Soon, you might be able to log into your bank account with a litany of smiling poo emojis, or a string of little chicken wing images, or multiple little monkeys holding their hands over their eyes.

On Monday, a UK online banking service provider called Intelligent Environments announced what they’re calling the “world’s first emoji-only passcode.” Intelligent Environments says the emoji passcode system will allow users to use codes from a bank of 44 emojis — and don’t worry, it includes that lady in the red dress salsa dancing.

IE argues the emoji passcodes make sense, because images are easier to remember than combinations of letters and numbers. The company also says that when compared to number-only PINs and passwords, their emoji passcode system is more secure, because it has “480 times more permutations using enojis over traditional four digit passcodes.”

And, IE says this is what young people want. David Webber, manager director of engagement at the company said in a statement, “We’ve had input from lots of millennials when we developed the technology. What’s clear is that the younger generation is communicating in new ways.” He continued, “Our research shows 64% of millennials regularly communicate only using emojis. So we decided to reinvent the passcode for a new generation…”

Worth The Hype?

But not everyone thinks emoji passwords are that great. Lorrie Cranor, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University who studies cybersecurity and passwords, told NPR, “I think it’s a gimmick. I’m not sure that it will make a difference as far as security goes.”

And Cranor says it’s not particularly a new idea. “Maybe it’s fun for people, but I’m not sure it’s a big breakthrough,” she said. “For years now, people have been proposing various graphical password schemes. Some of them have your password be photographs of faces, and some of them are pictures. Emoji is just another variation on this.”

Cranor says the argument that people will remember images better than they will numbers is true to a certain extent, but the reality is that we all use a lot of different passwords in our digital lives, so they’d be hard to remember whether they were pictures or numbers.

And that need to remember multiple passwords makes us lazy with our passwords, Cranor says, using the same patterns over and over. “We all do the same things with numbers and with regular passwords.”

Michael Orosz, a behavioral decision-making expert at the University of Southern California, agrees. “The majority of your users are going to use basically the same patterns as everybody else. We think alike. 1-2-3-4? There’s gonna be the equivalent of that, in that domain. In theory, a lot more combinations, therefore a lot more security. But in a practical sense, doubtful.”

Four smiling poops in a row instead of A-B-C-D might be a bit more fun, but not particularly safer.

Cranor says that’s actually not our fault. “We’re lazy but part of it is actual rational laziness,” she said. “Most of us have dozens of passwords and PINs to remember and if we had to come up with unique and interesting passwords for all of those things we’d have to spend a lot of our time memorizing them the way we memorize spelling words in elementary school. We can blame the people, but actually, maybe we should blame the system and the technology that forces us to do this.”

Or you could celebrate the technology that allows you to see your banking statements by typing in a series of smiling suns, pigs and tiny little men on bicycles. Intelligent Environments says they hope to have emoji passcodes rolled out in the next year. The company isn’t a bank itself, so it will have to find a banking partner, but it says those talks are already taking place.

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John S. Carroll, a former editor of The Baltimore Sun and The Los Angeles Times, which he led to 13 Pulitzer Prizes in his short tenure — has died at age 73.

The LA Times describes Carroll as “a courageous editor [who had an] instinct for the big story and unrelenting focus” said he died today in Lexington, Ky., of Creutzfeldt-Jakob, a degenerative brain disease.

In his long career, Carroll also spent time at The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Lexington Herald-Leader and The Baltimore Sun.

He joined the Sun as a reporter and covered the Vietnam War for the newspaper. Later, during his time as the paper’s editor, it “won two Pulitzer Prizes for an investigation into the dangers of shipbreaking and a series about a major league umpire’s children who were dying of a genetic disease,” according to the Sun.

“For a publisher, John was a dream to work with, always trying to improve the paper,” Michael E. Waller, publisher of the Sun from 1997 to 2002, was quoted by the newspaper as saying. “He was a genius at spotting small stories that he thought might hide bigger truths. He’d assign a reporter to check it out and often would wind up with a significant investigative project, such as the dangerous ship-salvaging business.”

The 13 Pultizers the Times won in his five years there compare to a total of eight won by the paper in the whole of the 1990s.

According to The Associated Press, his departure at the LA Times “came amid increasing tensions over newsroom budget cuts and the paper’s direction with corporate owner, the Tribune Company.”

“He received a standing ovation from the staff when he announced his resignation, and the Times’ then-publisher Jeff Johnson told The Associated Press that Carroll left behind an ‘extraordinary legacy of journalistic excellence.’ “

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Dealing a big blow to President Obama’s agenda, the House of Representatives failed to pass a key element of a package of bills that would have given Obama the ability to fast-track a trade deal with Pacific-Rim nations.

