Drones are routinely used in warfare, law enforcement and agriculture. Now more and more U.S. businesses are using them to deliver cookies and coffee right to your front door. VOA’s Julie Taboh has more. Camera: Adam Greenbaum, Chad Baugh 
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Add a top U.S. intelligence official to the list of Americans expressing concern about Chinese-made technology and Chinese social media platforms like TikTok. 

General Paul Nakasone, who heads both the U.S. Cyber Command and the National Security Agency, told lawmakers Tuesday there are multiple reasons to be wary of China’s rapid expansion in cyberspace, calling Beijing “a very formidable foe.”

“TikTok concerns me for a number of different reasons,” Nakasone said during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. “One is that the data that they have. Secondly is the algorithm and the control. Who has the algorithm?”  

Third, he said, “is the broad platform” both for unleashing potential influence operations but also for the ability to give China a way to “turn off the message.” 

Last month, the United States moved forward with plans to ban TikTok — a social media app used by more than 100 million Americans — from government devices. Some U.S. lawmakers have called for giving U.S. President Joe Biden the ability to ban use of the social media app nationwide. 

Others, however, object to giving Biden the ability to issue a blanket nationwide ban, arguing TikTok is only a small part of a larger issue.  

“The threat that everyone is talking about is TikTok, and how it could enable surveillance by the Chinese Communist Party or facilitate the spread of malign influence campaigns in the U.S,” Democratic Senator Mark Warner told reporters.”Before TikTok, however, it was Huawei and ZTE, which threatened our nation’s telecommunications networks. And before that, it was Russia’s Kaspersky Lab.”

“We need a comprehensive, risk-based approach that proactively tackles sources of potentially dangerous technology before they gain a foothold in America,” he said.

The Restrict Act, being pushed by Warner and others, would establish a rule-based process — informed by the U.S. intelligence community and directed by the Department of Commerce — to identify and address foreign technological threats. 

For its part, TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, has dismissed concerns it would improperly use user data as “political theater.” 

But concerns about Chinese companies and Chinese technology keep growing. 

On Sunday, The Wall Street Journal reported U.S. defense officials are worried that  Chinese-made ship-to-shore cranes used at many of America’s ports could be used to spy on materials being shipped in and out of the U.S. 

“Communist China has monopolized the port crane industry, and I will continue to spearhead efforts to decouple from the regime in Beijing and incentivize the near-shoring and reshoring of our strategic manufacturing capabilities,” Republican Congressman Carlos Gimenez told VOA when asked about the potential for Chinese espionage at U.S. ports. “I will fight to protect our critical infrastructure from the CCP’s espionage tactics.”

Tensions also have been rising since the U.S. shot down what it identified as a Chinese spy balloon last month after it had traveled across much of the continental United States.

And Biden is expected to issue an executive order in the coming days that would tighten rules on the ability of U.S. companies to invest in China. 

China’s Foreign Minister Qin Gang chastised the U.S. Tuesday, telling reporters in Beijing that Washington’s China policy has “entirely deviated from the rational.” 

But Nakasone told lawmakers that politicians and businesses alike would be smart to be careful about how they make use of Chinese-made platforms and technology. 

“What I would do is ensure that the areas that are most sensitive to our operations are well-sensored, and I have the confidence that’s what’s being utilized there. I understand where that information may be going,” the CYBERCOM commander said.  

“I would take a very, very hard look at anything that would come from an adversarial nation,” Nakasone said, though he acknowledged it would be “very difficult” to proceed with an all-out ban of Chinese products. 

“So much of what we do is based upon international trade,” he said, “and China has the corner on some things.”
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U.S. National Security Agency director Paul Nakasone on Tuesday expressed concern about Chinese-owned video app TikTok’s data collection and potential to facilitate broad influence operations.

In response to a lawmaker’s question about any concerns he has on the influence of TikTok on American children, Nakasone told a Senate hearing, “TikTok concerns me for a number of different reasons.”

Nakasone said his concerns include “the data that they have.”

“Secondly is the algorithm and the control of who has the algorithm,” Nakasone added.

Nakasone ended his comments by asserting that the TikTok platform could enable sweeping influence operations. Nakasone said his concern is not only the fact that TikTok can proactively influence users, but also its ability to “turn off the message,” and noted its large number of users.

The app is used by more than 100 million Americans.

The NSA, part of the Defense Department, is the agency responsible for U.S. cryptographic and communications intelligence and security.

A TikTok representative did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

TikTok, a unit of China’s ByteDance, has come under increasing fire over fears that user data could end up in the hands of the Chinese government, undermining Western security interests. TikTok Chief Executive Shou Zi Chew is due to appear before the U.S. Congress on March 23.

A bipartisan group of 12 U.S. senators is set to introduce legislation on Tuesday that would give Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo new powers to ban TikTok and other foreign-based technologies if they are found to pose national security threats.

