U.S. automaker General Motors Corporation announced Monday it will build certain 2021 light-duty full-size pickup trucks without a fuel management module due to the global semiconductor chip shortage.In an email to the Reuters news agency, GM spokeswoman Michelle Malcho said the decision will lower the fuel economy slightly in those models effected by the decision, including the Chevy Silverado and the GMC Sierra.Malcho emphasized all trucks are still being built, something GM has repeatedly stressed it would try to sustain as pickups are among GM’s most profitable models. She declined to say the volume of vehicles affected.The change runs through the 2021 model year, which typically ends in late summer or early fall, she said.Malcho said it would not have a major impact on the Detroit automaker’s U.S. corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) numbers.Other automakers around the world, including Ford and Nissan, have had to make production adjustments because of the microchip shortage.Industry observers say the shortage has been driven by the pandemic in a number of ways, including a surge in demand for consumer electronics, as more people work and study from home. Automakers, meanwhile, expecting lower sales, cancelled orders for chips last year, only to see sales rebounding, catching suppliers unprepared.  
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Facebook has scrapped plans to connect California, Taiwan and Hong Kong via a 12,000 kilometer underwater cable, citing tensions between the U.S. and China.
The social media giant told the Wall St. Journal, which broke the story, it was halting the project due to political pressure from the U.S. government, which noted potential national security concerns.
“Due to ongoing concerns from the U.S. government about direct communication links between the United States and Hong Kong, we have decided to withdraw our [Federal Communications Commission] application,” a Facebook spokesperson said. “We look forward to working with all the parties to reconfigure the system to meet the concerns of the U.S. government.”  
Facebook, along with several Chinese companies including China Telecom, applied for permits to start the cable in 2018. The cable would have sped up the flow of data across the Pacific.
This is not the first time a Pacific cable that included Hong Kong has been placed on hold. In September of 2020, Google and Facebook shelved the Pacific Light Cable Network that would have linked the U.S. with Taiwan, Hong Kong and the Philippines.  
Around the same time, Facebook and Amazon ditched a proposed cable link between San Francisco and Hong Kong called the Bay to Bay Express Cable. 
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The nightly internet shutdowns in Myanmar are part of a strategy employed by many governments worldwide in times of crisis. But they come with costs. VOA’s Michelle Quinn reports.   
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The White House on Sunday urged computer network operators to take further steps to gauge whether their systems were targeted amid a hack of Microsoft Corp’s Outlook email program, saying a recent software patch still left serious vulnerabilities.”This is an active threat still developing and we urge network operators to take it very seriously,” a White House official said, adding that top U.S. security officials were working to decide what next steps to take following the breach.CNN reported Sunday that the Biden administration was forming a task force to address the hack. The White House official, in a statement, said the administration was making “a whole of government response.”While Microsoft released a patch last week to shore up flaws in its email software, the remedy still leaves open a so-called back door that can allow access to compromised servers and perpetuate further attacks by others.”We can’t stress enough that patching and mitigation is not remediation if the servers have already been compromised, and it is essential that any organization with a vulnerable server take measures to determine if they were already targeted,” the White House official said.A source told Reuters that more than 20,000 U.S. organizations had been compromised by the hack, which Microsoft has blamed on China, although Beijing denies any role.The server vulnerabilities can impact credit unions, town governments and small business, and have left U.S. officials scrambling to reach victims, with the FBI on Sunday urging them to contact the law enforcement agency.Those affected appear to host Web versions of Microsoft’s email program Outlook on their own machines instead of cloud providers, possibly sparing many major companies and federal government agencies, records from the investigation suggest.A Microsoft representative on Sunday said it was working with the government and others to help guide customers, and the company urged impacted clients to apply software updates as soon as possible.Neither the company nor the White House has specified the scale of the hack. Microsoft initially said it was limited, but the White House last week expressed concern about the potential for “a large number of victims.”So far, only a small percentage of infected networks have been compromised through the back door, the source previously told Reuters, but more attacks are expected.
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Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is selling his first tweet at auction, with bidding Saturday reaching $2 million in a sign of the appetite for virtual objects authenticated through blockchain technology.”just setting up my twttr,” Dorsey tweeted on March 21, 2006.On Friday he posted a link to “Valuables @Cent,” an online marketplace for tweets where, the site says, investors or collectors can “buy and sell tweets autographed by their creators.”The top bid Saturday for Dorsey’s tweet — $2 million — came from Justin Sun, the founder of TRON, a platform for blockchain, the technology underlying cryptocurrencies. He also heads the BitTorrent streaming platform.”The creator of a tweet decides if they would like to mint it on the blockchain, creating a 1-of-1 autographed version,” Valuables explained.Buying ‘a digital certificate’Buying a tweet means purchasing “a digital certificate of the tweet, unique because it has been signed and verified by the creator,” according to Valuables.In Dorsey’s case, the tweet itself remains visible to all, so long as he and Twitter leave it online.The approach is much like the online sales of dramatic digital “moments” from National Basketball Association games; the short video sequences remain visible for free on the internet but a blockchain-backed “Non-Fungible Token” (NFT) is generated to guarantee the identity, authenticity and traceability of the video, confirming its value.Thus, a 10-second clip showing a spectacular sequence by basketball superstar LeBron James fetched $208,000 on the NBA Top Shot site late last month.Top Shot has generated more than $200 million in transactions this year, according to Dapper Labs, which partnered with the NBA to create Top Shot.In 2019, Sun paid $4.6 million in a winning bid to have lunch with billionaire Warren Buffett. Sun reportedly tried but failed to convince the elderly investor of the value of bitcoins.NFTs have soared in popularity, to the point that prestigious auction house Christie’s last month sold an entirely digital artwork.  
