RISKS-LIST: Risks-Forum Digest Friday 21 May 2020 Volume 31 : Issue 85

ACM FORUM ON RISKS TO THE PUBLIC IN COMPUTERS AND RELATED SYSTEMS (comp.risks) Peter G. Neumann, founder and still moderator

***** See last item for further information, disclaimers, caveats, etc. ***** This issue is archived at <http://www.risks.org> as
<http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/31.85>
The current issue can also be found at
<http://www.csl.sri.com/users/risko/risks.txt>

Contents:
A Case for Cooperation Between Machines and Humans (John Markoff)
Scammers steal > $100m in Wash. State unemployment fraud (Seattle Times) Satellites and spacecraft malfunction as Earth's magnetic field
mysteriously weakens (Sky)
Microsoft: Beware this massive phishing campaign using malicious Excel
macros to hack PCs (ZDNet)
Ransomware deploys virtual machines to hide itself from antivirus software
(ZDNet)
Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can't handle iPhone
photos (The Verge)
How Do Astronauts Escape When a Space Launch Goes Wrong? (WiReD)
How a Chinese AI Giant Made Chatting -- and Surveillance -- Easy (WiReD)
90-Day Security Plan Progress Report: May 20 (Zoom Blog)
How the CDC is misreporting COVID-19 testing data (The Atlantic)
Re: COVID codebase [D Maziuk)
Re: The ultimate Turing test (Arthur Flatau)
Re: Teen Hacker and Crew of Evil Geniuses Accused of $24 Million Crypto
Theft (Gabe Goldberg)
Re: The FBI Just Unlocked an iPhone Without Apple's Help (Keith Medcalf)
Re: AI gets the attention, but biotechnology is poised to change the world
(Dan Jacobson)
Abridged info on RISKS (comp.risks)

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: May 22, 2020 at 17:57:40 GMT+9
From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne@warpspeed.com>
Subject: A Case for Cooperation Between Machines and Humans (John Markoff)

John Markoff, *The New York Times*, 21 May 2020

A computer scientist argues that the quest for fully automated robots is misguided, perhaps even dangerous. His decades of warnings are gaining more attention.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/21/technology/ben-shneiderman-automation-humans.html

The Tesla chief Elon Musk and other big-name Silicon Valley executives have long promised a car that can do all the driving without human assistance.

But Ben Shneiderman, a University of Maryland computer scientist who has for decades warned against blindly automating tasks with computers, thinks fully automated cars and the tech industry's vision for a robotic future is misguided. Even dangerous. Robots should collaborate with humans, he
believes, rather than replace them.

Late last year, Dr. Shneiderman embarked on a crusade to convince the artificial intelligence world that it is heading in the wrong direction. In February, he confronted organizers of an industry conference on ``Assured Autonomy'' in Phoenix, telling them that even the title of their conference
was wrong. Instead of trying to create autonomous robots, he said, designers should focus on a new mantra, designing computerized machines that are ``reliable, safe and trustworthy.''

There should be the equivalent of a flight data recorder for every robot,
Dr. Shneiderman argued.

It is a warning that's likely to gain more urgency when the world's
economies eventually emerge from the devastation of the coronavirus pandemic and millions who have lost their jobs try to return to work. A growing
number of them will find they are competing with or working side by side
with machines.

Dr. Shneiderman, 72, began spreading his message decades ago. A pioneer in
the field human-computer interaction, he co-founded in 1982 what is now the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems and coined the term
``direct manipulation'' to describe the way objects are moved on a computer screen either with a mouse or, more recently, with a finger.

In 1997, Dr. Shneiderman engaged in a prescient debate with Pattie Maes, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, over the then-fashionable idea of intelligent software agents designed to perform autonomous tasks for computer users -- anything from reordering groceries to making a restaurant reservation.

``Designers believe they are creating something lifelike and smart --
however, users feel anxious and unable to control these systems,'' he
argued.

Since then, Dr. Shneiderman has argued that designers run the risk not just
of creating unsafe machines but of absolving humans of ethical
responsibility of the actions taken by autonomous systems, ranging from cars
to weapons.

The conflict between human and computer control is at least as old as interactive computing itself.

The distinction first appeared in two computer science laboratories that
were created in 1962 near Stanford University. John McCarthy, a computer scientist who had coined the term ``artificial intelligence,'' established
the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory with the goal of creating a ``thinking machine'' in a decade. And Douglas Engelbart, who invented the computer mouse, created the Augmentation Research Center at the Stanford Research Center and coined the term ``intelligence augmentation,'' or I.A.

