Our Blog

The commission said that Google had “obstructed the development of competing mobile operating systems which could have provided a platform for rival search engines to gain traffic”.Google then offered an auction to other companies, allowing them to pay for inclusion on Android.“The choice screen will always show a maximum of 4 providers, including Google. The auction winners, and Google, will be ordered randomly in the choice screen on a per device basis,” Google said.Read more“In the event of a tie, Google will allocate the slots randomly among the tied bidders on a per device basis.”The options change based on each EU country. In the United Kingdom, the options are between Bing, info.com, and PrivacyWall. In Slovenia, by contrast, the options are either Ecosia, GMX, or info.com.Across all European countries, PrivacyWall is offered 22 times, GMX is offered 16 times, Bing is offered 13 times, Yandex is offered eight times, as is DuckDuckGo. Info.com, by contrast, is offered in all 31 countries.DuckDuckGo claims that the result of this auction means that “only the highest bidders are on the menu”, incentivising profit over privacy so they can afford to place higher bids.The company also claims that DuckDuckGo was the second most-selected search engine, after Google, but was priced out of contention.“Despite DuckDuckGo being robustly profitable since 2014, we have been priced out of this auction because we choose to not maximize our profits by exploiting our users”, the company said.“In practical terms, this means our commitment to privacy and a cleaner search experience translates into less money per search. This means we must bid less relative to other, profit-maximizing companies.”The company says that as a result of Google’s auction, search engines are incentivised to “be worse on privacy, to increase ads, and to not donate to good causes, because, if they do those things, then they could afford to bid higher.”Instead, DuckDuckGo proposes that the European Commission take action to remove the auction and allow alternative search engines with the most market share to be shown on the setup screen in a random order, with the remaining search engines available by scrolling.The Independent has reached out to Google and the European Commission for comment.

Astronauts Chris Cassidy, Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner were instructed to move into the Russian segment of the ISS in order to collect data at a range of locations.Previous checks had been made in the US, European, and Japanese modules of the space station.“One by one, the crew closed hatches between Zvezda’s aft and forward sections and Zvezda’s passageways to the Pirs Docking Compartment and the Poisk module while using an ultrasonic leak detector to collect data”, the space agency write in a blog post.“Throughout the night, pressure measurements were taken by US and Russian specialists to try to isolate the source of the leak. At the completion of the overnight checks, the crew opened hatches once again between the US and Russian segments and resumed regular activities.”Read moreNasa has repeatedly said that the leak, which it has been investigating for weeks, poses no immediate danger to the crew.At the current rate of leakage, it only presents a slight deviation to the crew’s schedule.“Currently the search is underway to precisely locate the leak. With that, the general atmosphere pressure decrease rates remain at 1 mm per 8 hours”, the Russian space agency Roscosmos tweeted.Nasa has previously said that the station can be repressurised using nitrogen tanks.In the coming months, many cargo spacecrafts are scheduled to arrive at the station in the beginning of October.It “marks the beginning of a very busy vehicle traffic month on ISS,” Greg Dorth, manager of the ISS Program External Integration Office at Nasa, said in a previous statement. 

Scientists have hailed a new quantum computing breakthrough that could bring the revolutionary technology into the real world.The discovery could fundamentally change how quantum computers are able to measure energy quanta, which allow the entirely new kind of computers to work.Quantum computing has long been promised as a way of carrying out computing tasks in vastly quicker ways, potentially changing everything from health research to security.But they have proven difficult to make practically, not yet fulfilling the promise that their proponents have claimed.The new breakthrough – described in research newly published in Nature – focuses on a new kind of detector known as a bolometer. That measures the energy of incoming radiation by measuring how much it heats up that detector.For a quantum computer to work, it must be able to measure the energy state of the qubits that it is made up of.Read moreAt the moment, quantum computers generally do so by measuring the voltage induced by the qubit. But that comes with a host of problems, including the need for extensive circuity that could make the computers difficult to scale up and consume power, as well as potentially introducing errors.By using bolometers, the scientists hope to overcome all of these problems. But until now they have not proven fast or sensitive enough to be actually used practically.Now the paper describes a new kind of bolometer that could theoretically be included in quantum computers and help bring them into practical use.’Bolometers are now entering the field of quantum technology and perhaps their first application could be in reading out the quantum information from qubits. The bolometer speed and accuracy seems now right for it,’ says Mikko Möttönen, the researcher who led the team who made the breakthrough.Previous bolometers have been made out of a gold-palladium alloy that overcome the noise problems, but was too slow to actually do the work of measuring qubits. Instead, the new research saw engineers create them out of graphene, vastly speeding them up so they are as fast as the current technology.“Changing to graphene increased the detector speed by 100 times, while the noise level remained the same. After these initial results, there is still a lot of optimisation we can do to make the device even better,” said Pertti Hakonen, who leads a group at Aalto University that has expertise in making graphene-based devices.

At a briefing on 28 September about the upcoming Northrop Grumman NG-14 Cygnus cargo mission, Nasa said that its investigation into the leak continues.It has already been searching for the cause of the leak for several weeks.“As of this morning, there was no clear indication of where the leak is,” said Greg Dorth, manager of the ISS Program External Integration Office at Nasa, said. “The teams are still looking at the data and evaluating it.”The crew of the ISS stayed in the Zvezda service module over the weekend, while other modules were opened and closed in order to identify which one had the leak, but to no avail.The module acted as the living quarters when permanent habitation of the space station began in 2000.Read moreThe leak poses no risk to either the station or the people living on board, as the station can be repressurised using nitrogen tanks.Nasa astronaut Chris Cassidy reemphasised that point in a series of tweets before going into isolation in Zvezda.“Strangely the data did not point us to any particular location. Yesterday and today, Anatoly and I have been checking all of the window seals (not #navyseals) for any indication of a leak using an ultrasonic leak detector”, he tweeted on 24 September. “So far no luck finding the source, but it looks like we will try again with the module isolation this weekend. No harm or risk to us as the crew, but it is important to find the leak we are not wasting valuable air.”In the coming months, many cargo spacecrafts are scheduled to arrive at the station in the beginning of October.The NG-14 Cygnus cargo is expected to arrive at the station on 4 October; this “marks the beginning of a very busy vehicle traffic month on ISS,” Dorth said.By the end of October, the crew of the ISS will reach seven astronauts following docking with the a new Soyuz spacecraft and a SpaceX Crew Dragon.