” that could possibly justify restraints on the right of Twitter to talk about surveillance requests.

“The government’s restrictions on Twitter’s speech are content-based prior restraints subject to the highest level of scrutiny under the First Amendment,” Rogers wrote.

The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees certain rights including freedom of speech.

Twitter filed the lawsuit in 2014 after revelations by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden about the extent of U.S. spying.

The detail that tech companies can provide about U.S. national security requests is limited, so that companies can release the number of requests only within a range, such as 0-499 in a six month period.

Rogers scheduled a hearing in Twitter’s case for next month.
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Microsoft is laying off thousands of employees in a shake-up aimed at selling more subscriptions to software applications that can be used on any internet-connected device.

Most of the people losing their jobs work in sales and are located outside the U.S. The Redmond company confirmed that it began sending the layoff notices Thursday, but declined to provide further specifics, except that thousands of sales jobs would be cut.

“Like all companies, we evaluate our business on a regular basis,” Microsoft said in a statement. “This can result in increased investment in some places and, from time to time, redeployment in others.”

Microsoft Corp. employs about 121,500 people worldwide. Nearly 71,600 of them work in the U.S.

Software subscriptions

The job cuts are part of Microsoft’s shift away from its traditional approach of licensing its Office software and other programs for a one-time fee tied to a single computer. The company is now concentrating on selling recurring subscriptions for software accessible on multiple devices, a rapidly growing trend known as “cloud computing.”

That part of Microsoft’s operations has been playing an increasingly important role, especially among corporate and government customers, since Satya Nadella replaced Steve Ballmer as the company’s CEO in 2014.

Microsoft’s “commercial cloud” segment is on a pace to generate about $15 billion in annual revenue. More than 26 million consumers subscribe to Microsoft’s Office 365 service that includes its Word, Excel and other popular programs. That number has more than doubled in the past two years.

Meanwhile, revenue from licensing of Microsoft’s Windows operating system has been increasing by 5 percent or less in the past three quarters.
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There is a happy ending for a team of Gambian students who planned to compete in a major global robotics contest in Washington later this month.

The five-members were granted visas Thursday to come to the United States after being turned down earlier this week.

They say they are still disappointed that their mentor, education and science ministry director, Mucktarr Darboe, was not granted a visa.

But the Gambian American Association will escort the students around Washington.

Gambia and Afghanistan were the only two countries whose robotics teams were initially denied visas. Neither were given any reason.

The Afghan students had planned to try again this week.

The Gambian and Afghan students were especially puzzled because teams from Iran and Sudan, and a group of Syrian refugees were given visas. All three Muslim-majority countries are on President Donald Trump’s travel ban. Afghanistan and Gambia are not.

Lida Azizi, a 17-year old from Herat, calls the visa rejection “a clear insult for the people of Afghanistan.”

The group called FIRST Global Challenge holds the yearly robotics competition to build up interest in science, technology, engineering and math across the world.

The group says the focus of the competition is finding solutions to problems in such fields as water, energy, medicine and food production.
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While the public contemplates how to protect large computer systems, such as banks and voting machines, from hacking, experts warn that another critical part of the data-based world may be vulnerable. Robots are rapidly entering everyday life, and they also rely on a connection to the internet and thus are potentially open to malware. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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Swedish carmaker Volvo says it is phasing out the internal combustion engine in favor of electric motors by 2019.

Volvo, which is Chinese owned, is the first traditional carmaker to announce the move.

“This announcement marks the end of the solely combustion engine-powered car,” said Volvo’s president Håkan Samuelsson in a statement Wednesday. “People increasingly demand electrified cars, and we want to respond to our customers’ current and future needs.”.

The company, which made a name for itself for emphasizing passenger safety, said it will offer five electric cars between 2019 and 2021. Three will be branded as Volvo and the others will be labeled as Polestar, the company’s high-end brand.

The company said it will also offer plug-in hybrid or other hybrid-type cars, some of which do use a small gas engine along with a rechargeable battery.

The company says it will continue to make pure combustion engine cars launched prior to 2019.

Geely, the Chinese company which has owned Volvo since 2010, was likely an impetus for the move as electric vehicles have been eagerly adopted in China due to high levels of air pollution.

According to Center for Automotive Research at Germany’s University of Duisberg-Essen, the country is home to half the world’s electric cars. China has said it wants 5 million electric cars on Chinese roads by 2020.

Electric carmaker Tesla recently announced it was in talks to build a plant near Shanghai.
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