7 min read

ReHacked vol. 271: Tokyo Street Photography, How influencer cartels manipulate social media, Martha Gellhorn Was The Only Woman to Report on the D-Day Landings and more

ReHacked vol. 271: Tokyo Street Photography, How influencer cartels manipulate social media, Martha Gellhorn Was The Only Woman to Report on the D-Day Landings and more

Martha Gellhorn Was The Only Woman to Report on the D-Day Landings From the Ground | Smithsonian #history #longread

“Gellhorn was willing to put herself in positions where some journalists wouldn’t and then tell the stories that weren’t the traditional ‘what’s going on with a battle?’ or troop movements,” Hartley says. “It resonated, especially back home, where people were waiting on news about their loved ones. That personal take really did impact her audience.”


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.

Щира подяка. Разом до перемоги!


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The censorship circumvention extension has disappeared from the Russian version of Mozilla Addons - Add-ons / Add-on Support - Mozilla Discourse https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/the-censorship-circumvention-extension-has-disappeared-from-the-russian-version-of-mozilla-addons/130914


British Cold War Nuclear Warning System #coldwar #history

The nuclear warning system in the U.K. was based around colour coded messages and their associated warning signals. It was an extension of the system used in World War 2 to inform the public of two messages 'Attack Warning' and 'Raiders Passed' by using sirens. The siren control buttons were coloured red and white. In the nuclear bomb era, these siren signals became 'Attack Warning Red' and Attack Message White', the warning of Nuclear Fallout was added in the form of a Grey and Black warning.


Tokyo’s Government Gets in the Matchmaking Business to Boost Marriages | TIME #society

Called “Tokyo Futari Story,” the city hall’s new initiative is just that: An effort to create couples, “futari,” in a country where it is increasingly common to be “hitori,” or alone.

While a site offering counsel and general information for potential lovebirds is online, a dating app is also in development. City hall hopes to offer it later this year, accessible through phone or web, a city official said Thursday.

Details were still undecided. City Hall declined to comment on Japanese media reports that said the app will require a confirmation of identity, such as a driver’s license, your tax records to prove income and a signed form that says you are ready to get married.


EU Plans Major Expansion of Mass Surveillance: Indiscriminate Data Collection, Device Monitoring, Encryption Backdoors, and Mandatory Data Sharing #privacy

The European Union (EU) is planning to implement a new set of draconian mass surveillance rules shortly after Sunday’s EU Parliament election, a member of the EP has warned after the plans surfaced on the internet.

The conclusion that radical surveillance measures are in the works proceeds from documents detailing the meetings of working groups, dubbed “high level group(s) on access to data for effective law enforcement.”


Japan's Wildly Popular 'Zombie Train' is Back #culture

The “Zombie Train” is back. Following its hugely successful debut run last summer, Watarase Keikoku Railway Co. decided that the haunted house-on-rails, in which passengers are scared out of their wits by actors posing as reanimated corpses, was worth pursuing for another year.

The hair-raising characters returned on Sunday, June 2, and will appear eight more times over the next three months. Passengers can enjoy the experience either on the outbound service, which departs from Omama Station in Midori city, Gunma Prefecture, in the morning, or the outbound one, which leaves from Tsudo Station in Nikko city, Tochigi Prefecture, in the afternoon. While the whole journey lasts 90 minutes, the zombie course is one hour.


Tokyo Street Photography: Lee Chapman’s Quietly Profound Work #art #photography

Photographer Lee Chapman documents the ever-changing Tokyo landscape through a profound lens of grief, loss and resilience.


How influencer cartels manipulate social media: Fraudulent behaviour hidden in plain sight | CEPR #internet

Social media influencers account for a growing share of marketing budgets worldwide. This column examines a problem within this rapidly expanding advertising market – influencer cartels, in which groups of influencers collude to increase advertising revenue by inflating each other’s engagement numbers. Influencer cartels can improve consumer welfare if they expand social media engagement to the target audience, but reduce welfare if they divert engagement to less relevant audiences. Rewarding engagement quantity encourages harmful collusion. Instead, the authors suggest, influencers should be compensated based on the actual value they provide.


Study shows most doctors endorsing drugs on X are paid to do so #health

A team of medical researchers affiliated with several institutions in the U.S. has found that a high percentage of doctors posting endorsements regarding drugs on the social media site X were paid to do so by the makers of the drugs.


behind the scenes - Was the appearance of the sand worms in David Lynch's Dune (1984) completely original to that film? - Science Fiction & Fantasy Stack Exchange #sci-fi #history

The first depiction of a sandworm with 3 radially-symmetrical mouth flaps I can find is an illustration by John Schoenherr for the first part of the serialized "The Prophet of Dune" in Analog, January 1965.


