Unsupervised Learning Newsletter NO. 328

MEMBER EDITION  | EP. 328 | APR 25 2022
 

SECURITY NEWS

The FBI, US Treasury, and CISA are warning that North Korea is actively targeting blockchain companies. They're specifically talking about the Lazarus group, which is known to operate out of North Korea. It's pretty remarkable that a government is starving its people through policies that keep it isolated and sanctioned, and then it employs hacking groups to basically find it money to survive. Talk about work pressure: imagine your job being to hack the planet so your government and country can continue to exist. More

Lapsus$, which has become known recently for hacking Microsoft and Okta, also hacked T-Mobile and stole its source code. T-Mobile said the method of attack was using stolen credentials on operational tools systems. More

The Five Eyes say Russia is planning cyberattacks against rivals supporting Ukraine. They issued an alert that said Russian attacks have the ability to compromise IT networks, steal large amounts of data, and to deploy destructive malware. More | Alert

Google/Mandiant released a report on zero-day exploits and found that 2021 was the busiest year so far, with 80 exploited in the wild, which was more than 2020 and 2019 combined. They also said most exploits came from state actors, led by China. More

Israel is looking to deploy a new high-power laser called Iron Beam as part of its Iron Dome missile defense. The system can shoot down multiple types of threats that can't be handled by missiles, and costs around $1 to fire instead of $100,000. More

Vulnerabilities:

• Cisco Umbrella has a default SSH key that allows the theft of admin credentials, but only in non-default configurations. More

• QNAP says users should upgrade their NAS firmware in order to patch existing Apache vulnerabilities. More

Companies:

• SeeMetrics out of Israel raises $6 million to provide a single-source-of-truth to CISOs regarding their risk posture.

TECHNOLOGY NEWS

It looks like Twitter's board is likely to accept Musk's purchase of Twitter. More

Netflix is in serious trouble after a 37% stock drop due to its losing subscribers for the first time. It looks like they're blaming account sharing, so you should expect that to get much harder to do. They're also looking at a cheaper ad-based model. More

Amazon is getting into the AR/VR headset game. I personally think they'll do very well in this space. Why? Because they ship products. They're not always great at first pass, but they iterate aggressively. I think they'll just move faster than anyone else, and while it might not be as good as a potential Apple play, it'll likely be more innovative in some areas because of how fast they move. Kind of like Tesla vs. BMW. More

Meta is investigating Sheryl Sandberg for allegedly trying to kill a negative story about her ex-boyfriend. More

Kevin Rose launched his NFT, Moonbirds, and they have already sold over $200 million worth. More

Stripe is partnering with Twitter to pay creators using crypto. More

Elon Musk has raised another $675 million to dig more tunnels for his Boring company. This is the company that wants to beat traffic by creating underground tunnels between key places. So, like trains, but underground, and for cars. More


HUMAN NEWS

Canada is banning foreign homebuyers for two years. The move is designed to reduce price increases for Canadians due to outside investors. More

The US has forgiven 40,000 student loans, and has provided aid for 3.6 million others. More

Uber is no longer requiring masks from drivers or passengers. This despite the fact that Covid cases are up over 50% in the last two weeks. More | More


CONTENT, IDEAS & ANALYSIS

Disappointed in Scott Galloway — A short piece on why I like Scott, and why I find myself liking him less. More

Music Might be a Home for NFTs — Well I think I discovered a solid use of NFTs outside of the theoretical. Up-and-coming music artists! There's this really interesting service called Catalog, which is a pretty cool interface for listening to music in its own right, but the main feature seems to be offering NFTs that support the artist. Think of it this way: what industry has rabid fans for little-known bands, but where artists make very little money unless they have already "made it"? Music. So what if there were a way for artists to offer indicators of fandom, that include bragging rights later, to people who find them early on and want to support them? That to me feels like product-market fit. That just leaves the questions of implementation and adoption, which are not small things, but it's very early. The next question is what other spaces are similar? Where else is the market completely failing creators? And specifically where there is a fan base that would love to support them but don't have a compelling way to do so.
 

NOTES

Our book club was wonderful yesterday. We talked a lot about The Three-Body Problem, but actually ended up tying the discussion back to a previous book: Things Fall Apart. One of the things that came out of the discussion was a desire to have a running UL Book List. Not like the ones I've put together myself in the past, but one where all of us make recommendations that others can see. Our UL group does a lot of reading, so we end up reading many more books than the official choice of the month. And this new list is going to let us track and talk more about our other recommendations.

The other big thing that came out of bookclub this week was the desire to get more UL member hangtime. Both physically and virtually. We've been talking about a meatspace meetup for a while now, and the first one will likely be at RSA in San Francisco—assuming travel and meet-ups are relatively safe. After that we're thinking about a dedicated one that we maybe pair with a family get-together. So during the day everyone does stuff with their families, and then at night we have a bunch of UL discussion and hangout time.

Separate from the meatspace stuff, we're also looking more seriously at a second monthly virtual meetup. Going a month without seeing each other is too long! So we're thinking about maybe the second Friday of the month at 2PM PST (which matches the last Sunday's 2PM PST for bookclub). We're still thinking about content for that meeting, but I'm contemplating maybe a lightning talk from a member, a possible theme for the meetup (Tim's idea), or a possible question for us all to be willing to give our answer on, and then general discussion about that topic and sharing of news from everyone who shows up. Having just read Dunbar's new book on friendship, I'm going to be looking to incorporate as much wisdom from that as possible when it comes to what humans need from groups and relationships. I can think of no better group to experiment with putting new knowledge into practice.
 

DISCOVERY

Sam Harris' excellent conversation with Eric Schmidt on the topic of AI and its coming impact on society. More

NASA's Perseverance captured a solar eclipse on Mars. The lumpy blob you see is Mars' misshapen moon, Phobos. Spectacular. More

[ Web Hacking ] Shubham Shaw on subdomain takeovers. More | by Shubham Shah

[ CI/CD Security ] RipSecrets — Scan code for secrets before committing. More | by Sirwart
 

RECOMMENDATION

If you are into EDM, Hip Hop, or both, I highly suggest this new artist I just found called GreatDane. Check out the track Dirty Daddy for a nice sample. More


APHORISM

“Someone has to build the stuff. If nobody builds the stuff…there's no stuff."

— Elon Musk