45% of Canadians willing to sell their digital data

Amid the controversy over companies harvesting personal information on consumers – everything from their ages to their search interests – an increasing number of  people want something in return.

A new study from Microsoft Corp. shows 32 per cent of Canadians are willing to sell all their digital data to the right company for the right price and 45 per cent would sell at least some of it.

Those high numbers didn't surprise interim privacy commissioner Chantal Bernier, who says Canadians have a sophisticated understanding of how their data is used.

"Canadians yes, want to remain in control. They understand there is a monetary value to their personal information and they want to make sure they get their value for it," she said in an interview with CBC's The Lang & O'Leary Exchange.

The Digital Trends study by Microsoft and IPG Mediabrands found 45 per cent of Canadian respondents are interested in selling their data for a reward, but many don't know how. 

The findings, from a survey of 9,000 people worldwide, including 1,050 in Canada, points to a need for those gathering digital data to engage with online and mobile consumers, Microsoft says.

There was strong awareness among Canadians that their data is valuable to marketers and service providers, with 35 per cent saying they had thought about how much information they hand over when they shop or browse.

Younger respondents were more likely to say they would be willing to sell all their data, or would show greater loyalty to a brand that gave them something in return. In addition to the survey, Microsoft interviewed 45 "early adopters" of technology and found them more responsive to some kind of trade between their own privacy and those who want to gather data.

Among that group, the average asking price for selling data was $2,168.

Canadians already are familiar with several types of reward programs – including grocery chains that give reward points for each dollar spent and credit cards that give travel or bonus points to cardholders.

But only 28 per cent said they knew how to harness their online data for rewards.

Misuse of data in the past has made many consumers distrustful of companies that gather information about them.

This month, the federal privacy commissioner reprimanded Google  after an investigation found that a man's health information was used to target ads for medical devices to him. There has also been backlash over issues such as Target's loss of consumer data and Facebook's use of user data.

Bernier said the privacy commission made the Google ruling public to raise awareness among digital companies that they have to "up their game" to respect privacy laws.

She said the commission's own analysis of companies that gather digital data shows a wide range of privacy policies.

"Privacy policies were either totally insufficient or unreadable, way too long – some were good, some were right, but clearly there is an issue," she said.

Microsoft advises digital services to "put consumers first – be transparent and tell them how you use their information." The study says consumers should be empowered to control their own data and exchange it for rewards.

Just how that relationship would be managed is not outlined, though Microsoft gives the example of Mydex, a British non-profit that manages personal data and gives consumers the power to parcel it out to selected brands.

The digital trends report also found:

• 30 per cent of Canadians already expect brands to know them and offer something they didn't even know they wanted.
• 27 per cent of Canadians are interested in tracking biodata such as heart rate and distance walked using wearable devices.
• 47 per cent of consumers want to spend time away from the internet.

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CSEC used airport Wi-Fi to track Canadian travellers: Edward Snowden documents

A top secret document retrieved by U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden and obtained by CBC News shows that Canada's electronic spy agency used information from the free internet service at a major Canadian airport to track the wireless devices of thousands of ordinary airline passengers for days after they left the terminal.

After reviewing the document, one of Canada's foremost authorities on cyber-security says the clandestine operation by the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC) was almost certainly illegal.

Ronald Deibert told CBC News: "I can't see any circumstance in which this would not be unlawful, under current Canadian law, under our Charter, under CSEC's mandates."

The spy agency is supposed to be collecting primarily foreign intelligence by intercepting overseas phone and internet traffic, and is prohibited by law from targeting Canadians or anyone in Canada without a judicial warrant.

As CSEC chief John Forster recently stated: "I can tell you that we do not target Canadians at home or abroad in our foreign intelligence activities, nor do we target anyone in Canada.

"In fact, it's prohibited by law. Protecting the privacy of Canadians is our most important principle."

But security experts who have been apprised of the document point out the airline passengers in a Canadian airport were clearly in Canada.

CSEC said in a written statement to CBC News that it is "mandated to collect foreign signals intelligence to protect Canada and Canadians. And in order to fulfill that key foreign intelligence role for the country, CSEC is legally authorized to collect and analyze metadata."

Metadata reveals a trove of information including, for example, the location and telephone numbers of all calls a person makes and receives — but not the content of the call, which would legally be considered a private communication and cannot be intercepted without a warrant.

"No Canadian communications were (or are) targeted, collected or used," the agency says.

In the case of the airport tracking operation, the metadata apparently identified travelers' wireless devices, but not the content of calls made or emails sent from them.

Black Code

Diebert is author of the book Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace, which is about internet surveillance, and he heads the world-renowned Citizen Lab cyber research program at the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs.

He says that whatever CSEC calls it, the tracking of those passengers was nothing less than an "indiscriminate collection and analysis of Canadians' communications data," and he could not imagine any circumstances that would have convinced a judge to authorize it.

A passenger checks his cellphone while boarding a flight in Boston in October. The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration issued new guidelines under which passengers will be able to use electronic devices from the time they board to the time they leave the plane, which will also help electronic spies to keep tabs on them. (Associated Press)

The latest Snowden document indicates the spy service was provided with information captured from unsuspecting travellers' wireless devices by the airport's free Wi-Fi system over a two-week period.

Experts say that probably included many Canadians whose smartphone and laptop signals were intercepted without their knowledge as they passed through the terminal.

The document shows the federal intelligence agency was then able to track the travellers for a week or more as they — and their wireless devices — showed up in other Wi-Fi "hot spots" in cities across Canada and even at U.S. airports.

That included people visiting other airports, hotels, coffee shops and restaurants, libraries, ground transportation hubs, and any number of places among the literally thousands with public wireless internet access.

The document shows CSEC had so much data it could even track the travellers back in time through the days leading up to their arrival at the airport, these experts say.

While the documents make no mention of specific individuals, Deibert and other cyber experts say it would be simple for the spy agency to have put names to all the Canadians swept up in the operation. 

All Canadians with a smartphone, tablet or laptop are "essentially carrying around digital dog tags as we go about our daily lives," Deibert says.

Anyone able to access the data that those devices leave behind on wireless hotspots, he says, can obtain "extraordinarily precise information about our movements and social relationships."

Trial run for NSA

The document indicates the passenger tracking operation was a trial run of a powerful new software program CSEC was developing with help from its U.S. counterpart, the National Security Agency.

In the document, CSEC called the new technologies "game-changing," and said they could be used for tracking "any target that makes occasional forays into other cities/regions."

Sources tell CBC News the technologies tested on Canadians in 2012 have since become fully operational.

CSEC claims "no Canadian or foreign travellers' movements were 'tracked,'" although it does not explain why it put the word "tracked" in quotation marks.

Deibert says metadata is "way more powerful than the content of communications. You can tell a lot more about people, their habits, their relationships, their friendships, even their political preferences, based on that type of metadata."

The document does not say exactly how the Canadian spy service managed to get its hands on two weeks' of travellers' wireless data from the airport Wi-Fi system, although there are indications it was provided voluntarily by a "special source."

The country's two largest airports — Toronto and Vancouver — both say they have never supplied CSEC or other Canadian intelligence agency with information on passengers' Wi-Fi use.

Alana Lawrence, a spokesperson for the Vancouver Airport Authority, says it operates the free Wi-Fi there, but does "not in any way store any personal data associated with it," and has never received a request from any Canadian intelligence agency for it.

A U.S.-based company, Boingo, is the largest independent supplier of Wi-Fi services at other Canadian airports, including Pearson International in Toronto.

Spokesperson Katie O'Neill tells CBC News: "To the best of our knowledge, [Boingo] has not provided any information about any of our users to the Canadian government, law enforcement or intelligence agencies."

It is also unclear from the document how CSEC managed to penetrate so many wireless systems to see who was using them — specifically, to know every time someone targeted at the airport showed up on one of those other Wi-Fi networks elsewhere.

Deibert and other experts say the federal intelligence agency must have gained direct access to at least some of the country's main telephone and internet pipelines, allowing the mass-surveillance of Canadian emails and phone calls.

'Blown away'

Ontario's privacy commissioner Ann Cavoukian says she is "blown away" by the revelations.

"It is really unbelievable that CSEC would engage in that kind of surveillance of Canadians. Of us.

"I mean that could have been me at the airport walking around… This resembles the activities of a totalitarian state, not a free and open society."

Privacy commissioner Ann Cavoukian. (Colin Perkel/Canadian Press)

Experts say the document makes clear CSEC intended to share both the technologies and future information generated by it with Canada's official spying partners — the U.S., Britain, New Zealand and Australia, the so-called Five Eyes intelligence network.

Indeed, the spy agency boasts in its leaked document that, in an apparently separate pilot project, it obtained access to two communications systems with more than 300,000 users, and was then able to "sweep" an entire mid-sized Canadian city to pinpoint a specific imaginary target in a fictional kidnapping.

The document dated May 2012 is a 27-page power-point presentation by CSEC describing its airport tracking operation.

While the document was in the trove of secret NSA files retrieved by Snowden, it bears CSEC's logo and clearly originated with the Canadian spy service.

