WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 28, 2015 technology Japan turns to ‘I am Kenji’ Facebook page TOKYO: The plight of freelance journalist Kenji Goto, taken captive by Islamic State group militants, has gripped Japan, and the people’s hopes for his safety are now on Facebook with a simple, unifying plea: “I am Kenji.” The video, posted online last week, showing Goto and another Japanese hostage, has dominated mainstream media here, a relatively crimefree nation unaccustomed to such violence. But as government officials made stately pronouncements on TV news, regular people were taking action of their own - online, with some rallying to Goto’s support and others mocking the terrorists with images - in a quiet but massive show of defiance. “We want Kenji to come home,” said Taku Nishimae, a Japanese filmmaker living in New York, who started the “I am Kenji” Facebook page, right after seeing last week’s video threatening the hostages’ lives. The page, with thousands of “likes,” asks people to post self-portraits and other photos with a sign that says: “I am Kenji.” It’s a reference to the “Je Suis Charlie,” or “I Am Charlie,” slogan showing solidarity with Charlie Hebdo, the Paris weekly newspaper where 12 people were killed in a terrorist attack earlier this month. “Let’s show that we’re united, and tell that it’s unjust to kill innocent citizens and it’s meaningless to turn entire nation against you,” the Facebook page says in English and Japanese. Nishimae, 52, stressed the page is not about taking political sides, or even about freedom of the press, but a more general human statement, like a desperate prayer. About a thousand people have posted photos, some of them portraits holding handwritten messages, some identifying themselves as Muslim, but all with the same message. The slogan has taken off. “I am Kenji” was among the signs held up at a demonstration of about 1,000 people outside the prime minister’s office over the weekend, demanding the government do more to save the hostages. “It’s great people are getting inspired,” said Nishimae, who has known Goto, 47, for 12 years and has worked with him on documentary movies. “Even now, I can’t believe it. But it is Kenji. It feels so unre- al.” They had hit it off right away, he recalled. Goto devoted his life to telling the stories of refugees and children in war zones, and had worked with UNICEF. Robert Campbell, an American professor of Japanese literature at the University of Tokyo, did not know Goto personally and posted his “I am Kenji” photo out of impulse. But he wanted more people to know Goto’s work and added a translation he did into English of Goto’s blog on the suffering of the people of Syria, which starts: “Why did they have to die?” “It’s a small act that we can all do. It is important,” Campbell, 57, said. “You feel connected to other people. That’s all very good.” Campbell, a 30-year resident of Japan, said he sensed a change from the stereotype of Japanese being standoffish, afraid to speak up and preoccupied with appearances. And “I am Kenji” highlights that change, he said, with more Japanese “putting down their apprehension of being judged.” Another video over the weekend appeared to show hostage Haruna Yukawa had been killed and demanded a prisoner exchange for Goto. That video had not been verified, but Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has said it is likely credible. A stream of doctored images from the first video have appeared on Japanese Twitter, including cutesy manga-like figures juxtaposed on top of the images of the two kneeling hostages as well as the masked man standing in the middle. Nobuyuki Hayashi, a consultant and technology journalist, who knew Goto in junior high school, says he finds Twitter chatter disturbing, because of the anonymity that allows people to voice irresponsible and sometimes hurtful views. “We needed to avoid these Japanese netizens cloaked under anonymity to make any constructive discussion,” Hayashi said. Many Japanese are worried for Goto, but don’t know what to do and feel frustrated, he said. The Facebook page allowed them to do something. They can also see the concerns of others around the world. “And that is encouraging,” Hayashi said. “And we can all hope that, when Kenji returns to Japan sometime soon, he would be happy to see so many people supporting him.” — AP The drone debate hits close to home for White House WASHINGTON: The drone-control debate has hit uncomfortably close to home for the White House, thanks to an apparently hapless operator who sent his quadcopter crashing inside the presidential compound. Questions persist about why the night-owl drone operator would be flying it within range of the White House at 3 a.m. but the Secret Service’s early investigation suggested he meant no harm. Even so, the crash inside the compound Monday pointed to the risk of increasingly commonplace drones penetrating the presidential security bubble, with more dangerous intent. And it highlighted the challenge of setting controls on this expanding frontier. President Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, were overseas when the quadcopter a two-foot-long craft with four propellers struck the southeast side of the grounds. Officials believed the intrusion to be the first of its kind on the highly fortified property, although not the first in the vicinity. Authorities locked down the White House for several hours in a vigorous emergency response, only to have the unidentified man step forward to own up to a big mistake. The episode unfolded with the Obama administration on the verge of proposing rules for drone operations that would replace an existing ban on most