Backslash from publishers as Facebook shuts out Australia over revenue
Facebook has faced a backlash from publishers and politicians after blocking news feeds in Australia in a surprise escalation of a dispute with the government over a law to require it to share revenue from news. Facebook wiped out pages from Australian state governments and charities as well as from...
New report: Western sources still dominate how the Africa story is told
One-third of all African stories in news outlets on the continent are sourced from foreign news services, a new report from Africa No Filter, says. The How African Media Covers Africa report highlights the fact that stories about Africa continue to be told through the same persistent and negative stereotypes...
How police, spies and hackers get around your smartphone’s encryption
Lawmakers and law enforcement agencies around the world, including in the United States, have increasingly called for backdoors in the encryption schemes that protect your data, arguing that national security is at stake. But new research indicates governments already have methods and tools that, for better or worse, let them...
Anti-secrecy activists publish a trove of ransomware victims’ data
For years, radical transparency-focused activists like WikiLeaks have blurred the line between whistle-blowing and hacking. Often, they’ve published any data they consider to be of public interest, no matter how questionable the source. But now one leak-focused group is mining a controversial new vein of secrets: the massive caches of...
Opinion: Marginalised groups were ‘mistreated’ by Wikipedia’s editing corps
More than decade ago, I wrote an essay comparing Wikipedia to a vibrant city, how it “can send you down unlikely alleyways” via the many links embedded on a single page: There are the links to articles about other people or places mentioned; links to categories of articles on similar...
Billions poured into Covid vaccine facilitated multiple tests at the same time
The slowest part of vaccine development isn’t finding candidate treatments, but testing them. This often takes years, with companies running efficacy and safety tests on animals and then in humans. Human testing requires three phases that involve increasing numbers of people and proportionately escalating costs. The Covid-19 vaccines went through...
First ever peek inside Mars reveals a crust with three cake-like layers
NASA’s InSight mission has finally peered inside Mars – and discovered that the planet’s crust might be made of three layers. This is the first time scientists have directly probed the inside of a planet other than Earth and will help researchers to unravel how Mars formed and evolved over...
FDA scientists endorse Moderna coronavirus vaccine
Scientists at the Food and Drug Administration endorsed the Covid-19 vaccine developed by Moderna as safe and efficacious a day after the first doses of a competing vaccine from Pfizer and BioNTech were delivered across the United States. The FDA reviewers said that the two-dose vaccine “was highly effective” in...
Technology experts foresee utility-like criticality for data centres in 2021
As the world moved online seemingly overnight in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic, the criticality of data centres and the unrelenting reliance on them across all walks of life became an enduring storyline of the crisis. This reality will manifest in new ways in 2021 as the data centre...
Scientist: It will be a while before engineers identify source of noise in owl aviation
Forget about the superstition about bad omens associated owls. Science is gradually changing the perception and now beyond the ugly looks of owls, the birds are attracting the interest of researchers keen on identifying the most important source of noise in owl aviation. Research suggests that owl wings have three...
