Monday, August 09, 2021

How addicted are people to social media dragons? πŸ‰

“The truly valuable skill here isn’t the capacity to push yourself harder, but to stop and recuperate despite the discomfort of knowing that work remains unfinished, emails unanswered, other people’s demands unfulfilled” — advice about work


How Local Media Spreads Misinformation From Vaccine Skeptics

The New York Times: “Facebook and other social media have been under scrutiny for vaccine misinformation, but local outlets have also sometimes been active…In total, local media remains a significant force. There were 1,762 local television stations and 3,379 radio stations operating in the United States last year, according to the Radio Television Digital News Association and Syracuse University. While print publications have been decimated, there are still about 1,300 daily papers and 5,800 weekly publications, with roughly half located in small rural communities, according to research from the University of North Carolina. Jo Lukito, an assistant journalism professor who studies disinformation at the University of Texas at Austin, said local media is often a starting point that creates a “trading up the chain” effect. It starts when a rumor is covered or published in local media, she said, where it can gain a sheen of credibility. Then “when you pitch it to a Fox News or a larger news platform, you can say that this other outlet covered it, so it must be real,” she said…”



Watch The ISS’s Own Space Olympics That Are Literally Out Of This World



How addicted are people to social media?

Source: WaPo via beSpacific
https://www.bespacific.com/how-addicted-are-people-to-social-media/

Washington Post: “We found a way to measure it – Just as with smoking, people will pay to have their behavior restricted. The average person with Internet access spends 2.5 hours each day on social media, by one estimate, and there are now 3.8 billion social media users worldwide. 


Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, August 1, 2021 – Privacy and security issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and security, often without our situational awareness. Four highlights from this week: 48 Advocacy Groups Call on the FTC to Ban Amazon Surveillance; Facial recognition surges in retail stores; Fight for Control Threatens to Destabilize and Fragment the Internet; and Here’s how much victims have saved in ransom payments by using these free decryption tools.


Tracking Federal Awards: USAspending.gov and Other Data Sources Updated July 30, 2021 – “USAspending.gov, available at https://www.USAspending.gov, is a government source for data on federal awards by state, congressional district (CD), county, city, and zip code. The awards data in USAspending.gov are provided byfederal agencies and represent contracts, grants, loans, and other forms of financial assistance. USAspending.gov also provides tools for examining the broader picture of federal spending obligations within the categories of budget function, agency, and object class



Harassers and bullies succeed in tech because silence is encouraged The Register. “In tech”? How about pretty much everywhere? Oh, and passive aggression, like shutting people up by accusing them of negativity, is also bullying. 


Why Lower Yield Treasuries Are More Attractive Than Higher Yield Fixing the Economists 


United States Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, Rob Portman, Ranking Member. Gary Peters, Chairman. Federal Cybersecurity: America’s Data Still at Risk. August 2021: “..The current state of cyber espionage. In the past two years, state-sponsored hackers have perpetrated some of the largest and most damaging cyber-attacks in our history. In December 2020, we learned that the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service used a sophisticated supply chain vulnerability to corrupt a security patch for SolarWinds network management software. This allowed hackers to infiltrate nine Federal agencies, including DHS, State, Energy, and Treasury. Russia’s cyber-spies remained undetected in those Federal agencies’ systems for at least nine months. The Federal Government only became aware of the attack after it was discovered by a private cybersecurity firm, FireEye, which was also breached. The Federal Government is still working to understand exactly what information and data Russia accessed during those nine months. In April 2021, we learned Chinese hackers breached multiple Federal agencies through a vulnerability in a widely used remote access product called Pulse Connect Secure. A Chinese state-sponsored hacking group exploited vulnerabilities in Pulse Connect Secure products allowing hackers to bypass passwords and multifactor authentication to access agencies’ data. These were just two of the most damaging attacks. Indeed, for 2020, the White House reported 30,819 information security incidents across the Federal Government—an 8 percent increase from the prior year…It is clear that the data entrusted to these eight key agencies remains at risk. As hackers, both state-sponsored and otherwise, become increasingly sophisticated and persistent, Congress and the executive branch cannot continue to allow PII and national security secrets to remain vulnerable…”