If you need a safe haven on the internet, where the pipes are open and the freedoms are plentiful -- you might want to move to Estonia or Iceland. From a report: The latest "internet freedoms" rankings are out, courtesy of Freedom House's annual report into the state of internet freedoms and personal liberties, based on rankings of 65 countries that represent the vast majority of the world's internet users. Although the U.S. remains firmly in the top 10, it dropped a point on the year earlier after a recent rash of changes to internet regulation and a lack of in the realm of surveillance. Last year, the U.S. was 21 in the global internet freedom ranking -- the lower number, the better a country ranks. That was behind Estonia, Iceland, Canada, Germany and Australia. This year the U.S. is at 22 -- thanks to the repeal of net neutrality and the renewal of U.S. spy powers. The report also cited "disinformation and hyperpartisan content" -- or fake news -- as a "pressing concern."

Scientists are warning that if human beings continue to mine the world's wildernesses for resources and convert them into cities and farms at the pace of the previous century, the planet's few remaining wild places could disappear in decades. From a report: Today, more than 77 percent of land on earth, excluding Antarctica, has been modified by human industry, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature, up from just 15 percent a century ago. The study, led by researchers from the University of Queensland in Australia and the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York, paints the first global picture of the threat to the world's remaining wildernesses -- and the image is bleak. "We're on a threshold where whole systems could collapse and the consequences of that would be catastrophic," said James R. Allan, one of the study's authors. In the study, Mr. Allan and his colleagues urged the participants of a United Nations conference on biological diversity, scheduled for next month in Egypt, to protect all of the world's remaining wilderness areas. "We cannot afford to lose more," he said. "We must save it in its entirety."

Google announced this week that it has signed an agreement with New Zealand's Ministry of Education to provide all state and state integrated schools in the country with Chrome Education licenses. The three-year agreement goes into effect on November 1 next month. From a report: "Starting on November 1, as part of an agreement with Google and the New Zealand Ministry of Education, all state and state-integrated schools across New Zealand will be able to start claiming Ministry-funded Chrome Education licenses to manage new and existing unmanaged Chromebooks. The Chrome Education license was developed to make device management in schools a breeze, so that teachers and students can focus on what's most important -- teaching and learning. Equipped with the Chrome Education license, schools can utilize essential education features to better support the many ways Chromebooks are used in the classroom," says Suan Ye, Head of Google for Education, Australia and New Zealand.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Although the century-old technology has disappeared from most people's daily view, magnetic tape lives on as the preferred medium for safely archiving critical cloud data in case, say, a software bug deletes thousands of Gmail messages, or a natural disaster wipes out some hard drives. The world's electronic financial, health, and scientific records, collected on state-of-the-art cloud servers belonging to Amazon.com, Microsoft, Google, and others, are also typically recorded on tape around the same time they are created. Usually the companies keep one copy of each tape on-site, in a massive vault, and send a second copy to somebody like Iron Mountain. Unfortunately for the big tech companies, the number of tape manufacturers has shrunk over the past three years from six to just two -- Sony and Fujifilm -- and each seems to think that's still one too many.

The Japanese companies have said the tape business is a mere rounding error as far as they're concerned, but each has spent millions of dollars arguing before the U.S. International Trade Commission to try to ban the other from importing tapes to America. [...] The tech industry worries that if Sony or Fujifilm knocks the other out of the U.S., the winner will hike prices, meaning higher costs for the big cloud providers; for old-line storage makers, including IBM, HPE, and Quantum; and, ultimately, for all those companies' customers. [...] Although Sony and Fujifilm have each assured the trade commission that they could fill the gap if their rival's products were shut out of the U.S., the need for storage continues to grow well beyond old conceptions. Construction is slated to begin as soon as next year on the Square Kilometer Array, a radio telescope with thousands of antennas in South Africa and Australia meant to detect signals emitted more than 13 billion years ago. It's been estimated the project could generate an exabyte (1 billion gigabytes) of raw data every day, the equivalent of 300 times the material in the U.S. Library of Congress and a huge storage headache all by itself.

