Google has announced it is to open its first African artificial intelligence research centre in Ghana in 2018.

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Femi Otedola posted the video on his Twitter account:

“Spent Democracy Day with my mentor and good friend @AlikoDangote on a working visit to the Dangote refinery under construction in Lekki, Lagos which will be the largest oil refinery in the world producing up to 650,000 barrels per day. #Ote$

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The Vice President, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo, has attributed the impressive delivery of the Edo-Azura 450mw Independent Power Project (IPP) as a testimony of Edo Government’s posture in creating an enabling environment for private businesses.

Osinbajo made the commendation after inspecting facilities at the site of the power plant in Benin on Friday.

Vice President Yemi Osinbajo has commended Edo Government for initiating Azura power project to generate electricity and boost the economy.

Osinbajo made the commendation after inspecting facilities at the site of the power plant in Benin on Friday.

The vice president, who is on a two-day official visit to the state, says the 450 megawatts Azura power plant will increase power generation in the country.

He expressed satisfaction with the level of work done at the site, saying it would boost the capability of Nigeria’s engineering enterprise.

The Azura Project Contractor, Mr David Oladipo, led the the vice president and other state government officials to assess the level of work at the site.

Azura Power is a developer, financier, acquirer and operator of Independent Power Plants (IPPs) across Africa.

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“I got all excited. Wouldn’t you?” said Bernhardt, 67, a retired forklift driver and Army veteran in Ham Lake, Minnesota. He stayed up until dawn trading messages with the person on the other end. To obtain his winnings, he was told, he first needed to send $200 in iTunes gift cards.

Hours later, Bernhardt bought the gift cards at a gas station and sent the redemption codes to the account that said it was Zuckerberg. But the requests for money didn’t stop. By January, Bernhardt had wired an additional $1,310 in cash, or about a third of his Social Security cheques over three months.

Bernhardt eventually realized that he had been the unwitting victim of a scam that has thrived on Facebook and Instagram by using the sites’ own brands — and its top executives — to lure people in. At a time when the real Zuckerberg has vowed to clean up Facebook, the Silicon Valley company has failed to eliminate impostor accounts masquerading as him and his chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, to swindle Facebook users out of thousands of dollars.

An examination by The New York Times found 205 accounts impersonating Zuckerberg and Sandberg on Facebook and its photo-sharing site Instagram, not including fan pages or satire accounts, which are permitted under the company’s rules. At least 51 of the impostor accounts, including 43 on Instagram, were lottery scams like the one that fooled Bernhardt.

The fake Zuckerbergs and faux Sandbergs have proliferated on Facebook and Instagram, despite the presence of Facebook groups that track the scams and complaints about the trick dating to at least 2010.

A day after The Times informed Facebook of its findings, the company removed all 96 impostor Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg accounts on its Facebook site. It had left up all but one of the 109 fakes on Instagram, but removed them after this article was published.

“Thank you so much for reporting this,” said Pete Voss, a Facebook spokesman. He could not say why Facebook had not spotted the accounts posing as its top executives, including several that appeared to have existed for more than eight years. “It’s not easy,” he said. “We want to get better.”

Facebook requires people to use their authentic name and identity. Yet the company has estimated that perhaps 3 per cent of its users — as many as 60 million accounts — are fake. Some of those accounts are disguised as ordinary people, some pretend to be celebrities such as Justin Bieber.

In congressional testimony this month, Zuckerberg said Facebook was improving its software to automatically detect and remove such accounts. Facebook officials have said the company blocks millions of fake accounts trying to register each day and analysts said the social network has improved its efforts to remove the accounts.

“Fake accounts, overall, are a big issue, because that’s how a lot of the other issues that we see around fake news and foreign election interference are happening as well,” Zuckerberg told lawmakers, adding that Facebook is hiring more people to work on reviewing content.

But major holes remain. Interviews with a half-dozen recent victims — and online conversations with nine impostor accounts — showed that the Facebook lottery deception is alive and well, preying particularly on older, less educated and low-income people.

The Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg impostor accounts typically use the executives’ pictures as profile photos and list their Facebook titles. Some post manipulated images of people holding oversize cheques. The names of Zuckerberg and Sandberg are sometimes misspelled, or use parentheses and middle names (Elliot for Zuckerberg and Kara for Sandberg) to evade Facebook’s software.

