ReHacked #100: Mighty Shorebirds Keep Breaking Flight Records, Space debris forces astronauts on space station to take shelter, Air cargo suddenly affordable relative to ocean shipping and more

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These Mighty Shorebirds Keep Breaking Flight Records—And You Can Follow Along | Audubon #nature

On September 28, one small bird completed a very long flight. An adult, male Bar-tailed Godwit, known by its tag number 4BBRW, touched down in New South Wales, Australia, after more than 8,100 miles in transit from Alaska —flapping its wings for 239 hours without rest, and setting the world record for the longest continual flight by any land bird by distance. And 4BBRW isn’t even done yet. In the next few days, the Godwit is expected to end its southbound migration in New Zealand after its well-earned island stopover, says Adrian Riegen, a builder from West Auckland and a passionate birdwatcher.

Space debris forces astronauts on space station to take shelter in return ships | Space #space #safety

Seven astronauts on the International Space Station were forced to take shelter in their transport spacecraft early Monday (Nov. 15) when the station passed uncomfortably closed to orbital debris, according to reports.

The space junk passes began in the pre-dawn hours of Monday and the International Space Station has continued to make close passes to the debris every 90 minutes or so, according to experts monitoring the situation. Russia's space agency Roscosmos confirmed the space junk encounter with Space.com, though NASA has not yet commented on the situation either publicly or to Space.com.

Why is air cargo suddenly affordable relative to ocean shipping? - FreightWaves #economy

The cost to ship goods around the world by air is about 2.5 times more expensive than before the pandemic. On major trade lanes, where demand is especially high, such as China and Southeast Asia to the United States, rates are five or six times higher than normal for the peak shipping season.

So how has airfreight become a relative bargain when ocean shipping is cheaper?

The air rate from China to the U.S. West Coast during the first week of November was about $14 per kilogram, double what it was a year ago, according to the Freightos Air Index. Shipping by air to the East Coast cost about $13, also twice as much as in 2020.

We all know the reasons by now. Passenger aircraft are the source for more than half of air cargo’s global capacity, and most of them stopped flying when COVID started spreading and restricted travel. Fewer border restrictions this year have increased demand and helped start airlines toward recovery, but international air capacity is still about 70% below pre-crisis levels.

Meanwhile, demand, especially in North America, is at record levels as federal relief monies and higher savings rates gave people more disposable income, which they disproportionately spent on goods over services, while the manufacturing sector suffered dislocations and a lack of labor. Inventories have been unable to catch up.

Depression is more than low mood – it’s a change of consciousness | Psyche Ideas #psychology #health #longread

Neuroscientists and philosophers of consciousness have recently coined a new term – the global state of consciousness – to describe the structural properties of experience that varies between ordinary wakefulness, dreaming, the psychedelic state and the minimally conscious state. These states are called ‘global’ because the whole of conscious experience is altered, not just a particular element. The fine detail of what we experience in everyday waking life changes all the time (sounds, colours, odours all come and go), but the structure stays largely fixed: I feel myself to be present in the world, at the centre of an integrated, coherent point of view; time carries on flowing at the same rate; space has the same geometric structure. The global state is this overarching structure and ordinarily stays constant as particular experiences pass us by. When we dream, take psychedelics or suffer a brain injury, this structure can be altered, and we enter a different global state.

Portugal: Proposed law tries to sneak in biometric mass surveillance. - Reclaim Your Face #privacy

Whilst the European Parliament has been fighting bravely for the rights of everyone in the EU to exist freely and with dignity in publicly accessible spaces, the government of Portugal is attempting to push their country in the opposite direction: one of digital authoritarianism.

The Portuguese lead organisation in the Reclaim Your Face coalition D3 (Defesa Dos Direitos Digitais) are raising awareness of how the Portuguese government’s new proposed video surveillance and facial recognition law amounts to illiberal biometric mass surveillance. Why? Ministers are trying to rush the law through the Parliament, endangering the very foundations of democracy on which the Republic of Portugal rests.

