ReHacked #91: Most Canadians believe Facebook harms their mental health, Valve bans blockchain games and NFTs on Steam, Twitter is being sued for letting Saudi spies inside the company and more

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Every search bar looks like a URL bar to users – Terence Eden’s Blog #design #ui #ux

Most Canadians believe Facebook harms their mental health, survey suggests - The Globe and Mail #health #socialnetworks

A broad swath of Canadians has a sour view of Facebook, with half of respondents to a new poll saying it should be regulated or broken up as a “corporate image” crisis rocks the social media giant yet again.

Forty per cent of those who responded to an online survey by Leger and the Association for Canadian Studies said they had a negative opinion of the company.

Valve bans blockchain games and NFTs on Steam, Epic will try to make it work - The Verge #blockchain

Games that use blockchain technology or let users exchange NFTs or cryptocurrencies won’t be allowed on Steam, according to a rule added to Valve’s “What you shouldn’t publish on Steam” list. The change was pointed out by SpacePirate, a developer working on an NFT-based game, who said that the change was because the company doesn’t allow game items that could have real-world value. But Steam could also be avoiding controversy with the move.

Steam is one of the most well-known PC game stores, but it’s not the only one. While Epic’s CEO Tim Sweeney has said that the company isn’t interested in touching NFTs, that policy doesn’t seem to apply to games in its store: Epic told The Verge that it’s “open” to the idea of games that use NFTs or cryptocurrencies in an email on Friday.

The void in Calgary: How office towers emptied in a once bustling downtown - The Globe and Mail #urbanism #city #infographic

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, Calgary had the highest rate of commercial vacancies in Canada as an economic downturn driven by the price of oil hollowed out the city’s downtown office towers. Calgary is now struggling to figure out what that means for the city — and how to fix it.

New Zealand council ends contract with wizard after two decades of service | New Zealand | The Guardian #world

The official Wizard of New Zealand, perhaps the only state-appointed wizard in the world, has been cast from the public payroll, spelling the end to a 23-year legacy.

The Wizard, whose real name is Ian Brackenbury Channell, 88, had been contracted to Christchurch city council for the past two decades to promote the city through “acts of wizardry and other wizard-like services”, at a cost of $16,000 a year. He has been paid a total of $368,000.

Carbon | Create and share beautiful images of your source code #software

Create and share beautiful images of your source code.

Twitter is being sued for letting Saudi spies inside the company - Protocol — The people, power and politics of tech #politics #privacy #socialnetworks

A prominent human rights activist and Saudi dissident is suing Twitter for allegedly hiring two men who acted as spies for the Saudi government. The suit accuses Twitter of negligence in its failure to detect the two spies inside the company — who are currently under indictment from U.S. federal prosecutors — and prevent them from stealing personal information for the Saudi government.

Ali Al-Ahmed, the leader of the human-rights investigation agency Institute for Gulf Affairs, is known as a prominent critic of the current Saudi regime and was granted asylum to remain in the United States in 1998. The suit filed Oct. 14 in the Northern District of California names both Twitter and the two alleged spies as defendants; Al-Ahmed already has a second suit underway against Twitter in the Southern District of New York, where he is claiming that the company's hiring of the two men eventually led to the imprisonment and death of activists in Saudi Arabia.

Privacy fears as Moscow metro rolls out facial recognition pay system | Russia | The Guardian #privacy

The Moscow metro has rolled out what authorities have lauded as the world’s first mass-scale facial recognition payment system, amid privacy concerns over the new technology.

The cashless, cardless and phoneless system, named Face Pay, launched at more than 240 stations across the Russian capital on Friday.

Ghost Robotics strapped a gun to its robot dog | Engadget #technology #military

Boston Dynamics, the company most commonly associated with robot dogs, prohibits the weaponization of its Spot devices. That's not the case for all robot dog manufacturers, however. One of them, Ghost Robotics, showed off a version of its Q-UGV device that many will have been dreading. It's a robot dog with a gun attached to it.

Ghost Robotics has made robot dogs for the military, and it displayed this deadly model at the Association of the United States Army’s 2021 annual conference in Washington DC this week. A company called Sword International built the "special purpose unmanned rifle" (or SPUR) module. According to The Verge, it has a thermal camera for nighttime operation, an effective range of 1.2km (just under three quarters of a mile) and a 30x optical zoom.

Privacy activists oppose new EU NIS Directive draft • The Register #internet #privacy

The European Union has drawn the ire of privacy activists for proposals to put real names and contact details back into Whois lookups, as part of its Network and Information Systems (NIS) Directive.

