Month: March 2023

Time may be running out in the U.S. for Chinese-owned entertainment platform TikTok, with the White House on Thursday supporting proposed legislation that would effectively ban the app over concerns about the safety of the data of the 100 million Americans who use the trendy video platform.

“The bottom line is that when it comes to potential threats to our national security, when it comes to the safety of Americans, when it comes to privacy, we’re going to speak out, and we’re going to be very clear about that, and the president has been over the last two years,” said White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre.

“And so we’re asking Congress to act, we’re asking Congress to move forward with this bipartisan legislation, the RESTRICT Act … and we’re going to continue to do so,” Jean-Pierre said.

When asked if the administration had any concrete evidence that the platform has used data maliciously, she pointed to an ongoing study by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) and said the White House was “not going to get ahead of their process.”

The CFIUS is an inter-agency panel that reviews certain transactions involving foreign investment and national security concerns.

Also Thursday, the U.K. prohibited the use of the app on government-issued devices – a move already imposed by the U.S., the European Union, Canada and India. And in the U.S., other entities, such as universities, have banned use of the app on their networks.

Earlier this week, TikTok leadership told U.S. media that the Biden administration has demanded that the platform’s Chinese owners divest their stakes or face a ban, issuing a statement that said “a change in ownership would not impose any new restrictions on data flows or access.”

In recent weeks, the company has been promoting its $1.5 billion plan, called “Project Texas,” for the Texas software company it has partnered with to construct a firewall between U.S. users and ownership in Beijing.

“The best way to address concerns about national security is with the transparent, U.S.-based protection of U.S. user data and systems, with robust third-party monitoring, vetting, and verification, which we are already implementing,” the statement read.

A Trojan giraffe or just a chocolate one?

TikTok, which is owned by China’s ByteDance, is best known for its bite-sized dance videos and unconventional recipes — one video providing a tutorial for Flamin’ Hot Cheetos macaroni and cheese provoked more than 24,000 reactions, including one commenter who described the recipe as “worse than first-degree murder.” It also has offered some truly revelatory feats of food engineering, like the French pastry chef who made an impressively realistic 8-foot-tall giraffe out of chocolate.

But critics of the platform say its close ties to the Chinese government make it a Trojan horse: Once the compelling app gains entry to users’ devices, it then has access to their data and information.

Earlier in March, a bipartisan group of U.S. senators introduced the RESTRICT Act, which stands for “Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Technology.”

“Over the past several years, foreign adversaries of the United States have encroached on American markets through technology products that steal sensitive location and identifying information of U.S. citizens, including social media platforms like TikTok,” said Senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat. “This dangerous new internet infrastructure poses serious risks to our nation’s economic and national security.”

Senator Mark Warner, also a Democrat, one of the bill’s main sponsors, is calling for “a comprehensive, risk-based approach that proactively tackles sources of potentially dangerous technology before they gain a foothold in America, so we aren’t playing Whac-A-Mole [dealing with a recurring problem with no solution] and scrambling to catch up once they’re already ubiquitous.”

This is not the first time the White House has gone after the popular video service — the Trump administration also pushed the platform to divest. In 2020, CFIUS unanimously recommended that ByteDance divest the platform. The company tried to make a deal with Walmart, the largest U.S. retailer, and Austin, Texas-based Oracle Corp. to shift its assets into a new entity.

But analysts are divided on the next move.

“A forced sale is the right move,” said Lindsay Gorman, senior fellow for emerging technologies at the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

“The app gives a name and a face to the export of China’s surveillance state around the world. But now there’s bipartisan consensus that TikTok poses a national security threat to the United States’ democracy. The China tech threat — today exemplified by TikTok — may be the only thing Congress agrees on,” Gorman said.

Caitlin Chin, a fellow with the Strategic Technologies Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said stopping TikTok won’t solve the larger issue over apps using data maliciously.

“The strongest approach would be for Congress to establish comprehensive rules across the entire data ecosystem that would limit how all companies — including TikTok — use personal information in ways that could amplify the spread of harmful content,” she said.

“Policymakers should take popular interest in TikTok as an opportunity to implement industrywide protections that could benefit all of society, rather than just a messaging tool primarily geared toward the Chinese Communist Party,” Chin said.

Some information in this article came from Reuters.
…

Microsoft on Thursday trumpeted its latest plans to put artificial intelligence into the hands of more users, answering a spate of unveilings this week by its rival Google with upgrades to its own widely used office software.

The company previewed a new AI “copilot” for Microsoft 365, its product suite that includes Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations and Outlook emails.  

