No seeds were lost but the ability of the rock vault to provide failsafe protection against all disasters is now threatened by climate change
Source: Arctic stronghold of world’s seeds flooded after permafrost melts
because global warming isn’t happening. NOT.
The Liberal Democrats have pledged to end the “Orwellian nightmare” of mass-snooping powers in the Investigatory Powers Act ahead of their manifesto launch.
They will propose to roll back state surveillance powers by ending the indiscriminate bulk collection of communications data and internet connection records.
The party also committed to fighting Conservative attempts to undermine encryption, which it warned will put people’s online security at risk.
It comes as a recent leaked draft document from the Home Office has revealed that government aims to be able to access anyone’s communications within 24 hours and to bring an end to encrypted messages under the recently passed Investigatory Powers Bill.
Under the plans, companies would be legally required to introduce a backdoor to their systems so authorities can read all correspondence if required.
Source: Lib Dems pledge to end ‘Orwellian’ snooping powers in manifesto
Finally someone who cares!
Bell is apologizing to its customers after 1.9 million email addresses and approximately 1,700 names and phone numbers were stolen from a company database.
The information appears to have been posted online, but the company could not confirm the leaked data was one and the same.
Bell, the country’s largest telecommunications company, attributed the incident to “an anonymous hacker,” and says it is working with the RCMP to investigate the breach.
“There is no indication that any financial, password or other sensitive personal information was accessed,” the company wrote in a statement. Bell said the incident was unrelated to the massive spike in ransomware infections that affected an estimated 200,000 computers in more than 150 countries late last week.
Source: 1.9 million Bell customer email addresses stolen by ‘anonymous hacker’
The document – a data-sharing agreement between Google-owned artificial intelligence company DeepMind and the Royal Free NHS Trust – gives the clearest picture yet of what the company is doing and what sensitive data it now has access to.
The agreement gives DeepMind access to a wide range of healthcare data on the 1.6 million patients who pass through three London hospitals run by the Royal Free NHS Trust – Barnet, Chase Farm and the Royal Free – each year. This will include information about people who are HIV-positive, for instance, as well as details of drug overdoses and abortions. The agreement also includes access to patient data from the last five years.
Source: Revealed: Google AI has access to huge haul of NHS patient data | New Scientist
It goes beyond belief that this much patient data is given (sold?) to a commercial entity by the NHS without agreement from the people involved.
British police have charged a man under antiterror laws after he refused to hand over his phone and laptop passwords.
Muhammad Rabbani, international director of CAGE, was arrested at Heathrow in November after declining to unlock his devices, claiming they contained confidential testimony describing torture in Afghanistan as well as information on high-ranking officials. CAGE positions itself as a non-profit organization that represents and supports families affected by the West’s TWAT (aka The War Against Terror).
On Wednesday this week, he was charged under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000: specifically, he is accused of obstructing or hampering an investigation by refusing to cough up his login details.
“On 20 November 2016, at Heathrow Airport, he did willfully obstruct, or sought to frustrate, an examination or search under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000, contrary to paragraph 18(1)(c) of that Schedule,” London’s Metropolitan Police alleged. “He is due to appear in Westminster Magistrates’ Court on 20 June.”
If found guilty, Rabbani could face up to three months in prison and a fine of £2,500 (US$3,242). He has said he will fight the case and is hopeful of winning. He claims he has been stopped under Schedule 7 about 20 times and has always refused to hand over his passwords. However, it appears that the Met is now ready to test this case in court, so formal charges have been brought.
[…]
What makes Schedule 7 rather tricksy is that no evidence is required to pull someone over for questioning under the law. Usually, Brit officers must have at least reasonable suspicion of a crime before collaring a suspect, but under these antiterror rules, they can hold and quiz people for up to nine hours with no evidence at all.
Source: Bloke charged under UK terror law for refusing to cough up passwords
Welcome to the Brexit concentration camp
The European Banking Federation (EBF) has asked the EU Commission to support a ban on “screen scraping”.
Screen-scraping services, seen as a first-generation direct access technology, allow third parties to access bank accounts on a client’s behalf using the client’s access credentials.
The Revised Directive on Payment Services (PSD2) introduces a general security upgrade for third-party access to a client’s data.
Earlier this month, 65 European fintech firms made their opposition to this known, stating in a manifesto (PDF) that “[T]he only functioning technology used for bank-independent [payment initiation services] and [account information services] must not be foreclosed.”
Privacy of client data, cybersecurity and innovation are all at risk if European Banking Authority (EBA) standards are dismissed and screen scraping continues, the EBF argues.
The proposal requires banks to opt for either creating a “dedicated interface” that lets third parties access bank accounts on behalf of clients, or to upgrade their client interface. The EBF wants to see PSD2 delivered within the framework of (EBA) standards and the end of screen-scraping.
The European Commission appears to be willing to go against the EBA advice and allow screen-scraping to continue.
Source: Banking association calls for end of ‘screen-scraping’
Then there is some ridiculous analogy to putting a diesel engine on an aircraft. Having to recode your fintech software to PSD2 – which may be incomplete and missing important functionality – is expensive and thus weeds out the crop of fintech companies. In my experience it’s usually better for customers to have large amounts of competing products than to be locked into a mono- or duopoly.
We train on a million images, with simulated user inputs. To guide the user towards efficient input selection, the system recommends likely colors based on the input image and current user inputs. The colorization is performed in a single feed-forward pass, enabling real-time use. Even with randomly simulated user inputs, we show that the proposed system helps novice users quickly create realistic colorizations, and show large improvements in colorization quality with just a minute of use.
Source: Real-Time User-Guided Image Colorization with Learned Deep Priors. In SIGGRAPH, 2017.