ISIL fighters have closed the streets around Mosul’s Grand al-Nuri Mosque, residents said, apparently in preparation for a final showdown in the battle against Iraqi forces over their last major stronghold in the country.

Dozens of fighters were seen by residents taking up positions in the past 48 hours around the medieval mosque, the site where ISIL leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared a caliphate in July 2014.

Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant’s black flag has been flying from the mosque since the fighters captured Mosul and seized swathes of Iraq and Syria in the summer of 2014.

“Daesh’s fighters know that the mosque is the most important target and they are preparing for a major battle there,” said Hisham al-Hashemi, who advises several Middle East governments, including Iraq’s, on ISIL, using an Arabic acronym for the group.

READ MORE: ISIL’s ‘caliph’ lauds Iraq rebellion

The fall of the city would, in effect, mark the end of the Iraqi half of the self-styled caliphate. Meanwhile in Syria, Kurdish forces backed by US air raids are besieging ISIL forces in the city of Raqqa, the fighters’ de facto capital in that country.

Up to 200,000 people still live in harrowing conditions behind ISIL lines in Mosul, running low on food, water and medicine.

Civilians fleeing the fighting told Al Jazeera about the terrible conditions they have been living in.

Tired and panicked, they desribed starving conditions with limited access to water

A fleeing man said that during the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, which is currently under way, he has been surviving with flour and water.

An older woman said that they were being treated as prisoners and had no food or water.

Iraqi forces launched a major US-backed operation to retake Mosul in October last year, fighting their way to the city and retaking its eastern side before setting their sights on its smaller but more densely populated west.

The battle has taken a heavy toll on civilians, pushing hundreds of thousands to flee, while hundreds more have been killed or wounded.

Final push

The Grand al-Nuri Mosque has become a symbolic focus of the campaign with Iraqi commanders privately saying they hope to capture it during Ramadan.

But a battle in or near the mosque would put the building and its famed leaning minaret at risk, experts say.

The minaret, several metres off the perpendicular and standing on humid soil, is particularly vulnerable as it has not been renovated since 1970. Its tilt gave the landmark its popular name – al-Hadba, or the hunchback.

The Mosul offensive has taken much more time than expected as ISIL is fighting in the middle of civilians and using them as human shields.

READ MORE: Focus on al-Nuri Mosque as residents flee Mosul

Over the past few days, fighters ordered dozens of families living in the Zanjili district to move into the Old City to prevent them from escaping towards the Iraqi forces trying to advance from the northern side, a resident said.

Government forces have been dropping leaflets over the districts telling families to flee, but the intensity of the fighting has prevented people from escaping.

ISIL is countering the offensive with suicide car and motorbike bombs, snipers, booby-traps and mortar fire.

About 700,000 people, or one-third of the pre-war city’s population, have already fled seeking refuge either with friends and relatives or in camps.

Source: Al Jazeera and news agencies

Unlike most OCR apps on the market, Adobe Scan is free to use, with no watermarks or page limits, and it’s optimized for capturing multi-page documents.

The app works by capturing a picture of what a user wants to scan, from notes and forms to receipts and business cards. Adobe Scan detects the edges of a document, captures and cleans the image, fixes perspective, removes shadows, and then uses image recognition to detect and convert printed text.

Scans are converted into Adobe PDFs that can be searched, highlighted, copied, edited, marked up, and shared with other users.

“Adobe Scan represents a radical reimagination of how to capture your most important document content,” said Bryan Lamkin, executive vice president and general manager, Digital Media at Adobe. “Adobe invented PDF creation for PCs, and with Adobe Scan we’re doing the same for a mobile-first world. As part of Adobe Document Cloud, new apps like Adobe Scan integrate with services in Adobe Sign andAcrobat DC, offering a modern document experience with unprecedented value to our customers.”

Adobe Scan is powered by the company’s Adobe Sensei image processing technology. Scans captured by the app are stored in the Adobe Document Cloud, also free to use, and are accessible across desktop and mobile devices, and it works with Acrobat DC and Adobe Sign.

Adobe Sign is also gaining new features, including cloud-based digital signatures, cross-device signature capture, customizable email templates, and more.

Adobe Scan is available for download starting today on iOS and Android devices. [Direct Link]

Sensitive files linked to the United States intelligence agency were reportedly left on a public Amazon server by one of the nation’s top intelligence contractor without a password, according to a new report.

UpGuard cyber risk analyst Chris Vickery discovered tens of thousands of documents from a US military project for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) left unsecured on Amazon cloud storage server for anyone to access.

The documents included passwords to a US government system containing sensitive information, and the security credentials of a senior employee of Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the country’s top defense contractors.

Although there wasn’t any top secret file in the cache Vickery discovered, the documents included credentials to log into code repositories that could contain classified files and other credentials.

Master Credentials to a Highly-Protected Pentagon System were Exposed

Roughly 28GB of exposed documents included the private Secure Shell (SSH) keys of a Booz Allen employee, and a half dozen plain text passwords belonging to government contractors with Top Secret Facility Clearance, Gizmodo reports.

What’s more? The exposed data even contained master credentials granting administrative access to a highly-protected Pentagon system.

The sensitive files have since been secured and were likely hidden from those who didn’t know where to look for them, but anyone, like Vickery, who knew where to look could have downloaded those sensitive files, potentially allowing access to both highly classified Pentagon material and Booz Allen information.

“In short, information that would ordinarily require a Top Secret-level security clearance from the DoD was accessible to anyone looking in the right place; no hacking was required to gain credentials needed for potentially accessing materials of a high classification level,” Vickery says.

Vickery is reputed and responsible researcher, who has previously tracked down a number of exposed datasets on the Internet. Two months ago, he discovered an unsecured and publicly exposed database, containing nearly 1.4 Billion user records, linked to River City Media (RCM).

Vickery is the one who, in 2015, reported a huge cache of more than 191 Million US voter records and details of nearly 13 Million MacKeeper users.

Both NGA and Booz Allen are Investigating the Blunder

The NGA is now investigating this security blunder.

“We immediately revoked the affected credentials when we first learned of the potential vulnerability,” the NGA said in a statement. “NGA assesses its cyber security protections and procedures constantly with all of its industry partners. For an incident such as this, we will closely evaluate the situation before determining an appropriate course of action.”

However, Booz Allen said the company is continuing with a detailed forensic investigation about the misstep.

“Booz Allen takes any allegation of a data breach very seriously, and promptly began an investigation into the accessibility of certain security keys in a cloud environment,” a Booz Allen spokesperson told Gizmodo. 

“We secured those keys, and are continuing with a detailed forensic investigation. As of now, we have found no evidence that any classified information has been compromised as a result of this matter.”

Booz Allen Hamilton is the same consulting firm that employed whistleblower Edward Snowden when he disclosed the global surveillance conducted by the NSA. It is among top 100 US federal contractor and once described as “the world’s most profitable spy organisation.”

There’s always been talk about how drones could improve the emissions situation produced by our truck-based delivery infrastructure. But you have to look into these things. A new study from University of Washington researchers indicates that drone delivery may indeed lead to a lower carbon footprint — if it’s done properly.

“I was amazed at how energy-efficient drones are in some contexts,” said Anne Goodchild, who led the research, in a UW news release. “Trucks compete better on heavier loads, but for really light packages, drones are awesome.”

Her study examined the theoretical energy costs of a number of delivery scenarios in the Los Angeles area. Drones, as they are today, can only carry one item at a time, but they can fly over traffic in efficient straight lines. When was this style more efficient than a truck with dozens or hundreds of packages?