The publisher of video game Grand Theft Auto V has been granted the right to search the homes of five people accused of making cheat software. From a report: The court order allowed Rockstar Games and its parent company, Take-Two Interactive, to search two properties in Melbourne, Australia, for evidence related to a cheat known as Infamous. The Australian federal court has also frozen the assets of the five, who have not yet filed a defence. The cheat went offline six months ago. It allowed players who paid about $40 to manipulate the gaming environment, generate virtual currency and use a "god mode" feature that makes players invincible.

Google Maps is adding a new feature that will let you search for charging stations and provide you with useful information about that station. The feature is rolling out today and will be available on both Android and iOS. Engadget reports: Just search for "EV charging stations" or "EV charging," and Google Maps will locate those nearby. It will also tell you what types of ports are available, how many there are as well as the station's charging speeds, and businesses with charging stations will now have a link that will lead you to more information about their setup. Additionally, you'll be able to see what other users thought of the station, as Google Maps will bring up user-posted photos, ratings and reviews. Google Maps will include information about charging stations from Tesla and Chargepoint worldwide. In the US, it will also source info about SemaConnect, EVgo and Blink stations. UK users will have access to Chargemaster and Pod Point stations, while Australia and New Zealand EV drivers will see info on Chargefox stations. Unfortunately, you won't be able to tell if individual charging stations are occupied. Also, Google doesn't have Electrify America, a Volkswagen subsidiary that's building a nationwide network of fast-charging stations with universal technology.

With 95% of Americans owning a cellphone, it can feel like we've been calling, texting, and tweeting on the go forever. But the infrastructure supporting our cellphones has actually not been around that long. From a report: While we're now on 4G networks, it was only 35 years ago this week that Ameritech (now part of AT&T) launched 1G, or the first commercial cell phone network. That network, called the Advanced Mobile Phone System (AMPS), went online on October 13, 1983, allowing people in the Chicago area to make and receive mobile calls for the first time. Ameritech president Bob Barnett, who made the first call, decided to make the historic moment count by ringing Alexander Graham Bell's grandson. A little more than a year later, UK's Vodafone hosted its first commercial call on New Year's Day. Israel's Pelephone followed suit in 1986, followed by Australia in 1987.

Cellphone technology had been around for quite a while before that. AMPS was in development for around 15 years, and engineers made the first mobile call on a prototype network a decade before the first commercial network call. It took that long to troubleshoot the various hardware, software, and radio frequency issues associated with setting up a fully functional commercial network.

Apple has strongly criticized Australia's anti-encryption bill, calling it "dangerously ambiguous" and "alarming to every Australian." From a report: The Australian government's draft law -- known as the Access and Assistance Bill -- would compel tech companies operating in the country, like Apple, to provide "assistance" to law enforcement and intelligence agencies in accessing electronic data. The government claims that encrypted communications are "increasingly being used by terrorist groups and organized criminals to avoid detection and disruption," without citing evidence. But critics say that the bill's "broad authorities that would undermine cybersecurity and human rights, including the right to privacy" by forcing companies to build backdoors and hand over user data -- even when it's encrypted. Now, Apple is the latest company after Google and Facebook joined civil and digital rights groups -- including Amnesty International -- to oppose the bill, amid fears that the government will rush through the bill before the end of the year. In a seven-page letter to the Australian parliament, Apple said that it "would be wrong to weaken security for millions of law-abiding customers in order to investigate the very few who pose a threat." The company adds, "We appreciate the government's outreach to Apple and other companies during the drafting of this bill. While we are pleased that some of the suggestions incorporated improve the legislation, the unfortunate fact is that the draft legislation remains dangerously ambiguous with respect to encryption and security. This is no time to weaken encryption. Rather than serving the interests of Australian law enforcement, it will just weaken the security and privacy of regular customers while pushing criminals further off the grid."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Australian scientists have discovered a previously unknown chain of volcanic seamounts near Tasmania. The area appears to be brimming with marine life, including a surprising number of whales who may be using the undersea volcanoes as a navigational tool. The volcanic chain was discovered by scientists from the Australian National University and CSIRO, Australia's national science agency, while on a 25-day mission aboard the research vessel Investigator to conduct detailed seafloor maps of the region. The undersea volcanoes are about 250 miles (400 kilometers) east of Tasmania, and they're quite deep.

