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