According to the researchers’ analysis, drones are more efficient for pretty much anything up to a mile away, and depending on the number of stops, considerably farther. Scenarios with lots of stops in one place, like a major office building, don’t make much sense for drones — but going a mile out of your way to deliver to a farmhouse is equally nonsensical for a heavy truck.

“You’re probably not going to see these in downtown Seattle anytime soon,” Goodchild said. “But maybe in a rural community with roads that are slow and hard for trucks to navigate and no air space or noise concerns.”

There’s much more to the question than simply which is more efficient, of course: How clean is the power used to recharge the drones? How reliable are these estimates? Is backyard delivery really what’s needed? What about electric trucks?

Good questions all! And studies addressing them will surely be conducted over the years to come. Meanwhile, this one will appear in an upcoming issue of the journal Transportation Research.

Featured Image: Matternet Inc.

Android Pay launched in Canada on Wednesday, with support for a number of major banks at launch, and additional banks to be added soon. The Android Pay debut in Canada was teased at Google’s I/O developer conference keynote earlier this month, and reported as imminent last week by MobileSyrup.

The launch today includes support for Visa and MasterCard credit, as well as Interac debit cards (starting June 5) from leading national banks BMO, CIBC and Scotiabank, as well as from smaller regional and specialist institutions like ATB Financial, PC Financial, Desjardins, Banque Nationale and ATB Financial. Android devices running version 4.4 of the OS or higher will be able to add cards from these banks and make mobile payments at compatible, tap-enabled terminals – which are actually very prevalent in Canada.

American Express and Tangerine support are “coming later this summer,” Google says. The noteworthy absentees from this list of supporting financial institutions are RBC and TD, which are the largest of Canada’s “Big Five” banks. Both RBC and TD do support Apple Pay, though, indicating a willingness to support mobile payment options. Spencer Spinnell, Google’s Director of Emerging Platforms, would only say  at a launch event that it “expects banks will come on board over the next several quarters.”

Spinnell also noted at a launch event that the progress of Android Pay represents the result of a tremendous amount of work, since it means bringing together and satisfying a large number of stakeholders, from merchants, to financial institutions, to payment networks and to customers. Unlike Apple, Google doesn’t charge transaction fees to any parties involved  for use of Android Pay (Apple charges banks).

Android Pay uses NFC tech to transfer tokenized payment information from the device to a merchant terminal. Like Apple Pay, which launched in Canada last year, Android Pay doesn’t pass on your actual original payment card details to a merchant, but instead generates a unique token to use for transactions. To use it, once you register your card you simply wake your device and tap it to a payment terminal. Also, once your cards are registered, if they’re lost or stolen, you can use Android Pay to remotely lock or wipe or disable your card.

Android Pay first launched in the U.S. in 2015, and has been rolling out to additional markets gradually since then, covering 12 in total. Other new markets coming online this year include Brazil, Russia, Spain and Taiwan, and Google will also be offering improved loyalty card integration on the merchant side. Android Pay also works in-app with a range of partners, including Uber, 1-800 Flowers and more.

Android Pay has had 1.5 million new registrations per moth on average in the U.S. alone, Spinnell said, which he argued is all the more impressive given the current state of the contactless payment system in America, which lags its equivalents in Canada, the UK and other countries. He said that one in three Canadians who own smartphones have used their device to pay for something, and noted that in Q4 2016, Canadian contactless payments rose 120 percent. Spinnell also noted that eight out of 10 Canadian retailers support NFC capability, making the market an ideal target for an expansion of Android Pay.

In the battle of the voice assistants, one entrant still appears to be staying rather quiet.

Samsung’s Bixby voice assistant was initially supposed to launch alongside the company’s Galaxy S8 smartphone, but after a series of delays the English-language version may not be reaching U.S. customers until late June, the WSJ reports.

Sources tell the WSJ that Bixby isn’t quite ready for prime time:

Recent internal tests of the service have revealed the voice-activated assistant is struggling to comprehend English syntax and grammar, one of the people said.

Bixby is about more than voice, with text entry and camera-based computer vision modes of analysis, as well. While those two use cases launched with the device, the much-hyped voice assistant has remained elusive. In many ways, the entire AI-powered Bixby assistant has still felt rushed.

The voice feature has been an important one for the South Korea company, which is still reeling from the disastrous rollout of its Note 7 smartphone last year that was cancelled because of battery issues. Bixby was lauded as a hallmark feature during the phone’s reveal earlier this year, and was seen as a shot for Samsung to compete in the hot AI-powered voice assistant race alongside Google, Apple and Amazon.

Samsung has been pushing back the English-language release since it first announced that the voice assistant would not be launching alongside the S8 phone.

The company hasn’t been entirely clear about the eventual release, noting in April that the feature would simply be launching “later this spring.” Nearly every section head on the company’s Bixby site comes with a rather visible asterisk denoting the varying availability of specific features based on country and language.

We’ve reached out to representatives from Samsung for more details on release timing and will update if we hear back.

Featured Image: Samsung

Witnesses described scenes of panic, confusion and destruction following a devastating bomb blast at Kabul’s diplomatic quarter that killed scores of people and wounded hundreds.

“[I have] not heard something this big before”, Fatima Faizi, a Kabul resident, told Al Jazeera, minutes after the blast on Wednesday.

READ MORE: Scenes of carnage in Afghan capital

At the Wazir Akhbar Khan hospital, there were scenes of chaos as ambulances brought in wounded and frantic relatives scanned casualty lists and questioned hospital staff for news.

“I couldn’t think clearly, there was a mess everywhere,” Nabib Ahmad, who was lightly hurt, told the Reuters news agency. 

A suspected truck bomb ripped through the heart of Kabul’s diplomatic area in a “earthquake-like” blast described by officials as “one of the biggest” to have hit the city. At least 80 people were killed killed and more than 300 wounded.

Kabul residents said the explosion was so powerful it could be felt throughout the Afghan capital. 

“I was just 500m from the location of the explosion and it was so heavy that in every part of Kabul, people thought as if it was next to them,” Mushtaq Rahim, an independent analyst and security commentator, told Al Jazeera.

“It was pretty strong. It felt like a tremor, like an earthquake in many parts of the city. As soon as the blast went off, one could see a huge amount of smoke coming from the area,” Rahim added.

Mohammad Hassan, who worked at a bank near the site of the blast, also said the explosion felt “like an earthquake”. He suffered from a head wound.

The explosion went off at rush hour near Zanbaq square, in Kabul’s 10th district, close to shops and restaurants, as well as government offices and foreign embassies.

READ MORE – ‘Horrific’: Social media reacts to Kabul bomb blast

Faizi said the explosion “was so loud that it shattered” all the windows in her home. 

Video from the scene showed debris burning near destroyed buildings and cars.

#KabulAttack latest video. http://pic.twitter.com/OrmfIzw3Yc

— Ishaq sadat (@Ishaqsadat) May 31, 2017

Gul Rahim, who was at the site, said “there are a large number of casualties”.

Naser Shahalemi, who works in a building about five to 10 minutes from the blast scene, said he felt “a huge gust of wind … followed by an immediate explosion”. 

Afghan security expert: ‘Such attacks will never end’

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack. Zabihullah Mujahid, a spokesman for the Taliban, told Al Jazeera that the group was not responsible for the blast.

Officials have said the death toll is expected to rise. The victims appear mainly to have been Afghan civilians and there were no immediate reports of casualties among foreign embassy staff.

