An anonymous reader quotes the Next Web:
According to Spiegel Online, the country’s Federal Interior Minister, Horst Seehofer, wants encrypted messaging services like WhatsApp and Telegram to provide chat logs in plain text to the authorities. Since these services come with end-to-end encryption, the companies will have to break the encryption and provide a backdoor to give access to the texts. Wired…
Tag: Germany
DIY Facial Recognition For Porn Is a Dystopian Disaster
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Vice News: Someone posting on Chinese social network Weibo claims to have used facial recognition to cross-reference women’s photos on social media with faces pulled from videos on adult platforms like Pornhub. In a Monday post on Weibo, the user, who says he’s based in Germany, claimed to have “successfully identified more than 100,000…
‘Holy Spirit’ saves German driver from fine
A driver captured on a speed camera in Germany had his identity hidden by a rather timely dove. Police officials in the city of Viersen near Germany’s… Source: https://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/news/328077/holy-spirit-saves-german-driver-from-fine…
How a Professor Beat Roulette, Crediting a Non-Existent Supercomputer
I loved this story. The Hustle remembers how in 1964 a world-renowned medical professor found a way to beat roulette wheels, kicking off a five-year winning streak in which he amassed $1,250,000 ($8,000,000 today).
He noticed that at the end of each night, casinos would replace cards and dice with fresh sets — but the expensive roulette wheels went untouched and often…
What is the Brocken Spectre?
The Brocken Spectre is your own shadow, cast on mists below you, when you are mountain climbing. The shadow may appear enormous and has a ring around it. Source: https://earthsky.org/earth/what-is-the-brocken-spectre…
Formation of the moon brought water to Earth
The Earth is unique in our solar system: It is the only terrestrial planet with a large amount of water and a relatively large moon, which stabilizes the Earth’s axis. Both were essential for Earth to develop life. Planetologists at the University of Münster (Germany) have now been able to show, for the first time, that water came to Earth with…
Scientists find new periodic water cycle on Mars
A new study shows that Mars has a unique water vapor cycle that occurs only once about every 2 years. The cycle might help explain how Mars lost most of its water. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/scientists-find-new-periodic-water-cycle-on-mars…
Three Geeks Rescue a 50-Year-Old IBM 360 Mainframe From an Abandoned Building
In late April of 2019 Slashdot reader Adam Bradley and engineer Chris Blackburn were “sitting in a pub on a Monday night when Chris happened across a somewhat unusual eBay listing…” They eventually submitted the winning bid for an IBM 360 Model 20 mainframe — €3,710 (about $4,141 USD) — and proceeded to pick it up from an abandoned building “in…
Mission control ‘saves science’
Every minute, ESA’s Earth observation satellites gather dozens of gigabytes of data about our planet—enough information to fill the pages on a 100-metre long bookshelf. Flying in low-Earth orbits, these spacecraft are continuously taking the pulse of our planet, but it’s teams on the ground at ESA’s Operations Centre in Darmstadt, Germany, that keep these explorers afloat. Source: https://phys.org/news/2019-05-mission-science.html…
City Residents Live With Mental Illness At Higher Rates Than General Population
Dating back to the 1930s, researchers have discovered that mental illnesses are more common in densely populated cities than in greener and more rural areas, but it wasn’t until recently that scientists have started to seriously study the mechanisms through which exposure to various environmental stressors could be wounding our mental health. Popular Science reports: Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg, director of the Central…