Month: June 2023

The first large-scale battery to be built at an Australian coal site has been switched on in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley, east of Melbourne.

The 150-megawatt battery is at the site of the former Hazelwood power station in the southern Australian state of Victoria. The station was built in the 1960s and closed in 2017.

The new battery was officially opened Wednesday and has the ability to power about 75,000 homes for an hour during the evening peak. The decommissioned coal plant produced 10 times more electricity, but the battery’s operators aim to increase its generating capacity over time.

The Latrobe Valley has been the center of Victoria’s coal-fired power industry for decades, but the region is changing.

The new battery will store power generated by offshore wind farms and is run by the French energy giant Engie, and its partners Eku Energy and Fluence.

Engie chief executive Rik De Buyserie told reporters it is an important part of Australia’s green energy future.

“The commissioning of this battery represents a key milestone in this journey and marks an important step in the transition of the La Trobe Valley from a thermal energy power to a clean energy power provider,” he said.

The state of Victoria aims to have at least 2.6 gigawatts of battery storage connected to the electricity grid by 2030 and 6.3 gigawatts by 2035.

Lily D’Ambrosio, Victoria’s minister for climate action, energy and resources, told reporters that the state government is committed to boosting its renewable energy sector.

“It is important that we just do not sit around waiting for old technology to disappear, close down, but we actually get in front of it and make sure that we have more than sufficient supply to meet our needs,” she said. “That is what keeps downward pressure on prices.”

Australia has legislated a target to cut carbon emissions by 43% from 2005 levels by 2030 and to achieve net zero emissions by 2050.

Electricity generation in Australia is still dominated by coal and gas but there is a distinct shift to renewable sources of power.

In April the Clean Energy Council, an industry association, said that clean energy accounted for 35.9% of Australia’s total electricity generation in 2022, up from 32.5% in 2021.
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U.S. security officials say the U.S. Energy Department and several other federal agencies have been hacked by a Russian cyber-extortion gang.

Homeland Security officials said Thursday the agencies were caught up in the hacking of MOVEit  Transfer, a file-transfer program that is popular with governments and corporations.

The Energy Department said two of its entities were “compromised” in the hack.

The Russia-linked extortion group CI0p, which claimed responsibility for the hacking, said last week on the dark web site that its victims had until Wednesday to negotiate a ransom or risk having sensitive information dumped online.  It added that it would delete any data stolen from governments, cities and police departments.

Jen Easterly, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said while the intrusion was “largely an opportunistic one” that was superficial and caught quickly, her agency was “very concerned about this campaign and working on it with urgency.”

Reuters reports that the Britain’s Shell Oil Company, the University of Georgia, Johns Hopkins University and the Johns Hopkins Health System were also among those targeted in the hacking campaign. The Associated Press quoted a senior CISA official as saying U.S. military and intelligence agencies were not affected.

MOVEit said it is working with the federal agencies and its other customers to help fix their systems.

Information for this report was provided by The Associated Press and Reuters.  
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An announcement by YouTube that it will no longer remove content containing misinformation on the U.S. 2020 presidential election has some experts divided.

In a June blog post, YouTube said it was ending its policy — enforced since December 2020 — that removed tens of thousands of videos that falsely claimed the 2020 election was impaired by “widespread fraud, errors or glitches.”

“We find that while removing this content does curb some misinformation, it could also have the unintended effect of curtailing political speech without meaningfully reducing the risk of violence or other real-world harm,” the post said.

The Google-owned platform says the move is to support free speech, but some experts in tech and disinformation say it could allow harmful content to again be easily shared.

“The message that YouTube is sending is that the election denial crowd is now welcome again on YouTube and can resume its campaign of undermining trust in American elections and democratic institutions,” said Paul Barrett, deputy director at New York University’s Stern Center for Business and Human Rights.

But others say the policy caused “legitimate” content to be removed and that the core issue is a wider societal problem, not something confined to YouTube.

