Growing up on Mount Boutmezguida in southwest Morocco on the edge of the Sahara desert, Khadija Ghouate never imagined that the fog enveloping the nearby peaks would change her life.

For hours every day and often before sunrise, Ghouate and other women from nearby villages would walk 5 km (3 miles) to fetch water from open wells, with girls pulled out of school to help and at risk of violence on the lonely treks.

But with groundwater levels dropping due to overuse, drought and climate change, the challenge to get enough water daily was becoming harder, and almost half of people in the local area sold up and quit rural life after generations for the city.

As the future of the traditional Berber region by Mount Boutmezguida floundered, a mathematician whose family came from the area had a eureka moment gleaned from living overseas – using fog to make water.

Now Ghouate’s village is connected to the world’s largest functioning fog collection project, alleviating the need to collect water that fell mainly on women, and with state-of-the-art equipment setting an example for other projects globally.

“You always had to go to the wells, always be there, mornings, evenings,” said Ghouate, a mother-of-three, as she prepared lunch for her family, showing off the tap in her home.

“But now water has arrived in our house. I like fog a lot.

The project, running since 2015 after nine years of surveys and tests, was founded by the Moroccan non-government organization Dar Si Hmad, which works to promote and preserve local culture, history, and heritage.

It was the brainchild of mathematician and businessman Aissa Derhem whose parents were originally from Mount Boutmezguida where the slopes are covered in mist on average 130 days a year.

Derhem first came across fog collection when he learned of one of the world’s first projects – in Chile’s Atacama Desert – while he living in Canada in the 1980s studying for his PhD.

But it was not until visiting his parents’ village years later that he realized the mountainous location, situated at the edge of the Sahara and about 35 km (22 miles) from the Atlantic Ocean, was perfect for fog.

Ideal Location

Mist accumulates in coastal areas where a cold sea current, an anticyclone and a land obstacle, such as a mountain range, combine.

“When the sea water evaporates, the anticyclone … stops it from becoming rain, and when it hits the mountain, that’s where it can be gathered,” Derhem told the Thomson Reuters Foundation, looking out from the top of Mount Boutmezguida besides a small building used as a fog observatory and tool deposit.

“If we look at the planet, we see this happening in all tropical regions … In Chile and Peru in Latin America. The Kalahari desert in Africa. In Western Australia. Around the Thar desert in India and in California,” he listed as examples.

Developed in South America in the 1980s, fog collection projects have since spread globally to countries including Guatemala, Ghana, Eritrea, Nepal and the United States.

In Morocco, Dar Si Hmad has built a system of nets stretching about 870 square metres – about 4.5 tennis courts.

These nets are hung between two poles and when wind pushes the fog through the mesh, water droplets are trapped, condense and fall into a container at the bottom of the unit with pipes connecting the water to reservoirs.

Derhem hopes the success of the Mount Boutmezguida scheme can help other areas in West Africa and in North Africa – where the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) says fresh water resources are among the world’s lowest.

Studies show climate change impacting water patterns globally and Derhem said in Morocco levels have dropped to about 500 cubic meters a person a year from about 1,500 cubic meters a person in the 1960s on calculations based on government figures.

Challenges Too

The principles behind fog collection are simple, and throughout nature examples exist of creatures capturing moisture from the air in the most arid conditions, ranging from beetles in the Namib Desert to lizards in the Australian outback.

But creating a water collection project on a large scale comes with challenges, as the research and development, as well as the infrastructure and technology involved in expanding and developing fog collection projects, can be costly.

The project at Mount Boutmezguida, however, has been a trailblazer for other projects due to its equipment, according to its founders.

The original nets used were insufficiently resistant to the high winds and tore but a partnership with the German non-profit Water Foundation allowed Dar Si Hmad to develop a stronger net.

The CloudFisher was described by the WaterFoundation as the first maintance-free fog collector that can withstand wind speeds of up 120 kph with flexible troughs following the movement of the net in the wind.

Now collected water is filtered and combined with underground water before being distributed to villages on the grid with homes paying for water through a pre-paid system.

The initial pilot project served five villages. At present, the 870 square metres of nets installed reach about 140 families – 14 villages – while a second set of nets is being built.

