Trying to curb increasingly serious air pollution in their cities, authorities in France, followed this week by those in Britain, announced they will ban the sale of new gas and diesel-powered cars by 2040. This may speed up sales of hybrid electric vehicles. In the meantime, engineers are working hard to make such cars more attractive. Researchers at the University of California say their mileage could be improved with smarter onboard computers. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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Cheery Hi-5, a snobbish Poop and a conflicted Meh have starring roles in the animated The Emoji Movie, which imagines a world inside cellphones where emojis rebel against portraying just one emotion all their lives.

Yet the dozen or so people who select and release the tiny, ubiquitous characters globally are far removed from the glitz of Hollywood, where the Sony Pictures movie, which begins its global rollout Friday, was developed.

The humans who toil in obscurity to shape and approve new emojis are part of the Unicode Consortium, a Silicon Valley-based group of computer and software corporations and individual volunteers with backgrounds in technology, encoding and linguistics.

2,600-plus emojis

From smiley faces to thumbs up, there are now more than 2,600 emojis worldwide and, according to a July Facebook report, more than 60 million a day are sent on the No. 1 social media network alone.

The consortium approves about 50-100 new emojis every year, not counting the different skin tones for people emoji, after a rigorous application and review process, said Mark Davis, president and co-founder of the group.

The latest batch, released in June and reaching phones and other devices in coming months, include a star-struck emoji, an exploding head, a group of wizards, mermaids and a woman wearing a hijab.

​Submissions from everywhere

“We get submissions from all over the world,” Davis said in an interview. “The hijab emoji came from a Saudi Arabian young woman who is living in Germany who made a very compelling proposal. I’m looking forward to the exploding head — I think that’s going to be very popular.

“People need to make a case as to why they think their emoji is going to be frequently used, how it breaks new ground, how it is different from other emojis that have already been encoded.”

Logos, brands and emojis tied to specific companies are not accepted. “We also don’t accept specific people. We did encode a cowboy but we wouldn’t encode John Wayne,” Davis said.

Some concepts just do not translate as emoji.

LOL emoji most popular

“Anything that needs a lot of detail to explain or understand is trouble. It’s also hard to make an emoji for something abstract — like good governance, or a responsible president,” Davis said.

Davis said there are 2,666 emojis worldwide. The LOL emoji with tears of laughter is the most popular, according to a July Facebook survey of its 2 billion monthly users, followed by the heart eyes emoji. Italians and Spaniards favor the kissing emoji.

The consortium played no part in the making of The Emoji Movie, Davis said, because all of its work is open-source, available to all, and no permission was needed.

Nevertheless, he never imagined that the computer-generated punctuation marks that originated in Japan in the 1980s would become Hollywood stars.

“That’s something that never really crossed our minds,” Davis said.

 
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The surge in far-flung and destructive cyber attacks is not good for national security, but for an increasing number of hackers and researchers, it is great for job security.

The new reality is on display in Las Vegas this week at the annual Black Hat and Def Con security conferences, which now have a booming side business in recruiting.

“Hosting big parties has enabled us to meet more talent in the community, helping fill key positions and also retain great people,” said Jen Ellis, a vice president with cybersecurity firm Rapid7 Inc., which filled the hip Hakkasan nightclub Wednesday at one of the week’s most popular parties.

More tech, more jobs

Twenty or even 10 years ago, career options for technology tinkerers were mostly limited to security firms, handfuls of jobs inside mainstream companies, and in government agencies.

But as tech has taken over the world, the opportunities in the security field have exploded.

Whole industries that used to have little to do with technology now need protection, including automobiles, medical devices and the ever-expanding Internet of Things, from thermostats and fish tanks to home security devices.

More insurance companies now cover breaches, with premiums reduced for strong security practices. And lawyers are making sure that cloud providers are held responsible if a customer’s data is stolen from them and otherwise pushing to hold tech companies liable for problems, meaning they need security experts too.

1.8 million skilled workers needed

The nonprofit Center for Cyber Safety and Education last month predicted a global shortage of 1.8 million skilled security workers in 2022. The group, which credentials security professionals, said that a third of hiring managers plan to boost their security teams by at least 15 percent.

For hackers who prefer to pick things apart rather than stand guard over them, an enormous number of companies now offer “bug bounties,” or formal rewards, for warnings about vulnerabilities that leave them exposed to criminals or spies.

​New ways to make money

One of the outside firms that handle such programs, HackerOne, said it has paid out $18.8 million since 2014 to fix 50,140 bugs, with about half of that work done in the past year.

Mark Litchfield made it into the firm’s “Hacker Hall of Fame” last year by being the first to pull in more than $500,000 in bounties through the platform, well more than he earned at his last full-time security job, at consulting firm NCC Group.

