A California-based company backed by tech billionaires says it has discovered major copper deposits in Zambia using artificial intelligence. The discovery comes as demand for the metal is especially high for the global transition to cleaner energy sources. Kathy Short reports from Lusaka, Zambia. (Camera and produced by: Richard Kille)
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A test of ChatGPT’s capabilities to create false information finds the chatbot spreads more disinformation in Chinese, says media watchdog NewsGuard. VOA’s Robin Guess has more. VOA footage by Michael Eckels, Roy Kim.
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Two titans of space travel team up to study our planet’s health. Plus, a Russian cosmonaut breaks the record for the most time in space, and sky gazers in North America will get a treat in coming months. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi brings us The Week in Space.
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Lahore, Pakistan — Artificial rain was used for the first time in Pakistan on Saturday in a bid to combat hazardous levels of smog in the megacity of Lahore, the provincial government said.

In the first experiment of its kind in the South Asian country, planes equipped with cloud seeding equipment flew over 10 areas of the city, often ranked one of the worst places globally for air pollution.

The “gift” was provided by the United Arab Emirates, said caretaker chief minister of Punjab, Mohsin Naqvi.

“Teams from the UAE, along with two planes, arrived here about 10 to 12 days ago. They used 48 flares to create the rain,” he told the media.

He said the team would know by Saturday night what effect the “artificial rain” had.

The UAE has increasingly used cloud seeding, sometimes referred to as artificial rain or “blueskying,” to create rain in the arid expanse of the country.

The weather modification involves releasing common salt — or a mixture of different salts — into clouds.

The crystals encourage condensation to form as rain.

It has been deployed in dozens of countries, including the United States, China and India.

Even very modest rain is effective in bringing down pollution, experts say.

Air pollution has worsened in Pakistan in recent years, as a mixture of low-grade diesel fumes, smoke from seasonal crop burn off and colder winter temperatures coalesce into stagnant clouds of smog.

Lahore suffers the most from the toxic smog, choking the lungs of more than 11 million residents in Lahore during the winter season.

Levels of PM2.5 pollutants — cancer-causing microparticles that enter the bloodstream through the lungs — were measured as hazardous in Lahore on Saturday at more than 66 times the World Health Organization’s danger limits.

Breathing the poisonous air has catastrophic health consequences.

Prolonged exposure can trigger strokes, heart disease, lung cancer and respiratory diseases, according to the WHO.

Successive governments have used various methods to reduce air pollution in Lahore, including spraying water on the roads, and weekend shutdowns of schools, factories and markets, with little or no success.

When asked about a long-term strategy to combat smog, the chief minister said the government needs studies to formulate a plan.
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WASHINGTON — U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo vowed Monday to take the “strongest action possible” in response to a semiconductor chip-making breakthrough in China that a House Foreign Affairs Committee said “almost certainly required the use of U.S. origin technology and should be an export control violation.”

In an interview with Bloomberg News, Raimondo called Huawei Technology’s advanced processor in its Mate Pro 60 smartphone released in August “deeply concerning” and said the Commerce Department investigates such things vigorously.

The United States has banned chip sales to Huawei, which reportedly used chips from China chip giant Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp., or SMIC, in the phone that are 7 nanometers, a technology China has not been known as able to produce.

Raimondo said the U.S. was also looking into the specifics of three new artificial intelligence accelerator chips that California-based Nvidia Corp. is developing for China. “We look at every spec of every new chip, obviously, to make sure it doesn’t violate the export controls,” she said.

Nvidia came under U.S. scrutiny for designing China-specific chips that were just under new Commerce Department requirements announced in October for tighter export controls on advanced AI chips for civilian use that could have military applications.

China’s Foreign Ministry responded to Raimondo’s comments Tuesday, saying the U.S. was “undermining the rights of Chinese companies” and contradicting the principles of a market economy.

‘Almost certainly required US origin technology’

The U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee in a December 7 report criticized the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security, or BIS, the regulatory body for regulating dual-use export controls.

The report said Chinese chip giant “SMIC is producing 7 nanometer chips — advanced technology for semiconductors that had been only capable of development by TSMC, Intel and Samsung.”

“Despite this breakthrough by SMIC, which almost certainly required the use of U.S. origin technology and should be an export control violation, BIS has not acted,” the 66-page report said. “We can no longer afford to avoid the truth: the unimpeded transfer of U.S. technology to China is one of the single-largest contributors to China’s emergence as one of the world’s premier scientific and technological powers.”

Excessive approvals alleged

Committee Chairman Michael McCaul said BIS had an excessive rate of approval for controlled technology transfers and lacked checks on end-use, raising serious questions about the current U.S. export control mechanism.

“U.S. export control officials should adopt a presumption that all [Chinese] entities will divert technology to military or surveillance uses,” said McCaul’s report, but “currently, the overwhelming approval rates for licenses or exceptions for dual-use technology transfers to China indicate that licensing officials at BIS are likely presuming that items will be used only for their intended purposes.”

According to BIS’s website, a key in determining whether an export license is needed from the Department of Commerce is knowing whether the item one intends to export has a specific Export Control Classification Number, or ECCN. All ECCNs are listed in the Commerce Control List, or CCL, which is divided into ten broad categories.

The committee’s report said that “in 2020, nearly 98% of CCL items export to China went without a license,” and “in 2021, BIS approved nearly 90% of applications for the export of CCL items to China.”

The report said that between 2016 and 2021, “the United States government’s two export control officers in China conducted on average only 55 end-user checks per year of the roughly 4,000 active licenses in China. Put another way, BIS likely verified less than 0.01% of all licenses, which represent less than 1% of all trade with China.”

China skilled in avoiding controls

But China is also skilled at avoiding U.S. export controls, analysts said.

William Yu, an economist at UCLA Anderson Forecast, told VOA Mandarin in a phone interview that China can get banned chips through a third country. “For example, some countries in the Middle East set up a company in that country to buy these high-level chips from the United States. From there, one is transferred back to China,” Yu said.

Thomas Duesterberg, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, told VOA Mandarin in a phone interview that the Commerce Department’s BIS has a hard job.

“If you forbid technology from going to one company in China, the Chinese are experts at creating another company or just moving the company to a new address and disguising its name to try to evade the controls. China is a big country and there’s a lot of technology that is at stake here,” he said.

“It’s true on the one hand that BIS has been successful in some areas, such as advanced semiconductors in conjunction with denial of Chinese ability to buy American technology companies,” said Duesterberg. “But it’s also true as the [House Foreign Affairs Committee] report emphasizes that a lot of activities that policymakers would like to restrict is not being done.”

Insufficient resources or political will?

Despite its huge responsibility to ensure that the United States stays ahead in the escalating U.S.-China science and technology competition, the Commerce Department’s BIS is small, employing just over 300 people.

