ReHacked #13: psychology, security and some fun

Hello again. Some serious and fun stuff this time awaiting to be red by you :) Share this newsletter with your friends if you find it interesting - it’s very important to me. Just hit that big button at the end of the letter - thanks in advance! Have a great time while reading!

You probably don't have a problem playing video games or browsing social media on your phone. In fact, I have no doubt you could sit in front of a screen and do both of those activities for 2 hours, or even longer without breaking your concentration. But what about half an hour of studying? That might be too hard. How about working on your side business for another hour? Doesn't sound too appealing. How to trick Your brain to like the hard things [video]. #learning #biohacking #health

Twitter last week permanently suspended the account of Sci-Hub, the website that has posted millions of freely accessible copies of scientific articles pirated from subscription journals. Twitter said Sci-Hub had violated its policy against promoting “counterfeit goods,” according to Sci-Hub’s founder, Alexandra Elbakyan.  #copyrights

Shoji Morimoto has been advertising himself as a person who can "eat and drink, and give simple feedback, but do nothing more" since June 2018, and has received over 3,000 requests. He has about 270,000 followers on Twitter. Initially, he had offered his "rent-a-person who does nothing" services for free, but he now charges 10,000 yen (roughly $96) per request. #culture #society #japan

Dungeon Adventures, or simply Dungeon, was a magazine targeting consumers of role-playing games, particularly Dungeons & Dragons. It was first published by TSR, Inc. in 1986 as a bimonthly periodical. It went monthly in May 2003 and ceased print publication altogether in September 2007 with Issue 150.  Here is the archive of the magazine for RPG nerds. #rpg #games

Fitbit is now officially part of Google  #internet #software #privacy

A German-led police sting has taken down the "world's largest" darknet marketplace, whose Australian alleged operator used it to facilitate the sale of drugs, stolen credit card data and malware, prosecutors said Tuesday.

At the time of its closure, DarkMarket had nearly 500,000 users and more than 2,400 vendors worldwide, as the coronavirus pandemic leads much of the street trade in narcotics to go online. #security #internet

Universitas Vilnensis of Lithuania gives public-use status for many items in electronic online library #history #education #learning

Imagine what could happen if the country-code top-level domain (ccTLD) of a sovereign state fell into the wrong hands. Here’s how some guy bought the domain name used in the NS delegations for the ccTLD of the Democratic Republic of Congo (.cd) and temporarily took over 50% of all DNS traffic for the TLD that could have been exploited for MITM or other abuse. This issue has been resolved and the .cd ccTLD no longer sends NS delegations to the compromised domain. #security #internet

WhatsApp’s updated privacy policy verges on user surveillance and threatens India’s security, a petition filed in an Indian court said on Thursday, presenting another legal challenge for the Facebook Inc-owned messenger.   #software #privacy

For blue-collar workers, shortening the workweek by four hours leads to a 19% to 24% decrease in smoking, according to the paper, which was published in the December 2020 issue of Economics & Human Biology. For white-collar workers, meanwhile, cut the same amount of hours was associated with a 1.7% to 2.1% drop in BMI.  #health #economy

In June 2020, in the biggest research scandal of the pandemic so far, two of the most important medical journals each retracted a high-profile study of COVID-19 patients. Thousands of news articles, tweets, and scholarly commentaries highlighted the scandal, yet many researchers apparently failed to notice. In an examination of the most recent 200 academic articles published in 2020 that cite those papers, Science found that more than half—including many in leading journals—used the disgraced papers to support scientific findings and failed to note the retractions.  #health #science

[UPDATE: As the world began celebrating the success on K2's summit earlier today, Sergi Mingote (Spain) fell while descending from Camp 1 and has died after climbers tried to help him in Advanced Base Camp.]

K2 (8611) was the last of the 14 8000-meter peaks on Earth that had yet to be climbed in winter. No more. At 5 p.m. January 16, a group of 10 Nepali/Sherpa climbers from separate expeditions ascended the last few meters to the summit together as one. #nature

Many cultures around the world refer to the Pleiades as “seven sisters,”  and also tell quite similar stories about them. After studying the motion of the stars very closely, we believe these stories may date back  100,000 years to a time when the constellation looked quite different. #history #mythology #culture #astronomy

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Thanks for reading and sharing it with your friends.

Dainius.