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Wikipedia Zero Discontinued Due to Lack of Adoption and Interest Outside North America and Europe

takyon writes:

Wikipedia's zero-rated access program will be discontinued:

In the program's six year tenure, we have partnered with 97 mobile carriers in 72 countries to provide access to Wikipedia to more than 800 million people free of mobile data charges. Since 2016, we have seen a significant drop off in adoption and interest in the program. This may be due, in part, to the rapidly shifting mobile industry, as well as changes in mobile data costs. At this same time, we conducted extensive research [1] [2] to better understand the full spectrum of barriers to accessing and participating in Wikipedia.

One of the critical issues we identified as part of this research was low awareness of Wikipedia outside of North America and Europe. To address this, we experimented with new projects and partnerships to increase awareness of Wikipedia, and we've experienced some initial success in this work. In Iraq, for example, we raised awareness of Wikipedia by more than 30%. In Nigeria, we partnered with Nigerian community members and Nollywood stars to introduce more than 15 million people to Wikipedia and how it works. These successes have given us several ideas for where we may take our partnership work next, and over the coming year, we will explore other ways we can leverage the findings from our research and the Wikipedia Zero program to direct future work with partners.

Also at TechCrunch, Boing Boing, and BetaNews.

Related: Wikipedia's 'Complicated' Relationship with Net Neutrality
A Dark Web Version Of Wikipedia

Wikipedia Ceases Zero-Rating Programme

canopic jug writes:

The Wikimedia Foundation, most well-known for Wikipedia, has participated in zero-rating for long enough to see a massive decline in it being a source of visits. That settles that. So now Wikipedia is turning around and resuming its efforts to instead be available to any visitor.

After careful evaluation, the Wikimedia Foundation has decided to discontinue one of its partnership approaches, the Wikipedia Zero program. Wikipedia Zero was created in 2012 to address one barrier to participating in Wikipedia globally: high mobile data costs. Through the program, we partnered with mobile operators to waive mobile data fees for their customers to freely access Wikipedia on mobile devices. Over the course of this year, no additional Wikipedia Zero partnerships will be formed, and the remaining partnerships with mobile operators will expire.

Source : Building for the future of Wikimedia with a new approach to partnerships

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2 

Fnord666 writes:

Would it be wise for many hospitals to replace saline with balanced fluids for hospitalized patients? It appears so. Doing such a move might significantly reduce mortality and morbidity, according to Vanderbilt University Medical Center's Matthew W. Semler during a presentation at the annual meeting of the Society of Critical Care Medicine.

The study involved 28,000 patients at Vanderbilt University who were given either saline-based IV bags or balanced fluid variants. They found that for every 100 patients on balanced fluids, there was one fewer death or critical kidney damage. Yes, 1 percent doesn't seem a dramatic reduction — but when viewed at a grander scale, that could mean up to 70,000 fewer deaths and 100,000 fewer incidents of kidney problems annually in the United States.

Source: http://www.techtimes.com/articles/222043/20180228/a-new-study-suggests-there-s-a-much-safer-iv-liquid-than-saline.htm

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

A new study links doing one's homework, being interested and behaving responsibly in high school to better academic and career success as many as 50 years later. This effect, reported in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, holds true even after accounting for parental income, IQ and other factors known to influence achievement, researchers report.

The study analyzed decades of data collected by the American Institutes for Research beginning in 1960 and continuing to the present. The original data set included more than 370,000 students. High school participants were originally tested on academic, cognitive and behavioral characteristics in 1960 and also responded to follow-up surveys in later years. The new analysis looked at the initial student tests and their responses 11 years and 50 years later.