At the annual Reagan National Defense Forum on December 2, Secretary Raimondo lamented that BIS “has the same budget today as it did a decade ago” despite the increasing challenges and workload, reported Breaking Defense, a New York-based online publication on global defense and politics.

U.S. Representatives Elise Stefanik, Mike Gallagher, who is chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, and McCaul released a joint response to Raimondo’s call for additional funds for the BIS, saying resources alone would not resolve export control shortcomings.

Raimondo also warned chip companies that the U.S. would further tighten controls to prevent cutting edge AI technology from going to Beijing.

“The threat from China is large and growing,” she said in an interview to CNBC at the December 2 forum. “China wants access to our most sophisticated semiconductors, and we can’t afford to give them that access. We’re not just going to deny a single company in China, we’re going to deny the whole country access to our cutting-edge semiconductors.”
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European Union officials worked into the late hours last week hammering out an agreement on world-leading rules meant to govern the use of artificial intelligence in the 27-nation bloc.

The Artificial Intelligence Act is the latest set of regulations designed to govern technology in Europe — that may be destined to have global impact.

Here’s a closer look at the AI rules:

What is the AI act and how does it work?

The AI Act takes a “risk-based approach” to products or services that use artificial intelligence and focuses on regulating uses of AI rather than the technology. The legislation is designed to protect democracy, the rule of law and fundamental rights like freedom of speech, while still encouraging investment and innovation.

The riskier an AI application is, the stiffer the rules. Those that pose limited risk, such as content recommendation systems or spam filters, would have to follow only light rules such as revealing that they are powered by AI.

High-risk systems, such as medical devices, face tougher requirements like using high-quality data and providing clear information to users.

Some AI uses are banned because they’re deemed to pose an unacceptable risk, like social scoring systems that govern how people behave, some types of predictive policing and emotion recognition systems in school and workplaces.

People in public can’t have their faces scanned by police using AI-powered remote “biometric identification” systems, except for serious crimes like kidnapping or terrorism.

The AI Act won’t take effect until two years after final approval from European lawmakers, expected in a rubber-stamp vote in early 2024. Violations could draw fines of up to 35 million euros ($38 million) or 7% of a company’s global revenue.

How does the AI act affect the rest of the world?

The AI Act will apply to the EU’s nearly 450 million residents, but experts say its impact could be felt far beyond because of Brussels’ leading role in drawing up rules that act as a global standard.

The EU has played the role before with previous tech directives, most notably mandating a common charging plug that forced Apple to abandon its in-house Lightning cable.

While many other countries are figuring out whether and how they can rein in AI, the EU’s comprehensive regulations are poised to serve as a blueprint.

“The AI Act is the world’s first comprehensive, horizontal and binding AI regulation that will not only be a game-changer in Europe but will likely significantly add to the global momentum to regulate AI across jurisdictions,” said Anu Bradford, a Columbia Law School professor who’s an expert on EU law and digital regulation.

“It puts the EU in a unique position to lead the way and show to the world that AI can be governed, and its development can be subjected to democratic oversight,” she said.

Even what the law doesn’t do could have global repercussions, rights groups said.

By not pursuing a full ban on live facial recognition, Brussels has “in effect greenlighted dystopian digital surveillance in the 27 EU Member States, setting a devastating precedent globally,” Amnesty International said.

The partial ban is “a hugely missed opportunity to stop and prevent colossal damage to human rights, civil space and rule of law that are already under threat through the EU.”

Amnesty also decried lawmakers’ failure to ban the export of AI technologies that can harm human rights — including for use in social scoring, something China does to reward obedience to the state through surveillance.

What are other countries doing about AI regulation?

The world’s two major AI powers, the U.S. and China, also have started the ball rolling on their own rules.

U.S. President Joe Biden signed a sweeping executive order on AI in October, which is expected to be bolstered by legislation and global agreements.

It requires leading AI developers to share safety test results and other information with the government. Agencies will create standards to ensure AI tools are safe before public release and issue guidance to label AI-generated content.

Biden’s order builds on voluntary commitments made earlier by technology companies including Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft to make sure their products are safe before they’re released.

China, meanwhile, has released ” interim measures ” for managing generative AI, which applies to text, pictures, audio, video and other content generated for people inside China.

President Xi Jinping has also proposed a Global AI Governance Initiative, calling for an open and fair environment for AI development.

How will the AI act affect ChatGPT?

The spectacular rise of OpenAI’s ChatGPT showed that the technology was making dramatic advances and forced European policymakers to update their proposal.

The AI Act includes provisions for chatbots and other so-called general purpose AI systems that can do many different tasks, from composing poetry to creating video and writing computer code.

Officials took a two-tiered approach, with most general-purpose systems facing basic transparency requirements like disclosing details about their data governance and, in a nod to the EU’s environmental sustainability efforts, how much energy they used to train the models on vast troves of written works and images scraped off the internet.

They also need to comply with EU copyright law and summarize the content they used for training.

Stricter rules are in store for the most advanced AI systems with the most computing power, which pose “systemic risks” that officials want to stop spreading to services that other software developers build on top.
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Lawmakers and parents are blaming social media platforms for contributing to mental health problems in young people. A group of U.S. states is suing the owner of Instagram and Facebook for promoting their platforms to children despite knowing some of the psychological harms and safety risks they pose. From New York, VOA’s Tina Trinh reports that a cause-and-effect relationship between social media and mental health may not be so clear.
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U.S. chipmaker Nvidia’s chief executive said on Monday the company will expand its partnership with Vietnam’s top tech firms and support the

country in training talent for developing artificial intelligence and digital infrastructure.

Nvidia, which has already invested $250 million in Vietnam, has so far partnered with leading tech companies to deploy AI in the cloud, automotive and healthcare industries, a document published by the White House in September showed when Washington upgraded diplomatic relations with Vietnam.

“Vietnam is already our partner as we have millions of clients here,” Jensen Huang, Nvdia’s CEO said at an event in Hanoi in his first visit to the country.

“Vietnam and Nvidia will deepen our relations, with Viettel, FPT, Vingroup, VNG being the partners Nvidia looks to expand partnership with,” Huang said, adding Nvidia would support Vietnam’s artificial training and infrastructure.

Reuters reported last week Nvidia was set to discuss cooperation deals on semiconductors with Vietnamese tech companies and authorities in a meeting on Monday.

Huang’s visit comes at a time when Vietnam is trying to expand into chip designing and possibly chip-making as trade tensions between the United States and China create opportunities for Vietnam in the industry.

At Monday’s event, Vietnam’s investment minister Nguyen Chi Dzung said the country had been preparing mechanisms and incentives to attract investment projects in the semiconductor and artificial intelligence industries.

