Google's autonomous drone delivery service is spreading its wings. After starting deliveries last month in Australia's capital city, Canberra, Project Wing is now moving into Finland's capital, Helsinki. TechCrunch reports: Drone deliveries will start next month -- which may just make the "spring" time frame it announced late last year. Like the Australian deliveries, this is considered a "pilot" program, with select goods and limited geography. Specifically, things are being test driven in the Vuosaari distract -- the city's most populated.

Wing notes on its Medium page: "Vuosaari is an inspiring locale for Wing in several ways. Helsinki's most populous district, it is bordered by water on three sides, with significant forestland alongside residential areas and a large international cargo port. The density of Vuosaari's population makes it a great place to launch our first service to multi-family housing communities as well." The program will kick off with two partners: gourmet super market, Herkku Food Mark and Cafe Monami. That means everything from salmon sandwiches to pastries delivered via drone.

The U.S. will not sign onto the "Christchurch call to action" against online extremism expected to be released Wednesday, citing concerns that the pact would violate free speech protections in the First Amendment, the Washington Post reports. From a report: The document, negotiated by New Zealand and French officials as a commitment to study and stop the spread of online extremism that motivated the Christchurch mosque shootings earlier this year, is expected to be signed by Australia, Canada and the U.K., among others. It also has the support of major U.S. tech companies, including Facebook and Google, whose platforms were used to livestream and host videos of the attack.

While the pros and cons of drinking coffee have been debated for decades, new research from the University of South Australia reveals that drinking six or more coffees a day can be detrimental to your health, increasing your risk of heart disease by up to 22 percent. From a report: In Australia, one in six people are affected by cardiovascular disease. It is a major cause of death with one person dying from the disease every 12 minutes. According to the World Health Organization, cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death, yet one of the most preventable. Investigating the association of long-term coffee consumption and cardiovascular disease, UniSA researchers Dr Ang Zhou and Professor Elina Hypponen of the Australian Centre for Precision Health say their research confirms the point at which excess caffeine can cause high blood pressure, a precursor to heart disease.

This is the first time an upper limit has been placed on safe coffee consumption and cardiovascular health. "Coffee is the most commonly consumed stimulant in the world -- it wakes us up, boosts our energy and helps us focus -- but people are always asking 'How much caffeine is too much?'," Prof Hypponen says. "Most people would agree that if you drink a lot of coffee, you might feel jittery, irritable or perhaps even nauseous -- that's because caffeine helps your body work faster and harder, but it is also likely to suggest that you may have reached your limit for the time being.

Long-time Slashdot reader William Robinson writes: Using cores drilled from coral, scientists have been able to produce the first 400-year-long seasonal record of El Niño events. "This understanding of El Niño events is vital because they produce extreme weather across the globe with particularly profound effects on precipitation and temperature extremes in Australia, South East Asia and the Americas," reports Phys.org.

The results? A new category of El Niño "has become far more prevalent in the last few decades than at any time in the past four centuries," reports Scientific American. "Over the same period, traditional El Niño events have become more intense."
Obtaining this data was considered impossible, until a Melbourne PhD researcher realized that coral cores, like tree rings, captured the "signature" of El Niño events going back for several centuries, according to the article. They were then able to identify that signature using machine learning techniques, and after three years of work produced the 400-year record.

The study's lead author now says that "By understanding the past, we are better equipped to understand the future, especially in the context of climate change."

the_newsbeagle writes: While the Google spinoff Wing is just launching its first commercial service in Australia (scones and coffee are on the menu) and getting FAA clearance to operate in the United States, a company called Zipline is already offering a nationwide service in Rwanda. Zipline currently uses its fixed-wing drones to deliver blood products to hospitals across the country, and will soon begin delivering other medical supplies as well.

