ReHacked vol. 231: Tolkien, 50 years on, Harry Browne’s 17 Golden Rules of Financial Safety, Google Preemptively Banned Hundreds of Millions of 'Pirate' URLs and more
The latest Bing popup appeared above the taskbar on Windows 11. Screenshot by Tom Warren / The Verge
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Tolkien, 50 years on | Sebastian Milbank | The Critic Magazine #culture #history #longread
50 years ago, J.R.R Tolkien left this world much changed for his having been in it. The anniversary is being celebrated with a requiem mass in Birmingham Oratory, where he once served as an altar boy, and by celebrations and gatherings around the world. There is even, improbably, an ongoing attempt to make the poor man a saint, which one can only hope goes nowhere.
A romantic Edwardian, steeped in Northern European folklore and Victorian literature, Tolkien was and is despised by large parts of the fashionable literary establishment. I have known very few neutral reactions to his work. People either love or loathe Lord of the Rings, which seems doomed to eternally inspire adoration or ire, and nothing much in between.
Harry Browne’s 17 Golden Rules of Financial Safety – The Tao Of Wealth #economy
Whenever you’re in doubt about a course of action, it is always better to err on the side of safety.
Google Preemptively Banned Hundreds of Millions of 'Pirate' URLs Last Year * TorrentFreak #copyrights
Preemptive Takedowns
This doesn’t mean that Google actually removed that many URLs from its search index. As reported before, Google also supports ‘preemptive‘ takedowns, which means that it will block reported URLs before they are indexed by the search engine.
These preemptive takedowns ensure that rightsholders can report content before Google picks it up. This isn’t required by the DMCA, but rightsholders use this feature en masse.
In the USPTO letter Google reveals that in 2022, more than 40% of the takedowns submitted via the web form were for content that hadn’t yet been indexed.
“Search accepts notices for web pages that are not even in our index at the time of submission. Nevertheless, we will proactively block such web pages from appearing in our Search results and will apply these notices to our demotion signal.
The boiling frog of digital freedom | Gazoche's blog #society #copyrights
Note: the dates of past events are only approximate. The other half of the timeline is wildly speculative and hypothetical.
Razavi Electronics - free electronics course on YouTube #learning
ISRO’s Chandrayaan-3 Confirms Presence of Sulfur and Other Elements on Lunar South Pole – ScienceSwitch #stem #space
India recently achieved a space exploration milestone by becoming the first nation to land a rover on the Moon’s mysterious south pole. The ambitious Chandrayaan-3 mission’s rover Pragyan has begun using its onboard instruments to study this unexplored frontier up close. Early results reveal the rover’s groundbreaking capabilities to analyze lunar soil composition, with potential implications for discovering frozen water.
Pragyan’s instruments are unlocking clues about the elemental makeup of the lunar surface near the south pole. A specialized Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) tool became the first equipment to ever perform in-situ measurements of this region’s composition. By shooting intense laser pulses at the soil, LIBS can induce plasma emissions that identify elemental signatures.
Poems by Detained Japanese Americans in the U.S. During WWII | Tokyo Weekender #art #history
An old manuscript in Japanese that Duane Watari, a third generation Japanese American, happened to find in the basement of his mother’s house in the U.S., turned out to be historically significant. It was the first in a series of serendipitous events that led to the publication of They Never Asked: Senryu Poetry from the WWII Portland Assembly Center in June 2023.
How Google made the world go viral - The Verge #google #internet #history #longread
The first thing ever searched on Google was the name Gerhard Casper, a former Stanford president. As the story goes, in 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin demoed Google for computer scientist John Hennessy. They searched Casper’s name on both AltaVista and Google. The former pulled up results for Casper the Friendly Ghost; the latter pulled up information on Gerhard Casper the person.
What made Google’s results different from AltaVista’s was its algorithm, PageRank, which organized results based on the amount of links between pages. In fact, the site’s original name, BackRub, was a reference to the backlinks it was using to rank results. If your site was linked to by other authoritative sites, it would place higher in the list than some random blog that no one was citing.
Microsoft is using malware-like pop-ups in Windows 11 to get people to ditch Google - The Verge #software
Microsoft’s latest desperate attempts to get people to use Bing are a disgusting overreach.
How to Communicate When Trust Is Low (Without Digging Yourself Into A Deeper Hole) – charity.wtf #career #psychology
When a relationship has very little trust, you tend to interpret everything someone says in the worst possible light, or you may hear hostility, contempt, or dismissiveness where none exists. On the other side of the exchange, the conversation becomes a minefield, where it feels like everything you say gets misinterpreted or turned against you no matter how careful you are trying to be. This can turn into a death spiral of trust where every interaction ends up with each of you hardening against each other a little more and filing away ever more wounds and slights. 💔
Yet you HAVE to communicate in order to work together! You have to be able to ask for things and give feedback.
The way trust gets rebuilt is by ✨small, positive interactions✨. If you’re in a trust hole, you can’t hear them clearly, and they can’t hear you (or your intent) clearly. So you have to bend over backwards to overcommunicate and overcompensate.
The study noted that humans are exposed to microplastics through the consumption of ‘water, seafood, consumer products (clothes, toothpaste, salt, sugar, honey, beer, anything stored in plastic bottles, plastic wrap, or cans/cartons lined with plastic), and via inhalation from textiles, synthetic rubber tires, and plastic covers’. They have been detected, among others, in blood and even breast milk - findings that warrant more investigation into the health outcomes of such exposure in mammals. Currently, there are limited studies that address the potential adverse effects of exposure to MPs on brain health in mammals and even fewer studies that consider age as an additional factor that may impact the outcome of exposure to microplastics - the reason Ross and her team chose to focus on neurobehavioral effects and inflammatory response to exposure to microplastics, as well as the accumulation of microplastics in tissues. Together with graduate students Lauren Gaspar and Sydney Bartman, she examined the biological and cognitive consequences of exposure to microplastics in mice.
ISPs Should Not Police Online Speech—No Matter How Awful It Is. | Electronic Frontier Foundation #internet #freespeech
Tier 1 ISPs play a unique role in the internet “stack,” because numerous other service providers depend on Tier 1 companies to serve their customers. As a result, Tier 1 providers can be especially powerful chokepoints—given their reach, their content policies can affect large swaths of the web. At the same time given their distant relationship to speakers, Tier 1 ISPs have little if any context to make good decisions about their speech.
When your classmates threaten you with felony charges | R. Miles McCain #privacy #security
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