The EU Commission's draft update to the NIS Directive has been slowly grinding through the bloc's bureaucracy, and this week German Pirate Party MEP Patrick Breyer declared it "a big step towards abolishing anonymous publications and leaks on the internet."

Researchers show Facebook’s ad tools can target a single user | TechCrunch #internet #socialnetworks #privacy

A new research paper written by a team of academics and computer scientists from Spain and Austria has demonstrated that it’s possible to use Facebook’s targeting tools to deliver an ad exclusively to a single individual if you know enough about the interests Facebook’s platform assigns them.

The paper — entitled “Unique on Facebook: Formulation and Evidence of (Nano)targeting Individual Users with non-PII Data” — describes a “data-driven model” that defines a metric showing the probability a Facebook user can be uniquely identified based on interests attached to them by the ad platform.

Canon sued for disabling scanner when printers run out of ink #hardware #copyrights

Canon USA is being sued for not allowing owners of certain printers to use the scanner or faxing functions if they run out of ink.

David Leacraft, a customer of Canon, filed the class action lawsuit on Tuesday alleging deceptive marketing and unjust enrichment by the printer manufacturer.

Vienna museums open adult-only OnlyFans account to display nudes | Art | The Guardian #culture #socialnetworks #art

Vienna’s tourism board has started an account on OnlyFans – the only social network that permits depictions of nudity – in protest against platforms’ ongoing censorship of its art museums and galleries.

In July, the Albertina Museum’s new TikTok account was suspended and then blocked for showing works by the Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki that showed an obscured female breast, forcing the museum to start a new account. This followed a similar incident in 2019, when Instagram ruled that a painting by Peter Paul Rubens violated the platform’s community standards which prohibit any depictions of nudity – even those that are “artistic or creative in nature”.

Female Spanish thriller writer Carmen Mola revealed to be three men | Books | The Guardian #culture #art #literature

A million euro literary prize has lured three Spanish men out of anonymity, to reveal that they are behind ultra-violent Spanish crime thrillers marketed as the work of “Spain’s Elena Ferrante”

The men had published under the pseudonym Carmen Mola, which roughly translates as “Carmen’s cool”.

When one of their books won the lucrative Planeta prize, the trio went public to pick up the cheque at a glitzy ceremony attended by the Spanish king.

42 years later, how 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' has endured : NPR #history #literature #culture #cyberpunk

It's the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything: 42.

And 42 is now the number of years since the publication of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, the first in the series of wacky and beloved sci-fi books by Douglas Adams.

The book follows Englishman Arthur Dent as he wakes up to find that Earth is about to be demolished to make way for a space highway. Adventure ensues across the galaxy with aliens, super computers and Marvin, a perpetually sad robot.

L0phtCrack is now opensource #software

As of July 1, 2021, the L0phtCrack software is no longer owned by Terahash, LLC. It has been repossessed by the previous owners, formerly known as L0pht Holdings, LLC for Terahash defaulting on the installment sale loan.

L0phtCrack is no longer being sold. The current owners have no plans to sell licenses or support subscriptions for the L0phtCrack software. All sales have ceased as of July 1, 2021. Refunds for any subscription renewals after June 30, 2021 are being processed. Contact admin@l0phtcrack.com to work out details if automatic billing has charged you on or after July 1, 2021.

An underwater mystery on Canada's coast - BBC Travel #nature #history

Greene realised that the 150,000 to 200,000 stakes, representing more than 300 fish traps, filled the shallow wetland. Radiocarbon dating placed the ages to range from 1,300 to just more than 100 years old. For Frank, the most impressive thing about the system is the precision of the designs. "My ancestors were amazing engineers," he said.

He explained that once he started studying how it all worked, he realised the traps are based on a deep knowledge of fish behaviour and the region's large tidal ranges. Laid out in two styles – one heart shaped and one chevron shaped – the traps were lined with removable woven-wood panels that let water through but not the fish. During a rising tide, the fish followed the centreline of the trap, which mimicked the shoreline they'd naturally follow, through an entrance and into the enclosure. When the tide receded; the fish inside the trap were stranded in shallow pools.

Ask a Librarian - Ask a Librarian #link

Google: We're Tracking 270 State-Sponsored Hacker Groups From Over 50 Countries #privacy #security

Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) on Thursday said it's tracking more than 270 government-backed threat actors from more than 50 countries, adding it has approximately sent 50,000 alerts of state-sponsored phishing or malware attempts to customers since the start of 2021.

The warnings mark a 33% increase from 2020, the internet giant said, with the spike largely stemming from "blocking an unusually large campaign from a Russian actor known as APT28 or Fancy Bear."

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