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The United Kingdom will cut net greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) to zero by the middle of this century, Prime Minister Theresa May has announced, marking it out as the first G7 nation to set such a goal. From a report: The UK's pre-existing target, set more than a decade ago, was to slash net GHGs by 80 percent from 1990 levels by 2050. However, campaigners have cautioned this target would not go far enough to meet pledges made under the 2015 Paris climate agreement to try to limit a rise in global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, widely considered to be the threshold for dangerous climate change. "Now is the time to go further and faster to safeguard the environment for our children," May said in a statement on Wednesday. "Reaching net zero by 2050 is an ambitious target, but it is crucial that we achieve it to ensure we protect our planet for future generations," she added. "Standing by is not an option."

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Spain's data protection agency has fined La Liga, the nation's top professional soccer league, 250,000 euros ($283,000 USD) for using the league's phone app to spy on its fans. From a report: With millions of downloads, the app was reportedly being used to surveil bars in an effort to catch establishments playing matches on television without a license. The La Liga app provides users with schedules, player rankings, statistics, and league news. It also knows when they're watching games and where. According to Spanish newspaper El Pais, the league told authorities that when its apps detected users were in bars the apps would record audio through phone microphones. The apps would then use the recording to determine if the user was watching a soccer game, using technology that's similar to the Shazam app. If a game was playing in the vicinity, officials would then be able to determine if that bar location had a license to play the game. El Diario reports that the app has been downloaded 10 million times.

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All that was missing was a Beware of the Leopard sign

A "highly skilled IT professional" has lost his fight to be paid his unused vacation days as well as a non-trivial bonus, after a judge stuck to a law he admitted was outdated.…

Psychologist Dr. Jordan B. Peterson announced a subscription-based free speech platform called 'Thinkspot' on Wednesday that promises to provide users the best features of other social media platforms, but without censorship. From a report: It's being marketed as a free speech alternative to payment processors like Patreon in that it will "monetize creators" and as provide a social media alternative to platforms like Facebook and YouTube. Peterson discussed Thinkspot with podcaster Joe Rogan on June 9, emphasizing a radically pro-free speech Terms of Service. He described that freedom as the "central" aspect saying, "once you're on our platform we won't take you down unless we're ordered to by a US court of law."

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Welcome to Vim Sh*tty 2000

Proof-of-concept text files are now available that, when opened in a vulnerable installation of the Vim and Neovim, will execute commands on the underlying machine, or even open a backdoor.…

CERN is best known for pushing the boundaries of science and understanding, but the famed research outfit's next major experiment will be with open-source software. From a report: The European Organization for Nuclear Research, better known as CERN, and also known as home of the Large Hadron Collider, has announced plans to migrate away from Microsoft products and on to open-source solutions where possible. Why? Increases in Microsoft license fees. Microsoft recently revoked the organisations status as an academic institution, instead pricing access to its services on users. This bumps the cost of various software licenses 10x, which is just too much for CERN's budget.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: In April, Google announced a groundbreaking technology that could allow Android users to use their smartphones as hardware security keys whenever logging into Google accounts on their laptops or work PCs. Initially, the technology was made available for Chrome OS, macOS, and Windows 10 devices. Today, Google announced it is expanding this technology to iOS as well. Today's news means that iPhone and iPad users can now use their (secondary) Android smartphones as a security key whenever logging into their Google accounts on an iOS device. The technology works basically the same, as Google explained in April, at the Cloud Next 2019 conference.

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India said on Wednesday it will launch its second lunar mission in mid-July, as it moves to consolidate its status as a leader in space technology by achieving a controlled landing on the moon. From a report: The mission, if successful, would make India only the fourth country behind the United States, Russia and China to perform a "soft" landing on the moon and put a rover on it. China successfully landed a lunar rover in January. The unmanned mission, called Chandrayaan-2, which means "moon vehicle" in Sanskrit, will involve an orbiter, a lander and a rover, which have been built by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO). The mission is scheduled to launch on July 15 aboard ISRO's Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle Mark III. It will cost about 10 billion rupees ($144 million), ISRO said. After a journey of more than 50 days, ISRO's lander will attempt a "soft," controlled landing on the lunar surface on around Sept. 6.

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Facebook uncovered emails that appear to show Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg's connection to potentially problematic privacy practices at the company, WSJ reported Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: Within the company, the unearthing of the emails in the process of responding to a continuing federal privacy investigation has raised concerns that they would be harmful to Facebook -- at least from a public-relations standpoint -- if they were to become public, one of the people said. The potential impact of the internal emails has been a factor in the tech giant's desire to reach a speedy settlement of the investigation by the Federal Trade Commission, one of the people said. Facebook is operating under a 2012 consent decree with the agency related to privacy, and the emails sent around that time suggest that Mr. Zuckerberg and other senior executives didn't make compliance with the FTC order a priority, the people said. It couldn't be determined exactly what emails the agency has requested and how many of them relate to Mr. Zuckerberg. The FTC investigation began more than a year ago after reports that personal data of tens of millions of Facebook users improperly wound up in the hands of Cambridge Analytica, a data firm that worked on President Trump's 2016 campaign. The FTC is investigating whether that lapse violated the 2012 consent decree with the agency in which Facebook agreed to better protect user privacy. Since the Cambridge Analytica affair, other privacy missteps have come to light, adding to Facebook's headaches.

