Alexandre Storelli

Technical

Most new printers print nearly invisible yellow dots for offline tracking

[Yesterday], The Intercept released documents on election tampering from an NSA leaker. Later, the arrest warrant request for an NSA contractor named "Reality Winner" was published, showing how they tracked her down because she had printed out the documents and sent them to The Intercept. The document posted

Society

A laptop ban would be a disruptive privacy risk

Computing on the road may be about to get more complicated, expensive, and risky. For this you can thank people who want to blow airplanes out of the sky — and US officials who see genuine danger and/or an opportunity to engage in “just shut up and do as you’

Business & Economy

Why don't more open-source projects monetize? (Ask HN)

Because monetizing your open-source project means you take on a second job. Here are your choices: * Turn your OSS project into a company (Docker). The pro is that you can capture a lot of the value, the con is that you're splitting your project into CE/EE and

Society

Transhumanisme, notre liberté menacée ? (Jean-François Mattei, La Croix)

Le transhumanisme s’installe dans le débat, il est vrai encore limité à une élite intellectuelle et à des médias spécialisés. Parmi ses objectifs, il a celui d’améliorer l’homme, voire de préparer sa transformation grâce aux nouvelles technologies dites convergentes (nanotechnologies, biotechnologies, informatiques et cognitives). Le philosophe Fukuyama

Society

Les bienfaits de l'ennui (InternetActu)

L’ennui accroît la créativité, nous informe Clive Thompson dans Wired [https://www.wired.com/2017/01/clive-thompson-7/], qui cite deux études « récentes » (sans donner de liens) qui confirment l’intérêt de cet état mental mal aimé. La première étude (menée par Sandi Mann, également auteure du livre La science

Technical

Messaging app Signal circumvents current ban in Egypt with the "domain fronting" technique

If I understood correctly, the privacy messaging app Signal  configured itself to be reached after a HTTP redirection from Google  servers, encapsulated in HTTPS traffic. This is a nice workaround. So Egypt, to enforce the ban of Signal, should now either ban Google or Man-In-The-Middle Google's traffic in

Society

On Digital Minimalism (Cal Newport)

People are sometimes confused about my personal relationship with digital communication technologies. On the one hand, I’m a computer scientist who studies and  improves these tools. As you might therefore expect, I’m incredibly  optimistic about the role of computing and networks in our future. On the other hand,

Culture

Tyrannicide et justice d’exception (La Croix)

L’historien Jean-Noël Jeanneney a choisi de s’intéresser à un événement qu’on pouvait penser réservé à la « petite histoire » : l’attentat du Petit-Clamart, le 22 août 1962, contre le général de Gaulle. Emmené par le lieutenant-colonel Bastien-Thiry, un commando opposé à l’indépendance de l’Algérie proclamée un

Science

Injecting sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere to counter global warming (Curtis Bartley)

Airplane contrails are real, but we know what they are: water vapor  and small amounts of other combustion products created by jet engines.   The other pollutants may be somewhat harmful, but they are basically the  same thing as produced by any other form of combustion.  So what are  chemtrails?  Wikipedia

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Enrayer l’inoculation perverse du virus de l’hyperconsommation (Jacques Muller, La Croix)

Rarement débat parlementaire aura été à ce point au cœur de  l’actualité des fêtes de Noël : le Sénat examine le mercredi 7 décembre  en deuxième et ultime lecture une proposition de loi relative à la «  suppression de la publicité commerciale dans les programmes jeunesse de  la télévision publique ». Cibles

Society

L’impossible voyage connecté, ou comment le numérique a étouffé le sentiment d’aventure (Mais où va le web)

Internet nous colle à la peau. Étrange rencontre de l’immobilité et du mouvement, il nous suit jusqu’à l’autre bout du monde et nous ramène sans cesse à l’immense toile dont un fil finit toujours par atterrir dans notre poche. Même lorsque nous partons en voyage, il

Science

In Fiji, ants have learned to grow plants to house their massive colonies (ArsTechnica)

High in the trees on the Fiji islands, ants in the species Philidris  nagasau are doing something extraordinary. They've brought in seeds from  several species of a large, lumpy fruit from a plant known as  Squamellaria and carefully planted them in the nooks and crannies of the  tree

