ReHacked #90: RIP Jörg Schilling, Open Source Tractor, Solar-powered aircraft flown for nearly three weeks without landing and more

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Russia STOLE the blueprint for the Oxford/AstraZeneca jab, security sources tell ministers | Daily Mail Online #health #politics

Russia was today accused of using a spy embedded in Britain to steal the design for the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine so Vladimir Putin could create their own suspiciously similar Sputnik V jab and win the race to produce world's first effective coronavirus vaccine.

Security sources have evidence a Moscow mole in the UK was physically able to grab the top secret blueprint - but it is not clear if this was a document from the pharma giant's lab or factory, or a vial of the finished medicine then smuggled out of the country for analysis.

Home Office minister Damian Hinds claimed today he couldn’t comment on the case - but didn’t deny it - and said: ‘It's fair to assume there are certainly foreign states who constantly would like to get their hands on sensitive information, including commercial and scientific secrets and intellectual property'.

Tractor - LifeTrac 6 - Open Source Tractor #engineering #link

[TUHS] RIP Jörg Schilling #promemoria

He will be remembered for his open source projects including

 - cdrtools, the first portable CD burning program

 - star, a powerful and fast tar implementation, the first to  use two processes with a shared ring buffer for better  performance.

 - smake, a make implementation with autoconf features

 - sformat, a versatile SCSI disk formatting program

 - SING, an autoconf fork with a comprehensive set of libc

   shims, providing a uniform API across operating systems

 - ved, an early visual editor for the UNOS operating system (I believe)

 - bosh, a carefully maintained fork of the Bourne shell

 - sccs, a carefully maintained fork of SCCS.  His attempts  to teach it projects and networking will remain unfinished.

 - libfind, an implementation of find(1) as a library for  integration into other software.

 - libxtermcap, an extended termcap library

 - libscg, an early portable SCSI driver and library 

Solar-powered aircraft flown for nearly three weeks without landing | E&T Magazine #engineering #futurism

Airbus has completed test flights for its solar-powered Zephyr aircraft which is designed to stay airborne for weeks at a time in order to provide internet to users on the ground.

Zephyr has flown six times so far, with four low-level test flights and two stratospheric flights. The stratospheric flights flew for around 18 days each, totalling more than 36 days of continuous flight from only two take-offs.

Led by France, 10 EU countries call on Brussels to label nuclear energy as green source | Euronews #energy #politics

A group of ten EU countries, led by France, have asked the European Commission to recognise nuclear power as a low-carbon energy source that should be part of the bloc's decades-long transition towards climate neutrality.

Tapping into Europe's ongoing energy crunch, the countries make the case for nuclear energy as a "key affordable, stable and independent energy source" that could protect EU consumers from being "exposed to the volatility of prices".

The European Parliament Voted to Ban Remote Biometric Surveillance - Schneier on Security #privacy

To respect “privacy and human dignity,” MEPs said that EU lawmakers should pass a permanent ban on the automated recognition of individuals in public spaces, saying citizens should only be monitored when suspected of a crime.

The parliament has also called for a ban on the use of private facial recognition databases — such as the controversial AI system created by U.S. startup Clearview (also already in use by some police forces in Europe) — and said predictive policing based on behavioural data should also be outlawed.

Finland lobbied EU to declare nuclear power sustainable after unpublished cabinet decision supported by Greens | Yle Uutiset | yle.fi #energy #politics

Finland's government has agreed to lobby the EU to declare nuclear power a sustainable energy source, but kept the decision secret.

If nuclear power gets the so-called 'green label', financing for nuclear projects will be easier to come by and the terms of any loans will be softer than for other energy projects.

As a power source that produces virtually no carbon emissions during operations, nuclear has gained the approval of some experts as a sustainable energy source that can help countries transition to a carbon-free energy system.

The Weather Year Round Anywhere on Earth - Weather Spark #link #nature

Check the weather trends where you live or in your vacation destination.

Scribe - An alternative frontend to Medium #software #link

Here's Why Soda Tastes So Much Better in Glass Bottles | Southern Living #interesting

While the good people of Coca-Cola make a good point that their secret formula doesn't change whether you are taking a refreshing sip from a can or a bottle, turns out that the packaging itself might affect the taste. According to food chemist Sara Risch, founder of food and packaging consultancy Science by Design, while the soda's formula remains the same, the plastic, aluminum, or glass packaging can impact the flavor as the liquid reacts with polymers in the packaging, she told Popular Science.

Amazon copied products and rigged search results, documents show #internet #economy

A trove of internal Amazon documents reveals how the e-commerce giant ran a systematic campaign of creating knockoff goods and manipulating search results to boost its own product lines in India - practices it has denied engaging in. And at least two top Amazon executives reviewed the strategy.

GTFOBins #software #security

GTFOBins is a curated list of Unix binaries that can be used to bypass local security restrictions in misconfigured systems.

The project collects legitimate functions of Unix binaries that can be abused to get the f**k break out restricted shells, escalate or maintain elevated privileges, transfer files, spawn bind and reverse shells, and facilitate the other post-exploitation tasks.

Dopamine, Smartphones & You: A battle for your time - Science in the News #psychology #health #socialnetworks

If you’ve ever misplaced your phone, you may have experienced a mild state of panic until it’s been found. About 73% of people claim to experience this unique flavor of anxiety, which makes sense when you consider that adults in the US spend an average of 2-4 hours per day tapping, typing, and swiping on their devices—that adds up to over 2,600 daily touches. Most of us have become so intimately entwined with our digital lives that we sometimes feel our phones vibrating in our pockets when they aren’t even there.

2001: A Space Odyssey | Typeset In The Future #design #art #culture

2001: A Space Odyssey – Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 sci-fi masterpiece – seems an appropriate place to start a blog about typography in sci-fi. Amongst other delights, it offers a zero-gravity toilet, emergency resuscitations, exploding bolts, and product placement aplenty. It’s also the Ur Example of Eurostile Bold Extended’s regular appearance in spacecraft user interfaces.

Why “Trusting the Science” Is Complicated - Los Angeles Review of Books #science #longread #history

IT IS POSSIBLE that John Pringle’s neighbors viewed him with some distaste. Formerly physician-general to the British forces in the Low Countries, in 1749 Pringle had settled down in a rather swanky part of London, where he began investigating the processes behind putrefaction. He would place pieces of beef in a lamp furnace, sometimes combining them with another substance — and then wait for putrefaction to commence, or not. Falsifying an earlier hypothesis, Pringle showed that not only acids but alkalis, like baker’s ammonia, could retard the progress of decay. Even more impressively, some substances, like Peruvian bark (source of the malarial prophylactic, quinine) could outright reverse putrefaction, rendering tainted meat seemingly edible again.

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Dainius