British Prime Minister David Cameron and US President Barack Obama at the G7 Summit in Brussels in June.

David Cameron, the British Prime minister, is one-upping his Western allies when it comes to anti-encryption propaganda. Ahead of national elections in May, Cameron said that if re-elected, he would seek to ban encrypted online messaging apps unless the UK government is given backdoors.

"Are we going to allow a means of communications which it simply isn't possible to read?" Cameron said Monday while campaigning, in reference to apps such as WhatsApp, Snapchat, and other encrypted services. "My answer to that question is: 'No, we must not.'"

He said the Paris attacks, including the one last week on satirical newspaper

underscored the need for greater access.

"The attacks in Paris demonstrated the scale of the threat that we face and the need to have robust powers through our intelligence and security agencies in order to keep our people safe," Cameron said.

To be sure, it's not known if Cameron could carry out his threats, but they are part of a global government anti-encryption theme. Last week, a Spanish judge reportedly ordered the detention of several suspected terrorists because, in part, they "used e-mails with extreme security measures, such as the RISE UP server." Rise Up, the Seattle company that offers encrypted e-mail services, responded in a blog post titled "Security is not a crime."

Encryption became a hot-button topic in the wake of the summer 2013 leaks by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden. His documents, including some last week seemingly showing that Skype has a backdoor, highlighted a broad online global surveillance society and set off a cottage industry of encryption companies.

What's more, Apple began making its latest mobile phones encrypted by default, and Google did the same with the Nexus 6, a move that likely prevents authorities from physically accessing contents directly from these phones' hardware, even with a warrant.

Attorney General Eric Holder and FBI Director James Comey are urging industry to give the US government backdoor access to their encrypted wares. The response, at least publicly, was an overwhelming no.

"People have a right to privacy," Apple Chief Tim Cook told PBS News in September.

Holder said encryption "emboldens" criminals.

"Recent technological advances have the potential to greatly embolden online criminals, providing new methods for abusers to avoid detection," Holder said in an October speech. "In some cases, perpetrators are using cloud storage to cheaply and easily store tens of thousands of images and videos outside of any home or business—and to access those files from anywhere in the world. Many take advantage of encryption and anonymizing technology to conceal contraband materials and disguise their locations."

Comey said he was concerned about "companies marketing something expressly to allow people to place themselves beyond the law."

Unlike Cameron, Comey and Holder never threatened to ban encrypted services.

In the United States, the law surrounding this issue is the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act of 1994, commonly referred to as CALEA. It requires that telcos make their phone networks amenable to wiretaps, but it doesn’t apply to phone hardware or most other communication services—at least not yet. Congress hasn't backed Comey or Holder's words with legislation.

Well, this is more than a little depressing: The politician who tried reducing NASA funding (and successfully shut it down for over two weeks) is now in charge of the senate subcommittee that effectively controls NASA. More than that, one of the most vocal climate-change detractors is now in charge of the United States Senate's Environmental committee. Let's let that sink in for a minute, shall we? Despite all the progress we've made so far with things like unmanned, deep-space space-flight and our efforts toward limiting the negative effects that humans have had on the environment, any future plans are now up in the air. Any major scientific progress is now at the mercy of Republican senators Ted Cruz and James Inhofe. With their actions and words over the recent years, the pair have proved just how little they understand about each area they're now controlling.

In addition to exploring the reaches of space, NASA also has done a number of climate change studies -- something that Cruz also is an opponent of. He once told CNN that climate change was a hoax and a bogus theory that was designed to be immune to detractors. "They'll [scientists] say, well, it's changing so it proves our theory." He maintains that the problem with climate change is there's no data to support it and that "there has never been a day in the history of the world in which the climate is not changing." If you're curious why he was on camera in the first place, it was to espouse his energy bill that, among other things, would repeal "harmful" EPA regulations and promote more oil drilling.

In 2013, however, he said that it's "critical" that the US maintains its continued leadership in space. How he intends to do that isn't exactly clear given his track record.

Inhofe, on the other hand, is even more keen to undo emissions regulations, according to The Independent. Why? He thinks that rising world-wide temperatures might be an asset:

"It's also important to question whether global warming is even a problem for human existence. Thus far, no one has seriously demonstrated any scientific proof that increased global temperatures would lead to the catastrophes predicted by alarmists. In fact, it appears that just the opposite is true: that increases in global temperatures may have a beneficial effect on how we live our lives."

That stands in stark contrast to what the some 97 percent of climate scientists -- and non-climate scientists, like Stephen Hawking -- have to say about climate change. For his part, Hawking compares climate change to a threat on par with nuclear weaponry.