In the old days, “The only payout was publicity, free press,” Litchfield said. “That was the payoff then. The payoff now is literally to be paid in dollars.”

There are other emerging ways to make money too. Justine Bone’s medical hacking firm, MedSec, took the unprecedented step last year of openly teaming with an investor who was selling shares short, betting that they would lose value.

It was acrimonious, but St Jude Medical ultimately fixed its pacemaker monitors, which could have been hacked, and Bone predicted others will try the same path.

“Us cyber security nerds have spent most of our careers trying to make the world a better place by engaging with companies, finding bugs which companies may or may not repair,” Bone said.

“If we can take our expertise out to customers, media, regulators, nonprofits and think tanks and out to the financial sector, the investors and analysts, we start to help companies understand in terms of their external environment.”

Chris Wysopal, co-founder of code auditor Veracode, bought in April by CA Technologies, said that he was initially skeptical of the MedSec approach but came around to it, in part because it worked. He appeared at Black Hat with Bone.

“Many have written that the software and hardware market is dysfunctional, a lemon market, because buyers don’t know how insecure the products they purchase are,” Wysopal said in an interview. “I’d like to see someone fixing this broken market. Profiting off of that fix seems like the best approach for a capitalism-based economy.”
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Alphabet’s Google aims to train 10 million people in Africa in online skills over the next five years in an effort to make them more employable, its chief executive said Thursday.

The U.S. technology giant also hopes to train 100,000 software developers in Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa, a company spokeswoman said.

Google’s pledge marked an expansion of an initiative it launched in April 2016 to train young Africans in digital skills. It announced in March that it had reached its initial target of training 1 million people.

The company is “committing to prepare another 10 million people for jobs of the future in the next five years,” Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai told a company conference in Nigeria’s commercial capital, Lagos.

Google said it would offer a combination of in-person and online training. Google has said on its blog that it carries out the training in languages including Swahili, Hausa and Zulu and tries to ensure that at least 40 percent of people trained are women. It did not say how much the program cost.

Africa, with its rapid population growth, falling data costs and heavy adoption of mobile phones, having largely leapfrogged personal computer use, is tempting for tech companies.

Executives such as Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s Chairman Jack Ma have also recently toured parts of the continent.

Basic phones, less surfing

But countries like Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa, which Google said it would initially target for its mobile developer training, may not offer as much opportunity as the likes of China and India for tech firms.

Yawning wealth gaps mean that much of the population in places like Nigeria has little disposable income, while mobile adoption tends to favor more basic phone models. Combined with bad telecommunications infrastructure, that can mean slower and less internet surfing, which tech firms rely on to make money.

Google also announced plans to provide more than $3 million in equity-free funding, mentorship and working space access to more than 60 African startups over three years.

In addition, YouTube will roll out a new app, YouTube Go, aimed at improving video streaming over slow networks, said Johanna Wright, vice president of YouTube.

YouTube Go is being tested in Nigeria as of June, and the trial version of the app will be offered globally later this year, she said.
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Apple said Thursday that it will discontinue the iPod Shuffle and iPod Nano, the last two music players in the company’s lineup that cannot play songs from Apple Music, its streaming service that competes with Spotify and Pandora Media.

The two devices are the direct descendants of the original iPod introduced by then-CEO Steve Jobs in 2001, widely seen as putting Apple on the eventual path toward the iPhone. They can only play songs that have been downloaded from iTunes or from physical media such as CD.

Apple said the new iPod line will consist of two models of the iPod Touch ranging form $199 to $299 depending on storage capacity. The iPod Touch is essentially an iPhone without mobile data service and runs iOS, the same operating system as iPhones and iPads.

It is capable of streaming music from Apple Music and running the same apps as iPhones. Apple does not break out sales figures for iPods but says the iPod Touch is the most popular model.
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Twitter has made it clear that it won’t ban Donald Trump from its service, despite calls for it from critics.

It’s a tricky balancing act: The president’s tweets draw attention to the struggling service, but tweets mocking reporters and rivals undercut Twitter’s commitment to make the service a more welcoming place.

Twitter’s policies prohibit harassment and hateful conduct. But there is a lot of wiggle room as to what constitutes such behavior. Trump, meanwhile, has defended his use of social media, tweeting in June that the mainstream media doesn’t want him to get his “honest and unfiltered message out.”

CEO Jack Dorsey told NBC in May that it’s “really important to hear directly from leadership” to hold people accountable and have conversations out in the open, not behind closed doors.

 
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The U.S. Transportation Security Administration is boosting security measures by requiring any carry-on electronics larger than a cellphone to be screened separately at U.S. airports.

