Silicon

Robot teammates and “snake” arms that can find a crack .005 millimeter long were just two of the U.S. military’s latest technological innovations on display at the Pentagon this week.

The Defense Laboratory Enterprise showcased more than 80 exhibits on its biennial Lab Day on Thursday. The enterprise is a network of 63 defense laboratories, warfare centers and engineering centers that operate across the United States, and the event provided the Defense Department community with an up-close look at projects in various stages of development and readiness.

Here are some of VOA’s favorites:

Soldier Visual Integrated Technology

Imagine a soldier comes across a suspicious object that she has never seen before. As she stops to explore, she immediately sees an enemy fighter and has to spring into action without time to fully raise her weapon’s sight up to her eye. And she’s unable to see another enemy lurking around the corner.

With Soldier Visual Integrated Technology, the soldier can better see her surroundings and needs less time to react to dangers accurately.

Ronald Geer, a staff sergeant assigned to the Army’s Communications-Electronics Research, Development and Engineering Center, says SVIT wirelessly links three pieces of technology on the soldier: a reticle eyepiece, a thermal device on the gun and a communications system attached to the chest.

“What this is going to do is increase my speed and lethality on the battlefield, especially in a close combat situation,” Geer said. “I don’t have to worry so much about raising my weapon to an exact point where I’m able to view through this [his thermal device], because as I raise the weapon, what this is looking at, I’m able to immediately see pulled into the reticle device.”

The connectivity also allows soldiers to use their guns to see what’s around a corner without having to move their bodies into harm’s way.

SVIT updates in real time as well, providing a way to virtually “mark” obstacles or enemy weaponry so that other soldiers can see what the SVIT user views.

Remote Access Nondestructive Evaluation

Jokingly called a “snake on a plane” by some at the Air Force Research Laboratory, R.A.N.D.E. (pronounced Randy) is a robotic arm that can wriggle through an opening as small as 7 centimeters to inspect the interior of aircraft wings or other structures without dismantling them.

Senior Materials Engineer Charles Buynak told VOA that any sensing device can be attached to R.A.N.D.E. to look for minute structural defects.

“We’re looking for things on the order of 1/50,000th of an inch [.00508mm] — before a crack becomes a major thing … and becomes a serious problem to the aircraft,” Buynak said.

The system is driven by a controller from an Xbox 360 home video game console. Buynak said that makes R.A.N.D.E. easy for young operators to use. Another reason is that the Air Force wanted to take advantage of technologies already available.

“Why go spend money developing something that’s easily available that we can adapt to our application here?” he said.

Robots as teammates

The U.S. Army is developing ways to use robots not as tools but as teammates. The Army Research Laboratory displayed several robots this week that can be used as hosts for developing software algorithms for artificial intelligence and machine learning purposes.

Stuart Young, chief of the Asset Control and Behavior Branch, told VOA the goal is to protect soldiers by using technology to “manipulate unknown objects in an unknown world.”

His team is trying to develop AI algorithms that can generalize and understand what’s going on in a robot’s environment. “And then once we have that information,” Young said, “we can manipulate it to accomplish the mission that the robot needs to accomplish.”

Such robot missions could range from breaching an enemy’s defensive position to removing improvised explosive devices, or just moving large objects out of the way while soldiers are in a safer location.
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One day instead of visiting a doctor in person for health information or searching online, you could be asking for advice from a medical expert’s avatar. A new app is being developed that can be used on a smartphone to ask a virtual doctor about various medical conditions and their treatments. VOA’s Deborah Block has more on this innovative technology.
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A couple of things about the WannaCry cyberattack are certain. It was the biggest in history and it’s a scary preview of things to come. But one thing is a lot less clear: whether North Korea had anything to do with it.

 

Despite bits and pieces of evidence that suggest a possible North Korea link, experts warn there is nothing conclusive yet, and a lot of reasons to be dubious.

 

Within days of the attack, respected cybersecurity firms Symantec and Kaspersky Labs hinted at a North Korea link. Google researcher Neel Mehta identified coding similarities between WannaCry and malware from 2015 that was tied to the North. And the media have since spun out stories on Pyongyang’s league of hackers, its past involvement in cyberattacks and its perennial search for new revenue streams, legal or shady.

Meet Lazarus

 

But identifying hackers behind sophisticated attacks is a notoriously difficult task. Proving they are acting under the explicit orders of a nation state is even trickier.

