Facebook on Monday said it had struck a deal with Australian lawmakers to pay local publishers for their news content, after the government finally agreed to change some of the terms within its new media code. From a report: The agreement ends Facebook's temporary ban on sharing news links on its platform in the country. Data showed that the link-sharing ban caused news traffic to plummet in the region. It also ends Facebook's global ban on users' sharing links to Australian news publishers. Facebook's decision to stop link-sharing was made in response to a new law that would have forced Google and Facebook to pay Australian news publishers for content, including headlines and links, with terms set by a third party, if they weren't able to come up with payout agreements with local publishers themselves. Google struck last-minute payout deals with big Australian publishers last week so that it wouldn't have to skirt the law and pull Google Search from the country. Facebook did not. The law was intended to benefit publishers, but the impact of Facebook's link ban showed the power the tech giants have over publishers, who lost a large volume of traffic during the confrontation.

ZDNet reports: A handful of technology giants operating in Australia have agreed on a code of practice that aims to stem disinformation on their respective platforms. All signatories — Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Redbubble, TikTok, and Twitter — have committed to the Australian Code of Practice on Disinformation and Misinformation. They have also committed to releasing an annual transparency report about their efforts under the code...

[The Code] provides seven guiding principles, with the first aimed at protecting freedom of expression. "Signatories should not be compelled by governments or other parties to remove content solely on the basis of its alleged falsity if the content would not otherwise be unlawful," the code said. Another is centred on protecting user privacy and notes that any actions taken by digital platforms to address the propagation of disinformation and misinformation should not contravene commitments they have made to respect the privacy of Australian users...

"Empowering users" is another principle, that is to enable users to make informed choices about digital media content that purports to be a source of authoritative current news or of factual information. Signatories also commited to supporting independent researchers and having policies and processes concerning advertising placements implemented.

Neel V. Patel, writing at MIT Technology Review: Einstein first predicted the existence of black holes when he published his theory of general relativity in 1916, describing how gravity shapes the fabric of spacetime. But astronomers didn't spot one until 1964, some 6,070 light-years away in the Cygnus constellation. Geiger counters launched into space detected cosmic x-rays coming from a region called Cygnus X-1. (We now know the cosmic rays are produced by black holes. Back then, scientists disagreed about what it was: Stephen Hawking famously bet physicist Kip Thorne that this signal was not from a black hole, but he conceded in 1990.) Now, some 57 years later, scientists have learned that the black hole at Cygnus X-1 is much more massive than first believed -- forcing us to once again rethink how black holes form and evolve. This time, the observations were taken from Earth's surface. "To some extent, the result was serendipitous," says James Miller-Jones of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research at Curtin University in Australia, the lead author of the new study, published in Science. "We had not initially set out to remeasure the distance and black hole mass, but when we had analyzed our data, we realized its full potential."

Black holes are objects so massive that not even light, let alone physical matter, is supposed to escape its gravitational pull. Yet sometimes one inexplicably spews jets of radiation and ionized matter into space. Miller-Jones and his team wanted to investigate how matter is sucked into and expelled from black holes, so they took a closer look at Cygnus X-1. They observed the black hole for six days using the Very Long Baseline Array, a network of 10 radio telescopes sited across North America from Hawaii to the Virgin Islands. The resolution is comparable to what would be required to spot a 10-centimeter object on the moon, and it's the same technique that the Event Horizon Telescope used to snap the first photo of a black hole. Using a combination of measurements involving radio waves and temperatures, the team modeled the precise orbits of both Cygnus X-1's black hole and the massive supergiant star HDE 226868 (the two objects orbit each other). Knowing the orbits of each object allowed the team to extrapolate their masses -- in the case of the black hole, 21 solar masses, which is about 50% more than once thought.

Internet pioneer Tim Berners-Lee has said Australia's plan to make tech giants pay for journalism could render the internet as we know it "unworkable." From a report: The inventor of the World Wide Web claimed that proposed laws could disrupt the established order of the internet. "Specifically, I am concerned that that code risks breaching a fundamental principle of the web by requiring payment for linking between certain content online," Berners-Lee told a Senate committee scrutinizing a bill that would create the New Media Bargaining Code. If the code is deployed globally, it could "make the web unworkable around the world," he said.