IBM Unveils Breakthrough 127-Qubit Quantum Processor #futurism #hardware

- Delivers 127 qubits on a single IBM quantum processor for the first time with breakthrough packaging technology

- New processor furthers IBM's industry-leading roadmaps for advancing the performance of its quantum systems

- Previews design for IBM Quantum System Two, a next generation quantum system to house future quantum processors

Chrome may start restricting requests to private networks #software #internet

Chrome (and apparently Microsoft Edge) are likely to add new restrictions on allowing things to talk to private network addresses (in a surprisingly broad sense). The reference for this is Feature: Restrict "private network requests" for subresources from public websites to secure contexts (via), which describes the first steps. The first steps Chrome is making is that such "private network requests" may only be made from a public context that is secure, ie from a HTTPS website instead of a HTTP one.

Obituary: ZX Spectrum developer Bernie Drummond has died #promemoria

Bernie Drummond, game designer behind a number of beloved 3D adventure titles for the ZX Spectrum computer, has died.

Word of Drummond's passing has been passing through social media, with colleague Jason Clark apparently sharing the news in a closed Facebook group for the ZX Spectrum-loving community. "He was my local mate - didn't age much from his 80s photos and we had many a beer over the games and stories," Clark apparently wrote.

Router Bugs and Security Vulnerabilities #internet #security

Every month, We evaluate 17000 routers for security Vulnerabilities using the national vulnerability database and publish the list with the remediation steps

NOTE: This is a complete historical list. Lots of Vulnerabilities could since be patched. You will have to upgrade your router firmware and also read the advisory links listed for corrective action

Microsoft Calls Firefox’s Browser Workaround “Improper,” Will Block It #software #privacy

Windows 11 lets you choose your default browser, but it takes a lot of clicks and Microsoft sometimes forces you to use Edge, anyway. Firefox had a workaround, but Microsoft calls it “improper” and will soon block it.

The upcoming Windows Update won’t block you from changing the default browser in Windows 11. The patch will force links using the microsoft-edge protocol to always open in Edge. These are specific links opened through Windows 11, such as those directly from the taskbar’s search feature. Firefox’s workaround and EdgeDeflector made it so these links would still open in your default browser. Microsoft is about to roll out an update that disables this workaround, calling it “improper” on Mozilla’s part

Mozilla publishes position paper on the EU Digital Identity Framework - Open Policy & Advocacy #privacy

As such, should the revised Article 45 be adopted as is, Mozilla would no longer be able to honour the security commitments we make to the hundreds of millions of people who use our Firefox browser or any of the other browser and email products that also depend on Mozilla’s Root Program. It would amount to an unprecedented weakening of the website security ecosystem, and undercut the browser community’s ability to push back against authoritarian regimes’ interference with fundamental rights (see here and here for two recent examples).

Fortunately, there is still time to address the problems wrought by this proposal, and our position paper includes recommendations for how lawmakers in the European Parliament and EU Council can amend the relevant provisions. As the discussions on the eIDAS revision heat up in the EU Institutions, we’ll be engaging intensively with lawmakers and the broader community to protect trust and security on the web.

To Be Energy-Efficient, Brains Predict Their Perceptions | Quanta Magazine #science #nature #longread

…many neuroscientists are pivoting to a view of the brain as a “prediction machine.” Through predictive processing, the brain uses its prior knowledge of the world to make inferences or generate hypotheses about the causes of incoming sensory information. Those hypotheses — and not the sensory inputs themselves — give rise to perceptions in our mind’s eye. The more ambiguous the input, the greater the reliance on prior knowledge.

“The beauty of the predictive processing framework [is] that it has a really large — sometimes critics might say too large — capacity to explain a lot of different phenomena in many different systems,” said Floris de Lange, a neuroscientist at the Predictive Brain Lab of Radboud University in the Netherlands.

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Dainius