YouTube’s other election misinformation policies remain unchanged, the platform said.

These include prohibiting content aimed at misleading people about the time and place for voting and claims that could significantly discourage voting.

Google spokesperson Ivy Choi told VOA in an email that the company has “nothing to add beyond what we shared in our blog post.”

Still, some U.S. lawmakers and experts are concerned about how harmful content circulates on YouTube.

Representative Zoe Lofgren, who sat on the House January 6 committee, said the idea that election denial disinformation is “no longer harmful — including that they do not increase the risk of violence — is simply wrong.”

“The lies continue to have a dramatic impact on our democracy and on the drastic increase in threats faced by elected officials at all levels of government,” Lofgren told VOA in an emailed statement.

Lofgren, a Democrat from California, added that YouTube’s parent company Alphabet should reconsider its decision.

Justin Hendrix, founder and editor of the nonprofit website Tech Policy Press, questioned whether YouTube’s policy had even been successful.

“There is, to me, a bigger question about whether YouTube was ever really effectively removing information that promoted false claims about the 2020 election,” Hendrix told VOA. “I wonder whether this is a capitulation to the reality that the company was never able to effectively take action against false claims in the 2020 election.”

YouTube is one of the most popular social media platforms in the United States, and it has over 2 billion users around the world.

But despite the platform’s popularity, it has escaped the level of scrutiny given to Twitter and Facebook, according to Barrett. The main reason: the difficulty in analyzing videos in bulk.

YouTube is the main place people go for videos on innocuous things like how to fix your car or do your makeup, said Barrett. “But it’s also the go-to place for video for people with extreme political ideas,” he added.

Videos on YouTube amplified the false narratives that the 2020 election was rigged and that the entire American election system is corrupt, according to a 2022 report Barrett and Hendrix co-authored, A Platform ‘Weaponized’: How YouTube Spreads Harmful Content – And What Can Be Done About It.

Election misinformation was also cited by the January 6 committee as it investigated the circumstances that resulted in a mob of former President Donald Trump’s supporters storming the U.S. Capitol on the day the election results were due to be certified.

In a report on the insurrection, the committee said the platform “included efforts to boost authoritative content” and that it “labeled election fraud claims — but did so anemically.”

Some free-speech experts like Jennifer Stisa Granick, the surveillance and cybersecurity counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, believe the policy change is good.

“There have been some legitimate discussions about voting and the legitimacy of the election that have been adversely impacted” under the former policy, Granick said.

“Election disinformation was not spread by YouTube or other online platforms, but by [Trump] himself. And the misinformation that circulates online is a drop in the bucket compared to what the [former] president of the United States says,” Granick said.

The bigger problem, she said, is that for some political candidates, “election denial is a fundamental part of their campaigns.”

People who complain that YouTube is evading its responsibility are “looking to the platform to solve a social and political problem that the United States has,” Granick said.

Roy Gutterman, director of the Tully Center for Free Speech at Syracuse University, believes any policy that openly fosters free speech is worthwhile.

“But calls to violence, which may accompany some of this discourse, would still not be protected,” Gutterman told VOA.

Barrett, however, is concerned that the reversal creates the potential for YouTube to be exploited.

The broader effect, Barrett said, “is the erosion of trust more generally” — not just in American elections.

Studies have shown that exposure to misinformation and disinformation is tied to lower trust in the media.

The YouTube policy change is hardly the main cause of that process, Barrett said, but it’s a contributing factor.

The policy change comes as several major social media companies face criticism for failing to quell election misinformation and disinformation on their platforms. The recent development with YouTube is part of a broader trend in the tech industry, according to Hendrix.

“I’m concerned that we’re seeing across the board almost a kind of throwing up the hands around some of these issues,” he said, pointing to staff layoffs, including those in trust and safety departments.

