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Germany considers ban on end-to-end chat encryption
The German government is, according to Der Spiegel, considering a law that will require all chat app providers to give law enforcement agencies plain text copies of users' conversations on demand (The Register).
This is obviously incompatible with end-to-end encryption, used by services such as Signal, WhatsApp and Telegram and, if passed, such a law would effectively ban secure encryption for instant messaging. The potential law is to be discussed by Germany's interior ministry at a June conference, where it's likely to meet stiff opposition on the grounds of both privacy and technical feasibility.
France's Parrot to make spy drones for the US
French dronemaker Parrot has been tapped by the US military to develop reconnaissance drones that soldiers will be to fit in a rucksack, with a 30-minute battery life and 3km range (The Verge). They're one of six firms that will receive part of an $11 million Department of Defense fund to develop prototypes as the US seeks to distance itself from Parrot's key rival, Chinese firm DJI.
The world's first known albino giant panda has been photographed
China's Wolong National Nature Reserve has published the first ever photo of an albino giant panda (Gizmodo). The animal was snapped, a little blurrily, by a motion-activated camera in a bamboo forest at an altitude of 2,000 metres.
The US Navy is analysing 350 billion social media posts
Researchers at California's Naval Postgraduate School are analysing 350 billion social media messages posted by 200 million people around the world, including examination of user names, metadata, location data and hometown (Bloomberg).
All the messages were posted publicly on a single – unspecified – social network between July 2014 and December 2016. The stated goal of the project is to understand how slang and colloquial language use evolve and "how and why communities come to be formed around certain forms of discourse rather than others."
New Pokemon products to include sleep tracker and cloud services
The Pokémon Company has unveiled its 2020 release plans, which include Pokémon Sleep, a Pokémon GO style app that rewards you for getting a good night's sleep, monitored by the forthcoming new Pokémon Go Plus + sleep and fitness tracker (The Verge). Other slated releases include a cross-platform cloud service called Pokémon Home, to collect your monsters from all current games, and the long-anticipated Switch version of movie-inspiring cult 3DS hit Detective Pikachu, with a new ending.
Elon Musk's wild space internet plan
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
