Author: Uponsil

WASHINGTON — An executive at cybersecurity company CrowdStrike apologized in testimony to Congress for sparking a global technology outage over the summer. 

“We let our customers down,” said Adam Meyers, who leads CrowdStrike’s threat intelligence division, in a hearing before a U.S. House cybersecurity subcommittee Tuesday. 

Austin, Texas-based CrowdStrike has blamed a bug in an update that allowed its cybersecurity systems to push bad data out to millions of customer computers, setting off a global tech outage in July that grounded flights, took TV broadcasts off air and disrupted banks, hospitals and retailers. 

“Everywhere Americans turned, basic societal functions were unavailable,” House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green said. “We cannot allow a mistake of this magnitude to happen again.” 

The Tennessee Republican likened the impact of the outage to an attack “we would expect to be carefully executed by a malicious and sophisticated nation-state actor.” 

“We’re deeply sorry and we are determined to prevent this from ever happening again,” Meyers told lawmakers while laying out the technical missteps that led to the outage of about 8.5 million computers running Microsoft’s Windows operating system. 

Meyers said he wanted to “underscore that this was not a cyberattack” but was, instead, caused by a faulty “rapid-response content update” focused on addressing new threats. The company has since bolstered its content update procedures, he said. 

The company still faces a number of lawsuits from people and businesses that were caught up in July’s mass outage. 
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new york — Caroline Ellison, a former top executive in Sam Bankman-Fried’s fallen FTX cryptocurrency empire, was sentenced to two years in prison on Tuesday after she apologized repeatedly to everyone hurt by a fraud that stole billions of dollars from investors, lenders and customers. 

U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan said Ellison’s cooperation was “very, very substantial” and “remarkable.” 

But he said a prison sentence was necessary because she had participated in what might be the “greatest financial fraud ever perpetrated in this country and probably anywhere else” or at least close to it. 

He said in such a serious case, he could not let cooperation be a get-out-of-jail-free card, even when it was clear that Bankman-Fried had become “your kryptonite.” 

“I’ve seen a lot of cooperators in 30 years here,” he said. “I’ve never seen one quite like Ms. Ellison.”

She was ordered to report to prison on November 7. 

Ellison, 29, pleaded guilty nearly two years ago and testified against Bankman-Fried for nearly three days at a trial last November. 

At sentencing, she emotionally apologized to anyone hurt by the fraud that stretched from 2017 through 2022. 

“I’m deeply ashamed with what I’ve done,” she said, fighting through tears to say she was “so so sorry” to everyone she had harmed directly or indirectly. 

She did not speak as she left Manhattan federal court, surrounded by lawyers. 

In a court filing, prosecutors had called her testimony the “cornerstone of the trial” against Bankman-Fried, 32, who was found guilty of fraud and sentenced to 25 years in prison. 

In court Tuesday, Assistant U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon called for leniency, saying her testimony was “devastating and powerful proof” against Bankman-Fried. 

The prosecutor said Ellison’s time on the witness stand was very different from Bankman-Fried, who she said was “evasive, even contemptuous, and unable to answer questions directly” when he testified. 

Attorney Anjan Sahni asked the judge to spare his client from prison, citing “unusual circumstances,” including her off-and-on romantic relationship with Bankman-Fried and the damage caused when her “whole professional and personal life came to revolve” around him. 

FTX was one of the world’s most popular cryptocurrency exchanges, known for its Superbowl TV ad and its extensive lobbying campaign in Washington before it collapsed in 2022. 

U.S. prosecutors accused Bankman-Fried and other executives of looting customer accounts on the exchange to make risky investments, make millions of dollars of illegal political donations, bribe Chinese officials, and buy luxury real estate in the Caribbean. 

Ellison was chief executive at Alameda Research, a cryptocurrency hedge fund controlled by Bankman-Fried that was used to process some customer funds from FTX. 

As the business began to falter, Ellison divulged the massive fraud to employees who worked for her even before FTX filed for bankruptcy, trial evidence showed. 

Ultimately, she also spoke extensively with criminal and civil U.S. investigators. 

Sassoon said prosecutors were impressed that Ellison did not “jump into the lifeboat” to escape her crimes but instead spent nearly two years fully cooperating. 

Since testifying at Bankman-Fried’s trial, Ellison has engaged in extensive charity work, written a novel, and worked with her parents on a math enrichment textbook for advanced high school students, according to her lawyers. 

They said she also now has a healthy romantic relationship and has reconnected with high school friends she had lost touch with while she worked for and sometimes dated Bankman-Fried from 2017 until late 2022. 
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New York — The U.S. Commerce Department said Monday it’s seeking a ban on the sale of connected and autonomous vehicles in the U.S. that are equipped with Chinese and Russian software and hardware with the stated goal of protecting national security and U.S. drivers.