All of these factors contribute to “an erosion of even more than democracy,” Barrett said. “That’s an erosion of the social connections that hold society together.”
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Suspected state-backed Chinese hackers used a security hole in a popular email security appliance to break into the networks of hundreds of public and private sector organizations globally, nearly a third of them government agencies including foreign ministries, the U.S. cybersecurity firm Mandiant said Thursday.

“This is the broadest cyber espionage campaign known to be conducted by a China-nexus threat actor since the mass exploitation of Microsoft Exchange in early 2021,” Charles Carmakal, Mandiant’s chief technical officer, said in an emailed statement. That hack compromised tens of thousands of computers globally.

In a blog post Thursday, Google-owned Mandiant expressed “high confidence” that the group exploiting a software vulnerability in Barracuda Networks’ Email Security Gateway was engaged in “espionage activity in support of the People’s Republic of China.” It said the activity began as early as October.

The hackers sent emails containing malicious file attachments to gain access to targeted organizations’ devices and data, Mandiant said. Of those organizations, 55% were from the Americas, 22% from the Asia Pacific region and 24% from Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and they included foreign ministries in Southeast Asia and foreign trade offices and academic organizations in Taiwan and Hong Kong. the company said.

Mandiant said the majority impact in the Americas may partially reflect the geography of Barracuda’s customer base.

Barracuda announced on June 6 that some of its email security appliances had been hacked as early as October, giving the intruders a back door into compromised networks. The hack was so severe that the California company recommended fully replacing the appliances.

After discovering it in mid-May, Barracuda released containment and remediation patches, but the hacking group, which Mandiant identifies as UNC4841, altered its malware to try to maintain access, Mandiant said. The group then “countered with high-frequency operations targeting a number of victims located in at least 16 different countries.”

Blinken trip

Word of the breach comes as U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken departs for China this weekend as part of the Biden administration’s push to repair deteriorating ties between Washington and Beijing.

His visit had initially been planned for early this year but was postponed indefinitely after the discovery and shootdown of what the U.S. said was a Chinese spy balloon over the United States.

Mandiant said the targeting at both the organizational and individual account levels focused on issues that are high policy priorities for China, particularly in the Asia Pacific region. It said the hackers searched for email accounts of people working for governments of political or strategic interest to China at the time they were participating in diplomatic meetings with other countries.

In an emailed statement Thursday, Barracuda said about 5% of its active Email Security Gateway appliances worldwide showed evidence of potential compromise. It said it was providing replacement appliances to affected customers at no cost.

The U.S. government has accused Beijing of being its principal cyber espionage threat, with state-backed Chinese hackers stealing data from both the private and public sector.

In terms of raw intelligence affecting the U.S., China’s largest electronic infiltrations have targeted OPM, Anthem, Equifax and Marriott.

Earlier this year, Microsoft said state-backed Chinese hackers have been targeting U.S. critical infrastructure and could be laying the technical groundwork for the potential disruption of critical communications between the U.S. and Asia during future crises.

China says the U.S. also engages in cyber espionage against it, hacking into computers of its universities and companies.
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Chinese manufacturers of electric vehicles are stepping up their push to dominate the European market. As Amy Guttman reports from London, they are making progress in Britain, where car shoppers are eager to buy the lower-cost electric cars that Chinese automakers are offering.
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Microsoft Founder Bill Gates was in China on Thursday for what he said were meetings with global health and development partners who have worked with his charitable foundation.

“Solving problems like climate change, health inequity and food insecurity requires innovation,” Gates tweeted. “From developing malaria drugs to investing in climate adaptation, China has a lot of experience in that. We need to unlock that kind of progress for more people around the world.”

Gates said global crises stifled progress in reducing death and poverty in children and that he will next travel to West Africa because African countries are particularly vulnerable “with high food prices, crushing debt, and increasing rates of TB and malaria.”

Reuters, citing two people familiar with the matter, said Gates would meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Gates is the latest business figure to visit China year, following Apple’s Tim Cook and Tesla’s Elon Musk.

