Spain’s government approved Tuesday the introduction of new taxes on digital business and stock market transactions, following similar steps by other European countries.The Cabinet agreed at its weekly meeting to adopt the so-called Google tax and Tobin tax. The measures still require parliament’s approval.Finance Minister Mara Jesus Montero said the Google tax, which has angered U.S. authorities and brought a threat of tariffs by the Trump administration, will be levied only from the end of the year.By then, the government hopes an international agreement on digital business taxes will be in place. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, which advises the world’s rich countries on policies, is currently trying to draw up the agreement.Montero said the government wants a “fairer” tax system, adapted to the new economic trends of globalization and digitalization.Spain’s Socialist-led coalition government is following other European countries, such as France and the United Kingdom, in adopting a digital tax.The measure is an attempt to get around tax avoidance measures frequently used by multinationals. Big tech firms such as Google and Facebook pay most of their taxes in the European Union country where they are based and often pay very little in countries where they run large and profitable operations.Spain wants to place a 3% tax on online ads, on deals brokered on digital platforms and on sales of user data by tech companies that have a turnover of more than 750 million euros a year internationally and more than 3 million in Spain. It hopes to raise close to 1 billion euros a year in extra tax revenue.Other EU countries, such as France, Italy and Belgium, have already passed a Tobin tax. In Spain, the government aims to levy a 0.2% tax on share purchases involving companies worth more than 1 billion euros. That should raise more than 800 million euros annually, according to the government.A Socialist government first said it wanted to adopt the new taxes in January of last year, but an April general election foiled its plans.
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As some of the negative effects of life lived online become more apparent, “digital wellness” groups are promoting ways to maintain healthy lifestyles. Deana Mitchell reports 
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Women and minorities pursuing computer science degrees often feel alone and isolated, since the field is overwhelmingly dominated by men. While about 60 percent of all 2017 bachelor’s degree recipients in the U.S. were women, only about 20 percent of Computer and Information Science bachelor’s degree recipients went to women, according to the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT). But an innovative program initiated by a global non-profit in partnership with universities across the U.S. has already made impressive gains in helping to boost those numbers. VOA’s Julie Taboh has more.
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It seems inevitable that in this era of smart technology people would begin to think of ways to make their tech part of their body. Today, people have the ability to change themselves in new and unprecedented ways – and a 19-year-old Kai Landre is living proof. Anna Nelson has the story, narrated by Anna Rice
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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg plans to throw his support behind international reforms that would require Silicon Valley tech giants to pay more tax in Europe.
    
The billionaire social network founder is due to meet members of the European Union’s executive Commission in Brussels and speak at the Munich Security Conference in Germany.
    
Zuckerberg is expected to tell the conference on Saturday that he’s backing plans for digital tax reform on a global scale proposed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
    
According to an excerpt of his speech provided in advance, Zuckerberg will say, “I understand that there’s frustration about how tech companies are taxed in Europe.”
    
Zuckerberg will tell the conference that he’s glad that that the OECD is looking at tax reform, which Facebook also wants.
“And we accept that may mean we have to pay more tax and pay it in different places under a new framework,” Zuckerberg will reportedly say.
    
The OECD plans would require digital and internet companies, including social media platforms, to pay more tax in countries where they have significant consumer-facing activities and generate profits.
    
The current system for taxing multinationals is based on where they are physically located, which sees internet companies such as Facebook pay the majority of their tax in the United States.
    
The situation is even more complicated in the European Union, where multinationals largely pay taxes on business done across the region in the one country that serves as their EU base, often a low-tax haven.
    
