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Australia’s Defense Department will remove surveillance cameras made by Chinese Communist Party-linked companies from its buildings, the government said Thursday after the U.S. and Britain made similar moves.

The Australian newspaper reported Thursday that at least 913 cameras, intercoms, electronic entry systems and video recorders developed and manufactured by Chinese companies Hikvision and Dahua are in Australian government and agency offices, including the Defense Department and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

Hikvision and Dahua are partly owned by China’s Communist Party-ruled government.

Australian Defense Minister Richard Marles said his department is assessing all its surveillance technology.

“Where those particular cameras are found, they’re going to be removed,” Marles told Australian Broadcasting Corp. “There is an issue here and we’re going to deal with it.”

Asked about Australia’s decision, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning criticized what she called “wrongful practices that overstretch the concept of national security and abuse state power to suppress and discriminate against Chinese enterprises.”

Without mentioning Australia by name, Mao said the Chinese government has “always encouraged Chinese enterprises to carry out foreign investment and cooperation in accordance with market principles and international rules, and on the basis of compliance with local laws.”

“We hope Australia will provide a fair and non-discriminatory environment for the normal operation of Chinese enterprises and do more things that are conducive to mutual trust and cooperation between the two sides,” she told reporters at a daily briefing.

The U.S. government said in November it was banning telecommunications and video surveillance equipment from several prominent Chinese brands including Hikvision and Dahua in an effort to protect the nation’s communications network.

Security cameras made by Hikvision were also banned from British government buildings in November.

An audit in Australia found that Hikvision and Dahua cameras and security equipment were found in almost every department except the Agriculture Department and the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet.

The Australian War Memorial and National Disability Insurance Agency have said they will remove the Chinese cameras found at their sites, the ABC reported.

Opposition cybersecurity spokesperson James Paterson said he had prompted the audit by asking questions over six months of each federal agency, after the Home Affairs Department was unable to say how many of the cameras, access control systems and intercoms were installed in government buildings.

“We urgently need a plan from the … government to rip every one of these devices out of Australian government departments and agencies,” Paterson said.

Both companies are subject to China’s National Intelligence Law which requires them to cooperate with Chinese intelligence agencies, he said.

“We would have no way of knowing if the sensitive information, images and audio collected by these devices are secretly being sent back to China against the interests of Australian citizens,” Paterson said.
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The Australian government will examine surveillance technology used in offices of the defense department, Defense Minister Richard Marles said Thursday, amid reports the Chinese-made cameras installed there raised security risks.

The move comes after Britain in November asked its departments to stop installing Chinese-linked surveillance cameras at sensitive buildings. Some U.S. states have banned vendors and products from several Chinese technology companies.

“This is an issue and … we’re doing an assessment of all the technology for surveillance within the defense (department) and where those particular cameras are found, they are going to be removed,” Marles told ABC Radio in an interview.

Opposition lawmaker James Paterson said Thursday his own audit revealed almost 1,000 units of equipment by Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology and Dahua Technology, two partly state-owned Chinese firms, were installed across more than 250 Australian government offices.

Paterson, the shadow minister for cybersecurity and countering foreign interference, urged the government to urgently come up with a plan to remove all such cameras.

Marles said the issue was significant but “I don’t think we should overstate it.”

Australian media reported on Wednesday that the national war memorial in Canberra would remove several Chinese-made security cameras installed on the premises over concerns of spying.

Hikvision and Dahua Technology did not immediately respond to requests seeking comment.

Australia and China have been looking to mend diplomatic ties, which soured after Canberra in 2018 banned Huawei from its 5G broadband network. That cooled further after Australia called for an independent investigation into the origins of COVID-19.

China responded with tariffs on several Australian commodities.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said he was not concerned about how Beijing might react to the removal of cameras.

“We act in accordance with Australia’s national interest. We do so transparently and that’s what we will continue to do,” Albanese told reporters.
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Last November, Northeastern University student Andre Neto Caetano watched the live, late-night launch of NASA’s Artemis 1 from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on a cellphone placed on top of a piano in the lobby of the hotel where he was staying in California.

“I had, not a flashback, but a flash-forward of seeing maybe Artemis 4 or something, and COBRA, as part of the payload, and it is on the moon doing what it was meant to do,” Caetano told VOA during a recent Skype interview.