In recent years, the computer industry and academic researchers have tried
to bring the two fields back together, describing the resulting discipline
as ``humanistic'' or ``human-centered'' artificial intelligence.

Dr. Shneiderman has challenged the engineering community to rethink the way
it approaches artificial intelligence-based automation. Until now, machine autonomy has been described as a one-dimensional scale ranging from machines that are manually controlled to systems that run without human intervention.

The best known of these one-dimensional models is a set of definitions
related to self-driving vehicles established by the Society of Automotive Engineers. It describes six levels of vehicle autonomy ranging from Level 0, requiring complete human control, to Level 5, which is full driving
automation.

In contrast, Dr. Shneiderman has sketched out a two-dimensional alternative that allows for both high levels of machine automation and human
control. With certain exceptions such as automobile airbags and nuclear
power plant control rods, he asserts that the goal of computing designers should be systems in which computing is used to extend the abilities of
human users.

This approach has already been popularized by both roboticists and Pentagon officials. Gill Pratt, the head of the Toyota Research Institute, is a
longtime advocate of keeping humans ``in the loop.'' His institute has been working to develop Guardian, a system that the researchers have described as ``super advanced driver assistance.''

``There is so much that automation can do to help people that is not about replacing them,'' Dr. Pratt said. He has focused the laboratory not just on
car safety but also on the challenge of developing robotic technology
designed to support older drivers as well.

Similarly, Robert O. Work, a deputy secretary of defense under Presidents
Trump and Barack Obama, backed the idea of so-called centaur weapons
systems, which would require human control, instead of A.I.-based robot killers, now called lethal autonomous weapons.

The term ``centaur'' was originally popularized in the chess world, where partnerships of humans and computer programs consistently defeated
unassisted software.

At the Phoenix conference on autonomous systems this year, Dr. Shneiderman
said Boeing's MCAS flight-control system, which was blamed after two 737 Max jets crashed, was an extreme example of high automation and low human
control.

``The designers believed that their autonomous system could not fail,'' he wrote in an unpublished article that has been widely
circulated. ``Therefore, its existence was not described in the user manual
and the pilots were not trained in how to switch to manual override.''

Dr. Shneiderman said in an interview that he had attended the conference
with the intent of persuading the organizers to change its name from a focus
on autonomy to a focus on human control.

``I've come to see that names and metaphors are very important,'' he said.

------------------------------

Date: Thu, 21 May 2020 22:24:38 -0700
From: Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com>
Subject: Scammers steal > $100m in Wash. State unemployment fraud
(Seattle Times)

BTW, how's that 'Internet Voting' thingy workin' out fer ya ?

Paul Roberts, Jim Brunner and Patrick Malone, *Seattle Times*, 21 May 2020 'Hundreds of millions of dollars' lost in Washington to unemployment fraud
amid coronavirus joblessness surge

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/economy/washington-adds-more-than-145000-weekly-jobless-claims-as-coronavirus-crisis-lingers/

Washington state officials have acknowledged the loss of "hundreds of
millions of dollars" to an international fraud scheme that hammered the
state's unemployment insurance system and could mean even longer delays for thousands of jobless workers still waiting for legitimate benefits.

Suzi LeVine, commissioner of the state Employment Security Department (ESD), disclosed the staggering losses during a news conference Thursday
afternoon. LeVine declined to specify how much money was stolen during the scam, which is believed to be orchestrated from Nigeria. But she conceded
that the amount was "orders of magnitude above" the $1.6 million that the
ESD reported losing to fraudsters in April.

LeVine said state and law enforcement officials were working to recover as
much of the money as possible, though she declined to say how much had been returned so far. She also said the ESD had taken "a number of steps" to
prevent new fraudulent claims from being filed or paid but would not specify the steps, to avoid alerting criminals.

"We do have definitive proof that the countermeasures we have put in place
are working," LeVine said. "We have successfully prevented hundreds of
millions of additional dollars from going out to these criminals and
prevented thousands of fraudulent claims from being filed."

Thursday's disclosure, which came after state officials had largely refused
to discuss the scale of the fraud, helped explain the unusual surge in the number of new jobless claims filed last week in Washington. For the week
ending May 16, the ESD received 138,733 initial claims for unemployment insurance, a 26.8% increase over the prior week and one of the biggest
weekly surges since the coronavirus crisis began.