While there is minimal Chinese and Russian software deployed in the U.S, the issue is more complicated for hardware. That’s why Commerce officials said the prohibitions on the software would take effect for the 2027 model year and the prohibitions on hardware would take effect for the model year of 2030, or Jan. 1, 2029, for units without a model year.

The measure announced Monday is proactive but critical, the agency said, given that all the bells and whistles in cars like microphones, cameras, GPS tracking and Bluetooth technology could make Americans more vulnerable to bad actors and potentially expose personal information, from the home address of drivers, to where their children go to school.

In extreme situations, a foreign adversary could shut down or take simultaneous control of multiple vehicles operating in the United States, causing crashes and blocking roads, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo told reporters on a call Sunday.

“This is not about trade or economic advantage,” Raimondo said. “This is a strictly national security action. The good news is right now, we don’t have many Chinese or Russian cars on our road.”

But Raimondo said Europe and other regions in the world where Chinese vehicles have become commonplace very quickly should serve as “a cautionary tale” for the U.S.

Security concerns around the extensive software-driven functions in Chinese vehicles have arisen in Europe, where Chinese electric cars have rapidly gained market share.

“Who controls these data flows and software updates is a far from trivial question, the answers to which encroach on matters of national security, cybersecurity, and individual privacy,” Janka Oertel, director of the Asia program at the European Council on Foreign Relations, wrote on the council’s website.

Vehicles are now “mobility platforms” that monitor driver and passenger behavior and track their surroundings.

A senior administration official said that it is clear from terms of service contracts included with the technology that data from vehicles ends up in China.

Raimondo said that the U.S. won’t wait until its roads are populated with Chinese or Russian cars.

“We’re issuing a proposed rule to address these new national security threats before suppliers, automakers and car components linked to China or Russia become commonplace and widespread in the U.S. automotive sector,” Raimondo said.

It is difficult to know when China could reach that level of saturation, a senior administration official said, but the Commerce Department says China hopes to enter the U.S. market and several Chinese companies have already announced plans to enter the automotive software space.

The Commerce Department added Russia to the regulations since the country is trying to “breathe new life into its auto industry,” senior administration officials said on the call.

The proposed rule would prohibit the import and sale of vehicles with Russia and China-manufactured software and hardware that would allow the vehicle to communicate externally through Bluetooth, cellular, satellite or Wi-Fi modules. It would also prohibit the sale or import of software components made in Russia or the People’s Republic of China that collectively allow a highly autonomous vehicle to operate without a driver behind the wheel. The ban would include vehicles made in the U.S. using Chinese and Russian technology.

The proposed rule would apply to all vehicles, but would exclude those not used on public roads, such as agricultural or mining vehicles.

U.S. automakers said they share the government’s national security goal, but at present there is little connected vehicle hardware or software coming to the U.S. supply chain from China.

Yet the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, a large industry group, said the new rules will make some automakers scramble for new parts suppliers. “You can’t just flip a switch and change the world’s most complex supply chain overnight,” John Bozzella, the alliance’s CEO, said in a statement.

The lead time in the new rules will be long enough for some automakers to make the changes, “but may be too short for others,” Bozzella said.

Commerce officials met with all the major auto companies around the world while it drafted the proposed rule to better understand supply chain networks, according to senior administration officials, and also met with a variety of industry associations.

The Commerce Department is inviting public comments, which are due 30 days after publication of a rule before it’s finalized. That should happen by the end of the Biden Administration.

The new rule follows steps taken earlier this month by the Biden administration to crack down on cheap products sold out of China, including electric vehicles, expanding a push to reduce U.S. dependence on Beijing and bolster homegrown industry.
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Washington — The U.S. Commerce Department is expected on Monday to propose prohibiting Chinese software and hardware in connected and autonomous vehicles on American roads due to national security concerns, two sources told Reuters.

The Biden administration has raised serious concerns about the collection of data by Chinese companies on U.S. drivers and infrastructure as well as the potential foreign manipulation of vehicles connected to the internet and navigation systems.

The proposed regulation would ban the import and sale of vehicles from China with key communications or automated driving system software or hardware, said the two sources, who declined to be identified because the decision had not been publicly disclosed.

The move is a significant escalation in the United States’ ongoing restrictions on Chinese vehicles, software and components. Last week, the Biden administration locked in steep tariff hikes on Chinese imports, including a 100% duty on electric vehicles as well as new hikes on EV batteries and key minerals.

Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said in May the risks of Chinese software or hardware in connected U.S. vehicles were significant.