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U.S. President Joe Biden’s order to secure semiconductor supply chains for high-tech hardware production offers a commercial boost to Taiwan, one of the world’s biggest providers of chips, and gives Taipei new weight in any free-trade talks, analysts say.Biden signed an executive order Feb. 24 for the United States to start overcoming a chip shortage that has hobbled the manufacturing of vehicles, consumer electronics and medical supplies. It will trigger a review process leading to policy recommendations on how to bolster supply chains.Taiwan comes into play as the home of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., which spins out more chips than any other contract manufacturer in the world and has some of the most advanced production processes. Those advances generate semiconductors that run on relatively little power without sacrificing the speed of a device.Remote study and telework, two trends that exploded during the 2020 coronavirus outbreak, raised demand last year for chips that run notebook PCs, among other types of consumer hardware. World demand for chips should increase from $450 billion last year to about $600 billion in 2024, market research firm Gartner says.“This is good, and I think at this moment Taiwan finally can offer something concretely and to help the United States somehow, some way,” said Liu Yih-jiun, public affairs professor at Fo Guang University in Taiwan.Taiwan has tried off and on since 1994 to arrange a trade deal with the United States, which is its second-biggest trading partner after China. U.S.-Taiwan trade totaled $90.9 billion in 2020. Americans buy chips, computers and machinery, among other Taiwanese goods, resulting in a $29.3 billion trade surplus for the Asian manufacturing center last year.Starting in January, Taiwan began allowing shipments of American pork from pigs raised on the feed additive ractopamine, and U.S. officials lauded that step as progress in trade relations.The Biden administration has asked Taiwanese officials about pushing their chipmakers to step up semiconductor production amid a shortage of chips for automotive use, Bloomberg reported last month.American demand for semiconductors will help raise Taiwan’s position when negotiators meet again for trade talks, said John Brebeck, senior adviser at the Quantum International Corp. investment consultancy in Taipei.“Because of the [Sino-U.S.] trade war, and because of semiconductors, and because Taiwan did so well on COVID, and it’s a democracy they want to support, I think it moves forward,” Brebeck said.Trade talks will take place “in a much more balanced way” due to Taiwan’s weight in global semiconductors, Liu said.Trade deal or not, Taiwan’s chipmakers will get a surge in business because of the shortage, though they may struggle to prioritize customers, Brady Wang, an analyst in Taipei with the market intelligence firm Counterpoint Research, said.“There’s actually no risk to the companies, but you can say there’s the issue of how much they can spread out production and who they’re going to sacrifice,” Wang said.Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. broke ground in 2018 on a $15 billion factory complex in Taiwan with volume production expected to reach full capacity this year. The complex will produce more than 1 million wafers per year and employ about 4,000 people. In December last year the 34-year-old firm got Taiwan government clearance to build a $12 billion factory in the U.S. state of Arizona. That plant will make up to 20,000 wafers per month.The project in Arizona and the new one in Taiwan are “well on track,” a spokesperson from the company’s headquarters said.Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp. and United Microelectronics Corp. also make chips in Taiwan. A spokesperson for United Microelectronics said last month his company was doing all it can to meet demand for automotive chips.
