Many people enjoy playing video games but take for granted that they can hold and easily operate game controllers. Now Microsoft is making it possible for disabled gamers to join in the fun. Tina Trinh reports.
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Top Twitter and Facebook executives will defend their companies before U.S. lawmakers on Wednesday, with Facebook insisting it takes election interference seriously and Twitter denying its operations are influenced by politics.

But no executive from Alphabet’s Google is expected to testify, after the company declined the Senate Intelligence Committee’s request to send one of its most senior executives, frustrating lawmakers.

Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, appearing alongside Twitter Chief Executive Jack Dorsey, will say that her company’s efforts to combat foreign influence have improved since the 2016 U.S. election, according to written testimony released Tuesday.

“The actions we’ve taken in response … show our determination to do everything we can to stop this kind of interference from happening,” Sandberg said.

The company is getting better at finding and removing “inauthentic” content and now has more than 20,000 people working on safety and security, she said.

Technology executives have repeatedly testified in Congress over the past year, on the defensive over political influence activity on their sites as well as concerns about user privacy.

The Senate Intelligence Committee has been looking into efforts to influence U.S. public opinion for more than a year, after U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that Kremlin-backed entities sought to boost Republican Donald Trump’s chances of winning the White House in 2016.

Moscow has denied involvement.

Google offered to send its chief legal officer, Kent Walker, to Wednesday’s hearing, but he was rejected by the committee, which said it wanted to hear from corporate decision-makers.

​’Don’t understand the problem’

Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina, the committee’s Republican chairman, said he expected the hearing would focus on solutions to the problem of foreign efforts to influence U.S. elections and sow political discord, with a jab at Google.

“You don’t understand the problem if you don’t see this as a large effort from whole of government and the private sector,” Burr told reporters at the Senate.

Google said Walker would be in Washington on Wednesday and be available to meet with lawmakers. On Tuesday it released written “testimony” describing the company’s efforts to combat influence operations.

Twitter’s Dorsey also will testify at a House of Representatives hearing on Wednesday that the company “does not use political ideology to make any decisions,” according to written testimony also made public Tuesday.

Dorsey will appear before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, addressing Republican concerns about how the social media platform polices content.

“From a simple business perspective and to serve the public conversation, Twitter is incentivized to keep all voices on the platform,” Dorsey said.

Conservative Republicans in Congress have criticized social media companies for what they say are politically motivated practices in removing some content, a charge the companies have repeatedly rejected.

Trump faulted Twitter on July 26, without citing any evidence, for limiting the visibility of prominent Republicans through a practice known as shadow banning.

Democratic Representative David Cicilline of Rhode Island blasted Wednesday’s hearing and his Republican colleagues, calling claims of political bias baseless.

“There is no evidence that the algorithms of social networks or search results are biased against conservatives. It is a made-up narrative pushed by the conservative propaganda machine to convince voters of a conspiracy that does not exist,” Cicilline said.
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As legislators prepare to grill Silicon Valley executives over Russian hacking ahead of midterm elections, some observers say the debate over expanded government oversight is far from over.

On Tuesday, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey met with legislators in Washington ahead of Wednesday morning’s hearing, where Dorsey and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg will answer questions about cybersecurity before the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the committee’s ranking Democrat, told The Washington Post that the hearing aims to “to sound the alarm that what happened in 2016, as we’ve seen, was not a one-off.”

In recent weeks, Microsoft reported that it had disabled six Russian-launched websites masquerading as U.S. think tanks and Senate sites. Facebook and the security firm FireEye revealed influence campaigns, originating in Iran and Russia, that led the social network to remove 652 impostor accounts, some targeting Americans. The office of Republican Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania said hackers tied to a “nation-state” had sent phishing emails to old campaign email accounts.

Hacking attempts

Newly reported attempts at infiltration and social media manipulation — which Moscow officially denies — point to Russia’s continued interest in meddling in U.S. politics. While observers say there is no clear evidence of Kremlin efforts to disrupt midterms, it nonetheless appears hackers outside the American political system are probing for a way in.

“What’s interesting about this is that the Russians have shown here that they are not at all partisan in this,” said David Sanger of The New York Times, who first reported on Microsoft’s account of the latest attacks, in which company officials seized website domains created by the Kremlin-linked hacker group known as Fancy Bear or APT28 — the same group that federal investigators and private cybersecurity firms blamed for the 2016 election hack.

The phony sites, designed to emulate the Hudson Institute and International Republican Institute, surreptitiously routed users to pages built by hackers to steal passwords and log-in credentials. The aim, Sanger said, is to disrupt institutions that challenge Moscow or Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“They are pursuing their own national interests, going after think tanks that have taken positions that the Russians find uncomfortable or threatening, whether it’s the use of sanctions or promotion of democracy or pursuit of kleptocrats,” Sanger told VOA.