That sharp increase came as the number of initial jobless claims nationwide fell 9.2%, to 2.4 million, according to data released earlier in the day by
the Labor Department.

Indeed, the surge in claims made Washington the state with the highest percentage of its civilian labor force filing unemployment claims -- at
30.8%, according to an analysis by the Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan Washington, D.C., think tank. Nevada, the next-highest state, reported
claims from 24.5% of its civilian workforce.

Thursday's disclosures also raised new questions about what, if anything,
the ESD could have done to detect and prevent the fraudulent activity.

Last week, the U.S. Secret Service issued an alert warning that Washington
was the "primary state targeted" by a "well-organized Nigerian fraud ring exploiting the COVID-19 crisis to commit large-scale fraud against state unemployment insurance programs." The alert, which said there was "also evidence of attacks in North Carolina, Massachusetts, Rhode Island,
Oklahoma, Wyoming and Florida," noted "potential losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars."

Among the criminal groups implicated in the fraud is a Nigerian organization known as Scattered Canary, according to a report released this week by
Agari, a California-based cybersecurity firm that has tracked the African organization's activities. The group has been running scams for more than a decade, working to steal Social Security payments, student aid and disaster relief funds, among other targets, the report said.

The group likely used personal information about Washingtonians from
previous consumer-data breaches to slam Washington's unemployment system
with phony claims, which were paid out along with hundreds of thousands of legitimate ones.

"These crime rings are indiscriminate and very quick to jump on an opportunity," said Armen Najarian, chief identity officer for Agari, in an interview.

"It is clear this is not just a Washington state problem," said a statement from Gov. Jay Inslee's office Thursday. "This is a national and
international criminal conspiracy. We were among the first states hit by
these fraudsters but we will not be the last."

ESD officials have argued that fraudsters targeted Washington because it was among the first states to begin paying new benefits available under the $2.2 trillion federal stimulus bill. The legislation not only boosted benefits available under existing state unemployment insurance systems, including an extra $600 per week; it also gave state officials less time to verify new claims for those benefits.

ESD officials have acknowledged that, because of the elimination of
the so-called waiting week between the time a claim is filed and the
time the benefit is paid, the agency wasn't always able to get
verification from employers about a claim before payment was made.

Furthermore, because federal benefits were technically available beginning
in March, several weeks before Washington was able to upgrade its processing system to be able to pay them, many claimants had retroactive claims for multiple weeks waiting to be paid in the ESD's system. Those retroactive payments went out all at once, which added to the volume of the fraud.

At the federal level, the fraud is being investigated by the inspectors
general of the Social Security Administration and the Department of Labor;
the Secret Service; the FBI; and the U.S. attorney's office in Seattle,
which is coordinating the effort.

In a statement Thursday, U.S. Attorney Brian Moran said federal officials worked with a "diligent financial institution" to "prevent $120 million from being distributed to criminals, and were "assisting in recovering millions
of additional dollars, with assistance from scores of other banks and credit unions."

Thursday's disclosures come as Washington was struggling to process an unprecedented wave of legitimate jobless claims amid one of the worst
economic crises in U.S. history. On Wednesday, the state's monthly
employment report for April showed Washington with a seasonally adjusted unemployment rate of 15.4%, up from 5.1% in March. The national unemployment rate for April stood at 14.7%, seasonally adjusted.

The massive number of new claims had already led to delays in benefits being paid to tens of thousands of workers, who have periodically overwhelmed the ESD's telephone lines and website with inquiries.

On Thursday, LeVine acknowledged that, because of the fraud, some additional delays in benefit payments to legitimate claimants are likely as the ESD subjects all claims to more scrutiny.

"This makes me the most angry, and the most upset -- that we need to delay payments to Washingtonians who need the benefits," LeVine said. "But we need
to also build in more time for analysis. So going forward, we want to set expectations that we will add an additional one to two days to our
processing time."

That delay, which follows a decision last Thursday to temporarily suspend benefit payments for two days, will mean more hardship for people like
Thomas Segers of Seattle. The 61-year-old independent contractor, who
provided packaging services to retailers, began receiving preliminary unemployment benefits in April, pending verification that he had lost his
job.

Segers said he submitted the necessary paperwork by mail in time for the deadline to prove his employment status. However, he was notified this week that his submission was not processed on time, so his claim was denied. Now, he's trying to figure out how to appeal that decision, but can't reach
anyone at the state for guidance.

He called the ESD more than 225 times on Thursday morning alone, but never
got through.

