ReHacked #117: Music industry is suing youtube-dl hosters, Why Rocket Engines Don't Melt, The impact of sexual abuse on female development and more
Being useful to others isn’t always good for us. --Zhuangzi
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Music industry is suing youtube-dl hosters #copyrights
The music industry is shifting up a gear and is now taking action against a German hosting provider. Three big labels are suing the provider Uberspace for hosting the website of the open source project youtube-dl. With the software, which is available on the code sharing platform Github, YouTube videos and music files can be downloaded without a web browser. According to the plaintiffs, this violates copyright law.
The dispute between the music industry, youtube-dl and its environment has been smoldering for over a year. At that time, the US lobby organization Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) managed to briefly remove the source code of youtube-dl from Github.
Engine Cooling - Why Rocket Engines Don't Melt | Everyday Astronaut #engineering
The gas generator uses both a heat sink and a very fuel-rich exhaust. This is done as the other types of cooling can’t be used for a spinning turbine. In this situation, engineers just have to use high temperature tolerant metals and lower the exhaust temperature so that the metal can handle the heat.
Regenerative cooling is used for cooling the chamber walls, throat and the first section of the nozzle, and for the inside of the engine, some film cooling is done. Film cooling with the gas generator exhaust at the nozzle extension is utilized when the regenerative cooling channels end. Additionally, the nozzle extension also radiates additional heat away by glowing bright orange using a niobium alloy.
The vacuum optimized Merlin engine doesn’t appear to use ablative cooling, but as the upper stages are only used once, the engine could probably even have used ablative cooling if it were necessary.
About 30 years ago, it was realized that child sexual abuse was much more prevalent than had been previously thought, and research evidence began to accrue indicating that such abuse often had deleterious consequences both during childhood and across later periods of development. There were inconsistencies and large gaps in this knowledge (Trickett & Putnam, 1993). This was partly because the research designs at the time were largely cross-sectional studies of acute reactions of children recently reported to authorities for sexual abuse or retrospective studies of adults who in adulthood reported that they had been abused as children. Neither design facilitated understanding of how the experience of child sexual abuse affected development over time.
Toxic Culture Is Driving the Great Resignation #career
The Great Resignation is affecting blue-collar and white-collar sectors with equal force. Some of the hardest hit industries — apparel retail, fast food, and specialty retail — employ the highest percentage of blue-collar workers among all industries we studied. Management consulting, in contrast, had the second-highest attrition rate but also employs the largest percentage of white-collar professionals of any Culture 500 industry. Enterprise software, which also suffered high churn, employs the highest percentage of engineering and technical employees.
Industry explains some of the variation in attrition rates across companies but not all of it. Even within the same industry, we observed significant differences in attrition rates. The figure below compares competitors with high and low attrition rates within their industries. (See “How Culture 500 Company Attrition Rates Compare Within Industries.”) Workers are 3.8 times more likely to leave Tesla than Ford, for example, and more than twice as likely to quit JetBlue than Southwest Airlines.
Austrian DSB: EU-US data transfers to Google Analytics illegal #privacy #copyrights
In a groundbreaking decision, the Austrian Data Protection Authority ("Datenschutzbehörde" or "DSB") has decided on a model case by noyb that the continuous use of Google Analytics violates the GDPR. This is the first decision on the 101 model complaints filed by noyb in the wake of the so-called "Schrems II" decision. In 2020, the Court of Justice (CJEU) decided that the use of US providers violates the GDPR, as US surveillance laws require US providers like Google or Facebook to provide personal details to US authorities. Similar decisions are expected in other EU member states, as regulators have cooperated on these cases in an EDPB "task force". It seems the Austrian DSB decision is the first to be issued.
Don’t try to sanitize input. Escape output. #security #software
The only code that knows what characters are dangerous is the code that’s outputting in a given context.
So the better approach is to store whatever name the user enters verbatim, and then have the template system HTML-escape when outputting HTML, or properly escape JSON when outputting JSON and JavaScript.
Why is 'Debt' Spelled Like That? | Merriam-Webster #history
Debt is derived through the Middle English word dette, from the Old French dette or dete. Note the conspicuous absence of "b." Some scholars in those dark days we refer to as the Middle Ages sure did. They knew that the word had its origin in the Latin word debitum, and they thought it should pay homage to that word—and they had the wherewithal to slip a "b" into both the English and French versions of the word. Despite the fact that the "b" had never been pronounced in either language, the spellings became established.