The extent to which Microsoft coordinated with federal investigators to thwart the latest attack wasn’t clear, he said.

“I’m not sure whether they gave the government an advance heads up, but the nature of cyber now is that you hear about these [attacks from the] companies before you hear about them from government,” Sanger added.

In recent months, legislators on both sides of the aisle have expressed willingness to regulate how U.S. tech companies safeguard themselves against intrusions. But analyst Ben Nimmo of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab says the Microsoft takedown bodes well for the tech sector’s independent ability to prevent attacks.

“This is something we’ve seen over the last couple of months — tech companies have been much more forward-leaning in their attempts to prevent this kind of interference,” Nimmo told VOA.

“We had Microsoft coming out up front and saying we’ve just stopped this attack, and they actually attributed it directly to Fancy Bear, which is very striking that they’re actually confident in making that direct attribution. A couple of weeks ago, we had Facebook coming out and exposing a number of inauthentic accounts, which had some connections with the troll farm in St. Petersburg,” he added, referring to the Internet Research Agency linked to the 2016 U.S. election hack. “About a month before that, we had Twitter coming out and releasing a list of handles that it had traced back to the troll farm.”

A troll farm is a group of people who attempt to create disruption in an online community by posting comments online that are deliberately inflammatory or provocative.

US, European action

With all of the recent activity on the platform side, Nimmo said the question is “what are we going to see on the government level?”

More specifically, what can the West can do in order to pressure the Russian government — and does the West have the political will to do it? If nothing else, the latest attacks are likely to embolden U.S. and European lawmakers to pass additional sanctions.

“Although I think we need to fully understand the scope of this activity that Microsoft has reported, it clearly demonstrates that Russia is not in any way pulling back from the techniques that it used in 2016,” said Alexander Vershbow, a distinguished fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, and a former NATO deputy secretary general.

“If anything, it’s broadening its target to include conservative think tanks and organizations like the Hudson Institute, and so I think you can say right now, at a minimum, it would give momentum to congressional efforts to tighten the sanctions even further,” added Vershbow, who also has been a U.S. ambassador to Russia, South Korea and NATO. “It may also strengthen the hand of administration officials as they consult with Europe in trying to push the Europeans to tighten their sanctions as well.”

Retired Marine General Jim Jones, former national security adviser during the Obama administration, said although sanctions can be effective in the short term, long-term national security depends on safeguarding the cyber infrastructure itself.

“In a not so distant future, the country that first succeeds in reaching complete cybersecurity will be able to cause even more serious disorders,” Jones told VOA. “That’s the essence of cyberwar in our century.”

For individuals targeted by foreign hackers, such as the Hudson Institute’s Russian kleptocracy expert Ben Judah, no amount of new sanctions or malware detection will be enough.

“Be careful of what you keep on your computer and on your phone,” Judah told VOA. “Have sensitive information? Use pen and paper.”

Following Wednesday morning’s Senate hearing, Twitter CEO Dorsey will appear solo before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, where he’ll be asked to address allegations of political censorship.

This story originated in VOA’s Russian Service. Original reporting contributed by Natalia Antonova and Jela De Franceschi. Some information is from AP.
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Twitter’s CEO says the company is not biased against Republicans or Democrats and is working on ways to ensure that debate is healthier on its platform.

In prepared testimony released ahead of a House hearing Wednesday, Jack Dorsey says he wants to be clear about one thing: “Twitter does not use political ideology to make any decisions, whether related to ranking content on our service or how we enforce our rules.”

The testimony comes as some Republicans say conservatives have been censored on social media and have questioned the platform’s algorithms. Dorsey will testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Wednesday afternoon on that subject, following a morning hearing in the Senate Intelligence Committee on Russian interference on social media.

Dorsey says in the House testimony the company has continued to identify accounts that may be linked to a Russian internet agency that was indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller earlier this year.

The indictment detailed an elaborate plot by Russian intelligence officers to disrupt the 2016 U.S. presidential election, charging several people associated with the Internet Research Agency with running a huge but hidden social media trolling campaign aimed in part at helping Republican Donald Trump defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton.

Dorsey says in the testimony Twitter has so far suspended 3,843 accounts the company believes are linked to the agency and has seen recent activity.

“These accounts used false identities purporting to be Americans, and created personas focused on divisive social and political issues,” Dorsey said.

To address concerns about bias, Dorsey offered an explanation of how Twitter uses “behavioral signals,” such as the way accounts interact and behave on the service. Those signals can help weed out spam and abuse.

He said such behavioral analysis “does not consider in any way” political views or ideology.

Dorsey said the San Francisco-based company is also “committed to help increase the collective health, openness, and civility of public conversation, and to hold ourselves publicly accountable towards progress.”
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Russia on Tuesday said it has officially warned US internet giant Google against meddling in next Sunday’s local elections by posting opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s videos calling for mass protests.