"I'm sure I'm speaking for a lot of people who have questions, that it's frustrating that nobody is answering," Segers said. "They're inaccessible at the one time, in my viewpoint, they most need to be accessible."

------------------------------

Date: Fri, 22 May 2020 10:58:05 -1000
From: the keyboard of geoff goodfellow <geoff@iconia.com>
Subject: Satellites and spacecraft malfunction as Earth's magnetic field
mysteriously weakens (Sky)

*Scientists are finding that the weakening is causing technical problems
for satellites, and seems to be growing in its effects*

Earth's magnetic field, which is vital to protecting life on our planet from solar radiation, is mysteriously weakening. On average the planet's
magnetic field has lost almost 10% of its strength over the last two
centuries, but there is a large localised region of weakness stretching from Africa to South America.

Known as the South Atlantic Anomaly, the field strength in this area has rapidly shrunk over the past 50 years just as the area itself has grown and moved westward.

Over the past five years a second centre of minimum intensity has developed southwest of Africa, which researchers believe indicates the anomaly could split into two separate cells.

The anomaly is causing technical difficulties for satellites orbiting the Earth. [...]

https://news.sky.com/story/earths-magnetic-field-which-protects-us-from-solar-radiation-is-mysteriously-weakening-11992022

------------------------------

Date: Fri, 22 May 2020 17:30:06 -0400
From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com>
Subject: Microsoft: Beware this massive phishing campaign using malicious
Excel macros to hack PCs (ZDNet)

https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-beware-this-massive-phishing-campaign-using-malicious-excel-macros-to-hack-pcs/

------------------------------

Date: Fri, 22 May 2020 10:59:05 -1000
From: the keyboard of geoff goodfellow <geoff@iconia.com>
Subject: Ransomware deploys virtual machines to hide itself from antivirus
software (ZDNet)

*The operators of the RagnarLocker ransomware are running Oracle VirtualBox
to hide their presence on infected computers inside a Windows XP virtual machine.*

The operators of the RagnarLocker ransomware are installing the VirtualBox
app and running virtual machines on computers they infect in order to run
their ransomware in a "safe" environment, outside the reach of local
antivirus software.

This latest trick has been spotted and detailed today by UK cyber-security
firm Sophos and shows the creativity and great lengths some ransomware gangs will go to avoid detection while attacking a victim.

*WHAT'S RAGNARLOCKER?*

Avoiding detection is crucial because RagnarLocker is not your typical ransomware gang. They're a group that carefully selects targets, avoiding
home consumers, and goes after corporate networks and government
organizations only.

Sophos says the group has targeted victims in the past by abusing Internet-exposed RDP endpoints and has compromised MSP (managed service provider) tools to breach companies and gain access to their internal
networks.

On these networks, the RagnarLocker group deploys a version of their
ransomware -- customized per each victim -- and then demands an astronomical decryption fee in the tune of tens and hundreds of thousands of US dollars.

Because each of these carefully planned intrusions represents a chance to
earn large amounts of money, the RagnarLocker group has put a primer on
stealth and has recently come up with a novel trick to avoid detection by antivirus software.

*THE VIRTUAL MACHINE TRICK* [...] https://www.zdnet.com/article/ransomware-deploys-virtual-machines-to-hide-itself-from-antivirus-software/

------------------------------

Date: Thu, 21 May 2020 14:26:55 -0400
From: Gabe Goldberg <gabe@gabegold.com>
Subject: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can't
handle iPhone photos (The Verge)

How to deal with HEIC images proves to be the hardest question of all

https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/20/21262302/ap-test-fail-iphone-photos-glitch-email-college-board-jpeg-heic

...some Android devices too.

------------------------------

Date: Thu, 21 May 2020 00:05:56 -0400
From: Gabe Goldberg <gabe@gabegold.com>
Subject: How Do Astronauts Escape When a Space Launch Goes Wrong? (WiReD)

SpaceX is preparing for the first crewed launch of its Crew Dragon
capsule. Engineers have spent years planning for what happens if things go awry.

https://www.wired.com/story/how-do-astronauts-escape-when-a-space-launch-goes-wrong/

------------------------------

Date: May 21, 2020 22:48:18 JST
From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne@warpspeed.com>
Subject: How a Chinese AI Giant Made Chatting -- and Surveillance -- Easy
(WiReD)

[Note: This item comes from friend Desire Banse. DLH]