Dzung also asked Nvidia to consider setting up a research and development facility in the country following Huang’s proposal to set up a base in Vietnam, after his meeting with the Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh on Sunday.

 
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Elon Musk has restored the X account of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, pointing to a poll on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter that came out in favor of the Infowars host who repeatedly called the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting a hoax.

It poses new uncertainty for advertisers, who have fled X over concerns about hate speech appearing alongside their ads, and is the latest divisive public personality to get back their banned account. 

Musk posted a poll on Saturday asking if Jones should be reinstated, with the results showing 70% of those who responded in favor. Early Sunday, Musk tweeted, “The people have spoken and so it shall be.”

A few hours later, Jones’ posts were visible again and he retweeted a post about his video game. He and his Infowars show had been permanently banned in 2018 for abusive behavior.

Musk, who has described himself as a free speech absolutist, said the move was about protecting those rights. In response to a user who posted that “permanent account bans are antithetical to free speech,” Musk wrote, “I find it hard to disagree with this point.”

The billionaire Tesla CEO also tweeted it’s likely that Community Notes — X’s crowd-sourced fact-checking service — “will respond rapidly to any AJ post that needs correction.”

It is a major turnaround for Musk, who previously said he wouldn’t let Jones back on the platform despite repeated calls to do so. Last year, Musk pointed to the death of his first-born child and tweeted, “I have no mercy for anyone who would use the deaths of children for gain, politics or fame.”

Jones repeatedly has said on his show that the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, that killed 20 children and six educators never happened and was staged in an effort to tighten gun laws.

Relatives of many of the victims sued Jones in Connecticut and Texas, winning nearly $1.5 billion in judgments against him. In October, a judge ruled that Jones could not use bankruptcy protection to avoid paying more than $1.1 billon of that debt.

Relatives of the school shooting victims testified at the trials about being harassed and threatened by Jones’ believers, who sent threats and even confronted the grieving families in person, accusing them of being “crisis actors” whose children never existed.

Jones is appealing the judgments, saying he didn’t get fair trials and his speech was protected by the First Amendment.

Restoring Jones’ account comes as Musk has seen a slew of big brands, including Disney and IBM, stop advertising on X after a report by liberal advocacy group Media Matters said ads were appearing alongside pro-Nazi content and white nationalist posts.

They also were scared away after Musk himself endorsed an antisemitic conspiracy theory in response to a post on X. The Tesla CEO later apologized and visited Israel, where he toured a kibbutz attacked by Hamas militants and held talks with top Israeli leaders. 

But he also has said advertisers are engaging in “blackmail” and, using a profanity, essentially told them to go away.

“Don’t advertise,” Musk said in an on-stage interview late last month at The New York Times DealBook Summit.

After buying Twitter last year, Musk said he was granting “amnesty” for suspended accounts and has since reinstated former President Donald Trump; Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, following two suspensions over antisemitic posts last year; and far-right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who was kicked off the platform for violating its COVID-19 misinformation policies.

Trump, who was banned for encouraging the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection, has his own social media site, Truth Social, and has only tweeted once since being allowed back on X.
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The future of fossil fuels is at the center of the United Nations climate summit in Dubai, where many activists, experts and nations are calling for an agreement to phase out the oil, gas and coal responsible for warming the planet. On the other side: energy companies and oil-rich nations with plans to keep drilling well into the future.

In the background of those discussions are carbon capture and carbon removal, technologies most, if not all, producers are counting on to meet their pledges to get to net-zero emissions. Skeptics worry the technology is being oversold to allow the industry to maintain the status quo.

“The industry needs to commit to genuinely helping the world meet its energy needs and climate goals — which means letting go of the illusion that implausibly large amounts of carbon capture are the solution,” International Energy Agency Executive Director Fatih Birol said before the start of talks.

What is carbon capture?

Many industrial facilities such as coal-fired power plants and ethanol plants produce carbon dioxide. To stop those planet-warming emissions from reaching the atmosphere, businesses can install equipment to separate that gas from all the other gases coming out of the smokestack and transport it to where it can be permanently stored underground. And even for industries trying to reduce emissions, some are likely to always produce some carbon, such as cement manufacturers that use a chemical process that releases CO2.

“We call that a mitigation technology, a way to stop the increased concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere,” said Karl Hausker, an expert on getting to net-zero emissions at World Resources Institute, a climate-focused nonprofit that supports sharp fossil fuel reductions along with a limited role for carbon capture.

The captured carbon is concentrated into a form that can be transported in a vehicle or through a pipeline to a place where it can be injected underground for long-term storage.

What is carbon removal?

Then there’s carbon removal. Instead of capturing carbon from a single, concentrated source, the objective is to remove carbon that’s already in the atmosphere. This already happens when forests are restored, for example, but there’s a push to deploy technology, too. One type directly captures it from the air, using chemicals to pull out carbon dioxide as air passes through.

For some, carbon removal is essential during a global transition to clean energy that will take years. For example, despite notable gains for electric vehicles in some countries, gas-fired cars will be operating well into the future. And some industries, like shipping and aviation, are challenging to fully decarbonize.

“We have to remove some of what’s in the atmosphere in addition to stopping the emissions,” said Jennifer Pett-Ridge, who leads the federally supported Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s carbon initiative in the United States, the world’s second-leading emitter of greenhouse gases.

How is it going?

Many experts say the technology to capture carbon and store it works, but it’s expensive, and it’s still in the early days of deployment.

There are about 40 large-scale carbon capture projects in operation around the world capturing roughly 45 million metric tons of carbon dioxide each year, according to the International Energy Agency, or IEA. That’s a tiny amount — roughly 0.1% — of the 36.8 billion metric tons emitted globally as tallied by the Global Carbon Project.

The IEA says the history of carbon capture “has largely been one of unmet expectations.” The group analyzed how the world can achieve net zero emissions, and its guide path relies heavily on lowering emissions by slashing fossil fuel use. Carbon capture is just a sliver of the solution — less than 10% — but despite its comparatively small role, its expansion is still behind schedule.

The pace of new projects is picking up, but they face significant obstacles. In the United States, there’s opposition to CO2 pipelines that move carbon to storage sites. Safety is one concern; in 2020, a CO2 pipeline in Mississippi ruptured, releasing carbon dioxide that displaced breathable air near the ground and sent dozens of people to hospitals.

The federal government is working on improving safety standards.

Who supports carbon capture?

The American Petroleum Institute says oil and gas will remain a critical energy source for decades, meaning that for the world to reduce its carbon emissions, rapidly expanding carbon capture technology is “key to cleaner energy use across the economy.” A check of most oil companies’ plans to get to net-zero emissions also finds most of them relying on carbon capture in some way.

