Type: News

Marble Arch Mound is a demonstration of the insanity of local councils. They live in a different world to normal people.

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.

I wondered if this Dominic Cummings business was just about petty revenge, but it turns out it's about money.

The European Super League proposals were a travesty and the idea has now been abandoned by the participants. So, what punishment has been handed out?

A contestant on US TV show Jeopardy suffers the onslaught of a mob of social media posters based on an incorrect conspiracy theory.

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.

The European Super League proposals for football are rotten to the core, but one reason is particularly troubling.

A description of Googles proposed FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts) standard for profiling people and providing those profiles to advertisers.

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.

Flightless bird pockets money despite making a fortune in book sales.

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

The BBC's coverage of the Harry and Meghan nonsense has been, to put it mildly, excessive. Interest in this baffles me.

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.

Facebook refuses to play ball with new Australian regulations. Instead of paying news corporations to link to them, Facebook bans Australians from seeing any news.

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.

Apple is facing a backlash over its App Store. Epic, third-party developers, the North Dakota Senate and Congress all have it in for them.

Some thoughts on the WallStreetBet/GameStop/RobinHood story. It's fascinating to follow if you're interested in stocks and shares investments.

The Association of British Insurers (ABI) defends the funding of ransomware criminals.

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.

Facebook has taken out full-page advertisements in a number of US newspapers to complain about Apple's upcoming privacy change.

Parallax measurements from the European Space Agency's Gaia spacecraft confirm the universe is expanding faster than astronomers thought.

The EU has adopted a resolution that says it wants 'security through encryption and security despite encryption', which basically means it wants a backdoor.

Federal regulators and prosecutors from 45 states want to break up Facebook and undo its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp.

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

A new paper suggests the outer planets will be dragged away from the Sun and wander through the galaxy after about 100 billion years.

A researcher has written a paper that might help whittle down the planets SETI should look at as part of its search for alien life.

There is a rumour that No Time To Die might be released on Apple TV or Netflix as coronavirus keeps cinemas shut.

The BBC reports on a Twitter row about idlis, which are lentil and rice cakes often eaten in Southern India. I add my own take on this food.

Physicists theorise that a pattern may exist in the distortions of the energy blips from some pulsars. Could a cosmic string be responsible?

Epic has started the Coalition for App Fairness as part of its ongoing battle against Apple's app store policies.

A new rule by Ireland's Data Protection Commission upsets Facebook enough for them to threaten to withdraw their services from the EU.

NuScale gets US safety approval for its small nuclear reactor. It is however not as small as I first thought.

Facebook says it might be pointless to try and track advert performance when Apple's iOS 14 starts asking users for permission to do so.

Epic Games are suing both Apple and Google over their app stores. This is amidst antitrust hearings in both the US and the EU.

Virgin Galactic have made an aeroplane that will travel at three times the speed of sound. About time too.

More and more hacked companies appear to be paying off the hackers to recover their data. This is a very bad idea.

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.

My own opinions about Trump's recent spat with Twitter and Facebook's subsequent lack of action.

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.

Hafthor Bjornsson breaks Eddie Hall's 500kg deadlift record, taking it up to 501kg or 1,104lb.

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

How the UK's coronavirus tracking app will leverage APIs from Apple and Google.

Google will charge for its reCAPTCHA service, but I still don't see why I have to prove I'm human.

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.

A look at the LiDAR system that comes with some of Apple's latest iPads.

A Russian company called Promobot created a robot based on Terminator and Arnold Schwarzenegger plans to sue.

Somebody builds a gadget where the first gear must turn 1 googol times to turn the last gear just once.

The BBC reports that baboons ran riot in Australia as one of them was scheduled for a vasectomy.

Barclays Bank have abandoned an employee monitoring system after robust feedback from staff.

BT has announced a new range of so-called 'flexible' TV packages but you still have to sign up for 24 months.

The UK government is investigating the idea of building a bridge from Scotland to Northern Ireland. Here are my thoughts on this idea.

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

Ring doorbell passes data from its app to a host of third-parties without any opt-in from users.

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

An article on TechCrunch takes a look at how cookie consents are breaking the EU's GDPR laws.

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.

Motorola will be releasing a new Razr flip phone in December 2019. It'll have a 6.2in foldable screen.

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 load of tosh about World Egg Day and, as a service to mankind, I'll tell you the Order of The Egg.

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.

Why is repatriating the people stranded as a result of Thomas Cook's collapse going to cost the taxpayer £100m?

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.

Gravitational-wave detectors may have discovered a black hole of a mass that shouldn't really be allowed.

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.

How cosmic distances are measured and why we need to use them to determine how fast the universe is expanding.

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

Priti Patel mirrors a lot of the world's governments as she wants backdoors into end-to-end encryption. The trouble is, most governments have no idea what they're doing.

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.

Apple's June 2019 WWDC unveiled a mouthwatering array of enhancements to its operating systems. I review some of my favourite features here.

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.

Panic Software are breaking into hardware with a handheld games console due for release in early 2020.

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.

Musing on the picture of the M87 black hole taken by the Event Horizon telescope array in 2019.

A summary of the UK's Online Harms White Paper, which aims to prevent 'online harm' by regulating certain internet-based companies.

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.

Apple's March 2019 announcements left me flat. TV channels, news and gaming subscriptions and a credit card aren't my thing.

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.

Panic have announced that they intend to replace Coda, their web development software, with something entirely new.

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

Due to the way they store the number of weeks, legacy GPS systems will end an epoch on 6 April 2019. Is this another Y2K situation?

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.

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 world of Fortnite hackers, but I tend to think a better sense of perspective is necessary.

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

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.

Medium deprecates custom domain support, which is just another way to maintain control of your content in my opinion.

Donald Trump now thinks Google Search is biased agains him and blusters on about it, threatening consequences. Google issued denial.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Bear Writer team have released a new update, version 1.5. This includes tweaks to TagCons, more default tags and export to ePub, amongst other things.

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