Meta sued for £2.3bn over claim Facebook users in UK were exploited | Meta | The Guardian #socialnetworks #privacy
Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta is being sued for £2.3bn in a class action lawsuit that claims 44 million Facebook users in the UK had their data exploited after signing up to the social network.
The case argues that Meta has broken the 1998 Competition Act by setting an “unfair price” for Facebook’s UK users when they are given access to the service. The lawsuit brought by the legal expert Dr Liza Lovdahl Gormsen argues that the price for getting on Facebook, which does not charge its users, is handing over personal data that generates most of the company’s income.
How to be useless | Psyche Guides #psychology #longread
We don’t always need to be useful; it’s good to simply enjoy yourself. In our society, as in Zhuangzi’s, usefulness is often presented as the measuring rod, the bottom line against which we should gauge all policies and life decisions. Zhuangzi shows that this mindset traps us in a calculus in which we end up seeing ourselves and people around us as a means to an end. This prevents us from enjoying our own lives, and the things around us, on their own terms.
The Korean War: Barbarism Unleashed #history #politics #longread
Revealed: UK Gov't Plans Publicity Blitz to Undermine Chat Privacy - Rolling Stone #privacy #politics
The UK government is set to launch a multi-pronged publicity attack on end-to-end encryption, Rolling Stone has learned. One key objective: mobilizing public opinion against Facebook’s decision to encrypt its Messenger app.
The Home Office has hired the M&C Saatchi advertising agency — a spin-off of Saatchi and Saatchi, which made the “Labour Isn’t Working” election posters, among the most famous in UK political history — to plan the campaign, using public funds.
Why isn't there a universal data-format for résumés? #software
So, here's a thing.
A lot of job application sites will ask you to upload a résumé (henceforth "CV") and then attempt to parse it out into something more like a set of database entries, presumably with the idea of making it easier for prospective employers to search for people with particular types of experience.
The problem is, the parsing software they all seem to use is hot garbage.
Panic as Kosovo pulls the plug on its energy-guzzling bitcoin miners | Cryptocurrencies | The Guardian #blockchain
For bitcoin enthusiasts in Kosovo with a breezy attitude to risk, it has been a good week to strike a deal on computer equipment that can create, or “mine”, the cryptocurrency.
From Facebook to Telegram, new posts in the region’s online crypto groups became dominated by dismayed Kosovans attempting to sell off their mining equipment – often at knockdown prices.
“There’s a lot of panic and they’re selling it or trying to move it to neighbouring countries,” said cryptoKapo, a crypto investor and administrator of some of the region’s largest online crypto communities.
Kronos hack update: Employers are suing as paycheck delays drag on : NPR #security #software #internet
A month-old ransomware attack is still causing administrative chaos for millions of people, including 20,000 public transit workers in the New York City metro area, public service workers in Cleveland, employees of FedEx and Whole Foods, and medical workers across the country who were already dealing with an omicron surge that has filled hospitals and exacerbated worker shortages.
BBC licence fee to be abolished in 2027 and funding frozen | BBC licence fee | The Guardian #politics #copyrights
<…> this would be the end of the current licence fee funding model for the BBC, raising doubts about the long-term financial future and editorial independence of the public service broadcaster under a Conservative government.
Dorries said: “This licence fee announcement will be the last. The days of the elderly being threatened with prison sentences and bailiffs knocking on doors are over. Time now to discuss and debate new ways of funding, supporting and selling great British content.”
Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai were involved in ad collusion plot, claims court filing - The Verge #copyrights #internet
One Facebook study in 2019 found that Facebook’s bids for in-app impressions won more frequently in Google-run auctions than they did on any other platform. At the same time, the average price Facebook paid per in-app impression was lower in Google-run auctions than it was on any other platform. This would be a puzzling result, to say the least, if Facebook faced the same competition for inventory across auction houses.
Google also denies granting Facebook or its ad networks any structural advantage in ad auctions. “FAN must make the highest bid to win a given impression,” Shottenfels said. “If another eligible network or exchange bids higher, they win the auction.”
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