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This week a U.S.-government backed commission of technology experts completed a three-year review of the country’s artificial intelligence capabilities, urging the development of a new national technology strategy to stay competitive with China.The National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI) has been studying how artificial intelligence and machine learning can address U.S. national security and defense needs. It recommended spending billions of dollars more on research, diversifying the American industrial supply chain for microchips and other high-tech products, and reforming immigration policies to attract talented researchers and workers.Some of those steps are under way. Republican and Democratic lawmakers are now focusing more on ways to address technological competition with China, following years in which officials say China carried out corporate espionage and forced technology transfers to rapidly advance its technological capabilities.Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., talks to reporters on Jan. 28, 2020 on Capitol Hill in Washington.On Thursday, a bipartisan group of senators introduced legislation aiming to help the U.S. government develop more technology partnerships with allies to counter China’s rise in artificial intelligence, 5G, quantum computing and other areas.The bill, led by Virginia Democratic Senator Mark Warner, a former technology entrepreneur, would create a new interagency office within the State Department focusing on coordinating tech strategies with other democratic nations. It would also create a $5 billion fund supporting research projects between government and private companies.In this image from video, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of N.Y., speaks in the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.Last week, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer urged a bipartisan effort to draft a bill investing in disruptive new technologies to challenge China.Also last week, President Joe Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., talks to reporters on Capitol Hill in Washington on June 12, 2018.Democratic Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey, chairman of Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told VOA Mandarin he believes the bill will receive broad bipartisan support.“On the broad issue of China, supply chain is one element of it. But we are working on the broader issue of how do we both compete with China and how do we confront China,” Menendez said, “I think there’s plenty of room where there should be a common ground that we can come together.”He added that he has been discussing America’s China policy with Secretary of State Tony Blinken, and the State Department is conducting its own comprehensive evaluation on current China policies.“There’s a whole of government review vis-a-vis China, which I applaud,” Menendez told VOA.Similar efforts are ongoing in the U.S. Congress, where several Republican legislators are pushing the White House to maintain former President Donald Trump’s hardline posture on China.Rep. Greg Steube, R-Fla, speaks during a House Judiciary subcommittee hearing on Capitol Hill on July 29, 2020 in Washington.Representative Greg Steube, a Florida Republican, introduced the Keep Huawei on the Entity List Act on Wednesday, which would continue export controls and keep China’s telecommunication firm Huawei on the U.S. Department of Commerce’s entity list.“Huawei is one of the most powerful tools that the Chinese Communist Party can use for espionage and potential destruction against the United States,” Steube said in a statement.James Lankford, a Republican senator from Oklahoma, said that he and his colleagues have been talking with the White House about keeping some of the Trump-era policies on China.“We want to make it very clear. And that policy shouldn’t be thrown aside just because they have the name Trump in front of them,” he told VOA. “If there were good policies, and they were good policies, and they should remain.”Artificial intelligence for the futureThe artificial intelligence report recommends that the Department of Defense must have the foundations in place by 2025 for widespread adoption of artificial intelligence systems.The commission also addressed the ethics of using AI-enabled and autonomous weapons. For now, it said the Defense Department has adequate protections in place so that such weapons do not require a global ban and can continue to be used in accordance with international humanitarian law. It recommended establishing systems to build confidence in AI technology and keeping humans in the decision chain for deploying nuclear weapons.Lin Yang contributed to this report.
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An international advocacy group’s claim that the Vietnamese government has tapped hackers to target activists shows that the communist Southeast Asian state is widening the use of technology to quash its biggest opponents, experts believe. Ocean Lotus, a shadowy group suspected of working with the Vietnamese government, is “behind a sustained campaign of spyware attacks,” London-based Amnesty International said in a statement on February 24 following two years of research. It says the attacks surfaced in 2014 and targeted rights activists and the private sector, inside Vietnam as well as abroad. The hack attacks would signal a growing use of technology to muzzle strong vocal opponents of Vietnam’s officials, country observers say. Police already use internet trolls and authorities have been known to damage people’s Facebook accounts, said James Gomez, regional director of the Asia Centre, a Bangkok-based think tank. The FILE – Vietnamese Ministry of Foreign Affairs deputy spokesperson Ngo Toan Thang speaks to media in Hanoi, Vietnam, Nov. 7, 2019.”This is groundless information,” deputy ministry spokesperson Ngo Toan Thang told a news conference in May, as quoted on the ministry’s website. “Vietnam strictly bans all cyber-attacks against organizations and individuals in any form.” The ministry’s English-language website does not address Amnesty International’s claims. Amnesty International’s Security Lab said in the February 24 statement it had found Ocean Lotus’s influence in phishing emails sent to two Vietnamese “human rights” advocates. One lives in Germany, the statement says, and the other was a Vietnamese nongovernmental organization in the Philippines. “The hacking group has been repeatedly identified by cybersecurity firms as targeting Vietnamese political dissidents, foreign governments and companies,” the statement adds.  Vietnam ‘cyber-troops’French journalism advocacy group Reporters Without Borders said in 2018 Vietnam had appointed 10,000 “cyber-troops” to fight online dissent. The journalism group called the deployment an “army of internet trolls” aimed at attacking independent media outlets. Authorities showed last year they can quickly shutter social media accounts registered in foreign countries.  After Vietnamese blogger Bui Thi Minh Hang livestreamed an interview with a woman whose 3-year-old child was exposed to tear gas, her posts quickly disappeared from Facebook and YouTube and she was arrested hours later. She lost access to her accounts.Vietnam Pressures Social Media Platforms to Censor Vietnam’s laws and requests for content removal are stifling free speech, bloggers and rights organizations say Jack Nguyen, a partner at the business advisory firm Mazars in Ho Chi Minh City, suggests that internet commentators stick to issues rather than targeting the state or the Communist Party. Pollution and drought are acceptable topics, he said, and it’s even OK to suggest policy changes. “Don’t criticize the party,” Nguyen said. “You can criticize some of the policies but don’t do anything that they can say that it’s counterrevolutionary.” 
