The United Nations has begun an effort to help the world manage the risks and benefits of artificial intelligence.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Thursday launched a 39-member advisory body of tech company executives, government officials and academics from countries spanning six continents.

The panel aims to issue preliminary recommendations on AI governance by the end of the year and finalize them before the U.N. Summit of the Future next September.

“The transformative potential of AI for good is difficult even to grasp,” Guterres said. He pointed to possible uses including predicting crises, improving public health and education, and tackling the climate crisis.

However, he cautioned, “it is already clear that the malicious use of AI could undermine trust in institutions, weaken social cohesion and threaten democracy itself.”

Widespread concern about the risks associated with AI has grown since tech company OpenAI launched ChatGPT last year. Its ease of use has raised concern that the tool could replace writing tasks that previously only humans could perform.

With many calling for regulation of AI, researchers and lawmakers have stressed the need for global cooperation on the matter.

The U.N.’s new body on AI will hold its first meeting Friday.

Some information for this report came from Reuters. 
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Thirty-three U.S. states are suing Meta Platforms Inc., accusing it of damaging young people’s mental health through the addictive nature of their social media platforms.

The suit filed Tuesday in federal court in Oakland, California, alleges Meta knowingly installed addictive features on its social media platforms, Instagram and Facebook, and has collected data on children younger than 13, without their parents’ consent, violating federal law.

“Research has shown that young people’s use of Meta’s social media platforms is associated with depression, anxiety, insomnia, interference with education and daily life, and many other negative outcomes,” the complaint says.

The filing comes after Meta’s own research in 2021 found that the company was aware of the damage Instagram can do to teenagers, especially girls.

In Meta’s 2021 study, 13.5% of teen girls said Instagram makes thoughts of suicide worse and 17% of teen girls said it makes eating disorders worse.

Meta responded to the lawsuit by saying it has “already introduced over 30 tools to support teens and their families.”

“We’re disappointed that instead of working productively with companies across the industry to create clear, age-appropriate standards for the many apps teens use, the attorneys general have chosen this path,” the company added.

Meta is one of many social media companies facing criticism and legal action, with lawsuits also filed against ByteDance’s TikTok and Google’s YouTube.

Measures to protect children on social media exist, but they are easily circumvented, such as a federal law that bans kids under 13 from setting up accounts.

The dangers of social media for children have been highlighted by U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy, who said the effects of social media require “immediate action to protect kids now.”

In addition to the 33 states suing, nine more state attorneys general are expected to join and file similar lawsuits.

Some information in this report came from The Associated Press and Reuters. 
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Phoenix, Arizona, in America’s Southwest, is the site of a Taiwanese semiconductor chip making facility. One part of President Joe Biden’s cornerstone agenda is to rely less on manufacturing from overseas and boost domestic production of chips that run everything from phones to cars. Many Taiwanese workers who moved to the U.S. to work at the facility — face the challenges of living in a new land. VOA’s Stella Hsu, Enming Liu and Elizabeth Lee have the story.
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Artificial intelligence companies and governments should allocate at least one third of their AI research and development funding to ensuring the safety and ethical use of the systems, top AI researchers said in a paper on Tuesday. 

The paper, issued a week before the international AI Safety Summit in London, lists measures that governments and companies should take to address AI risks. 

“Governments should also mandate that companies are legally liable for harms from their frontier AI systems that can be reasonably foreseen and prevented,” according to the paper written by three Turing Award winners, a Nobel laureate, and more than a dozen top AI academics. 

Currently there are no broad-based regulations focusing on AI safety, and the first set of legislation by the European Union is yet to become law as lawmakers are yet to agree on several issues.

“Recent state of the art AI models are too powerful, and too significant, to let them develop without democratic oversight,” said Yoshua Bengio, one of the three people known as the godfather of AI.

“It [investments in AI safety] needs to happen fast, because AI is progressing much faster than the precautions taken,” he said.

Authors include Geoffrey Hinton, Andrew Yao, Daniel Kahneman, Dawn Song and Yuval Noah Harari.

Since the launch of OpenAI’s generative AI models, top academics and prominent CEOs such as Elon Musk have warned about the risks on AI, including calling for a six-month pause in developing powerful AI systems.

Some companies have countered this, saying they will face high compliance costs and disproportionate liability risks.

“Companies will complain that it’s too hard to satisfy regulations — that ‘regulation stifles innovation’ — that’s ridiculous,” said British computer scientist Stuart Russell.

“There are more regulations on sandwich shops than there are on AI companies.” 
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Kenyan developers have designed a mobile phone application that police say is helping to safeguard smartphones from theft, recover stolen cell phones and prevent loss of data. Victoria Amunga reports from Nairobi. Camera: Jimmy Makhulo
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India successfully carried out Saturday the first of a series of key test flights after overcoming a technical glitch ahead of its planned mission to take astronauts into space by 2025, the space agency said.

The test involved launching a module to outer space and bringing it back to earth to test the spacecraft’s crew escape system, said the Indian Space Research Organization chief S. Somanath, and was being recovered after its touchdown in the Bay of Bengal.

The launch was delayed by 45 minutes in the morning because of weather conditions. The attempt was again deferred by more than an hour because of an issue with the engine, and the ground computer put the module’s liftoff on hold, said Somanath.

The glitch caused by a monitoring anomaly in the system was rectified and the test was carried out successfully 75 minutes later from the Sriharikota satellite launching station in southern India, Somanath told reporters.

It would pave the way for other unmanned missions, including sending a robot into space next year.

In September, India successfully launched its first space mission to study the sun, less than two weeks after a successful uncrewed landing near the south pole region of the moon.

After a failed attempt to land on the moon in 2019, India in September joined the United States, the Soviet Union and China as only the fourth country to achieve the milestone.

The successful mission showcased India’s rising standing as a technology and space powerhouse and dovetails with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s desire to project an image of an ascendant country asserting its place among the global elite.

Signaling a roadmap for India’s future space ambitions, Modi earlier this week announced that India’s space agency will set up an Indian-crafted space station by 2035 and land an Indian astronaut on the moon by 2040.

