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.
…

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.
…

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.
 
…

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.
…

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.
…

Germany’s closely watched impending decision on whether and to what extent to allow Huawei, the Chinese tech giant, to enter its next generation telecommunications infrastructure may yield a result as early as Tuesday, sources tell VOA.The decision “is imminent,” says Emily Haber, German ambassador to the United States, in answer to a question raised by VOA Monday afternoon concerning the German government’s stance with regard to Huawei.“Any decision we take will factor in the relevance of the trustworthiness of the provider,” Haber added.VOA has since learned from diplomatic sources that “imminent” could mean as early as Tuesday February 11th when German lawmakers convene in Berlin.Jacob F. Kirkegaard, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Peterson Institute for International Economics, thinks Germany could end up following Britain’s precedence and reach a compromise solution “between Merkel’s permissive ‘few limits suggestion and the more restrictive line called for by many backbench MPs, led by Norbert Roettgen,” Kirkegaard told VOA.Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel is seen as wanting to work with Beijing in order to secure German business interests in China, while Roettgen, also a member of the governing Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and chairman of the influential Foreign Affairs Committee in the Bundestag, has made  no secret of his mistrust of Huawei.Roettgen pinned his tweet from November 23rd following a CDU vote in which he declared the unanimous vote a huge victory and an unambiguous declaration of where CDU stands on this issue.Unser #Initiativantrag zu #5G wurde beim #cdupt19 einstimmig beschlossen – ein Riesenerfolg! Die Debatte kommt in den #Bundestag. Klare Position der @CDU gegen Einfluss ausländischer Staaten in deutsche kritische Infrastruktur & für eine europäische Lösung! pic.twitter.com/W3uvLAxWJU— Norbert Röttgen (@n_roettgen) November 23, 2019CDU position “against foreign influence in critical German infrastructure” as well as its determination to find a European solution are “clear,” he tweeted, “next comes the parliamentary debate” which could take place Tuesday in Berlin, sources tell VOA.In Kirkegaard’s opinion, Germany could also impose a ceiling on Huawei’s market share and attempt to prevent the company from supplying “core network” components, a measure Britain has recently announced, in spite of Washington’s strong objection.He nonetheless points out that given the 5G technology’s largely “cloud”-based feature, it remains “technically unclear” how core and peripheral distinction could be meaningfully established.Should the German parliament vote Huawei out of Germany’s 5G telecommunications infrastructure, it would be a huge surprise to many, including Kirkegaard. Should it happen, it would constitute a “huge defeat for Merkel,” he says, even as Merkel’s party is thrown into turmoil as her designated successor Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer announced her decision to step down as chairman of the CDU on Monday.It remains to be seen whether the latest development within the CDU could affect the German parliament’s debate on Huawei.Speaking along with the German ambassador at an event hosted by the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies Monday afternoon, Piotr Wilczek, Poland’s ambassador to the United States, said “there’s been a big effort” on the part of all EU countries “to provide Brussels with our positions” on the issue of Huawei.“Now we’re in the process of discussing this in more detail,” Wilczek said, in answer to VOA’s question on his country’s position with regard to Huawei. “Poland and I believe Romania are the only countries that have signed a declaration with the United States, stating just that we’ll be very careful in choosing providers and providers should be very reliable,” he added, without naming any company by name.“This is a very complicated issue … a difficult decision,” he says, “because it’s about the quality of services, of various providers; we know some of them are very much advanced, and some of them are not so much advanced but perhaps more reliable.”Earlier, Norbert Roettgen, the German lawmaker who has openly expressed his concerns about Huawei, stated that when it comes to which providers to be let in, “You don’t just need technical certainty, you need the suppliers to be politically trustworthy, too.” A bill that Roettgen helped draft requires that any company designated as “untrustworthy” be excluded “from both the core and peripheral networks.”Roettgen tweeted on February 8 that the United States and the EU “could team up to counter China’s 5G dominance.”  “We share the same security concerns and should cooperate to expand alternatives.”  He added that “but to do so, we must know that tariffs against Brussels are off the table.  Partners don’t threaten one another,” in a reference to tariffs U.S. President Donald Trump has said he would impose on a number of European imports, including on German automobiles.The #USA & EU could team up to counter #China’s #5G dominance. We share the same security concerns & should cooperate to expand 🇪🇺 alternatives. But to do so we must know that tariffs against Brussels are off the table. Partners don’t threaten one another. https://t.co/ZPvZFKWNYq— Norbert Röttgen (@n_roettgen) February 8, 2020Huawei has repeatedly denied that it is beholden to the Chinese government and its political demands. China’s top envoy to Berlin has made it clear that Beijing “will not stand idly by” should Germany’s decision on Huawei turns out to be unfavorable to Beijing. “If Germany were to make a decision that led to Huawei’s exclusion from the German market, there will be consequences,” Wu Ken is quoted as saying. Whichever way Germany decides, its decision likely will have significant impact on the other European Union countries. Political influence aside, the fact that Germany takes up about 30% of the EU’s 5G market is “enough for pan-EU operators to follow its lead,” according to the Peterson Institute’s Kirkegaard.
…