 
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From a smart dog collar that can tell you your pet’s emotional state to toys that automatically move, the pet tech industry is growing, especially during the pandemic when many people staying at home have been adopting dogs and cats.  VOA’s Elizabeth Lee has more on the latest tech devices for pets.Camera:  Elizabeth Lee, Sam Verma   
Producer: Elizabeth Lee
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There’s a new player in the social media webspace: it’s called Clubhouse. But unlike other social media platforms this one isn’t open to just anyone. Mariia Prus looked into why the platform got so popular so fast.
Camera: Oleksii Osyka
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A federal judge on Friday approved a $650 million settlement of a privacy lawsuit against Facebook for allegedly using photo face-tagging and other biometric data without the permission of its users.U.S. District Judge James Donato approved the deal in a class-action lawsuit that was filed in Illinois in 2015. Nearly 1.6 million Facebook users in Illinois who submitted claims will be affected.Donato called it one of the largest settlements ever for a privacy violation.”It will put at least $345 into the hands of every class member interested in being compensated,” he wrote, calling it “a major win for consumers in the hotly contested area of digital privacy.”Jay Edelson, a Chicago attorney who filed the lawsuit, told the Chicago Tribune that the checks could be in the mail within two months unless the ruling is appealed.“We are pleased to have reached a settlement so we can move past this matter, which is in the best interest of our community and our shareholders,” Facebook, which is headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area, said in a statement.The lawsuit accused the social media giant of violating an Illinois privacy law by failing to get consent before using facial-recognition technology to scan photos uploaded by users to create and store faces digitally.The state’s Biometric Information Privacy Act allowed consumers to sue companies that didn’t get permission before harvesting data such as faces and fingerprints.The case eventually wound up as a class-action lawsuit in California.Facebook has since changed its photo-tagging system.
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With internet access increasing in many emerging democracies, use of social media is changing the ways that candidates and voters interact.  It’s also changing how the non-profit U.S.-based Carter Center assesses elections. As VOA’s Kane Farabaugh reports, monitoring online disinformation and threats to prevent political violence is a new front in the center’s democracy initiatives and is a focus ahead of elections in Ethiopia.Camera: Kane Farabaugh    Producer: Kane Farabaugh
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U.S. lawmakers launched an investigation this week into the December 2020 SolarWinds hack that included a breach of many private and U.S. government computer systems. As VOA’s congressional correspondent Katherine Gypson reports, tech leaders are telling lawmakers the full scope of the breach is still not known.  Camera: Adam Greenbaum  Produced by: Katherine Gypson
  
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U.S. lawmakers launched an investigation this week into the December 2020 SolarWinds hack that included a breach of many private and U.S. government computer systems. As VOA’s congressional correspondent Katherine Gypson reports, tech leaders are telling lawmakers the full scope of the breach is still not known.  Camera: Adam Greenbaum  Produced by: Katherine Gypson
 
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ByteDance has agreed to a $92 million class-action settlement over data privacy claims from some U.S. TikTok users, according to documents filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Illinois. ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns the short video app that has more than 100 million U.S. users, agreed to the settlement after more than a year of litigation. “While we disagree with the assertions, rather than go through lengthy litigation, we’d like to focus our efforts on building a safe and joyful experience for the TikTok community,” TikTok said Thursday. The settlement still requires court approval. FILE – A man opens social media app TikTok on his cellphone, in Islamabad, Pakistan, July 21, 2020.The lawsuits claimed the TikTok app “infiltrates its users’ devices and extracts a broad array of private data including biometric data and content that defendants use to track and profile TikTok users for the purpose of, among other things, ad targeting and profit.” The settlement was reached after “an expert-led inside look at TikTok’s source code” and extensive mediation efforts, according to the motion seeking approval of the settlement. Separately, in Washington the Federal Trade Commission and U.S. Justice Department are looking into allegations that TikTok failed to live up to a 2019 agreement aimed at protecting children’s privacy. 
 
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Australia has become the world’s first nation to make digital companies such as Facebook and Google pay domestic news outlets for their content.Parliament approved the law Thursday that would allow a government arbitrator to decide the price a digital company should pay news outlets if the two sides fail to reach an agreement.The final legislation includes a set of amendments as part of an agreement reached Tuesday between the Australian government and Facebook. The amendments include a two-month mediation period that would give social media giants and news publishers extra time to broker agreements before they are forced to abide by the government’s provisions.The agreements ended a stalemate that prompted Facebook to block all Australian news content last week, preventing them from being viewed or shared. The websites of several public agencies and emergency services were also blocked on Facebook, including pages that include up-to-date information on COVID-19 outbreaks, brushfires and other natural disasters.
