ReHacked vol. 193: Boeing's last 747, Asymmetry Detected in the Distribution of Galaxies, Internet Archive Scholar and more

Make a donation - support Ukraine

Ukrainian Red Cross | Providing emergency aid to all those in need

Urgent Action Fund for Women’s Human Rights | Supporting women and LGBTQI+ people in and around Ukraine

Voices of Children | Helping children in Ukraine affected by conflict

Support the Armed Forces of Ukraine | via National Bank of Ukraine

Don’t forget to share if you like what you read here, subscribe (if not yet) and leave a comment any form of your feedback is very important to me. Thanks!

RSS feed available if you don’t want to clutter your inbox.

Anti-money laundering: Council agrees its position on a strengthened rulebook - Consilium #money

Terrorists and those who finance them are not welcome in Europe. In order to launder dirty money, criminal individuals and organisations had to look for loopholes in our existing rules which are already quite strict. But our intention is to close these loopholes further, and to apply even stricter rules in all EU member states. Large cash payments beyond €10.000 will become impossible. Trying to stay anonymous when buying or selling crypto-assets will become much more difficult. Hiding behind multiple layers of ownership of companies won’t work any more. It will even become difficult to launder dirty money via jewellers or goldsmiths.

Untangled: Shibari Artist Hajime Kinoko Ropes the World Into Art | Tokyo Weekender #art #subculture #shibari

“I’m not a BDSM maniac” is among the first things Hajime Kinoko tells me when we sit down to chat in his studio in central Tokyo. That is what many people might immediately assume, given that he specializes in shibari – in other words, Japanese rope bondage.

Shibari has always been done under the comfortable cover of darkness and behind closed doors. The eroticism of this tying technique thrives in privacy, while its criminal-restraining origins tinge it with some shame and guilt. Shibari is by no means secret, but it is whispered about sensually, practiced out of sight in windowless velvety or tatami rooms. Unless it is the kind performed by Kinoko. He dresses up shibari in its best outfit and takes it out in the sunlight for a walk.

Internet Archive Scholar #internet #learning

Search Millions of Research Papers

This fulltext search index includes over 25 million research articles and other scholarly documents preserved in the Internet Archive. The collection spans from digitized copies of eighteenth century journals through the latest Open Access conference proceedings and pre-prints crawled from the World Wide Web.

Huge win for privacy: Facebook tracking is illegal in Europe! #privacy #internet

TL;DR: Meta's practice of requiring users to consent to tracking via their terms is not legal according to the GDPR. Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp must offer a Yes & No option so that users can actively give consent - or refuse. This is a huge blow to Meta's business model of surveillance-based advertising.

Findings from 3,300-year-old Uluburun shipwreck reveal complex trade network #history

More than 3,000 years before the Titanic sunk in the North Atlantic Ocean, another famous ship wrecked in the Mediterranean Sea off the eastern shores of Uluburun—in present-day Turkey— carrying tons of rare metal. Since its discovery in 1982, scientists have been studying the contents of the Uluburun shipwreck to gain a better understanding of the people and political organizations that dominated the time period known as the Late Bronze Age.

Now, a team of scientists, including Michael Frachetti, professor of archaeology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, have uncovered a surprising finding: small communities of highland pastoralists living in present-day Uzbekistan in Central Asia produced and supplied roughly one-third of the tin found aboard the ship—tin that was en route to markets around the Mediterranean to be made into coveted bronze metal.

The research, published on November 30 in Science Advances, was made possible by advances in geochemical analyses that enabled researchers to determine with high-level certainty that some of the tin originated from a prehistoric mine in Uzbekistan, more than 2,000 miles from Haifa, where the ill-fated ship loaded its cargo.

The Making of Dune II - Read-Only Memory #games #history #longread

Despite its name suggesting otherwise, Dune II was a first – a real-time strategy game that sprang out of the box with almost every gameplay attribute and control system seen in every RTS since. In direct lineage, it was the father of the globally successful Command & Conquer franchise, in that its code was used as a basis of the first game of the series. Yet in terms of wider influence, the battles first fought out on the vibrant sands of Arrakis continue to echo through modern videogaming. While Dune II’s designer and programmer Joe Bostic humbly maintains that RTS games would have evolved eventually, with or without Dune II, the fact remains that he was instrumental in creating them. No Dune II, no Warcraft, no StarCraft and, arguably, a completely different timeline for global esports.

Yet Dune II actually invented very little and its key elements had already been seen across a handful of existing titles. The genius of the development team at Westwood Studios was to stand on the shoulders of giants to perfectly balance the tactics of wargaming against the time-critical awareness of arcade games. It wasn’t the first game to have map exploration or to tie unit deployment against weapon development and resource gathering. It wasn’t even the first Dune videogame although, confusingly, it wasn’t ever exactly a sequel either …

Boeing's last 747 rolls out of the factory after a more than 50-year production run #technology #engineering #aviation #history

Boeing’s final 747 rolled out of the company’s cavernous factory north of Seattle Tuesday night as airlines’ push for more fuel-efficient planes ends the more than half-century production run of the jumbo jet.

The 1,574th — and last — 747 will later be flown by a Boeing test pilot, painted and handed over to cargo and charter carrier Atlas Air Worldwide Holdings early next year.

Nigeria bans ATM cash withdrawals over $225 a week to force use of CBDC #blockchain #economy #world

Nigeria has drastically reduced the amount of cash individuals and businesses can withdraw as it attempts to push its “cash-less Nigeria” policy and increase the use of the eNaira — Nigeria’s central bank digital currency (CBDC).

