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Eleven countries meeting at the APEC summit in Da Nang agreed Saturday to seek a trans-pacific free trade agreement, despite the world’s largest market – the United States – pulling out of the deal.  Vietnam is expected to be one of the biggest beneficiaries of freer trade as it expands rapidly growing exports, including technology.  VOA’s Daniel Schearf visited Vietnam’s largest technology company, FPT, and has an exclusive interview with its chairman in Danang.
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U.S. intelligence agencies say that Russia meddled in the 2016 presidential election in part through online propaganda. But a new report shows the United States was not the only target. According to the 2017 “Freedom on the Net” report, disinformation campaigns are increasing as Internet freedom declines globally. VOA’s Jesusemen Oni has the findings of the report.
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Before advanced satellites and drones started collecting military intelligence, the U.S. relied on high-flying supersonic aircraft that could quickly penetrate the airspace of adversary countries, take pictures and exit before being caught. The last of those planes, retired in 1998, still holds several world records. But now, spy planes can only be found in museums. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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Last week, Somalilanders went to the polls in a historic presidential election. Officials employed advanced iris-scanning technology to identify voters and prevent duplicate ballots — the first use of such a biometric system in a national election.

For Somaliland, a breakaway region whose independence has not yet been recognized by the U.N., the scanners also made a powerful statement about its legitimacy as a nation-state.

Traditional ways to identify voters, including ID cards and indelible ink, aren’t perfect. Paper identification can be forged, and ink can be washed off. In Somaliland, concerns about duplicate voting in past elections have been well-documented, to the point that the legitimacy of the process has been questioned, according to Calestous Juma, a professor of international development at Harvard Kennedy School.

The move to iris-scanning technology is a way to thwart these concerns. It’s also a high-tech solution that vaults Somaliland ahead of more connected countries such as Nigeria and Kenya. In the latter, concerns about the transmission of electronic ballots figured prominently in the Supreme Court’s decision to annul the August election.

“When elections don’t go well, it basically generates the view that Africa is not ready for democracy,” Juma told VOA. Iris scanning helps Somaliland improve its democratic process by incorporating the best-available technology, Juma said.

Like fingerprints, everyone’s eyes are unique. But because our irises also have a highly complex pattern, they’re more reliable than other biometrics.

To establish someone’s identity, iris scanning involves capturing high-quality images of an individual’s eyes. To record the greatest detail possible, the scan uses special cameras capable of sensing both visible and infrared light. The images are then added to a database where they can be compared with any other saved images to find potential matches, indicating a duplicate.

Building public trust

Early on, Somaliland contacted researchers on the forefront of iris-scanning technology at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana to ensure the feasibility of the technology. Election officials engaged in a lengthy pilot study to test different system designs and solicit feedback from the public. This transparent process built trust, Juma said.

In a test ahead of the Somaliland election, Notre Dame researchers correctly found all 457 duplicates in a large sample of images. No false positives were identified in the process — any pair of images determined to be a duplicate did, in fact, belong to the same person.

These results show a high degree of accuracy, although a small collection of images required manual verification after the software’s analysis generated inconclusive results.

The effort is particularly inspiring given Somaliland’s poverty and struggle for international recognition, according to Juma. “To me, [it’s] a demonstration to the commitment that Somaliland has to having credible elections.”

Still, biometric identification such as iris scanning isn’t without critics, and concerns about privacy loom particularly large. For the system to work, images must be stored and, to create a national registry, transmitted. That means a data breach is possible. And emerging technologies suggest individuals’ eyes could soon be scanned without their consent. So-called long-range iris scanning makes it possible to capture a scan from dozens of feet away.

New leadership

Vote counting is under way to determine Somaliland’s fifth leader since the republic broke away from Somalia in 1991. The current president, Ahmed Mohamed Mohamoud, did not seek re-election, clearing the way for one of three candidates to assume his post.

Election observers from 27 countries found isolated issues at the over 1,600 polling stations, but no problems with the iris scanners have been reported.
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How do you obtain the freshest, locally grown produce in a big city? For an increasing number of urbanites, the answer is to grow it yourself.

Cam MacKugler can help. MacKugler was at the recent Food Loves Tech event in Brooklyn, New York showing off Seedsheets, roll-out fabric sheets embedded with seed-filled pods.

The sheets are placed atop soil in a home planter or an outdoor garden. When watered, the pods dissolve and plants sprout in 10 days (for pea shoots) to 70 days (for dragon carrots).

The seed groupings on any given Seedsheet provide ingredients for specific dishes like salads or tacos. Pricing starts at $15 for pre-made sheets and go up to $100 for custom outdoor sheets measuring 1.2 by 2.4 meters.