 

When experts say North Korea is behind an attack, what they often mean is that Pyongyang is suspected of working with or through a group known as Lazarus. The exact nature of Lazarus is cloudy, but it is thought by some to be a mixture of North Korean hackers operating in cahoots with Chinese “cyber-mercenaries” willing to at times do Pyongyang’s bidding. 

 

Lazarus is a serious player in the cybercrime world.

 

It is referred to as an “advanced persistent threat” and has been fingered in some very sophisticated operations, including an attempt to breach the security of dozens of banks this year, an attack on the Bangladesh central bank that netted $81 million last year, the 2014 Sony wiper hack and DarkSeoul, which targeted the South Korean government and businesses.

 

“The Lazarus Group’s activity spans multiple years, going back as far as 2009,” Kaspersky Labs said in a report last year. “Their focus, victimology, and guerrilla-style tactics indicate a dynamic, agile and highly malicious entity, open to data destruction in addition to conventional cyberespionage operations.”

WannaCry doesn’t fit

 

But some experts see the latest attack as an anomaly.

 

WannaCry infected more than 200,000 systems in more than 150 countries with demands for payments of $300 in Bitcoin per victim in exchange for the decryption of the files it had taken hostage. Victims received warnings on their computer screens that if they did not pay the ransom within three days, the demand would double. If no ransom was paid, the victim’s data would be deleted. 

 

As ransomware attacks go, that’s a pretty typical setup.

 

But that’s not — or at least hasn’t been — the way North Korean hackers are believed to work. 

 

“This is not part of the previously observed behavior of DPRK cyberwar units and hacking groups,” Michael Madden, a visiting scholar at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and founder of North Korea Leadership Watch, said in an email to The Associated Press. “It would represent an entirely new type of cyberattack by the DPRK.” 

 

Madden said the North, officially known as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, if it had a role at all, could have instead been involved by giving or providing parts of the packet used in the attack to another state-sponsored hacking group with whom it is in contact. 

 

“This type of ransomware/jailbreak attack is not at all part of the M.O. of the DPRK’s cyberwar units,” he said. “It requires a certain level of social interaction and file storage, outside of those with other hacking groups, that DPRK hackers and cyberwar units would not engage. Basically they’d have to wait on Bitcoin transactions, store the hacked files and maintain contact with the targets of the attack.”

Attack not strategic

 

Other cybersecurity experts question the Pyongyang angle on different grounds. 

 

James Scott, a senior fellow at the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology, a cybersecurity think tank, argues that the evidence remains “circumstantial at best,” and believes WannaCry spread because of luck and negligence, not sophistication.

 

“While it is possible that the Lazarus group is behind the WannaCry malware, the likelihood of that attribution proving correct is dubious,” he wrote in a recent blog post laying out his case. “It remains more probable that the authors of WannaCry borrowed code from Lazarus or a similar source.”

 

Scott said he believes North Korea would likely have attacked more strategic targets — two of the hardest-hit countries, China and Russia, are the North’s closest strategic allies — or tried to capture more significant profits. 

 

Very few victims of the WannaCry attack appear to have paid up. As of Friday, only $91,000 had been deposited in the three Bitcoin accounts associated with the ransom demands, according to London-based Elliptic Enterprises, which tracks illicit Bitcoin activity.
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Robots can see well enough to drive a car. Computers can hear our voices and respond to commands. VOA’s Arturo Martinez and Steve Baragona report that engineers are breaking through the next sensation frontier for robots: touch. Steve Baragona narrates.
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Virgin Galactic’s Beth Moses, who received the Adler Planetarium’s “Women in Space Science Award” this year, views the opportunity for widely available space flight as a unifying endeavor for humanity. As Kane Farabaugh reports from Chicago, Moses is telling students about space flight as a way to motivate them to pursue careers like hers.
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Two-thirds of those caught up in the past week’s global ransomware attack were running Microsoft’s Windows 7 operating system without the latest security updates, a survey for Reuters by security ratings firm BitSight found.

Researchers are struggling to try to find early traces of WannaCry, which remains an active threat in hardest-hit China and Russia, believing that identifying “patient zero” could help catch its criminal authors.

They are having more luck dissecting flaws that limited its spread.

Security experts warn that while computers at more than 300,000 internet addresses were hit by the ransomware strain, further attacks that fix weaknesses in WannaCry will follow that hit larger numbers of users, with more devastating consequences.

