ReHacked vol. 188: The Death Flights of Argentina’s Dirty War, Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee wants us to 'ignore' Web3, Twitter’s mass layoffs and more
You have to understand what the terms mean that we’re discussing actually mean, beyond the buzzwords. --T.Berners-Lee
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Did you know there are cool bars in Antarctica? (2021) #culture #society
Hidden in the pristine wilderness of Antarctica are several of the world’s most remote bars, where you can sip a cocktail in snowy seclusion.
The most glamorous is located at Whichaway Camp, one of only two luxury hotels on continent. There are a selection of heated sleeping pods, a communal dining and lounge area and a Snow Bar. Made from thousand-year-old ice, the bar a stunning spot to relax and sip a whiskey highball after a day spent spotting emperor penguins or ice climbing.
Memoirist Elissa Altman met the writer behind The Julie/Julia Project, who died last week at 49, and reflects on their time together and the movie that came from her popular food blog. #promemoria
Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee wants us to 'ignore' Web3 #internet
The creator of the web isn’t sold on crypto visionaries’ plan for its future and says we should “ignore” it.
Tim Berners-Lee, the British computer scientist credited with inventing the World Wide Web in 1989, said Friday that he doesn’t view blockchain as a viable solution for building the next iteration of the internet.
He has his own web decentralization project called Solid.
“It’s important to clarify in order to discuss the impacts of new technology,” said Berners-Lee, speaking onstage at the Web Summit event in Lisbon. “You have to understand what the terms mean that we’re discussing actually mean, beyond the buzzwords.”
Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun | TechCrunch #internet #socialnetworks #economy #bigcorp
According to an internal memo sent to Twitter employees, the new management under Elon Musk will begin conducting layoffs Friday morning. These layoffs have been rumored since before Musk’s takeover, with the most recent report estimating that half of the 7,500 employees will lose their jobs.
On Thursday evening, all employees received an email stating that they will be informed of their employment status at 9 A.M. PT on Friday. Each email will be sent with the subject line “Your Role at Twitter.” If an employee is keeping their job, they’ll be notified via their work email — if they’re let go, they’ll be notified on a personal address.
Google to remove all VPN ad blockers that don’t comply - Press / Blog - Blokada Community #privacy
On November 1st, all app developers that use the VpnService API received an email from Google, requiring them to fill in a VPN Service declaration form. This means that Google is determined to enforce their policy and make it harder for ad blockers to exist inside their Play Store.
The new policy specifically says that VpnService cannot be used to “Manipulate ads that can impact apps monetization”.
ZLibrary domains have been seized by the United States Postal Inspection Service #copyrights
The Only Crypto Story You Need, by Matt Levine #blockchain #longread
The Death Flights of Argentina’s Dirty War | History Hit #history
Imagine the scene. Men and women are drugged, stripped naked and then dragged aboard aeroplanes, before being pushed out into the ocean and plunging to their deaths in the cold waters of the Atlantic.
In an added twist of horrific cruelty, some of the victims are falsely told that they are in fact being released from their imprisonment and that they should dance in joy and celebration of their imminent release.
This is the horrifying truth of what happened during the so-called ‘dirty war’ in Argentina, where it is alleged that around 200 of these ‘death flights’ took place between 1977 and 1978.
Misconceptions - Some common geographic mental misplacements #nature #world #interesting #fun
If learned early on, a foundationally incorrect view of the world can perpetuate, as students naturally build knowledge in light of a past, incorrect, understanding. Something as basic as our assumptions about the relative locations of Earth's continents is an interesting, and actually sort of fun, example of how we can get things wrong right off the bat. Ultimately, everything is learned, but some curious geographic errors tend to persist more than others.
