ReHacked vol. 270: 12 books from global tech leaders, Tracking private jets just got much harder, Possible association between tattoos and lymphoma revealed and more
Huge #privacy threat arises in #Europe and highly prorussian move.
Original message:
Beware: The #ChatControl proposal which has been stalling could be adopted by EU governments after all. France is considerung to give up its resistance.
The "compromise": Either you agree to have your chats scanned or you can no longer share&receive pictures/videos and links!
Link: https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/majority-for-chat-control-possible-users-who-refuse-scanning-to-be-prevented-from-sharing-photos-and-links/
Merridith Whittaker reply:
Signal strongly opposes this proposal.
Let there be no doubt: we will leave the EU market rather than undermine our privacy guarantees.
This proposal--if passed and enforced against us--would require us to make this choice.
It's surveillance wine in safety bottles.
Thread: https://x.com/mer__edith/status/1796508893822238881
Make a donation - support Ukraine. My favourite: Support the Armed Forces of Ukraine | via National Bank of Ukraine. More options if you want alternatives. Also, very important Come Back Alive Foundation - Charity Organization.
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Summer reading list: 12 books from global tech leaders - Rest of World #reading
Every year, we share a list of books from around the world that our team has read and enjoyed. For 2024, we decided to do something different: We asked influential decision makers at global companies — from TikTok to iFood to Shein — to share the books they’re reading and why they think you should read them, too. Here are 12 books that you should put on your reading list this year.
Nick M
Lord Kelvin’s Tide-Predicting Machine - IEEE Spectrum #science #history
Although Thomson is credited with designing the machine, in his paper “The Tide Gauge, Tidal Harmonic Analyser, and Tide Predicter” (published in Minutes of the Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers), he acknowledges a number of people who helped him solve specific problems. Craftsman Alexander Légé drew up the plan for the screw gearing for the motions of the shafts and constructed the initial prototype machine and subsequent models. Edward Roberts of the Nautical Almanac Office completed the arithmetic to express the ratio of shaft speeds. Thomson’s older brother, James, a professor of civil engineering at Queen’s College Belfast, designed the disk-globe-and-cylinder integrator that was used for the tidal harmonic analyzer. Thomson’s generous acknowledgments are a reminder that the work of engineers is almost always a team effort.
Internal messages show how the new head of one of the world’s oldest universities organized a citation cartel | Science | EL PAÍS English #science #copyrights
Their tricks are so crude that anyone who takes a look can easily spot them. In science, references included at the end of papers work like currency. The more other scientists cite you in their work, the greater your prestige, which leads to promotions, salary increases and even million-dollar projects. Corchado is quoted a lot, but only by a few close collaborators. On January 9, 2019, the mathematician Roberto Casado Vara signed a paper on computer security in electrical distribution networks, and 94% of the references (29 out of 31) were citations of Corchado’s work, even if it had nothing to do with the paper’s subject matter: the references included studies on the risk of bladder cancer, CO₂ in the ocean, oil spills, and red tides of microalgae.
The FMP notebooks offer a collection of educational material closely following the textbook Fundamentals of Music Processing (FMP). #music #software #learning
This is the starting website, which is opened when calling https://www.audiolabs-erlangen.de/FMP. Besides giving an overview, this website provides information on the license and the main contributors.
Napster Sparked a File-Sharing Revolution 25 Years Ago * TorrentFreak #internet #history
On June 1, 1999, the first public release of Napster launched online, kick-starting a global piracy frenzy that never disappeared. At the same time, it can be argued that the file-sharing software paved the way for legitimate business models that would eventually evolve into subscription-based platforms such as Spotify and Netflix.
Circular economy: Council gives final approval to right-to-repair directive - Consilium #law
The Council has today adopted a directive promoting the repair of broken or defective goods, also known as the right-to-repair (or R2R) directive. This legislation will make it easier for consumers to seek repair instead of replacement and repair services will become more accessible, transparent and attractive. The adoption of the directive is the last step in the legislative decision-making process.
Japan’s push to make all research open access is taking shape #copyrights
The Japanese government is pushing ahead with a plan to make Japan’s publicly funded research output free to read. In June, the science ministry will assign funding to universities to build the infrastructure needed to make research papers free to read on a national scale. The move follows the ministry’s announcement in February that researchers who receive government funding will be required to make their papers freely available to read on the institutional repositories from January 2025.
Leak: EU governments double down on penalising privacy-friendly and encrypted messaging services with chat control bulk scanning orders – Patrick Breyer #privacy #security
An updated version of the methodology to be used in the Child Sexual Abuse Regulation, leaked by the news portal Contexte, reveals more details on the approach pursued by the Belgian Council Presidency: The text doubles-down on services that allow people to protect themselves. If services are used through pseudonyms, VPNs, encryption or without an account, they will score worse on the risk scale, and will be more likely to be served a detection order mandating scanning of all communications content. The same applies if a services allows users to use cryptocurrencies or if it allows users to connect from another jurisdiction (like VPNs, TOR). If a services enables the „direct sharing of content without using centralised servers“, via P2P, that makes it score worse, because it would evade server-side scanning. If a privacy-friendly platform cannot or does not collect data on users (to monitor their behaviour or metadata), it will score worse. Services through which users “predominantly engage in public communication” (i.e. instead of private chats) will score better and thus be less likely to receive detection orders.