Active since the 1960s, India has launched satellites for itself and other countries, and successfully put one in orbit around Mars in 2014. India is planning its first mission to the International Space Station next year in collaboration with the United States.
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The Philippine defense chief has ordered all defense personnel and the 163,000-member military to refrain from using digital applications that harness artificial intelligence to generate personal portraits, saying they could pose security risks.

Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro Jr. issued the order in a Saturday memorandum, as Philippine forces have been working to weaken decades-old communist and Muslim insurgencies and defend territorial interests in the disputed South China Sea.

The Department of National Defense on Friday confirmed the authenticity of the memo, which has been circulating online in recent days, but did not provide other details, including what prompted Teodoro to issue the prohibition.

Teodoro specifically warned against the use of a digital app that requires users to submit at least 10 pictures of themselves and then harnesses AI to create “a digital person that mimics how a real individual speaks and moves.” Such apps pose “significant privacy and security risks,” he said.

“This seemingly harmless and amusing AI-powered application can be maliciously used to create fake profiles that can lead to identity theft, social engineering, phishing attacks and other malicious activities,” Teodoro said. “There has already been a report of such a case.”

Teodoro ordered all defense and military personnel “to refrain from using AI photo generator applications and practice vigilance in sharing information online” and said their actions should adhere to the Philippines Defense Department’s values and policies.
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After the Hamas attack on Israel, the Israeli Embassy in Beijing began posting on China’s social media platform Weibo. The online effort to gain popular support appears to be backfiring as comments revile the Jewish state, applaud Hamas and praise Adolf Hitler.

The embassy’s account, which has 24 million followers, shows almost 100 posts since the Oct. 7 attack. Some are disturbing, such as an image of a baby’s corpse burnt in the attack. Others suggest Israeli resilience, such as the story of one person who was wounded at the Nova Festival but rescued several other music fans after the attack.

The comment areas have been flooded with hate speech such as “Heroic Hamas, good job!” and “Hitler was wise” referring to the German leader who orchestrated the deaths of 6 million Jews before and during World War II. Many people changed their Weibo avatars to the Israeli flag with a Nazi swastika in the middle.

Occasionally, someone expresses support for Israel and accuses Hamas of being a terrorist group. This triggers strong reactions from other netizens, such as “Only dead Israelis are good Israelis” and “the United States supports Israel, and the friend of the enemy is the enemy.”

Similar commentary has flooded sites elsewhere on China’s heavily censored internet.

VOA Mandarin could not determine how many of the Weibo accounts posting to the Israeli Embassy account belong to people who work for the Chinese government.

The Israeli Embassy in China did not respond to interview requests from VOA Mandarin.

Eric Liu, a former Weibo moderator who is now editor of China Digital Times, told VOA Mandarin the Israeli Embassy “has received more comments recently, which are very straightforwardly hateful, with antisemitic content. They probably have taken the initiative to contain it.”

Liu believes that because the antisemitic remarks remain online, that shows the Chinese government is comfortable with them. China has long backed the Palestinian cause but more recently it has also boosted ties with Israel as it seeks a larger role in trade, technology and diplomacy.

“It’s more of a voice influenced by public opinion,” he said. “Relatively speaking, it is an extreme voice. Moderate voices cannot be heard. Most of the participants are habitual offenders who hate others. But they are also spontaneous, or rather, they are spontaneous under the guidance” of the government censors.

Gu Guoping, a retired Shanghai teacher and human rights citizen-journalist, told VOA Mandarin, “I don’t go to Weibo, WeChat, or QQ. These are all anti-human brainwashing platforms controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. Due to the CCP’s long-term brainwashing and indoctrination of ordinary people, as well as internet censorship, many Weibo users … [confuse] right and wrong.”

“They don’t know Israel at all. The Israeli nation is an amazing, great, humane and civilized nation,” said Gu, who emphasized that Hamas killed innocent people in Israel first, and Israel’s counterattack was legitimate self-defense.

Liu said that Weibo moderators usually must delete hateful comments toward foreign embassies in China. However, they may receive instructions from the Cyberspace Administration of China and the State Council Information Office for major incidents, and different standards may be applied.

VOA Mandarin contacted the Chinese Embassy in Washington, Cyberspace Administration of China and the State Council Information Office for comment but did not receive a reply.

“The government’s opinion has been very, very clear, which is why the online public opinion has such an obvious tendency,” he said. “It must be the all-round propaganda machine that led the public opinion to be like this.”

While calling for a cease-fire in the Israel-Gaza conflict, Chinese officials have refused to condemn Hamas by name. Some observers say Beijing is exploiting the Israel-Hamas war to diminish U.S. influence.

On Saturday, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi condemned Israel for going “beyond the scope of self-defense” and called for it to “cease its collective punishment of the people of Gaza.”

When the Iranian Embassy in China posted comments by the Iranian president accusing the United States and Israel of causing the deadly explosion at the Ahli Arab Hospital, Chinese netizens posted their support.

U.S. President Joe Biden said during his visit to Tel Aviv on October 18 that the “intel” provided by his team regarding the hospital attack exonerated Israel. Israel said the militant group Islamic Jihad caused the blast that killed at least 100 people. The militant group that often works with Hamas has denied responsibility. Palestinian officials and several Arab leaders accuse Israel of hitting the hospital amid its ongoing airstrikes in Gaza.

The Weibo accounts of other foreign embassies and diplomats that have posted support for Israel have also been targeted by Chinese netizens. When the Swiss ambassador to China, Jürg Burri, posted on Oct. 13, “I send my deepest condolences to the victims and their families in the terrorist attacks in Gaza,” he was criticized for “pseudo-neutrality.”

“I don’t even want to wear a Swiss watch anymore! So angry,” said one netizen.

Liu believes the netizens’ support for Gaza will change.

“It’s not like that they stand with Palestine,” he said. “Maybe they will hate Palestine tomorrow because they believe in Islam. [The posters] are talking in general terms and do not care about the life and death of Palestine. Hatred of Israelis and Jews is the core.”
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The EU announced probes Thursday into Facebook owner Meta and TikTok, seeking more details on the measures they have taken to stop the spread of “illegal content and disinformation” after the Hamas attack on Israel.