The Biden administration wants more investment in carbon capture and removal, too, building off America’s comparatively large spending compared with the rest of the world.

But it’s an industry that needs subsidies to attract private financing. The Inflation Reduction Act makes tax benefits much more generous. Investors can get a $180-per-ton credit for removing carbon from the air and storing it underground, for example. And the Department of Energy has billions to support new projects.

“What we are talking about now is taking a technology that has been proven and has been tested but applying it much more broadly and also applying it in sectors where there is a higher cost to deploy,” said Jessie Stolark, executive director of the Carbon Capture Coalition, an industry advocacy group.

Investment is picking up. The EPA is considering dozens of applications for wells that can store carbon. And in places such as Louisiana and North Dakota, local leaders are fighting to attract projects and investment.

Who is against it?

Some environmentalists argue that fossil fuel companies are holding up carbon capture to distract from the need to quickly phase out oil, gas and coal.

“The fossil fuel industry has proven itself to be dangerous and deceptive,” said Shaye Wolf, climate science director at the Center for Biological Diversity.

There are other problems. Some projects haven’t met their carbon removal targets. A 2021 U.S. government accountability report said that of eight demonstration projects aimed at capturing and storing carbon from coal plants, just one had started operating at the time the report was published despite hundreds of millions of dollars in funding.

Opponents also note that carbon capture can serve to prolong the life of a polluting plant that would otherwise shut down sooner. That can especially hurt poorer, minority communities that have long lived near heavily polluting facilities.
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European Union negotiators clinched a deal Friday on the world’s first comprehensive artificial intelligence rules, paving the way for legal oversight of technology used in popular generative AI services such as ChatGPT that have promised to transform everyday life and spurred warnings of existential dangers to humanity. 

Negotiators from the European Parliament and the bloc’s 27 member countries overcame big differences on controversial points, including generative AI and police use of facial recognition surveillance, to sign a tentative political agreement for the Artificial Intelligence Act. 

“Deal!” tweeted European Commissioner Thierry Breton, just before midnight. “The EU becomes the very first continent to set clear rules for the use of AI.” 

The result came after marathon closed-door talks this week, with the initial session lasting 22 hours before a second round kicked off Friday morning. 

Officials were under the gun to secure a political victory for the flagship legislation but were expected to leave the door open to further talks to work out the fine print, likely to bring more backroom lobbying. 

Out front

The EU took an early lead in the global race to draw up AI guardrails when it unveiled the first draft of its rulebook in 2021. The recent boom in generative AI, however, sent European officials scrambling to update a proposal poised to serve as a blueprint for the world. 

The European Parliament will still need to vote on it early next year, but with the deal done, that’s a formality, Brando Benifei, an Italian lawmaker co-leading the body’s negotiating efforts, told The Associated Press late Friday. 

“It’s very, very good,” he said by text message after being asked if it included everything he wanted. “Obviously we had to accept some compromises but overall very good.”  

The eventual law wouldn’t fully take effect until 2025 at the earliest and threatens stiff financial penalties for violations of up to $38 million (35 million euros) or 7% of a company’s global turnover. 

Generative AI systems like OpenAI’s ChatGPT have exploded into the world’s consciousness, dazzling users with the ability to produce humanlike text, photos and songs but raising fears about the risks the rapidly developing technology poses to jobs, privacy and copyright protection, and even human life itself. 

Now, the U.S., U.K., China and global coalitions like the Group of Seven major democracies have jumped in with their own proposals to regulate AI, though they’re still catching up to Europe. 

‘A powerful example’

Strong and comprehensive regulation from the EU “can set a powerful example for many governments considering regulation,” said Anu Bradford, a Columbia Law School professor who’s an expert on EU and digital regulation. Other countries “may not copy every provision but will likely emulate many aspects of it.” 

AI companies that will have to obey the EU’s rules will also likely extend some of those obligations to markets outside the continent, she said. “After all, it is not efficient to retrain separate models for different markets,” she said. 

Others are worried that the agreement was rushed through. 

“Today’s political deal marks the beginning of important and necessary technical work on crucial details of the AI Act, which are still missing,” said Daniel Friedlaender, head of the European office of the Computer and Communications Industry Association, a tech industry lobby group. 

The AI Act was originally designed to mitigate the dangers from specific AI functions based on their level of risk, from low to unacceptable. But lawmakers pushed to expand it to foundation models, the advanced systems that underpin general purpose AI services like ChatGPT and Google’s Bard chatbot. 

Foundation models looked set to be one of the biggest sticking points for Europe. However, negotiators reached a tentative compromise early in the talks, despite opposition led by France, which called instead for self-regulation to help homegrown European generative AI companies competing with big U.S. rivals, including OpenAI’s backer Microsoft. 

Also known as large language models, these systems are trained on vast troves of written works and images scraped off the internet. They give generative AI systems the ability to create something new, unlike traditional AI, which processes data and completes tasks using predetermined rules. 

Under the deal, the most advanced foundation models that pose the biggest “systemic risks” will get extra scrutiny, including requirements to disclose more information, such as how much computing power was used to train the systems. 

Elevation of threats

Researchers have warned that these powerful foundation models, built by a handful of big tech companies, could be used to supercharge online disinformation and manipulation, cyberattacks or creation of bioweapons. 

Rights groups also caution that the lack of transparency about data used to train the models poses risks to daily life because they act as basic structures for software developers building AI-powered services. 

What became the thorniest topic was AI-powered facial recognition surveillance systems, and negotiators found a compromise after intensive bargaining. 

European lawmakers wanted a full ban on public use of facial scanning and other “remote biometric identification” systems because of privacy concerns, while governments of member countries wanted exemptions so law enforcement could use them to tackle serious crimes like child sexual exploitation or terrorist attacks. 

Civil society groups were more skeptical. 

“Whatever the victories may have been in these final negotiations, the fact remains that huge flaws will remain in this final text,” said Daniel Leufer, a senior policy analyst at the digital rights group Access Now. Along with the law enforcement exemptions, he also cited a lack of protection for AI systems used in migration and border control, and “big gaps in the bans on the most dangerous AI systems.” 
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A new optical ground station has been built by the Australian National University to help the U.S. space agency, NASA, and others explore space and safely reach Mars.

The Australian team has developed a new type of space communication using lasers.

Researchers say the system will allow them to connect with satellites and NASA-crewed missions beyond low-Earth orbit.

The project is supported by the Australian Space Agency’s Moon to Mars initiative.

The Australian National University Quantum Optical Ground Station is based at the Mount Stromlo Observatory, near Canberra.

It is a powerful telescope that will support high-speed advanced communications with satellites orbiting at distances from low-Earth orbit to the moon.

Kate Ferguson, associate director for strategic projects at the Australian National University Institute for Space, told VOA current communication systems relying on radio frequencies can be slow and cumbersome.