In a sign of just how important the bill was for the White House, President Obama made a rare personal visit to the U.S. Capitol to lobby for the bill. But his overtures proved insufficient.

The House began by voting on a bill that would provide funding for training Americans who would lose their jobs because of the trade deal. When that bill failed by a wide margin, it became clear that the bill giving Obama fast-track powers is also in jeopardy.

The White House had made the case that the president needed fast-track authority to put the finishing touches on the Trans Pacific Partnership trade agreement, which some analysts believe would be the most significant international trade deal in decades.

Critics of the deal — including a large contingent of Obama’s own caucus — are opposed to it partly because they believe it will drive American jobs overseas.

Just how contentious is this issue? Right before the House voted on the Trade Adjustment Assistance bill, House Minority Leader and Obama ally Nancy Pelosi said she would not vote in favor of it.

She said this trade deal was not a good deal for American workers and she would not accept giving up the power to make amendments to the trade deal crafted by Obama.

“I will be voting to slow down the fast track,” Pelosi said.

NPR’s Marilyn Geewax will be live-tweeting the action. We’ve embedded her tweets below:

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As California endures its fourth year of drought, water restrictions are taking effect across the state. On April 1, Governor Jerry Brown signed an executive order implementing a mandatory 25 percent water cutback in cities and towns across the state from 2013 usage levels. It took effect June 1.

Brown’s executive order, and the hundreds of other water guidelines throughout the state, can be confusing. NPR asked listeners what questions they have about California water restrictions. We took those questions to experts to get to the bottom of what all these rules actually mean.

For some background, you can read NPR’s coverage of that April executive order here:

Ok, now here are the answers to some questions you sent us, as well as some other questions we had ourselves.

Q. Are there different restrictions depending on where you live?

There are 411 urban water districts in California, and most of them have been putting their own conservation measures in place for some time. Some vary greatly, and new state guidelines appear to take that into account.

And even within the statewide regulations there are variations. Brown’s 2015 executive order says the statewide restrictions will “consider the relative per capita water usage of each water supplier’s service area, and require those areas with high per capita use achieve proportionally greater reductions than those with low use.” Basically, areas that have already been doing a pretty good job of conserving will be forced to conserve less under these new rules than areas that have not.

To do that, the state places each urban water supplier into one of eight tiers, which are assigned a conservation standard, ranging between eight percent and 36 percent. Sixty-seven water suppliers are in Tier 8, the highest tier with a 36 percent reduction mandate from 2013 levels. Only 29 water suppliers are in tier 1, which requires an eight percent cut in water use. Even though the state assigns water suppliers to a tier, it’s on the water supplier to figure out how to reach that standard.

NPR member station KPCC did its own drought FAQ a few weeks ago, and at the bottom, they featured a nifty tool that allows you to see how much your specific water district has to save.

The San Jose Mercury-News says, “Cities like Hayward, Santa Cruz and San Francisco, which already have been conserving and have low per-capita water use, were given 8 percent targets. Cities such as Beverly Hills, Hillsborough and Bakersfield, which have been guzzling water, were told to cut 36 percent.”

The state water board says it might adjust who’s in what tier based on new data as conservation efforts continue.

Q. What kind of fines and penalties could I face for violating water restrictions?

In 2014, the governor gave water regulators the ability to fine people up to $500 for certain violations: any outdoor watering that causes runoff, using a hose to wash your car unless that hose has a shutoff nozzle, applying water to hard surfaces like a sidewalk or driveway, and using potable water in fountains and other decorative features.

That 2014 executive order also grants the state the ability to fine water agencies that don’t comply up to $10,000 a day.

In addition, every local authority can have its own fine and penalty structure. Los Angeles’ Department of Water and Power told us theirs:

“Our enforcement team in Los Angeles, the Water Conservation Response Unit, tries to educate our customers about their water waste violation before handing out fines. This gives the customer an opportunity to correct their violation before facing monetary fines. For residential customers, the first offense gets a formal warning letter, 2nd offense – $100 fine, 3rd offense – $200 fine, and 4th offense – $300 fine. Fine amounts are double for commercial customers.”

Most water suppliers give out at least one warning before a fine or penalty. And many water suppliers don’t have a high number of enforcement personnel to be on the look out for violations. Los Angeles’ Department of Water and Power, which serves a metropolitan area of millions, has about half a dozen so-called “water cops.”