The U.S. government’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), a powerful national security body, in 2020 unanimously recommended ByteDance divest TikTok because of fears that user data could be passed on to China’s government.
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Japan’s new medium-lift rocket failed on its debut flight in space on Tuesday after the launcher’s second-stage engine did not ignite as planned, in a blow to its efforts to cut the cost of accessing space and compete against Elon Musk’s SpaceX. 

The 57-metre tall H3 rocket lifted off without a hitch from the Tanegashima space port, a live-streamed broadcast by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) showed. 

But upon reaching space, the rocket’s second-stage engine failed to ignite, forcing mission officials to manually destroy the vehicle. 

“It was decided the rocket could not complete its mission, so the destruct command was sent,” a launch broadcast commentator from JAXA said. “So what happened? It’s something we will have to investigate looking at all the data.” 

The failed attempt followed an aborted launch last month. 

“Unlike the previous cancellation and postponement, this time it was a complete failure,” said Hirotaka Watanabe, a professor at Osaka University with expertise in space policy. 

“This will have a serious impact on Japan’s future space policy, space business and technological competitiveness,” he added. 

Japan’s first new rocket in three decades was carrying the ALOS-3, a disaster management land observation satellite, which was also equipped with an experimental infrared sensor designed to detect North Korean ballistic missile launches. 

H3 builder Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd (MHI) said it was confirming the situation surrounding the rocket with JAXA and did not have an immediate comment. 

MHI has estimated that the H3’s cost per launch will be half that of its predecessor, the H-II, helping it win business in a global launch market increasingly dominated by SpaceX’s reusable Falcon 9 rocket. 

A company spokesperson said earlier that it was also relying on the reliability of Japan’s previous rockets to gain business. 

In a report published in September, the Center for Strategic and International Studies put the cost of a Falcon 9 launch to low Earth orbit at $2,600 per kilogram. The equivalent price tag for the H-II is $10,500. 

A successful launch on Tuesday would have put the Japanese rocket into space ahead of the planned launch later this year of the European Space Agency’s new lower-cost Ariane 6 vehicle. 

Powered by a new simpler, lower-cost engine that includes 3D-printed parts, the H3 is designed to lift government and commercial satellites into Earth orbit and will ferry supplies to the International Space Station. 

As part of Japan’s deepening cooperation with the United States in space, it will also eventually carry cargo to the Gateway lunar space station that U.S. space agency NASA plans to build as part of its program to return people to the moon, including Japanese astronauts. 

Shares of MHI fell 1.8% in morning trade, while the broader Japanese benchmark index was up 0.4%.  
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A group of attorneys general from 45 U.S. states and Washington, D.C., demanded Monday that social media app TikTok produce materials as part of an investigation into its effect on young users’ mental health.   

“We know that social media is taking a devastating toll on young people’s mental health and well-being, and through our investigation we are getting a clearer sense of TikTok’s role,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a statement.   

The investigation began last year when eight states, including California, Massachusetts and Tennessee, launched a bipartisan probe of TikTok, focusing on whether the popular video-sharing app is endangering young people and violating state consumer protection laws.    

On Monday, Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti asked a Tennessee court to order TikTok to produce subpoenaed materials sought by the investigation. Attorneys general from across the United States filed a brief in support of the motion to compel TikTok to hand over the information.    

The Tennessee court petition alleges that TikTok has failed to preserve potentially relevant evidence in the investigation, including internal employee chat messages.   

It says TikTok has shared some internal messages in response to its request but said the company has rendered them “unrecognizable and nearly incomprehensible.”   

TikTok has not commented on the case.   

“We need to know more about the company’s business practices so we can keep our kids safe,” North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein said in a statement Monday.   

California’s Department of Justice said in a statement that heavy use of social media is “strongly associated with self-harm, depression, and low self-esteem in teens — and every additional hour young people spend on social media is associated with an increased severity of the symptoms of depression.”   

The latest court challenge comes as TikTok, owned by Chinese tech company ByteDance, faces security concerns. The United States, Canada and the European Union have all banned the use of the app on government-issued devices.    

Like other social media apps, TikTok has also received criticism that it is not doing enough to protect younger users from inappropriate content.   

Last week, TikTok said it was developing a tool that would allow parents to block certain content on the app. The company also said parents will now be able to set time limits on the app for their teens, depending on the day of the week.   

Some information in this report came from Reuters. 
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Twitter users reported a string of problems with the social media site on Monday, including broken links and images not loading.

The company’s tech support account said in a tweet, “Some parts of Twitter may not be working as expected right now. We made an internal change that had some unintended consequences. We’re working on this now and will share an update when it’s fixed.”

Twitter’s billionaire owner, Elon Musk, tweeted Monday: “This platform is so brittle (sigh). Will be fixed shortly.” 

The problems appeared to be resolved about an hour after they began.

“Things should now be working as normal,” the company tweeted around 1 p.m. Eastern time.

The glitches started around midday Monday, with users around the world saying they were unable to read links to articles from outside websites.