Shahalemi said area of the explosion took place in a “very fast-paced area” and “everything could have possibly been a target”. 

Embassies damaged 

Al Jazeera’s Qais Azimy, reporting from Kabul, said the location of the attack was very significant, as it hit one of the Afghan capital’s busiest and most secure parts.

“Kabul has been very quiet for the past week but police has confirmed to us that this was one of the biggest blasts Kabul has ever seen,” he said.

OPINION – Afghanistan: A pawn in major power rivalry?

Officials of several embassies in the area, including the German, Japanese, French, Canadian and Bulgarian missions, reported damage to their buildings.

“We are all safe, all our staff, all our personnel are safe. However, the blast was very large and nearby buildings including our own building have considerable damage in terms of broken glass and shattered windows and blown doors etc,” Manpreet Vohra, India’s envoy to Afghanistan, told the Times Now television channel.

Emergency, an Italian NGO that operates in a hospital near the site of the blast, wrote on Twitter that the explosion “was so big that our hospital got damaged”. 

It added its “staff is well and working to treat the wounded arriving from the blast”. 

Source: Al Jazeera and news agencies

President Donald Trump is reportedly set to pull the United States out of the Paris climate accord, according to several US news reports, dealing a giant setback to efforts aimed at cutting global emissions.

Multiple sources confirmed to news agencies and US broadcasters on Wednesday the decision of the American leader, who later posted on social media that he would make an announcement this week.

I will be announcing my decision on the Paris Accord over the next few days. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 31, 2017

Trump, who has previously called global warming a hoax, refused to endorse the landmark climate change accord at a summit of the G7 group of wealthy nations on Saturday, saying he needed more time to decide.

Fox News, Axios, the Associated Press and Reuters cited unnamed sources confirming the pullout.

Al Jazeera’s James Bays, reporting from Washington DC, said that no official announcement was expected on Wednesday, adding that “it is worth cautioning” that there are disagreements among his advisers on how to proceed with the deal. 

“So until we have the final words of the president, I don’t think we should jump the gun. But it is looking like he is going to pull out.”

A decision to withdraw from the deal would put the US in league with Syria and Nicaragua as the world’s only non-participants in the Paris Climate Agreement.

A US withdrawal would have sweeping implications for the deal, which relies heavily on the commitment of big polluter nations to reduce emissions of gases scientists blame for sea level rise, droughts and more frequent violent storms.

The accord, agreed on by nearly 200 countries in Paris in 2015, aims to limit global warming in part by slashing carbon dioxide and other emissions from the burning of fossil fuels.

Under the pact, former US president Barack Obama committed the US to reducing its emissions by 26 to 28 percent from 2005 levels by 2025.

The US is the world’s second-biggest carbon dioxide emitter behind China.

Reacting to news reports of Trump’s decision, Samantha Power, President Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations, posted on Twitter: “The end of the American Century.”

Nancy Pelosi, opposition leader in the House of Representatives, said the decision would be a “stunning abdication of American leadership” and “a threat to the planet.” 

READ MORE: UN demands more ambition as US weighs climate pullout

During Trump’s overseas trip last week, European leaders pressed him to keep the US in the pact.

French President Emmanuel Macron spoke with Trump at length about the issue during a meeting in Brussels, and even at the Vatican, Cardinal Secretary of State Pietro Parolin made his own pro-Paris pitch to Trump and his advisers.

But Trump’s chief White House economic adviser, Gary Cohn, told reporters during the trip abroad that Trump’s views on climate change were “evolving” following the president’s discussions with European leaders.

Word of Trump’s decision comes a day after the president met with Scott Pruitt, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. Like his boss, Pruitt has questioned the consensus of climate scientists that the Earth is warming and that man-made climate emissions are to blame.

Once in power, Trump and Pruitt have moved to delay or roll back federal regulations limiting greenhouse gas emissions while pledging to revive the long-struggling US coal mines.

What is not yet clear is whether Trump plans to initiate a formal withdrawal from the Paris accord, which under the terms of the agreement could take three years, or exit the underlying UN climate change treaty on which the accord was based.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and 21 other Republicans sent Trump a letter last week urging him to follow through on his campaign pledge to pull out of the climate accord. Most of the senators who signed are from states that depend on the continued burning of coal, oil and gas.

There have been influential voices urging Trump not to ditch the Paris accord. Forty Democratic senators sent Trump a letter urging him to stay in, saying a withdrawal would hurt America’s credibility and influence on the world stage.

Hundreds of high-profile businesses have spoken out in favor of the deal, including Apple, Google and Walmart. Even fossil fuel companies such as Exxon Mobil, BP and Shell say the US should abide by the deal.

Source: Al Jazeera and news agencies

If you’re about to replace your roof, Tesla has you covered, but roofs have a long life span, and besides, not all of us have the luxury/misery of having a roof to replace in the first place. Most of us have walls with glass in them, however, and that’s the window of opportunity SolarGaps is reaching for, with a Kickstarter campaign for its solar panel window blinds.

At first glimpse, this sounds like a brilliant idea. Per square footage, we probably have more window glass than roof space in the world; why not leverage it? The slick Kickstarter campaign shows the company’s vision, which is undoubtedly ambitious. SolarGaps integrates with a smartphone app, Google Home, Amazon Echo and the Nest Thermostat. It can either feed electricity back into the grid or into a battery system like the Tesla Powerwall. On top of all that, the campaign claims the product can be custom-made for the same cost as (non-solar) motorized blinds.

In theory, the product is sound: On a south-facing wall, the most direct sunlight you can expect (averaged through the year) is about 10 hours per day. For a 10-square-foot panel (which the company quotes at $385), the company indicates around 1.5Kwh per day on average, or 500 kWh per year. At current prices, that’s power generation of around $88 per year, assuming it’s sunny every day. At a cost of $385, it means it’ll take about 4-6 years to earn the SolarGaps back, assuming all the estimates are correct, and you live in a place that has perfect sunshine year around.

Right off the bat, I spot a couple of challenges. Ask a 5-year-old to point at a window and they’ll point sideways. Ask them where the sun is, and they’ll point straight above. Which means that the sides of walls are already at a disadvantage to roof-mounted panels. Of course, the panels do live on slats, so it’s possible to point the panels toward the sun, but still.

The SolarGaps team sent me a small, approximately 3.2-foot panel to try out. The build quality looks solid, and when you think of it as a set of blinds to keep the sun out, it works great. However, when trying to measure the company’s stated performance, I fell short; the panel wasn’t delivering even close to what I ought to be measuring. It doesn’t help that the panel I was sent had a 220V to 110V converter, and that the DC-DC converter box I was supplied for testing is a lot less efficient than what the company is planning to ship. I questioned the wisdom of sending a review sample to a journalist with so many bottlenecks that it’s hard to evaluate whether or not it’s working properly, and received a photo of the company’s testing setup in response.

SolarGaps’ testing rig in Redwood City, California

You’ll probably have spotted that the panel is balanced at a wall at an angle, outside. Which is cool for prototyping, of course, but also highlights the challenge mentioned above: Walls and windows tend to be vertical, without the luxury of angling the panel.

“To get best results your SolarGaps should be facing the sun and not under any shade, and you should rotate blinds using our application to get the best results,” says SolarGaps’ CEO Yevgen Erik. On the other hand, he also points out that “SolarGaps provides active window shading. This will help reduce energy wasted on AC by up to 40% and your payback period may just be 3 years or less depending on how frequently you are using AC. We can reduce this and try to help solve climate change.”