Facebook has restricted access to news in Australia, and so far the tech giant seems to have taken a pretty broad definition of news. From a report: Some pages that don't fit the traditional news genre have been stripped out as part of the stoush between Facebook and the federal government over whether the social media company should pay for Australian content it runs on its site. In response to the outages, Facebook said government pages should not be hit by the changes. A spokesperson said any inadvertently impacted pages would be fixed. "As the law does not provide clear guidance on the definition of news content, we have taken a broad definition in order to respect the law as drafted," the spokesperson said in a statement. [...] Post are down for the Bureau of Meteorology, the government agency responsible for providing weather service updates. [...] The health departments for the ACT, South Australia and Queensland have had posts taken down. [...] Law enforcement has also been caught by the ban. Content under the "latest news" tab for the Victoria Police Facebook page is unavailable. [...] Domestic, family and sexual violence services 1800RESPECT and DVConnect have had posts taken down. Also affected is the Australian Council of Trade Unions. [...] Other pages which have been stripped of their content include Urban List, which offer restaurant reviews, satire sites like the The Betoota Advocate and The Shovel, and even homemaker magazines like Home Beautiful.

Facebook said Wednesday that it would no longer allow Australian publishers to share news on Facebook or allow Australian people to view or share international news sources. From a report: The change comes as Australia prepares to pass a law that would require companies like Facebook and Google to pay news publishers to carry their stories. "The proposed law fundamentally misunderstands the relationship between our platform and publishers who use it to share news content. It has left us facing a stark choice: attempt to comply with a law that ignores the realities of this relationship, or stop allowing news content on our services in Australia," Facebook's managing director of Australia and New Zealand, William Easton, wrote in a blog post. "With a heavy heart, we are choosing the latter." Before Facebook's announcement Wednesday, Google and News Corp struck a deal through which Google will pay the company -- which owns The Wall Street Journal, Barron's, MarketWatch and The New York Post -- to feature their stories in Google News Showcase. Facebook addressed the companies' divergent responses in the blog post. "Our platforms have fundamentally different relationships with news. Google Search is inextricably intertwined with news and publishers do not voluntarily provide their content," Easton wrote. "On the other hand, publishers willingly choose to post news on Facebook, as it allows them to sell more subscriptions, grow their audiences and increase advertising revenue." Easton went on to describe the "business gains" of news on Facebook as "minimal," writing that it accounts for 4% of all content on the platform.

"Microsoft has said the USA should copy Australia's plan to force Google and Facebook to pay for links to news content," reports The Register, "and suggested that doing so will help improve social cohesion and strengthen democracy." But Google has fired back with a statement asserting that Microsoft's motives are impure. "Of course they'd be eager to impose an unworkable levy on a rival and increase their market share," wrote Kent Walker, Google's chief legal officer.

Microsoft's suggestion to the Biden administration came from company president Brad Smith arrived in a Thursday blog post that opens: "As the dust slowly settles on a horrifying assault on the Capitol, it's apparent that American democracy is in a fragile state." Smith attributed much of that fragility to disinformation spreading on social media and "the erosion of more traditional, independent and professional journalism... The internet eroded the news business as dotcoms like Craigslist disrupted advertising revenue, news aggregators lured away readers, and search engines and social media giants devoured both," Smith wrote...

Smith also points out that Microsoft's decision to support Australia's plan and pay local news outlets quickly saw Google CEO Sundar Pichai call Australian prime minister Scott Morrison, then asserts that Pichai only did so once the prospect of increased competition roused him to action.

"At the end of the day, what is wrong with compensating independent news organizations for the benefits the tech gatekeepers derive from this content?" Smith asks.

