PHNOM PENH, CAMBODIA — Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, a devoted and very active user of Facebook — on which he has posted everything from photos of his grandchildren to threats against his political enemies — said Wednesday that he would no longer upload to the platform and would instead depend on the Telegram app to get his messages across. 

Telegram is a popular messaging app that also has a blogging tool called “channels.” In Russia and some neighboring countries, it is actively used both by government officials and opposition activists for communicating with mass audiences. Telegram played an important role in coordinating unprecedented anti-government protests in Belarus in 2020, and it currently serves as a major source of news about Russia’s war in Ukraine. 

Hun Sen, 70, who has led Cambodia for 38 years, is listed as having 14 million Facebook followers, though critics have suggested a large number of them are merely “ghost” accounts purchased in bulk from so-called “click farms,” an assertion the long-serving prime minister has repeatedly denied. The Facebook accounts of Joe Biden and Donald Trump by comparison boast 11 million and 34 million followers, respectively, though the United States has about 20 times the population of Cambodia. 

Hun Sen officially launched his Facebook page on September 20, 2015, after his fierce political rival, opposition leader Sam Rainsy, effectively demonstrated how it could be used to mobilize support. Hun Sen is noted as a canny and sometimes ruthless politician, and he has since then managed to drive his rival into exile and neutralize all his challengers, even though Cambodia is a nominally democratic state. 

Controversial remarks

Hun Sen said he was giving up Facebook for Telegram because he believed the latter would be more effective for communicating. In a Telegram post on Wednesday, he said it would be easier for him to get his message out when traveling in other countries that officially ban Facebook use, such as China, the top ally of his government. Hun Sen has 855,000 followers so far on Telegram, where he appears to have started posting in mid-May. 

It is possible, however, that Hun Sen’s social media loyalty switch has to do with controversy about remarks he posted earlier this year on Facebook that in theory could see him get at least temporarily banned from the platform very soon. 

In January, speaking at a road construction ceremony, he decried opposition politicians who accused his ruling Cambodian People’s Party of stealing votes. 

“There are only two options. One is to use legal means and the other is to use a stick,” the prime minister said. “Either you face legal action in court, or I rally [the Cambodian] People’s Party people for a demonstration and beat you up.” His remarks were spoken on Facebook Live and kept online as a video. 

Perhaps because of heightened consciousness about the power of social media to inflame and trigger violence in such countries as India and Myanmar, and because the remarks were made ahead of a general election in Cambodia this July, complaints about his words were lodged with Facebook’s parent company, Meta. 

Facebook’s moderators declined to recommend action against Hun Sen, judging that his position as a national leader made his remarks newsworthy and therefore not subject to punishment despite their provocative nature. 

However, the case was forwarded in March to Meta’s Oversight Board, a group of independent experts that is empowered to render an overriding judgment that could limit Hun Sen’s Facebook activities. They are expected to issue a decision on Thursday. The case is being closely watched as an indicator of where Facebook will draw the line in countries with volatile political situations. 

Hun Sen said his Facebook account would remain online, but that he would no longer actively post to it. He urged people looking for news from him to check YouTube and his Instagram account as well as Telegram and said he had ordered his office to establish a TikTok account to allow him to communicate with his country’s youth.
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U.S. President Joe Biden says he wants to make sure that every American has access to high-speed internet. VOA’s Julie Taboh has our story about the United States’ more than $40 billion-dollar investment to expand the service. (Videographer:  Adam Greenbaum; Produced by Julie Taboh, Adam Greenbaum)    
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Since the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT launched last fall, a torrent of think pieces and news reports about the ins and outs and ups and downs of generative artificial intelligence has flowed, stoking fears of a dystopian future in which robots take over the world.  

While much of that hype is indeed just hype, a new report has identified immediate risks posed by apps like ChatGPT. Some of those present distinct challenges to journalists and the news industry.  

Published Wednesday by New York University’s Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, the report identified eight risks related to generative artificial intelligence, or AI, including disinformation, cyberattacks, privacy violations and the decay of the news industry.  

The AI debate “is getting a little confused between concerns about existential dangers versus what immediate harms generative AI might entail,” the report’s co-author Paul Barrett told VOA. “We shouldn’t get paralyzed by the question of, ‘Oh my God, will this technology lead to killer robots that are going to destroy humanity?'” 

The systems being released right now are not going to lead to that nightmarish outcome, explained Barrett, who is the deputy director of the Stern Center.  

Instead, the report — which Barrett co-authored with Justin Hendrix, founder and editor of the media nonprofit Tech Policy Press — argues that lawmakers, regulators and the AI industry itself should prioritize addressing the immediate potential risks.  

Safety concerns

Among the most concerning risks are the human-level threats that artificial intelligence may pose to the safety of journalists and activists.  

Doxxing and smear campaigns are already among the many threats that journalists face online over their work. Doxxing is when someone publishes private or identifying information about someone — such as their address or phone number — on the internet.  

But now with generative AI, it will likely be even easier to dox reporters and harass them online, according to Barrett.  

“If you want to set up a campaign like that, you’re going to have to do a lot less work using generative AI systems,” Barrett said. “It’ll be easier to attack journalists.”  

Propaganda easy to make

Disinformation is another primary risk that the report highlights, because generative AI makes it easier to churn out propaganda.  

The report notes that if the Kremlin had access to generative AI in its disinformation campaign surrounding the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Moscow could have launched a more destructive and less expensive influence operation.  

Generative AI “is going to be a huge engine of efficiency, but it’s also going to make much more efficient the production of disinformation,” Barrett said.  

That bears implications for press freedom and media literacy, since studies indicate that exposure to misinformation and disinformation is linked to reduced trust in the media.  

Generative AI may also exacerbate financial issues plaguing newsrooms, according to the report. 

If people ask ChatGPT a question, for instance, and are happy with the summarized answer, they’re less likely to click on other links to news articles. That means shrinking traffic and therefore ad dollars for news sites, the report said.  

But artificial intelligence is far from all bad news for the media industry.  

For example, AI tools can help journalists research by scraping PDF files and analyzing data quickly. Artificial intelligence can also help fact-check sources and write headlines.  

In the report, Barrett and Hendrix caution the government against allowing this new industry to make the same mistakes as were made with social media platforms.  

“Generative AI doesn’t deserve the deference enjoyed for so long by social media companies,” they write.  

They recommend the government enhance federal authority to oversee AI companies and require more transparency from AI companies.  