“You can imagine the most catastrophic outcome theoretically if you had a couple million cars on the road and the software were disabled,” she said.

President Joe Biden in February ordered an investigation into whether Chinese vehicle imports pose national security risks over connected-car technology — and if that software and hardware should be banned in all vehicles on U.S. roads.

“China’s policies could flood our market with its vehicles, posing risks to our national security,” Biden said earlier. “I’m not going to let that happen on my watch.”

The Commerce Department plans to give the public 30 days to comment before any finalization of the rules, the sources said. Nearly all newer vehicles on U.S. roads are considered “connected.” Such vehicles have onboard network hardware that allows internet access, allowing them to share data with devices both inside and outside the vehicle.

The department also plans to propose making the prohibitions on software effective in the 2027 model year and the ban on hardware would take effect in January 2029 or the 2030 model year. The prohibitions in question would include vehicles with certain Bluetooth, satellite and wireless features as well as highly autonomous vehicles that could operate without a driver behind the wheel.

A bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers in November raised alarm about Chinese auto and tech companies collecting and handling sensitive data while testing autonomous vehicles in the United States.

The prohibitions would extend to other foreign U.S. adversaries, including Russia, the sources said.

A trade group representing major automakers including General Motors, Toyota Motor, Volkswagen, Hyundai and others had warned that changing hardware and software would take time.

The carmakers noted their systems “undergo extensive pre-production engineering, testing, and validation processes and, in general, cannot be easily swapped with systems or components from a different supplier.”

The Commerce Department declined to comment on Saturday. Reuters first reported, in early August, details of a plan that would have the effect of barring the testing of autonomous vehicles by Chinese automakers on U.S. roads. There are relatively few Chinese-made light-duty vehicles imported into the United States.

The White House on Thursday signed off on the final proposal, according to a government website. The rule is aimed at ensuring the security of the supply chain for U.S. connected vehicles. It will apply to all vehicles on U.S. roads, but not for agriculture or mining vehicles, the sources said.

Biden noted that most cars are connected like smartphones on wheels, linked to phones, navigation systems, critical infrastructure and to the companies that made them.
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SACRAMENTO, California — California will make it illegal for social media platforms to knowingly provide addictive feeds to children without parental consent beginning in 2027 under a new law Governor Gavin Newsom signed Friday. 

California follows New York state, which passed a law earlier this year allowing parents to block their kids from getting social media posts suggested by a platform’s algorithm. Utah has passed laws in recent years aimed at limiting children’s access to social media, but those have faced challenges in court. 

The California law will take effect in a state home to some of the largest technology companies in the world. Similar proposals have failed to pass in recent years, but Newsom signed a first-in-the-nation law in 2022 barring online platforms from using users’ personal information in ways that could harm children. 

It is part of a growing push in states across the country to try to address the impact of social media on the well-being of children. 

“Every parent knows the harm social media addiction can inflict on their children — isolation from human contact, stress and anxiety, and endless hours wasted late into the night,” Newsom, a Democrat, said in a statement. “With this bill, California is helping protect children and teenagers from purposely designed features that feed these destructive habits.” 

The law bans platforms from sending notifications without permission from parents to minors between midnight and 6 a.m., and between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m. on weekdays from September through May, when children are typically in school. The legislation also makes platforms set children’s accounts to private by default. 

Opponents of the legislation say it could inadvertently prevent adults from accessing content if they cannot verify their age. Some argue it would threaten online privacy by making platforms collect more information on users. 

The law defines an “addictive feed” as a website or app “in which multiple pieces of media generated or shared by users are, either concurrently or sequentially, recommended, selected, or prioritized for display to a user based, in whole or in part, on information provided by the user, or otherwise associated with the user or the user’s device,” with some exceptions. 

The subject garnered renewed attention in June when U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called on Congress to require warning labels on social media platforms and their impacts on young people. Attorneys general in 42 states endorsed the plan in a letter sent to Congress last week. 

State Senator Nancy Skinner, a Democrat representing Berkeley who wrote the California law, said that “social media companies have designed their platforms to addict users, especially our kids.” 

“With the passage of SB 976, the California Legislature has sent a clear message: When social media companies won’t act, it’s our responsibility to protect our kids,” she said in a statement.
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Washington — Based on the posts of an X account that bears the name of Dutch cartoonist Bart van Leeuwen, a profile picture of his face and short professional bio, one would think the Amsterdam-based artist is a staunch supporter of China and fierce critic of the United States.

In one post, the account blasts what it calls Washington’s “fallacies against the Chinese economy,” accompanied by a cartoon from the Global Times — a Beijing-controlled media outlet — showing Uncle Sam aiming but failing to hit a target emblazoned with the words “China’s economy.”