Security officers will ask travelers to take all larger devices out of their bags and put them in a bin by themselves, similar to the screening of most travelers’ laptops, TSA announced Wednesday.

‘An increased threat’

TSA cited an “an increased threat to aviation security” as the reason for the move. The change will not apply to PreCheck lanes.

The new rule eliminates one benefit of leaving laptops at home and traveling with a tablet. In the past, travelers weren’t required to fish out those smaller  electronics from their carry-on bags to be X-rayed.  

In May, the TSA said it was going to test additional screening measures for tablets at 10 U.S. airports. That pilot program was successful and the agency said it planned to expand the rules nationwide “during the weeks and months ahead.”

Worried about laptops

Airlines for America, a trade group representing American, Alaska, Atlas, Federal Express, Hawaiian JetBlue, Southwest, United and UPS airlines “remain committed to working collaboratively with DHS officials to strike the appropriate balance of maintaining the efficiency of the system, while ensuring the highest levels of security are in place.”

The threat of terrorists hiding explosives in laptops prompted the Department of Homeland Security in March to ban electronics larger than cellphones in carry-on bags on direct flights of nine airlines at 10 Middle East airports to the U.S.  That ban has since been lifted as each of the airlines tightened its screening.

John Kelly, the secretary of Department of Homeland Security, then announced tighter security for all 180 airlines flying directly to the U.S. from 280 airports worldwide. The measures that went into effect July 19 applied to 325,000 passengers on 2,000 daily flights.
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Against a backdrop of cyberattacks that have grown into full-fledged sabotage, Facebook chief security officer Alex Stamos is bringing a new message to hackers and security experts at the Black Hat conference.

In short: It’s time for hackers once known for relatively harmless mischief to shoulder responsibility for helping detect and prevent major attacks.

The Black Hat security gathering, starting Wednesday in Las Vegas, follows a series of attacks and data breaches that have paralyzed hospitals, disrupted commerce, caused blackouts and interfered with national elections.

Stamos, a keynote speaker, is calling for more emphasis on defense — and basic digital hygiene — over the thrilling hunt for undiscovered vulnerabilities.

Stamos joined Facebook from Yahoo, which last year disclosed breaches of more than a billion user accounts.
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Facebook Inc (FB.O) will provide initial funding for a nonprofit organization that aims to help protect political parties, voting systems and information providers from hackers and propaganda attacks, the world’s largest social network said on Wednesday.

The initiative, dubbed Defending Digital Democracy, is led by the former campaign chairs for Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Mitt Romney, and will initially be based at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, which announced the project last week.

Facebook said it hoped additional participants would turn it into a freestanding information-sharing center controlled by its members. Facebook, with 2 billion monthly users, bills itself as a vehicle for political debate and education, but was also used as a major platform to spread fake news and propaganda during the U.S. presidential race.

Facebook Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos announced the company’s backing at the opening of the Black Hat information security conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday. The event, named after the term for malicious hackers, is aimed mainly at corporate and government security professionals.

Stamos declined to say how much money the Facebook would spend.

“Right now we are the founding sponsor, but we are in discussions with other tech organizations,” Stamos said in an interview before the speech. “The goal for our money specifically is to help build a standalone ISAO (Information Sharing and Analysis Organization) that pulls in all the different groups that have some kind of vulnerability.”

The project will be managed by Eric Rosenbach, a former assistant secretary of defense who is co-director of the Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

“Most campaigns don’t have the tools right now to defend themselves from cyber attacks,” Clinton campaign chair Robby Mook said in an email. “Our initiative aims to fill that void and to help both Democratic and Republican campaigns defend themselves with greater information-sharing and security tools.”

“This is a forward-looking and bipartisan effort to tackle a real problem,” said 2012 Romney campaign manager Matt Rhoades in an email.

Stamos also urged Black Hat attendees, many of whom are leery of government intrusion, to be more open-minded about helping law enforcement track criminals and terrorists.

Unthinking rejection of official requests could lead to legislation forcing companies to break their own encryption, Stamos warned.

Stamos said he would continue to argue against such steps.

“We’re not going to be effective unless we demonstrate that we have the same goals,” he said. “I want to present our position that strong cryptography is a critical part of building a safe, trustworthy future.”

 
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Twitter Inc heads toward its quarterly earnings report on Thursday with a stock that has risen more than 40 percent since April when much of Wall Street was ready to write off the tech company.

The company’s share price popped after its most recent earnings report in April, when Twitter disclosed better-than-expected user growth.

The number of people on Twitter will be in sharp focus on Thursday, when investors and analysts will see if it has kept up the 6 percent year-over-year growth in monthly active users it reported in April. Twitter said then that it had 328 million users.