Some information for this report came from The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters.
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Experts are raising concerns that a recent Cambodian government order allocating around $1 million to a local company for a facial recognition technology project could pave the way for the technology to be used against citizens and human rights defenders.

The order, signed by Prime Minister Hun Sen and released in March in a recent tranche of government documents, would award the funds to HSC Co. Ltd., a Cambodian company led by tycoon Sok Hong that has previously printed Cambodian passports and installed CCTV cameras in Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital.

The Oct. 17 order appears to be the first direct indication of Cambodia’s interest in pursuing facial recognition, alarming experts who say such initiatives could eventually be used to target dissenters and build a stronger surveillance state similar to China’s. In recent months, the government has blocked the country’s main opposition party from participating in the July national elections, shut down independent media and jailed critics such as labor organizers and opposition politicians.

Neither the Interior Ministry nor the company would answer questions about what the project entails.

“This is national security and not everyone knows about how it works,” Khieu Sopheak, secretary of state and spokesperson for the Interior Ministry, told VOA by phone. “Even in the U.S., if you ask about the air defense system, they will tell you the same. This is the national security system, which we can’t tell everyone [about].”

The order names HSC, a company Sok Hong founded in 2007, as the funds’ recipient. HSC’s businesses span food and beverage, dredging and retail.

HSC also has close ties to the government: in addition to printing passports and providing CCTV cameras in Phnom Penh, it runs the system for national ID cards and has provided border checkpoint technology. Malaysian and Cambodian media identify Sok Hong as the son of Sok Kong, another tycoon who founded the conglomerate Sokimex Investment Group. Both father and son are oknhas or “lords,” a Cambodian honorific given to those who have donated more than $500,000 to the government.

When reached by phone, Sok Hong told VOA, “I think it shouldn’t be reported since it is related to national security.”

Cambodia’s history of repression, including monitoring dissidents in person and online, has raised suspicions that it could deploy such technology to target activists. Last year, labor leaders reported they were recorded via drones during protests.

“Authorities can use facial recognition technology to identify, track individuals and gather vast amounts of personal data without their consent, which could eventually lead to massive surveillance,” said Chak Sopheap, director of the Cambodian Center for Human Rights. “For instance, when a government uses facial recognition to monitor attendance at peaceful gatherings, these actions raise severe concerns about the safety of those citizens.”

In addition, giving control of facial recognition technology to a politically connected firm, and one that already has access to a trove of identity-related information, could centralize citizens’ data in a one-stop shop. That could make it easier to fine-tune algorithms quickly and later develop more facial recognition tools to be shared with the government in a mutually beneficial relationship, Joshua Kurlantzick, Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow for Southeast Asia, told VOA.

China — one of Cambodia’s oldest and closest allies — has pioneered collecting vast amounts of data to monitor citizens. In Xinjiang, home to about 12 million Uyghurs, Chinese authorities combine people’s biometric data and digital activities to create a detailed portrait of their lives.

In recent years, China has sought to influence Southeast Asia, “providing an explicit model for surveillance and a model for a closed and walled-garden internet,” Kurlantzick said, referring to methods of blocking or managing users’ access to certain content.

Some efforts have been formalized under the Digital Silk Road, China’s technology-focused subset of the Belt and Road initiative that provides support, infrastructure and subsidized products to recipient countries.

China’s investment in Cambodian monitoring systems dates back to the early days of the Digital Silk Road. In 2015, it installed an estimated $3 million worth of CCTV cameras in Phnom Penh and later promised more cameras to “allow a database to accumulate for the investigation of criminal cases,” according to reports at the time. There is no indication China is involved in the HSC project, however.

While dozens of countries use facial recognition technology for legitimate public safety uses, such investments must be accompanied by strict data protection laws and enforcement, said Gatra Priyandita, a cyber politics analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

Cambodia does not have comprehensive data privacy regulations. The prime minister himself has monitored Zoom calls hosted by political foes, posting on Facebook that “Hun Sen’s people are everywhere.”

Given the country’s approach to digital privacy, housing facial recognition within a government-tied conglomerate is “concerning” but not surprising, Priyandita said.

“The long-term goal of these kinds of arrangements is the reinforcement of regime security, of course, particularly the protection of Cambodia’s main political and business families,” Priyandita said.

In the immediate future, Cambodia’s capacity to carry out mass surveillance is uncertain. The National Internet Gateway — a system for routing traffic through government servers which critics compared to China’s “Great Firewall” — was delayed in early 2022. Shortly before the scheduled rollout, the government advertised more than 100 positions related to data centers and artificial intelligence, sowing doubts about the technical knowledge behind the project.

Still, the government is pushing to strengthen its digital capabilities, fast-tracking controversial laws around cybercrime and cybersecurity and pursuing a 15-year plan to develop the digital economy, including a skilled technical workforce.

Sun Narin of VOA’s Khmer Service contributed to this report.
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Chinese authorities are cracking down on political and fraud cases driven by deepfakes, created with face- and voice-changing software that tricks targets into believing they are video chatting with a loved one or another trusted person.

How good are the deepfakes? Good enough to trick an executive at a Fuzhou tech company in Fujian province who almost lost $600,000 to a person he thought was a friend claiming to need a quick cash infusion.

The entire transaction took less than 10 minutes from the first contact via the phone app WeChat to police stopping the online bank transfer when the target called the authorities after learning his real friend had never requested the loan, according to Sina Technology.

Despite the public’s outcry about such AI-driven fraud, some experts say Beijing appears more concerned about the political challenges that deepfakes may pose, as shown by newly implemented regulations on “deep synthesis” management that outlaw activities that “endanger national security and interests and damage the national image.”

The rapid development of artificial intelligence technology has propelled cutting-edge technology to mass entertainment applications in just a few years.

In a 2017 demonstration of the risks, a video created by University of Washington researchers showed then-U.S. President Barack Obama saying things he hadn’t.

Two years later, Chinese smartphone apps like Zao let users swap their faces with celebrities so they could appear as if they were in a movie. Zao was removed from app stores in 2019 and Avatarify, another popular Chinese face-swapping app, was also banned in 2021, likely for violation of privacy and portrait rights, according to Chinese media.

Pavel Goldman-Kalaydin, head of artificial intelligence and machine learning at SumSub, a Berlin-based global antifraud company, explained how easy it is with a personal computer or smartphone to make a video in which a person appears to say things he or she never would.

“To create a deepfake, a fraudster uses a real person’s document, taking a photo of it and turning it into a 3D persona,” he said. “The problem is that the technology, it is becoming more and more democratized. Many people can use it. … They can create many deepfakes, and they try to bypass these checks that we try to enforce.”

Subbarao Kambhampati, professor at the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence at Arizona State University, said in a telephone interview he was surprised by the apparent shift from voice cloning to deepfake video calling by scammers in China. He compared that to a rise in voice-cloning phone scams in the U.S.

“Audio alone, you’re more easily fooled, but audio plus video, it would be little harder to fool you. But apparently they’re able to do it,” Kambhampati said, adding that it is harder to make a video that appears trustworthy.

“Subconsciously we look at people’s faces … and realize that they’re not exactly behaving the way we normally see them behave in terms of their facial expressions.”

Experts say that AI fraud will become more sophisticated.

“We don’t expect the problem to go away. The biggest solution … is education, let people understand the days of trusting your ears and eyes are over, and you need to keep that in the back of your mind,” Kambhampati said.

The Internet Society of China issued a warning in May, calling on the public to be more vigilant as AI face-changing, voice-changing scams and slanders became common.