Wesley Wark, a renowned authority on international security and intelligence, agrees with Deibert.

"I cannot see any way in which it fits CSEC's legal mandate."

Wark says the document suggests CSEC was "trying to push the technological boundaries" in part to impress its other international counterparts in the Five-Eyes intelligence network.

"This document is kind of suffused with the language of technological gee-whiz."

Wark says if CSEC's use of "very powerful and intrusive technological tools" puts it outside its mandate and even the law, "then you are in a situation for democracy where you simply don't want to be."   

Like Wark and other experts interviewed for this story, Deibert says there's no question Canada needs CSEC to be gathering foreign intelligence, "but they must do it within a framework of proper checks and balances so their formidable powers can never be abused. And that's the missing ingredient right now in Canada."

The only official oversight of CSEC's spying operations is a retired judge appointed by the prime minister, and reporting to the minister of defence who is also responsible for the intelligence agency.

"Here we clearly have an agency of the state collecting in an indiscriminate and bulk fashion all of Canadian communications and the oversight mechanism is flimsy at best," Deibert says.

"Those to me are circumstances ripe for potential abuse."

CSEC spends over $400 million a year, and employs about 2,000 people, almost half of whom are involved in intercepting phone conversations, and hacking into computer systems supposedly in other countries.

It has long been Canada's most secretive spy agency, responding to almost all questions about its operations with reassurances it is doing nothing wrong.

Privacy watchdog Cavoukian says there has to be "greater openness and transparency because without that there can be no accountability.

"This trust-me model that the government is advancing and CSEC is advancing – 'Oh just trust us, we're doing the right thing, don't worry' — yes, worry! We have very good reason to worry."

In the U.S., Snowden exposed massive metadata collection by the National Security Agency, which is said to have scooped up private phone and internet records of more than 100 million Americans.

A U.S. judge recently called the NSA's metadata collection an Orwellian surveillance program that is likely unconstitutional.

The public furor over NSA snooping prompted a White House review of the American spy agency's operations, and President Barack Obama recently vowed to clamp down on the collection and use of metadata.

Cavoukian says Canadians deserve nothing less.

"Look at the U.S. — they've been talking about these matters involving national security for months now very publicly because the public deserves answers.

"And that's what I would tell our government, our minister of national defence and our prime minister: We demand some answers to this."

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Flying snakes have 'surprising aerodynamic' bodies

This may be the last thing that anyone with a touch of ophidiophobia — fear of snakes — would want to hear: flying snakes have surprisingly good aerodynamic qualities.

'[T]hey're much more scared of you than you are of them. If you are near them, they're gliding away from you and not at you.'— Jake Socha, Virginia Tech

Scientists studying the amazing gliding proficiency of an Asian species known as the paradise tree snake say it does two things as it goes airborne. It splays its ribs in order to flatten its profile from round into a more triangular form, and it undulates while airborne — sort of swimming through the air.

Researchers led by Jake Socha, an expert in biomechanics at Virginia Tech, replicated in a plastic model the shape the snake assumes while airborne, and tested it to evaluate its aerodynamic qualities.

They placed the snake model in a water tunnel and used a laser to track flow patterns around the model.

"Our expectations going in were that it would not be very good because it does not look like a classically streamlined, airplane-type cross-sectional shape," Socha said in a telephone interview on Thursday.

'Surprising aerodynamic characteristics'

"What we got were some surprising aerodynamic characteristics. In fact, it was much better than we anticipated," Socha added.

The paradise tree snake is one of the world's five species of flying snakes, all from the genus Chrysopelea. To be precise, they are gliders, not actual flyers like birds and bats that achieve powered flight.

The mildly venomous snake — green and black with occasional touches of red and orange — has a diameter roughly equal to a human finger and is up to one metre long. It lives in rain forests in Southeast Asia and South Asia, including Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines.

The snake takes to the air from trees, and is capable of gliding about 30 metres. Socha said its gliding ability enables the snake to escape trouble and to get from one place to the next efficiently. He doubted that the creature is taking to the air in order to spot prey like lizards below.

"You can glide to a tree 30 metres away much more quickly than if you had to slither down the tree and then slither across the forest floor and then climb back up that tree," said Socha, whose research was published in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

6 other gliding mammals

This snake is one of numerous animals around the world that can glide through the air. Six types of mammals are gliders, including flying squirrels and an arboreal critter called the colugo. Some lizards also glide, including the Draco lizard and some geckos.

There are even gliding frogs and gliding wingless ants, as well as types of flying fish and even gliding squid.

Scientists are eager to unlock the secrets of flying snakes, especially considering that a snake shape would seem to be bad for aerodynamics. This study was funded in part by the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which Socha said was interested in the basic science behind what makes the snakes good gliders.

To people with ophidiophobia, the idea of a flying snake may be nightmarish. But Socha offered some reassuring thoughts.

"They are small and they're effectively harmless," Socha said. "And to tell you the truth, they're much more scared of you than you are of them. If you are near them, they're gliding away from you and not at you."

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Monarch migration said to be in trouble as numbers fall

The number of Monarch butterflies wintering in Mexico plunged this year to its lowest level since studies began in 1993, leading experts to announce Wednesday that the insects' annual migration from the United States and Canada is in danger of disappearing.

A report released by the World Wildlife Fund, Mexico's Environment Department and the Natural Protected Areas Commission blames the displacement of the milkweed the species feeds on by genetically modified crops and urban sprawl in the United States, as well as the dramatic reduction of the butterflies' habitat in Mexico due to illegal logging of the trees they depend on for shelter.

After steep and steady declines in the previous three years, the black-and-orange butterflies now cover only 0.67 hectares (1.65) acres in the pine and fir forests west of Mexico City, compared to 1.19 hectares (2.93 acres) last year. They covered more than 18 hectares (44.5 acres) at their recorded peak in 1995.

Because the butterflies clump together by the thousands in trees, they are counted by the area they cover.

The decline in the Monarch population now marks a statistical long-term trend and can no longer be seen as a combination of yearly or seasonal events, experts say.

The announcement followed on the heels of the 20th anniversary of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which saw the United States, Mexico and Canada signing environmental accords to protect migratory species such as the Monarch. At the time, the butterfly was adopted as the symbol of trilateral cooperation.

"Twenty years after the signing of NAFTA, the Monarch migration, the symbol of the three countries' cooperation, is at serious risk of disappearing," said Omar Vidal, Omar Vidal, the World Wildlife Fund director in Mexico.

Genetically modified crops blamed

Lincoln Brower, a leading entomologist at Sweet Briar College in Virginia, wrote that "the migration is definitely proving to be an endangered biological phenomenon."

"The main culprit is now GMO herbicide-resistant corn and soybean crops and herbicides in the USA," which "leads to the wholesale killing of the monarch's principal food plant, common milkweed," Brower wrote in an email.

While Mexico has made headway in reducing logging in the officially protected winter reserve, that alone cannot save the migration, wrote Karen Oberhauser, a professor at the University of Minnesota. She noted that studies indicate that the U.S. Midwest is the main source of the butterflies coming to Mexico. "A large part of their reproductive habitat in that region has been lost due to changes in agricultural practices, mainly the explosive growth in the use of herbicide-tolerant crops."

While some gardeners and activists in the United States have started a movement to plant small patches of milkweed, the effort is in its infancy. Extreme weather — extreme cold snaps, unusually heavy rains or droughts in all three countries — have also apparently played a role in the decline.

It's unclear what would happen to the Monarchs if they no longer migrated. The butterflies can apparently survive year-round in warmer climates, but populations in the northern United States and Canada would have to face bitter winters. There is also another small migration route that takes the butterflies to California, but that has also registered declines.

Migration trip a mystery

The migration is an inherited trait. No butterfly lives to make the full round-trip, and it is unclear how they remember the route back to the same patch of forest each year, a journey of thousands of miles to a forest reserve that covers 56,259-hectares (193,000) acres in central Mexico.

Inhabitants of the reserve had already noted a historic change, as early as the Nov. 1-2 Day of the Dead holiday, when the butterflies usually arrive.

"They were part of the landscape of the Day of the Dead, when you could see them flitting around the graveyards," said Gloria Tavera, the director of the reserve. "This year was the first time in memory that they weren't there."

Losing the butterflies would be a blow for people such as Adolfo Rivera, 55, a farmer from the town of Los Saucos who works as a guide for tourists in the Piedra Herrada wintering ground. He said the butterflies had come later and in smaller numbers this year, a fact he attributed to a rainy winter. "This is a source of pride for us, and income," Rivera said.

Butterfly guide Emilio Velazquez Moreno, 39, and other farmers in the village of Macheros, located inside the reserve, have been planting small plots of milkweed in a bid to provide food for the Monarchs if they decide to stay in Mexico year-round, which he said some do.

Sitting beside a mountainside patch of firs where the butterflies were clumping on the branches, Velazquez Moreno, a second-generation guide who has been visiting the butterflies since he was a boy, said "we have to protect this. This comes first, this is our heritage."

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How Google's $2.9B sale of Motorola could lift Lenovo

An expensive mistake by Google could turn into a golden opportunity for China's Lenovo Group as it expands beyond its success in the personal computer industry.

