An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: Twitter accounts run by machines are a major source of climate change disinformation that might drain support from policies to address rising temperatures. In the weeks surrounding former President Trump’s announcement about withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, accounts suspected of being bots accounted for roughly a quarter of all tweets about climate change, according to new research. “If we are to effectively address the existential crisis of climate change, bot presence in the online discourse is a reality that scientists, social movements and those concerned about democracy have to better grapple with,” wrote Thomas Marlow, a postdoctoral researcher at the New York University, Abu Dhabi, campus, and his co-authors. Their paper published last week in the journal Climate Policy is part of an expanding body of research about the role of bots in online climate discourse.

The new focus on automated accounts is driven partly by the way they can distort the climate conversation online. Marlow’s team measured the influence of bots on Twitter’s climate conversation by analyzing 6.8 million tweets sent by 1.6 million users between May and June 2017. Trump made his decision to ditch the climate accord on June 1 of that year. President Biden reversed the decision this week. From that dataset, the team ran a random sample of 184,767 users through the Botometer, a tool created by Indiana University’s Observatory on Social Media, which analyzes accounts and determines the likelihood that they are run by machines.

Researchers also categorized the 885,164 tweets those users had sent about climate change during the two-month study period. The most popular categories were tweets about climate research and news. Marlow and the other researchers determined that nearly 9.5% of the users in their sample were likely bots. But those bots accounted for 25% of the total tweets about climate change on most days. […] The researchers weren’t able to determine who deployed the bots. But they suspect the seemingly fake accounts could have been created by “fossil-fuel companies, petro-states or their surrogates,” all of which have a vested interest in preventing or delaying action on climate change.

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Source: Slashdot – Twitter Bots Are a Major Source of Climate Disinformation

US greenhouse gas emissions tumbled below their 1990 level for the first-time last year as a result of the response to the coronavirus pandemic. The BBC reports: A preliminary assessment from research group Rhodium says that overall emissions were down over 10%, the largest fall since World War II. Transport suffered the biggest decline, with emissions down almost 15% over 2019. Energy emissions also fell sharply, due to a decline in the use of coal. With stay-at-home orders in place, economic activity ground to a halt in March and April and this had significant implications for greenhouse gas emissions.

In transport, the restrictions on international travel and non-essential journeys saw demand for fuel fall sharply. At the peak of restrictions demand for jet fuel was down 68% on 2019, with petrol down 40%. They have both bounced back as travel bans were eased later in the year but jet fuel demand was still 35% down in December compared to the previous year. When it comes to electricity though the picture is more complicated. Overall the demand for electricity was down just 2% but emissions fell by over 10%. After decades of dominance, coal in 2020 was the third largest source of power, behind natural gas and nuclear. Renewables now supply 18% of power, the report says, just behind coal with 20% of the market.

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Source: Slashdot – US Emissions In 2020 In Biggest Fall Since WWII

Honor, the Chinese smartphone brand formerly owned by Huawei, launched the V40, its first device since being sold off. CNBC reports: Huawei sold Honor, its budget smartphone brand, in November to a consortium of buyers in China, as a way to help the unit survive in the face of U.S. sanctions. In 2019, Huawei was put on a U.S. export blacklist called the Entity List which restricted American firms from selling certain components to the Chinese technology giant. This included both semiconductors and software.

Honor’s new smartphone is called the V40. It boasts a 6.72-inch display and comes in three colors: silver, black and rose gold. Honor talked up the phone’s graphics processing and touchscreen capabilities, features that enhance gaming on the device, a popular use of smartphones in China. It has the ability to connect to next-generation 5G mobile networks, a key requirement in China which is the world’s largest market for 5G phones. The V40 uses a key 5G chip from Taiwan’s MediaTek, a company which became China’s number one smartphone semiconductor supplier in 2020. Honor’s V40 starts at 3,599 yuan ($556) for the 128GB storage option and 3,999 yuan for the 256GB version. It will be released in China but it is unclear if it will be launched internationally.