Tech companies have faced criticism for not paying enough tax in come countries. The U.S., meanwhile, has criticized the OECD plans, arguing they discriminate against big Silicon Valley companies.
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Facebook decided Friday to allow a type of paid political message that had sidestepped many of the social network’s rules governing political ads. Its policy change came days after presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg exploited a loophole to run such humorous messages promoting his campaign on the accounts of popular Instagram personalities followed by millions of younger people. The change involves what Facebook calls branded content'' — sponsored items posted by ordinary users who are typically paid by companies or organizations. Advertisers pay the influential users directly to post about their brand. No money for FacebookFacebook makes no money from such posts and does not consider them advertising. As a result, branded content isn't governed by Facebook's advertising policies, which require candidates and campaigns to verify their identity with a U.S. ID or mailing address and disclose how much they spent running each ad. Until Friday, Facebook tried to deter the use of paid posts through influential users as political messages. Specifically, it barred political campaigns from using a tool designed to help advertisers run branded posts on Facebook and Instagram, which is owned by Facebook. Friday's rule change will now allow campaigns in the U.S. to use this tool, provided they've been authorized by Facebook to run political ads and disclose who paid for the sponsored posts. Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a Democratic presidential candidate, speaks during his campaign launch of "Mike for Black America," at the Buffalo Soldiers National Museum, Feb. 13, 2020, in Houston.The Bloomberg campaign took the unconventional step of paying social media influencers — individuals with huge followings — to post Bloomberg memes using their Instagram accounts. Different versions of the sponsored posts from the Bloomberg campaign ran on more than a dozen influential Instagram accounts, each of which has millions of followers. That effort skirted many of the rules that tech companies have imposed on political ads to safeguard U.S. elections from malicious foreign and domestic interference and misinformation. Online political ads have been controversial, especially after it was revealed Russia used them to try to influence the 2016 presidential election. In response, Facebook has rolled out rules to prevent a repeat of that, though it has declined to fact-check political ads and refuses to ban even blatantly false messages. The Bloomberg campaign's memes showed the 78-year-old candidate, in a tongue-in-cheek awkward fashion, chatting with popular social media influencers with names likeTank Sinatra,asking them to help him raise his profile among younger folk. Can you post a meme that lets everyone know I’m the cool candidate?” Bloomberg wrote in one of the exchanges posted by an account called F Jerry, which has nearly 15 million followers on Instagram. The candidate then sent a photo of him wearing baggy chino shorts, an orange polo and a zip-up vest. F Jerry’s account then replied, Ooof that will cost like a billion dollars.'' Bloomberg responded by asking where to send the money. Looking to broaden audienceWith the sponsored posts, Bloomberg's campaign said it was reaching those who might not be normally interested in the day-to-day developments of politics. You want to engage people at every platform and you want them to feel like they’re not just getting a canned generic statement,” campaign spokeswoman Sabrina Singh said of the campaign’s strategy. The campaign declined to say how much it paid for the sponsored posts, or if it had more of them in the works. The posts did not appear in Facebook’s ad transparency library, which catalogs the political ads that campaigns buy directly from Facebook or Instagram and tells users how much was spent on them. Bloomberg’s campaign told The Associated Press on Thursday that Instagram does not require the campaign to disclose that information on the sponsored posts it ran earlier this week. 
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A federal judge in Washington has halted, for now, a major U.S. Defense Department cyber contract, blocking Microsoft Corp. from working on the Pentagon’s JEDI cloud-computing initiative pending the resolution of a lawsuit brought by rival Amazon.com.In October, Microsoft was awarded the Pentagon’s Joint Enterprise Defense infrastructure (JEDI) cloud contract, which has an estimated worth of around $10 billion over the next decade. The JEDI project will process and store classified data to provide the U.S. military improved communications with soldiers in the field as well as artificial intelligence to speed up war planning and fighting capabilities.By November, Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud computing division, filed a lawsuit alleging the Defense Department unfairly judged its bid for the contract. Amazon believes the process was tainted by U.S. President Donald Trump’s animosity towards Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s Chief Executive Officer and owner of The Washington Post newspaper, which Trump has regularly accused of bias against him.FILE – This April 12, 2016 file photo shows the Microsoft logo in Issy-les-Moulineaux, outside Paris, France.Court of Federal Claims Judge Patricia Campbell-Smith said the JEDI contract cannot continue to be enacted “until further order of the court.” Judge Campbell-Smith’s full opinion was sealed.While Amazon scored at least a preliminary victory, it is required to create a $42 million security fund that will be used to pay for any damages if the court later finds the injunction was improper.Earlier this week, Amazon asked the U.S. Court of Federal Claims to allow them to question Trump and top Pentagon leaders, including former defense secretary James Mattis and Defense Secretary Mark Esper about any political interference from the White House in the awarding of the contract.“We believe that we will ultimately be able to move forward with the work to make sure those who serve our country can access the new technology they urgently require,” said Microsoft’s spokesman Frank Shaw, adding that he is disappointed by the ruling and believes the Pentagon’s decision-making process was fair.
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Organizers of the world’s biggest mobile technology fair insisted Thursday that they canceled the annual Mobile World Congress due to health and safety concerns over the virus outbreak in China. But the Spanish government disagreed, hinting that there was another motive for the cancellation.
“This is indeed a very difficult situation and a very difficult decision that we have taken,” Mats Granryd, director general of the GSMA, told reporters in Barcelona on Thursday, a day after they canceled the event.
“Our priorities have been very clear and very simple: The first is health and safety of everyone involved in the show and the second priority is the reputation of the MWC and this event here in Barcelona,” he said.
The decision to scrap the Feb. 24-27 event in Barcelona was taken after dozens of tech companies and wireless carriers dropped out over the COVID-19 virus, including major companies like Ericsson, Nokia, Sony, Amazon, Intel and LG. The companies cited concerns for the safety of staff and visitors.
But the Spanish government said in a statement Thursday it “believes it is not public health reasons in Spain that have motivated the cancellation.”
“There is no public health reason to not hold events of this type in our country,” the government added. It did not say what reasons it thought were behind the decision.
Spain has only two people infected with the virus, neither of whom is in Barcelona.
Barcelona Mayor Ada Colau, sitting alongside Granryd, also said, “neither in Barcelona, Catalonia or Spain does any health concern exist today. There is no local reason” to cancel.
Granryd said the decision had nothing to do with the trade differences between China and the U.S., as suggested by one reporter who noted that some of those that had canceled were at events in Amsterdam.
“Absolutely not. Everyone I have spoken to, this is a health and safety issue concern, concern of travel, concern of having to put business-critical resources in quarantine for 14 days so it has nothing to do with anything else than the force majeure situation of having coronavirus disease spreading on the planet,” Granryd said.
John Hoffman, chief executive of GSMA, emphasized they were dealing with “business-critical people,” including 8,000 CEOs. He said “there was grave concern on disrupting their business not only now but into the future.”
Granryd said GSMA could not discuss the costs of the cancellation, as it was “early days.”
“It’s not about money,” he added.
Hoffman said they had considered a scaled-down event but “all of our buyers have indicated they would not attend.”
He said they looked at the data Wednesday and concluded that the “vast majority of those who planned to attend were not going to be there.”
He said it was not possible to postpone the event because it was impossible to know when the situation would change.
Describing it as “a very dark day,” Hoffman said that the group nevertheless looked forward to hosting the event again in Barcelona in 2021. Barcelona city hall and the national government welcomed this.
The show was originally expected to draw more than 100,000 visitors from about 200 countries, including 5,000-6,000 from China.
The decision stands to be a major economic blow to the city, which has been hosting the event for 14 years.
Colau said “the local impact will be very substantial” and that authorities will consult with those sectors affected to see how they can reduce the financial pain.
The show normally represents a huge source of revenue for hotels, restaurants and taxi companies. Authorities have estimated the show would generate 473 million euros ($516 million) and more than 14,000 part-time jobs for the local economy. 
 