Of the 1,952 participants randomly selected from those who responded to surveys 50 years later, "those who showed more interest in high school and had higher writing skills reported earning higher incomes," said Spengler, who led the study. "They also tended to have higher occupational prestige than their peers when they showed responsible behaviors as a student." This was in addition to the gains associated with IQ, family income and personality traits such as conscientiousness, she said.

https://phys.org/news/2018-02-links-responsible-behavior-high-school.html

[Also Covered By]:
Behavior in high school predicts income and occupational success later in life

American Psychological Association

[Source]: University of Illinois

The paper "How you behave in school predicts life success above and beyond family background, broad traits, and cognitive ability" is available online and from the U. of I. News Bureau. DOI

Has your experience been as described ??

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Jake Archibald writes in his blog about the bigger problem presented by importing third-party content into web pages. Even CSS is a problem as a CSS keylogger demo showed the other day.

A few days ago there was a lot of chatter about a 'keylogger' built in CSS.

Some folks called for browsers to 'fix' it. Some folks dug a bit deeper and saw that it only affected sites built in React-like frameworks, and pointed the finger at React. But the real problem is thinking that third party content is 'safe'.

While most are acutely aware, yet ignore, the danger presentd by third-party javascript and javascript in general, most forget about CSS. Jake reminds us and walks through quite a few exampled of how CSS can be misused by third-parties exporting it.

Source : Third party CSS is not safe

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

The videos from the USENIX Enigma 2018 sessions are now online. The 2018 conference ran from January 16^th through the 18^th in Santa Clara, California, USA and dealt with topics within the theme of "Security and Privacy Ideas that Matter". The conference is a single track and the overall goal is to "clearly explain emerging threats and defenses in the growing intersection of society and technology, and to foster an intelligent and informed conversation within the community and the world."

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

A new system that securely checks whether your passwords have been made public in known data breaches has been integrated into the widely used password manager, 1Password. This new tool lets customers find out if their passwords have been leaked without ever transmitting full credentials to a server.

Security researcher Troy Hunt this week announced his new version of "Pwned Passwords," a search tool and list of more than 500 million passwords that have been leaked in data breaches. Users can access it online and developers can connect applications to it via an API.

Within a day, the company AgileBits had integrated Hunt's new tool into the 1Password password manager. AgileBits' announcement describes how it works:

Troy's new service allows us to check your passwords while keeping them safe and secure. They're never sent to us or his service.

First, 1Password hashes your password using SHA-1. But sending that full SHA-1 hash to the server would provide too much information and could allow someone to reconstruct your original password. Instead, Troy's new service only requires the first five characters of the 40-character hash.

To complete the process, the server sends back a list of leaked password hashes that start with those same five characters. 1Password then compares this list locally to see if it contains the full hash of your password. If there is a match then we know this password is known and should be changed.

Source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/02/new-tool-safely-checks-your-passwords-against-a-half-billion-pwned-passwords/

Original Submission

Mykl writes:

As reported in news.com.au, South Africa's Parliament have voted to "expropriate" land from white farmers with no compensation.

From TFA:

The motion was brought by Julius Malema, leader of the radical Marxist opposition party the Economic Freedom Fighters, and passed overwhelmingly by 241 votes to 83 against. The only parties who did not support the motion were the Democratic Alliance, Freedom Front Plus, Cope and the African Christian Democratic Party
...
"The time for reconciliation is over. Now is the time for justice," Mr Malema was quoted by News24 as telling parliament. "We must ensure that we restore the dignity of our people without compensating the criminals who stole our land."
...
Mr Malema has been leading calls for land confiscation, forcing the ANC to follow suit out of fear of losing the support of poorer black voters. In 2016, he told supporters he was "not calling for the slaughter of white people‚ at least for now"

This policy has been tried in other African countries before, most recently Zimbabwe, with disastrous results. The farms appropriated usually fail rapidly, leading to food shortages and economic destruction. Will South Africa be able to avoid repeating history, or is it about to slide into 3rd World status?

Original Submission

PastTense writes:

5G is – surprise, surprise – dominating this year's Mobile World Congress [MWC] as more emphasis is heaped on how non-telco vertical sectors can use the fledgling technology.