“Someone that’s never gardened before might say, ‘I want to know where my food comes from but I don’t know how to do it, but I like salads so I’m going to buy the salad kit,’ ” said MacKugler, Seedsheet’s CEO and founder.

Efforts like Seedsheet come as consumers increasingly want to know where their food comes from and are more interested in socially and environmentally responsible growing methods.

MacKugler told VOA that most of the company’s sales come from urban millennials.

Comparing Seedsheets to meal kit delivery companies like Blue Apron, MacKugler said Seedsheet took an experiential and educational approach to gardening, while making it user-friendly for customers.

“I view it as a way to not only help them grow food, but also help grow their skill sets of knowing how to curate their food, how to actually bring food from seed to supper. It’s a life skill,” said MacKugler, “It’s the same thing that you get from using Blue Apron and learning how to cook.”

Consumers aren’t giving up on the convenience and low cost of packaged foods, but new products and technologies are playing a bigger role in helping them understand where their food comes from.

“Consumer education is really progressing,” said Nicole Baum, senior marketing and partnerships manager at Gotham Greens, a New York-based provider of hydroponically grown produce.

Baum said consumers were less familiar with the term “hydroponics,” growing plants in water instead of soil, when Gotham Greens started in 2011. Perceptions have since changed, and she has seen an increase in competing companies.

“We’re definitely seeing a lot more people within the space from when we first started, which is awesome,” said Baum. “I think it’s really great that other people are coming into the space and looking for ways to use technology to have more productive, efficient growth.”

Gotham Greens provides rooftop-grown leafy greens and herbs to supermarkets and top-ranked restaurants like Gramercy Tavern, which uses seasonal vegetables but also depends on the reliability of produce from urban hydroponic farms.

“When we write our menus, we know that there are staples that we can continue using,” said Gramercy Tavern sous chef Kyle Goldstein.

Companies like Smallhold were also on hand at the Food Loves Tech event to promote their mushroom mini-farms — self-contained, vertical farm units that are intended for use in commercial kitchens.

Smallhold’s mini-farms are installed and serviced by the company at restaurants, with chefs harvesting mushrooms directly on-site. Hannah Shufro, operations lead at Smallhold, said the mini-farms minimize the environmental footprint that comes with transporting and packaging produce for delivery.

“A lot of chefs these days, I think, are more concerned with sustainability” and have always been concerned with freshness, she said.

Shufro noted that produce starts to lose its nutritional value from the moment it’s picked or harvested. “When you’re harvesting food right out of a system that’s growing on-site, it does not get fresher than that,” she said.
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A new independent study places Pakistan among the top four countries, including Brazil, Mexico and Syria, where people have been murdered in each of the last three years for writing about sensitive subjects online.

The annual “Freedom on the Net” report, released Tuesday by U.S.-based Freedom House, is based on an assessment of internet freedom in 65 countries, accounting for 87 percent of internet users worldwide. The latest study primarily focused on developments between June 2016 and May 2017.

The research declared Pakistan “not free” for a sixth consecutive year, noting internet freedom has deteriorated due to violence and intimidation related to social media activists.

“Internet shutdowns, a problematic cybercrime law, and cyberattacks against government critics contributed to the ongoing deterioration. Political speech online is vulnerable to restriction as Pakistan enters an election year in 2018,” the report noted.

The most frequent targets, it says, seem to be online journalists and bloggers covering politics, corruption and crime, as well as people who express religious views that may contrast with or challenge the views of the majority.

The study went on to conclude that perpetrators of the reprisal attacks remained unknown “but their actions often aligned with the interests of politically powerful individuals or entities.”

The report documented incidents of violence and intimidation during the research period. The government of Pakistan has not commented on the findings.

In June, a Pakistani court sentenced to death earlier this year an internet user, Taimoor Raza, for committing blasphemy on Facebook. In April, university student Mashal Khan was killed in the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province by a mob who accused him of posting blasphemous content online.

Khan’s murder sparked widespread outrage across Pakistan. An anti-terrorism court is hearing the lynching case against 57 suspects indicated by the court.

“Such attacks often succeed in silencing more than just the victim, encouraging wider self-censorship on sensitive issues like religion. The state’s failure to punish perpetrators of reprisal attacks for online speech perpetuates a cycle of impunity,” according to the report.

The Pakistani government enacted the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act in August 2016, introducing stronger censorship and surveillance powers with inadequate oversight, say critics.