The European Commission said it had sent formal requests for information to Meta and TikTok respectively in what is a first procedure launched under the EU’s new law on digital content.

The EU launched a similar probe into billionaire mogul Elon Musk’s social media platform X, formerly Twitter, last week.

The commission said the request to Meta related “to the dissemination and amplification of illegal content and disinformation” around the Hamas-Israel conflict.

In a separate statement, it said it wanted to know more about TikTok’s efforts against “the spreading of terrorist and violent content and hate speech”.

The EU’s executive arm added that it wanted more information from Meta on its “mitigation measures to protect the integrity of elections”.

Meta and TikTok have until October 25 to respond, with a deadline of November 8 for less urgent aspects of the demand for information.

The commission said it also sought more details about how TikTok was complying with rules on protecting minors online.

The European Union has built a powerful armory to challenge the power of big tech with its landmark Digital Services Act (DSA) and a sister law, the Digital Markets Act, that hits internet giants with tough new curbs on how they do business.

The EU’s fight against disinformation has intensified since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine last year and Russian attempts to sway European public opinion.

The issue has gained further urgency after Hamas’ assault on October 7 on Israel and the aftermath which sparked a wave of violent images that flooded the platforms.

The DSA came into effect for “very large” platforms, including Meta and TikTok, that have more than 45 million monthly European users in August.

The DSA bans illegal online content under threat of fines running as high as six percent of a company’s global turnover.

The EU’s top tech enforcer, Thierry Breton, sent warning letters to tech CEOs including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, TikTok’s Shou Zi Chew and Sundar Pichai of YouTube owner Alphabet.

Growing EU fears

Breton, EU internal market commissioner, told the executives to crack down on illegal content following Hamas’ attack.

Meta said last week that it was putting special resources towards cracking down on illegal and problematic content related to the Hamas-Israel conflict.

On Wednesday, Breton expressed his fears over the impact of disinformation on the EU.

“The widespread dissemination of illegal content and disinformation… carries a clear risk of stigmatization of certain communities, destabilization of our democratic structures, not to mention the exposure of our children to violent content,” he said.

AFP fact-checkers have found several posts on Facebook, TikTok and X promoting a fake White House document purporting to allocate $8 billion in military assistance to Israel.

And several platforms have had users passing off material from other conflicts, or even from video games, as footage from Israel or Gaza.

Since the EU’s tougher action on digital behemoths, some companies, including Meta, are exploring whether to offer a paid-for version of their services in the European Union.
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A reedy pipe and a high-pitched trill duet against the backdrop of a low-pitched insect drone. Their symphony is the sound of a forest and is monitored by scientists to gauge biodiversity.

The recording from the forest in Ecuador is part of new research looking at how artificial intelligence could track animal life in recovering habitats.

When scientists want to measure reforestation, they can survey large tracts of land with tools like satellite and lidar.

But determining how fast and abundantly wildlife is returning to an area presents a more difficult challenge — sometimes requiring an expert to sift through sound recordings and pick out animal calls.

Jorg Muller, a professor and field ornithologist at University of Wurzburg Biocenter, wondered if there was a different way.

“I saw the gap that we need, particularly in the tropics, better methods to quantify the huge diversity… to improve conservation actions,” he told AFP.

He turned to bioacoustics, which uses sound to learn more about animal life and habitats.

It is a long-standing research tool, but more recently is being paired with computer learning to process large amounts of data more quickly.

Muller and his team recorded audio at sites in Ecuador’s Choco region ranging from recently abandoned cacao plantations and pastures to agricultural land recovering from use to old-growth forests.

They first had experts listen to the recordings and pick out birds, mammals and amphibians.

Then, they carried out an acoustic index analysis, which gives a measure of biodiversity based on broad metrics from a soundscape, like volume and frequency of noises.

Finally, they ran two weeks of recordings through an AI-assisted computer program trained to distinguish 75 bird calls.

More recordings needed

The program was able to pick out the calls on which it was trained in a consistent way, but could it correctly identify the relative biodiversity of each location?

To check this, the team used two baselines: one from the experts who listened to the audio recordings, and a second based on insect samples from each location, which offer a proxy for biodiversity.

While the library of available sounds to train the AI model meant it could only identify a quarter of the bird calls the experts could, it was still able to correctly gauge biodiversity levels in each location, the study said.

“Our results show that soundscape analysis is a powerful tool to monitor the recovery of faunal communities in hyperdiverse tropical forest,” said the research published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.

“Soundscape diversity can be quantified in a cost-effective and robust way across the full gradient from active agriculture to recovering and old-growth forests,” it added.

There are still shortcomings, including a paucity of animal sounds on which to train AI models.

And the approach can only capture species that announce their presence.

“Of course (there is) no information on plants or silent animals. However, birds and amphibians are very sensitive to ecological integrity, they are a very good surrogate,” Muller told AFP.

He believes the tool could become increasingly useful given the current push for “biodiversity credits” — a way of monetizing the protection of animals in their natural habitat.

“Being able to directly quantify biodiversity, rather than relying on proxies such as growing trees, encourages and allows external assessment of conservation actions, and promotes transparency,” the study said.

 
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The U.S. Commerce Department on Tuesday tightened its export controls to keep China from acquiring advanced computer chips that it could use to help develop hypersonic missiles and artificial intelligence.

Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said the new controls are “intended to protect technologies that have clear national security or human rights implications.”   

The new controls could increase tensions between the United States, the world’s biggest economy, and No. 2 China. In recent talks over several months with high-ranking U.S. officials, Beijing had appealed for “concrete actions” from Washington to improve relations between the two countries, although U.S. officials warned that the new export rules were in the offing.

Raimondo told reporters, “The vast majority of [the sale of] semiconductors [to China] will remain unrestricted. But when we identify national security or human rights threats, we will act decisively and in concert with our allies.”

The Commerce Department said the new restrictions came after consultations with U.S. chip manufacturers and conducting technological analyses.

