How a downed internet balloon produced an unlikely love story →
Google's Loon balloons have been hailed as the future of connectivity, but in Uruguay, they've been most effective for matchmaking.
Prickly business: the hedgehog highway that knits a village together →
Hedgehogs need space to create territories, forage and find mates. The compartmentalisation of land into private gardens is one of the causes of their disappearance from our landscape – they have declined by 90% since the second world war. More than 12,000 hedgehog holes have been created as part of the UK's hedgehog highway network, and Kirtlington has one of the most creative routes on the map. Miniature ramps and staircases thread between gardens in this higgledy-piggledy place, with its 13th-century church and notices about cake sales and "cricketers wanted".
Heh! Hedgehog higways.
Oh my goodness that's pretty. Trevor Mahlmann captures Space X's latest launch for Ars Technica.
The High Privacy Cost of a "Free" Website – The Markup →
Trackers piggybacking on website tools leave some site operators in the dark about who is watching or what marketers do with the data.
The Democracy Factory →
Printing presses, scanners, envelope stuffers, and lots of lots of paper.
IBM completes successful field trials on Fully Homomorphic Encryption →
Large performance penalties, but within the bounds of usefulness for real problems now. This could allow companies to provide you useful information about your data without ever seeing what your data actually is.
Keeping Google Meet ahead of usage demand during COVID-19 →
A great look at the process of scaling Google Meet to handle 30x more traffic due to COVID-19. Many of the same techniques were applied to our work scaling Teams.