Google is ridding itself of a financial headache by selling Motorola Mobility's smartphone business to Lenovo for $2.9 billion. The deal announced late Wednesday comes less than two years after Google bought Motorola Mobility for $12.4 billion in the biggest acquisition of Google's 15-year history.

While Google Inc. is backpedaling, Lenovo Group Ltd. is gearing up for a major expansion. Already the world's largest PC maker, Lenovo is now determined to become a bigger player in smartphones as more people rely on them instead of laptop and desktop computers to go online.

Lenovo already is among the smartphone leaders in its home country, but it has been looking for ways to expand its presence in other markets, especially the U.S. and Latin America. The company had been rumored to be among the prospective buyers for BlackBerry Ltd. when that troubled smartphone maker was mulling a sale last year.

"We will be going from an emerging-market player to a worldwide player in smartphones," Lenovo CEO Yang Yuanqing said in an interview with The Associated Press.

Miscalculated Motorola's worth

This marks Lenovo's second high-profile deal this month. The company announced plans last week to buy a major piece of IBM Corp.'s computer server business for $2.3 billion.

For Google, the sale is a tacit admission that a company that prides itself on employing some of the world's smartest people miscalculated how much Motorola was worth.

Three models of Motorola's Droid Razr smartphones are shown at a 2012 press conference. The phones were the first from Motorola as a part of Google. (Bebeto Matthews/Associated Press)

Google previously recovered some of the money that it spent on Motorola by selling its set-top operations last year to Arris Group Inc. for $2.35 billion.

And Google is holding on to most of Motorola's more than 20,000 mobile patents, providing Google with legal protection for its widely used Android software for smartphones and tablet computers. Gaining control of Motorola's patents was the main reason Google was willing to pay so much for a smartphone maker that was already losing money and market share.

The Motorola patents were valued at $5.5 billion at the time Google took over, according to regulatory filings.

Factoring all that, there's a gap of roughly $1.65 billion between what Google paid for Motorola and what Google is getting from its sales to Arris and Lenovo, plus the original value of the patents. What's not known is the value of the patents Google is keeping, as Lenovo is picking up about 2,000 Motorola patents in addition to the phone manufacturing operations.

It's also unclear if Google will have to absorb a charge to account for its apparent miscalculation of Motorola Mobility's value. The Mountain View, Calif., company may address the issue Thursday when it announces its fourth-quarter earnings after the market closes.

'This makes Lenovo a company to watch'

Most investors viewed Motorola as an unnecessary drain on Google's profit, a perspective that was reflected by Wall Street's reaction to the sale. Google's stock gained $28.08, or 2.5 pe rcent, to $1,135 in extended trading.

A cellphone pioneer, Motorola Mobility had its last big hit with the Razr flip phone, which came out in 2004. Its product line became outmoded after Apple Inc. released the iPhone in 2007, unleashing a new era of touch-screen phones. Motorola hasn't been able to catch up yet, even as last summer's Moto X received positive reviews.

Motorola's losses are likely to dampen Google's earnings at least for the first half of this year. That's because it's expected to take six to nine months before the proposed sale gets the necessary approvals from regulators.

Buying Motorola will enable Lenovo to join Apple Inc. as the only major technology companies with global product lines in PCs, smartphones and tablets, putting Lenovo in a better position to become a one-stop shop for companies to buy all their devices from the same vendor, said Forrester Research analyst Frank Gillett.

"This makes Lenovo a company to watch," Gillett said in an email. "The personal device manufacturer business is consolidating — and manufacturers must compete in all three device markets, plus emerging wearable categories, or get left out of the next market shift."

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Mind-bending indeed! Stephen Hawking's black holes U-turn explained

New

CBC's science correspondent uses computer animation to explain Hawking's new view

CBC News Posted: Jan 30, 2014 9:43 AM ET Last Updated: Jan 30, 2014 9:43 AM ET

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The famed theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, one of the founders of modern theories about black holes, declared in a new paper last week that he may have been wrong when he first proposed his ideas 40 years ago.

Contrary to what he theorized decades ago, Hawking now believes black holes are not the final graveyard for matter that gets sucked in by the gravitational pull caused by a "collapsing" star, explains CBC science correspondent Bob McDonald.

"He's not saying [black holes] don't exist, he's just kind of modifying his idea of how they work," McDonald says, noting that Hawking now believes there may be "an escape route" for matter.

Watch player above for McDonald's explanation of the latest bombshell to shake up the physics community.

A brief explanation of black holes:

What is a black hole?

According to NASA, black holes can form when a star is dying. Some stars, which can be up to 20 times more than the mass of our sun, emerge when a large star "collapses" or falls in on itself. This creates a strong gravitational pull that draws in everything, including, light. The term "black hole" was coined by physicist John Wheeler, who died in 2008.

What is an event horizon?

An event horizon is the invisible surface at which point nothing can escape being drawn into a black hole. Hawking previously stated that nothing could escape this black hole, but he has since revised that theory.

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Data Privacy Day highlights need for action: Dan Misener

Once again, it's International Data Privacy Day, and I am, as ever, unclear on the proper greeting.

"Happy International Data Privacy Day?" "Merry International Data Privacy Day?" Perhaps it's fitting to wish friends and family a private International Data Privacy Day.

Avner Levin clears things up for me.

"'Happy' is what I hear people use more often than not," he explains. "Of course, there would be some irony to that this year."

Levin is the director of the Privacy & Cyber Crime Institute at Ryerson University, which is hosting its own Data Privacy Day event.

"The goal is to raise awareness," Levin says of the annual event.

But I have to wonder: is a lack of awareness really the issue?

From the Edward Snowden revelations to data breaches at retailers such as Target and Michaels, the privacy of our personal information has never felt more front-and-centre. We're starting to see what bad privacy news looks like on a large scale.

Research suggests two-thirds of Canadians have "a significant level of concern" about their personal privacy. But somewhere between concern and action -- actually doing something to improve privacy -- there's a breakdown.

In the abstract, Canadians seem to feel that privacy matters. At the same time, we don't read privacy policies. We use terrible passwords. Many of us don't adjust our privacy settings from the defaults.

Disconnect between awareness and action

"I don't know that awareness is really the problem," says Levin.

"We've been raising awareness for several years. People in the privacy sector -- advocates or commissioners -- they're always thinking that awareness will be followed up by activities. But that's where the chain breaks."

So why is it so difficult to translate awareness into action? Perhaps it's the intangibility.

"People don't feel the impact on their daily lives," says Levin. "There is no immediate impact. There's no consequence for the lack of taking action. People don't see what difference that would make in their lives."

Intellectually, I understand that I regularly hand over huge amounts of personal information to tech companies. But it's hard to work through exactly what that means for my day-to-day existence.

What's more, being told to check your privacy settings can feel a bit like being told to eat your vegetables. Or take your vitamins. Or backup your hard drive.

"'Enough already,'" says Levin, echoing a weary consumer. "'I heard you a hundred million times. I'm acting to the best of my abilities.'"

Finally, I think part of this has to do with our desire for easy answers. We want a set-it-and-forget-it solution to our online privacy. But of course, no such thing exists.

Data privacy can be complicated, and requires constant vigilance. The absence of a silver bullet can make it easy to throw your hands in the air and say, "I give up."

Personal responsibility

Given the complexity of managing your online privacy, is it reasonable to expect individuals to keep track of all the privacy settings and behind-the-scenes machinations of data brokers?

Clearly, there's a certain level of personal responsibility here. If you hand over personal data to a company, and they do something you don't like with that data, that's partly on you.

However, Avner Levin thinks it's unrealistic to shoulder individuals with all that responsibility.

"I don't think that the answer is to berate the individual all the time about what they should be doing," he says.

That's why he's calling for increased powers for the federal privacy commissioner, something former privacy commissioner Jennifer Stoddart called for in 2011. He wants the privacy commissioner to be able to look into how companies handle personal data without the need for a complaint first.

"Give them the power to order companies to do something," he says. "And if they don't comply, [give them the power] to impose fines or sanctions like some of their provincial colleagues have here, and like some of, or most of, their European colleagues have."

According to Levin, federal oversight is the way forward for data privacy in Canada. He believes leaving it in the hands of individuals won't compel companies to change how they handle personal data.

Personally, I plan to celebrate Data Privacy Day quietly, spending a few minutes reviewing privacy settings on the social networks I use.

I've already checked Twitter, and found two checkboxes about "Personalization" and "Promoted content" that I don't remember turning on. I've adjusted those accordingly.

I'm also going to review which apps are authorized to use my accounts. After years of granting apps permission to use my Facebook and Twitter accounts, things are starting to get a bit crufty, so I'm going to tidy things up and remove the apps that I don't use anymore.

I'm also going to spend some time on the Canadian Access to Social Media Information website, to read up on the privacy policies for the services I use.

Finally, I'm going to resist the urge to tell other people they should do these same things. Because that would be like reminding you to eat your vegetables.

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Stephen Hawking's black holes 'blunder' stirs debate

When Stephen Hawking contradicts his own theory, that's a paradox worth noting.