Science

La liste de plantes anti-pollution de la NASA (MrMondialisation)

Si les plantes vertes sont le plus souvent décoratives, elles ont aussi une fonction purifiante bien utile de l’air ambiant. En effet, certaines plantes sont en mesure d’absorber des substances toxiques bien spécifiques qui se cachent dans l’air que nous respirons au quotidien. Et c’est une

Comics

The Next Great Stoic Competition (Existential Comics)

Stoicism, which was founded by Zeno of Citium, is largely based on the  acceptance of things which you cannot control. Zeno believed that the universe was determinisitc, and it was irrational to get angry or upset at the universe for existing the way that it does. Stoicism gained great popularity

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Adblock Plus now sells ads (The Verge)

Adblock Plus is launching a new service that... uh, puts more ads on  your screen. Rather than stripping all ads from the internet forever, Adblock Plus is hoping to replace the bad ads — anything it deems too big, too ugly, or too intrusive — with good ads, ones that are smaller,

Society

Ne tirez pas sur les élites ! (Gaspard Koenig, Les Échos)

Dans le Land de Mecklembourg-Poméranie-Occidentale, le parti d'extrême droite Alternative für Deutschland vient de passer devant la CDU d'Angela Merkel. Aux Etats-Unis, les républicains ont choisi Donald Trump comme candidat. Les Britanniques ont voté en faveur du Brexit. Les Italiens ont élu à la mairie de

Comics

Beauty standards (Owlturd Comics)

Comics

One van to screw them all (Bonkers World)

Hey Siri, set recurring alarm for 4 AM. OK Google, set recurring alarm for 4 AM. Alexa, set recurring alarm for 4AM. Hey Cortana, set recurring alarm for 4 AM. Hey Siri.... source: http://www.bonkersworld.net/one-van-to-screw-them-all/

Comics

Catching pokémon & meaning of life (Existential Comics)

Dead philosopher in heaven, about the meaning of life. God – It could be anything: helping people, making great art, catching pokémon. Anything really. Phil. – Catching pokémon? God – Look, here's what they don't tell you about freedom. If  you let people pick themselves, some of them are

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Ruin My Search History - Ruin your Google search history with a single click

This site will make crazy google search requests from your computer and put you on surveillance watchlists across the planet. As a bonus, you will get funny ads from google from now on ;) ['how to appear funny', 'why are my thumbs uneven', 'am i lack

Science

The brachistochrone curve: the problem of quickest descent

Suppose there is an incline such as that shown below. When a ball rolls from A to B, which curve yields the shortest duration? Let’s assume that we have three hypotheses: a straight line, a quadratic, and a cycloid. The shortest path from A to B is the straight

Science

Fire in Microgravity

In microgravity, flames given so little oxygen that on Earth they  would extinguish, do not go out but break up into tiny, two-dimensional  caps called flamelets. Much like smoldering coals in a banked hearth,  these flamelets can persist for long periods under near-limit conditions  and, if oxygen is reintroduced, ignite

Technical

Hey, You Have Given Me Too Many Knobs! (Greg Wilson)

This paper makes a first step in understanding a fundamental question of configuration design: "do users really need so many knobs?" To provide the quantitatively answer, we study the configuration settings of real-world users, including thousands of customers of a commercial storage system (Storage-A), and hundreds of users

Technical

What is Differential Privacy?

Yesterday at the WWDC keynote, Apple announced a series of new security and privacy features, including one feature that’s drawn a bit of attention — and confusion. Specifically, Apple announced that they will be using a technique called “Differential Privacy [https://www.wired.com/2016/06/apples-differential-privacy-collecting-data/]” (henceforth: DP) to

Society

Défendre un terroriste, un casse-tête pour un avocat (La Croix)

Ce sont des contentieux difficiles mais passionnants. Dans ce genre de dossiers, l’art de la défense est poussé à son plus haut niveau. (...) L’avocat est en effet seul aux côtés d’un client dont il réprouve les actes. Il se doit, malgré tout, de garder la tête froide