Currently, there’s no one website that lists all the rules for all 411 of California’s urban water districts. Most water authorities publish their own rules online.

Q. What are the best ways to quickly cut water use in someone’s home?

Pretty much everyone we talked to agrees on these basics:

• When watering your lawn or garden, watch for runoff that flows onto non-irrigated areas, private or public walkways. (In California, all across the state, you’re now legally restricted from watering outdoor landscapes to the point you create runoff.)
• Use a hose with a shut-off nozzle. This will stop potable (drinking) water from leaking.
• Turn off any decorative fountains or water features, unless it is a part of a recirculating pump system.
• Don’t ask for water at restaurants unless you know you’ll drink it. (In fact, under new statewide regulations, servers can’t actually bring you water unless you request it.)
• Some of the easiest things to do are turning off the water when brushing your teeth or soaping dishes, as well as taking shorter showers.
• Follow your local outdoor watering restrictions. In Los Angeles, this means you can only water a maximum of three days per week.
• Check out any rebates your local water authority might provide. For instance, LA residents can get a $300 rebate for using a high-efficiency clothes washer, $150 for a high-efficiency toilet, free low-flow showerheads and faucet aerators, and various rebates for landscape conversion and irrigation.

We talked with experts and water officials, including the Association of California Water Agencies, and representatives of Los Angeles and Butte County. We also consulted water-saving suggestions from the state.

California has a website, http://saveourwater.com/, that makes water-saving to-do lists and even drought-themed comic books.

Q. How do water restrictions and enforcement differ between poorer and richer neighborhoods? Do rich people just get away with using more water?

This is a hard question to answer. Lots of data does suggest wealthier Californians are using more water than poorer residents. For one, a lot of the time, they have bigger lawns to water. The state has a breakdown of how much communities have saved so far.

And some neighborhoods stand out. Beverly Hills for instance, only conserved 3 percent more water from June 2014 to February 2015, compared to 2013 usage levels. But in that same period, Palo Alto, another wealthy area in California, conserved 16 percent.

While it’s hard to generalize conservation by income level, some do say that when it comes to enforcement, rich people get off the hook, leading to the recent phenomenon of public “droughtshaming” of celebrities like J.Lo, Kim Kardashian, and Barbra Streisand.

Part of Governor Brown’s executive action on water conservation requires water districts to report their monthly use. March 2015 numbers say that in the Santa Fe Irrigation District, which serves the elite Rancho Santa Fe neighborhood in San Diego, the R-GPCD, or residential gallons per capita day, was 366.7 gallons. That figure is several times higher than usage rates for the Lake Arrowhead Community Services District (in the mountains east of Los Angeles), for instance. Their R-GPCD number was 22.6 for the same period.

Q: What about restrictions on agriculture? Are there any?

Agriculture was left out of Brown’s April 1st executive order. But many farmers in the Central Valley say they’ve already been forced to cut back for the last two years, as water deliveries from state and federal irrigation systems have been cut to near zero.

And NPR’s Kirk Siegler reports that water shortages are pitting farmer against farmer. Siegler reports that the Westlands Water District in Fresno County routinely tops the nation in agricultural output, but 2015 is expected to be the second straight year that 700 farmers in the district won’t get any irrigation water from the federal canal system.

It’s often pointed out that agriculture uses the bulk of California’s available water supply, and the governor has hinted that more regulations on farmers could be coming. To get out in front of that, some farmers in the Sacramento Delta area with senior water rights agreed to some voluntary water use cutbacks. Those farmers went to the state with their proposal, which says they’ll either reduce their water diversions by 25 percent, or fallow 25 percent of their land. Those cutbacks would be from 2013 levels. The state said water rights holders who choose not to participate might face mandatory cutbacks later in the year.

One study from the University of California-Davis said the drought could cost the agriculture industry close to $3 billion in 2015 alone.

Q. Are there any medical exemptions to these restrictions?

Some readers wanted to know what happens to people that have conditions that require them to, say, shower or bathe multiple times a day. This answer depends on your local water authority. Los Angeles does have a medical exemption, and they say this: “There are exemptions in water use restrictions allowed for health and safety reasons. LADWP allows customers to fill out a variance request for any restrictions in the city’s Water Conservation Plan Ordinance that would cause undue hardship to customer with physical disabilities and other medical considerations.”

Q. Are there any restrictions on corporate water use, for places like restaurants, hotels and golf courses? Are they harsher than individual and family restrictions?