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The earliest fans of the internet wondered if it could be a democratizing technology, giving all people access to information, regardless of their income, social status, or level of freedom under their governments. Today another computer technology — artificial intelligence — raises similar questions, depending on whether it will bring benefits for all, or worsen the inequality already in place.A new report, jointly released by Google, INSEAD business school, and Adecco recruiters, tackles those questions by ranking nations and cities based on how well they attract people to their workforce by investing in technology like AI. Asian nations shot up the Global Talent Competitiveness Index in 2020 compared to 2019, particularly developing nations. That has led observers to a two-pronged conclusion marked by cautious optimism: on the one hand, poorer nations can use this technology to get ahead; on the other hand, if people become complacent, the technological advantage could stay in rich nations.“As talent becomes increasingly fluid and mobile, some early AI adopters could leverage this to become more talent competitive,” Bruno Lanvin, executive director of global indices at INSEAD, said, “however there are also signs that the ubiquity of AI is amplifying current imbalances and inequalities.”Most large nations in Asia improved their rankings this year, including China, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Indonesia. The index assigns nations a score for each of dozens of indicators, such as how much technical education and training they provide, the amount of technology transfer they enable, and the level of social mobility.The reason observers have drawn mixed conclusions from the index is that there is opportunity for developing nations to improve, but it is limited. For instance Malaysia got higher marks this year because it does a good job of matching workforce needs with talent. However the report authors say it “would benefit from higher tolerance and greater opportunities for minorities and immigrants.”Residents walk down a street in Kyoto, Japan, a nation whose investment in artificial intelligence helped it climb three spots in the Global Talent Competitiveness Index. (VOA News)What the authors call most “worrying,” though, is the risk of a widening gap between rich and poor in terms of which nations are best preparing to use artificial intelligence. Rich city-state Singapore is the only Asian nation to break the top 10 of the index released last month. In the part of the study focused on cities, high-income Tokyo and Hong Kong are the best performing in the region.Developing nations are able to make some progress because, at a lower level, technology is accessible and cheap. India and the Philippines, for instance, have become global call centers and IT outsourcing hubs, and it is relatively easy for their citizens to pick up basic coding skills regardless of their income.However when technology needs move beyond just coding skills, more investment and resources help. Artificial intelligence, in particular, relies on massive amounts of data to be input and computer power to crunch the data. Nations and companies that amass that data, and the highly-paid professionals who can understand it, have such an advantage that it might become too hard for others to catch up in the future.“AI also will affect people’s jobs and change the nature of work,”Kent Walker, senior vice president of Google, said. “We need to anticipate these changes and take steps to prepare for them.”Google has exactly such an AI advantage. It has been able to collect many photos to input into and improve its image recognition algorithms, for instance, at a level that would be hard for other companies to match.The authors released the global talent index in hopes of highlighting the digital divide, as well as providing recommendations on how to solve it. They say to prevent people from being left behind, developing nations can focus on vocational training and lifelong learning, and not just for lower-skilled tech jobs like coding. People can learn to do work that is complemented — not replaced — by robots; machines may be able to move a syringe into position, but patients will still want human nurses to oversee the injection, for instance.“The human role in the world of work is being augmented by technology rather than substituted by it,” Alain Dehaze, CEO of the Adecco Group, said.At a government level, nations should agree on the rules and principles that guide AI research and uses, such as the need for data protection, the report said. That would increase the odds that new technologies are advanced in the interest of humans.
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Samsung on Tuesday unveiled a new foldable phone, the Galaxy Z Flip, its second attempt to sell consumers on phones with bendable screens and clamshell designs.The company announced the phone at the start of a product event in San Francisco. The new phone can unfold from a small square upward into a traditional smartphone form, and will go on sale Feb. 14 starting at $1,380.Samsung’s first foldable phone, the Galaxy Fold, finally went on sale last September after delays and reports of screens breaking. The Fold, which carries a price tag of nearly $2,000, folds at a vertical crease rather than horizontally as a flip-phone design would. Motorola has also taken the flip-phone approach with its new $1,500 Razr phone.The foldable phones represent manufacturers’ attempt to energize a market where sales have slowed. Many consumers are holding onto old phones longer, in part because new phone features offer increasingly marginal benefits. But these foldable models come with higher price tags and are likely to appeal for now mostly to tech enthusiasts and others at the forefront of technology.For everyone else, Samsung offers its S series. As the 2020s kick off, the South Korean company showed off the Galaxy S20, S20 Plus and S20 Ultra at an event in San Francisco, skipping directly to the 20s from its S10 series.The S20 phones are designed to take high-quality pictures in dark settings, Samsung product manager Mark Holloway said. The phones can take both video and photos at the same time, using artificial intelligence to zero in on the best moments to capture the still images.Samsung’s renewed focus on the camera follows Apple, whose iPhone 11 phones last fall offered an additional lens for wider-angle shots and combined multiple shots with software to improve low-light images. Google’s Pixel phones also offer a similar low-light feature.Samsung’s S phones already offer the wider angle and some features for low-lighting – but Samsung says the new phones will focus on high-resolution photos and the ability to zoom in 30 to 100 times, depending on the model.The S20 phones are expected to come out in March. Samsung didn’t immediately announce prices. Last year’s main S10 model went for $900 in the U.S. at launch. For all models, Samsung plans to make versions compatible with next-generation cellular networks, known as 5G, though it’s still an early technology that consumers typically won’t need yet.As people packed into San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts for Samsung’s launch event, they passed a team taking remote temperatures in the security line, likely a precaution to check for the coronavirus. Samsung also offered hand sanitizer stations and face masks inside the event lobby.
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Have you ever stored something on the cloud and wondered where that data goes? You might be surprised to learn it’s in a quiet residential community located about 30 miles outside of Washington, D.C. The majority of the world’s internet traffic passes through the town of Ashburn in Loudoun County, Virginia — home to one of the world’s largest internet exchanges. VOA’s Dora Mekouar reports.
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Have you ever stored something in the cloud and wondered where that data goes?  You might be surprised to learn it’s in a quiet residential community about 30 miles outside the capital city of Washington, where people jog or walk their dogs around human-made lakes, children’s teams practice on soccer fields, and teens play pick-up basketball on community courts.  The majority of the world’s internet traffic passes through the town of Ashburn in Loudoun County, Virginia, home to one of the world’s major internet exchanges.  “It’s amazing when you think about the amount of fiber that’s in the ground,” says Buddy Rizer, executive director of economic development for Loudoun County. “Both sides of the road pretty much have fiber troughs in them. And now we’re putting some fiber in the middle of the roads as well. We want to continue to build on that fiber network.”Seventy percent of the world’s internet traffic passes through all of that fiber. That’s why Ashburn is known as Data Center Alley. The Silicon Valley of the east. The cloud capital of the world. Pretty much any email sent or received anywhere around the globe passes through this town. If you’ve got something stored in the cloud, it’s probably in one of the 100-plus data centers located in Loudoun County.”A lot of people, they think about the cloud and their eyes go up. Well, it’s not really up,” Rizer says. “The cloud is based somewhere and, by and large, the cloud has been based here in Loudoun County, Virginia, in the data centers, the 18-million-square-feet of data centers that we have on the ground here.”It all started when America Online moved to Ashburn back in the 1990s. AOL brought fiber and power infrastructure with it. MAE-East, one of the world’s first internet exchanges, moved to Loudoun in the late ’90s after first forming in 1992.”It was a couple guys who got together over some beers and decided that they were going to allow one another to pass traffic back and forth across the different networks that they’d been creating,” says John Day, vice president of sales and leasing for Sabey Data Centers.    Other companies followed, each new addition contributing to the creation of the most dense fiber network anywhere in the world. Tech titans like Amazon and Google now have a presence in Loudoun. Northern Virginia’s appeal includes reasonably priced land, low-cost-but-dependable electricity, access to water to help cool the equipment, and a skilled, educated population.Data centersToday, the internet is basically housed in the data centers located in the Washington-area suburb, which is the biggest data center market in the world.”The internet itself is really comprised of these peering points that are housed inside data centers. So without data centers, you wouldn’t really have the internet,” Day says. “The infrastructure that powers the internet wouldn’t be around if it weren’t for the data centers that it lives in.”Companies want their information technology infrastructure close to those peering points. So they often turn to third parties like Sabey Data Centers to host them. Sabey’s client list is confidential, but it includes one of the five biggest cloud providers in the world.Data centers provide power, cooling and connectivity. Back-up generators ensure the power never runs out. The buildings themselves are hardened and have cooling capabilities that allow for the release of waste heat generated by the IT equipment.The data centers ensure the computer applications used by their clients are up and running around the clock, whether it’s a bank, insurance company, or e-commerce website.”They want to ensure that all of their customers, wherever they are, can get to it through the internet,” Day says.Return on investmentSecurity is tight. There’s a lot of privileged information to protect. With non-descript exteriors, data centers aren’t flashy. But they are quietly raking in the bucks for the Virginia county, which expects to take in $320 million in local tax revenue from data centers this year.”A single family home is not a moneymaker for a community like ours,” Rizer says. “For every dollar they take in services, we don’t get the corresponding amount of money back. Data centers, for every dollar we spend on them, we get about $15 dollars back, which is a great return on our investment.”Rizer expects the data center business to keep booming in his county and elsewhere. Across the United States, IT infrastructure isn’t expected to catch up with demand until sometime late in the 2020s.
 