Microsoft is calling for the US and the EU to follow Australia in introducing rules that require technology companies to share revenue with news organizations and support journalism. The Guardian reports: The company, which stood against Facebook and Google in supporting the proposal, argues that it is necessary to impose such a levy to create a level playing field between large tech firms and independent media organizations. Australia's proposal requires large technology companies to not only pay a fee for news content they use or link to, but to agree to partake in arbitration to determine that fee. In response, Facebook and Google threatened to pull services from the country, while Microsoft took the opposite tack: eagerly stepping up to promote Bing, which currently has fewer than one in 20 searches in Australia, as an alternative.

In a blog post, Brad Smith, Microsoft's president, said that he felt the Australian rule "deserves serious consideration, including in the United States." "Democracy has always started at the local level. Today, far too many local communities must nurture democracy without a fourth estate," Smith wrote. "As we know from our own experience with Microsoft's Bing search service, access to fresh, broad and deep news coverage is critical to retaining strong user engagement." "Our endorsement of Australia's approach has had immediate impact," Smith argued. "Within 24 hours, Google was on the phone with the prime minister, saying they didn't really want to leave the country after all. And the link on Google's search page with its threat to leave? It disappeared overnight. Apparently, competition does make a difference."

Smith says the change in U.S. government could be a chance for Washington to switch its position. "Facebook and Google persuaded the Trump administration to object to Australia's proposal. However, as the United States takes stock of the events on January 6 [the attack on the Capitol in Washington], it's time to widen the aperture. The ultimate question is what values we want the tech sector and independent journalism to serve. Yes, Australia's proposal will reduce the bargaining imbalance that currently favors tech gatekeepers and will help increase opportunities for independent journalism. But this a defining issue of our time that goes to the heart of our democratic freedoms."

necro81 writes: Back in March 2020, NASA shut down the Australia dish in its Deep Space Network for repairs and upgrades. For the duration of the outage, NASA had no means for communicating with Voyager 2. From the NYTimes:

On Friday, Earth's haunting silence will come to an end as NASA switches that communications channel back on, restoring humanity's ability to say hello to its distant explorer.

Because of the direction in which it is flying out of the solar system, Voyager 2 can only receive commands from Earth via one antenna in the entire world. It's called DSS 43 and it is in Canberra, Australia. It is part of the Deep Space Network, or DSN, which along with stations in California and Spain, is how NASA and allied space agencies stay in touch with the armada of robotic spacecraft exploring everything from the sun's corona to the regions of the Kuiper belt beyond the orbit of Pluto. (Voyager 2's twin, Voyager 1, is able to communicate with the other two stations.)

A round-trip communication with Voyager 2 takes about 35 hours --17 hours and 35 minutes each way....

While Voyager 2 was able to call home on the Canberra site's smaller dishes during the shutdown, none of them could send commands to the probe....

NASA ... did send one test message to the spacecraft at the end of October when the antenna was mostly reassembled.

Google has launched a limited version of its News Showcase in Australia despite threatening to pull Search from the nation a fortnight ago. ZDNet reports: News Showcase, Google claims, provides an "enhanced view" of articles, and aims to give participating news publishers more ways to share important news to readers while having "more direct control of presentation and branding." The product will appear across Google News on Android, iOS and the mobile web, and in Discover on iOS.

As part of the initial version of News Showcase in Australia, seven local news publishers have partnered with the search giant, Google APAC news, web and publishing head Kate Beddoe said in a blog post. "The initial publishers featured in today's launch were among the first globally to sign up, providing early feedback and input on how the product could help bring their journalism to the fore for readers," she said. The Australian publications included in the initial version of Google News Showcase are The Canberra Times, The Illawarra Mercury, The Saturday Paper, Crikey, The New Daily, InDaily, and The Conversation.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Technology that harnesses wave energy through a "blowhole" is being tested at a remote Tasmanian island in a project backed by federal grants and investors. When the mostly above-water unit is connected in about a month, King Island in Bass Strait will be powered by three renewables -- wave, wind and solar. And there are hopes the project can be expanded across Australia's vast southern coastline.

