Collaborate Disseminate
The world’s desalination plants, which use energy intensive processes to remove salt from water, produce enough toxic brine each year to cover all of Florida under a foot of water. Continue reading Desalination Produces 50 Percent More Toxic Brine Than Previously Thought
If these companies actually execute the plan as written, it would make a significant impact in our effort to curb warming temperatures. Continue reading The UN Is Now Working Directly With Companies to Fight Climate Change
Fresh off the release of its national cybersecurity strategy, the Trump administration gauged interest at the United Nations in restarting talks on global cybersecurity norms. The negotiations, which collapsed last year amid reported acrimony among the U.S., Russia and others, aim to set limits on government-backed hacking at a time when offensive operations are abundant. At a meeting Friday with representatives of more than 20 countries, Deputy Secretary of State John J. Sullivan raised the prospect of restarting the norms dialogue at the U.N. Group of Governmental Experts (GGE), according to a State Department statement. Sullivan told reporters the department hopes to reconvene the GGE “to define norms of behavior that states will abide by and, if they don’t, to impose consequences.” “[N]onbinding norms of responsible behavior during peacetime provides important guidance to states, and we’re looking to develop those,” Sullivan said, echoing language in the administration’s new cyber strategy. Furthermore, he […]
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In a passionate speech delivered at the United Nations headquarters in New York, the UN chief said we are “careening towards the abyss” and announced a 2019 climate summit. Continue reading UN Secretary-General Says We Have A Year and a Half to Avoid ‘Runaway’ Climate Change
Faced with continued ethnic violence in Myanmar, Facebook banned the country’s commander-in-chief, the military’s television network and dozens of pages and accounts followed by almost 12 million people, the company announced on Monday. Earlier on the same day, a United Nations fact finding mission in Myanmar called for an independent investigation of Facebook’s role in what the mission’s report describes as a genocide against the Rohingya ethnic minority, directed in large part by Gen. Min Aung Hlaing. The U.N. investigators found that “Facebook has been a useful instrument for those seeking to spread hate, in a context where for most users Facebook is the Internet” and that the company has been “slow and ineffective” in response to the ongoing crisis. Earlier this year, a U.N. investigator said Facebook’s primary role in directing hate and inciting violence against the Rohingya showed the platform had “turned into a beast.” “The ethnic violence in […]
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The State Department’s top cybersecurity official says he is “optimistic” the United States can strike a deal on norms for government behavior in cyberspace with China and Russia, two of Washington’s biggest adversaries in the domain. Despite myriad grievances with the Russian and Chinese governments over their hacking operations, Robert Strayer said there is ample precedent for a new agreement involving the three cyber powers. “I think that it is possible because we have had three successful processes at the [United Nations] that have established that international law applies to cyberspace just like it does in the real world,” Strayer, a deputy assistant secretary of State, said in an interview. “All of those successful, consensus-based documents required that the U.S., China, and Russia came to agreement on the terms.” Despite that history, the latest round of talks at the UN forum, known as the Group of Governmental Experts, collapsed in […]
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Xiuhtezcatl Martinez is raising awareness of environmental issues through fiery speeches, hip hop, and federal lawsuits. Continue reading The Teen Rapper Suing the US Government for Climate Change Negligence
One of science’s most important publications assumes science journalists don’t know how to do their jobs. Continue reading ‘Nature’ Editorial Juxtaposes FOIA Email Release With Illegal Hacking
The Trump administration will continue its predecessor’s push for the adoption of global cyber norms, but is putting efforts to do so through the United Nations on the back burner, preferring instead to work with small groups of allied countries, White House cybersecurity czar Rob Joyce said Tuesday. This new “coalition of the willing” strategy seems at odds with the plans apparently developed last week for a joint cybersecurity framework with Russia to combat outside interference and hacking of elections. “We’re going to be working with like-minded countries to start to enforce the norms that we’ve talked about” — like the one outlawing attacks on critical infrastructure in peacetime — Joyce told a standing-room only crowd at the Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate’s cybersecurity R&D showcase. “We’ve got to raise the cost on the attackers … [We’ve got] to start pushing at those norms we know need to be enforced and following up so […]
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A U.N.-backed project built by Accenture and Microsoft aims to provide a permanent digital ID to 1.1 billion people around the globe who have no official identity, including many of the world’s refugees. The project, ID2020, on Monday unveiled a new blockchain-supported network designed to build a permanent and legal identity using biometric data on a person’s phone. Lacking access to identity excludes people from voting, health care, banking, housing and a wide range of modern rights. The new tool was unveiled at U.N. headquarters in New York on Monday during the second ID2020 summit, a “ID2020 is a public-private partnership dedicated to solving the challenges of identity” for individuals including the world’s 22 million refugees. The blockchain is a reliable, decentralized database that was first used publicly to track the bitcoin cryptocurrency. The method — also known as distributed ledger technology — is increasingly being explored to securely track data outside of currency. […]
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