ReHacked vol. 269: When Kodak Went to War with Polaroid, Carmakers Will Give Your Location to Police Without a Warrant, Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Science Data and more

Steve Blank Secret History – When Kodak Went to War with Polaroid #photography #history #economy #longread

In April 1969 Kodak tore up a 20-year manufacturing partnership with Polaroid. In a surprise to everyone at Polaroid, Kodak declared war. They terminated their agreement to supply Polaroid with negative film for Polacolor – the only color film Polaroid had on the market. Kodak gave Polaroid two years’ notice but immediately raised the film price 10% in the U.S. and 50% internationally. And Kodak publicly announced they were going to make film for Polaroid’s cameras – a knife to the heart for Polaroid as film sales were what made Polaroid profitable. Shortly thereafter, Kodak announced they were also going to make instant cameras in direct competition with Polaroid cameras. In short, they were going after every part of Polaroid’s business.

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!

Don’t forget to share if you like what you read here, subscribe (if not yet) and leave a comment. Any form of your feedback is very important to me. Thanks!

RSS feed available if you don’t want to clutter your inbox.

I'm excited to offer you an opportunity to support my work as the sole contributor to ReHacked. Your contribution will play a crucial role in covering server expenses. Rest assured, my commitment to keeping the primary content accessible to everyone remains unwavering.

As the sole contributor, your support is truly invaluable. Feel free to become a paid subscriber, and remember, you have the flexibility to cancel or switch to the "Free" option at any time.

Thank you for being an essential part of our community. Together, let's continue fostering a culture of knowledge-sharing and making a positive difference in the digital landscape.

Periodic Table of the Elements, in Pictures and Words #science #fun

FILE-ID.DIZ Description (1994) #computers #software #history

Basically, the FILE_ID.DIZ file is a straight ASCII text file, distributed
inside your distribution archive file along with your program files, which
contains a description of your program. This file will be used by most BBS
(Bulletin Board System) softwares for the online file description of your
file. We recommend that the FILE_ID.DIZ file be used in all of your
distribution archives.

Aldous Huxley Tells Mike Wallace What Will Destroy Democracy: Overpopulation, Drugs & Insidious Technology (1958) | Open Culture #society #world #politics #predictions #futurism

Over­pop­u­la­tion, manip­u­la­tive pol­i­tics, imbal­ances of soci­etal pow­er, addic­tive drugs, even more addic­tive tech­nolo­gies: these and oth­er devel­op­ments have pushed not just democ­ra­cy but civ­i­liza­tion itself to the brink. Or at least author Aldous Hux­ley saw it that way, and he told Amer­i­ca so when he appeared on The Mike Wal­lace Inter­view in 1958. (You can also read a tran­script here.) “There are a num­ber of imper­son­al forces which are push­ing in the direc­tion of less and less free­dom,” he told the new­ly famous news anchor, “and I also think that there are a num­ber of tech­no­log­i­cal devices which any­body who wish­es to use can use to accel­er­ate this process of going away from free­dom, of impos­ing con­trol.”

This startup is about to install bladeless rooftop wind turbines on box buildings #technology

Aeromine, launched in 2022, makes compact 50 kW or larger “wind harvesting platforms” that it mounts on the edge of a building’s roof. The rooftop wind units, which have no external moving parts or blades, capture wind flowing up and over the building and convert it into onsite electricity. Its generator system is a rotor-stator system with a highly efficient 5 kW permanent magnet generator.

Google just updated its algorithm. The Internet will never be the same #internet

Over the last two years, a series of updates to Google Search amount to a dramatic upheaval to the Internet's most powerful tool, complete with an unprecedented AI feature. Will Google save the web, or destroy it?

If you've ever typed "air purifier reviews" into Google, you were probably looking for the kind of content you'll find on HouseFresh.com. The site was started in 2020 by Gisele Navarro and her husband, based on a decade of experience writing about indoor air quality products. They filled their basement with purifiers, running rigorous science-based tests and writing articles to help consumers sort through marketing hype.