Medical supplies seem like they could be a killer app for delivery drones, since they're often lightweight and urgently needed. But Zipline hasn't yet proven that its business model is sustainable. So two technology reporters from IEEE Spectrum traveled to Rwanda to embed themselves in a Zipline operations center, and produced an in-depth report and a 360 video about the company's logistics and technology.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A small Cessna soared high above the Mojave Desert recently, its engine growling in the choppy morning air. As the aircraft skirted the mountains on the edge of Death Valley National Park, a clutch of passengers and environmentalists peered intently at a broiling salt flat thousands of feet below. The desolate beauty of the Panamint Valley has long drawn all manner of naturalists, adventurers and social outcasts -- including Charles Manson -- off-road vehicle riders and top gun fighter pilots who blast overhead in simulated dogfights.

Now this prehistoric lake bed is shaping up to be an unlikely battleground between environmentalists and battery technologists who believe the area might hold the key to a carbon-free future. Recently, the Australia-based firm Battery Mineral Resources asked the federal government for permission to drill four exploratory wells to see if the hot, salty brine beneath the valley floor contains economically viable concentrations of lithium. The soft, silvery-white metal is a key component of rechargeable lithium-ion batteries and is crucial to the production of electric and hybrid vehicles.

The drilling request has generated strong opposition from the Center for Biological Diversity, the Sierra Club and the Defenders of Wildlife, who say the drilling project would be an initial step toward the creation of a full-scale lithium mining operation. They say lithium extraction would bring industrial sprawl, large and unsightly drying ponds and threaten a fragile ecosystem that supports Nelson's bighorn sheep, desert tortoises and the Panamint alligator lizard, among other species.

Global security officials agreed a set of proposals on Friday for future 5G networks, highlighting concerns about equipment supplied by vendors that might be subject to state influence. From a report: No suppliers were named, but the United States has been pressing allies to limit the role of Chinese telecom equipment makers such as Huawei over concerns their gear could be used by Beijing for spying. Huawei denies this. "The overall risk of influence on a supplier by a third country should be taken into account," participants at the conference in the Czech capital said in a non-binding statement released on the last day of the two-day gathering. Representatives from 30 European Union, NATO and countries such as the United States, Germany, Japan and Australia attended the meeting to hash out an outline of practices that could form a coordinated approach to shared security and policy measures.

AmiMoJo writes: The UK government has given Chinese telecoms giant Huawei the go-ahead to supply equipment for the UK 5G data network. The company will help build some "non-core" parts such as antennas. But the plans have concerned the home, defense and foreign secretaries. The U.S. also wants its allies in the "Five Eyes" intelligence grouping -- the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand -- to exclude Huawei. Huawei said it was "pleased that the UK is continuing to take an evidence-based approach to its work," adding it would continue to work cooperatively with the government and the industry.

"U.S. intelligence has accused Huawei Technologies of being funded by Chinese state security, The Times said on Saturday."

Long-time Slashdot reader hackingbear shares a story from Reuters: The CIA accused Huawei of receiving funding from China's National Security Commission, the People's Liberation Army and a third branch of the Chinese state intelligence network, the British newspaper reported, citing a source. Earlier this year, U.S. intelligence shared its claims with other members of the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing group, which includes Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, according to the report...

The accusation comes at a time of trade tensions between Washington and Beijing and amid concerns in the United States that Huawei's equipment could be used for espionage. The company has said the concerns are unfounded... top educational institutions in the West have recently severed ties with Huawei to avoid losing federal funding.

