"Allowing cash to die would be a grave mistake. A cashless society is a surveillance society," writes Reason, adding that "The recent round of protests in Hong Kong highlights exactly what we have to lose..." schwit1 shared their report: [T]ens of thousands of Hongkongers took to the streets to protest what they saw as creeping tyranny from a powerful threat. But they did it in a very particular way. In Hong Kong, most people use a contactless smart card called an "Octopus card" to pay for everything from transit, to parking, and even retail purchases. It's pretty handy: Just wave your tentacular card over the sensor and make your way to the platform. But no one used their Octopus card to get around Hong Kong during the protests. The risk was that a government could view the central database of Octopus transactions to unmask these democratic ne'er-do-wells. Traveling downtown during the height of the protests? You could get put on a list, even if you just happened to be in the area. So the savvy subversives turned to cash instead. Normally, the lines for the single-ticket machines that accept cash are populated only by a few confused tourists, while locals whiz through the turnstiles with their fintech wizardry. But on protest days, the queues teemed with young activists clutching old school paper notes. As one protestor told Quartz: "We're afraid of having our data tracked." Using cash to purchase single tickets meant that governments couldn't connect activists' activities with their Octopus accounts. It was instant anonymity. Sure, it was less convenient. And one-off physical tickets cost a little more than the Octopus equivalent. But the trade-off of avoiding persecution and jail time was well worth it. What could protestors do in a cashless world...? If some of our eggheads had their way, the protestors would have had no choice. The article concludes that "there is simply no substitute for the privacy that cash, including digitized versions like cryptocurrencies, provide."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Afghans from across the political and social spectrum to meet Taliban representatives in bid to end the 18-year war.

"Life's information-storage system is being adapted to handle massive amounts of information," reports Scientific American, reports Scientific American, calling it "an alternative to hard drives" and noting that DNA "is already routinely sequenced (read), synthesized (written to) and accurately copied with ease. "DNA is also incredibly stable, as has been demonstrated by the complete genome sequencing of a fossil horse that lived more than 500,000 years ago. And storing it does not require much energy." But it is the storage capacity that shines. DNA can accurately stow massive amounts of data at a density far exceeding that of electronic devices. The simple bacterium Escherichia coli, for instance, has a storage density of about 10**19 bits per cubic centimeter, according to calculations published in 2016 in Nature Materials by George Church of Harvard University and his colleagues. At that density, all the world's current storage needs for a year could be well met by a cube of DNA measuring about one meter on a side. The prospect of DNA data storage is not merely theoretical. In 2017, for instance, Church's group at Harvard adopted CRISPR DNA-editing technology to record images of a human hand into the genome of E. coli, which were read out with higher than 90 percent accuracy. And researchers at the University of Washington and Microsoft Research have developed a fully automated system for writing, storing and reading data encoded in DNA. A number of companies, including Microsoft and Twist Bioscience, are working to advance DNA-storage technology... DNA bar coding is now being used to dramatically accelerate the pace of research in fields such as chemical engineering, materials science and nanotechnology.

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Cameroon out of the African Cup of Nations after losing 3-2 to Nigeria in a last-16 game.

Mediterranea's ship follows in steps of German charity Sea-Watch which docked in Italy last week without authorisation.

The Houthi drones were destroyed in Saudi Arabia's airspace according to the military coalition.

On Monday, 7-Eleven launched a smartphone payment service for its 20,000 stores in Japan. By Thursday $510,000 had been stolen from the people using it -- as many as 900 customers. Long-time Slashdot reader shanen shared this follow-up article, which points out that it's also possible that email addresses and birth dates have been accessed from among the new app's 1.5 million registered users: Tsuyoshi Kobayashi, president of Seven Pay Co., told a press conference in Tokyo that the company will compensate users for the losses caused by fraudulent access and that it has already suspended accepting new users or allowing users of the service to add money to its smartphone application. The estimated amount of losses the company announced is as of 6 a.m. Thursday and the damage could expand... The parent company said someone, who had accessed their accounts and used the registered numbers of their credit or debit cards, purchased items at its convenience stores. The items included packs of cigarettes, which can be easily converted into cash, it said, adding there was a case in which a huge quantity worth 100,000 yen [$921] was purchased all at once at one of its outlets... According to Seven & i Holdings, some customers reported their losses on Tuesday and unauthorized access from China and other locations outside Japan was confirmed... Police arrested two Chinese men on Thursday in connection with the problem, investigative sources said. They are suspected of illegally using the ID and password of a customer Wednesday in an attempt to buy electric cigarette cartridges worth around 200,000 yen [$1,843] at a 7-Eleven shop in Tokyo. Nikkei Asian Review reports that one of the suspects "received instructions about gaining unauthorized access to 7pay accounts via WeChat, a popular Chinese messaging app. The Metropolitan Police Department suspects the involvement of an international criminal organization." (Japan Times reports that one man was asked to do "some shopping" after which they would receive "a reward".) Nikkei Asian Review also notes that the Japanese government has been pushing to to have a least 40% of all payments be cashless by the mid-2020s -- including generous government tax incentives -- which one consumer finance writer says has "overheated" the market, while "the quality of services has declined in some cases."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Activists say widening acceptance of LGBT people stands in sharp contrast to rise in hate crimes against the community.

