The EU announced probes Thursday into Facebook owner Meta and TikTok, seeking more details on the measures they have taken to stop the spread of “illegal content and disinformation” after the Hamas attack on Israel.

The European Commission said it had sent formal requests for information to Meta and TikTok respectively in what is a first procedure launched under the EU’s new law on digital content.

The EU launched a similar probe into billionaire mogul Elon Musk’s social media platform X, formerly Twitter, last week.

The commission said the request to Meta related “to the dissemination and amplification of illegal content and disinformation” around the Hamas-Israel conflict.

In a separate statement, it said it wanted to know more about TikTok’s efforts against “the spreading of terrorist and violent content and hate speech”.

The EU’s executive arm added that it wanted more information from Meta on its “mitigation measures to protect the integrity of elections”.

Meta and TikTok have until October 25 to respond, with a deadline of November 8 for less urgent aspects of the demand for information.

The commission said it also sought more details about how TikTok was complying with rules on protecting minors online.

The European Union has built a powerful armory to challenge the power of big tech with its landmark Digital Services Act (DSA) and a sister law, the Digital Markets Act, that hits internet giants with tough new curbs on how they do business.

The EU’s fight against disinformation has intensified since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine last year and Russian attempts to sway European public opinion.

The issue has gained further urgency after Hamas’ assault on October 7 on Israel and the aftermath which sparked a wave of violent images that flooded the platforms.

The DSA came into effect for “very large” platforms, including Meta and TikTok, that have more than 45 million monthly European users in August.

The DSA bans illegal online content under threat of fines running as high as six percent of a company’s global turnover.

The EU’s top tech enforcer, Thierry Breton, sent warning letters to tech CEOs including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, TikTok’s Shou Zi Chew and Sundar Pichai of YouTube owner Alphabet.

Growing EU fears

Breton, EU internal market commissioner, told the executives to crack down on illegal content following Hamas’ attack.

Meta said last week that it was putting special resources towards cracking down on illegal and problematic content related to the Hamas-Israel conflict.

On Wednesday, Breton expressed his fears over the impact of disinformation on the EU.

“The widespread dissemination of illegal content and disinformation… carries a clear risk of stigmatization of certain communities, destabilization of our democratic structures, not to mention the exposure of our children to violent content,” he said.

AFP fact-checkers have found several posts on Facebook, TikTok and X promoting a fake White House document purporting to allocate $8 billion in military assistance to Israel.

And several platforms have had users passing off material from other conflicts, or even from video games, as footage from Israel or Gaza.

Since the EU’s tougher action on digital behemoths, some companies, including Meta, are exploring whether to offer a paid-for version of their services in the European Union.
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A reedy pipe and a high-pitched trill duet against the backdrop of a low-pitched insect drone. Their symphony is the sound of a forest and is monitored by scientists to gauge biodiversity.

The recording from the forest in Ecuador is part of new research looking at how artificial intelligence could track animal life in recovering habitats.

When scientists want to measure reforestation, they can survey large tracts of land with tools like satellite and lidar.

But determining how fast and abundantly wildlife is returning to an area presents a more difficult challenge — sometimes requiring an expert to sift through sound recordings and pick out animal calls.

Jorg Muller, a professor and field ornithologist at University of Wurzburg Biocenter, wondered if there was a different way.

“I saw the gap that we need, particularly in the tropics, better methods to quantify the huge diversity… to improve conservation actions,” he told AFP.

He turned to bioacoustics, which uses sound to learn more about animal life and habitats.

It is a long-standing research tool, but more recently is being paired with computer learning to process large amounts of data more quickly.

Muller and his team recorded audio at sites in Ecuador’s Choco region ranging from recently abandoned cacao plantations and pastures to agricultural land recovering from use to old-growth forests.

They first had experts listen to the recordings and pick out birds, mammals and amphibians.

Then, they carried out an acoustic index analysis, which gives a measure of biodiversity based on broad metrics from a soundscape, like volume and frequency of noises.

Finally, they ran two weeks of recordings through an AI-assisted computer program trained to distinguish 75 bird calls.

More recordings needed

The program was able to pick out the calls on which it was trained in a consistent way, but could it correctly identify the relative biodiversity of each location?

To check this, the team used two baselines: one from the experts who listened to the audio recordings, and a second based on insect samples from each location, which offer a proxy for biodiversity.

While the library of available sounds to train the AI model meant it could only identify a quarter of the bird calls the experts could, it was still able to correctly gauge biodiversity levels in each location, the study said.

