What’s Mark Zuckerberg’s biggest takeaway as he wraps up a year of travel to dozens of U.S. states? The importance of local communities.

To this end, Facebook’s CEO is announcing a program to boost small businesses and give people technical skills on and off Facebook. The move shows how intertwined Facebook has become not just in our social lives, but in entrepreneurs’ economic survival and growth. Facebook says 70 million small businesses use its service. Only 6 million of them advertise.

Called Community Boost, the program will visit 30 U.S. cities next year and work with local groups to train people in skills such as coding, building websites – and naturally, using Facebook for their business.

Zuckerberg says the effort is not just about Facebook’s business but its core mission.

 
…

Executives from Google, Facebook and Twitter faced anger from lawmakers last week over their platforms’ roles in Russian interference into the 2016 election. But for Silicon Valley, the biggest challenge lies ahead as tech companies look for ways to work with a U.S. Congress intent on closing legal loopholes before 2018 midterm elections.

Congressional scrutiny showed U.S. law has fallen behind the rapid growth of social media. Without rules governing paid political advertising on social media, foreign agents were free to post false or inflammatory material in an attempt manipulate public opinion. But lawmakers remain optimistic about the opportunity to learn from the past.

“If there is a place that has ever understood change, it’s Silicon Valley. It is based on disruption. It’s based on people taking risks,” Representative Anna Eshoo, a California Democrat, told VOA.

Greater transparency

Eshoo, whose congressional district covers part of Silicon Valley, has been a longtime advocate for greater transparency in the more traditional fields of TV and print political advertising.

“When citizens know who has paid for something, it has an effect on their thinking,” Eshoo said. “It doesn’t mean that there wouldn’t still be Americans that would like that divisive ad. But at least they’ll know where it comes from, and you can have a much clearer debate about who is saying what and what they are attempting to do.”

The HONEST Ads Act, a legislative proposal recently introduced in both houses of Congress, follows along those lines.

If passed, the bill would regulate online political ads under the same rules as broadcast advertisements, requiring companies to keep a public database storing those ads and providing information about their funding.

“Americans deserve to know who’s paying for the online ads,” Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, a co-sponsor of the bill, said last month. “Even if the Russian interference hadn’t occurred, we should still be updating our laws. Our laws should be as sophisticated as those who are trying to manipulate us.”

“Creating a database like that is going to be hard and complicated and messy. It’s a good idea that’s going to have a tough execution,” Dave Karpf, a professor of political communication at George Washington University, told VOA.

Karpf said that while there are no perfect solutions, it’s important to recognize the tech companies for what they’ve become.

“Facebook and Google are media companies — they’re just different media companies then we’re used to seeing,” he said. “They’re not broadcasters, but they are information platforms. And they’re quasi-monopolies — even a benevolent monopoly is a bad thing for public discourse and public knowledge.”

But none of the social media heads would fully commit to support of the bill as it now stands during their congressional testimony, appearing instead to favor a self-policing approach.

Battling fake news

Addressing paid political advertisements on social media platforms is just one part of the puzzle. The 2016 election revealed a vast ecosystem of fake news that will be almost impossible to police.

“What’s an even greater problem is that the Russians and others are setting up sites to deliberately disseminate misinformation — false news, fake news, what have you — they are not identifying themselves as Russian-sponsored,” said Mark Jacobson, a professor at Georgetown University and co-author of an October 2017 report on Russian cybermeddling.

“This is the larger problem for Facebook and other social media companies — how to handle the deliberate disinformation — and I’m not so sure the solution is legislative,” Jacobson said.

Eshoo downplayed talk that these challenges signal a downturn for tech innovators, saying it’s time lawmakers, companies and citizens took on a shared responsibility.

“We need to do a much better job with this,” she said. “We’re going to need them to cooperate with us. I don’t think that there has to be a slugfest on this.” She said the social media companies need to tell Congress how, in terms of their engineering and their algorithms, they can best accomplish what lawmakers set forth.
…

The Texas church massacre is providing a familiar frustration for law enforcement: FBI agents are unable to unlock the gunman’s encrypted cellphone to learn what evidence it might hold.

But while heart-wrenching details of the rampage that left more than two dozen people dead might revive the debate over the balance of digital privacy rights and national security, it’s not likely to prompt change anytime soon.