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Facebook on Wednesday pledged to invest at least $1 billion to support journalism over the next three years as the social media giant defended its handling of a dispute with Australia over payments to media organizations.Nick Clegg, head of global affairs, said in a statement that the company was willing to support news media while reiterating its concerns about mandated payments.”Facebook is more than willing to partner with news publishers,” Clegg said after Facebook restored news links as part of a compromise with Australian officials. “We absolutely recognize quality journalism is at the heart of how open societies function — informing and empowering citizens and holding the powerful to account.”Clegg defended the U.S. social media giant in a blog post titled “The Real Story of What Happened With News on Facebook in Australia.”The social media platform came under fire after it blanked out the pages of media outlets for Australian users and blocked them from sharing any news content, rather than submit to the proposed legislation.Clegg contended in his post that at the heart of the controversy was a misunderstanding about the relationship between Facebook and news publishers.’Free referrals’News groups share their stories at the social network or make them available for Facebook users to share with features such as buttons designed into websites, Clegg noted.Facebook drove some 5.1 billion such “free referrals” to Australian news publishers last year, worth an estimated 407 million Australian dollars, according to Clegg.”The assertions — repeated widely in recent days — that Facebook steals or takes original journalism for its own benefit always were and remain false,” Clegg said. “We neither take nor ask for the content for which we were being asked to pay a potentially exorbitant price.”Clegg said that to comply with the law as originally proposed in Australia, “Facebook would have been forced to pay potentially unlimited amounts of money to multinational media conglomerates under an arbitration system that deliberately misdescribes the relationship between publishers and Facebook.”He maintained that in blacking out all news in the country, “we erred on the side of overenforcement” and acknowledged that “some content was blocked inadvertently” before being restored.  
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Facebook Inc.’s oversight board has received a “user statement” for the case it is deciding about whether the social media company was right to indefinitely suspend former President Donald Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts, a board spokeswoman confirmed on Tuesday. Facebook handed the case to its independent board in January after it blocked Trump’s access to his accounts over concerns of further violent unrest following the storming of the U.S. Capitol by the former president’s supporters. The board’s process gave administrators of Trump’s page the option to submit a statement challenging Facebook’s decision. The spokeswoman said the board would have no further comment until it had issued a decision. The appeal was first reported by the UK’s Channel 4 News. Earlier this month, the oversight board said it was extending the public comment period on the case for a week, citing “high levels of interest.” The oversight board spokeswoman said the board had received more than 9,000 comments on the Trump case, the most the board has had for any case. Several academics and civil rights activists have publicly shared their letters urging the board to ban Trump permanently. Republican lawmakers have railed against the ban and demanded Trump’s accounts be reinstated. 
 
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The latest International Labor Organization FILE – Travelers request an Uber ride at Los Angeles International Airport’s LAX-it pick up terminal, Aug. 20, 2020.However, there are a number of downsides to this new form of work.  For example, Ryder notes workers sometimes have to pay a commission or a fee just to access the digital labor market. “Workers also frequently struggle to find sufficient well-paid work to earn a decent income, and many do not have access to social protection, and this has become a particular point of concern obviously in the course of the current pandemic.  Moreover, workers are often unable to engage in collective bargaining that would allow them to have the way to address some of these issues,” he said.The report finds working hours often can be long and unpredictable.  It says half of online platform workers earn less than $2 per hour, women earn less than men and workers in developing countries earn about 60 percent less than those doing the same job in developed countries. Since digital labor platforms operate across multiple jurisdictions, the ILO says international labor standards governing digital platform workers must be enacted.  Among its recommendations, authors of the report say self-employed platform workers should have the right to bargain collectively. They say all workers, including platform workers, should have access to adequate social security benefits.
 
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Nigeria’s reported rapes tripled during COVID-19 pandemic to a few thousand, but the U.N. Children’s fund says one in four girls have been victims of sexual violence – meaning countless thousands of rapes are going unreported due to stigma. A Nigerian programmer has created an application for rape survivors to report the attacks and seek help while avoiding stigma. Percy Dabang reports from Yola, Nigeria.Camera: Halley Cromwell  Produced by: Jon Spier 
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The Australian government says Facebook has agreed to allow Australians to resume viewing or sharing news content after the two sides reached an agreement over a proposal to make the digital giants pay domestic news outlets for their content. The two sides announced the deal Tuesday just hours before the Australian Senate was set to begin debate on a set of amendments to a bill that was passed just last week by the lower House of Representatives.  The amendments include a two-month mediation period that would give social media giants and news publishers extra time to broker agreements before they are forced to abide by the government’s provisions.   Treasurer Josh Frydenberg issued a joint statement with Communications Minister Paul Fletcher saying Facebook will restore Australian news outlets on the social media platform “in the coming days.”An illustration image shows a phone screen with the “Facebook” logo and Australian newspapers in Canberra, Australia, Feb. 18, 2021.Facebook regional director William Easton issued a statement saying the company was “satisfied” the Australian government agreed to the changes and guarantees “that address our core concerns about allowing commercial deals that recognize the value our platform provides to publishers relative to the value we receive from them.” Facebook blocked Australian news content last week despite ongoing negotiations with Canberra. The websites of several public agencies and emergency services were also blocked on Facebook, including pages that include up-to-date information on COVID-19 outbreaks, brushfires and other natural disasters. Australian media companies have seen their advertising revenue increasingly siphoned off by big tech firms like Google and Facebook in recent years. Google had also threatened to block news content if the law were passed, even warning last August that Australians’ personal information could be “at risk” if digital giants had to pay for news content. But the company has already signed a number of separate agreements with such Australian media giants as the Rupert Murdoch-owned News Corp, Nine Entertainment and Seven West Media. 