“Fog is like aeroplanes at the start. At the beginning they were only little toys but, with some effort, things have changed … but it needs investment,” said Derhem.

“Along the coast, there is three times as much fog as there is available on Mount Boutmezguida. The government spends millions for water desalination processes. This is something that is worth exploring.”

For with dry wells comes anxiety and risk but also the unraveling of traditional livelihoods and communities.

Mohamed Zabour, president of the local municipality, said more than 60 percent of the inhabitants of the region live without running water in their homes.

Between 2004 and 2014, 2,000 of the 5,000 local residents moved to cities.

“Our region is rich but it needs infrastructure. And water is one of the priorities,” said Zabour.

“If we don’t find a solution in the next 10 years, it’s going to be a catastrophe … It’s going to be like a desert. Empty.”

For Ghouate, the fog scheme has improved village life.

“When we were kids, we didn’t even know what it meant to need water  … Now there is less rain and if I still had to go to the wells, I wouldn’t find much water now,” she said. “Everything is about water, everything. I don’t have to worry about it anymore.”
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Facebook said a software bug led some users to post publicly by default regardless of their previous settings. The bug affected as many as 14 million users over several days in May.

The problem, which Facebook said it has fixed, is the latest privacy scandal for the world’s largest social media company.

It said the bug automatically suggested that users make new posts public, even if they had previously restricted posts to “friends only” or another private setting. If users did not notice the new default suggestion, they unwittingly sent their post to a broader audience than they had intended.

Erin Egan, Facebook’s chief privacy officer, said the bug did not affect past posts. Facebook is notifying users who were affected and posted publicly during the time the bug was active, advising them to review their posts.

The news follows recent furor over Facebook’s sharing of user data with device makers, including China’s Huawei. The company is also still recovering from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which a Trump-affiliated data-mining firm got access to the personal data of as many as 87 million Facebook users.

Jonathan Mayer, a professor of computer science and public affairs at Princeton University, said on Twitter that this latest privacy gaffe “looks like a viable Federal Trade Commission/state attorney general deception case.” That’s because the company had promised that the setting users set in their most recent privacy preferences would be maintained for future posts. In this case, this did not happen for several days.

Facebook’s 2011 consent decree with the FTC calls for the company to get “express consent” from users before sharing their information beyond what they established in their privacy settings. Even if the bug was an accident on Facebook’s part, Mayer said in an email that the FTC can bring enforcement action for privacy mistakes.

Facebook, which has 2.2 billion users, says the bug was active from May 18 until May 27. While the company says it stopped the error on May 22, it was not able to change all the posts back to their original privacy parameters until later.

The mistake happened when the company built a new way for people to share “featured items” on their profiles. These items, which include posts and photo albums, are automatically public. In the process of creating this feature, Facebook said it accidentally made the suggested audience for all new posts public.

When people post to Facebook, the service suggests a default distribution for their posts based on past privacy settings. If someone made all posts “friends only” in the past, it will set their next post to “friends only” as well. People can still manually change the privacy level of the posts — anywhere from “public” to “only me” — and this was the case while the bug was active as well.
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As the internet continues to revolutionize communications, the next world-changing technology may already be here. Blockchain, a way of recording data and automatically storing it on computers around the world, has the potential to change everything from collecting crime scene evidence to creating new digital currencies. VOA’s Jill Craig visited a blockchain hackathon in Memphis, Tennessee, to learn more.
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Major changes could be ahead for the International Space Station but there will always be an American astronaut in orbit, NASA’s new boss said Wednesday.

The space agency is talking with private companies about potentially taking over the space lab after 2025, but no decision will made without the other 21 countries that are partners in the project, NASA Administrator James Bridenstine said in his first briefing with reporters.

President Donald Trump’s recent budget requests have put discussions about the station’s future “on steroids,” he said. Under Trump’s 2019 proposed budget, U.S. funding for the space station would end by 2025. The U.S. has spent more than $75 billion on the space station.

Options include splitting the station into different segments or reducing its size by breaking it up and discarding one part.

Always a US astronaut in orbit

But no matter what happens, there won’t be any gap when Americans aren’t in space, Bridenstine vowed. It won’t be as it was after the Apollo moon program closed or even the retirement of the space shuttle fleet, which has forced NASA to pay Russia to ferry astronauts to the station.

