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A Tesla Model S involved in a fatal crash with a semitrailer in Florida March 1 was operating on the company’s semi-autonomous Autopilot system, federal investigators have determined. The car drove beneath the trailer, killing the driver, in a crash that is strikingly similar to one that happened on the other side of Florida in 2016 that also involved use of Autopilot. In both cases, neither the driver nor the Autopilot system stopped for the trailers, and the roofs of the cars were sheared off. The crash, which remains under investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, raises questions about the effectiveness of Autopilot, which uses cameras, long-range radar and computers to detect objects in front of the cars to avoid collisions. The system also can keep a car in its lane, change lanes and navigate freeway interchanges. Tesla has maintained that the system is designed only to assist drivers, who must pay attention at all times and be ready to intervene. In a preliminary report on the March 1 crash, the NTSB said that preliminary data and video from the Tesla show that the driver turned on Autopilot about 10 seconds before …

Facebook said Thursday it banned an Israeli company that ran an influence campaign aimed at disrupting elections in various countries and has canceled dozens of accounts engaged in spreading disinformation. Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, told reporters that the tech giant had purged 65 Israeli accounts, 161 pages, dozens of groups and four Instagram accounts. Many were linked to the Archimedes Group, a Tel Aviv-based political consulting and lobbying firm that boasts of its social media skills and ability to “change reality.” Gleicher said Facebook could not speculate about Archimedes’ motives, which “may be commercial or political.” But he said Facebook discovered “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” with accounts posing as certain political candidates, smearing opponents and presenting as local news organizations peddling supposedly leaked information. The activity appeared focused on Sub-Saharan African countries but was also scattered in parts of Southeast Asia and Latin America. The pages have racked up 2.8 million followers and hundreds of thousands of views. Gleicher said Archimedes had spent some $800,000 on fake ads and that its deceptive activity dated back to 2012. He said Facebook has banned Archimedes. Facebook has come under pressure to more aggressively and transparently tackle misinformation aimed at sowing …

Joyce Huang contributed to this report. SHENZHEN, CHINA — U.S. officials have effectively banned Chinese telecom titan Huawei from building next-generation 5G mobile networks in the United States and are warning other countries about the company’s national security risks. On Wednesday, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order that bars American companies from using telecommunications equipment that is made by companies that pose a national security risk. The order, which declares a national emergency, is the first step toward formalizing a ban on doing business with Huawei. For its part, however, Huawei has shown no signs of backing down and has been making extraordinary pledges to win over its critics and dispel allegations that it is a security threat. The company says it will quit its business if forced to spy on its customers and now its company chairman Liang Hua has offered to sign “no spy” agreements as well. Speaking through an interpreter during a visit to London, Liang said Huawei is willing “to commit ourselves to making our equipment meet the no-spy, no-backdoors standard.” What does Huawei hand over? It is unclear what Liang means by “no-spy, no-backdoors” since Huawei, like all technology companies, requires users to sign …

U.S. lawmakers are pushing legislation that would force the State Department to report what it is doing to control the spread of U.S. hacking tools around the world. A bill passed in a House of Representatives’ appropriations subcommittee on Tuesday said Congress is “concerned” about the State Department’s ability to supervise U.S. companies that sell offensive cybersecurity products and know-how to other countries. The proposed legislation, released on Wednesday, would direct the State Department to report to Congress how it decides whether to approve the sale of cyber capabilities abroad and to disclose any action it has taken to punish companies for violating its policies in the past year. National security experts have grown increasingly concerned about the proliferation of U.S. hacking tools and technology. The legislation follows a Reuters report in January which showed a U.S. defense contractor provided staff to a United Arab Emirates hacking unit called Project Raven. The UAE program utilized former U.S. intelligence operatives to target militants, human rights activists and journalists. State Department officials granted permission to the U.S. contractor, Maryland-based CyberPoint International, to assist an Emirate intelligence agency in surveillance operations, but it is unclear how much they knew about its activities in …

