Type: Citation

Does the Rare Earth hypothesis still stand up in the age of exoplanets? The authors of a book on the subject they wrote 20 years ago still think so.

Cloudflare is experimenting with a new USB-based authentication of personhood to replace CAPTCHAs, but they still fail to understand who's responsible for this.

Some experts think our advancing technology might allow us to discover alien civilisation within the next two decades.

Scientists are excited by the discovery that muons are wobbling more than theory predicts. This could all point to the discovery of a new particle.

Scientists have been looking at the parts of the brain that are activated when people write computer code. Is it a language or mathematics?

Jack Dorsey is selling a tweet for $millions and I cannot fathom why anyone would pay such money for something so ephemeral.

Scientists in Japan have been studying cats to see if they respond to human social cues like dogs.

An experiment that hoped to find quantised spacetime has so far come up blank. Space is smooth according to recent experiments in the field.

Scientists run a two-year experiment to look at the effects of Prozac on guppy fish and find it alters their behaviour in measurable ways.

Scientists have found that you can go some way to preventing cats from hunting wildlife by feeding them raw meat and playing with them.

A young physicist and his supervisor have worked out a way time travel might work without creating any of the paradoxes normally associated with it.

Multiverses are still a bit controversial but a couple of scientists have figured out how we might detect them if they do exist.

Google threatens to withdraw from Australia if it's forced to pay news outlets for links to articles in its search engine.

Do not seek refuge in shopping malls or pubs, say statisticians.

Scientists look for a message from God in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). They didn't find one, but I did.

Wired reviews Tim Hwang's book, which is called Subprime Attention Crisis. It draws parallels between online advertising the subprime mortgage crisis of the mid-late 2000s.

Apple have made my early 2013 MacBook Pro obsolete, so I need to consider upgrading if I want to remain in the macOS ecosystem.

A BBC article about the man who's looking out for asteroids and comets that may be heading our way and threatening all life on Earth.

The latest news from SETI is that there are 36 intelligent civilisations in the galaxy. Possibly. It’s all a bit limited by the sample size we’re using.

In an article on Quanta Magazine, four physicists mull over how naughty gravity can be and why we need a new theory to describe it.

An article in the New York Times features the views of Dr Ben Shneiderman and he suggests fully automated AI is a bad thing.

Apparently we still view gains in a different way to losses and Prospect Theory still holds.

Zuckerberg says Facebook will prevent electoral interference but is less like to prevent coronavirus misinformation.

Why are we plagued by intrusive tracking and advertising without our informed consent?

ICANN has received many complaints about the sale of the .org domain to Ethos Capital.

How getting rid of the law of the excluded middle in maths might help quantum theory and relativity find common ground.

There is some argument about whether the sterile neutrino is the source of the unidentified x-ray line and thus a candidate for dark matter.

An article on Wired summarises the vaccines currently being developed to fight coronavirus.

There is a cold spot in the Cosmic Microwave Background and cosmologists speculate as to why this might be.

How is it that companies who chose to jump the gun and develop age-verification software for porn sites can claim £3m in 'damages'?

Samsung's new toy is simply a killer robot in disguise, but then again I am paranoid.

A binary star system got too close to the black hole at the centre of our galaxy and one of its stars acquired phenomenal speed as a result.

For a long while scientists have thought the universe is flat but a recent paper suggests it's highly likely it is in fact curved.

Zuckerberg doesn't fare well in front of Congress's House Financial Services Committee. He's held to account for his many sins alongside his plans for Libra.

A writing instructor has an article in The New York Times praising the US whistle-blower's use of English.

Google's quantum computer performs a task in a few minutes that would take a supercomputer 10,000 years.

An article by Sean Carroll on Quanta Magazine looks at what quantum probability might mean. I provide an intro and then link to the article.

Billy Mitchell takes Guinness and Twin Galaxies to court after they remove his high score. ArsTechnica reports.

A Quanta Magazine article about a new measurement of the size of the proton. Previously they thought protons might shrink in the presence of a muon, but it turned out their original measurements of the standard proton were wrong.

A Quanta Magazine article about what happens at a cellular level during sleep. Apparently a process called phosphorylation helps us file memories.

An interview with Automattic's CEO about their takeover of the Tumblr microblogging platform.

The Cloudflare/8chan situation raises questions about how the internet should be moderated. With a bit of prelude I link to Ben Thompson's ideas about this.

BBC report about how researchers at Exeter University have determined gulls are less likely to steal chips if they're being watched.

The linked article specifically talks about bipolar's depiction in 'Midsommar' but it's equally true of all mental health depictions in TV and film.

More than 100 years after Einstein proposed it, his General Theory of Relativity is still being tested. In this case, Einstein's 'Equivalence Principle' is put to the test.

A BBC article portraying the advantages of counting in base 12 rather than base 10 as we currently do.

A BBC article reports the increasing number of ransomware victims who are paying off their hackers.

