ReHacked vol. 202: Windows 11: a spyware machine out of users' control?, The 8th edition of the Estonian Foreign Intelligence Service, Japan Adopts Plan to Make Maximum Use of Nuclear Power and more

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International Security and Estonia 2023 – Estonian Foreign Intelligence Service #politics #world #security #longread

The 8th edition of the Foreign Intelligence Service’s annual report.

Japan Adopts Plan to Make Maximum Use of Nuclear Power - The Japan News #economy #energy

The Japanese government Friday adopted a plan to make maximum use of nuclear power, in a bid to realize a carbon-free society while ensuring stable electricity supplies.

The basic plan for green transformation marks a departure from Japan’s policy of reducing its dependence on nuclear energy decided after the 2011 meltdowns at Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc.’s tsunami-hit Fukushima No. 1 power plant.

The plan also includes a target of achieving over ¥150 trillion in public and private investments for decarbonization over the coming 10 years.

Turkey earthquake opened 190-mile-long fissure, satellite images show | Space #nature

The longer of the two ruptures stretches 190 miles (300 kilometers) in the northeastern direction from the northeastern tip of the Mediterranean Sea. The crack was created by the first of the two major tremors that hit the region on Monday, the more powerful 7.8-magnitude earthquake that struck at 4:17 a.m. local time (8:17 p.m. EST on Feb. 5). The second crack, 80 miles long (125 km), opened during the second, somewhat milder 7.5-magnitude temblor about nine hours later, COMET said in a tweet on Friday (Feb. 10).

Trove of spices from around the world found on sunken fifteenth-century Norse ship #history

A pair of archaeologists with Lund University in Sweden has found "a treasure trove" of plants aboard a sunken 15th-century Norse ship. Mikael Larsson and Brendan Foley describe their findings in PLOS ONE.

In 1495, Danish King Hans docked his ship Gribshunden off the coast of Sweden in preparation for a meeting with Swedish ruler, Sten Sture the Elder. His plan was to broker a deal that would give him control over Sweden as he had done with Norway, creating a united Nordic kingdom. Unfortunately for Hans and many of his crew, the ship caught fire and sank. To give himself the upper hand, the King had filled his ship with both warriors and goods worthy of a rich and powerful man. The loss of the ship led to a change in plans—Hans attacked Sweden soon thereafter and conquered the country instead of negotiating for it. But the sinking of the ship also created a motherlode of artifacts for modern historians to study.

Decorated With 4,000 Skeletons, This Roman Church Will Have You Pondering Your Own Mortality | Travel | Smithsonian Magazine #history #architecture

Beneath the church lies a crypt where almost 4,000 friars have been laid to rest. They’re not neatly buried under tombstones. Instead, their skeletons adorn the walls and ceilings, like 3D paintings. Even the ornate chandeliers are made out of bones.

I’m far from the first traveler to come to Rome to see this crypt for myself. It’s estimated that upwards of 200,000 visitors come every year. And they follow in the footsteps of famous tourists. The Marquis de Sade paid a visit in 1775. He commented that “I have never seen anything so striking,” high praise coming from a man who wrote violent pornography. A French libertine, Sade led such a depraved life the word “sadism” was coined after him. Almost a century later, in 1867, a budding American writer showed up at the crypt. “Here was a spectacle for sensitive nerves!” Mark Twain exclaimed, struck by its “picturesque horrors.”

Open Space Innovation Platform - OSIP - Campaign: ‪Space Suit Design Competition‬ #design

What do you think the future European space suit should look like?

Winners will be invited for a visit of the European Astronaut Centre!

LocalBitcoins will discontinue its service - LocalBitcoins #blockchain

Timeline for discontinuing the Bitcoin trading service:

2023-02-09 Suspension of new sign ups

2023-02-16 Suspension of trading on LocalBitcoins; Suspension of using LocalBitcoins wallet (with exception of withdrawing one's funds)

After 2023-02-17 LocalBitcoins customers will only be able to log-in to withdraw their Bitcoins. The trading and Wallet services will no longer be available at this point.

Ancient Pompeii site installs 'invisible' solar panels that look like Roman terracotta tiles #architecture #technology #history

Ancient Roman ruins at Pompeii have been fitted with invisible solar panels, in a move that will ensure the archaeological site’s sustainability and cut costs. The innovative panels, which blend into the background by imitating traditional materials, were installed on the House of Cerere, on a thermopolium—a Roman snack bar—and on the House of the Vettii, which recently reopened following 20 years of restoration work.