The pair of lawmakers have proven time and again that they have a shocking misunderstanding of the world around them and now they're in positions of direct power over topics they don't grasp. Whether it's due to willful ignorance or a simple refusal to accept fact is anyone's guess. To quote Neil deGrasse Tyson, the good thing about science is that it's true, whether or not you believe in it. Unfortunately, "science" can't write legislation or filibuster, but Ted Cruz and James Inhofe can.

[Image credit: Shutterstock/ Stephen Rees]

More than 20 years ago, the psychologist Arthur Aron succeeded in making two strangers fall in love in his laboratory. Last summer, I applied his technique in my own life, which is how I found myself standing on a bridge at midnight, staring into a man’s eyes for exactly four minutes.

Let me explain. Earlier in the evening, that man had said: “I suspect, given a few commonalities, you could fall in love with anyone. If so, how do you choose someone?”

He was a university acquaintance I occasionally ran into at the climbing gym and had thought, “What if?” I had gotten a glimpse into his days on Instagram. But this was the first time we had hung out one-on-one.

“Actually, psychologists have tried making people fall in love,” I said, remembering Dr. Aron’s study. “It’s fascinating. I’ve always wanted to try it.”

I first read about the study when I was in the midst of a breakup. Each time I thought of leaving, my heart overruled my brain. I felt stuck. So, like a good academic, I turned to science, hoping there was a way to love smarter.

I explained the study to my university acquaintance. A heterosexual man and woman enter the lab through separate doors. They sit face to face and answer a series of increasingly personal questions. Then they stare silently into each other’s eyes for four minutes. The most tantalizing detail: Six months later, two participants were married. They invited the entire lab to the ceremony.

“Let’s try it,” he said.

Let me acknowledge the ways our experiment already fails to line up with the study. First, we were in a bar, not a lab. Second, we weren’t strangers. Not only that, but I see now that one neither suggests nor agrees to try an experiment designed to create romantic love if one isn’t open to this happening.

I Googled Dr. Aron’s questions; there are 36. We spent the next two hours passing my iPhone across the table, alternately posing each question.

They began innocuously: “Would you like to be famous? In what way?” And “When did you last sing to yourself? To someone else?”

But they quickly became probing.

In response to the prompt, “Name three things you and your partner appear to have in common,” he looked at me and said, “I think we’re both interested in each other.”

I grinned and gulped my beer as he listed two more commonalities I then promptly forgot. We exchanged stories about the last time we each cried, and confessed the one thing we’d like to ask a fortuneteller. We explained our relationships with our mothers.

The questions reminded me of the infamous boiling frog experiment in which the frog doesn’t feel the water getting hotter until it’s too late. With us, because the level of vulnerability increased gradually, I didn’t notice we had entered intimate territory until we were already there, a process that can typically take weeks or months.

I liked learning about myself through my answers, but I liked learning things about him even more. The bar, which was empty when we arrived, had filled up by the time we paused for a bathroom break.

I sat alone at our table, aware of my surroundings for the first time in an hour, and wondered if anyone had been listening to our conversation. If they had, I hadn’t noticed. And I didn’t notice as the crowd thinned and the night got late.

We all have a narrative of ourselves that we offer up to strangers and acquaintances, but Dr. Aron’s questions make it impossible to rely on that narrative. Ours was the kind of accelerated intimacy I remembered from summer camp, staying up all night with a new friend, exchanging the details of our short lives. At 13, away from home for the first time, it felt natural to get to know someone quickly. But rarely does adult life present us with such circumstances.

The moments I found most uncomfortable were not when I had to make confessions about myself, but had to venture opinions about my partner. For example: “Alternate sharing something you consider a positive characteristic of your partner, a total of five items” (Question 22), and “Tell your partner what you like about them; be very honest this time saying things you might not say to someone you’ve just met” (Question 28).

Much of Dr. Aron’s research focuses on creating interpersonal closeness. In particular, several studies investigate the ways we incorporate others into our sense of self. It’s easy to see how the questions encourage what they call “self-expansion.” Saying things like, “I like your voice, your taste in beer, the way all your friends seem to admire you,” makes certain positive qualities belonging to one person explicitly valuable to the other.

It’s astounding, really, to hear what someone admires in you. I don’t know why we don’t go around thoughtfully complimenting one another all the time.

We finished at midnight, taking far longer than the 90 minutes for the original study. Looking around the bar, I felt as if I had just woken up. “That wasn’t so bad,” I said. “Definitely less uncomfortable than the staring into each other’s eyes part would be.”

