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SNAPI_Test notes that Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
The United States, Britain and Australia have called on Facebook to give authorities the ability to circumvent encryption used in its messaging services—a measure opposed by the social media giant.
Facebook has been dogged by several privacy scandals in recent years and has pledged to boost user protections by rolling out end-to-end encryption across all of its social media platforms.
But that plan risks weakening the ability of law enforcement to detect criminal acts including terrorism and child pornography, according to a joint letter signed by US Attorney General William Barr, British Home Secretary Priti Patel and Australian Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton.
"Facebook has not committed to address our serious concerns about the impact its proposals could have on protecting our most vulnerable citizens," said the Thursday letter, addressed to company chief Mark Zuckerberg and seen by AFP.
The company already encrypts WhatsApp messages from end-to-end—meaning only the sender and recipient can read the message—and is working to extend the technology to other apps in its family, including Messenger and Instagram.
Facebook says it is intent on introducing the service without granting oversight to law enforcement agencies.
"We strongly oppose government attempts to build backdoors because they would undermine the privacy and security of people everywhere," a Facebook spokesperson said.
[...] During a livestreamed question and answer session with employees, Zuckerberg said Facebook would continue to work with authorities to strike a balance between privacy concerns and fighting crimes such as child exploitation and terrorism.
"Having the availability to look at the content is a useful signal, and when you lose that you are fighting that battle with at least a hand tied behind your back and you hope there is a lot of good stuff you can do with your other hand," Zuckerberg said.
But he added that encryption had many positive benefits such as protection for journalists and political protesters.
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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Andromeda, a massive spiral galaxy, has swallowed several galaxies within the last few billion years before setting its sights on the Milky Way.
"The Milky Way is on a collision course with Andromeda in about four billion years,” said Dougal Mackey, co-author of a new study published in Nature and a research fellow at the Australian National University. “So knowing what kind of a monster our galaxy is up against is useful in finding out the Milky Way's ultimate fate."
The astronomers noted that the stellar halo that surrounds Andromeda is much bigger and more complex than the Milky Way, and it contains two giant globular clusters of stars that are rotating perpendicular to each other, and this indicates that it has cannibalized other galaxies in the past. They made observations using the wide-field camera on the Canada-France-Hawaii-Telescope, and this showed that the globular clusters are on the same rotation axis as a plane of dwarf galaxies that orbit Andromeda.
Andromeda is a good specimen to study the evolution of spiral galaxies like the Milky Way, Mackey explained. "One of our main motivations in studying astronomy is to understand our place in the Universe. A way of learning about our galaxy is to study others that are similar to it, and try to understand how these systems formed and evolved.”
"Sometimes this can actually be easier than looking at the Milky Way, because we live inside it and that can make certain types of observations quite difficult."
Reference:
Mackey, D., Lewis, G.F., Brewer, B.J. et al. Two major accretion epochs in M31 from two distinct populations of globular clusters. Nature 574, 69–71 (2019).
DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1597-1
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Unpredictable weather in Europe has produced some of the lowest honey harvests ever, particularly in France and Italy. Only about half the normal harvest was collected in Italy and only about a quarter of the usual crop in France. Even recent high honey producing countries such as Romania and Spain are seeing decreases. The reasons for the declines are varied and include frosts, droughts, and heavy rains across the affected countries, but everyone is counting on better weather conditions in the coming year. However, even if that pans out, recovery will be challenging.
To save the colonies, "the bees have killed all the males to get rid of extra mouths to feed". The lack of males for mating may lead to a "lack of fertilized queens" next spring, meaning fewer new colonies and bees.
Bee mortality has also shot up in recent years due to an "epidemic" of the Varroa parasitic mite, the uncontrolled spread of the Asian hornet in Europe, and the "intense use of pesticides in agriculture", according to the French Cyclops report.
Beekeepers are also complaining about a massive influx of low-cost Chinese honey, which they say is "adulterated," such as being cut with sugar syrup.
There is currently no European legislation requiring producers to specify the origin of honey.
Labels can state it is a "blend of honeys originating and non-originating in the European Community", even if the product contains 99 percent Chinese honey and only 1 percent of, say French honey.
In Spain, beekeepers have held several protests against low-cost Chinese honey and authorities are planning to impose new labelling requirements which would list the percentages of honey included per country of origin.
In France, a decree is expected to come into force on January 1, 2020 which would list all countries that have supplied more than 20 percent of the honey in a jar, in order of importance.
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The Hopewell civilization refers to a culture shared by native Americans tribes from about 200 BC to 400 AD that spanned a region from the eastern coast to the Rocky Mountains, and from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. The fairly rapid decline of this culture has been a mystery for many years. A group of researchers from the University of Cincinnati found evidence of a Tunguska-like airburst that struck sometime between 252 and 383 AD and affected an area of 9200 square miles (24,000 sq km). That time range coincides with a period when 69 near-Earth comets were observed and documented by Chinese astronomers, and many Native American tribes include some sort of devastating event from the skies in their oral histories.
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Did a journal retract your paper on homeopathy? Meet the journal that will publish your complaint:
In 2016, Homeopathy lost its slot on Thomson Reuters’s (now Clarivate’s) influential journal rankings list after an analysis found that more than 70% of citations in the papers it published were of papers it published. That led Elsevier to cut the journal loose — although it remains in business under the umbrella of Thieme, and has since earned its impact factor back.
Part of Homeopathy’s mission under new ownership, it seems, is to criticize journals that have spurned its contributors. Well, one journal, anyway.
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New tool checks if a password has been compromised, without sending it to a remote server:
A new system that securely checks whether your passwords have been made public in known data breaches has been integrated into the widely used password manager, 1Password. This new tool lets customers find out if their passwords have been leaked without ever transmitting full credentials to a server.
Security researcher Troy Hunt this week announced his new version of "Pwned Passwords," a search tool and list of more than 500 million passwords that have been leaked in data breaches. Users can access it online and developers can connect applications to it via an API.
Within a day, the company AgileBits had integrated Hunt's new tool into the 1Password password manager. AgileBits' announcement describes how it works:
Troy's new service allows us to check your passwords while keeping them safe and secure. They're never sent to us or his service.
First, 1Password hashes your password using SHA-1. But sending that full SHA-1 hash to the server would provide too much information and could allow someone to reconstruct your original password. Instead, Troy's new service only requires the first five characters of the 40-character hash.
To complete the process, the server sends back a list of leaked password hashes that start with those same five characters. 1Password then compares this list locally to see if it contains the full hash of your password. If there is a match then we know this password is known and should be changed.
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This is a test story on which there is to be a sufficient number of comments to cause them to spill onto a subsequent page.
The intent is to have a place to experiment with ways to better call out that pagination has occurred.
This in response to a problem reported by a user where they thought their comment had disappeared.
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