ReHacked vol. 261: Proteins let cells remember how well their last division went, Mazda’s Rotary Engine in the Age of the Electric Car and more

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Proteins let cells remember how well their last division went | Ars Technica #nature

When we talk about memories in biology, we tend to focus on the brain and the storage of information in neurons. But there are lots of other memories that persist within our cells. Cells remember their developmental history, whether they've been exposed to pathogens, and so on. And that raises a question that has been challenging to answer: How does something as fundamental as a cell hold onto information across multiple divisions?

There's no one answer, and the details are really difficult to work out in many cases. But scientists have now worked out one memory system in detail. Cells are able to remember when their parent had a difficult time dividing—a problem that's often associated with DNA damage and cancer. And, if the problems are substantial enough, the two cells that result from a division will stop dividing themselves.

Keeping Rotary Alive: Mazda’s Rotary Engine in the Age of the Electric Car | Nippon.com #engineering

In the early 1960s, the Japanese government attempted to consolidate the auto industry into three main groups: a mass-production group, a sporting/luxury group, and a light vehicle group. Mazda (known at the time as Tōyōkōgyō), which entered the car market in 1960 with the release of its light vehicle range, would have been incorporated into the light vehicle group, but that idea didn’t sit well with Mazda’s engineers, who already had dreams of turning Mazda into an all-round car manufacturer. To show the company had the potential to cover all the bases, Mazda’s engineers attempted to commercialize Mazda’s proprietary, advanced technologies, and chose the rotary engine as a prime example.

Breakdown of Safety Is Not Unique to Boeing — It’s Endemic to Capitalist Society | Truthout #economy #aviation

While the dramatic news of the deposed CEO has made many headlines, it’s also a corporate sleight of hand that obscures the ways in which corporate profit motives … have promoted unsafe production practices.

Facebook let Netflix see user DMs, quit streaming to keep Netflix happy: Lawsuit | Ars Technica #privacy

One of the first questions that may come to mind is why a company like Facebook would allow Netflix to influence such a major business decision. The litigation claims the companies formed a lucrative business relationship that included Facebook allegedly giving Netflix access to Facebook users' private messages:

By 2013, Netflix had begun entering into a series of “Facebook Extended API” agreements, including a so-called “Inbox API” agreement that allowed Netflix programmatic access to Facebook’s users' private message inboxes, in exchange for which Netflix would “provide to FB a written report every two weeks that shows daily counts of recommendation sends and recipient clicks by interface, initiation surface, and/or implementation variant (e.g., Facebook vs. non-Facebook recommendation recipients). ... In August 2013, Facebook provided Netflix with access to its so-called “Titan API,” a private API that allowed a whitelisted partner to access, among other things, Facebook users' “messaging app and non-app friends."

Amazon fined in Poland for dark pattern design tricks | TechCrunch #economy

Amazon has been fined in Poland for misleading consumers about the conclusion of sales contracts on its online marketplace. The sanction, of close to $8 million (or in local currency: PLN 31,850,141), also calls out the e-commerce giant for deceptive design elements which may inject a false sense of urgency into the purchasing process and mislead shoppers about elements like product availability and delivery dates.

Boeing’s Dead Whistleblower Spoke the Truth | The Free Press #aviation #crime

In the days before his death, John Barnett was in Charleston, giving a deposition for the whistleblower suit he had filed against Boeing. According to one of his lawyers, Rob Turkewitz, he was upbeat about his testimony, feeling he was finally able to tell the story of his efforts to get the company to take safety more seriously—and the rejection of those efforts by his bosses, who, according to Barnett, simply didn’t want to hear about it.

The last day of the deposition was scheduled for Saturday, March 9. But that morning, he was found in his truck, a bullet in his head and a gun in his hand. The police said it was “a self-inflicted wound.”

Mutt on Windows without WSL — Dan's Musings #software

Meta takes $40K, holds our business ransom – Tidbyt #socialnetworks #economy

tl;dr: Meta charged my credit card $40K for advertising, somehow lost track of the money, and has now suspended our account unless we wire them $40K more.

When you’re running a small business, you always hear horror stories from fellow founders about dealing with large platform companies like Meta, Google, Amazon, and Apple. Depending on your business, working with these platforms ranges from “convenient” to “existentially necessary”.

‘He was always voraciously watching’: Scorsese’s secret life as an obsessive VHS archivist | Martin Scorsese | The Guardian #history #culture

The Oscar-winning director has donated over 50 storage boxes of tapes that show a devoted interest in recording films and shows from the '80s to the 2000s.
In the basement of the University of Colorado Boulder’s main library, an 85-year-old stone fortress built in the Italian rural style, the archives of the school’s Rare and Distinctive Collections occupy rows of shelves as far as the eye can see. Here, amid yellowed books, historical maps and medieval manuscripts, Martin Scorsese has quietly made public a very private preoccupation. More than 50 storage boxes hold thousands of VHS tapes that contain films and television programs Scorsese recorded directly from broadcast television. The renowned director and film preservationist, it turns out, was also, for decades, a prolific guerrilla archivist.

Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun to step down in shakeup amid safety crisis | Reuters #aviation

Boeing (BA.N) CEO Dave Calhoun will step down by year-end in a broad management shakeup brought on by the planemaker's sprawling safety crisis exacerbated by a January mid-air panel blowout on a 737 MAX plane.
In addition, board chair Larry Kellner and Stan Deal, head of the company's commercial planes business, are also leaving as Boeing's board tries to get control of the myriad issues that have shaken confidence in the iconic planemaker over several weeks.

ZenHammer: Rowhammer Attacks on AMD Zen-based Platforms - Computer Security Group #hardware #security

Our work shows that it is possible to trigger Rowhammer bit flips on DDR4 devices on AMD Zen 2 and Zen 3 systems despite deployed TRR mitigations. This result proves that AMD systems are equally vulnerable to Rowhammer as Intel systems, which greatly increases the attack surface, considering today’s AMD market share of around 36% on x86 desktop CPUs. This poses a significant risk as DRAM devices in the wild cannot easily be fixed, and previous work showed that Rowhammer attacks are practical, for example, in the browser, on smartphones, across VMs, and even over the network. Furthermore, we show that ZenHammer can trigger Rowhammer bit flips on a DDR5 device for the first time.

What Happens to Google Maps When Tectonic Plates Move? - Nautilus #nature

The “rest of the world” includes Southern California, which straddles the North American and Pacific plates. The Pacific plate creeps a couple of inches toward the northwest every year relative to the rest of North America. The plate boundary is not sharp, so the actual amount of movement varies in a complicated way. The California Spatial Reference Center in La Jolla has a network of tracking stations and periodically updates the coordinates of reference points in the state. “That’s what the surveyors then use to tie themselves into NAD 83,” said the center’s director, Yehuda Bock. The last update was in 2018.

Like Smith, Bock says that more frequent updating would actually complicate matters: “Surveyors do not like it if coordinates change, so this is kind of a compromise.” For localized line-drawing, it doesn’t much matter, but large-scale projects such as the California high-speed rail system have to keep up with tectonic motion.

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