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ReHacked vol. 249: JAL A359 Accident, 2023’s best global tech stories we wish we’d written, Bitwarden Heist and more

ReHacked vol. 249: JAL A359 Accident, 2023’s best global tech stories we wish we’d written, Bitwarden Heist and more
An aerial view shows the burnt Japan Airlines Airbus A350 plane after a collision with a Japan Coast Guard aircraft at Haneda Airport in Tokyo | KYODO

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JAL flight was cleared to land before fiery Tokyo collision - The Japan Times
Investigators are continuing to probe what went wrong a day after a deadly collision between a Japan Airlines jet and a coast guard plane at Tokyo's Haneda Airport.

AVHerald report (preliminary):

Accident: JAL A359 at Tokyo on Jan 2nd 2024, collided with Coast Guard DH8C on runway and burst into flames

JAL Japan Airlines Airbus A350-900, registration JA13XJ performing flight JL-516 from Sapporo to Tokyo Haneda (Japan) with 367 passengers and 12 crew, landed on Haneda's runway 34R at 17:47L (08:47Z) in night time conditions but collided with a Japanese Coast Guard Dash 8-300 registration JA722A (Coast Guard code MA722) on the runway shortly after touchdown and burst into flames. The A350 came to a stop off the right hand edge of the runway about 1680 meters/5510 feet down the runway and was evacuated. All occupants were able to evacuate. The other aircraft carrying 6 people also burst into flames, 5 of the six occupants are confirmed dead. Both aircraft burned down. 14 occupants of the A359 received injuries, the captain of the Dash 8 received serious injuries.


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Women of NASA 21312 | Ideas | Buy online at the Official LEGO® Shop GB #fun #science #history #technology #woman-in-science

Explore the professions of some of the groundbreaking women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) with the LEGO® Ideas Women of NASA set. It features minifigures of 4 pioneering women of NASA— astronomer and educator Nancy Grace Roman, computer scientist and entrepreneur Margaret Hamilton, astronaut, physicist and entrepreneur Sally Ride and astronaut, physician and engineer Mae Jemison—and 3 builds illustrating their areas of expertise. Role-play space exploration from planning to moon landing, beginning with the iconic scene from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1969 of Hamilton with software that she and her team programmed. Build the posable Hubble Space Telescope and launch a LEGO version of the Space Shuttle Challenger with 3 removable rocket stages. The set also includes a booklet about the 4 featured women of NASA, and the fan creator and LEGO designers of this fun and educational set.


Cheap and They Don't Snitch: Drones Are the New Drug Mules #crime #technology

Last week border officials in the Punjab region of India revealed they intercepted 107 drug-carrying drones sent by smuggling gangs last year over the border from Pakistan, the highest number on record.

Most were carrying heroin or opium from Pakistan to be dropped and received by collaborators in the Punjab, notorious for having India’s worst levels of opiate addiction.


YouTube demonetizes public domain 'Steamboat Willie' video after copyright claim | Mashable #copyrights

UPDATE: Jan. 5, 2024, 5:18 p.m. EST On Friday, Disney retracted the copyright claim on YouTuber Brock Baker's "Steamboat Willie" video.

Read the update here as well as the original story below.

Planning to utilize new public domain works featuring Mickey Mouse this year? Well, here's a case you should certainly pay attention to.

On Thursday, voice actor and YouTuber Brock Baker uploaded a new video, titled "Steamboat Willie (Brock's Dub)," to his YouTube channel with more than 1 million subscribers.


This holographic camera turns any window into an invisible camera | Digital Camera World #technology #futurism

Zeiss is bringing its remarkable Holocam technology to CES 2024, which can turn any glass screen into a camera. This means that everything from the window in your car to the screen on your laptop to the glass on your front door can now possess an invisible image sensor.


A dedicated scratchpad for developers #software


Silenzio! 'Anna's Archive' Shadow Library Blocked Following Publishers' Complaint * TorrentFreak #copyrights

Appearing in the wake of the Z-Library shutdown late 2022, shadow library 'Anna's Archive' now bills itself as the "largest truly open library in human history." A complaint filed in December 2023 by the Italian Publishers Association, which represents publishers of books, scientific journals, and digital content, paints a somewhat different picture. As a result, telecoms regulator AGCOM has issued immediate blocking instructions to ISPs.


Bitwarden Heist - How to Break Into Password Vaults Without Using Passwords #security

Sometimes, making particular security design decisions can have unexpected consequences. For security-critical software, such as password managers, this can easily lead to catastrophic failure: In this blog post, we show how Bitwarden’s Windows Hello implementation allowed us to remotely steal all credentials from the vault without knowing the password or requiring biometric authentication. When we discovered this during a penetration test it was so unexpected for us that we agreed with our client to publish a blog post about it and tell the story.

The underlying issue has been corrected in Bitwarden v2023.4.0 in April 2023 (but the story is interesting nonetheless).


Ants Recognise Infected Wounds and Treat Them #nature

The Matabele ants (Megaponera analis), which are widespread south of the Sahara, have a narrow diet: They only eat termites. Their hunting expeditions are dangerous because termite soldiers defend their conspecifics – and use their powerful mandibles to do so. It is therefore common for the ants to be injured while hunting.

