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ReHacked vol. 185: Piracy as a form of music appreciation, Jessica Wade Makes Wikipedia bios For Unknown Women Scientists, Google Engineers Joked About How Incognito Mode Isn't Very Incognito and more

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. --H. L. Mencken
ReHacked vol. 185: Piracy as a form of music appreciation, Jessica Wade Makes Wikipedia bios For Unknown Women Scientists, Google Engineers Joked About How Incognito Mode Isn't Very Incognito and more
Brian Eno, Dieter Moebius, Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Conny Plank in Plank's studio, 1977 by Christa Fast

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Fictitious vol. 19: Piracy as a form of music appreciation #copyrights #music #art

  • The illusion that everything is there when it’s not. With your personal collection, you always knew its limits. And you knew that to add some rare record to it, you’d have to search for it, sometimes futilely. The feeling of finding something new was truly serendipitous. With something like Spotify, it’s too easy to start feeling satisfied with what they’ve got.
  • You don’t own anything. Now, I know this is a bit rich coming from someone who just bragged about storing GBs of pirated music. I have no illusion about musicians actually getting anything from my several monthly streams. But when their music is saved and shared with others, it’s at least cherished.
  • You stop valuing music. When there’s little backstory to how you discovered a certain piece other than “an algorithm suggested I listen to it”, a valuable layer to the musical experience is lost.

1956 Philips 353A Bakelite Vacuum Tube Radio Repair & Restoration – Adam's Vintage Computer Restorations #diy #longread


Jessica Wade Makes Wikipedia bios For Unknown Women Scientists #women #science

When Jessica Wade was invited to Buckingham Palace to receive the prestigious British Empire Medal, she stood out for being a young woman honored for her contributions to science.

Ironically, she was being honored for trying to change that.

The 33-year-old London-based physicist has become something of a phenomenon herself — both an irresistible force and immoveable object — in her very personal campaign to bring more girls to study and work in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics).


Everyone going to the World Cup must have this app - experts are now sounding the alarm – NRK Sport – Sportsnyheter, resultater og sendeplan #privacy #security

– It's not my job to give travel advice, but personally I would never bring my mobile phone on a visit to Qatar.

That's what NRK's head of security Øyvind Vasaasen says after a thorough review of the apps.

Everyone travelling to Qatar during the football World Cup will be asked to download two apps called Ehteraz and Hayya.

Briefly, Ehteraz is an covid-19 tracking app, while Hayya is an official World Cup app used to keep track of match tickets and to access the free Metro in Qatar.

In particular, the covid-19 app Ehteraz asks for access to several rights on your mobile., like access to read, delete or change all content on the phone, as well as access to connect to WiFi and Bluetooth, override other apps and prevent the phone from switching off to sleep mode.


Google Engineers Joked About How Incognito Mode Isn't Very Incognito #software #privacy

Google is at the center of an icky lawsuit, filed in May, that alleges the Silicon Valley giant misled the public about how much data it collects from users even when they're in its Chrome browser's "Incognito" private browsing mode. And while those allegations are concerning, one of the more eye-brow raising details to emerge from the lawsuit is the Google employees' potentially compromising jokes on the matter.

But what was also revealed in court was a very serious email from Google marketing chief Lorraine Twohill sent to CEO Sundar Pichai.

"Make Incognito Mode truly private," Twohill wrote in the email last year, as quoted by Bloomberg. "We are limited in how strongly we can market Incognito because it's not truly private, thus requiring really fuzzy, hedging language that is almost more damaging."


Low Earth Orbit Visualization | LeoLabs #space


China Pairs Armed Robot Dogs With Drones That Can Drop Them Anywhere #futurism #robotics #warfare

Footage of a Chinese-made drone carrying a ‘robot dog’ that is armed with a machine gun has started to make its rounds on social media, and it looks like it was taken straight out of a dystopian war movie. It isn’t immediately clear if the video was recorded as part of a Chinese military exercise or rather in an effort to demonstrate how the pairing will operate, but even without that context, the clip could serve as a foretelling of the technology that may populate future battlegrounds.


First Ever Recording of Friday Kahlo's Voice Discovered in Mexico #art #history

Frida Kahlo is undoubtedly one of the most recognizable names in art history, and an interest in Frida Kahlo's paintings has seen a resurgence over the past 40 years. Both her surreal artwork and dramatic life story have captured the public's imagination, but while it may seem that we have a wealth of information about Kahlo, there's still a lot that remains a mystery. Interestingly, this includes the sound of her voice.


Toyota Suffered a Data Breach by Accidentally Exposing A Secret Key Publicly On GitHub #privacy #security

On October 7, 2022 Toyota, the Japanese-based automotive manufacturer, revealed they had accidentally exposed a credential allowing access to customer data in a public GitHub repo for nearly 5 years. The code was made public from December 2017 through September 2022. While Toyota says they have invalidated the key, any exposure this long could mean multiple malicious actors had already acquired access.