Unlike 4G or any previous cellular generation, 5G aims to cover a wider set of use cases from the outset: not only enhanced mobile broadband, but also massive machine-type communications and ultra-reliable low latency applications. The new capabilities could broaden cellular-based networks to potential new users, particularly in vertical industries from automotive to factory automation.

To achieve that, the telecom sector is seeking input from other verticals on 5G use cases and technical requirements that will help them to shape standards. During the last 18 months to two years, the telecom industry has been urging vertical sectors to get involved and there are now signs of engagement.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/02/27/5g_finds_vertical_home/

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Google releases info on 2.4 million 'right to be forgotten' requests

Google has received 2.4 million "right to be forgotten" requests since 2014, most of which came from private individuals, according to its latest transparency report. Europe's biggest court passed the right to be forgotten law in 2014, compelling the tech titan to remove personal info from its search engine upon request. In the report, Google has revealed that it complied with 43.3 percent of all the requests it's gotten and has also detailed the nature of those takedown pleas.

France, Germany and the UK apparently generated 51 percent of all the URL delisting appeals. Overall, 89 percent of the takedown pleas came from private individuals: Non-government figures such as celebrities submitted 41,213 of the URLs in Google's pile, while politicians and government officials submitted 33,937. As Gizmodo noted, though, there's a small group of law firms and reputation management services submitting numerous pleas, suggesting the rise of reputation-fixing business in the region.

Three years of the right to be forgotten

Also at The Verge and Search Engine Land.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Amazon has acquired Ring for over $1 billion:

Amazon said Tuesday that it had acquired Ring, a maker of internet-connected doorbells and cameras, pushing more deeply into the home security market. The deal is worth around $1.1 billion, according to a person briefed on the deal who would speak only anonymously because the terms were private.

Ring is best known for a doorbell with a security camera inside. The device allows homeowners to monitor visitors at their front door through an app on their phone, even if they're not at home. Amazon has made home automation a major focus because of the success of its Echo family of products, which allow users to control thermostats, surveillance cameras and other connected devices using voice commands.

[...] James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research, said he believed that Amazon had bought Ring so it could add more intelligent capabilities to its doorbells and cameras, like the ability to use software to recognize faces at the front door. "I think it's about going to the next level and having Alexa say, 'James, your fifth grader just walked in, and I locked the door behind them,'" he said. "It's where these technologies have to go."

Also at The Verge.

Related: Amazon Wants to Deliver Purchases into Your Home
Amazon Key Flaw Could Let Rogue Deliverymen Disable Your Camera

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

There's a better way to use a standing desk

[...] some research suggests that even regular exercise—as much as 60 minutes per day—is not enough to offset the effects of sedentary workdays.

A standing desk, seems like a great way to combat this problem, since it's unlikely that computer use will decrease anytime soon. But turns out that when you do the opposite of sitting—standing for incredibly long periods of the day—well, that's bad for you, too. A highly-cited study out last year in the Journal of Epidemiology on 7,000 office workers found that, "Occupations involving predominantly standing were associated with an approximately 2-fold risk of heart disease compared with occupations involving predominantly sitting."

Alan Taylor, a physiology expert at Nottingham University, told the Chicago Tribune that the expansion and popularity of standing desks has been largely driven not by scientific evidence, but rather by popularity and profit.

Welcome to medical science.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A team of astronomers led by Carnegie's Meredith MacGregor and Alycia Weinberger detected a massive stellar flare -- an energetic explosion of radiation -- from the closest star to our own Sun, Proxima Centauri, which occurred last March. This finding, published in Astrophysical Journal Letters, raises questions about the habitability of our Solar System's nearest exoplanetary neighbor, Proxima b, which orbits Proxima Centauri.

MacGregor, Weinberger and their colleagues -- the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics' David Wilner and Adam Kowalski and Steven Cranmer of the University of Colorado Boulder -- discovered the enormous flare when they reanalyzed observations taken last year by Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, or ALMA, a radio telescope made up of 66 antennae.

