Saturday, March 10, 2018

Nothing changes on this ‘front.’ Makes me wonder what might have cause North Korea to ask for a ‘time out’ on the nuclear front. Perhaps an accident in one of the research facilities that will take a year or more to recover from? Just saying…
New North Korea-linked Cyberattacks Target Financial Institutions
Hidden Cobra, also known as the Lazarus Group from North Korea, is now targeting the Turkish financial system with a new and 'aggressive' operation that resembles earlier attacks against the global SWIFT financial network.
McAfee's report on the campaign says that one government-controlled financial organization, a government organization involved in finance and trade, and three large financial organizations are victims of the attack -- which occurred on March 2 and 3.


(Related)
Sophisticated Cyberspies Target Middle East, Africa via Routers
A cyber espionage group whose members apparently speak English has been targeting entities in the Middle East and Africa by hacking into their routers.
Researchers at Kaspersky Lab have analyzed this threat actor’s operations and determined that it has likely been active since at least 2012, its most recent attacks being observed in February.
Roughly 100 Slingshot victims have been identified, a majority located in Kenya and Yemen, but targets have also been spotted in Afghanistan, Libya, Congo, Jordan, Turkey, Iraq, Sudan, Somalia and Tanzania. While the campaign seems to focus on individuals, the security firm has also observed attacks aimed at government organizations and, strangely, some internet cafés.




Research will enable us to perfect fake news! (Or has someone already done that research?)
Why It’s Okay to Call It ‘Fake News’
This week, more than a dozen high-profile social scientists and legal scholars charged their profession to help fix democracy by studying the crisis of fake news.
Their call to action, published in Science, was notable for listing all that researchers still do not know about the phenomenon. How common is fake news, how does it work, and what can online platforms do to defang it? “There are surprisingly few scientific answers to these basic questions,” the authors write.




Why didn’t I think of this? I think the answer is obvious.
Bird is raising $100 million to become the Uber of electric scooters
“It feels like investing in Uber when it first launched.”
That’s what one investor said of the hot new Santa Monica, Calif.-based startup, Bird — an electric scooter company that’s now in the process of raising as much as $100 million on a $300 million valuation, according to several people with knowledge of the company’s plans.
… Like Uber, Bird has also rolled out its services with little regard for the regulations imposed by the neighborhoods in which it operates. When TechCrunch first reported on the company’s $15 million raise less than a month ago, we noted that the company had surreptitiously put 1,000 of its electric scooters on the streets — to the delight of the 50,000 people who have taken 250,000 rides on them, and disregarding many laws put in place by the city of Santa Monica.
As a Washington Post article notes, the Santa Monica Police Department has made 281 traffic stops and issued 97 tickets since the beginning of the year and late February — and the coastal, Los Angeles-adjacent city’s fire department has responded to 8 accidents involving Bird’s scooters — seeing injuries to both minors and adults.
Under California law, riders of motorized scooters must be at least 16 years old, licensed drivers, wearing a helmet and not riding the scooters on sidewalks — all things that Bird has no control over.
… Then there’s the nuisance factor for businesses — Bird picks up its scooters by 8PM to get them off the streets and only offers them in front of storefronts that have agreed to host the scooters. And as for injuries — Bird will pay out if its scooter breaks, but not if a rider is putting the scooter through its paces for a bid at a new extreme sport.




What barriers?
What Breaking the 4-Minute Mile Taught Us About the Limits of Conventional Thinking
The sad news of the passing of Roger Bannister, the first human being to run a four-minute mile, got me thinking about his legacy—not just as one of the great athletes of the past century, but as an innovator, a change agent, and an icon of success
… Bannister was an outlier and iconoclast—a full-time student who had little use for coaches and devised his own system for preparing to race. The British press “constantly ran stories criticizing his ‘lone wolf’ approach,” Bryant notes, and urged him to adopt a more conventional regimen of training and coaching.
So the four-minute barrier stood for decades—and when it fell, the circumstances defied the confident predictions of the best minds in the sport. The experts believed they knew the precise conditions under which the mark would fall. It would have to be in perfect weather—68 degrees and no wind. On a particular kind of track—hard, dry clay—and in front of a huge, boisterous crowd urging the runner on to his best-ever performance. But Bannister did it on a cold day, on a wet track, at a small meet in Oxford, England, before a crowd of just a few thousand people.




Helping my students get jobs.




Why children learn to read?
Harry Potter: A History of Magic


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