“They look exactly like the terracotta tiles used by the Romans, but they produce the electricity that we need to light the frescoes," says Gabriel Zuchtriegel, the director of the archaeological park of Pompeii, in a press release.

Windows 11: a spyware machine out of users' control? | TechSpot #privacy #security

For the past few years, Microsoft has been accused of regularly violating user privacy. Compared to the classic NT-based systems, Windows 10 and especially Windows 11 are two completely different beasts in this regard.

How much data is a Windows operating system sending to online servers? According to a recent video from The PC Security Channel (TPCSC), the most up-to-date version of the Redmond OS is a real "talker" when it comes to telemetry and other data about users' preferences and online behavior.

Titled, "Has Windows become Spyware?," the video describes how live capture sessions can show online communication between Windows and external servers. The video creator used Wireshark, a well-known (and free) network protocol analyzer useful to see what is happening on a network "at a microscopic level."

Tsunami: Asteroid Impact - 66 Million Years Ago - Science On a Sphere #history #nature

The 6+ miles wide asteroid that hit Earth 66 million years ago, widely accepted to have wiped out nearly all the dinosaurs and roughly three-quarters of the planet’s plant and animal species, also triggered a megatsunami with mile-high waves. Recent historical tsunamis pale in comparison with this globally catastrophic event, thought to be 30,000 times more initial energy than any recorded events.

In this dataset, the black continents depict the land masses at the time of the impact, around 66 million years ago. The white country borders show where the land masses are today — moving at approximately 2.5 cm (1 inch) per year, the continents are constantly drifting. The animation shows tsunami wave amplitude 10 minutes after impact until 48 hours after impact, shown in hours below the scale. After the first 48 hours, the tsunami had mostly subsided except near the point of impact. The colors on the tsunami animation are associated with both positive (red) and negative (blue) wave amplitudes, highlighting how the ocean ripples with both higher and lower water levels in the ocean basins during a catastrophic tsunami.

Israeli grandfather of MP3 passes away at 86 #promemoria

The first major milestone of Lempel’s oeuvre came in 1977 when he and his colleague Prof. Jacob Ziv published LZ77, the first version of the Lempel-Ziv algorithm, which was followed up the very next year with LZ78.

These algorithms and their derivative works formed the basis of several data compression formats that are widely popular to this day, such as TIFF, PNG, ZIP, and GIF, and played a central role in PDF (for documents) and MP3 (for music) formats.

Of regrets – Laanwj's blog #copyrights

It is a fool’s game in retrospect. The no-warranty clause apparently doesn’t hold up in court (at least in the UK). So, you’re, effectively, giving away an unlimited license to use your software for anyone to do with what they want, and they get to sue you for millions when it doesn’t work out.

Bloatware pushes the Galaxy S23 Android OS to an incredible 60GB | Ars Technica #software #android

As a smartphone operating system, Android strives to be a lightweight OS so it can run on a variety of hardware. The first version of the OS had to squeeze into the T-Mobile G1, with only a measly 256MB of internal storage for Android and all your apps, and ever since then, the idea has been to use as few resources as possible. Unless you have the latest Samsung phone, where Android somehow takes up an incredible 60GB of storage.

Yes, the Galaxy S23 is slowly trickling out to the masses, and, as Esper's senior technical editor Mishaal Rahman highlights in a storage space survey, Samsung's new phone is way out of line with most of the ecosystem. Several users report the phone uses around 60GB for the system partition right out of the box. If you have a 128GB phone, that's nearly half your storage for the Android OS and packed-in apps. That's four times the size of the normal Pixel 7 Pro system partition, which is 15GB. It's the size of two Windows 11 installs, side by side. What could Samsung possibly be putting in there?!

HSBC's Money Laundering 2012 Charge #economy #history #crime

HSBC Holdings' (HSBC) agreement to pay a $1.9 billion fine to regulators for serving as a middleman for Mexican drug cartels and enter into a deferred prosecution agreement points to a lack of adequate control processes in compliance and anti-money laundering.

Given the bank's size, it appears that it and some of its peers are too big to jail because they are too big to fail.

The agreement in 2012 constitutes a warning to the bank to clean up its act and avoids revocation of its charter to operate in the United States. The action was taken by regulators in the belief that a failure of a large financial institution could imperil the world's financial system.

FreeCAD Day 2023 - Report and Continued Discussion - FreeCAD Forum #software #opensource

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Dainius