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It took just three months for the rumor that the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 was engineered as a bioweapon to spread from the fringes of the Chinese internet and take root in millions of people’s minds.By March 2020, belief that the virus had been human-made and possibly weaponized was widespread, multiple surveys indicated. The Pew Research Center found, for example, that one in three Americans believed the new coronavirus had been created in a lab; one in four thought it had been engineered intentionally.This chaos was, at least in part, manufactured.Powerful forces, from Beijing and Washington to Moscow and Tehran, have battled to control the narrative about where the virus came from. Leading officials and allied media in all four countries functioned as super-spreaders of disinformation, using their stature to sow doubt and amplify politically expedient conspiracies already in circulation, a nine-month Associated Press investigation of state-sponsored disinformation conducted in collaboration with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab found. The analysis was based on a review of millions of social media postings and articles on Twitter, Facebook, VK, Weibo, WeChat, YouTube, Telegram, and other platforms.Disinformation leaderAs the pandemic swept the world, it was China — not Russia — that took the lead in spreading foreign disinformation about COVID-19 virus’s origins.Beijing was reacting to weeks of fiery rhetoric from leading U.S. Republicans, including then-President Donald Trump, who sought to rebrand COVID-19 virus as “the China virus.”China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs says Beijing has worked to promote friendship and serve facts, while defending itself against hostile forces seeking to politicize the pandemic.“All parties should firmly say ‘no’ to the dissemination of disinformation,” the ministry said in a statement to AP, but added, “In the face of trumped-up charges, it is justified and proper to bust lies and clarify rumors by setting out the facts.”FILE – Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian takes a question at the daily media briefing in Beijing on April 8, 2020.The day after the World Health Organization designated the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic, Zhao Lijian, a spokesman for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, shot off a series of late-night tweets that launched what may be the party’s first truly global digital experiment with overt disinformation.Chinese diplomats have only recently mobilized on Western social media platforms, more than tripling their Twitter accounts and more than doubling their Facebook accounts since late 2019. Both platforms are banned in China.”When did patient zero begin in US?” Zhao tweeted on March 12. “How many people are infected? What are the names of the hospitals? It might be US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan. Be transparent! Make public your data! US owe (sic) us an explanation!”What happened next showcases the power of China’s global messaging machine.Spray of tweetsOn Twitter alone, Zhao’s aggressive spray of 11 tweets on March 12 and 13 was cited more than 99,000 times over the next six weeks, in at least 54 languages, according to an analysis conducted by DFRLab. The accounts that referenced him had nearly 275 million followers on Twitter, a number that almost certainly includes duplicate followers and does not distinguish fake accounts.Influential conservatives on Twitter, including Donald Trump Jr., hammered Zhao, propelling his tweets to their largest audiences.China’s Global Times and at least 30 Chinese diplomatic accounts, from France to Panama, rushed in to support Zhao. Venezuela’s foreign minister and RT’s correspondent in Caracas, as well as Saudi accounts close to the kingdom’s royal family, also significantly extended Zhao’s reach, helping launch his ideas into Spanish and Arabic.FILE – The logo of Sina Corp.’s Chinese microblogging site, Weibo, on a screen, Beijing, September 2011.His accusations got uncritical treatment in Russian and Iranian state media and shot back through QAnon discussion boards. But his biggest audience, by far, lay within China itself — even though Twitter is banned there. Popular hashtags about his tweetstorm were viewed 314 million times on the Chinese social media platform Weibo, which does not distinguish unique views.Late on the night of March 13, Zhao posted a message of gratitude on his personal Weibo: “Thank you for your support to me, let us work hard for the motherland ??!”China leaned on Russian disinformation strategy and infrastructure, turning to an established network of Kremlin proxies to seed and spread messaging. In January, Russian state media were the first to legitimize the theory that the U.S. engineered the virus as a weapon. Russian politicians soon joined the chorus.”One was amplifying the other. How much it was command controlled, how much it was opportunistic, it was hard to tell,” said Janis Sarts, director of the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence, based in Riga, Latvia.FILE – Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei delivers a televised speech, in Tehran, Iran, Jan. 8, 2021. (Official Khamenei Website/Handout via