Representatives of Russia’s electoral commission, the Prosecutor-General’s Office and the state internet watchdog at a meeting alleged Navalny uses Google’s services to disseminate illegal information and warned that the company may be prosecuted if it does not act to stop this.

A Google spokeswoman declined to give a specific comment, telling AFP in an emailed statement that the company “reviews all valid requests from government institutions.”

Central Election Commission member Alexander Klyukin said the commission had sent an official letter to Larry Page, the CEO of Google’s parent company Alphabet, regarding Navalny’s use of YouTube.

The fierce Kremlin critic has urged Russians to protest on September 9, when several Russian regions and Moscow elect regional and local officials.

Navalny is currently serving a 30-day sentence for violating public order laws during a protest earlier this year.

“Mr. Navalny buys the company’s advertising tools to publish information on YouTube about the mass political event on September 9, on the day of elections,” Klyukin said.

“We informed Google that such events on election day will lead to massive violation of the law” because political agitation is banned on election day, he said.

“Meddling by a foreign company in our election is not permitted.”

He called Google a “gigantic American company” and hinted that Washington uses it as an influence tool.

US officials have repeatedly warned about the dangers of Russian interference in upcoming elections and there is a full-scale probe underway into Moscow’s alleged role in the 2016 presidential election which brought Donald Trump to office.

‘Mouthpiece’ for illegal information

The deputy chief of Russia’s internet watchdog Roskomnadzor, Vadim Subbotin, accused “foreign internet platforms” of disrespecting Russian laws and serving as a “mouthpiece for disseminating illegal information.”

He said Google-owned YouTube “acts as a link in the chain for propaganda of anti-social behaviour during Russian elections.”

He said “over 40” YouTube channels “constantly call for violating Russian law.”

“Certain parties interested in destabilising the situation in Russia attempt to attract internet users to illegal actions by providing unlimited opportunities on foreign internet giants like Google,” he said.

If Google fails to respond to official complaints, this will be seen as “de-facto direct intervention in Russia’s domestic affairs,” he said.

The officials discussed their grievances against Google during a meeting at Russia’s upper house of parliament.

Alexei Zhafyarov, an official from the Prosecutor-General’s Office, said it had sent an official warning to Google over the “inadmissibility” of violating Russian election law.

“This is a rather serious measure, after which they can be called to account,” including via criminal prosecution, he said.

Russia has long pushed for greater control of information published by Russian users on international platforms to curb political dissent and prevent terrorism.
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When Stephen Dennis was raising his two sons in the 1980s, he never heard the phrase “screen time,” nor did he worry much about the hours his kids spent with technology. When he bought an Apple II Plus computer, he considered it an investment in their future and encouraged them to use it as much as possible.

Boy, have things changed with his grandkids and their phones and their Snapchat, Instagram and Twitter.

“It almost seems like an addiction,” said Dennis, a retired homebuilder who lives in Bellevue, Washington. “In the old days you had a computer and you had a TV and you had a phone but none of them were linked to the outside world but the phone. You didn’t have this omnipresence of technology.”

Today’s grandparents may have fond memories of the “good old days,” but history tells us that adults have worried about their kids’ fascination with new-fangled entertainment and technology since the days of dime novels, radio, the first comic books and rock n’ roll.

“This whole idea that we even worry about what kids are doing is pretty much a 20th century thing,” said Katie Foss, a media studies professor at Middle Tennessee State University. But when it comes to screen time, she added, “all we are doing is reinventing the same concern we were having back in the `50s.”

True, the anxieties these days seem particularly acute — as, of course, they always have. Smartphones have a highly customized, 24/7 presence in our lives that feeds parental fears of antisocial behavior and stranger danger.

What hasn’t changed, though, is a general parental dread of what kids are doing out of sight. In previous generations, this often meant kids wandering around on their own or sneaking out at night to drink. These days, it might mean hiding in their bedroom, chatting with strangers online.

Less than a century ago, the radio sparked similar fears.

“The radio seems to find parents more helpless than did the funnies, the automobile, the movies and other earlier invaders of the home, because it can not be locked out or the children locked in,” Sidonie Matsner Gruenberg, director of the Child Study Association of America, told The Washington Post in 1931. She added that the biggest worry radio gave parents was how it interfered with other interests — conversation, music practice, group games and reading.

In the early 1930s a group of mothers from Scarsdale, New York, pushed radio broadcasters to change programs they thought were too “overstimulating, frightening and emotionally overwhelming” for kids, said Margaret Cassidy, a media historian at Adelphi University in New York who authored a chronicle of American kids and media.

Called the Scarsdale Moms, their activism led the National Association of Broadcasters to come up with a code of ethics around children’s programming in which they pledged not to portray criminals as heroes and to refrain from glorifying greed, selfishness and disrespect for authority.