The new controls allow the monitoring of the sale of chips that could still be used for military aims, even if they might not specifically meet the thresholds for trade limitations. The U.S. said chip exports can also be restricted to companies headquartered in Macao, a Chinese territory, or other countries under a U.S. arms embargo, to prevent them from circumventing the controls and providing chips to China.

The updated restrictions, an expansion of export controls announced last year, also make it more difficult for China to manufacture advanced chips abroad. The list of manufacturing equipment that falls under the export controls has also been expanded, among other changes to the policy.

China protested last year’s export controls, viewing the design and manufacture of high-level semiconductors as essential for its economic growth. Raimondo has said the limits on these chips are not designed to impair China’s economy.  

Chinese government officials are scheduled to go to San Francisco in November for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit.

U.S. President Joe Biden has suggested he could meet on the sidelines of the summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping, though a meeting has yet to be confirmed. The two leaders met last year following the Group of 20 summit in Bali, Indonesia, shortly after the export controls were announced.

Some material in this report came from The Associated Press.
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Artificial Intelligence is being used to create musical “deepfakes” – songs that sound like one artist but were made by a computer. Deana Mitchell brings us the story of one artist who is engaging with machine learning to create new kinds of music.
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A technology, innovation and entrepreneurship summit sparked imaginations in Ethiopia last week. The inaugural Enkopa summit — a collaboration between the Ethiopian Ministry of Labor and Skills and other partners — brought in speakers and exhibitors from across the world to Addis Ababa to discuss technology, innovation and entrepreneurship.

Speaking at the two-day event, Ethiopian State Minister of Labor and Skills Nigussu Tilahun emphasized the important role of the government in clearing a path for job creation in the country.

Nigussu said government’s role in building the entrepreneurship ecosystem is to create and facilitate a conducive environment for it.

The event, which was October 12 and 13, had 150 speakers from sectors like fintech, health care and agriculture.

Feven Tsehaye, founder and CEO of Chakka Origins — which sources natural ingredients in biodiversity hotspots — said land management is crucial to the work the company does in Ethiopia.

She said working with small holder farmers is essential.

“It makes sense to work with them and more efficiently utilizing their space instead of engaging in land clearing or displacing people,” Feven said.

Sessions during the two-day summit also explored the role of AI in agriculture, and sustainable farming in Ethiopia.

Abrhame Endrias leads Lersha, which provides digital services to farmers. He said making technology accessible to farmers encourages tech adoption.

Lersha provides climate and pest control advisories, farming inputs and options for mechanization.

Abrhame said Lersha translates information into local languages so farmers can understand the information and make decisions. The information comes to the farmers via text message.

While Lersha focuses on small holder famers, there were startups at the summit that focused on Ethiopia’s commercial farmers.

Semegn Tadesse, CEO of ARMADA AgriTech, said working with commercial farmers promises to deliver a more radical change.

“If you want to show progress, here is a big room for improvement in commercial farmers,” Semegn said. “They are also underserved even though they have financial capacity.”

The summit, funded by the United Nations Development Program, and other partners is expected to be held every year.
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Settlement talks have collapsed between Facebook’s parent company Meta and Kenyan content moderators over a lawsuit alleging unfair dismissal, a tech rights group working with the moderators said on Monday. 

The 184 moderators sued Meta and two subcontractors earlier this year after they said they lost their jobs with one of the subcontractors, Sama, for organizing a union. They said they were then blacklisted from applying for the same roles at a second firm, Majorel, after Facebook changed contractors. 

In August, the court asked the parties to hold out-of-court settlement talks and said the case would proceed if those failed. 

British tech rights group Foxglove said in a statement on Monday that the negotiations had broken down, accusing Meta and Sama of making “very little attempt to address core issues raised by the petitioners.” 

“The respondents were buying time and not being genuine. We kept waiting for them to participate … only for them to keep asking for an extension of time and then come back every time to refuse to take accountability,” the statement quoted Mercy Mutemi, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, as saying. 

Sama said it was disappointed the mediation had failed and would not comment further on the case. 

“We have been successful in coming to a mutually agreed resolution with about 60 moderators outside of the mediation process, demonstrating our commitment and willingness to find an amicable, beneficial solution,” it said in a statement, adding it was fully complying with all court orders. 

Meta declined to comment. There was no immediate comment from Majorel. 

Meta has previously responded to allegations of a poor working environment in Kenya by saying it requires partners to provide industry-leading conditions. 

Sama has said it has always followed Kenyan law and provided mental health services to its employees. In August, Majorel said it does not comment on matters involving pending or active litigation. 

The moderators also allege that Meta is trying to terminate their contracts in defiance of an earlier court order. A hearing on their petition to find Meta and Sama in contempt of court is scheduled for October 31, Foxglove said. 

Meta has also been sued in Kenya by a former moderator over accusations of poor working conditions at Sama, and by two Ethiopian researchers and a rights institute, which accuse it of letting violent and hateful posts from Ethiopia flourish on Facebook.

In response, Meta said last December that hate speech and incitement to violence were against the rules of its Facebook and Instagram platforms. 
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Paul Lane uses his mouth, cheek and chin to push buttons and guide his virtual car around the Gran Turismo racetrack on the PlayStation 5. It’s how he’s been playing for the past 23 years, after a car accident left him unable to use his fingers.

Playing video games has long been a challenge for people with disabilities, chiefly because the standard controllers for the PlayStation, Xbox or Nintendo can be difficult, or even impossible, to maneuver for people with limited mobility. And losing the ability to play the games doesn’t just mean the loss of a favorite pastime, it can also exacerbate social isolation in a community already experiencing it at a far higher rate than the general population.

As part of the gaming industry’s efforts to address the problem, Sony has developed the Access controller for the PlayStation, working with input from Lane and other accessibility consultants. Its the latest addition to the accessible-controller market, whose contributors range from Microsoft to startups and even hobbyists with 3D printers.