“Our results show that soundscape analysis is a powerful tool to monitor the recovery of faunal communities in hyperdiverse tropical forest,” said the research published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.

“Soundscape diversity can be quantified in a cost-effective and robust way across the full gradient from active agriculture to recovering and old-growth forests,” it added.

There are still shortcomings, including a paucity of animal sounds on which to train AI models.

And the approach can only capture species that announce their presence.

“Of course (there is) no information on plants or silent animals. However, birds and amphibians are very sensitive to ecological integrity, they are a very good surrogate,” Muller told AFP.

He believes the tool could become increasingly useful given the current push for “biodiversity credits” — a way of monetizing the protection of animals in their natural habitat.

“Being able to directly quantify biodiversity, rather than relying on proxies such as growing trees, encourages and allows external assessment of conservation actions, and promotes transparency,” the study said.

 
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Artificial Intelligence is being used to create musical “deepfakes” – songs that sound like one artist but were made by a computer. Deana Mitchell brings us the story of one artist who is engaging with machine learning to create new kinds of music.
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The U.S. Commerce Department on Tuesday tightened its export controls to keep China from acquiring advanced computer chips that it could use to help develop hypersonic missiles and artificial intelligence.

Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said the new controls are “intended to protect technologies that have clear national security or human rights implications.”   

The new controls could increase tensions between the United States, the world’s biggest economy, and No. 2 China. In recent talks over several months with high-ranking U.S. officials, Beijing had appealed for “concrete actions” from Washington to improve relations between the two countries, although U.S. officials warned that the new export rules were in the offing.

Raimondo told reporters, “The vast majority of [the sale of] semiconductors [to China] will remain unrestricted. But when we identify national security or human rights threats, we will act decisively and in concert with our allies.”

The Commerce Department said the new restrictions came after consultations with U.S. chip manufacturers and conducting technological analyses.

The new controls allow the monitoring of the sale of chips that could still be used for military aims, even if they might not specifically meet the thresholds for trade limitations. The U.S. said chip exports can also be restricted to companies headquartered in Macao, a Chinese territory, or other countries under a U.S. arms embargo, to prevent them from circumventing the controls and providing chips to China.

The updated restrictions, an expansion of export controls announced last year, also make it more difficult for China to manufacture advanced chips abroad. The list of manufacturing equipment that falls under the export controls has also been expanded, among other changes to the policy.

China protested last year’s export controls, viewing the design and manufacture of high-level semiconductors as essential for its economic growth. Raimondo has said the limits on these chips are not designed to impair China’s economy.  

Chinese government officials are scheduled to go to San Francisco in November for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit.

U.S. President Joe Biden has suggested he could meet on the sidelines of the summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping, though a meeting has yet to be confirmed. The two leaders met last year following the Group of 20 summit in Bali, Indonesia, shortly after the export controls were announced.

Some material in this report came from The Associated Press.
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Settlement talks have collapsed between Facebook’s parent company Meta and Kenyan content moderators over a lawsuit alleging unfair dismissal, a tech rights group working with the moderators said on Monday. 

The 184 moderators sued Meta and two subcontractors earlier this year after they said they lost their jobs with one of the subcontractors, Sama, for organizing a union. They said they were then blacklisted from applying for the same roles at a second firm, Majorel, after Facebook changed contractors. 

In August, the court asked the parties to hold out-of-court settlement talks and said the case would proceed if those failed. 

British tech rights group Foxglove said in a statement on Monday that the negotiations had broken down, accusing Meta and Sama of making “very little attempt to address core issues raised by the petitioners.” 

“The respondents were buying time and not being genuine. We kept waiting for them to participate … only for them to keep asking for an extension of time and then come back every time to refuse to take accountability,” the statement quoted Mercy Mutemi, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, as saying. 

Sama said it was disappointed the mediation had failed and would not comment further on the case. 

“We have been successful in coming to a mutually agreed resolution with about 60 moderators outside of the mediation process, demonstrating our commitment and willingness to find an amicable, beneficial solution,” it said in a statement, adding it was fully complying with all court orders. 

Meta declined to comment. There was no immediate comment from Majorel. 

Meta has previously responded to allegations of a poor working environment in Kenya by saying it requires partners to provide industry-leading conditions. 

Sama has said it has always followed Kenyan law and provided mental health services to its employees. In August, Majorel said it does not comment on matters involving pending or active litigation. 

