Month: April 2018

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On Friday, federal law enforcement authorities seized Backpage domain names, including Backpage.com and Backpage.ca.

In addition, the Arizona Republic reported that on Friday morning, law enforcement raided the Sedona-area home of Michael Lacey, a co-founder of the site.

For years, Backpage has acted with impunity as a place that offered thinly veiled online prostitution ads. In December 2016, Backpage CEO Carl Ferrer and his co-defendants beat back a state prosecution in California.

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As part of a slew of recent changes stemming from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook announced Friday that it would require advertisers to be "authorized" before they could post political ads.

The new policy comes just a few months after Facebook announced related moves after it discovered sketchy ad buys that likely came from the Internet Research Agency, a Russian troll factory.

"We are working with third parties to develop a list of key issues, which we will refine over time," Rob Goldman, vice president of Ads, and Alex Himel, vice president of Local & Pages, wrote in the Friday blog post.

Enlarge / British Prime Minister Theresa May at the location in Salisbury visited by Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia before they were found on a nearby bench in March. British intelligence traced the nerve agent used to a Russian facility in the closed city of Shikhany. (credit: Jack Taylor/Getty Images)

An intelligence report shown by the British government to the US and other allies specifically attributes the source of the nerve agent used in the attack against former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in March to a Russian military laboratory. That report led to the expulsion of over 150 Russian diplomats from 28 countries.

According to The Times of London, the report traced the nerve agent to Russia's Scientific & Research Institute of Radiation and Chemical Defence in Shikhany, a "closed city" that is home to a chemical testing ground. The report suggests that small amounts of the chemical compounds used in the attack and other chemical weapons classified as "novichok" nerve agents were tested at Shikhany over the past decade, likely in an effort to determine if they could be used for targeted killings. In the Skripal case, it appears the agent used was applied to a doorknob.

The details were shared with The Times by Hamish de Bretton Gordon, former commander of Britain’s Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Regiment, who saw the intelligence report. "No doubt the Russians are scrubbing it down as we speak," Gordon said.

Enlarge / WUHAN, CHINA - APRIL 27: Workers from Wuhan Guangsheng Photovoltaic Company install solar panels on the roof of a building on April 27, 2017 in Wuhan, China. (Photo by Kevin Frayer/Getty Images) (credit: Getty Images)

To say 2017 was a good year for solar panels is a bit of an understatement. According to a report from the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management, last year more solar capacity was installed around the world than net coal, gas, and nuclear plant capacity combined.

Solar's total came to 98 gigawatts (GW) of capacity versus 73 GW of net fossil fuel capacity added (that is, additional fossil fuel capacity adjusted for fossil fuel plant retirements). That's great for solar, but it also shows we're nowhere close to breaking our addiction to fossil fuels. The world added 67 GW of coal plant capacity in 2017, but 32 GW were retired, leaving a net 35 GW of coal capacity added. For gas-fired plants, gross additions totaled 54 GW, and 16 GW were retired, leaving a net addition of 38 GW.

The numbers come from Bloomberg New Energy Finance's database. The company partnered with the Frankfurt School and the United Nations Environmental Programme to complete the 86-page analysis of 2017's energy landscape.

Researchers found these spewing bacteria and spores. (credit: Alisha Vargas)

Washing your grubby mitts is one of the all-time best ways to cut your chances of getting sick and spreading harmful germs to others. But using the hot-air dryers common in bathrooms can undo that handy hygienic work.

Hot-air dryers suck in bacteria and hardy bacterial spores loitering in the bathroom—perhaps launched into the air by whooshing toilet flushes—and fire them directly at your freshly cleaned hands, according to a study published in the April issue of Applied and Environmental Microbiology. The authors of the study, led by researchers at the University of Connecticut, found that adding HEPA filters to the dryers can reduce germ-spewing four-fold. However, the data hints that places like infectious disease research facilities and healthcare settings may just want to ditch the dryers and turn to trusty towels.

Indeed, in the wake of the blustery study—which took place in research facility bathrooms around UConn—"paper towel dispensers have recently been added to all 36 bathrooms in basic science research areas in the UConn School of Medicine surveyed in the current study,” the authors note.

Enlarge / Mark Zuckerberg in 2017. (credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Hours ago, Facebook admitted that Mark Zuckerberg had given himself special powers to delete old Facebook messages from recipients' inboxes—a feature that's not available to ordinary Facebook users. Now, in a remarkable coincidence, the company told Techcrunch's Josh Constine it has been working on a feature to allow any user to unsend messages. The feature will be available in "several months," Facebook says.

"Until the unsend feature is released for everyone, Facebook says it won’t unsend or retract any more of Zuckerberg’s messages," Constine writes. There's no indication that Facebook will attempt to restore Zuckerberg messages that were already deleted, however.

This appears to be an effort to dampen outrage over Zuckerberg giving himself special powers on the platform that are not available to ordinary users. But Constine reports that Facebook "hasn’t finalized exactly how the unsend feature will work."

Enlarge (credit: ArniEin via Wikimedia Commons)

When the Vikings first sailed to Greenland in the late 10^th century, they didn’t have compasses to guide them; that technology wouldn’t reach Europe until the late 16^th century. So how did they do it? A new computer simulation says an unusual method mentioned in an eight- or nine-hundred-year-old Icelandic saga would have been precise enough to get Viking ships safely to Greenland.

“The Viking legends (so-called sagas) refer to mysterious tools, sunstones, with which they could determine the position of the invisible Sun in cloudy or foggy weather,” archaeologist Gabor Horvath told Ars Technica.

In The Saga of King Olaf, the titular king—who ruled Norway from 955-1030, around the time the Vikings settled Greenland—visits a chieftain in a remote part of the country to investigate some cattle thefts. There, he spends the night in a strange rotating house and has a strange dream, which the chieftain’s sons interpret as a vision of the kings who would succeed Olaf as rulers of Norway. One part of the text describes a stone that allows the king to peer through dense clouds and snow to determine the position of the Sun: