ReHacked vol. 187: RIP: Kathleen Booth, the inventor of assembly language, First-ever study shows bumble bees 'play', The only way of being anonymous in Sweden is illegal? and more
The currency of the New Economy won't be money, but attention --A radical theory of value, 1997
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RIP: Kathleen Booth, the inventor of assembly language • The Register #promemoria #history #internet
OBITUARY Professor Kathleen Booth, one of the last of the early British computing pioneers, has died. She was 100.
Kathleen Hylda Valerie Britten was born in Worcestershire, England, on July 9, 1922. During the Second World War, she studied at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she got a BSc in mathematics in 1944. After graduating, she became a junior scientific officer at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, a research organization in Farnborough. Two years later she moved to Birkbeck College, first as a research assistant, and later a lecturer and then research fellow.
Volkswagen develops hydrogen car that can travel 2,000 kilometers on one tank - Ruetir #technology #hydrogen #futurism
The technology is different from the competition
‘The main difference with the fuel cells from Hyundai and Toyota is that we use a ceramic membrane instead of the usual plastic membrane. That is a huge difference’, an employee of Kraftwerk Tubes explains to BI.
This ceramic membrane does not need to be wetted, so it does not freeze in the winter, dry out in the summer or attract mould. These are apparently problems that other hydrogen cars with fuel cells encounter.
According to Kraftwerk, there is another advantage. The fuel cell would generate heat which can be used for heating, but apparently also for air conditioning. This means that no separate electric air conditioning or heating is required, which saves energy. On the other hand, you would say that energy also disappears with residual heat. Due to the high efficiency, a range of 2,000 kilometers is possible.
Iran’s Secret Manual for Controlling Protesters’ Mobile Phones #privacy #control #censorship #longread
AS FURIOUS ANTI-GOVERNMENT protests swept Iran, the authorities retaliated with both brute force and digital repression. Iranian mobile and internet users reported rolling network blackouts, mobile app restrictions, and other disruptions. Many expressed fears that the government can track their activities through their indispensable and ubiquitous smartphones.
Iran’s tight grip on the country’s connection to the global internet has proven an effective tool for suppressing unrest. The lack of clarity about what technological powers are held by the Iranian government — one of the most opaque and isolated in the world — has engendered its own form of quiet terror for prospective dissidents. Protesters have often been left wondering how the government was able to track down their locations or gain access to their private communications — tactics that are frighteningly pervasive but whose mechanisms are virtually unknown.
Ursula Le Guin on Star Trek: TNG (1994) #sci-fi #history
My Top 10 Tips for Doing Time In ‘the Hole’ | The Marshall Project #psychology #longread
In prison, going to “the hole” can mean spending 23 hours a day alone in a tiny cell. Here, incarcerated author Michael J. Nichols shares his top 10 tips for enduring long stretches of “administrative segregation.”
Mental advice from prisoner but could be used in regular day-to day life to keep you going.
Record Labels Say AI Music Generators Threaten Music Industry #ai #copyrights
The music industry’s lobbying arm claims that services using machine learning to alter tracks are infringing on artists’ rights.
As first reported by TorrentFreak, the Recording Industry Association of America listed AI-powered music websites that make remixes, improve homemade tracks, or strip songs of vocals or instrumentals harm artists, in a response to a request from the Office of the US Trade Representative.
Artists working within all kinds of media have raised concerns in recent years—and increasingly, with the rising popularity of text-to-image generators like DALL-E—about whether AI-generated art infringes on individuals’ copyright. Most AI content generators depend on datasets that are filled with original artworks, texts, or audio, and use those original works without the owners’ permission.
Contents from SunOS 4.1.3 SUNSRC CD-ROM (1992) #history #programming
Dangerous Google Ad Disguising Itself as www.gimp.org : GIMP #security
The Iran Firewall - A preliminary report #internet
TL;DR
The Internet is easily censored. The neo-liberals got their arses kicked. The big players like Google/Apple/AWS are partly to blame. China runs the GFI as a service.