“For a company that people thought six months ago was knocking on death’s door and going the way of Myspace and AOL, the double-digit rebound and the continued acceleration in users has really surprised investors,” BTIG Research analyst Richard Greenfield said.

Twitter shares closed on Tuesday at $19.97, nearly flat on the day but up 41.4 percent since its stock hit an intraday low of $14.12 on April 17.

The S&P 500 information technology index is up 10.6 percent since its April 17 closing price.

The surge of interest is a morale boost for Twitter, which has limped through past earnings announcements, struggled to keep a stable management and suffered unfavorable comparisons to its bigger and more profitable competitor Facebook Inc.

This month, Twitter had a streak of 12 days when its shares closed up.

The business is expected to report quarterly revenue of $536.6 million, according to a Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S forecast average. That would be a drop of 10.9 percent from $602 million a year earlier.

What has investors upbeat, though, is the number of people on the service, which public figures including U.S. President Donald Trump use to blast out 140-character messages.

“People are willing to give them the benefit of the doubt if they start to grow again,” Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter said.

Other positive signs cited by analysts include co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey purchasing additional shares and co-founder Biz Stone announcing in May his return to Twitter. Ex-banker Ned Segal starts next month as Twitter’s next chief financial officer.

Meanwhile, advertisers and investors have gotten used to Twitter existing as a niche platform, Pivotal Research analyst Brian Wieser said. “There’s nothing wrong with that,” he said.

 
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The Trump administration’s refusal to publicly accuse Russia and others in a wave of politically motivated hacking attacks is creating a policy vacuum that security experts fear will encourage more cyber warfare.

In the past three months, hackers broke into official websites in Qatar, helping to create a regional crisis; suspected North Korean-backed hackers closed down British hospitals with ransomware; and a cyber attack that researchers attribute to Russia deleted data on thousands of computers in the Ukraine.

Yet neither the United States nor the 29-member NATO military alliance have publicly blamed national governments for those attacks. President Donald Trump has also refused to accept conclusions of U.S. intelligence agencies that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. elections using cyber warfare methods to help the New York businessman win.

“The White House is currently embroiled in a cyber crisis of existential proportion, and for the moment probably just wants ‘cyber’ to go away, at least as it relates to politics,” said Kenneth Geers, a security researcher who until recently lived in Ukraine and works at NATO’s think tank on cyber defense. “This will have unfortunate side effects for international cyber security.”

Without calling out known perpetrators, more hacking attacks are inevitable, former officials said.

“I see no dynamics of deterrence,” said ex-White House cyber security officer Jason Healey, now at Columbia University.

The government retreat is underscored by the departure at the end of July of Chris Painter, the official responsible for coordinating U.S. diplomacy on cyber security. No replacement has been named and the future of the position in the State Department is in flux.

Some of Trump’s cyber officials have publicly highlighted a strategy to focus less on building global norms and more on bilateral agreements. Trump and the Kremlin have said Russia and the United States are in discussions on creating a cyber security group.

But at the big Black Hat and Def Con security conferences this week in Las Vegas the U.S. government will have an unusually light footprint. Past government speakers have included a head of the National Security Agency and senior Homeland Security officials.

A session featuring U.S. law enforcement officials discussing the purported theft by Russia of hundreds of millions of Yahoo account credentials was pulled at the last minute. A spokeswoman for the Federal Bureau of Investigation said the presentation was canceled because the Yahoo expert slated to talk, Deputy Assistant Director Eric Sporre, had been reassigned to run the Tampa FBI office.

The policy vacuum left by the United States is also affecting private security firms, which say they have grown more cautious in publicly attributing cyber attacks to nation-states lest they draw fire from the Trump administration.

Trump suggested in an April interview that the security firm CrowdStrike, which worked on investigating the election hack of the Democratic National Committee, might not be trustworthy because he was told it was controlled by a Ukrainian. It is not.

Cyber policy veterans are particularly alarmed about the lack of U.S. and NATO response to the destructive attack, dubbed NotPetya, in June that struck computers worldwide but was especially harmful for Ukraine, which is in armed conflict with Russia in the east of the country.

Cyber security experts, such as Jim Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a government veteran who advised former President Barack Obama, believe Russia carried out the attack. The Russian defense ministry did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Lewis and others predicted that Trump will not publicly accuse Russia, and NATO has only said it appears to be the work of a government agency somewhere.

“If you are not ringing alarm bells in an eloquent way, then I think you’re dropping the ball,” said retired CIA officer Daniel Hoffman, who worked on Russian issues. “When we fail to do enough, that just emboldens them.”

 
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Origami – the ancient Japanese art of paper folding – can create cranes whose wings flap and frogs that jump. Engineers are taking the same idea and apply it to robotics. VOA’s Deborah Block reports.
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