“There are kids graduating from high school this month, that their entire lives, we’ve had an astronaut in space,” Bridenstine said. “And we want that to live on in perpetuity forever. No gaps.”

Companies are interested in running the station and “there’s a range of options” that are just now being examined, he said.

The first station piece was launched in 1998. The complex was essentially completed with the end of the shuttle program in 2011. It is about the size of a six-bedroom house, complete with two bathrooms, a gym and a 360-degree bay window. It usually has a crew of six.

Climate change

In wide-ranging remarks, the former Oklahoma Republican congressman said he generally supports NASA’s Earth science missions, including missions that monitor heat-trapping carbon dioxide. He said at least three climate science satellites that the Trump administration had tried to cancel earlier in budget proposals “could all end up in very good shape” and that he supported them in Congress, crossing party lines.

“We’re going forth with missions that are going to do carbon monitoring,” he said, ticking off a couple of projects. “We’re committed to that.”

When told that a Pew Research poll out Wednesday said that 63 percent of Americans said NASA’s top priority should be monitoring key parts of Earth’s climate, Bridenstine said “good” and reiterated his acceptance of human-caused climate change as a threat to national security and the globe.

Back to the moon

Bridenstine also said he hopes NASA will put some kind of small robotic landers on the moon next year, followed at some later date by humans. Astronauts should use the moon as a “proving ground” for future missions to Mars, especially checking out potential health issues for living far away from Earth for a long time. He said he worried about balance, vision, bone loss and heart issues that have been reported with space station astronauts.

“We do not want to go to Mars and have our astronauts to be marshmallows on the surface of Mars,” Bridenstine said. “The moon is our best opportunity to be successful when we go to Mars.”
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Passenger jets of the future will be safer, lighter, faster, more fuel-efficient and … windowless.

So predicts Emirates Airlines chief Tim Clark. The Dubai-based airline has already introduced virtual windows in the first-class suites of its newest planes. 

Instead of being able to see out a conventional window, the passengers will be able to enjoy the view on a full display of windows that will project live camera feeds on a high-definition screen. 

Clark said the images are “so good, it’s better than with the natural eye.”

Clark told the BBC that the ultimate goal was to have a completely windowless plane. 

“Now you have a fuselage which has no structural weaknesses because of windows. The aircraft are lighter, the aircraft could fly faster, they’ll burn less fuel and fly higher,” he said.

But Emirates’ experiment has raised concerns that might not win it the votes of safety regulators. Some passengers have expressed concerns of possibly feeling claustrophobic on windowless planes. 
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The former head of Cambridge Analytica admitted on Wednesday his firm had received data from the researcher at the center of a scandal over Facebook users’ personal details, contradicting previous testimony to

lawmakers.

Cambridge Analytica, which was hired by Donald Trump in 2016, has denied its work on the U.S. president’s successful election campaign made use of data allegedly improperly harvested from around 87 million Facebook users.

Former chief Alexander Nix, in earlier testimony to parliament’s media committee, also denied the political consultancy had ever been given data by Aleksandr Kogan, the researcher linked to the scandal.

On Wednesday he said it had received data from Kogan.

“Of course, the answer to this question should have been ‘yes,'” Nix said, adding that he thought he was being asked if Cambridge Analytica still held data from the researcher.

He denied deliberately misleading British lawmakers and said the company had deleted the data, which had been of no use.

The committee is investigating fake news, and focusing on the role of Cambridge Analytica and Facebook in the 2016 Brexit vote as well as the Trump election.

In lengthy, and often testy, questioning by lawmakers, Nix apologized for an undercover film in which he said Cambridge Analytica’s online campaign played a decisive role in Trump’s election win.

But he defended the now-defunct consultancy’s reputation and said he felt victimized.

Cambridge Analytica said after the film was broadcast by Channel 4 television in March that the comments did not “represent the values or operations of the firm.”

Lawmakers asked Nix to return to face questions about inconsistencies in his evidence.

Kogan had told lawmakers he did give Cambridge Analytica the data.

