ReHacked #165: FCC wants TikTok removed from app stores over spying concerns, Swedish Radio reveals how Facebook stored sensitive information, The GPU shortage is over and more

Make a donation - support Ukraine

Ukrainian Red Cross | Providing emergency aid to all those in need

Urgent Action Fund for Women’s Human Rights | Supporting women and LGBTQI+ people in and around Ukraine

Voices of Children | Helping children in Ukraine affected by conflict

Don’t forget to share if you like what you read here, subscribe (if not yet) and leave a comment any form of your feedback is very important to me. Thanks!

RSS feed available if you don’t want to clutter your inbox.

U.S. communications regulator wants TikTok removed from app stores over spying concerns | CBC News #privacy #security #software #socialnetworks

Brendan Carr, a commissioner with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), has written a letter to the CEOs of both companies, alerting them that the wildly popular video-sharing app does not comply with the requirements of their app store policies.

"TikTok is not what it appears to be on the surface. It is not just an app for sharing funny videos or meme. That's the sheep's clothing," Carr said in the letter. "At its core, TikTok functions as a sophisticated surveillance tool that harvests extensive amounts of personal and sensitive data."

"It is clear that TikTok poses an unacceptable national security risk due to its extensive data harvesting being combined with Beijing's apparently unchecked access to that sensitive data."

Swedish Radio created fake pharmacy - reveals how Facebook stored sensitive information - Radio Sweden | Sveriges Radio #privacy #internet

Facebook say that their system is built to find and delete sensitive information, for example about people's medication, illnesses and sex lives.

By creating a made-up online pharmacy that has been visited by fictitious customers, Swedish Radio News can show that the social media giant saves sensitive information.

After hundreds of thousands of data transfers to Facebook, the social media giant has still not answered whether its systems can filter words in Swedish.

The GPU shortage is over - The Verge #hardware #economy

Over the past six months, the street price of a modern GPU has been chopped in half. Almost every graphics card we track fell by more than 50 percent on eBay since January — 30 percent of that since April alone.

It was also Nvidia’s most popular and best bang for your buck cards — the RTX 3060 Ti, RTX 3070, and RTX 3080 — that saw the biggest dips. Of those cards, the 3060 Ti is the only used GPU that can’t be had at or under MSRP on average. Meanwhile, an average AMD card will cost you $100 less than MSRP.

What happened when the rich stopped intermarrying #history #society

When the Queen went into mourning, the Season was effectively canceled for three successive years (1861–1863). As a result, posh rich daughters failed to meet posh rich men, and married commoners instead.

Fortune India: Business News, Strategy, Finance and Corporate Insight #energy #economy #futurism

The latest buzzword in the world of global energy aspirations sounds like the title of a blockbuster Sci-Fi movie — Green H2 -1-1-1 ($1 for 1 kg of green hydrogen in 1 decade). The buzzword may be new but the science behind it was dreamt up way back in the 19th century. “Water will one day be employed as fuel, that hydrogen and oxygen which constitute it, used singly or together, will furnish an inexhaustible source of heat and light, of an intensity of which coal is not capable,” Jules Verne wrote in his 1875 novel, The Mysterious Island.

Hydrogen, nature’s lightest and most abundant element, can be used as energy after being taken out from coal (brown hydrogen), natural gas (grey hydrogen), renewable energy (green hydrogen) and water (blue hydrogen). Technologies for doing so have been around for decades but are yet to become commercially viable as output is less than the energy used to produce the gas. But this is set to change with governments and companies making hydrogen an important part of their carbon neutrality goals.

If you would like to propose any interesting article for the next ReHacked issue, just hit reply or push this sexy “Leave a comment” (if not subscribed yet) button below. It’s a nice way to start a discussion.

Thanks for reading this digest and remember: we can make it better together, just leave your opinion or suggestions after pressing this button above or simply hit the reply in your e-mail and don’t forget - sharing is caring ;) Have a great week!

Dainius