The moderators also allege that Meta is trying to terminate their contracts in defiance of an earlier court order. A hearing on their petition to find Meta and Sama in contempt of court is scheduled for October 31, Foxglove said. 

Meta has also been sued in Kenya by a former moderator over accusations of poor working conditions at Sama, and by two Ethiopian researchers and a rights institute, which accuse it of letting violent and hateful posts from Ethiopia flourish on Facebook.

In response, Meta said last December that hate speech and incitement to violence were against the rules of its Facebook and Instagram platforms. 
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A technology, innovation and entrepreneurship summit sparked imaginations in Ethiopia last week. The inaugural Enkopa summit — a collaboration between the Ethiopian Ministry of Labor and Skills and other partners — brought in speakers and exhibitors from across the world to Addis Ababa to discuss technology, innovation and entrepreneurship.

Speaking at the two-day event, Ethiopian State Minister of Labor and Skills Nigussu Tilahun emphasized the important role of the government in clearing a path for job creation in the country.

Nigussu said government’s role in building the entrepreneurship ecosystem is to create and facilitate a conducive environment for it.

The event, which was October 12 and 13, had 150 speakers from sectors like fintech, health care and agriculture.

Feven Tsehaye, founder and CEO of Chakka Origins — which sources natural ingredients in biodiversity hotspots — said land management is crucial to the work the company does in Ethiopia.

She said working with small holder farmers is essential.

“It makes sense to work with them and more efficiently utilizing their space instead of engaging in land clearing or displacing people,” Feven said.

Sessions during the two-day summit also explored the role of AI in agriculture, and sustainable farming in Ethiopia.

Abrhame Endrias leads Lersha, which provides digital services to farmers. He said making technology accessible to farmers encourages tech adoption.

Lersha provides climate and pest control advisories, farming inputs and options for mechanization.

Abrhame said Lersha translates information into local languages so farmers can understand the information and make decisions. The information comes to the farmers via text message.

While Lersha focuses on small holder famers, there were startups at the summit that focused on Ethiopia’s commercial farmers.

Semegn Tadesse, CEO of ARMADA AgriTech, said working with commercial farmers promises to deliver a more radical change.

“If you want to show progress, here is a big room for improvement in commercial farmers,” Semegn said. “They are also underserved even though they have financial capacity.”

The summit, funded by the United Nations Development Program, and other partners is expected to be held every year.
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Paul Lane uses his mouth, cheek and chin to push buttons and guide his virtual car around the Gran Turismo racetrack on the PlayStation 5. It’s how he’s been playing for the past 23 years, after a car accident left him unable to use his fingers.

Playing video games has long been a challenge for people with disabilities, chiefly because the standard controllers for the PlayStation, Xbox or Nintendo can be difficult, or even impossible, to maneuver for people with limited mobility. And losing the ability to play the games doesn’t just mean the loss of a favorite pastime, it can also exacerbate social isolation in a community already experiencing it at a far higher rate than the general population.

As part of the gaming industry’s efforts to address the problem, Sony has developed the Access controller for the PlayStation, working with input from Lane and other accessibility consultants. Its the latest addition to the accessible-controller market, whose contributors range from Microsoft to startups and even hobbyists with 3D printers.

“I was big into sports before my injury,” said Cesar Flores, 30, who uses a wheelchair since a car accident eight years ago and also consulted Sony on the controller. “I wrestled in high school, played football. I lifted a lot of weights, all these little things. And even though I can still train in certain ways, there are physical things that I can’t do anymore. And when I play video games, it reminds me that I’m still human. It reminds me that I’m still one of the guys.”

Putting the traditional controller aside, Lane, 52, switches to the Access. It’s a round, customizable gadget that can rest on a table or wheelchair tray and can be configured in myriad ways, depending on what the user needs. That includes switching buttons and thumbsticks, programming special controls and pairing two controllers to be used as one. Lane’s Gran Turismo car zooms around a digital track as he guides it with the back of his hand on the controller.

“I game kind of weird, so it’s comfortable for me to be able to use both of my hands when I game,” he said. “So I need to position the controllers away enough so that I can be able to to use them without clunking into each other. Being able to maneuver the controllers has been awesome, but also the fact that this controller can come out of the box and ready to work.”

Lane and other gamers have been working with Sony since 2018 to help design the Access controller. The idea was to create something that could be configured to work for people with a broad range of needs, rather than focusing on any particular disability.

