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Most visitors to the US must now hand over email and social media details
A new US visa policy requires almost all visitors to the country to provide details of all email addresses and social media accounts they've used within the past five years as part of its “extensive security screening” (The Register).
It'll affect an estimated 710,000 tourists and business travellers to the US, including visitors from the EU countries of Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Poland and Romania. However, the UK, like most of the rest of the EU, is covered by the 90-day visa-free ESTA tourism scheme, so British citizens will not have to hand over these details unless they've recently visited specific countries.
YouTube is suggesting children's swimsuit videos to soft porn viewers
Viewers of soft erotic content on YouTube may find their recommendations filled with ever-younger subjects, all the way down to girls as young as 5 or 6 “wearing bathing suits, or getting dressed or doing a split”, The New York Times has found.
The fundamental issue is the same one identified in a WIRED investigation earlier this year: the video recommendation engine's disconcerting ability to identify and suggest children's videos to viewers seeking sexual gratification and YouTube's unwillingness to disable recommendations on children's videos so as not to harm “creators” – largely toy and family YouTubers that earn ad revenue from entirely innocent videos of their kids playing.
Amazon Prime Video is full of dodgy documentaries pushing dangerous cancer 'cures'
Below the big-budget films and series at the surface of Amazon's Prime Video lies a deep well of pseudoscientific documentaries pushing potentially harmful cancer ‘cures’, suggesting that fluoride in water causes neurological diseases and arguing that gene-edited crops are harmful to human health (WIRED).
At its worst, the platform’s recommendation algorithms push viewers towards dangerous medical misinformation masquerading as fact, suggesting that diseases like cancer and diabetes can be “reversed” by eating plants, or that cancer can be cured using unproven treatments.
Watch an Asian Elephant assess quantity by smell alone
Science magazine has published video footage showing that Asian elephants' sense of smell is so sensitive that they can tell which of two covered and locked buckets contains more sunflower seeds. In the associated study researchers found that the elephants chose the bucket containing more food bucket 59 to 82 per cent of the time.
Apple introduces new operating systems and streamlines features
Apple's WWDC keynote focussed heavily on new software and some hardware that's clearly targeting businesses with plenty to spend, from a dedicated iPadOS with split-screen and USB mass storage support to a Xeon-based Mac Pro workstation that starts at $5,999 (WIRED). Other announcements include iOS 13 – now with a long-awaited dark mode – and macOS Catalina, which can use an iPad as a second screen and is finally doing away with iTunes in favour of dedicated Music, Podcasts and TV apps.
How big beef destroyed the planet
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
