Interesting Things #43 — EXIF Privacy

Hi,

This is Beng Tan and welcome to Interesting Things, a curation of interesting stories and links from tech, work, biz, science and society.

Happy reading!

#tech

EXIF metadata privacy: A picture is worth a thousand data points (Oct 2021) — Are the pictures you share online posing a threat to your privacy?

Precision In Technical Discussions — Some things that help me get precise. (hn)

Best F-Droid Apps — Relevant F-Droid applications, discover the most interesting ones. I’m sure many will interest you. (hn)

Doing 100,000 push-ups this year with the help of Siri — When keeping track of my New Year resolution started to slow me down I decided to automate it through Siri and Shortcuts. (hn)

The Internet Is Just Investment Banking Now —The sick, refreshing honesty of web3. (hn)

The right thing for the wrong reasons: FLOSS doesn’t imply security — While source code is critical for user autonomy, it isn’t required to evaluate software security or understand run-time behavior. (hn)

how I wound up causing a major outage of my services and destroying my home directory by accident — Due to a combination of Linux mdraid bugs and a faulty SSD. (hn)

Networking of a turn-based game — If I had to develop from scratch again, I would do it using a deterministic method and only have to do it once. (hn)

#work

Don’t ask for a big pay rise, warns Bank of England boss — Ridiculous. (hn)

It’s OK to not be passionate about your job — Passion and work often feel inextricably linked, but this favors privilege and can lead to burnout. (hn)

#business

The Payment Dance — In general, and for most people, the process is simple. Sometimes, however, there are more steps than you might think. (hn)

To Raise VC, or Not. Choosing The Road Less Travelled. — Monetary aspects aside, we are hesitant to raise Venture Capital for a number of reasons that I want to highlight in this post. (hn)

#science

Active ingredient in cannabis protects aging brain cells — Salk researchers find cannabinol preserves mitochondrial function and prevents oxidative damage to cells. (hn)

Omicron’s molecular structure could help explain its global takeover — Multiple studies are revealing why the SARS-CoV-2 variant is so transmissible, but also seems to cause milder disease. (hn)

Machine Learning Gets a Quantum Speedup — Quantum approaches can solve problems faster than classical computers, bringing physics and computer science closer together. (hn)

How to store excess wind power underwater — A Dutch company is testing an underwater system that can store excess energy from wind farms. (hn)

Our Solar System in True Color Is Really Something Else — Venus is white. So is the sun. They’re beautiful anyway. (hn)

Everything we see is a mash-up of the brain’s last 15 seconds of visual information — The brain is basically a time machine that ensures what we see is stable and continuous. (hn)

MIT Engineers Create the “Impossible” – New Material That Is Stronger Than Steel and As Light as Plastic — The new substance is the result of a feat thought to be impossible: polymerizing a material in two dimensions. (hn)

Why Triangles Are Easy and Tetrahedra Are Hard — The triangle angle sum theorem makes working with triangles easy. What happens when you can’t rely on it? (hn)

#society

People Are Creating Sexbot Girlfriends and Treating Them as Punching Bags — We’re facing a fundamental question about how we treat those we perceive to be subhuman. (hn)

Pizza Isn’t Italian — Sometimes, decades later, you realize that something that seemed mundane at the time is, in retrospect, really odd. (hn)

Exposed documents reveal how the powerful clean up their digital past using a reputation laundering firm — Reputation firms like Eliminalia use legal threats and copyright notices to have material taken down around the world. (hn)

Germany Has Picked a Fight With Telegram — The country’s government is struggling to assert its authority over a messaging app believed to have been used to organize violent incidents. (hn)

The people deciding to ditch their smartphones — In order to take back more control of their lives. (hn)

Inside Trickbot, Russia’s Notorious Ransomware Gang — Internal messages shed new light on the operators of one of the world’s biggest botnets. (hn)

#end

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Enjoy your reading and have a good day, Beng