ReHacked #86: the rights of the machines, Something Weird Is Happening on Facebook, Imgur acquired by Medialab and more

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btop++ #software #link

Resource monitor that shows usage and stats for processor, memory, disks, network and processes.

AI cannot be the inventor of a patent, appeals court rules - BBC News #copyrights #ai #futurism

At its core, the argument is about whether a law written for human inventors can be applied to machines.

The appeal court ruled against Stephen Thaler, creator of a system called Dabus, who took a case against the UK's Intellectual Property Office (IPO) which refused patents to his AI.

Something Weird Is Happening on Facebook – Political Orphans #internet #socialnetworks

That first post generated 21 comments and 59 shares. The second one on the same hyper-twee recipe page generated 1.4 million comments and 35,000 shares. Yes, a question-post invites more engagement than a simple comment, but there’s something else at work here. We’re seeing a rash of posts like this soliciting a kind of engagement that would reveal valuable personal insights. In many cases they’re coming from pages purporting to be “blogs” which in fact are nodes in an “affiliate network.”

These affiliate networks are the new Tupperware or LuLaRoe, where housewives or hobbyists sell clicks instead of Amway. The humans in this network provide a veneer of authenticity. Network owners give them access to troves of thin content, usually recipes or vapid “lifestyle” tips, while cramming their pages to the gills with ads. Bloggers get a cut of the ad revenue, but here’s where it gets interesting. They aren’t doing a lot of selling. These social media and blog ads don’t appear to generate much revenue. Rarely are the blogs specifically selling anything on any scale. For that matter, they rarely write much either. This multi-billion dollar industry has to be getting revenue somewhere else.

Prevent Google from mangling links on the search results when clicking or copying on Firefox #software

view raw        noMangleGoogle.user.js        hosted with ❤ by GitHub

The Mom Test - How to talk to customers. A Summary #books #marketing

In the chapter The Mom Test the interesting part begins. Rob shows you a really common scenario on how a bad validation conversation looks like. It starts with the so-called Mom Test. A son wants to test his idea on his mum and asks her a couple of questions. Since the mum doesn't want to hurt the feelings of the son she "validates" the idea for him and tells him that it is really awesome. It follows a second conversation that focuses purely on the problem the idea wants to solve (digital recipes). With that approach, the son has some success, by focusing on the mum, her iPad, and cooking skills instead of pitching his idea.

Imgur acquired by Medialab - Imgur #software #internet #economy

Bitfinex just spent $23.7 million in fees to make a single Ethereum payment #blockchain #crypto

UPDATE (6:10 p.m. EST): The majority of the funds -- some $22.1 million worth of ETH -- have been returned to the Bitfinex-controlled wallet. The transaction was sent at 5:14 p.m. EST at a cost of $33.74.

‘Impossible’ Particle Discovery Adds Key Piece to the Strong Force Puzzle | Quanta Magazine #physics #nature #longread

This spring, at a meeting of Syracuse University’s quark physics group, Ivan Polyakov announced that he had uncovered the fingerprints of a semi-mythical particle.

“We said, ‘This is impossible. What mistake are you making?’” recalled Sheldon Stone, the group’s leader.

Polyakov went away and double-checked his analysis of data from the Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment, which the Syracuse group is part of. The evidence held. It showed that a particular set of four fundamental particles called quarks can form a tight clique, contrary to the belief of most theorists. The LHCb collaboration reported the discovery of the composite particle, dubbed the double-charm tetraquark, at a conference in July and in two papers posted earlier this month that are now undergoing peer review.

Secret military aircraft possibly exposed on TikTok | War Is Boring #privacy #security #socialmedia

An OPSEC violation has once again made a case for why using TikTok should be a punishable offense in the military, this time after someone revealed some US stealth technology testing going on and posted it to the Chinese government-affiliated platform.

The stealthy object -possibly a component of a new drone or plane- was filmed on a tractor-trailer platform at Helendale Radar Cross Section Facility.

After making their debut on a social media platform tied to America’s top adversary, images of the object quickly made their way to the internet, gracing everything from 4chan to Reddit.

Revenge Bedtime Procrastination - by Anne Helen Petersen - Culture Study #health #psychology

Here is a potentially familiar scene. You are exhausted after working a full day, the sort of day when you felt like your attention was drawn in 20 different directions, where you were ricocheting between obligations and meetings and running six minutes late to pick-up and realizing that if you didn’t put that load of laundry in the wash now, at 9 pm, the rest of the week could very well collapse in on itself. You answered emails while stirring something on the stove. You answered different emails while half-listening to a story from a family member or roommate. You might have squeezed in some time for exercise, but you spent most of that time thinking about work: either periodically checking your phone or making mental to-do lists. You put your kids to bed, you let the dog outside, you turn off the lights, you’re ready for a much needed good night’s sleep — but then you can’t put yourself to bed.

Revenge Bedtime Procrastination

This is the Sunday edition of Culture Study — the newsletter from Anne Helen Petersen, which you can read about here. If you like it and want more like it in your inbox, consider subscribing. Here is a potentially familiar scene. You are exhausted after working a full day, the sort of day when you …

Culture Study

Download Inkscape 1.1.1 | Inkscape #software #link

Military leaders saw pandemic as opportunity to test propaganda techniques, report says | Ottawa Citizen #security #politics

Canadian military leaders saw the pandemic as a unique opportunity to test out propaganda techniques on an unsuspecting public, a newly released Canadian Forces report concludes.

The federal government never asked for the so-called information operations campaign, nor did cabinet authorize the initiative developed during the COVID-19 pandemic by the Canadian Joint Operations Command, then headed by Lt.-Gen. Mike Rouleau.

Portpass app may have exposed hundreds of thousands of users' personal data | CBC News #privacy

Private proof-of-vaccination app Portpass exposed personal information, including the driver's licences, of what could be as many as hundreds of thousands of users by leaving its website unsecured.

On Monday evening, CBC News received a tip that the user profiles on the app's website could be accessed by members of the public.

CBC is not sharing how to access those profiles, in order to protect users' personal information, but has verified that email addresses, names, blood types, phone numbers, birthdays, as well as photos of identification like driver's licences and passports can easily be viewed by reviewing dozens of users' profiles.

The information was not encrypted and could be viewed in plain text.

In 2019, Almost All of Facebook's Top Christian Pages Were Run By Foreign Troll Farms - RELEVANT #socialnetworks #politics

19 of Facebook’s top 20 pages for American Christians are run by Eastern European troll farms overseas, internal documents leaked to MIT Technology Review reveal. The data shows the vast spread of Facebook misinformation is largely powered by coordinated efforts among foreign professionals working together to spread provocative content in the U.S.

These groups, based largely in Kosovo and Macedonia, have been particularly successful when it comes to targeting American Christians. Though they split their efforts among multiple pages, they are mostly operated by the same groups. Collectively, their Christian Facebook pages reach about 75 million users a month — an audience 20 times the size of the next largest Christian Facebook page.

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Dainius