'It's saying there's no 'black' in black hole'- Amanda Peet, University of Toronto physicist

Like the black holes he described 40 years ago, the British cosmologist's reassessment last week of the concept of "event horizons" is pulling in chatter from astrophysicists around the world.

What is an event horizon?

An event horizon is the invisible surface at which point nothing can escape being drawn into a black hole. Hawking previously stated that nothing could escape this black hole, but he has since revised that theory.

It turns out that the black holes Hawking wrote about in 1974 — those places in the space-time continuum that can devour galaxies and even trap light forever — may not exist in the way that he proposed decades ago.

In a new online paper titled Information Preservation and Weather Forecasting for Black Holes, the 72-year-old Hawking says, "There are no black holes — in the sense from which light can't escape to infinity."

The U-turn from Hawking, one of the pioneers of modern black hole theory, surprised his colleagues, said Amanda Peet, a theoretical physicist and associate professor at the University of Toronto who specializes in black hole paradoxes and string theory.

'Radical departure'

"It's majorly provocative. It's saying there's no 'black' in black hole. He's sort of saying the hole is grey instead, not just absorbing everything," she said. "It's a very radical departure from past ideas."

In other words, Hawking now admits that light can probably pass through what he once defined as a point-of-no-return void, and that black holes can leak "information" in the form of matter.

This reversal proposes that matter and energy can be temporarily held before being released back into space in a scrambled form.

Stephen Hawking's new paper modifies his views on the properties of a black hole. (Kimberly White/Reuters)

Peet said that although Hawking's paper has been described as "cryptic," running just four pages long and lacking any calculations, physicists are rightly paying close attention to what he says.

"This is the mind that originated the whole black hole information paradox in the first place," she said.

Black holes occur when a dead star "literally runs out of gas" for nuclear fusion and begins to collapse on itself under the force of gravity, Peet explained. If there's enough mass, this creates a "runaway collapse" so powerful that no other force can resist. All nearby matter would get drawn in and crushed.

'An event horizon is this hidden thing, a place where if you fall beyond that surface, you can never get out.…You end up getting squished like a bug.'— Amanda Peet, University of Toronto physicist

Hawking's new revelation means he has ruled out what Peet called one of the classical "signatures" of black holes, the notion of boundaries in space-time known as event horizons.

"An event horizon is this hidden thing, a place where if you fall beyond that surface, you can never get out," Peet explained. "If you fall into it, you end up getting squished like a bug. These event horizons, as imagined in the classical black hole literature, are what Hawking is now backtracking on."

What is a black hole?

According to NASA, black holes can form when a star is dying. Some stars, which can be up to 20 times more than the mass of our sun, emerge when a large star "collapses" or falls in on itself. This creates a strong gravitational pull that draws in everything, including, light. The term "black hole" was coined by physicist John Wheeler, who died in 2008.

Harald Pfeiffer, an expert on gravitational waves who teaches at U of T's Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics, said it appears that Hawking changed his mind because event horizons are incompatible with quantum theory.

"The picture before last week was whenever you throw things into a black hole, all the information about the properties of what you have thrown in is completely lost," he said.

But Pfeiffer said that led to problems, because it violates a law of quantum mechanics known as "unitarity," which says information can't simply be eaten up and destroyed like that.

"The conflict is that with quantum mechanics, you're never destroying information," he said. "If information gets completely lost and falls into a black hole, there's no way of reversing this. So either Einstein's theory of relativity is incomplete, or quantum mechanics is incomplete."

Hawking now believes physicists should be thinking in terms of "apparent horizons" — boundaries that can contain matter and light for a period of time — rather than the classical event horizon.

In his paper, Hawking writes: "This suggests that black holes should be redefined as metastable bound states of the gravitational field."

Chaos mangles information

Based on the respected physicist's latest assumptions, Peet said, the reason it's so hard to recover information out of black holes would be because this apparent horizon behaves pretty much like a true event horizon would, except that "chaos would be driving the scrambling of information rather than some mysterious property of quantum gravity."

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has imaged this coiled galaxy. The 'eye' at the centre of the galaxy is actually a monstrous black hole surrounded by a ring of stars. (NASA/Reuters)

So what might have changed Hawking's view?

Peet noted there has been much modern development in the field, with physicists Andrew Strominger and Cumrun Vafa demonstrating in 1996 it's even possible to calculate the entropy of some types of black holes from first principles.

Pfeiffer said Hawking has always known that his views clashed with quantum physics, but he seems to have been relenting in recent years.

In 2004, for example, he conceded a bet against physics theorist John Preskill about black holes. Hawking admitted that information is probably not swallowed forever in a black hole, as he had previously thought.

"He's only recently came around," Pfeiffer said.

"Stephen writes extremely few papers, so … this might very well be the very few occasions that Stephen actually puts these ideas in writing. As such, it might very well be quite an important event," he added.

At his 70th birthday two years ago, Hawking claimed his theory about black holes was his "biggest blunder."

Peet said scientists will be waiting patiently for a possible followup paper from him.

"The usual style if you're famous enough to put out a paper like this, is you follow it up with more details," she said. "That's what physicists like me will be waiting on, because it matters what he thinks."

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Big baby? Animal offspring size linked to dad's role

New

Females produce larger offspring with male mates who help with rearing

The Canadian Press Posted: Jan 29, 2014 9:00 AM ET Last Updated: Jan 29, 2014 9:00 AM ET

A new study suggests that whether animals give birth to more offspring or larger offspring depends on whether males are helping to raise the young.

Biological sciences researcher Holly Kindsvater of Simon Fraser University says that in general, females tend to produce bigger offspring if they mate with a male that helps to look after them.

Kindsvater says that's because bigger offspring have a greater chance of surviving and passing on good genes.

But there are some puzzling instances where females will give birth to bigger babies after mating with a male that slacks on parental duties, and others where they produce a bunch of smaller babies after mating with a supposedly good male.

Kindsvater's study suggests that sometimes, when paired with a lousy mate, the female is better off having just a few large babies because they're more likely to survive without the care of a father.

She says that if males are helping to raise the offspring, then it's better to have many babies of a smaller size because the father will help look after them.

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Black Death mysteries unlocked by McMaster scientists

Two devastating plagues that decimated much of Europe hundreds of years ago were actually caused by distinct strains of the same pathogen, new research suggests — and scientists say it's not impossible for a new strain of the plague to emerge in humans in the future.

These findings mark the apex of McMaster University scientist Hendrik Poinar's quest to do something no other scientist has ever done — crack the code of an ancient killer and change the way we fight disease in the 21st century.

'The pathogen only represents one half of the equation. We're the other half.'- Hendrik Poinar, director of the McMaster University Ancient DNA Centre

The Hamilton university scientist is part of an international team studying the Plague of Justinian and the Black Death — a fourteenth century killer disease that wiped out more than 50 million people. The results are currently published in the online edition of The Lancet Infectious Diseases. 

"The research is both fascinating and perplexing. It generates new questions which need to be explored," said Poinar, an associate professor and director of the McMaster Ancient DNA Centre and an investigator with the Michael G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research.

"Why did this pandemic, which killed somewhere between 50 and 100 million people, die out?" he asked.  

Poinar is an evolutionary biologist, which means he studies the nature of how humans got here and where we're going. Until now, little was known about the origins or cause of the Justinian plague — which helped bring an end to the Roman Empire — and its relationship to the Black Death, which came about some 800 years later.

Secrets pulled from ancient teeth

Researchers from McMaster, Northern Arizona University and the University of Sydney have isolated minuscule DNA fragments from the 1,500-year-old teeth of two victims of the Justinian plague that were buried in Bavaria, Germany. These are the oldest pathogen genomes scientists have obtained.

It's from these short fragments that scientists have reconstructed the genome of the oldest Yersinia pestis, which is the bacterium responsible for the plague, and compared it to a database of hundreds of contemporary disease strains.

Scientists studied remains taken from two victims of the Justinian plague. They believe the victims died in the latter stages of the epidemic when it had reached southern Bavaria, likely sometime between 541 and 543. (Courtesy McMaster University)

Pulling DNA from century-old skeletal remains was akin to finding a "needle in the proverbial haystack," Poinar said.

"These are tiny little DNA fragments. We managed again using these novel technologies to pull all these little tiny pieces out and stitch them together to be able to access and understand these genomes of the past.

"That's quite a challenge from a technological standpoint, but it allows us really to go deeper and deeper and deeper into the past."

The Plague of Justinian struck in the sixth century and is estimated to have killed between 30 and 50 million people, virtually half the world's population, as it spread across Asia, North Africa, Arabia and Europe.

The Black Death erupted about 800 years later with similar force, killing 50 million Europeans between 1347 and 1351.

'A massive pandemic'

These new findings suggest the strain of the pathogen responsible for the Justinian outbreak was an evolutionary "dead-end" that was distinct from strains involved later in the Black Death and other pandemics.

"We know the bacterium Y. pestis has jumped from rodents into humans throughout history and rodent reservoirs of plague still exist today in many parts of the world," said Dave Wagner, an associate professor in the Center for Microbial Genetics and Genomics at Northern Arizona University.