At peak luminosity it was 10 times brighter than our Sun's largest flares when observed at similar wavelengths. Stellar flares have not been well studied at the wavelengths detected by ALMA, especially around stars of Proxima Centauri's type, called M dwarfs, which are the most common in our galaxy.

"March 24, 2017 was no ordinary day for Proxima Cen," said lead author MacGregor.

The flare increased Proxima Centauri's brightness by 1,000 times over 10 seconds. This was preceded by a smaller flare; taken together, the whole event lasted fewer than two minutes of the 10 hours that ALMA observed the star between January and March of last year.

[...] "It's likely that Proxima b was blasted by high energy radiation during this flare," MacGregor explained, adding that it was already known that Proxima Centauri experienced regular, although smaller, x-ray flares. "Over the billions of years since Proxima b formed, flares like this one could have evaporated any atmosphere or ocean and sterilized the surface, suggesting that habitability may involve more than just being the right distance from the host star to have liquid water."

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Apple moves to store iCloud keys in China, raising human rights fears

When Apple Inc begins hosting Chinese users' iCloud accounts in a new Chinese data center at the end of this month to comply with new laws there, Chinese authorities will have far easier access to text messages, email and other data stored in the cloud.

That's because of a change to how the company handles the cryptographic keys needed to unlock an iCloud account. Until now, such keys have always been stored in the United States, meaning that any government or law enforcement authority seeking access to a Chinese iCloud account needed to go through the U.S. legal system.

Now, according to Apple, for the first time the company will store the keys for Chinese iCloud accounts in China itself. That means Chinese authorities will no longer have to use the U.S. courts to seek information on iCloud users and can instead use their own legal system to ask Apple to hand over iCloud data for Chinese users, legal experts said.

Human rights activists say they fear the authorities could use that power to track down dissidents, citing cases from more than a decade ago in which Yahoo Inc handed over user data that led to arrests and prison sentences for two democracy advocates. Jing Zhao, a human rights activist and Apple shareholder, said he could envisage worse human rights issues arising from Apple handing over iCloud data than occurred in the Yahoo case.

Also at WSJ and TechCrunch.

Related: Apple now relies on Google Cloud Platform and Amazon S3 for iCloud data

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Neural networks are powerful things, but they need a lot of juice. Engineers at MIT have now developed a new chip that cuts neural nets' power consumption by up to 95 percent, potentially allowing them to run on battery-powered mobile devices.

Smartphones these days are getting truly smart, with ever more AI-powered services like digital assistants and real-time translation. But typically the neural nets crunching the data for these services are in the cloud, with data from smartphones ferried back and forth.

That's not ideal, as it requires a lot of communication bandwidth and means potentially sensitive data is being transmitted and stored on servers outside the user's control. But the huge amounts of energy needed to power the GPUs neural networks run on make it impractical to implement them in devices that run on limited battery power.

Engineers at MIT have now designed a chip that cuts that power consumption by up to 95 percent by dramatically reducing the need to shuttle data back and forth between a chip's memory and processors.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

PastTense writes:

Vodafone and Nokia have joined forces to bring 4G to a barren, characterless expanse (no, we don't mean Surrey suburbia). From 2019 LTE will be available on the moon.

The network is intended to support a mission by Berlin company PTScientists, along with Vodafone Germany and Audi, to achieve the first privately funded Moon landing.

Mission to the Moon is due to launch in 2019 from Cape Canaveral on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

Vodafone's network will be used to set up the Moon's first 4G network, connecting two Audi Lunar Quattro rovers to a base station in the Autonomous Landing and Navigation Module (ALINA).

The base station should be able to broadcast 4G using the 1800 MHz frequency band and send back live HD video feed of the Moon's surface, which will be broadcast to a global audience via a deep space link.

4G found on Moon

Original Submission