“Congress, regulators, the public — and the industry, for that matter — need to pay attention to the immediate potential risks,” Barrett said. “And if the industry doesn’t move fast enough on that front, that’s something Congress needs to figure out a way to force them to pay attention to.” 
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The commission that enforces rules for U.S. elections is not regulating AI-generated deepfakes in political advertising ahead of the 2024 presidential election. Deana Mitchell has the story.
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Robot makers who want to explore the oceans are looking to one of Earth’s most successful sea creatures for design inspiration. Steve Baragona reports.
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Just a dot on the horizon at first, the bug-like and surprisingly quiet electrically-powered craft buzzes over Paris and its traffic snarls, treating its doubtless awestruck passenger to privileged vistas of the Eiffel Tower and the city’s signature zinc-grey rooftops before landing him or her with a gentle downward hover. And thus, if all goes to plan, could a new page in aviation history be written.

After years of dreamy and not always credible talk of skies filled with flying, nonpolluting electric taxis, the aviation industry is preparing to deliver a future that it says is now just around the corner.

Capitalizing on its moment in the global spotlight, the Paris region is planning for a small fleet of electric flying taxis to operate on multiple routes when it hosts the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games next summer. Unless aviation regulators in China beat Paris to the punch by greenlighting a pilotless taxi for two passengers under development there, the French capital’s prospective operator — Volocopter of Germany — could be the first to fly taxis commercially if European regulators give their OK.

Volocopter CEO Dirk Hoke, a former top executive at aerospace giant Airbus, has a VVIP in mind as his hoped-for first Parisian passenger — none other than French President Emmanuel Macron.

“That would be super amazing,” Hoke said, speaking this week at the Paris Air Show, where he and other developers of electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft — or eVTOLs for short — competed with industry heavyweights for attention.

“He believes in the innovation of urban air mobility,” Hoke said of Macron. “That would be a strong sign for Europe to see the president flying.”

But with Macron aboard or not, those pioneering first flights would still be just small steps for the nascent industry that has giant leaps to make before flying taxis are muscling out competitors on the ground.

The limited power of battery technology restricts the range and number of paying passengers they can carry, so eVTOL hops are likely to be short and not cheap at the outset.

And while the vision of simply beating city traffic by zooming over it is enticing, it also is dependent on advances in airspace management. Manufacturers of eVTOLs aim in the coming decade to unfurl fleets in cities and on more niche routes for luxury passengers, including the French Riviera. But they need technological leaps so flying taxis don’t crash into each other and all the other things already congesting the skies or expected to take to them in very large numbers — including millions of drones.

Starting first on existing helicopter routes, “we’ll continue to scale up using AI, using machine-learning to make sure that our airspace can handle it,” said Billy Nolen of Archer Aviation Inc. It aims to start flying between downtown Manhattan and Newark’s Liberty Airport in 2025. That’s normally a 1-hour train or old-fashioned taxi ride that Archer says its sleek, electric 4-passenger prototype could cover in under 10 minutes.

Nolen was formerly acting head of the Federal Aviation Administration, the U.S. regulator that during his time at the agency was already working with NASA on technology to safely separate flying taxis. Just as Paris is using its Olympic Games to test flying taxis, Nolen said the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics offer another target for the industry to aim for and show that it can fly passengers in growing numbers safely, cleanly and affordably.

“We’ll have hundreds, if not thousands, of eVTOLs by the time you get to 2028,” he said in an interview with The Associated Press at the Paris show.

The “very small” hoped-for experiment with Volocopter for the Paris Games is “great stuff. We take our hats off to them,” he added. “But by the time we get to 2028 and beyond … you will see full-scale deployment across major cities throughout the world.”

Yet even on the cusp of what the industry portrays as a revolutionary new era kicking off in the city that spawned the French Revolution of 1789, some aviation analysts aren’t buying into visions of eVTOLs becoming readily affordable, ubiquitous and convenient alternatives to ride-hailing in the not-too-distant future.

And even among eVTOL developers who bullishly talked up their industry’s prospects at the Paris show, some predicted that rivals will run dry of funding before they bring prototypes to market.

Morgan Stanley analysts estimate the industry could be worth $1 trillion by 2040 and $9 trillion by 2050 with advances in battery and propulsion technology. Almost all of that will come after 2035, analysts say, because of the difficulty of getting new aircraft certified by U.S. and European regulators.

“The idea of mass urban transit remains a charming fantasy of the 1950s,” said Richard Aboulafia of AeroDynamic Advisory, an aerospace consultancy.

“The real problem is still that mere mortals like you and I don’t get routine or exclusive access to $4 million vehicles. You and I can take air taxis right now. It’s called a helicopter.”

Still, electric taxis taking to Paris’ skies as Olympians are going faster, higher and stronger could have the power to surprise — pleasantly so, Volocopter hopes.

One of the five planned Olympic routes would land in the heart of the city on a floating platform on the spruced-up River Seine. Developers point out that ride-hailing apps and E-scooters also used to strike many customers as outlandish. And as with those technologies, some are betting that early adopters of flying taxis will prompt others to try them, too.

“It will be a total new experience for the people,” said Hoke, Volocopter’s CEO. “But twenty years later someone looks back at what changed based on that and then they call it a revolution. And I think we are at the edge of the next revolution.”
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The Transportation Safety Board of Canada has opened an investigation into the implosion of the Titan, the underwater sea vessel that imploded with five people onboard as it was traveling to the wreckage of the Titanic, the British ocean liner that sank in the North Atlantic in 1912 after striking an iceberg.

The submersible vessel was the property of OceanGate Expeditions, a U.S.-based company. Its support ship, Polar Prince, however, is a Canadian-flagged ship.

“The Transportation Safety Board of Canada (TSB) is launching an investigation into the fatal occurrence involving the Canadian-flagged vessel Polar Prince and the privately operated submersible Titan,” the board said in a statement Friday, raising questions about the safety of the ill-fated excursion. The board said a team of investigators has been sent to St. John’s, Newfoundland, to gather information and conduct interviews.

U.S. officials said they too, were opening an investigation.

“The U.S. Coast Guard has declared the loss of the Titan submersible to be a major marine casualty and will lead the investigation. The NTSB has joined the investigation and will contribute to their efforts. The USCG is handling all media inquiries related to this investigation,” the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board said Friday in a tweet.

The Polar Prince lost contact with the Titan an hour and 45 minutes after the submersible began its descent Sunday.

Responders rushed equipment to where remains of the Titan were found. Five major fragments of the 6.7-meter Titan were located in the debris field left from its disintegration, including the vessel’s tail cone and two sections of the pressure hull, U.S. Coast Guard officials said. No mention was made of whether human remains were sighted.