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Images of a reborn Princess Leia, or a youthful Robert DeNiro are bewitching illusions for movie-goers. But concern that the same technology could be weaponized to incite chaos in an election is leading to “deepfake” bans on social media, and a race to develop detection tools. Matt Dibble reports.
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Amazon wants to depose President Donald Trump over the tech company’s losing bid for a $10 billion military contract.
The Pentagon awarded the cloud computing project to Microsoft in October. Amazon later sued, arguing that Trump’s interference and bias against the company harmed Amazon’s chances of winning the contract.The company said in a federal court filing in Washington on Monday that Trump has a “well-documented personal animus towards” Amazon, its CEO Jeff Bezos and The Washington Post, which Bezos owns. Amazon says that Trump is the only who can testify about the “totality of his conversations and the overall message he conveyed” about the bidding process.Amazon is also asking to depose Defense Secretary Mark Esper, former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and other government officials in its filing Monday with the U.S. Court of Federal Claims. The Pentagon didn’t immediately return an emailed request for comment Monday.
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The FBI is conducting roughly 1,000 investigations into suspected Chinese theft of U.S. intellectual property, with many expected to result in criminal charges against individuals and companies later in the year, U.S. law enforcement officials said Thursday.The investigations involve all 56 FBI field offices across the country and span nearly every industry and sector of the U.S. economy, from large Fortune 100 companies to Silicon Valley startups, FBI Director Christopher Wray said.”They’re not just targeting defense sector companies,” Wray said at a conference on the Justice Department’s initiative to combat Chinese economic espionage. “They’re also targeting cutting-edge research at our universities.”FBI Director Christopher Wray testifies during an oversight hearing of the House Judiciary Committee, on Capitol Hill, Feb. 5, 2020 in Washington.The FBI’s China-related investigations have steadily grown over the last two decades and now stand at an all-time high, according to John Brown, assistant director for the FBI’s counter-intelligence division. China-related arrests have also surged in recent years. During the past fiscal year, the FBI arrested 24 people in China-related cases, up from 15 five years earlier, FBI data show.  So far this fiscal year, the bureau has made 19 similar arrests.  “Of course, with our increased caseload we’re achieving more disruptions than ever,” Brown said.The Justice Department’s China initiative was unveiled in November 2018 in response to mounting Chinese economic espionage and came as Washington and Beijing engaged in a months-long trade and tariffs war that cooled off with the signing of an initial agreement between the two nations last month. Since its launch, the Justice Department has brought charges in more than a dozen Chinese economic espionage cases.Last week, the Department announced criminal charges against a prominent Harvard University professor and two others in the Boston area. Charles Lieber, chair of Harvard’s department of chemistry and chemical biology, was charged with lying to federal grant-making authorities about his ties to China.    Lieber, a pioneer in the field of nanoscience, is accused of working for China’s Thousand Talents Plan and Wuhan University of Technology while receiving millions of dollars in grants from the U.S. Department of Defense and the National Institutes of Health.  Speaking at the conference, federal prosecutors signaled that more Chinese economic cases are on the horizon.U.S. Attorney for District of Massachusetts Andrew Lelling announces indictments in a sweeping college admissions bribery scandal, during a news conference, March 12, 2019, in Boston.Andrew Lelling, U.S. attorney for the District of Massachusetts whose office is prosecuting the Lieber case, said he expects to announce additional China cases out of Boston. Boston and the surrounding area are home to numerous prestigious academic institutions.”I can tell you that for the coming year in Boston, I anticipate, frankly, prosecuting more people, which I hope will deter this kind of conduct in the private and academic sectors. And we will couple that with outreach,” Lelling said.However, Lelling said he expects the number to plateau as the private sector and academia “become sensitized to the problem” of Chinese economic espionage.  Richard Donoghue, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York whose office is prosecuting Huawei Technologies for intellectual property theft and violating U.S. sanctions on Iran, said he expects an increase in Chinese intellectual theft-related prosecution, “not only of individuals but of companies.””If we address it now, and we address it effectively, through prosecutions of individuals, prosecution of companies, outreach to academia and the technology industry, I think in the long run, that will lessen the chance for conflict between the United States and (China),” Donoghue said.U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York Richard Donoghue, speaks during a news conference in his office, in the Brooklyn borough of New York, July 16, 2019.Lelling and Donoghue sit on the DOJ’s China Initiative working group, which is focused on preventing and prosecuting thefts of American technology and intellectual property.China has sharply escalated its economic espionage activities in the U.S. over the past two decades, according to law enforcement officials, costing the U.S. economy an estimated $600 billion. The surge comes as Beijing seeks to supplant the United States as the world’s dominant economic power in part by stealing U.S. intellectual property and trade secrets. China denies the assertion.The Justice Department’s aggressive prosecution of Chinese economic espionage has swept up Chinese nationals and Chinese American academics and researchers. That has led to pushback by Chinese American groups and universities concerned about protecting academic freedom.But an aggressive campaign by the FBI over the past year to highlight the threat has helped chip away at the traditional wall of suspicion between universities and law enforcement, according to officials and several university administrators who spoke at the conference.”I appreciate so much the working relationship that we’re developing now with the Department of Justice and the FBI to let us know more about the threats, what they are, because we cannot convince our faculty if they don’t really have the information,” said Mary Sue Coleman, president of the American Association of Universities. “So, kudos to the federal government for bringing these groups together to help us really know what the threat is, develop the armor to protect ourselves from the threat, but not kill what has made us so powerful for the last 75 years.”
 