Facebook says Kogan harvested it by creating an app on the platform that was downloaded by 270,000 people, providing access not only to their own but also their friends’ personal data.

Facebook said Kogan then violated its policies by passing the data to Cambridge Analytica.

Embarrassed but vindicated

Nix apologized for his comments in the film, saying he had been foolish and had made exaggerated claims in order to attract what he thought was a potential client.

“It’s not only deeply embarrassing, but it’s something I regret enormously,” he said.

Nix said that Channel 4 had heavily edited the footage to portray him in a worse light. “All Mr Nix’s comments carried in our reports were used in context, including any caveats,” the broadcaster said in a statement.

On other matters, Nix was less apologetic.

He said that he was vindicated in saying Cambridge Analytica had not been involved in the Brexit campaign by a report by the Electoral Commission, and that whistleblower Christopher Wylie had lied about the consultancy’s involvement in Brexit.

Wylie had told the committee that Cambridge Analytica played a pivotal role in the campaign.

On Wednesday he told Channel 4: “I actually backed up everything I said with documents. I am quite comfortable standing by the statements that I made.”

Nix denied a story in the Financial Times that he had withdrawn $8 million from Cambridge Analytica before its collapse last month.

Asked about a Guardian report that a Cambridge Analytica employee visited Wikileaks founder Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy in 2017, he said he had been unaware of the meeting.
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A surge in participation by startup companies this week, at a highlight of Asia’s biggest annual tech event, shows an increased reliance on young entrepreneurs to come with the IT industry’s strongest ideas for connected devices and artificial intelligence.

The InnoVEX segment of Taipei Computex 2018 brought together 388 startups, a term usually defined as founder-owned firms of three to five years old. That number is a jump from 272 at the same event a year ago. Venture capitalists, including at least one with half a billion dollars in investment funds, evaluated them one-on-one and at formal pitching events.

Startups are catching attention as inventors of Internet-of-things technology because there’s no market leader yet, said Jamie Lin, founding partner of AppWorks Ventures, a startup accelerator in Taipei. That technology refers to software and hardware that let computers or phones communicate with everyday devices such as cameras and alarm systems.

Some connections run on artificial intelligence, which means computerized processing of the data collected from those devices. That can mean making human-like decisions.

“Computers continue to morph and there are no dominant players in IoT,” Lin said. “That’s why they need startups and that’s what makes the show relevant.”

In software, by contrast, Google and Microsoft dominate markets worldwide. Apple and Samsung, among others, lead in smartphones.

Coinciding with the tech show this week, Lin’s accelerator, another like it and a Japanese venture capital firm are all holding their own events in Taipei this week for startups.

Expanding market

More than 20 billion things will be connected to the internet by 2020, up from 8.4 billion connected last year, market research firm Gartner forecasts. The number will pick up especially as 5G wireless services speed up connections.

By next year, Gartner anticipates, startup firms working with artificial intelligence will overtake Amazon, Google, Microsoft and IBM in “driving the artificial intelligence economy” for businesses.

Artificial intelligence, also known by its abbreviation AI, will reach a market value of $1.2 trillion per year by 2020 as investment triples between now and then, Forrester Research said.

“There’s a process, which is experimental — error and trial, error and trial – so there’s no one with a ready solution, and AI is so broad that one that can do it all,” said Tracy Tsai, a Gartner research VP in Taipei.

“With AI startups, they say ‘I’m focused, I just do some part of it and I do it well, and I do it attentively,’” she said. “For companies looking for a full solution, if you can show your part works, then they use it.”

Venture capitalists watching

Venture capital firms at the three-day InnoVEX show Wednesday watched a spread of mostly Asian startups with software and hardware ideas focused largely on connected devices. Healthcare and the management of drones were among the fields that companies said they could help with AI.

The show offered chances for startups to pitch their ideas to venture capital firms and accelerators, which are programs that show young firms how to improve their businesses.

Startup promotion authorities from 13 countries, including France and the Netherlands, also scanned the exhibition hall for Asian firms that might complement their own.

“What we care about the most is whether these startups or smaller firms have technology, so if it’s a just a business model only, they aren’t suitable for us,” said Amanda Liu, CEO of the Taiwan government-backed business accelerator StarFab. Her accelerator takes 10 to 15 of every 100 applicants. “They need to have products and their core competence must come from technology.”

