Unsupervised Learning No. 237
STANDARD EDITION | EP. 237 | July 13, 2020
THIS WEEK’S TOPICS: Americans in China, TikTok Banning, Chinese Critics, BlueLeaks, Router Security, COVID Accelerating Trends, Twitter Subscriptions?, Technology News, Human News, Ideas Trends & Analysis, Discovery, Recommendations, and the Weekly Aphorism…
SECURITY NEWS
The US is warning that Americans can be detained or deported in China for saying anything bad about the Chinese government. More >
The US is evidently looking at banning TikTok because it's a Chinese application. Amazon said on Friday that no employee could have it on their phones, and then an hour later said that email was sent by mistake. Very strange. More >
China is using family leverage to force hundreds of Chinese-born critics of the government to return home to face punishment. More >
German authorities seized the BlueLeaks server that was hosting doxing information on US police officers. More >
Another study has found that home routers are riddled with vulnerabilities. Yep. This study was pretty large though, covering 127 different products. More >
China continues to muck about in the East China Sea, this time crossing into Japan's territorial waters. More >
Vulnerabilities:
Citrix patches 11 vulnerabilities in their network products. More >
VMware has updated Fusion, Remote Console, and Horizon Client due to security issues. More >
TECHNOLOGY NEWS
COVID is speeding up many trends, including the move to automate front-line workers' jobs like cashiers. It's also accelerating the move to Universal Basic Income. More > More >
Twitter may be working on a subscription platform and business model, according to a number of industry analysts and some job postings. More >
Rivian, which is a very interesting Tesla rival, just raised $2.5 billion to make electric trucks and SUVs. These trucks look super interesting. I really hope they do well and give Tesla serious competition. They have a head-start there with an Amazon contract to build 100,000 delivery trucks, which is supposedly a middle finger to Musk from Bezos. More >
Nvidia has passed Intel as the world's most valuable chipmaker. More >
Tesla took $3,000 of the price of the Model Y. More >
Tech startups have laid off around 70,000 employees since March. More >
As of Sunday evening in the US, Github is down. And this isn't the first time this has happened. Expect some serious criticism this week. More >
HUMAN NEWS
Walmart+ is launching in July as a competitor to Amazon Prime, and will cost $98/year to get same-day grocery delivery, discounts, and other perks. More >
There's an updated study on the effect of money on happiness, and it shows it matters a lot more than it used to. It used to be that happiness largely leveled off after around $75,000/year, but now it continues to increase even beyond $160,000 a year. More >
Travel is trending towards isolationist, with a focus on small groups and the outdoors. More >
Online grocery sales in the US hit $7.2 billion in June. More >
32% of American households missed their July mortgage payment. More >
IDEAS, TRENDS, & ANALYSIS
Our Lighted Path to Totalitarianism —My latest essay about multiple tech and demographic trends that are steering us towards bad outcomes. More >
Searching for the Ultimate Obstacle to Creativity — My new essay on a possible root cause for multiple symptoms that keep you from being creative. More >
Why I Think Trump is Compromised by Russia — Think of this as a security post, not a political post. I have recently written other political stuff that I don't believe in sharing here because it's not security-related. More >
The stock market continues to surpass records, despite 50% unemployment and massive uncertainty for most people in America. I think it's because the rich just figured out that their success is completely untethered from the success of the bottom 70%. More >
Listen Notes says there are around 1,378,000 podcasts. More >
UPDATES
I finished Burn-In, which is the UL Book Club Book Club's book of the month. More >
I just started reading The Murderbot Series, and I'm still working on Anna Karenina.
I actually started and stopped a couple of reading this month, which I was happy to be able to do. Don't force yourself to finish bad reading (or reading you just don't like). The Sunk Cost Fallacy is called a fallacy for a reason.
I'm pretty excited about the NEOWISE comet, and plan on getting a good view one day this week—probably before dawn.
DISCOVERY
Canary Tokens — High-signal, low-maintenance attacker detection that you can deploy throughout your environment. More >
A database of online surveillance cameras. More >
The product manager's guide to web scraping. More >
Analysis of YouTube Trending Videos of 2020. More >
San Francisco is evidently the most gentrified city in America. More >
Classifying 200,000 articles in 7 hours using NLP. More >
How to perform an OSINT Company Assessment. More >
Fedora is changing the default text editor from Vi to Nano, and 1) Fedora is dead to me, and 2) 2020 just got 37% worse, which is hard to do. I'm just glad I stopped using Fedora in … lol, never used it. More >
A teardown of the Oura Ring 2. More >
A couple talks about how they sleep in separate bedrooms, and I have to say it sounds pretty great. More >
Why Nerds Are Unpopular (2003) More >
URLGrab — A Go-based tool for pulling the links from a URL. More >
RECOMMENDATIONS
Start thinking about what you life will look like if you are working remotely for the next 6 months, the next year, or permanently. Obviously that applies to some of you more than others. But I think it's time to start getting out of the mindset of getting back to normal. I listen to TWIV (an epidemiology podcast), and those experts (and the ones they have on) think we're going to be playing this game for a very long time. Start thinking about reorganizing the house for long-term arrangements, or even moving to a new, cheaper area. The big cities aren't as necessary or attractive anymore, so it might be time to get some more space and a bigger yard.
APHORISMS
"Everyone is guilty of the good they didn't do."
~ Voltaire