Beijing has broadened its block of online encyclopedia Wikipedia to include all language editions, an internet censorship research group reported just weeks ahead of China’s most politically explosive anniversary. According to a report by the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI), China started blocking all language editions of Wikipedia last month. Previously, most editions of Wikipedia — besides the Chinese language version, which was reportedly blocked in 2015 — were available, OONI said in their report. AFP could not open any of Wikipedia’s versions in China on Wednesday. “At the end of the day, the content that really matters is Chinese-language content,” said Charlie Smith, the pseudonym of one of the co-founders of Greatfire.org, which tracks online censorship in China. “Blocking access to all language versions of Wikipedia for internet users in China is just symbolic,” he told AFP. “It symbolises the fear that the Chinese authorities have of the truth.” Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organisation that operates Wikipedia, said it had not received any notices explaining the latest block. According to the organisation, Wikipedia has been blocked intermittently in China since 2004. “With the expansion of this block, millions of readers and volunteer editors, writers, academics, and researchers within …

Facebook toughened its livestreaming policies Wednesday as it prepared to huddle with world leaders and other tech CEOs in Paris to find ways to keep social media from being used to spread hate, organize extremist groups and broadcast terror attacks. Facebook’s move came hours before its executives would face the prime minister of New Zealand, where an attacker killed 51 people in March — and livestreamed parts of it on Facebook.   The CEOs and world leaders will try to agree on guidelines they will call the “Christchurch Call,” named after the New Zealand city where the attack on a mosque took place.   Facebook said it’s tightening up the rules for its livestreaming service with a “one strike” policy applied to a broader range of offenses. Any activity on the social network that violates its policies, such as sharing a terrorist group’s statement without providing context, will result in the user immediately being temporarily blocked. The most serious offenses will result in a permanent ban.   Previously, the company took down posts that breached its community standards but only blocked users after repeated offenses.   The tougher restrictions will be gradually extended to other areas of the platform, starting with …

San Francisco supervisors voted Tuesday to ban the use of facial recognition software by police and other city departments, becoming the first U.S. city to outlaw a rapidly developing technology that has alarmed privacy and civil liberties advocates.  The ban is part of broader legislation that requires city departments to establish use policies and obtain board approval for surveillance technology they want to purchase or are using at present. Several other local governments require departments to disclose and seek approval for surveillance technology.  “This is really about saying: ‘We can have security without being a security state. We can have good policing without being a police state.’ And part of that is building trust with the community based on good community information, not on Big Brother technology,” said Supervisor Aaron Peskin, who championed the legislation.  The ban applies to San Francisco police and other municipal departments. It does not affect use of the technology by the federal government at airports and ports, nor does it limit personal or business use.  The San Francisco board did not spend time Tuesday debating the outright ban on facial recognition technology, focusing instead on the possible burdens placed on police, the transit system and …

If you’re fuzzy on next-generation 5G wireless connectivity, you aren’t alone. Powerful U.S. lawmakers who help shape the legal framework for America’s technological advances on Tuesday admitted ignorance and confusion about the highly-anticipated broadband system already being deployed in parts of the world. “I actually know very little about 5G,” said Dianne Feinstein of California, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee. “Today, we’re going to talk about something that I’m by no means an expert on,” the panel’s chairman, South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, said at a hearing where America’s top cybersecurity officials testified on 5G’s promise and looming perils. “It’s really hard for people to get their heads around what we’re talking about here,” Republican Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska said. “First of all, what is it?” Witnesses said the fifth generation of wireless technology, or 5G, will bring eye-popping data transmission capacity and spur a new age of digital device connectivity that will revolutionize many people’s daily lives, as well as America’s economic output. “5G is going to be about machine-to-machine communication, the internet of things,” said Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Cyber and International Communications Robert Strayer. “Advances in 5G will support greater …