“I was big into sports before my injury,” said Cesar Flores, 30, who uses a wheelchair since a car accident eight years ago and also consulted Sony on the controller. “I wrestled in high school, played football. I lifted a lot of weights, all these little things. And even though I can still train in certain ways, there are physical things that I can’t do anymore. And when I play video games, it reminds me that I’m still human. It reminds me that I’m still one of the guys.”

Putting the traditional controller aside, Lane, 52, switches to the Access. It’s a round, customizable gadget that can rest on a table or wheelchair tray and can be configured in myriad ways, depending on what the user needs. That includes switching buttons and thumbsticks, programming special controls and pairing two controllers to be used as one. Lane’s Gran Turismo car zooms around a digital track as he guides it with the back of his hand on the controller.

“I game kind of weird, so it’s comfortable for me to be able to use both of my hands when I game,” he said. “So I need to position the controllers away enough so that I can be able to to use them without clunking into each other. Being able to maneuver the controllers has been awesome, but also the fact that this controller can come out of the box and ready to work.”

Lane and other gamers have been working with Sony since 2018 to help design the Access controller. The idea was to create something that could be configured to work for people with a broad range of needs, rather than focusing on any particular disability.

“Show me a person with multiple sclerosis and I’ll show you a person who can be hard of hearing, I can show someone who has a visual impairment or a motor impairment,” said Mark Barlet, founder and executive director of the nonprofit AbleGamers. “So thinking on the label of a disability is not the approach to take. It’s about the experience that players need to bridge that gap between a game and a controller that’s not designed for their unique presentation in the world.”

Barlet said his organization, which helped both Sony and Microsoft with their accessible controllers, has been advocating for gamers with disabilities for nearly two decades. With the advent of social media, gamers themselves have been able to amplify the message and address creators directly in forums that did not exist before.

“The last five years I have seen the game accessibility movement go from indie studios working on some features to triple-A games being able to be played by people who identify as blind,” he said. “In five years, it’s been breathtaking.”

Microsoft, in a statement, said it was encouraged by the positive reaction to its Xbox Adaptive controller when it was released in 2018 and that it is “heartening to see others in the industry apply a similar approach to include more players in their work through a focus on accessibility.”

The Access controller will go on sale worldwide on Dec. 6 and cost $90 in the U.S.

Alvin Daniel, a senior technical program manager at PlayStation, said the device was designed with three principles in mind to make it “broadly applicable” to as many players as possible. First, the player does not have to hold the controller to use it. It can lay flat on a table, wheelchair tray or be mounted on a tripod, for instance. It was important for it to fit on a wheelchair tray, since once something falls off the tray, it might be impossible for the player to pick it up without help. It also had to be durable for this same reason — so it would survive being run over by a wheelchair, for example.

Second, it’s much easier to press the buttons than on a standard controller. It’s a kit, so it comes with button caps in different sizes, shapes and textures so people can experiment with reconfiguring it the way it works best for them. The third is the thumbsticks, which can also be configured depending on what works for the person using it.

Because it can be used with far less agility and strength than the standard PlayStation controller, the Access could also be a gamechanger for an emerging population: aging gamers suffering from arthritis and other limiting ailments.

“The last time I checked, the average age of a gamers was in their forties,” Daniel said. “And I have every expectation, speaking for myself, that they’ll want to continue to game, as I’ll want to continue to game, because it’s entertainment for us.”

After his accident, Lane stopped gaming for seven years. For someone who began playing video games as a young child on the Magnavox Odyssey — released in 1972 — “it was a void” in his life, he said.

Starting again, even with the limitations of a standard game controller, felt like being reunited with a “long-lost friend.”

“Just the the social impact of gaming really changed my life. It gave me a a brighter disposition,” Lane said. He noted the social isolation that often results when people who were once able-bodied become disabled.

“Everything changes,” he said. “And the more you take away from us, the more isolated we become. Having gaming and having an opportunity to game at a very high level, to be able to do it again, it is like a reunion, (like losing) a close companion and being able to reunite with that person again.”
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In what Guatemalan authorities described as a national security incident, hackers affiliated with the activist group Anonymous disabled multiple government webpages Saturday.

The attacks were in support of demonstrations led by Indigenous organizations in the Central American country.

For almost two weeks, demonstrators have been calling for the resignation of Guatemalan Attorney General Consuelo Porras, saying she has tried to undermine the popular vote that made progressive Bernardo Arévalo the president-elect.

Posting on the social media website X, formerly known as Twitter, hackers under the handle @AnonGTReloaded announced, “This October 14 #Anonymous will attack the Government of Guatemala, but this time we do not come alone.”

The hackers targeted government webpages with floods of automated traffic until they crashed, a technique known as distributed denial-of-service attacks.

Webpages for Guatemala’s judicial branch, Department of Agriculture and the General Secretary of the president were targeted, among others. Some pages were quickly reinstated, but others remained down.

Guatemalan authorities said the hacking was a matter of “national security” and they are responding.

The attacks come after 13 days of protests and road closures. Thousands of Indigenous people have demanded that Porras and prosecutors Rafael Curruchiche and Cinthia Monterroso, as well as Judge Fredy Orellana, all resign, accusing them of endangering the country’s democracy.

Demonstrators maintain that after Arévalo’s victory in the August runoff election, Porras mounted an undemocratic challenge against Arévalo, his left-wing Seed Movement party and electoral authorities.

A representative of Anonymous involved in the cyberattack, who agreed to talk about the hacking only if not identified to avoid legal repercussions, said, “Everything we do is to support humanity and, now in Guatemala, in support of the people who are in the streets, fighting against corruption and impunity.”

Also on Saturday morning, Miguel Martínez, former official and personal friend of current President Alejandro Giammattei, was surrounded by a throng of protesters as security officers escorted him from a Mass in Antigua, Guatemala.

In footage posted on social media, protesters appeared to accuse Martínez of corruption. He is not currently known to be under investigation by the prosecutor’s office.
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Malawi launched its first-ever Centre for Artificial Intelligence and STEAM — Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics — Friday at the Malawi University of Science and Technology. Established with support from various U.S.-based universities, the center aims to provide solutions to the country’s innovation and technology needs.

