2021-06-11

Cool

• Stack Exchange Data Dump : Stack Exchange, Inc. : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

• A Mathematical Foundation for Foundation Paper Pieceable Quilts

Worthy

• Collections: The Queen’s Latin or Who Were the Romans? Part I: Beginnings and Legends – A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry

etc

• Kentucky professor resigns ahead of vote that could have stripped him of tenure – Retraction Watch

• I study UFOs – and I don’t believe the alien hype

• 'I was completely inside': Lobster diver swallowed by humpback whale

Horseshit

• The Surveilled Student

celebrity gossip

• Jeff Bezos is going to space for 11 minutes. Here's how risky that is

Culture War / Re segregation / Identdoctrination

• Parents panic as top NYC school plans to end advanced math program

• Abertay student cleared after being investigated for saying women have vaginas

Media / Many Ministries of Truths / Censorship

• Pulitzer Prize: BuzzFeed News Wins For China Detention Investigation

TechSuck

• “The Ethereum community has accidentally solved a major problem of the Internet

  "Sign-In w/ Ethereum" is the future of login for every app on the Internet, crypto-related or not. Not just an idea, it's already the norm for web3 & will spread

Economicon

• Millennial millionaires have a large share of their wealth in crypto

• Fewer Young Men Are in the Labor Force. More Are Living at Home

• Businesses found a way around worker shortage: Raising wages to $15/hour or more

• Half of the pandemic's unemployment money may have been stolen

Poilitcks

• Congress Is Going To Throw The Kitchen Sink At Big Tech - Big Technology

• Hunting Leaks, Trump Officials Focused on Democrats in Congress

• Texas Republican asks: can we fix the moon’s orbit to fight climate change?

Security / Militaria / Crime / Police

• Puerto Rico power outage blamed on explosion | News | DW | 11.06.2021

• How Did the Feds Get the Pipeline Hackers' Bitcoin? Here's the Best Theory - Decrypt

  The evidence he says is that the Justice Department recovered only 63.7 of the 75 Bitcoins paid in the ransom. The missing 11.3 Bitcoins amount to 15% of the ransom—a figure that is the usual commission to use the ransomware, which is made by a shadowy group called DarkSide. The group rents out its tools to other hackers who have used them to extort more than $90 million in total.

  The answer, says Smilyanets, is that the amateurs made a key mistake in hard coding the private key to their Bitcoin wallet into the larger ransomware package they deployed. They made another mistake, he says, when they rented a server in the United States run by a cloud provider called Digital Ocean.

  The ransomware crooks rented that server, Smilyanets says, in order to speed up the process of exfiltrating the data they stole from the pipeline operator to another country. The amount of data is vast, so using an intermediary like Digital Ocean to temporarily store and relay the data overseas makes the ransomware operation more efficient.

  • Data exfiltration isn't usually a feature in ransomware attacks...

  • FBI didn’t hack Bitcoin – but it won’t say how it got DarkSide’s private key

  • How the FBI Got Colonial Pipeline’s Ransom Money Back

• U.S. UFO Report Doesn’t Explain Mystery Sightings but Finds No Sign of Aliens

Health / Medicine / COVID

• The Covid lab-leak hypothesis: what scientists do and don’t know

• A Half Dose of Moderna Is More Effective Than a Full Dose of AstraZeneca

• Third member of FDA panel resigns over approval of Biogen Alzheimer's drug

  • The Drug That Could Break American Health Care

• Dr. Steven Hatfill on HCQ

• Laughing gas relieves symptoms in people with treatment-resistant depression

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Energy Secretary says US wants 'responsible' lithium mining

• Lyme Disease-Carrying Ticks Are Turning Up on California's Beaches