ReHacked #85: Text entered into Windows’ Run dialogue doesn't gets sent to Microsoft, Mozilla Says Chrome’s Latest Feature Enables Surveillance, The NSA and CIA Use Ad Blockers and more

O one link this week above the fold:

Why You Should Stop Reading News #news #information

First, the speed of news delivery has increased. We used to have to wait to get a newspaper or gossip with people in our town to get our news, but not anymore. Thanks to alerts, texts, and other interruptions, news finds us almost the minute it’s published.

Second, the cost to produce news has dropped significantly.

Third, like other purveyors of drugs, producers of news want you to consume more of it.

Fourth, the incentives are misaligned.

That’s what ReHacked actually do - curated older news. I’m even considering to go on a weekly basis, but would like to hear about it from you, so please, hit the comment button below and share your opinion and please share this with your social media bubbles on Twitter, Facebook other where you are active - this newsletter needs a good spin-off! Thanks!

First things first: I shared a Twitter message in the last issue taht text entered into Windows’ Run dialogue gets sent to Microsoft’s telemetry,  but it is not true.

Marcus: "If you use #GMail, #Google keeps records of every…" - Mastodon #privacy

If you use GMail, Google keeps records of everything you buy, even if you delete the email receipt, and even if you didn't buy the product from them.  Here's metadata from my takeout showing price, delivery address, description, vendor, etc. #privacy

Mozilla Says Chrome’s Latest Feature Enables Surveillance #privacy

Chrome 94 introduces a controversial idle detection API. Basically, websites can ask Chrome to report when a user with a web page open is idle on their device. It’s not just about your usage of Chrome or a particular website: If you’ve stepped away from your computer and aren’t using any applications, Chrome can tell the website you’re not actively using your computer.

Dog parasite is developing resistance to treatments #health #science

Right now, U.S. veterinarians rely on three types of drugs to kill the hookworms, but the parasites appear to becoming resistant to all of them. Researchers from the UGA College of Veterinary Medicine first reported this concerning development in 2019, and new research, published recently in the International Journal for Parasitology: Drugs and Drug Resistance, provides deeper insight into where the problem started and how bad it’s since become.

Lab-grown meat is supposed to be inevitable. The science tells a different story. #futurology #economy

For four years, Wood, who has a PhD in immunology, served as the executive director of global discovery for Pfizer Animal Health. (His division was later spun off into Zoetis, today the largest animal health company in the world.) One of his responsibilities was to oversee production of vaccines, which can involve infecting living cells with weakened virus strains and inducing those cells to multiply inside large bioreactors. In addition to yielding large quantities of vaccine-grade viruses, this approach also creates significant amounts of animal cell slurry, similar to the product next-generation protein startups want to process further into meat. Wood knew the process to be extremely technical, resource-intensive, and expensive. He didn’t understand how costly biomanufacturing techniques could ever be used to produce cheap, abundant human food.

The NSA and CIA Use Ad Blockers Because Online Advertising Is So Dangerous #privacy

Lots of people who use ad blockers say they do it to block malicious ads that can sometimes hack their devices or harvest sensitive information on them. It turns out, the NSA, CIA, and other agencies in the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) are also blocking ads potentially for the same sorts of reasons.

NASA ballistic air gun hurls rocks at space suits to test their micrometeorite protection #engineering #space

Shock testing is commonly used throughout engineering to determine how a product will do when impacted by something. That something could be anything from the ground to a cruise missile. Like so much else in space exploration, engineers at NASA are performing the same type of test, just scaled up. Instead of simply dropping the object under test, as is common in most settings, they shoot it with a steel ball going 3000 ft/second.

FlowBite - Tailwind CSS components library #software

FlowBite is an open-source collection of UI elements based on the utility-first CSS framework Tailwind designed and coded by Themesberg available in Figma and as web components.