In another, the account reposts a Chinese propaganda video about the country’s rubber-stamp legislature, writing “today’s China is closely connected with the world, blending with each other, and achieving mutual success.”

But Van Leeuwen didn’t make the posts. In fact, this account doesn’t even belong to him.

It belongs to a China-connected network on X of “spamouflage” accounts, which pretend to be the work of real people but are in reality controlled by robots sending out messages designed to shape public opinion.

China has repeatedly rejected reports that it seeks to influence U.S. presidential elections, describing such claims as “fabricated.”

VOA Mandarin and DoubleThink Lab (DTL), a Taiwanese social media analytics firm, uncovered the fake Van Leeuwen account during a joint investigation into a network of spamouflage accounts working on behalf of the Chinese government.

The network, consisting of at least nine accounts, propagated Beijing’s talking points on issues including human rights abuses in China’s western Xinjiang province, territorial disputes with countries in the South China Sea and U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods.

Fake account contradicts real artist

Van Leeuwen confirmed in an interview with VOA Mandarin that he had nothing to do with and was not aware of the fake account.

“It’s ironic that my identity, being a political cartoonist, is being used for political propaganda,” he told VOA in a written statement.

The real Van Leeuwen is an award-winning cartoonist whose works have been published on news outlets around the world, such as the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the Korea Times, Sing Tao Daily in Hong Kong and Gulf Today in the United Arab Emirates.

He specializes in editorial cartoons, whose main subjects include global politics, elections in the U.S. and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Several of his past illustrations made fun of Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s economic policies and the opaqueness of Beijing’s inner political struggles.

After being contacted by VOA Mandarin, a spokesman from X said the fake account has been suspended.

Other than finding irony in being impersonated by a Chinese propaganda bot, Van Leeuwen said the incident also worries him.

“This example once again highlights the need for far-reaching measures regarding the restriction of social media,” Van Leeuwen wrote in his statement, “especially with irresponsible people like Elon Musk at the helm.”

After purchasing what was then called Twitter in 2022, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO vowed to reduce the prevalence of bots on the platform, but many users complain it has become even worse.

Musk, the world’s richest person, is a so-called “free speech absolutist,” opposing almost all censorship of people voicing their views. Critics say his policy allows racist and false information to flourish on X.

Former President Donald Trump has praised Musk’s business acumen and said he plans to have the man who may become the world’s first trillionaire head a commission on government efficiency if he is reelected in November.

Network of spamouflage accounts

Before its suspension, the X account that impersonated Van Leeuwen had close to 1,000 followers, more than Van Leeuwen’s real X account. It was registered in 2013, but its first post came only last year. The account’s early posts were mostly encouraging and inspiring words in Chinese. It also posted many dance videos.

Gradually, the account started to mix in more and more political narratives, criticizing the U.S. and defending China. It often reposted content from another spamouflage account called “Grey World.”

“Grey World” used a photo of an attractive Asian woman as its profile picture. Most of its posts were supportive of Beijing’s talking points. It regularly posted videos and cartoons from Chinese state media. It also posted several of Van Leeuwen’s cartoons about American politics.

VOA Mandarin and DTL’s investigation identified “Grey World” as the main spamouflage account in a network of nine such accounts. Other accounts in the network, including the fake Van Leeuwen account, amplified “Grey World” by reposting its content.

But posts from “Grey World” had limited reach on X, despite having tens of thousands of followers. For example, between August 18 and September 1, its most popular post, a diatribe against Washington’s Indo-Pacific strategy, was viewed a little over 10,000 times but only had 35 reposts and 65 likes.

After the suspension of the fake Van Leeuwen account, X also shut down the “Grey World” account.

The spamouflage network is not the first linked to China.

In April, British researchers released a report saying Chinese nationalist trolls were posing as American supporters of Trump on X to try to exploit domestic divisions ahead of the U.S. election.

U.S. federal prosecutors in 2023 accused China’s Ministry of Public Security of having a covert social media propaganda campaign that also aimed to influence U.S. elections.

Researchers at Facebook’s parent company Meta said it was the largest known covert propaganda operation ever identified on that platform and Instagram, reported Rolling Stone magazine.

Network analysis firm Graphika called the pro-Chinese network “Spamouflage Dragon,” part of a campaign it identified in early 2020 that was at the time posting content that praised Beijing’s policies and attacked those of then-President Trump.
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Washington — The United States has identified and taken down a botnet campaign by China-directed hackers to further infiltrate American infrastructure as well as a variety of internet-connected devices.

