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Twitter announced Monday that it will start labeling and making it harder for users to see tweets about the invasion of Ukraine that contain information from Russian state media outlets like RT and Sputnik.

“For years we’ve provided more context about state-affiliated media while not accepting ad $ or amplifying accounts,” Twitter said in a tweet. “With many looking for credible info due to the conflict in Ukraine, we’re now adding labels on Tweets linking to state media & reducing the content’s visibility.”

Twitter said it had seen over 45,000 tweets a day from people sharing links to Russian state media, much more than coming from state-sponsored accounts.

Twitter began to de-amplify Russian state media accounts in 2020 and had earlier banned Russian state media from advertising.

The announcement Monday will impact individuals sharing links from those entities.

The move is the latest spat between U.S. social media companies and Russia.

Twitter has been slowed down in Russia several times, most recently on Saturday, and last week, Russia said it would limit Russians’ access to some features of Facebook, saying the company was involved in censorship.

Google and Facebook have also banned Russian state media from monetizing their accounts.

Some information in this report comes from Reuters.
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YouTube on Saturday barred Russian state-owned media outlet RT and other Russian channels from receiving money for advertisements that run with their videos, similar to a move by Facebook, after the invasion of Ukraine.

Citing “extraordinary circumstances,” YouTube said in a statement that it was “pausing a number of channels’ ability to monetize on YouTube, including several Russian channels affiliated with recent sanctions.” Ad placement is largely controlled by YouTube.

Videos from the affected channels also will come up less often in recommendations, YouTube spokesperson Farshad Shadloo said. He added that RT and several other channels would no longer be accessible in Ukraine due to “a government request.”

Ukraine Digital Minister Mykhailo Fedorov tweeted earlier on Saturday that he contacted YouTube “to block the propagandist Russian channels such as Russia 24, TASS, RIA Novosti.”

RT did not immediately respond to a request for comment. YouTube did not name the other channels it had restricted.

For years, lawmakers and some users have called on YouTube, which is owned by Alphabet Inc’s Google, to take greater action against channels with ties to the Russian government out of concern that they spread misinformation and should not profit from that.

Russia received an estimated $7 million to $32 million over the two-year period ended December 2018 from ads across 26 YouTube channels it backed, digital researcher Omelas told Reuters at the time.

YouTube previously has said that it does not treat state-funded media channels that comply with its rules any differently than other channels when it comes to sharing ad revenue.

Meta Platforms Inc, owner of Facebook, on Friday barred Russian state media from running ads or generating revenue from ads on its services anywhere in the world.
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The Biden administration announced on Tuesday actions taken by the federal government and private industry that it says will bolster the supply chain of rare earths and other critical minerals used in technologies from household appliances and electronics to defense systems. They say these steps will reduce the nation’s dependence on China, a major producer of these elements. White House Bureau Chief Patsy Widakuswara has this report.
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U.S. auto safety regulators have launched another investigation of Tesla, this time tied to complaints that its cars can come to a stop for no apparent reason.  

The government says it has 354 complaints from owners during the past nine months about “phantom braking” in Tesla Models 3 and Y. The probe covers an estimated 416,000 vehicles from the 2021 and 2022 model years.  

No crashes or injuries were reported. 

The vehicles are equipped with partially automated driver-assist features, such as adaptive cruise control and “Autopilot,” which allow them to automatically brake and steer within their lanes. 

Documents posted Thursday by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration say the vehicles can unexpectedly brake at highway speeds.  

“Complainants report that the rapid deceleration can occur without warning, and often repeatedly during a single drive cycle,” the agency said. 

Many owners in the complaints say they feared a rear-end crash on a freeway. 

The probe is another enforcement effort by the agency that include Autopilot and “Full Self-Driving” software. Despite their names, neither feature can legally drive the vehicles without people supervising. 

Messages were left Thursday seeking comment from Tesla. 

It’s the fourth formal investigation of the Texas automaker in the past three years, and NHTSA is supervising 15 Tesla recalls since January 2021. In addition, the agency has sent investigators to at least 33 crashes involving Teslas using driver-assist systems since 2016 in which 11 people were killed. 

In one of the complaints, a Tesla owner from Austin, Texas, reported that a Model Y on Autopilot brakes repeatedly for no reason on two-lane roads and freeways. 

“The phantom braking varies from a minor throttle response to decrease speed to full emergency braking that drastically reduces the speed at a rapid pace, resulting in unsafe driving conditions for occupants of my vehicle as well as those who might be following behind me,” the owner wrote in a complaint filed February 2. People who file complaints are not identified in NHTSA’s public database.  

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been fighting with U.S. and California government agencies for years, sparring with NHTSA and the Securities and Exchange Commission.  

Last week, NHTSA made Tesla recall nearly 579,000 vehicles in the U.S. because a “Boombox” function can play sounds over an external speaker and obscure audible warnings for pedestrians of an approaching vehicle. Musk, when asked on Twitter why the company agreed to the recall, responded: “The fun police made us do it (sigh).” 

Michael Brooks, acting executive director of the nonprofit Center for Auto Safety, said it’s encouraging to see NHTSA’s enforcement actions “after years of turning the other way,” with Tesla. But he said the company keeps releasing software onto U.S. roads that isn’t tested to make sure it’s safe. 

“A piecemeal investigative approach to each problem that raises its head does not address the larger issue in Tesla’s safety culture — the company’s continued willingness to beta test its technology on the American public while misrepresenting the capabilities of its vehicles,” Brooks wrote in an email Thursday. 

Other recent recalls by Tesla were for “Full Self-Driving” equipped vehicles that were programmed to run stop signs at slow speeds, heating systems that don’t clear windshields quickly enough, seat belt chimes that don’t sound to warn drivers who aren’t buckled up, and to fix a feature that allows movies to play on touch screens while cars are being driven. Those issues were to be fixed with online software updates. 

In August, NHTSA announced a probe of Teslas on Autopilot failing to stop for emergency vehicles parked on roadways. That investigation covers a dozen crashes that killed one person and injured 17 others.  

Thursday’s investigation comes after Tesla recalled nearly 12,000 vehicles in October for a similar phantom braking problem. The company sent out an online software update to fix a glitch with its more sophisticated “Full Self-Driving” software. 

Tesla did a software update in late September that was intended to improve detection of emergency vehicle lights in low-light conditions. 

Selected Tesla drivers have been beta testing the “Full Self-Driving” software on public roads. NHTSA also has asked the company for information about the testing, including a Tesla requirement that testers not disclose information. 

 
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The United States and its Western allies are bracing for the possibility that a Russian invasion of Ukraine would have a ripple effect in cyberspace, even if Western entities are not initially the intended target.

“I am absolutely concerned,” U.S. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco told the virtual Munich Cyber Security Conference on Thursday when asked about the chances of catastrophic spillover from a cyberattack on Ukraine.

“It’s not hypothetical,” Monaco said, pointing to the June 2017 “NotPetya” virus, engineered by Russia’s military intelligence service, the GRU.

The virus initially targeted a Ukrainian accounting website but went on to hobble companies around the world, including Danish shipping giant Maersk and U.S.-based FedEx.

“Companies of any size and of all sizes would be foolish not to be preparing right now,” Monaco said. “They need to be shields-up and really be on the most heightened level of alert.”

Monaco is not the first high-ranking U.S. official to warn that potential Russian actions in cyberspace might reverberate in unexpected ways.

“We’ve seen this play before,” U.S. National Cyber Director Chris Inglis warned a virtual audience earlier this month. Like Monaco, he alluded to the NotPetya attack: “It got out of its reservoir, so to speak, and it then eviscerated broad swaths of infrastructure across Europe and across the United States.”

U.S. Homeland Security Department officials said that for the moment, there were no specific or credible threats indicating an attack like NotPetya is about to be unleashed against the United States. But they said they were not taking any chances and were closely collaborating with Ukraine and other allies, just in case.

Russia’s record

“We are all hands on deck,” Homeland Security Undersecretary Robert Silvers told the Munich Cyber Security Conference on Thursday.

“It’s no secret that Russia has proven itself willing to use cyber means to achieve its broader geopolitical objectives,” Silvers added, pointing to Russia’s attack on Ukraine’s energy grid in 2015.

Some officials remained concerned that Russian President Vladimir Putin would give the order to target countries beyond Ukraine as part of any military action against Ukraine.

