The small Pacific island Tokelau is still the most populated country-level domain in the world, outnumbering the 20.8 million domains that use China's .cn. From a report: UK registry for .uk domains has published its latest topsy-turvy map of the world, with land mass weighted according to the number of registered country-level domains. As it was two years ago, Tokelau remains the world's 'largest' country, thanks to its free registration policy; the number of .tk domains reaching nine million in 2012 and from there tripling to 31 million by 2016. Today, the number of .tk domains stands at 21.2 million, but it still remains the largest, just ahead of China. The number of domains with China's .cn has increased over the past two years from 17 million to 20.8 million, making it the second most widely used country-level domain in the world.

No one told them to look for the Earth. It was Christmas Eve 1968 and the first manned mission to the moon had reached its destination. As Apollo 8 slipped into lunar orbit the crew prepared to read passages of Genesis for a TV broadcast to the world. But as the command module came around on its fourth lap, there it was visible through the window -- a bright blue and white bauble suspended in the black above the relentless grey of the moon. The Guardian: Before that moment 50 years ago, no one had seen an earthrise. The sight sent Bill Anders, the mission photographer, scrambling for his camera. He slapped a 70mm colour roll into the Hasselblad, set the focus to infinity, and started shooting though the telephoto lens. What he captured became one of the most influential images in history. A driving force of the environmental movement, the picture, which became known as Earthrise, showed the world as a singular, fragile, oasis.

On previous laps Anders had snapped the far side of the moon for the geologists and the near side of it for Apollo's landing site planners. "It didn't take long for the moon to become boring. It was like dirty beach sand," Anders told the Guardian. "Then we suddenly saw this object called Earth. It was the only colour in the universe." Apollo 8 launched from the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida on 21 December 1968. The enormous Saturn V rocket, more than 110 metres tall, had flown only twice before and never with a crew. But on that day the rocket performed. Tucked inside the command module, Anders, Frank Borman and James Lovell looped the planet twice before the third stage blasted them onwards to the moon. They arrived nearly three days later, completed 10 lunar orbits, and headed home for a splashdown in the north Pacific.

Earthrise did not have an immediate impact. Its philosophical significance sunk in over years, after Nasa put it on a stamp, and Time and Life magazine highlighted it as an era-defining image. "It gained this iconic status," Anders said. "People realised that we lived on this fragile planet and that we needed to take care of it." The shot did more than boost the environmental movement. Even Anders, who calls himself "an arch cold war warrior," felt it held a message for humanity. "This is the only home we have and yet we're busy shooting at each other, threatening nuclear war, and wearing suicide vests," he said. "It amazes me." Further reading: Wired.

The Higher Regional Court of Saarbrucken (a city in Germany) concluded Key-Systems, a German-based registrar, can be held secondarily liable for the infringing actions of a customer if it fails to take action if rightsholders point out "obvious" copyright infringing activity online. From a report: This means that, if a site owner is unresponsive to takedown requests, Key-Systems and other registrars can be required to take a domain name offline, even when the infringing activity is limited to a single page. The local music group BVMI is happy with the outcome of the case. They believe it will help copyright holders to take action against infringing activity. "This is a further important clarification in the legal space of the internet, helping it to become clearer and fairer for creatives and their partners," says Rene Houareau, BVMI's Managing Director Legal & Political Affairs. "The [court] affirms, with clearly outlined criteria, the responsibility of so-called registrars and thus gives affected rightsholders an important legal tool to defend themselves against the unlawful use of their content on the internet."

Free online courses -- also called Massive Open Online Courses -- have quite a year. An anonymous reader shares a blog post: It's been seven years since these courses rose to prominence, when a few Stanford professors decided to offer their courses online free. Since then over over 900 universities have launched over 11,000 courses. And in its seven years these Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) have achieved new milestone: 100 million plus learners. [...] At the end of every year, I do an extensive analysis of the MOOC space. To help me with analysis, I send the top MOOC providers a set of questions, one of them being the top enrolled courses of 2018.

