“The senior Twitter executive with editorial responsibility for the Middle East is also a part-time officer in the British Army’s psychological warfare unit,” reports Middle East Eye: The 77th Brigade uses social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, as well as podcasts, data analysis and audience research to wage what the head of the UK military, General Nick Carter,…
Tag: acting
Attorney General Bill Barr Will Ask Zuckerberg To Halt Plans For End-To-End Encryption Across Facebook’s Apps
Attorney General Bill Barr, along with officials from the United Kingdom and Australia, is set to publish an open letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg asking the company to delay plans for end-to-end encryption across its messaging services until it can guarantee the added privacy does not reduce public safety. From a report: A draft of the letter, dated Oct. 4,…
Could a melting exomoon explain Tabby’s Star?
This star undergoes a long-term dimming that’s so mysterious it was, at one time, proposed as possible evidence of an alien culture. Now, scientists say, a disk of debris – torn from a melting exomoon – might explain Tabby’s Star. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/tabbys-star-explanation-melting-exomoon…
GNU’s Former Kernel Maintainer Shares ‘A Reflection on the Departure of Richard Stallman’
Thomas Bushnell, BSG, founded GNU’s official kernel project, GNU Hurd, and maintained it from 1990 through 2003. This week on Medium he posted “a reflection on the departure of RMS.” There has been some bad reporting, and that’s a problem. While I have not waded through the entire email thread Selam G. has posted, my reaction was that RMS did not…
Does America’s First Commercial Offshore Wind Farm Portend a Clean Energy Revolution?
In the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Slashdot reader Dan Drollette describes visiting one of North America’s biggest experiments in renewable energy, off the coast of Rhode Island. As the only commercial offshore wind farm in North America, Block Island is “setting the stage for what could be a rapid explosion in the number of commercial offshore windmills on the entire…
Experts Warn World ‘Grossly Unprepared’ For Future Pandemics
Prominent international experts are warning that a virulent flu pandemic capable of spreading across the world in 36 hours, killing up to 80 million people, is entirely plausible and efforts by governments to prepare for it are “grossly insufficient.” The Guardian reports: The first annual report by the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board, an independent group of 15 experts convened by the…
Physicists discover topological behavior of electrons in 3-D magnetic material
An international team of researchers led by scientists at Princeton University has found that a magnetic material at room temperature enables electrons to behave counterintuitively, acting collectively rather than as individuals. Their collective behavior mimics massless particles and anti-particles that coexist in an unexpected way and together form an exotic loop-like structure. …
‘Snow-cannon’ Enceladus shines up Saturn’s super-reflector moons
Radar observations of Saturn’s moons, Mimas, Enceladus and Tethys, show that Enceladus is acting as a “snow-cannon,” coating itself and its neighbors with fresh water-ice particles to make them dazzlingly reflective. The extreme radar brightness also points to the presence of “boomerang” structures beneath the surface that boost the moons’ efficiency in returning the microwave signals to the spacecraft. The results…
‘King of Kong’ Billy Mitchell Argues He Was Framed for Donkey Kong Cheating, Threatens Legal Action
“Billy Mitchell, the former Donkey Kong and Pac-Man high-score champion made famous in the 2007 film The King of Kong, has threatened legal action against the sanctioning bodies who threw out all of Mitchell’s high scores in April 2018 after finding that two were illegitimate,” reports Polygon.
This week, lawyers for Mitchell sent a letter to Twin Galaxies and Guinness World Records…