“Some organizations just aren’t aware of the risks; some don’t want to risk interrupting important business processes; sometimes they are short-staffed,” said Ziv Mador, vice president of security research at Israel’s SpiderLabs Trustwave.

“There are plenty of reasons people wait to patch and none of them are good,” said Mador, a former long-time security researcher for Microsoft.

WannaCry’s worm-like capacity to infect other computers on the same network with no human intervention appear tailored to Windows 7, said Paul Pratley, head of investigations & incident response at UK consulting firm MWR InfoSecurity.

Data from BitSight covering 160,000 internet-connected computers hit by WannaCry, shows that Windows 7 accounts for 67 percent of infections, although it represents less than half of the global distribution of Windows PC users.

Computers running older versions, such as Windows XP used in Britain’s NHS health system, while individually vulnerable to attack, appear incapable of spreading infections and played a far smaller role in the global attack than initially reported.

In laboratory testing, researchers at MWR and Kyptos say they have found Windows XP crashes before the virus can spread.

Windows 10, the latest version of Microsoft’s flagship operating system franchise, accounts for another 15 percent, while older versions of Windows including 8.1, 8, XP and Vista, account for the remainder, BitSight estimated.

Computer basics

Any organization which heeded strongly worded warnings from Microsoft to urgently install a security patch it labeled “critical” when it was released on March 14 on all computers on their networks are immune, experts agree.

Those hit by WannaCry also failed to heed warnings last year from Microsoft to disable a file sharing feature in Windows known as SMB, which a covert hacker group calling itself Shadow Brokers had claimed was used by NSA intelligence operatives to sneak into Windows PCs.

“Clearly people who run supported versions of Windows and patched quickly were not affected”, Trustwave’s Mador said.

Microsoft has faced criticism since 2014 for withdrawing support for older versions of Windows software such as 16-year-old Windows XP and requiring users to pay hefty annual fees instead. The British government canceled a nationwide NHS support contract with Microsoft after a year, leaving upgrades to local trusts.

Seeking to head off further criticism in the wake of the WannaCry outbreak, the U.S. software giant last weekend released a free patch for Windows XP and other older Windows versions that it previously only offered to paying customers.

Microsoft declined to comment for this story.

On Sunday, the U.S. software giant called on intelligence services to strike a better balance between their desire to keep software flaws secret – in order to conduct espionage and cyber warfare – and sharing those flaws with technology companies to better secure the internet.

Half of all internet addresses corrupted globally by WannaCry are located in China and Russia, with 30 and 20 percent respectively. Infection levels spiked again in both countries this week and remained high through Thursday, according to data supplied to Reuters by threat intelligence firm Kryptos Logic.

By contrast, the United States accounts for 7 percent of WannaCry infections while Britain, France and Germany each represent just 2 percent of worldwide attacks, Kryptos said.

Dumb and sophisticated

The ransomware mixes copycat software loaded with amateur coding mistakes and recently leaked spy tools widely believed to have been stolen from the U.S. National Security Agency, creating a vastly potent class of crimeware.

“What really makes the magnitude of this attack so much greater than any other is that the intent has changed from information stealing to business disruption”, said Samil Neino, 32, chief executive of Los Angeles-based Kryptos Logic.

Last Friday, the company’s British-based 22-year-old data breach research chief, Marcus Hutchins, created a “kill-switch”, which security experts have widely hailed as the decisive step in halting the ransomware’s rapid spread around the globe.

WannaCry appears to target mainly enterprises rather than consumers: Once it infects one machine, it silently proliferates across internal networks which can connect hundreds or thousands of machines in large firms, unlike individual consumers at home.

An unknown number of computers sit behind the 300,000 infected internet connections identified by Kryptos.

Because of the way WannaCry spreads sneakily inside organization networks, a far larger total of ransomed computers sitting behind company firewalls may be hit, possibly numbering upward of a million machines. The company is crunching data to arrive at a firmer estimate it aims to release later Thursday.

Liran Eshel, chief executive of cloud storage provider CTERA Networks, said: “The attack shows how sophisticated ransomware has become, forcing even unaffected organizations to rethink strategies.”

Security Experts Find Clues to Ransomware Worm’s Lingering Risks

Researchers from a variety of security firms say they have so far failed to find a way to decrypt files locked up by WannaCry and say chances are low anyone will succeed.