Eight people jailed in one of the biggest ever cases of slavery operation in Europe.

Many Iranians are more concerned about the economic impact on their lives than the threat of war.

On Monday, 7-Eleven launched a smartphone payment service for its 20,000 stores in Japan. By Thursday $510,000 had been stolen from the people using it -- as many as 900 customers -- according to Japan Today. Long-time Slashdot reader shanen shared the article, which points out that it's also possible that email addresses and birth dates have been accessed from among the new app's 1.5 million registered users: Tsuyoshi Kobayashi, president of Seven Pay Co., told a press conference in Tokyo that the company will compensate users for the losses caused by fraudulent access and that it has already suspended accepting new users or allowing users of the service to add money to its smartphone application. The estimated amount of losses the company announced is as of 6 a.m. Thursday and the damage could expand... The parent company said someone, who had accessed their accounts and used the registered numbers of their credit or debit cards, purchased items at its convenience stores. The items included packs of cigarettes, which can be easily converted into cash, it said, adding there was a case in which a huge quantity worth 100,000 yen [$921] was purchased all at once at one of its outlets... According to Seven & i Holdings, some customers reported their losses on Tuesday and unauthorized access from China and other locations outside Japan was confirmed... Police arrested two Chinese men on Thursday in connection with the problem, investigative sources said. They are suspected of illegally using the ID and password of a customer Wednesday in an attempt to buy electric cigarette cartridges worth around 200,000 yen [$1,843] at a 7-Eleven shop in Tokyo. Nikkei Asian Review reports that one of the suspects "received instructions about gaining unauthorized access to 7pay accounts via WeChat, a popular Chinese messaging app. The Metropolitan Police Department suspects the involvement of an international criminal organization." (Japan Times reports that one man was asked to do "some shopping" after which they would receive "a reward".) x Nikkei Asian Review also notes that the Japanese government has been pushing to to have a least 40% of all payments be cashless by the mid-2020s -- including generous government tax incentives -- which one consumer finance writer says has "overheated" the market, while "the quality of services has declined in some cases."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Last month, Rob McGinnis fired up a new machine that runs combustion in reverse, using electricity to weld carbon dioxide and water into liquid fuels," writes Slashdot reader sciencehabit: McGinnis, a chemical engineer and entrepreneur, has launched a new start-up called Prometheus, in hopes that he will be able to synthesize fuels more cheaply than energy giants can drill for oil, ship it and refine it. If powered by solar, wind, or other renewable power sources, McGinnis' machine will churn out carbon neutral fuels, eliminating the fossil from fossil fuels. At the heart of McGinnis' machine is proprietary carbon nanotube-based filter that separates fuel molecules from water without the large energy input normally required for this job. Can a former Yale University theater major remake the $2 trillion liquid fuels industry? The article adds that the startup signed its first deal last month, "to begin to sell carbon-neutral fuel to Boom Supersonic, a Denver company building a supersonic commercial airliner."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tehran set to increase level of uranium enrichment in a risky bid to force Europe’s hand to purchase its oil.

schwit1 writes: A former University of Chicago medical patient filed a class-action lawsuit against the University of Chicago and Google, claiming that the University of Chicago Medical Center is giving private patient information to the tech giant without patients consent. About two years ago, the university medical center partnered with Google with the hope of identifying patterns in patient health records to help predict future medical issues. Now, former patient Matt Dinerstein is filing a lawsuit on behalf of the medical center's patients, alleging that the university violated privacy laws by sharing sensitive health records with Google from 2009 to 2016, aiding Google's goal of creating a digital health record system, according to the student newspaper of the University of Chicago.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The blast sent large pieces of debris about 91 metres across the street.