He hesitated and asked. “Do you think we should do that, too?”

“Here?” I looked around the bar. It seemed too weird, too public.

“We could stand on the bridge,” he said, turning toward the window.

The night was warm and I was wide-awake. We walked to the highest point, then turned to face each other. I fumbled with my phone as I set the timer.

“O.K.,” I said, inhaling sharply.

“O.K.,” he said, smiling.

I’ve skied steep slopes and hung from a rock face by a short length of rope, but staring into someone’s eyes for four silent minutes was one of the more thrilling and terrifying experiences of my life. I spent the first couple of minutes just trying to breathe properly. There was a lot of nervous smiling until, eventually, we settled in.

I know the eyes are the windows to the soul or whatever, but the real crux of the moment was not just that I was really seeing someone, but that I was seeing someone really seeing me. Once I embraced the terror of this realization and gave it time to subside, I arrived somewhere unexpected.

I felt brave, and in a state of wonder. Part of that wonder was at my own vulnerability and part was the weird kind of wonder you get from saying a word over and over until it loses its meaning and becomes what it actually is: an assemblage of sounds.

So it was with the eye, which is not a window to anything but a rather clump of very useful cells. The sentiment associated with the eye fell away and I was struck by its astounding biological reality: the spherical nature of the eyeball, the visible musculature of the iris and the smooth wet glass of the cornea. It was strange and exquisite.

When the timer buzzed, I was surprised — and a little relieved. But I also felt a sense of loss. Already I was beginning to see our evening through the surreal and unreliable lens of retrospect.

Most of us think about love as something that happens to us. We fall. We get crushed.

But what I like about this study is how it assumes that love is an action. It assumes that what matters to my partner matters to me because we have at least three things in common, because we have close relationships with our mothers, and because he let me look at him.

I wondered what would come of our interaction. If nothing else, I thought it would make a good story. But I see now that the story isn’t about us; it’s about what it means to bother to know someone, which is really a story about what it means to be known.

It’s true you can’t choose who loves you, although I’ve spent years hoping otherwise, and you can’t create romantic feelings based on convenience alone. Science tells us biology matters; our pheromones and hormones do a lot of work behind the scenes.

But despite all this, I’ve begun to think love is a more pliable thing than we make it out to be. Arthur Aron’s study taught me that it’s possible — simple, even — to generate trust and intimacy, the feelings love needs to thrive.

You’re probably wondering if he and I fell in love. Well, we did. Although it’s hard to credit the study entirely (it may have happened anyway), the study did give us a way into a relationship that feels deliberate. We spent weeks in the intimate space we created that night, waiting to see what it could become.

Love didn’t happen to us. We’re in love because we each made the choice to be.

Two supermassive black holes, significantly farther apart (about 3000 light-years) than the two discussed in this article (about one-third of a light-year apart).

When galaxies collide, they tend to intermingle, ultimately forming a new, merged galaxy. And the supermassive black holes from the original galaxies’ cores should generally end up at the core of the new galaxy, according to current models. Some models predict that the two supermassive black holes could orbit each other, forming a black hole binary system. However, until recently, this has proved difficult to actually observe. Current instruments can’t resolve the difference between two supermassive black holes like these, which could be significantly less than a parsec apart.

But by using alternative methods, recent searches have found some promising candidates that could be supermassive black hole binary systems. In a new study, a team of researchers has reported a strong, clear signal from an extremely bright quasar that appears to be an example of a black hole binary. While this identification is still uncertain, the researchers conclude it’s the most plausible explanation of the behavior of that quasar.

Quasars

Quasars are simply extremely bright supermassive black holes, with the intense light originating from their jets and accretion disks. The jets, which emerge at each pole, are probably caused by their magnetic fields interacting with their spin and mass. The black hole also often has a disk of material falling in, called an accretion disk, that can produce a lot of light, since the infalling material is hot from friction.

If a quasar contained two black holes rather than one, detecting it would be tricky, since all these associated structures would interact. One way would be to look for quasars that are especially variable, meaning their intensity changes through a regular cycle. If there are indeed two black holes, their orbits could be causing the regular variations. The black holes’ jets would precess, meaning their orientations change over time in their orbits, explaining the variation. Perturbations in the holes’ accretion disks could also cause regular changes.

Light curves

To make their discovery, the research team examined data on quasars from the Catalina Real-time Transient Survey, which has been collecting data since 2009; they also looked at archived data going back to 1993. The data was used to track the quasars’ light curves, which show the object’s brightness over time. Light curves are useful for objects that have variable brightness, because they make it easy to pick out regular patterns in the variation.

