Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: futurism

If you rely on WhatsApp to message friends and family, it’s important to know that the service lets your contacts know about when you’re available to chat, and whether you’ve read their texts.

That’s not all: Lifehacker has spotted Chatwatch, a new iOS app that uses WhatsApp’s public online/offline status feature to tell users how often their friends check the app, and estimate when they go to bed each day; it can even correlate data on two contacts you choose to guess if they’ve been talking to each other.

Yeah, there’s no need to give anyone that sort of ammo. I prefer to maintain a low profile on messaging services so I can chat and respond on my own terms, so it’s rather alarming to know that my contacts can keep tabs on me this way.

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Inti de Ceukelaire, the ethical hacker from ‘Oilsjt’ in Belgium, is back again. De Ceukelaire has built a tool that can pretty reliably tell who you are after answering 15 questions on his new site ‘Oilsjt Analytica,’ a cheeky reference to Cambridge Analytica’s recent Facebook scandal.

I would say it was creepy, but the disclaimer on the website jokes that feeling away. Which also kind of makes me feel like a sucker for giving away data because someone makes light of it. Maybe it illuminates a deeper truth: We don’t care about our data as long as we’re entertained.

“Disclaimer: this website does not store any personal information. I mean, we could, but we say we don’t. So we don’t. We cannot be held responsible for any fake news related to this website.”

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Photographer Amanda Cross, of Lancashire, UK, wrote:

I wanted to compare the colors of different stars next to each other. These are stacks of Rigel, Betelgeuse and Sirius. I took individual images 60 seconds apart with iso 16000 and speed 1/50, stacked them with starstax and presented them together to show the different colors of the stars. I took the images deliberately out of focus to show the colors. The color variations are from the Earth’s atmosphere which splits the light from the star and the camera picks up the colors.

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