Artemis 1 launched the night before Caetano and his team of scholars presented their Crater Observing Bio-inspired Rolling Articulator (COBRA) rover project at NASA’s Breakthrough, Innovative, and Game Changing (BIG) Idea Challenge. The team hoped to impress judges assembled in the remote California desert.

“They were skeptical that the mobility solutions that we were proposing would actually work,” he said.

That skepticism, said Caetano, came from the simplicity of their design.

“It’s a robot that moves like a snake, and then the head and the tail connect, and then it rolls,” he said.

NASA’s BIG Idea Challenge prompted teams of college students to compete to develop solutions for the agency’s ambitious goals in the upcoming Artemis missions to the moon, which Caetano explains are “extreme lunar terrain mobility.”

Northeastern’s COBRA is designed to move through the fine dust, or regolith, of the lunar surface to probe the landscape for interesting features, including ice and water, hidden in the shadows of deep craters.

“They never could … deploy a robot or a ground vehicle that can sort of negotiate the environment and get to the bottom of these craters and look for ice water content,” said professor Alireza Ramezani, who advises the COBRA team and has worked with robotic designs that mimic the movements of real organisms, something Caetano said formed a baseline for their research.

“With him building a robot dog and robot bat, we knew we wanted to have some ‘bioinspiration’ in our project,” Caetano said.

Using biology as the driving force behind COBRA’s design was also something Ramezani hoped would win over judges in NASA’s competition.

“Our robot sort of tumbled 80 to 90 feet (24-27 meters) down this hill and that … impressed the judges,” he told VOA. “We did this with minimum energy consumption and within, like, 10 or 15 seconds.”

Caetano said COBRA weighs about 7 kilograms, “so the fact that COBRA is super light brings a benefit to it, as well.”

Ramezani added that COBRA is also cost-effective.

“If you want to have a space-worthy platform, it’s going to be in the order of $100,000 to $200,000. You can have many of these systems tumbling down these craters,” he said.

The Northeastern team’s successful COBRA test put to rest any lingering skepticism, sending them to the top of NASA’s 2022 BIG Idea competition and hopefully — in the not-too-distant future — to the top of NASA’s Space Launch System on its way to the moon.

“I’m not saying this, our judges said this. It’s potentially going to transform the way future space exploration systems look like,” said Ramezani. “They are even talking to some of our partners to see if we can increase technology readiness of the system, make it space worthy, and deploy it to the moon.”

Which is why, despite his impending graduation later this year, Caetano plans to continue developing COBRA alongside his teammates.

“Because we brought it to life together, the idea of just fully abandoning it at graduation probably doesn’t appeal to most of us,” Caetano said. “In some way or another, we still want to be involved in the project, in making sure that … we are still the ones who put it on the moon at some point.”

That could happen as soon as 2025, the year NASA hopes to return astronauts to the lunar surface in the Artemis program.
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Former Twitter executives conceded Wednesday they made a mistake by blocking a story about Hunter Biden, the son of U.S. President Joe Biden, from the social media platform in the run-up to the 2020 election, but adamantly denied Republican assertions they were pressured by Democrats and law enforcement to suppress the story.

“The decisions here aren’t straightforward, and hindsight is 20/20,” Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, testified to Congress. “It isn’t obvious what the right response is to a suspected, but not confirmed, cyberattack by another government on a presidential election.”

He added, “Twitter erred in this case because we wanted to avoid repeating the mistakes of 2016.”

The three former executives appeared before the House Oversight and Accountability Committee to testify for the first time about the company’s decision to initially block from Twitter a New York Post article in October 2020 about the contents of a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden.

Emboldened by Twitter’s new leadership in billionaire Elon Musk — whom they see as more sympathetic to conservatives than the company’s previous leadership — Republicans used the hearing to push a long-standing and unproven theory that social media companies including Twitter are biased against them.

Committee Chairman Representative James Comer said the hearing is the panel’s “first step in examining the coordination between the federal government and Big Tech to restrict protected speech and interfere in the democratic process.”

Alleged political bias

The hearing continues a yearslong trend of Republican leaders calling tech company leaders to testify about alleged political bias. Democrats, meanwhile, have pressed the companies on the spread of hate speech and misinformation on their platforms.