Congress has not shown a strong appetite for legislation that would force technology companies to help the government break into encrypted phones and computers. And the fiery public debate surrounding the FBI’s legal fight with Apple Inc. has largely faded since federal authorities announced they were able to access a locked phone in a terror case without the help of the technology giant.

As a candidate, Donald Trump called on Americans to boycott Apple unless it helped the FBI hack into the phone, but he hasn’t been as vocal as president.

Still, the issue re-emerged Tuesday, when Christopher Combs, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s San Antonio division, said agents had been unable to get into the cellphone belonging to Devin Patrick Kelley, who slaughtered much of the congregation in the middle of a Sunday service.

“It highlights an issue you’ve all heard about before. With the advance of the technology and the phones and the encryption, law enforcement is increasingly not able to get into these phones,” Combs told reporters, saying the device was being flown to an FBI lab for analysis.

Combs didn’t identify the make or model, but a U.S. official briefed by law enforcement told The Associated Press it was an Apple iPhone.

“We’re working very hard to get into that phone, and that will continue until we find an answer,” Combs said.

Combs was telegraphing a longstanding frustration of the FBI, which claims encryption has stymied investigations of everything from sex crimes against children to drug cases, even if they obtain a warrant for the information. Agents have been unable to retrieve data from half the mobile devices – more than 6,900 phones, computers and tablets – that they tried to access in less than a year, FBI Director Christopher Wray said last month, wading into an issue that also vexed his predecessor, James Comey. Comey spoke before Congress and elsewhere about the bureau’s inability to access digital devices. But the Obama White House never publicly supported legislation that would have forced technology companies to give the FBI a back door to encrypted information, leaving Comey’s hands tied to propose a specific legislative fix.

Bad idea, some believe

Security experts generally believe such encryption backdoors are a terrible idea that could expose a vast amount of private, business and government data to hackers and spies. That’s because those backdoor keys would work for bad guys as well as good guys – and the bad guys would almost immediately target them for theft, and might even be able to recreate them from scratch.

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein took aim at Silicon Valley’s methods for protecting privacy during a speech last month, saying Trump’s Justice Department would be more aggressive in seeking information from technology companies. He took a harder line than his predecessors but stopped short of saying what specific steps the administration might take.

Washington has proven incapable of solving a problem that an honest conversation could fix, said David Hickton, a former U.S. attorney who now directs a cyber law institute at the University of Pittsburgh.

“We wait for a mass disaster to sharpen the discussion about this, when we should have been talking about it since San Bernardino,” he said. “Reasonable people of good will could resolve this problem. I don’t think it’s dependent on the political wins or who is the FBI director. It’s begging for a solution.”

Even so, the facts of the church shooting may not make it the most powerful case against warrant-proof encryption. When the FBI took Apple to court in February 2016 to force it to unlock the San Bernardino shooter’s phone, investigators believed the device held clues about whom the couple communicated with and where they may have traveled.

But Combs didn’t say what investigators hoped to retrieve from Kelley’s phone, and investigators already have ample information about his motive. Authorities in Texas say the church shooting was motivated by the gunman’s family troubles, rather than terrorism, and investigators have not said whether they are seeking possible co-conspirators.

Investigators may have other means to get the information they seek. If the Texas gunman backed up his phone online, they can get a copy of that with a legal order – usually a warrant. They can also get warrants for any accounts he had at server-based internet services such as Facebook, Twitter and Google.

In the California case, the FBI ultimately broke into the phone by paying an unidentified vendor for a hacking tool to access the phone without Apple’s help, averting a court battle.

The FBI has not yet asked Apple for help unlocking Kelley’s phone as it continues to analyze the device, according to the U.S. official, who was not authorized to discuss the case and did so on condition of anonymity. Another person familiar with the matter, who also spoke on condition of anonymity because of sensitivity of the discussions, said Apple contacted the FBI on its own to offer technical advice after learning from a Texas news conference that the bureau was trying to access the cellphone.

Former federal prosecutor Joseph DeMarco, who filed a friend of the court brief on behalf of groups that supported the Justice Department against Apple, said he was hopeful the case would spur fresh discussion. If not by itself, he said, the shooting could be one of several cases that prompt the Justice Department to take other technology companies to court.