“Show me a person with multiple sclerosis and I’ll show you a person who can be hard of hearing, I can show someone who has a visual impairment or a motor impairment,” said Mark Barlet, founder and executive director of the nonprofit AbleGamers. “So thinking on the label of a disability is not the approach to take. It’s about the experience that players need to bridge that gap between a game and a controller that’s not designed for their unique presentation in the world.”

Barlet said his organization, which helped both Sony and Microsoft with their accessible controllers, has been advocating for gamers with disabilities for nearly two decades. With the advent of social media, gamers themselves have been able to amplify the message and address creators directly in forums that did not exist before.

“The last five years I have seen the game accessibility movement go from indie studios working on some features to triple-A games being able to be played by people who identify as blind,” he said. “In five years, it’s been breathtaking.”

Microsoft, in a statement, said it was encouraged by the positive reaction to its Xbox Adaptive controller when it was released in 2018 and that it is “heartening to see others in the industry apply a similar approach to include more players in their work through a focus on accessibility.”

The Access controller will go on sale worldwide on Dec. 6 and cost $90 in the U.S.

Alvin Daniel, a senior technical program manager at PlayStation, said the device was designed with three principles in mind to make it “broadly applicable” to as many players as possible. First, the player does not have to hold the controller to use it. It can lay flat on a table, wheelchair tray or be mounted on a tripod, for instance. It was important for it to fit on a wheelchair tray, since once something falls off the tray, it might be impossible for the player to pick it up without help. It also had to be durable for this same reason — so it would survive being run over by a wheelchair, for example.

Second, it’s much easier to press the buttons than on a standard controller. It’s a kit, so it comes with button caps in different sizes, shapes and textures so people can experiment with reconfiguring it the way it works best for them. The third is the thumbsticks, which can also be configured depending on what works for the person using it.

Because it can be used with far less agility and strength than the standard PlayStation controller, the Access could also be a gamechanger for an emerging population: aging gamers suffering from arthritis and other limiting ailments.

“The last time I checked, the average age of a gamers was in their forties,” Daniel said. “And I have every expectation, speaking for myself, that they’ll want to continue to game, as I’ll want to continue to game, because it’s entertainment for us.”

After his accident, Lane stopped gaming for seven years. For someone who began playing video games as a young child on the Magnavox Odyssey — released in 1972 — “it was a void” in his life, he said.

Starting again, even with the limitations of a standard game controller, felt like being reunited with a “long-lost friend.”

“Just the the social impact of gaming really changed my life. It gave me a a brighter disposition,” Lane said. He noted the social isolation that often results when people who were once able-bodied become disabled.

“Everything changes,” he said. “And the more you take away from us, the more isolated we become. Having gaming and having an opportunity to game at a very high level, to be able to do it again, it is like a reunion, (like losing) a close companion and being able to reunite with that person again.”
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In what Guatemalan authorities described as a national security incident, hackers affiliated with the activist group Anonymous disabled multiple government webpages Saturday.

The attacks were in support of demonstrations led by Indigenous organizations in the Central American country.

For almost two weeks, demonstrators have been calling for the resignation of Guatemalan Attorney General Consuelo Porras, saying she has tried to undermine the popular vote that made progressive Bernardo Arévalo the president-elect.

Posting on the social media website X, formerly known as Twitter, hackers under the handle @AnonGTReloaded announced, “This October 14 #Anonymous will attack the Government of Guatemala, but this time we do not come alone.”

The hackers targeted government webpages with floods of automated traffic until they crashed, a technique known as distributed denial-of-service attacks.

Webpages for Guatemala’s judicial branch, Department of Agriculture and the General Secretary of the president were targeted, among others. Some pages were quickly reinstated, but others remained down.

Guatemalan authorities said the hacking was a matter of “national security” and they are responding.

The attacks come after 13 days of protests and road closures. Thousands of Indigenous people have demanded that Porras and prosecutors Rafael Curruchiche and Cinthia Monterroso, as well as Judge Fredy Orellana, all resign, accusing them of endangering the country’s democracy.

Demonstrators maintain that after Arévalo’s victory in the August runoff election, Porras mounted an undemocratic challenge against Arévalo, his left-wing Seed Movement party and electoral authorities.

A representative of Anonymous involved in the cyberattack, who agreed to talk about the hacking only if not identified to avoid legal repercussions, said, “Everything we do is to support humanity and, now in Guatemala, in support of the people who are in the streets, fighting against corruption and impunity.”

Also on Saturday morning, Miguel Martínez, former official and personal friend of current President Alejandro Giammattei, was surrounded by a throng of protesters as security officers escorted him from a Mass in Antigua, Guatemala.