OceanGate Expeditions said in a statement the five people on the vessel were company CEO Stockton Rush, Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood, Hamish Harding, and Paul-Henri Nargeolet.

Since the submersible went missing with an approximately four-day air supply, questions about it its safety have grown.

“I know there are also a lot of questions about how, why and when did this happen,” said Rear Adm. John Mauger of the First Coast Guard District. “Those are questions we will collect as much information as we can about now.”

According to an Associated Press report, David Lochridge, a former OceanGate director of marine operations, raised questions in 2018 about the methods the company used to insure the structural viability of the hull.

Filmmaker James Cameron, who directed the 1997 Academy Award-winning film Titanic and who has made several dives to the ocean liner’s wreckage aboard other deep-sea submersibles, said in an interview with the BBC that he was sure an “extreme catastrophic event” had happened when he heard the submersible had lost communication and navigation.

“For me, there was no doubt,” he said.

He told the BBC the news about the air supply and underwater noises were a “prolonged and nightmarish charade” to provide false hope to the families of the passengers. Cameron said that once a remotely operated vehicle reached the depth of the vessel, it was likely to be found “within hours … probably within minutes.”

Arthur Loibl, a passenger on the Titan two years ago, described his trip to the Titanic as a “kamikaze operation.” The retired German businessman said, “Imagine a metal tube a few meters long with a sheet of metal for a floor. You can’t stand. You can’t kneel. Everyone is sitting close to or on top of each other.”

Scientist and journalist Michael Guillen, who survived an expedition in 2000 that ran into some challenges, said, “We need to stop, pause and ask this question, why do you want to go to the Titanic and how do you get there safely?”

Some information is from The Associated Press and Reuters.
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Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi met with U.S. and Indian technology executives in Washington on Friday, the final day of a state visit where he agreed to new defense and technology cooperation and addressed challenges posed by China. 

U.S. President Joe Biden rolled out the red carpet for Modi on Thursday, declaring after about 2-1/2 hours of talks that their countries’ economic relationship was “booming.” Trade has more than doubled over the past decade. 

Biden and Modi gathered with CEOs including Apple’s Tim Cook, Google’s Sundar Pichai and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella. 

Also present were Sam Altman of OpenAI, NASA astronaut Sunita Williams, and Indian tech leaders including Anand Mahindra, chairman of Mahindra Group, and Mukesh Ambani, chairman of Reliance Industries, the White House said. 

“Our partnership between India and the United States will go a long way, in my view, to define what the 21st century looks like,” Biden told the group, adding that technological cooperation would be a big part of that partnership. 

Observing that there were a variety of tech companies represented at the meeting from startups to well established firms, Modi said: “Both of them are working together to create a new world.” 

Modi, who has appealed to global companies to “Make in India,” will also address business leaders at the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts. The CEOs of top American companies, including FedEx, MasterCard and Adobe, are expected to be among the 1,200 participants.  

Not ‘about China’ 

The backdrop to Modi’s visit is the Biden administration’s attempts to draw India, the world’s most populous country at 1.4 billion and its fifth-largest economy, closer amid its growing geopolitical rivalry with Beijing. 

Modi did not address China directly during the visit, and Biden mentioned China only in response to a reporter’s question, but a joint statement included a pointed reference to the East and South China seas, where China has territorial disputes with its neighbors. 

Farwa Aamer, director for South Asia at the Asia Society Policy Institute, in an analysis note described that as “a clear signal of unity and determination to preserve stability and peace in the region.” 

Alongside agreements to sell weapons to India and share sensitive military technology, announcements this week included several investments from U.S.-firms aimed at spurring semiconductor manufacturing in India and lowering its dependence on China for electronics. 

White House national security spokesperson John Kirby said the challenges presented by China to both Washington and New Delhi were on the agenda but insisted the visit “wasn’t about China.” 

“This wasn’t about leveraging India to be some sort of counterweight. India is a sovereign, independent state,” Kirby said at a news briefing, adding that Washington welcomes India becoming “an increasing exporter of security” in the Indo-Pacific. 

“There’s a lot we can do in the security front together. And that’s really what we’re focused on,” Kirby said.  

Some political analysts question India’s willingness to stand up to Beijing over Taiwan and other issues, however. Washington has also been frustrated by India’s close ties with Russia while Moscow wages war in Ukraine.  

Diaspora ties 

Modi attended a lunch on Friday at the State Department with Vice President Kamala Harris, the first Asian American to hold the No. 2 position in the White House, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken. 

In a toast, Harris spoke of her Indian-born late mother, Shyamala Gopalan, who came to the United States at age 19 and became a leading breast cancer researcher. 

“I think about it in the context of the millions of Indian students who have come to the United States since, to collaborate with American researchers to solve the challenges of our time and to reach new frontiers,” Harris said. 

Modi praised Gopalan for keeping India “close to her heart” despite the distance to her new home, and he called Harris “really inspiring.” 

On Friday evening, Modi will address members of the Indian diaspora, many of whom have turned out at events during the visit to enthusiastically fete him, at times chanting “Modi! Modi! Modi!” despite protests from others. 

Activists have called for the Biden administration to publicly call out what they describe as India’s deteriorating human rights record under Modi, citing allegations of abuse of Indian dissidents and minorities, especially Muslims. Modi leads the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party and has held power since 2014. 

Biden said he had a “straightforward” discussion with Modi about issues including human rights, but U.S. officials emphasize that it is vital for Washington’s national security and economic prosperity to engage with a rising India. 

Asked during a rare press conference on Thursday what he would do to improve the rights of minorities including Muslims, Modi insisted “there is no space for any discrimination” in his government.
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Kenyan video gamers are joining forces to advocate for bringing to Africa more world-class gaming servers that provide greater stability and control. Apart from South Africa, many African countries lack servers, placing players at a disadvantage and discouraging many from joining esports. Mohammed Yusuf has more from Nairobi.
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Artificial intelligence is changing how wildlife reserves prevent poaching, with smart cameras, drones, and other technology helping rangers protect endangered species. Kate Bartlett and Zaheer Cassim report from Limpopo, South Africa. Video editor: Jason Godman.
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A submarine on a tourism expedition to explore the wreckage of the Titanic has gone missing off the coast of southeastern Canada, according to the private company that operates the vessel.

OceanGate Expeditions said in a brief statement on Monday that it was “mobilizing all options” to rescue those on board the vessel. It was not immediately clear how many people were missing.

The U.S. Coast Guard did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Media reports said the Coast Guard has launched search-and-rescue operations.