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Next up, Falcon Heavy and thinking about those Crew Dragons for Bigelow

SpaceX nailed a second landing of a Falcon 9 first stage at its Vandenberg Landing Zone 4 today after punching through the Californian fog to send a trio of Canadian satellites into orbit.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: Hey, if Nintendo and Sega can do it, then Konami can too. In a surprise E3 announcement, the company is releasing a miniature version of the classic 90s Turbografx-16 console, called the Turbografx-16 mini. If you're wondering why Konami is handling this, the original console was a joint effort between NEC and Hudson. Konami became Hudson's parent company in 2005 and then absorbed its operations in 2012, meaning it owns the brand and all its properties.

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A distributed denial of service attack may sound like hacker talk, but there's a simple explanation behind it. Secure messaging app Telegram said it had to endure one Wednesday, and it gave an explanation that almost anyone could understand. From a report: Telegram tweeted Wednesday morning that it was dealing with a DDoS attack. The app was down for many users across the globe, according to DownDetector. The downtime period was just a little over an hour, and while it was going on, Telegram explained how a DDoS attack works. "Imagine that an army of lemmings just jumped the queue at McDonald's in front of you -- and each is ordering a whopper," Telegram tweeted. "The server is busy telling the whopper lemmings they came to the wrong place -- but there are so many of them that the server can't even see you to try and take your order." The tweets then went on to describe how hackers accomplish a DDoS attack. "To generate these garbage requests, bad guys use 'botnets' made up of computers of unsuspecting users which were infected with malware at some point in the past. This makes a DDoS similar to the zombie apocalypse: one of the whopper lemmings just might be your grandpa," the company said in another tweet.

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Tired of taking the flak for helping spread fake news, WhatsApp will start suing parties it finds flouting its rules. Till now, it was only using machine learning to flag accounts that were abusing its anti-spam policies. From a report: The messaging platform, used by more than 1.5 billion users, confirmed on Tuesday that starting December 7 it will start considering signals off its platform to pursue legal actions against those who are abusing its system. The company will also go after individuals who -- or firms that -- falsely claim to have found ways to cause havoc on the service.

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OK, it has Files On-Demand, but haven't the people suffered enough?

Uneasy bedfellows Apple and Microsoft have hooked up to update the PC client for the fruity firm's cloudy storage service.…

Huawei has ditched a product launch for the first time since the US placed it on a trade blacklist. From a report: Richard Yu, CEO of Huawei's consumer division, told CNBC that the firm had formally planned to launch a new product in its Matebook series without giving a date, but it had been indefinitely put on hold. He said that being on the U.S. Entity List, which restricts American companies from selling products to Huawei, had caused the cancellation. "We cannot supply the PC," Yu said, adding that the situation is "unfortunate." When asked if the laptop could be launched at a later date, Yu said it "depends on how long the Entity List will be there." He acknowledged that, if Huawei is on the blacklist for a long time, the laptop will not be able to be launched.

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Not great, not terrible – but downright diabolical

The absolute state of 2019 is that millions of vapid young people, followed by millions more vapid young people, make serious bank just by virtue of being really, really, really ridiculously good looking and posting about it online.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Tesla is currently installing its solar roof product in eight states, according to Elon Musk, speaking at the Tesla Annual Shareholder Meeting on Tuesday. The solar roof-tile project has had a relatively long genesis since being unveiled three years ago, in 2016. In addition to having installations run in eight states, Musk said the solar roof product is currently on version three, and that this version is very exciting to him because it offers a chance of being at cost parity with an equivalent entry-level cheap traditional tile, when you include the cost of utilities you'd be saving by generating your own power instead. Regarding timelines for wider rollout of the solar roof products at the costs he anticipates, his own words probably say it best: "I'm sometimes a little optimistic about time frames -- it's time you knew," he joked at the meeting.

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SQL support and Release 4 arrives in cloudy open source service

Feeling a bit poorly? Good news! Microsoft has added SQL to its FHIR Server for Azure, so your symptoms can now be flung even further.…

They've got us on the list

Huawei has suspended the launch of the latest Matebook laptop ahead of sanctions being imposed by the US government that will block it from dealing with American suppliers.…

A stitch in time saves 6.5

Microsoft crossed its fingers and started rolling out an update to Azure Service Fabric over its cloudy platform yesterday.…