Researchers used this tooth to extract DNA information about plagues that ravaged Europe centuries ago. (Courtesy McMaster University)

"If the Justinian plague could erupt in the human population, cause a massive pandemic, and then die out, it suggests it could happen again," he said. "Fortunately we now have antibiotics that could be used to effectively treat plague, which lessens the chances of another large scale human pandemic."

Scientists say they hope this research will lead to a better understanding of the dynamics of modern infectious disease, including a form of the plague that still kills thousands every year.

The disease remains a threat today in parts of Africa and Asia. Just last month, the bubonic plague killed 20 people in Madagascar. A squirrel was also found carrying a strain of the plague that is a descendent of the Black Death in a Los Angeles park last year.

All it takes for the disease to spread are fleas that feed on rodents infected with the plague to then feed on humans, Poinar said — though thanks to much cleaner cities than fourteenth-century Europe and modern antibiotics, a widespread plague like the one that swept across Europe is unlikely, Poinar said.

In studying the human genome before and after these epidemics struck, scientists can really start to understand what is inherent in the human genetic makeup that made some so susceptible to the plague and others resistant.

"The pathogen only represents one half of the equation," Poinar said. "We're the other half."

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Data Privacy Day highlights need for action: Dan Misener

Once again, it's International Data Privacy Day, and I am, as ever, unclear on the proper greeting.

"Happy International Data Privacy Day?" "Merry International Data Privacy Day?" Perhaps it's fitting to wish friends and family a private International Data Privacy Day.

Avner Levin clears things up for me.

"'Happy' is what I hear people use more often than not," he explains. "Of course, there would be some irony to that this year."

Levin is the director of the Privacy & Cyber Crime Institute at Ryerson University, which is hosting its own Data Privacy Day event.

"The goal is to raise awareness," Levin says of the annual event.

But I have to wonder: is a lack of awareness really the issue?

From the Edward Snowden revelations to data breaches at retailers such as Target and Michaels, the privacy of our personal information has never felt more front-and-centre. We're starting to see what bad privacy news looks like on a large scale.

Research suggests two-thirds of Canadians have "a significant level of concern" about their personal privacy. But somewhere between concern and action -- actually doing something to improve privacy -- there's a breakdown.

In the abstract, Canadians seem to feel that privacy matters. At the same time, we don't read privacy policies. We use terrible passwords. Many of us don't adjust our privacy settings from the defaults.

Disconnect between awareness and action

"I don't know that awareness is really the problem," says Levin.

"We've been raising awareness for several years. People in the privacy sector -- advocates or commissioners -- they're always thinking that awareness will be followed up by activities. But that's where the chain breaks."

So why is it so difficult to translate awareness into action? Perhaps it's the intangibility.

"People don't feel the impact on their daily lives," says Levin. "There is no immediate impact. There's no consequence for the lack of taking action. People don't see what difference that would make in their lives."

Intellectually, I understand that I regularly hand over huge amounts of personal information to tech companies. But it's hard to work through exactly what that means for my day-to-day existence.

What's more, being told to check your privacy settings can feel a bit like being told to eat your vegetables. Or take your vitamins. Or backup your hard drive.

"'Enough already,'" says Levin, echoing a weary consumer. "'I heard you a hundred million times. I'm acting to the best of my abilities.'"

Finally, I think part of this has to do with our desire for easy answers. We want a set-it-and-forget-it solution to our online privacy. But of course, no such thing exists.

Data privacy can be complicated, and requires constant vigilance. The absence of a silver bullet can make it easy to throw your hands in the air and say, "I give up."

Personal responsibility

Given the complexity of managing your online privacy, is it reasonable to expect individuals to keep track of all the privacy settings and behind-the-scenes machinations of data brokers?

Clearly, there's a certain level of personal responsibility here. If you hand over personal data to a company, and they do something you don't like with that data, that's partly on you.

However, Avner Levin thinks it's unrealistic to shoulder individuals with all that responsibility.

"I don't think that the answer is to berate the individual all the time about what they should be doing," he says.

That's why he's calling for increased powers for the federal privacy commissioner, something former privacy commissioner Jennifer Stoddart called for in 2011. He wants the privacy commissioner to be able to look into how companies handle personal data without the need for a complaint first.

"Give them the power to order companies to do something," he says. "And if they don't comply, [give them the power] to impose fines or sanctions like some of their provincial colleges have here, and like some of, or most of, their European colleges have."

According to Levin, federal oversight is the way forward for data privacy in Canada. He believes leaving it in the hands of individuals won't compel companies to change how they handle personal data.

Personally, I plan to celebrate Data Privacy Day quietly, spending a few minutes reviewing privacy settings on the social networks I use.

I've already checked Twitter, and found two checkboxes about "Personalization" and "Promoted content" that I don't remember turning on. I've adjusted those accordingly.

I'm also going to review which apps are authorized to use my accounts. After years of granting apps permission to use my Facebook and Twitter accounts, things are starting to get a bit crufty, so I'm going to tidy things up and remove the apps that I don't use anymore.

I'm also going to spend some time on the Canadian Access to Social Media Information website, to read up on the privacy policies for the services I use.

Finally, I'm going to resist the urge to tell other people they should do these same things. Because that would be like reminding you to eat your vegetables.

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Google Glass prescription frames, shades are coming

Google Glass is getting glasses.

Google is adding prescription frames and new styles of detachable sunglasses to its computerized, internet-connected goggles known as Glass.

The move comes as Google Inc. prepares to make Glass available to the general population later this year. Currently, Glass is available only to the tens of thousands of people who are testing and creating apps for it.

Glass hasn't actually had glasses in its frame until now.

Glass is basically a small computer, with a camera and a display screen above the wearer's right eye. The device sits roughly at eyebrow level, higher than where eyeglasses would go.

Google Glass is currently offered in five colours, but hasn't actually had glasses in its frame until now. Google Inc. will introduce four popular styles of prescription frames and two choices for sunglasses styles (Reuters)

It lets wearers surf the Web, ask for directions and take photos or videos. Akin to wearing a smartphone without having to hold it in your hands, Glass also lets people read their email, share photos on Twitter and Facebook, translate phrases while traveling or partake in video chats. Glass follows some basic voice commands, spoken after the worlds "OK, Glass."

4 styles of frames

The gadget itself is not changing with this announcement. Rather, Google plans to make various attachments available. Starting Tuesday, the Mountain View, Calif., company is offering four styles of prescription frames and two new types of shades available to its "explorers" — the people who are trying out Glass. The frames will cost $225 and the shades, $150. That's on top of the $1,500 price of Glass.

'We want as many people as possible to wear it'- Isabelle Olsson, lead designer for Google Glass

Users can take the frames to any vision care provider for prescription lenses, though Google says it is working with insurance provider Vision Service Plan to train eye-care providers around the U.S. on how to work with Glass. Google says some insurance plans may cover the cost of the frames.

Isabelle Olsson, the lead designer for Google Glass, says the new frames open the spectacles up to a larger audience.

She demonstrated the new frames to The Associated Press last week at the Google Glass Basecamp, an airy loft on the eighth floor of New York City's Chelsea Market. It's one of the places where Glass users go to pick up their wares and learn how to use them. Walking in, visitors are greeted, of course, by a receptionist wearing Google Glass.

"We want as many people as possible to wear it," she said.

To that end, Glass's designers picked four basic but distinct frame styles. On one end is a chunky "bold" style that stands out. On the other is a "thin" design — to blend in as much as possible.

'Lifestyle products'

Olsson said Google won't be able to compete with the thousands of styles offered at typical eyeglasses stores. Instead, Glass's designers looked at what types of glasses are most popular, what people wear the most and, importantly, what they look good in.

The latter has been a constant challenge for the nascent wearable technology industry, especially for something like Google Glass, designed to be worn on your face. When Google unveiled Glass in a video nearly two years ago, it drew unfavourable comparisons to Bluetooth headsets, the trademarks of the fashion-ignorant technophile.

In designing Google Glass, Olsson and her team focused on three design principles with the goal of creating something that people want to wear. These were lightness, simplicity and scalability. That last one means having different options available for different people — just as there are different styles of headphones, from in-ear buds to huge aviator-style monstrosities.

Google Glass currently comes in five colours — "charcoal," a lighter shade of grey called "shale," white, tangerine and bright blue "sky." The frame attachments out Tuesday are all titanium. Users can mix and match.

"People need to be able to choose," Olsson said. "These products need to be lifestyle products."

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Flu volunteers sniffle for scientists

Forget being sneezed on: U.S. government scientists are deliberately giving dozens of volunteers the flu by squirting the live virus straight up their noses.

It may sound bizarre, but the rare type of research is a step in the quest for better flu vaccines. It turns out that how the body fends off influenza remains something of a mystery.

"Vaccines are working, but we could do better," said Dr. Matthew Memoli of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, who is leading the study that aims to infect up to 100 adults over the next year.

Wait a minute: Flu is sweeping the country, so why not just study the already sick? That wouldn't let scientists measure how the immune system reacts through each step of infection, starting with that first exposure to the virus.