The tallest of the seamounts extends 3,000 meters (9,800 feet) from the seafloor, so they're not tiny. It's hard to believe that something so large has gone undetected for so long, but our oceans are notoriously understudied. A mere 20 percent of Earth's oceans has been explored, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. [T]he seamounts appeared to serve as a kind of mid-ocean oasis for a host of marine organisms. In addition to finding copious amounts of plankton in the area, the researchers observed various seabirds and a surprising number of whales. The volcanic seamounts, the researchers say, are likely important stopping points for migratory animals, particularly whales, who rely on seafloor structures for navigation. The volcanoes are likely serving as important signposts as the whales travel from their winter breeding areas to summer feeding grounds, the researchers say.

Alongside the new Pixel smartphones, and the Pixel Slate laptop-tablet hybrid, Google on Tuesday also announced a new version of its Chromecast streaming adapter, the third generation of the company's streaming device, which supports playback video at higher frame rates and can also stream multiroom audio. From a report: The new device goes on sale Tuesday in the U.S., Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Great Britain, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Singapore and Sweden. Stateside, the new Chromecast once again costs $35 -- the same as its predecessor. [...] The bigger changes are on the inside: The new Chromecast is 15% faster than the previous model, which allows it to stream 1080p HD video with a rate of up to 60 frames per second (fps). "Everything becomes much smoother," said Google Home product manager Chris Chan during a recent interview with Variety. He specifically cited the growth of 60fps content on YouTube as one of the reasons Google added the new feature.

Some Apple Watch Series 4 owners in Australia experienced crashes and reboots on Saturday due to a bug that surfaced because of the daylight saving time change. From a report: According to Reddit users hit by the Apple Watch bug, the root of the problem appears to be the Infograph Modular face's Activity complication, which displays a timeline graph with hourly data for the user's Move calories, Exercise minutes, and Stand hours. When daylight saving time (DST) lops an hour off the typical 24-hour day, the Activity complication is apparently unable to compute the change and draw the timeline graph with only 23 hours, which throws the Apple Watch into an endless reboot loop until the battery runs out.

The United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has issued a report that says global temperatures are heading towards 3 degrees C, and that the original goal of keeping the rise under 1.5 degrees C will require "rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society." While the window of opportunity is not yet closed, the prospect looks unlikely and hugely expensive. BBC reports: The critical 33-page Summary for Policymakers certainly bears the hallmarks of difficult negotiations between climate researchers determined to stick to what their studies have shown and political representatives more concerned with economies and living standards. Despite the inevitable compromises, there are some key messages that come through loud and and clear. "The first is that limiting warming to 1.5C brings a lot of benefits compared with limiting it to 2 degrees. It really reduces the impacts of climate change in very important ways," said Prof Jim Skea, who is a co-chair of the IPCC. "The second is the unprecedented nature of the changes that are required if we are to limit warming to 1.5C -- changes to energy systems, changes to the way we manage land, changes to the way we move around with transportation."

"Scientists might want to write in capital letters, 'ACT NOW IDIOTS,' but they need to say that with facts and numbers," said Kaisa Kosonen, from Greenpeace, who was an observer at the negotiations. "And they have." The researchers have used these facts and numbers to paint a picture of the world with a dangerous fever, caused by humans. We used to think if we could keep warming below 2 degrees this century then the changes we would experience would be manageable. Not any more. This new study says that going past 1.5C is dicing with the planet's liveability. And the 1.5C temperature "guard rail" could be exceeded in just 12 years in 2030. We can stay below it but it will require urgent, large-scale changes from governments and individuals, plus we will have to invest a massive pile of cash every year, around 2.5% of global GDP, for two decades. Even then, we will still need machines, trees and plants to capture carbon from the air that we can then store deep underground. Forever! In order to get to 1.5C, the report says the following will be necessary: Global emissions of CO2 need to decline by 45% from 2010 levels by 2030; Renewables are estimated to provide up to 85% of global electricity by 2050; Coal is expected to reduce to close to zero; Up to 7 million sq km of land will be needed for energy crops (a bit less than the size of Australia); and Global net zero emissions by 2050. As if this wasn't demanding enough, the report says that to limit warming to 1.5C, it will involve "annual average investment needs in the energy system of around $2.4 trillion" between 2016 and 2035.

