‘You cannot annex another country’: Denmark PM to US on Greenland
Mette Frederiksen visits the Arctic island as the US continues its threats of taking over the region.
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Mette Frederiksen visits the Arctic island as the US continues its threats of taking over the region.
BBC News reports on assisted dying in Canada, where some say it’s now easier to choose to die than get support to live
Said to be the new trend among young people. It involves gluing yarn to your face and then painting over it with makeup. To get the yarn off, you have to soak your face in adhesive remover. Of course, when the media says it’s a trend, that means the reporter found two or three people who have done it. More info: people.com
When Google announced Tuesday that end-to-end encrypted messages were coming to Gmail for business users, some people balked, noting it wasn’t true E2EE as the term is known in privacy and security circles. Others wondered precisely how it works under the hood. Here’s a description of what the new service does and doesn’t do, as well as some of the basic security that underpins it. When Google uses the term E2EE in this context, it means that an email is encrypted inside Chrome, Firefox, or just about any other browser the sender chooses. As the message makes its way to its destination, it remains encrypted and can’t be decrypted until it arrives at its final destination, when it’s decrypted in the recipient’s browser. Giving S/MIME the heave-ho The chief selling point of this new service is that it allows government agencies and the businesses that work with them to comply with a raft of security and privacy regulations and at the same time eliminates the massive headaches that have traditionally plagued anyone deploying such regulation-compliant email systems. Up to now, the most common means has been S/MIME, a standard so complex and painful that only the bravest and most well-resourced organizations tend to implement it. Read full article Comments
Bonobos, great apes related to us and chimpanzees that live in the Republic of Congo, communicate with vocal calls including peeps, hoots, yelps, grunts, and whistles. Now, a team of Swiss scientists led by Melissa Berthet, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Zurich, discovered bonobos can combine these basic sounds into larger semantic structures. In these communications, meaning is something more than just a sum of individual calls—a trait known as non-trivial compositionality, which we once thought was uniquely human. To do this, Berthet and her colleagues built a database of 700 bonobo calls and deciphered them using methods drawn from distributional semantics, the methodology we’ve relied on in reconstructing long-lost languages like Etruscan or Rongorongo. For the first time, we have a glimpse into what bonobos mean when they call to each other in the wild. Context is everything The key idea behind distributional semantics is that when words appear in similar contexts, they tend to have similar meanings. To decipher an unknown language, you need to collect a large corpus of words and turn those words into vectors—mathematical representations that let you place them in a multidimensional semantic space. The second thing you need is context data, which tells you the circumstances in which these words were used (that gets vectorized, too). When you map your word vectors onto context vectors in this multidimensional space, what usually happens is that words with similar meaning end up close to each other. Berthet and her colleagues wanted to apply the same trick to bonobos’ calls. That seemed straightforward at first glance, but proved painfully hard to execute. Read full article Comments
Dozens of companies are building robots that look like humans. One of them is training a machine to be a butler and will soon test them in homes.
The constitutional court unanimously upheld the impeachment of Yoon Suk Yeol.
South Korea’s constitutional court has unanimously voted to uphold the impeachment of president Yoon Suk Yeol.
Oz, who has never held public office, is best known for hosting US daytime TV show The Dr Oz Show.
The EU has enormous economic clout as the biggest single market in the world, but does not want to risk a backlash.
Almost exactly nine years after the Panama Papers were revealed, two dozen countries’ tax agencies say they’ve recovered nearly $2 billion combined in tax arrears thanks to information in the leak about hidden bank accounts and offshore shell companies.
Gen. Timothy Haugh had just last week testified on Capitol Hill about the Signal leak in which a journalist had been added to a group chat with high-ranking members of the Trump administration.
World reacts to Trump’s mass tariffs; Reporter’s Notebook: Senate considers extending Trump tax cuts at a heavy cost
These are the key events on day 1,135 of Russia’s war on Ukraine.