It's not an experiment to be taken lightly. After all, the flu kills thousands of Americans a year. For safety, Memoli chose a dose that produces mild to moderate symptoms — and accepts only volunteers who are healthy and no older than 50.

Daniel Bennett sits in isolation as he remains quarantined to avoid spreading flu germs. His health is closely monitored before release. (Charles Dharapak/Associated Press)

And to avoid spreading the germs, participants must spend at least nine days quarantined inside a special isolation ward at the NIH hospital, their health closely monitored. They're not released until nasal tests prove they're no longer contagious.

The incentive: About $3,000 US to compensate for their time.

"I received a very scolding email from my mother" about signing up, Daniel Bennett, 26, said with a grin.

"Their standards are so high, I don't believe I'm in danger," added Bennett, a restaurant worker from College Park, Md. "I don't get sick that often."

A masked and gloved Memoli had Bennett lie flat for about a minute.

"It will taste salty. Some will drip down the back of your throat," Memoli said, before squeezing a syringe filled with millions of microscopic virus particles, floating in salt water, into each nostril.

Sure enough, a few days later Bennett had the runny nose and achiness of mild flu.

The best defense against influenza is a yearly vaccine, but it's far from perfect. In fact, the vaccine is least effective in people age 65 and older — the group most susceptible to flu — probably because the immune system weakens with age.

Understanding how younger adults' bodies fight flu may help scientists determine what the more vulnerable elderly are missing, clues to help develop more protective vaccines for everyone, Memoli explained.

Here's the issue: The vaccine is designed to raise people's levels of a particular flu-fighting antibody. It targets a protein that acts like the virus' coat, called hemagglutinin — the "H" in H1N1, the strain that caused the 2009 pandemic and that is causing the most illness so far this winter, too.

But it's not clear what antibody level is best to aim for — or whether a certain amount means you're protected against getting sick at all, or that you'd get a mild case instead of a severe one.

"As mind-boggling as it is, we don't know the answer to that," said Dr. Anthony Fauci, chief of NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. "We made some assumptions that we knew everything about flu."

Just targeting hemagglutinin probably isn't enough, Memoli added. Already, some people in his study didn't get sick, despite remarkably low antibody levels, meaning something else must be protecting them.

Could it be antibodies against the "N" in flu's name, the neuraminidase protein? Specific T cells that are activated to fight infection? Genes that switch on and off when a virus invades?

To begin finding out, Memoli first developed a laboratory-grown copy of the H1N1 flu strain and sprayed different amounts into volunteers' noses until he found the right dose to trigger mild flu. He hopes eventually to test the harsher H3N2 strain, too.

Now he's infecting two groups — people with low antibody levels and those with high levels. Some were recently vaccinated, and some weren't. He'll compare how sick they get, how long they're contagious and how the immune system jumps into action.

Called a human challenge study, this kind of research hasn't been performed with flu viruses in the U.S. for more than a decade, before scientists had ways as sophisticated to measure what happens.

"It's all going to add up to a better understanding of what you need to have to be protected against the flu," said Dr. John Treanor, a flu specialist at the University of Rochester Medical Center who is closely watching the work.

So far, Memoli's patients are becoming contagious a day or two before they start feeling bad, one reason the flu spreads so easily. He sees a range of symptoms, from sniffles to a few days of moderate fever, fatigue and congestion.

Bennett's flu was pretty mild, and he passed the time studying, watching TV and playing games with the four other study participants infected this month.

"All I had to do was read and watch movies, so it wasn't that terrible," Bennett said. "It was a really cool experience" to see how research is done.

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Chinese lunar rover has mechanical problems

China says its first lunar rover is experiencing mechanical problems, a setback for its burgeoning space program that in recent years has conducted space walks and placed a space station in orbit.

The six-wheeled Yutu vehicle began operating last month after making the first soft landing on the moon by a space probe in 37 years. It was designed to roam the lunar surface for three months while surveying for natural resources and sending back data, along with its stationary lander, Chang'e 3.

The mission has been a popular success for China's space program and the rover has attracted more than 150,000 followers on its microblog. It last posted on Saturday saying repairs were underway and hope was not lost.

"Sorry to make you all sad. The engineers and I haven't given up yet," the posting said.

News of the rover's troubles were splashed across newspapers on Monday and even featured at the Foreign Ministry's daily briefing, with spokesman Qin Gang expressing hope that Yutu could "return to normal."

The mechanical problems appeared to be related to the solar-powered probe's process for shutting down for the lunar night, which lasts more than two weeks. The temperature during that time drops to minus 180 degrees Celsius.

The probe had survived its first lunar night shutdown, during which it is unable to generate energy from its solar panels and relies on a radioactive power source to keep its delicate sensors and other equipment intact.

The 140-kilogram rover was traversing a relatively flat part of the moon known as Sinus Iridum, or the Bay of Rainbows, at a speed of 200 metres per hour. The landing vehicle, which has already shut down for the lunar night, is designed to conduct scientific examinations for one year.

Online speculation focused on the possibility of lunar dust having blocked one of the solar panels from folding inward, leaving equipment exposed to the dangerously low temperatures. It won't be known if the probe is able to function again until after the two-week break.

China's space program has made steady progress since the country launched its first manned spacecraft in 2003. It has launched a lunar orbiter, conducted space walks, and put into orbit a prototype space station, to be replaced by a permanent station at the end of the decade.

Already a source of enormous national pride, the space program has increasingly sought to connect with the public through social media and educational outreach. China's second woman in space, Wang Yaping, conducted China's first space classroom to students nationwide from the prototype space station, the Tiangong.

"Yutu, or "Jade Rabbit," is named after a mythological Chinese animal said to live on the moon.

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Earth in HD: 2nd spacewalk to outfit ISS with B.C. cameras

Cosmonauts are busy this morning in their second attempt to bolt two high-definition Earth-observation cameras provided by a B.C. company onto the International Space Station.  

The efforts mark Vancouver-based UrtheCast's second attempt at putting the HD cameras into space — one shooting photos, the other streaming video — with lenses trained back on the Earth. 

UrtheCast tried to have the cameras installed on the ISS late last year.

Scott Larson, CEO of UrtheCast, said the cameras had gone through rigorous preflight testing before December's installation attempt, but space station staff decided to uninstall them after running into problems with connectors and then difficulties monitoring the power received.

"Yeah so it's in space. Ah, space, is of course ... It's always tricky," Larson told CBC News. "There's always funny stuff going on there."

Now, a month later, with the bugs hopefully worked out, the camera installation will go ahead again starting just after 2 p.m. GMT, or 6 a.m. Vancouver time. Larson said this time, the spacewalk should change the way the world sees itself. 

Images from the two HD video cameras will be downloaded to ground stations on Earth and be made available just a few hours after they're captured, providing what the company calls the "world's first near-live HD video feed of Earth."

The International Space Station broadcast this photo just after 11 p.m. PT Sunday. Cosmonauts attempt Monday to remount cameras from B.C. firm UrtheCast on the exterior of the ISS. (NASA TV)

Larson says astronauts see Earth from space as small, borderless and special, and most come back with a desire to do more to take care of it.

"And so the goal is to give a little bit of what astronauts see, their viewpoint, and get that out over the web."

But there's another pressure for the rapidly expanding Vancouver tech company to get the cameras working: cash.

UrtheCast customers will be able to hire one of the two cameras to look at a particular spot on Earth for a fee.

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Camera-wearing falcons reveal hunting strategy

Falcons wearing tiny cameras are giving scientists a dizzying glimpse into the predators' aerial hunting tactics.

In an interview airing Saturday, physicist Suzanne Amador Kane tells CBC Radio's Quirks & Quarks how she analyzed falcon hunting strategies mid-flight and in three dimensions.

"In order to get a sense of what the falcons were seeing, we used miniaturized video cameras small enough to mount on little helmets or little backpacks," said Kane, an associate professor of physics and astronomy at Haverford College in Pennsylvania.

Using a video camera the size of a USB key, Kane watched the mid-air, dogfight-style pursuits.

The falcon's excellent peripheral vision allows them to give chase with a "predictive strategy," she said.

"Falcons have found a way to figure out where the prey will be in the future rather than where they see it at the present," said Kane. "They target the prey so it's constantly at an angle in their visual field, and that constant angle corresponds to the angle that will allow them to fly towards the prey's future position."

The manoeuvres are so effective because falcons appear to use a "motion camouflage trick" in which the falcon keeps a fixed position on the side of its prey, making it appear motionless during the pursuit.

From the prey's point of view, she said, the falcon's approach would be masked and gradually "loom larger as the two get closer together."

Kane's research is published in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

You can listen to the full interview Saturday at noon on CBC Radio One.

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Gmail experiences mass disruptions

According to reports on Twitter and from corporate email users, including those at the CBC, Google's Gmail was down around the world Friday, and experienced intermittent problems following the outage.

The email service is used by hundreds of millions of people across the globe.

People took to Twitter, first to report an outage, and then patchy service. Reports were coming in from Europe, the U.S., Canada, India and other parts of the world. 

