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Google Says Does Not Change Search Results after Hong Kong Anthem Row

This photo taken on August 23, 2018 shows the Google logo on display at the Smart China Expo at Chongqing International Expo Center in southwest China's Chongqing. (Getty Images)
This photo taken on August 23, 2018 shows the Google logo on display at the Smart China Expo at Chongqing International Expo Center in southwest China's Chongqing. (Getty Images)
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Google Says Does Not Change Search Results after Hong Kong Anthem Row

This photo taken on August 23, 2018 shows the Google logo on display at the Smart China Expo at Chongqing International Expo Center in southwest China's Chongqing. (Getty Images)
This photo taken on August 23, 2018 shows the Google logo on display at the Smart China Expo at Chongqing International Expo Center in southwest China's Chongqing. (Getty Images)

Google said Thursday it does not manipulate search results, after Hong Kong's government said the tech giant had refused its demand to remove a popular protest song.

The controversy began after it emerged that links to the pro-democracy song "Glory to Hong Kong" appeared ahead of China's official "March of the Volunteers" when people searched for the city's anthem, AFP said.

The song was accidentally played for Hong Kong athletes at two international sports events last month, prompting the demand from the Chinese city to remove it from search results.

"Google handles billions of search queries every day, so we build ranking systems to automatically surface relevant, high quality, and helpful information," the tech giant told AFP in response to a query about the anthem request.

"We do not manually manipulate organic web listings to determine the ranking of a specific page," it said in a statement.

Hong Kong's security chief Chris Tang said Monday that Google had refused the city government's request. He described the company's explanation -- that results were based on algorithms -- as "evasive" and "inconceivable".

Hong Kong leader John Lee said this week that Google had a "moral obligation" to respect a country's national anthem.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry backed Lee, saying internet companies "have a duty to deliver correct information to the public".

Google told AFP it was in contact with Hong Kong's government to explain "how our platforms and removal policies work".

"We do not remove web results except for specific reasons outlined in our global policy documentation."

Both Tang and Lee have argued that Google search results can be manipulated, citing the placement of ads and the deletion of certain results to comply with privacy laws in the European Union.

Police have also been asked to investigate whether the anthem mix-up in South Korea was a violation of the city's national security law, which Beijing imposed in 2020 to crush dissent after democracy protests.

Google's search engine is banned in mainland China but is freely accessible in Hong Kong, where the firm also has an office.

It was among the tech companies that suspended cooperation with Hong Kong police on data requests after the security law came into effect.

This year, YouTube -- a Google subsidiary -- terminated Hong Kong leader Lee's channel citing US sanctions.

Lee was among the officials sanctioned by the United States in 2020 for their role in curtailing civil liberties in Hong Kong.

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Technology

'Tech Debt Coming Due': AI-found Flaw Signals Chaos Ahead

Michael Daniel is president of the Cyber Threat Alliance and was a White House cybersecurity coordinator under former US president Barack Obama. BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI / AFP
Michael Daniel is president of the Cyber Threat Alliance and was a White House cybersecurity coordinator under former US president Barack Obama. BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI / AFP
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'Tech Debt Coming Due': AI-found Flaw Signals Chaos Ahead

Michael Daniel is president of the Cyber Threat Alliance and was a White House cybersecurity coordinator under former US president Barack Obama. BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI / AFP
Michael Daniel is president of the Cyber Threat Alliance and was a White House cybersecurity coordinator under former US president Barack Obama. BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI / AFP

Companies and government agencies rushed this week to patch two critical flaws in PHP, the programming language that runs a large share of the world's websites.

The vulnerability to potential hackers was found by using a powerful model from OpenAI in one of the most high-profile demonstration of AI's cyber capabilities.

AFP spoke with Michael Daniel, president of the Cyber Threat Alliance and a former White House cybersecurity coordinator under former US president Barack Obama, about what the episode means as AI tools find software flaws faster than ever.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: What does the PHP episode tell us?

A: This is the beginning of a pretty chaotic period, given the abilities of the advanced models. I've been saying for years that the logical conclusion of these AI models being able to find vulnerabilities at speed and at scale is that there's going to be a flood of these vulnerabilities.

Rob Joyce [former cybersecurity director at the US National Security Agency] has referred to it as the great cleansing forest fire of old software. I've talked about our tech debt coming due.