Of all the quasars examined, 20 were good candidates for having regular variations. Of those, the strongest candidate is called PG 1302-102, which the researchers examined in detail. Its light curve resembled a sine wave, its light’s intensity gradually increasing and decreasing with a period of about 60 months.

While indications seemed strong that the variations in PG’s light curve were caused by the presence of two supermassive black holes, other mechanisms could still possibly create this pattern with a single supermassive black hole. The first of these is that there’s a single black hole in PG, and the light from PG is made up of contributions from both the black hole’s accretion disk and its jet—and the jet’s angle, due to precession, creates the variable pattern we observe.

While this could fit the data, it does have one major hurdle: if it was a single, precessing black hole with a jet, it should take from about a thousand to over a million years for one cycle. Remember that the observed period was about 60 months; the researchers concluded that this option is pretty unlikely.

A second possibility is that there’s a single black hole with an accretion disk that has a temporary hot spot. But getting a hotspot into a stable orbit with this period would require that the black hole has an unrealistically large mass.

It’s also possible that the single black hole’s accretion disk is warped, and that it’s partially eclipsed at regular intervals. If the disk is uneven, then it would be producing light unevenly, and so as the brighter section moves behind the black hole from Earth's perspective, it would get eclipsed and we’d see a variation in the quasar’s light. However, warped disks are thought to be the result of the interactions between two bodies in a binary. So if there’s only one supermassive black hole in PG, it raises the question of how the disk became warped in the first place.

To eliminate these and other alternative explanations, the researchers created computer simulations of different kinds of quasars—247,000 of them. Some of these had variable brightness due to various situations involving a single supermassive black hole, while others had two.

Out of all 247,000, only one simulated quasar was a good match for PG, and it was one with a supermassive black hole binary. In other words, out of all those possible systems, the one that looks the most like PG, at least in simulation, has two supermassive black holes. This provides a strong argument that the team’s conclusion is correct.

Supermassive binary

While the researchers conclude that a supermassive black hole binary system is the best candidate right now, the other explanations can't be ruled out definitively. Future observations should be able to distinguish among them, however.

Studying the relationship between PG’s host galaxy and its two neighboring galaxies, three and six kiloparsecs away from PG, respectively, could provide clues as to how the binary system formed in the first place. PG and these other galaxies are ellipticals and probably have supermassive black holes of similar mass.

While a binary would presumably form through the merger of two galaxies, piecing together the exact history of how that happened is important to our understanding of this system and to our understanding of the formation and evolution of galaxies in general.

If PG does turn out to be a supermassive black hole binary, the interactions of two bodies with such incredible masses and intense gravitational fields should be producing gravitational waves that might eventually be detectable. As gravity waves have yet to be directly observed, this would be a significant step forward.

Nature, 2014. DOI: 10.1038/nature14143 (About DOIs)

Edward Snowden, in his interview with James Bamford for PBS' NOVA.

NOVA/ PBS

In an on-camera interview with James Bamford for an upcoming episode of PBS' NOVA, Edward Snowden warned that the US Department of Defense and National Security Agency have over-emphasized the development of offensive network capabilities, placing the US's own systems at greater risk. With other countries now developing offensive capabilities that approach those of the NSA and the US Cyber Command, Snowden believes the US has much more at stake.

The raw transcript of the NOVA interview showed Snowden in full control, to the point of giving direction on questions and even suggesting how to organize the report and its visual elements. Snowden frequently steered questions away from areas that might have revealed more about NSA operations, or he went into areas such as White House policy that he considered "land mines." But the whistleblower eloquently discussed the hazards of cyber-warfare and the precariousness of the approach that the NSA and Cyber Command had taken in terms of seeking to find and exploit holes in the software of adversaries. In fact, he says the same vulnerabilities are in systems in the US. "The same router that’s deployed in the United States is deployed in China," Snowden explained. "The same software package that controls the dam floodgates in the United States is the same as in Russia. The same hospital software is there in Syria and the United States."

Video from the NOVA interview.

Some of the interview, which took place last June in Russia, possibly foreshadowed the cyber attack on Sony Pictures. Snowden said that the capabilities for cyber attacks such as the "Shamoon" malware attack in 2012 and other "wiper" attacks similar to what happened to Sony Pictures were "sort of a Fisher Price, baby’s first hack kind of a cyber campaign," capable of disruption but not really of creating long-term damage. But he said more sophisticated organizations, including nation-state actors, are "increasingly pursuing the capability to launch destructive cyber attacks as opposed to the disruptive kinds that you normally see online...and this is a pivot that is going to be very difficult for us to navigate."