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Source: Slashdot – Honor Launches First Post-Huawei Phone

Darrell Etherington reports via TechCrunch: Web infrastructure company Cloudflare is releasing a new tool today that aims to provide a way for health agencies and organizations globally tasked with rolling out COVID-19 vaccines to maintain a fair, equitable and transparent digital queue — completely free of charge. The company’s Project Fair Shot initiative will make its new Cloudflare Waiting Room offering free to any organization that qualifies, essentially providing a way for future vaccine recipients to register and gain access to a clear and constantly-updated view of where they are in line to receive the preventative treatment.

On the technical side, Cloudflare Waiting Room is simple to implement, according to the company, and can be added to any registration website built on the company’s existing content delivery network without any engineering or coding knowledge required. Visitors to the site can register and will receive a confirmation that they’re in line, and then will receive a follow-up directing them to a sign-up page for the organization administering their vaccine when it’s their turn. Further configuration options allow Waiting Room operators to offer wait time estimates to registrants, as well as provide additional alerts when their turn is nearing (though that functionality is coming in a future update).

Waiting Room was already on Cloudflare’s project roadmap, and was actually intended for other high-demand, limited supply allocation items: Think must-have concert tickets, or the latest hot sneaker release. But the Fair Shot program will provide it totally free to those organizations that need it, whereas that would’ve been a commercial product. Interested parties can sign up at Cloudflare’s registration page to get on the waitlist for availability.

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Source: Slashdot – Cloudflare Introduces Free Digital Waiting Rooms For Any Organizations Distributing COVID-19 Vaccines

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: A military arm of the intelligence community buys commercially available databases containing location data from smartphone apps and searches it for Americans’ past movements without a warrant, according to an unclassified memo obtained by The New York Times. Defense Intelligence Agency analysts have searched for the movements of Americans within a commercial database in five investigations over the past two and a half years, agency officials disclosed in a memo they wrote for Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon.

The disclosure sheds light on an emerging loophole in privacy law during the digital age: In a landmark 2018 ruling known as the Carpenter decision, the Supreme Court held that the Constitution requires the government to obtain a warrant to compel phone companies to turn over location data about their customers. But the government can instead buy similar data from a broker — and does not believe it needs a warrant to do so. “D.I.A. does not construe the Carpenter decision to require a judicial warrant endorsing purchase or use of commercially available data for intelligence purposes,” the agency memo said.

Mr. Wyden has made clear that he intends to propose legislation to add safeguards for Americans’ privacy in connection with commercially available location data. In a Senate speech this week, he denounced circumstances “in which the government, instead of getting an order, just goes out and purchases the private records of Americans from these sleazy and unregulated commercial data brokers who are simply above the law.” He called the practice unacceptable and an intrusion on constitutional privacy rights. “The Fourth Amendment is not for sale,” he said.

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Source: Slashdot – Intelligence Analysts Use US Smartphone Location Data Without Warrants, Memo Says

The Federal Trade Commission issued multimillion-dollar fines against three bot-powered ticket scalping operations. The Verge reports: The FTC says these organizations bought over 150,000 event tickets over the past four years, nabbing them with automated tools that evaded online purchasing limits. After reselling these tickets for an estimated $26.1 million, they’ve been accused of breaking a 2016 anti-bot law — the first time this law has been applied.

Regulators reached a proposed settlement with the ticket selling groups, including $31.6 million in fines. However, most of these fines were suspended because of an inability to pay. The three groups will pay a total of $3.7 million instead, and they’ll have to maintain records demonstrating their future compliance with the law. The settlement must still be approved by a judge. […] While the complaints don’t specify which shows the scalpers were targeting, they note that the list includes many sporting events and other performances, including Elton John concerts.

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Source: Slashdot – FTC Fines Three Ticket Scalping Companies For Illegally Using Bots