Microsoft blocks popular method to install Windows 11 sans account | PCWorld #software

Before PC users can enjoy everything Windows 11 has on tap, they must first enter an e-mail address that’s linked to a Microsoft account. If you don’t have one, you’ll be asked to create one before you can start setting it up.

A frequently used trick to circumvent this block is a small but ingenious step. By entering a random e-mail address and password, which doesn’t exist and causes the link to fail, you end up directly with the creation of a local account and can thus avoid creating an official account with Microsoft.


A Geospatial Data Science Blog - Saint Michael Sword #interesting #nature #science

Are the 7 famous Cathedrals really on a straight line? A numerical investigation


Boeing's Starliner Docks at ISS After Five Thrusters Unexpectedly Shut Off #space

After back-to-back failed launch attempts, a crewed Starliner capsule finally launched on Wednesday to deliver two NASA astronauts to low Earth orbit. Boeing is testing its capsule’s ability to transport crews to the International Space Station (ISS), with Starliner set to dock to the orbital lab on Thursday.


FBI has obtained 7k Lockbit ransomware decryption keys. From the hands of the bad guys to the hands of the good(?) #privacy #security


The Right Not to Be Subjected to AI Profiling Based on Publicly Available Data—Privacy and the Exceptionalism of AI Profiling | Philosophy & Technology #privacy #ai

Social media data hold considerable potential for predicting health-related conditions. Recent studies suggest that machine-learning models may accurately predict depression and other mental health-related conditions based on Instagram photos and Tweets. In this article, it is argued that individuals should have a sui generis right not to be subjected to AI profiling based on publicly available data without their explicit informed consent. The article (1) develops three basic arguments for a right to protection of personal data trading on the notions of social control and stigmatization, (2) argues that a number of features of AI profiling make individuals more exposed to social control and stigmatization than other types of data processing (the exceptionalism of AI profiling), (3) considers a series of other reasons for and against protecting individuals against AI profiling based on publicly available data, and finally (4) argues that the EU General Data Protection Regulation does not ensure that individuals have a right not to be AI profiled based on publicly available data.



Troy Hunt: Telegram Combolists and 361M Email Addresses #security #privacy

Last week, a security researcher sent me 122GB of data scraped out of thousands of Telegram channels. It contained 1.7k files with 2B lines and 361M unique email addresses of which 151M had never been seen in HIBP before. Alongside those addresses were passwords and, in many cases, the website the data pertains to. I've loaded it into Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) today because there's a huge amount of previously unseen email addresses and based on all the checks I've done, it's legitimate data.


The Intellectual Obesity Crisis - by Gurwinder - The Prism #information #news

Junk info is often false info, but it isn't junk because it's false. It's junk because it has no practical use; it doesn't make your life better, and it doesn't improve your understanding. Even lies can be nourishing; the works of Dostoevsky are fiction, yet can teach you more about humans than any psychology textbook. Meanwhile, most verified facts do nothing to improve your life or understanding, and are, to paraphrase Nietzsche, as useful as knowledge of the chemical composition of water to someone who is drowning.


Scientists should use AI as a tool, not an oracle #ai #science

Who produces AI hype? As we discuss in the AI Snake Oil book, it is not just companies and the media but also AI researchers. For example, a pair of widely-publicized papers in Nature in December 2023 claimed to have discovered over 2.2 million new materials using AI, and robotically synthesized 41 of them. Unfortunately, the claims were quickly debunked: “Most of the [41] materials produced were misidentified, and the rest were already known”. As for the large dataset, examining a sample of 250 compounds showed that it was mostly junk.


Crooks threaten to leak 2.9B records of personal info • The Register #security

Billions of records detailing people's personal information may soon be dumped online after being allegedly obtained from a Florida firm that handles background checks and other requests for folks' private info.

A criminal gang that goes by the handle USDoD put the database up for sale for $3.5 million on an underworld forum in April, and rather incredibly claimed the trove included 2.9 billion records on all US, Canadian, and British citizens. It's believed one or more miscreants using the handle SXUL was responsible for the alleged exfiltration, who passed it onto USDoD, which is acting as a broker.


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Dainius