Earlier this year, five bloggers known for criticizing the powerful military and religious militancy were abducted for few weeks. One of them later told media a government institution had detained and tortured him. Authorities had distanced themselves from the alleged abductions.

Tuesday’s report also criticized the government for the prolonged suspension of mobile internet services in parts of Pakistan, including the violence-plagued northwestern federally administered tribal areas, where security forces have been conducting anti-militancy operations.
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About 15 percent of U.S. federal agencies have reported some trace of Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab software on their systems, a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official told Congress on Tuesday.

Jeanette Manfra, assistant secretary for cybersecurity at DHS, told a U.S. House of Representatives panel that 94 percent of agencies had responded to a directive ordering them to survey their networks to identify any use of Kaspersky Lab products.

The Trump administration in September ordered civilian U.S. agencies to remove Kaspersky Lab from their networks, saying it was concerned the Moscow-based cybersecurity firm was vulnerable to Kremlin influence and that using its anti-virus software could jeopardize national security.

Kaspersky Lab has repeatedly denied the allegations.

Reporting by Dustin Volz; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama.
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Around the world, Internet freedom is deteriorating, with some governments taking down their mobile Internet service, restricting live video streaming and employing a digital army of pro-government commentators.

These are some of the findings of “Freedom on the Net 2017,” an annual report by Freedom House, a global non-profit that tracks democracy and freedom around the world.

According to the report, which covered June 2016 to May 2017, about half of the 65 countries assessed – which covers about 87 percent of all the people online globally – saw their Internet freedoms decline, with the Ukraine, Egypt and Turkey showing the most notable one-year erosion of freedoms. China remained the world’s worst abuser of Internet freedom, followed by Syria and Ethiopia, the report said.

Sanja Kelly, director of the Freedom on the Net project at Freedom House, said the decline of Internet freedoms has coincided with the rise of Internet access worldwide and people increasingly turning to the Internet to promote democratic reforms and greater human rights.

“One of the reasons why we are seeing greater restrictions is precisely because some of the leaders in authoritarian countries, in particular, have discovered the power of the Internet and are trying to come up with innovative methods to suppress that,” she said.

Until recently, some governments in Africa and other parts of the world didn’t pay much attention to the Internet, focusing instead on traditional media, such as broadcast. That focus shifts when Internet penetration reaches 20 to 30 percent of the population, she said.

“Suddenly the governments start taking note and we start seeing propaganda actions,” she said.

Countries such as Zambia and Gambia have shut down mobile access to the Internet, particularly around elections.

“Shutting down mobile Internet is such a blunt measure,” she said. “It really signals the government is willing to take it to the next level.”

Some other key findings of the report:

• Online manipulation tactics played a role in elections in 18 countries.

• Governments in 30 countries promoted distorted online information, up from 23 the previous year, employing tools such as paid commentators and false news sites.

• Half of all Internet shutdowns were focused on mobile connectivity, with most shutdowns happening in areas populated with ethnic or religious minorities. In October 2016, the Ethiopian, government shut down mobile networks for nearly two months as part of a state of emergency amid antigovernment protests. Belarus disrupted mobile connectivity to prevent livestreamed images from reaching mass audience. Bahrain has issued a specific law that news websites are prohibited from using live video on their websites.

• In 30 countries, there have been physical reprisals for online speech, up from 20 countries in the prior year.

Not long ago, some of these online suppression techniques were mostly employed by China and Russia. “The extent to which these techniques are being used and the number of countries where they are present is something in itself new,” said Kelly.

“It seems like these techniques are spreading and some of the authoritarian countries like China and Russia are actually exporting these techniques,” Kelly said. “And some of the authoritarian regimes around the world are learning from example.”
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A proposal by the U.S. Senate to change the way shares in startup companies are taxed incited panic and dread in Silicon Valley on Monday, with startup founders and investors warning of nothing less than the demise of their industry should the proposal become law.

The provision in the Senate’s tax reform plan, which appeared to catch the industry by surprise, involves the treatment of employee stock options. These options give the holder the right to purchase shares in the future at a set price and can be very valuable if a company does well and the share price increases.

Options are often a major portion of the compensation for startup employees and founders, who take lower salaries in anticipation of a big payout if their startup takes off. Options typically vest over a four-year period.

Senate Republicans have now proposed taxing those stock options as they vest and before startup employees have the opportunity to cash them in, resulting in annual tax bills that could easily climb into the tens of thousands of dollars, say startup founders and venture capitalists.

“If there were a single piece of legislation to adversely affect startups, it would be this,” said Venky Ganesan, managing director at venture capital firm Menlo Ventures. “Everyone is freaked out.”