“I don’t think Ukraine is his goal,” said Jaak Tarien, the director of NATO’s Cooperative Cyber Defense Center of Excellence in Estonia.

“Putin said in 2007 at the Munich Security Conference that he is sick and tired of the existing security architecture and he wants to change that, and he’s still at it,” Tarien told Thursday’s cybersecurity conference. His goal is “to get U.S. allies to fight amongst each other and disrupt our unity. So cyber is a really, really good way to do that.”

U.S. agencies are likewise worried that as tensions escalate, Russia may be tempted to ramp up cyber operations.

On Wednesday, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the FBI and the National Security Agency issued a joint advisory warning that Kremlin-linked actors might use a variety of techniques to target U.S. defense contractors. 

Not all cyber experts are convinced Russia will resort to cyberattacks to hurt the West, even if the U.S. and its allies make good on promises to hit Moscow with severe economic sanctions.

“I don’t think that cyber [attacks] from state actors is going to be the first or the preferred mechanism for response,” Dmitri Alperovitch, the co-founder of the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, told the Munich Cyber Security Conference.

“Russia has enormous leverage in the economic sphere, even outside of cyber, to respond through export control measures, for example, on critical materials like aluminum and uranium and titanium and palladium and many other things that will do a lot to hurt the U.S. economy and the global economy,” he said.

Alperovitch also cautioned that Russia might be willing to let cybercriminals do the work instead, perhaps releasing a number of ransomware actors it has arrested in recent weeks.

“That would send an unmistakable, even unspoken message to the Russian cybercrime ecosystem that it’s open season on Western organizations,” he said.
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Google said Wednesday it plans to limit tracking and data sharing for users of its Android operating system, which is used by over 2.5 billion people around the world.

The change, which won’t take effect for at least two years, comes in response to growing pressure on tech companies to increase privacy by limiting tracking.

Google, which dominates the online advertising market, currently assigns IDs to each Android device and then collects highly valuable data on users that allows advertisers to target them with ads based on their interests and activities.

Google said it would test alternatives to those IDs or get rid of them entirely.

“These solutions will limit sharing of user data with third parties and operate without cross-app identifiers, including advertising ID,” the company said in a blog post. “We’re also exploring technologies that reduce the potential for covert data collection.”

“Our goal … is to develop effective and privacy-enhancing advertising solutions, where users know their information is protected, and developers and businesses have the tools to succeed on mobile,” Google added.

Google’s move follows Apple’s announcement last year that it would allow users to decide if they wanted to be tracked or not.

Google made $61 billion in advertising revenue in the fourth quarter of 2021, according to The Washington Post.
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A Nigerian rights group has filed a lawsuit to force authorities to publish an agreement reached with Twitter in January to lift a block on the social media company. The rights group says the failure by Nigerian authorities to publish all the details of the agreement raises concerns about citizens’ rights and censorship.

A Nigerian rights group, the Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP), said this week that authorities ignored its request last month to publish the agreement.

The lawsuit seeks a court order compelling authorities to publish details of the agreement reached with Twitter before the company restored access to the site in Nigeria.

Nigeria suspended Twitter last June for deleting a tweet from President Muhammadu Buhari that threatened regional separatists and referred to the 1960s war in the Biafra region.

Nigerian authorities lifted the ban in January, boasting that its new engagement with the company will create jobs and generate revenue for the country.

But rights groups are concerned the terms of agreement may include clauses that violate the rights of citizens, says Kolawole Oluwadare, a deputy director at SERAP.

“If this agreement has the tendency to impact on the rights of Nigerians to freedom of expression, it’s important that Nigerians have access to the agreement, scrutinize the terms and critique it if necessary, because of the effect it will have on our ability to use Twitter freely,” said Oluwadare. “How are we sure that those terms do not necessarily affect even the rights to privacy? I’m talking about the access of Nigerian government to the data of Nigerians.”

Nigerian authorities are often accused of trying to stifle free speech.

In 2019, lawmakers considered a bill that sought to punish statements on social media deemed to diminish public confidence in the president or government officials. The bill never passed.

This week, Nigerian Information Minister Lai Mohammed criticized Twitter and the Canadian government as having double standards citing the truckers protest against COVID-19 mandates in Canada.

“Twitter actively supported the EndSARS protesters and even raised funds,” said Mohammed. “These are the same entities that are now rushing to distance themselves from the protest in Canada and even denying them the use of their platforms.”

But Amnesty International spokesperson Seun Bakare has this to say: “International human rights laws are clear on standards that even platforms like Twitter and Facebook must uphold,” said Bakare. “They must uphold the fundamental tenets of freedom of expression, and access to information and they must not bend their rules just to please any government at all.”

Under its agreement with Twitter, Nigeria said the company agreed to be legally registered in the country, run a local office, appoint country representatives to interface with authorities, pay taxes and enroll officials in its partner support portals.

It remains unclear if Nigerian officials have the ability to monitor and block prohibited content.

An ECOWAS court of justice is scheduled to rule on SERAP’s lawsuit this week.
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The technology industry has long employed mostly men in technical roles. But a nonprofit group in Seattle, Washington is trying to change that. VOA’s Natasha Mozgovaya reports.
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Several senior members of President Joe Biden’s administration led the charge Thursday for a significant practical expansion of the nationwide use of electric vehicles.

The federal government is “teaming up with states and the private sector to build a nationwide network of EV chargers by 2030 to help create jobs, fight the climate change crisis, and ensure that this game-changing technology is affordable and accessible for every American,” said Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg outside the headquarters of the U.S. Department of Transportation.

In the largest investment of its kind, the Biden administration is to distribute $5 billion to begin building up to a half million roadside rapid charging stations across the country for electric cars and trucks.

To rid EV drivers of “range anxiety,” there will be a “seamless network” of charging stations along the nation’s highways, said Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm.

“Most of them will have more than one [charging] port associated with them,” Granholm added.

“The future is electric, and this administration is moving toward it at lightning speed,” she said.

“Soon we’ll be rolling out an additional two and a half billion [dollars] for a new grant program with even more funding for chargers at the community level across the country,” Buttigieg announced.

Most EVs are hampered from driving long distances by the gap between charging stations and the time it takes to recharge their batteries, which have limited range. Most new electric cars can travel about 500 kilometers or less between charging stops, although some models with ranges beyond 800 kilometers are set to come on the market in the next several years.

The federal money being distributed will “help states create a network of EV charging stations along designated Alternative Fuel Corridors, particularly along the Interstate Highway System,” according to the Transportation Department.

It is estimated that nearly $40 billion will need to be spent to build public charging stations to reach the goal of 100% EV sales in the United States by 2035.

Some analysts see a bumpy road toward Biden’s clean energy destination.

“EVs do not necessarily generate lower carbon emissions than gasoline-powered vehicles,” said Jeff Miron, vice president of research at the Cato Institute, a public policy think tank. “The energy needed to charge batteries comes from somewhere, and in some parts of the country, that source tends to be coal, which generates even more carbon than gasoline,” he told VOA.

“Building charging stations will lower the cost of using EVs, which might encourage more driving,” added Miron, who is also a senior lecturer in economics at Harvard University. “More generally, unless an anti-carbon policy raises the price of using carbon-based fuels, it is unlikely to be the most efficient way to reduce carbon emissions.”

To tap the funds, the 50 states must submit an EV Infrastructure Deployment Plan by August 1, with approvals from the federal government to come by the end of the following month.

The federal guidance requests that states explain how they will deliver projects with at least 40% of the benefits going to disadvantaged communities.

The Biden White House has an initiative named “Justice40,” which calls for a minimum of 40% of the federal funds for climate mitigation and clean energy to go to disadvantaged areas.

The initial $5 billion in funds for the public charging stations comes from the $1 trillion infrastructure law. The investment is seen as a significant contribution toward the president’s stated goal of cutting carbon emissions caused by transportation and ensuring half of new cars are electric by 2030.

“We will have to expand both the transmission grid as well as the sources of clean energy that we add to it in order to get to the president’s goal,” acknowledged Granholm.
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Media giant News Corp is investigating a cyberattack that has accessed the email and documents of some of its employees and journalists.

On Friday, New York-based News Corp, whose entities include The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, sent an internal email to staff, stating that it had been the target of “persistent nation-state attack activity.”

“On January 20th, News Corp discovered attack activity on a system used by several of our business units,” David Kline, News Corp chief technology officer, wrote in the email.