Google opened a privacy focused engineering center in Munich, Germany, on Tuesday, its latest move to beef up its data protection credentials as tech companies’ face growing scrutiny of their data collection practices. CEO Sundar Pichai said the Silicon Valley tech giant is expanding its operations in the southern German city, including doubling the number of data privacy engineers there to more than 200 by the end of 2019. The new Google Safety Engineering Center will make Munich a global hub for the company’s “cross-product privacy engineering efforts,” Pichai said in a blog post. Staff will work with Google privacy specialists in other cities to build products for use around the world, Pichai said, adding that Munich engineers built the Google Account control panel as well as privacy and security features for the Chrome browser. Data privacy and security at Google and its tech rivals including Facebook are increasingly in the spotlight. Both companies dedicated much of their annual developer conferences last week to privacy, with Google unveiling new tools giving people more control over how they’re being tracked while Facebook outlined plans to connect people though more private channels. …

Spyware crafted by a sophisticated group of hackers-for-hire took advantage of a flaw in the popular WhatsApp communications program to remotely hijack dozens of phones, the company said late Monday.  The Financial Times identified the actor as Israel’s NSO Group, and WhatsApp all but confirmed the identification, describing hackers as “a private company that has been known to work with governments to deliver spyware.” A spokesman for the Facebook subsidiary later said: “We’re certainly not refuting any of the coverage you’ve seen.” The malware was able to penetrate phones through missed calls alone via the app’s voice calling function, the spokesman said. An unknown number of people – an amount in the dozens at least would not be inaccurate – were infected with the malware, which the company discovered in early May, said the spokesman, who was not authorized to be quoted by name.  John Scott-Railton, a researcher with the internet watchdog Citizen Lab, called the hack “a very scary vulnerability.”  “There’s nothing a user could have done here, short of not having the app,” he said. The spokesman said the flaw was discovered while “our team was putting some additional security enhancements to our voice calls” and that engineers …

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday that an antitrust lawsuit against Apple can proceed. Consumers are suing the company, alleging Apple overcharges when downloading iPhone applications at the company’s App Store. Conservative Judge Brett Kavanaugh joined with the four liberal judges in the 5-4 decision, agreeing with the plaintiffs that the 30% commissions Apple charges violate federal antitrust laws. Consumers allege Apple has monopolized the market by requiring apps be sold only through their stores.  Apple argued it is just a conduit between app developers and customers and that it is the developers who set the prices. “We’re confident we will prevail when the facts are presented and that the App Store is not a monopoly by any metric,” a company statement said.  Apple is also under scrutiny by Dutch antitrust authorities over complaints about commissions in European markets. …

A new mass spectroscopy machine is helping forensic scientists who are looking for a much better view of fingerprints on objects used in a crime. The current methods of making a copy of a fingerprint may not be good enough and DNA swabbing can damage evidence. VOAs Deborah Block reports. …

South Africa, which has the largest population of rhinos in the world, has been the country hit hardest by poaching. Between 2007 and 2015, there was a 9,000% increase in poaching there, reaching a high of 1,215 animals in 2014. While numbers have been declining since then, poaching remains a problem. But as Faith Lapidus reports, technology is helping turn one game reserve into a high-tech fortress. …

President Donald Trump signed an executive order this month designed to strengthen the country’s cybersecurity workforce, the front line against hackers, domestic and foreign. With 7 billion internet-connected devices in the world, and numbers expected to rise, the threat is growing. Faith Lapidus reports, web-connected devices, from smart homes to drones, are vulnerable. …

A cat who lost his back legs when he was hit by a train got a new lease on life by getting new prosthetic limbs. They were designed by engineering students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison using a 3D printer. VOA’s Deborah Block has more. …

Billionaire Richard Branson is moving Virgin Galactic’s winged passenger rocket and more than 100 employees from California to a remote commercial launch and landing facility in southern New Mexico, bringing his space tourism dream a step closer to reality. Branson said Friday at a news conference that Virgin Galactic’s development and testing program has advanced enough to make the move to the custom-tailored hangar and runway at the taxpayer-financed Spaceport America facility near the town of Truth or Consequences. Virgin Galactic CEO George Whitesides said a small number of flight tests are pending. He declined to set a specific deadline for the first commercial flight. An interior cabin for the company’s space rocket is being tested, and pilots and engineers are among the employees relocating from California to New Mexico. The move to New Mexico puts the company in the “home stretch,” Whitesides said. The manufacturing of the space vehicles by a sister enterprise, The Spaceship Company, will remain based in the community of Mojave, California. ​Taxpayer backing Taxpayers invested more than $200 million in Spaceport America after Branson and then-Gov. Bill Richardson, a Democrat, pitched the plan for the facility, with Virgin Galactic as the anchor tenant. Virgin Galactic’s …