Internet observation group NetBlocks said the issue was also affecting image and video content.

Musk tweeted later Monday in response to another user, “A small API change had massive ramifications. The code stack is extremely brittle for no good reason. Will ultimately need a complete rewrite.”

API, or Application Programming Interface, refers to software that is made available to outside developers and defines how two software components — in this case, those of Twitter and those belonging to outside platforms — can communicate with each other.

Musk has held several rounds of layoffs at Twitter, letting go more than half of the company’s staff. Some former employees have raised concerns that the mass layoffs could lead to technical problems for the platform.

Musk took over Twitter in October 2022, following a deal to buy the company for $44 billion.

Some information in this report came from The Associated Press, Reuters and Agence-France Presse. 
…

Only a third of people in the world’s poorest countries can connect to the internet, the U.N. telecoms agency said Sunday, but low-flying satellites could bring hope to millions, especially in remote corners of Africa.

Tech giants including Microsoft have pledged to help populations hobbled by poor internet services to “leapfrog” into an era of online connectivity, with satellites set to play a key role as rival firms send thousands of new generation transmitters into low level orbit.

At the moment just 36% of the 1.25 billion people in the world’s 46 poorest countries can plug into the internet, the International Telecommunication Union said. By comparison, more than 90 percent have access in the European Union.

The ITU condemned the “staggering international connectivity gap” that it said had widened over the past decade.

The divide has been a key complaint at a U.N. summit of Least Developed Countries in Doha, where UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told their leaders that “you are being left behind in the digital revolution.”

The digital dearth is particularly acute in some African countries, including the Democratic Republic of Congo, where barely a quarter of the population of nearly 100 million can connect.

While internet access is easy in major DRC cities such as Kinshasa, huge rural zones and swathes of territory battled over by rival rebel groups for more than two decades are digital deserts.

The launch of thousands of Low-Earth Orbit satellites could bring speedy change and boost African hopes, tech experts promised at the Doha summit.

‘Leapfrog other nations’

Satellite coverage will play a key role in Microsoft’s vow to bring internet access to 100 million Africans by 2025, which was outlined ahead of the summit.

Microsoft announced a first phase for five million Africans in December and last week added a commitment to cover another 20 million people.

The initial five million will be served by Viasat, one of the companies sending constellations of satellites into space to compete with land-based fibre broadband.

Elon Musk’s Space X and Starlink are also putting thousands of satellites into an orbit between 400 and 700 kilometers (250 to 430 miles) above Earth.

Microsoft president Brad Smith told AFP that when he first saw the 20 million figure proposed by his team last year, he asked “is this real?”, but that he was now convinced it is possible.

“The technology costs have come down substantially and will continue to drop,” he said. “That is part of what makes it possible to move this fast to reach this size of population.

“Countries in Africa have the opportunity to leapfrog other nations when it comes to the regulatory structure for something like wireless communications,” he added.

“We can reach many more people than we could with fixed line technologies five or 10 or 15 years ago.”

Bandwidth bonanza

Richer countries have already largely allocated the available bandwidth for telecoms and television.

“In Africa the spectrum isn’t being used and so it is available and the governments are moving faster to bring this connectivity to more people,” Smith said.

Microsoft is working with Africa telecoms specialist Liquid Intelligent Technologies to provide internet for the second segment of 20 million people.

Providing internet and digital skills training for thousands of Africans was part of an effort to provide a private-sector alternative to “foreign aid”, Smith said, declaring that “we are bullish on what we believe digital technology can do for development.”

But the Microsoft president acknowledged that the private sector is “woefully under-developed and under-invested” in many LDC economies.

Liquid Intelligent says it has 100,000 kilometers (62,000 miles) of land fibre across Africa but is building a major satellite footprint.

“In hard-to-reach areas,” said Nic Rudnick, its deputy chief executive, “satellite is often the only technology or the most reliable technology for fast broadband that always works.”

 
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The Biden administration is pushing for more comprehensive federal regulations to keep the online realm safer against hackers, including by shifting cybersecurity responsibilities away from consumers to industry and treating ransomware attacks as national security threats.

The plan is part of the National Cyber Strategy that the administration released Thursday, outlining long-range goals for how individuals, government and businesses can safely operate in the digital world. This includes placing the burden on the computer and software industry to develop “secure by design” products that are purposefully designed, built and tested to significantly reduce the number of exploitable flaws before they’re introduced into the market.

The strategy “fundamentally reimagines America’s cyber social contract” and will “rebalance the responsibility for managing cyber risk onto those who are most able to bear it,” Acting National Cyber Director Kemba Walden said Wednesday in a press briefing to preview the strategy.

Walden stressed that asking individuals, small businesses and local governments to shoulder the bulk of the cybersecurity burden “isn’t just unfair, it’s ineffective.”

“The biggest, most capable and best-positioned actors in our digital ecosystem can and should shoulder a greater share of the burden for managing cyber risks and keeping us all safe,” she added.