“I am sure some of us remember the grainy pictures that we got of the moon landing that came from the Apollo era,” Ferguson said. “So, again the current radio frequency systems, they have these much slower data rates and especially over really long distances.  For space exploration those become very slow but with optical communications we will be able to increase the rate of that communication.”

She said the new system, based on powerful lasers that are invisible to the naked eye, will transform communications in space.

“What we are aiming to do is to be able to receive high-definition video from future crewed missions. Not only will that be great for us here on Earth, seeing what is happening with the astronauts on these types of missions, but it will improve the connectivity between those missions,” she said. “And what we are doing here is optical communication, which uses laser beams to communicate and these offer much higher speeds and increased security over the current systems and this is really important for us to be getting that data down and being able to use it here on Earth.”

Scientists say the Australian-developed systems will be compatible with NASA missions.

They say the laser-based technology will improve astronauts’ ability to connect with Earth from the moon and also allow high-definition video to be sent from the moon and Mars.

NASA has said previously that astronauts could be sent on a mission to the red planet by the mid-to-late 2030s.

 
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Facebook and Instagram fail to protect underage users from exposure to child sexual abuse material and let adults solicit pornographic imagery from them, New Mexico’s attorney general alleges in a lawsuit that follows an undercover online investigation.

“Our investigation into Meta’s social media platforms demonstrates that they are not safe spaces for children but rather prime locations for predators to trade child pornography and solicit minors for sex,” Attorney General Raul Torrez said in a statement Wednesday.

The civil lawsuit filed late Tuesday against Meta Platforms Inc. in state court also names its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, as a defendant.

In addition, the suit claims Meta “harms children and teenagers through the addictive design of its platform, degrading users’ mental health, their sense of self-worth and their physical safety,” Torrez’s office said in a statement.

Those claims echo others in a lawsuit filed in late October by the attorneys general of 33 states, including California and New York, against Meta that alleges Instagram and Facebook include features deliberately designed to hook children, contributing to the youth mental health crisis and leading to depression, anxiety and eating disorders. New Mexico was not a party to that lawsuit.

Investigators in New Mexico created decoy accounts of children 14 years and younger that Torrez’s office said were served sexually explicit images even when the child expressed no interest in them. State prosecutors claim that Meta let dozens of adults find, contact and encourage children to provide sexually explicit and pornographic images.

The accounts also received recommendations to join unmoderated Facebook groups devoted to facilitating commercial sex, investigators said, adding that Meta also let its users find, share and sell “an enormous volume of child pornography.”

“Mr. Zuckerberg and other Meta executives are aware of the serious harm their products can pose to young users, and yet they have failed to make sufficient changes to their platforms that would prevent the sexual exploitation of children,” Torrez said, accusing Meta’s executives of prioritizing “engagement and ad revenue over the safety of the most vulnerable members of our society.”

Meta, based in Menlo Park, California, did not directly respond to the New Mexico lawsuit’s allegations, but said it works hard to protect young users with a serious commitment of resources.

“We use sophisticated technology, hire child safety experts, report content to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and share information and tools with other companies and law enforcement, including state attorneys general, to help root out predators,” the company said. “In one month alone, we disabled more than half a million accounts for violating our child safety policies.”

Company spokesman Andy Stone pointed to a company report detailing the millions of tips Facebook and Instagram sent to the National Center in the third quarter of 2023 — including 48,000 involving inappropriate interactions that could include an adult soliciting child sexual abuse material directly from a minor or attempting to meet with one in person.

Critics, including former employees, have long complained that Meta’s largely automated content moderation systems are ill-equipped to identify and adequately eliminate abusive behavior on its platforms.
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Spotify says it is planning to lay off 17% of its global workforce, amounting to around 1,500 employees, following layoffs earlier this year of 600 people in January and an additional 200 in June.

The music streaming giant is continuing its effort to cut costs and work toward becoming profitable, said Spotify CEO Daniel Ek in a prepared statement.

“By most metrics, we were more productive but less efficient,” he said. “We need to be both.”

The layoffs come following a rare quarterly net profit of about $70.3 million in October. The company has never seen a full year net profit.

“I realize that for many, a reduction of this size will feel surprisingly large given the recent positive earnings report and our performance,” Ek said. “We debated making smaller reductions throughout 2024 and 2025. Yet, considering the gap between our financial goal … and our current operational costs, I decided that a substantial action to right size our costs was the best option to accomplish our objectives.”

With the new layoffs, the company now expects to see a fourth quarter loss between $100 million to $117 million after previously anticipating a $40 million profit.

A majority of the charges will go toward severance for laid off employees, who will get about five months’ pay, vacation pay and health care coverage for the severance period.

Spotify did not clearly state when the layoffs would become financially beneficial but said that they would “generate meaningful operating efficiencies going forward.”

Spotify is following many companies in the tech industry trying to cut costs after growth in the industry slowed following a surge during the COVID pandemic.

Tech giants including Meta, Microsoft, Amazon and Google parent company, Alphabet, all have plans to cut 10,000 or more people this year.

Spotify began informing affected employees on Monday.

Some information in this report came from Reuters, The Associated Press and Agence France-Presse.
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In early November, Nigeria launched its first interconnected solar hybrid mini grid in Nasarawa State to make electricity more reliable, renewable and accessible. Gibson Emeka has this story from Abuja, Nigeria, Grace Oyenubi narrates.
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A small western Pennsylvania water authority was just one of many organizations breached in the United States by Iran-affiliated hackers who targeted a specific industrial control device because it is Israeli-made, U.S. and Israeli authorities say.

“The victims span multiple U.S. states,” the FBI, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, known as CISA, as well as Israel’s National Cyber Directorate said in an advisory emailed to The Associated Press late Friday.

They did not say how many organizations were hacked or otherwise describe them.

Matthew Mottes, the chairman of the Municipal Water Authority of Aliquippa, which discovered it had been hacked on Nov. 25, said Thursday that federal officials had told him the same group also breached four other utilities and an aquarium.

Cybersecurity experts say that while there is no evidence of Iranian involvement in the Oct. 7 attack into Israel by Hamas that triggered the war in Gaza, they expected state-backed Iranian hackers and pro-Palestinian hacktivists to step up cyberattacks on Israeli and its allies in its aftermath. And that has happened.

The multiagency advisory explained what CISA had not when it confirmed the Pennsylvania hack Wednesday — that other industries outside water and water-treatment facilities use the same equipment — Vision Series programmable logic controllers made by Unitronics — and were also potentially vulnerable.

Those industries include “energy, food and beverage manufacturing and healthcare,” the advisory says. The devices regulate processes including pressure, temperature and fluid flow.