Taiwanese firms are good at altering hardware specs, Liu said, and for technology ideal for businesses rather than individual consumers, Liu said. Taiwan positioned itself decades ago as a high-tech hardware manufacturing hub for much of the world.

Qara was one AI-dependent startup at InnoVEX. The 4-year-old South Korean developer with $1 million in venture capital funding uses an AI algorithm to predict the movement of stock and cryptocurrency markets. It has earned revenues of $1.5 million and reports a profit.

“Anyone can see the predictions powered by AI,” said Qara’s global CEO Katie Bomi Son. In terms of accuracy, she said, “Some are from 70, or between 70 to 90. Most of our information [comes] from the machine.”

Qara counts mostly companies as clients but it’s looking for a way to monetize the free app for common users.
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Facebook has admitted that it had a data sharing agreement with four Chinese technology companies, including one considered a national security threat by the U.S. intelligence community, raising new concerns about the social media giant’s handling of its consumer’s personal information.

The admission by the U.S.-based social media giant Tuesday came two days after The New York Times revealed that Facebook had struck special data-sharing deals with as many as 60 device makers, including Huawei, Lenovo, OPPO and TCL, to make it easier for Facebook users to access their accounts on a wide array of devices.

U.S. intelligence officials have raised concerns for years about Huawei, fearing the Chinese government could demand access to data stored on their devices or servers. The concerns prompted the U.S. military to ban the sale of Huawei smartphones on its bases.

Francisco Varela, Facebook’s vice president of mobile partnerships, said Tuesday that the data sharing deals with Huawei and the other Chinese companies “were controlled from the get-go.”

Facebook has been under intense criticism after it was disclosed that tens of millions of users’ personal information was accessed by the British-based political consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica. The company has also been under fire after revealing in September that Russians, using fake names, used social media to try to influence voters ahead of the 2016 U.S. election.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is investigating whether Facebook violated a 2011 consent agreement over a previous ruling that found Facebook had misled consumers over its data-use policies.

 
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For Apple users worried about how much time they and their children spend posting photos and videos to their devices, help is on the way.

Apple has announced new controls that will allow parents to remotely limit the amount of time their offspring spend on iPhones and iPads, as well as hold up a mirror to their own online habits. The feature will be available in the next software update.

The move comes as the tech industry faces criticism that it has successfully made its smartphones and apps addictive with little thought for how people’s lives may be negatively affected by the distraction of constantly checking their devices.

Smartphone addiction

Apple CEO Tim Cook spoke about his own habits at an Apple developers conference this week. After trying out Apple’s new controls, he saw his usage in a new light.

“I thought I was fairly disciplined about this, and I was wrong,” he told CNN.

Earlier this year, major Apple shareholders wrote the company asking that it do more to help parents by providing tools to limit children’s screen time, while looking at how being online constantly affects customers’ mental health.

Apple appears to have listened to some of these concerns. It is introducing “Screen Time,” an app that will give users a weekly report about how much time they spend on their devices and on specific apps, as well as new ways to curb the habit.

Parents can give their children screen time allowances — a specific amount of time they can play a video game or check in with friends on apps such as Snapchat. Once they hit the limit, children will have to ask parents to increase the time allotment.

“We’re empowering people with the facts that will allow them to decide for themselves how they want to cut back,” said Cook.

Apple’s changes will be part of a software update typically released in September.

Apple isn’t the only company creating a digital baby sitter of sorts. Last month, Google announced it, too, was giving parents more tools to monitor their and their children’s usage. 

Customer privacy

In addition, Apple revealed new ways it would limit the sharing of customer information, perhaps in response to the firestorm directed at Facebook over how the social media giant mishandled customer data. It has long been part of Apple’s message that compared with fellow Silicon Valley companies, Apple cares the most about users’ privacy.

Apple customers might not notice some of the changes. They include limiting “fingerprinting,” which gives data collectors the ability to tell one Apple computer from another. Others will allow customers to actively decide whether to allow websites that track them on the Safari browser.

“We believe your private data should remain private,” said Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, Craig Federighi.
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