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The Democrats had their final presidential debate Sunday before the Iowa caucus in two weeks. There was the usual venom and posturing among the three candidates vying to win their party's nomination to run for president. And then there was a candidate who said there should be no encryption backdoors—or did he? Former Maryland governor Martin O'Malley couched his response during the Charleston, South Carolina debate that was livestreamed on YouTube.

Here's the dialogue after a YouTube "creator" asked about encryption.

Hi, my name's Marques Brownlee, and I've been making YouTube videos about electronics and gadgets for the past seven years.

I think America's future success is tied to getting all kinds of tech right. Tech companies are responsible for the encryption technology to protect personal data, but the government wants a backdoor into that information.

So do you think it's possible to find common ground? And where do you stand on privacy versus security?

"I believe whether it's a backdoor or a front door that the American principle of law should still hold that our federal government should have to get a warrant, whether they want to come through the backdoor or your front door," O'Malley replied.

(credit: Amazon)

In an interview with Yahoo News, Amazon has revealed a little more about its forthcoming drone-based delivery system. Paul Misener, Amazon’s vice president for global public policy, said that the company has very specific targets for "Prime Air."

"So Prime Air is a future delivery service that will get packages to customers within 30 minutes of them ordering it online at Amazon.com," he told Yahoo News. "The goals we’ve set for ourselves are: The range has to be over 10 miles. These things will weigh about 55 pounds each, but they’ll be able to deliver parcels that weigh up to five pounds. It turns out that the vast majority of the things we sell at Amazon weigh less than five pounds."

And how will Amazon deal with drone haters with shotguns? Misener isn't worried. "I suppose they could shoot at trucks, too," he said. "We want to make the deliveries. And we believe that these Prime Air drones will be as normal as seeing a delivery truck driving down the street someday. So the novelty will wear off."

Did you drop something in that AGAIN? (credit: NASA)

Very occasionally, my imagination gets the better of me. When I encountered a paper entitled "How to Recover a Qubit That Has Fallen into a Black Hole," I envisioned a typical lab experiment. One student, having been given a precious quantum state, accidentally drops it into a black hole—"accidentally" in the same way that you accidentally break into the chemistry supplies cupboard and mix everything together under a fume hood just to see what will happen. Never mind, says the clearly annoyed lab instructor, who then performs some arcane maneuvers and recovers the carelessly handled qubit.

Reality has fewer students dropping quantum states into black holes but makes up for it with an excess of equally amusing theoretical physicists. The idea behind studying how to recover a qubit from a black hole is not to help future students avert a lab disaster but to understand the quantum state of a black hole.

Black holes are rather coy about what they have under their event horizons. Nothing that we send into a black hole is coming back, so the only information that comes directly from a black hole is the Hawking radiation it emits.

Audi

Audi's h-tron quattro fuel cell concept.

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It seems like most of the auto industry is getting hydrogen fever, and we can now add Audi and Mercedes-Benz to that list. Audi used last week's North American International Auto Show in Detroit to debut its h-tron Quattro fuel cell SUV concept, and the UK's Autocar is reporting that Mercedes-Benz has green-lit for production a fuel cell version of its GLC SUV.

Audi's h-tron Quattro looks fairly similar to the e-tron Quattro concept we saw in Los Angeles, and it presumably uses a lot of the same EV powertrain know-how. A full tank of H₂ gives it a range of 373 miles (600km), and the on-board lithium-ion batteries can also be topped up by the gigantic solar panel on the roof.

Meanwhile, Mercedes-Benz told Autocar at the Detroit show that it was in the middle of rolling out the fuel cell-powered GLC, which should be revealed to the world at next year's Frankfurt Auto Show. Mercedes-Benz had previously ventured into the world of H₂ with a fuel-cell version of the B-Class, called the F-Cell. Several years ago, Mercedes-Benz leased 50 F-Cells to environmentalists in California.

(credit: Warner Bros.)

Facebook's lip-service 69p ($1) annual subscription fee for its WhatsApp messaging service has been dropped by the company.

However, the Mark Zuckerberg-run free content ad network has promised that WhatsApp will remain ad-free.

Instead—in a strategy that echoes that of the plans for Facebook's Messenger service—the multinational is hoping to tie-up deals with big name brands, such as airlines and banks, which may prove to be a red flag for privacy campaigners, particularly in Europe.