The Aliquippa hack promoted workers to temporarily halt pumping in a remote station that regulates water pressure for two nearby towns, leading crews to switch to manual operation. The hackers left a digital calling card on the compromised device saying all Israeli-made equipment is “a legal target.”

The multiagency advisory said it was not known if the hackers had tried to penetrate deeper into breached networks.

The advisory says the hackers, who call themselves “Cyber Av3ngers,” are affiliated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, which the U.S. designated as a foreign terrorist organization in 2019.

The group targeted the Unitronics devices at least since Nov. 22, it said.

An online search Saturday with the Shodan service identified more than 200 such internet-connected devices in the U.S. and more than 1,700 globally.

The advisory notes that Unitronics devices ship with a default password, a practice experts discourage as it makes them more vulnerable to hacking. Best practices call for devices to require a unique password to be created out of the box. It says the hackers likely accessed affected devices by “exploiting cybersecurity weaknesses, including poor password security and exposure to the internet.”

In response to the Aliquippa hack, three Pennsylvania congressmen asked the U.S. Justice Department in a letter to investigate. Americans must know their drinking water and other basic infrastructure is safe from “nation-state adversaries and terrorist organizations,” U.S. Sens. John Fetterman and Bob Casey and U.S. Rep. Chris Deluzio said.

Cyber Av3ngers claimed in an Oct. 30 social media post to have hacked 10 water treatment stations in Israel, though it is not clear if they shut down any equipment.

Unitronics has not responded to the AP queries about the hacks.

The attack came less than a month after a federal appeals court decision prompted the EPA to rescind a rule that would have obliged U.S public water systems to include cybersecurity testing in their regular federally mandated audits. The rollback was triggered by a federal appeals court decision in a case brought by Missouri, Arkansas and Iowa, and joined by a water utility trade group.

The Biden administration has been trying to shore up cybersecurity of critical infrastructure — more than 80% of which is privately owned — and has imposed regulations on sectors including electric utilities, gas pipelines and nuclear facilities. But many experts complain that too many vital industries are permitted to self-regulate.
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The U.S. proposed new guidelines Friday spelling out which electric vehicles will be eligible for tax credits, ruling out those that contain batteries or minerals sourced from China and other nations that have fallen out of favor with the U.S.

The restrictions dictate which clean energy vehicles will qualify for a subsidy of up to $7,500 under President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, a federal law promoting sustainable, domestic energy production.

Only about 20 out of the more than 100 electric vehicles on the U.S. market qualify for a tax credit as it is. That number may be further reduced when this regulation goes into effect.

If a clean energy battery went through an assembly line owned by any “foreign entity of concern,” the car it will go into would be immediately disqualified from earning its owner any tax breaks from the U.S. government, starting in 2024.

The new rules target firms incorporated or headquartered in China, Russia, North Korea and Iran, among others, as well as companies where 25% or more of the equity interest or board seats are controlled by those countries.

From 2025 onward, electric vehicles made with critical minerals, such as lithium, nickel and cobalt, mined or processed by any “foreign entity of concern” will also be ineligible for subsidies.

The rules will be open to public feedback from automotive leaders for several weeks and are subject to change depending on industry recommendations.

Some information for this report came from Agence France-Presse. 
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US lawmakers warned Thursday that the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to spread disinformation will only increase ahead of the 2024 elections in the United States. As VOA’s Congressional Correspondent Katherine Gypson reports, social media giant TikTok is lawmakers’ top concern.
Camera: Saqib Ui Islam
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The United States plans to sign a memorandum of understanding to cooperate with South Korea and Japan in the fight against false propaganda and disinformation.

It will be the first such agreement that Washington signs with its Asian allies, and it comes as U.S. officials and lawmakers accuse the People’s Republic of China of conducting “deceptive online campaigns” targeting the United States and other countries. Chinese officials have rejected the accusation.

Liz Allen, the U.S. undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, is traveling to Asia this week. Allen will be sealing the agreement with South Korea and Japan on countering disinformation, according to U.S. and diplomatic sources.

U.S. President Joe Biden, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida have agreed to find ways to coordinate efforts to counter disinformation, after the three leaders held talks during their first trilateral summit at Camp David in August.

“President Yoon mentioned the threat from false propaganda and disinformation in his address to the joint session of U.S. Congress in April. In this regard, we are now discussing the possible follow-up measures with the U.S.,” an official from the South Korean Embassy told Voice of America on Thursday.

In a statement on Thursday, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul condemned the “increasingly deceptive online campaigns targeting the U.S. and other countries” by the Chinese Communist Party.

“The CCP has made clear it will use every tactic to spread its malign intent,” the Republican congressman said.

The South Korean government has identified 38 suspected fake Korean-language news websites that it believes are operated by Chinese companies. For example, in November, South Korea’s National Intelligence Service said two Chinese public relations companies, Haimai and Haixun, were allegedly creating such websites, according to Seoul-based Yonhap News Agency.

The State Department said Allen, while in Tokyo, will hold bilateral discussions with Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs officials that include a focus on countering malign foreign influence.

In a report issued in September, the State Department’s Global Engagement Center accused the Chinese government of using a combination of tactics in a bid to create a world in which Beijing, either explicitly or implicitly, controls the flow of critical information. The U.S. has warned that China is pouring billions of dollars into efforts to reshape the global information environment and, eventually, bend the will of multiple nations to Beijing’s advantage.

The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs has pushed back, saying the report by U.S. State Department’s Global Engagement Center “misrepresents facts and truth.” A spokesperson from the Chinese Foreign Ministry called GEC the command center of “perception warfare.”

James Rubin, special envoy for the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, has said that Washington is working with allies to detect and counter misinformation and disinformation around the world.

In May, the U.S. signed a memorandum of understanding with North Macedonia, and in September, another with Bulgaria, both aimed at enhancing cooperation in countering foreign information manipulation.
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Vietnam, with the world’s second-largest reserves of the rare earths used in such modern devices as electric vehicle batteries and smart phone screens, is intensifying mining of the critical minerals. The industry, though, faces high processing costs, environmental concerns, and the takedown of industry leaders for illegal mining and mineral sales.

Vietnam’s rare earth resources are second only to those of China, which has held a tight monopoly since the 1980s. With Chinese relations with the West becoming more volatile, many countries are looking for other sources for the elements.

“China produces about 60% of the world’s rare earths but what they process is over 90%,” Louis O’Connor, CEO of Strategic Metals Invest, an Irish investment firm, told VOA.

“It was not a good idea to allow one country to dominate critical raw materials that are critical to all nations’ economic prosperity and increasingly military capability,” he said.

O’Connor added that while China has the world’s majority of raw materials, its dominance over technical expertise in the complex and costly process of rare earth refining is even greater. China has 39 metallurgy universities and approximately 200 metallurgists graduate weekly in the country, he said.