Justin Field, vice president of government affairs at the National Venture Capital Association, said that the Senate’s proposed tax change would be “crippling” to the startup industry.

How far the provision gets remains to be seen. The National Venture Capital Association was successful in getting a similar proposal removed from the House tax bill, although it “didn’t fully appreciate” the Senate’s intention to add the tax provision, Field said.

The association also helped to steer lawmakers away from a proposal discussed late last year to tax venture capitalists’ profits on investments at a higher rate.

Republican Senator Rob Portman of Ohio, a member of the Senate Committee on Finance, has filed an amendment to repeal the provision in the tax bill, according to his spokesman.

A new proposal

Under current tax code, employees are taxed only when they exercise their options. Options are exercised when the price they were granted at–known as the strike price–is lower than the share price, and some shares can then be sold to pay the taxes.

But the Senate proposal would require startup employees to pay regular income tax on the value gain of their stock options even before they are exercised. These options are illiquid assets, and cannot be spent or saved.

“What this would mean is every month, when your equity compensation vests a little bit, you will owe taxes on it even though you can’t do anything with that equity compensation,” Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist with Union Square Ventures, wrote on his blog Monday.

For instance, if a startup employee receives stock options at a dollar per share, and the shares increase in value by $1 every year during the four-year vesting period, the employee would have to pay income tax on $1 per share after the first year, pay again on the $1 increase in value after the second year, and so on.

When that employee owns hundreds of thousands and even millions of shares, that is a hefty bill to pay. And there is always the risk the startup will eventually fail.

“This reform will force the average employee to pay taxes on that bet well before they even know if it’s a winning ticket,” said Amanda Kahlow, founder and executive chairman of marketing data startup 6sense.

For startup founders in particular, such a tax bill could be ruinous.

“It would mean that I would have to sell the company,” said Shoaib Makani, founder and chief executive of long-haul trucking startup KeepTruckin. “I have zero net worth aside from the common stock I hold in the company. It would be impossible. I would be in default.”

Some executives in the startup industry, however, have pushed for companies to move toward bigger salaries so employees are not so dependent on options to buy a house or pay for other large expenses. And when startups suffer valuation cuts, employees can end up with worthless options.

The Senate’s proposal came as a revenue-generating measure to help offset tax breaks in the bill. A spokesman for Senator Orrin Hatch, a Republican and chairman of the Senate Committee on Finance, did not respond to requests for comment and other Republicans on the committee were not immediately available.

A spokeswoman for Senator Ron Wyden, the committee’s ranking member and a Democrat, said he was aware of concerns that the provision would limit startups’ ability to attract talent.
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Alphabet’s Google in the last few months has begun removing from YouTube extremist videos that do not depict violence or preach hate, YouTube said Monday, a major policy shift as social media companies face increasing pressure from governments.

The new policy affects videos that feature people and groups that have been designated as terrorist by the U.S. or British governments but lack the gory violence or hateful speech that were already barred by YouTube.

A YouTube spokesperson, who asked not to be named for security reasons, confirmed the policy in response to questions. The company would not specify when the policy went into effect.

As YouTube terms already barred “terrorists” from using the service, the new policy keeps out videos uploaded by others that militants likely would try to distribute if they could have accounts, according to the spokesperson.

Hundreds of videos of slain al-Qaida recruiter Anwar al-Awlaki lecturing on the history of Islam, recorded long before he advocated violence against the United States, were among those removed under the new policy, the spokesperson said.

Governments and human rights groups have pressed YouTube for years to crack down on extremist videos. They argue that the propaganda radicalized viewers and contributed to deadly terror attacks.

British Home Secretary Amber Rudd amplified the pressure during visits with tech companies in Silicon Valley in July and a speech in Washington, D.C., last week. European Union and U.S. lawmakers this year have threatened consequences for tech companies if concerns are not addressed.

Legislation could resemble a German law approved in June to fine social media companies 50 million euros ($57 million) if hateful postings are not promptly removed.

Looking for balance

YouTube said discussions with outside experts prompted the new policy, but it was unclear why the company decided to act only recently. In June, the company announced that “inflammatory religious or supremacist content” that did not violate its policies would be allowed with warning labels and a restriction making them ineligible for ad revenue.

At the time, Google General Counsel Kent Walker said in a blog post, “We think this strikes the right balance between free expression and access to information without promoting extremely offensive viewpoints.”

The latest step goes farther and was praised by critics such as Paul Barrett, deputy director of the New York University Stern Center for Business and Human Rights.

“If the terrorist is in the business of recruiting and inciting people to make violent attacks, you’ve got to the draw the line” against any of their content, Barrett said.