SolarGaps also suggests that they’ve been able to improve the efficiency of its product by 20 percent with software updates. They suggest further optimizations will be possible.

The company is recommending that you mount the panels on the outside of your windows, rather than on the inside. Of course, that brings its own challenges, as installation, wind-proofing and cable installation is likely to get more complicated on the outside of a building, compared to on the inside.

Ultimately, I think that SolarGaps is a good solution for areas that suffer from brutal heat, high air-conditioning bills and consistent sunshine. Wearing my business hat, though — on the company’s behalf, I worry about how small that makes its potential target market. Having said that, with 14 days to go, 231 people believe in the product to the tune of about $60,000, comfortably beating SolarGaps’ $50,000 goal on Kickstarter, so perhaps they’re seeing an opportunity that’s missed on me.

Over the past two months, Venezuela has seen near daily demonstrations – with anti- and pro-government protesters taking to the streets. More than 50 people have been killed.

The political roots of the protests extend back to January 2016, when the Supreme Court suspended the election of four legislators for alleged voting irregularities. The opposition accused the court of trying to strip them of their super-majority, and went ahead and swore in three of the legislators. The Supreme Court responded by ruling that the entire opposition-led National Assembly was in contempt and that any decisions it made would not stand.

When, in early 2017, the National Assembly refused to approve the state-run oil company PDVSA’s forming joint ventures with private companies, the government went to the Supreme Court, which ruled that it would take over the legislative powers of the National Assembly.

Protests broke out the next day – and were violently repressed – and although the court reversed its decision, the demonstrations have continued.

READ: Why I support Nicolas Maduro

They come against the backdrop of a crippling economic crisis that has resulted in a drastic shortage of food and medicine. 

President Nicolas Maduro has accused the United States of attempting to destabilise his government and has pressed ahead with a plan to create a popular assembly with the ability to rewrite the constitution. He says the grassroots body is needed to bring peace to Venezuela, but opponents view it as a tactic to buy time and avoid a general election.

It is a crisis that has divided Venezuelans. Here, we speak to two who explain why they oppose the government:

Helena Carpio, 25, photojournalist
‘I protest because it is a duty‘ 

“I attend the protests because I fear having to live like this – with fear, scarcity, censorship – my whole life. To live without a future. I protest because it is my right and because, in the face of so many outrages and threats, it is a duty.

I worked in adventure tourism for a couple of years. On the one hand I got to experience this country’s touristic potential, the raw beauty of its Tepuys and other world-acclaimed natural wonders, but on the other hand I also got to see how bad governance, terrible economic policies and an absent justice system have ravaged a once booming sector and left many in extreme poverty without any prospects.

My salary back in 2016 for a full-time job, considered a good one for a college graduate, was the equivalent of $20 [on the black market].

I’m 25, so my experience doesn’t go back much. But before Chavez, I can remember that there was lots of wealth inequality and poverty. Undeniably, there was also corruption and many of the institutional consequences derived from an oil-exporting economy. But never in the history of our country did we receive as much money from oil as Chavez did. So that applied pressure to existing institutional cracks.

President Chavez used populist tactics to transform discontent and marginalisation into political capital.

I remember vividly that he used to say things like “Rich people are not people, they are animals” and then laugh afterwards. That’s a quote. I’ll never forget that.

Some things were good. His social missions were good in principle but terribly executed. He brought health to places that didn’t have access to it before, and the same with education – but the problem was implementation and quality.

So much corruption was born within these institutions, and the quality of the services provided left people at times worse off.

Division and segregation existed before, but nothing like today. People didn’t hate each other back then because of politics. The biggest rivalries I remember were between Caraquistas and Magallaneros, two baseball teams that usually faced one another. But nothing like this – people punching you because you look a certain way or women screaming insults at others because of their shirt. It’s terrifying to see a nation broken apart by hatred and resentment.

We’ve been protesting for 60 almost-consecutive days. In a way, my job has permitted me to attend most of the protests. I’m a photojournalist, so I get paid to be there. But most people have to stop going to work in order to attend a protest during the week.

READ: Venezuela: What is happening today?

Before a protest I start monitoring Twitter to see if there’s any early repression. I pack my bag: anti-tear gas mask, Maalox or antiacid [which helps fight the effects of pepper spray and tear gas], water, helmet, bandages and Band-Aids in case I get hurt or someone near me does. I also pack my camera and an extra mobile phone battery in case I run out, as well as my press credentials.

I don’t know when this will end. And anyone that says they do is probably lying. I don’t see people quitting the protests; they are too angry, too upset, too tired and too scared. There’s so much frustration towards this government’s reluctance to change, to accept its mistakes, to listen, and to compromise, that I don’t think people will stop. They feel like their most basic needs aren’t being met: there’s no medicine, no food, inflation is rampant, crime is terrible.

At one of the protests I was near the front. After the police fired more than 60 tear gas canisters at the protesters and the protesters threw Molotov cocktails and rocks at the police and National Guard for close to two hours, I heard one of the protesters, who couldn’t have been older than 22, say: “This is it guys. Now or never. This sh***y life is not living, so be ready to die.”

You hear things like that a lot. It’s like they have lost everything, they have nothing else left to lose.

We are protesting not only because of the scarcity, the lack of security, and censorship, but because of the president’s bid to create a popular assembly that would have the authority to rewrite the constitution. We want to let the government know that we are against it, and against the way that he is implementing; it’s unconstitutional. Protesting is the only way we have found of actually being heard.

In 2014, one of the first times that the government sat down and spoke to the opposition was after months of protests. The government has shown repeatedly that they don’t listen to the opposition.

I don’t want to keep protesting; there are a million more constructive ways to actually improve the country. But we can’t do this until the government recognises us, the other part of the country that is calling for change.

I want to see elections, free, fair, universal elections. I want the will of the people to be heard. I’m not asking for my vision to overcome the vision of others, I’m asking for an equal playing field, for the referendum that we asked for last year.

I want to live in a democracy. I want to be someone who worked hard during college and is actually able to earn a living. I want to be someone who can marry in her own country, and see her children grow up in the same places where she grew up. I want to be in a country where I can travel wherever I want, and go to the mountains and climb them and not be scared of being mugged when I get down.

I want to live in a country where people don’t hate each other, where neighbours’ doors are open, and they can talk to each other, and where I’m not scared to go to certain places because I look a certain way, and a place where my opinion is respected just as much as anybody’s. I think sometimes that is worthy of dying for.

I’m scared during the protests, I’m not going to lie, people get killed.

I known some of the kids that have lost their lives. But you know what scares me more than that, having to live like this for the rest of my life, because this is not a life; being scared, having to queue to get food, and with a government that wants you gone. That’s why they feel they have nothing left to lose, and sometimes I feel the same way.”

Amaranta Campos, 26, student
‘The greatest legacy of Chavez was the division of this country’ 

“I study literature at the Catholic University of Andres Bello. I am also a housewife and mother of two children.

We are going through a very difficult moment. What we are experiencing is a mixture of all our defects, as a country, set in motion at the same time.

Life has always been difficult in Venezuela, but the levels of difficulty we have now are unusual. Until a few months ago there was neither money nor food. Now there is food, but not enough money to buy it.

I feel that we will live this for thousands of years unless something more forceful takes place. But to do something more forceful would not lay a good foundation for the next government.

Today I own my home. My husband is a professional who works in a ministry. And, yet, on many days we are not able to eat because we only have enough money to buy food for our children.