News Corp said that as soon as it discovered the attack, it notified law enforcement and launched an investigation with the help of Mandiant, a cybersecurity firm.

The cyberattack affected a “limited number of business email accounts and documents” from News Corp headquarters as well as its News Technology Services, Dow Jones, News UK and New York Post businesses.

“Our preliminary analysis indicates that foreign government involvement may be associated with this activity, and that some data was taken,” Kline wrote. “We will not tolerate attacks on our journalism, nor will we be deterred from our reporting.”

“Mandiant assesses that those behind this activity have a China nexus, and we believe they are likely involved in espionage activities to collect intelligence to benefit China’s interests,” Dave Wong, Mandiant vice president and incident responder, said in an email to VOA.

Wong’s suspicion echoed that of human rights groups, which have also faced an increase in cyberattacks thought to originate from a “foreign government” they also believe is China.

Liu Pengyu, spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in the U.S., told VOA in an email Friday that rather than making allegations based on speculations, he hoped there could be “a professional, responsible and evidence-based approach” to identifying cyberattacks.

“China is a staunch defender of cybersecurity and has long been a main victim of cyberthefts and attacks,” Liu said. “China firmly opposes and combats cyberattacks and cybertheft in all forms.”

Rights groups targeted

Cyberattacks might be used to intimidate those who are critical of the Chinese government, according to Peter Irwin, senior program officer for advocacy and communications at Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP) in Washington.

“They might want journalists to think twice before they continue to do critical work uncovering issues in the country,” Irwin told VOA, adding that his organization had also seen a major spike in cyberattacks believed to be from China in recent weeks, targeting its website and staff email.

Uyghur rights groups such as UHRP have been calling for a boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics on social media, using the hashtag #GenocideGames and citing allegations of human rights abuses of Uyghurs and other Turkic ethnic groups in Xinjiang, where China has been accused of arbitrarily detaining more than 1 million people in internment camps.

On Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal reported that pro-China accounts had flooded Twitter messages with the #GenocideGames hashtag. Hashtag flooding is the act of hijacking a hashtag on social media platforms to dilute or change its meaning.

In early December, the U.S. announced a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics, citing China’s “ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang and other human rights abuses.”

Beijing denies accusations of mass detention and says that all ethnic groups in Xinjiang “live in together in harmony” and experience “healthy and balanced development.”

Tahir Imin, a Uyghur activist and founder of the Washington-based Uyghur Times, says his news organization has long been the target of cyberattacks he believes are coming from China.

Volexity, a Washington-based cybersecurity firm, stated in a September 2019 blog post that “cyberspace has become a battleground for the Uyghur people. The level of surveillance occurring in China against Uyghurs extends well beyond their borders and has fully entered the digital realm.”

“Recently, especially starting from January 10, 2022, we have seen more cyberattacks by unknown hackers aimed at the main index of English and Chinese websites of Uyghur Times,” Imin told VOA, adding that his organization’s email server had also been the target of similar attacks.

FBI assessment

In a speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in California, FBI Director Christopher Wray said that in the U.S., Beijing had unleashed “a massive, sophisticated hacking program that is bigger than those of every other major nation combined.”

“They’re not just hacking on a huge scale but causing indiscriminate damage to get to what they want,” Wray said. “Like in the recent Microsoft Exchange hack, which compromised the networks of more than 10,000 American companies in a single campaign alone.”

According to Salih Hudayar, president and founder of the East Turkistan National Awakening Movement, a Washington-based Uyghur independence advocacy group, his group’s website has seen a “severe increase” in cyberattacks in recent weeks, especially since the beginning of the Beijing Winter Games.

“It seems, on average, in the past 24 hours (per hour), we had over 15 million attacks against our website,” Hudayar told VOA, adding that most of the attacks were originating from Singapore.

He said he believed Singapore was being used “to mask the true location” of the origin of the attacks. “We definitely think China is behind this attack,” Hudayar said.
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As if we didn’t have enough to worry about: Some scientists are warning about the inevitable catastrophic effects on modern life from a super-sized solar storm.

These outbursts from the sun, which eject energy in the form of magnetic fields and billions of tons of plasma gas known as “flares,” are unpredictable and difficult to anticipate.

The Earth suffers a devastating direct hit every century or two, according to recent analysis of scientific data and historic accounts. In the past, these were mainly celestial events with spectacular aurora light shows but scant impact on humanity. Modern technology, however, is vulnerable to the shocks from extreme solar storms.

“It’s not as rare as an asteroid or a comet hitting the Earth, but it’s something that really needs to be dealt with by policymakers,” said Daniel Baker, distinguished professor of planetary and space physics at the University of Colorado. “Certainly, in the longer term, it’s not a question of if but when.”

Astrophysicists estimate the likelihood of a solar storm capable of causing catastrophe to be as high as 12% in a decade.

“It’s just a matter of time,” according to professor Raimund Muscheler, chair of quaternary sciences in the geology department of Lund University in Sweden. “One has to be aware of it and one has to calculate the risks and be prepared as much as possible.”

A new study of ancient ice samples conducted by the Swedish scientist concludes that a previously unknown, huge solar storm about 9,200 years ago would have crippled communications if it had hit Earth in modern times.

“A failure in one kind of sector can propagate through the system and affect a lot of other things, and I think that’s probably the thing that worries me most about storms is that they can be widespread and can have consequences in all kinds of systems that that we might not otherwise think about,” Baker said.

A relatively minor solar storm, that caused a disturbance in the Earth’s magnetic field, is blamed for the loss of as many as 40 of the 49 Starlink internet-access satellites launched February 3 from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Phases of disturbance

When the sun shoots out energy, it affects Earth in phases. The first occurs here eight minutes after the solar event 150 million kilometers away, the time it takes light to travel from the sun.

The initial trouble occurs on the daylight side of the planet from the early arriving X-rays, which dramatically disrupt the ionosphere — where the Earth’s atmosphere meets space — and radio communications. They also create additional drag on some satellites, degrading their orbits, which is what happened to the Starlink satellites.

In subsequent minutes and hours, highly charged particles unleash a radioactive storm, posing a danger to astronauts in orbit.

The third phase, known as the coronal mass ejection — gas and magnetic field explosions on the surface of the sun — disturbs the planet’s magnetosphere, lighting up the sky and inducing electrical currents on the surface, which can overload power grids and speed corrosion of pipelines.

“The geomagnetic storm can actually cause transformers to burn through if they are not adequately protected,” said Muscheler of Lund University.

The power industry in North America has taken steps in recent years to harden its infrastructure to protect from the dangerous surges. U.S. government agencies have a program to deploy emergency transformers to replace those that would fail.

“Although the U.S. government has estimated the cost of a severe space weather event to be in the billions, this worst-case scenario is typically not considered by most policy planners,” said Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi, assistant professor in the computer science department at the University of California, Irvine. “In short, the risk is well-known, but not always considered during design and planning in most cases.”

Long-distance fiber-optic and submarine telecommunications cables at higher latitudes, where the Earth is more exposed, can also suffer serious damage.

“The U.S. is highly susceptible to disconnection from Europe,” Jyothi wrote in a recent research paper. “Europe is in a vulnerable location but is more resilient due to the presence of a larger number of shorter cables. Asia has relatively high resilience with Singapore acting as a hub with connections to several countries.”

The sun frequently hurls big flares at Earth, but most are not large enough to wreak havoc or don’t strike the planet directly. But, as SpaceX experienced this week, even some of the less severe flares can neutralize satellites.

“The timing is unfortunate for SpaceX,” said Bill Murtagh, program coordinator for the Space Weather Prediction Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. He added that the 1,500 SpaceX satellites already in orbit were not affected.

Any major solar storm poses a threat to Global Positioning System satellites, which provide accurate time signals and precise navigation, technology critical in modern life from agriculture to aviation.

A big storm can also trigger ozone depletion, meaning there are possible effects on the terrestrial climate, according to atmospheric scientists.

Previous disruptions

The societal reactions to the solar outbursts of past centuries now seem quaint, although they were sensational events at the time.

When an intense geomagnetic storm hit the Earth in September 1859, known as the Carrington Event, telegraph systems across North America and Europe failed and some operators reported receiving electrical shocks.

A solar storm in March 1989 caused power failures in Quebec, Canada.

The Halloween Storms of 2003 affected more than half of the orbiting satellites, and disrupted aviation for more than a day because planes could not be accurately tracked. Electrical service was also knocked out in parts of Europe for several hours, and transformers in South Africa were permanently damaged.