Wave Swell Energy co-founder Tom Denniss says the pilot will provide crucial data about the system's potential. "It's very much like an artificial blowhole," he said. "There's a big underwater chamber that's open out the front, so the water is forced into the chamber. "It pushes that air back and forth. The movement of air that spins the turbine and produces electricity." Research by the peak scientific body estimates wave energy could contribute up to 11% of the nation's energy by 2050, the equivalent of a city the size of Melbourne. The boat-like structure can generate up to 200kW of power but there are plans for larger 1,000kW models.

Microsoft has moved to capitalise on Google's threat to shut its search engine in Australia, throwing its weight behind efforts to make Big Tech pay for news content and offering to transfer small businesses to its rival service Bing at no cost. From a report: The Seattle-based company on Wednesday slammed Google's threat to exit Australia [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source] over the news media bargaining code and said it fully supported a draft law aimed at forcing technology groups to pay news providers for content. "One thing is clear: while other tech companies may sometimes threaten to leave Australia, Microsoft will never make such a threat," said Brad Smith, Microsoft's president, in a statement. "We are committed to supporting the country's national security and economic success."

Canberra's proposed news media bargaining code would introduce binding arbitration and non-discrimination clauses to protect publishers and force Google and Facebook to negotiate payments for carrying their content. Google has a 94.5 per cent market share in search in Australia, while Microsoft's Bing search engine holds 3.6 per cent, according to StatCounter, a web analytics company. Microsoft's decision to throw down the gauntlet will complicate Google's aggressive lobbying campaign against the draft legislation, which it has called "unworkable" and "unreasonable." Mel Silva, Google Australia's chief executive, said last month that if the code became law, Google would have "no real choice but to stop providing search in Australia."

Popular "buy now, pay later" shopping services like Klarna will face stricter regulation under proposals announced by the U.K. government Tuesday. From a report: The Treasury said buy now, pay later (BNPL) firms would come under the supervision of the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), which regulates financial services firms and markets in Britain. Such firms will be required to conduct affordability checks before lending to customers, the government said, while people will also be allowed to escalate complaints to the U.K.'s financial ombudsman. BNPL products are used as an alternative to credit cards and have exploded in popularity during the coronavirus pandemic, as people turned to online shopping due to lockdown restrictions. Popularized by the Swedish start-up Klarna, these services let customers spread out the cost of their purchases over a period of interest-free instalments. Other companies in the space include Australia's Afterpay, which operates the Clearpay brand in the U.K., and Laybuy.

Software giant Microsoft is confident its search product Bing can fill the gap in Australia if Google pulls its search over required payments to media outlets, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said on Monday. From a report: Australia has introduced laws that would force internet giant Google and social media heavyweight Facebook Inc to negotiate payments to domestic media outlets whose content links drive traffic to their platforms. However, the Big Tech firms have called the laws unworkable and said last month they would withdraw key services from Australia if the regulations went ahead. Those services include Google's search engine, which has 94% of the country's search market, according to industry data. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has since spoken with Morrison about the new rules, the tech company told Reuters, and on Monday, Morrison said the software company was ready to grow the presence of its search tool Bing, the distant No. 2 player.

"Twenty five years ago I made a bet in the pages of Wired. It was a bet whether the world would collapse by the year 2020." So writes the 68-year-old founding executive editor of Wired magazine, Kevin Kelly.

He'd made the bet with a "Luddite-loving doomsayer," according to Wired — author Kirkpatrick Sale. "Sale while a student in the 1950s co-wrote a musical with Thomas Pynchon about escaping a dystopian America ruled by IBM," remembers Slashdot reader joeblog.

This month a new article in Wired re-visits that 25-year bet: They argued about the Amish, whether printing presses denuded forests, and the impact of technology on work. Sale believed it stole decent labor from people. Kelly replied that technology helped us make new things we couldn't make any other way. "I regard that as trivial," Sale said. Sale believed society was on the verge of collapse. That wasn't entirely bad, he argued. He hoped the few surviving humans would band together in small, tribal-style clusters. They wouldn't be just off the grid. There would be no grid. Which was dandy, as far as Sale was concerned...