“Eventually, the courts will rule on this or a legislative fix will be imposed,” he said. “Eventually, the pressure will mount.”
…

Struggling social media platforms Twitter and Snapchat are taking on new looks as the services seek wider audiences in the shadow of Facebook.

Twitter is rolling out a 280-character limit for nearly all its users, abandoning its iconic 140-character limit for tweets. And Snapchat, long popular with young people, will undergo a revamp in hopes of becoming easier to use for everyone else.

Both services announced the moves Tuesday as they look for ways to expand beyond their passionate but slow-growing fan bases.

Twitter has said that 9 percent of tweets written in English hit the 140-character limit. People ended up spending more time editing tweets or didn’t send them out at all. By removing that hurdle, Twitter is hoping people will tweet more, drawing more users in.

Waking up to the news Wednesday, Germany’s justice ministry wrote that it can now tweet about legislation concerning the transfer of oversight responsibilities for beef labeling.

The law is known in German as the Rindfleischetikettierungsueberwachungsaufgabenuebertragungsgesetz.

Munich police, meanwhile, said that “at last” they won’t need abbreviations to tweet about accidents involving forklift drivers, or Niederflurfoerderfahrzeugfuehrer.

In Rome, student Marina Verdicchio said the change “will give us the possibility to express ourselves in a totally different way and to avoid canceling important words when we use Twitter.”

Shakespearean skepticism

Others were not impressed, including at least one who quoted Shakespeare: “Brevity is the soul of wit.”

And, as Snap Inc. CEO Evan Spiegel noted, change does not come without risk.

“We don’t yet know how the behavior of our community will change when they begin to use our updated application,” he said. “We’re willing to take that risk for what we believe are substantial long-term benefits to our business.”

Snap, Snapchat’s parent company, did not provide details on the upcoming changes.

During the third quarter, Twitter averaged 330 million monthly users, up just 1 percent from the previous quarter. Snapchat added 4.5 million daily users in the quarter to 178 million, which amounts to a 3 percent growth. The company does not report monthly user figures.

Those numbers pale next to social media behemoth Facebook, which reported that its monthly users rose 16 percent to 2.07 billion.

“The one thing that we have heard over the years is that Snapchat is difficult to understand or hard to use, and our team has been working on responding to this feedback,” Spiegel said. “As a result, we are currently redesigning our application to make it easier to use.”

His comments came on a conference call with industry analysts after the company posted the lackluster user-growth numbers and revenue that fell well short of Wall Street expectations. Snap’s stock was bludgeoned Wednesday, falling 16 percent to $12.70 in early-morning trading. The Venice, California, company went public in March at $17 a share.

Expanding the base

Snapchat needs to grow its user base beyond 13-to-34-year-olds in the U.S., France, the U.K. and Australia, Spiegel said. This, he said, includes Android users, people older than 34 and what he called “rest of world” markets.

Meanwhile, Snap said Wednesday that Chinese internet company Tencent had acquired a 10 percent stake in the company. Tencent runs the WeChat messaging app, as well as online payment platforms and games. Earlier this year, Tencent bought a 5 percent stake in Tesla Inc.

As for Twitter, the move to 280 characters was begun as a test in September.

“People in the experiment told us that a higher character limit made them feel more satisfied with how they expressed themselves on Twitter, their ability to find good content, and Twitter overall,” said project manager Aliza Rosen in a blog post.

The expansion to 280-character tweets will be extended to all users except those tweeting in Chinese, Japanese and Korean, who will still have the original limit. That’s because writing in those languages uses fewer characters.

The company has been slowly easing restrictions to let people cram more characters into a tweet. It stopped counting polls, photos, videos and other things toward the limit. Even before it did so, users found creative ways to get around the limit. These include multipart tweets and screenshots of blocks of text.

Twitter’s character limit was created so that tweets could fit into a single text message, back when many people were using texts to receive tweets. But now, most people use Twitter through its mobile app; the 140-character limit is no longer a technical constraint but nostalgia.
…

As U.S.-backed forces made their final push into the city of Raqqa to liberate what had once been the Syrian capital of the Islamic State’s self-declared caliphate, they faced a problem.

Not only were the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) holding IS fighters — some captured and some who had surrendered — they were also encountering many Syrians who, for various reasons, had collaborated with or worked for the terror group.