My husband and I have decided to be vegetarians so we don’t have to buy meat; the little we buy, and we can afford, is for our kids. 

Daily life is basically about surviving.

Life is very different from what it was before. My mother, 16 years ago, managed to sustain my brother and me on a teacher’s salary without any problems, and without any help.

Now my husband’s salary is not enough.

Wages are really low. For example, if I earn 40,000 bolivares ($3,934), and a package of rice costs 6,000 ($593) bolivares and it is 8,000 bolivares ($791) for a package of Harina Pan, and 17,000 ($1681) for a chicken, how can you afford anything else?

There are people who eat every day from what they find in the rubbish.

Many blame foreign actors, but I wonder, if the government controls the currency, and here everything that can be produced needs raw materials that you will need to buy with that currency, who is to blame, then?

Transnationals have left the country because foreign investment is so heavily limited. Add to that exchange control and it is not profitable to have a business here anymore.

Now the Venezuelan “upper class” are members of the government who have been enriched by stealing government money.

Most of my life I have lived under the presidency of Hugo Chavez. I remember that my mother, with her teacher’s salary, was able to shop at the supermarket, and every weekend we had the chance to go out and do something new.

I also remember that I could go out without too much fear, I could walk or get on a bus, and the safest place to be was the metro.

From the age of 16 to 18 I worked as a construction worker. What I earned was enough. I had enough for me and to help my mother with the expenses of the house.

Eventually, I left the country, but when I returned things were worse.

When my husband and I returned to the country in 2013, we decided to ask for a loan to buy an apartment. The bank gave us 350,000 bolivares ($34,568) in August 2013. The apartment cost us 1,000,000 bolivares ($98,757). Do you know how much a smartphone from a little-known brand costs in May 2017? Between 700,000 bolivares ($69,218) and 1,000,000 bolivares. With what I bought my house for four years ago, I could now only buy a smartphone.

Unfortunately, today, the ruling party is absolutely exclusive, and the opposition too. The greatest legacy of the late President Chavez has been the deep division of this country into these two factions.”

Source: Al Jazeera News

The Bamboo Sketch can be used within apps like Bamboo Paper, ArtRage, Autodesk SketchBook, Concepts, and MediaBang Paint, and when it’s in use the stylus boasts 2,048 levels of pressure sensitivity.

“Visual thinkers who use an iPad or iPhone for their notes and sketches require a pen that offers precision and individualization,” said Mike Gay, Senior Vice President of the Wacom Consumer Business Unit. “Bamboo Sketch offers an advanced writing and drawing experience for those whose first instinct is to reach for a pen and paper as soon as inspiration strikes.”

To charge the stylus, users will be able to connect the magnetic charging port on the pen to a USB dongle accessory, which can be plugged into any traditional USB 3.0 port. The company said that the Bamboo Sketch stylus can last for up to 15 hours on one charge.

Sensitive files tied to a US military project were leaked by a multi-billion dollar firm once described as the world’s most profitable spy operation, Gizmodo has confirmed.

A cache of more than 60,000 files were discovered last week on a publicly accessible Amazon server, including passwords to a US government system containing sensitive information, and the security credentials of a lead senior engineer at Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the nation’s top intelligence and defense contractors. What’s more, the roughly 28GB of data contained at least a half dozen unencrypted passwords belonging to government contractors with Top Secret Facility Clearance.

The exposed credentials could potentially grant their holders further access to repositories housing similarly sensitive government data.

Countless references are made in the leaked files to the US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), which in March awarded Booz Allen an $86 million defense contract (around £66.8m). Often referred to as the Pentagon’s “mapmakers,” the combat support agency works alongside the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, and the Defense Intelligence Agency to collect and analyse geospatial data gathered by spy satellites and aerial drones.

The NGA on Tuesday confirmed the leak to Gizmodo while stressing that no classified information had been disclosed. “NGA takes the potential disclosure of sensitive but unclassified information seriously and immediately revoked the affected credentials,” an agency spokesperson said. The Amazon server from which the data was leaked was “not directly connected to classified networks,” the spokesperson noted.

Some of the passwords are encrypted using a hash protocol that’s difficult but not impossible to crack. (UpGuard)

UpGuard cyber risk analyst Chris Vickery discovered the Booz Allen server last week while at his Santa Rosa home running a scan for publicly accessible s3 buckets (what Amazon calls its cloud storage devices). At first there was no reason to suspect it contained sensitive military data. Typically, US government servers hosted by Amazon are segregated into what’s called the GovCloud — a “gated community” protected by advanced cryptography and physical security. Instead, the Booz Allen bucket was found in region “US-East-1,” chiefly comprised of public and commercial data.

Yet the files bore some hallmarks of a government project. First, Vickery spotted the public and private SSH keys of a Booz Allen employee, identified by his LinkedIn page as a lead senior engineer in Virginia — also home to the NGA’s Fort Belvoir campus. “Exposing a private key belonging to a Booz Allen IT engineer is potentially catastrophic for malicious intrusion possibilities,”he said.

SSH keys employ what’s called public-key cryptography and challenge-response authentication. Essentially, Booz Allen stores sensitive data in the cloud, and before the engineer can access it, his private key must pair successfully with a public key on Booz Allen’s server. This protocol only really works, however, so long as the employee’s private key remains a secret.

The public and private SSH keys for a Booz Allen engineer were discovered in the dataset. (UpGuard)

“Booz Allen takes any allegation of a data breach very seriously, and promptly began an investigation into the accessibility of certain security keys in a cloud environment,” a Booz Allen spokesman told Gizmodo on Tuesday. “We secured those keys, and are continuing with a detailed forensic investigation. As of now, we have found no evidence that any classified information has been compromised as a result of this matter.”

Mark Zaid, a Washington lawyer who specialises in national security cases, said the incident is likely to dredge up bad memories of the company. “The first thing that jumps to mind,” he said, is “Oh, no. It’s Booz Allen again.”

Zaid was referring to Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who worked for Booz Allen when he fled to Hong Kong in 2013 with a trove of classified material. Another of the firm’s employees, Harold Martin III, was arrested last year and charged under the Espionage Act after federal agents discovered over 50 terabytes of classified data in his residence, the trunk of his car and in an unlocked outdoor shed.

“Obviously, Booz Allen is a large company and a well-respected defense contractor,” Zaid added. “And none of these cases are necessarily related to one another. But it still raises some real serious concerns about what’s going on with Booz Allen’s security protocols.”

In addition to keys, the Booz Allen server contained master credentials to a datacenter operating system — and others used to access the GEOAxIS authentication portal, a protected Pentagon system that usually requires an ID card and special computer to use. Yet another file contained the login credentials of a separate Amazon bucket, the contents of which remain a mystery; there’s no way to verify the contents legally since the bucket is secured by a password, and thus not open to the public.

Moreover, a categorisation script found in one of the Booz Allen files indicates the system under construction is at least designed to handle classified information. And while Vickery didn’t realise its significance at the time, the leaked files also appear connected to a third server he found open last month.

In April, he discovered an Amazon bucket with no password containing a review of what he now believes is the same NGA system. An “application security risk assessment,” carried out using HP software called Fortify, detailed 3039 issues within the program’s source code (only 7 were described as critical). “I’m reading the report,” he says, “and the code snippets line up with code from the second bucket.”

The mission of UpGuard’s Cyber Risk Team is to locate and secure leaked sensitive records, so Vickery’s first email on Wednesday was to Joe Mahaffee, Booz Allen’s chief information security officer. But after received no immediate response, he went directly the agency. “I emailed the NGA at 10:33am on Thursday. Public access to the leak was cut off nine minutes later,” he said.