“We are deeply thankful for the extensive assistance we have received from several government agencies and deep sea companies in our efforts to reestablish contact with the submersible,” OceanGate said in a statement.

The company is currently operating its fifth Titanic “mission” of 2023, according to its website, which was scheduled to start last week and finish on Thursday.

The expedition, which costs $250,000 per person, starts in St. John’s, Newfoundland, before heading out approximately 400 miles into the Atlantic to the wreckage site, according to OceanGate’s website.

In order to visit the wreck, passengers climb inside Titan, a five-person submersible, which takes about two hours to descend to the Titanic.

The British passenger ship famously sunk in 1912 on its maiden voyage after striking an iceberg, killing more than 1,500 people. The story has been immortalized in non-fiction and fiction books as well as the 1997 blockbuster movie “Titanic.”

 
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The Dutch government is soon to join the United States and Japan in rolling out new semiconductor export control measures aimed at keeping sensitive technology away from China due to concern for potential misuse, the country’s economic affairs minister told reporters on a visit to Washington.

The measures are likely to further restrict sales to China by Netherlands-based ASML, maker of the world’s most advanced chip-printing machines, which last year disclosed the “unauthorized misappropriation of data” by a now former employee in China.

The United States in October 2022 announced its own export control measures affecting advanced computing integrated circuits and certain semiconductor manufacturing items.

The U.S. said the measures were aimed at items that “could provide direct contributions to advancing military decision making” such as “designing and testing weapons of mass destruction (WMD), producing semiconductors for use in advanced military systems, and developing advanced surveillance systems that can be used for military applications and human rights abuses.”

The U.S. subsequently asked allies including Japan and the Netherlands, which play key roles in the semiconductor supply chain, to introduce similar measures.

“The main concern is [the chip-making technology] will be used in military products,” Micky Adriaansens, Netherlands’ minister of economic affairs and climate, told a group of journalists on June 8 at the Dutch Embassy in Washington.

Adriaansens acknowledged that the negotiations with Washington have not been easy.

“To be honest, the conversation has been intense, and is still intense,” she said. “But we agreed already upon the main issues, with a good [mutual] understanding of what is the right thing to do.”

Adriaansens said those understandings still have to be translated into regulations but that her country understands the importance of the measures.

“We realize that we, the U.S., the Netherlands, Japan and Korea, are very strong in the semicon[ductor] value chain, supply chain, and we have a responsibility there,” the minister said, echoing a statement made by Japan’s trade minister in March.

Japan also takes steps

Tokyo announced its own measures on March 31, saying that beginning in July, Japan will restrict 23 types of semiconductor manufacturing equipment from being exported to China. “We are fulfilling our responsibility as a technological nation to contribute to international peace and stability,” Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry Yasutoshi Nishimura told reporters.

At the center of the Netherlands’ semiconductor export control deliberations is ASML, a Dutch company with its headquarters in Veldhoven, about an hour and a half’s drive southeast of Amsterdam. The company was known as Advanced Semiconductor Materials Lithography in its early years but is now known as ASML.

Europe’s biggest high-tech firm by market capitalization, ASML is the world’s largest supplier of photolithography machines, which are used to produce computer chips.

Its flagship products are the EUV, or extreme ultraviolet, and DUV, or deep ultraviolet, lithography machines that use advanced light technology to shrink and then print tiny patterns down to the nanometer level on silicon wafers, a critical and essential component of the semiconductor manufacturing process.

Since 2019, ASML’s world-exclusive EUV machines have been on the Netherlands’ export control list, meaning they cannot be sold to China without government approval. In a statement issued in March, the company said it understood that the new export controls could be applied to its less-advanced DUV machines and other products as well.

While Taiwan is its top customer, ASML has more than 1,000 employees working in 12 office buildings in major Chinese cities including Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen. Last year, sales to China made up 14% of the company’s total net systems sales.

In its 2022 annual report, released on February 15 this year, the company disclosed that it had experienced “unauthorized misappropriation of data relating to proprietary technology by a (now) former employee in China.” The incident may have led to the violation of certain export control regulations, the report said.

The company said a comprehensive internal review has since been launched, but the nature and extent of the data that was misappropriated has not been publicly disclosed.

Report mentions possible leak

Another possible leak of the company’s proprietary information that happened in China was disclosed in the previous year’s annual report.

“Early in 2021, we became aware of reports that a company associated with XTAL, Inc., against which ASML had obtained a damage award for trade secret misappropriation in 2019 in the USA, was actively marketing products in China that could potentially infringe on ASML’s IP rights,” said the 2021 report.

The second company was identified as Beijing-based DongFang JingYuan Electron, which was established in 2014 at about the same time as XTAL and controlled by the same people.

ASML’s annual report said the company had shared its concerns with the Chinese authorities and was monitoring the situation closely.

In its case against XTAL, ASML told the court that a former Chinese employee working at an ASML subsidiary in the United States had stolen 2 million lines of source code for critical software. It said the theft was conducted on behalf of both XTAL and DongFang.

ASML’s representatives told the court that it took XTAL only two years to replicate a technology that ASML had spent $100 million and a decade developing, as first reported by Bloomberg. XTAL, which ASML’s attorneys described in court proceedings as essentially the same as DongFang JingYuan, then tried to sell the technology to South Korea-based Samsung, a longtime client of ASML.

In late March, ASML CEO Peter Wennink met with China’s newly installed minister of commerce in Beijing. China is “firmly committed to high-level openness, willing to create favorable conditions for multinationals such as ASML to do business in China,” Wang Wentao, the newly minted commerce minister, told the visiting CEO.

“We hope ASML will affirm and strengthen its confidence in trading and investing in China and make proactive contributions to Sino-Dutch collaboration in trade and economics,” Wang continued.

It isn’t clear whether the two sides discussed the intellectual property infringement issues described in ASML’s 2021 and 2022 annual reports or if they did, what remedies Beijing may have proposed.

‘Relentless pursuit’

Asked how the company plans to fend off future attempts to steal its trade secrets, a company spokesperson told VOA that ASML is committed to “relentless pursuit of individuals or entities that violate or threaten to violate our [intellectual property] in any way.”

While less well known for semiconductor manufacturing than Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp. or U.S.-based Intel, ASML is often viewed as Europe’s most valuable high-tech company, likely key to the Netherlands’ winning the bid to be the seat of NATO’s newly established Innovation Fund.
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In early June, sporadic but serious service disruptions plagued Microsoft’s flagship office suite — including the Outlook email and OneDrive file-sharing apps — and cloud computing platform. A shadowy hacktivist group claimed responsibility, saying it flooded the sites with junk traffic in distributed denial-of-service attacks.