If the planet reaches 2C of warming, coral reefs would be almost entirely wiped out and global sea-levels will rise around 10 centimeters more. "There are also significant impacts on ocean temperatures and acidity, and the ability to grow crops like rice, maize and wheat," reports The Guardian.

Further reading: Major Climate Report Describes a Strong Risk of Crisis as Early as 2040.

OpenSourceAllTheWay writes: CNN reports on a new font that is purposely designed to more easily help students recall academic materials they read. From the report: "Australian researchers say their new font, called Sans Forgetica, could be the tool to help people retain information. The typeface, which slants to the side and has gaps in the middle, is not easy on the eyes. But according to the team at RMIT University in Australia who conceived Sans Forgetica, it has the perfect combination of 'obstruction' needed to recall information. The multidisciplinary team of typographic design specialists and psychologists said they designed Sans Forgetica using the learning principle called 'desirable difficulty.' The principle means that when obstruction is added to the learning process, people are required to make a little more effort and end up having better memory retention.

With normal fonts 'readers often glance over them and no memory trace is created,' RMIT senior lecturer Janneke Blijlevens said in a statement. Conversely, if a font is too difficult, memory is not retained. 'Sans Forgetica lies at a sweet spot where just enough obstruction has been added to create that memory retention,' she said. To get to that sweet spot, the researchers tested various fonts with roughly 400 Australian university students in a laboratory and an online experiment 'where fonts with a range of obstructions were tested to determine which led to the best memory retention,' RMIT said. 'Sans Forgetica broke just enough design principles without becoming too illegible and aided memory retention,' RMIT said."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: Australia is set to be the first country to eliminate cervical cancer, aided by its national vaccination and screening programs, says a new study. The country is on track to meet the threshold of four or less new cases per 100,000 women each year, effectively eliminating the cancer by 2028, finds the new study published Wednesday. The cancer could be classified as "rare" as early as 2022, meeting a threshold of six new cases per 100,000 and deaths due to the diseases are expected to decline to one new case per 100,000 women by 2034. But this is all contingent on Australia's high vaccination coverage and screening being maintained, write the study authors.

An estimated 99.7% of cervical cancer cases are caused by infection with Human Papillomavirus (HPV), a group of viruses that spread though sexual intercourse and skin-to-skin contact around the genitals. In their new study, the researchers at Cancer Council NSW modeled data on HPV vaccination, natural history of the disease, and cervical screening to estimate the age-incidence of cervical cancer in Australia from 2015 to 2100. Currently, Australia reports seven cases of cervical cancer per 100,000 women, according to the study. As well as eliminating the disease within 20 years, the data showed that the annual incidence of cervical cancer will decrease and remain at fewer than one case per 100,000 women if screening for HPV every five years continues and as long as people have been offered the vaccine.

A new encryption bill that's expected to be passed in Australia is facing strong opposition from tech heavyweights. A new group called "Alliance for a Safe and Secure Internet" has been formed by Australian industry, technology, and human rights groups to persuade the country from passing the bill, reports ZDNet. "The membership of the new alliance consists of Australian Communications Consumer Action Network, Access Now, Ai Group, Australian Information Industry Association, Amnesty International Australia, AMTA, Blueprint for Free Speech, members of Communications Alliance sans NBN, DIGI, Digital Rights Watch, Future Wise, Hack for Privacy, Human Rights Law Centre, Internet Australia, IoT Alliance Australia, and Liberty Victoria." The Guardian also notes that Google and Facebook are part of the group. From the report: The Bill is currently before the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, with a minuscule three-week window for submissions closing on Friday, October 12 and a hearing set for Friday, October 19. The proposed legislation would allow the nation's police and anti-corruption forces to ask, before forcing, internet companies, telcos, messaging providers, or anyone deemed necessary, to break into whatever content interception agencies want access to.