Walking Trees, Parasitic Flowers, and Other Remarkable Plants: An Illustrated Guide | The MIT Press Reader #history #nature #longread

Like any good tour guide, Hallé tells stories to illustrate his facts. Readers learn about, among other things, Queen Victoria’s rubber tree; legends of the moabi tree (for example, that powder from the bark confers invisibility); a flower that absorbs energy from a tree; plants that imitate other plants; a tree that rains; and a fern that clones itself.

Hallé’s Atlas aims to show that “the equatorial forest isn’t the ‘green inferno’ that colonialists and adventurers have so often confronted,” as he writes in the book’s introduction, but “a universe with magical allure.” His drawings represent an investment in time that returns a dividend of wonder more satisfying than the ephemeral thrill afforded by the photograph.

Submarine internet cables projected on a globe #technology #internet #link

200,000-Year-Old Hand Art Found Near a Tibetan Hot Spring #nature #history

An international team of researchers has reported the discovery of hand and foot prints from Quesang, in the Tibetan Plateau. The fossil impressions, which date to between 169,000 and 226,000 years ago and seem to have been created intentionally, could represent the earliest known art of its kind.

Called parietal art, this form of ancient visual expression typically crops up on cave walls but can also be made on the ground, as appears to be the case for the recent Tibet discovery. The fossil is a series of hand and foot impressions, none of which overlap.

Truth about ProtonMail #privacy #security

Italy wants an exception to Europe's ga-engine ban for Ferrari, Lambo | Driving #economy

As Europe prepares to ban combustion engines, Italy, home of high-powered, high-testosterone sports cars made by Ferrari and Lamborghini, is already looking for ways around the proposed restrictions.

Mario Draghi’s government is in talks with the European Union on shielding supercar makers from the phase-out, planned to go into effect by 2035, according to Roberto Cingolani, minister for ecological transition.

Leaked Grant Proposal Details High-Risk Coronavirus Research #health #politics

A grant proposal written by the U.S.-based nonprofit the EcoHealth Alliance and submitted in 2018 to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, provides evidence that the group was working — or at least planning to work — on several risky areas of research. Among the scientific tasks the group described in its proposal, which was rejected by DARPA, was the creation of full-length infectious clones of bat SARS-related coronaviruses and the insertion of a tiny part of the virus known as a “proteolytic cleavage site” into bat coronaviruses. Of particular interest was a type of cleavage site able to interact with furin, an enzyme expressed in human cells.

Pope Francis And Other Christian Leaders Are Calling For Bold Climate Action #nature #politics

The leaders of three prominent Christian denominations have issued an unprecedented joint statement calling on people of all faiths to take action to halt the devastating impacts of climate change.

The statement from Pope Francis, Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby and Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew — who collectively minister to more than a billion-and-a-half Christian faithful — comes as the world's political leadership prepares for a major United Nations conference on climate change, COP26, scheduled for early November in Scotland.

Congratulations, Mini, You Made The Stupidest Turn Signals Ever #technology

Over at the Crimson Glow, the East Coast’s fifth-best taillight-themed nightclub and massage parlor, there’s a group of us that meet every month to discuss important taillight developments, the general state of taillightdom globally, brainstorm new taillight ideas, and get really drunk. Normally, it’s a fun way to for hardcore taillight enthusiasts to exchange ideas, but last night was different. Last night I saw something awful. I saw what may be the stupidest rear turn indicators yet developed by the hand of man.

Research: Trusting science makes Americans vulnerable to pseudoscience #science

Pseudoscience is false information that references science broadly or scientific terms, research or phenomena. Across four experiments, researchers asked U.S. adults to read news articles written for the study that intentionally made false claims about two topics: a fictional virus created as a bioweapon or the health effects of genetically modified organisms, or GMOs.

The experiments reveal that study participants who indicated they had higher levels of trust in science were most likely to believe the fake account if it contained scientific references. Those individuals also were more likely to agree that stories spotlighting pseudoscience should be shared with others.

On the other hand, people who demonstrated a stronger understanding of scientific methods were less likely to believe what they read and say it should be shared, regardless of whether the information was attributed to science.

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Dainius