ReHacked #104: German gov. calls for European ban on biometric mass surveillance, Disney+ censor Simpsons episode referring Tiananmen Massacre, Free public domain audiobooks and more
Disney+ appears to have censored an episode of The Simpsons in Hong Kong which references the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre.
Don’t forget to share if you like what you read here, subscribe (if not yet) and leave a comment any form of your feedback is very important to me. Thanks!
RSS feed available if you don’t want to clutter your inbox.
The newly-agreed German government coalition has called for a Europe-wide ban on public facial recognition and other biometric surveillance. This echoes the core demands of the Reclaim Your Face campaign which EDRi has co-led since 2020, through which over 65 civil society groups ask the EU and their national governments to outlaw biometric data mass surveillance.
Today, 24 November 2021, the new German government announced their highly-anticipated coalition deal, including the strongest commitments seen so far in Europe to “rule … out” “biometric recognition in public”. They further called to “reject comprehensive video surveillance and the use of biometric recording for surveillance purposes”.
The center-left Social Democrats (SPD), the environmentalist Greens and the business-focused Free Democrats (FDP) jointly emphasised the vital importance of anonymity in public as well as online. Their statement echoes the demands of over 65 groups in the Reclaim Your Face campaign, co-led by EDRi.
Online video streaming service Disney+ appears to have censored an episode of The Simpsons in Hong Kong which references the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre.
The 12th episode of the 16th season was first broadcast in 2005 and sees the family visit China, where the cartoon family visits the mummified body of ex-leader Mao Zedong. The newly-launched Disney+ platform skips from episode 11 to 13.
LibriVox | free public domain audiobooks #copyrights #culture #link
Seeing the light: Research breakthrough by McMaster PhD student creates a simple, cost-effective laser on silicon – Brighter World #science #engineering
Scientific curiosity and a lot of hard work have paid off for PhD student Khadijeh Miarabbas Kiani. She’s the lead author of a paper that demonstrates a single, working laser on silicon, using a simple, cost-effective method.
“Silicon is not a great material for lasing,” Miarabbas Kiani explains. “It’s a good detector material, but not an efficient emitter of light.”
Her field of study is silicon photonics, which creates ultra-compact, lower-cost, and energy-efficient optical systems that are useful in many applications, from high-speed communications to self-driving cars to medical diagnostics. However, the current manufacturing process to fabricate a laser onto a silicon chip is complex and costly, due to the element’s inefficiency as a light emitter.
Why Adversarial Image Attacks Are No Joke - Unite.AI #security
Attacking image recognition systems with carefully-crafted adversarial images has been considered an amusing but trivial proof-of-concept over the last five years. However, new research from Australia suggests that the casual use of highly popular image datasets for commercial AI projects could create an enduring new security problem.
For a couple of years now, a group of academics at the University of Adelaide have been trying to explain something really important about the future of AI-based image recognition systems.
It’s something that would be difficult (and very expensive) to fix right now, and which would be unconscionably costly to remedy once the current trends in image recognition research have been fully developed into commercialized and industrialized deployments in 5-10 years’ time.
U.K. regulators order Facebook-owner Meta to sell Giphy - Axios #internet #copyrights
Regulators in the U.K. on Tuesday said they have directed Facebook parent company Meta to sell Giphy after finding "the takeover could reduce competition between social media platforms and increase Facebook's already significant market power."
Why it matters: Facebook agreed to buy Giphy in May of last year for an estimated price of $400 million. The deal almost immediately invited antitrust scrutiny, given the increased attention to Facebook's growing market power.
Details: In a statement, the U.K.'s competition and markets authority concluded that the deal would be anticompetitive because Facebook could theoretically increase market power by "denying or limiting other platforms’ access to Giphy GIFs," or "changing the terms of access," to its GIFs for competitive sites.
PeerTube v4, more power to help you present your videos – Framablog #internet
PeerTube is a free software that, once installed on a server, generates a video hosting platform. This platform can be federated, to share its video catalog with other PeerTube platforms. It also provides a resilient video broadcasting system, which combines peer-to-peer and traditional streaming.
Today, PeerTube is a whole ecosystem : with an index of nearly 900 public « instances » (that’s how a PeerTube server is called), a search engine, dozens of plugins to adapt one’s instance to the needs of the content creators they hosts… But also tens of thousands of lines of code and hundreds of thousands of videos.
New cancer therapy from Yibin Kang's lab holds potential to switch off major cancer types without side effects #science #health
Cancer biologist Yibin Kang has spent more than 15 years investigating a little-known but deadly gene called MTDH, or metadherin, which enables cancer in two important ways — and which he can now disable, in mice and in human tissue, with a targeted experimental treatment that will be ready for human trials in a few years. His work appears in two papers in today’s issue of Nature Cancer.
“You can’t find a drug target better than this: MTDH is important for most major human cancers, not important for normal cells, and it can be eliminated with no obvious side effects,” said Kang, Princeton’s Warner-Lambert/Parke-Davis Professor of Molecular Biology and one of the principal investigators of the Princeton Branch of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research.
“In the two papers we are publishing back-to-back today, we identify a compound, show it is effective against cancer, and show that it is very, very effective when combined with chemotherapy and immunotherapy,” said Kang. “Even though metastatic cancers are scary, by figuring out how they work — figuring out their dependency on certain key pathways like MTDH — we can attack them and make them susceptible to treatment.”
Arctic Ocean started getting warmer decades earlier than we thought - study #nature
The Arctic Ocean has been getting warmer since the beginning of the 20th century – decades earlier than records suggest – due to warmer water flowing into the delicate polar ecosystem from the Atlantic Ocean.
An international group of researchers reconstructed the recent history of ocean warming at the gateway to the Arctic Ocean in a region called the Fram Strait, between Greenland and Svalbard.
Using the chemical signatures found in marine microorganisms, the researchers found that the Arctic Ocean began warming rapidly at the beginning of the last century as warmer and saltier waters flowed in from the Atlantic – a phenomenon called Atlantification – and that this change likely preceeded the warming documented by modern instrumental measurements. Since 1900, the ocean temperature has risen by approximately 2 degrees Celsius, while sea ice has retreated and salinity has increased.
Townscaper #fun
Game in a browser
supabase dashboard opensourced #software #link
Synthetic tissue can repair hearts, muscles, and vocal cords - McGill University #science #health #futurism
Combining knowledge of chemistry, physics, biology, and engineering, scientists from McGill University develop a biomaterial tough enough to repair the heart, muscles, and vocal cords, representing a major advance in regenerative medicine.
“People recovering from heart damage often face a long and tricky journey. Healing is challenging because of the constant movement tissues must withstand as the heart beats. The same is true for vocal cords. Until now there was no injectable material strong enough for the job,” says Guangyu Bao, a PhD candidate in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at McGill University.
If you would like to propose any interesting article for the next ReHacked issue, just hit reply or push this sexy “Leave a comment” (if not subscribed yet) button below. It’s a nice way to start a discussion.
Thanks for reading this digest and remember: we can make it better together, just leave your opinion or suggestions after pressing this button above or simply hit the reply in your e-mail and don’t forget - sharing is caring ;) Have a great week!
Dainius