Initially reticent to name the cause, Microsoft has now disclosed that DDoS attacks by the murky upstart were indeed to blame.

But the software giant has offered few details — and did not immediately comment on how many customers were affected and whether the impact was global. A spokeswoman confirmed that the group that calls itself Anonymous Sudan was behind the attacks. It claimed responsibility on its Telegram social media channel at the time. Some security researchers believe the group to be Russian.

Microsoft’s explanation in a blog post Friday evening followed a request by The Associated Press two days earlier. Slim on details, the post said the attacks “temporarily impacted availability” of some services. It said the attackers were focused on “disruption and publicity” and likely used rented cloud infrastructure and virtual private networks to bombard Microsoft servers from so-called botnets of zombie computers around the globe.

Microsoft said there was no evidence any customer data was accessed or compromised.

While DDoS attacks are mainly a nuisance — making websites unreachable without penetrating them — security experts say they can disrupt the work of millions if they successfully interrupt the services of a software service giant like Microsoft on which so much global commerce depends.

It’s not clear if that’s what happened here.

“We really have no way to measure the impact if Microsoft doesn’t provide that info,” said Jake Williams, a prominent cybersecurity researcher and a former National Security Agency offensive hacker. Williams said he was not aware of Outlook previously being attacked at this scale.

“We know some resources were inaccessible for some, but not others. This often happens with DDoS of globally distributed systems,” Williams added. He said Microsoft’s apparent unwillingness to provide an objective measure of customer impact “probably speaks to the magnitude.”

Microsoft dubbed the attackers Storm-1359, using a designator it assigns to groups whose affiliation it has not yet established. Cybersecurity sleuthing tends to take time — and even then can be a challenge if the adversary is skilled.

Pro-Russian hacking groups including Killnet — which the cybersecurity firm Mandiant says is Kremlin-affiliated — have been bombarding government and other websites of Ukraine’s allies with DDoS attacks. In October, some U.S. airport sites were hit. Analyst Alexander Leslie of the cybersecurity firm Recorded Future said it’s unlikely Anonymous Sudan is located as it claims in Sudan, an African country. The group works closely with Killnet and other pro-Kremlin groups to spread pro-Russian propaganda and disinformation, he said.

Edward Amoroso, NYU professor and CEO of TAG Cyber, said the Microsoft incident highlights how DDoS attacks remain “a significant risk that we all just agree to avoid talking about. It’s not controversial to call this an unsolved problem.”

He said Microsoft’s difficulties fending of this particular attack suggest “a single point of failure.” The best defense against these attacks is to distribute a service massively, on a content distribution network for example.

Indeed, the techniques the attackers used are not old, said U.K. security researcher Kevin Beaumont. “One dates back to 2009,” he said.

Serious impacts from the Microsoft 365 office suite interruptions were reported on Monday June 5, peaking at 18,000 outage and problem reports on the tracker Downdetector shortly after 11 a.m. Eastern time.

On Twitter that day, Microsoft said Outlook, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business were affected.

Attacks continued through the week, with Microsoft confirming on June 9 that its Azure cloud computing platform had been affected.

On June 8, the computer security news site BleepingComputer.com reported that cloud-based OneDrive file-hosting was down globally for a time.

Microsoft said at the time that desktop OneDrive clients were not affected, BleepingComputer reported.
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The first large-scale battery to be built at an Australian coal site has been switched on in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley, east of Melbourne.

The 150-megawatt battery is at the site of the former Hazelwood power station in the southern Australian state of Victoria. The station was built in the 1960s and closed in 2017.

The new battery was officially opened Wednesday and has the ability to power about 75,000 homes for an hour during the evening peak. The decommissioned coal plant produced 10 times more electricity, but the battery’s operators aim to increase its generating capacity over time.

The Latrobe Valley has been the center of Victoria’s coal-fired power industry for decades, but the region is changing.

The new battery will store power generated by offshore wind farms and is run by the French energy giant Engie, and its partners Eku Energy and Fluence.

Engie chief executive Rik De Buyserie told reporters it is an important part of Australia’s green energy future.

“The commissioning of this battery represents a key milestone in this journey and marks an important step in the transition of the La Trobe Valley from a thermal energy power to a clean energy power provider,” he said.

The state of Victoria aims to have at least 2.6 gigawatts of battery storage connected to the electricity grid by 2030 and 6.3 gigawatts by 2035.

Lily D’Ambrosio, Victoria’s minister for climate action, energy and resources, told reporters that the state government is committed to boosting its renewable energy sector.

“It is important that we just do not sit around waiting for old technology to disappear, close down, but we actually get in front of it and make sure that we have more than sufficient supply to meet our needs,” she said. “That is what keeps downward pressure on prices.”

Australia has legislated a target to cut carbon emissions by 43% from 2005 levels by 2030 and to achieve net zero emissions by 2050.

Electricity generation in Australia is still dominated by coal and gas but there is a distinct shift to renewable sources of power.

In April the Clean Energy Council, an industry association, said that clean energy accounted for 35.9% of Australia’s total electricity generation in 2022, up from 32.5% in 2021.
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U.S. security officials say the U.S. Energy Department and several other federal agencies have been hacked by a Russian cyber-extortion gang.

Homeland Security officials said Thursday the agencies were caught up in the hacking of MOVEit  Transfer, a file-transfer program that is popular with governments and corporations.

The Energy Department said two of its entities were “compromised” in the hack.

The Russia-linked extortion group CI0p, which claimed responsibility for the hacking, said last week on the dark web site that its victims had until Wednesday to negotiate a ransom or risk having sensitive information dumped online.  It added that it would delete any data stolen from governments, cities and police departments.

Jen Easterly, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said while the intrusion was “largely an opportunistic one” that was superficial and caught quickly, her agency was “very concerned about this campaign and working on it with urgency.”

Reuters reports that the Britain’s Shell Oil Company, the University of Georgia, Johns Hopkins University and the Johns Hopkins Health System were also among those targeted in the hacking campaign. The Associated Press quoted a senior CISA official as saying U.S. military and intelligence agencies were not affected.

MOVEit said it is working with the federal agencies and its other customers to help fix their systems.

Information for this report was provided by The Associated Press and Reuters.  
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An announcement by YouTube that it will no longer remove content containing misinformation on the U.S. 2020 presidential election has some experts divided.

In a June blog post, YouTube said it was ending its policy — enforced since December 2020 — that removed tens of thousands of videos that falsely claimed the 2020 election was impaired by “widespread fraud, errors or glitches.”

