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opy. Pythons slumber on the gnarled roots of eerie mangrove forests. Only rarely will you spot the people who live here: the Moken, shy, peaceful nomads of the sea.
• The Mergui archipelago has been called the "Lost World," but outsiders have found it -- first fishermen, poachers and loggers, and now developers and high-end tourists. The people losing this world are the Moken, who have lived off the land and the sea for centuries.
• The islands are thought to harbor some of the world's most important marine biodiversity, and are a lodestone for those eager to experience one of Asia's last tourism frontiers before, as many fear, it succumbs to the ravages that have befallen many once-pristine seascapes.
• As the world closes in, the long-exploited Moken are rapidly diminishing in numbers and losing the occupations that sustained them for generations. Though they are known as "sea gypsies," very few still live the nomadic life, and only some aging men can fashion the "kabang," houseboats on which the Moken once spent much of every year.
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Google enhances encryption technology for email service, making it harder for NSA to intercept
• WASHINGTON (AP) -- Google has enhanced the encryption technology for its flagship email service in ways that will make it harder for the National Security Agency to intercept messages moving among the company's worldwide data centers.
• Among the most extraordinary disclosures in documents leaked by former NSA systems analyst Edward Snowden were reports that the NSA had secretly tapped into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world.
• Google, whose executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, said in November that he was outraged over the practice, didn't mention the NSA in Thursday's announcement, except in a veiled reference to "last summer's revelations." The change affects more than 425 million users of Google's Gmail service.
• Yahoo has promised similar steps for its email service by this spring.
• Google and other technology companies have been outspoken about the U.S. government's spy programs. The companies are worried more people will reduce their online activities if they believe almost everything they do is being monitored by the government. A decline in Internet use could hurt the companies financially by (Continued on page 32)
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