A reference to classified material from a leaked configuration file. (UpGuard)

“You can have fantastic cybersecurity, but if you’re using IT systems to share information with a partner whose cybersecurity isn’t up to snuff, then your protection measures don’t mean very much,” says Paulo Shakarian, a cybersecurity fellow at the Washington think-tank New America. The big unresolved question, he says, is whether Booz Allen had proper security protocols in place for its contractors working on the NGA project. “And likewise, what has NGA done to ensure that the proper protective measures were in place.”

NGA informed Gizmodo that it was still evaluating the incident and had yet to determine a proper course of action. “It’s important to note that a misconfiguration, properly reported and addressed, does not disqualify industry partners from doing business with NGA,” the agency said, adding that it reserves the right to “address any violations or patterns of non-compliance appropriately.”

On Friday, UpGuard was contacted by a government agency and asked to preserve all of its records related to Vickery’s find. The company said it is abiding by a request not to reveal the agency’s name at this time.

[UpGuard Cyber Risk Team]

The alleged Russian hacker, who was arrested by the Czech police in Prague last October on suspicion of massive 2012 data breach at LinkedIn, can be extradited to either the United States or Russia, a Czech court ruled on Tuesday.

Yevgeniy Aleksandrovich Nikulin, a 29-years-old Russian national, is accused of allegedly hacking not just LinkedIn, but also the online cloud storage platform Dropbox, and now-defunct social-networking company Formspring.

However, he has repeatedly denied all accusations.

Nikulin was arrested in Prague on October 5 by the Czech police after Interpol issued an international arrest warrant against him.

Nikulin appeared at a court hearing held inside a high-security prison in Prague on Tuesday and emaciated after eight months in solitary confinement.

The court ruling, pending appeals, left the final decision in the hands of Czech Justice Minister Robert Pelikan, who can approve extradition to one of the countries and block the other.

The United States has requested Nikulin extradition for carrying out hacking attacks and stealing information from several American social networking companies, including LinkedIn, Dropbox, and Formspring, between March 2012 to July 2012.

However, Russia, where Nikulin is facing a lesser charge, has requested his extradition on a separate cyber theft charge of stealing $3,450 via the Internet in 2009.

“Both [case] documents are very, very sufficient for reasonable suspicion that [the offenses] took place and that there is a reason to press charges,” the judge said.

Hacker Claims FBI Pressured Him to Confess to US Election Hacks

Nikulin’s arrest last October came three days before the United States officially accused Russia of hacking the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and interfering in the 2016 presidential election.

Nikulin’s lawyer says the case is a set-up, indicating that his arrest may have deeper inclinations than over the cyber attacks against American firms.

The Guardian reported Nikulin was interrogated in Prague, where he currently remains imprisoned, by FBI special agent Jeffrey Miller.

Nikulin wrote in a letter from prison that during his interrogation, Miller reportedly brought up the US election hacking and claimed that the FBI agent pressured him to admit to the DNC hack and promised him good treatment if he accepted to cooperate.

Nikulin wrote in the letter that he rejected the offer. His lawyer indicated that Nikulin was not a hacker, but just a victim of an FBI plot.

“Do you really imagine that a high-ranking FBI agent is going to travel all the way from San Francisco just to read this guy his rights?,” Nikulin lawyer said.

Mark Galeotti, a senior security researcher at the Institute of International Relations Prague, also showed his concern about an FBI agent traveling to another country to extradite a hacker.

“An FBI agent traveling from the US to a third country as part of an extradition request is extremely unusual and highlights that the case is seen as significant,” Galeotti said, as quoted by the Guardian.

Nikulin’s Russian lawyer stated that his client’s life revolved around buying and selling luxury cars, adding that Nikulin was “useless with computers” and capable of checking his email and no more and, far from being a super-hacker who can hack big firms.

Tuesday’s court hearing was held in a tiny room inside the prison for security reasons, to which Nikulin’s Czech lawyer said: “In all my 25 years as a lawyer, I don’t remember any cases being tried inside the prison, including serial killers or organized crime cases.“

Now, the final decision is in the hands of the Czech Justice Minister Robert Pelikan, who is slated to decide where Nikulin will be extradited: The United States, where he can face a “disproportionately harsh” sentence of 54 years behind bars, or Russia, where he faces a lesser charge of cyber theft.

The joke in the smartphone space in years past was how screens just kept getting bigger — stretching palms and making you look ridiculous when held up to the head to talk.

How times change. Talking into phones? Why, how 2005 of you! Phablets have long been the new normal as the telephone icon lost out in the war to capture our attention via finger-flicking touchscreen fun — losing out to all the other apps offering more visual ways to be entertained and/or communicate, be it by text, selfie lens or silly GIF.

Apple, a laggard at inflating smartphone screen size, has remained something of a reluctant participant in this ‘bigger is better’ logic. Evident in its tortured sloganizing for its very first phablet, the 5.5-inch iPhone 6 Plus — which it launched in 2014 and stuck next to the words: “bigger than bigger”. The less said about which the better.

The iPhone-maker’s reluctance to participate in the pant-stretching smartphone craze has also included an attempt to buck the trend, by reviving — in 2016 — the 4-inch form iPhone factor, and putting a bit more heft under the hood, aka the iPhone SE.

It’s continued to range this ‘littlest iPhone’ alongside its 4.7-inch ‘standard’ flagship and 5.5-inch top of the range phablet. But analyst projections suggest declining demand for SE-sized smartphones in the coming years — as phablets are set to take a greater and greater share of the market.

tl;dr the phablet is now the smartphone fixture.

Analyst IDC put out its latest smartphone market projections yesterday, and looking ahead to 2021 it sees shipments of devices with screens of 4-inches (up to less than 5-inches) losing out to those with larger panes. It’s projecting 314.2M million devices in this iPhone SE size category will ship worldwide this year — shrinking to 223.3M by 2021.

Meanwhile, it’s expecting the vast bulk of the smartphone market to become almost equally divided between devices with screens of between 5-inches and less than 5.5-inches, and those with screens of 5.5-inches and under 6-inches — expecting shipments to grow from 593.3M and 558.7M this year respectively, to 731.4M and 749.3M by 2021.

Which means phablets or phones verging on phablet territory really are the future. Or the ‘phuture’ if you prefer (hattip to my colleague Jon Russell for that quip).

As with most inflationary issues, the line between the smartphone and the phablet has shifted over time as phones have swelled in size — so while a phablet used to start around the 5-inch mark (or even a little less), it’s now more typically 5.5-inches+.

So it’s possible that by 2021 it may have been pushed out a bit further still.

That said, IDC isn’t expecting much market change for the very biggest smartphones (of between 6-inches to under 7-inches). It’s expecting shipments in this whopper category to be 32M this year — and to have grown only slightly to 37.4M by 2021.

So perhaps more likely: a smartphone will simply become synonymous with a device that has a screen size of between 5 and 6 inches. And the word ‘phablet’ will end up being reserved for the minority ‘up to seven inches’ proper whopper category.

Which just goes to show that winning isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be if you’re a weird-sounding word that nobody liked in the first place.

When it comes to smartphone displays, size certainly matters, and the smallest displays (of less than 4 inches look set to disappear entirely). But being the biggest isn’t the best, either — effectively over six inches you have a clumsily large phone and/or a small and therefore not very useful tablet. It’s all about finding the sweet-spot based on device utility: i.e. visual, sensory computing combined with portability.

