ReHacked vol. 279: To preserve their work journalists take archiving into their own hands, How Great was the “Great Oxidation Event” and more

To preserve their work — and drafts of history — journalists take archiving into their own hands | Nieman Journalism Lab #copyrights #internet #longread

AI further complicates matters — what happens when sites are used to feed ChatGPT, then go offline? “What happens when that information is baked into large language models and the source of that information is not live on the web anymore?” Cooper wondered. “It’s kind of mind-boggling to think about, but it is reality for a lot of websites that have been crawled and had their content put into the blender of large language models. How will it be possible, in the future, to trace back some of the claims that will be made by ChatGPT if the content is no longer alive?”

When news sites’ archives disappear, readers aren’t the only ones who lose out — there are all kinds of personal and professional challenges for journalists, too. They’re left to archive their work on their own, so that they have clips to show the next job. Web pages, photographs, and text stories are easier to save than audio files, interactives, and other types of digital journalism; to preserve those, journalists often have to get creative. Paid personal archiving services are available, but “it’s not necessarily appealing when you’re just trying to look for a way to save something that was previously online for free,” one journalist told me.

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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Apprentice, Journeyman, and Master: The Medieval Guild #history

The word Journeyman has a more interesting etymology. A Journeyman is someone who does work for “another.” That is, he is an Apprentice who has been sent out into the world to work, generally for other Masters or shops. An original meaning of the word “journey” was “a day” and a Journeyman was someone who performed work for a day and then moved on, as it were.

Moscow’s Spies Were Stealing US Tech — Until the FBI Started a Sabotage Campaign - POLITICO #history #politics #longread

The CIA assessed that, in the late 1970s, Moscow’s spies had illicitly acquired thousands of pieces of Western microelectronics worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The Soviets “were stealing us blind,” said Milt Bearden, a retired senior CIA official who ran the agency’s Soviet operations. “It was a vacuum cleaner of tech theft.”

While the Soviet Union might have imploded over three decades ago, this underlying dynamic hasn’t really changed. Russia’s intelligence services are still scouring the globe for prohibited U.S. tech, particularly since Moscow’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Current sanctions have only stanched, but not stopped, the flow of prohibited goods. A constellation of countries, including former Soviet republics in Central Asia and the Caucasus, have become major transshipment hubs for contraband ultimately making its way to Russia. Russia has reportedly even covertly imported household items like refrigerators and washing machines to rip out the microchips within them for use in military equipment.

What Happens in a Mind That Can’t ‘See’ Mental Images | Quanta Magazine #psychology #health #longread

The brain’s process for creating mental images can be described as perception in reverse.

When we perceive something in front of us, “we try to infer meaning from an image,” Dijkstra said. Electromagnetic waves enter our eyes, are translated into neural signals and then flow to the back of the brain, where they’re processed in the visual cortex. The information then flows forward toward the front of the brain into memory or semantic regions — a pipeline that ends with us knowing we are looking at a cat or a cup of coffee.

“During imagination, we basically do the opposite,” Dijkstra said. You start with knowing what you want to imagine, like a cat, and information flows from the brain’s memory and semantic regions to the visual cortex, where the image is sketched. However, that’s a working model of visual imagination; there’s still much that is not known about the process, such as where mental imagery begins and the exact role of the visual cortex.

Reverse engineering the 59-pound printer onboard the Space Shuttle #engioneering #space #history #longread

The motivation for the teleprinter goes back to the Apollo program. During Apollo missions, the only way to send information to the astronauts was by talking to them over the radio and having the astronauts write down the data. NASA decided that the Space Shuttle should include a mechanism to send text and images to the astronauts, a 78-pound, high-tech fax machine called the Uplink Text & Graphics System (TAGS). A high-resolution grayscale image was sent to the Shuttle as a digital data stream. Onboard the Shuttle, a squat CRT displayed the image one line at a time and a fiber-optic faceplate transferred each line to light-sensitive silver emulsion paper. The paper was developed by passing it over a hot roller at 260ºF for 25 seconds, creating a permanent image.

The one flaw in this plan was that sending the digital image to the Shuttle required the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System (TDRS), which due to delays wouldn't be ready until the sixth Shuttle flight. (The TDRS was a space-based replacement for the worldwide network of ground stations that was used during Apollo.) As a result, NASA decided just seven months before the first Shuttle launch that they needed an interim system "for transmission of real-time, flight-plan changes and other operational data to the crew."