Reuters)Iran participatesIran also jumped in. The same day Zhao tweeted that the virus might have come from the U.S. Army, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, announced COVID-19 could be the result of a biological attack. He would later cite that conspiracy to justify refusing COVID-19 aid from the U.S.Ten days after Zhao’s first conspiratorial tweets, China’s global state media apparatus kicked in.”Did the U.S. government intentionally conceal the reality of COVID-19 with the flu?” asked a suggestive op-ed in Mandarin published by China Radio International on March 22. “Why was the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Ft. Detrick in Maryland, the largest biochemical testing base, shut down in July 2019?”Within days, versions of the piece appeared more than 350 times in Chinese state outlets, mostly in Mandarin, but also around the world in English, French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Arabic, AP found.China’s Embassy in France promoted the story on Twitter and Facebook. It appeared on YouTube, Weibo, WeChat and a host of Chinese video platforms, including Haokan, Xigua, Baijiahao, Bilibili, iQIYI, Kuaishou and Youku. A seven-second version set to driving music appeared on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok.No consequences”Clearly pushing these kinds of conspiracy theories, disinformation, does not usually result in any negative consequences for them,” said Mareike Ohlberg, a senior fellow in the Asia Program of the German Marshall Fund.In April, Russia and Iran largely dropped the bioweapon conspiracy in their overt messaging.China, however, has carried on.In January, as a team from the World Health Organization poured through records in China to try to pinpoint the origins of the virus, spokeswoman Hua Chunying of China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs urged the U.S. to “open the biological lab at Fort Detrick, give more transparency to issues like its 200-plus overseas biolabs, invite WHO experts to conduct origin-tracing in the United States.”Her remarks went viral in China.China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs told AP it resolutely opposes spreading conspiracy theories.”We have not done it before and will not do it in the future,” the ministry said in a statement. “False information is the common enemy of mankind, and China has always opposed the creation and spread of false information.”  
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Alphabet Inc.’s Google fired staff scientist Margaret Mitchell on Friday, they both said, a move that fanned company divisions on academic freedom and diversity that were on display since its December dismissal of AI ethics researcher Timnit Gebru.Google said in a statement that Mitchell violated the company’s code of conduct and security policies by moving electronic files outside the company. Mitchell, who announced her firing on Twitter, did not respond to a request for comment.Google’s ethics in artificial intelligence work has been under scrutiny since the firing of Gebru, a scientist who gained prominence for exposing bias in facial analysis systems. The dismissal prompted thousands of Google workers to protest. She and Mitchell had called for greater diversity and inclusion among Google’s research staff and expressed concern that the company was starting to censor papers critical of its products.Gebru said Google fired her after she questioned an order not to publish a study saying AI that mimics language could hurt marginalized populations. Mitchell, a co-author of the paper, publicly criticized the company for firing Gebru and undermining the credibility of her work.The pair for about two years had co-led the ethical AI team, started by Mitchell.Google AI research director Zoubin Ghahramani and a company lawyer informed Mitchell’s team of her firing on Friday in a meeting called at short notice, according to a person familiar with the matter. The person said little explanation was given for the dismissal. Google declined to comment.The company said Mitchell’s firing followed disciplinary recommendations by investigators and a review committee. It said her violations “included the exfiltration of confidential business-sensitive documents and private data of other employees.” The investigation began Jan. 19.Google employee Alex Hanna said on Twitter the company was running a “smear campaign” against Mitchell and Gebru, with whom she worked closely. Google declined to comment on Hanna’s remarks.Google has recruited top scientists with promises of research freedom, but the limits are tested as researchers increasingly write about the negative effects of technology and offer unflattering perspectives on their employer’s products.Reuters reported exclusively in December that Google introduced a new “sensitive topics” review last year to ensure that papers on topics such as the oil industry and content recommendation systems would not get the company into legal or regulatory trouble. Mitchell publicly expressed concern that the policy could lead to censorship.Google reiterated to researchers in a memo and meeting on Friday that it was working to improve pre-publication review of papers. It also announced new policies on Friday to handle sensitive departures and evaluate executives based on team diversity and inclusion.