The administration’s strategy is organized around five pillars; defend critical infrastructure; disrupt and dismantle threat actors; shape market forces to drive security and resilience; invest in a resilient future; and forge international partnerships to pursue shared goals.

The strategy was crafted in the aftermath of a series of major cyberattacks including the 2021 Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack and the Solar Winds cyberbreach of federal government agencies in 2019-20. Attackers in those incidents exploited vulnerabilities of companies central to a computer security ecosystem, allowing access to a large number of clients. By mandating greater security requirements on companies that are central to a cybersecurity system, the administration is hoping there will be less risk of security breaches affecting users and clients.

Previous administrations’ approaches to cybersecurity focused more on voluntary public-private partnerships and information-sharing practices. While the Biden White House strategy also seeks to enhance cooperation with the private sector, it’s the first one to push for more aggressive and comprehensive federal cybersecurity regulation.

Ransomware as national security threats

Pointing to the Iranian cyberattacks on Albania’s government networks in 2022, Anne Neuberger, deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging technology, warned that criminals and state actors have conducted destructive cyber and ransomware attacks across the globe.

Under the strategy, ransomware threats will be dealt with as national security problems rather than criminal activities.

“Americans must be able to have confidence that they can rely on critical services, hospitals, gas pipelines, air, water services, even if they are being targeted by our adversaries,” she said, underscoring the administration’s commitment to building a more resilient cyber infrastructure and strengthening international partnerships to deter cyberattacks.

The strategy lays the groundwork for a much more aggressive response from the federal government, including law enforcement and military authorities, to disrupt malicious cyber activity and pursue their perpetrators.

“We are certainly in a more forward-leaning position to make sure that we’re protecting the American people from these threats,” a senior administration official said, adding that the administration will take diplomatic and intelligence actions and financial sanctions as necessary.

“And military tools as necessary. These are options that the president has, and we’re certainly open to using all of them,” the official said.

The White House did not respond to VOA’s query on whether the options would include hack-back operations against criminals or foreign governments.

The strategy calls out China, Russia, Iran, North Korea and “other autocratic states with revisionist intent,” accusing them of “aggressively using advanced cyber capabilities” to pursue objectives that run counter to U.S. interests and international norms. It singles out China as the country presenting the “broadest, most active and most persistent threat to both government and private sector networks.”

Investments in cyber infrastructure

The strategy also calls for long-term investments in the U.S. cyber workforce, infrastructure and digital ecosystems, and underlining technologies to improve national resilience and economic competitiveness.

However, the White House will be implementing the strategy without a national cyber director. Christopher Inglis, who led the Office of the National Cyber Director established by Congress in 2021, stepped down in mid-February. His deputy Kemba Walden is acting national cyber director until a new one is appointed by the president and approved by the Senate.

VOA National Security Correspondent Jeff Seldin contributed to this report.
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Ethiopia’s hydropower dam on the Blue Nile River has angered downstream neighbors, especially Sudan, where people rely on the river for farming and other livelihoods. To reduce the risk of conflict, a group of scientists has used artificial intelligence, AI, to show how all could benefit. But getting Ethiopia, Sudan, and Egypt to agree on an AI solution could prove challenging, as Henry Wilkins reports from Khartoum, Sudan.
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The Biden administration approved more than $23 billion worth of licenses for companies to ship U.S. goods and technology to blacklisted Chinese companies in the first quarter of 2022, a Republican lawmaker said Tuesday.

The data comes amid growing pressure on the administration of Democratic President Joe Biden to further expand a broad crackdown on shipments of sensitive U.S. technology to China from Republican lawmakers, who now control the House of Representatives.

“Overwhelmingly, [the Commerce Department] continues to grant licenses that allow critical U.S. technology to be sold to our adversaries,” Republican Representative Michael McCaul, chair of the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, said at a hearing on combating the generational challenge of Chinese aggression, as he grilled U.S. officials for allowing the licenses to be approved.

“How does this align with your statement that ‘we’re doing everything within [the Commerce Department’s] power to prevent sensitive U.S. technologies from getting in the hands of [Chinese] military, intelligence services or other parties?’”

McCaul said the Commerce Department, which oversees export controls, denied only 8% of license requests to sell to companies on the U.S. trade blacklist during the January to March period last year.

Commerce Department official Alan Estevez, who oversees U.S. export policy, told the hearing that a Trump-era policy that allows China’s blacklisted telecommunications equipment maker Huawei to receive some U.S. technology below the “5G level” is “under assessment.”

Estevez also described TikTok as a “threat,” noting that a powerful committee that reviews foreign investments in the United States was dealing with how to handle the popular Chinese-owned social media app.

TikTok said in a statement the company has been working with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States “for over two years on a plan to address national security concerns about TikTok in the U.S.”

Democratic Congressman Gregory Meeks cautioned against reading too much into the licensing numbers, noting that the approval and denial data provides no information about the transactions.