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Virtual Reality, which immerses viewers in three-dimensional computer-generated worlds, is transforming many fields, from entertainment to education. Mike O’Sullivan reports from a California college, where students are exploring some new applications for so-called VR technology.
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When Iranian-born German academic Erfan Kasraie received an email from The Wall Street Journal requesting an interview, he sensed something was amiss.The Nov. 12 note purportedly came from Farnaz Fassihi, a veteran Iranian-American journalist
who covers the Middle East. Yet it read more like a fan letter, asking Kasraie to share his
“important achievements” to “motivate the youth of our beloved country.””This interview is a great honor for me,” the note gushed.Another red flag: the follow-up email that instructed Kasraie to enter his Google password
to see the interview questions.The phony request was, in reality, an attempt to break into Kasraie’s email account. The
incident is part of a wider effort to impersonate journalists in hacking attempts that three cybersecurity firms said they have tied to the Iranian government, which rejected the claim.The incidents come to light at a time when the U.S. government has warned of Iranian cyber threats in the wake of the U.S. airstrike that killed Iran’s second most powerful official,
Major-General Qassem Soleimani.In a report published Wednesday, London-based cybersecurity company Certfa tied the impersonation of Fassihi to a hacking group nicknamed Charming Kitten, which has long been associated with Iran.Israeli firm ClearSky Cyber Security provided Reuters with documentation of similar
impersonations of two media figures at CNN and Deutsche Welle, a German public broadcaster.ClearSky also linked the hacking attempts to Charming Kitten, describing the individuals
targeted as Israeli academics or researchers who study Iran. ClearSky declined to give the
specific number of people targeted or to name them, citing client confidentiality.FILE – Erfan Kasraie, an Iranian science journalist from Kassel, is pictured in Berlin, Germany, Jan. 30, 2020.Digital threatIran denies operating or supporting any hacking operation. Alireza Miryousefi, the spokesman for the Islamic Republic’s mission to the United Nations, said that firms claiming otherwise “are merely participants in the disinformation campaign against Iran.”Reuters uncovered similar hacking attempts on two other targets, which the two cybersecurity firms, along with a third firm, Atlanta-based Secureworks, said also appeared to be the work of Charming Kitten. Azadeh Shafiee, an anchor for London-based satellite broadcaster Iran International, was impersonated by hackers in attempts to break into the accounts of a relative of hers in London and Prague-based Iranian filmmaker Hassan Sarbakhshian.Sarbakhshian — who fled the Islamic Republic amid a crackdown that saw the arrest of several fellow photojournalists in 2009 — was also targeted with an email that claimed to be from Fassihi. The message asked him to sign a contract to sell some of his pictures to The Wall
Street Journal. Sarbakhshian said in an interview that he was suspicious of the message and
didn’t respond.Neither did the ruse fool Kasraie, an academic who frequently appears on television
criticizing Iran’s government.”I understood 100 percent that it was a trap,” he said in an interview.That’s not surprising given the hackers’ sloppy tactics. For instance, they missed the fact
that Fassihi had left the Journal last year for a new job at The New York Times.The Journal declined to comment. Fassihi referred questions to The Times, which in a
statement called the impersonation “a vivid example of the challenges journalists are facing
around the globe.”U.S. officials and cybersecurity experts see Iran as a digital threat. Earlier this month,
the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) issued alerts about the threat of Iranian cyberattacks following the controversial U.S. attack that killed Soleimani. Microsoft, which tracks attempts to undermine election security, in October accused Charming Kitten of targeting a U.S. presidential campaign; sources told Reuters at the time that the campaign was Donald Trump’s.FILE – Iranian cybersecurity experts and members of Certfa Nariman Gharib, left, and Amin Sabeti check their messages as they work from their office in London, Britain, Jan. 7, 2020.Links to Charming KittenHomeland Security and FBI spokespeople declined to comment on the recent impersonations
identified by Reuters. Certfa, ClearSky, and Secureworks said they could be tied to Charming
Kitten through a study of the tactics, targets, and digital infrastructure involved — including
servers, link shortening services, and domain registration patterns.”This activity does align with prior Iranian cyber operations,” said Allison Wikoff, a Secureworks researcher who has tracked Charming Kitten for years.In early 2019, the United States indicted Behzad Mesri — who ClearSky has linked to Charming Kitten through emails and social media activity — on charges of recruiting a former U.S. Air Force intelligence officer to spy on behalf of Iran. Mesri remains at large and could not be reached for comment.Other impersonated journalists included CNN national security analyst Samantha Vinograd,
whose identity was stolen in August and used in attempts to break into email accounts in Israel, ClearSky said. Another was Michael Hartlep, a Berlin-based videojournalist who has done freelance assignments for Deutsche Welle and Reuters. ClearSky found his name on an email inviting recipients to a bogus Deutsche Welle webinar on Iran’s role in the Middle East. The firm did not find evidence that the Reuters name was used in hacking attempts.In another case, the hackers appear to have invented a journalist — “Keyarash Navidpour” —
to send out a phony invitation on Jan. 4 to an online seminar that it claimed Deutsche Welle
would hold about the killing of Soleimani the day before. No such journalist works for Deutsche Welle, said the news organization’s spokesman Christoph Jumpelt.Vinograd referred questions to CNN, which did not return messages seeking comment. Hartlep told Reuters he worried such stunts might give sources second thoughts about answering a reporter’s queries.”If this becomes the usual way of tricking people,” he said, “definitely it makes our work
very hard.”
 