The Central Bank of Nigeria issued the directive to financial businesses in a Dec. 6 circular, noting that individuals and businesses would now be limited to withdrawing $45 (20,000 Nigerian nairas) per day and $225 (100,000 nairas) per week from ATMs.

Individuals and businesses will also be limited to withdrawing $225 (100,000 nairas) and $1,125 (500,000 nairas), respectively, at banks per week, with individuals hit with a 5% fee and businesses with a 10% fee for amounts above those limits.

Ur-Fascism | Umberto Eco | The New York Review of Books #politics #history #society

During World War II, the Americans who took part in the Spanish war were called “premature anti-fascists”—meaning that fighting against Hitler in the Forties was a moral duty for every good American, but fighting against Franco too early, in the Thirties, smelled sour because it was mainly done by Communists and other leftists. … Why was an expression like fascist pig used by American radicals thirty years later to refer to a cop who did not approve of their smoking habits? Why didn’t they say: Cagoulard pig, Falangist pig, Ustashe pig, Quisling pig, Nazi pig?

Mein Kampf is a manifesto of a complete political program. Nazism had a theory of racism and of the Aryan chosen people, a precise notion of degenerate art, entartete Kunst, a philosophy of the will to power and of the Ubermensch. Nazism was decidedly anti-Christian and neo-pagan, while Stalin’s Diamat (the official version of Soviet Marxism) was blatantly materialistic and atheistic. If by totalitarianism one means a regime that subordinates every act of the individual to the state and to its ideology, then both Nazism and Stalinism were true totalitarian regimes.

Asymmetry Detected in the Distribution of Galaxies | Quanta Magazine #nature #space

Physicists believe they have detected a striking asymmetry in the arrangements of galaxies in the sky. If confirmed, the finding would point to features of the unknown fundamental laws that operated during the Big Bang.

“If this result is real, someone’s going to get a Nobel Prize,” said Marc Kamionkowski, a physicist at Johns Hopkins University who was not involved in the analysis.

As if playing a cosmic game of Connect the Dots, the researchers drew lines between sets of four galaxies, constructing four-cornered shapes called tetrahedra. When they had built every possible tetrahedron from a catalog of 1 million galaxies, they found that tetrahedra oriented one way outnumber their mirror images.

A hint of the imbalance between tetrahedra and their mirror images was first reported by Oliver Philcox, an astrophysicist at Columbia University in New York, in a paper published in Physical Review D in September. In an independent analysis conducted simultaneously that’s now undergoing peer review, Jiamin Hou and Zachary Slepian of the University of Florida and Robert Cahn of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory detected the asymmetry with a level of statistical certainty that physicists usually consider definitive.

Family says Amazon shipped fake product, refuses refund until 'correct' item returned | CBC News #economy #internet

When Matthew Legault graduated from high school in June, his parents figured they'd recognize his hard work by buying the parts he needed to build his own personal computer.

They placed an order with Amazon and it arrived at their Calgary home quickly.

But when Matthew opened the graphics card — a $690 part — he discovered the plastic casing had been hollowed out and filled with a putty-like substance to give it weight.

"It was actually a bit of a shock," he said. "Everything looked pretty official up to the point where I pulled it out and took a second look."

The real shock came, though, when Matthew's father tried to get a refund.

François Legault followed Amazon's return instructions and sent the item back, expecting a refund.

Instead, Amazon said in an email there would be no refund until the "correct" item was shipped back.

Company 'Hijacks' Blender's CC BY-Licensed Film, YouTube Strikes User (Update) * TorrentFreak #copyrights

Blender releases its films under Creative Commons licenses because it wants them to be shared, remixed, and reshared. Bruno Fernandez-Ruiz is the co-founder of an AI driver safety company and a film music composer and producer. When a TV channel in Uzbekistan claimed ownership of a Blender film, YouTube gave Ruiz a copyright strike and rejected every appeal.

France says non to Office 365 and Google Workspace in school • The Register #copyrights #software

The French minister of national education and youth has said that free versions of Microsoft Office 365 and Google Workspace should not be used in schools – a position that reflects ongoing European concerns about cloud data sovereignty, competition, and privacy rules.

In August, Philippe Latombe, a member of the French National Assembly, advised  Pap Ndiaye, the minister of national education, that the free version of Microsoft Office 365, while appealing, amounts to a form of illegal dumping. He asked the education minister what he intends to do, given the data sovereignty issues involved with storing personal data in an American cloud service.

Drowning in AI Generated Garbage : the silent war we are fighting #copyrights #ai

All over the web, we are witnessing very spectacular results from statistic algorithms that have been in the work for the last forty years. We gave those algorithms an incredibly catchy name: "Artificial Intelligence". We now have very popular and direct applications for them: give the algorithm a simple text prompt (don’t get me started on the importance of text) and it generates a beautiful original picture or a very serious-sounding text. It could also generate sounds or videos (we call them "deep fakes"). After all, it generates only a stream of bits, a bunch of 1 and 0 open to interpretation.

All of this has been made possible because billions of humans were uploading and sharing texts and pictures on the commons we call "the Internet" (and more specifically the web, a common more endangered every day because of the greediness of monopolies). People upload their creation. Or creations from others. After all, does "owning" a text or a picture has any meaning anywhere except in the twisted minds of corrupted lawyers?

If you would like to propose any interesting article for the next ReHacked issue, just hit reply or push this sexy “Leave a comment” (if not subscribed yet) button below. It’s a nice way to start a discussion.

Thanks for reading this digest and remember: we can make it better together, just leave your opinion or suggestions after pressing this button above or simply hit the reply in your e-mail and don’t forget - sharing is caring ;) Have a great week!

Dainius