The data comes a week after the Biden administration added new Chinese companies to the trade blacklist for aiding Russia’s military and months after announcing a sweeping new policy aimed at dramatically curbing shipments of chips and chipmaking tools to China.

Chinese tech giant Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. was added to a trade blacklist known as the entity list by former Republican President Donald Trump in 2019, amid allegations of sanctions violations, spying capabilities, and intellectual property theft.

Suppliers of most companies added to the entity list see their requests to ship to the targeted firms denied, but the Trump administration implemented a special policy for Huawei, pledging to deny it access to some things like 5G chips but allow it to receive other items, such as 4G chips.
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Mexico’s president announced Tuesday that electric car company Tesla has committed to building a major plant in the industrial hub of Monterrey in northern Mexico.

President Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador said the promise came in phone calls he had Friday and Monday with Tesla head Elon Musk. It would be Tesla’s third plant outside the U.S., after one in Shanghai and one near Berlin.

Lopez Obrador had previously ruled out such a plant in the arid northern state of Nuevo Leon, where Monterrey is the capital, because he didn’t want water-hungry factories in a region that suffers water shortages. But he said Musk’s company had offered commitments to address those concerns, including using recycled water.

“There is one commitment that all the water used in the manufacture of electric automobiles will be recycled water,” Lopez Obrador said.

The president said it would be a large investment without giving a dollar amount and did not specify what the plant would produce. He said it was unclear if it would produce batteries, an industry Mexico desperately wants despite not having a current domestic supply of lithium.

Lopez Obrador said the company planned to release details on Wednesday.

“This is going to mean a considerable investment and many, many jobs,” he said. “My understanding is that it will be very big.”

Investment estimated to be $10 billion

Monterrey is highly industrialized and close to the U.S. border and had long been considered the frontrunner for any Tesla investment.

But the city suffered water shortages in 2022 that were so severe that many homes went weeks with intermittent or no water supply. The government is building a 100-kilometer pipeline to bring in water from a dam.

Lopez Obrador had previously said his government “simply won’t grant permits” for any new plants there. Apparently Musk’s proposal overrode the president’s stance.

Gabriela Siller, chief economist at Nuevo Leon-based Banco Base, said the Tesla investment — which she estimated could be worth $10 billion — represented such a large amount that it trumped any of the president’s objections.

Lopez Obrador “could not turn this down. It would have had a very big political cost for him,” said Siller.

The announcement was a disappointment for more water-rich southern states that had begun jockeying for the Tesla plant after Lopez Obrador’s comments last week.

‘WE ALL WIN!’

The governor of Nuevo Leon state, where billboards went up last year saying, “Welcome Tesla,” crowed about Tuesday’s announcement.

“Mexico won, Nuevo Leon (NL) won, WE ALL WIN!” Governor Samuel García wrote on his Twitter account.

Lopez Obrador said Mexico wouldn’t match any U.S. subsidies to win the Tesla plant, referring to U.S. incentives under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.

“We cannot give subsidies like that,” the president said, adding “Mr. Musk was very attentive, respectful” of Mexico’s position.

Tesla is expected to announce plans for its “Gen 3” vehicle platform on Wednesday at its annual investor day at a factory near Austin, Texas.

Musk previously has floated the idea of building a $25,000 electric vehicle, which would cost about $20,000 less than the current Model 3, now Tesla’s least-expensive car. Many automakers build lower-cost models in Mexico to save on labor costs and protect profit margins.

Musk also is expected to show off the company’s production line at the Austin plant, as well as discuss long-term expansion plans, how it will spend capital investment dollars, and other subjects.
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Holding the bulky brick cellphone he’s credited with inventing 50 years ago, Martin Cooper thinks about the future.

Little did he know when he made the first call on a New York City street from a thick gray prototype that our world — and our information — would come to be encapsulated on a sleek glass sheath where we search, connect, like and buy.

He’s optimistic that future advances in mobile technology can transform human lives but is also worried about risks smartphones pose to privacy and young people.

“My most negative opinion is we don’t have any privacy anymore because everything about us is now recorded someplace and accessible to somebody who has enough intense desire to get it,” the 94-year-old told The Associated Press at MWC, or Mobile World Congress, the world’s biggest wireless trade show where he was getting a lifetime award this week in Barcelona.

Besides worrying about the erosion of privacy, Cooper also acknowledged the negative side effects that come with smartphones and social media, such as internet addiction and making it easy for children to access harmful content.

But Cooper, describing himself as a dreamer and an optimist, said he’s hopeful that advances in cellphone technology have the potential to revolutionize areas like education and health care.

“Between the cellphone and medical technology and the Internet, we are going to conquer disease,” he said.

It’s a long way from where he started.

Cooper made the first public call from a handheld portable telephone on a Manhattan street on April 3, 1973, using a prototype device that his team at Motorola had started designing only five months earlier.

Cooper used the Dyna-TAC phone to famously call his rival at Bell Labs, owned by AT&T. It was, literally, the world’s first brick phone, weighing 2.5 pounds and measuring 11 inches. Cooper spent the best part of the next decade working to bring a commercial version of the device to market.