The project’s leader, Zipangani Vokhiwa, a science professor at Mercer University in the U.S. and a Fulbright scholar, says the center will help promote the study and use of artificial intelligence, or AI, and STEAM for the socioeconomic development of Malawi and beyond.

“Economic development that we know cannot go without the modern scientific knowledge and aspect so the center will complement vision 2063 for Malawi as a country that needs to be moving together with the country developments in science,” Vokhiwa said. “Not to be left behind.”

Vokhiwa said the center, known by its acronym, CAIST, will offer educational, technical, policy, and strategy products and services in emerging technologies such as AI.

He said it will also offer machine learning, deep learning, data science, data analytics, internet of things and more that are based on humanistic STEAM education and research.

A consortium of various U.S. universities provided the center with pedagogical and technical support.

These include Baylor College of Medicine, Texas Tech University, Morehouse College, Colorado University, Georgia Southern University, Clemson University, New York University and Mercer University.

There are fears worldwide, however, that the introduction of AI will result in loss of jobs.

CBS news reported  that AI eliminated nearly 4,000 jobs in the U.S. in May.

But Vokhiwa said the advantages and disadvantages of AI are still debatable.

“As has been said by the experts, AI has both positive elements and negative elements,” he said. “But knowing fairly well that we cannot run away from digitization of what we do, AI will be needed, and Malawi does not need to lag behind.”

Vokhiwa said AI has helped create employment because it needs people to run the AI machines.

Malawi’s Minister of Education, Madalitso Kambauwa Wirima, officially opened the AI center at the Malawi University of Science and Technology.

She said the launch of the AI center has set the tone and laid the foundation for the country to explore the opportunities that come with new technologies.

However, she said, while AI has the potential to transform the country, there is also a need to address its downside.

“For this to happen, the government will be looking to CAIST for knowledge and expertise so that we can together facilitate the development of the necessary policy and regulatory frameworks governing responsible use of AI,” she said. “The earlier we do this the better, because AI is already here, and we are all using it. Some of us with enough knowledge, but many of us surely without full knowledge of it.”

Kambauwa Wirima said that whatever the case, AI is something that Malawi cannot avoid, mentioning that the intergovernmental Southern African Development Community is already addressing the issue.

“We adopted a decision to develop regional guidelines on the ethics of artificial intelligence to be domesticated and implemented by member states,” she said. “Therefore, Malawi cannot sit on the fence.”

Address Malata, the vice chancellor for Malawi University of Science and Technology, said the university is strategizing its operations to align them to various development agendas including Malawi 2063, Africa Agenda 2063 and the Sustainable Development Goals, so that whatever the center does, it should benefit everyone.
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The U.S. space agency, NASA, launched a rocket Friday from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The rocket carried a probe designed to study a metal-rich asteroid that scientists think might be the remnants of small planet or planet-like object. 

The rocket, built by the private space company SpaceX, took off early Friday, starting NASAs Psyche probe on a 3.5-billion kilometer, six-year journey to the asteroid of the same name, orbiting between the planets Mars and Jupiter. 

Using Earth-based radar and optical telescope data, scientists hypothesize that the asteroid Psyche could be part of the metal-rich interior of a “planetesimal,” a building block of a rocky planet that never formed.  

NASA scientists say Psyche may have collided with other large bodies during its early formation and lost its outer rocky shell. Examining such an asteroid could provide unprecedented insights into the history of violent collisions and the accumulation of matter that created planets like Earth. 

The probe is powered by a pair of massive solar arrays which unfurled after the craft reached space and was released from the launch vehicle. Its unique solar electric propulsion system creates thrust by creating electric and magnetic fields, which accelerate and expel charged atoms, or ions, of a propellant called xenon at a high rate of speed. 

Xenon is a gas used in automobile headlights and plasma televisions and will emit a blue glow behind the probe as it travels through space. The voyage to Psyche marks the first mission to use the propulsion system — known as Hall-effect thrusters — in deep space.  

NASA expects the probe to reach its namesake asteroid in 2029.  

Some information for this report was provided by The Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse. 
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Africa is the site of a new battle for influence as Washington ramps up efforts to build an alternative critical minerals supply chain to avoid reliance on China. Beijing dominates the processing of critical minerals such as cobalt, lithium and other resources from the continent that are needed for the transition to clean energy and electric vehicles.

But at the Green Energy Africa Summit this week in Cape Town, which was held on the sidelines of Africa Oil Week, few were willing to talk about it directly.

Asked whether the U.S. was playing catch-up with China, one of the panel’s speakers, Deputy Assistant Secretary in the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Energy Resources Kimberly Harrington, said simply that Washington was looking to “diversify.”

For his part, fellow panelist Chiza Charles Newton Chiumya, the African Union’s director for industry, minerals, entrepreneurship and tourism, told VOA he didn’t want to use the term “competing” to describe the relative approaches of the West and China but agreed there is “lots of interest” in Africa’s critical minerals.

The Chinese Embassy in Washington was also circumspect when asked whether it sees itself in competition with the U.S. for the natural resources.

“The tangible outcomes of China-Africa practical cooperation throughout the years are there for all to see,” spokesperson Liu Pengyu wrote in an emailed response.

“Supporting Africa’s development is the common responsibility of the international community. We welcome stronger interest and investment in Africa from all quarters to help increase the continent’s capability to achieve self-driven sustainable growth and move forward towards modernization and prosperity.”

Independent analysts, however, had a different take. The Chinese made it a “priority to corner the market for critical minerals about two decades ago and supported that strategy with massive public diplomacy and infrastructure investments into Africa — most of which [came] via long-term debt,” said Tony Carroll, adjunct professor in the African studies program at Johns Hopkins University, told VOA earlier this year.

“The West woke up to this strategy too late and have been scrambling ever since.”

Part of that response has been the Minerals Security Partnership set up by U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration last year as a way of diversifying supply chains. Partners include Australia, Canada, Finland, France, Japan, South Korea, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the European Union.

“We see anywhere from three to six times demand growth for critical minerals across the world. … So, I think our sense is that no single government, no single company, can create resilient supply chains,” said Harrington at the Green Energy Africa Summit.