FBI Director Christopher Wray announced the disruption of what he called Flax Typhoon during a cyber summit Wednesday in Washington, describing it as part of a much larger campaign by Beijing.

“Flax Typhoon hijacked Internet-of-Things devices like cameras, video recorders and storage devices — things typically found across both big and small organizations,” Wray said. “And about half of those hijacked devices were located here in the U.S.”

Wray said the hackers, working under the guise of an information security company called the Integrity Technology Group, collected information from corporations, media organizations, universities and government agencies.

“They used internet-connected devices — this time, hundreds of thousands of them — to create a botnet that helped them compromise systems and exfiltrate confidential data,” he said.

But Flax Typhoon’s operations were disrupted last week when the FBI, working with allies and under court orders, took control of the botnet and pursued the hackers when they tried to switch to a backup system.

“We think the bad guys finally realized that it was the FBI and our partners that they were up against,” Wray said. “And with that realization, they essentially burned down their new infrastructure and abandoned their botnet.”

Wray said Flax Typhoon appeared to build on the exploits and tactics of another China-linked hacking group, known as Volt Typhoon, which was identified by Microsoft in May of last year.

Volt Typhoon used office network equipment, including routers, firewalls and VPN hardware, to infiltrate and disrupt communications infrastructure in Guam, home to key U.S. military facilities.

The Chinese Embassy in Washington Wednesday rejected the U.S accusations.

“Without valid evidence, the U.S. jumped to an unwarranted conclusion and made groundless accusations” Chinese Embassy spokesperson Liu Pengyu told VOA in an email, responding to the allegations about Flax Typhoon.

“The U.S. itself is the origin and the biggest perpetrator of cyberattacks,” Liu added. “We urge the U.S. to stop its worldwide cyber espionage and cyberattacks, and stop smearing other countries under the excuse of cyber security.”

The FBI and the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency have previously warned that Chinese-government directed hackers, like Volt Typhoon, have been positioning themselves to launch destructive cyberattacks that could jeopardize the physical safety of Americans.

Following Wednesday’s announcement by the FBI, the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) issued an advisory encouraging anyone with a device that was compromised by Flax Typhoon to apply needed patches.

It said that as of this past June, the Flax Typhoon botnet was making use of more than 260,000 devices in North America, Europe, Africa and Southeast East.

The NSA said almost half of the compromised devices were in the U.S. Another 18 countries, including Vietnam, Bangladesh, Albania, China, South Africa and India, were also impacted.

 
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Ratcliffe on Soar, United Kingdom — Ratcliffe-on-Soar Power Station has dominated the landscape of the English East Midlands for nearly 60 years, looming over the small town of the same name and a landmark on the M1 motorway bisecting Derby and Nottingham.  

At the mainline railway station serving the nearby East Midlands Airport, its giant cooling towers rise up seemingly within touching distance of the track and platform.  

But at the end of this month, the site in central England will close its doors, signaling the end to polluting coal-powered electricity in the UK, in a landmark first for any G7 nation.   

“It’ll seem very strange because it has always been there,” said David Reynolds, a 74-year-old retiree who saw the site being built as a child before it began operations in 1967.  

“When I was younger you could go down certain parts and you saw nothing but coal pits,” he told AFP.   

Energy transition 

Coal has played a vital part in British economic history, powering the Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries that made the country a global superpower, and creating London’s infamous choking smog.  

Even into the 1980s, it still represented 70% of the country’s electricity mix before its share declined in the 1990s.   

In the last decade the fall has been even sharper, slumping to 38% in 2013, 5.0% in 2018 then just 1.0% last year. 

In 2015, the then Conservative government said that it intended to shut all coal-fired power stations by 2025 to reduce carbon emissions.  

Jess Ralston, head of energy at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit think-tank, said the UK’s 2030 clean-energy target was “very ambitious.”  

But she added: “It sends a very strong message that the UK is taking climate change as a matter of great importance and also that this is only the first step.”  

By last year, natural gas represented a third of the UK’s electricity production, while a quarter came from wind power and 13 percent from nuclear power, according to electricity operator National Grid ESO.  

“The UK managed to phase coal out so quickly largely through a combination of economics and then regulations,” Ralston said.   

“So larger power plants like coal plants had regulations put on them because of all the sulphur dioxide, nitrous oxides, all the emissions coming from the plant and that meant that it was no longer economically attractive to invest in those sorts of plants.”  

The new Labour government launched its flagship green energy plan after its election win in July, with the creation of a publicly owned body to invest in offshore wind, tidal power and nuclear power.  

The aim is to make Britain a superpower once more, this time in “clean energy.”  

