› added 11 years ago

107

TIL in 1993 the NSA was almost successful requiring a chip in all communication devices that would essentially outlaw public key encryptions and give them a backdoor to… everything.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

PnAV TIL that mothers in Canada can get up to a year of maternity leave, whereas the max amount in the U.S. is only 12 weeks.
N7LBe TIL that the seasons in the Northern Hemisphere are the opposite of those in the Southern Hemisphere. This means that in Argentina and Australia, winter begins in June.
ne9Ob TIL Bill Withers, the singer song writer of "Aint no Sunshine" was a factory worker making airplane toilets when he wrote the hit song at age 31. After the song hit gold, the record company presented him with a gold toilet marking the start of his new career.
RjY8 TIL that in 1958 the US government funded a experiment to try to get dolphins to talk with humans by having a human and dolphin live together. When the dolphin went through adolescence he tried courting the woman, and she began to give him hand jobs, which made him more receptive to the lessons.
dPYE TIL there’s a kind of fish where some males build nests and help raise their young, and other “sneaker” males just swim by and ejaculate into those nests while the males that built them are trying to mate.