Month: March 2019

For techies and phone geeks, Digital Cambodia 2019 was the place to be. More than a dozen high school students clustered at the booth for Cellcard, Cambodia’s leading mobile operator. Under the booth’s 5G sign, they played video games on their phones. Hak Kimheng, a ninth grade student in Phnom Penh, said his mom bought him a Samsung smartphone a few months ago, when he moved to the capital city from nearby Kandal province to live with his uncle while attending school. Like moms everywhere, she thought the smartphone would help her stay in touch with her son. But smartphones being smartphones and kids being kids, Hak Kimheng, 16, has used it to set up an account on Facebook, Cambodia’s favorite social media platform. He’s also downloaded Khmer Academy, a…

For decades, it was virtually unknown outside a small circle of investors, corporate lawyers and government officials.    But in recent years, the small interagency body known as the Committee for Investment in the United States has grown in prominence, propelled by a U.S. desire to use it as an instrument of national security and foreign policy.    This week, the panel made headlines after it reportedly directed Chinese gaming company Beijing Kunlun Tech to divest itself of Grindr, a popular gay dating app, because of concern the user data it collects could be used to blackmail military and intelligence personnel.    Operating out of the Treasury Department, the nine-member CFIUS (pronounced Cy-fius) reviews foreign investments in U.S. businesses to determine whether they pose a national security threat.   Notification was voluntary…

Facebook said Friday it is further tightening requirements for European Union political advertising, in its latest efforts to prevent foreign interference and increase transparency ahead of the bloc's parliamentary elections. However, some EU politicians criticized the social media giant, saying the measures will make pan-European online campaigning harder. Under the new rules, people, parties and other groups buying political ads will have to confirm to Facebook that they are located in the same EU country as the Facebook users they are targeting. That's on top of a previously announced requirement for ad buyers to confirm their identities. It means advertisements aimed at voters across the EU's 28 countries will have to register a person in each of those nations. "It's a disgrace that Facebook doesn't see Europe as an entity…

Most of us don't give much thought to getting dressed every day, but for the elderly and disabled, seemingly simple tasks - like buttoning a shirt - can prove complicated. Fashion design students recently looked at low-tech ways to make clothes smarter. Tina Trinh reports. ...

At one atom thick, graphene is one of those miracle materials that many say is the stuff of the future. The future may be now as graphene's potential is being realized as the key to quick efficient 5G networks, and the future of telecommunications. VOA's Kevin Enochs reports. ...

Facebook was charged with discrimination by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development because of its ad-targeting system. HUD said Thursday Facebook is allowing advertisers to exclude people based on their neighborhood by drawing a red line around those neighborhoods on a map and giving advertisers the option of showing ads only to men or only to women. The agency also claims Facebook allowed advertisers to exclude people that the social media company classified as parents; non-American-born; non-Christian; interested in accessibility; interested in Hispanic culture or a wide variety of other interests that closely align with the Fair Housing Act's protected classes. HUD, which is pursuing civil charges and potential monetary awards that could run into the millions, said Facebook's ad platform is "encouraging, enabling, and causing housing discrimination"…

British cybersecurity inspectors have found significant technical issues in Chinese telecom supplier Huawei's software that they say pose risks for the country's telecom companies.   The annual report Thursday said there is only "limited assurance" that long-term national security risks from Huawei's involvement in critical British telecom networks can be adequately managed.   The report adds pressure on Huawei, which is at the center of a geopolitical battle between the U.S. and China.   The U.S. government wants its European allies to ban the company from next-generation mobile networks set to roll out in coming years over fears Huawei gear could be used for cyberespionage.   The report noted that Britain's cybersecurity authorities did not believe the defects were a result of "Chinese state interference."     ...

Most of us don't give much thought to getting dressed every day, but for the elderly and disabled, seemingly simple tasks like buttoning a shirt can prove complicated. Fashion design students recently looked at low-tech ways to make clothes smarter. VOA's Tina Trinh reports. ...