Since the Carrington Event, state-of-the-art communication has gone from the telegraph to the internet.

“Are we ready for a Carrington class event? No, we still have work to do,” Murtagh of NOAA told VOA.

“While the frequency of climate disasters is increasing gradually, we will be caught by surprise by an extreme solar event that causes significant disruptions. Most people alive today have never experienced an extreme space weather event that has a global impact during our lifetime,” Jyothi of University of California-Irvine told VOA.

She also warned that solar superstorms could cause large-scale internet outages covering the entire globe and lasting several months.

The geomagnetic storms tend to happen more frequently when there are more sunspots (each such freckle on the sun being about the size of Earth). The sun is heading into a new cycle, meaning there is an increasing likelihood of disruptive events as this cycle ramps up to its predicted peak in July 2025.

“We’re going to see more sunspots, more solar flares, more eruptions and consequently more effects on technology here on Earth,” Murtagh said.

Intensity levels

One bit of good news: Solar scientists predict this cycle will be less intense than the most active cycles of past centuries.

Society in the 21st century, however, seems unprepared for the consequences of cascading inter-connected technological failings likely to be caused by future major storms.

“The sun is the giver of life, but it can be cruel too — especially on the technology we rely on for so much of what we do today,” Murtagh said.

Congress passed a bill in 2020 directing the National Science Foundation, NASA and the Defense Department to continue supporting basic research related to space weather.

Some other governments seem less focused on the issue.

Baker recalls a letter he received from a concerned woman in France who contacted officials there for advice on how to prepare for a major geo-magnetic storm.

“We suggest you buy a chocolate cake, eat it and wait for the end of the world,” she was told, according to Baker.
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At the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, China is using technology to keep athletes and visitors safe as part of its pandemic precautions. But for visitors, the use of technology can come with security and privacy concerns. Michelle Quinn reports. Carolyn Presutti contributed.
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More than a decade ago, technology giant Apple began telling its smartphone customers that if something was worth doing, “There’s an app for that.”

Starting now, the same can be said of fighting terrorism.

The U.S. National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) Monday launched its aCTknowledge mobile app, ready for download from the Apple app store and from the NCTC website.

“The app is a one stop shop to get unclassified counterterrorism information,” a NCTC official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss the center’s foray into mobile apps.

Officials said a version should also be available in the coming months from Google Play, and that the information will also be available in a desktop version. 

But while the app is public, access to the full suite of features is limited to counterterrorism professionals.

NCTC officials say the initial rollout is limited to officials with the U.S. federal government and in the U.S. military.  State and local counterterrorism officials will also be getting access in the near future.

“This is a tremendous evolution of our information sharing efforts,” a NCTC expert who helped develop the aCTknowledge app told reporters.

“We’re moving from a weekly, regularized information sharing effort (via email) to a daily, near real time effort,” the expert said. “Our ability to send push notifications to partners using the app is really going to change the community, in general, because we’ll be able to immediately level-set everyone’s understanding of a counterterrorism event as it occurs.”

Like other apps, NCTC’s aCTknowledge will enable users to get notifications, search for information and follow for updates on specific terms or topics.

NCTC says the nature of the new mobile app will also allow it to see what type of information its various government partners are looking for, and make sure that data or training is made available.

Although the information being shared on the app is unclassified, officials are taking precautions to protect the systems from hackers and others who might try to misuse it.

“You’re required to use your official government email address to register,” a second NCTC expert said, speaking like the other on the condition of anonymity. “And then we have an established vetting criteria to make sure that applicants have a validated need to know.”

Officials say many of the app’s features were designed with the help of state and local first responders, including police and fire departments from across the United States.

“With the release of aCTknowledge, NCTC is delivering on our mission to innovate how we share intelligence products with our partners,” NCTC Director Christy Abizaid said in a statement late Monday. “The app empowers its users with the information they need to protect their communities from potential threats.” 
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News Corp disclosed on Friday it was the target of a cyberattack that accessed data of some employees, with its internet security adviser saying the hack was likely aimed at gathering “intelligence to benefit China’s interests.”

The publisher of the Wall Street Journal said the breach, discovered in late January, accessed emails and documents of a limited number of employees, including journalists, but added that cybersecurity firm Mandiant had contained the attack.

“Mandiant assesses that those behind this activity have a China nexus, and we believe they are likely involved in espionage activities to collect intelligence to benefit China’s interests,” David Wong, vice president of consulting at Mandiant, told Reuters.

The Chinese Embassy in the United States did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“Although we are in the early stages of our investigation, we believe the activity affected a limited number of business email accounts and documents from News Corp headquarters, News Technology Services, Dow Jones, News UK, and New York Post,” company executives wrote in a letter to employees, seen by Reuters.

“Our preliminary analysis indicates that foreign government involvement may be associated with this activity, and that some data was taken.”

The company added that its other business units, including HarperCollins Publishers, Move, News Corp Australia, Foxtel, REA, and Storyful, were not targeted in the attack.

The Wall Street Journal, which reported the news first, competes with Reuters, the news division of Thomson Reuters Corp , in supplying news to media outlets.

 
…

The same technology companies that helped drag the U.S. stock market back from the depths of the pandemic recession in 2021 led the market into a sharp plunge on Thursday after Meta Platforms, the company that owns Facebook, revealed that user growth on its marquee product has hit a plateau, and revenue from advertising has fallen off sharply.

Meta was not the only U.S. tech company to suffer on Thursday. Snap Inc., the owner of Snapchat; Pinterest, Twitter, PayPal, Spotify and Amazon all suffered sharp sell-offs during trading.

U.S. tech stocks are facing a variety of major challenges right now, including a possible economic slowdown, changes to privacy rules, increased regulatory pressure and competitive challenges that have pushed users — especially young people — to new platforms such as TikTok.

Every major U.S. stock index was down significantly on Thursday, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average falling by 1.45%, the S&P 500 down 2.44%, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq down 3.74%.

Meta’s Facebook struggles

Although the pain was spread broadly across the tech sector Thursday, it was the travails of Facebook that captured much of the public’s attention. The company’s shares, which were trading at $323 when the markets closed Wednesday, opened on Thursday at $242.48 and never recovered, closing at $237.76.

The 27% decline in the company’s share value translated into a loss of more than $230 billion in market value, an utterly unprecedented one-day loss for a single firm.

The share price began its tumble after the company announced for the first time ever that its total number of monthly users had not risen in the fourth quarter of 2021. Additionally, in its key North American market, Facebook saw monthly users decline slightly.

The stagnant user figures raised concerns about the company’s ability to grow even as more bad news poured in from its advertising business, which generates the overwhelming majority of the company’s profits.

Last year, Apple changed the privacy setting on its iPhones and other devices, requiring apps, including Facebook, to get each user’s explicit permission to track their activity on the internet. Prior to that change, Facebook had made extensive use of tracking software to deliver targeted advertising to its users — something its advertising clients were willing to pay a significant premium for.

Since Apple instituted the change, the majority of users have declined to allow Facebook to track their browsing, greatly diminishing the company’s ability to target advertisements. On Thursday, Meta Chief Financial Officer David Wehner told investors the company expects the changes to cost it $10 billion in advertising revenue in 2022.

Trouble with young users

Facebook has long struggled to attract younger users to its platform, and on Thursday, company officials admitted that the firm is finding it difficult to compete with TikTok, an app created by the Chinese firm ByteDance, which allows users to share brief videos.

In a call with investors, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company’s answer to TikTok, a service called Reels, is still being developed.

“Over time, we think that there is potential for a tremendous amount of overall engagement growth” he said. “We think it’s definitely the right thing to lean into this and push as hard to grow Reels as quickly as possible and not hold on the brakes at all, even though it may create some near-term slower growth than we would have wanted.”

Zuckerberg, who holds 55% of the voting shares of Meta, giving him de facto control of the company, saw his personal wealth fall by an estimated $24 billion as a result of Thursday’s market rout.

Economic headwinds

Over the past year, investors have consistently pushed the share prices of U.S. tech firms higher. Now, though, with the Federal Reserve preparing a series of interest rate increases meant to cool the U.S. economy and slow price inflation, investors appear to be reconsidering the prices they are willing to pay.

Investors typically judge the value of a stock based on its price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio, which is determined by dividing the share price by the fraction of the company’s earnings represented by an individual share of stock.