The list below contains the top enrolled courses from the major MOOC providers: Coursera, edX, Udacity, and FutureLearn. Combined, these providers represent a big chunk of the MOOC learners (70 million plus). Without further ado, here are the most popular free online university courses of 2018:
Learning How to Learn: Powerful mental tools to help you master tough subjects from University of California, San Diego.
Machine Learning from Stanford University.
The Science of Well-Being from Yale University.
Introduction to Computer Science and Programming Using Python from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
CS50's Introduction to Computer Science from Harvard University.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Congress has passed a bill that could make it easier for you to access public data released by the government. The House approved the OPEN Government Data Act on Saturday, while all eyes were on the shutdown, as part of a larger bill to support evidence-based policymaking. It requires that federal agencies must publish any "non-sensitive" info in a "machine-readable" format (essentially in a way that's legible on your smartphone or laptop). The act also insists that agencies appoint a chief data officer to oversee all open data efforts. Having passed the Senate last Wednesday, the bill is next headed to the President's desk.

President Donald Trump last week signed legislation ramping up quantum computing research and development. From a report: The National Quantum Initiative Act (H.R. 6227) authorizes $1.2 billion over five years for federal activities aimed at boosting investment in quantum information science, or QIS, and supporting a quantum-smart workforce. The law also establishes a National Quantum Coordination Office, calls for the development of a five-year strategic plan and establishes an advisory committee to advise the White House on issues relating to quantum computing. "This next great technological revolution has far-reaching implications for job creation, economic growth and national security," Michael Kratsios, deputy assistant to the president for technology policy, said in a White House statement. "We look forward to building upon efforts to support the quantum-smart workforce of the future and engage with government, academic and private-sector leaders to advance QIS."

[...] Earlier this month, a report from the National Academies of Science said there is an urgent need to develop "post-quantum" encryption protocols in order to protect commerce and national security. QIS research could also produce new types of quantum processors, sensors, navigation tools and security systems. The challenges could bring about "new approaches to understanding materials, chemistry and even gravity through quantum information theory," according to a White House strategy paper issued in September.

Two years after a congressional report labeled Huawei a national-security threat, the Chinese firm unexpectedly scored a big-name ally in Washington. It was the Redskins, the capital's National Football League franchise. Huawei reached an agreement in 2014 to beam Wi-Fi through the suites at the team's FedEx Field, in exchange for advertising in the stadium and during broadcasts. From a report: It was a marketing coup for a company hankering to beef up its meager U.S. business and boost its image inside the Beltway. But the deal didn't last long. A government adviser read about the partnership. He knew the FedEx Field suites were a frequent haunt for lawmakers and senior officials across many agencies. So he triggered an unofficial federal complaint to the Redskins, who quietly tore up the deal. That previously unreported backroom maneuver is an example of a yearslong effort by U.S. officials, often working outside formal channels, to blacklist the Chinese technology giant. Washington has since intensified the campaign and taken it mainstream, with Congress and federal agencies working this year to snuff out Huawei's small U.S. business and curtail its much bigger overseas ambition. Further reading: Huawei Exceeds 200 Million Smartphone Shipments, Setting Company Record.

In new book Why They Can't Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities, John Warner dispenses with arguments that the current moment of compositional crisis is related to screen time, text-speak, Twitter, or the idea that kids have become snowflakes who want participation trophies. An anonymous reader shares a report: There are, however, specific factors that have erected specific challenges to teaching writing in 2018; these include standardized testing, over-reliance on teaching grammar instead of writing, reliance on formulaic structure (i.e. those five-paragraph beasts), classroom surveillance, and college labor conditions. Warner examines the systemic causes in K-12 education that propel students into college without having discovered much about themselves as writers. Having explained the problems, Warner turns to solutions. The second half of the book offers his philosophical approach to teaching writing, honed over 18 years teaching first-year-writing classes at various schools, paired with practical exercises. Warner's next book, The Writer's Practice: Building Confidence in Your Nonfiction Writing, a book of exercises, will be coming out next February. Together, they offer his assessment of the problems and plan for transforming how we teach college writing in higher education.

[...] Interviewer: So why isn't the five-paragraph essay a useful starting point? Why isn't it like doing scales before playing music, or practicing free throws before playing basketball?
Warner: The danger is the prescriptive process that the use of the five-paragraph essay privileges. Students are given rules -- not just parts of speech and subject-verb agreement rules -- but [they are told] all paragraphs should have five to seven sentences. The last paragraph should start, "In conclusion," then summarize the previous three paragraphs. In a 500-word essay, the audience hasn't forgotten what you've said! So if there's a specific purpose where a five-paragraph essay is useful, go nuts.

