ReHacked vol. 287: Neil Postman on Technology and Society (1998), Postcards are the email of their day, Smart TVs take snapshots of what you watch multiple times per second and more

'Postcards are the email of their day': How cat memes went viral 100 years ago #history #memes #cats #fun

Like memes, postcards carried not just a picture and a few lines of text but were tangible evidence of a vast network and powerful institutions that had transported them rapidly across a far distance. They marked a changing world and technology's startling advance, delivered daily into the hands and mailboxes of citizens.

"We've forgotten the density of that early 20th-Century communications network, which postcards were moving through," says Weiss. "You could send a postcard to someone at 10 saying you'll be there at 5:30, if you're going from Manhattan to Jersey City, and you can get the message to them fairly quickly."

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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Playlist #society #history #futurism

More here: Amusing Ourselves to Death (2014)

Meta fined $102 million for storing passwords in plain text #security

The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) has slapped Meta with a $101.5 million (€91 million) fine after wrapping up an investigation into a security breach in 2019, wherein the company mistakenly stored users' passwords in plain text. Meta's original announcement only talked about how it found some user passwords stored in plain text on its servers in January that year. But a month later, it updated its announcement to reveal that millions of Instagram passwords were also stored in easily readable format.

Remember That DNA You Gave 23andMe? - The Atlantic #privacy

23andMe is not doing well. Its stock is on the verge of being delisted. It shut down its in-house drug-development unit last month, only the latest in several rounds of layoffs. Last week, the entire board of directors quit, save for Anne Wojcicki, a co-founder and the company’s CEO. Amid this downward spiral, Wojcicki has said she’ll consider selling 23andMe—which means the DNA of 23andMe’s 15 million customers would be up for sale, too.

Moving Bricks: Money-Laundering Practices in the Online Scam Industry #economy #crime #longread

Money-launderers call this type of ‘matchmaking transaction’ (撮合交易) process ‘moving bricks’ (搬砖, banzhuan), in which money is the commodity being moved from one place to another, sometimes through direct transfers between accounts and sometimes by withdrawing cash and then depositing it in other bank accounts. Jingjing told me that if a client entrusts them to receive a sum of money on their behalf, the company will contact an outside team that operates bank accounts, which they refer to as ‘motorcades’ (车队), to prepare to receive the sum. In the words of one of her colleagues with whom I had a chance to speak: ‘We are just natural carriers, acting as middlemen to earn a commission.’

Smart TVs take snapshots of what you watch multiple times per second | New Scientist #privacy

Smart TVs from Samsung and LG take screenshots of what you are watching even when you are using them to display images from a connected laptop or video game console

Kaspersky deletes itself, installs UltraAV antivirus without warning #security

Starting Thursday, Russian cybersecurity company Kaspersky deleted its anti-malware software from customers' computers across the United States and automatically replaced it with UltraAV's antivirus solution.
Does it mean that UltraAV also depends to FSB?
UltraAV on transition

End of an era: Historic Landsat 7 mission takes final images | U.S. Geological Survey #science #history

After more than 132,000 trips around the Earth and more than 3.3 million satellite images under its belt, the work of the Landsat 7 satellite is complete, even as the Landsat science mission continues with newer satellites.

Firefox tracks you with “privacy preserving” feature #privacy #software

Tracking by default, no information. To make matters worse, Mozilla has turned on its “privacy preserving attribution” by default. Users have not been informed about this move, nor have they been asked for their consent to be tracked by Firefox. The feature isn’t even mentioned in Mozilla’s data protection policies. The only way for users to turn it off is to find the opt-out function in a sub-menu of the browser’s settings. Irritatingly, a Mozilla developer justifies the move by claiming that users can’t make an informed decision.

Radioactive Consumer Products | Museum of Radiation and Radioactivity #interesting

Everything is radioactive. The question is, "How radioactive?"

As is often necessary, the scope of this category is being stretched—a number of the items shown here were never sold to the public as consumer products.

Hacker plants false memories in ChatGPT to steal user data in perpetuity | Ars Technica #ai #security

When security researcher Johann Rehberger recently reported a vulnerability in ChatGPT that allowed attackers to store false information and malicious instructions in a user’s long-term memory settings, OpenAI summarily closed the inquiry, labeling the flaw a safety issue, not, technically speaking, a security concern.

So Rehberger did what all good researchers do: He created a proof-of-concept exploit that used the vulnerability to exfiltrate all user input in perpetuity. OpenAI engineers took notice and issued a partial fix earlier this month.

Telegram will now hand over your phone number and IP if you’re a criminal suspect - The Verge #privacy

If Telegram receives a valid order from the relevant judicial authorities that confirms you’re a suspect in a case involving criminal activities that violate the Telegram Terms of Service, we will perform a legal analysis of the request and may disclose your IP address and phone number to the relevant authorities.

We abolished private schools in Finland - here's what happened next #education

Finland doesn’t have any kind of school ranking. When you go to high school, the schools publish the attainment of the students but it isn’t put into a table or a leaderboard. And at primary school, there isn’t anything close to that. A couple of years ago, the biggest newspaper in Finland, Helsinki Sanomat, tried to establish some kind of a ranking system. It caused outrage and many people were angry, saying they shouldn’t have done it. The line was that it isn’t OK to do that in Finland.

Embodied energy | Seth's Blog #ideas

But what about that book you just read? Not simply the energy to print it and ship it, or even the energy to grow the trees…

What about the energy of a life well lived by the author? The edits and rewrites and dead ends?

Everything feels different once we realize that something happened for it to become what it is now.

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Dainius