Blurry lines

The new policy does not affect news clips or educational videos about terrorism. But YouTube will not always have an easy time distinguishing, experts said, pointing to tactics such as overlaying extremist commentary on news footage to get around censors.

YouTube has resisted imposing more editorial control because it fears making it harder for important videos to get a wide audience, Juniper Downs, YouTube’s global director of public policy, told a San Francisco conference sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League on Monday.

“We will lose something very valuable if we completely transform the way these platforms work,” she said during a panel discussion.

Internet freedom advocates such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation have urged tech companies to be cautious and transparent in responding to government pressure.

YouTube is relying on government lists of terrorists and terrorist groups for enforcement. Content moderators check the listings and make removal decisions after fielding reports from an automated system, users or partner organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League and The Institute for Strategic Dialogue.

Al-Awlaki, whom the U.S. killed in a 2011 drone strike, was designated a terrorist by the U.S. Treasury the year prior.

The New York Times first reported the removal of al-Awlaki videos.
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Ash Bhat and Rohan Phadte, computer science students, recently stared at a screen in their Berkeley apartment showing the Twitter account of someone called “Red Pilled Leah.” They suspected she was a “bot,” short for robot.

Red Pilled Leah joined Twitter in 2011 and had 165,000 followers. The majority of her 250,000 tweets were retweets on political topics. Was she a human with strong opinions or an automated account that is part of a digital army focused on riling up Americans over divisive social and political issues?

Internet companies are under pressure to do more to crack down on such automated accounts, following scrutiny over Russian-backed efforts to influence the last U.S. presidential election. But companies are struggling over how to identify the malicious bots from the merely opinionated human users.

The two students at the University of California, Berkeley developed a software program called botcheck.me that looks for 100 characteristics in Twitter accounts that they say are common among bots.

Among them, tweeting every few minutes, gaining a lot of followers in a short time span and retweeting other accounts that are likely bots. In addition, bot accounts typically endorse polarizing political positions and propagate fake news, they say.

Concern about Twitter bots

Twitter says that less than five percent of its 69 million monthly active users in the U.S. are automated, but some researchers have pegged the bots at closer to 15 percent.

U.S. lawmakers say that bots on Twitter played a role in trying to upend the democratic process.

“Bots generated one out of every five political messages posted on Twitter over the entire presidential campaign,” said Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia.

Facebook requires its users to prove their identity. To get an account on Twitter, on the other hand, a user needs a phone number. And Twitter allows automated accounts for legitimate purposes, such as for companies to provide customer service or for public safety officials to spread the word regarding a possible danger.

But the company is also trying to crack down on bots and “other networks of manipulation,” the company said in a blog post.

Nonhuman Twitter behavior

Bhat and Phadte have worked on other projects, such as developing technology to determine the political bias of a news article or to detect fake news on Facebook.

They turned to Twitter after they noticed that many accounts tweeting about politics appeared to be “nonhuman,” Bhat said. These accounts gained a lot of followers fast and tweeted and retweeted frequently, about five times as much as a human account. They promoted polarizing views and fake news.

Launched in October, Botcheck.me has a 93.5 percent accuracy rate, the students say. However, they have heard from real people complaining that their accounts have been falsely identified as “bots.” When the algorithm makes a mistake, the two students say they investigate what went wrong and improve the program.

Phadte says it matters if a Twitter account is a human being or a robot.

“People are seeing political, polarizing opinions that aren’t accurate,” Phadte said. “People are getting angry at each other about stereotypes that are not really true.”

Bot-like characteristics

Bhat pressed a blue button next to Red Pilled Leah’s Twitter account. Botcheck.me scanned a person’s Twitter history and ran the tweets through an algorithm to predict if the account was actually a bot.

Sure enough, Botcheck.me said Red Pilled Leah, who claims to be an entrepreneur with a master’s degree in psychology, exhibits “bot-like characteristics.”

The students said they have contacted Twitter about their software, but haven’t heard back. Twitter didn’t respond to a request for comment from Voice of America. However, the company has said that it can’t share details of how it’s determining which accounts are bots.

From their vantage point, the students say the bots are getting more sophisticated. A whole network of accounts will retweet a single tweet to spread a message quickly. And programmers can change bots’ behavior as detection methods improve. But the students say that only makes it more important to determine when messages are being spread by malicious actors.

“The reason why this really matters is that we formulate our views based on the information we have available to us,” Bhat said of the social media content. “When certain views are propagated on the network that is very artificial, it tends to influence the way we think and act. We think it is very horrific.”