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Twitter said on Monday that it had discovered attempts by possible state actors to access the phone numbers associated with user accounts, after a security researcher unearthed a flaw in the company’s “contacts upload” feature.In a statement published on its privacy blog, Twitter said it had identified a “high volume of requests” to use the feature coming from IP addresses in Iran, Israel and Malaysia. It said, without elaborating, that “some of these IP addresses may have ties to state-sponsored actors.”A company spokeswoman declined to say how many user phone numbers had been exposed, saying Twitter was unable to identify all of the accounts that may have been impacted.She said Twitter suspected a possible connection to state-backed actors because the attackers in Iran appeared to have had unrestricted access to Twitter, even though the network is banned there.Tech publication TechCrunch reported on Dec. 24 that a security researcher, Ibrahim Balic, had managed to match 17 million phone numbers to specific Twitter user accounts by exploiting a flaw in the contacts feature of its Android app. TechCrunch said it was able to identify a senior Israeli politician by matching a phone number through the tool.The feature, which allows people with a user’s phone number to find and connect with that user on Twitter, is off by default for users in the European Union where stringent privacy rules are in place. It is switched on by default for all other users globally, the spokeswoman said.Twitter said in its statement that it has changed the feature so it no longer reveals specific account names in response to requests. It has also suspended any accounts believed to have been abusing the tool.However, the company is not sending individual notifications to users whose phone numbers were accessed in the data leak, which information security experts consider a best practice.
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YouTube is making clear there will be no “birtherism” on its platform during this year’s U.S. presidential election.Also banned: Election-related “deepfake” videos and anything that aims to mislead viewers about voting procedures and how to participate in the 2020 census.The Google-owned video service clarified its rules ahead of the Iowa caucuses Monday. The company is mostly reiterating content guidelines that is has been putting in place since the last presidential election in 2016.Google said that it will remove any videos that advance false claims about whether political candidates and elected officials are eligible to serve in office.The company’s announcement comes about nine years after celebrity businessman Donald Trump began to get notice for claiming that Barack Obama, the nation’s first African American president, was not born in the United States.Trump repeatedly voiced citizenship doubts even after Obama produced his long-form birth certificate. Trump only fully backed off from the idea in the final stages of his 2016 presidential campaign.YouTube said it will also crack down on any attempts to artificially increase the number of views, likes and comments on videos. It changed its systems for recommending what videos users watch last year in a push to curb harmful misinformation. 
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A federal jury Wednesday decided that Apple Inc. and Broadcom Inc. must pay $1.1 billion to the California Institute of Technology for infringing on patents.Apple was on the hook for nearly $838 million of the damages awarded in a lawsuit that said Broadcom used its patented Wi-Fi data transmission technology in computer chips that went into iPhones, iPads, Apple Watches and other Apple devices.Caltech, the superstar tech school based in Pasadena, said it was pleased by the verdict of the Los Angeles jury.“As a nonprofit institution of higher education, Caltech is committed to protecting its intellectual property in furtherance of its mission to expand human knowledge and benefit society through research integrated with education,” a school statement said.Emails seeking comment from Cupertino-based Apple and Broadcom weren’t immediately returned Wednesday night but they are expected to appeal.Last week, San Jose-based Broadcom announced it had reached agreements to supply components to Apple devices released for the next three years.It wasn’t immediately clear what impact the lawsuit award would have on those deals, which Broadcom said could generate $15 billion in revenues.
 
