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Read all of that in one breath. A MOIS-operated persona whose unit head was killed three weeks earlier walked into one of the largest medical device manufacturers in the world, exfiltrated 50 TB, then pushed a destructive button that bricked 200,000 endpoints across 79 countries in minutes, postponed surgeries, stated a retaliation motive, absorbed a $10 million FBI bounty, had four of its domains seized, and was operating a replacement site the same day. from We May Be Living Through the Most Consequential Hundred Days in Cyber History, and Almost Nobody Has Noticed [ungated]
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[he/they] Queer, trans, disabled, disgruntled. Former librarian, future dust.
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"And yet, the public conversation around them has been quiet to the point of being strange. This is a curious observation more than a complaint. And the goal of what follows is to gather the events into one place, cite the publications that reported each one, and then ask, gently, why the period feels so undocumented in real time."
I posit it's because: the average person doesn't understand anything about hacking or anything else to do with technology. The average person often doesn't know how to change the ringtone on their phone, or how to check their email if they're away from their own customized devices.
Have I, in my former professional capacities, helped people who were frustrated because e.g. typing their email address into the browser's address bar didn't open their inbox? Yes. Has my sister, in hers, had widows try to return their late husband's "cell phone" to their cell phone store, only to be handed a television remote control. Again, YES. MORE THAN ONCE.
We've spent most of the last few decades failing to teach tech literacy [not that we're doing so hot on _regular_ literacy either] and failing to make the hardware widely affordable and available. My middle school kids have had school-provided ipads for the last 2 years, but we parents had to independently find, pay for, and make them attend a typing class over spring break. I've had to teach them the media literacy and security stuff: who says so? how do you know? why would they do that? can you trust them, and how much? how do you know that? etc etc
If we continue to ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ it off, we'll continue to get ignorance. The folks in charge will be thrilled ("they trust me/dumb fucks" -- Zuckerberg).
I posit it's because: the average person doesn't understand anything about hacking or anything else to do with technology. The average person often doesn't know how to change the ringtone on their phone, or how to check their email if they're away from their own customized devices.
Have I, in my former professional capacities, helped people who were frustrated because e.g. typing their email address into the browser's address bar didn't open their inbox? Yes. Has my sister, in hers, had widows try to return their late husband's "cell phone" to their cell phone store, only to be handed a television remote control. Again, YES. MORE THAN ONCE.
We've spent most of the last few decades failing to teach tech literacy [not that we're doing so hot on _regular_ literacy either] and failing to make the hardware widely affordable and available. My middle school kids have had school-provided ipads for the last 2 years, but we parents had to independently find, pay for, and make them attend a typing class over spring break. I've had to teach them the media literacy and security stuff: who says so? how do you know? why would they do that? can you trust them, and how much? how do you know that? etc etc
If we continue to ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ it off, we'll continue to get ignorance. The folks in charge will be thrilled ("they trust me/dumb fucks" -- Zuckerberg).
FRA again
Yosef Treller has a very interesting Facebook post (in Russian) that starts:
Я – то, что называлось в советское время “книголюб”, 60 лет покупаю, собираю, меняю, а в последние годы – продаю книги (чтобы купить другие, соответствующие моим нынешним вкусам)
I am what was known in the Soviet era as a “booklover”; for sixty years I have been buying, collecting, and trading books — and in recent years, selling them (in order to buy others that suit my current tastes).
He says that now, of course, you can get pretty much anything you want: “Хочешь Платона, Костанеду, Стругацких, Пастернака, Даниэлу Стил или, прости Господи, Армалинского – только плати” [you can get Plato, Castaneda, the Strugatskys, Pasternak, Danielle Steel, or — God forgive me — Armalinsky, you just have to pay]. But back in the day, from the ’60s through the ’80s, things were more interesting — booklovers had to go to a lot of trouble to find what they wanted, and those who had access to the desired books through connections could charge what the market would bear. He goes on to list the “white whales” that were in particular demand:
Большая Библиотека Поэта. Тут были три сияющие вершины – Саша Чёрный, Марина Цветаева и Пастернак. Потом присоединился Мандельштам.
Литературные Памятники. Трехтомник Плутарха, трехтомник (подчёркиваю, оригинальный именно трехтомник) Монтеня, двухтомник Тацита, двухтомник Речей Цицерона. Позднее появились более массовые хотелки – собрание рассказов Эдгара По, Петербург Андрея Белого, Смерть Артура. Ну, были, конечно, среди желанных Ларошфуко, Шамфор, Талеман де Рео, были оригиналы не от мира сего собиравшие полную Махабхарату, но я говорю о массовом спросе.
Любители искусства и просто желающие быть in искали Вазари и двухтомник Ревалда. Остальные убивались по Жизни Ван Гога Перрюшо и Модильяни в Жизни в искусстве. Ну, конечно, всем нужен был Кафка и Булгаков
Отдельно – любители фантастики сметали всё, делая, конечно, упор на Стругацких и Зарубежную фантастику, но об этом я писал уже не раз.