The call help kick-start the cellphone revolution, but looking back on that moment 50 years later, “we had no way of knowing this was the historic moment,” Cooper said.

“The only thing that I was worried about: ‘Is this thing going to work?’ And it did,” he said Monday.

While blazing a trial for the wireless communications industry, he hoped that cellphone technology was just getting started.

Cooper said he’s “not crazy” about the shape of modern smartphones, blocks of plastic, metal and glass. He thinks phones will evolve so that they will be “distributed on your body,” perhaps as sensors “measuring your health at all times.”

Batteries could even be replaced by human energy.

“The human body is the charging station, right? You ingest food, you create energy. Why not have this receiver for your ear embedded under your skin, powered by your body?” he imagined.

Cooper also acknowledged there’s a dark side to advances — the risk to privacy and to children.

Regulators in Europe, where there are strict data privacy rules, and elsewhere are concerned about apps and digital ads that track user activity, allowing tech and digital ad companies to build up rich profiles of users.

“It’s going to get resolved, but not easily,” Cooper said. “There are people now that can justify measuring where you are, where you’re making your phone calls, who you’re calling, what you access on the Internet.”

Smartphone use by children is another area that needs limits, Cooper said. One idea is to have “various internets curated for different audiences.”

Five-year-olds should be able to use the internet to help them learn, but “we don’t want them to have access to pornography and to things that they don’t understand,” he said.

The inspiration for Cooper’s cellphone idea was not the personal communicators on Star Trek, but comic strip detective Dick Tracy’s radio wristwatch. As for his own phone use, Cooper says he checks email and does online searches for information to settle dinner table arguments.

However, “there are many things that I have not yet learned,” he said. “I still don’t know what TikTok is.”
…

A top U.S. cybersecurity official launched a warning shot at major technology companies, accusing them of “normalizing” the release of flawed and unsafe products while allowing the blame for safety issues, security breaches and cyberattacks to fall on their customers.

Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Director Jen Easterly called Monday for new rules and legislation to hold technology and software companies accountable for selling products that she says are released despite known vulnerabilities.

While massive hacking campaigns by China and other adversaries, including Russia, Iran and North Korea, are a major problem, “cyber intrusions are a symptom rather than a cause,” Easterly told an audience at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

“The cause, simply put, is unsafe technology products,” she said. “The risk introduced to all of us by unsafe technology is frankly much more dangerous and pervasive than the [Chinese] spy balloon, but somehow we’ve allowed ourselves to accept it.”

The push for regulation and legislation is not entirely new. Both Easterly and former National Cyber Director Chris Inglis, who stepped down earlier this month, warned during their confirmation hearings more than a year and a half ago that government action could be required if private companies refused to do more.

“Enlightened self-interest, that’s apparently not working. … Market forces, that’s apparently not working,” Inglis said at the time. 

Now, with China running a “massive and sophisticated” hacking program, and threats from other countries and from cyber criminals constantly growing, “we have to make a fundamental shift,” Easterly said.

CISA is in the process of laying out a set of core principles, Easterly said. Some of the most critical are to make sure that the burden for safety is never left solely to tech and software customers, that manufacturers be transparent about problems and how to fix them, and that products be “secure by design and secure by default.”

“Technology must be purposefully designed and developed and built and tested to significantly reduce the number of exploitable flaws before they’re introduced into the market for broad use,” Easterly said. 

“Ultimately such a transition to secure-by-design and secure-by-default products will help organizations and technology providers, because it’ll mean less time fixing problems, more time focusing on innovation and growth, and importantly it’ll make life much harder for our adversaries.”

Easterly said the U.S. government is already using its purchasing power to help make the change, requiring companies that want government contracts to meet higher security requirements.

She also praised a handful of companies, including Apple, Google, Mozilla and Amazon Web Services for moving to a more secure model but called efforts by others, including Twitter and Microsoft when it comes to the use of multifactor authentication, “disappointing.” 

VOA contacted Microsoft and Twitter for their reaction to Easterly’s specific criticism. Neither had provided a response as of the time of publication.

“We’ve normalized the fact that technology products are released to market with dozens, hundreds or thousands of defects when such poor construction would be unacceptable in any other critical field,” Easterly said, adding other industries have found ways to change.

“For the first half of the 20th century, conventional wisdom held that car accidents were solely the fault of bad drivers,” she said. “Cars today are designed to be as safe as possible. … Nobody would think of purchasing a car today that didn’t have seatbelts or airbags included as standard features, and no one would accept paying extra to have these basic security features installed.” 
…

Europe’s existing telecom networks aren’t up to the job of handling surging amounts of internet data traffic, a top European Union official said Monday, as he defended a consultation on whether Big Tech companies should help pay for upgrades.

