ReHacked #125: Betty Davis Dead at 77, Censored Images From America's Great Depression, Homemade Bugatti and more
Remember What Used to Work, Then Do It Again
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Betty Davis, Trailblazing Queen of Funk, Dead at 77 - Rolling Stone #promemoria
Betty Davis, the cult funk singer and ex-wife of jazz legend Miles Davis who left an underappreciated yet trailblazing body of work, died Wednesday at the age of 77. Danielle Maggio, a close friend of Davis whose research as an ethnomusicologist focused on Davis’ work, confirmed the singer’s death to Rolling Stone. Amie Downs, communications director for Allegheny County where Davis lived, added that the cause of death was natural causes.
Use of Google Analytics and data transfers to the United States: the CNIL orders a website manager/operator to comply | CNIL #internet #privacy
Google Analytics provides statistics on website traffic. After receiving complaints from the NOYB association, the CNIL, in cooperation with its European counterparts, analysed the conditions under which the data collected through this service is transferred to the United States. The CNIL considers that these transfers are illegal and orders a French website manager to comply with the GDPR and, if necessary, to stop using this service under the current conditions.
Top 10 web hacking techniques of 2021 | PortSwigger Research #internet #privacy
Welcome to the Top 10 (new) Web Hacking Techniques of 2021, the latest iteration of our annual community-powered effort to identify the most significant web security research released in the last year.
Since kicking off the selection process in January, the infosec community has nominated 40 research papers, then voted on their favourites to whittle the list down to 15 final-round candidates. Finally, an expert panel consisting of myself and noted researchers Nicolas Grégoire, Soroush Dalili, and Filedescriptor have voted on the 15 finalists to create the official top 10. As usual, we haven't excluded PortSwigger research, but panellists can't vote for anything they're affiliated with.
France to build six new nuclear reactors – POLITICO #energy
French President Emmanuel Macron today announced that France will build six new generation nuclear reactors (so-called EPR2) and will consider building eight additional ones.
"The time of nuclear renaissance has come," Macron said today in Belfort, East of France, in a speech outlining France's energy policy for 2050.
We’ve featured many pictures from the US Farm Security Administration’s (FSA) ambitious project to document the lives of farming families during the 1930s. We’ve witnessed Migrant Mothers, Dorothea Lange’s elegant portraits of life in The Dust Bowl, viewed haunting and powerful pictures of Appalachian families, spent a day in London, Ohio, taken a look at heavy industry at Corpus Christi, Texas and attended a Square Dance in McIntosh County, Oklahoma.
Now we can show you what the censors didn’t want you to see: the black hole photographs. These pictures each contain an inky black disc of nothing. A black sun hangs with pendant menace and mystery.
But they’re neither objects nor stains, rather punch holes made by Roy Stryker, director of the FSA’s documentary photograph program, and his team of editors. The holes marked pictures as unfit for purpose. But what was the purpose of the Government program if not to show it all?
A Medieval Book That Opens Six Different Ways, Revealing Six Different Books in One | Open Culture #history
Technology has come so far that we consider it no great achievement when a device the size of a single paper book can contain hundreds, even thousands, of different texts. But 21st-century humanity didn’t come up with the idea of putting multiple books in one, nor did we first bring that idea into being — not by a long shot. Medieval book historian Erik Kwakkel points, for example, to the “dos-à-dos” (back to back) binding of the 16th and 17th centuries, which made for books “like Siamese twins in that they present two different entities joined at their backs: each part has one board for itself, while a third is shared between the two,” so “reading the one text you can flip the ‘book’ to consult the other.”
It’s algorithmic, generative 70s sci-fi pulp, courtesy OpenAI. Artist Lewis tells us about how it was done. Meanwhile, see how many friends will pretend to have heard of Neytiri A. Quaritch’s pioneering tome, Green Glass is the Color of the Wind.
Whether you’re a hardcore sci-fi fan or have just been rummaging 70s paperbacks at a flea market, I’ll give you a moment to just soak this in before we get into the explanation of the machine learning techniques behind the scenes. I had to clean up some coffee I chortled out my nose.
Some Advice Gathered from People Smarter than Me
I have credited the people who gave me this advice, but this is worded in the way I would say it, and the precise examples are mine. If any of this sounds stupid, I am to blame. Remember What Used to Work, Then Do It Again The current composition of your behaviors is probably not strictly rational. Some behaviors, you do because they’re adaptive. Some beh…
Biohybrid fish made from human cardiac cells swims like the heart beats #health #futurism #science
Harvard University researchers, in collaboration with colleagues from Emory University, have developed the first fully autonomous biohybrid fish from human stem-cell derived cardiac muscle cells. The artificial fish swims by recreating the muscle contractions of a pumping heart, bringing researchers one step closer to developing a more complex artificial muscular pump and providing a platform to study heart disease like arrhythmia.
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Prosecutor won't charge reporter who uncovered database flaw #copyrights
A Missouri prosecutor will not charge a St. Louis Post-Dispatch journalist who exposed a state database flaw that allowed public access to thousands of teachers' Social Security numbers.
Cole County Prosecutor Locke Thompson released a statement Friday saying there is an argument to be made that there was a violation of law, and that the issues at the heart of the investigation have been resolved through non-legal means, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.
Animals in the soil make noises. Biologists are listening. #nature
The first time that Marcus Maeder stuck a noise sensor into the ground, it was on a whim. A sound artist and acoustic ecologist, he was sitting in a mountain meadow and pushed a special microphone he’d built into the soil. “I was just curious,” says Maeder, who is working on a dissertation on the sounds of biodiversity at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich.
He certainly wasn’t prepared for the clamor of sounds that started to flood his headset. “They were very strange. There was thrumming and chirring and scraping. You need a whole new vocabulary to describe it.” Maeder was eavesdropping, he realized, on creatures that live in the soil.
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