Kelly then asked how, in a quarter century, one might determine whether Sale was right. Sale extemporaneously cited three factors: an economic disaster that would render the dollar worthless, causing a depression worse than the one in 1930; a rebellion of the poor against the monied; and a significant number of environmental catastrophes... "I bet you $1,000 that in the year 2020, we're not even close to the kind of disaster you describe," Kelly said. Sale barely had $1,000 in his bank account. But he figured that if he lost, a thousand bucks would be worth much less in 2020 anyway. He agreed... "Oh, boy," Kelly said after Sale wrote out the check. "This is easy money."

Twenty-five years later, the once distant deadline is here. We are locked down. Income equality hasn't been this bad since just before the Great Depression. California and Australia were on fire this year. We're about to find out how easy that money is... Sale failed to account for how human ingenuity would keep us from getting tossed into forests and caves. Kelly didn't factor in tech companies' reckless use of power or their shortcomings in solving (or sometimes stoking) tough societal problems...

Sale believes more than ever that society is basically crumbling — the process is just not far enough along to drive us from apartment blocks to huts. The collapse, he says, is "not like a building imploding and falling down, but like a slow avalanche that destroys and kills everything in its path, until it finally buries the whole village forever."

"I cannot accept that I lost," he wrote... "The clear trajectory of disasters shows that the world is much closer to my prediction. So clearly it cannot be said that Kevin won..."

Kelly warns Sale that history will recall him as a man who doesn't honor his word. But Sale doesn't believe that there will be a history.
Kelly responded by offering Sale a second double-or-nothing bet: I believe that we are in fact on the eve of a 25-year period of global progress and prosperity, the likes of which we have not seen before on this planet. In 25 years, poverty will be rare, and middle class lifestyle the norm. War between nations will also be rare. A bulk of our energy will be renewables, slowing down climate warming. Lifespans continue to lengthen. I'll bet on it.
Kelly added later that his rival "did not take me up on the double or nothing offer."

"More than at any point since the QAnon conspiracy began, there is a tremendous opportunity to pull disaffected followers out of the conspiracy," writes FiveThirtyEight. And while it's just one of three possible scenarios, online posts suggest at least some members are abandoning the group, "but they will need support to really sever their connection."

ABC News reports that some QAnon adherents "are turning to therapy and online support groups to talk about the damage done when beliefs collide with reality," including Ceally Smith, a working single mom in Kansas City: "We as a society need to start teaching our kids to ask: Where is this information coming from? Can I trust it?" she said. "Anyone can cut and paste anything." After a year, Smith wanted out, suffocated by dark prophesies that were taking up more and more of her time, leaving her terrified....

Another ex-believer, Jitarth Jadeja, now moderates a Reddit forum called QAnon Casualties to help others like him, as well as the relatives of people still consumed by the theory. Membership has doubled in recent weeks to more than 119,000 members. Three new moderators had to be added just to keep up. "They are our friends and family," said Jadeja, of Sydney, Australia. "It's not about who is right or who is wrong. I'm here to preach empathy, for the normal people, the good people who got brainwashed by this death cult." His advice to those fleeing QAnon? Get off social media, take deep breaths, and pour that energy and internet time into local volunteering.

Michael Frink is a Mississippi computer engineer who helps administer a QAnon recovery channel on the social media platform Telegram. He said that while mocking the group has never been more popular online, it will only further alienate people. Frink said he never believed in the QAnon theory but sympathizes with those who did. "I think after the inauguration a lot of them realized they've been taken for a ride," he said.
The New York Times tells the story of one Bernie Sanders supporter who entered — and then exited — the QAnon movement: Those who do leave are often filled with shame. Sometimes their addiction was so severe that they have become estranged from family and friends... "We felt we were coming from a place of moral superiority. We were part of a special club." Meanwhile, her family was eating takeout all the time since she had stopped cooking and her stress levels had shot up, causing her blood pressure medication to stop working. Her doctor, worried, doubled her dose...

When she first left QAnon, she felt a lot of shame and guilt. It was also humbling: Ms. Perron, who has a master's degree, had looked down on Scientologists as people who believed crazy things. But there she was...