However, a bug in WannaCry code means the attackers cannot use unique bitcoin addresses to track payments, security researchers at Symantec found this week. The result: “Users unlikely to get files restored”, the company’s Security Response team tweeted.

The rapid recovery by many organizations with unpatched computers caught out by the attack may largely be attributed to back-up and retrieval procedures they had in place, enabling technicians to re-image infected machines, experts said.

While encrypting individual computers it infects, WannaCry code does not attack network data-backup systems, as more sophisticated ransomware packages typically do, security experts who have studied WannaCry code agree.

These factors help explain the mystery of why such a tiny number of victims appear to have paid ransoms into the three bitcoin accounts to which WannaCry directs victims.

Less than 300 payments worth around $83,000 had been paid into WannaCry blackmail accounts by Thursday (1800 GMT), six days after the attack began and one day before the ransomware threatens to start locking up victim computers forever.

The Verizon 2017 Data Breach Investigations Report, the most comprehensive annual survey of security breakdowns, found that it takes three months before at least half of organizations install major new software security patches.

WannaCry landed nine weeks after Microsoft’s patch arrived.

“The same things are causing the same problems. That’s what the data shows,” MWR research head Pratley said.

“We haven’t seen many organizations fall over and that’s because they did some of the security basics,” he said.

 
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The European Union’s competition watchdog has fined Facebook 110 million euros ($122 million) for providing misleading information over its buyout of mobile messaging service WhatsApp.

The European Commission said Thursday that when Facebook informed the Commission of the 2014 buyout, it said it would be unable to “establish reliable automated matching” between Facebook and WhatsApp user accounts.

But the Commission says that in 2016, WhatsApp offered updates including the possibility of linking user phone numbers with Facebook user IDs.

Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager said the fine is proportionate and serves as a deterrent.

She said “the Commission must be able to take decisions about mergers’ effects on competition in full knowledge of accurate facts.”
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When Hurricane Sandy swept over Long Island, New York, in October 2012, power was knocked out and traffic lights were inoperable. While driving in her car, Stony Brook University student Vishwaja Muppa, 21, was struck by a police car and later died. The death of Muppa, from India, was one of 53 that were blamed on the storm.

On Stony Brook’s campus, damage was limited and students who sheltered remained safe. But university officials took the hurricane’s visit as a wake-up call and planned a state-of-the-art Emergency Operations Center (EOC).

Stony Brook hired two security technology firms, VCORE Solutions and IntraLogic Solutions, to install equipment and software  that would bring separate monitoring and communications systems under one roof.

“All the things we have in different silos, managed by different systems, are imported into one virtual environment,” Larry Zacarese, director of emergency management at Stony Brook, told VOA.

From the command center during Hurricane Sandy, Zacarese had little contact with other parts of the campus or local emergency responders off campus, he said. The new system shows images from cameras throughout campus and projects them on several monitors mounted across a 6½-meter-long wall.

Eyes everywhere

The system is regarded as a model and has been studied by other universities. Among the devices linked electronically are entry codes on hundreds of doors across campus, Global Positioning System units, fire alarms, video cameras and large, flat-screen television sets. The information from cameras and sensors is projected onto a large computer screen that shows the entire campus from above, including each building.

“We have a three-dimensional world overlaid on top of satellite imagery of our campus,” Zacarese said.

Software allows operators in the command center to expand each image and go into a building, checking its characteristics and the status of its sensors and alarms on each floor.

The system also allows the Emergency Operations Center to communicate in 15 ways with students across campus, utilizing social media, text messages, public address speakers and the 175 flat-screen television panels across campus. Operators can use the screens to warn students and faculty of a problem. They can use screens at all locations, or only at one site.

“If there is a fire in a chemistry lab,” Zacarese said, “we could communicate specifically to people in the chemistry building, as well as those in the immediate vicinity outside.”

Violence on campus

Zacarese said Stony Brook’s security system is vital in responding to violence and protecting those on campus. Last year, threatening messages of a “terroristic nature” appeared at a campus bus stop, he said. Using the information from cameras and other devices, police were able to identify the perpetrator and arrest him.

“In less than three hours,” Zacarese said, “we had someone in custody.”

There are more than 25,000 students enrolled at Stony Brook during a normal semester, but adding faculty and staff, campus population swells to about 50,000.

“The population size of this campus is essentially as big or bigger than some small cities,” Zacarese said.