commercial flights. Only a small number of companies can use them for inspections and aerial photography. Hobbyists can fly them, but must keep them under 400 feet in altitude, 5 miles from an airport, always within sight and not within a highly populated area. The drone operator clearly violated the rules, and in a zone designated as protected air space around the White House. Monday’s episode “complicates the administration’s messaging that commercial drones can be introduced smoothly without concern over safety, security and privacy,” said Kenneth Quinn, a former Federal Aviation Administration general counsel. The FAA has estimated 7,500 commercial drones will be in the skies within five years of the coming regulations taking effect. That does not count the increasingly inexpensive consumer drones that were a hit for Christmas, far more sophisticated than the remote-controlled toy and hobby airplanes out for decades. Whether a quadcopter can carry and fire a weapon depends upon how robust the drone is and how lightweight the weapon. Most commercially manufactured quadcopters are small, weighing 2 to 5 pounds and measuring 1 to 3 feet in length. Paul McDuffee, vice president at dronemaker Insitu, said of the one that crashed: “Something of that size is going to be very limited in terms of what it can carry, probably down to a few ounces in payload.” Even so, a small drone at low altitude is hard to intercept. “There’s probably nothing they have that could stop it, particularly at night,” said James Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “The sniper would be shooting at the drone and his bullets would be going past it into the buildings on Connecticut Avenue. If it’s a crisis or emergency, sure, that makes sense, but what goes up comes down, and that includes bullets.” The Federal Aviation Administration receives reports across the country nearly every day of drones operating near manned aircraft and airports or over densely populated areas, including multiple times near the White House. In one, police arrested a man in August who got stuck in a tree at Freedom Plaza, several blocks from the White House, after he climbed to retrieve his drone, according to a compilation of recent incidents by the FAA. In July, a Secret Service patrol detained someone flying a quadcopter drone in President’s Park, not far from the White House grounds, and confiscated it. — -AP NEW YORK: This April 9, 2012, file photo shows Instagram being demonstrated on an iPhone in New York. Social media websites Facebook and Instagram have stopped working yesterday. The problem is affecting users in Australia but also in other countries including the United States. —AP Facebook takes blame for service outages FRANKFURT: Access to Facebook, the world’s largest social network, and its Instagram photosharing site, was blocked around the world for up to an hour yesterday, which the company said later was due to an internal fault and not an outside attack. The outage at Facebook, which started around 0600 GMT, appeared to spill over and temporarily slow or block traffic to other major Internet sites, according to web and mobile user reports from around the globe. US-based online match-making site Tinder, a unit of IAC/InterActive Corp, and Hipchat, the workplace instant- messaging ser vice of Australian enterprise software company Atlassian, were also down around the same period, but recovered. A hacker group associated with other recent high-profile attacks on other online services sought to claim responsibility for the outages, but Facebook said the fault was its own. “This was not the result of a third-party attack but instead occurred after we introduced a change that affected our configuration systems,” WASHINGTON: This handout photo provided by the US Secret Service shows the drone that crashed onto the White House grounds in Washington, Monday, Jan. 26, 2015. A small drone flying low to the ground crashed onto the White House grounds before dawn, triggering a major emergency response and raising fresh questions about security at the presidential mansion. — AP Apple supplier Foxconn to shrink workforce SHENZHEN: Taiwan’s Foxconn Technology Group, the world’s largest contract electronics manufacturer, will cut its massive workforce, the company told Reuters, as the Apple Inc supplier faces declining revenue growth and rising wages in China. Under its flagship unit Hon Hai Precision Industr y Co Ltd , the group currently employs about 1.3 million people during peak production times, making it one of the largest private employers in the world. Special assistant to the chairman and group spokesman Louis Woo did not specify a timeframe or target for the reduction, but noted that labour costs had more than doubled since 2010, when the company faced intense media scrutiny following a spate of worker suicides. “We’ve basically stabilised (our workforce) in the last three years,” Woo said. When asked if the company plans to reduce overall headcount, he responded “yes”. Revenue growth at the conglomerate tumbled to 1.3 percent in 2013 and only partially recovered to 6.5 percent last year after a long string of double-digit increases from 2003 to 2012. That decade saw the firm ride an explosion of popularity in PCs, smartphones and tablets, largely driven by its main client Apple, but now it is feeling the effects of falling growth and prices in the gadget markets it supplies, a trend that is expected to continue. Growth in smartphone sales will halve this year from 26 percent in 2014, according to researcher IDC, while PC sales will contract by 3 percent. Similarly, the average smartphone will sell for 19 percent less in 2018 than last year’s $297. “Even if technology is improving, the price will still come down,” Woo said. “We’ve come to accept that, our customers have come to accept that.” Automation will be key to keeping labor costs under control in the long-term, Woo said, as the company pushes to have robotic arms complete mundane tasks currently done by workers. But Woo noted that company chairman Terry Gou’s previously stated goal of 1 million robots was “a generic concept” rather than a firm target. — Reuters Facebook said. “Both services are back to 100 percent for everyone.” Users in the United States and many countries in Asia and Europe reported that they were unable to log on to the websites of Facebook, Instagram and corresponding mobile apps including Facebook and Facebook Messenger. During the outages, Facebook users were greeted with the message: “Sorry, something went wrong. We’re working on it and we’ll get it fixed as soon as we can.” “If you run a service with the capacity (and complexity) to deliver media for hundreds of millions of users, it’s inevitable that things don’t always go according to plan,” said Steve Santorelli, a former London police detective and now a researcher at U.S. threat intelligence firm Team Cymru. Facebook counted more than 1.35 billion web and 1.12 mobile phone users on a monthly basis in September, the latest date for which official figures are available. Earlier yesterday a Twitter account that purports to speak for hacker group “Lizard Squad” posted messages suggesting that it was behind an attack that temporarily blocked several major web sites, including Facebook and Instagram. The Lizard Squad is a group of unknown hackers that has taken credit for several highprofile outages, including the attacks that took down the Sony PlayStation Network and Microsoft’s Xbox Live network last month. Santorelli said that attacking Internet sites which operate at the size and scale of Facebook via a classic distributed denial of service attack would be a huge undertaking, which, while not entirely impossible, would be “monumentally hard.” Denial of service attacks direct thousands of infected computers under an attacker’s control to ping a site or sites, thereby slowing or blocking access for regular users. Such attacks can create congestion on branches of the Internet where the site is located, slowing Web traffic and affecting access to unrelated services. As a precaution, Facebook users are advised to change their passwords and review their privacy settings, Santorelli said. — Reuters Call to disable popular police-tracking app WASHINGTON: Law enforcement is concerned that the popular Waze mobile traffic app by Google Inc., which provides real-time road conditions, can also be used to hunt and harm police. Waze is a combination of GPS navigation and social networking. Fifty million users in 200 countries turn to the free service for warnings about nearby congestion, car accidents, speed traps, traffic cameras, construction zones, potholes, stalled vehicles or unsafe weather conditions. Waze users mark police - who are generally working in public spaces - on maps without much distinction other than “visible” or “hidden.” Users see a police icon, but it’s not immediately clear whether police are there for a speed trap, a sobriety check or a lunch break. To some in law enforcement, this feature amounts to a stalking app for people who want to harm police. They want Google to disable that feature. The growing concern is the latest twist in Google’s complicated relationship with government and law enforcement. It places the Internet giant, again, at the center of an ongoing global debate about public safety, consumer rights and privacy. Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck complained in a letter to Google’s chief executive on Dec. 30 that Waze could be “misused by those with criminal intent to endanger police officers and the community.” The Los Angeles Police Department said Monday it had not heard back from Google about whether it had addressed Beck’s concerns. Google purchased Waze for $966 million in 2013. There are no known connections between any attack on police and Waze, although Beck said Waze was used in the killing of two New York Police Department officers on Dec. 20. The Instagram account of the gunman in that case included a screenshot from Waze along with other messages threatening police. Investigators do not believe the shooter, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, used Waze to ambush the NYPD officers, in part because police say Brinsley tossed his cellphone more than two miles from where he shot the officers. In his letter to Google, Beck said that Brinsley had been using the Waze app to track police since early December. “I am confident your company did not intend the Waze app to be a means to allow those who wish to commit crimes to use the unwitting Waze community as their lookouts for the location of police officers,” Beck wrote. Some officers, like Sheriff Mike Brown of Bedford County, Virginia, think it’s only a matter of time before Waze is used to hunt and harm police. “The police community needs to coordinate an effort to have the owner, Google, act like the responsible corporate citizen they have always been and remove this feature from the application even before any litigation or statutory action,” said Brown, who raised the issue at a National Sheriffs’ Association meeting in Washington January 23. — AP WASHINGTON: This image taken from the the Waze app on an iPhone, shows police at the scene on a map on the app. Sheriffs are campaigning to pressure Google Inc. to turn off a feature on its Waze traffic software that warns drivers when police are nearby. — AP