Month: February 2023

Enlarge / Signal app on a phone. (credit: Getty Images)

The nonprofit responsible for the Signal messenger app is prepared to exit the UK if the country requires providers of encrypted communications to alter their products to ensure user messages are free of material that’s harmful to children.

“We would absolutely exit any country if the choice were between remaining in the country and undermining the strict privacy promises we make to the people who rely on us,” Signal CEO Meredith Whittaker told Ars. “The UK is no exception.”

Whittaker’s comments came as the UK Parliament is in the process of drafting legislation known as the Online Safety Bill. The bill, introduced by former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, is a sweeping piece of legislation that requires virtually any provider of user-generated content to block child sexual abuse material, often abbreviated as CSAM or CSA. Providers must also ensure that any legal content that can be accessed by minors—including self-harm topics—is age appropriate.

Enlarge / Signal app on a phone. (credit: Getty Images)

The nonprofit responsible for the Signal messenger app is prepared to exit the UK if the country requires providers of encrypted communications to alter their products to ensure user messages are free of material that’s harmful to children.

“We would absolutely exit any country if the choice were between remaining in the country and undermining the strict privacy promises we make to the people who rely on us,” Signal CEO Meredith Whittaker told Ars. “The UK is no exception.”

Whittaker’s comments came as the UK Parliament is in the process of drafting legislation known as the Online Safety Bill. The bill, introduced by former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, is a sweeping piece of legislation that requires virtually any provider of user-generated content to block child sexual abuse material, often abbreviated as CSAM or CSA. Providers must also ensure that any legal content that can be accessed by minors—including self-harm topics—is age appropriate.

Enlarge (credit: Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Google's offices were once famous to outsiders as a whimsical, magical place full of giant playground slides, 24/7 staff masseuses, a huge selection of free food, and complimentary laundry service. Today, in the new, cost-cutting era of Google, some employees don't even get to have their own desks.

CNBC's Jennifer Elias obtained an internal document from Google's "Cloud" division, which declares, “Most Googlers will now share a desk with one other Googler.” The move is apparently part of a cost-cutting measure that will allow Google to “continue to invest in Cloud’s growth,” and will result in some buildings being vacated. CNBC says the new policy will apply to Google Cloud's biggest US locations, in Kirkland, Washington; New York City; San Francisco; Seattle; and Sunnyvale, California.

Rather than the humorous image of Google employees sitting shoulder-to-shoulder and fighting over desk space, employees are expected to alternate their desk usage from one day to the next. After the pandemic and the work-from-home trend, Google wants employees to visit the office twice a week on a "hybrid work" policy. So they'll be expected to partner with a desk buddy and set the rules for how they will share. Google's document says if you don't stick to your schedule you could end up without a desk; in that case, you'll have to work at an “overflow drop-in space.”

Enlarge (credit: DeFodi Images )

Vaccine maker Moderna has forked over $400 million to the National Institutes of Health for using a molecular stabilizing technique borrowed from government and academic researchers in its mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccine—which the company made roughly $36 billion selling amid the deadly pandemic, according to The New York Times.

Moderna mentioned the payment in the company's latest earnings report, which described the sum as a "catch-up payment" negotiated with the NIH in December as part of a new royalty-bearing license agreement. The agreement will also grant the NIH "low single-digit royalties on future COVID-19 vaccine sales." The company expects to make around $5 billion in COVID-19 vaccine sales in 2023.

The molecular technique at the center of the agreement is designed to stabilize the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein so that it can spur a strong immune response following vaccination. The mRNA-based vaccine delivers genetic code for the spike protein, which is then translated by human cells into protein. Researchers at the NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)—as well as collaborators at Dartmouth and The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California—came up with a method of tweaking the mRNA code so that, when translated, the spike protein would stay locked in a specific conformation best for generating an immune response. They had developed the technique years before the pandemic, publishing it in a 2017 study involving the spike protein from a SARS-CoV-2 relative, MERS-CoV, aka the Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus. Moderna began collaborating with the NIAID on a general design for mRNA-based vaccines in 2016, but none of its scientists were authors of the 2017 paper.

Enlarge (credit: Anadolu Agency / Contributor | Anadolu)

On Wednesday and Thursday, Twitter’s internal Slack channels were suddenly shut down. Platformer reported that the company manually shut services off. Before that was confirmed, a Twitter employee posting on the anonymous workplace chat app Blind had speculated that it was also possible that Twitter had shut down employee access because it had stopped paying its Slack bills.

Whatever the reason driving Twitter’s decision to remove Slack access, it resulted in a very unproductive work day for some Twitter employees who were suddenly unable to communicate, Platformer reported. At the same time that employees lost Slack access, they also couldn’t access Jira, a tracking software that Platformer said engineers use to ship code and monitor progress on new features. Rather than being equipped to go “hardcore,” some decided to just take the day off. Other employees took two days off.

Apparently, Twitter told employees that the Slack channel was down for “routine maintenance,” but a Slack employee told Platformer that was “bullshit.”

Enlarge / Rodger Kram, left, and James Wilson carry a log with tumplines with the Boulder Foothills in the background. (credit: Patrick Campbell/CU Boulder)

The so-called "great houses" of Chaco Canyon in New Mexico may have taken decades or longer to construct. Most large complexes had four or five stories and averaged over 200 rooms, with the largest boasting as many as 700 rooms. The complexes also featured large circular ceremonial areas called kivas. To construct these great houses, archaeologists have estimated that the Chacoans would have needed wood from some 200,000 trees, and those 16-foot-long wooden beams must have been transported from mountain ranges as far as 70 miles (110 km) away.

Many scientists have hypothesized about how the Chacoans might have accomplished this feat. The latest theory is that the Chacoans may have used simple devices called tumplines, still favored by sherpas in Nepal, according to a new paper published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports. To test that hypothesis, co-authors Rodger Kram and James Wilson spent the summer of 2020 training until they could haul a heavy log some 15 miles using tumplines. "Some people baked sourdough bread during COVID," said Kram, an emeritus professor of integrative physiology at the University of Colorado at Boulder. "Instead, we carried sand and heavy logs around using our heads."

There are no preserved timber scrape marks near the site, and the people of Chaco Canyon didn't have draft animals or even wheels, according to Kram and his co-authors. So the logs must have been carried by people, most likely along the wide roadways that linked this world. A 1925 publication featured a photograph depicting eight young men from Zuni Pueblo carrying a log: four on each side holding thin cross-poles at hip height, with the log laid on top. That photograph influenced many of the proposed mechanisms for transporting the logs. However, Kram et al. pointed out that there's no clear evidence that the residents of Zuni Pueblo share cultural connections with the people who once inhabited Chaco Canyon. "We feel that it is dubious to infer Chaco era timber transportation methods from a staged 20th century image," they wrote.