The Wall Street Journal reported on June 4 that local governments across China have begun to crack down on false information generated by artificial intelligence chatbots. Much of the false content designed as clickbait is similar to authentic material on topics that have already attracted public attention.

To regulate “deep synthesis” content, China’s administrative measures implemented on January 10 require service providers to “conspicuously mark” AI-generated content that “may cause public confusion or misidentification” so that users can tell authentic media content from deepfakes.

China’s practice of requiring technology platforms to “watermark” deepfake content has been widely discussed internationally.

Matt Sheehan, a fellow in the Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, noted that deepfake regulations place the onus on the companies that develop and operate these technologies.

“If enforced well, the regulations could make it harder for criminals to get their hands on these AI tools,” he said in an email to VOA Mandarin. “It could throw up some hurdles to this kind of fraud.”

But he also said that much depends on how Beijing implements the regulations and whether bad actors can obtain AI tools outside China.

“So, it’s not a problem with the technology,” said SumSub’s Goldman-Kalaydin. “It is always a problem with the usage of the technology. So, you can regulate the usage, but not the technology.”

James Lewis, senior vice president of the strategic technologies program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, told VOA Mandarin, “Chinese law needs to be modernized for changes in technology, and I know the Chinese are thinking about that. So, the cybercrime laws you have will probably catch things like deepfakes. What will be hard to handle is the volume and the sophistication of the new products, but I know the Chinese government is very worried about fraud and looking for ways to get control of it.”

Others suggest that in regulating AI, political stability is a bigger concern for the Chinese government.

“I think they have a stronger incentive to work on the political threats than they do for fraud,” said Bill Drexel, an associate fellow for the Technology and National Security Program at Center for a New American Security.

In May, the hashtag #AIFraudEruptingAcrossChina was trending on China’s social media platform Weibo. However, the hashtag has since been censored, according to the Wall Street Journal, suggesting authorities are discouraging discussion on AI-driven fraud.

“So even we can see from this incident, once it appeared that the Chinese public was afraid that there was too much AI-powered fraud, they censored,” Drexel told VOA Mandarin.

He continued, “The fact that official state-run media initially reported these incidents and then later discussion of it was censored just goes to show that they do ultimately care about covering themselves politically more than they care about addressing fraud.”

Adrianna Zhang contributed to this report.
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Bill Gates, Microsoft Corp’s co-founder, is set to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping on Friday during his visit to China, two people with knowledge of the matter said.

The meeting will mark Xi’s first meeting with a foreign private entrepreneur in recent years. The people said the encounter may be a one-on-one meeting. A third source confirmed they would meet, without providing details.

The sources did not say what the two might discuss. Gates tweeted on Wednesday that he had landed in Beijing for the first time since 2019 and that he would meet with partners who had been working on global health and development challenges with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The foundation and China’s State Council Information Office, which handles media queries on behalf of the Chinese government, did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment. 

Gates stepped down from Microsoft’s board in 2020 to focus on philanthropic works related to global health, education and climate change. He quit his full-time executive role at Microsoft in 2008. 

The last reported meeting between Xi and Gates was in 2015, when they met on the sidelines of the Boao forum in Hainan province. In early 2020, Xi wrote a letter to Gates thanking him, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, for pledging assistance to China including $5 million for its fight against COVID. 

The meeting would mark the end of a long hiatus by Xi in recent years from meeting foreign private entrepreneurs and business leaders, after the Chinese president stopped traveling abroad for nearly three years as China shut its borders during the pandemic. 

Several foreign CEOs have visited China since it reopened early this year but most have mainly met with government ministers. 

Premier Li Qiang met a group of CEOs including Apple’s Tim Cook in March and a source told Reuters that Tesla’s Elon Musk met vice-premier Ding Xuexiang last month.
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EU lawmakers on Wednesday voted for tougher landmark draft artificial intelligence rules that include a ban on the use of the technology in biometric surveillance and for generative AI systems like ChatGPT to disclose AI-generated content.

