Member Edition | Ep. 308 | November 22, 2021
SECURITY NEWS
The US, Australia, and the UK are warning that Iranian state-backed attackers are targeting US companies running critical infrastructure with ransomware. More >
CISA has released Incident and Vulnerability Response playreading. More > | The Order > | The Playreading >
The FBI is warning that an APT group is has been exploiting a zero-day in FatPipe VPN since May. More >
US banks will now be required to report cyberattacks within 36 hours. More >
A woman got an alert on her iPhone that an AirTag was following her, which she ignored it for a while. Finally she decided to look and found one taped to her car. She took it to the police and is now being more careful about shopping alone. More >
The Pentagon has announced a new cloud contract that replaces the cancelled JEDI fiasco. This one appears to allow for multiple vendors, with a preference towards Amazon and Microsoft. More >
Russia shot down one of its own satellites, creating a giant and highly-dangerous debris field. More >
Incidents:
Cloudflare blocked a 2 Tpbs DDoS attack from 15,000 bots running a variant of Mirai. More >
Wind Turbine company Vestas says data was compromised in a security incident. More >
Vulnerabilities:
There are new updates for Chrome. More >
Companies:
DomainTools has purchased Farsight Security. Farsight is a DNS security company. More >
TECHNOLOGY NEWS
OpenAI just opened up their GPT-3 API to everyone. They say this was possible because they made safety improvements around providing answers to questions. I'm going to be playing with this a lot. More >
Twitter is relaunching its APIs, giving developers the ability to create functionality via direct interaction again. They used to have this functionality before and killed it off. It's nice to see it back again. More >
OpenSea, the largest NFT platform, could be worth $10 billion to investors right now. More >
Amazon is going to stop accepting Visa cards in the UK due to high fees. More >
HUMAN NEWS
A study done in the UK finds that a third dose (booster) of COVID vaccine takes protection back up to 94%. More >
China now owns the mine in Congo that holds two-thirds of the world's cobalt supply. A US company used to own it, which took decades of diplomacy and investments to make happen, but we just fumbled it and solid it to a company run by Beijing. Now China has a massive advantage over the US in the effort to electrify cars. The US is playing Connect Four and China is playing 3D Go. More >
Companies:
Grammarly has raised $200 million to expand its AI-powered writing platform. More >
CONTENT, IDEAS & ANALYSIS
Why The Metaverse Will Succeed — My essay on how the metaverse appeals deeply to base human desires, and why it will succeed regardless of technological implementation. More >
The Rittenhouse Trial — My super-quick analysis on the outcome of this trial More >
NOTES
I made some cybersecurity predictions for Deep Instinct. More >
I'm currently reading a book called Wanting, which is about how humans tend to want things that other people want, which causes all sorts of problems. I think they're taking the point too far, but I like the concept a lot. More >
DSICOVERY
A fascinating article saying OKRs are not strategy, and that we should stop confusing the two. More >
Web Scraping with Go More >
Uniscan — An RFI, LFI, and RCE vulnerability scanner. More >
RECOMMENDATIONS
Try to take lots of time off during this holiday. If even you don't think you need it, you probably need it. Take days around the actual holidays, like a couple before and after. And if you're feeling cheeky, take (an) entire week(s).
APHORISMS
"Never regret a day in your life. Good days give happiness, bad days give experiences, worst days give lessons, and best days give memories."
Richard Feynman
"Nothing destroys an organization faster than a leader with the desire to be well liked."
Mike Speiser