And that smartphone screen size sweet-spot looks firmly settled at between 5 and 6 inches for the foreseeable future. At least until the computing paradigm shifts again — and some kind of socially acceptable wearable manages to lift everyone’s eyes off attention-sucking glass slabs with an augmented vista of the real world instead. At least that’s one theory.

Until then, we’d like between five and six inches of touchscreen glass please.

Featured Image: Bloomberg/Getty Images

The US military scored an important success in a test of its oft-criticised missile-defence programme, destroying a mock warhead over the Pacific Ocean with an interceptor that is key to protecting US territory from a North Korean attack.

Vice Admiral Jim Syring, director of the Pentagon agency in charge of developing the missile-defence system, called the test result “an incredible accomplishment” and a critical milestone for a programme hampered by setbacks over the years.

“This system is vitally important to the defence of our homeland, and this test demonstrates that we have a capable, credible deterrent against a very real threat,” Syring said in a statement announcing the test result.

Despite the success, the $244m test didn’t confirm that under wartime conditions the US could intercept an intercontinental-range missile fired by North Korea.

OPINION: Is war coming to North Korea?

Pyongyang is understood to be moving closer to the capability of putting a nuclear warhead on such an ICBM and could develop decoys sophisticated enough to trick an interceptor into missing the real warhead.

The most recent intercept test, in June 2014, was successful, but the longer track record is spotty. Since the system was declared ready for potential combat use in 2004, only four of nine intercept attempts have been successful.

Failure on Tuesday could have deepened concern about a programme that, according to one estimate, has so far cost more than $40bn.

John Tierney, executive director of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, told Al Jazeera the missile programme – despite its cost – has a success record of less than 50 percent.

“Unfortunately, we need to be aware of a false sense of security here. This programme is nowhere near ready to be relied upon against North Korea or anybody else. This is a baby step,” Tierney said.  

Pentagon spokesman Navy Captain Jeff Davis had said the test was not timed specifically in response to tensions with Pyongyang but “in a broad sense, North Korea is one of the reasons why we have this capability”.

North Korea says its nuclear and missile programmes are a defence against perceived US military threats.

Its accelerating missile development has complicated Pentagon calculations, most recently by incorporating solid-fuel technology into its rockets. The step would mean even less launch warning time for the United States. Liquid fuel is less stable and rockets using it have to be fueled in the field, a process that takes longer and can be detected by satellites.

Underscoring its uninterrupted efforts, North Korea on Monday fired a short-range ballistic missile that landed in Japan’s maritime economic zone.

In Tuesday’s US test, the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency launched an interceptor rocket from an underground silo at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The target was an intercontinental-range missile fired from a test range on Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific.

According to the plan, two-metre-long “kill vehicle” released from atop the interceptor zeroed in on the ICBM-like target’s mock warhead outside Earth’s atmosphere and obliterated it by sheer force of impact, the Pentagon said.

READ MORE: North Korea fires missile in third test in three weeks

The target was a custom-made missile meant to simulate an ICBM, meaning it flew faster than missiles used in previous intercept tests, according to Christopher Johnson, the Missile Defense Agency’s spokesman. It was not a mock-up of an actual North Korean ICBM, and details of its exact capabilities weren’t made public.

Officially known as the Ground-based Midcourse Defense system, the Pentagon likens the defensive tactic to hitting a bullet with a bullet. With congressional support, the Pentagon is increasing by the end of this year the number of deployed interceptors, based in California and Alaska, to 44 from the current total of 36.

Laura Grego, senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, which has criticised the missile defence programme, called the interceptor an “advanced prototype”, meaning it is not fully matured technologically.

“Overall,” she wrote in an analysis prior to the test, the military “is not even close to demonstrating that the system works in a real-world setting”.

Source: Al Jazeera and news agencies

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres urged the world to raise its ambition in implementing the Paris climate agreement as the United States weighed pulling out of the landmark emissions-cutting deal.    

Making his first address on climate since taking the UN helm five months ago, Guterres said it was “absolutely essential” the world implements the 2015 agreement “with increased ambition”.    

The United States is among the 147 countries and parties that have ratified the agreement, but President Donald Trump has voiced concerns the deal signed by the previous US administration could harm the US economy.    

READ MORE: Trump moves to roll back Obama climate policies

“We believe that it would be important for the US not to leave the Paris agreement,” Guterres said in response to a question following his address at New York University.    

“But even if the government decides to leave the Paris agreement, it’s very important for US society as a whole – the cities, the states, the companies, the businesses – to remain engaged. It is very clear that governments aren’t everything.”

At a summit meeting of the G7 group of leading economies over the weekend, Trump refused to join the other six leaders in pledging to implement the Paris accord and said he would announce the US position this week.    

Guterres said the United Nations was engaged with the US administration and Congress to try to convince them to abide by the deal.    

His appeal suggested if the United States – the world’s biggest carbon emitter after China – were to quit the accord, the onus would be on other key players such as China, India, and the European Union to do more to fight global warming.    

The Paris agreement’s commitment to curb carbon emissions and limit temperature rise to well below 2 degrees Celsius and as close as possible to 1.5 degrees “do not nearly go far enough”, Guterres said.

“So we must do our utmost to increase ambition and action until we can bend the emissions curve and slow down global warming,” he said. 

Betting on green economy 

Describing the agreement as a “remarkable moment in the history of humankind”, the UN chief stressed that private corporations – including oil and gas companies – were not awaiting government policy and joining the green economy.    

“Some may seek to portray the response to climate change as a fundamental threat to the economy,” said Guterres. “Yet what we are witnessing in these early years of a systemic response is the opposite.    

“Those who fail to bet on the green economy will be living in a grey future,” he warned. “On the other hand, those who embrace green technologies will set the gold standard for economic leadership in the 21st century.”

READ MORE: The Paris climate agreement and why it matters

Guterres pointed to growth in the clean energy sector, saying solar power grew 50 percent last year and that more new jobs were being created in renewable energy than in oil and gas.    

He argued climate action was a sound security policy, warning of mass displacement from natural disasters or from refugees whose lands become unlivable.    

The UN chief vowed to mobilise governments, the energy industry, investors, and civil society to “raise the bar on climate action”.    

As a first step, Guterres said he would press for ratification of an agreement reached last year on phasing out hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), a major source of greenhouse gas emissions.    

Guterres announced plans for a summit in 2019 to review progress in implementing the Paris agreement.

Source: AFP news agency

“Carpool Karaoke: The Series” is based on the popular Carpool Karaoke segment from “The Late Late Show with James Corden.” Apple purchased rights to the show back in mid-2016 and showed off the first trailer in February. The show was originally supposed to launch in April, but its debut was delayed.

Carpool Karaoke: The Series for Apple Music will welcome a different group of superstars every Tuesday, with new episodes available exclusively to Apple Music subscribers in more than 100 countries. Celebrity pairings include Will Smith and James Corden; Miley, Noah, Billy Ray and the entire Cyrus family; Shakira and Trevor Noah; Game of Thrones stars Sophie Turner and Maisie Williams; Queen Latifah and Jada Pinkett Smith; John Legend, Alicia Keys and Taraji P. Henson; LeBron James and James Corden; and many more.

“Carpool Karaoke: The Series” will be available solely to Apple Music subscribers in more than 100 countries.

Syrian rebels say the United States and its allies are sending them more arms to try to fend off a new push into the southeast by Iran-backed militias aiming to open an overland supply route between Iraq and Syria.