The question comes up over and over, with extremist material, hate speech, election meddling and privacy invasions. Why can’t Facebook just fix it? It’s complicated, with reasons that include Facebook’s size, its business model and technical limitations, not to mention years of unchecked growth. Oh, and the element of human nature. The latest revelation: Facebook is inadvertently creating celebratory videos using extremist content and auto-generating business pages for the likes of Islamic State and al-Qaida. The company says it is working on solutions and the problems are getting better. That is true, but critics say better is not good enough when mass shootings are being live-streamed and online mobs are spreading rumors that lead to deadly violence. “They have been frustratingly slow in dealing with everything from child sexual abuse to terrorism, white supremacy, bullying, nonconsensual porn” and things like allowing advertisers to target categories such as “Jew hater,” simply because some users had listed the term as an “interest,” said Hany Farid, a digital forensics expert at the University of California, Berkeley. As new problems crop up, Facebook’s formula has been to apologize and promise to make changes, sometimes also noting that it did not anticipate how malicious actors …

France welcomed Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg on Friday with a threat of sweeping new regulation. With Facebook under fire on multiple fronts, Zuckerberg is in Paris to show that his social media giant is working hard to limit violent extremism and hate speech shared online. But a group of French regulators and experts who spent weeks inside Facebook facilities in Paris, Dublin and Barcelona say the company isn’t working hard enough. Just before Zuckerberg met French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris, the 10 officials released a report calling for laws allowing the government to investigate and fine social networks that don’t take responsibility for the content that makes them money. The French government wants the legislation to serve as a model for Europe-wide management of social networks. Several countries have introduced similar legislation, some tougher than what France is proposing. To an average user, it seems like the problem is intractable. Mass shootings are live-streamed, and online mobs are spreading rumors that lead to deadly violence. Facebook is even inadvertently creating celebratory videos using extremist content and auto-generating business pages for the likes of the Islamic State group and al Qaida. The company says it is working on solutions, and the …

Nike wants to meet your feet. The sneaker seller will launch a foot-scanning tool on its app this summer that will measure and remember the length, width and other dimensions of customers’ feet after they point a smartphone camera to their toes. The app will then tell shoppers what size to buy each of its shoes in, which Nike hopes will cut down on costly online returns as it seeks to sell more of its goods through its websites and apps.    But Nike will also get something it has never had before: a flood of data on the feet of regular people, a potential goldmine for the shoemaker, which says it will use the information to improve the design of its shoes. Nike mainly relies on the feet of star athletes to build its kicks. “Nikes will become better and better fitting shoes for you and everyone else,” said Michael Martin, who oversees Nike’s websites and apps.    Nike won’t sell or share the data to other companies, Martin says. And he says shoppers don’t have to save the foot scans to their Nike accounts. But if they do, they’ll only have to scan their feet once and Nike’s …

U.S. communications regulators are rejecting a Chinese telecom company’s application to provide service in the U.S. due to national-security risks amid an escalation in tensions between the two countries.   The Federal Communications Commission on Thursday voted unanimously, 5-0 across party lines, to reject China Mobile International USA Inc.’s long-ago filed application. The Commerce Department had recommended that denial last year.   The company, which the FCC says is ultimately owned by the Chinese government, applied in 2011 to provide international phone service in the U.S.   The Trump administration has been pushing against China in several ways. It has been pressuring allies to reject Chinese telecom equipment for their networks, citing security risks from Chinese telecom giant Huawei.   The U.S. and China are also in the middle of high-stakes trade talks.     …