“We find that while removing this content does curb some misinformation, it could also have the unintended effect of curtailing political speech without meaningfully reducing the risk of violence or other real-world harm,” the post said.

The Google-owned platform says the move is to support free speech, but some experts in tech and disinformation say it could allow harmful content to again be easily shared.

“The message that YouTube is sending is that the election denial crowd is now welcome again on YouTube and can resume its campaign of undermining trust in American elections and democratic institutions,” said Paul Barrett, deputy director at New York University’s Stern Center for Business and Human Rights.

But others say the policy caused “legitimate” content to be removed and that the core issue is a wider societal problem, not something confined to YouTube.

YouTube’s other election misinformation policies remain unchanged, the platform said.

These include prohibiting content aimed at misleading people about the time and place for voting and claims that could significantly discourage voting.

Google spokesperson Ivy Choi told VOA in an email that the company has “nothing to add beyond what we shared in our blog post.”

Still, some U.S. lawmakers and experts are concerned about how harmful content circulates on YouTube.

Representative Zoe Lofgren, who sat on the House January 6 committee, said the idea that election denial disinformation is “no longer harmful — including that they do not increase the risk of violence — is simply wrong.”

“The lies continue to have a dramatic impact on our democracy and on the drastic increase in threats faced by elected officials at all levels of government,” Lofgren told VOA in an emailed statement.

Lofgren, a Democrat from California, added that YouTube’s parent company Alphabet should reconsider its decision.

Justin Hendrix, founder and editor of the nonprofit website Tech Policy Press, questioned whether YouTube’s policy had even been successful.

“There is, to me, a bigger question about whether YouTube was ever really effectively removing information that promoted false claims about the 2020 election,” Hendrix told VOA. “I wonder whether this is a capitulation to the reality that the company was never able to effectively take action against false claims in the 2020 election.”

YouTube is one of the most popular social media platforms in the United States, and it has over 2 billion users around the world.

But despite the platform’s popularity, it has escaped the level of scrutiny given to Twitter and Facebook, according to Barrett. The main reason: the difficulty in analyzing videos in bulk.

YouTube is the main place people go for videos on innocuous things like how to fix your car or do your makeup, said Barrett. “But it’s also the go-to place for video for people with extreme political ideas,” he added.

Videos on YouTube amplified the false narratives that the 2020 election was rigged and that the entire American election system is corrupt, according to a 2022 report Barrett and Hendrix co-authored, A Platform ‘Weaponized’: How YouTube Spreads Harmful Content – And What Can Be Done About It.

Election misinformation was also cited by the January 6 committee as it investigated the circumstances that resulted in a mob of former President Donald Trump’s supporters storming the U.S. Capitol on the day the election results were due to be certified.

In a report on the insurrection, the committee said the platform “included efforts to boost authoritative content” and that it “labeled election fraud claims — but did so anemically.”

Some free-speech experts like Jennifer Stisa Granick, the surveillance and cybersecurity counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, believe the policy change is good.

“There have been some legitimate discussions about voting and the legitimacy of the election that have been adversely impacted” under the former policy, Granick said.

“Election disinformation was not spread by YouTube or other online platforms, but by [Trump] himself. And the misinformation that circulates online is a drop in the bucket compared to what the [former] president of the United States says,” Granick said.

The bigger problem, she said, is that for some political candidates, “election denial is a fundamental part of their campaigns.”

People who complain that YouTube is evading its responsibility are “looking to the platform to solve a social and political problem that the United States has,” Granick said.

Roy Gutterman, director of the Tully Center for Free Speech at Syracuse University, believes any policy that openly fosters free speech is worthwhile.

“But calls to violence, which may accompany some of this discourse, would still not be protected,” Gutterman told VOA.

Barrett, however, is concerned that the reversal creates the potential for YouTube to be exploited.

The broader effect, Barrett said, “is the erosion of trust more generally” — not just in American elections.

Studies have shown that exposure to misinformation and disinformation is tied to lower trust in the media.

The YouTube policy change is hardly the main cause of that process, Barrett said, but it’s a contributing factor.

The policy change comes as several major social media companies face criticism for failing to quell election misinformation and disinformation on their platforms. The recent development with YouTube is part of a broader trend in the tech industry, according to Hendrix.

“I’m concerned that we’re seeing across the board almost a kind of throwing up the hands around some of these issues,” he said, pointing to staff layoffs, including those in trust and safety departments.

All of these factors contribute to “an erosion of even more than democracy,” Barrett said. “That’s an erosion of the social connections that hold society together.”
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Suspected state-backed Chinese hackers used a security hole in a popular email security appliance to break into the networks of hundreds of public and private sector organizations globally, nearly a third of them government agencies including foreign ministries, the U.S. cybersecurity firm Mandiant said Thursday.

“This is the broadest cyber espionage campaign known to be conducted by a China-nexus threat actor since the mass exploitation of Microsoft Exchange in early 2021,” Charles Carmakal, Mandiant’s chief technical officer, said in an emailed statement. That hack compromised tens of thousands of computers globally.

In a blog post Thursday, Google-owned Mandiant expressed “high confidence” that the group exploiting a software vulnerability in Barracuda Networks’ Email Security Gateway was engaged in “espionage activity in support of the People’s Republic of China.” It said the activity began as early as October.

The hackers sent emails containing malicious file attachments to gain access to targeted organizations’ devices and data, Mandiant said. Of those organizations, 55% were from the Americas, 22% from the Asia Pacific region and 24% from Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and they included foreign ministries in Southeast Asia and foreign trade offices and academic organizations in Taiwan and Hong Kong. the company said.

Mandiant said the majority impact in the Americas may partially reflect the geography of Barracuda’s customer base.

Barracuda announced on June 6 that some of its email security appliances had been hacked as early as October, giving the intruders a back door into compromised networks. The hack was so severe that the California company recommended fully replacing the appliances.

After discovering it in mid-May, Barracuda released containment and remediation patches, but the hacking group, which Mandiant identifies as UNC4841, altered its malware to try to maintain access, Mandiant said. The group then “countered with high-frequency operations targeting a number of victims located in at least 16 different countries.”

Blinken trip

Word of the breach comes as U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken departs for China this weekend as part of the Biden administration’s push to repair deteriorating ties between Washington and Beijing.

His visit had initially been planned for early this year but was postponed indefinitely after the discovery and shootdown of what the U.S. said was a Chinese spy balloon over the United States.

