Month: September 2021

Enlarge / A sculpture of Russian opposition leader and anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny in front of the Brandenburg Gate at an anti-Putin demonstration on May 9, 2021 in Berlin, Germany. (credit: Getty Images | Adam Berry )

Apple and Google gave a boost to Russian President Vladimir Putin's ruling party by removing a strategic voting app developed by activists who support the jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny. The app, called "Navalny," was kicked off the mobile app stores ahead of this weekend's legislative election as Apple and Google caved to pressure from the Russian government.

"Removing the Navalny app from stores is a shameful act of political censorship. Russia's authoritarian government and propaganda will be thrilled," Ivan Zhdanov, who is director of the Navalny-founded Anti-Corruption Foundation and a politician in the Russia of the Future opposition party, wrote on Twitter. While candidates associated with Navalny are banned from the election, the Navalny app was designed to help voters coalesce around opposition candidates who are on the ballot.

As noted by NBC News, the now-removed "tactical voting app allows voters who do not want President [Vladimir] Putin's ruling political party, United Russia, to win the election to organize around a single opposition candidate in each of the 225 electoral districts in an effort to boost the number of non-Kremlin-approved politicians in power." Since mid-August, the Russian government has "threatened Apple and Google with fines if they didn't remove Navalny's tactical voting app from the App Store and Google Play store," NBC News wrote.

Enlarge / Sir Clive Sinclair holding the world's smallest television screen when it was created by Sinclair Radionics in 1977. (credit: Getty Images)

Sir Clive Sinclair, the namesake of a British electronics manufacturer who helped pioneer Europe's microcomputing boom, is dead at the age of 81.

His company, Sinclair Radionics, is arguably best known around the world for 1982's ZX Spectrum, an early example of a computer capable of multi-color, real-time graphics. The device dominated the UK and other European territories in the early 1980s. This computer was a major processing step up from black-and-white Spectrum computers like ZX80 and ZX81, and it debuted in a configuration priced as low as £125. American readers probably best know this platform thanks to popular and ambitious ZX Spectrum games from the little developer Ultimate: Play The Game. That company eventually rebranded itself as Rareware and turned into a '90s powerhouse on Nintendo consoles.

Yet before his name became interminably linked to gaming history, Sinclair's rise to running his own electronics manufacturing company largely resembles the stories of American electronics pioneers who began as garage hobbyists. A BBC documentary, Clive Sinclair: The Pace Setters, chronicles the inventor's rise, which began with him selling one-at-a-time radio kits via mail order in the 1960s.

Enlarge / Android 6.0 Marshmallow is getting a spiffy new feature. (credit: Ron Amadeo)

Google is coming for your unused Android crapware. The company announced Friday that it will backport an Android 11 privacy feature—auto-resetting app permissions—to Android 6.

Auto-resetting app permissions were introduced in Android 11 as part of a continually expanding Android feature set aiming to automatically limit apps you don't use. When you don't use an app for a set period of time, Android will automatically strip the app of any permissions it has been granted, limiting it from tracking you in the background or accessing data. It's a nice feature for less tech-savvy people who aren't interested in manually organizing the inner workings of their phones. If you open the app again, it can ask for all of those permissions again.

Like most new Android features, auto-resetting permissions were exclusive to Android 11 when it came out last year—making up a very small number of Android's 3 billion active devices. Google's official Android Studio stats have Android 11 at 0 percent market share, but that chart hasn't been updated since Android 11 came out (update your chart, Google!). The last update we got said OEMs were pushing out Android 11 about as quickly as they rolled out Android 10, so today, version 11 might be cracking 10 percent of Android devices.

Enlarge (credit: Chesnot | Getty Images)

In the wake of the 2016 election, Facebook knew it had a problem. Pages and fake accounts created by the Kremlin-backed Internet Research Agency had spread through the social network and drawn massive engagement from real users. Facebook knew it had to get things under control.

But years later, Facebook’s own internal research teams revealed that troll farms were still reaching massive audiences, even if they didn’t have large direct followings. The company’s own algorithms pushed the troll content onto users who had not expressed interest in the pages, expanding the trolls’ reach exponentially. A report detailing the research was leaked to MIT Technology Review by a former employee.

When the report was published in 2019, troll farms were reaching 100 million Americans and 360 million people worldwide every week. In any given month, Facebook was showing troll farm posts to 140 million Americans. Most of the users never followed any of the pages. Rather, Facebook’s content-recommendation algorithms had forced the content on over 100 million Americans weekly. “A big majority of their ability to reach our users comes from the structure of our platform and our ranking algorithms rather than user choice,” the report said.

Enlarge / Some of the massive volcanic deposits that are part of the Siberian Traps. (credit: MIT)

The end-Permian mass extinction was a big deal. It was the largest mass extinction event ever and occurred 252 million years ago. A whopping 90 percent of all marine species and around 70 percent of their terrestrial kin were killed off.

Over the years, there have been numerous efforts to look into this massive, world-changing event. The end-Permian mass extinction was coincident with mass eruptions in the Siberian Traps, and some potential scenarios include volcanism driving acid rain, volcanism triggering the burning of coal (which released greenhouses gases into the atmosphere), and a reduction in the availability of oxygen in the ocean, among others. However, a new paper relies on previously unused data and modeling to dig into the matter.

In all, the study found that 36,000 gigatons of carbon—mostly from volcanic sources—were released into the atmosphere over a relatively short span of 15,000 years. This period also saw the global average temperature rise a staggering amount, from 25ºC to 40ºC. While researchers previously explored volcanism and carbon as potential causes for the massive extinction, this work provides more insight into the event, said Wolfram Kürschner, a geologist at the University of Oslo and one of the authors of the paper.