The lawmakers agreed to the amendments to the draft legislation proposed by the European Commission which is seeking to set a global standard for the technology used in everything from automated factories to bots and self-driving cars.

Rapid adoption of Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other bots has led top AI scientists and company executives including Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to raise the potential risks posed to society.

“While Big Tech companies are sounding the alarm over their own creations, Europe has gone ahead and proposed a concrete response to the risks AI is starting to pose,” said Brando Benifei, co-rapporteur of the draft act.

Among other changes, European Union lawmakers want any company using generative tools to disclose copyrighted material used to train its systems and for companies working on “high-risk application” to do a fundamental rights impact assessment and evaluate environmental impact.

Microsoft, which has called for AI rules, welcomed the lawmakers’ agreement.

“We believe that AI requires legislative guardrails, alignment efforts at an international level, and meaningful voluntary actions by companies that develop and deploy AI,” a Microsoft spokesperson said.

However, the Computer and Communications Industry Association said the amendments on high-risk AIs were likely to overburden European AI developers with “excessively prescriptive rules” and slow down innovation.

“AI raises a lot of questions – socially, ethically, economically. But now is not the time to hit any ‘pause button’. On the contrary, it is about acting fast and taking responsibility,” EU industry chief Thierry Breton said.

The Commission announced its draft rules two years ago aimed at setting a global standard for a technology key to almost every industry and business and in a bid to catch up with AI leaders the United States and China.

The lawmakers will now have to thrash out details with European Union countries before the draft rules become legislation. 
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European Union antitrust regulators took aim at Google’s lucrative digital advertising business in an unprecedented decision ordering the tech giant to sell off some of its ad business to address competition concerns.

The European Commission, the bloc’s executive branch and top antitrust enforcer, said that its preliminary view after an investigation is that “only the mandatory divestment by Google of part of its services” would satisfy the concerns.

The 27-nation EU has led the global movement to crack down on Big Tech companies, but it has previously relied on issuing blockbuster fines, including three antitrust penalties for Google worth billions of dollars.

It’s the first time the bloc has ordered a tech giant to split up keys of business.

Google can now defend itself by making its case before the commission issues its final decision. The company didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The commission’s decision stems from a formal investigation that it opened in June 2021, looking into whether Google violated the bloc’s competition rules by favoring its own online display advertising technology services at the expense of rival publishers, advertisers and advertising technology services.

YouTube was one focus of the commission’s investigation, which looked into whether Google was using the video sharing site’s dominant position to favor its own ad-buying services by imposing restrictions on rivals.

Google’s ad tech business is also under investigation by Britain’s antitrust watchdog and faces litigation in the U.S.

Brussels has previously hit Google with more than $8.6 billion worth of fines in three separate antitrust cases, involving its Android mobile operating system and shopping and search advertising services.

The company is appealing all three penalties. An EU court last year slightly reduced the Android penalty to 4.125 million euros. EU regulators have the power to impose penalties worth up to 10% of a company’s annual revenue.
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Amazon.com said cloud services offered by its unit Amazon Web Services were recovering after a big disruption on Tuesday affected websites of the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority and The Boston Globe, among others.

Several hours after Downdetector.com started showing reports of outages, Amazon said many AWS services were fully recovered and marked resolved.

“We are continuing to work to fully recover all services,” AWS’ status page showed.

Tuesday’s impact stretching from transportation to financial services businesses underscores adoption of Amazon’s younger Lambda service and the degree to which many of its cloud offerings are crucial to companies in the internet age.

According to research in the past year from the cloud company Datadog, more than half of organizations operating in the cloud use Lambda or rival services, known as serverless technology.

Nearly 12,000 users had reported issues with accessing the service, according to Downdetector, which tracks outages by collating status reports from a number of sources, including user-submitted errors on its platform.