"We're investigating reports of an issue with Gmail. We will  provide more information shortly," the company said on its "App Status" dashboard online, which tracks the state of various Google services.

The error message on Gmail's landing page displayed a 500 code problem, which indicated that it was temporary, coupled with a brief note: "We're sorry, but your Gmail account is temporarily unavailable. We apologize for the inconvenience and suggest trying again in a few minutes."

The outage also affected Google+ and YouTube comments, which meant comments weren't loading at all on videos or for Hangouts across the web and mobile platforms.

It is unclear what caused the outage.

Earlier Friday before the disruptions, the Google Site Reliability Engineering team agreed to do an "ask me anything" on Reddit. Users around the world peppered the team with questions. 

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Michaels crafts store admits possible data breach

'We have not confirmed a compromise to our systems,' said Michaels CEO Chuck Rubin. (John Fitzhugh/Associated Press)

Michaels, the biggest U.S. arts and crafts retailer, said on Saturday that it is working with federal law enforcement officials to investigate a possible data breach on its systems that process payment cards.

"We are concerned there may have been a data security attack on Michaels that may have affected our customers' payment card information and we are taking aggressive action to determine the nature and scope of the issue," Chief Executive Chuck Rubin said in a statement emailed to Reuters.

"While we have not confirmed a compromise to our systems, we believe it is in the best interest of our customers to alert them to this potential issue so they can take steps to protect themselves," he said in the statement.

There are no details yet on whether the breach includes its stores in Canada.

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Gmail experiences mass disruptions

According to reports on Twitter and from corporate email users, including those at the CBC, Google's Gmail was down around the world Friday, and experienced intermittent problems following the outage.

The email service is used by hundreds of millions of people across the globe.

People took to Twitter, first to report an outage, and then patchy service. Reports were coming in from Europe, the U.S., Canada, India and other parts of the world. 

"We're investigating reports of an issue with Gmail. We will  provide more information shortly," the company said on its "App Status" dashboard online, which tracks the state of various Google services.

The error message on Gmail's landing page displayed a 500 code problem, which indicated that it was temporary, coupled with a brief note: "We're sorry, but your Gmail account is temporarily unavailable. We apologize for the inconvenience and suggest trying again in a few minutes."

The outage also affected Google+ and YouTube comments, which meant comments weren't loading at all on videos or for Hangouts across the web and mobile platforms.

It is unclear what caused the outage.

Earlier Friday before the disruptions, the Google Site Reliability Engineering team agreed to do an "ask me anything" on Reddit. Users around the world peppered the team with questions. 

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Cord-cutting: 16% of Canadians mull ditching paid TV

About 16 per cent of Canadians are thinking of cutting the cord on their cable or satellite TV service, according to a survey by Media Technology Monitor.

Anglophone Canadians in the survey are twice as dissatisfied as their French-speaking counterparts, with 17 per cent saying they are considering cancelling their paid TV subscription, compared to eight per cent of francophones.

The frustration Canadians expressed with paid TV service seems to run counter to what TV viewers are actually doing which is sign up for additional TV services, such as Netflix or online TV, while maintaining their cable service, according to a recent Deloitte survey.

Media Technology Monitor surveyed more than 4,000 18- to 34-year-old anglophone Canadians between October and December of 2013 to determine their media habits. The results of the survey are considered accurate within plus or minus 1.5 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

The study found that Generation X viewers (those aged 34-47) and visible minority viewers were most likely to want to cut the cord.

In a consumer-friendly throne speech last year, the federal Conservatives signalled they wanted to make it easier for Canadians to love their cable or satellite subscription service by legislating more flexible TV packages so they could opt for what they want.

About 42 per cent of respondents said they had watched TV online in the past month, up 10 per cent from last year and nearly double the number in 2008. A third said they chose internet TV because it was convenient, though 19 per cent said they were catching up on a show they'd missed.

The survey also asked about binge-viewing habits and found half of Canadians admitted to watching at least three episodes of TV shows in a single sitting within the past year. About 64 per cent of anglophones under age 35 had done some binge-watching.

About 27 per cent said they had watched on a PVR and the same number on Netflix, but marathons of scheduled TV were still popular with 34 per cent of respondents.

Video watching on a smartphone took a sharp jump upward, with 30 per cent of smartphone users saying they had watched on their device, a reflection of improving smartphone technology.

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Camera-wearing falcons reveal hunting strategy

Falcons wearing tiny cameras are giving scientists a dizzying glimpse into the predators' aerial hunting tactics.

In an interview airing Saturday, physicist Suzanne Amador Kane tells CBC Radio's Quirks & Quarks how she analyzed falcon hunting strategies mid-flight and in three dimensions.

"In order to get a sense of what the falcons were seeing, we used miniaturized video cameras small enough to mount on little helmets or little backpacks," said Kane, an associate professor of physics and astronomy at Haverford College in Pennsylvania.

Using a video camera the size of a USB key, Kane watched the mid-air, dogfight-style pursuits.

The falcon's excellent peripheral vision allows them to give chase with a "predictive strategy," she said.

"Falcons have found a way to figure out where the prey will be in the future rather than where they see it at the present," said Kane. "They target the prey so it's constantly at an angle in their visual field, and that constant angle corresponds to the angle that will allow them to fly towards the prey's future position."

The manoeuvres are so effective because falcons appear to use a "motion camouflage trick" in which the falcon keeps a fixed position on the side of its prey, making it appear motionless during the pursuit.

From the prey's point of view, she said, the falcon's approach would be masked and gradually "loom larger as the two get closer together."

Kane's research is published in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

You can listen to the full interview Saturday at noon on CBC Radio One.

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Ice in Great Lakes a danger to ships, coast guard says

The unusual deep freeze gripping southwestern Ontario concerns the Canadian Coast Guard, which is warning that it could pose dangers to shipping operations.

Andre Maillet, a supervisor of operations for the Canadian Coast Guard, said all the ice on the lakes and the wind coming from the north are bad news for navigation.

'There's some serious ice out there.'- George Leshkevich, Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory.

"The current winds ... and with the cold, compresses the ice, it solidifies the ice and makes it very very difficult to escort anybody through that," Maillet said.

The Canadian and U.S. coast guards begin ice-breaking operations on Lake Michigan on Saturday and will make their way into Lake Huron, including Georgian Bay.

"All ice near the planned shipping routes should be considered unsafe during and after ice-breaking and shipping operations," The Canadian Coast Guard said in a news release. "The Canadian Coast Guard, the United States Coast Guard and the Ontario Provincial Police are advising everyone to stay clear of these areas."

Approximately 60 per cent of the Great Lakes is covered with ice, according to the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory.

Despite being led by an icebreaker, ice jams stranded three ships on the Detroit River on Jan. 6. If the cold continues, it could lead to more ice jams filling up the Great Lakes and more ships could get stuck.

"There's some serious ice out there, especially if you compare with last year and especially the 2011-2012 season, in which there was very little ice on the Great Lakes," said George Leshkevich, a scientist at the research laboratory. "Because of the cold weather we had in the late fall and early winter, the ice appears to have started building as early as the later part of November."

Ice covered approximately 30 per cent of the lakes last year.

The polar vortex that has twice engulfed the lakes has helped the amount of ice to grow quickly.

There's an upside to the ice.

Scientists say the ice cover can provide protection to some species and prevent evaporation that leads to low water levels.

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China blocks CBC website after story about offshore accounts

The websites of several major news outlets, including the CBC, have been blocked in locations within China following yesterday's worldwide exposés on how close relatives of current and former Communist leaders have used secretive offshore corporations that help shroud wealth.

At first only this story about offshore holdings by China's elite was blocked, but later the entire CBC News website couldn't be accessed. (CBC)

The CBC's entire website as well as those of the Guardian, Spanish newspaper El Pais and French daily Le Monde were all unavailable in Beijing as of Wednesday at 5 p.m. ET.

The CBC's news story about the exposé, but not its entire website, was being blocked as early as the night before.

The website of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which spearheaded the international joint investigation and obtained the leaked documents on which it was based, was also mostly unavailable.

Other news sites that did not prominently report the story, such as CNN and the BBC's main news page, were still viewable. However, a BBC story that mentioned the offshore disclosures was blocked.

"The authorities are not prepared to let that information be public," Fred Bild, Canada's former ambassador to Beijing, said in an interview last week anticipating what the Chinese government's reaction would be to the news.

Bild said the revelations would still filter through to mainland China, however.

"Even though they have extremely good methods of controlling the internet, if you have 500 million people conspiring to get information, there is no censorship that can really be absolute, and so it will get to be known very quickly."

The news outlets' reports included details of a real estate company co-owned by Chinese President Xi Jingping's brother-in-law, as well as British Virgin Islands corporations set up by former premier Wen Jiabao's son and son-in-law, plus dozens of more cases of people tied to high-level officials.

A wide array of Chinese nationals were found to be using offshore havens, including relatives of at least five current or former members of China's Politburo Standing Committee, the all-powerful group of seven (formerly nine) men who run the Communist Party and the country.

