The RECC’E - DAY 91 | APR 01 | DIGITAL DRUGS

Day 91 / 365

46YEARS ago today Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs founded Apple Computers in the garage of Jobs' parents house in Cupertino, California. 

RECC’E OF THE DAY

2CRITICAL day zero vulnerabilities in iPhones, iPads, and Macs that gave hackers dangerous access to the internals of the OSes have now been hastily resolved by Apple; the 4th and 5th zero-days the company has patched this year. 

12ZERO DAYS were tracked for Apple across 2021. Among those was a flaw in iMessage that the Pegasus spyware framework was targeting using a zero click exploit, meaning devices were infected merely by receiving a malicious message, without any user action required. Two zero-days that Apple patched in May made it possible for attackers to infect fully up-to-date devices.  

0DAYS to ‘fix a flaw or security vulnerabilities because it’s only just been discovered’ is the basis behind the term "Zero-day". It is a broad term that describes recently discovered vulnerabilities that hackers can use to attack systems.

NEED-TO-KNOW

19YEARS ago scientists mapped 92% of the human genome, however due to technological limitations of the time the DNA in our heterochromatin regions would go undiscovered. Now scientists have finally deciphered the missing 8% and finished mapping the entire human genome; a breakthrough with remarkable potential to impact the lives of millions.

5%OF PEOPLE could be experimenting with ‘digital drugs’ delivered via sound; and 12% of those are attempting to replicate a psychedelic experiences. ‘Binaural beats’ - where digital sounds of conflicting frequencies are fed into each ear - appear to be a relatively new way to alter the mind however they were initially developed in the mid 19th century. Users report being able to drop out, reduce pain, enhance memory and even ease anxiety and depression.

SHOULD-KNOW

20kLIONS remain across the world, only a fraction of the 200k which existed only 100 years ago. Now scientists in South Africa have discovered Lions exposed to Oxytocin - the love hormone - became increasingly mellow and friendlier with each other. A breakthrough that could be a boon to conservationists in Africa who increasingly need to introduce strange lions to one another as natural territory shrinks. 

10HOUR full charge times at home and 20 to 40 minute full charge times at specialised stations have been a major drawback for the EV movement. Now scientists have turned to quantum battery technology and discovered that collective charging - something not possible in modern, high-capacity batteries - can outpace current parallel charging and increase it by 200x. Soon that 10 hour charge might be 3 minutes and that station visit mere seconds.  

6MONTHS is how long Facebook boosted bad posts including the visibility of misinformation, nudity, violence and Russian state media by up to 30%. It was caused by a “massive ranking failure” bug in the Facebook News Feed, affecting up to a billion people worldwide. This comes as a new report also suggests Facebook recently ran an orchestrated smear campaign against growing platform TikTok, a growing threat it is unable to buy.

GOOD-TO-KNOW

30%INCREASE in Etsy transaction fees - 5% to 6.5% - starting April 11th has prompted a week long protest by 5000+ sellers set too begin on the day of the changes. Sellers are also asking shoppers to boycott the platform. Etsy has defended the most recent fee increase as a good thing for 5.3 million sellers with increases allowing them to make further improvements.

13YEARS since Waymo was founded, the once quirky side project inside Google’s X division has announced it’s fully driverless cars are heading to San Francisco after a years worth of driverless tests in the suburbs of Phoenix. 2.3 million driverless miles in 2021 for Waymo - the most autonomous miles logged of all the companies permitted to test in the state - was a huge increase over 2020 when it had about 629,000 miles driven and even the pre-pandemic year of 2019, with 1.45 million.

 

SIGN-OFF STAT

7’4AND 520 lbs, the late Andre the giant reportedly once drank 102 beers in a single 45 minute sitting. He was so big that the NYPD had a police officer secretly follow him whenever he went out drinking in NewYork to make sure he didn’t get too drunk and fall on anyone.

  

   

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