The GFI uses Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) on all international peering points. In addition the local operators (telco & DSL) use their own Firewall but most of them are static and badly configured. Some use DPI.
The GFI is port number agnostic and changing the port number of a service will not yield success.
First-ever study shows bumble bees 'play' #nature
Bumble bees play, according to new research led by Queen Mary University of London published in Animal Behaviour. It is the first time that object play behavior has been shown in an insect, adding to mounting evidence that bees may experience positive "feelings."
The team of researchers set up numerous experiments to test their hypothesis, which showed that bumble bees went out of their way to roll wooden balls repeatedly despite there being no apparent incentive for doing so.
The Debian Administrator's Handbook #books #software
This book is free documentation: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
Appian Way - Wikipedia #history
The Appian Way (Latin and Italian: Via Appia) is one of the earliest and strategically most important Roman roads of the ancient republic. It connected Rome to Brindisi, in southeast Italy. Its importance is indicated by its common name, recorded by Statius, of Appia longarum... regina viarum ("the Appian Way, the queen of the long roads").
The road is named after Appius Claudius Caecus, the Roman censor who began and completed the first section as a military road to the south in 312 BC during the Samnite Wars.
Shutterstock will start selling AI-generated stock imagery with help from OpenAI - The Verge #technology #art #ai #futurism
Will AI image generators kill the stock image industry? It’s a question asked by many following the rise of text-to-image AI models in recent years. The answer from the industry’s incumbents, though, is “no” — not if we can start selling AI-generated content first.
Today, stock image giant Shutterstock has announced an extended partnership with OpenAI, which will see the AI lab’s text-to-image model DALL-E 2 directly integrated into Shutterstock “in the coming months.” In addition, Shutterstock is launching a “Contributor Fund” that will reimburse creators when the company sells work to train text-to-image AI models. This follows widespread criticism from artists whose output has been scraped from the web without their consent to create these systems. Notably, Shutterstock is also banning the sale of AI-generated art on its site that is not made using its DALL-E integration.
Galactic settlement of low-mass stars as a resolution to the Fermi paradox #science #astronomy #nature
An expanding civilization could rapidly spread through the galaxy, so the absence of extraterrestrial settlement in the solar system implies that such expansionist civilizations do not exist. This argument, often referred to as the Fermi paradox, typically assumes that expansion would proceed uniformly through the galaxy, but not all stellar types may be equally useful for a long-lived civilization. We suggest that low-mass stars, and K-dwarf stars in particular, would be ideal migration locations for civilizations that originate in a G-dwarf system. We use a modified form of the Drake Equation to show that expansion across all low-mass stars could be accomplished in 2 Gyr, which includes waiting time between expansion waves to allow for a close approach of a suitable destination star. This would require interstellar travel capabilities of no more than ~0.3 ly to settle all M-dwarfs and ~2 ly to settle all K-dwarfs. Even more rapid expansion could occur within 2 Myr, with travel requirements of ~10 ly to settle all M-dwarfs and ~50 ly to settle all K-dwarfs. The search for technosignatures in exoplanetary systems can help to place constraints on the presence of such a "low-mass Galactic Club" in the galaxy today.
The only way of being anonymous in Sweden is illegal? – commit pizza #privacy
Sweden has that database but thanks to some for-profit companies we have it completely open and searchable on a lot of sites and the best part is that you can’t have the data removed. Sites like Mr.koll, Ratsit, Hitta and Eniro all gather and publish all kinds of information they can find of individuals. Your social security number, your phone number(s), your latest addresses including a nice Google Maps image on some showing either the street view or satellite view. The best part for these companies is, the state is on their side and if you try to hide from it, you are the criminal.
Rooftop wind energy innovation claims 50% more energy than solar at same cost – pv magazine International #engineering #energy
A new bladeless wind energy unit, patented by Aeromine Technologies, is tackling the challenge of competing with rooftop solar as a local source of clean energy that can be integrated with the built environment. The scalable, “motionless” wind energy unit can produce 50% more energy than rooftop solar at the same cost, said the company.