The witnesses Republicans subpoenaed were Roth, Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s former chief legal officer, and James Baker, the company’s former deputy general counsel.

Democrats brought a witness of their own, Anika Collier Navaroli, a former employee with Twitter’s content moderation team. She testified last year to the House committee that investigated the January 6 Capitol riot about Twitter’s preferential treatment of Donald Trump until it banned the then-president from the site two years ago.

‘A bizarre political stunt’

The White House criticized congressional Republicans for staging “a bizarre political stunt,” hours after Biden’s State of the Union address where he detailed bipartisan progress in his first two years in office.

“This appears to be the latest effort by the House Republican majority’s most extreme MAGA members to question and relitigate the outcome of the 2020 election,” White House spokesperson Ian Sams said in a statement Wednesday. “This is not what the American people want their leaders to work on.”

The New York Post reported weeks before the 2020 presidential election that it had received from Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, a copy of a hard drive from a laptop that Hunter Biden had dropped off 18 months earlier at a Delaware computer repair shop and never retrieved. Twitter blocked people from sharing links to the story for several days.

“You exercised an amazing amount of clout and power over the entire American electorate by even holding (this story) hostage for 24 hours and then reversing your policy,” Representative Andy Biggs said to the panel of witnesses.

Months later, Twitter’s then-CEO, Jack Dorsey, called the company’s communications around the Post article “not great.” He added that blocking the article’s URL with “zero context” around why it was blocked was “unacceptable.”

The newspaper story was greeted at the time with skepticism because of questions about the laptop’s origins, including Giuliani’s involvement, and because top officials in the Trump administration had already warned that Russia was working to denigrate Joe Biden before the White House election.

The Kremlin interfered in the 2016 race by hacking Democratic emails that were subsequently leaked, and fears that Russia would meddle again in the 2020 race were widespread across Washington.

Musk releases ‘Twitter files’

Just last week, lawyers for the younger Biden asked the U.S. Justice Department to investigate people who say they accessed his personal data. But they did not acknowledge that the data came from a laptop Hunter Biden is purported to have dropped off at a computer repair shop.

The issue was also reignited recently after Musk took over Twitter as CEO and began to release a slew of company information to independent journalists, what he has called the “Twitter Files.”

The documents and data largely show internal debates among employees over the decision to temporarily censor links to the Hunter Biden story. The tweet threads lacked substantial evidence of a targeted influence campaign from Democrats or the FBI, which has denied any involvement in Twitter’s decision-making.

Witness often targeted

One of Wednesday’s witnesses, Baker, has been a frequent target of Republican scrutiny.

Baker was the FBI’s general counsel during the opening of two of the bureau’s most consequential investigations in history: the Hillary Clinton investigation and a separate inquiry into potential coordination between Russia and Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Republicans have long criticized the FBI’s handling of both investigations.

Baker denied any wrongdoing during his two years at Twitter and said that despite disagreeing with the decision to block links to the Post story, “I believe that the public record reveals that my client acted in a manner that was fully consistent with the First Amendment.”

There has been no evidence that Twitter’s platform is biased against conservatives; studies have found the opposite when it comes to conservative media in particular. But the issue continues to preoccupy Republican members of Congress.

And some experts said questions around government influence on Big Tech’s content moderation are legitimate.
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A global ransomware outbreak has scrambled servers belonging to the U.S. state of Florida’s Supreme Court and several universities in the United States and Central Europe, according to a Reuters analysis of ransom notes posted online to stricken servers.

Those organizations are among more than 3,800 victims of a fast-spreading digital extortion campaign that locked up thousands of servers in Europe over the weekend, according to figures tallied by Ransomwhere, a crowdsourced platform that tracks digital extortion attempts and online ransom payments and whose figures are drawn from internet scans.

Ransomware is among the internet’s most potent scourges. Although this extortion campaign was not sophisticated, it drew warnings from national cyber watchdogs in part because of the speed of its spread.

Ransomwhere did not name individual victims, but Reuters was able to identify some by looking up internet protocol address data tied to the affected servers via widely used internet scanning tools such as Shodan.

The extent of the disruption to the affected organizations, if any, was not clear.

Florida Supreme Court spokesperson Paul Flemming told Reuters that the affected infrastructure had been used to administer other elements of the Florida state court system, and that it was segregated from the Supreme Court’s main network.