In the end, against their initial instincts, the U.S.-backed forces let many of them go.

“[The SDF] was pressured and convinced by the civil council, the civil leadership, in that part of Syria, who listened to the tribal leaders,” said Major General James Jarrard, commander of the special operations joint task force for Operation Inherent Resolve.

Just how many IS followers or collaborators from the areas in and around Raqqa were ultimately freed is unclear — officials with Operation Inherent Resolve have not been able to provide any numbers.

As worrisome as the prospect of their release might sound, coalition officials are not concerned, assuring anyone who asks that the local IS fighters and supporters are not likely to cause trouble.

“A lot of those that were captured that were local Syrians have been turned over to their tribal leadership,” according to Jarrard, who briefed reporters last week. “The SDF leadership feels comfortable that the tribal leadership and the tribal code in northeast Syria will make sure that they maintain control of those individuals.”

Tracking IS fighters, collaborators

But perhaps more critically, other protections have been put in place.

“What we did do with the SDF, is we did take all of those members and we enrolled them biometricaly, so that we are able to track them into the future,” Jarrard said.

The collection of biometric information from those who fought for or worked with Islamic State in Raqqa is just a small part of a much wider effort encompassing other areas once under the terror group’s control.

The goal is to make sure those affiliated with IS are not able to go undetected and find ways to unleash terror and havoc, whether in Iraq and Syria or the West.

The collected information commonly includes fingerprints, photos, DNA samples and even retinal scans, and not just from Syria. Iraqi forces and U.S.-backed Kurdish forces in Iraq have also been gathering biometric data.

Some of the biometric information is already available to forces on the ground, who can use hand-held scanners, slightly larger than a big mobile phone, to take readings from suspects to see if they are already in the IS database.

But officials and observers in the United States, Europe and the Middle East acknowledge it is a massive undertaking, and that gaps remain.

“IDPs [internally displaced persons] who end up in camps on the Kurdish side and suspects held by Kurdish authorities are all getting put onto a biometric database,” according to Belkis Wille, a senior Human Rights Watch researcher who has spent time in the region.

“On the Iraqi side, I have not seen it happening to the broader population and have not heard about it with regard to ISIS suspect detainees yet, but have heard it talked about many times as in the plans,” she added, using an acronym for the terror group.

Iraqi officials told VOA in July that they were “working on the mechanism” for sharing biometric data with their coalition partners, admitting there was no timeline for when a solution might be found.

Overcoming obstacles

The coalition, too, admitted there were obstacles.

“We are working to enable them [Iraqi officials] to better manage biometric information, to re-establish some capability that was here before that no longer is,” Canadian Armed Forces Brigadier General D.J. Anderson, then director of the coalition’s partner force development liaison team, said at the time.

There are also concerns about ensuring that everyone who might need access to the biometric data can get it, with European officials especially keen on speeding up the process.

“In a world where we see more people traveling with false documents, counterfeit documents, we need to inject much more biometrics,” European Union Counterterrorism Coordinator Gilles de Kerchove said during a visit to the U.S. in June.

“I would like to see if fingerprints are collected in Mosul or in Raqqa that it be shared in real time with the border guard at the external border of the European Union,” he added.

Interpol, the international police organization with more than 190 member countries, has been trying to help.

Interpol officials say it has shared information on more than 18,000 foreign fighters through its I-24/7 global communications network, some of which includes biometric information. And it is working to increase the amount of biometric data currently available.

Watching for returning foreign fighters

That additional biometric information cannot come soon enough for some European officials, worried about the steady tide of refugees from Syria and Iraq, even though there are no indications that the long-feared wave of returning foreign fighters will ever materialize.

“We have, however, identified an increase in the number of wives and children who are willing to return,” said Friedrich Grommes, head of the international terrorism directorate at Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service (BND), during a recent visit to Washington.

“This upward trend will probably increase in the months to come,” he added.

German officials say they have already used whatever biometric information is available to confirm the identities of family members of foreign fighters who may be seeking entry into Germany.

There are also growing fears some foreign fighters, terrorist operatives and their family members may be getting some sophisticated help.

“We see a lot of relationships between organized crime and terrorism, not ideologically but from old friendships sometimes,” said Dutch National Counterterrorism Coordinator Dick Schoof. “Organized crime is a facilitator for weapons, for transport, for fraud documents, for identity theft.”