The technology leverages aerodynamics similar to airfoils in a race car to capture and amplify each building’s airflow. The unit requires about 10% of the space required by solar panels and generates round-the-clock energy. Aeromine said unlike conventional wind turbines that are noisy, visually intrusive, and dangerous to migratory birds, the patented system is motionless and virtually silent.
Video gaming may be associated with better cognitive performance in children | National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) #health #psychology
A study of nearly 2,000 children found that those who reported playing video games for three hours per day or more performed better on cognitive skills tests involving impulse control and working memory compared to children who had never played video games. Published today in JAMA Network Open, this study analyzed data from the ongoing Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, which is supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and other entities of the National Institutes of Health.
Attention Shoppers! | WIRED (1997) #history #economy #predictions
As is now obvious, the economies of the industrialized nations - and especially that of the US - have shifted dramatically. We've turned a corner toward an economy where an increasing number of workers are no longer involved directly in the production, transportation, and distribution of material goods, but instead earn their living managing or dealing with information in some form. Most call this an "information economy."
LEGO is discontinuing MINDSTORMS at the end of 2022 #hardware #software
The LEGO Group has announced that it’s discontinuing its LEGO MINDSTORMS line-up at the end of 2022, with app support only guaranteed for another two years.
First launching in September 1998, the MINDSTORMS platform has been central to the LEGO Group’s coding experience for nearly a quarter of a century. However, the company says its priorities now lie in ‘LEGO Education and other Build & Code experiences’, and it’s subsequently retiring the current MINDSTORMS set 51515 Robot Inventor (and the platform’s individual components) by the end of this year.
Starlink signals can be reverse-engineered to work like GPS—whether SpaceX likes it or not | MIT Technology Review #technology #space
When the idea was first proposed in 2020, executives at SpaceX were open to the idea, says Humphreys. Then word came from on high. “Elon told the leaders we spoke to: every other LEO [low Earth orbit] communications network has gone into bankruptcy,” Humphreys told MIT Technology Review. “And so we [SpaceX] have to focus completely on staying out of bankruptcy. We cannot afford any distractions.”
But Humphreys wouldn’t take no for an answer. For the past two years, his team at UT Austin’s Radionavigation Lab has been reverse-engineering signals sent from thousands of Starlink internet satellites in low Earth orbit to ground-based receivers. Now Humphreys says his team has cracked the problem, and he believes that regular beacon signals from the constellation, designed to help receivers connect with the satellites, could form the basis of a useful navigation system. Crucially, this could be done without any help from SpaceX at all.
Self-Hosting-Guide: Self-Hosting Guide. #software #longread
Learn all about locally hosting(on premises & private web servers) and managing software applications by yourself or your organization.
A guide for getting started with Self Hosting devices including software and hardware that will make you a better and more efficient Self Hosting.
A Shocking Amount of US "Recycling" Goes Straight to the Landfill #nature #society #environment
According to a scathing new Greenpeace USA report, only five percent of plastic waste generated by US households actually gets recycled.
In other words, despite our best efforts, the vast majority of plastic waste ends up in the landfill. In large part, that's due to the fact that China stopped importing plastic waste back in 2018, causing a massive pile up in western countries.
Since then, though, the US has failed to get its act together. The average American generated just over 300 pounds of plastic per person in 2021, according to the report, which amounted to an astonishing 51 million tons of wrappers, bottles, bags and more in 2021 alone.
"After more than 30 years, it is time to accept that plastic recycling is a failed concept," the report reads, arguing that a circular plastic economy remains a "fiction."
Software Freedom in Europe 2022 - FSFE #software #opensource #longread
“Software Freedom in Europe” is the yearly report of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE), your charity organisation which empowers people to control technology. Every year we refine our manifold activities to address the current needs of software freedom in Europe. This yearly report covers the FSFE activities from November 2021 to August 2022.
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