“If the COVID-19 pandemic showed us anything…one of the primary things it showed us is that if we are too overly reliant on any one source in a supply chain … it creates vulnerabilities, and so I think our approach overall on this issue is to make sure that we have diversity,” she told VOA during a Q&A after the panel.  

“When it comes to China in general, our secretary of state has been crystal clear, we have areas in which we cooperate with China, we have areas in which we compete with China, and that’s not going to change,” she said. “This is a complex and consequential relationship and we see it as such.”

The view from Africa

While he didn’t want to use the word “competition” to describe the outside interest in Africa’s critical minerals, the AU’s Chiumya stressed during the panel discussion that Africa must benefit from its mineral wealth.

“This is not the first time that Africa is sitting at the frontier of having critical minerals. … In the past we have lost a chance,” he said, referring to the continent’s vast gold and diamond deposits. “This time around we want to do things different.”

“For a long time, our governments have not been able to effectively exploit the mineral wealth that is there and ended up effectively going into very bad deals” which have not contributed to the social and economic development of the African people, Chiumya added.

Democratic Republic of the Congo President Felix Tshisekedi has been among the African leaders demanding better terms from China for several years. His country produces some 70% of the world’s cobalt but remains one of the world’s least developed nations.

Tshisekedi complained in January that the Congolese people have not benefited from a $6.2 billion minerals-for-infrastructure contract with China that was signed by his predecessor.

Meanwhile in Zimbabwe, which has large lithium deposits, the government has imposed a ban on exports of raw lithium ore, insisting that it be processed at home. A Chinese company has since built a large lithium processing plant in the country.

U.S. critical mineral plans

Washington says environmental, social and governance standards are a key consideration for the U.S. when it comes to its dealings with the continent regarding critical minerals.

“We want to do our part to ramp up our efforts with like-minded partners in Africa to promote sustainable clean energy supply chains in mining,” said Harrington. She said it is also important to help countries “do some domestic processing and refining, because it’s really the value-added, that’s how you create jobs, that’s how you create local capacity.”

At the U.S.-Africa Summit in Washington in December, the DRC, the U.S. and Zambia — another major source of minerals — signed a memorandum of understanding to develop a supply chain for electric car batteries, in what was widely seen by analysts as a move to counter China.

Harrington said the MOU had “the overall goal of a lot of an EV (electric vehicle) battery being processed and refined locally,” even if some further refinement might need to be done in a third country. 

Additionally, on the sidelines of last month’s G20 summit, the U.S. and E.U. pledged to develop the partially existing Lobito Corridor — a railway connecting the DRC’s cobalt belt to Zambia’s copper belt and on to Angola’s port of Lobito, from where it can be shipped to international markets.
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As Hamas militants and rockets entered Israel Saturday, so too did a barrage of disinformation. The conflict is being fought not only on the ground but also on the internet. VOA’s Robin Guess has the story. Liam Scott contributed to this report.
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Utah on Tuesday became the latest U.S. state to sue TikTok, alleging the company is “baiting” children into addictive and unhealthy social media habits.

TikTok lures children into hours of social media use, misrepresents the app’s safety and deceptively portrays itself as independent of its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, Utah claims in the lawsuit.

“We will not stand by while these companies fail to take adequate, meaningful action to protect our children. We will prevail in holding social media companies accountable by any means necessary,” Utah Governor Spencer Cox, a Republican, said at a news conference announcing the lawsuit, which was filed in state court in Salt Lake City.

Arkansas and Indiana have filed similar lawsuits, while the U.S. Supreme Court prepares to decide whether state attempts to regulate social media platforms such as Facebook, X and TikTok violate the U.S. Constitution.

Public health concerns are cited in the Utah lawsuit. Research has shown that children who spend more than three hours a day on social media double their risk of poor mental health, including anxiety and depression, the lawsuit alleges.

“TikTok designed and employs algorithm features that spoon-feed kids endless, highly curated content from which our children struggle to disengage. TikTok designed these features to mimic a cruel slot machine that hooks kids’ attention and does not let them go,” Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes said at the news conference.

The lawsuit seeks to force TikTok to change its “destructive behavior” while imposing fines and penalties to fund education efforts and otherwise address damage done to Utah children, Reyes said.

TikTok spokesperson Hilary McQuaide did not immediately return an email message seeking comment on the lawsuit.

Utah earlier this year became the first state to pass laws that aim to limit the use of social media apps such as TikTok by children and teens. The laws are set to take effect next year.

They will impose a digital curfew on people under 18, which will require minors to get parental consent to sign up for social media apps and force companies to verify the ages of all their Utah users.

They also require tech companies to give parents access to their kids’ accounts and private messages, raising concern among some child advocates about further harming children’s mental health. Depriving children of privacy, they say, could be detrimental for LGBTQ+ kids whose parents are not accepting of their identity.
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“Digital currencies have played a pivotal role in backing Myanmar’s Spring Revolution,” following a military takeover of the government in February 2021, said NUG Deputy Minister of Planning, Finance and Development Min Zayar Oo, in a statement to VOA.

The minister was appointed by the National Unity Government, or NUG, made up of members of Myanmar’s former democratically elected government and other opponents of the junta.

Centralized digital currencies, however, can be a double-edged sword, with authoritarian regimes seeking to use them as a tool for financial surveillance and censorship. 

“The primary advantage for pro-democracy activists lies in the fact that these currencies operate independently of government control, enabling individuals to offer support to their chosen recipients discreetly, without disclosing their identities,” said Aung Paing, an expert on digital currencies living in exile from Myanmar.

The NUG introduced its own digital currency, the DMMK (Digital Myanmar Kyat), last year as a creative means to bypass banks controlled by the junta. According to a recent statement, the NUG is on the verge of establishing its own online bank, the Spring Development Bank, using digital currency and targeting NUG supporters and the Myanmar diaspora as customers.

The DMMK is tied to the value of the Myanmar kyat one-to-one, much like higher classes of cryptocurrencies, such as Tether (USDT), are tied to the value of the dollar. This class of cryptocurrency is known as “stablecoins.” 