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.
…

Cyborgs, trolls and bots can fill the internet with lies and half-truths. Understanding them is key to learning how misinformation spreads online.As the 2016 election showed, social media is increasingly used to amplify false claims and divide Americans over hot-button issues including race and immigration. Researchers who study misinformation predict it will get worse leading up to this year’s presidential vote. Here’s a guide to understanding the problem:MISINFORMATION VS. DISINFORMATIONPolitical misinformation has been around since before the printing press, but the internet has allowed falsehoods, conspiracy theories and exaggerations to spread faster and farther than ever.Misinformation is defined as any false information, regardless of intent, including honest mistakes or misunderstandings of the facts. Disinformation, on the other hand, typically refers to misinformation created and spread intentionally as a way to confuse or mislead.Misinformation and disinformation can appear in political ads or social media posts. They can include fake news stories or doctored videos. One egregious example of disinformation from last year was a video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that was slowed down to make her sound as if she were slurring her words.Research indicates that false claims spread more easily than accurate ones, possibly because they are crafted to grab attention.Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology analyzed more than 126,000 stories, some true and some false, that were tweeted millions of times from 2006 through the end of 2016. They found that misleading or incorrect stories traveled six times faster — and reached more people.Online misinformation has been blamed for deepening America’s political polarization and contributing to distrust in government. The risks were highlighted in 2016 when Russian trolls created fake accounts to spread and amplify social media posts about controversial issues.WAR OF THE BOTS AND CYBORGSThe disposable foot soldiers in this digital conflict are bots. In the social media context, these autonomous programs can run accounts to spread content without human involvement.Many are harmless, tweeting out random poems or pet photos. But others are up to no good and designed to resemble actual users.One study by researchers at the University of Southern California analyzed election-related tweets sent in September and October 2016 and found that 1 in 5 were sent by a bot. The Pew Research Center concluded in a 2018 study that accounts suspected of being bots are responsible for as many as two-thirds of all tweets that link to popular websites.While flesh-and-blood Twitter users will often post a few times a day, about a variety of subjects, the most obvious bots will tweet hundreds of times a day, day and night, and often only on a specific topic. They are more likely to repost content rather than create something original.And then there’s the cyborg, a kind of hybrid account that combines a bot’s tirelessness with human subtlety. Cyborg accounts are those in which a human periodically takes over a bot account to respond to other users and to post original content. They are more expensive and time consuming to operate, but they don’t give themselves away as robots.“You can get a lot from a bot, but maybe it’s not the best quality,” said Emilio Ferrara, a data science researcher at the University of Southern California who co-wrote the study on Twitter bots. “The problem with cyborgs is they are much harder to catch and detect.”SPOT THE BOTSBots can be hard to spot, even for the best researchers.“We have 12 ways that we spot a bot, and if we hit seven or eight of them we have pretty high confidence,” said Graham Brookie, director of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that studies connections between social media, cybersecurity and government.Nonetheless, Brookie recalled the case of a Twitter account from Brazil that was posting almost constantly — sometimes once per minute — and displayed other bot-like characteristics. And yet, “It was a little grandma, who said, ‘This is me!’”Their prevalence and the difficulty of identifying them has made bots into a kind of digital bogeyman and transformed the term into an insult, used to dismiss other social media users with different opinions.Michael Watsey, a 43-year-old New Jersey man who often tweets his support for President Donald Trump, said he has been repeatedly called a Russian bot by people he argues with online. The accusations prompted Twitter to temporarily suspend his account more than once, forcing him to verify he is a human.“All I’m trying to do is uses my First Amendment right to free speech,” he said. “It’s crazy that it’s come to this.”TROLLS AND SOCK PUPPETSThe word troll once referred to beasts of Scandinavian mythology who hid under bridges and attacked travelers. Now it also refers to people who post online to provoke others, sometimes for their own amusement and sometimes as part of a coordinated campaign.Sock puppets are another oddly named denizen of social media, in this case a type of imposter account. While some users may use anonymous accounts simply to avoid identifying themselves, sock-puppet accounts are used by the owner to attack their critics or praise themselves. In October, Utah Sen. Mitt Romney acknowledged operating a secret Twitter account under the name “Pierre Delecto,” which he used to defend himself against criticism.FAKED VIDEOS: DEEP, CHEAP AND SHALLOWDeepfakes are videos that have been digitally created with artificial intelligence or machine learning to make it appear something happened that did not. They are seen as an emerging threat, as improvements in video editing software make it possible for tricksters to create increasingly realistic footage of, say, former President Barack Obama delivering a speech he never made, in a setting he never visited. They are expensive and difficult to create — especially in a convincing way.Facebook announced last month that it would ban deepfake videos — with exceptions for satire. Beginning in March, Twitter will prohibit doctored videos, photography and audio recordings “likely to cause harm.” Material that is manipulated but isn’t necessarily harmful may get a warning label. And YouTube bans “deceptive uses of manipulated media” that could pose serious risk of harm.By contrast, shallowfakes, cheapfakes or dumbfakes are videos that have been doctored using more basic techniques, such as slowing down or speeding up footage or cutting it.Examples include a doctored video posted by Britain’s Conservative Party before December’s U.K. election that made it seem like a Labour Party official was struggling to respond to a question about Brexit.Because they’re easy and inexpensive to make, cheapfakes can be every bit as dangerous as their fancier cousin, the deepfake.“Deepfakes are getting more realistic and easier to do,” said John Pavlik, a journalism professor at Rutgers University who studies how technology and the internet are changing communication habits. “But you don’t have to have special software to make these simpler ones.”Researchers who study Americans’ changing media habits recommend that people turn to a variety of sources and perspectives for their news, use critical thinking when evaluating information on social media, and think twice about reposting viral claims. Otherwise, they say, misinformation will continue to flow, and users will continue to spread it.“The only solution,” Ferrara said, “is education.” 
…