“The ability to go from having the potential to end product — that’s the most challenging, complicated, and expensive part,” O’Connor said. “For Vietnam, even if they have the deposits, what they don’t have is the human capital, or the engineering expertise.”

Vietnam increased rare earth mining tenfold with its output hitting 4,300 tons last year, compared to 400 tons in 2021.  according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Vietnam said in July it plans to process 2 million tons of rare earth ores by 2030 and produce 60,000 tons of rare earth oxides annually starting in 2030. This year, China’s mining quota is set at 240,000 tons to meet the demand for the electric vehicle industry, according to Chinese government data.

The United States and other countries are interested in Vietnam increasing its production of rare earths.

“The U.S. wants Vietnam to become a more important supplier and perhaps replace China, if possible, because of the risk that the U.S. may face in relying on rare earth supplies from China,” Le Hong Hiep, senior fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore told VOA.

“Not only the U.S., but also other partners like Korea, Japan, and Australia also are working with Vietnam to develop the rare earth industry,” he said.

South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol signed a memorandum of understanding in Vietnam in June to establish a joint supply chain center for rare earth minerals.

“We reached an agreement that there is more potential to develop rare earths together, as they are abundant in Vietnam,” Yoon said in a June 23 statement with Vietnam’s president Vo Van Thuong.

The United States signed such a memorandum on cooperation in the rare earths sector during President Joe Biden’s visit to Hanoi on September 9.

“We see Vietnam as a potential critical nexus in global supply chains when it comes to critical minerals and rare earth elements,” Marc Knapper, U.S. ambassador to Vietnam, said on September 13 during a digital press briefing. “We certainly want to work together to ensure that Vietnam is able to take advantage of its rich resources in a way that’s also sustainable.”

Scandal

However, a handful of Vietnam’s key rare earth enterprises have become entangled in scandal. On October 20, police arrested six individuals for mining and tax violations.

Police arrested Doan Van Huan, chairman of the Hanoi-based Thai Duong Group that operates a mine in Yen Bai province, and its chief accountant, Nguyen Van Chinh, for violating regulations on the exploration and exploitation of natural resources and accounting violations, the Public Security Ministry said. The two were accused of making $25.5 million from the illegal sale of rare earth ore and iron ore. Police raided 21 excavation and trading sites in Yen Bai province and three other locations. Authorities seized an estimated 13,700 tons of rare earth and more than 1,400 tons of iron ores, according to local publication VnExpress.

Although government statements did not state what made Thai Duong’s rare earth sales illegal, a source told Reuters raw Yen Bai mine ore had been exported to China to avoid high domestic refining costs, in violation of Vietnamese rules.

The chairman, Luu Anh Tuan, and accountant, Nguyen Thi Hien, of the country’s primary rare earth refining company, Vietnam Rare Earth JSC, were also arrested for violating accounting regulations in trading rare earth with Thai Duong Group. Dang Tran Chi, director of Hop Thanh Phat, and his accountant Pham Thi Ha were arrested on the same charge.

Looking at corruption in Vietnam’s rare earth industry will be “top of the list” for future investors, O’Connor said.

“Corruption levels would have to be looked at,” he said. “If you’re buying a metal that’s going to need to perform in a jet engine, for example or a rocket … they have to be sure of the purity levels. The chain of custody of these, it’s more important really than gold.”

Vietnam committed to industry

Hanoi is committed to developing the rare earths industry even though economic gains are limited by environmental and production costs, Hiep told VOA.

“Vietnam is now interested in promoting this industry mainly because of the strategic significance,” Hiep told VOA. “If you can grow this industry and become a reliable supplier of rare earth products for the U.S. and its allies, Vietnam’s strategic position will be enhanced greatly.”

“Whether that will be successful, we have to wait and see,” he added.

There are also environmental concerns for the growing industry, particularly as a crackdown on Vietnam’s environmental organizations and civil society leaves little room for public speech.

“The biggest challenge is going to be how do you handle the waste process from the mining,” said Courtney Weatherby, deputy director of the Southeast Asia Program at Washington’s Stimson Center told VOA.

“Ensuring that development happens in a sustainable way takes a lot of different actors,” she said.

But Duy Hoang, executive director of unsanctioned political party Viet Tan, said the room for outside actors to express concern over environmental and labor practices is narrowing.

“What we’re seeing is sort of a shrinking space for civil society to speak out and a number of the leading environmental activists are now in jail. We don’t have their voices which are very needed and I think there may be self-censorship going on by other activists,” he said. “There has to be accountability.”
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American leadership is essential in establishing norms and laws to “determine how we both glean the promise and manage the peril” of emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and digital economic and social platforms used to connect billions of people around the world, a White House adviser told VOA.

The Biden administration has rolled out a number of initiatives on the topic — most recently, an executive order that aims to set new AI safety and security standards. That order relies on cooperation from private developers and other countries, “because the attackers are in one set of countries, the infrastructure is in another and the victims are global,” said Anne Neuberger, deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging technology at the National Security Council.

Neuberger sat down with VOA White House Correspondent Anita Powell to explain these complex, compelling technologies and how she thinks they have exposed the worst but also the best in humanity.

The following has been edited for length and clarity.

VOA: Thank you so much for sitting down with VOA today. Can you walk us through the concrete outcomes of the recent meeting between President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping in the areas you cover — cybersecurity, AI and the digital economy?

Anne Neuberger, White House deputy national security adviser: Of course, strategic technologies are very important to both of our countries’ growth and national security — and we’re global players on a global stage. The most important part of the discussion was two leaders coming together to say: While we are in competition, we’re committed to working together on areas where we can collaborate – areas like climate change, like discussions of what are the rules for artificial intelligence.

VOA: Would you assess that the meeting made any progress, especially on AI regulation?

Neuberger: Certainly very good discussions related to an agreement for the countries to sit down and establish a working group on AI [about] appropriate guardrails and guidelines in this area.

VOA: I’m going to stick with AI and the administration’s recent moves, like the AI Bill of Rights and also the attempt to set some norms at the recent London summit on AI. Why does the administration think U.S. leadership matters so much here?

Neuberger: For two reasons. First, the United States is a committed democracy and AI is a major technology that brings both promise and peril. It is up to us to determine how we both glean the promise and manage the peril. President Biden has made that clear in his game-changing executive order that, as a country, we must manage the perils in order to glean the promise.

VOA: Speaking of the perils of AI, what is the administration doing to prevent the malicious use of generative AI in both conflicts and contests? I’m talking about conflicts like Israel and Ukraine, but also contests like the upcoming elections in Congo, in Taiwan and here in the United States.