The Shuttle teleprinter is the result of this rushed effort to create a printer that could work over the existing audio channel rather than the digital TDRS satellite. Due to the time pressure, the Shuttle teleprinter needed to be based on an off-the-shelf printer. Thermal and electrostatic printers were rejected due to toxicity and flammability problems. (The Shuttle teleprinter used a roll of yellowish paper, which required a NASA waiver due to its flammability, a concern ever since the Apollo-1 disaster).

WhatsApp for Windows lets Python, PHP scripts execute with no warning #security

A security issue in the latest version of WhatsApp for Windows allows sending Python and PHP attachments that are executed without any warning when the recipient opens them.

For the attack to be successful, Python needs to be installed, a prerequisite that may limit the targets to software developers, researchers, and power users.

Stop Killing Games #copyrights

Videogames are being destroyed! Most video games work indefinitely, but a growing number are designed to stop working as soon as publishers end support. This effectively robs customers, destroys games as an artform, and is unnecessary. Our movement seeks to pass new law in the EU to put an end to this practice. Our proposal would do the following:

Require video games sold to remain in a working state when support ends.
Require no connections to the publisher after support ends.
Not interfere with any business practices while a game is still being supported.

If you are an EU citizen, please sign the Citizens' Initiative!

How Great was the “Great Oxidation Event”? - Eos #nature #longread

A critical transition in our planet’s history occurred when the single-celled ancestors of plants learned to combine carbon dioxide and water—two chemicals found everywhere on Earth—to make their cells and produce energy. These early innovators spat out a waste product formerly absent from their environment: free molecular oxygen (O2). This highly reactive gas began to run rampant on Earth’s surface, leaving telltale signs of its activity in minerals and sediments.

It’s been more than 5 decades since scientists began deciphering these signs from the geologic record. Over that time, most scientists have come to agree that O2 first reached appreciable concentrations in Earth’s atmosphere roughly 2.4 billion years ago, during the Great Oxidation Event (GOE) [Farquhar et al., 2014]. Geologists who first described the GOE estimated that oxygen levels rose from near zero to about 10%–40% of what they are today (oxygen currently makes up 21% of the air we breathe). They also proposed that atmospheric O2 remained at these levels until it reached modern levels more than 1.5 billion years later. This extended interval roughly coincided with the third and longest of the four geologic eons of Earth’s history, the Proterozoic.

Other researchers have since challenged those original estimates of Proterozoic O2. They suggest that oxygen concentrations rose to less than 0.1% of today’s level during the GOE and remained there, with only occasional short-term increases, through the ensuing eon. This substantial distinction—10% or more versus less than 0.1%—bears critically on the role of oxygen in animal evolution. Various forms of animal life require different minimum oxygen levels for survival, but even primitive animals like sponges require at least 0.25% of today’s atmospheric oxygen levels to metabolize [Cole et al., 2020].

Warwick: Missing Henry VIII portrait found after random spot on X #art #history

A post on X spotted randomly by an art historian has led to a portrait of King Henry VIII - hanging in a West Midland council hall - to be identified as a famous missing artwork.

Adam Busiakiewicz, who works as a consultant for famous auction house Sotheby's, said that when he saw a photo of the work hanging in the Shire Hall, Warwick, it "just stood out to me".

After inspecting it personally to test his theory, he confirmed the artwork was created for tapestry maker Ralph Sheldon and dated back to the 1590s.

It was one of a collection of 22 portraits made for Sheldon, but the whereabouts of only a handful were known.

Meta to pay Texas $1.4 billion in facial recognition case | The Texas Tribune #privacy

Facebook’s parent company Meta will pay Texas $1.4 billion to settle a lawsuit that accused the company of using personal biometric data without users’ authorization.

The 2022 lawsuit, filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in state court, alleged that Meta had been using facial recognition software on photos uploaded to Facebook without Texans’ consent.

Children should be allowed to get bored, expert says - BBC News (2013) #psychology

Children should be allowed to get bored so they can develop their innate ability to be creative, an education expert says.

Dr Teresa Belton told the BBC cultural expectations that children should be constantly active could hamper the development of their imagination

She quizzed author Meera Syal and artist Grayson Perry about how boredom had aided their creativity as children.

Syal said boredom made her write, while Perry said it was a "creative state".

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