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U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has warned that the United States will only pass information across what he termed “trusted networks” and criticized close ally Britain over its decision to allow the Chinese firm Huawei to build parts of the country’s 5G mobile network.  Speaking to reporters Wednesday en route to London, where he is due to meet Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab, Pompeo said putting Huawei into the British system “creates a real risk.”The top U.S. diplomat described Huawei as an extension of China’s communist party that is obligated to hand over information to the party, adding that the Trump administration will evaluate Britain’s decision. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo speaks to reporters aboard his plane en route to London, Jan. 29, 2020.”We will make sure that when American information passes across a network, we are confident that that network is a trusted one. We’ll work with the United Kingdom. We were urging them to make a decision that was different than the one they made and we’ll have a conversation about how to proceed,” Pompeo said.Britain had been agonizing over whether to allow Huawei to be part of its 5G rollout, twice postponing the decision since July last year. In the end, the government said it would allow the Chinese firm restricted access to a 35 percent market share of the periphery of the network, rather than the core elements.  Johnson told lawmakers Wednesday the decision offered the best of both worlds.Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson leaves 10 Downing Street to attend the weekly session of Prime Ministers Questions in Parliament in London, Jan. 29, 2020.”I think it is absolutely vital that people in this country do have access to the best technology available. But that we also do absolutely nothing to imperil our relationship with the United States, to do anything to compromise our critical national security infrastructure,” Johnson said at the weekly Prime Minister’s Questions in Parliament.The announcement comes just days before Britain is set to formally leave the European Union on Jan. 31. Some lawmakers fear the Huawei decision could compromise the transatlantic relationship just as Britain seeks to build on its links beyond Europe after Brexit, with a group of Conservative MPs threatening to vote against the government’s 5G plans.”Certainly, U.S. politicians have made some bold threats over the last couple of weeks, but I think this storm will blow over,” said James Sullivan, head of cybersecurity at the London-based Royal United Services Institute. “From the UK’s perspective, this has been a risk-management decision based on technical assessments.”However, in Washington, Democratic U.S. Senator Mark Warner says there is bipartisan agreement that Britain has made the wrong choice.FILE – Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., talks to reporters on Capitol Hill in Washington, Jan. 28, 2020.”Huawei has been and will continue to be a national security threat,” Warner said. “The Brits are our strongest allies. We’ve got to find a way to work through this. I do recognize as well that in Huawei we’ve got an equipment vendor that while as a national security threat is also a lot cheaper than any of the other Western alternatives.”Those Western alternatives are lagging behind, notes cyber industry expert Mark Skilton of Britain’s Warwick Business School.”The issue just in a nutshell is whether you want to continue the economic growth 5G can create because of the speed and power of it, versus the national interests of the U.S., particularly over the Chinese dominating the market,” Skilton said. “5G networks promise to transform our lives through the so-called ‘internet of things.’ Everything from domestic refrigerators to critical national infrastructure will be connected through near-instantaneous networks. That presents many more ‘attack points.'”There is a threat of potentially embedding ‘Trojans’ or malware into these devices,” he added. “Now, if Huawei is the choice of hardware, then they could embed — and I’m not saying they are, but they could — embed this kind of surveillance technology or stealth technology.”  The European Union on Wednesday adopted similar guidelines to Britain, stopping short of banning Huawei but imposing strict security rules.For its part, Huawei welcomed the British decision Wednesday and insisted it does not “take orders” from the Chinese government.
 
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Barbara Birungi Mutabazi has a vision: Train Ugandan women to code and do other technology work.”The beauty of this is that even if there are not enough jobs in Uganda, if you have the right skills, you can work for any organization around the world,” said Mutabazi, who runs Women in Technology, a skills-training organization in Uganda.Mutabazi recently attended the African Diaspora Investment Symposium to find investors and possible employers for the young women she trains. The event brought together entrepreneurs, investors and businesses to talk about the future of Africa business.”The African Diaspora Network is trying to bring Africans and friends of Africa together to collaborate, create and to imagine possibilities for the continent,” said Almaz Negash, the founder and executive director of the African Diaspora Network and the event’s organizer.One theme of the symposium was money — how to tap into the African diaspora to fund small, medium and large companies on the continent.’Scaling’ remittancesRemittances — money sent by people living in the U.S. to family in Africa — has long been a key way to support people. More than $40 billion in remittances goes to sub-Sahara Africa, mostly to Nigeria, Negash said. This is a powerful source of support for families, but some speakers wondered if there are other ways to help spur growth.”How do we scale remittances so that it can also be invested in other people than our family,” Negash said. “Supporting startups.”Another area of support could be to create a fund to help African entrepreneurs and businesses protect their intellectual property, said Joseph Mucheru, Google’s first sub-Sahara Africa lead and now a minister in the Kenyan government.An IP fundAfrican leaders need to find ways to attract investors and businesses “to invest and come in and work with our startups, protect our startups, ensure that the intellectual property that they build can be retained in the continent,” he said.   For the roughly 50 African entrepreneurs attending the event, this was an opportunity to pitch their businesses. The kinds of businesses varied widely.Aboubacar Komara, an architect from Guinea, is working on a housing startup.
“We’re implicating people in the process of actually building their homes. You know, we want to change the concept of what is architecture, because architecture has a lot to do with your identity,” he said.
 
