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Governments largely ignore youth and scientific climate demands at UN conference
Climate activist Greta Thunberg addressed the UN climate summit in New York yesterday, bluntly informing world leaders that “we are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth” (The Guardian).
Unfortunately, the statements later that day by representatives of the most powerful nations continued to evidence disappointing and dangerous inaction – Germany won't phase out coal mining until 2038, India has no plan to replace coal power, and worldwide funding to aid transition away from fossil fuel dependency continues to be tokenistic. Thunberg and her fellow youth protesters have also filed a formal complaint against countries they say have failed to uphold their obligations under the Convention on the Rights of the Child by allowing ecological collapse to occur.
Kik shuts down its messaging app, pivots to cryptocurrency
Popular messaging app Kik, which had some 300 million users by 2016, is shutting down and making most of its staff redundant as the eponymous company behind it focusses instead on legitimising its Kin cryptocurrency (TechCrunch). The company, whose cryptocurrency is currently under investigation from the US Securities and Exchange Commission, will reduce its staff from over 100 people to just 19 employees.
The UK phone system is going digital and this is how Openreach will do it
Openreach – the national phone infrastructure subsidiary of BT – is preparing to move 15 million UK phone lines away from analogue full-copper phone lines and over to digital VoIP lines. In an interview with The Register, Openreach copper and service chief James Lilley has detailed some of the challenges involved, from switching over users' connections seamlessly and dealing with mixed copper and fibre cable runs, to effectively communicating the change to every UK landline customer before the 2025 forced migration deadline.
Software developer ends US government contracts over human rights outcry
The world of DevOps has been rocked by an ethical crisis that saw a developer at widely-used server configuration tool Chef delete critical libraries in protest at the company's ongoing contracts with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), notorious for its mistreatment of child detainees (The Register). After considerable, very public vacillation, during which it initially defended the company's US government contracts, Chef's leadership has announced that it will not renew its software supply deals with either ICE or US Border Protection.
Android gets its own game subscription service but isn't funding developers
Google has launched Play Pass its own game and app subscription service for Android, currently only available in the US, for a very reasonable $5 a month, with a first-year discount putting it at just $2 per month (Ars Technica). Coming just days after Apple Arcade went live, it's a bit less exciting than its iOS rival. There's a good range of games and apps there, from Stardew Valley to AccuWeather, and you can share them with your family but there aren't any exclusives and, critically, Google is funding developers to bring their most exciting projects to the platform.
The fight against food fraud
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