When a company’s shares trade at a high P/E ratio that is usually because investors expect the underlying business to continue growing. However, that growth can be hampered by a slowdown in the broader economy, something many investors expect to see in the coming m

Political challenges

In addition to concerns about economic headwinds, the tech sector is facing a distinctly unfriendly regulatory environment in the U.S. Lawmakers in both parties have expressed their concern that big technology companies enjoy too much influence over areas like popular culture and political discourse but face too little accountability.

Facebook and its subsidiary, Instagram, were subjected to hostile congressional hearings last year, after a whistleblower revealed internal documents that showed the companies understood that their products could be harmful to some users but took little action to address the issue.

During the hearings, high-profile lawmakers, including Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, called for Facebook to be broken up into multiple, smaller companies.

 
…

A single lightning bolt that leapt across three U.S. states has been identified as the longest ever, the U.N. weather agency said Tuesday. Dubbed a megaflash, the rare low-rate horizontal discharge covered 768 kilometers (477 miles) between clouds in Texas and Mississippi in April 2020.

It was detected by scientists using satellite technology and its distance – beating the previous record by 60 kilometer – confirmed by a World Meteorological Organization committee.

“That trip by air[plane] would take a couple of hours and in this case the distance was covered in a matter of seconds,” WMO spokesperson Clare Nullis said.

Another megaflash that occurred above Uruguay and Argentina in June 2020 also set a record, as the longest-lasting at 17.1 seconds, the WMO said.

While these two newly cataloged megaflashes never touched the ground, they serve as a reminder of the dangers of a weather phenomenon that kill hundreds of people a year.

“We reiterate our message: when thunder roars, when you see lightning — go indoors. Don’t seek shelter in a beach hut, don’t stand under a tree,” Nullis said. 
…

For teachers at a middle school in New Mexico’s largest city, the first inkling of a widespread tech problem came during an early morning staff call.

On the video, there were shout-outs for a new custodian for his hard work, and the typical announcements from administrators and the union rep. But in the chat, there were hints of a looming crisis. Nobody could open attendance records, and everyone was locked out of class rosters and grades.

Albuquerque administrators later confirmed the outage that blocked access to the district’s student database — which also includes emergency contacts and lists of which adults are authorized to pick up which children — was due to a ransomware attack.

“I didn’t realize how important it was until I couldn’t use it,” said Sarah Hager, a Cleveland Middle School art teacher.

Cyberattacks like the one that canceled classes for two days in Albuquerque’s biggest school district have become a growing threat to U.S. schools, with several high-profile incidents reported since last year. And the coronavirus pandemic has compounded their effects: More money has been demanded, and more schools have had to shut down as they scramble to recover data or even manually wipe all laptops.

“Pretty much any way that you cut it, incidents have both been growing more frequent and more significant,” said Doug Levin, director of the K12 Security Information Exchange, a Virginia-based nonprofit that helps schools defend against cybersecurity risk.

Precise data is hard to come by since most schools are not required to publicly report cyberattacks. But experts say public school systems — which often have limited budgets for cybersecurity expertise — have become an inviting target for ransomware gangs.

The pandemic also has forced schools to turn increasingly toward virtual learning, making them more dependent on technology and more vulnerable to cyber-extortion. School systems that have had instruction disrupted include those in Baltimore County and Miami-Dade County, along with districts in New Jersey, Wisconsin and elsewhere.

Levin’s group has tracked well over 1,200 cyber security incidents since 2016 at public school districts across the country. They included 209 ransomware attacks, when hackers lock data up and charge to unlock it; 53 “denial of service” attacks, where attackers sabotage or slow a network by faking server requests; 156 “Zoombombing” incidents, where an unauthorized person intrudes on a video call; and more than 110 phishing attacks, where a deceptive message tricks a user to let a hacker into their network.

Recent attacks also come as schools grapple with multiple other challenges related to the pandemic. Teachers get sick, and there aren’t substitutes to cover them. Where there are strict virus testing protocols, there aren’t always tests or people to give them.

In New York City, an attack this month on third-party software vendor Illuminate Education didn’t result in canceled classes, but teachers across the city couldn’t access grades. Local media reported the outage added to stress for educators already juggling instruction with enforcing COVID-19 protocols and covering for colleagues who were sick or in quarantine.

Albuquerque Superintendent Scott Elder said getting all students and staff online during the pandemic created additional avenues for hackers to access the district’s system. He cited that as a factor in the Jan. 12 ransomware attack that canceled classes for some 75,000 students.

The cancellations — which Elder called “cyber snow days” — gave technicians a five-day window to reset the databases over a holiday weekend.

Elder said there’s no evidence student information was obtained by hackers. He declined to say whether the district paid a ransom but noted there would be a “public process” if it did.

Hager, the art teacher, said the cyberattack increased stress on campus in ways that parents didn’t see.

Fire drills were canceled because fire alarms didn’t work. Intercoms stopped working.

Nurses couldn’t find which kids were where as positive test results came in, Hager said. “So potentially there were students on campus that probably were sick.” It also appears the hack permanently wiped out a few days worth of attendance records and grades.

Edupoint, the vendor for Albuquerque’s student information database, called Synergy, declined to comment.

Many schools choose to keep attacks under wraps or release minimal information to prevent revealing additional weaknesses in their security systems.

“It’s very difficult for the school districts to learn from each other, because they’re really not supposed to talk to each other about it because you might share vulnerabilities,” Elder said.

Last year, the FBI issued a warning about a group called PYSA, or “Protect Your System, Amigo,” saying it was seeing an increase in attacks by the group on schools, colleges and seminaries. Other ransomware gangs include Conti, which last year demanded $40 million from Broward County Public Schools, one of the nation’s largest.

Most are Russian-speaking groups that are based in Eastern Europe and enjoy safe harbor from tolerant governments. Some will post files on the dark web, including highly sensitive information, if they don’t get paid.

While attacks on larger districts garner more headlines, ransomware gangs tended to target smaller school districts in 2021 than in 2020, according to Brett Callow, a threat analyst at the firm Emsisoft. He said that could indicate bigger districts are increasing their spending on cybersecurity while smaller districts, which have less money, remain more vulnerable.

A few days after Christmas, the 1,285-student district of Truth or Consequences, south of Albuquerque, also had its Synergy student information system shut down by a ransomware attack. Officials there compared it to having their house robbed.

“It’s just that feeling of helplessness, of confusion as to why somebody would do something like this because at the end of the day, it’s taking away from our kids. And to me that’s just a disgusting way to try to, to get money,” Superintendent Channell Segura said.

The school didn’t have to cancel classes because the attack happened on break, but the network remains down, including keyless entry locks on school building doors. Teachers are still carrying around the physical keys they had to track down at the start of the year, Segura said.

In October, President Joe Biden signed the K-12 Cybersecurity Act, which calls for the federal cyber security agency to make recommendations about how to help school systems better protect themselves.

New Mexico lawmakers have been slow to expand internet usage in the state, let alone support schools on cyber security. Last week, state representatives introduced a bill that would allocate $45 million to the state education department to build a cybersecurity program by 2027.

Ideas on how to prevent future hacks and recover from existing ones usually require more work from teachers.

In the days following the Albuquerque attack, parents argued on Facebook over why schools couldn’t simply switch to pen and paper for things like attendance and grades.

Hager said she even heard the criticism from her mother, a retired school teacher.

“I said, ‘Mom, you can only take attendance on paper if you have printed out your roster to begin with,'” Hager said.

Teachers could also keep duplicate paper copies of all records — but that would double the clerical work that already bogs them down.

In an era where administrators increasingly require teachers to record everything digitally, Hager says, “these systems should work.”
…

Myanmar’s military government is set to pass a new cybersecurity law that will ban the use of internet services, a move that has been condemned by digital rights activists and business groups.

The Southeast Asian country has been in turmoil since a coup by the military last February. A widespread grassroots movement has seen thousands refuse to accept military rule, with anti-coup communications and demonstrations now largely mobilized online.

But a draft bill released by the junta, if passed, would criminalize the use of virtual private networks and online gambling, carrying a punishment of one to three years’ imprisonment and fines of up to $2,800.

The first draft of the bill was released last year, but progress on the legislation slowed after substantial public outcry and industrywide criticism. The legislation is expected to become law next week.

“We are speculating the bill will actually be official within just a few days, it might come before the first of February,” Ma Htike, a digital rights activist, told VOA.