If the wounds become infected, there is a significant survival risk. However, Matabele ants have developed a sophisticated healthcare system: they can distinguish between non-infected and infected wounds and treat the latter efficiently with antibiotics they produce themselves. This is reported by a team led by Dr Erik Frank from Julius-Maximilians-Universität (JMU) Würzburg and Professor Laurent Keller from the University of Lausanne in the journal Nature Communications.


23andMe tells victims it’s their fault that their data was breached | TechCrunch #privacy

Facing more than 30 lawsuits from victims of its massive data breach, 23andMe is now deflecting the blame to the victims themselves in an attempt to absolve itself from any responsibility, according to a letter sent to a group of victims seen by TechCrunch.

“Rather than acknowledge its role in this data security disaster, 23andMe has apparently decided to leave its customers out to dry while downplaying the seriousness of these events,” Hassan Zavareei, one of the lawyers representing the victims who received the letter from 23andMe, told TechCrunch in an email.


Why you should grow and keep big muscles · Today Purpose #health

Life isn’t just about how long we live; it’s about how well we live it. We often hear about increasing our lifespan, but is a longer life worth it if we can’t move and become dependent on others? What’s equally, or even more important, is enhancing our healthspan—the period during which we enjoy a good quality of life. From what I’ve observed when talking to older people, they care more about “improving the quality of their life” than “living a longer life”

Imagine being unable to engage in activities you love, like traveling, playing with kids, hiking, or even just gardening. The loss of functional ability can lead to a diminished the enjoyment we have in life.


The Esquire Glamour Girl Calendar of 1948 » Design You Trust #art #history #eyecandy

Esquire magazine, when it debuted in 1933, was a precursor to Playboy in many respects. It featured substantial articles but was primarily purchased for its pin-up content. Unlike photographic nudes, Esquire’s pin-ups consisted of tantalizing glamour girl cartoons, initially created by George Petty. By 1939, these cartoons had evolved into double-page spreads, essentially pioneering the concept of the centerfold.


All DMCA Notices Filed Against TorrentFreak in 2023 Were Bogus * TorrentFreak #copyrights

Any content creator who sees their work being used by unauthorized third-parties can file DMCA notices against platforms communicating that content to the public.

Platforms should respond by taking allegedly-infringing content down but in practice, some do and some don’t.

Full-blown pirate sites may not respond to notices at all for obvious reasons but some entirely legitimate platforms also refuse to comply in appropriate circumstances.

Google is one of those platforms and without the diligence of the Google Search team, at least 150 articles published on TorrentFreak.com would’ve been disappeared over the years due to bogus DMCA notices. We very much appreciate that first line of defense; since we don’t have to commit resources towards countering wrongful complaints, we can concentrate on our reporting.

To that end, today we can report that DMCA notices continued to be filed against us at Google, all of them demanding the deindexing of links to our news reports in Google search. We also received a few direct to us via email, more than usual in 2023. All complaints/takedown notices had something in common; 100% bogus, right across the board, and a complete waste of resources for everyone involved.


Dillo, a multi-platform graphical web browser #software


How Salim Kara Stole $2m Of Coins With A Magnet & Car Antenna (2022) #history #crime

Maintaining public transit ticket machines is crucial to keeping cities moving but not a job that would normally generate headlines. That is unless you’re Salim Kara, who for 13 years used a car antenna and magnet to pilfer $ 2.3 million of fares from Edmonton’s LTR, one coin at a time. Finally caught in 1994, Salim’s salami-slicing style scam had netted him 37 tonnes of small change and minor celebrity status. Here’s the fascinating story of Salim Kara’s coin scam in full.


Elizabeth line testing ways of banishing its “ghosts in the walls” #interesting

The shadows are appearing behind the seats on the platforms where people are leaning up against the walls and thanks to their appearance, have been nicknamed by some as ghosts.

They are starting to look shabby though, so TfL is trying out an idea to see if it can help reduce the effect or even eradicate it entirely.


Fix My Blinds | Do It Yourself Blind Repair #DIY

Join over 1,000,000 people that have fixed their blinds!


2023’s best global tech stories we wish we’d written - Rest of World #retrospective

Favorite global tech stories from publications not named Rest of World.


Pluralistic: 2024’s public domain is a banger (20 Dec 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow #copyrights

They stole something from you. For decades, they stole it. That thing they stole? Your entire culture. For all of human history, works created in living memory entered the public domain every year. 40 years ago, that stopped.

First in 1976, and then again in 1998, Congress retroactively extended copyright's duration by 20 years, for all works, including works whose authors were unknown and long dead, whose proper successors could not be located. Many of these authors were permanently erased from history as every known copy of their works disappeared before they could be brought back into our culture through reproduction, adaptation and re-use (copyright is "strict liability," meaning that even if you pay to clear the rights to a work from someone who has good reason to believe they control those rights, if they're wrong, you are on the hook as an infringer, and the statutory damages run to six figures).


Woman with rectifier and car 1912 #art #history

New York Heritage Digital Collections Woman with rectifier and electric car.



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