Neile Nkholise is the chief executive of 3DIMO, a sports technology company in South Africa. Sensors are sewn into sports garments, which send data that indicates whether an athlete is at risk of an injury. At the moment, she is focused on football, rugby and basketball.She is raising her seed round of investment but is also looking for investors who can be partners, “people who unlock access to networks” and expertise “that enable us to scale much faster,” she said.For many of the attendees, the event was a welcomed chance to talk about Africa successes. Thelma Ekiyor runs a Nigeria-based business accelerator and an investment fund for women-run businesses.There is no doubt there are problems in Africa, she said, but “for the diaspora, the lens through which you look at these problems must be different. For the diaspora, these problems are opportunities. For the diaspora, they are entry points.”Women in ‘the box’ of micro-lendingShe said one of the challenges has been that the structure of financing women entrepreneurs in Africa and other developing regions has been “micro.””Most of the funds available to women are micro-lending, as if women don’t know what to do with big money,” she told the attendees. “And so the first thing that I knew we had to do was change that and ensure that how we finance women was aspirational. We would start them at them micro-level and support them to grow.”The power of the symposium doesn’t stop after everyone goes home, said Negash of the African Diaspora Network.Over the coming months, connections made may turn into something else — a new business, a customer or partnership — all with a focus on the African continent.
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In a 2017 episode of the TV show “The Good Wife,” a doctor in Chicago is seen advising a dental surgery in Syria, over Skype. Such remote operations, part of an emerging sector known as telemedicine, is not only the stuff of televised fiction, but a real technology that is attracting increasing attention from business and government. That includes Singapore, which has introduced telemedicine legislation in a nation whose medical research and development already has impacts across borders.Telemedicine lawSingapore will regulate telemedicine businesses as part of its upcoming Healthcare Services Act 2020.These services already “have become increasingly popular and are poised to become a key feature of Singapore’s health care system,” said Marian Ho, a senior partner in the corporate division of Dentons Rodyk Singapore, a law firm.Regulate medical services not premisesShe said in a legal briefing that what makes the new law significant is that Singapore will focus on the types of medical services provided, rather than on the premises where they’re provided. For instance, if a patient only needs to refill his painkiller prescription, it is less important that he is on the premises of a hospital, and more important that he is receiving consultation services from a doctor, even if it is over Skype.Citizens of Singapore are readySingaporeans have already started using smartphone apps for simple check-ins with their doctors, using text messages and video calls. The apps range from Doctor Anywhere to MaNaDr. However the new law will be the overarching framework that the island nation uses to regulate this business, including to authorize the Ministry of Health to issue licenses for new services.As businesses develop new ways to provide health services over the internet, the impacts are likely to spread beyond Singapore. The rich micro-state is already a world leader in biomedical science, manufacturing four out of the world’s top 10 drugs, for instance, according to a 2019 report from consulting firm TMF Group and Singapore’s Economic Development Board, a government board.RisksHowever the new technology also comes with risks, such as a doctor’s accuracy rate over a video call versus in person, whether personal data will be protected as it is handed over to apps, and insurance and liability questions in case of malpractice.“My understanding is that out of 10 startups, maybe one survives,” gastroenterologist Desmond Wai told Singapore’s Business Times. “When the rest close down, who will be keeping the patient records?”Large part of the Singapore economyThe Healthcare Services Act, approved by parliament this month, will regulate one of Singapore’s biggest sectors.  National manufacturing decreased overall from December to January, yet biomedical production increased 10.3% annualized, including a 20% increase in medical technology production, according to research from Singapore’s OCBC Bank.That makes medtech a significant part of the Southeast Asian economy, one that will see even more telemedicine in the future.“Singapore’s strong digital capabilities and vibrant research ecosystem aided by close collaboration between the public, private and academic sectors make it the region’s leading center for biomedical sciences,” the TMF-EDB report said. “Over 30 of the world’s major biomedical science and pharmaceutical companies have established their regional clinical trial centers in Singapore.”   
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Britain will allow China’s Huawei Technologies Co. to help build the country’s next-generation cellular network, dealing a blow to a U.S. campaign to launch a worldwide boycott of the telecom equipment giant.The British government said Tuesday it would permit Huawei to build less critical parts of the country’s new high-speed 5G wireless network.The U.S. has campaigned against Huawei for more than a year, noting concerns about national security and the Chinese firm’s relations with the country’s Communist Party.“The United States is disappointed by the U.K.’s decision,” said a senior Trump administration official Tuesday. “There is no safe option for untrusted vendors to control any part of a 5G network.”The U.S. official said the U.S. is willing to work with Britain to exclude “untrusted vendor components from 5G networks.”Mobile network phone masts are visible in front of St. Paul’s Cathedral in the City of London, Jan. 28, 2020. The Chinese tech firm Huawei will be given the opportunity to build non-core elements of Britain’s 5G network, the government announced.Without mentioning any companies, Britain said it would exclude “high-risk” companies from providing “core” components of the new network. It also said it would permit high risk suppliers to supply up to 35-percent of new network’s less risky parts of its infrastructure.Britain’s announcement comes a day before U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is scheduled to meet in London with Prime Minister Boris Johnson. The announcement puts Johnson in an awkward position, as he needs the Trump administration to quickly reach a trade agreement after Brexit.The 5G rollout is particularly critical for Britain, as it leaves the European Union with hopes of positioning its economy as a beneficiary of technological innovation.  In a Friday phone call with Johnson, U.S. President Donald Trump told the British prime minister that giving Huawei the go-ahead would cause a major rift in transatlantic relations and jeopardize intelligence-sharing between Washington and London.U.S. officials have also voiced frustration with decisions by some European nations to grant Huawei some access in the rollout of their 5G network.  Under the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2020, the U.S. defense secretary should brief Congressional defense committees by March 15 on the implementation of plan for fifth generation information and communications technologies, including steps to work with U.S. allies and partners to protect critical networks and supply chains. 
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