People living in Myanmar rely heavily on internet access, especially social media platforms such as Facebook, for news, and many have struggled to get online since the junta took control of the country’s telecommunication regulators after the Feb. 1, 2021, coup. Major Norwegian telecommunication operator Telenor recently quit its operations inside the country because of the political situation.

The military regularly shuts down the internet, routinely blocks social media platforms and censors what information can be found online, all in the name of ensuring national “stability.”

But political analyst Aung Thu Nyein describes the latest draft legislation as unusually severe.

“The leaked new communication law is the most draconian law restricting many freedoms and privacy of a person,” he told VOA. “This law could be a major roadblock to technological development as well, such as prohibiting the use of digital coins and blockchain technology, etc.

“It is definitely for the purpose of oppression of freedom of speech and a tool for control,” he said.

Junta-enforced regional internet blackouts make VPNs vital to accessing independent news online via private networks outside of the country.

According to Top10VPN, Myanmar went without internet access for 72 consecutive days from February to April of last year, driving demand for VPNs up by 7,200%. The report also says the shutdowns came at a cost, with Myanmar suffering nearly $3 billion in lost revenue, according to the indicators from the World Bank, The International Telecommunication Union, Eurostat and the U.S. Census.

Htike says most of Myanmar’s citizens continue to struggle with the blackouts.

“There are still various locations that the mobile internet has not been available,” she told VOA, adding that junta-backed regulators have scheduled price increases for internet subscriptions, which is likely to pose “a big obstacle” for most citizens in a country with typically low per capita incomes.

“[The] internet plays a pivot role to send information to all parts of the country, from cities to remote corners,” said Aung Htun, a journalist for Burma VJ, an informal network of professional and citizen video journalists who pool footage. “That’s why the military tried to raise the data fees higher than previously.”

In its attempts to control the flow of information, the Myanmar military has also cracked down on the country’s media. According to Reporting ASEAN, a monitoring group in Southeast Asia, 120 journalists have been arrested with 49 still detained and 16 convicted. The licenses of at least five media outlets have been revoked.

Aung Htun also says the looming internet restrictions under the new law will put people at increased risk of arrest in public, where the military sometimes randomly searches phones.

“It’s getting more difficult to hide data in your phone. It’s better to use simple ways; don’t keep any important data in your phone,” he said, adding that journalists must “stay low, and try to be in touch with your colleagues [only] by secure network.”

Freedom House, a nonprofit research institute that ranks internet freedom by country on a scale in which 100 is “most free,” placed Myanmar at 17 in 2021.

Ten foreign businesses and industry groups in Myanmar said in a joint letter they are “deeply concerned” over the latest draft of the cybersecurity law.

“If enforced, the current draft disrupts the free flow of information and directly impacts businesses’ abilities to operate legally and effectively in Myanmar,” the statement read.

Htike said the new law could force customers to break the law in order to use basic business services.

“Myanmar’s economy really declined after the coup, but still small businesses have used social media and networks, but with this kind of [restriction] it’s going to be very difficult,” she added.

Feb. 1 marks one year since the Myanmar military removed the country’s democratically elected government. To mark the anniversary, anti-coup activists have called for a silent strike, which leaves the streets of towns and cities across Myanmar deserted.

“Silent strikes are a good strategy for people to get involved,” said Htike, who also warned that risks remain whether you’re demonstrating in the streets or online.

Myanmar’s military routinely stops and searches people to check phones for evidence of VPN activity, such as whether the phone has Facebook access, which is impossible without a VPN.

They also surveil the web for digital anti-junta activity.

In a silent protest, Htike added, “it might be difficult for [the military] to do search and seizure [on empty streets], but [even] if people are active [only] online, they can [still] be targeted there.”

Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, gained independence from Britain in 1948, but most of its modern history has been under military rule.

After a brief period of civilian rule, the military in November 2020 began making unsubstantiated claims of electoral fraud. On Feb. 1 of 2021, the military removed the democratically elected government and arrested leader Aung San Suu Kyi and President Win Myint, both of whom have since been sentenced to several jail terms.

Widespread opposition to military rule has resulted in thousands of arrests and at least 1,499 killings, according to the Thai-based Assistance Association for Political Prisoners.
…

Electric vehicles are in high demand as gas prices and concerns about carbon emissions and global warming climb. From the 2022 Washington Auto Show, VOA’s Saqib Ul Islam examines where consumers and car manufacturers think all-electric vehicles are heading in the future.

Camera: Saqib Ul Islam Produced by: Saqib Ul Islam
…

Toyota is working with Japan’s space agency on a vehicle to explore the lunar surface, with ambitions to help people live on the moon by 2040 and then go live on Mars, company officials said Friday.

The vehicle being developed with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency is called Lunar Cruiser, whose name pays homage to the Toyota Land Cruiser sport utility vehicle. Its launch is set for the late 2020’s.

The vehicle is based on the idea that people eat, work, sleep and communicate with others safely in cars, and the same can be done in outer space, said Takao Sato, who heads the Lunar Cruiser project at Toyota Motor Corp.

“We see space as an area for our once-in-a-century transformation. By going to space, we may be able to develop telecommunications and other technology that will prove valuable to human life,” Sato told The Associated Press.

Gitai Japan Inc., a venture contracted with Toyota, has developed a robotic arm for the Lunar Cruiser, designed to perform tasks such as inspection and maintenance. Its “grapple fixture” allows the arm’s end to be changed so it can work like different tools, scooping, lifting and sweeping.

Gitai Chief Executive Sho Nakanose said he felt the challenge of blasting off into space has basically been met but working in space entails big costs and hazards for astronauts. That’s where robots would come in handy, he said.

Since its founding in the 1930s, Toyota has fretted about losing a core business because of changing times. It has ventured into housing, boats, jets and robots. Its net-connected sustainable living quarters near Mount Fuji, called Woven City, where construction is starting this year.

Japanese fascination with the moon has been growing.

A private Japanese venture called ispace Inc. is working on lunar rovers, landing and orbiting, and is scheduled for a moon landing later this year. Businessman Yusaku Maezawa, who recently took videos of himself floating around in the International Space Station, has booked an orbit around the moon aboard Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s Starship.

Toyota engineer Shinichiro Noda said he is excited about the lunar project, an extension of the automaker’s longtime mission to serve customers and the moon may provide valuable resources for life on Earth.

“Sending our cars to the moon is our mission,” he said. Toyota has vehicles almost everywhere. “But this is about taking our cars to somewhere we have never been.” 
…

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration announced Friday U.S.-based telecommunications companies AT&T and Verizon can activate more of their fifth-generation, or 5G, transmitters after consultation with the agency. 

Earlier this month, the telecommunication companies agreed they would delay launching the new wireless service near key airports after weeks of legal wrangling with the nation’s largest airlines and U.S. government regulators that feared the 5G service would interfere with aircraft technology and cause massive flight disruptions. 

But in its release Friday, the FAA said both companies provided additional data about the exact location of wireless transmitters and supported more thorough analysis of how 5G C-band signals interact with aircraft instruments. 

The agency said it used that data to precisely map the size and shape of the areas around airports where 5G signals might interfere with aircraft, allowing the regulators to shrink the areas where wireless operators had to delay their antenna activations. 

The FAA said that will allow wireless providers to safely turn on more towers as they deploy new 5G service in major markets across the country. The agency expressed its appreciation for the “collaborative approach” AT&T and Verizon took in providing the data. 

The FAA says it is continuing to work with helicopter operators and others in the aviation community to ensure they can safely operate in areas of current and planned 5G deployment. 

Some information for this report came from Reuters. 

 
…

The current difficulty in filling many service jobs in the U.S. is leaving hotels scrambling to provide room service. But with a bit of ingenuity and a little high-tech help some American hotels are finding a way. Angelina Bagdasaryan has the story, narrated by Anna Rice.
…

Voice activated virtual assistant technologies, such as Siri and Alexa, are becoming increasingly common around the world but in Africa, with its many languages, most people are at a digital disadvantage.  To address the problem, some African researchers are creating translation tools to recognize and promote indigenous languages, such as Yoruba. Timothy Obiezu in Abuja has details.

Camera: Emeka Gibson  
…

Voice-activated virtual assistant technologies, such as Siri and Alexa, are becoming increasingly common around the world, but in Africa, with its many languages, most people are at a digital disadvantage. To address the problem, some African researchers are creating translation tools to recognize and promote indigenous languages, such as Yoruba. 