The telecom industry needs to reconsider its business models as it undergoes a “radical shift” fueled by a new wave of innovation such as immersive, data-hungry technologies like the metaverse, Thierry Breton, the European Commission’s official in charge of digital policy, said at a major industry expo in Barcelona called MWC, or Mobile World Congress.

Breton’s remarks came days after he announced a consultation on whether digital giants should help contribute to the billions needed to build the 27-nation bloc’s future communications infrastructure, including next-generation 5G wireless and fiber-optic cable connections, to keep up with surging demand for digital data.

“Yes, of course, we will need to find a financing model for the huge investments needed,” Breton said in a copy of a keynote speech at the MWC conference.

Telecommunications companies complain they have had to foot the substantial costs of building and operating network infrastructure only for big digital streaming platforms like Netflix and Facebook to benefit from the surging consumer demand for online services.

“The consultation has been described by many as the battle over fair share between Big Telco and Big Tech,” Breton said. “A binary choice between those who provide networks today and those who feed them with the traffic. That is not how I see things.”

Big tech companies say consumers could suffer because they’d end up paying twice, with extra fees for their online subscriptions.

Breton denied that the consultation was an attack on Big Tech or that he was siding with telecom companies.

“I’m proposing a new approach,” he later told reporters. Topics up for discussion include how much investment is needed and whether regulations need to be changed, he said.

“We will have zero taboo,” Breton said, referring to the conference’s approach that no topic is off limits. “Do we need to adapt it? Do we need to discuss who should pay for what? This is exactly what is the consultation today.”
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The big beasts of the telecom industry kicked off their most important annual get-together in Barcelona on Monday, promising to lead a “tsunami of innovation”, as they try to shrug off a major slump across the technology sector.

Some 80,000 delegates are expected at the four-day Mobile World Congress (MWC), which is back to near full strength following years of pandemic-related disruption.

Industrial titans like Huawei, Nokia and Samsung are set to showcase their latest innovations, flanked by smartphone makers like Oppo and Xiaomi and network operators like Orange, Verizon and China Mobile.

“We are at the doors of a new change of era driven by the intersection of Telco, Computing, Artificial Intelligence and Web3,” said Jose Maria Alvarez-Pallete, boss of Spanish operator Telefonica and current chairman of industry body GSMA, which organizes the Barcelona event.

He promised the telecoms industry would be at the forefront of the “tsunami of innovation”, adding: “Without telcos there is no digital future.”

But many of the firms are more concerned with finding a path back to profit as the global economy stutters and the wider tech sector slashes thousands of jobs.

In the first clear sign that the ills of the wider tech sector are reaching telecoms, equipment maker Ericsson announced 8,500 layoffs last week.

Overall sales of smartphones last year slumped by 11.3 percent compared with 2021, according to the IDC consultancy.

Research firm Gartner reckons sales of smartphones, tablets and computers will fall again by four percent this year.

And network operators are still struggling to make 5G pay, years after they spent billions in government auctions for the right to use the bandwidth.

‘Unsustainable situation’ 

A hugely popular idea for many at the show is to get the owners of bandwidth-hungry platforms like YouTube, Netflix and Facebook to pay network operators a “fair share”.

Christel Heydemann, boss of French operator Orange, said the five largest users — which she did not name — account for 55% of daily traffic on European networks, costing telecoms firms 15 billion euros ($16 billion) a year.

She said it was an “unsustainable situation” and welcomed a public consultation launched by EU commissioner Thierry Breton last week.

But Breton told the MWC on Monday that it was not a “binary choice” or a battle between telecoms and big tech.

He said the idea was for everyone to make sure Europe had the best possible network by 2030 and warned that telecoms firms “will have to adapt to survive”.

Critics of the “fair share” narrative point out that customers already pay the operators for use of their networks.

Netflix boss Greg Peters, who is unlikely to be enthusiastic about the fair share proposal, is expected at the MWC on Tuesday.

Huawei center stage 

The organizers are trumpeting the return of Chinese delegates as a vital boon to the event.

Chinese firms heavily sponsor the MWC and Huawei is once again getting pride of place, this time hosting the biggest dedicated pavilion in the event’s decades-long history.

The Chinese tech giant was the second biggest smartphone maker in the world in 2020 but retreated after US regulators accused it of being controlled by Beijing.

The firm is now under pressure in Europe, where Breton and other commissioners are pushing for its equipment to be removed from 5G network infrastructure.

Huawei boss Eric Xu said before the event he would use the MWC to display products that would “help carriers meet evolving demand and unleash more opportunities for new growth”.

In total, GSMA said the four-day show would host almost 750 operators and manufacturers and 2,000 exhibitors.
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Twitter Inc has laid off at least 200 employees, or about 10% of its workforce, the New York Times reported late on Sunday, in its latest round of job cuts since Elon Musk took over the micro-blogging site last October. 

The layoffs on Saturday night impacted product managers, data scientists and engineers who worked on machine learning and site reliability, which helps keep Twitter’s various features online, the NYT report said, citing people familiar with the matter. 

Twitter did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment. 