And while most of the more than 5,000 would-be jihadists who left Europe are not expected to attempt a return — a feat made more difficult with a tightening of the Turkish-Syrian border — counterterror officials believe there are plenty of reasons to remain concerned.

“Quantity may not be the story,” U.S. National Counterterrorism Director Nicholas Rasmussen said this past July at the Aspen Security Summit.

“If I’m sitting in western Europe in a security service or a law enforcement organization, I’m very, very concerned about even a small number of foreign fighters from my country who come back from the conflict zone with a whole new set of skills, a whole new set of contacts, perhaps even specialized skills that go into areas of mass destruction.”
…

German bureaucrats — notorious for their ability to create lengthy tongue twisters consisting of one single word — are celebrating the doubling of Twitter’s character limit.

Twitter announced Tuesday it’s increasing the limit for almost all users of the messaging service from 140 to 280 characters, prompting a mix of delighted and despairing reactions.

Waking up to the news Wednesday, Germany’s justice ministry wrote that it can now tweet about legislation concerning the transfer of oversight responsibilities for beef labeling.

The law is known in German as the Rindfleischetikettierungsueberwachungsaufgabenuebertragungsgesetz.

Munich police, meanwhile, said that “at last” they won’t need abbreviations to tweet about accidents involving forklift drivers, or Niederflurfoerderfahrzeugfuehrer.

Government spokesman Steffen Seibert made clear he’ll keep it short, quoting Anton Chekhov: “Brevity is the sister of talent.”
…

To learn more about how stars are formed, astronomers look at light coming from deep space that illuminate events that happened billions of years ago. Cosmic dust, vapor in the earth’s atmosphere and light pollution can obscure that vision, but scientists at NASA found a way around all this by placing a sophisticated infrared telescope aboard a high-flying aircraft. VOA’s George Putic has more.
…

Microsoft and the U.N. Refugee Agency have partnered to teach about two dozen young refugees from around East Africa how to code and develop software. For VOA, Lameck Masina has the story from the Dzaleka refugee camp in central Malawi.
…

A team of scientists who last week announced the discovery of a large void inside the Great Pyramid of Giza have created a virtual reality tour that allows users to “teleport” themselves inside the structure and explore its architecture.

Using 3-D technology, the Scan Pyramids Project allows visitors wearing headsets to take a guided tour inside the Grand Gallery, the Queen’s Chamber and other ancient rooms not normally accessible to the public, without leaving Paris.

“Thanks to this technique, we make it possible to teleport ourselves to Egypt, inside the pyramid, as a group and with a guide,” said Mehdi Tayoubi, co-director of Scan Pyramids, which on November 2 announced the discovery of a mysterious space inside the depths of the Pyramid.

The void itself is visible on the tour, appearing like a dotted cloud.

“What is new in the world of virtual reality is that from now on, you are not isolated,” Tayoubi said. “You’re in a group — you can take a tour with your family. And you can access places which you usually can’t in the real pyramid.”

While partly designed as a fun experience, the “collaborative immersion” project allows researchers to improve the technologies they used to detect the pyramid void and think about what purpose it may have served.

Ancient wonder

The pyramid, built around 2,500 B.C. and one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, was a monumental tomb soaring to a height of 479 feet (146 meters). Until the Eiffel Tower was built in 1889, the Great Pyramid stood as the tallest man-made structure for more than 4,000 years.

While there are passageways into it and chambers in various parts, much of the internal structure had remained a mystery until a team from France’s HIP Institute used an imaging method based on cosmic rays to gain a view inside.

So-called muon particles, which originate from interactions with rays from space and atoms in Earth’s upper atmosphere, are able to penetrate hundreds of meters through stone before being absorbed. That allows for mapping inside stone structures.

“Muon tomography has really improved a lot due to its use on the pyramid, and we think that muography will have other applications in other fields,” said Tayoubi. “But we also wanted to innovate and imagine devices to allow the wider public to understand what this pyramid is, understand it from within.”

When looking through their 3-D goggles, visitors can see the enormous stones of the pyramid as if they were real, and walk virtually along its corridors, chambers and hidden spaces.

As they approach the pyramid from the outside, the tour even includes audio of Cairo’s deafening and ever-present traffic.
…