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The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has issued a decision that anti-censorship campaigners say could spell an end to anonymous website comments in the EU. The judgment came through on Thursday in the case of Delfi AS v. Estonia. Delfi is an Estonian news site that had been found liable by a court in that country for offensive comments posted by anonymous users under one of its stories – it went to the ECHR claiming this violated its right to freedom of expression, but the human rights court disagreed. This all traces back to the start of 2006, when Delfi carried a story about a ferry company that had changed its routes in a way that delayed the opening of new ice roads to various islands. Enraged readers wrote nasty things about the ferry firm, which successfully sued Delfi, winning around €320 ($434) in damages. Having established that the comments were defamatory and Delfi should have expected that, given the nature of the article, the ECHR’s ruling (which can still be appealed) noted that the comments had not been taken down by Delfi’s automated system for catching naughty words, nor by its notice-and-take-down system. Now here comes the crucial bit for online publishers. Although Delfi’s site was clear that commenters were themselves liable for what they wrote, which would theoretically have allowed the ferry company to sue them rather than Delfi, the commenters were anonymous. And so, according to the ECHR’s subsequent statement: Index on Censorship’s Padraig Reidy responded by saying : What it could stand as a precedent for is not entirely clear. The Delfi case was quite specific: it was largely about the legality of Estonia’s interpretation of EU free-expression law (which the court upheld); the comments were apparently merely offensive rather than whistleblowing or anything like that; the fine in question was small and found to be reasonable; and Delfi’s systems for picking up abusive comments seem to have failed in this instance. Also, the EU is not America – it has fairly good guarantees for free expression, but not as cast-iron as those stateside. But nonetheless, particularly in the context of a wider questioning of anonymous comments, it’s not hard to see why Index on Censorship finds the ruling troubling. There can be great value in anonymous comments, and a ruling such as this may have a chilling effect if it leads publishers and site operators to decide the potential liability is too great.

A European trio of researchers has discovered a "circumstellar disk" – a corpse, in other words – of a minor planet that was about 26 per cent water. The discovery of the rocky remains, found orbiting a white dwarf star 150 light years over the rainbow, gives credence to the theory that our own Earth's watery condition was brought about when such H2O-bearing rocks – asteroids, planetoids, and the like – crashed into our home world in the distant past. The boffinry breakthrough is detailed in a paper published in the journal Science titled "Evidence for Water in the Rocky Debris of a Disrupted Extrasolar Minor Planet". While those of us on Earth's surface are duly impressed by the vastness of our oceans and seas, our planet is actually rather water-poor. As Phys.org points out, water accounts for only about 0.02 per cent of Earth's mass. That's a paltry dribble when compared with the 26 per cent of mass estimated to have been in the now-destroyed planetoid that once orbited around its home star, which collapsed into white dwarf GD61 about 200 million years ago. That 26 per cent, by the way, is essentially equal to the proportion of water in Ceres, the largest asteroid in our solar system's main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. At 930 kilometers in diameter, however, Ceres is much larger than the now-defunct victim of GD61, which the researchers estimate to have been just 90km or so. Artist's conception of a watery asteroid being torn apart white dwarf GD 61 Artist's conception of a watery asteroid being shredded Despite its formerly small size, the ex-asteroid is tantalizing in a number of ways. First, of course, is its water content. But also of great interest is that it's the first body found outside our solar system that has the two main ingredients needed for life as we know it: a rocky composition and abundant water. Also of interest is the fact that when GD61 turned into a white dwarf, there was no particular reason why the asteroid, planetoid, or whatever you want to call it – and likely some of its fellow travelers – should have been torn apart by the dwarf's gravitational forces. Unless it was pushed. the paper's lead author Jay Farihi told Phys.org, That means that there are other, far more massive bodies that are now orbiting or have orbited GD61, and that at least some of them are or were likely to have the same rocky, watery composition as the object that met its doom in GD61's gravitational maw, or were given water by similar objects, as it appears that the Earth has been. Farihi said.