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.
…

The FBI is conducting about 1,000 investigations into suspected Chinese theft of U.S. intellectual property, with many expected to lead to 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 China Initiative. “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 China Initiative, unveiled in November 2018, combines DOJ and FBI resources into a single effort to investigate and prosecute cases of Chinese economic espionage.  Under the initiative, the Justice Department has brought charges in several high-profile cases of Chinese economic espionage.Last week, the department announced economic espionage-related 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.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.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.“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 alleged intellectual property theft and violation of 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.China has sharply escalated its economic espionage in the United States over the past two decades, according to law enforcement officials, costing the U.S. economy an estimated $600 billion.  The surge has come as Beijing seeks to surpass the U.S. in key economic sectors, using a variety of methods from cyber intrusions to outright physical theft.   With few exceptions, the recent uptick in prosecutions has involved 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 outreach campaign by the FBI over the past year has helped chip away at the traditional wall of suspicion between universities and law enforcement, according to prosecutors 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.”
…

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.”
 
…

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.
…

Irish regulators have launched separate inquiries into Google and dating app Tinder over how they process user data, in a new round of regulatory scrutiny aimed at tech companies.Ireland’s Data Protection Commission said Tuesday that it decided to look into how Google handles location data after a number of consumer groups across the European Union filed complaints.The commission opened an investigation into Google’s Irish subsidiary to determine whether the U.S. search giant “has a legal basis for processing the location data of its users” and whether it meets transparency obligations under the EU’s strict General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR.Google “will cooperate fully with the office of the Data Protection Commission in its inquiry, and continue to work closely with regulators and consumer associations across Europe,” the company said in a statement. “In the last year, we have made a number of product changes to improve the level of user transparency and control over location data.”The regulator is also investigating Tinder after people in Ireland and elsewhere in the EU raised concerns about issues surrounding U.S. parent company Match Group’s “ongoing processing of users’ personal data” related to Tinder, transparency and compliance with GDPR.“Transparency and protecting our users’ personal data is of utmost importance to us,” Match Group said. “We are fully cooperating with the Data Protection Commission, and will continue to abide by GDPR and all applicable laws.”Ireland’s Data Privacy Commission is the lead EU regulator for both companies because their European headquarters are based in Dublin. Under GDPR, regulators can fine companies up to 20 million euros, or 4% of global turnover, whichever is higher, for any breaches as well as require changes to follow the law.The commission now has a total of 23 inquiries into big U.S. tech companies, which also include Facebook and Twitter. It launched a separate investigation of Google last year over personalized online advertising.
…

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. 
…