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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:New method converts methane in natural gas to methanol at room temperature:

takyon writes:Report: Fry's Electronics going out of business, shutting down all stores

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:New metalens shifts focus without tilting or moving: The design may enable miniature zoom lenses for drones, cellphones, or night-vision goggles.:

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:Microsoft slashes Windows 10 long-term support by half:

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:USPS picks Oshkosh Defense for future electric mail trucks:

MrPlow writes in with a submission, via IRC, for TheMightyBuzzard.Flapping Wings And The Science Of How Bees Can Fly:

An Anonymous Coward writes:Firefox 86 Introduces Total Cookie Protection:

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:Unexpected Life Lurking in Subglacial Lakes Isolated Deep Beneath Antarctic Ice:

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:Huawei turns to pig farming as smartphone sales fall:

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:Sleep is vital to associating emotion with memory, study finds:

An Anonymous Coward writes:

aristarchus writes:Background on the Roboticist that guided Perserverance to Mars,

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:Concept for a new storage medium:

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:Humans had never seen a spacecraft land on another planet:

Japan Grounds Boeing 777s After United Jet Engine FailureAn Anonymous Coward writes:https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-21/ana-jal-ordered-to-ground-boeing-777s-after-united-jet-failure:

Europe is planning to label flights according to their carbon footprint:

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:Elon Musk: SpaceX will double Starlink's satellite internet speeds in 2021:

SpaceX's first private flight will carry the youngest ever American to orbit:

A ferret is the first North American endangered animal to be cloned:

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:Dogecoin: Inside the joke cryptocurrency that somehow became real:

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:UK Supreme Court says Uber drivers are not independent contractors:

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:How Should We Calculate the Social Cost of Carbon? Researchers Offer Roadmap in New Analysis

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:MX Linux Fluxbox Respin Officially Released for Raspberry Pi - 9to5Linux:

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:Pfizer vaccine doesn't need ultra-cold storage after all, company says:

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:The AI research paper was real. The "co-author" wasn't:

canopic jug writes:Developer and entrepeneur Bert Hubert has written about how software supply chain safety is similar to food supply safety. Both are about recognizing hazards and finding critical control points to monitor. Strict rules about handling must also be followed, in both fields.

takyon writes:Kodi 19 Released With Python 3 Transition Complete, AV1 Software Decode

martyb writes:A Genetic Variant You May Have Inherited From Neanderthals Reduces the Risk of Severe COVID-19:

takyon writes:Toshiba Unveils World's First FC-MAMR HDD: 18 TB, Helium Filled

AnonTechie writes:A second Google A.I. researcher says the company fired her:

AnonTechie writes:

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:How NASA Designed a Helicopter That Could Fly Autonomously on Mars:

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:Researchers eavesdrop on cellular conversations:

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:The Grim Consequences of a Misleading Study on Disinformation:

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:WhatsApp to move ahead with privacy update despite backlash:

MrPlow writes:

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:Brave privacy bug exposes Tor onion URLs to your DNS provider:

Freeman writes:Valve gets dragged into Apple and Epic's legal fight over Fortnite:

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Fnord666:AI has remastered Rick Astley's 'Never Gonna Give You Up' in glorious 4K:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

hubie writes:No one here will be surprised by the size and reach of the data broker industry and the desire to identify and track individual users. From a data standpoint, the majority of human interaction now happens on mobile devices, and these devices end up collecting and storing a very large amount of our information. US privacy laws allow sharing and selling of anonymized data, which are those that do not contain Personally Identifying Information (PII), and the much ballyhooed GDPR imposes strict inform and consent requirements on collecting and using personal information. To comply with these laws many entities simply throw away all the personal information and keep the rest of the data, which sounds like a great thing until one realizes that it turns out to be relatively easy to deanonymize this data using otherwise innocuous data on the mobile device anyway.The reason that so many apps report to third parties what other apps are installed on a phone is because these other apps create a remarkably unique fingerprint of each person. The aggregate of the installed apps and their relative usage turn out to be very unique for over 99% of people. So ad blockers can block cookies, and users can reset things like the Android Advertisement ID, but users can't reset or fake their app usage stats.Some researchers looked at a data set of millions of people spanning 12 months and 33 countries and found that 91% of the people could be identified by looking at just the usage of four apps. They also looked at seasonal and cultural differences for identifying users. They found that people have more unique app fingerprints during summer months making them easier to identify then. They also saw significant variations in uniqueness across countries and found that American users are the easiest to identify while Finns have the least unique app fingerprints.Sekara, V., Alessandretti, L., Mones, E. et al. Temporal and cultural limits of privacy in smartphone app usage [open]. Sci Rep 11, 3861 (2021).

hubie writes:From a recent Scientific Reports paper:

takyon writes:NVIDIA Nerfs Ethereum Hash Rate & Launches CMP Dedicated Mining Hardware

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:Uber Shuts Down App That Told Drivers If Uber Underpaid Them:

takyon writes:Million-year-old mammoth DNA rewrites animal's evolutionary tree

An Anonymous Coward writes:https://if50.substack.com/p/1977-zork

takyon writes:Unique life forms accidentally found under 3,000 feet of Antarctica ice, scientists say

martyb writes:Touchdown! NASA's Mars Perseverance Rover Safely Lands on Red Planet:First image from surface. (Members of NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover team watch in mission control as the first images arrive moments after the spacecraft successfully touched down on Mars, Thursday, Feb. 18, 2021, at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. (Credits: NASA/Bill Ingalls)