On Monday, Vladimir Putin, President of the Russian Federation, issued a decree [PDF, not secure] naming Snowden (#53), among others, as being granted the boon of Russian citizenship. […] While Snowden’s status as a whistleblower is disputed by the US government, the surveillance apparatus he exposed – the bulk collection of US phone records – Read more about NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden granted Russian citizenship[…]
[…] On July 31st, Étienne Klein, the director of France’s Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission, shared an image he claimed the JWST captured of Proxima Centauri, the nearest-known star to the sun. “It was taken by the James Webb Space Telescope,” Klein told his more than 91,000 Twitter followers. “This level of detail… A Read more about Physicist pranks with James Webb Space Telescope photo of a chorizo sausage – some people really have no sense of humor any more[…]
This map shows you how far you can travel from each station in Europe in less than 5 hours. It is inspired by the great Direkt Bahn Guru. The data is based off of this site, which sources it from the Deutsch Bahn. Hover your mouse over a station to see the isochrones from that Read more about map: How far can you go by train in 5h?[…]
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Thursday in West Virginia vs. EPA in favor of plaintiffs who argued that the Environmental Protection Agency does not have the power to regulate carbon dioxide from power plants—the country’s second-largest source of CO2 emissions—without input from Congress. The ruling almost completely disrupts any major plans to fight climate change Read more about Supreme Court Rules Environmental Protection Agency can’t protect Environment In West Virginia v EPA lawsuit[…]
Atlassian has published an account of what went wrong at the company to make the data of 400 customers vanish in a puff of cloudy vapor. And goodness, it makes for knuckle-chewing reading. The restoration of customer data is still ongoing. Atlassian CTO Sri Viswanath wrote that approximately 45 percent of those afflicted had had Read more about Atlassian comes clean on script data-deleting 400 customers behind weeks long outage[…]
[…] OpenSea has revealed just how much of the NFT activity on its platform is defined by fakery and theft, and it’s a lot. In fact, according to the company, nearly all of the NFTs created for free on its platform are either spam or plagiarized. The revelation began with some drama. On Thursday, popular Read more about More Than 80% of NFTs Created for Free on OpenSea Are Fraud or Spam, Company Says[…]
The High Court’s ruling on Wednesday is just a small part of a larger case brought against Australian news outlets, including the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, and The Australian, among others, by a man who said he was defamed in the Facebook comments of the newspapers’ stories in 2016. The question before the High Read more about Australia: Facebook Users Liable for Comments Under Their Posts[…]
The mysterious thief who stole $600m-plus in cryptocurrencies from Poly Network has been offered the role of Chief Security Advisor at the Chinese blockchain biz. It’s been a rollercoaster ride lately for Poly Network. The outfit builds software that handles the exchange of crypto-currencies and other assests between various blockchains. Last week, it confirmed a Read more about OK, so you stole $600m-plus from us, how about you be our Chief Security Advisor, Poly Network asks thief[…]
A cryptocurrency platform that was hacked and had hundreds of millions of dollars stolen from it has now offered the thief a “reward” of $500,000 after the criminal returned almost all of the money. A few days ago a hacker exploited a vulnerability in the blockchain technology of decentralized finance (DeFi) platform Poly Network, pilfering Read more about Poly Network Offers $500k Reward to Hacker Who Stole $611 Million and then returned it[…]
After first announcing Gmail’s Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) pilot last year, today we’re announcing that over the coming weeks we’re rolling out Gmail’s general support of BIMI, an industry standard that aims to drive adoption of strong sender authentication for the entire email ecosystem […] BIMI enables organizations that authenticate their emails using Read more about Gmail to show your company logo in inbox if DMARC and BIMI authenticated[…]
Most data on microplastic concentrations comes from commercial and research ships that tow plankton nets—long, cone-shaped nets with very fine mesh designed for collecting marine microorganisms. But net trawling can sample only small areas and may be underestimating true plastic concentrations. Except in the North Atlantic and North Pacific gyres—large zones where ocean currents rotate, Read more about Using satellites to track tiny plastic particles and their concentration in the ocean[…]
After a recent investigation by Anandtech pointed out that a number of popular apps were experiencing sluggish performance on the OnePlus 9 and OnePlus 9 Pro, OnePlus has now admitted to throttling hundreds of popular apps to help “reduce power consumption.” Anandtech’s Andrei Frumusanu noticed that a number of popular browsers, including Google Chrome, performed Read more about OnePlus Admits to Throttling OnePlus 9 and 9 Pro for battery life[…]