The disruption appeared smaller in time and breadth than one the company suffered in 2017 of its data-hosting service known as Amazon S3, representing the bread and butter of its cloud business.

The outage appeared to extend to AWS’s own webpage describing disruptions in its operations, which at one point failed to load on Tuesday, Reuters witnesses saw.

“We quickly narrowed down the root cause to be an issue with a subsystem responsible for capacity management for AWS Lambda, which caused errors directly for customers and indirectly through the use by other AWS services,” Amazon said.

AWS Lambda is a service that lets customers run computer programs without having to manage any underlying servers.

Twitter users expressed their frustration with the outage, with one user saying, “I don’t know, Alexa won’t tell me because #AWS and her services are down!”

Delta Air Lines also said it was facing problems but did not say if it was related to the AWS outage. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Other Amazon services such as Amazon Music and Alexa were also impacted, according to Downdetector.

Amazon had its last major outage in December 2021, when disruptions to its cloud services temporarily knocked out streaming platforms Netflix and Disney+, Robinhood, and Amazon’s e-commerce website ahead of Christmas.
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India threatened to shut Twitter down unless it complied with orders to restrict accounts critical of the government’s handling of farmer protests, co-founder Jack Dorsey said, an accusation Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government called an “outright lie.”

Dorsey, who quit as Twitter CEO in 2021, said on Monday that India also threatened the company with raids on employees if it did not comply with government requests to take down certain posts.

“It manifested in ways such as: ‘We will shut Twitter down in India’, which is a very large market for us; ‘we will raid the homes of your employees’, which they did; And this is India, a democratic country,” Dorsey said in an interview with YouTube news show Breaking Points.

Deputy Minister for Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar, a top ranking official in Modi’s government, lashed out against Dorsey in response, calling his assertions an “outright lie.”

“No one went to jail nor was Twitter ‘shut down’. Dorsey’s Twitter regime had a problem accepting the sovereignty of Indian law,” he said in a post on Twitter.

Dorsey’s comments again put the spotlight on the struggles faced by foreign technology giants operating under Modi’s rule. His government has often criticized Google, Facebook and Twitter for not doing enough to tackle fake or “anti-India” content on their platforms, or for not complying with rules.

The former Twitter CEO’s comments drew widespread attention as it is unusual for global companies operating in India to publicly criticize the government. Last year, Xiaomi in a court filing said India’s financial crime agency threatened its executives with “physical violence” and coercion, an allegation which the agency denied.

Dorsey also mentioned similar pressure from governments in Turkey and Nigeria, which had restricted the platform in their nations at different points over the years before lifting those bans.

Twitter was bought by Elon Musk in a $44 billion deal last year.

Chandrasekhar said Twitter under Dorsey and his team had repeatedly violated Indian law. He didn’t name Musk, but added Twitter had been in compliance since June 2022.

Big tech vs Modi

Modi and his ministers are prolific users of Twitter, but free speech activists say his administration resorts to excessive censorship of content it thinks is critical of its working. India maintains its content removal orders are aimed at protecting users and sovereignty of the state.

The public spat with Twitter during 2021 saw Modi’s government seeking an “emergency blocking” of the “provocative” Twitter hashtag “#ModiPlanningFarmerGenocide” and dozens of accounts. Farmers’ groups had been protesting against new agriculture laws at the time, one of the biggest challenges faced by the Modi government.

The government later gave in to the farmers’ demands. Twitter initially complied with the government requests but later restored most of the accounts, citing “insufficient justification”, leading to officials threatening legal consequences.

In subsequent weeks, police visited a Twitter office as part of another probe linked to tagging of some ruling party posts as manipulated. Twitter at the time said it was worried about staff safety.

Dorsey in his interview said many India content take down requests during the farmer protests were “around particular journalists that were critical of the government.”

Since Modi took office in 2014, India has slid from 140th in World Press Freedom Index to 161 this year, out of 180 countries, its lowest ranking ever.
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