US Justice Department Says It Disrupted Russian Intelligence Hacking Network

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Washington — The U.S. Justice Department said on Thursday it disrupted a Russian intelligence hacking network. “For the second time in two months, we’ve disrupted state-sponsored hackers from launching cyber-attacks behind the cover of compromised U.S. routers,” U.S. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said in a statement. The Justice Department said that a January 2024 court-authorized operation neutralized the network of hundreds of small office/home office (SOHO) routers controlled by Russian intelligence and used “to conceal and otherwise enable a variety of crimes.”   “In this case, Russian intelligence services turned to criminal groups to help them target home and office routers, but the Justice Department disabled their scheme,” Attorney General Merrick Garland added. Garland said the Justice Department was accelerating efforts to disrupt the Russian government’s cyber campaigns against the United States and its partners, including Ukraine. …

China’s VPN Usage Nearly Doubles Amid Internet Censorship

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WASHINGTON — Last year, VPN usage in China nearly doubled, according to data from IT education news outlet Techopedia, this despite the country’s strict regime of internet controls of everything from overseas websites to online games. China’s “Great Firewall” is one of the world’s most comprehensive internet censorship regimes, preventing citizens from accessing websites like Instagram, Wikipedia and YouTube, as well most major news organizations including VOA. VPNs are outlawed in China because they allow users to jump the “Great Firewall” and securely connect to the internet outside the country while blocking their IP address. Rob Binns, a journalist with Techopedia, said China’s increasingly strict censorship policies may explain the rise in VPN usage there. “Looking at VPN usage versus what it’s combating, which is online censorship, we are seeing online censorship in a range of countries, particularly China, becoming more strategic and more surgical,” Binns told VOA in an interview.  In 2021, Chinese regulators limited teenagers’ access to video games to three hours per week — from 8 to 9 p.m. on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays — before unveiling more severe restrictions last December which set spending limits on video game platforms and banned incentives for daily logins. Binns said these regulations on minors may particularly motivate Chinese usage of VPNs. “With that younger demographic, which is traditionally, extremely, highly tech-literate demographic, they’re always going to be looking for ways to kind of circumvent that top-down pressure from governments and find ways to get around that,” Binns said. “And if …

Biden is on TikTok Despite Security Concerns

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In an effort to connect to younger voters, the Biden campaign has joined TikTok. But while many users have welcomed the move, security experts and even legislators have expressed disapproval amid long-standing privacy concerns surrounding the use of the Chinese-owned app. VOA’s Veronica Balderas Iglesias has details from Washington. (Produced by: Veronica Balderas Iglesias) …

Biden Campaign Joins TikTok, Despite Security Concerns 

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washington — President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign Monday defended its new TikTok account as a vital way to boost its appeal with young voters, even as his administration continued to raise security concerns about whether the popular social media app might be sharing user data with China’s communist government. The campaign’s inaugural post featured the president being quizzed on Sunday’s Super Bowl — and included a reference to the latest political conspiracy theory centering on pop superstar Taylor Swift. “The president’s TikTok debut last night — with more than 5 million views and counting — is proof positive of both our commitment and success in finding new, innovative ways to reach voters in an evolving, fragmented and increasingly personalized media environment,” Biden reelection deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty said in a statement. At the White House, though, national security communications adviser John Kirby said that “there are still national security concerns about the use of TikTok on government devices, and there’s been no change to our policy not to allow that.” Kirby referred most questions about TikTok to the Biden campaign and ducked a more general query about whether it was wise to use the app at all. He said the potential security issues “have to do with concerns about the preservation of data and potential misuse of that data and privacy information by foreign actors.” Both the FBI and the Federal Communications Commission have warned that TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, could share user data — such as browsing history, location …