This incident adds Toyota to the list of companies that have had similar exposures; a list that includes Samsung, Nvidia, and Twitch, just to name a few. While this breach at Toyota is currently understood as fairly limited, compared to the ​​6,695 secrets exposed in the Samsung case, the growing number of companies experiencing such issues is still a very disturbing trend.


The Rabbit Box: A Most Unusual Vintage Children’s Book for Grownups Celebrating the Mystery of Life and the Magic of Love – The Marginalian #art #history #longread

In 1970, poet, playwright, and former priest Joseph Pintauro teamed up with artist Norman Laliberté on a marvelous limited-edition boxed set titled The Rainbow Box, containing four children’s books for grownups, each dedicated to a season and full of playful and poignant fragmentary meditations on love, loss, war, peace, loneliness, communion — in other words, the emotional kaleidoscope of life itself. Dedicated to spring was The Rabbit Box (public library) — a most unusual lens on themes both of the time (the dawn of the environmental movement, the anti-war movement) and timeless (love, peace, the meaning of the human experience), equal parts strange and spectacular.

What emerges is a poem, a love letter, an elegy for Mother Earth, an incantation against war, and above all a vibrant invitation to aliveness.


How Brian Eno Created "Ambient 1: Music For Airports" #history #art

Music for Airports was released in 1978, though Brian Eno started working on it while working on David Bowie’s Low, in 1976. Part of it was recorded at the recording studio of Conny Plank, a legendary Krautrock producer, where he started by recording single notes sung by a trio of female singers, which he would later loop via tape machines. At a 1996 talk, Brian Eno described the recording of Music for Airports:

Music for Airports, at least one of the pieces on there, is structurally very, very simple. There are sung notes, sung by three women and my self. One of the notes repeats every 23 1/2 seconds. It is in fact a long loop running around a series of tubular aluminum chairs in Conny Plank’s studio. The next lowest loop repeats every 25 7/8 seconds or something like that. The third one every 29 15/16 seconds or something. What I mean is they all repeat in cycles that are called incommensurable — they are not likely to come back into sync again.

Removing SMS support from Signal Android (soon) #software

We have now reached the point where SMS support no longer makes sense. For those of you interested, we walk through our reasoning in more detail below.

In order to enable a more streamlined Signal experience, we are starting to phase out SMS support from the Android app. You will have several months to transition away from SMS in Signal, to export your SMS messages to another app, and to let the people you talk to know that they might want to switch to Signal, or find another channel if not.


Students break acceleration world record | News | Oct 6, 2022 | University of Stuttgart #science #engineering

The 20 members of the GreenTeam university group and the associated support association have been preparing for the world record for almost a year. The young team members study a range of different subjects at the University of Stuttgart and designed and built the e-vehicle in their own workshop on Campus Vaihingen.

The carbon racing car weighs just under 145 kilograms and puts a maximum output of 180 kilowatts on the road thanks to the four-wheel drive with motors developed at the university, and a newly designed high-voltage battery pack. Due to the low vehicle weight, this corresponds to 1750 hp per ton. The vehicle can thus achieve a peak acceleration of 2.5g, which is roughly equivalent to the force experienced by astronauts when a rocket re-enters the Earth's atmosphere.


US puts Chinese drone giant DJI on military ties blacklist | Technology News | Al Jazeera #security #economy

The United States Defense Department (DoD) has added more than a dozen Chinese companies, including the world’s largest drone manufacturer, to a blacklist of firms with alleged ties to the Chinese military, clearing the way for restrictions on their business.

Shenzhen-based DJI Technology, which is estimated to control more than half of the global market for commercial drones, is among the 13 firms added to the blacklist released by the Pentagon on Wednesday.


Archaeologists Dig Up 1,400-Year-Old Native American Canal in Alabama | Science| Smithsonian Magazine #history

In the beachside resort town of Gulf Shores, Alabama, locals had often referred to an odd feature in the landscape as “Indian ditch.” As far back as the 1820s, a handful of antiquarians and United States Army engineers recognized it as a feature that predated white settlers, but it hadn’t received enough scholarly attention to explain its history and function. One resident, Harry King, who had been exploring the back bays of the region, became fascinated with the remnants of this large trench, about 30 feet wide and 3 feet deep. On visits to the archaeology museum at the University of South Alabama in Mobile, King would encourage researchers to examine it. Gregory Waselkov, a now-retired anthropologist at the university, figured the ditch was probably an antebellum construction built by enslaved laborers.


Neom: Saudi Arabia sentences tribesmen to death for resisting displacement | Middle East Eye #crimes

A Saudi court sentenced three members of the Howeitat, a tribe forcibly ejected to make way for the $500 bn Neom megacity, to death earlier this month for resisting displacement, a UK-based rights group has reported.

Shadli, Atallah, and Ibrahim al-Howeiti were arrested in 2020 for opposing the eviction of their tribe for the project and were handed down death sentences on 2 October by Saudi Arabia's Specialised Criminal Court, according to UK-based rights group Alqst.

"We condemn the sentences and call for their release," Alqst said in a tweet.


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