To use botcheck.me, users can download a Google Chrome extension, which puts the blue button next to every Twitter account. Or users can run a Twitter account through the website botcheck.me.
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Flying drones are nothing new in the skies, but online retailers have been investing in them as a way to deliver goods faster and to those in hard-to-reach rural areas. But the automation doesn’t stop there. Arash Arabasadi reports.
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Prepare to be amazed … and possibly terrified. Engineers in Zurich have created a four-legged robot that may one day do labor that is dangerous for humans. It’s also equipped with thermal cameras, which means the “ANYmal” may one day keep an eye on you. Arash Arabasadi reports.
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In Cambodia, one of Asia’s poorest countries, the rapid improvement in internet connectivity and availability of affordable smartphones has been a great leveler.

Many of its roughly 15 million urban and rural inhabitants have gained, in a short time, access to mobile internet and social media, which provide relatively free communication and independent, nongovernment sources of information.

Some tech-savvy Cambodian activists, like Ngeth Moses, began to harness the internet to foster social change years ago.

Ngeth Moses, head of the Media/ICT Unit with the Center for Alliance of Labor and Human Rights in Phnom Penh, has campaigned online through social media platforms for political freedom and human rights causes.

Ngeth Moses has also trained dozens of members of NGOs and youth organizations on how to use online campaigning and online expression platforms, such as Open Cyber Talk.

In the past year or so, however, the optimism among activists about the positive impact of greater internet access has given way to growing fears as the Cambodian government stepped up efforts to curtail online freedom of expression and political opposition.

“I’m more cautious now before posting or commenting [on] anything political online,” Ngeth Moses said, because of the growing state scrutiny of online content and the increase in reprimands or arrests of netizens.

At the same time, however, Prime Minister Hun Sen and the ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) have actively raised their online profile ahead of the national elections next year in an attempt to reach millions of new social media users.

Tightening online control

In early 2016, a new law increased the government’s authority over the telecommunications industry to include “overbroad surveillance powers” that pose “a threat to the privacy of individual users,” according to the U.S. think tank Freedom House.

The law includes punishments for several offensives, among them a prison term of seven to 15 years for threatening “national security,” a charge that the local human rights group Licadho said is vague and open to political abuse.

A pending cybercrime law is also raising concerns about legal limits on what users are allowed to post on the internet.

In 2016, the court used an older law to punish online dissent when it sentenced university student Kong Raiya to 18 months in prison for incitement over a Facebook post that criticized the CPP.

The opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) has been increasingly targeted over online statements.

Senator Hong Sok Hour was sentenced to seven years in prison for allegedly posting false documents on Facebook in 2016. On October 25, King Norodom Sihamoni pardoned him at Hun Sen’s request.

Last month, a 20-year-old fruit vendor was arrested in western Cambodia and reportedly charged with incitement and public insult for Facebook posts said to defame Hun Sen and the Queen Mother Norodom Monineath Sihanouk.

“The situation of internet freedom in Cambodia is of increasing concern,” said Ramana Sorn, who coordinates the Protecting Fundamental Freedoms Project of the Cambodian Center for Human Rights, adding that the government’s technological ability to collect the communications and social media data from individual users has expanded exponentially.

“In the current political climate, social media users must be keenly aware of the risks related to what they are posting and sharing on Facebook and other web platforms,” Ramana Sorn said.

Nop Vy, media director of the Cambodian Center for Independent Media, echoed these concerns, saying, “Human rights and social workers who are using the social media platforms feel insecure in communicating and publishing their information.”

​Government plays down concerns

Government spokesmen told VOA Khmer that the activists’ criticism was overblown and that prosecutions over online content concerned only those who defamed others or posed genuine threats.

“We need those multiple opinions, but we do not want those insulting or organizing any subversive campaigns against other people’s reputations — they will face legal consequences,” said Phay Siphan, spokesman for the Council of Ministers.

“Only those having a hidden agenda are concerned about it,” CPP spokesman Sok Eysan said. “Those who have nothing to hide, they need not worry about being surveilled or monitored.”

The rising online repression comes, however, amid a nationwide crackdown on political opposition and independent media ahead of the July 2018 national elections.

On September 3, CNRP Chairman Kem Sokha was arrested and charged with treason.

Hun Sen announced the CNRP would be dissolved, and many party members, including deputy party leader Mu Sochua, have fled Cambodia since the first week of October, fearing arrest.