The Most Mind-Blowing Tales from the History of Sumo #history
Sumo has a lot of rules that casual fans may not be aware of, like how junior wrestlers who haven’t yet climbed the ranks must get around in a yukata (which literally means “bathing cloth”) and geta wooden sandals all throughout the year. This can be a little uncomfortable when the temperature drops, since another Japan Sumo Association rule prohibits active wrestlers from driving a car.
Tracking private jets just got much harder | Popular Science #privacy
The latest Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization bill contains a pointed amendment within it—the government is making it much more difficult to monitor and track private aircraft travel. The new law passed last week will almost exclusively benefit the nation’s wealthiest flyers and obscure public attempts to hold them accountable for their disproportionate carbon emissions.
A federal cybersecurity bill, slated to advance through Parliament soon, contains secretive, encryption-breaking powers that the government has been loath to talk about. And they threaten the online security of everyone in Canada.
Bill C-26 empowers government officials to secretly order telecommunications companies to install backdoors inside encrypted elements in Canada’s networks. This could include requiring telcos to alter the 5G encryption standards that protect mobile communications to facilitate government surveillance.
How Researchers Cracked an 11-Year-Old Password to a $3 Million Crypto Wallet | WIRED #security #privacy
Grand and Bruno spent months reverse engineering the version of the RoboForm program that they thought Michael had used in 2013 and found that the pseudo-random number generator used to generate passwords in that version—and subsequent versions until 2015—did indeed have a significant flaw that made the random number generator not so random. The RoboForm program unwisely tied the random passwords it generated to the date and time on the user’s computer—it determined the computer’s date and time, and then generated passwords that were predictable. If you knew the date and time and other parameters, you could compute any password that would have been generated on a certain date and time in the past.
If Michael knew the day or general time frame in 2013 when he generated it, as well as the parameters he used to generate the password (for example, the number of characters in the password, including lower- and upper-case letters, figures, and special characters), this would narrow the possible password guesses to a manageable number. Then they could hijack the RoboForm function responsible for checking the date and time on a computer and get it to travel back in time, believing the current date was a day in the 2013 time frame when Michael generated his password. RoboForm would then spit out the same passwords it generated on the days in 2013.
A robot will soon try to remove melted nuclear fuel from Japan's destroyed Fukushima reactor | AP News #engineering #technology
The operator of Japan’s destroyed Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant demonstrated Tuesday how a remote-controlled robot would retrieve tiny bits of melted fuel debris from one of three damaged reactors later this year for the first time since the 2011 meltdown.
Trying to buy a house is 'playing a game you can't win' #economy #society
When Nathan Wilkins moved back in with his mother and sister in 2019, he hoped it would help him save money to buy a home.
But in the years since, the US housing market has been transformed by rising rents, surging home prices, and a massive jump in mortgage rates, making homeownership seem ever more impossible.
He and his sister are making more money than ever, the 32-year-old insurance adjuster from Utah says. But shelling out $2,500 (£1,960) a month in rent doesn't leave much left over.
“It’s like I’m playing a game that you can’t win,” he says. “The fact that we’re being priced out just makes me want to throw up.”
Such frustrations are spreading, fuelling dissatisfaction and contributing to the widespread pessimism about the US economy that is looming over the country's upcoming election.
Mariana Rodríguez might actually win Monterrey’s mayoral election - Rest of World #internet #politics #socialnetworks
Mariana Rodríguez spent a recent Wednesday afternoon high-fiving and hugging hundreds of supporters around town, plastering smiley-face stickers on dozens of cars, and dancing with a presidential candidate well into the night.
When Rodríguez, who is running for mayor of the northern Mexican city of Monterrey, got home, she turned her attention to her strongest base: her 3.7 million followers on Instagram. The social media influencer-turned-politician posted a series of stories about the day’s highlights before bidding her audience a good night.
AI detector chatbots on WhatsApp don’t detect AI that well - Rest of World #internet #ai #politics #fakenews
Rest of World sent 15 pieces of misinformation, including AI-generated and real videos, to 11 WhatsApp “tip lines” in India.
Five did not verify any content at all.
The tip lines that responded struggled with the volume of queries, automatching results, and maintaining uniformity in responses across devices.
There are many genes involved in psychiatric disorders – and Hervs are only a part of this puzzle. Although the precise impact of these Hervs on brain cells and on a person’s susceptibility to certain psychiatric disorders requires further research, our study is the first to show that genetic susceptibility for a psychiatric disorder also acts through these ancient viral DNA sequences.
It’s still too early to determine the practical applications of our findings – and whether they might be used to develop new treatments. But we’re optimistic about this line of research. By linking Herv expression in the brain with psychiatric disorders, our research recognises the importance of these mysterious sequences in the human genome, which have been ignored for years.
Possible association between tattoos and lymphoma revealed | Lund University #health
A new study from Lund University in Sweden suggests that tattoos could be a risk factor for cancer in the lymphatic system, or lymphoma. Now, the researchers underline the need for more research on the topic.
Kabosu dies: Shiba inu dog was meme and face of Dogecoin #internet #meme #doge #promemoria
Kabosu, the dog behind the "doge" meme, has died after 14 years of internet fame, her owner has said.
The Japanese shiba inu inspired a generation of online jokes and became the face of Dogecoin cryptocurrency.
She had been suffering from leukaemia and liver disease and died on 24 May.
"She quietly passed away as if asleep while I caressed her," Atsuko Sato wrote on her blog, thanking Kabosu's fans.
"I think Kabo-chan was the happiest dog in the world. And I was the happiest owner."
As a rescue dog, Kabosu's real birthday was unknown, but Ms Sato estimated her age at 18.
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