"This Bill stands to have a huge impact on millions of Australians, so it is crucial that lawmakers reject this proposal in its present form before we sleepwalk into a digital dystopia," said board member of Digital Rights Watch and alliance spokesperson Lizzie O'Shea. "The rushed processes coupled with the lack of transparency can only mean that expert opinions from Australia and abroad are being disregarded, and deep concerns about privacy erosion and lack of judicial review have simply been tossed aside."

A trial is underway to restore damaged coral on the Great Barrier Reef using electricity. From a report: The reef has been severely assaulted in recent years by cyclones and back-to-back heatwaves. Nathan Cook at conservation group Reef Ecologic and his colleagues are attempting to regrow surviving coral fragments on steel frames. The frames are placed on damaged parts of the reef and stimulated with electricity to accelerate the coral's growth. Electrified metal frames have previously been used to encourage coral growth on reefs in South-East Asia, the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean. They have been shown to attract mineral deposits that help corals grow 3 to 4 times faster than normal. The technique is being trialed at a section of the reef 100 kilometres north of Cairns that was badly affected by the 2016 and 2017 mass coral bleaching events. Some coral is starting to grow back naturally, but it will take at least a decade for even the fastest-growing species to fully recover.

A social media post from Anders G da Silva, who accused Apple of deleting movies he had purchased from iTunes, went viral earlier this month. There is more to that story, of course. In a statement to CNET, Apple explained that da Silva had purchased movies while living in Australia, with his iTunes region set to "Australia." Then he moved to Canada, and found that the movies were no longer available for download -- due, no doubt, to licensing restrictions, including restrictions on Apple itself. While his local copies of the movies were not deleted, they were deleted from his cloud library. Apple said the company had shared a workaround with da Silva to make it easier for him to download his movies again. Public Knowledge posted a story Tuesday to weigh in on the subject, especially since today is International Day Against DRM. From the post: To that rare breed of person who carefully reads terms of service and keeps multiple, meticulous backups of important files, da Silva should have expected that his ability to access movies he thought he'd purchased might be cut off because he'd moved from one Commonwealth country to another. Just keep playing your original file! But DRM makes this an unreasonable demand. First, files with DRM are subject to break at any time. DRM systems are frequently updated, and often rely on phoning home to some server to verify that they can still be played. Some technological or business change may have turned the most carefully backed-up and preserved digital file into just a blob of unreadable encrypted bits.

Second, even if they are still playable, files with DRM are not very portable, and they might not fit in with modern workflows. To stay with the Apple and iTunes example, the old-fashioned way to watch a movie purchased from the iTunes Store would be to download it in the iTunes desktop app, and then watch it there, sync it to a portable device, or keep iTunes running as a "server" in your home where it can be streamed to devices such as the Apple TV. But this is just not how things are done anymore. To watch an iTunes movie on an Apple TV, you stream or download it from Apple's servers. To watch an iTunes movie on an iPhone, same thing. (And because this is the closed-off ecosystem of DRM'd iTunes movies, if you want to watch your movie on a Roku or an Android phone, you're just out of luck.)

[...] My takeaway is that, if a seller of DRM'd digital media uses words like "purchase" and "buy," they have at a minimum an obligation to continue to provide additional downloads of that media, in perpetuity. Fine print aside, without that, people simply aren't getting what they think they're getting for their money, and words like "rent" and "borrow" are more appropriate. Of course, there is good reason to think that even then people are not likely to fully understand that "buying" something in the digital world is not the same as buying something in the physical world, and more ambitious measures may be required to ensure that people can still own personal property in the digital marketplace. See the excellent work of Aaron Perzanowski and Jason Schultz on this point. But the bare minimum of "owning" a movie would seem to be the continued ability to actually watch it.