The high-tech Emergency Operations Center can also be useful in police and fire investigations, he said, because investigators can use recorded data to find evidence and trace suspects.
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Apple will reportedly announce an update to its lineup of laptops at its annual developer conference, known as WWDC, in June.

The report from Bloomberg suggests Apple is responding to increased competition from rival Microsoft.

According to the report, Apple will announce three new laptops: The MacBook Pro will get a quicker processor, as will the 12-inch MacBook and the 13-inch MacBook Air. The processors, according to Bloomberg, will be Intel’s newest, seventh generation chips.

Apple’s laptops account for 11 percent of the company’s annual $216 billion in sales. iPhones make up nearly two thirds of the company’s sales.

Rival Microsoft recently unveiled its own Surface Laptop as a possible competitor to MacBook Air. That device reportedly boots up quickly and has a touchscreen.

According to Bloomberg, the new MacBook Pro would share the same basic external look of the current models.

It has been seven years since Apple redesigned the MacBook Air and more than a year since the company released a new MacBook Pro. The 12-inch MacBook saw its last update last spring.

Apple will also reportedly announce an upgrade to its macOS operating system.

The WWDC will start June 5.
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The hacker group behind the leak of cyber spying tools from the U.S. National Security Agency, which were used in last week’s “ransomware” cyberattack, says it has more code that it plans to start selling through a subscription service launching next month.

The group known as Shadow Brokers posted a statement online Tuesday saying the new data dumps could include exploits for Microsoft’s Windows 10 operating system, and for web browsers and cell phones, as well as “compromised network data from Russian, Chinese, Iranian or North Korean nukes and missile programs.”

Shadow Brokers tried unsuccessfully last year to auction off cyber tools it said were stolen from the NSA.

The WannaCry ransomware virus exploited a vulnerability in Microsoft’s older Windows XP operation system. The company had largely stopped offering support such as security updates for Windows XP, but did release a patch to protect users against the attack that demanded people pay to avoid losing their data.

There is no definitive evidence yet of who used the NSA tools to build WannaCry.

Cybersecurity experts say the technical evidence linking North Korea to the cyberattack is somewhat tenuous, but Pyongyang has the advanced cyber capabilities, and the motive to compensate for lost revenue due to economic sanctions, to be considered a likely suspect.

Since Friday, the WannaCry virus has infected more than 300,000 computers in 150 countries, at least temporarily paralyzing factories, banks, government agencies, hospitals and transportation systems.

On Monday, analysts with the cybersecurity firms Symantec and Kaspersky Lab said some code in an earlier version of the WannaCry software had also appeared in programs used by the Lazarus Group, which has been identified by some industry experts as a North Korea-run hacking operation.

“Right now we’ve uncovered a couple of what we would call weak indicators or weak links between WannaCry and this group that’s been previously known as Lazarus. Lazarus was behind the attacks on Sony and the Bangladesh banks for example. But these indicators are not enough to definitively say it’s Lazarus at all,” said Symantec Researcher Eric Chien.

Bureau 121

Symantec has linked the Lazarus group to a number of cyberattacks on banks in Asia dating back years, including the digital theft of $81 million from Bangladesh’s central bank last year. 

The U.S. government blamed North Korea for the hack on Sony Pictures Entertainment that leaked damaging personal information after Pyongyang threatened “merciless countermeasures” if the studio released a dark comedy movie that portrayed the assassination of Kim Jong Un. And South Korea had accused the North of attempting to breach the cybersecurity of its banks, broadcasters and power plants on numerous occasions.

Pyongyang is believed to have thousands of highly trained computer experts working for a cyberwarfare unit called Bureau 121, which is part of the General Bureau of Reconnaissance, an elite spy agency run by the military. There have been reports the Lazarus group is affiliated with Bureau 121. Some alleged North Korean-related cyberattacks have also been traced back to a hotel in Shenyang, China near the Korean border.

“Mostly they hack directly, but they hack other countries first and transfer [the data] so various other countries are found when we trace back, but a specific IP address located in Pyongyang can be found in the end,” said Choi Sang-myung, a senior director of the cybersecurity firm Hauri Inc. in Seoul.

Ransom

It is not clear if the purpose of the WannaCry malware is to extort payments or to cause widespread damage.

The WannaCry hackers have demanded ransoms from users, starting at $300 to end the cyberattack, or they threatened to destroy all data on infected computers. So far the perpetrators have raised less than $70,000 according to Tom Bossert, a homeland security adviser for U.S. President Donald Trump.