The hikikomori in Asia who withdraw from society: A life within four walls. #society #psychology #subculture

Charlie was 15 when his life inexplicably shrank to fit within the frame of his lower bunk bed in his family's cramped Hong Kong apartment.

“I felt very depressed, confused, like I didn’t know what I wanted,” said Charlie, who’s now 19 and still learning how to navigate the world outside.

Charlie is among millions of hikikomori, a Japanese term for people who cut themselves off from society, sometimes for months or years – often Gen Z and Millennials in the prime of their youth.

The phenomenon first emerged in Asia, and is particularly well-documented in Japan – but similar stories are surfacing in other parts of the world including the United States, Spain and France.

A Brief History of the World’s First Planetarium - IEEE Spectrum #history #space

In 1912, Oskar von Miller, an electrical engineer and founder of the Deutsches Museum, had an idea: Could you project an artificial starry sky onto a dome, as a way of demonstrating astronomical principles to the public?

It was such a novel concept that when von Miller approached the Carl Zeiss company in Jena, Germany, to manufacture such a projector, they initially rebuffed him. Eventually, they agreed, and under the guidance of lead engineer Walther Bauersfeld, Zeiss created something amazing.

The Disturbing Case of the Killer Geisha Sada Abe #history

Sada Abe was born into a family of relatively well-off tatami makers in Tokyo’s Kanda neighborhood in 1905. She was one of eight children (only four of whom survived until adulthood) and was often sent out of the house alone as a child. In her mid-teens, Abe was raped by a Keio University student. Following that traumatic event, she became increasingly rebellious.

We’re Ending Our Samsung Collaboration | iFixit News #hardware #sustainability

Two years ago we launched iFixit’s Samsung Repair Hub with the goal of building an incredible, repair-friendly ecosystem. We aimed to set the gold standard for repair documentation and empower local independent repair businesses with the tools and parts they needed to thrive, all while keeping Galaxy devices running.

Despite our best efforts, we have not been able to deliver on that promise.

Super Size Me director Morgan Spurlock dies aged 53 | Film | The Guardian #promemoria

Documentary-maker Morgan Spurlock, the director of films including Super Size Me and Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden? died on Thursday aged 53.

His family announced in a statement that he “passed away peacefully surrounded by family and friends in New York from complications of cancer.”

Calculate the day of the week without a calendar #math #history

Having hit upon the following method of mentally computing the day of the week for any given date, I send it you in the hope that it may interest some of your readers. I am not a rapid computer myself, and as I find my average time for doing any such question is about 20 seconds, I have little doubt that a rapid computer would not need 15.

Google Search Is Now a Giant Hallucination #internet

Google tested out AI overviews for months before releasing them nationwide last week, but clearly, that wasn’t enough time. The AI is hallucinating answers to several user queries, creating a less-than-trustworthy experience across Google’s flagship product. In the last week, Gizmodo received AI overviews from Google that reference glue-topped pizza and suggest Barack Obama was Muslim.

Carmakers Will Give Your Location to Police Without a Warrant, Senators Say #privacy

Connected cars have been promised to bring about a variety of quality-of-life improvements, both to car ownership and our experiences on the road. They're touted as preventing theft, streamlining service, improving road safety, and smoothing out traffic. But the drawbacks are manifesting just as quickly, in forms such as privacy issues, stealth recalls, and even enabling stalking. Consumers have other reasons to worry, too: Insurers are pressing harder for vehicle data, and privacy is only becoming more valuable in an increasingly authoritarian surveillance state. The federal government has expressed concern too, with the Biden administration asserting that allowing Chinese EVs to be sold in the U.S. poses national security risks.