Going forward, AI can offer a first draft in Microsoft’s applications, speeding up content creation and freeing up workers’ time, the company said.

“We believe this next generation of AI will unlock a new wave of productivity growth,” Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, said in a livestreamed presentation.

This week’s drumbeat of news including new funding for AI startup Adept reflects how companies large and small are locked in a fierce competition to deploy software that could reshape how people work. At the center are Microsoft and Google-owner Alphabet Inc, which on Tuesday touted AI features for Gmail and a “magic wand” to draft prose in its own word processor.

The frenzy to invest in and build new products began with the launch last year of ChatGPT, from the Microsoft-backed startup OpenAI. Chatbot showed the potential of so-called large language models, technology that learns from past data how to create content anew. It is rapidly evolving. Just this week, OpenAI began the release of a more powerful version known as GPT-4.
…

TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew is scheduled to testify before the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce on March 23. Lawmakers have questions about the app’s connections to China. For VOA, Deana Mitchell reports.
…

TikTok confirmed Wednesday that U.S. officials have recommended the popular video-sharing app part ways with its Chinese parent ByteDance to avoid a national ban.

Western powers, including the European Union and the United States, have been taking an increasingly tough approach to the app, citing fears that user data could be used or abused by Chinese officials.

“If protecting national security is the objective, calls for a ban or divestment are unnecessary, as neither option solves the broader industry issues of data access and transfer,” a TikTok spokesperson told AFP.

“We remain confident that the best path forward to addressing concerns about national security is transparent, U.S.-based protection of U.S. user data and systems, with robust third-party monitoring, vetting, and verification.”

The Wall Street Journal and other U.S. news outlets on Wednesday reported that the White House set an ultimatum: if TikTok remains a part of ByteDance, it will be banned in the United States.

“This is all a game of high stakes poker,” Wedbush analyst Dan Ives said in a note to investors.

Washington is “clearly… putting more pressure on ByteDance to strategically sell this key asset in a major move that could have significant ripple impacts,” he continued.

The White House last week welcomed a bill introduced in the U.S. Senate that would allow President Joe Biden to ban TikTok.

The bipartisan bill “would empower the United States government to prevent certain foreign governments from exploiting technology services… in a way that poses risks to Americans’ sensitive data and our national security,” Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said in a statement.

The bill’s introduction and its quick White House backing accelerated the political momentum against TikTok, which is also the target of a separate piece of legislation in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Appearing tough on China is one of the rare issues with potential for bipartisan support in both the Republican-run House and the Senate, where Biden’s Democratic Party holds the majority.

Concern ramped up among American officials earlier this year after a Chinese balloon, which Washington alleged was on a spy mission, flew over U.S. airspace.

TikTok use rocketing

TikTok claims it has more than a billion users worldwide including over 100 million in the United States, where it has become a cultural force, especially among young people.

Activists argue a ban would be an attack on free speech and stifle the export of American culture and values to TikTok users around the world.

U.S. government workers in January were banned from installing TikTok on their government-issued devices.

Civil servants in the European Union and Canada are also barred from downloading the app on their work devices.

According to the Journal report, the ultimatum to TikTok came from the U.S. interagency board charged with assessing risks foreign investments represent to national security.

U.S. officials declined to comment on the report.

TikTok has consistently denied sharing data with Chinese officials and says it has been working with the U.S. authorities for more than two years to address national security concerns.

Time spent by users on TikTok has surpassed that spent on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram or Twitter and is closing in on streaming television titan Netflix, according to market tracker Insider Intelligence.
…

Moonwalking astronauts will have sleeker, more flexible spacesuits that come in different sizes when they step onto the lunar surface later this decade. 

Exactly what that looks like remained under wraps. The company designing the next-generation spacesuits, Axiom Space, said Wednesday that it plans to have new versions for training purposes for NASA later this summer. 

The moonsuits will be white like they were during NASA’s Apollo program more than a half-century ago, according to the company. That’s so they can reflect heat and keep future moonwalkers cool. 

The suits will provide greater flexibility and more protection from the moon’s harsh environment, and will come in a wider range of sizes, according to the Houston-based company. 

NASA awarded Axiom Space a $228.5 million contract to provide the outfits for the first moon landing in more than 50 years. The space agency is targeting late 2025 at the earliest to land two astronauts on the moon’s south pole. 

At Wednesday’s event in Houston, an Axiom employee modeled a dark spacesuit, doing squats and twisting at the waist to demonstrate its flexibility. The company said the final version will be different, including the color. 

“I didn’t want anybody to get that mixed up,” said Axiom’s Russell Ralston. 
…