As such, Ratcliffe-on-Soar’s closure on September 30 is a symbolic step in the UK’s ambition to decarbonize electricity by 2030, and become carbon neutral by 2050.   

It will make the country the first in the G7 of rich nations to do away entirely with coal power electricity.  

Italy plans to do so by next year, France in 2027, Canada in 2030 and Germany in 2038. Japan and the United States have no set dates.   

• ‘End of an era’ – 

In recent years, Ratcliffe-on-Soar Power Station, which had the potential to power two million homes, has been used only when big spikes in electricity use were expected, such as during a cold snap in 2022 or the 2023 heatwave.  

Its last delivery of 1,650 tons of coal at the start of this summer barely supplied 500,000 homes for eight hours.    

“It’s like the end of a era,” said Becky, 25, serving £4 pints behind the bar of the Red Lion pub in nearby Kegworth.  

Her father works at the power station and will be out of a job. September 30 is likely to stir up strong emotions for him and the other 350 remaining employees.   

“It’s their life,” she said.  

Nothing remains of the world’s first coal-fired power station, which was built by Thomas Edison in central London in 1882, three years after his invention of the electric light bulb.  

The same fate is slated for Ratcliffe-on-Soar: the site’s German owner, Uniper, said it will be completely dismantled “by the end of the decade.”  

In its place will be a new development — a “carbon-free technology and energy hub”, the company said.
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brussels — Europe’s second-top court largely confirmed on Wednesday an EU antitrust fine imposed on U.S. chipmaker Qualcomm, revising it down slightly to $265.5 million from an initial $2.7 million.

The European Commission imposed the fine in 2019, saying that Qualcomm sold its chipsets below cost between 2009 and 2011, in a practice known as predatory pricing, to thwart British phone software maker Icera, which is now part of Nvidia Corp.

Qualcomm had argued that the 3G baseband chipsets singled out in the case accounted for just 0.7% of the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) market and so it was not possible for it to exclude rivals from the chipset market.

The Court made “a detailed examination of all the pleas put forward by Qualcomm, rejecting them all in their entirety, with the exception of a plea concerning the calculation of the amount of the fine, which it finds to be well founded in part,” the Luxembourg-based General Court said.

Qualcomm can appeal on points of law to the EU Court of Justice, Europe’s highest.

The chipmaker did not immediately reply to an emailed Reuters request for comment.

The company convinced the same court two years ago to throw out a $1.1 billion antitrust fine handed down in 2018 for paying billions of dollars to Apple from 2011 to 2016 to use only its chips in all its iPhones and iPads in order to block out rivals such as Intel Corp.

The EU watchdog subsequently declined to appeal the judgment.
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Brussels — Teresa Ribera will have to square up to Big Tech, banks and airlines if confirmed as Europe’s new antitrust chief, while juggling calls for looser rules to help create EU champions.

Nominated Tuesday by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen for the high-profile antitrust post, Ribera has been Spain’s minister for ecological transition since 2018.

The 55-year-old Spanish socialist, one of Europe’s most ambitious policymakers on climate change, will have to secure European Parliament approval before taking up her post.

As competition commissioner, she will be able to approve or veto multi-billion euro mergers or slap hefty fines on companies seeking to bolster their market power by throttling smaller rivals or illegally teaming up to fix prices.

One of her biggest challenges will be to ensure that Amazon, Apple, Alphabet’s Google, Microsoft and Meta comply with landmark rules aimed at reining in their power and giving consumers more choice.

Apple, Google and Meta are firmly in outgoing EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager’s crosshairs for falling short of complying with the Digital Markets Act.

Another challenge will be how to deal with the increasing popularity of artificial intelligence amid concerns about Big Tech leveraging its existing dominance.

Ribera may ramp up a crackdown on non-EU state subsidies begun by Vestager aimed at preventing foreign companies from acquiring EU businesses or taking part in EU public tenders with unfair state support.

Recent rulings from Europe’s highest court, which backed the Commission’s $14.5 billion tax order to Apple, and its $2.7 billion antitrust fine against Google, could embolden Ribera to take a tough line against antitrust violations.

That would mean she would be in no hurry to ease up on antitrust rules, despite Mario Draghi’s call to boost EU industrial champions so that they are able to compete with U.S. and Chinese competitors.

Ribera was also named on Tuesday as executive vice president of a clean, just and competitive energy transition, tasked with ensuring that Europe achieves its green goals.

Her credentials include negotiating deals last year among EU countries on emissions limits for trucks and a contentious upgrade of EU power market rules.

 
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PARIS — When French prosecutors took aim at Telegram boss Pavel Durov, they had a trump card to wield – a tough new law with no international equivalent that criminalizes tech titans whose platforms allow illegal products or activities.

