ReHacked vol. 197: The science of having great ideas in the shower, Swiss Drone-Busting Eagle Squadron Permanently Grounded, How to draw an a$$ 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.
The science of why you have great ideas in the shower | National Geographic #nature #psychology
Besides leading to greater self-understanding, gaining insights into these aspects of the creative process can help you maximise your brain power in various situations. But keep in mind, Jung points out, “these are early days, and there’s still a lot to learn about how the brain creates.”
As a first step, it’s wise to prioritise getting plenty of good quality sleep, which can improve your mood and help with memory, says Kounios who is co-author of The Eureka Factor: Aha Moments, Creative Insight, and the Brain. While you’re asleep, he notes, “the information you take in during the day is transformed from a fragile state into a more durable state which can bring aha moments.”
Immediately upon awakening from a full night’s sleep or even a 20-minute nap, Christoff recommends paying attention to thoughts and ideas that occur to you in that liminal state between being sound asleep and fully awake—that’s a time when your ideas are “often quite free-flowing,” she adds, which means you can tap your creative potential.
Swiss Drone-Busting Eagle Squadron Permanently Grounded – UAS VISION #technology
Yet another squadron of anti-drone eagles is being grounded after officials in Geneva, Switzerland decided advances in the technology made success rates uncertain and even dangerous for the birds to manage.
The so-called “eagle brigade” project took flight in 2017, and the eagles were trained to catch drones in mid-air to protect dignitaries in a city that often hosts international summits and the like.
Ownership of AI-Generated Code Hotly Disputed - IEEE Spectrum #copyrights
“The spirit of open source is not just a space where people want to keep it open,” says Sal Kimmich, an open-source developer advocate at Sonatype, machine-learning engineer, and open-source contributor and maintainer. “We have developed processes in order to keep open source secure, and that requires traceability, observability, and verification. Copilot is obscuring the original provenance of those [code] snippets.”
How do I draw a pair of buttocks? - Mathematica Stack Exchange #science #fun
Slack's private GitHub code repositories stolen over holidays #security
"On December 29, 2022, we were notified of suspicious activity on our GitHub account. Upon investigation, we discovered that a limited number of Slack employee tokens were stolen and misused to gain access to our externally hosted GitHub repository. Our investigation also revealed that the threat actor downloaded private code repositories on December 27. No downloaded repositories contained customer data, means to access customer data, or Slack’s primary codebase."
BREAKING: Meta prohibited from use of personal data for advertisment #privacy #internet
Meta (Facebook and Instagram) prohibited from using personal data for advertisement. Major blow to Meta's business model in Europe, following noyb litigation. Fine for Meta more than tenfold from € 28 million to € 390 million. Third case on WhatsApp pending.
As confirmed by the Irish DPC, the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) has rejected the Irish DPC and Meta's bypass of the GDPR based on noyb complaints against Facebook and Instagram. Meta is now prohibited to bypass the GDPR via a clause in the terms and conditions. Meta has to get "opt-in" consent for personalized advertisement and must provide users with a "yes/no" option. The decision on a third parallel case on WhatsApp is delayed until mid-January.
The Hidden Cost of Cheap TVs - The Atlantic #privacy #security
TVs aren’t furniture anymore—no major TV brand is going to hire American workers to build a modern screen into a beautifully finished wooden box next year. The television is just another piece of tech now, for better or for worse. Don’t get me wrong; watching Netflix on a big screen is superior in every way to watching network TV in the 1990s, and it’s also a lot cheaper. That’s amazing.
But there are downsides. Willcox told me that the average consumer replaces their TV every seven to eight years, which is adding to the roughly 2.7 million tons of e-waste we produce annually. What was an American-made heirloom is now, generally, a cheaply manufactured chunk of plastic and glass—one that monitors everything you do in order to drive down its price even lower. In that way, cheap TVs tell the story of American life right now, almost as well as the shows we watch on them.
Breaking RSA with a Quantum Computer - Schneier on Security #security
A group of Chinese researchers have just published a paper claiming that they can—although they have not yet done so—break 2048-bit RSA. This is something to take seriously. It might not be correct, but it’s not obviously wrong.
We have long known from Shor’s algorithm that factoring with a quantum computer is easy. But it takes a big quantum computer, on the orders of millions of qbits, to factor anything resembling the key sizes we use today. What the researchers have done is combine classical lattice reduction factoring techniques with a quantum approximate optimization algorithm. This means that they only need a quantum computer with 372 qbits, which is well within what’s possible today. (The IBM Osprey is a 433-qbit quantum computer, for example. Others are on their way as well.)
The infrastructure behind ATMs #economy #banking #history #longread
The first automated teller machines, which debuted in the late 1960s, were, as the name suggests, strictly cost-saving devices for bank branches. Branches exist as sales offices but have incidental cash-management functions. The denser depositors are around a branch, the more transactions happen during peak windows like e.g. the morning commute and lunchtime. The more transactions you need to support in a window, the more tellers you need to employ. Tellers are both surprisingly inexpensive relative to the degree of trust placed in them but surprisingly costly relative to occupations like e.g. cashiers which look outwardly similar. Banks have long wanted to control the costs of the teller base.
French startup unveils new residential thermo-acoustic heat pump – pv magazine International #technology #engineering
French startup Equium has developed a heat pump core that works on acoustic waves and produces hot and cold air. Equium manufactures the core and works with another company that integrates it into heat pump systems. The units are scalable from 1 kW to 3 kW and are designed for residential applications.
The novel heat pump can purportedly reach higher temperatures than existing heat pumps, without the need for refrigerants. It works with a high-fidelity (Hi-Fi) speaker powered by electricity that creates an acoustic wave in a closed-pressure vessel filled with helium at a pressure of 30 bars. The acoustic wave causes the gas to compress or expand, displacing heat from a lower temperature to a higher temperature, or vice versa. The heat pump core is filled with water, which absorbs or releases that heat.
Eating viruses can power growth, reproduction of microorganism | Nebraska Today | University of Nebraska–Lincoln #nature #science
Over the last three years, the University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s John DeLong has been busy discovering a potential tide-turning secret: Those virus particles are a source not just of infection, but nutrition.
In a turnabout worthy of Pac-Man, DeLong and his colleagues have found that a species of Halteria — microscopic ciliates that populate freshwater worldwide — can eat huge numbers of infectious chloroviruses that share their aquatic habitat. For the first time, the team’s lab experiments have also shown that a virus-only diet, which the team calls “virovory,” is enough to fuel the physiological growth and even population growth of an organism.
Bring back personal blogging - The Verge #internet #history #socialnetworking
In the beginning, there were blogs, and they were the original social web. We built community. We found our people. We wrote personally. We wrote frequently. We self-policed, and we linked to each other so that newbies could discover new and good blogs.
I want to go back there.
The Web 1.0 landscape looked a lot different than the Web 2.0 experience we are used to these days, and personal weblogs or “blogs” were a big part of the evolution of Web 2.0.
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