There are differences in statewide as well as local regulations. The Association of California Water Agencies gave us this summary:

“In addition to the prohibitions that apply to all Californians, there are a few specific provisions for businesses. Restaurants and other food service establishments can serve water to customers only on request. Hotels and motels must provide guests with the option of not having towels and linens laundered daily. Golf courses, like all Californians, are subject to the individual end-user requirements contained in the emergency regulation. Furthermore, golf courses served by a water supplier are subject to the conservation actions determined by their water supplier. Additionally, golf courses with an independent water supply (i.e., not served by a water supplier in part or whole) are required to either limit outdoor irrigation to two days per week or achieve a 25 percent reduction in water use.”

Q. Are some municipalities fighting these mandates?

Yes, at least one. Riverside sued the state saying the new rules on water conservation are “arbitrary and capricious.” KPCC’s Molly Peterson reported on the story, and says:

“Under the rules, Riverside is required to reduce water use over the next nine months by 24 percent compared to a similar period in 2013 or face penalties of up to $10,000 a day. In a complaint filed in Fresno Superior Court, lawyers for the city counter that Riverside should have qualified for an alternative “reserve tier,” which only required cities to save 4 percent.”

Q. How much water should I be using every day?

There isn’t just one answer to this question. Different local authorities, and experts have multiple targets for use. But UC Berkeley researchers told NPR that using 35 gallons per person, per day is a pretty good amount. Without thinking, those researchers told us, many people use more than 50 gallons of water per day. But lowering that number is simple. Changing just one or two things can cut a lot of water waste.

Q. How much water have Californians actually saved?

A fair amount, actually. Monthly water saving, statewide in California were 13.5 percent in April of this year, compared with April 2013. But that’s still just more than half of the governor’s goal for the state.

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In the first crowdfunding case, the Federal Trade Commission has reached a settlement with Erik Chevalier, who started a Kickstarter campaign to create a board game called “The Doom That Came to Atlantic City.”

Chevalier promised backers that if they helped fund his campaign, they would receive T-shirts or a copy of the game with pewter figurines made by well-known sculptor Paul Komoda. Chevalier was hoping to raise $35,000. More than 1,000 backers later, Chevalier received $122,000.

The FTC claims, however, that Chevalier never worked on the game with that money. In a press release the FTC says:

“He represented in a number of updates that he was making progress on the game. But after 14 months, Chevalier announced that he was cancelling the project and refunding his backers’ money.

“Despite Chevalier’s promises he did not provide the rewards, nor did he provide refunds to his backers. In fact, according to the FTC’s complaint, Chevalier spent most of the money on unrelated personal expenses such as rent, moving himself to Oregon, personal equipment, and licenses for a different project.”

Under the agreement Chevalier reached with the FTC, he is obligated to honor any stated refund policies and he is “prohibited from making misrepresentations about any crowdfunding campaign.” The agreement imposes a $111,793.71 judgement against him, but that has been suspended because of his “inability to pay.”

The Washington Post explains:

“The enforcement action is a sign that the FTC is willing to extend its consumer protection powers to the somewhat murky waters of crowdfunding. Kickstarter uses an all or nothing type of system in which projects must reach a funding goal during a specific campaign period or they do not receive any of the pledges committed to it. Most campaigns fall short, according to the statistics from the company’s Web site, and backers keep their money.

“But the 37 percent of projects successfully funded have raised more than $1.5 billion dollars, of which Kickstarter takes a modest cut. The “games” category has an even lower success rate, with only 32 percent of projects meeting funding goals. And projects like “The Doom That Came To Atlantic City” show that not all successful campaigns end up delivering what they promised.

“Because often times projects are delayed rather than cancelled, statistics on that category of projects are hard to determine. And that risk is almost inherent to funding passion projects on platforms like Kickstarter.”

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The Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday started what could be a lengthy process: making rules to limit the amount of climate-warming pollution that comes from aircraft engines.

In a statement, the EPA said it’s “proposing to find” that greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from commercial aircraft contribute to “pollution that causes climate change endangering the health and welfare of Americans.” The agency hasn’t outlined any limits yet; this statement is just an announcement that it has begun the process that would lead to limits down the road.

The EPA pointed out that any rules would not apply to military aircraft or the types of planes used for recreational purposes. Once the EPA’s “action” is published in the Federal Register, it will be open for a 60-day public comment period.

The EPA also said it is releasing details of the work by the United Nations’ International Civil Aviation Organization to develop international carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions guidelines for aircraft. Those are expected to be adopted in early 2016. The EPA and the Federal Aviation Administration have been involved in that process on behalf of the U.S., and the EPA says it’s working to make sure any standards reached “are equitable across national boundaries.”