The so-called LOPMI law, enacted in January 2023, has placed France at the forefront of a group of nations taking a sterner stance on crime-ridden websites. But the law is so recent that prosecutors have yet to secure a conviction.

With the law still untested in court, France’s pioneering push to prosecute figures like Durov could backfire if its judges balk at penalizing tech bosses for alleged criminality on their platforms.

A French judge placed Durov under formal investigation last month, charging him with various crimes, including the 2023 offence: “Complicity in the administration of an online platform to allow an illicit transaction, in an organized gang,” which carries a maximum 10-year sentence and a $556,300 fine.

Being under formal investigation does not imply guilt or necessarily lead to trial, but indicates judges think there’s enough evidence to proceed with the probe. Investigations can last years before being sent to trial or dropped.

Durov, out on bail, denies Telegram was an “anarchic paradise.” Telegram has said it “abides by EU laws,” and that it’s “absurd to claim that a platform or its owner are responsible for abuse of that platform.”

In a radio interview last week, Paris Prosecutor Laure Beccuau hailed the 2023 law as a powerful tool for battling organized crime groups who are increasingly operating online.

The law appears to be unique. Eight lawyers and academics told Reuters they were unaware of any other country with a similar statute.

“There is no crime in U.S. law directly analogous to that and none that I’m aware of in the Western world,” said Adam Hickey, a former U.S. deputy assistant attorney general who established the Justice Department’s (DOJ) national security cyber program.

Hickey, now at U.S. law firm Mayer Brown, said U.S. prosecutors could charge a tech boss as a “co-conspirator or an aider and abettor of the crimes committed by users” but only if there was evidence the “operator intends that its users engage in, and himself facilitates, criminal activities.”

He cited the 2015 conviction of Ross Ulbricht, whose Silk Road website hosted drug sales. U.S. prosecutors argued Ulbricht “deliberately operated Silk Road as an online criminal marketplace … outside the reach of law enforcement,” according to the DOJ. Ulbricht got a life sentence.

Timothy Howard, a former U.S. federal prosecutor who put Ulbricht behind bars, was “skeptical” Durov could be convicted in the United States without proof he knew about the crimes on Telegram, and actively facilitated them – especially given Telegram’s vast, mainly law-abiding user base.

“Coming from my experience of the U.S. legal system,” he said, the French law appears “an aggressive theory.”

Michel Séjean, a French professor of cyber law, said the toughened legislation in France came after authorities grew exasperated with companies like Telegram.

“It’s not a nuclear weapon,” he said. “It’s a weapon to prevent you from being impotent when faced with platforms that don’t cooperate.”

Tougher laws

The 2023 law traces its origins to a 2020 French interior ministry white paper, which called for major investment in technology to tackle growing cyber threats.

It was followed by a similar law in November 2023, which included a measure for the real-time geolocation of people suspected of serious crimes by remotely activating their devices. A proposal to turn on their devices’ cameras and mouthpieces so that investigators could watch or listen in was shot down by France’s Constitutional Council.

These new laws have given France some of the world’s toughest tools for tackling cybercrime, with the proof being the arrest of Durov on French soil, said Sadry Porlon, a French lawyer specialized in communication technology law.

Tom Holt, a cybercrime professor at Michigan State University, said LOPMI “is a potentially powerful and effective tool if used properly,” particularly in probes into child sexual abuse images, credit card trafficking and distributed denial of service attacks, which target businesses or governments.

Armed with fresh legislative powers, the ambitious J3 cybercrime unit at the Paris prosecutor’s office, which is overseeing the Durov probe, is now involved in some of France’s most high-profile cases.

In June, the J3 unit shut down Coco, an anonymized chat forum cited in over 23,000 legal proceedings since 2021 for crimes including prostitution, rape and homicide.

Coco played a central role in a current trial that has shocked France.

Dominique Pelicot, 71, is accused of recruiting dozens of men on Coco to rape his wife, whom he had knocked out with drugs. Pelicot, who is expected to testify this week, has admitted his guilt, while 50 other men are on trial for rape.

Coco’s owner, Isaac Steidel, is suspected of a similar crime as Durov: “Provision of an online platform to allow an illicit transaction by an organized gang.”

Steidel’s lawyer, Julien Zanatta, declined to comment.
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WASHINGTON — “I love you, China. My dear mother,” former U.S. President Donald Trump, standing in front of a mic at a lectern, appears to sing in perfect Mandarin.

“I cry for you, and I also feel proud for you,” Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump’s Democratic opponent in this year’s election, appears to respond, also in perfect Mandarin. Trump lets out a smile as he listens to the lyric.