Panama disease, an infection that ravages banana plants, has been sweeping across Asia, Australia, the Middle East and Africa. The impact has been devastating. From a report: In the Philippines alone, losses have totalled US$400m. And the disease threatens not only the livelihoods of everyone in this US$44 billion industry but also the 400m people in developing countries who depend on bananas for a substantial proportion of their calorie intake. However, there may be hope. In an attempt to save the banana and the industry that produces it, scientists are in a race to create a new plant resistant to Panama disease. But perhaps this crisis is a warning that we are growing our food in an unsustainable way and we will need to look to more radical changes for a permanent solution.

secwatcher shares a report from Threatpost: A popular smartwatch that allows parents to track their children's whereabouts, TicTocTrack, has been discovered to be riddled with security issues that could allow hackers to track and call children. Researchers at Pen Test Partners revealed vulnerabilities in the watch (sold in Australia) on Monday, which could enable hackers to track children's location, spoof the child's location or view personal data on the victims' accounts. The parent company of the TicTocTrack watch, iStaySafe Pty Ltd., has temporarily restricted access to the watch's service and app while it investigates further. Researchers found that the service's back end does not make any authorization attempt on any request -- besides the user having a valid username and password combination. That means that an attacker who is logged into the service could remotely compromise the app and track other accounts that are based in Australia.

The smartwatch, available in Australia for $149 (USD), is designed for children and uses GPS to track the movement of the wearer every six minutes, and offers voice calling and SMS features. The smartwatch's API can be attacked by changing the FamilyIdentifier number (which identifies the family that the user belongs to), which then could give a bad actor complete access to the user's data -- including the children's location, parent's full names, phone numbers and other personal identifiable information. Researchers with Pen Test Partners collaborated with security researcher Troy Hunt to test the attack. Hunt uploaded a video showing how the smartwatch vulnerability could be exploited to call his daughter -- and how her smartwatch would answer automatically without any interaction needed from her end.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: An American company is to build a series of undersea cables linking Australia to China after the Aussie government put its foot down and kicked Huawei off the contract. Building on our reports from last year that Australia had blocked Huawei from building a 4,000km cable between Australia, Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, U.S. company TE Subcom has reportedly won the deal to build the link.

"All options for meshing the Pacific Islands are good for the development of the economies of these countries," Keir Preedy, chief executive of the Solomon Island Submarine Cable Company, told Reuters. The company is developing the Solomons' new cable. In addition to the Aus-PNG-Solomons route previously announced, TE Subcom will build a cable spur to Hong Kong -- Chinese territory. "It is due for completion in 2022 and also includes a possible trans-Pacific branch to Los Angeles," the newswire stated.

Alphabet's Wing drone delivery company is launching its first public drone delivery service in Canberra, Australia, after the country's aviation authority granted it regulatory approval. "Around 100 homes in the suburbs of Crace, Palmerston, and Franklin will initially have access to the service, but in the coming months the company plans to expand it to homes in Harrison and Gungahlin," reports The Verge. From the report: The service works by partnering with local businesses including coffee shops and pharmacies to deliver their products "in minutes." Wing's regulatory approval comes with restrictions. Drones will not be allowed to fly over main roads, they will only be allowed to fly between 7am and 8pm on Monday to Friday (or between 8am and 8pm on Sundays), and they will be restricted from flying too close to people. Customers in eligible homes will also be given a safety briefing about interacting with the drones. Wing predicts that drone deliveries could be worth as much as AU$30 to AU$40 million to businesses in the area, and says drones could deliver as many as one in four takeaway orders by 2030.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: Successive ocean heat waves are not only damaging Australia's Great Barrier Reef, they are compromising its ability to recover, raising the risk of "widespread ecological collapse," a new study has found. The 2,300-kilometer-long (1,500 mile) reef has endured multiple large-scale "bleaching" events caused by above-average water temperatures in the last two decades, including back-to-back occurrences in 2016 and 2017. The new study, released Wednesday in the journal Nature, examined the number of adult corals which survived these two events and how many new corals they created to replenish the reef in 2018.

The answer was as bleak as it was stark: "Dead corals don't make babies," the study's lead author, Terry Hughes, said in a press release. Scientists working on the study found the loss in adult corals caused a "crash in coral replenishment" on the reef, as heat stresses brought about by warming ocean temperatures impacted the ability of coral to heal. "The number of new corals settling on the Great Barrier Reef declined by 89% following the unprecedented loss of adult corals from global warming in 2016 and 2017," said Hughes. Scientists working on the report say they would expect coral recruitment to recover over the next 5 to 10 years, as more corals reach sexual maturity, but only in the absence of another bleaching event. However, with sea temperatures continuing to rise this seems a near-impossiblity.