Prenda Law's copyright troll Paul Hansmeier finally gets his comeuppance and gets sentenced to 14 years.

Pound for pound bats outlive most other species of mammals. ArsTechnica reports scientific findings on the matter.

A Quanta Magazine article about ideas that have sprung up as a result of the Shuttlecock Universe idea Hawking proposed in the 1980s.

The University of Cambridge has proposed a new form of currency that could be the future of stellar financial transactions.

A post on Dave Winer's Scripting News site demonstrates why posting a good blog on Facebook is stupid.

An article on ArsTechnica looks at a new way to see whether the fundamental physical constants were different in the past.

Gizmodo reports on a study that appears to show cats recognise their own names, although not all scientists are convinced.

It seems we now have cloth nappy 'influencers' and I wonder if the world has reached a new level of crazy.

'Eugene's Friend', a thought experiment that suggests measurements are relative, has be proven to be true.

Wired reports that AI has managed to trick (some of) Google's reCAPTCHA, bot-protection mechanism. I ask why we have to put up with them anyway.

To celebrate pi day one of Google's employees calculated its value to 31,415,926,535,897 digits.

Mark Zuckerberg appears to have had a change of heart and now wants a privacy-focussed Facebook, according to an article on the BBC.

Facebook plans a fan subscription model to compete with Patreon. TechCrunch pick holes in it and ask whether Facebook can be trusted with creators' content.

An article on Gizmodo tells the story of Ong's Hat, which became one of the internet's early conspiracy theories.

Colin Devroe warms of the dangers of using big tech silos for your services, specifically in relation to Verizon in this case.

The BBC looks at the biggest threats to humanity but I believe it overlooks one of the most important ones.

The BBC looks at the world of Fortnite hackers, but I tend to think a better sense of perspective is necessary.

An excellent ArsTechnica overview (and tutorial) of Helm Personal Email Server, which provides the hardware and services you need to easily host your own email.

An article at Gizmodo describes the working environment at Netflix, which seems to operate by ensuring employees are scared to death.

Are Apple products now too expensive? I add my own comments on the back of an article by Bradley Chambers at 9To5Mac.

A Japanese firm has released a credit card-sized phone to act as a 'companion' to one's main phone.

A look at Solid, which is Tim Berners-Lee's latest project. It is intended to give people more control of their personal data.

A short article on Recode about Apple's 12 September 2018 event. It's mainly watch and phone stuff.

An article on the Huffington Post looks at how some of their staff handle an evening’s TV without a phone. The results concern me.

Gizmodo takes a look at Jeremy Corbyn's plans to promote journalism by levying a windfall tax on big tech. There are some problems with this plan.

In their attempt to deal with fake news, Facebook has introduced a 'trustworthiness' score. This score has its critics though.

An interesting article by Alexandra Jones on the BBC about 'Instagram face'. I'm more interested in how this reflects on society in general, if indeed it does at all.

If you've ever wondered why we have Launchpad you're in good company. However, Zac Hall at 9To5Mac describes a way it can be made a bit more useful.

MacStories reports the Twitter API changes due today and some of the effects those changes are having on third-party apps.

TechCrunch reports Twitter has dropped Infowars into the sin bin for seven days for a tweet that allegedly broke their terms of use.

Emoji candidates for inclusion in Emoji Version 12, which will be released in March 2019.

ArsTechnica reports that ISPs now advertise up to 41% slower speeds after new regulations in the UK make ISPs advertise more accurate broadband speeds.

Nick Heer's excellent article highlights much of what's wrong with the web today. Well worth a read.

The BBC reports that Google is planning a search-like app that complies with Chinese censorship laws despite withdrawing from China in 2010 on 'free speech' grounds.

An article by the BBC about the prevalence of fake news. Some MPs are calling for greater regulation to combat this, particularly online.

A BBC article announces that Larry Page's flying car company is now training people how to fly them.

The Next Web's summary of Apple's 2018 WWDC. Quite a few things were announced that probably interest many people, although I'm a little nonplussed.

A CBS News article about Google's search and search advertising dominance. An anti-trust lawyer is interviewed about this situation.

ArseTechnica article about how Chrome will flag insecure websites rather than secure ones.

An article from TechCrunch about the Medium blogging platform and how it has changed the rules, screwing some publishers in the process.

A BBC article about a butcher who has been told his light-hearted, humorous signs might be offensive.

A BBC article about how Amazon and Trustpilot reviews can be bought by unscrupulous vendors.

A New York Times article shows that Facebook has been largely unaffected by the privacy scandal in terms of its profits and revenues.

A monkey can't sue for copyright, which ought to be common sense. Unfortunately a less intelligent species than monkeys became involved - lawyers.

An article from the BBC about how Facebook is trying to dodge new EU privacy regulations.

An article from Gizmodo about iPod productivity. It claims an iPad is not a laptop replacement.

An article from Wired about Mark Zuckerberg's approach to privacy on Facebook over the years.