Yoruba language teacher Oluwafemi Awosanya resumes a day’s classes with his students. He has been teaching the language for 10 years, but says he often struggles to migrate his class modules to an online students’ blogsite he created because there is no speech recognition technology for Yoruba.  

“Yoruba language is a language that has to do with signs at the top, so I need to go (the) extra mile. When typing my notes, I have to first type on Microsoft Word and even when I type on Microsoft Word it gives me best highlighting, like your words are not correct,” Awosanya said.

Awosanya spends several hours manually editing and correcting his notes before uploading them to his blog. 

He says despite technological advances in Africa, languages like Yoruba, one of the most commonly spoken in Nigeria, remain neglected, affecting his students.  

“It limits knowledge. There are things you wish you want to educate the children on, things you want to exhibit in the classes…” Awosanya said.

More than 2,000 distinct languages are spoken in Africa. Researchers say two-thirds of the native speakers miss out on emerging technologies due to language limitations in the tech world. 

Nigerian writer and language advocate Kola Tubosun says the issue threatens Africa’s technological future. He has since been trying to promote inclusivity for his native Yoruba tongue. 

He created an online Yoruba dictionary as well as a text-to-speech machine that translates English to Yoruba. He said the initiative was partly inspired by his grandfather, who could not read or write in English. 

“If a language doesn’t exist in the technology space, it is almost as if it doesn’t exist at all. That is the way the world is structured today and in that you spend all your time online every day and the only language you encounter is English, Spanish or Mandarin or whatever else, then it tends to define the way you interact with the world. And over time you tend to lose either the interest in your own language or your competence [competency in that language],” Tubosun said. 

Tubosun, who advocates for including African languages in technology, says the tech giants are starting to pay attention even though the gap remains very wide.    

“There are lots of obstacles. Some languages are not written down at all; some don’t have scripts. Some have scripts but don’t have so many people using the languages or writing them in education or using them in daily conversations,” Tubosun said. 

Language experts say it will take a long time before African languages are widely adopted in voice-driven technology.    

In the meantime, researchers like Tubosun and Awosanya will be working to adapt the Yoruba language for technology users.  
…

It’s a key part of President Joe Biden’s plans to fight major ransomware attacks and digital espionage campaigns: creating a board of experts that would investigate major incidents to see what went wrong and try to prevent the problems from happening again — much like a transportation safety board does with plane crashes.

But eight months after Biden signed an executive order creating the Cyber Safety Review Board it still hasn’t been set up. That means critical tasks haven’t been completed, including an investigation of the massive SolarWinds espionage campaign first discovered more than a year ago. Russian hackers stole data from several federal agencies and private companies.

Some supporters of the new board say the delay could hurt national security and comes amid growing concerns of a potential conflict with Russia over Ukraine that could involve nation-state cyberattacks. The FBI and other federal agencies recently released an advisory — aimed particularly at critical infrastructure like utilities — on Russian state hackers’ methods and techniques.

“We will never get ahead of these threats if it takes us nearly a year to simply organize a group to investigate major breaches like SolarWinds,” said Sen. Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat who leads the Senate Intelligence Committee. “Such a delay is detrimental to our national security and I urge the administration to expedite its process.”

Biden’s order, signed in May, gives the board 90 days to investigate the SolarWinds hack once it’s established. But there’s no timeline for creating the board itself, a job designated to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

In response to questions from The Associated Press, DHS said in a statement it was far along in setting it up and anticipated a “near-term announcement,” but did not address why the process has taken so long.

Scott Shackelford, the cybersecurity program chair at Indiana University and an advocate for creating a cyber review board, said having a rigorous study about what happened in a past hack like SolarWinds is a way of helping prevent similar attacks.

“It sure is taking, my goodness, quite a while to get it going,” Shackelford said. “It’s certainly past time where we could see some positive benefits from having it stood up.”

The Biden administration has made improving cybersecurity a top priority and taken steps to bolster defenses, but this is not the first time lawmakers have been unhappy with the pace of progress. Last year several lawmakers complained it took the administration too long to name a national cyber director, a new position created by Congress.

The SolarWinds hack exploited vulnerabilities in the software supply-chain system and went undetected for most of 2020 despite compromises at a broad swath of federal agencies and dozens of companies, primarily telecommunications and information technology providers. The hacking campaign is named SolarWinds after the U.S. software company whose product was exploited in the first-stage infection of that effort.

The hack highlighted the Russians’ skill at getting to high-level targets. The AP previously reported that SolarWinds hackers had gained access to emails belonging to the then-acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf.

The Biden administration has kept many of the details about the cyberespionage campaign hidden.

The Justice Department, for instance, said in July that 27 U.S. attorney offices around the country had at least one employee’s email account compromised during the hacking campaign. It did not provide details about what kind of information was taken and what impact such a hack may have had on ongoing cases.

The New York-based staff of the DOJ Antitrust Division also had files stolen by the SolarWinds hackers, according to one former senior official briefed on the hack who was not authorized to speak about it publicly and requested anonymity. That breach has not previously been reported. The Antitrust Division investigates private companies and has access to highly sensitive corporate data.

The federal government has undertaken reviews of the SolarWinds hack. The Government Accountability Office issued a report this month on the SolarWinds hack and another major hacking incident that found there was sometimes a slow and difficult process for sharing information between government agencies and the private sector, The National Security Council also conducted a review of the SolarWinds hack last year, according to the GAO report.

But having the new board conduct an independent, thorough examination of the SolarWinds hack could identify inconspicuous security gaps and issues that others may have missed, said Christopher Hart, a former National Transportation Safety Board chairman who has advocated for the creation of a cyber review board.

“Most of the crashes that the NTSB really goes after … are ones that are a surprise even to the security experts,” Hart said. “They weren’t really obvious things, they were things that really took some deep digging to figure out what went wrong.”
…

In a California senior care community, very special pets are helping residents keep their spirits up, fight anxiety and feel loved. Officials say these animals are therapeutic, low-maintenance and never get moody. Angelina Bagdasaryan has the story, narrated by Anna Rice.

Camera: Vazgen Varzhabetian             
…

The United Arab Emirates has banned the flying of drones in the country for recreation after Yemen’s Houthi rebels claimed a fatal drone attack on an oil facility and major airport in the country.

As of Saturday, drone hobbyists and other operators of light electric sports aircraft face “legal liabilities” if caught flying the objects, the Interior Ministry said, adding it may grant exemptions to businesses seeking to film.

A rare drone and missile strike on the capital of Abu Dhabi blew up several fuel tankers and killed three people last week.

The Houthis, who hold Yemen’s capital and have fought a bloody, yearslong war with a Saudi-led military coalition that includes the UAE, claimed the assault. While the UAE has largely withdrawn troops from the stalemated conflict, the country continues to be a major player and support local militias on the ground.

The UAE said the Houthis targeted the country with bomb-laden drones and cruise and ballistic missiles, adding the country had intercepted some of the projectiles. In response to the strike, the Saudi-led coalition has escalated attacks on the rebel-held parts of Yemen in the last week.

Government regulations in the UAE already restrict flying drones in residential areas as well as near, around and over airports. Drone users typically must obtain a certificate from the civil aviation authorities. 

 
…

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has removed two popular Kurdish Facebook pages accused of spreading misinformation that helped convince thousands of Kurds to mass along the border of Belarus and Poland late last year.

The two accounts, one from a Kurdish lawmaker with 143,000 followers and another belonging to a Kurdish journalist with nearly 270,000 followers, were spreading misinformation that falsely claimed Kurds who went to the Belarus-Poland border would be allowed into the European Union.

There was no such immigration plan. Instead, frustrated crowds clashed with border guards and thousands were later deported. 

The false posts were among many seen by Kurds who traveled to the border area and were interviewed by VOA.

“We followed the crowd towards the Polish borders after rumors on Facebook. It resulted in nothing more than adversity for this destitute people,” said Hersh Saeed Ahmad, a Kurdish migrant in Belarus.

But the accounts on Facebook continued to publish widely read posts until earlier this month when VOA contacted Meta asking if the pages were violating the company’s policies. 

“Meta has decided both pages violated our policies for misinformation under Violence & Incitement Community Standards, and both have been taken down,” a spokesperson from the company told VOA in an email.

The episode illustrates how the social media network continues to struggle to police even well-known spreaders of misinformation who are involved in high-profile news events, especially when misinformation is being published in languages other than English.