How a Chinese AI Giant Made Chatting -- and Surveillance -- Easy
Alexa can tell you the weather. Siri knows a few jokes. In China, voice-computing company iFlytek built similar smart assistants beloved by users. But its tech is also helping the government listen in.
By Mara Hvistendahl
May 18 2020 https://www.wired.com/story/iflytek-china-ai-giant-voice-chatting-surveillance/

In 1937, the year that George Orwell was shot in the neck while fighting fascists in Spain, Julian Chen was born in Shanghai. His parents, a music teacher and a chemist, enrolled him in a school run by Christian
missionaries, and like Orwell he became fascinated by language. He studied English, Russian, and Mandarin while speaking Shanghainese at home. Later he took on French, German, and Japanese. In 1949, the year Mao Zedong came to power and Orwell published 1984, learning languages became dangerous in
China. In the purges of the late 1950s, intellectuals were denounced, sent
to labor camps, and even executed. Chen, who by then was a student at prestigious Peking University, was banished to a Beijing glass factory.

Chen's job was to cart wagons full of coal and ash to and from the factory's furnace. He kept his mind nimble by listening to his coworkers speak. At
night, in the workers' dormitory, he compiled a sort of linguistic
ethnography for the Beijing dialect. He finished the book around 1960. Soon after, Communist Party apparatchiks confiscated it.

His fortunes improved after Mao's death, when party leaders realized that China's economy needed intellectuals in order to develop. Chen went back to school, and in 1979, at the age of 42, his test scores earned him a spot in
the first group of graduate students to go abroad in decades. He moved to
the US and earned a PhD in physics at Columbia University. At the time,
America offered more opportunity than China, and like many of his peers,
Chen stayed after graduation, getting a job with IBM working on physical science research. IBM had developed some of the world's first speech recognition software, which allowed professionals to haltingly dictate
messages without touching a keyboard, and in 1994 the company started
looking for someone to adapt it to Mandarin. It wasn't Chen's area, but he eagerly volunteered.

Right away, Chen realized that in China speech recognition software could
offer far more than a dictation tool for office workers; he believed it
stood to completely transform communication in his native tongue. As a
written language in the computer age, Chinese had long posed a unique challenge: There was no obvious way to input its 50,000-plus characters on a QWERTY keyboard. By the 1980s, as the first personal computers arrived in China, programmers had come up with several workarounds. The most common
method used pinyin, the system of romanized spelling for Mandarin that
Chinese students learn in school. Using this approach, to write cat you
would type `m-a-o', then choose from a drop-down menu that also included characters meaning `trade' and `hat', and the surname of Mao Zedong. Because Mandarin has so many homophones, typing became an inefficient exercise in
word selection.

To build his dictation engine, Chen broke Mandarin down into its smallest elements, called phonemes. Then he recruited 54 Chinese speakers living in
New York and recorded them reading articles from People's Daily. IBM's
research lab in Beijing added samples from an additional 300 speakers. In October 1996, after he had tested the system, Chen flew to China to display
the resulting software, called ViaVoice, at a speech technology conference.

In a packed room festooned with gaudy wallpaper, Chen read aloud from that day's newspaper. In front of him, with a brief delay, his words appeared on
a large screen. After he finished, he looked around to see people staring at him, mouths agape. A researcher raised her hand and said she wanted to give
it go. He handed over the microphone, and a murmur ran through the
crowd. ViaVoice understood her too.

ViaVoice debuted in China in 1997 with a box that read, ``The
computer understands Mandarin! With your hands free, your thoughts will come alive.'' That same year, President Jiang Zemin sat for a
demonstration. Soon PC makers across China -- including IBM's
rivals -- were preinstalling the software on their devices. The era of
freely conversing with a computer was still a long way off, and ViaVoice had its limitations, but the software eased the headache of text entry in
Chinese, and it caught on among China's professional class. ``It was
the only game in town,'' Chen recalls.

But for some scholars who had stayed in China, it stung that a researcher working for an American company had been the one to make a first step toward conquering the Chinese language. China, they felt, needed to match what Chen had done.