The incentives have been for people to keep software as long as possible, and we don't really factor these risks into the cost of having the software. You're not incurring a direct cost on your books for this old software, but in reality you are, only it's an implicit cost until something like this happens.

Q: What should organizations be doing?

A: Preparing to get your software updated, be prepared to keep it updated, and be prepared to implement patches when they come out.

There's going to be a flood of vulnerabilities, a flood of patches and a flood of mitigations, and not all of them will be created equal.

For a lot of smaller organizations that don't have a lot of internal capacity, what you've got to do is shift your organization to be able to accept the vendor updates as fast as you can.

Q: Is every flaw dangerous?

A: Historically, the exploitation rate for vulnerabilities has been five or six percent, and there's no indication that number is going up. But now when bad guys exploit a vulnerability, they're able to do so much more quickly.

It used to take a month or two for a proof of concept to come out, and then another month or two for it to show up in exploit kits (used by bad actors). That's now measured in hours or days.

Q: What does that mean for large companies?

A: Most businesses essentially ran a zero-risk tolerance for breaking things, so they would test the hell out of a patch before they put it into production. Now they don't have that time.

If the risk of breaking something by putting this patch into place is one percent, but the risk of being attacked could cost me 50 million dollars...now I've got an interesting trade-off.

Q: Are advanced AI tools reliable at finding real flaws?

A: There's a lot of noise. The PHP one is a prime example of a real one, but there's an awful lot out there that are either not real or are on software that's never exposed to the internet. We've got to improve our triage system.

Q: Where does this lead us in two or three years?

A: We're going to turn these AI tools on software that hasn't been deployed yet, so one would hope we start to deploy software that has fewer vulnerabilities to begin with. You burn out all the old stuff, and it makes way for new growth that's more secure from the beginning.

It's not like this solves our cybersecurity problem, but it does change the nature of it going forward.

Technology

CEO: Amazon Cloud Capacity Sold Out Through 2027

FILE PHOTO: Amazon CEO Andy Jassy speaks during an Amazon Devices launch event in New York City, US, February 26, 2025. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: Amazon CEO Andy Jassy speaks during an Amazon Devices launch event in New York City, US, February 26, 2025. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid/File Photo
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CEO: Amazon Cloud Capacity Sold Out Through 2027

FILE PHOTO: Amazon CEO Andy Jassy speaks during an Amazon Devices launch event in New York City, US, February 26, 2025. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: Amazon CEO Andy Jassy speaks during an Amazon Devices launch event in New York City, US, February 26, 2025. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid/File Photo

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said on Friday that Amazon Web Services' cloud computing capacity is largely sold out through 2027, with significant commitments extending into 2028, on growing demand for AI infrastructure.

In a video podcast with Andreessen Horowitz co-founder Ben Horowitz and general partner Erik Torenberg, Jassy said Amazon is struggling to keep pace ⁠with the insatiable ⁠demand from AI labs and enterprises.

Earlier this year, Amazon had said it would spend about $220 billion in capital expenditure for 2026.

According to Reuters, Jassy said the ⁠company "could invest a lot more and it wouldn't be a bad use of capital," considering cloud-computing capacity for 2026 is already sold out.

"2027 is largely sold out. We always leave a certain amount for on demand and our inference service bedrock, or EC2, but largely sold out ⁠all ⁠the big chunks. A good chunk of 2028 is sold out," he said.

EC2 is an AWS service that provides cloud servers for running applications, while Bedrock gives customers access to AI models to build generative AI applications.

Amazon is scheduled to report third quarter results on October 29.

Technology

New ‘Scentronic’ Technology Can Detect and Transmit Aromas Remotely

Ohio State University researcher Chunyu Yang wears a prototype odor generator device which is part of a technology called Scentronic that can detect scents and transmit them remotely, at Columbus, Ohio, on June 13, 2025, in this image released October 21, 2026. (Shaoru Cheng/Handout via Reuters)
Ohio State University researcher Chunyu Yang wears a prototype odor generator device which is part of a technology called Scentronic that can detect scents and transmit them remotely, at Columbus, Ohio, on June 13, 2025, in this image released October 21, 2026. (Shaoru Cheng/Handout via Reuters)
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New ‘Scentronic’ Technology Can Detect and Transmit Aromas Remotely

