ProtonMail removed “we do not keep any IP logs” from its privacy policy

Swiss courts compelled it to log and disclose a user's IP and browser fingerprint.
This weekend, news broke that security/privacy-focused anonymous email service ProtonMail turned over a French climate activist's IP address and browser fingerprint to Swiss authorities. This move seemingly ran counter to the well-known service's policies, which as recently as last week stated that "by default, we do not keep any IP logs which can be linked to your anonymous email account." After providing the activist's metadata to Swiss authorities, ProtonMail removed the section that had promised no IP logs, replacing it with one saying, "ProtonMail is email that respects privacy and puts people (not advertisers) first."

Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus are down. Here’s what we know [Updated]

The root cause of the worldwide outage appears to be a flubbed BGP route update.
DNS—short for Domain Name System—is the service that translates human-readable hostnames (like arstechnica.com) to raw, numeric IP addresses (like 18.221.249.245). Without working DNS, your computer doesn't know how to get to the servers that host the website you're looking for. The problem goes deeper than Facebook's obvious DNS failures, though. Facebook-owned Instagram was also down, and its DNS services—which are hosted on Amazon rather than being internal to Facebook's own network—were functional. Instagram and WhatsApp were reachable but showed HTTP 503 failures (no server is available for the request) instead, an indication that while DNS worked and the services' load balancers were reachable, the application servers that should be feeding the load balancers were not.

Google's Pixel 6 processor brings AI photo features

Google has unveiled its latest smartphone, containing the tech giant's first self-designed computer chip.
The Pixel 6 contains Google's "Tensor" processor, which it says enables new phone features powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning. It is also the first phone in the series with a "Pro" model, designed to compete at the high end of the market. "The whole goal when we started was to reach this point," said Rick Osterloh, Google's head of devices. "Really, this is our original vision that we're finally able to get to after building a lot of capabilities both in technology and in product development capabilities," he told the BBC.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/12/goldfish_carp_oxygen_ethanol/

Goldfish turn to booze... smart fish.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/2017-solar-eclipse-einstein-general-relativity

More on the eclipse, who would have guessed?

https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/08/why-our-brains-lead-us-astray-when-we-take-things-at-face-value/

Happy 20th Birthday to the Gnome Project!

Youtube Video