Sunday, May 13, 2018

An early heads-up. (Good) No details available. (Typical)
'Data incident' may have exposed Chili's credit card data
Chili's Grill & Bar has reported a "data incident" of credit card information at some locations between March and April.
Brinker International, the owner off the restaurant chain, said Friday data was breached at undisclosed "certain" locations. The number of customers affected also were not disclosed.
The company said it learned Friday that it believes malware was used to collect credit and debit card numbers along with the names of cardholders from its payment systems.
The company said third-party forensic experts are attempting to learn incident details.




Improved computers – better weather guessing.
Supercomputers are driving a revolution in hurricane forecasting
Back in 1998, the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts housed the 27th most-powerful supercomputer in the world, with 116 cores providing a maximum performance of 213 gigaflops. Today, the ECMWF forecasting center has the world's 27th and 28th most powerful supercomputers, each with 126,000 cores and 20,000 times the computing power of its machine two decades ago.
This dramatic increase in computing power at the European center—as well as similar increases at US-based and other international numerical modeling centers—helps to explain the dramatic increase in hurricane-forecast accuracy over the same time period.
Based upon new data from the National Hurricane Center for hurricanes based in the Atlantic basin, the average track error for a five-day forecast fell to 155 nautical miles in 2017. That is, the location predicted by the hurricane center for a given storm was just 155 nautical miles away from the actual position of the storm five days later. What is incredible about this is that, back in 1998, this was the average error for a two-day track forecast.


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