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Your WIRED daily briefing. Today, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Microsoft have joined forces to fight terrorism online, Waymo has partnered with car hire firm Avis to maintain its autonomous ride-hailing fleet, Apple has released the first public beta of iOS 11 and more.
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Four of the world's world's biggest online firms have formed a partnership to fight the spread of extremism and terrorism on the internet (TechCrunch). Formed by Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Microsoft, the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism will build on the companies' existing measures against hate speech and terrorist propaganda to develop technological solutions, research and knowledge-sharing frameworks with other companies, academics and governments. Twitter says: "The spread of terrorism and violent extremism is a pressing global problem and a critical challenge for us all… We believe that by working together, sharing the best technological and operational elements of our individual efforts, we can have a greater impact on the threat of terrorist content online."
Waymo, Alphabet's self-driving car company, has forged a deal with car hire firm Avis to store and service Waymo's fleet of self-driving Chrysler Pacifica minivans in Phoenix, Arizona (Ars Technica). Avis, which also owns the worldwide ZipCar hire network, is a natural partner for Waymo, which is currently running an autonomous ride-hailing service in Phoenix but doesn't have the experience and broad industry network of its autonomous vehicle hire rivals such as Uber. Avis shares rose 12.5 per cent in response to the news.
Apple has released the first public beta of iOS 11, the latest version of the operating system driving the world's iPhones and iPads (WIRED). Anyone with a taste for risk and patience for bugginess can install iOS 11 now, ahead of its actual release this autumn. The biggest difference is iOS 11's new drag and drop functionality. Pick up two images in Photos, drag them over the Mail icon, then drop them in as email attachments. You can drag a URL or a string of text from Safari into Notes. You can add 10 apps to a folder at once. While it might not sound revolutionary, it tidies up a lot of time-wasting repetition. Other new features include the ability to run up to four apps side-by-side onscreen and integrated QR code scanning.
A report by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has found that 26 of the 29 coral reefs on its World Heritage list have been damaged by coral bleaching and may never recover (Science). Bleaching is caused by overly warm ocean temperatures, which make the corals expel their colourful symbiotic zooxanthellae algae, which normally make food for both themselves and their coral hosts. If water temperatures return to normal, the algae can return before the corals die, but UNESCO says that unless greenhouse gas emissions and global warming are curtailed, the affected areas "will cease to host functioning coral reef ecosystems by the end of the century".
Russia's telecoms regulator has ordered encrypted messaging app Telegram to give security services access to users' messages or be banned in the country (Telegram). The FSB security agency says the app was used by the perpetrator of a suicide bomb attack in St Petersberg in April and is known to be favoured by Daesh terrorist organisers and recruiters – something Telegram has taken efforts to stamp out. Telegram founder Pavel Durov has said that the demand to hand over decryption keys is both unconstitutional and technically impossible. If Telegram is banned, he says, terrorists will simply switch to another encrypted platform: "If you want to defeat terrorism by blocking stuff, you’ll have to block the Internet”.
WIRED Security 2017 returns to London on September 28 to highlight the latest innovations, trends and threats in enterprise cyber defence, security intelligence and cybersecurity.
Injecting bubbles in the bloodstream is usually the cause of a medical emergency, but that's precisely what Eleanor Stride intends to do to help us fight cancer (WIRED). The biomedical engineer from the University of Oxford has developed a method of delivering cancer drugs by encapsulating them inside microbubbles. This allows for a precise delivery of the drug to a target tumour, improving the efficacy of the treatment. "In conventional chemotherapy, even using nanoparticles, less than 1 per cent of the total injected dose makes it into the tumour," Stride says. "And all of that material is deposited close to the blood vessels at the tumour periphery". Stride’s research has shown that microbubbles help push cancer drugs four times deeper into a tumour and increase the uptake of the drug. "By using microbubbles and ultrasound we can control when and where a drug gets released, and crucially also distribute it throughout a tumour," she says.
A new study has examined the linguistic constructions that make political tweets go viral, and the results could help explain the success of US president Donald Trump's oddly-formed online rhetoric (The Verge). The researchers from New York University found that political messages that used "moral-emotional language" were more widely shared by people who agreed with them – but not by people whose initial opinions and political position differed. Examples of moral-emotional language include 'hate', while by comparison, 'duty' is a simply moral word and 'fear' is a purely emotional one; Trump's characteristic use of 'Sad!' as an end-of-sentence ejaculation would also fall into the moral-emotional category.
Researchers from Canada's Western University are inviting people from around the world to participate in what they hope will become the largest ever study on the effects of sleep deprivation on the human brain (BBC News). Participants will play a range of online games to assess the brain's performance when both rested and sleep deprived, looking at reasoning, language comprehension and decision-making skills. Lead scientist Prof Adrian Owen told BBC News: "We all know what it feels like to not get enough sleep but we know very little about the effects on the brain; we want to see how it affects cognition, memory and your ability to concentrate".
Nintendo has confirmed that it will be releasing the widely-anticipated SNES Classic Edition mini-console on September 29, priced £79.99 (VG24/7). It'll come loaded with 21 beloved games, including Earthbound, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Star Fox and Street Fighter II Turbo: Hyper Fighting. Most surprising of all, Nintendo will include the never-released Star Fox 2 – cancelled at the end of the SNES's life after the game had already been completed – on the tiny console. Nintendo has also announced that Japan will be getting the Super Famicom Mini, with a slightly different selection of games, including Fire Emblem: Mystery of the Emblem.
Funcom's Lovecraftian MMORPG Secret World Legends has launched in its new free-to-play incarnation (Rock, Paper, Shotgun). It's an upgrade to the original, paid-for MMO, The Secret World, with refined combat and skills systems to make it less daunting to new players and emphasise the game's acclaimed narrative. You can sign up and play for free now, and the game will be coming to Steam in July.
In 2003, Apple was working on new types of inputs for the Mac. The plan was to get rid of the mouse and keyboard, and the team began to experiment with multitouch — rotating and zooming on-screen with a few careful flicks of the finger. One of the first prototypes of a finger-controlled tablet was known as Model 035, a large white tablet that looked something like a clunky precursor to the iPad. But at the same time, the mobile phone race began to take over and Apple made an important decision to change direction, that would revolutionise phones forever.
With five Olympic medals, Ben Ainslie is one of the world's most successful sailors. His next challenge? To win the America's Cup. In this double issue, WIRED joins him and the Land Rover BAR team in Bermuda as he prepares for the race. Plus, we go inside the UK's new unicorn Improbable, and behind the lines at Elon Musk's distribution factory. Subscribe and save now. Out in print and digital. Subscribe now and save.
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
