ReHacked #119: When Cigarette Companies Used Doctors to Push Smoking, Denmark opensources it's economical model, Impact of Starlink Satellites and more
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UK.gov's No Place To Hide campaign flops on launch • The Register #privacy #security
The British government's PR campaign to destroy popular support for end-to-end encryption on messaging platforms has kicked off, under the handle "No Place To Hide", and it's as broad as any previous attack on the safety-guaranteeing technology.
Reported by us well in advance last year, the £500k campaign aims to destroy public support for end-to-end encryption (E2EE) as part of a wider strategy.
When Cigarette Companies Used Doctors to Push Smoking - HISTORY #health #history
Soon after e-cigarettes debuted in Europe in 2006, tobacco companies began investing heavily in vaping. The Food and Drug Administration noted in 2018 that vaping was increasing at an alarming rate among teens, raising concern that more young people were becoming addicted to nicotine. In 2019, six deaths and hundreds of cases of vaping-related lung illness were reported. By September, 2019, the U.S. Health Secretary Alex Azar said the FDA planned to take flavored e-cigarettes off the market.
Google Camera randomly changes some QR code URLs on Android 12 #software #security
As reported and investigated by German publication Heise, the Google Camera routinely runs into at least three distinct errors. The first one revolves around a few country-code top level domains (ccTLD), and it doesn’t matter if a QR code only directs you to an affected domain (like the non-existent Austrian https://fooco.at) or if it links to further directories (https://fooco.at/bar/index.htm). If the domain’s second level (fooco) ends with certain strings, the Google Camera will automatically insert a dot, turning a link like https://fooco.at into https://foo.co.at. Heise tested further combinations and found that the issue also exists for .au, .br, .hu, .il, .kr, .nz, .ru, .tr, .uk, and .za. The affected strings at the end of the second level include co, com, ac, net, org, gov, mil, muni, and edu, but not or, gv, and k12.
DREAM-DK/MAKRO #software #economy
This is the first publicly available beta version of MAKRO.
It comes with batteries included in the form of a stylized baseline starting in 2025, such that users can simulate marginal policy experiments without requiring a data subscription or calibrating the model. Note that the stylized baseline is NOT a serious forecast of the Danish economy, but rather is based on a number of simplified projection assumptions. As such, the baseline should only be used for marginal experiments rather than as a forecast on its own.
Addiction Journal › Cannabis use produces persistent cognitive impairments #health
A systematic review published today in the scientific journal Addiction has found that cannabis use leads to acute cognitive impairments that may continue beyond the period of intoxication. This Canadian-led meta-review (review of reviews) merged the findings of 10 meta-analyses representing more than 43,000 participants.
The study found that cannabis intoxication leads to small to moderate cognitive impairments in areas including
- making decisions,
- suppressing inappropriate responses,
- learning through reading and listening,
- the ability to remember what one reads or hears, and
- the time needed to complete a mental task.
These and other acute impairments mirror the residual effects documented for cannabis use, suggesting that the damaging effects of cannabis begin while it is being consumed and persist beyond that period.
Palomar Survey Instrument Analyzes Impact of Starlink Satellites | www.caltech.edu #technology #science
The findings, reported in the January 17 issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters, shows 5,301 satellite streaks appear in archival images taken between November 2019 and September 2021. The streaks are most apparent in so-called twilight observations, those taken at dawn or dusk, which are important for finding near-Earth asteroids that appear close to the sun in the sky. ZTF has discovered several asteroids of this nature, including 2020 AV2, the first asteroid spotted with an orbit that fits entirely within the orbit of Venus.
"In 2019, 0.5 percent of twilight images were affected, and now almost 20 percent are affected," says Przemek Mróz, study lead author and a former Caltech postdoctoral scholar who is now at the University of Warsaw in Poland.
Alabama farmer sues John Deere for ‘right to repair’ - al.com #copyrights
Trinity Dale Wells is a cattle farmer on a small farm of about 150 acres he leases in Franklin County in northwest Alabama. Wells has owned John Deere tractors his whole life. Last year the stop engine light came on his tractor.
“All it was was some water in a little old sensor wire and he walks around there and dried it out and took it off and put it back on,” Wells said in an interview with AL.com
He has always gotten his tractor repaired at a local dealer, so he was surprised to learn his only repair option was to call John Deere to adjust proprietary software on the machine, a repair he says took a John Deere technician less than three minutes but cost over $600.
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