Phylum Discovers Dozens More PyPI Packages Attempting to Deliver W4SP Stealer in Ongoing Supply-Chain Attack #software #security
Last week, our automated risk detection platform alerted us to some suspicious activity in dozens of newly published PyPI packages. It appears that these packages are a more sophisticated attempt to deliver the W4SP Stealer on to Python developer’s machines by hiding a malicious __import__ . Join us here on the Phylum research team as we investigate these new and shifting tactics the attacker is using to deploy W4SP stealer in this supply-chain attack.
The Joy of Suffering Overcome: Young Beethoven’s Stirring Letter to His Brothers About the Loneliness of Living with Deafness and How Music Saved His Life – The Marginalian #music #history #longread
“Blessed and blessing, this music is in some sort the equivalent of the night, of the deep and living darkness,” Aldous Huxley wrote of Beethoven’s Benedictus in his exquisite meditation on why music enchants us so. But he could have well been writing about Ludwig van Beethoven (December 16, 1770–March 26, 1827) himself — a creator suffused with darkness yet animated by the benediction of light.
Like Frida Kahlo, Beethoven sublimated a lifetime of unbearable bodily suffering to the irrepressible vitality of his creative spirit. Bedeviled by debilitating physical illness all his life — the anguishing pinnacle of which was his loss of hearing at the age of twenty-eight — he nonetheless became a servant of joy. Even Helen Keller, herself deaf and blind, conveyed the timeless transcendence of his music in her moving account of “hearing” his Ode to Joy.
India orders Google to allow third-party payments, slaps on another fine | Reuters #internet #bigcorp
Alphabet Inc's Google should not restrict app developers from using third-party billing or payment processing services in India, the country's antitrust body said on Tuesday, as it fined the U.S. giant $113 million for anti-competitive practices.
The Competition Commission of India (CCI) said Google (GOOGL.O) used its "dominant position" to force app developers to use its in-app payment system, noting the sale of in-app digital goods is a key means for developers to monetize their work.
The CCI's move is the latest setback for Google in one of its priority markets, where it was fined another $162 million by the watchdog on Thursday for anticompetitive practices related to its Android operating system, and was asked to change its approach to its Android platform.
The draft Indian Telecommunication Bill, 2022 retains its colonial roots #internet
The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) under the Ministry of Communications (MoC) has released for public consultation the draft of the Indian Telecommunication Bill, 2022. According to the accompanying explanatory note, the Bill aims to create a comprehensive framework for the regulation of telecommunications in India. In doing so, it repeals the Indian Telegraph Act, 1885, Indian Wireless Telegraphy Act, 1933, and The Telegraph Wire (Unlawful Protection) Act,1950. Comments on the draft from relevant stakeholders have been invited till October 20, 2022.
Wayback Machine - 2001 | Web Design Museum #internet #history
The Internet Archive organization launched a free digital archive of websites for the general public called the Wayback Machine. The oldest pages stored in the archive date back to 1996. In September 2021, the Wayback Machine maintained more than 606 billion versions of websites from various time intervals.
Invasive Diffusion: How one unwilling illustrator found herself turned into an AI model - Waxy.org #art #copyrights #ai
Last weekend, Hollie Mengert woke up to an email pointing her to a Reddit thread, the first of several messages from friends and fans, informing the Los Angeles-based illustrator and character designer that she was now an AI model.
The day before, a Redditor named MysteryInc152 posted on the Stable Diffusion subreddit, “2D illustration Styles are scarce on Stable Diffusion, so I created a DreamBooth model inspired by Hollie Mengert’s work.”
Using 32 of her illustrations, MysteryInc152 fine-tuned Stable Diffusion to recreate Hollie Mengert’s style. He then released the checkpoint under an open license for anyone to use. The model uses her name as the identifier for prompts: “illustration of a princess in the forest, holliemengert artstyle,” for example.
Random: NASCAR Driver Stuns To Qualify For Championship With GameCube Move | Nintendo Life #fun
Best part is in the post race interview he says he used to do this playing NASCAR 2005 on GameCube and wondered if it would work IRL.
