A quiet suburban mom, a hard-drinking war correspondent and an Arctic researcher were hiding in plain sight, championed by the Kremlin’s No. 1 fan of spy fiction
First Bitcoin Investor To Get Prison Time For Crypto-Related Tax Evasion
The Business of History Is Booming
The Global Hunt for Putin’s ‘Sleeper Agents’
Canadian MP shoots down Trump offer: 'Sexual abusers don't get to lead our nation'
Diagramming Dante: Michelangelo Caetani’s Maps of the Divina Commedia (1855/1872)
Bsky on Lifehacker: “It’s understandable if you’re a little burnt out on social media at the moment. I put off setting up a Bluesky account for years, mostly because I didn’t want yet another service to think about. At the same time, though, a lot of interesting people have shifted their posting to alternative sites like Bluesky account.
The good news: you can follow users on either site without ever setting anything up. That’s because every Bluesky and Mastodon account offers an RSS feed. This means you can use any of the best RSS readers to follow posts from any specific user. This is an ideal solution if you mostly want to keep up with the posts of a couple people. You could use this if there’s a writer whose articles and ideas you want to keep track of, for example. The RSS feeds for both services aren’t exactly obvious. Here’s how to find them…”
The FBI Account of the Las Vegas Bomber Story Does Not Make Sense Larry Johnson, Sonar21
Is your car spying on you? What it means that Tesla shared data in the Las Vegas explosion AP
The Paper Passport Is Dying
Wired [unpaywalled]: “In a matter of years, no matter where you live or travel, your face will likely be your new passport. For centuries, people have used some form of passport while moving from place to place. But the widespread standardization of passports as we know them today didn’t really begin until after World War 1, when passports were commonly used as a security measure and to deter spies entering a country. Even then, some considered passports to be an “anachronism in the modern world.”
But the use of paper passports—which were first digitized as “e-Passports” with NFC chips in 2006—is slowly undergoing one of its biggest transformations to date. The travel industry, airports, and governments are working to remove the need to show your passport while flying internationally. Eventually, you may not need to carry your passport at all. Instead, face recognition technology and smartphones are increasingly being used to check and confirm your identity against travel details before you can fly.
These systems, advocates claim, can reduce the amount of waiting time and “friction” you experience at airports. But privacy experts caution that there is little transparency about the technologies being deployed, and their proliferation could lead to data breaches and greater levels of surveillance. The push to remove paper passports is happening worldwide. So far, airports in Finland, Canada, the Netherlands, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, Italy, the United States, India, and elsewhere have been trialing various levels of passport-free travel or the technology needed to make it happen.
In October, officials in Singapore announced that its residents can fly to and from the country without using their documentation, and foreign visitors can “enjoy the convenience of passport-less clearance when they depart Singapore.” More than 1.5 million people have used the systems, officials claim…”
