Saturday, June 16, 2018

As expected.
Trump-Kim Summit Attracts Wave of Cyber-Attacks on Singapore
The number of cyber-attacks targeting Singapore skyrocketed from June 11 to June 12, during the meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean President Kim Jong-un in a Singapore hotel, and most of these attacks originated from Russia, F5 Labs reports.
Russia has long been said to keep the United States under a continuous barrage of cyber-attacks, and even attracted a series of sanctions following the hacking aimed at the 2016 presidential election, which was supposedly the doing of state-sponsored Russian threat actors.
Thus, it’s no wonder the Trump-Kim summit earlier this week was targeted as well, but the number of assaults coming from Russia is indeed impressive: 88% of the total number of observed cyber-attacks came from this country. Furthermore, 97% of all the attacks that originated from Russian during the timeframe targeted Singapore, data from F5 Labs and Loryka reveals.
We cannot prove they were nation-state sponsored attacks, however the attacks coincide with the day President Donald Trump met with North Korean President Kim Jong-un in a Singapore hotel. The attacks targeted VoIP phones and IoT devices, which appears to be more than a mere coincidence,” F5 says.




The cost of a software hack.
In 2017, the U.S. hit Volkswagen with a $4.3 billion fine as part of the company’s plea agreement for violating of the Clean Air Act. It was a rough ride for the automaker, caught using defeat devices on its diesel engines, but it brought the scandal more or less to a close in America.
An ocean away, it seemed nothing would come of the endless raids by German authorities on VW-owned facilities. Apparently, the wheels of justice just turn a little slower in Europe, as the automaker was fined 1 billion euros on Wednesday. It’s one of the largest financial penalties ever imposed on a company by German authorities.
According to Reuters, Volkswagen is not contesting the penalty. “Following thorough examination, Volkswagen AG accepted the fine and it will not lodge an appeal against it. Volkswagen AG, by doing so, admits its responsibility for the diesel crisis and considers this as a further major step toward the latter being overcome,” the automaker said in a statement.




This might work in classrooms! Do they really need one jammer per cell?
Federal officials: Prison cellphone jamming test a success
Federal officials say they conducted a successful test earlier this year of a jamming technology some hope will help combat the threat posed by inmates with smuggled cellphones.
A report obtained Friday by The Associated Press details the January 17 test of micro-jamming technology at a federal prison in Cumberland, Maryland. Officials say they were able to shut down phone signals inside a prison cell, while phones about 20 feet away worked normally.




I think this might be wise. (Not something I often say about California.)
California officials move to reject court ruling on coffee and cancer risk
California officials bucked a recent court ruling Friday and offered reassurance to concerned coffee drinkers that their fix won't give them cancer. The unprecedented action by the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment to propose a regulation to essentially clear coffee of the stigma that it could pose a toxic risk followed a review of more than 1,000 studies published this week by the World Health Organization that found inadequate evidence that coffee causes cancer.
The state agency implements a law passed by voters in 1986 that requires warnings of chemicals known to cause cancer and birth defects. One of those chemicals is acrylamide, which is found in many things and is a byproduct of coffee roasting and brewing present in every cup of joe.
If the regulation is adopted, it would be a huge win for the coffee industry which faces potentially massive civil penalties after recently losing an 8-year-old lawsuit in Los Angeles Superior Court that could require scary warnings on all coffee packaging sold in California.
Judge Elihu Berle found that Starbucks and other coffee roasters and retailers had failed to show that benefits from drinking coffee outweighed any cancer risks. He had previously ruled the companies hadn't shown the threat from the chemical was insignificant.
… "The proposed regulation would state that drinking coffee does not pose a significant cancer risk, despite the presence of chemicals created during the roasting and brewing process that are listed under Proposition 65 as known carcinogens," the agency said in a statement. "The proposed regulation is based on extensive scientific evidence that drinking coffee has not been shown to increase the risk of cancer and may reduce the risk of some types of cancer."




Turning trash into treasure. Now that’s smart technology!
Chinese Smart Garbage Recycling Platform Xiaohuanggou Raises $164M Series A Round
… Founded in 2017, Dongguan, Guangdong-based Xiaohuanggou is owned by Paithink Group, an investment company that focuses on fintech. It places smart garbage recycling machines close to residential areas, hotels and business centers. With Xiaohuanggou’s app and WeChat mini-program, users can locate the nearby recycling stations. The machine will automatically weight the garbage and pay users by cash.
Its recycling station has several machines for different types of wastes, including paper, plastic, metal, waste textiles, glass and others. Its staff will then send the garbage to different specialized recycling organizations.




Perspective. The robots are already here! “Human! Fetch me a nice cup of WD40!”
In China, a picture of how warehouse jobs can vanish
JD.com, a Chinese e-commerce gargantuan, has built a big new Shanghai fulfillment center that can organize, pack and ship 200,000 orders a day. It employs four people — all of whom service the robots.




Perspective.
The supply chain is the heart of a company’s operations. To make the best decisions, managers need access to real-time data about their supply chain, but the limitations of legacy technologies can thwart the goal of end-to-end transparency. However, those days may soon be behind us. New digital technologies that have the potential to take over supply chain management entirely are disrupting traditional ways of working. Within 5-10 years, the supply chain function may be obsolete, replaced by a smoothly running, self-regulating utility that optimally manages end-to-end work flows and requires very little human intervention.
With a digital foundation in place, companies can capture, analyze, integrate, easily access, and interpret high quality, real-time data — data that fuels process automation, predictive analytics, artificial intelligence, and robotics, the technologies that will soon take over supply chain management.


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