DMMK is used both locally and internationally via a mobile wallet app, NUGPay. In June 2023, NUGPay released its first annual report stating that, one year after launch, total transactions in the app had reached over 300 billion kyats (nearly $150 million). 

“The total amount in the DMMK system reflects that the cash flow is running well and that the number of NUGPay customers is growing,” the report said; a statement reaffirmed by Min Zayar Oo several months after the report was released.

“Since the launch of DMMK, a total of over 600 billion kyat (nearly $300 million) has been circulated so far,” he told VOA on Sunday.

Tool of liberation or oppression

While digital currencies are becoming a useful means for pro-democracy movements to circumvent controls by authoritarian regimes, they can also be an extremely useful tool for those regimes as well, according to Win Ko Ko Aung, Myanmar Human Rights Fellow at Bitcoin Policy Institute. “Globally, tyrannies have used legacy financial systems to suppress activists and civilians,” Aung told VOA by phone. 

“Central bank digital currencies, like the DMMK, have the potential to further empower authoritarian agendas,” he added.

Privacy concerns have kept countries like the U.S. from adopting a centralized digital version of its currency, but countries like China have doubled down on its use of digital currencies to surveil individual transactions in an increasingly connected society.

“I think people underestimate exactly how much power financial surveillance can have over your life,” said Chris Meserole, director of the Brookings Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology Initiative, at an event in Washington on September 27.

“They [authoritarian governments] can basically turn your house into a prison,” he continued. “Because if you can’t … go anywhere and transact in the world, they basically have … incarcerating power over everyone.”

“The flip side … is that there is this tremendous capability and feature set of this technology,” he said. “Whether it’s bitcoin, or some of the other digital assets out there … it’s fundamentally a messaging network that cannot be censored; and I think it’s incumbent upon democratic regimes and institutions to try and safeguard that technology.” 

Grant McCarty, co-executive director of the Bitcoin Policy Institute, which co-organized the event, told VOA after the panel discussion that what cryptocurrencies like bitcoin are allowing people to do, “is actually evade some of these totalitarian powers that exist within authoritarian and anti-democratic regimes. If they want to send money to another country, if they want to send money to a pro-democracy group, they can do that. We’ve seen this in parts of Africa, we’ve seen this in Asia, around the world, people are using bitcoin to circumvent authoritarianism and totalitarian regimes and fight for freedom, fight for free speech and democracy in their country.”

Bitcoin vs own currency 

The question arises: Why would the NUG adopt its own digital currency rather than using a more widely known cryptocurrency such as bitcoin, like they’re doing in Ukraine and other parts of the world struggling under similar circumstances? According to cryptocurrency expert, Win Ko Ko Aung, bitcoin is a better bet for those facing an authoritarian regime like the one in Myanmar. 

“The bitcoin protocol runs on over 70,000 computers around the world, and not a single person or government controls that network. DMMK is a type of CBDC [Central Bank Digital Currencies], according to the definition. Whoever controls the money, controls the system. I understand the Myanmar exile government’s ultimate goal in launching DMMK, but my concern is why they pegged the currency standard to the Myanmar kyat, which has been constantly dropping in value and being debased by the Myanmar military.”

While bitcoin is an effective way to quickly transfer dollars, essential in a situation like the one in Ukraine, “Myanmar is different,” said Aung Paing, one of the analysts who helped launch DMMK. 

“Ukraine is seeking support from all over the world, and using bitcoin, yes, they can transfer money quickly and freely. However, bitcoin’s value depends on supply and demand and can fluctuate wildly, so it’s not a stable currency for the long term. It may be a good option for investors and others willing to accept that risk, but not for a government like the NUG, planning logistics for a revolution and supporting the people. The people of Myanmar want to be able to transfer money to buy property freely, safely, quickly and with a stable value. A central bank digital currency like the DMMK provides that type of stability,” he said.

“It normally takes a lot of time to get people to accept a new currency,” Paing continued. “However, when the DMMK came out during the Burma [Myanmar] Spring Revolution, the people immediately accepted and used the value as set by the NUG. In a time of upheaval and struggle, this digital currency has proven to be more than just a financial tool. It is a symbol of resilience, empowerment, and the unyielding spirit of those fighting for change.” 
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As Indonesia celebrates the launch of its first high-speed railway, the government is dealing with cost overruns and Chinese bank loans with high interest rates. In Jakarta, Devianti Faridz has the story. Camera: Ahadian Utama
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Vodafone underlined its commitment to Open RAN networks on Monday by confirming it would create purpose-built chipset architecture for the nascent technology with Intel INTC.O.

The European operator also said it had made its first 4G calls using Open RAN over network sites shared with Orange ORAN.PA in Romania, and it was partnering with Nokia NOKIA.HE to pilot the technology in Italy.

Open RAN allows mobile operators to mix and match equipment from various suppliers, potentially increasing flexibility.

Progress has been slow, however, and the market remains dominated by proprietary solutions from Ericsson, Nokia, and Huawei, although the latter has been hit by government restrictions in countries including Britain.

Vodafone agreed in 2022 to work with U.S. chipmaker Intel on the potential to design its own chip architecture.

The company’s director of network architecture Santiago Tenorio confirmed the partners would jointly create chipsets at its campus in Malaga, Spain.

The chipsets will be available to smaller third-party vendors to test their own algorithms without a large financial outlay in silicon, Tenorio said at the FYUZ industry event in Madrid.

He said the ability to produce silicon designs in testing sample quantities would significantly speed up the time to deliver innovation.

“Combining Vodafone’s networking expertise with Intel’s strength in silicon architecture design will enable rapid prototyping, verification and testing, eventually leading to a faster mass production of the chips the industry needs to accelerate,” he said.

Vodafone and Orange said on Monday they had successfully made 4G calls over a cluster of sites in a rural area near Bucharest based on Open RAN technology.

The two companies used hardware and software provided by Samsung, Wind River and Dell in the pilot, they said.

In Italy, Vodafone said a pilot with Nokia aimed to prove that Nokia’s Open RAN solution could achieve the same functionality and performance as its purpose built RAN.
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