Facebook has announced it is banning praise, support, and representation of white nationalism and separatism on its platform and on Instagram, which it also owns. The company made the announcement Wednesday in a blog post, saying, "It's clear that these concepts are deeply linked to organized hate groups and have no place on our services." The post says Facebook has long banned hateful speech based on race, ethnicity and religion, though it had permitted expressions of white nationalism and separatism because it seemed separate from white supremacy. "But over the past three months," the post read, "our conversations with members of civil society and academics who are experts in race relations around the world ... have confirmed that white nationalism and separatism cannot be meaningfully separated from white supremacy and…

Computers have become so smart during the past 20 years that people don't think twice about chatting with digital assistants like Alexa and Siri or seeing their friends automatically tagged in Facebook pictures. But making those quantum leaps from science fiction to reality required hard work from computer scientists like Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun. The trio tapped into their own brainpower to make it possible for machines to learn like humans, a breakthrough now commonly known as "artificial intelligence," or AI. Their insights and persistence were rewarded Wednesday with the Turing Award, an honor that has become known as technology industry's version of the Nobel Prize. It comes with a $1 million prize funded by Google, a company where AI has become part of its DNA. The…

India says it has successfully tested a new anti-satellite missile, marking another major development in its budding space program. Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced Wednesday in a nationally televised address that scientists had destroyed a satellite orbiting about 300 kilometers above Earth's atmosphere in a mission that lasted only three minutes. The prime minister said the country has now "registered its name as a space power" alongside the United States, China and Russia, the only other nations to achieve such a feat. The United States and the former Soviet Union conducted anti-satellite tests from the early days of the space age, with the U.S. successfully shooting down a satellite in 1985. China achieved the feat in 2007. Modi insisted that Wednesday's test did not violate any international treaties, and was…

In Japan, every emperor's era has its own name - appearing in places such as coins, official paperwork and newspapers - and with abdication coming at the end of April, speculation is swirling about what the new "gengo" will be. Although the Western calendar has become more widespread in Japan, many people here count years in terms of gengo or use the two systems interchangeably. Emperor Akihito's era, which began in 1989, is Heisei, making 2019 Heisei 31. The new era name is one of biggest changes -- practically and psychologically - - for Japan at the start of Crown Prince Naruhito's reign on May 1. On April 30, Akihito will abdicate, ending an era in the minds of many Japanese. The new name is so secret that senior government…

Mounting public concern over data privacy is pushing tech giants to change their ways, industry experts said on Tuesday, a day after Apple unveiled a series of new products, stressing their privacy-friendly features. The world's second-most valuable technology company will now offer a credit card, a news service called Apple News+ and a TV service with original programming, all designed to keep users' information private and secure, it said on Monday. Apple's announcements come on the heels of user privacy scandals that have rocked tech companies over the last several years. Such clarity is welcome in a digital environment that lacks transparency and where people are sometimes unaware of what happens to their data, said Hielke Hijmans, a law expert at the Brussels Privacy Hub, a Belgian research center. "This…

Facebook said Tuesday it shut down more than 2,600 fake accounts linked to Iran, Russia, Macedonia and Kosovo and aiming to influence political sentiment in various parts of the world. It was the latest effort by the leading social network to shut down "inauthentic" accounts on Facebook and Instagram seeking to influence politics in the U.S. and elsewhere. Facebook said the accounts blocked in the four countries were not necessarily centrally coordinated but "used similar tactics by creating networks of accounts to mislead others about who they were and what they were doing," said Nathaniel Gleicher, head of cybersecurity policy for the company. "We are constantly working to detect and stop this type of activity because we don't want our services to be used to manipulate people," Gleicher said in…

It took a while, but finally — and with the carefully curated help of Oprah, Big Bird and Goldman Sachs — Apple has at last unveiled a new streaming TV service, its own branded credit card and a news subscription product. The moves have been largely expected and so far don’t appear to drastically alter the competitive landscape the way Apple has done with previous products such as the iPhone and the iPad. Still, the announcements represent an important step for the company as it seeks to diversify how it makes money amid declining sales of the iPhone, even if by themselves they are unlikely to turn Apple’s big ship either way. But it’s a way to keep fans sticking with Apple even when they aren’t buying a new iPhone…

Software engineers, entrepreneurs and product managers huddle in small groups, brainstorming ideas and scrawling thoughts onto Post-it Notes on a wall. The project leader exhorts them to "think of products around these themes." It's not a startup but a grassroots band of volunteers from London's tech industry developing websites to prevent Brexit, Britain's departure from the European Union that has fallen into complete disarray. They hope to put public pressure on politicians to give people a second vote. While the group is small, their engagement in politics underscores the concerns among businesses and entrepreneurs who stand to suffer from tariffs and border checks. "I've never been a political person before, really," said German-born venture capitalist Andreas Cser. A longtime London resident, he joined the group, Tech For U.K., after he…