Students need to be given experience wrestling with the full rhetorical purposes of writing. Doing that allows them to develop the kinds of thinking that writers do [and] makes them far more amenable to examining the quality of the sentences. I write bad sentences all the time in my drafts. I write ungrammatical sentences. That's how I believe how most writers work. So that's what I want students doing. A lot of what I talk about in the book a matter of re-orienting our values. The publisher hype calls The Writer's Practice revolutionary. I see it as the opposite. I have an assignment that my third-grade teacher did about the components of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. It's not a revolution. It's stripping away the apparatus of school and getting back to essence.

When one side isn't reserved for walkers, it saves time for everyone. But transit users around the world just can't be convinced. Linda Poon, writing for CityLab: I'm one of those people who speed past everyone on the escalator. As long as the left side isn't blocked, no amount of judgement from fellow riders to the right, or safety warnings, or even falls (two and counting) will stop me -- not yet anyway. I'm certainly not alone; it's a common enough habit that some cities occasionally try to change such behavior for safety's sake. London's tried, so has Hong Kong and Washington, D.C. Now it's Tokyo's turn. East Japan Railway Company (JR East) launched a campaign this month calling on riders to stand on both sides of the escalators inside some of the city's busiest transit hubs.

Signs are posted on walls and above escalators, reading, in both Japanese and English, "Walking on escalators may lead to accidents caused by collisions or luggage." Bright pink handrails carry similar messages. And in some stations, security staff with neon-colored vests stand watch and guide people. If people are really in a hurry, JR East suggests, they should take the stairs. So far, the effort has had mixed results: According to the Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK), railway officials say that some people did stop but many commuters were still hustling up and down the escalator on Monday. The campaign is set to run until February 1.

Linus Torvalds has announced the general availability of v4.20 of the Linux kernel. In a post to the Linux Kernel Mailing List, Torvalds said that there was no point in delaying the release of the latest stable version of the kernel just because so many people are taking a break for the holiday season. From a report: He says that while there are no known issues with the release, the shortlog is a little longer than he would have liked. However "nothing screams 'oh, that's scary'", he insists. The most notable features and changes in the new version includes: New hardware support! New hardware support includes bringing up the graphics for AMD Picasso and Raven 2 APUs, continued work on bringing up Vega 20, Intel has continued putting together its Icelake Gen 11 graphics support, there is support for the Hygon Dhyana CPUs out of China based upon AMD Zen, C-SKY 32-bit CPU support, Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 SoC enablement, Intel 2.5G Ethernet controller support for "Foxville", Creative Sound Blaster ZxR and AE-5 sound card support, and a lot of smaller additions.

Besides new hardware support when it comes to graphics processors, in the DRM driver space there is also VCN JPEG acceleration for Raven Ridge, GPUVM performance work resulting in some nice Vulkan gaming boosts, Intel DRM now has full PPGTT support for Haswell/IvyBridge/ValleyView, and HDMI 2.0 support for the NVIDIA/Nouveau driver. On the CPU front there are some early signs of AMD Zen 2 bring-up, nested virtualization now enabled by default for AMD/Intel CPUs, faster context switching for IBM POWER9, and various x86_64 optimizations. Fortunately the STIBP work for cross-hyperthread Spectre V2 mitigation was smoothed out over the release candidates that the performance there is all good now.

Btrfs performance improvements, new F2FS features, faster FUSE performance, and MDRAID improvements for RAID10 round out the file-system/storage work. One of the technical highlights of Linux 4.20 that will be built up moving forward is the PCIe peer-to-peer memory support for device-to-device memory copies over PCIe for use-cases like data going directly from NICs to SSD storage or between multiple GPUs.

As we inch closer to the end of the year, we will be running a couple of year-ender posts in the next few days. We're starting with books. What were some books you read this year that you would recommend to others? (It could be from any genre.) Second, what were some books from this year that you read that you would recommend to others? And third, what are you reading now, or planning to read soon?

One of the first men to orbit the Moon has told BBC Radio 5 Live that it's "stupid" to plan human missions to Mars. Bill Anders, lunar module pilot of Apollo 8, the first human spaceflight to leave Earth's orbit, said sending crews to Mars was "almost ridiculous". From a report: NASA is currently planning new human missions to the Moon. It wants to learn the skills and develop the technology to enable a future human landing on Mars. NASA was approached for a response to Anders' comments, but hasn't responded.

