ReHacked #150: The Dutch city testing the future of urban life, EU Commission presents mass surveillance plan on May 11, A common sunscreen ingredient turns toxic in the sea and more

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The Dutch city testing the future of urban life - BBC Future #society #architecture #urbanism

A little over a century ago, anyone looking out over the water on the eastern edges of Amsterdam on a clear day would have seen Dutch fishermen hauling their nets from the sea. Today the view is very different – more than 200,000 people now live in a spot that was once covered by the waters of the IJsselmeer, an inland sea created when the opening into the North Sea was cut off by a long dyke in the 1930s.

The settlement created where water once lay is Almere – the newest city in the Netherlands, growing from non-existence in the 1970s to the country's eighth-largest city today. If Atlantis was the ancient city myth says disappeared beneath the waves, Almere is the modern riposte, risen from the sea. And it has done so as perhaps the world's most experimental city, realising differing expressions of the concept of "design for living".

Chat control: EU Commission presents mass surveillance plan on May 11 – Patrick Breyer #privacy

“This spying attack on our private messages and photos by error-prone algorithms is a giant step towards a Chinese-style surveillance state. Will the next step be for the post office to open and scan all letters? Organized child porn rings don’t use email or messenger services, but darknet forums. With its plans to break secure encryption, the EU Commission is putting the overall security of our private communications and public networks, trade secrets and state secrets at risk to please short-term surveillance desires. Opening the door to foreign intelligence services and hackers is completely irresponsible. To stop chat control, the net community must go to the barricades as!”

European Commission prefers breaking privacy to protecting kids | Light Blue Touchpaper #privacy

The overt purpose is to pressure tech companies to take down illegal material, and material that might possibly be illegal, more quickly. A new agency is to be set up in the Hague, modeled on and linked to Europol, to maintain an official database of illegal child sex-abuse images. National authorities will report abuse to this new agency, which will then require hosting providers and others to take suspect material down. The new law goes into great detail about the design of the takedown process, the forms to be used, and the redress that content providers will have if innocuous material is taken down by mistake. There are similar provisions for blocking URLs; censorship orders can be issued to ISPs in Member States.

A common sunscreen ingredient turns toxic in the sea — anemones suggest why #nature #ecology

A common but controversial sunscreen ingredient that is thought to harm corals might do so because of a chemical reaction that causes it to damage cells in the presence of ultraviolet light.

Researchers have discovered that sea anemones, which are similar to corals, make the molecule oxybenzone water-soluble by tacking a sugar onto it. This inadvertently turns oxybenzone into a molecule that — instead of blocking UV light — is activated by sunlight to produce free radicals that can bleach and kill corals. “This metabolic pathway that is meant to detoxify is actually making a toxin,” says Djordje Vuckovic, an environmental engineer at Stanford University in California, who was part of the research team. The animals “convert a sunscreen into something that’s essentially the opposite of a sunscreen”.

If Programming Languages Were Futurama Characters #fun

Good news, everyone! Coming to you live from Omicron Persei 8, in Hypno-Vision, and sponsored by Bachelor Chow... What if programming languages were Futurama characters?

NVIDIA Releases Open-Source GPU Kernel Modules | NVIDIA Technical Blog #software

NVIDIA is now publishing Linux GPU kernel modules as open source with dual GPL/MIT license, starting with the R515 driver release. You can find the source code for these kernel modules in the NVIDIA Open GPU Kernel Modules repo on GitHub.

El Salvador expected to default as bitcoin plummets | Economy and Business | EL PAÍS English Edition #blockchain #economy

The Salvadoran experiment to make bitcoin legal currency has hit a wall. As a result of the fall in global markets caused by the uncertainty of the war in Ukraine, rising inflation and the US Federal Reserve’s decision to raise interest rates, the price of the most popular cryptocurrency in the world has plummeted more than 50% from its all-time highs. And with it, so too have the bonds of the government of El Salvador, which are trading at 40% of their original value, as investors start to doubt whether the country can meet its next debt payment.

Some Top 100,000 Websites Collect Everything You Type—Before You Hit Submit | WIRED #privacy

When you sign up for a newsletter, make a hotel reservation, or check out online, you probably take for granted that if you mistype your email address three times or change your mind and X out of the page, it doesn't matter. Nothing actually happens until you hit the Submit button, right? Well, maybe not. As with so many assumptions about the web, this isn't always the case, according to new research: A surprising number of websites are collecting some or all of your data as you type it into a digital form.

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Dainius