Oversight Board Urges Meta to Rethink Policy on Manipulated Media

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NEW YORK — An oversight board is criticizing Facebook owner Meta’s policies regarding manipulated media as “incoherent” and insufficient to address the flood of online disinformation that already has begun to target elections across the globe this year.  The quasi-independent board on Monday said its review of an altered video of President Joe Biden that spread on Facebook exposed gaps in the policy. The board said Meta should expand the policy to focus not only on videos generated with artificial intelligence, but on media regardless of how it was created. That includes fake audio recordings, which already have convincingly impersonated political candidates in the U.S. and elsewhere.  It also said Meta should clarify the harm it is trying to prevent and should label images, videos and audio clips as manipulated instead of removing the posts altogether.  The board’s feedback reflects the intense scrutiny that is facing many tech companies for their handling of election falsehoods in a year when voters in more than 50 countries will go to the polls. As both generative artificial intelligence deepfakes and lower-quality “cheap fakes” on social media threaten to mislead voters, the platforms are trying to catch up and respond to false posts while protecting users’ rights to free speech.  “As it stands, the policy makes little sense,” oversight board co-chair Michael McConnell said of Meta’s policy in a statement on Monday. He said the company should close gaps in the policy while ensuring political speech is “unwaveringly protected.”  Meta said it is reviewing the …

Deepfake Scam Video Cost Company $26 Million, Hong Kong Police Says

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Hong Kong — Scammers tricked a multinational firm out of some $26 million by impersonating senior executives using deepfake technology, Hong Kong police said Sunday, in one of the first cases of its kind in the city. Law enforcement agencies are scrambling to keep up with generative artificial intelligence, which experts say holds potential for disinformation and misuse — such as deepfake images showing people mouthing things they never said. A company employee in the Chinese finance hub received “video conference calls from someone posing as senior officers of the company requesting to transfer money to designated bank accounts,” police told AFP. Police received a report of the incident on January 29, at which point some HK$200 million ($26 million) had already been lost via 15 transfers. “Investigations are still ongoing and no arrest has been made so far,” police said, without disclosing the company’s name. The victim was working in the finance department, and the scammers pretended to be the firm’s U.K.-based chief financial officer, according to Hong Kong media reports. Acting Senior Superintendent Baron Chan said the video conference call involved multiple participants, but all except the victim were impersonated. “Scammers found publicly available video and audio of the impersonation targets via YouTube, then used deepfake technology to emulate their voices… to lure the victim to follow their instructions,” Chan told reporters. The deepfake videos were pre-recorded and did not involve dialogue or interaction with the victim, he added. …

China Launches Rocket as Commercial Missions Pick Up Pace

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BEIJING — A small but powerful Chinese rocket capable of carrying payloads at competitive costs delivered nine satellites into orbit Saturday, Chinese state media reported, in what is gearing up to be another busy year for Chinese commercial launches.  The Jielong-3, or Smart Dragon-3, blasted off from a floating barge off the coast of Yangjiang in southern Guangdong province, the second launch of the rocket in just two months.  Developed by China Rocket Company, a commercial offshoot of a state-owned launch vehicle manufacturer, Jielong-3 made its first flight in December 2022.  President Xi Jinping has called for the expansion of strategic industries including the commercial space sector, deemed key to building constellations of satellites for communications, remote sensing and navigation.  Also Saturday, Chinese automaker Geely Holding Group launched 11 satellites to boost its capacity to provide more accurate navigation for autonomous vehicles.  Last year saw 17 Chinese commercial launches with one failure, among a record 67 orbital launches by China. That was up from 10 Chinese commercial launches in 2022, including two failures.  In 2023, China conducted more launches than any other country except for the United States, which made 116 launch attempts, including just under 100 by Elon Musk’s SpaceX.  Critical to the construction of commercial satellite networks is China’s ability to open more launch windows, expand rocket types to accommodate different payload sizes, lower launch costs and increase the number of launch sites. …

