Bill Gates took private jet to Paris climate summit, his book reveals

Bill Gates has admitted to flying on a private jet to the Paris climate change summit in 2015. Green campaigners say the revelation, made in his new book on reducing carbon emissions, undermines the billionaire philanthropist’s message Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2267538-bill-gates-took-private-jet-to-paris-climate-summit-his-book-reveals/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=home…

A record deadly week for US avalanches in early February

2021 has brought a deadly avalanche season. “We’re only halfway through the season and we’re 3/4 of the way to the number of fatalities we’d see in a typical year. The dangerous, record-breaking year keeps avalanche forecasters up at night,” one expert said. Source: https://earthsky.org/human-world/avalanches-2021-united-states-how-to-survive…

Amid Bickering Over Movie Rights, Reddit Removes Top ‘WallStreetBets’ Moderators

The New York Times reports:
Late on Wednesday, a moderator of the popular Reddit message board WallStreetBets posted several screenshots on the chat app Discord. They showed that other moderators had quietly started talking among themselves about landing a movie deal. “What’s our cut?” one of the moderators had asked in a Discord chat, according to the screenshots. By Thursday morning, that…

Swiss Company Claims Weakness Found in Post-Quantum Encryption, Touts Its New Encryption Protocol

“A Swiss technology company says it has made a breakthrough by using quantum computers to uncover vulnerabilities in commonly used encryption,” reports Bloomberg: Terra Quantum AG said its discovery “upends the current understanding of what constitutes unbreakable” encryption… Terra Quantum AG has a team of about 80 quantum physicists, cryptographers and mathematicians, who are based in Switzerland, Russia, Finland and the…

Fake Pro-China Accounts Are Reaching Millions on Twitter

“A pro-China network of fake and impostor accounts found a global audience on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter to mock the U.S. response to the COVID-19 pandemic,” reports the Associated Press, “as well as the deadly riot in Washington that left five dead, new research published Thursday found.” Slashdot reader schwit1 shared their report:
Messages posted by the network, which also praised China,…

‘Nature’ Urges More Masks, Air Purifiers, and Ventilation Instead of Disinfecting Surfaces

“Catching the coronavirus from surfaces is rare. The World Health Organization and national public-health agencies need to clarify their advice,” urges an editorial in Nature (shared by long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo): A year into the pandemic, the evidence is now clear. The coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 is transmitted predominantly through the air — by people talking and breathing out large droplets and small…

Chinese researchers to send an ‘uncrackable’ quantum message to space

It’s now possible to send uncrackable quantum messages through thin air, and the people who figured out how to do it are getting ready to send the messages into space. Source: https://www.livescience.com/super-secure-quantum-messages-headed-to-space.html

Phone Numbers For 533 Million Facebook Users Were Being Sold On Telegram

Slashdot reader DevNull127 writes: This week a security researcher discovered a bot on Telegram that sold the phone numbers of Facebook users for $20 apiece. “The security researcher who found this vulnerability, Alon Gal, says that the person who runs the bot claims to have the information of 533 million users, which came from a Facebook vulnerability that was patched in…

‘Babylon 5’ Actress Mira Furlan Dies At 65

Slashdot reader The Grim Reefer shares a report from the BBC: Babylon 5 and Lost actress Mira Furlan has died at the age of 65, her family and management have confirmed. Furlan played Minbari Ambassador Delenn in the 1990s sci-fi TV drama, Babylon 5, and Danielle Rousseau in the noughties mystery drama, Lost. Her family told the BBC the Croatian actress…

New Site Extracts and Posts Every Face from Parler’s Capitol Hill Insurrection Videos

“Late last week, a website called Faces of the Riot appeared online, showing nothing but a vast grid of more than 6,000 images of faces, each one tagged only with a string of characters associated with the Parler video in which it appeared,” reports WIRED, saying the site raises clear privacy concerns: The site’s creator tells WIRED that he used simple,…