some_guy

Snapchat is reserving the right to put its users’ faces in ads, according to terms of service related to its “My Selfie” tool (formerly “AI Selfies”), which allows users and their friends to create AI-generated images trained on their selfies.

Users have the option to opt out of this by toggling off a “feature” in the app called “See My Selfie in Ads,” but according to 404 Media’s testing this feature is on by default.

For most people, an extinct species is an abstraction, a set of bones they might have seen on display in a museum. For Gennady Boeskorov, they are things he has interacted with directly, studying their fur, their skin, their internal organs—experiencing these animals much as they existed thousands of years ago. Some of the well-preserved Pleistocene animals he has worked with include the mummified remains of woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius), an extinct form of rabbit (Lepus tanaiticus), and cave lion cubs (Panthera spelaea).

His latest paper also makes it clear that woolly rhinoceroses belong on this list. Boeskorov is a senior researcher at the Diamond and Precious Metals Geology Institute, Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, as well as a professor at the North-Eastern Federal University in Yakutsk. This July, he and his colleagues described the relatively recent discovery of three woolly rhinoceros mummies, one of which is new to science, in a paper published in the journal Doklady Earth Sciences.

They finally busted him. Russell Laiosa. I know the NY Post is a rag, but it's the first article I found confirming an arrest.

I hadn't been to the Pirate Bay in quite some time. I occasionally pop over to look for old videos. I went today and a big popover for a dubious software upgrade came up. Then, another saying that my system is infected and offering to clean it. That's obviously fake, but it was blocking my access to the user interface so I wasn't able to complete my search. Closed it. That's unfortunate.

Facebook, Snapchat ads promise people $6,400 to switch insurers

Archive link.

Pot: Kettle

Pot: Kettle

My father told me he wanted to make USB flash drives of all the scanned and digitized family photos and other assorted letters and mementos. He planned to distribute them to all family members hoping that at least one set would survive. When I explained that they ought to be recipes to new media every N number of years or risk deteriorating or becoming unreadable (like a floppy disk when you have no floppy drive), he was genuinely shocked. He lost interest in the project that he’d thought was so bullet proof.

Climbers typically ascend only part of Mount Everest's elevation, as the mountain's full elevation is measured from the geoid, which approximates sea level. The closest sea to Mount Everest's summit is the Bay of Bengal, almost 700 km (430 mi) away. So to approximate a climb of the entire height of Mount Everest, one would need to start from this coastline, a feat accomplished by Tim Macartney-Snape's team in 1990. Climbers usually begin their ascent from base camps above 5,000 m (16,404 ft).

It’s obvious once you think about it, but at what point would you consider it in daily life?

Around 83 percent of NASA's facilities are beyond their design lifetimes, and the agency has a $3.3 billion backlog in maintenance.

Having just submitted an article about a commercial spacewalk, I’m depressed that space is destined to be owned by corporations. This won’t get funded. Politicians will point to how much more efficient private companies do this. Eff.

Compilation of war crimes committed by USA military in Iraq and Afghanistan after 9-11. Reported by the In the Dark podcast as part of their third season.