“Florida Supreme Court’s network and data are secure,” he said, adding that the rest of the state court system’s integrity also was not affected.

A dozen universities contacted by Reuters, including the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Rice University in Houston, and institutions of higher learning in Hungary and Slovakia, did not immediately return messages seeking comment.

Reuters also contacted the hackers via an account advertised on their ransom notes but only received a payment demand in return. They did not respond to additional questions.

Ransomwhere said the cybercriminals appear to have extorted only $88,000, a modest haul by the standard of multimillion-dollar ransoms regularly demanded by some hacking gangs.

One cybersecurity expert said the outbreak, thought to have exploited a 2-year-old vulnerability in VMWare software, was typical of automated attacks on servers and databases that have been carried out by hackers for years.

VMWare has urged customers to upgrade to the latest versions of its software.

“This is nothing unusual,” said Patrice Auffret, founder of French internet scanning company Onyphe. “The difference is the scale.”

Also uncommon is the highly visible nature of the outbreak, which began earlier this month. Because internet-facing servers were affected, researchers and tracking services like Ransomwhere or Onyphe could easily follow the criminals’ trail.

Digital safety officials in Italy said Monday that there was no evidence pointing to “aggression by a state or hostile state-like entity.”

Samuli Kononen, an information security specialist at the Finnish National Cyber Security Centre, said the attack was likely carried out by a criminal gang, although he added that it was not particularly sophisticated as many victims had managed to salvage their data without paying a ransom.

“More experienced ransomware groups usually don’t make that kind of mistake,” he said.
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Microsoft is fusing ChatGPT-like technology into its search engine Bing, transforming an internet service that now trails far behind Google into a new way of communicating with artificial intelligence.

The revamping of Microsoft’s second-place search engine could give the software giant a head start against other tech companies in capitalizing on the worldwide excitement surrounding ChatGPT, a tool that’s awakened millions of people to the possibilities of the latest AI technology.

Along with adding it to Bing, Microsoft is also integrating the chatbot technology into its Edge browser. Microsoft announced the new technology at an event Tuesday at its headquarters in Redmond, Washington.

Microsoft said a public preview of the new Bing was to launch Tuesday for users who sign up for it, but the technology will scale to millions of users in coming weeks.

Yusuf Mehdi, corporate vice president and consumer chief marketing officer, said the new Bing will go live for desktop on limited preview. Everyone can try a limited number of queries, he said.

The strengthening partnership with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI has been years in the making, starting with a $1 billion investment from Microsoft in 2019 that led to the development of a powerful supercomputer specifically built to train the San Francisco startup’s AI models.

While it’s not always factual or logical, ChatGPT’s mastery of language and grammar comes from having ingested a huge trove of digitized books, Wikipedia entries, instruction manuals, newspapers and other online writings.

The shift to making search engines more conversational — able to confidently answer questions rather than offering links to other websites — could change the advertising-fueled search business, but also poses risks if the AI systems don’t get their facts right.

Their opaqueness also makes it hard to source back to the original human-made images and texts they’ve effectively memorized.

Google has been cautious about such moves. But in response to pressure over ChatGPT’s popularity, Google CEO Sundar Pichai on Monday announced a new conversational service named Bard that will be available exclusively to a group of “trusted testers” before being widely released later this year.

Google’s chatbot is supposed to be able to explain complex subjects such as outer space discoveries in terms simple enough for a child to understand. It also claims the service will also perform other more mundane tasks, such as providing tips for planning a party, or lunch ideas based on what food is left in a refrigerator. Other tech rivals such as Facebook parent Meta and Amazon also worked on similar technology, but Microsoft’s latest moves aim to position it at he center of the ChatGPT zeitgeist.

Microsoft disclosed in January that it was pouring billions more dollars into OpenAI as it looks to fuse the technology behind ChatGPT, the image-generator DALL-E and other OpenAI innovations into an array of Microsoft products tied to its cloud computing platform and its Office suite of workplace products like email and spreadsheets.

The most surprising might be the integration with Bing, which is the second-place search engine in many markets but has never come close to challenging Google’s dominant position.