Ну и все – и простые люди, и ультраинтеллектуалы хотели Наследника из Калькутты, Джин Грин неприкасаемый, Зарубежные детективы, которыми радовали народ издательства Молодая гвардия и Прогресс.
Эверестом был красный двенадцатитомник Дюма
My translation:
Library of the Poet, Big series [academic editions with essays and annotations]; here there were three shining peaks—Sasha Chorny, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Pasternak. Later, Mandelstam joined them.
Literary Monuments: the three-volume Plutarch, the three-volume Montaigne (I emphasize: specifically the original three-volume edition); the two-volume Tacitus; and the two-volume set of Cicero’s Orations. Later on, items with more mass appeal showed up—a collection of Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories, Andrei Bely’s Petersburg, Le Morte d’Arthur. Well, of course among the coveted authors were La Rochefoucauld, Chamfort, and Tallemant des Réaux—and there were eccentrics, truly not of this world, who collected the complete Mahabharata—but I’m talking about mass demand.
Art lovers—and those who just wanted to be “in”—sought out Vasari and the two-volume Rewald. Others were obsessed with Perruchot’s La Vie de Van Gogh and the Modigliani [by Vitaly Valenkin] in the A Life in Art series. And, of course, everyone had to have Kafka and Bulgakov.
As an aside, science fiction fans snapped up everything, focusing, of course, on the Strugatskys and foreign sf, but I’ve written about that more than once already.
And everyone, both ordinary people and ultra-intellectuals, wanted The Heir from Calcutta, Gene Green the Untouchable, and the foreign detective novels with which the Molodaya Gvardiya and Progress publishing houses delighted the public.
The red twelve-volume set of Dumas was the Everest.
I love these obscure corners of cultural history, and I was pleased to learn about Robert Shtilmark and his adventure novel The Heir from Calcutta, set in the late 18th century (a pirate vessel under the command of Captain Bernardito Luis El Gorra seizes a passenger ship carrying Fredrick Ryland, heir to the Viscountcy of Chensfield, who is traveling from Calcutta to England, and his fiancée, Emily Hardy; Bernardito’s henchman Giacomo Grelli steals Ryland’s documents and travels to England under his name with Emily, forced to act as his wife), which was commissioned by a Gulag crime boss who wanted to send it to Stalin under his own name (after its own adventures, it was eventually published under both names in 1958), as well as Gene Green the Untouchable, a spy thriller parody featuring the American doctor Gene Green, born Evgeny Grinyov, son of a White Guard immigrant from Russia, who gets caught up in a spy plot, published in 1972 as by “Grivady Gorpozhaks,” a pseudonym for the group authorship of Grigory Pozhenyan, Ovid Gorchakov, and Vasily Aksenov; it was very popular, but was taken out of circulation in the USSR when Aksyonov emigrated in 1980.
A reminder that I -- we -- will always have more in common with one other than any of our nations (or today, billionaires) want us to think.
FRA again
How did you learn to live with/let go of the times when someone's upset with you after an interaction? Question is inclusive of but not exclusive to romantic relationships, and limited to neither big important disagreements nor minor everyday things that others might barely register/remember.
Didn't see my way: I realized nobody in my life cared (ruminated) as much about our interactions (about me) as I did. Me contributing (wasting) all that energy was therefore unjust, so I stopped. Highly recommend.
FRA again
The Nail Test. Wang Chuanfu, BYD's CEO, barely slept for weeks. Three passengers, all in their twenties. His chemistry. His cell. His company's name on the casing. He had not built it to kill anyone, but it had. He pulled his engineers together with one question: What is the mechanism by which this cell fails, and how do we make that physically impossible?
The speed and scale of change in China is jaw-dropping.
FRA again
Lead may be out of gasoline and paint but it’s not out of our hearts.
Physicians and patients alike may assume that lead poisoning is a relic of the past, with the notable exceptions of contaminated water plaguing people in Flint, Mich., or Milwaukee in recent years. A new study analyzing lead levels in bones reminds us that lead lingers in the body for a lifetime, including in the heart’s vital arteries, where it can elevate blood pressure, injure the lining of blood vessels, and raise risk of death from heart attacks.
“This study reframes coronary heart disease,” Bruce Lanphear, a professor of health sciences at Simon Fraser University and author of a companion editorial, told STAT in an email interview. “This and other research show that a large share of heart disease bears the imprint of industrialization. Lead, air pollution, and secondhand smoke aren’t side notes — they’re central to the story.”
FRA again
Few things will give a man as much of an insight into the female body as growing up with sisters. Painful, irregular periods, body hair, skin trouble: Al Barrus, a 43-year-old veteran and communications specialist from New Mexico, heard all about it growing up, the only male of three siblings. He’s also known for a while that one of his sisters had been diagnosed with polycystic ovary syndrome, an endocrinological disorder and leading cause of infertility associated with a range of issues including high androgen levels, insulin resistance, and enlarged ovaries. His other sister, too, had some PCOS symptoms.
Recently, he’s begun to wonder: Could he have it, too?
FRA again
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