hould probably sit down for this one. Sam Altman, the former CEO of famed startup incubator Y Combinator, is reportedly working on a new cryptocurrency that’ll be distributed to everyone on Earth. Once you agree to scan your eyeballs. Yes, you read correctly. You can thank Bloomberg for inflicting this cursed news on the rest Read more about Sam Altman’s New Startup Wants to Give You Crypto for Eyeball Scans – yes this is a terrible dr evil plan idea[…]
Plastic producers have tried to make us think that individuals can solve pollution by improving our recycling and shopping habits. A new study makes it clear why that’s their tactic. Just 20 companies are responsible for more than half of the world’s trashed single-use plastic. The Plastic Waste Makers Index, published Tuesday by the Australian Read more about Just 100 Companies Create 90% of Plastic Waste[…]
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) on Monday apologized for mishandling the announcement last month that founder Richard Stallman, or RMS, had been reelected to its board of directors – and published a statement from RMS both justifying his behavior and apologizing for it. “FSF staff should have been informed and consulted first,” the FSF said. Read more about FSF doubles down on Richard Stallman’s return: Sure, he is ‘troubling for some’ but we need him, says org – doesn’t kneel for self entitled cancel culture idiots who can’t read Stallman’s actual quotes.[…]
One of the world’s most important international shipping arteries remains blocked this evening after the MV Ever Given, a 1,300-foot, 220,000-ton container ship, ran aground and got stuck almost completely sideways in the Suez Canal—cutting off a vital shipping lane between Europe and Asia and leading to a massive backup of over a hundred giant Read more about Suez Canal Totally Blocked After One Of the World’s Largest Container Ships Runs Aground[…]
An otherwise meaningless game during Monday’s preliminary stage of the $200,000 Magnus Carlsen Invitational left a pair of grandmasters in stitches while thrusting one of chess’s most bizarre and least effective openings into the mainstream. Norway’s Magnus Carlsen and Hikaru Nakamura of the United States had already qualified for the knockout stage of the competition Read more about Double bongcloud: why grandmasters are playing the worst move in chess[…]
It was inevitable, really. In the early days of the internet, Tucows was known as a reliable place to find and download new software. Today, however, most people are happy to use a modern App Store — Microsoft and Apple both run their own — or navigate to developer websites directly. And if you’re looking Read more about Tucows closes its once-popular software download site[…]
There are many times where someone shares data as an image, whether intentionally due to software constraints (ie Twitter) or as a result of not understanding the implications (image inside a PDF or in a Word Doc). xkcd.com jokingly refers to this as .norm or as the Normal File Format. While it’s far from ideal Read more about Reading tables from images with magick[…]
Yesterday, the BBC ran a story with the factually untrue headline, “Cellebrite claimed to have cracked chat app’s encryption.” This is false. Not only can Cellebrite not break Signal encryption, but Cellebrite never even claimed to be able to. Since we weren’t actually given the opportunity to comment in that story, we’re posting this to Read more about No, Cellebrite cannot ‘break Signal encryption.’[…]
On Friday, a federal judge decided that he’s had enough of reading the tea leaves when it comes to exactly what the fuck Trump is talking about. The president’s tweets have become more central to his tenure in office than ever before as he’s been recovering from covid-19 infection and lashing out in every direction Read more about Judge Rules Trump Must Say Himself If His Tweets Are True or Bullshit. It can be one or the other.[…]
Today’s the day YouTube is killing its “Community Contributions” feature for videos, which let content creators crowdsource captions and subtitles for their videos. YouTube announced the move back in July, which triggered a community outcry from the deaf, hard of hearing, and fans of foreign media, but it does not sound like the company is Read more about YouTube celebrates Deaf Awareness Week by killing crowd-sourced captions[…]
Just last week, Facebook launched an initiative to uplift climate science. It was wildly misguided, yes, but the company was trying to show it’s down for the cause or something. Now, the company is proving just how devoted to climate activism it is by, um, booting environmental justice organizers from the platform. Tight! Hundreds of Read more about Facebook Fights Climate Change by Mass Banning of Climate Groups[…]
Users of UK web hosting firm 123-Reg’s email service told The Reg this morning that 96 hours after clocking the issue, they are still having trouble sending emails to users with Microsoft’s Live, Outlook or Hotmail accounts. For its part, 123-Reg has confirmed “delays in delivering emails to Hotmail/Outlook/Live email addresses,” but provided no ETA Read more about Angry 123-Reg customers in the UK wake up to another day where hosted mail doesn’t get through to users on Microsoft email accounts[…]
In an extraordinary and somewhat devastating discovery, it turns out virtually the entire Scots version of Wikipedia, comprising more than 57,000 articles, was written, edited or overseen by a netizen who clearly had nae the slightest idea about the language. The user is not only a prolific contributor, they are an administrator of sco.wikipedia.org, having Read more about Um, almost the entire Scots Wikipedia was written by someone with no idea of the language – 10,000s of articles[…]