She agreed to speak for this article to help others who are still in the throes of QAnon.
And CNN reporter Anderson Cooper recently interviewed a recovering QAnon supporter, who tells him there were many theories about Cooper, including one that said he was actually a robot. The embarrassed former QAnon supporter admits that he had once believed that the people behind Q "were actually a group of 5th dimensional, intra-dimensional, extraterrestrial bi-pedal bird aliens called blue avians."

During that interview, he also tells Anderson Cooper, "I apologize for thinking that you ate babies."

Slashdot reader DevNull127 writes: This week a security researcher discovered a bot on Telegram that sold the phone numbers of Facebook users for $20 apiece. "The security researcher who found this vulnerability, Alon Gal, says that the person who runs the bot claims to have the information of 533 million users, which came from a Facebook vulnerability that was patched in 2019," reported the Verge. Motherboard reported the bot was also offering "bulk" pricing, selling 10,000 phone numbers for $5,000.

Telegram told the New York Post that they'd blocked the bot Tuesday morning, while Facebook downplayed the incident, reminding the Post "This is old data." But the Post notes that Facebook already had more than 1.6 billion daily active users in September 2019, and security researcher Alon Gal posted a count of the millions of affected users in each country, finding 32,315,282 in America, 11,522,328 in the United Kingdom, 7,320,478 in Australia, and 3,494,385 in Canada.

But the Verge points out the most ominous message of the breach: that ""the data is still out there on the web" — and that it's already resurfaced, more than once, in the days since it was initially scraped.

Android users in the U.S. will soon gain access to betting and gambling apps through the Play Store, Google announced Thursday. CNET reports: As of March 1, online casino games, sports betting, lotteries and daily fantasy sports apps will be allowed in certain states. You can see a complete list of what types of gambling apps are allowed in each state on Google's support website.

To be eligible, app makers must complete a gambling application form, comply with state and country laws where the app is being used and have a valid gambling license for each state or country it wants to operate in. These apps must be rated adult only and display information about responsible gambling. Apps must also ensure they prevent minors from being able to use the app, and the app cannot be a paid app on Google Play or use Google Play in-app billing. Other countries gaining access to betting and gambling apps include: Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Romania, Spain, Sweden and the UK.

Google has threatened to disable its search engine in Australia if it's forced to pay local publishers for news, a dramatic escalation of a months-long standoff with the government. From a report: The proposed law, intended to compensate publishers for the value their stories generate for the company, is "unworkable," Mel Silva, managing director for Australia and New Zealand, told a parliamentary hearing Friday. She specifically opposed the requirement that Google pay media companies for displaying snippets of articles in search results.

The threat is Google's most potent yet as the digital giant tries to stem a flow of regulatory action worldwide. At least 94% of online searches in Australia go through the Alphabet unit, according to the local competition regulator. "We don't respond to threats," Australia Prime Minister Scott Morrison said Friday. "Australia makes our rules for things you can do in Australia. That's done in our parliament. It's done by our government. And that's how things work here in Australia."

"At least 10,000 Signal users can be attributed to a 12-year-old kid in India who created a somewhat popular clone of the encrypted chat app," reports Motherboard: Dev Sharma, a Signal user from Melbourne, Australia, found the Signal clone when he encountered an unusual thing: Signal displayed a pop-up showing that their friend had just joined the app. Sharma messaged their friend, but the friend had never even heard of Signal, despite apparently using the app. The friend had downloaded a different app called "Calls Chat," according to a tweet from Dev. It turned out, Calls Chat is actually a clone of Signal and lets users communicate with people on the legitimate Signal app.

The app may have been harmless in this instance, but its existence and thousands of downloads shows how it can be relatively easy for someone to take the open source code of Signal and repurpose it for their own means, potentially misleading users about what they're actually downloading in the process. "I didn't know I was creating a clone of Signal, in fact I didn't even know such an app existed," Dheeraj, the boy who made the clone, told Motherboard in a phone call...

The Google Play Store bars developers from impersonating other apps or making others that are deceptive, however. Google told Motherboard on Wednesday that the chat app is no longer available on the Play Store.