Also in September:

The 24-year-old independent English-language newspaper The Cambodia Daily closed after receiving a $6 million tax bill;
The Phnom Penh office of U.S.-funded Radio Free Asia Khmer-language news broadcaster was closed;
Local FM radio stations were ordered to stop carrying the Khmer news broadcasts by RFA and the Voice of America; some independent FM stations were shut down;
And the U.S.-funded National Democratic Institute was expelled after years of operation. 

This crackdown, seen as the worst in 20 years, prompted widespread international condemnation and threats of action from the European Union and the United States, but Cambodia, which relies on China’s political support and largesse, appears unmoved.

​Greater access to information

Despite the broad crackdown, millions of Cambodians are now on Facebook and connected through digital communications apps, sometimes encrypted.

Experts said any repressive government will find it hard to check the spread of independent information that can inform the public of politically sensitive issues.

In 2015, internet/Facebook became the main information channel for Cambodians, with 30 percent of netizens using it to access information, surpassing the more state-controlled TV (29 percent) and radio (15 percent), according to an Asia Foundation report.

The improved access to online information “often wakes people up and makes [them] more likely to be critical of the government,” said Mike Godwin, an internet freedom expert and a senior fellow with the U.S.-based R Street Institute.

“In fact, efforts to suppress [online] dissent probably will not work as well as they had hoped because they may have the effect of awaking citizens to their unhappiness,” he said.

When popular political analyst Kem Ley was assassinated last year, his funeral march in the capital, Phnom Penh, drew hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom reportedly learned of the event through online messages and posts that quickly went viral.

Cambodia’s capacity and effort to control online content, however, are still less than those of its mainland Southeast Asian neighbors, according to Freedom House, which ranked the country on its 2016 Freedom on the Internet Index as “partly free.”

​Strongman seeks ‘likes’

Amid the tightening government control on online dissent, Hun Sen and his CPP have sought to expand their social media use to reach out to the public ahead of the national elections next year. In 2013 elections, the CPP narrowly beat the CNRP in a disputed result.

The 65-year-old strongman has urged officials to use Facebook, and he has presented a warm, revitalized image on his Facebook page, which he began in 2015 and has 8.5 million followers. Some photos show him driving passenger cars, attending family outings and frequently exercising.

Some researchers have said that the Cambodian government has formed a nationwide program with “cyberunits” run at local levels, which spread countless pro-CPP messages, denounce the opposition and attack government criticism on social media.

Ngeth Moses, the tech-using activist, said the CPP’s recent embrace of social media only belied the worsening freedom of expression in Cambodia, as could be seen in the controls exercised over pro-CPP Facebook pages. 

“Commenters on the prime minister’s [Facebook] page have been followed and if these comments contained inappropriate words, there were people who got the commenters to apologize,” he said. “On the surface, the internet freedom in Cambodia looks better than in some other countries in ASEAN [the Association of Southeast Asian Nations], but in practice it is not.”
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The World Robot Olympiad, being held in Costa Rica this weekend, shows human athletes still have little to worry about: Sweat and glory do not compute well when relegated to faceless automatons.

But the same may not be true for workers, especially those in menial or transport activities where robots are steadily taking over. Think factory assemblers and sorters, or even self-driving cars.

Some of the technology behind the robot revolution could be seen in the Olympiad, which gathered more than 2,500 people from more than 60 countries in a vast hall on the outskirts of Costa Rica’s capital, San Jose — the first time the event, now in its 14th year, has been held in the Americas.

Pint-sized robots packed with sensors and rolling on plastic wheels showed their football skills by battling rivals on miniature soccer fields.

Others rolled across tables seeking out blocks of certain colors and sizes to grab and place within demarcated zones.

It was all more than child’s play for the contestants representing their countries, aged from 6 to adult.

“It’s so difficult,” said Hassan Abdelrahem Alqadi, 17, from the United Arab Emirates.

“We have to do it in the system and make the robot take the color and go to the pieces that we want. So it’s very difficult,” he said.

The teen, who hopes to be a mechanical engineer in the oil industry, admitted he had picked up tips from watching other competitors’ practice sessions. He and other tech-savvy youngsters crowded around dozens of tables — computers or robots in their hands — to observe.

Environmental theme

At one table, a group of Australian teens fine-tuned their contraptions trying to win possession of a palm-sized transparent “soccer” ball containing a sensor. The robots were able to detect the ball, grab it while fending off rivals, and protect the goal area.

Being at the Olympiad, surrounded by equally bright peers from around the world, was eye-opening for the teens.

“We’ve never been to an international competition before, so it’s a new experience. I can really only compare it to the competitions we’ve had in Australia — in Australia, we’ve done pretty well,” said Tiernan Martin, 13.

The competition over the weekend was being judged in several age categories, as well as in the football, university and open tournaments.