Google’s self-driving car spinoff, Waymo, is teaming up with Lyft in Arizona to attempt to lure passengers away from ride-hailing market leader Uber. The alliance announced Tuesday will allow anyone with the Lyft app in the Phoenix area to summon one of the 10 self-driving Waymo cars that will join the ride-hailing service by end of September. Waymo’s robotic vehicles will still have a human behind the wheel to take control in case something goes awry with the technology. But their use in Lyft’s service could make more people feel comfortable about riding in self-driving cars. Self-driving to a profit Both Lyft and Uber consider self-driving cars to be one of the keys to turning a profit, something neither company has done so far. Meanwhile, Waymo has been slowly expanding its own ride-hailing service in the Phoenix area that so far has been confined to passengers who previously participated in free tests of its self-driving technology. “We’re committed to continuously improving our customer experience, and our partnership with Lyft will also give our teams the opportunity to collect valuable feedback,” Waymo CEO John Krafcik wrote in a blog post. Lyft President John Zimmer described the Waymo partnership as “phenomenal” in …

When Google launched its now distinctive digital assistant in 2016, it was already in danger of being an also-ran. At the time, Amazon had been selling its Echo smart speaker, powered by its Alexa voice assistant, for more than a year. Apple’s Siri was already five years old and familiar to most iPhone users. Google’s main entry in the field up to that point was Google Now, a phone-bound app that took voice commands but didn’t answer back. Now the Google Assistant – known primarily as the voice of the Google Home smart speaker – is increasingly central to Google’s new products. And even though it remains commercially overshadowed by Alexa, it keeps pushing the boundaries of what artificial intelligence can accomplish in everyday settings. For instance, Google last year announced an Assistant service called Duplex, which it said can actually call up restaurants and make reservations for you. Duplex isn’t yet widely available yet outside of Google’s own Pixel phones in the U.S. Alexa and Siri so far offer nothing similar. Google is expected to announce updates and expansions to its AI Assistant at its annual developer conference Tuesday. Although voice assistants have spread across smartphones and into cars …

Alphabet’s Google is set to roll out a dashboard-like function in its Chrome browser to offer users more control in fending off tracking cookies, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday, citing people familiar with the matter. Cookies are small text files that follow internet users and are used by advertisers to target consumers on the specific interests they have displayed while browsing. While Google’s new tools are not expected to significantly curtail its ability to collect data, it would help the company press its sizable advantage over online-advertising rivals, the newspaper said. Google’s 3 billion users help make it the world’s largest seller of internet ads, capturing nearly a third of all revenue, ahead of rival Facebook’s 20%, according to research firm eMarketer. Total digital ad spending in the United States will grow 19%  to nearly $130 billion in 2019, according to eMarketer. Google has been working on the cookies plan for at least six years, in stops and starts, but accelerated the work after news broke last year that personal data of Facebook users was improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica. The company is mostly targeting cookies installed by profit-seeking third parties, separate from the owner of the website …

Microsoft announced an ambitious effort it says will make voting secure, verifiable and subject to reliable audits. Two of the three top U.S elections vendors have expressed interest in potentially incorporating the open-source software into their proprietary voting systems.   The software kit is being developed with Galois, an Oregon-based company separately creating a secure voting system prototype under contract with the Pentagon’s advanced research agency, DARPA.   Dubbed “ElectionGuard,” the Microsoft kit will be available this summer, the company says, with early prototypes ready to pilot for next year’s general elections. CEO Satya Nadella announced the initiative Monday at a developer’s conference in Seattle.   Nadella said the project’s software, provided free of charge as part of Microsoft’s Defending Democracy Program, would help “modernize all of the election infrastructure everywhere in the world.” Microsoft also announced a cut-rate Office 365 application suite for political parties and campaigns for what it charges nonprofits. Both Microsoft and Google provide anti-phishing email support for campaigns.   Three little-known U.S. companies control about 90 percent of the market for election equipment, but have long faced criticism for poor security, antiquated technology and insufficient transparency around their proprietary, black-box voting systems. Open-source software is …