Spreading misinformation 

The Belarus-EU border crisis began last July and worsened by November, when thousands of migrants from the Middle East, North Africa and Iraqi Kurdistan, attempted to cross into the EU from Belarus.

In mid-November, violence broke out at the Polish border when security forces used tear gas and water cannons to prevent migrants from breaking the border fencing. Polish police at the time reported several injuries in their ranks from migrants throwing stones at them.

At the time, Facebook told news outlets that it was working to shut down information about human trafficking in the region.

But two prominent Kurdish Facebook pages continued to traffic in misinformation about the situation at the border until earlier this month.

Sirwan Baban, a member of the Kurdistan Regional Parliament, and Ranj Pshdary, a Kurdish journalist based in Greece, used their pages on Facebook to tell their followers in early November that the EU and Germany had decided to open their borders to let in migrants stranded on a Belarus-Poland border point.

It was a claim denied by EU officials at the time, but thousands of migrants, mostly Kurds, still stormed the Polish border fence and clashed with police.

VOA interviews with officials in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq and Kurdish migrants in Belarus confirmed that misinformation on Facebook, including from Baban and Pshdary, helped to lure thousands of people towards the Polish border.

Hersh Saeed Ahmad, a 36-year-old Kurd from Sulaimani province, is among those migrants who, after reading posts on social media, took his wife and 4-year-old child to the Polish border in November.

“Our situation after the storming turned from bad to worse,” he said. “Our admission by Germany was nothing more than lies and rumors on Facebook.”

Another migrant, Bahadin Muhsin Qadir, said they were told the Polish security at the border had announced through loudspeakers that they will be transferred through buses to Germany.

The standoff at the border during extreme weather conditions left more than a dozen people dead, according to human rights activists, who say the total number is likely higher but hard to confirm due to restricted access to the area.

Ari Jalal, the head of Kurdish foundation Lutka for Refugees and Migrants, told VOA that his group registered two deaths among the Kurds at the border. He said about 4,000 migrants have since returned to the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, with about 1,100 people remaining in Belarus camps.

“In addition to bodily and material damage, the Kurdish migrants are also psychologically broken down completely,” said Jalal, while expressing his frustration at “how gullible Kurdish youth can be manipulated by livestream videos on social media.” 

Facebook’s efforts 

Working with independent experts, Meta says it works to detect and remove harmful false claims that could contribute to the risk of imminent violence or physical harm ­— such as claims in Arabic and Kurdish that either the Polish border is open to migrants or Germany is sending buses for the migrants to the border. 

In November, The New York Times reported that an account belonging to a Kurdish-German influencer widely known online as Karwan Rawanduzy was disabled on Facebook for frequently promoting bogus stories that fueled the crisis.

In early December, Meta released a threat report saying it removed 38 Facebook accounts, five groups and four Instagram accounts linked to the Belarusian KGB that were inflaming the migrant crisis. It also reported taking down 31 Facebook accounts, four groups, two Facebook events and four Instagram accounts that originated in Poland and targeted Belarus and Iraq.

Despite those high-profile takedowns, the social media giant missed other far-reaching pages that were still being used to mislead migrants.

False claim of open border 

In the case of Sirwan Baban, a lawmaker, and Ranj Pshdary, who calls himself a journalist, both with thousands of followers, Facebook for months served as their main medium to encourage migrants to amass at the Polish border.

Pshdary, 32, from Iraqi Kurdistan’s Qaladza town, has gained recognition in Kurdish media for his role in covering the Belarus crisis. On November 13, he went live on Facebook to tell migrants “the great news” that the EU was going to open its doors to let them in. In the video, viewed and shared by thousands, people claiming to be migrants in Belarus or their relatives, joined Pshdary’s call in encouraging the migrants to prepare to cross into Poland “in the next couple of days.”

“The Polish border will be opened to migrant on November 15 and the migrants will be sent to Germany via buses,” Pshdary said.

Three days later, thousands of migrants, mostly Kurds, headed from a Belarus forest to the Polish border, anticipating a crossing into Poland. They clashed with the Polish police, but no migrants crossed over.

Pshdary, in another live Facebook video titled “I confess that we failed,” admitted he had intentionally misled people.

“I don’t want to conceal from you that I was the organizer of the crowd. On Friday, [Nov. 12, 2021], I met with the representatives of the migrants… Seeing that the Belarus police were torturing a lot of young migrants, there was no option but to encourage those people to cut the barbed wire fence so that those young people can be seen as perpetrators and violated against [by the Polish security].”

Pshdary said in his Facebook Live he believed that falsely saying the border was open would have created a spectacle with women, children and older migrants out in the cold, thus embarrassing EU politicians and forcing them to open their doors on a humanitarian basis.

When reached by VOA, Pshdary insisted that his plan was “good intentioned” and aimed at helping the migrants who desperately reached out to him for a way out.

Lawmaker resigns from diaspora committee

Lawmaker Sirwan Baban, who served as a member of the Kurdistan Regional Parliament’s diaspora committee at the time of the crisis, gave similar false hopes to migrants on Facebook and on TV.

On November 8, he appeared in a live interview with the Kurdish media network Rudaw, which was streamed live on Facebook with 755,000 views, claiming he had access to a “proclamation” from the EU: “It says the migrant situation in Belarus has escalated and become tragedy and a global issue. Therefore, the European Union has met tonight, telling Poland, ‘Let Belarus continue its dictatorship. You open your borders and allow the migrants in. Once in Poland, we will distribute them among other European countries.'” 

In an interview with VOA, Baban denied coordinating his false information about border openings with Pshdary, claiming that he had received reliable information that the EU’s refugee committee and some German officials had made a “recommendation” to let in the migrants. However, he declined to share the source of his information with VOA.

“This issue is portrayed this way in Kurdistan only to implicate me,” he added. 

In addition to using his Facebook page, Baban also went live on several Facebook groups and other social media pages to promote the story which — at the time — was also denied by Kurdish Foreign Relations officer Safin Dizayee in an interview with VOA Kurdish Service.

Among videos Baban posted of alleged migrants celebrating and thanking him for his efforts to influence EU officials is a young girl introducing herself as Saya and saying, “Mr. Sirwan Baban, the parliamentarian, thank you very much for such a great news … I will see you in Germany.”

The Kurdistan Regional Parliament’s diaspora committee in an urgent statement on November 11 accused Baban of spreading misinformation “that pushes the youth into harm’s way.”

The head of the committee, Rebwar Babkai, told VOA that Baban has since been forced to resign from the committee due to his role in spreading the misinformation.

“I hope this is a lesson to all of us holding a public position to feel the responsibility of our jobs,” Babkai said, adding it was unclear if his region’s government was going to take further action against Baban.

Limits of Facebook’s enforcement? 

Some social media observers say Facebook’s failure to detect those pages after months of misinformation shows “a gap” that needs to be filled particularly in non-English content.

“I think Facebook needs to do more when it comes to content in local languages,” said Dlshad Othman, a Kurdish cybersecurity expert based in Washington.

Othman said the social media company has improved over the years in moderating content in major Middle Eastern languages such as Arabic, often at the expense of languages for smaller populations like the Kurds. A Facebook representative declined to answer VOA questions about how many Kurdish-literate moderators the company employs. 

Moustafa Ayad is the executive director for Africa, Middle East and Asia at the UK-based Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a research group that monitors online extremism and disinformation. He told VOA that while Facebook’s technical advances such as the development of artificial intelligence have been helpful in countering disinformation, the company needs to do more.

“I believe all of these issues can be fixed with effective moderation in those languages,” he said. “It is not only just language skills but also an understanding of what is happening in those countries in a geopolitical and social level.” 

Facebook says it works with law enforcement, academics, non-profit organizations and others to detect and remove harmful false claims, ads, posts, pages and groups about people smuggling over international borders, and did so during the crisis in Belarus. It uses technology, human review and “reports from our users and trusted partners to detect and remove such content,” said a Meta spokesperson in an email to VOA.

“We remove this content as soon as we become aware of it regardless of who posts the content,” the spokesperson said.

While their pages were removed, the journalist and lawmaker still have a presence on Facebook.

As of January 19, Pshdary, the journalist, has a personal account with 3,600 followers. 

The lawmaker Baban’s personal account has over 15,000 followers. On a recent post, he invites viewers to like his new page created on January 22.

 
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