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Jolted by a sweeping hack that may have revealed government and corporate secrets to Russia, U.S. officials are scrambling to reinforce the nation’s cyber defenses and recognizing that an agency created two years ago to protect America’s networks and infrastructure lacks the money, tools and authority to counter such sophisticated threats.The breach, which hijacked widely used software from Texas-based SolarWinds Inc., has exposed the profound vulnerability of civilian government networks and the limitations of efforts to detect threats.It’s also likely to unleash a wave of spending on technology modernization and cybersecurity.”It’s really highlighted the investments we need to make in cybersecurity to have the visibility to block these attacks in the future,” Anne Neuberger, the newly appointed deputy national security adviser for cyber and emergency technology, said Wednesday at a White House briefing. ‘Likely Russian’ hackersThe reaction reflects the severity of a hack that was disclosed only in December. The hackers, as yet unidentified but described by officials as “likely Russian,” had unfettered access to the data and email of at least nine U.S. government agencies and about 100 private companies, with the full extent of the compromise still unknown. And while this incident appeared to be aimed at stealing information, it heightened fears that future hackers could damage critical infrastructure, like electrical grids or water systems.President Joe Biden plans to release an executive order soon that Neuberger said would include about eight measures intended to address security gaps exposed by the hack. The administration has also proposed expanding by 30% the budget of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency, or CISA, a little-known entity now under intense scrutiny because of the SolarWinds breach.President Joe Biden participates in a virtual event with the Munich Security Conference in the East Room of the White House, Feb. 19, 2021.Biden, making his first major international speech Friday to the Munich Security Conference, said that dealing with “Russian recklessness and hacking into computer networks in the United States and the world has become critical to protecting our collective security.”Republicans and Democrats in Congress have called for expanding the size and role of the agency, a component of the Department of Homeland Security. It was created in November 2018 amid a sense that U.S. adversaries were increasingly targeting civilian government and corporate networks as well as the critical infrastructure, such as the energy grid that is increasingly vulnerable in a wired world.Call for resourcesSpeaking at a recent hearing on cybersecurity, Representative John Katko, a Republican from New York, urged his colleagues to quickly “find a legislative vehicle to give CISA the resources it needs to fully respond and protect us.”Biden’s COVID-19 relief package called for $690 million more for CISA, as well as providing the agency with $9 billion to modernize IT across the government in partnership with the General Services Administration.That has been pulled from the latest version of the bill because some members didn’t see a connection to the pandemic. But Representative Jim Langevin, co-chair of the Congressional Cybersecurity Caucus, said additional funding for CISA was likely to reemerge with bipartisan support in upcoming legislation, perhaps an infrastructure bill.FILE – Rep. Jim Langevin, D-R.I., prepares the dais after he was chosen as speaker pro tempore for the opening day of the 116th Congress, at the Capitol in Washington, Jan. 3, 2019.”Our cyber infrastructure is every bit as important as our roads and bridges,” Langevin, a Rhode Island Democrat, said in an interview. “It’s important to our economy. It’s important to protecting human life, and we need to make sure we have a modern and resilient cyber infrastructure.”CISA operates a threat-detection system known as Einstein that was unable to detect the SolarWinds breach. Brandon Wales, CISA’s acting director, said that was because the breach was hidden in a legitimate software update from SolarWinds to its customers. After it was able to identify the malicious activity, the system was able to scan federal networks and identify some government victims.”It was designed to work in concert with other security programs inside the agencies,” he said.The former head of CISA, Christopher Krebs, told the House Homeland Security Committee this month that the U.S. should increase support to the agency, in part so it can issue grants to state and local governments to improve their cybersecurity and accelerate IT modernization across the federal government, which is part of the Biden proposal.FILE – Then-U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Director Christopher Krebs speaks to reporters at CISA’s Election Day Operation Center in Arlington, Va., March 3, 2020.”Are we going to stop every attack? No. But we can take care of the most common risks and make the bad guys work that much harder and limit their success,” said Krebs, who was ousted by then-President Donald Trump after the election and now co-owns a consulting company whose clients include SolarWinds.The breach was discovered in early December by the private security firm FireEye, a cause of concern for some officials.”It was pretty alarming that we found out about it through a private company as opposed to our being able to detect it ourselves to begin with,” Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, said at her January confirmation hearing.Right after the hack was announced, the Treasury Department bypassed its normal competitive contracting process to hire the private security firm CrowdStrike, U.S. contract records show. The department declined to comment. Senator Ron Wyden, D-Ore., has said that dozens of email accounts of top officials at the agency were hacked.’Backdoor code’The Social Security Administration hired FireEye to do an independent forensic analysis of its network logs. The agency had a “backdoor code” installed like other SolarWinds customers, but “there were no indicators suggesting we were targeted or that a future attack occurred beyond the initial software installation,” spokesperson Mark Hinkle said.Senator Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the hack has highlighted several failures at the federal level but not necessarily a lack of expertise by public sector employees. Still, “I doubt we will ever have all the capacity we’d need in-house,” he said.There have been some new cybersecurity measures taken in recent months. In the defense policy bill that passed in January, lawmakers created a national director of cybersecurity, replacing a position at the White House that had been cut under Trump, and granted CISA the power to issue administrative subpoenas as part of its efforts to identify vulnerable systems and notify operators.The legislation also granted CISA increased authority to hunt for threats across the networks of civilian government agencies, something Langevin said they were only previously able to do when invited.”In practical terms, what that meant is they weren’t invited in because no department or agency wants to look bad,” he said. “So you know what was happening? Everyone was sticking their heads in the sand and hoping that cyberthreats were going to go away.” 
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