"I don’t want to hype the threat," Snowden told Bamford. "Nobody’s going to press a key on their keyboard and bring down the government. Nobody’s going to press a key on their keyboard and wipe a nation off the face of the earth." But Snowden emphasized that the US should be focusing more on defending against adversaries than trying to penetrate their networks to collect information and do damage.

"When you look at the problem of the US prioritizing offense over defense, imagine you have two bank vaults, the United States bank vault and the Bank of China," Snowden explained. "The US bank vault is completely full. It goes all the way up to the sky. And the Chinese bank vault or the Russian bank vault or the African bank vault or whoever the adversary of the day is, theirs is only half full or a quarter full or a tenth full." But because the US, he said, has focused on being able to break into other networks, it has made its own technology vulnerable—and other countries can use the same vulnerabilities to attack the US's networks.

"We’re opening ourselves up to attack," Snowden said. "We’re lowering our shields to allow us to have an advantage when we attack other countries overseas, but the reality is when you compare one of our victories to one of their victories, the value of the data, the knowledge, the information gained from those attacks is far greater to them than it is to us, because we are already on top. It’s much easier to drag us down than it is to grab some incremental knowledge from them and build ourselves up."

The most valuable piece of infrastructure for the US that is at risk, Snowden said, is the Internet itself. "We use the Internet for every communication that businesses rely on every day," he explained. "If an adversary didn't target our power plants but they did target the core routers, entire parts of the United States could be cut off...and we would go dark in terms of our economy and our business for minutes, hours, days. That would have a tremendous impact on us as a society and it would have a policy backlash."

When asked about the multi-day outage of Syria's connection to the Internet in 2013 and whether that might have been the result of someone at the NSA trying to attack Syria's core routers, Snowden demurred. He said that similar things happened in the past. "The problem is if you make a mistake when you’re manipulating the hardware control of a device, you can do what’s called bricking the hardware, and it turns it from a $6 million Internet communications device to a $6 million paperweight that’s in the way of your entire nation’s communications."

The interview took place just days after Admiral Adm. Michael S. Rogers, the new director of the NSA, downplayed the damage done by Snowden's leaks in an interview with the New York Times. Snowden commented on the irony of the shift and also on statements by former NSA director Michael Hayden during a discussion at St. John's Episcopal Church in Washington D.C. in September of 2013. During that event, Hayden said that Snowden was "morally arrogant" and would probably "end up like most of the rest of the defectors who went to the old Soviet Union: Isolated, bored, lonely, depressed—and most of them ended up alcoholics."

"I don’t drink," Snowden said to Bamford and the NOVA crew. "I’ve never been drunk in my life. And they talk about Russia like it’s the worst place on earth. Russia’s great."

Davide Cerretini (right) and Michele Massimo are the co-owners and chefs at Botto Bistro.

Cyrus Farivar

Last fall, a small Italian restaurant just across the bay from San Francisco decided that it had had enough of Yelp's famously aggressive sales tactics.

In exchange for one-star reviews on Yelp, Bistro Botto, in Richmond, California, began offering 25 percent off any pizza back in September 2014. As of Thursday, that discount has gone up to 50 percent off any pizza. (The most expensive pizza on the menu is a large meat-laden Supercazzola, at $35.)

According to a customer newsletter sent to Ars on Thursday, the extra discount is retaliation for a September 2014 ruling in US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit finding that Yelp's tactics were just "hard bargaining."

"The business owners may deem the posting or order of user reviews as a threat of economic harm, but it is not unlawful for Yelp to post and sequence the reviews," Judge Marsha Berzon wrote for the three-judge panel. "As Yelp has the right to charge for legitimate advertising services, the threat of economic harm that Yelp leveraged is, at most, hard bargaining."

Earlier this month, Yelp announced that the Federal Trade Commission has concluded an almost year-long investigation into the site's practices and decided to take no action.

In response, Botto Bistro writes:

So let's hard bargain a little ourselves...if Yelp can manipulate reviews of small businesses to sell ads, so can small businesses manipulate ratings to stick it to the man. Oh yes, this is going to be a fun ride that you don't want to miss.

…
Give us a one star review on Yelp and we'll give you 50% off any pizza.

We at Botto would do anything for a one star review, we walk your dog, we wash your car, we water your garden, we buy you groceries and we pay your rent and we take you to Disneyland.

Hate us on Yelp and we will love you!

Yelp did not immediately respond to Ars' request for comment.

According to Botto Bistro screenshots, Yelp has removed over 2,000 one-star reviews (including one by this reporter, who paid full price last year).