This year, the environment was the overriding theme — an area in which Costa Rica is at the forefront.

Thus, robots had to show their usefulness in sustainable tourism (identifying protected areas), carbon neutrality (planting trees) and clean energy (seeking out the best places to set up wind turbines.

Robots ‘help humanity’

Costa Rica’s science and technology minister, Carolina Vasquez Soto, told AFP her country won the right to host the Olympiad — hitherto held mostly in Asia — “for the participation we’ve had in sustainability, because we are contributing to that with more and bigger resources.”

On the larger question of what robots and artificial intelligence now represent for human workers, the national organizer for the World Robot Olympiad, Alejandra Sanchez, was upbeat.

While some see robots as a threat to jobs, she said she saw them as an opportunity.

“I think it’s really good. It’s good they replace human beings in some tasks. But we are not being discarded — we’re changing the functions for human beings,” she said.

“Before, a human being was the one painting cars, for example. Now we have a robot painting vehicles and a human being controlling the robot. … So, it’s a personal opinion, but I believe robots are here to stay, and here to help humanity.”
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Some foreign students in U.S. schools find it challenging to submit grammatically correct, idiomatically accurate papers. So two former Ukrainian graduate students launched an artificial intelligence-driven grammar-proofing program that goes well beyond spell-check. Today, their 8-year-old startup, Grammarly, whose first venture round netted $110 million in May, has offices in Ukraine and the U.S. VOA Ukrainian Service correspondent Tatiana Vorozhko has the story.
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Aerial surveillance can be an indispensable part of police or security work. But small police forces certainly can’t afford planes or helicopters to help them do their jobs. So increasingly, drones are filling the gap and providing eyes in the sky. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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The United Nations is set to host talks on the use of autonomous weapons, but those hoping for a ban on the machines dubbed “killer robots” will be disappointed, the ambassador leading the discussions said Friday.

More than 100 artificial intelligence entrepreneurs led by Tesla’s Elon Musk in August urged the U.N. to enforce a global ban on fully automated weapons, echoing calls from activists who have warned the machines will put civilians at enormous risk.

A U.N. disarmament grouping known as the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) will on Monday begin five days of talks on the issue in Geneva.

But anything resembling a ban, or even a treaty, remains far off, said the Indian ambassador on disarmament, Amandeep Gill, who is chairing the meeting.

“It would be very easy to just legislate a ban but I think … rushing ahead in a very complex subject is not wise,” he told reporters. “We are just at the starting line.”

He said the discussion, which will also include civil society and technology companies, will be partly focused on understanding the types of weapons in the pipeline.

Proponents of a ban, including the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots pressure group, insist that human beings must ultimately be responsible for the final decision to kill or destroy.

They argue that any weapons system that delegates the decision on an individual strike to an algorithm is by definition illegal, because computers cannot be held accountable under international humanitarian law.

Gill said there was agreement that “human beings have to remain responsible for decisions that involve life and death.”

But, he added, there are varying opinions on the mechanics through which “human control” must govern deadly weapons.

Machines ‘can’t apply the law’

The International Committee of the Red Cross, which is mandated to safeguard the laws of conflict, has not called for a ban, but has underscored the need to place limits on autonomous weapons.

“Our bottom line is that machines can’t apply the law and you can’t transfer responsibility for legal decisions to machines,” Neil Davison of the ICRC’s arms unit told AFP.

He highlighted the problematic nature of weapons that involve major variables in terms of the timing or location of an attack — for example, something that is deployed for multiple hours and programmed to strike whenever it detects an enemy target.

“Where you have a degree of unpredictability or uncertainty in what’s going to happen when you activate this weapons system, then you are going to start to have problems for legal compliance,” he said.

Flawed meeting?

Next week’s U.N. meeting will also feature wide-ranging talks on artificial intelligence, triggering criticism that the CCW was drowning itself in discussions about new technologies instead of zeroing in on the urgent issue.

“There is a risk in going too broad at this moment,” said Mary Wareham of Human Rights Watch, who is the coordinator of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots.

“The need is to focus on lethal autonomous weapons,” she told AFP.

The open letter co-signed by Musk as well as Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of Google’s DeepMind, warned that killer robots could become “weapons that despots and terrorists use against innocent populations, and weapons hacked to behave in undesirable ways.”

“Once this Pandora’s box is opened, it will be hard to close,” they said.
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The results of three recent separate studies are staggering, the oceans are filled with about 5 trillion bits and bobs of plastic debris. Now, one English sailing team is doing its part, skimming plastic off the ocean’s surface, bucket by bucket. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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