Mandiant said the targeting at both the organizational and individual account levels focused on issues that are high policy priorities for China, particularly in the Asia Pacific region. It said the hackers searched for email accounts of people working for governments of political or strategic interest to China at the time they were participating in diplomatic meetings with other countries.

In an emailed statement Thursday, Barracuda said about 5% of its active Email Security Gateway appliances worldwide showed evidence of potential compromise. It said it was providing replacement appliances to affected customers at no cost.

The U.S. government has accused Beijing of being its principal cyber espionage threat, with state-backed Chinese hackers stealing data from both the private and public sector.

In terms of raw intelligence affecting the U.S., China’s largest electronic infiltrations have targeted OPM, Anthem, Equifax and Marriott.

Earlier this year, Microsoft said state-backed Chinese hackers have been targeting U.S. critical infrastructure and could be laying the technical groundwork for the potential disruption of critical communications between the U.S. and Asia during future crises.

China says the U.S. also engages in cyber espionage against it, hacking into computers of its universities and companies.
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Chinese manufacturers of electric vehicles are stepping up their push to dominate the European market. As Amy Guttman reports from London, they are making progress in Britain, where car shoppers are eager to buy the lower-cost electric cars that Chinese automakers are offering.
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Microsoft Founder Bill Gates was in China on Thursday for what he said were meetings with global health and development partners who have worked with his charitable foundation.

“Solving problems like climate change, health inequity and food insecurity requires innovation,” Gates tweeted. “From developing malaria drugs to investing in climate adaptation, China has a lot of experience in that. We need to unlock that kind of progress for more people around the world.”

Gates said global crises stifled progress in reducing death and poverty in children and that he will next travel to West Africa because African countries are particularly vulnerable “with high food prices, crushing debt, and increasing rates of TB and malaria.”

Reuters, citing two people familiar with the matter, said Gates would meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Gates is the latest business figure to visit China year, following Apple’s Tim Cook and Tesla’s Elon Musk.

Some information for this report came from The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters.
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Experts are raising concerns that a recent Cambodian government order allocating around $1 million to a local company for a facial recognition technology project could pave the way for the technology to be used against citizens and human rights defenders.

The order, signed by Prime Minister Hun Sen and released in March in a recent tranche of government documents, would award the funds to HSC Co. Ltd., a Cambodian company led by tycoon Sok Hong that has previously printed Cambodian passports and installed CCTV cameras in Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital.

The Oct. 17 order appears to be the first direct indication of Cambodia’s interest in pursuing facial recognition, alarming experts who say such initiatives could eventually be used to target dissenters and build a stronger surveillance state similar to China’s. In recent months, the government has blocked the country’s main opposition party from participating in the July national elections, shut down independent media and jailed critics such as labor organizers and opposition politicians.

Neither the Interior Ministry nor the company would answer questions about what the project entails.

“This is national security and not everyone knows about how it works,” Khieu Sopheak, secretary of state and spokesperson for the Interior Ministry, told VOA by phone. “Even in the U.S., if you ask about the air defense system, they will tell you the same. This is the national security system, which we can’t tell everyone [about].”

The order names HSC, a company Sok Hong founded in 2007, as the funds’ recipient. HSC’s businesses span food and beverage, dredging and retail.

HSC also has close ties to the government: in addition to printing passports and providing CCTV cameras in Phnom Penh, it runs the system for national ID cards and has provided border checkpoint technology. Malaysian and Cambodian media identify Sok Hong as the son of Sok Kong, another tycoon who founded the conglomerate Sokimex Investment Group. Both father and son are oknhas or “lords,” a Cambodian honorific given to those who have donated more than $500,000 to the government.

When reached by phone, Sok Hong told VOA, “I think it shouldn’t be reported since it is related to national security.”

Cambodia’s history of repression, including monitoring dissidents in person and online, has raised suspicions that it could deploy such technology to target activists. Last year, labor leaders reported they were recorded via drones during protests.

“Authorities can use facial recognition technology to identify, track individuals and gather vast amounts of personal data without their consent, which could eventually lead to massive surveillance,” said Chak Sopheap, director of the Cambodian Center for Human Rights. “For instance, when a government uses facial recognition to monitor attendance at peaceful gatherings, these actions raise severe concerns about the safety of those citizens.”

In addition, giving control of facial recognition technology to a politically connected firm, and one that already has access to a trove of identity-related information, could centralize citizens’ data in a one-stop shop. That could make it easier to fine-tune algorithms quickly and later develop more facial recognition tools to be shared with the government in a mutually beneficial relationship, Joshua Kurlantzick, Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow for Southeast Asia, told VOA.

China — one of Cambodia’s oldest and closest allies — has pioneered collecting vast amounts of data to monitor citizens. In Xinjiang, home to about 12 million Uyghurs, Chinese authorities combine people’s biometric data and digital activities to create a detailed portrait of their lives.

In recent years, China has sought to influence Southeast Asia, “providing an explicit model for surveillance and a model for a closed and walled-garden internet,” Kurlantzick said, referring to methods of blocking or managing users’ access to certain content.

Some efforts have been formalized under the Digital Silk Road, China’s technology-focused subset of the Belt and Road initiative that provides support, infrastructure and subsidized products to recipient countries.

China’s investment in Cambodian monitoring systems dates back to the early days of the Digital Silk Road. In 2015, it installed an estimated $3 million worth of CCTV cameras in Phnom Penh and later promised more cameras to “allow a database to accumulate for the investigation of criminal cases,” according to reports at the time. There is no indication China is involved in the HSC project, however.

While dozens of countries use facial recognition technology for legitimate public safety uses, such investments must be accompanied by strict data protection laws and enforcement, said Gatra Priyandita, a cyber politics analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

Cambodia does not have comprehensive data privacy regulations. The prime minister himself has monitored Zoom calls hosted by political foes, posting on Facebook that “Hun Sen’s people are everywhere.”

Given the country’s approach to digital privacy, housing facial recognition within a government-tied conglomerate is “concerning” but not surprising, Priyandita said.

“The long-term goal of these kinds of arrangements is the reinforcement of regime security, of course, particularly the protection of Cambodia’s main political and business families,” Priyandita said.

In the immediate future, Cambodia’s capacity to carry out mass surveillance is uncertain. The National Internet Gateway — a system for routing traffic through government servers which critics compared to China’s “Great Firewall” — was delayed in early 2022. Shortly before the scheduled rollout, the government advertised more than 100 positions related to data centers and artificial intelligence, sowing doubts about the technical knowledge behind the project.

Still, the government is pushing to strengthen its digital capabilities, fast-tracking controversial laws around cybercrime and cybersecurity and pursuing a 15-year plan to develop the digital economy, including a skilled technical workforce.