The United Kingdom is working on legislation that would hold social media executives liable for harmful content distributed on their platforms. The leaked white paper comes less than 24 hours after Australia passed sweeping legislation that threatens huge fines for social media companies and jail for their executives if they fail to rapidly remove "abhorrent violent material" from their platforms. From the report: Under plans expected to be published on Monday, the government will legislate for a new statutory duty of care, to be policed by an independent regulator and likely to be funded through a levy on media companies. The regulator -- likely initially to be Ofcom, but in the longer term a new body -- will have the power to impose substantial fines against companies that breach their duty of care and to hold individual executives personally liable.

The scope of the recommendations is broad. As well as social media platforms such as Facebook and search engines such as Google they take in online messaging services and file hosting sites. Other proposals in the online harm white paper include:

- Government powers to direct the regulator on specific issues such as terrorist activity or child sexual exploitation.
- Annual "transparency reports" from social media companies, disclosing the prevalence of harmful content on their platforms and what they are doing to combat it.
- Co-operation with police and other enforcement agencies on illegal harms, such as incitement of violence and the sale of illegal weapons. "Companies will be asked to comply with a code of practice, setting out what steps they are taking to ensure that they meet the duty of care -- including by designing products and platforms to make them safer, and pointing users who have suffered harm towards support," the report says. "The code of practice is also likely to include the steps companies will be expected to take to combat disinformation, including by using fact-checking services, particularly during election periods, and improving the transparency of political advertising. Regulated firms will be expected to comply with the code of practice -- or explain what other steps they are taking to meet the duty of care. However, many questions are left to the regulator to determine."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Australia passed sweeping legislation Thursday that threatens huge fines for social media companies and jail for their executives (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source) if they fail to rapidly remove "abhorrent violent material" from their platforms. The law -- strongly opposed by the tech industry -- puts Australia at the forefront of a global movement to hold companies like Facebook and YouTube accountable for the content they host. It comes less than a month after a gunman, believed to be an Australian white nationalist, distributed a hate-filled manifesto online before using Facebook to live-stream the massacre of 50 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. Written quickly and without much input from technology companies or experts, the measure goes as far as any other democracy's attempt to punish multinational tech platforms for the behavior of their users. "The legislation criminalizes 'abhorrent violent material,' which it defines as videos that show terrorist attacks, murders, rape or kidnapping. Social media companies that fail to remove such content 'expeditiously' could face fines of up to 10 percent of their annual profit, and employees could be sentenced to up to three years in prison," the report adds. "Companies must also inform the police when illegal material is found."

"This law, which was conceived and passed in five days without any meaningful consultation, does nothing to address hate speech, which was the fundamental motivation for the tragic Christchurch terrorist attacks," said Sunita Bose, the managing director of the Digital Industry Group, an advocacy group representing Facebook, Google and other companies. "With the vast volumes of content uploaded to the internet every second, this is a highly complex problem that requires discussion with the technology industry, legal experts, the media and civil society to get the solution right -- that didn't happen this week."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Weeks after Steven Spielberg took a swing at Netflix and Hulu, the Hollywood legend had a change of heart about the medium, appearing at Apple's star-studded event to help the iPhone-maker launch a streaming service. The embrace comes as people are increasingly cutting their cable connections and moving to streaming services for their entertainment needs. Just last week, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), a trade body that represents major Hollywood studios and Netflix, reported that video streaming services now have more subscribers worldwide (613.3 million users) than those with a cable connection (some 556 million users). Another disruption is nigh. Revenue generated by streaming services is set to surpass worldwide theatrical revenue this year, according to research firm Ampere Analysis. Media and technology companies are naturally fighting for a piece of that pie.