Bing launched in 2009 as a rebranding of Microsoft’s earlier search engines and was run for a time by Nadella, years before he took over as CEO. Its significance was boosted when Yahoo and Microsoft signed a deal for Bing to power Yahoo’s search engine, giving Microsoft access to Yahoo’s greater search share. Similar deals infused Bing into the search features for devices made by other companies, though users wouldn’t necessarily know that Microsoft was powering their searches.

By making it a destination for ChatGPT-like conversations, Microsoft could invite more users to give Bing a try.

On the surface, at least, a Bing integration seems far different from what OpenAI has in mind for its technology.

OpenAI has long voiced an ambitious vision for safely guiding what’s known as AGI, or artificial general intelligence, a not-yet-realized concept that harkens back to ideas from science fiction about human-like machines. OpenAI’s website describes AGI as “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work.”

OpenAI started out as a nonprofit research laboratory when it launched in December 2015 with backing from Tesla CEO Elon Musk and others. Its stated aims were to “advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.”

That changed in 2018 when it incorporated a for-profit business Open AI LP, and shifted nearly all its staff into the business, not long after releasing its first generation of the GPT model for generating human-like paragraphs of readable text.

OpenAI’s other products include the image-generator DALL-E, first released in 2021, the computer programming assistant Codex and the speech recognition tool Whisper.
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Former Twitter employees are expected to testify next week before the House Oversight Committee about the social media platform’s handling of reporting on President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden.

The scheduled testimony, confirmed by the committee Monday, will be the first time the three former executives will appear before Congress to discuss the company’s decision to initially block from Twitter a New York Post article regarding Hunter Biden’s laptop in the weeks before the 2020 election.

Republicans have said the story was suppressed for political reasons, though no evidence has been released to support that claim. The witnesses for the February 8 hearing are expected to be Vijaya Gadde, former chief legal officer; James Baker, former deputy general counsel; and Yoel Roth, former head of safety and integrity.

The hearing is among the first of many in a GOP-controlled House to be focused on Biden and his family, as Republicans wield the power of their new, albeit slim, majority.

The New York Post first reported in October 2020 that it had received from former President Donald Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, a copy of a hard drive of a laptop that Hunter Biden had dropped off 18 months earlier at a Delaware computer repair shop and never retrieved. Twitter initially blocked people from sharing links to the story for several days.

Months later, Twitter’s then-CEO Jack Dorsey called the company’s communications around the Post article “not great.” He added that blocking the article’s URL with “zero context” around why it was blocked was “unacceptable.”

The Post article at the time was greeted with skepticism due to questions about the laptop’s origins, including Giuliani’s involvement, and because top officials in the Trump administration already had warned that Russia was working to denigrate Joe Biden ahead of the 2020 election.

The Kremlin had interfered in the 2016 race by hacking Democratic emails that were subsequently leaked, and there were widespread fears across Washington that Russia would meddle again in the 2020 race.

“This is why we’re investigating the Biden family for influence peddling,” Rep. James Comer, chairman of the Oversight committee, said at a press event Monday morning. “We want to make sure that our national security is not compromised.”

The White House has sought to discredit the Republican probes into Hunter Biden, calling them “divorced-from-reality political stunts.”

Nonetheless, Republicans now hold subpoena power in the House, giving them the authority to compel testimony and conduct an aggressive investigation. GOP staff has spent the past year analyzing messages and financial transactions found on the laptop that belonged to the president’s younger son. Comer has previously said the evidence they have compiled is “overwhelming,” but did not offer specifics.

Comer has pledged there won’t be hearings regarding the Biden family until the committee has the evidence to back up any claims of alleged wrongdoing. He also acknowledged the stakes are high whenever an investigation centers on the leader of a political party.

On Monday, the Kentucky Republican, speaking at a National Press Club event, said that he could not guarantee a subpoena of Hunter Biden during his term. “We’re going to go where the investigation leads us. Maybe there’s nothing there.”

Comer added, “We’ll see.” 
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As Russia’s targeted attacks on the Ukrainian energy infrastructure continue, Ukraine is forced to rethink its energy future. While inventing ways to quickly restore and improve the resilience of its energy system, Ukraine is also looking for green energy solutions. Anna Chernikova has the story from Irpin, one of the hardest-hit areas of the Kyiv region. Camera: Eugene Shynkar.
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