Tensions escalated in the southeastern region of Syria, known as the Badia, this month when government forces supported by Iraqi militias deployed in a challenge to rebels backed by President Bashar al-Assad’s enemies.

This has coincided with a march towards the Syrian border by militias from Iraq. They reached the frontier adjoining northern Syria on Monday. A top Iraqi militia commander said a wider operation to take the area from Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) started on Tuesday.

WATCH: Syria: Starvation as a weapon of war

While in Iraq the US has fought alongside Iranian-backed Iraqi government forces and militias against ISIL, in Syria Washington has lined up against Assad’s Iranian-backed government and wants to block a further expansion of Iranian influence with its regional allies.

Several rebel groups fighting under the Free Syrian Army (FSA) banner operate in sparsely populated Badia, where they captured swathes of territory from ISIL this year. US air raids on May 18 targeted Iran-backed fighters who had moved into the area.

Also in May, Damascus declared both the Badia and Deir Az Zor priorities of its campaign to re-establish its rule over Syria, which has been shattered by six years of war that have killed hundreds of thousands of people. The government is being helped by both Iran and Russia, while the opposition has been helped by the West and regional states that oppose Assad.

Rebels said military aid has been boosted through two separate channels: a programme backed by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), known as MOC, and regional states including Jordan and Saudi Arabia, and one run by the Pentagon.

“There has been an increase in the support,” said Tlass Salameh, head of the Jaish Usoud al-Sharqiya, one of the FSA groups backed by the CIA-sponsored programme. “There’s no way we can let them open the Baghdad-Damascus highway,” he said.

READ MORE: Syria’s civil war explained from the beginning

A senior commander of a Pentagon-backed group, Maghawir al-Thawra, told Reuters news agency a steady flow of weapons had arrived at their base near the Iraqi border since the pro-Damascus forces began deploying this month.

He said efforts to recruit and train local fighters from Deir Az Zor had accelerated at their garrison at Tanf, on the highway some 20km from the Iraqi border.

“The equipment and reinforcements come and go daily … but in the last few weeks they have brought in more heavy military vehicles, TOW [missiles], and armoured vehicles,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Two armoured vehicles newly delivered to the Tanf garrison were shown in photos sent to Reuters from a rebel source. A video showed fighters unpacking mortar rounds.

In a written response to emailed questions, a spokesman for the US-led coalition did not say if coalition support to Maghawir al-Thawra had increased.

Colonel Ryan Dillon said coalition forces were “prepared to defend themselves if pro-regime forces refuse to vacate” a de-confliction zone around Tanf.

“The coalition has observed pro-regime forces patrolling in the vicinity of the established de-confliction zone around the Tanf training site in Syria … Pro-regime patrols and the continued armed and hostile presence of forces inside the … zone is unacceptable and threatening to coalition forces,” Dillon said.

US jets this week dropped leaflets on pro-government forces instructing them to pull out of the Tanf area to the Zaza junction further from the border. The leaflets were obtained by Hammurabi Justice, a Maghawir-linked website.

The Syrian army could not be reached for comment.

READ MORE: Syria Civil War: ‘The sky is falling’ in Aleppo 

A commander in the military alliance fighting in support of Assad said the deployment of government forces and pro-Damascus Iraqi fighters in Badia would “obstruct all the plans of the MOC, Jordan and America”.

The commander, a non-Syrian, said Assad’s enemies were committed to blocking “what they call the [Shia] Crescent”. But, he said, “Now, our axis is insistent on this matter and it will be accomplished.”

The Iraqi Badr militia said its advance to the Syrian border would help the Syrian army reach the border from the other side.

“The Americans will not be allowed to control the border,” its leader, Hadi al-Amiri, told al-Mayadeen TV.

Source: Reuters news agency

An ex-Apple designer and former Twitter engineer have teamed up for a new take on iPhone photography, with today’s launch of their iOS camera app called Halide. The idea is to offer a variety of high-end tools for taking quality photographs, but packaged in a way where accessing those controls via gestures becomes like muscle memory – similar to using the dials on a camera.

Explains the app’s website, the new app’s gesture-based control scheme is meant to feel “as intuitive and tactile as a great film camera, like an old Leica or Pentax.”

While there are a number of alternative camera applications for iOS today – like Camera+ or Camera Awesome, for example – these tend to be marketed towards mainstream users who want to “shoot like a pro.” Halide, on the other hand, is designed more with the power user in mind first. That is, it will largely appeal to those who have some understanding of photography, and want to do things like quickly change the exposure or manually focus with a swipe.

However, there is a built-in automatic mode like the stock iOS app. This makes the app usable even by novice iPhone photographers, who sometimes need help when trying to take tricky shots.

But this automatic mode is designed to be turned off by tapping the “A” button in order to tweak specific values like ISO, white balance and shutter speed, however. The app also includes professional tools like focus peaking (which highlights the areas in focus, allowing users to manually pull focus), a detailed histogram, an adaptive level grid and support for both JPG and RAW capture.

Halide was developed by Ben Sandofsky and Sebastiaan de With, both of whom have experience with high-end photography. Sandofsky previously worked on Periscope’s video processing stack, was an advisor to both HBO’s “Silicon Valley” and Shyp, and worked as the tech lead on Twitter’s iPhone, iPad and Mac applications.

Meanwhile, de With is an ex-Apple designer who has done client work for Sony, T-Mobile, Mozilla and others, and runs the San Francisco design agency Pictogram, which designed the Nylas Mail app; he also worked on Doubletwist’s design, and others. He’s a photographer, as well, often taking photos as he take trips by motorcycle.

Beyond the app’s feature set, something that differentiates the app is its gesture-based interface. But its controls also work with a tap so you don’t have to learn all the gestures immediately. This makes the overall experience more consistent, and doesn’t leave newcomers hunting around to access the app’s features.

The team sees the gesture-based interface as part of what makes Halide usable – even for less experienced photographers.

“You don’t really need to understand concepts like Exposure Compensation, EVs, or manual focus to enjoy the features in Halide,” says de With. “So we hope to see many people pick it up, not just the die-hard photographers.”

Another feature in the app is “instant review,” which lets you swipe left or right on the photos you just took to either trash them or mark them as favorites. You can also use 3D Touch to preview the last photo you took in Halide.

The team was inspired to build Halide after seeing how the iPhone’s sensors improved over the years, even as the shooting experience remained stagnant.

“I went to Hawaii with friends, and I was that guy lugging around a giant camera,” explains Sandofsky, of how he came up with the initial idea. “At the bottom of a waterfall, the humidity made the camera sensor condensate, so I had to keep it off for a day while the camera internals dried out,” he says. “For the next day, I shot everything with an iPhone. At the time, iOS lacked important features, and all the camera apps had issues. But I was blown away by the quality of that tiny camera, and remembered how much more I enjoyed the trip by going light.”

Sandofsky says he built the first prototype on his flight home from that trip, and later showed it to de With, who had further ideas around the user experience. Development officially started around WWDC last year, when the new camera APIs were announced.

A year later, the app was ready to launch.

The team doesn’t expect their new app to fully replace the default camera app, but instead exist alongside it – ready for those times you want to take a great photo, not just a quick snap.

The app’s co-creators tell TechCrunch they’re self-funding Halide, which they consider a “passionate side project.”

Halide is available for $2.99 at launch, and will increase to $4.99 next week. If it does well, the team may consider a new pricing structure in the future, but didn’t go into details.

The app is available in English, with plans for localizations in Spanish, Dutch, German, and French.