The countries most affected by WannaCry to date are Russia, Taiwan, Ukraine and India, according to Czech security firm Avast.

Suffering under increased economic sanctions for its nuclear and ballistic missile programs, it would not be surprising for North Korea to attempt to make up for lost revenue through illicit cyber theft and extortion. But the WannaCry ransomware is more advanced than anything North Korean hackers have used in the past.

“Previous ransomwares required people to click an attachment in an email or access a specific website to get infected, but this time [computers] can be infected without getting an email or access to a website, just by connecting an Internet cable,” said Choi.

FireEye Inc., another large cybersecurity firm, said it was also investigating but cautious about drawing a link to North Korea.

In addition to past alleged cyberattacks, North Korea had also been accused of counterfeiting $100 bills which were known as “superdollars” or “supernotes” because the fakes were nearly flawless.

Youmi Kim contributed to this report.
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Motorized skateboards are a simple and affordable form of personal transportation while advanced battery technology considerably extended their range. Now a startup company in Germany offers a skateboard that is almost entirely printed in plastic and has wireless speed control. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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A computer virus that exploits the same vulnerability as the global “ransomware” attack has latched on to more than 200,000 computers and begun manufacturing digital currency, experts said Tuesday.

The development adds to the dangers exposed by the WannaCry ransomware and provides another piece of evidence that a North Korea-linked hacking group may be behind the attacks.

WannaCry, developed in part with hacking techniques that were either stolen or leaked from the U.S. National Security Agency, has infected more than 300,000 computers since Friday, locking up their data and demanding a ransom payment to release it.

Researchers at security firm Proofpoint said the related attack, which installs a currency “miner” that generates digital cash, began infecting machines in late April or early May but had not been previously discovered because it allows computers to operate while creating the digital cash in the background.

Proofpoint executive Ryan Kalember said the authors may have earned more than $1 million, far more than has been generated by the WannaCry attack.

Like WannaCry, the program attacks via a flaw in Microsoft Corp’s Windows software. That hole has been patched in newer versions of Windows, though not all companies and individuals have installed the patches.

Suspected links to North Korea

Digital currencies based on a technology known as blockchain operate by enabling the creation of new currency in exchange for solving complex math problems. Digital “miners” run specially configured computers to solve the problems and generate currency, whose value fluctuates according to market demand.

Bitcoin is by far the largest such currency, but the new mining program is not aimed at Bitcoin. Rather it targeted a newer digital currency, called Monero, that experts say has been pursued recently by North Korean-linked hackers.

North Korea has attracted attention in the WannaCry case for a number of reasons, including the fact that early versions of the WannaCry code used some programming lines that had previously been spotted in attacks by Lazarus Group, a hacking group associated with North Korea.

Security researchers and U.S. intelligence officials have cautioned that such evidence is not conclusive, and the investigation is in its early stages.

In early April, security firm Kaspersky Lab said that a wing of Lazarus devoted to financial gain had installed software to mine Moreno on a server in Europe.

A new campaign to mine the same currency, using the same Windows weakness as WannaCry, could be coincidence, or it could suggest that North Korea was responsible for both the ransomware and the currency mining.

Kalember said he believes the similarities in the European case, WannaCry and the miner were “more than coincidence.”

“It’s a really strong overlap,” he said. “It’s not like you see Moreno miners all over the world.”

The North Korean mission to the United Nations could not be reached for comment, while the FBI declined to comment.
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Thailand backed off a threat to block Facebook on Tuesday, instead providing the social media site with court orders to remove content that the government deems illegal.

Thailand made the threat last week as it wanted Facebook to block more than 130 posts it considers a threat to national security or in violation of the country’s lese majeste law, which makes insults to the monarchy punishable by up to 15 years in prison. Thailand’s military government has made prosecuting royal insults a priority since seizing power in a coup three years ago.

Takorn Tantasith, secretary-general of Thailand’s broadcast regulator, said Facebook had requested the court orders before it would take action but he expected the social media giant would comply with the government’s demands.

“Facebook have shown good cooperation with us,” Takorn told reporters.

Emails and calls seeking confirmation from Facebook were not immediately returned.

The regulator last week demanded that Facebook remove more than 130 illegal posts by Tuesday or face legal action that could shut down the site. In a change of tactic, Takorn said that Thailand had forwarded 34 court orders to Facebook so far.