Beheading Video Gone from YouTube, But Questions Remain

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NEW YORK — A graphic video from a Pennsylvania man accused of beheading his father that circulated for hours on YouTube has put a spotlight yet again on gaps in social media companies’ ability to prevent horrific postings from spreading across the web. Police said Wednesday that they charged Justin Mohn, 32, with first-degree murder and abusing a corpse after he beheaded his father, Michael, in their Bucks County home and publicized it in a 14-minute YouTube video that anyone, anywhere could see. News of the incident — which drew comparisons to the beheading videos posted online by the Islamic State militants at the height of their prominence nearly a decade ago — came as the CEOs of Meta, TikTok and other social media companies were testifying in front of federal lawmakers frustrated by what they see as a lack of progress on child safety online. YouTube, which is owned by Google, did not attend the hearing despite its status as one of the most popular platforms among teens. The disturbing video from Pennsylvania follows other horrific clips that have been broadcast on social media in recent years, including domestic mass shootings livestreamed from Louisville, Kentucky; Memphis, Tennessee; and Buffalo, New York — as well as carnages filmed abroad in Christchurch, New Zealand, and the German city of Halle. Middletown Township Police Capt. Pete Feeney said the video in Pennsylvania was posted at about 10 p.m. Tuesday and online for about five hours, a time lag that raises questions about whether …

History of AI

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From counting machines to neural networks, the development of artificial intelligence has paralleled emerging brain science. Writer, Matt Dibble; graphic designer, Kateryna Stepchenko; motion designer, Valeryia Rusak; narrator, Hayde Fitzpatrick. …

Lunar Night Puts Japan’s Lander Back to Sleep

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TOKYO — After a brief awakening, Japan’s Moon lander is out of action again but will resume its mission if it survives the two-week lunar night, the space agency said Thursday. The unmanned Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) touched down last month at a wonky angle that left its solar panels facing the wrong way. As the sun’s angle shifted, it came back to life for two days this week and carried out scientific observations of a crater with its high-spec camera. “After completing operation from 1/30 (to) 1/31, #SLIM entered a two-week dormancy period during the long lunar night,” space agency JAXA said on X, formerly Twitter. “Although SLIM was not designed for the harsh lunar nights, we plan to try to operate again from mid-February, when the Sun will shine again on SLIM’s solar cells.” JAXA said SLIM was able to “successfully complete observations… as originally planned” with its multiband spectroscopic camera and could study more target areas than initially expected. The space agency also on Thursday posted a black-and-white photo of the rocky surface taken by the spacecraft. It followed other grainy images sent back from the mission to investigate an exposed area of the moon’s mantle, the inner layer usually deep beneath its crust. SLIM, dubbed the “Moon Sniper” for its precision landing technology, touched down within its target landing zone on Jan. 20. The feat was a boon for Japan’s space program after a string of recent failures, making the nation only the fifth to …

Remote Washington State Town Becomes Hub for EV Battery Production

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Moses Lake, Washington — It’s mid-winter in east Washington state, yet despite the chilly fog, two construction sites in the town of Moses Lake are brimming with activity. Several hundred workers are on an ambitious timeline to complete two new factories slanted to begin production of the next-generation components for electric vehicle batteries later this year. Two American start-ups, backed by $100 million in federal grants each, in addition to commercial partnerships, are racing to secure the domestic supply chain with the next-generation battery materials for EV automakers. “That’s going to go into everything from electric vehicles to IoT [Internet of Things] devices to smartphones and wearables and a lot of battery-based applications that we don’t even know exist yet,” explains Nik Anderson, director of program management with Group 14 Technologies, as he walks through the company’s vast construction site. Washington is one of the American states planning to ban sales of new gasoline-powered vehicles starting in 2035. For now, electric cars account for 8.6% of new vehicle sales in the United States. Affordable electric vehicles would require a significant scaling of domestic battery production, experts say. According to the Biden administration, affordable electric vehicles and reliable supply chain would require a significant scaling of domestic battery production and the national charging infrastructure. Once fully operational, the two companies’ factories in Moses Lake will be able to annually produce enough material to make batteries for about 400,000 electric vehicles. They also promise to produce a better battery, reducing the ‘charge anxiety’ …