"An experiment has confirmed that quantum mechanics allows events to occur with no definite causal order," reports an article shared by long-time Slashdot readers UpnAtom and jd. Researchers at the University of Queensland in Australia believe this could link Einstein's general theory of relativity to quantum mechanics, according to Physics World: In classical physics -- and everyday life -- there is a strict causal relationship between consecutive events. If a second event (B) happens after a first event (A), for example, then B cannot affect the outcome of A. This relationship, however, breaks down in quantum mechanics because the temporal spread of a particles's wave function can be greater than the separation in time between A and B. This means that the causal order of A and B cannot be always be distinguished by a quantum particle such as a photon.

In their experiment, Romero, Costa and colleagues created a "quantum switch", in which photons can take two paths. One path involves being subjected to operation A before operation B, while in the other path B occurs before A. The order in which the operations are performed is determined by the initial polarization of the photon as it enters the switch.... The team did the experiment using several different types of operation for A and B and in all cases they found that the measured polarization of the output photons was consistent with their being no definite causal order between when A and B was applied. Indeed, the measurements backed indefinite causal order to a whopping statistical significance of 18 -- well beyond the 5 threshold that is considered a discovery in physics.
Science Magazine applauds the experiments for "obliterating our common sense notion of before and after and, potentially, muddying the concept of causality.

Australia's Great Barrier Reef appears to be showing signs of recovery after a massive coral bleaching event in 2016 and 2017. Stuff.co.nz reports: The nonprofit Reef & Rainforest Research Centre has reported signs of recovery due to a milder 2017-18 summer, as well as cooperation among science, industry, and government in supporting the reef's recovery, according to the report issued on Wednesday by the Queensland State Government. The RRRC, in cooperation with the Association of Marine Park Tourism Operators, conducted detailed surveys at key tourism dive sites around the city of Cairns in 2016 and 2017 and says certain reefs that were strongly affected in the bleaching event are showing significant signs of improvement.

Coral bleaching occurs in multiple stages, according to RRRC Managing Director Sheriden Morris, ranging from the equivalent of a mild sunburn to coral mortality. "When a reef is reported as 'bleached' in the media, that often leaves out a critical detail on how severe that bleaching is, at what depth the bleaching has occurred and if it's going to cause permanent damage to the coral at that site," Morris said in the statement, adding that the Barrier Reef "has significant capacity to recover from health impacts like bleaching events." Reports that the entire reef is dead due to severe bleaching are "blatantly untrue," Morris said. Still, he warns that the recovery is "contingent on environmental conditions" and that the reef "may suffer further bleaching events as the climate continues to warm."

What happens to gadgets when you're done with them? Too often, they explode. From a report: Around the world, garbage trucks and recycling centers are going up in flames. The root of the problem: volatile lithium-ion batteries sealed inside our favorite electronics from Apple, Samsung, Microsoft and more. They're not only dangerous but also difficult to take apart -- making e-waste less profitable, and contributing to a growing recycling crisis. These days, rechargeable lithium-ion batteries are in smartphones, tablets, laptops, ear buds, toys, power tools, scooters, hoverboards and e-cigarettes. For all their benefits at making our devices slim, powerful and easy to recharge, lithium-ion batteries have some big costs. They contain Cobalt, often mined in inhumane circumstances in places like the Congo. And when crushed, punctured, ripped or dropped, lithium-ion batteries can produce what the industry euphemistically calls a "thermal event." It happens because these batteries short circuit when the super-thin separator between their positive and negative parts gets breached.

Old devices end up in trouble when we throw them in the trash, stick them in the recycling bin, or even responsibly bring them to an e-waste center. There isn't official data on these fires, but the anecdotal evidence is stark. Since the spring of 2018 alone, batteries have been suspected as the cause of recycling fires in New York, Arizona, Florida, Wisconsin, Indiana, Idaho, Scotland, Australia and New Zealand. In California, a recent survey of waste management facilities found 83 percent had at least one fire over the last two years, of which 40 percent were caused by lithium-ion batteries.