Among those motivated by IBM's triumph was Liu Qingfeng, a 26-year-old PhD student in a speech recognition lab at the prestigious University of Science and Technology of China, in Hefei. In 1999, while still at USTC, Liu started
a voice computing company called iFlytek. The goal, it seemed, was not just
to compete with IBM and other foreign firms but to create products that
would recoup Chinese pride. Early on, Liu and his colleagues worked out of
the USTC campus. Later they moved elsewhere in Hefei. It was a second-tier
city -- USTC had been relocated there during the Cultural
Revolution -- but staying in Hefei meant iFlytek was close to the
university's intellectual talent.=20

When Liu explained his business concept to Kai-Fu Lee, then the head of Microsoft Research Asia, Lee warned that it would be impossible to catch up with American speech recognition giants. In the US, the industry was led by several formidable companies in addition to IBM and Microsoft, including BellSouth, Dragon, and Nuance Communications, which had recently spun off
from the nonprofit research lab SRI International. These companies were
locked in a slog to overcome the limitations of early-2000s computing and
build a voice-computer interface that didn't exasperate users, but they were far ahead of Chinese competitors.

Liu didn't listen to Lee's warnings. Even if voice-interface technology was
a crowded, unglamorous niche, Liu's ambition gave it a towering moral
urgency. ``Voice is the foundation of culture and the symbol of a nation,''
he later said, recounting iFlytek's origin story. ``Many people thought that they'' -- meaning foreign companies -- ``had us by the throat.'' When some members of his team suggested that the company diversify by getting into
real estate, Liu was resolute: Anyone who didn't believe in voice computing could leave. Nuance was building a healthy business helping corporate
clients begin to automate their call centers, replacing human switchboard operators with voice-activated phone menus (``To make a payment, say
`payment' ''). iFlytek got off the ground by doing the same sort of work for the telecommunications company Huawei.

iFlytek went public in 2008 and launched a major consumer product, the app iFlytek Input, in 2010. That same year, Apple's iPhone began to carry Siri, which had been developed by SRI International and acquired by Apple. But
while Siri was a ``personal assistant'' -- a talking
digital concierge that could answer questions -- iFlytek Input was far
more focused. It allowed people to dictate text anywhere on their phones: in
an email, in a web search, or on WeChat, the super app that dominates both
work and play in China.

Like any technology trained on interactions with human speech, Input was imprecise in the beginning. ``With the first version of that product,
the user experience was not that good,'' said Jun Du, a scientist at
USTC who oversaw technical development of the app. But as data from actual users' interactions with the app began to pour in, Input's accuracy at speech-to-text transcription improved dramatically.

As it happened, Siri and Input were relatively early arrivals in a coming onslaught of mature voice-interface technologies. First came Microsoft's Cortana, then Amazon's Alexa, and then Google Assistant. But while iFlytek launched its first generation of virtual assistant, Yudian, in 2012, the company was soon training much of its AI firepower on a different challenge: providing real-time translation to help users understand speakers of other dialects and languages. Later versions of Input allowed people to translate their face-to-face conversations and get closed captioning of phone calls in
23 Chinese dialects and four foreign languages. When combined with China's large population, the emphasis on translation has allowed the company to collect massive amounts of data.

Americans might tap Alexa or Google Assistant for specific requests, but in China people often use Input to navigate entire conversations. iFlytek
Input's data privacy agreement allows it to collect and use personal information for ``national security and national defense
security,'' without users' consent. ``In the West, there are
user privacy problems,'' Du says. ``But in China, we sign some
contract with the users, and we can use their data.'' Voice data can
be leaky in China. The broker Data Tang, for example, describes specific
data sets on its website, including one that includes nearly 100,000 speech samples from 3- to 5-year-old children.

In 2017, MIT Technology Review named iFlytek to its list of the world's 50 smartest companies, and the Chinese government gave it a coveted spot on its hand-picked national ``AI team.'' The other companies selected
that year were platform giants Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent. Soon after,
iFlytek signed a five-year cooperation agreement with MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), a leading AI lab. The
company's translation technology is used by the Spanish football club RCD Espanyol, and it signed an exclusive deal to provide automated translation
for the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics. As of mid-April, iFlytek was valued on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange at $10.8 billion, and it claims to have 70
percent of the Chinese voice market, with 700 million end users. Nuance was valued at $5.3 billion during the same time. In China, the company's other major competitors in voice computing are mainly platforms like Alibaba and Baidu.

Two decades after Julian Chen intuited that voice computing would
revolutionize how people interact with computers in China, its impact there
is indeed dramatic. Every day, WeChat users send around 6 billion voice
texts, casual spoken messages that are more intimate and immediate than the typical voicemail, according to 2017 figures. Because WeChat caps the
messages at one minute, people often dash them off in one long
string. iFlytek makes a tablet that automatically transcribes business meetings, a digital recorder that generates instantaneous transcripts, and a

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