Sometimes the offshore accounts were for business purposes tied to the state entities they run, such as for direct foreign investments in Latin America, where Chinese companies have been expanding operations for years. But in many cases, the offshore shell corporations set up by Chinese nationals seemed to have no connection to state industries and are shrouded in questions that they refused to answer.

The discovery could incense ordinary citizens in China, where senior Communist officials used to enjoy a modestly better living but nothing close to the extravagant wealth required to stash money offshore, Bild said.

"Now, the income gap between the elite and the masses is huge.… You have hundreds of millions of people that are still living on very low income and they will be outraged," he told CBC News.

The CBC's website has been blocked before in China, notably for nearly four months in 2008. That prompted CBC president Hubert Lacroix to complain to the Chinese ambassador to Canada, following which access was restored.

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Water vapour spouts from dwarf planet Ceres

The dwarf planet Ceres, one of the most intriguing objects in the solar system, is gushing water vapour from its unusual ice-covered surface, scientists said on Wednesday in a finding that raises the question of whether it might be hospitable to life.

'This is the first time water vapour has been unequivocally detected on Ceres or any other object in the asteroid belt and provides proof that Ceres has an icy surface and an atmosphere'- Michael Küppers, European Space Agency

Using the European Space Agency's Herschel infrared space telescope, researchers spotted plumes of water vapour periodically spewing from Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt residing between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

The discovery comes just over a year before the scheduled arrival of NASA's Dawn spacecraft for a closer look at Ceres, a round body measuring about 950 km in diameter — less than a third of the size of the moon.

"This is the first time water vapour has been unequivocally detected on Ceres or any other object in the asteroid belt and provides proof that Ceres has an icy surface and an atmosphere," Michael Küppers of the European Space Agency in Spain, who led the research published in the journal Nature, said in a statement.

The question is what is causing these plumes of water vapour from two locations on Ceres. One idea, according to scientists, is that the sun sometimes warms parts of the icy surface enough that water vapour emerges.

Geysers and icy volcanoes

Another possibility, they say, is that there is liquid water under the frozen surface of Ceres and that vapour is shooting out of geysers or icy volcanoes. Dramatic geysers have been spotted on Enceladus, one of the innermost moons of the giant ringed planet Saturn.

Scientists think Ceres holds rock in its interior and is wrapped in a mantle of ice that, if melted, would amount to more fresh water than is contained on Earth.

Ceres was discovered in 1801, more than a century before the discovery in 1930 of the more famous - and more distant - dwarf planet Pluto. It is one of the few places in the solar system aside from Earth where water has been located.

A big question about the discovery of the water vapour on Ceres is what it means regarding the possibility of life.

"One of the things that's intriguing here is the possibility of there being liquid water as opposed to ice," Marc Rayman of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Dawn's chief engineer and mission director, said in a telephone interview.

Microbial life 'a stretch'

"Certainly all life that we know depends on water. And so this is part of the larger question of where can life exist."

He said it is too early to declare that Ceres a good candidate for possible microbial life.

"I think that's a stretch," Rayman said. "Rather, I would say this indicates Ceres might be a good place to look to understand more about the places life could form — and perhaps places that life has formed.

"There's a lot more than just water that's required for life. And whether Ceres has those other ingredients — which include, for example, a source of energy and all of the nutrients that life requires, the rest of the chemistry — it's too early to say."

Rayman said scientists plan to use instruments aboard Dawn to map the surface of Ceres, measure its surface elevations, catalogue its minerals and study its interior structure. Dawn is due to arrive at Ceres in March or April 2015.

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Climate change: 2013 ranked 4th warmest year

Last year was one of the warmest ever recorded on Earth since scientists began keeping global average temperature stats 134 years ago, climate experts from two U.S. agencies revealed today.

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) ranked 2013 as being the fourth-warmest year ever, tied with 2003. NASA, which conducted its own report and processed the data sets differently, declared 2013 to be the seventh warmest year since 1880.

What is a temperature anomaly?

According to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the term "temperature anomaly" refers to a temperature that is different from long-term average temperatures, also known as reference values. Temperature anomaly is used by climate scientists to get a big-picture overview of average global temperatures compared to a reference value.

Despite the difference in rankings between the two agencies, the data "clearly makes this decade the warmest in historical period," Gavin Schmidt, deputy director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told reporters in a teleconference.

Schmidt noted that both analyses are actually very similar.

"The difference between the joint fourth place and the joint seventh place is within 0.02 C of a degree," he said, adding that NASA processes its data differently than NOAA.

NASA and NOAA are the keepers of the world's climate data. Each year, both agencies produce independent reports charting the planet's temperature changes, matched against historical data.

The annual reports are considered to be state of the climate addresses and help to give scientists a big-picture overview of the effects of global warming.

9 out of 10 warmest years were in 2000s

In NOAA's annual global analyses, researchers put the average world temperature (combined land and ocean surface temperatures) last year at 14.52 C.

That was 0.62 C above the 20th-century average of 13.9 C, making 2013 the 37th consecutive year that the yearly global temperature exceeded the average.

The global land temperature was just shy of 1 C (0.99 C) above the 20th-century average, according to NOAA.

Both NOAA and NASA said that nine out of 10 of the warmest years ever recorded between 1880 and 2013 were within the last 13 years. Only one entry prior to the 2000s, the year 1998, cracked the top 10.

NASA and NOAA released their 2013 annual temperature maps, showing global temperature anomalies.

The hottest recorded year so far was in 2010, when a temperature anomaly of 0.66 C was recorded above the 20th-century average. It topped both NOAA and NASA's lists.

Tom Karl, director of NOAA's National Climatic Data Center, told reporters that as the world continues to warm, high latitudes generally get wetter and the subtropics get drier.

"We saw, for example, in Brazil they had severe droughts for the second consecutive year, in many ways it was probably the worst in the past 50 years. We had an early onset to the southwest Indian monsoon, some of the worst flooding in the past half century," he said.

Warmer winter, spring in Canada

"Even though we had, on balance, a rather average-looking precipitation year, certainly in some parts we had far too much rain and in other parts far too little."

NOAA's analysis said Canada experienced a warmer-than-average winter and spring, as well as the eighth-warmest summer on record.

North America as a whole was hotter than normal in 2013, with Alaska having its second-warmest winter on record.

However, Karl said that some parts of the U.S. experienced cooler-than-average temperatures, due to the cooling effects of La Nina in the eastern Pacific and significant rainfall during the warmer months of the year.

A NOAA map showing global precipitation trends showed that a section of southern and central Canada was the wettest on record in 2013, while a region of coastal western Canada was the driest.

In recent years, parts of Asia, Africa, Australia and the Arctic in particular have undergone dramatic warming.

NOAA's and NASA's top 10 years on record. (NOAA, NASA)

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New technology aims to empty wait rooms at doctors' offices

Patients who are sick and tired of sitting in waiting rooms at doctors' offices may have the option of going home or running errands as they wait for a doctor.

A new system called ChronoMetriq, which already operates in 20 clinics in Montreal, has been launched at Clinique medicale de Touraine in Gatineau, Que.

'So someone's figured out how to make a buck helping you feel less bad having to wait, but it doesn't do anything to improve access to care.'- Marlene Riviere, president of the Ontario Health Coalition

A new system has been introduced in Quebec that allows patients to leave waiting rooms at doctors' offices without losing your spot in line.

Once a patient registers at a clinic, he or she takes a number and goes to a touch-screen kiosk. The patient would then pay $3 in Quebec, or $4 in Ontario, to be contacted via call or text message when a doctor is ready to be seen.

ChronoMetriq is advertised as a way to eliminate packed waiting rooms, which can spread germs. It is now negotiating with clinics in Ottawa and Toronto to introduce it, but the company hasn't received a green light from the Ontario Ministry of Health.

Patients and doctors at the Gatineau clinic said they were big fans, but one patient advocate said it is not fixing the wait-time problem in Ontario.

"So someone's figured out how to make a buck helping you feel less bad having to wait, but it doesn't do anything to improve access to care," said Marlene Riviere, president of the Ontario Health Coalition.

So far, the company said half of patients in Montreal and Gatineau have chosen to use the Chrono-Metriq system.

Company spokesman Louis Parent said he would like to introduce the program in hospital emergency rooms, which would start in Montreal in a year of two.

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Google Glass moviegoer grilled by FBI at Jack Ryan film

Patron confirmed he was not pirating film with recording function

The Associated Press Posted: Jan 22, 2014 8:59 AM ET Last Updated: Jan 22, 2014 8:59 AM ET

Federal authorities say they questioned an Ohio man they suspected of recording a movie in a theatre with his Google Glass computer-in-eyeglass device.

The government says no action was taken after the man confirmed the Google Glass was also a pair of prescription glasses with the recording function inactive.

The man was watching Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit at an AMC theatre in Columbus on Saturday. Authorities did not identify him.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman Khaalid Walls says the man voluntarily answered questions from officers with ICE Homeland Security Investigations.

AMC says it contacted authorities after identifying someone wearing a recording device. Spokesman Ryan Noonan says the company takes movie theft seriously.

Both ICE, which investigates piracy and counterfeiting, and the Motion Picture Association of America, were involved.

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