Then television burst into the public consciousness with unrivaled speed. By 1955, more than half of all U.S. homes had a black and white set, according to Mitchell Stephens, a media historian at New York University.

The hand-wringing started almost as quickly. A 1961 Stanford University study on 6,000 children, 2,000 parents and 100 teachers found that more than half of the kids studied watched “adult” programs such as Westerns, crime shows and shows that featured “emotional problems.” Researchers were aghast at the TV violence present even in children’s programming.

By the end of that decade, Congress had authorized $1 million (about $7 million today) to study the effects of TV violence, prompting “literally thousands of projects” in subsequent years, Cassidy said.

That eventually led the American Academy of Pediatrics to adopt, in 1984, its first recommendation that parents limit their kids’ exposure to technology. The medical association argued that television sent unrealistic messages around drugs and alcohol, could lead to obesity and might fuel violence. Fifteen years later, in 1999, it issued its now-infamous edict that kids under 2 should not watch any television at all.

The spark for that decision was the British kids’ show “Teletubbies,” which featured cavorting humanoids with TVs embedded in their abdomens. But the odd TV-within-the-TV-beings conceit of the show wasn’t the problem — it was the “gibberish” the Teletubbies directed at preverbal kids whom doctors thought should be learning to speak from their parents, said Donald Shifrin, a University of Washington pediatrician and former chair of the AAP committee that pushed for the recommendation.

Video games presented a different challenge. Decades of study have failed to validate the most prevalent fear, that violent games encourage violent behavior. But from the moment the games emerged as a cultural force in the early 1980s, parents fretted about the way kids could lose themselves in games as simple and repetitive as “Pac-Man,” `’Asteroids” and “Space Invaders.”

Some cities sought to restrict the spread of arcades; Mesquite, Texas, for instance, insisted that the under-17 set required parental supervision . Many parents imagined the arcades where many teenagers played video games “as dens of vice, of illicit trade in drugs and sex,” Michael Z. Newman, a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee media historian, wrote recently in Smithsonian.

This time, some experts were more sympathetic to kids. Games could relieve anxiety and fed the age-old desire of kids to “be totally absorbed in an activity where they are out on an edge and can’t think of anything else,” Robert Millman, an addiction specialist at the New York Hospital-Cornell University Medical Center, told the New York Times in 1981. He cast them as benign alternatives to gambling and “glue sniffing.”

Initially, the internet — touted as an “information superhighway” that could connect kids to the world’s knowledge — got a similar pass for helping with homework and research. Yet as the internet began linking people together, often in ways that connected previously isolated people, familiar concerns soon resurfaced.

Sheila Azzara, a grandmother of 12 in Fallbrook, California, remembers learning about AOL chatrooms in the early 1990s and finding them “kind of a hostile place.” Teens with more permissive parents who came of age in the 90s might remember these chatrooms as places a 17-year-old girl could pretend to be a 40-year-old man (and vice versa), and talk about sex, drugs and rockn’ roll (or more mundane topics such as current events).

Azzara still didn’t worry too much about technology’s effects on her children. Cellphones weren’t in common use, and computers — if families had them — were usually set up in the living room. But she, too, worries about her grandkids.

“They don’t interact with you,” she said. “They either have their head in a screen or in a game.”
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The U.S. space agency NASA is offering a public challenge, with a lofty $750,000 reward, to anyone who can find ways to turn carbon dioxide into compounds that would be useful on Mars.

Calling it the “CO2 Conversion Challenge,” NASA scientists say they need help finding a way to turn a plentiful resource like carbon dioxide into a variety of useful products in order to make trips to Mars possible.

Carbon dioxide is one resource that is readily abundant within the Martian atmosphere.

Scientists say astronauts attempting space travel to Mars will not be able to bring everything they need to the red planet, so will have to figure out ways to use local resources once they get there to create what they need.

“Enabling sustained human life on another planet will require a great deal of resources and we cannot possibly bring everything we will need. We have to get creative,” said Monsi Roman, program manager of NASA’s Centennial Challenges program.

She said if scientists could learn to transform “resource like carbon dioxide into a variety of useful products, the space — and terrestrial — applications are endless.”

Carbon and oxygen are the molecular building blocks of sugars.

On Earth, plants can easily and inexpensively turn carbon dioxide and water into sugar. However, scientists say this approach would be difficult to replicate in space because of limited resources, such as energy and water.

NASA says the competition is divided into two phases. During the first phase, individuals or teams would submit a design and description of their proposal, with up to five teams winning $50,000 each. In the second phase, the finalists would build and present a demonstration of their proposals, with the winning individual or team earning $750,000.

Those who are up for the challenge need to register by Jan. 24, 2019, and then officially apply by Feb. 28, 2019.
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