In footage posted on social media, protesters appeared to accuse Martínez of corruption. He is not currently known to be under investigation by the prosecutor’s office.
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Malawi launched its first-ever Centre for Artificial Intelligence and STEAM — Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics — Friday at the Malawi University of Science and Technology. Established with support from various U.S.-based universities, the center aims to provide solutions to the country’s innovation and technology needs.

The project’s leader, Zipangani Vokhiwa, a science professor at Mercer University in the U.S. and a Fulbright scholar, says the center will help promote the study and use of artificial intelligence, or AI, and STEAM for the socioeconomic development of Malawi and beyond.

“Economic development that we know cannot go without the modern scientific knowledge and aspect so the center will complement vision 2063 for Malawi as a country that needs to be moving together with the country developments in science,” Vokhiwa said. “Not to be left behind.”

Vokhiwa said the center, known by its acronym, CAIST, will offer educational, technical, policy, and strategy products and services in emerging technologies such as AI.

He said it will also offer machine learning, deep learning, data science, data analytics, internet of things and more that are based on humanistic STEAM education and research.

A consortium of various U.S. universities provided the center with pedagogical and technical support.

These include Baylor College of Medicine, Texas Tech University, Morehouse College, Colorado University, Georgia Southern University, Clemson University, New York University and Mercer University.

There are fears worldwide, however, that the introduction of AI will result in loss of jobs.

CBS news reported  that AI eliminated nearly 4,000 jobs in the U.S. in May.

But Vokhiwa said the advantages and disadvantages of AI are still debatable.

“As has been said by the experts, AI has both positive elements and negative elements,” he said. “But knowing fairly well that we cannot run away from digitization of what we do, AI will be needed, and Malawi does not need to lag behind.”

Vokhiwa said AI has helped create employment because it needs people to run the AI machines.

Malawi’s Minister of Education, Madalitso Kambauwa Wirima, officially opened the AI center at the Malawi University of Science and Technology.

She said the launch of the AI center has set the tone and laid the foundation for the country to explore the opportunities that come with new technologies.

However, she said, while AI has the potential to transform the country, there is also a need to address its downside.

“For this to happen, the government will be looking to CAIST for knowledge and expertise so that we can together facilitate the development of the necessary policy and regulatory frameworks governing responsible use of AI,” she said. “The earlier we do this the better, because AI is already here, and we are all using it. Some of us with enough knowledge, but many of us surely without full knowledge of it.”

Kambauwa Wirima said that whatever the case, AI is something that Malawi cannot avoid, mentioning that the intergovernmental Southern African Development Community is already addressing the issue.

“We adopted a decision to develop regional guidelines on the ethics of artificial intelligence to be domesticated and implemented by member states,” she said. “Therefore, Malawi cannot sit on the fence.”

Address Malata, the vice chancellor for Malawi University of Science and Technology, said the university is strategizing its operations to align them to various development agendas including Malawi 2063, Africa Agenda 2063 and the Sustainable Development Goals, so that whatever the center does, it should benefit everyone.
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The U.S. space agency, NASA, launched a rocket Friday from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The rocket carried a probe designed to study a metal-rich asteroid that scientists think might be the remnants of small planet or planet-like object. 

The rocket, built by the private space company SpaceX, took off early Friday, starting NASAs Psyche probe on a 3.5-billion kilometer, six-year journey to the asteroid of the same name, orbiting between the planets Mars and Jupiter. 

Using Earth-based radar and optical telescope data, scientists hypothesize that the asteroid Psyche could be part of the metal-rich interior of a “planetesimal,” a building block of a rocky planet that never formed.  

NASA scientists say Psyche may have collided with other large bodies during its early formation and lost its outer rocky shell. Examining such an asteroid could provide unprecedented insights into the history of violent collisions and the accumulation of matter that created planets like Earth. 

The probe is powered by a pair of massive solar arrays which unfurled after the craft reached space and was released from the launch vehicle. Its unique solar electric propulsion system creates thrust by creating electric and magnetic fields, which accelerate and expel charged atoms, or ions, of a propellant called xenon at a high rate of speed. 

Xenon is a gas used in automobile headlights and plasma televisions and will emit a blue glow behind the probe as it travels through space. The voyage to Psyche marks the first mission to use the propulsion system — known as Hall-effect thrusters — in deep space.  

NASA expects the probe to reach its namesake asteroid in 2029.  

Some information for this report was provided by The Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse. 
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