Ohio State University researcher Chunyu Yang wears a prototype odor generator device which is part of a technology called Scentronic that can detect scents and transmit them remotely, at Columbus, Ohio, on June 13, 2025, in this image released October 21, 2026. (Shaoru Cheng/Handout via Reuters)
Ohio State University researcher Chunyu Yang wears a prototype odor generator device which is part of a technology called Scentronic that can detect scents and transmit them remotely, at Columbus, Ohio, on June 13, 2025, in this image released October 21, 2026. (Shaoru Cheng/Handout via Reuters)

People can readily share images and sounds digitally, as evidenced by the billions of smartphones in use globally that often overload the human senses of sight and hearing. But smell generally remains missing from remote communication. That could soon change.

Researchers have developed technology that features an electronic nose that recognizes certain smells, like the distinctive aroma of coffee, and then instructs a small and wearable remote device to release scent molecules matching it. The digital communication can take place at any distance, from across the room to around the world.

"In simple terms, it connects 'smelling something here' with 'recreating the corresponding smell somewhere else,'" said Chunyu Yang, an Ohio State University doctoral student in materials science and engineering and lead author of a study describing the technology published in the journal Science Advances.

"The idea is to add smell to the visual and audio information we already share remotely, making those experiences more engaging," Yang said.

The researchers call this latest development in the field of digital scent technology "Scentronic."

"What makes Scentronic ‌different is that ‌it brings odor sensing and generation together for remote sharing. To the best of our knowledge, ‌our ⁠study is the ⁠first to explore this integration in a compact platform for remote odor sharing," Yang said.

The researchers created an e-nose, a device that uses an array of gas sensors to detect chemical compounds associated with different odors. A machine-learning model then classifies odors that the e-nose has been trained to recognize — cake, coffee and oranges.

The technology uses an online platform to transmit the odor information to a scent generator, which then releases fragrances to recreate the aroma at the receiving end. The scent molecules themselves are not transmitted over the internet.

The e-nose device is roughly 6 inches (15 cm) in diameter and is portable, though not designed to be worn. The researchers developed several versions of ⁠the odor generator, including wristband, necklace and handheld designs.

'EVERYDAY ODORS'

At this point, the e-nose recognizes ‌just the five scents.

"We chose these because they are familiar everyday odors with ‌different scent profiles, making them useful examples for demonstrating the system. We have not yet expanded beyond those categories," Yang said.

"A broader scent library ‌is possible in principle, but an unlimited repertoire is far beyond what we have demonstrated. Recognizing an odor and accurately reproducing ‌it are separate challenges. Covering a useful range of everyday scents is a more realistic goal, although that would still require substantial development," Yang said.

The receiving device cannot recreate every smell Scentronic encounters.

"To support additional odors, we would need to train the electronic nose to recognize them and provide corresponding scented liquids in the odor generator," Yang said.

The researchers see various potential applications for the technology.

"For example, someone could share the scent of ‌a meal with family or friends who live far away. Other potential applications include more immersive virtual and augmented reality experiences and online shopping that allows customers to sample selected scents remotely," ⁠Yang said.

'A RESEARCH PROTOTYPE'

The research ⁠was conducted and the devices developed without the involvement of a company, Yang said.

"At present, this is a research prototype. Moving toward commercialization would require a larger, more diverse training dataset and reliable odor recognition under real-world conditions, where smells often occur in mixtures," Yang said.

"The odor generator would also need further development to support more scents while remaining compact and convenient to use. Other considerations include scent fidelity, refillability, durability, manufacturing costs and the safety of repeated exposure to the scented mist," Yang said.

Smartphones are becoming increasingly capable. Could they in the future incorporate scent technology so that, for instance, a person at a tailgate party before an Ohio State football game could call a friend and share video, audio and the aroma of hot dogs on the grill?

"In principle, a smartphone could connect to a scent-generating accessory. Integrating everything into the phone itself would be more challenging because the scent reservoirs, electronics and atomizers all take up space and add weight. Miniaturization and convenient refilling would be important considerations," Yang said.

"The tailgate example illustrates the idea well. A future system could potentially combine video and audio with a corresponding scent, provided it could recognize the relevant odor and the receiver had a suitable scent formulation available. Our current system has not demonstrated the transmission of a grilling-hot-dog scent or the exact mixture of smells at a tailgate party," Yang said.