Neuberger: We’ve seen new AI models that generate very realistic videos, very realistic images. In terms of generative AI related to elections, I want to lift up one of the voluntary commitments that the president negotiated, which was around watermarking: having a visible and potentially invisible mark on an AI-generated image or video that notes that this is AI-generated, to alert a viewer. An invisible mark could be used so that, even if there are attempts to remove this mark, the platforms themselves can still be able to portray that message and help educate individuals. This is still an area of evolving technology. It’s getting better and better. But companies made commitments to start marking content that they generate. And I know a number of social media platforms are also making commitments to ensure that they display messages to help consumers who see such content know that it is generated by artificial intelligence.

VOA: Moving on to cybersecurity and malign actors like North Korea and Russia, what is the administration doing to curb their work in this area?

Neuberger: We see North Korea really using cyberattacks as a way to get money because they’re such a heavily sanctioned regime. So North Korea moved from targeting banks to targeting … cryptocurrency infrastructure around the world. And the White House has had a focused effort to bring together all elements we have to fight that with Treasury Department designations.

There’ll be further designations coming up for the cryptocurrency mixers that launder funds stolen from those cryptocurrency infrastructures. We also have been working with the industry to press them to improve the cybersecurity of their systems as well as law enforcement. U.S. law enforcement has been cooperating with partners around the world to take down that server infrastructure and to arrest the individuals who are responsible for some of this activity.

VOA: Tell us a little bit about the counter-ransomware initiative you’re working on.

Neuberger: Absolutely. Essentially, criminal groups, many of which are based in Russia with infrastructure operating from around the world, are locking systems … in order to request that the system owners pay ransom. In the United States alone in the last two years, $2.3 billion was paid in ransom. It’s a fundamentally transnational fight. … What we’ve done is assemble 48 countries, Interpol [and] the European Union to take this on together, because we know that the attackers are in one set of countries, the infrastructure is in another, and the victims are global. As the White House built this initiative, we ensure that the leadership is diverse.

So, for example, the leaders of the effort to build capacity around the world are Nigeria and Germany — intentionally, a country from Africa and a country from Europe, because their needs are different. And we wanted to ensure that as we’re helping countries build the capacity to fight this, we’re sensitive to the different needs of a country like Nigeria, like Rwanda, like South Africa, like Indonesia. Similarly, there’s an effort focused on exercising information, sharing information together.

You asked about the key deliverables from this most recent meeting. I’ll note three big ones. First, we launched a website and a system where countries can collaborate when they’re fighting a ransomware attack, where they can ask for help [or] learn from others who fought a similar attack. Second, we made the first ever joint policy statement — a big deal — 48 countries committing that countries themselves will not pay ransoms, because we know this is a financially driven problem. And third, the United States committed that we would be sharing bad wallets [that] criminals are using to move money around the world so other countries can help stop that money as it moves as well. So that’s an example of three of the many commitments that came out of the recent meeting.

VOA: Let’s talk about the Global South, which has pioneered development of really interesting digital economic technologies like Kenya’s M-PESA, which was rolled out in, like, 2007. Now the U.S. has Venmo, which is modeled on that. How is the U.S. learning from the developing world in the development of these projects and also the perils of these products?

Neuberger: M-PESA is a fantastic example of the promise of digital tech. Essentially, Kenya took the fact that they had a telecom infrastructure, and built their banking infrastructure riding on that, so they leapt ahead to enable people across the country to do transactions online. When you look at Ukraine in the context of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Ukraine quickly moved their government online, really building on lessons learned from Estonia, to enable Ukrainians — many who are in Poland and Hungary — to continue to engage with their government in a digital way.

The U.S. Agency for International Development is tremendously proud of that Ukrainian project and is using it as a model as we look to other countries around the world. So we’re learning a lot from the creativity and innovation; what we want to bring to that is American development, skill and aid, and also plugging in American tech companies who can accelerate the rollout of these projects in countries around the world, because we still believe in the promise of digital. But you mentioned the peril, and that’s where cybersecurity comes in.

VOA: This lines us up perfectly for my final question, about the promise and the peril. In the digital world, people can hide behind anonymity and say and do awful things using tools that were meant to improve the world. How do you keep your faith in humanity?

Neuberger: It’s a tremendously important question. It’s one that’s personally important to me. My great-grandparents lost their lives in Nazi death camps. And those members of my family who survived — some survived through the horrors of the camp, some managed to hide out under false identities. And I often think that the promise of digital has also made our identities very evident. Sometimes when I’m just browsing Amazon online, and it recommends a set of books, I think to myself: I wonder how I’d hide if what happened to my grandparents came for me. So as a result, I think that even as we engage with these technologies, we have to ensure that vulnerable populations are protected.

So, the president’s working with AI companies to say companies have an obligation to protect vulnerable populations online, to ensure that we’re using AI to detect where there’s bullying online, where there’s hate speech that goes against common practices that needs to be addressed; where there are AI-generated images related to children or women or other vulnerable populations, that we use AI to find them and remove them; and certainly use law enforcement and the power of law enforcement partnerships around the world to deter that as well. Freedom of speech is a part of free societies. Freedom from harm needs to be a fight we take on together.

VOA: Thank you so much for speaking to our audience.

Neuberger: Thank you.
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The United States on Wednesday imposed sanctions on a virtual currency mixer the Treasury Department said has processed millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency from major heists carried out by North Korea-linked hackers.

The U.S. Treasury Department in a statement said virtual currency mixer Sinbad, hit with sanctions on Wednesday, processed millions of dollars worth of virtual currency from heists carried out by the North Korea-linked Lazarus Group, including the Axie Infinity and Horizon Bride heists of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Lazarus, which has been sanctioned by the U.S., has been accused of carrying out some of the largest virtual currency heists to date. In March 2022, for example, they allegedly stole about $620 million in virtual currency from a blockchain project linked to the online game Axie Infinity.

“Mixing services that enable criminal actors, such as the Lazarus Group, to launder stolen assets will face serious consequences,” Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo said in the statement on Wednesday.

“The Treasury Department and its U.S. government partners stand ready to deploy all tools at their disposal to prevent virtual currency mixers, like Sinbad, from facilitating illicit activities.”

A virtual currency mixer is a software tool that pools and scrambles cryptocurrencies from thousands of addresses.

Sinbad is believed by some experts in the industry to be a successor to the Blender mixer, which the U.S. hit with sanctions last year over accusations it was being used by North Korea.

The Treasury said Sinbad is also used by cybercriminals to obscure transactions linked to activities such as sanctions evasion, drug trafficking and the purchase of child sexual abuse materials, among other malign activities. 

Wednesday’s action freezes any U.S. assets of Sinbad and generally bars Americans from dealing with it. Those that engage in certain transactions with the mixer also risk being hit with sanctions. 
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