NPR’s Christopher Joyce told our Newscast Unit that EPA rules on airplane emissions will likely parallel any rules coming out of the U.N. Joyce also said the aviation industry has previously fought regulations proposed by international authorities.

But in a statement released in response to Wednesday’s EPA news, Airlines For America, the industry’s trade group, didn’t explicitly oppose any of the work of the EPA or the U.N. Rather, it argued that U.S. aviation already has an “exceptional environmental track record.” A4A says the industry has improved fuel efficiency more than 120 percent since 1978, and saved “over 3.8 billion metric tons of CO2, the equivalent to taking 23 million cars off the road each of those years.” Nancy Young, vice president of A4A said, “U.S. airlines are green and we are getting even greener.”

The EPA says U.S. aircraft emit about 11 percent of the U.S. transportation sector’s greenhouse gas emissions, and 29 percent of those emissions from all aircraft across the globe.

The New York Times says this push for action on aircraft emissions is “the latest of Mr. Obama’s major initiatives to combat global warming.” The Times says next week, the Obama administration will propose rules on emissions for heavy-duty trucks, and in August, it will announce new rules on power plant pollution.

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Still reeling from a corruption scandal that has ensnared some of its top officials and led to the resignation of its president, FIFA said it was delaying the bidding process on the 2026 World Cup.

“Due to the situation, I think it’s nonsense to start any bidding process for the time being,” Jérôme Valcke, FIFA’s secretary general, said during a news conference on Wednesday.

In a separate statement, FIFA said the organization’s executive committee will discuss the process at a later date.

The BBC reports:

“The vote to decide who will host the 2026 World Cup is due to take place in Kuala Lumpur in May 2017.

“The United States are front-runners to stage the tournament, but Canada, Mexico and Colombia are also thought to be interested. Russia and Qatar were selected to host the 2018 and 2022 World Cups by a secret ballot of Fifa’s 22 executive members in December 2010.

“But Swiss prosecutors are now investigating alleged financial irregularities surrounding the bidding process. Both Russia and Qatar have denied any wrongdoing.”

Bloomberg reports that during the news conference, Valcke was defensive. If you remember, Valcke was not named in the U.S. bribery investigation, but subsequent reporting linked him to a $10 million payment that was allegedly part of a bribe to help South Africa secure the right to host the 2010 World Cup.

Wednesday’s news conference was Valcke’s first since those reports surfaced, and he said he had done no wrong. Bloomberg adds:

“The money involved came from South African authorities and not FIFA, and the transfer was in line with FIFA regulations, Valcke said.

” ‘You have decided that after [Sepp] Blatter I am the head to be cut, fine, but don’t use this $10 million because I haven’t made any mistake with this,’ he said.”

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What if there were an app where a user could have all of the news he was interested in, from the outlets he trusted, all in one place?

That’s the goal of Apple’s new iOS 9 feature, called, simply, News. It will be a permanent fixture on the iPhone and iPad home screen, just like Calendar, Maps and Weather.

If that app sounded familiar before it was unveiled Monday, that’s because other apps are already doing the same thing — Facebook, Flipboard, Twitter, Yahoo News and NYT Now are trying to become the gateway between news consumers and information.

Apple, which announced the app during its debut of iOS 9, is just the latest company to throw its hat into the ring, and it has a distinct advantage over the competition: The News app will automatically be an undeletable part of any Apple mobile device running iOS 9 starting in the fall.

News will be on the radar of millions of Apple users, making it one of the most salient apps on the market. As the Washington Post points out, News could quickly become a contender.

“If the algorithm is good and expansive enough, this could eat market share from Flipboard, Twitter and even, theoretically, those daily newsletters people send around. Not to mention from those outside the ecosystem.”

News won’t necessarily be a big success. Its predecessor, Newsstand, turned out to be unpopular with publishers.

Instead of making a home for news apps, as Newsstand did, Apple is partnering with publishers including BuzzFeed, CNN, Conde Nast, The New York Times, Time Inc. and more, displaying their content within the News app in a customizable wrapper. (NPR is among the media organizations that intend to make news available for the News app.)

In an article for NiemanLab, Joshua Benton explained this new relationship between Apple and publishers:

“Individual news apps and individual news brands aren’t the primary point of contact with news any more. They’re raw material, feeding into broader platforms. The loss of power for publishers in that exchange is obvious; the potential benefits remain mostly undiscovered.”

Publishers are trying to keep up as these platforms explore new ways to distribute information to consumers, but the future of News (the app, and the content) has yet to be determined.

Paige Pfleger is an intern with NPR Digital News.

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