Global: The recent Wi-Fi “KRACK” vulnerability, which allowed anyone to get onto a secure network (and which was quickly patched by reputable vendors), had been in plain sight behind a corporate-level paywall for 13 years. This raises a number of relevant, interesting, and uncomfortable questions.
Scare tactics simply aren’t working when it comes to altering our behaviour to tackle climate change, believes Solitaire Townsend, CEO of sustainability consultancy Futerra. Highlighting instead what we stand to gain is something that everyone can get on board with, she writes
The post ‘We should replace angry climate porn with a positive message’ appeared first on Positive News.
Global: Governments are still using “terrorism” as a scareword to get any insane law passed – like Britain’s digital book-burning law. But with its other hand, those same governments are expanding the definition of terrorism way beyond what the public could possibly imagine: the government’s own training material says that peaceful street protests in disagreement with administration policies are examples of terrorism.
From war clouds over Korea and wranglings over Brexit, to a shooting in Las Vegas and violence in Catalonia: bad news has dominated in recent months. But we think there are inspiring stories that are worthy of attention too. Get a fuller picture with our top 20 positive developments from July to September
The post What went right? July to September 2017 appeared first on Positive News.
Copyright Monopoly: Every so often, you hear copyright industry lobbyists ask “why copyright law shouldn’t apply on the Internet”, suggesting that the Internet is a lawless land with regard to people sharing what they like. They have a point, but not the point they think: Our laws have checks and balances that prevent enforcement against sharing culture and knowledge in the offline world, and there’s no reason why these check-and-balance laws shouldn’t apply online too.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which used to develop standards for the Web, has been captured by the copyright industry. In a doubly controversial vote, the W3C decided that media companies and not the user should be in control, ending their longstanding commitment to openness and the Internet’s core values. The open question is what new body web developers will choose to follow for future generations of standards.
Global: New research shows how a mobile phone can be turned into a passive indoor ultrasound sonar, locating people with high precision indoors using multi-target echolocation, and is even able to discern a rough selection of activities. It does this by overlaying imperceptible ultrasound sonar pings into played-back music, measuring the reflections coming back to the phone’s microphone. The privacy implications are staggering.
Activism: The German newspaper Die Zeit has a long feature this week about IMSI catchers and their countermeasures, words that were long heard only in countersurveillance cultures at Black Hat and Defcon.
We examine the popularity of different emojis around the world
The post From hearts to hamburgers: 5 facts about emoji use around the world appeared first on Positive News.
From glaring fabrication to masterful manipulation, fake news is a global problem. But society is fighting back. We meet the people separating fact from fiction
The post Fighting back against fake news: meet the factcheckers appeared first on Positive News.