The company has a headcount of about 2,300 active employees, according to Musk last month. 

The latest job cuts follow a mass layoff in early November, when Twitter laid off about 3,700 employees in a cost-cutting measure by Musk, who had acquired the company for $44 billion. 

Musk said in November that the service was experiencing a “massive drop in revenue” as advertisers pulled spending amid concerns about content moderation. 

Twitter recently started sharing revenue from advertisements with some of its content creators. 

Earlier in the day, The Information reported that the social media platform laid off dozens of employees on Saturday, aiming to offset a plunge in revenue. 
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NASA and SpaceX postponed a planned Monday launch of a four-member crew to the International Space Station due to a ground systems issue. 

The decision came less than three minutes before the spacecraft was due to lift off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. 

A backup launch date had already been set for early Tuesday. 

The four-person crew includes two Americans, one Russian and one astronaut from the United Arab Emirates. 

NASA said their planned six-month mission includes a range of scientific experiments including studying how materials burn in microgravity, collecting microbial samples from outside the space station and “tissue chip research on heart, brain, and cartilage functions.” 
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Mexico is undergoing a fevered competition among states to win a potential Tesla facility in jostling reminiscent of what happens among U.S. cities and states vying to win investments from tech companies.

Mexican governors have gone to extremes, like putting up billboards, creating special car lanes or creating mock-ups of Tesla ads for their states.

And there’s no guarantee Tesla will build a full-fledged factory. Nothing is announced, and the frenzy is based mainly on Mexican officials saying Tesla boss Elon Musk will have a phone call with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

The northern industrial state of Nuevo Leon seemed to have an early edge in the race.

It painted the Tesla logo on a lane at the Laredo-Colombia border crossing into Texas last summer and is erecting billboards in December in the state capital, Monterrey, that read “Welcome Tesla.”

The state governor’s influencer wife, Mariana Rodriguez, was even shown in leaked photos at a get-together with Musk.

However, López Obrador appeared to exclude the semi-desert state from consideration Monday, arguing he wouldn’t allow the typically high water use of factories to risk prompting shortages there.

That set off a competitive scramble among other Mexican states. The governors’ offers ranged from crafty proposals to near-comic ones.

“Veracruz is the only state with an excess of gas,” quipped Gov. Cuitláhuac García of the Gulf Coast state, before quickly adding “gas … for industrial use, for industrial use!”

A latecomer to the race, García had to try harder: He noted Veracruz was home to Mexico’s only nuclear power plant. And he claimed Veracruz had 30% of Mexico’s water, though the National Water Commission puts the state’s share at around 11%.

The governor of the western state of Michoacan wasn’t going to be left out. Gov. Alfredo Ramírez Bedolla quickly posted a mocked-up ad for a Tesla car standing next to a huge, car-sized avocado — Michoacan’s most recognizable product — with the slogan “Michoacan — The Best Choice for Tesla.”

“We have enough water,” Ramírez Bedolla said in a television interview he did between a round of meetings with auto industry figures and international business representatives.

Michoacan also has an intractable problem of drug cartel violence. But similar violence in neighboring Guanajuato state hasn’t stopped seven major international automakers from setting up plants there.

Nuevo Leon Gov. Samuel García had to think fast to avoid being shut out entirely.

García reached out to the western state of Jalisco, whose governor, Enrique Alfaro, belongs to the same small Citizen’s Movement party. Together, the two came up with an alliance Thursday that would allow trucks from Jalisco preferential use of Nuevo Leon’s border crossing, the same one where a “Tesla” lane appeared last year.

Jalisco has a healthy foreign tech sector, but most importantly, it has more water than Nuevo Leon.

López Obrador’s focus on water might be more about politics than about droughts, said Gabriela Siller, chief economist at Nuevo Leon-based Banco Base. She said the president appeared to be trying to steer Tesla investment to a state governed by his own Morena party, like Michoacan or Veracruz.

That could be a dangerous game, Siller said.

“Tesla could say it’s not somebody’s toy to be moved around anywhere, and it could decide not to come to Mexico,” she said.

There are doubts that whatever Musk eventually does announce will be an auto assembly plant. Foreign Relations Secretary Marcelo Ebrard said his understanding is that it won’t be a plant, but rather an ecosystem of suppliers.

Musk at times has floated the idea of building a $25,000 electric vehicle that would cost about $20,000 less than the current Model 3, now Tesla’s least-expensive car. Many automakers build lower-cost models in Mexico to save on labor costs and protect profit margins.

A Tesla investment could be part of “near shoring” by U.S. companies that once manufactured in China but now are leery of logistical and political problems there. That those companies will now turn to Mexico represents the Latin American country’s biggest foreign investment hope.

“The fight among states to attract investments from this nearshoring phenomenon is going to be tough, complicated,” Michoacan’s Ramírez Bedolla said.

As Ramírez Bedolla put it, “wherever Tesla sets up, it is going to be big news in Mexico.”
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