Leaked Documents Outline DHS’s Plans to Police Disinformation #privacy #security #disinformation #society
The work, much of which remains unknown to the American public, came into clearer view earlier this year when DHS announced a new “Disinformation Governance Board”: a panel designed to police misinformation (false information spread unintentionally), disinformation (false information spread intentionally), and malinformation (factual information shared, typically out of context, with harmful intent) that allegedly threatens U.S. interests. While the board was widely ridiculed, immediately scaled back, and then shut down within a few months, other initiatives are underway as DHS pivots to monitoring social media now that its original mandate — the war on terror — has been wound down.
Behind closed doors, and through pressure on private platforms, the U.S. government has used its power to try to shape online discourse. According to meeting minutes and other records appended to a lawsuit filed by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, a Republican who is also running for Senate, discussions have ranged from the scale and scope of government intervention in online discourse to the mechanics of streamlining takedown requests for false or intentionally misleading information.
Nordify your digital home. #design
Choose from a broad and constantly growing spectrum of port projects to unify the appearance of your favorite applications.
Solarized Precision colors for machines and people #design
Why did the F-14 Tomcat retire decades before its peers? - Sandboxx #history #engineering #warfare
The Grumman F-14 Tomcat was an incredibly capable aircraft, and with good reason. In an era before Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) had matured into the go-to nuclear weapon delivery vehicle they would become, the Tomcat was designed in large part to neuter the Soviet Union’s most potent means of putting nukes on American soil; their fleet of strategic bombers.
In the present tense, the idea of a foreign power flying bombers over the continental United States seems practically impossible, thanks is no small part to America’s broad military footprint, advanced detection technology, and today’s geopolitical climate. That wasn’t the case at the peak of the Cold War. The threat posed by Soviet long-range bombers was so dire, in fact, that before air-to-air missiles had become prevalent in the 1960s, the U.S. actually developed a rocket-propelled air-to-air nuclear weapon that would wipe out entire formations with a single launch.
With the threat of Soviet bombers armed with nuclear weapons or anti-ship missiles at the forefront of their minds, Grumman designed the largest and heaviest carrier fighter in history, with a fair amount of that weight dedicated to the new Phoenix missile and the onboard systems required to leverage it. When fueled up and ready to go, the F-14 weighed in at 61,000 pounds, which is almost twice that of the future F/A-18 and quite a bit more than twice the weight of a fully-fueled F-16 Fighting Falcon.
Feeling low? Take a walk down memory lane. Study says nostalgia improves psychological well-being #psychology #health
Nostalgia, or the good feeling one gets when thinking about the past, may not be getting the respect it deserves. A recent study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology concludes that the more nostalgic one is, the more authentic one feels, which has positive consequences for psychological well-being. The research team found correlational and experimental support for their hypothesis. Moreover, the effect was cross-cultural; subjects from the United States, China, and the United Kingdom were included in the study.
Factors that improve psychological well-being (PWB) are studied frequently and put to good use as components of therapy or valuable life advice. However, for some factors, it is not always clear why it improves PWB. Prior studies have found that nostalgic thinking improves PWB, but why was unknown. Nicholas Kelley and colleagues set out to answer this question with a series of four studies.
Nobody Wants Touch-Screen Glove Box Latches And It Needs To Stop Now - The Autopian #technology #automotive #safety
QR Code Menus Are the Restaurant Industry’s Worst Idea - The Atlantic #culture
The QR-code menu—which you access by scanning a black-and-white square with your smartphone—has taken off ever since. It may dominate going forward. But I hope not, because I detest those digital menus. Never mind dying peacefully in my sleep; I want to go out while sitting in a restaurant on my 100th birthday, an aperitif in my left hand and a paper menu in my right. And as eager as I’ll be for heaven if I’m lucky enough to stand on its threshold, I want one last downward glance at a paramedic prying the menu from my fist. In that better future, where old-school menus endure, I’ll go to my urn happy that coming generations will still begin meals meeting one another’s eyes across a table instead of staring at a screen.
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