Here's a look at some of the biggest rivals, the markets they operate in, and how they are trying to win customers. At the top of the list is Netflix, which began offering a streaming service in 2007, long before most companies even considered getting in the ring. This gave Netflix enough breathing room to bulk up its content catalog through licensing deals with cable networks and content studios. Twelve years later, Netflix has amassed 139 million subscribers in over 190 nations and territories. Following in Netflix's footsteps is Amazon, which has also made its Prime Video streaming service available in over 190 nations and territories. [...] While YouTube is the most-consumed video streaming app in most markets, Netflix is leading in revenue worldwide. As of 2018, Netflix generated more revenue than any other video streaming service -- and in some cases, more than any app in any category -- in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, Turkey, the U.K., the U.S., and Vietnam, among other markets, according to App Annie.

Cutting_Crew writes: After the last remaining Blockbuster Video store closed in Australia on March 31st, there is only one remaining left on earth. That location is in Bend, Oregon and seems to be a thriving location, where they write out membership cards by hand and the system is rebooted using floppy disks, apparently only something one person, the general manager, knows how to do. If you are wondering how there could be still blockbuster videos open since they went bankrupt back in 2010, the remaining stores left open were independent franchises and were separate from most of the other corporate stores, thus not part of the bankruptcy. There was also an Onion video before they even went bankrupt that's pretty funny. I remember getting a membership way back in late 90s and new releases were $8 per night. Even then, that seemed way too expensive. What are your most memorable (good or bad) memories of your local blockbuster?

"On Thursday, 41 scientists published the first worldwide analysis of a fungal outbreak that's been wiping out frogs for decades," The New York Times reports. The outbreak has caused more than 500 species of amphibians to decline significantly (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source), making it "the most deadly pathogen known to science." From the report: Scientists first noticed in the 1970s that some frog populations were declining quickly; by the 1980s, some species appeared to be extinct. The losses were puzzling, because the frogs were living in pristine habitats, unharmed by pollution or deforestation. In the late 1990s, researchers discovered that frogs in both Australia and Panama were infected with a deadly fungus, which they named Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis -- Bd, for short. The fungus turned up in other countries, but studies of its DNA suggest that Bd originated on the Korean Peninsula. In Asia, amphibians seem impervious to Bd, but when it got to other parts of the world â" probably via the international trade in pet amphibians -- the pathogen reached hundreds of vulnerable species.

Amphibians are infected with Bd by contact with other animals or by spores floating in the water. The fungus invades skin cells and multiplies. An infected frog's skin will start to peel away as the animal grows sluggish. Before it dies, a frog may manage to hop its way to a new stream or pond, spreading the fungus further. The fungus thrives in cool, moist conditions. As a result, frogs that live in cloud forests on mountainsides have been hit particularly hard. Big frogs are at a greater risk, too, possibly because they don't multiply as quickly as small ones. [The lead author of the new study and his colleagues] identified 501 species in decline, far greater than the previous estimate of 200. Certain factors once thought to account for the decimation of frog populations -- like climate change and deforestation -- are not the greatest threats, the scientists found. The study has been published in the journal Science.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: Following the livestreamed New Zealand mosque shooting that left 50 dead in Christchurch, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison is looking to crack down on extremist content on social media. Morrison will on Tuesday meet with Australian executives of Facebook, Twitter and Google to discuss extremist content legislation that would punish these companies' executives with jail time, the Australian Financial Review reports. Local internet service providers will also be present at the meeting.

Details of the proposed legislation aren't yet known. However, Europe's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which applies to any company operating in the continent, showed that tech companies can change their global practices to appease local legislation. News of Morrison's meeting with tech executives comes on the same day that his government announced increased punishment for companies misusing user information. Maximum penalties for misuse of private data was raised from AU$2.1 million to AU$10 million -- or 10 percent of the company's domestic revenue, or three times the value gained from that misuse of data.