Many of the impersonators had dozens to hundreds of followers; several had thousands. They are aided by a network of other sham accounts with generic names, such as Jim Towey and Mary Gilbert, which purported to be “Facebook claim agents.”

The scammers seek victims who, based on their Facebook and Instagram profiles, seem vulnerable, said Robin Alexander van der Kieft, who manages several Facebook groups that track the scams. The various fake accounts share information about successful shakedowns and continue pouncing on those victims, he said. He has traced many of the Internet Protocol addresses of these fake accounts to Nigeria and Ghana.

The pitch often begins with an unsolicited “Hello. How are you doing?” on Facebook or Instagram. The fake accounts then proceed, sometimes in broken English, to inform people of their enormous Facebook lottery prize.

The charade has ensnared people like Donna Keithley, 50, a stay-at-home mom with four children in Martinsburg, Pennsylvania. In March 2016, an account with the name Linda Ritchey messaged Keithley “on behalf of the Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg” to pass on word of her good fortune: $650,000 in lottery winnings. Keithley wired $350 — a delivery fee — the next day.

That began a monthlong saga. According to a 28,000-word transcript of a Facebook Messenger conversation between Keithley and the account, the scammer repeatedly played on Keithley’s Christian faith to get her to send more money.

“Are you good Christian with god fears?” the Linda Ritchey account asked. “Can you trust me and also have believe in me?”

Keithley’s scammer ordered her to open new credit cards and bank accounts, and even to get a loan using her husband’s 2001 Ford Taurus as collateral. Midway through the month, she said she had a minor stroke from the stress.

By April 2016, she had used her family’s tax refund and loans from relatives to pay the scammer $5,306.43 — much of it in money transfers to the name Ben Amos in Lagos, Nigeria.

“It just devastated the whole household,” said her husband, Tim Keithley, a security guard who was making $10 an hour at the time.

The ordeal was so costly, Donna Keithley said, the family’s telephone service was shut off. They also had to go to a food bank.

While Keithley still gets messages from accounts claiming to work for Facebook, she said she is now wiser. “Lord as my witness, no one’s getting any more money from me,” she said.

After they are duped, victims may struggle with what to do next. Bernhardt, the retired forklift driver, said he didn’t know how to report the scammers to Facebook. Keithley said she had called a number for Facebook she had found online, though she was not sure the number was authentic. She also reported the scam to local police, who said they couldn’t help, and the Pennsylvania attorney general.

A spokesman for the Pennsylvania attorney general said the office did not have a record of Keithley’s report, but that it planned to contact her.

Others said they regularly report scammers to Facebook, but the company can be slow to act.

Bernhardt said that since he wired his last payment to the Zuckerberg masquerader in January, he has heard from two other Mark Zuckerbergs, one Sheryl Sandberg and other accounts promising him winnings in return for more cash.

No conversations have gone as deep as with his original scammer. “I thought we were getting real close,” Bernhardt said. “He started calling me Mr. Gary and I started calling him Mr. Mark.”

He said he had told his scammer about growing up in a foster home and his dream of owning a house on a lake.

“They sucked me in because they knew my dreams,” he said.

The New York Times

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Facebook believes the data of up to 87 million people was improperly shared with the political consultancy Cambridge Analytica – many more than previously disclosed.  The BBC has been told that about 1.1 million of them are UK-based.

The overall figure had been previously quoted as being 50 million by the whistleblower Christopher Wylie.  Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg said “clearly we should have done more, and we will going forward”.

During a press conference he said that he had previously assumed that if Facebook gave people tools, it was largely their responsibility to decide how to use them.

But he added that it was “wrong in retrospect” to have had such a limited view.

Mark Zuckerberg answered questions from the press for nearly an hour

“Today, given what we know… I think we understand that we need to take a broader view of our responsibility,” he said.

“That we’re not just building tools, but that we need to take full responsibility for the outcomes of how people use those tools as well.”

Mr Zuckerberg also announced an internal audit had uncovered a fresh problem. Malicious actors had been abusing a feature that let users search for one another by typing in email addresses or phone numbers into Facebook’s search box.

As a result, many people’s public profile information had been “scraped” and matched to the contact details, which had been obtained from elsewhere.

Facebook has blocked now blocked the facility.

“It is reasonable to expect that if you had that [default] setting turned on, that in the last several years someone has probably accessed your public information in this way,” Mr Zuckerberg said.

BBC

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