Anders, 85, said he's a "big supporter" of the "remarkable" unmanned programmes, "mainly because they're much cheaper". But he says the public support simply isn't there to fund vastly more expensive human missions. "What's the imperative? What's pushing us to go to Mars?" he said, adding "I don't think the public is that interested". Meanwhile, robotic probes are still exploring Mars. Last month, the InSight lander, which will sample the planet's interior, successfully touched down at Elysium Planitia. Further reading: Bill Nye: We Are Not Going To Live on Mars, Let Alone Turn It Into Earth.

Huawei's 2018 was tumultuous, to put it mildly, but the company has at least a few reasons to brag. The Chinese mobile giant has revealed that it shipped over 200 million smartphones in the year, setting a new record. Last year, Huawei moved 153 million smartphones units. From a report: The Chinese phone maker said the numbers were largely driven by the success of products like its P20, Honor 10 and Mate 20 series. Huawei's smartphone shipments have grown from 3 million units in 2010, it added. Last year, it said it sold 153 million units. The company overtook Apple in the second quarter of 2018 to become the world's second largest phone vendor, according to researcher Canalys. "In the global smartphone market, Huawei has gone from being dismissed as a statistical 'other' to ranking among the Top 3 players in the world," Huawei said in its statement.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket roared to life and streaked away from Cape Canaveral early Sunday carrying the first in a powerful new generation of GPS navigation satellites into orbit. It was the California rocket builder's 21st launch this year and its first Pentagon-sanctioned national security mission. From a report: Propelled by 1.2 million pounds of thrust from its nine first stage engines, the 229-foot-tall rocket lifted off at 8:51 a.m. EST (GMT-5), climbing straight away from launch complex 40 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. It was the 20th major rocket launch from Florida this year, the busiest pace since 1998. The launching came five days late because of a last-minute problem with first stage propellant temperatures Tuesday and stormy weather Thursday. High winds forced another 24-hour delay Saturday, but conditions were ideal Sunday and the rocket put on a spectacular show as it raced away to the northeast through a cloudless sky.

Vice President Mike Pence, chairman of the newly reconstituted National Space Council, was on hand for Tuesday's initial launch try but flew back to Washington after touring SpaceX facilities at the Kennedy Space Center. "The most important thing is that we get that rocket up safely and securely and it achieves its mission," Pence told spaceport workers. "I know this bird is going to fly and when it flies, it's going to make a difference for the security and prosperity of the American people." Pence has taken an active role in directing the Trump administration's revised national space policy, calling for establishment of a military "Space Force," increased commercial development in low-Earth orbit and continued NASA development of a huge new rocket and spacecraft to carry astronauts back to the moon.

Remote teams incorrectly overwrote data developed by volunteer mappers in Thailand. TechCrunch reports: Grab, Southeast Asia's top ride-hailing company, has hit a roadblock in its efforts to improve its mapping and routing service after running into trouble with OpenStreetMap, the world's largest collaborative mapping community, through a series of blundering edits in Thailand. Grab, which gobbled up Uber's local business in exchange for an equity swap earlier this year, has busily added details and upgraded the maps it uses across its eight markets in Southeast Asia. Accurate maps are, of course, essential to a smooth ride-hailing experience for Grab's 125 million registered users. Without accurate location details, ensuring that drivers and passengers can easily rendezvous becomes nearly impossible.

Grab's effort to improve the never-ending quest of more accurate maps involves a multi-input approach that uses Google Maps as the base with Grab adding in its own information -- "points of interest" cultivated through customer feedback and groundwork -- and other public or licensed information. However, what appears to be a focus on speed has seen it suspend all activities in Thailand -- Southeast Asia's second-largest economy -- after it was found to have overwritten data developed by OpenStreetMap (OSM) with inaccurate edits that were created by a remote team based in India. Established in 2006, OSM's mission is to "make the best map data set of the world" and it makes its data, which is developed by more than two million volunteers from across the world, available for use without charge.

An India-based team from GlobalLogic, an outsourced software firm contracted by Grab, made dozens of edits in recent months that overwrote information created by OSM members, who voluntarily map streets by visiting them in person. Grab suspended work in Thailand by the GlobalLogic team after OSM members complained about numerous incorrect edits in OSM forum posts. Unlike the hobbyist mappers who collect data in person, the Grab contractors used satellite imagery to "correct" local map details in Thailand which, in fast-changing cities like Bangkok, meant that their work was incorrect because it relied on out-of-date sources.