Windows Recall sounds like a privacy nightmare – here's why I'm worried | TechRadar #software #privacy

Screenshotting everything you do and feeding it into an AI model could be a recipe for disaster

Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Science Data from Two Instruments - Voyager #space #technology

Voyager 1 has resumed returning science data from two of its four instruments for the first time since a computer issue arose with the spacecraft in November 2023. The mission’s science instrument teams are now determining steps to recalibrate the remaining two instruments, which will likely occur in the coming weeks. The achievement marks significant progress toward restoring the spacecraft to normal operations.

Business Booms and Depressions Since 1775 (1943) #economy #history

An Accurate Charting of the Past and Present Trend of Price Inflation, Federal Debt, Business, National Income, Stocks and Bond Yields with a Special Study of Postwar Periods | Title | FRASER | St. Louis Fed

Going Dark: The war on encryption is on the rise. #privacy

Through a shady collaboration between the US and the EU. Under the slogan ‘Think of the children’, the European Commission tried to introduce total surveillance of all EU citizens. When the scandal was revealed, it turned out that American tech companies and security services had been involved in the bill, generally known as ‘Chat Control’ – and that the whole thing had been directed by completely different interests. Now comes the next attempt. New battering rams have been brought out with the ‘Going Dark’ initiative. But the ambition is the same: to install state spyware on every European cell phone and computer.

Gordon Bell, an architect of our digital age, dies at age 89 | Ars Technica #promemoria

Computer pioneer Gordon Bell, who as an early employee of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) played a key role in the development of several influential minicomputer systems and also co-founded the first major computer museum, passed away on Friday, according to Bell Labs veteran John Mashey. Mashey announced Bell's passing in a social media post on Tuesday morning.

The People Deliberately Killing Facebook #internet #socialnetworks #longread

Mark Zuckerberg is personally responsible for the state of Facebook and Instagram today, and has assembled a cadre of growth fiends that will — at times happily and other times begrudgingly — make the user experience worse to increase engagement. And this isn’t a new phenomenon. From the very early days of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg has acted without remorse, tricking and scheming and screwing others over in pursuit of digital dominance and financial gain in a way that I find absolutely stomach churning.

Yet Zuckerberg could not perpetuate these disgusting acts without the help of people like Chief Marketing Officer Alex Schultz, who saw to it that Meta shut down CrowdTangle, a public insights tool from Meta that allowed researchers to easily analyze what was happening on Facebook. Horwitz reports in Broken Code that Facebook — led by Alex Schultz — killed CrowdTangle because reporter Kevin Roose kept posting a list of Facebook’s most-engaged-with content, and that Facebook was dominated with right wing lunacy and misinformation like “Plandemic,” a COVID conspiracy film that Joel Kaplan, head of Meta’s public policy team, initially blocked the health team from removing until Roose reported that it was Facebook’s number one post.

Election officials are role-playing AI threats in preparation for November - The Verge #security

It’s the morning of Election Day in Arizona, and a message has just come in from the secretary of state’s office telling you that a new court order requires polling locations to stay open until 9PM. As a county election official, you find the time extension strange, but the familiar voice on the phone feels reassuring — you’ve talked to this official before.

Just hours later, you receive an email telling you that the message was fake. In fact, polls must now close immediately, even though it’s only the early afternoon. The email tells you to submit your election results as soon as possible — strange since the law requires you to wait an hour after polls close or until all results from the day have been tabulated to submit.

This is the sort of whiplash and confusion election officials expect to face in 2024. The upcoming presidential election is taking place under heightened public scrutiny, as a dwindling public workforce navigates an onslaught of deceptive (and sometimes AI-generated) communications, as well as physical and digital threats.

If you would like to propose any interesting article for the next ReHacked issue, just hit reply or push this sexy “Leave a comment” (if not subscribed yet) button below. It’s a nice way to start a discussion.

Thanks for reading this digest and remember: we can make it better together, just leave your opinion or suggestions after pressing this button above or simply hit the reply in your e-mail and don’t forget - sharing is caring ;) Have a great week!

Dainius