The video has received thousands of likes and tens of thousands of reposts on Douyin, China’s variation of TikTok.

“These two are almost as Chinese as it gets,” one comment says.

Neither Trump nor Harris knows Mandarin. And the duet shown in the video has never happened. But recently, deepfake videos, frequently featuring top U.S. leaders, including President Joe Biden, singing Chinese pop songs, have gone viral on the Chinese internet.

Some of the videos have found their way to social media platforms not available in China, such as Instagram, TikTok and X.

U.S. intelligence officials and experts have long warned about how China and other foreign adversaries have been implementing generative AI in their disinformation effort to disrupt and influence the 2024 presidential election.

“There has been an increased use of Chinese AI-generated content in recent months, attempting to influence and sow division in the U.S. and elsewhere,” a Microsoft report on China’s disinformation threat said in April.

Few of the people who saw the videos of the American leaders singing in Chinese, however, were convinced that they were real, based on what users wrote in the comments. The videos themselves do not contain misinformation, either.

Instead, these videos and their popularity reflect, at least in part, a sense of cultural confidence in Chinese netizens in the age of perpetually intensifying U.S.-China competitions, observers told VOA Mandarin.

By making the likes of Biden and Trump sing whatever Chinese songs the creators of the videos want them to sing, they can “culturally domesticate powerful Americans,” said Alexa Pan, a researcher on China’s AI industry for ChinaTalk, an influential newsletter about China and technology.

“Making fun of U.S. leaders might be especially politically acceptable to and popular with Chinese viewers,” she said.

Political opponents sing about friendship

Videos of American leaders singing in Chinese started to spread on Chinese social media in May. In many of the videos featuring Biden and Trump, creators made the two politically opposed men sing songs about friendship.

After Biden announced his withdrawal from the presidential race in July, one viral video had him sing to Trump, “Actually I don’t want to leave. Actually, I want to stay. I want to stay with you through every spring, summer, autumn and winter,” to which Trump appeared to sing, “You have to believe me. It won’t take long before we can spend our whole life together.”

“Crying eyes,” one Chinese netizen commented sarcastically. “They must have gotten along really well.”

Another such video posted on Instagram received mostly positive reactions. Some users said it was a stark contrast to the bitterness that has permeated U.S. politics.

“Made me laugh,” an Instagram user wrote. “Wouldn’t that be so refreshing to actually have them sing like that together?”

Easy to make

After reviewing some of the videos, Pan, of ChinaTalk, told VOA Mandarin that she believes they were quite easy to make.

Obvious flaws in the videos, including body parts occasionally blending into the background, suggest they were created with simple AI technology, Pan said.

“One could generate these videos on the many AI text-to-video generation platforms available in China,” she wrote in an e-mail.

On the Chinese internet, there are countless tutorials on how to make AI-generated videos using popular lip-syncing AI models, such as MuseTalk, released by Chinese tech giant Tencent, and SadTalker, developed by Xi’an Jiaotong University, a research-focused university in northwestern China.

One Douyin account reviewed by VOA Mandarin has pumped out over 200 videos of American leaders singing in Chinese since May. One of the account’s videos was even reposted by the Iranian embassy.

Chinese leaders off-limits

The release of ChatGPT by OpenAI in 2022 has triggered a global AI frenzy, with China being one of the leading countries developing the technology. The United Nations said in July that China had requested the most patents on generative AI, with the U.S. being a distant second.

On the Chinese internet, the obsession has been particularly strong with deepfakes, which can be used to manipulate videos, images and audio of people to make them appear to say or sing things that they have not actually uttered.

Some deepfake videos are made mostly for fun, such is the case with Biden and Trump singing Chinese songs. But there have also been abuses of the technology. Earlier this year, web users in China stole a Ukrainian girl’s image and turned her into a “Russian beauty” to sell goods online.

 China has released strict regulations on deepfakes. A 2022 law states that the technology cannot be used to “endanger the national security and interests, harm the image of the nation, harm the societal public interest, disturb economic or social order, or harm the lawful rights and interests of others.”

Yang Han, an Australian commentator who used to work for China’s Foreign Ministry, told VOA Mandarin that the prominence of U.S leaders and the absence of Chinese leaders in these viral AI videos reflects a lack of political free speech in China.

He said that it reminds him of a joke that former U.S. President Ronald Reagan used to tell during the Cold War.

“An American and a Russian compare with each other whose country has more freedom,” Yang said, relaying the joke. “The American says he can stand in front of the White House and call Reagan stupid. The Russian dismisses it and says he can also stand in front of the Kremlin and call Reagan stupid.”
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