Sun Narin of VOA’s Khmer Service contributed to this report.
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Chinese authorities are cracking down on political and fraud cases driven by deepfakes, created with face- and voice-changing software that tricks targets into believing they are video chatting with a loved one or another trusted person.

How good are the deepfakes? Good enough to trick an executive at a Fuzhou tech company in Fujian province who almost lost $600,000 to a person he thought was a friend claiming to need a quick cash infusion.

The entire transaction took less than 10 minutes from the first contact via the phone app WeChat to police stopping the online bank transfer when the target called the authorities after learning his real friend had never requested the loan, according to Sina Technology.

Despite the public’s outcry about such AI-driven fraud, some experts say Beijing appears more concerned about the political challenges that deepfakes may pose, as shown by newly implemented regulations on “deep synthesis” management that outlaw activities that “endanger national security and interests and damage the national image.”

The rapid development of artificial intelligence technology has propelled cutting-edge technology to mass entertainment applications in just a few years.

In a 2017 demonstration of the risks, a video created by University of Washington researchers showed then-U.S. President Barack Obama saying things he hadn’t.

Two years later, Chinese smartphone apps like Zao let users swap their faces with celebrities so they could appear as if they were in a movie. Zao was removed from app stores in 2019 and Avatarify, another popular Chinese face-swapping app, was also banned in 2021, likely for violation of privacy and portrait rights, according to Chinese media.

Pavel Goldman-Kalaydin, head of artificial intelligence and machine learning at SumSub, a Berlin-based global antifraud company, explained how easy it is with a personal computer or smartphone to make a video in which a person appears to say things he or she never would.

“To create a deepfake, a fraudster uses a real person’s document, taking a photo of it and turning it into a 3D persona,” he said. “The problem is that the technology, it is becoming more and more democratized. Many people can use it. … They can create many deepfakes, and they try to bypass these checks that we try to enforce.”

Subbarao Kambhampati, professor at the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence at Arizona State University, said in a telephone interview he was surprised by the apparent shift from voice cloning to deepfake video calling by scammers in China. He compared that to a rise in voice-cloning phone scams in the U.S.

“Audio alone, you’re more easily fooled, but audio plus video, it would be little harder to fool you. But apparently they’re able to do it,” Kambhampati said, adding that it is harder to make a video that appears trustworthy.

“Subconsciously we look at people’s faces … and realize that they’re not exactly behaving the way we normally see them behave in terms of their facial expressions.”

Experts say that AI fraud will become more sophisticated.

“We don’t expect the problem to go away. The biggest solution … is education, let people understand the days of trusting your ears and eyes are over, and you need to keep that in the back of your mind,” Kambhampati said.

The Internet Society of China issued a warning in May, calling on the public to be more vigilant as AI face-changing, voice-changing scams and slanders became common.

The Wall Street Journal reported on June 4 that local governments across China have begun to crack down on false information generated by artificial intelligence chatbots. Much of the false content designed as clickbait is similar to authentic material on topics that have already attracted public attention.

To regulate “deep synthesis” content, China’s administrative measures implemented on January 10 require service providers to “conspicuously mark” AI-generated content that “may cause public confusion or misidentification” so that users can tell authentic media content from deepfakes.

China’s practice of requiring technology platforms to “watermark” deepfake content has been widely discussed internationally.

Matt Sheehan, a fellow in the Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, noted that deepfake regulations place the onus on the companies that develop and operate these technologies.

“If enforced well, the regulations could make it harder for criminals to get their hands on these AI tools,” he said in an email to VOA Mandarin. “It could throw up some hurdles to this kind of fraud.”

But he also said that much depends on how Beijing implements the regulations and whether bad actors can obtain AI tools outside China.

“So, it’s not a problem with the technology,” said SumSub’s Goldman-Kalaydin. “It is always a problem with the usage of the technology. So, you can regulate the usage, but not the technology.”

James Lewis, senior vice president of the strategic technologies program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, told VOA Mandarin, “Chinese law needs to be modernized for changes in technology, and I know the Chinese are thinking about that. So, the cybercrime laws you have will probably catch things like deepfakes. What will be hard to handle is the volume and the sophistication of the new products, but I know the Chinese government is very worried about fraud and looking for ways to get control of it.”

Others suggest that in regulating AI, political stability is a bigger concern for the Chinese government.

“I think they have a stronger incentive to work on the political threats than they do for fraud,” said Bill Drexel, an associate fellow for the Technology and National Security Program at Center for a New American Security.

In May, the hashtag #AIFraudEruptingAcrossChina was trending on China’s social media platform Weibo. However, the hashtag has since been censored, according to the Wall Street Journal, suggesting authorities are discouraging discussion on AI-driven fraud.

“So even we can see from this incident, once it appeared that the Chinese public was afraid that there was too much AI-powered fraud, they censored,” Drexel told VOA Mandarin.

He continued, “The fact that official state-run media initially reported these incidents and then later discussion of it was censored just goes to show that they do ultimately care about covering themselves politically more than they care about addressing fraud.”

Adrianna Zhang contributed to this report.
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Bill Gates, Microsoft Corp’s co-founder, is set to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping on Friday during his visit to China, two people with knowledge of the matter said.

The meeting will mark Xi’s first meeting with a foreign private entrepreneur in recent years. The people said the encounter may be a one-on-one meeting. A third source confirmed they would meet, without providing details.

The sources did not say what the two might discuss. Gates tweeted on Wednesday that he had landed in Beijing for the first time since 2019 and that he would meet with partners who had been working on global health and development challenges with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The foundation and China’s State Council Information Office, which handles media queries on behalf of the Chinese government, did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment. 

Gates stepped down from Microsoft’s board in 2020 to focus on philanthropic works related to global health, education and climate change. He quit his full-time executive role at Microsoft in 2008. 

The last reported meeting between Xi and Gates was in 2015, when they met on the sidelines of the Boao forum in Hainan province. In early 2020, Xi wrote a letter to Gates thanking him, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, for pledging assistance to China including $5 million for its fight against COVID. 

The meeting would mark the end of a long hiatus by Xi in recent years from meeting foreign private entrepreneurs and business leaders, after the Chinese president stopped traveling abroad for nearly three years as China shut its borders during the pandemic. 

Several foreign CEOs have visited China since it reopened early this year but most have mainly met with government ministers. 

Premier Li Qiang met a group of CEOs including Apple’s Tim Cook in March and a source told Reuters that Tesla’s Elon Musk met vice-premier Ding Xuexiang last month.
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