“The websites that need to be taken down are not only for those that are a threat to stability but they also include other illegal websites such as porn and websites that support human-trafficking which take time to legally determine,” Takorn said.

Thai authorities try to take pre-emptive actions against material they consider illegal, having local internet service providers block access or reaching agreements with some online services such as YouTube to bar access to certain material in Thailand.

Much of that is content deemed in violation of the country’s lese majeste law, the harshest in the world. The military government has charged more than 100 people with such offenses since the coup and handed down record sentences. Many of those cases have been based on internet postings or even private messages exchanged on Facebook.

Last month, Thai authorities declared it illegal to exchange information on the internet with three prominent government critics who often write about the country’s monarchy.

Facebook, which is blocked in a number of authoritarian countries such as North Korea, has said it relies on local governments to notify the site of information it deems illegal.

“If, after careful legal review, we find that the content is illegal under local law we restrict it as appropriate and report the restriction in our Government Request Report,” Facebook has said in past statements outlining its policy.
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Get ready for more rabbit ears, dog noses and funny hats to show up in your Facebook feed.

Facebook’s Instagram service is launching face filters in an effort to keep up with rival, Snap Inc.’s Snapchat.

“From math equations swirling around your head to furry koala ears that move and twitch, you can transform into a variety of characters that make you smile or laugh,” the company wrote on its blog.

The new features will also include the ability to manipulate video, allowing users to play them in reverse.

“Capture a fountain in motion and share a rewind of the water floating back up,” according to the blog post. “Experiment with some magic tricks of your own and defy the laws of physics wherever you are.”

Facebook, the largest social media platform, has been accused of copying features from Snapchat such as “Stories” which allows users to post pictures and videos that are erased after 24 hours.

According to Instagram, 200 million people use Stories daily.

Facebook’s stock price has been hovering around $150 this month, which is near the stock’s all-time high of $153.60.

Last week, Snap stocks cratered by 23 percent after the company posted poorer than expected quarterly results. The company says it has 166 million daily active users as of March 31.

Snap was trading at $20.42 Tuesday, down from an all-time high of $29.44.
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Recently, one of the largest computer hacks of its kind hit companies and governments around the world. It is an example of the challenges in digital security and keeping ahead of technology. The U.S. military has developed a way to tap into the innovation and speed unique to Silicon Valley and tech startups. VOA’s Elizabeth Lee has more details on this initiative.
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It looks like the time has finally come for residents across Africa to start using their most abundant natural power source. While building power plants and transmission lines takes years and costs much more, installing solar panels is quicker and more affordable for individual home owners, businesses and farmers. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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One of the effects of progressive muscle diseases like cerebral palsy is muscle stiffness. There are drugs and therapies that are supposed to help but gauging their effectiveness is challenging. Now there’s a high-tech way that may help provide relief for patients. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Cybersecurity experts warn that hundreds of thousands of computer users across the globe remain vulnerable following a large-scale virus attack in recent days. The so-called ‘ransomware’ virus struck governments and companies around the world, as Henry Ridgwell reports from London.
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A look at the software being used by extortionists to attack computer users around the globe.
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A New Hampshire man who was injured in a house explosion is thanking Siri for saving his life.

Christopher Beaucher says he was checking on his mother’s vacant cottage in Wilmot on May 1 when he saw something suspicious and went inside.

 

He tells WMUR-TV that when he switched on a light, the house exploded.

 

“The whole place caught fire,” Beaucher said. “Part of it collapsed while I was in it during the initial explosion, so I couldn’t really tell where I was.”

 

Beaucher’s face and hands were badly burned. He grabbed his cellphone but was unable to dial because of his injuries. He says he somehow asked his iPhone’s voice-controlled virtual assistant Siri to call 911, believing he was going into shock.

A spokeswoman for Apple said Monday that statistics on Siri being used for emergencies weren’t available, but noted some recent emergencies in which it was used. Those include three boaters off the Florida coast in April who used the water-resistant phone when their craft capsized; a 4-year-old boy from London who used his mother’s thumb to unlock her iPhone and called Siri after she collapsed at home in March; and a man in Vancouver who collapsed, became paralyzed, and was able to use his tongue to use Siri. 

 

Beaucher is undergoing treatment for his injuries and says he hopes to return to his job as a cook and tend to his farm.

 

“I’m very, very, extremely lucky to be alive,” he said.

 

The New Hampshire state fire marshal’s office is investigating the explosion.
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