ReHacked #108: Facebook exec blames society for COVID misinformation, Toyota owners have to pay $8/mo to keep using their key fob for remote start, AI Training Is Outpacing Moore’s Law and more

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Facebook exec blames society for COVID misinformation - Axios #internet #socialnetworks

Asked whether vaccine hesitancy would be the same with or without social media, Bosworth defended Facebook's role in combatting COVID, noting that the company ran one of the largest information campaigns in the world to spread authoritative information.

• He said that individuals make the choice whether to listen to that information or to rely on less reputable information spread by friends and family.
• "That's their choice. They are allowed to do that. You have an issue with those people. You don't have an issue with Facebook. You can't put that on me."

Toyota owners have to pay $8/mo to keep using their key fob for remote start | Ars Technica #economy

Automakers keep trying to get a piece of that sweet, sweet subscription income. Now, it’s Toyota’s turn.

Nearly every car company offers some sort of subscription package, and Toyota has one called Remote Connect. The service offers the usual fare, letting owners use an app to remotely lock their doors, for example, or if they own a plug-in vehicle, to precondition the interior. But as some complimentary subscriptions for Remote Connect come to an end, Toyota owners are getting an unexpected surprise—they can no longer use their key fob to remote-start their vehicles.

Log4Shell log4j vulnerability (CVE-2021-44228) - cheat-sheet reference guide #security

AI Training Is Outpacing Moore’s Law - IEEE Spectrum #datascience #futurism

The gains to AI training performance since MLPerf benchmarks began “managed to dramatically outstrip Moore’s Law,” says David Kanter, executive director of the MLPerf parent organization MLCommons. The increase in transistor density would account for a little more than doubling of performance between the early version of the MLPerf benchmarks and those from June 2021. But improvements to software as well as processor and computer architecture produced a 6.8-11-fold speedup for the best benchmark results. In the newest tests, called version 1.1, the best results improved by up to 2.3 times over those from June.

In Praise of Ponzis #economy #blockchain

After the auction, it was clear that the group failed. The DAO fulfilled its purpose, albeit unsuccessfully, and it was time to return everyone's money and call it a day. Then something strange happened. The price of $PEOPLE tokens shot up dramatically. It was worth nearly 100 times more than what original contributors paid at its peak.

This means people were willing to pay a 10,000% premium in order to buy shares in a project that no longer has a purpose. And it wasn'y just a handful of people — a whole liquid market emerged. Yesterday, nearly two weeks after the failed option, the daily trading volume in $PEOPLE tokens was over $70,000,000.  Why would anyone pay to buy a token that no longer has a purpose?

Blocks specific sites from appearing in Google search results #software #internet

Blocks specific sites from appearing in Google search results

iorate.github.io/ublacklist/

Rijksmuseum presenteert in 2023 eerste Vermeer tentoonstelling in zijn geschiedenis - Rijksmuseum #art #history

In the spring of 2023, the Rijksmuseum, the national museum of the Netherlands, will dedicate a retrospective exhibition to the 17th-century master Johannes Vermeer for the first time in its history. With loans from all over the world, this promises to be the largest Vermeer exhibition ever. The Rijksmuseum itself has four masterpieces by Vermeer, including the world-famous Milkmaid and The Little Street.

Steve Blank I Can’t See You but I’m Not Blind #health

Regardless of how descriptive the imagery, story or text I can’t create any pictures in my head at all. 2% of people can’t do this either. This inability to visualize is called aphantasia.

I never knew this absence of mental imagery was even a thing until my daughter pointed out that she and I were missing something my wife and other daughter had. Ask us to visualize a rainbow or a sunset and we just see nothing. We can’t create pictures in our head of objects, people, places or experiences. Where others can visualize these things, we can’t. Not for people, memories, or images past or future. When people say visualize this in your mind’s eye I just thought that was a turn of phrase. It now dawns on me that other people were really seeing something in their heads.

Log4Shell Update: Second log4j Vulnerability Published (CVE-2021-44228 + CVE-2021-45046) | LunaSec #security

The new CVE is difficult to understand​

The mention of possible RCE is unfortunately missing from the published CVE. In the CVE it only mentions a possible "Denial-of-Service" attack for versions prior to 2.15.0.

Because of these findings, we recommend that everybody using log4j immediately upgrades to 2.16.0 or later, or manually patches their log4j classes (for details, see our Mitigation Guide). Please read the rest of this post for context about our research.

log4j memes dot com #fun #cry

If you don't know whether to laugh or cry

NASA spacecraft ‘touches’ the Sun for the first time ever #science #engineering #space

A NASA spacecraft has entered a previously unexplored region of the Solar System — the Sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona. The long-awaited milestone, which was reached in April but announced on 14 December, is a major accomplishment for the Parker Solar Probe, a craft that is flying closer to the Sun than any mission in history.

“We have finally arrived,” said Nicola Fox, director of NASA’s heliophysics division, located at the agency’s headquarters in Washington DC. “Humanity has touched the Sun.”

I wrote the book on warp drive. We didn't make a warp bubble. - Big Think #science #physics #nature #longread

In perhaps his most famous quip of all time, celebrated physicist Richard Feynman once remarked, when speaking about new discoveries, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.” When you do science yourself, engaging in the process of research and inquiry, there are many ways you can become your own worst enemy. If you’re the one proposing a new idea, you must avoid falling into the trap of becoming enamored with it; if you do, you run the risk of choosing to emphasize only the results that support it, while discounting the evidence that contradicts or refutes it.

Similarly, if you’re an experimenter or observer who’s become enamored with a particular explanation or interpretation of the data, you have to fight against your own biases concerning what you expect (or, worse, hope) the outcome of your labors will indicate. As the more familiar refrain goes, “If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.” It’s part of why we demand, as part of the scientific process, independent, robust confirmation of every result, as well as the scrutiny of our scientific peers to ensure we’re all doing our research properly and interpreting our results correctly.

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Dainius