Behind the outrageous viral obituary that people are calling ‘a masterpiece’ Guardian
Who might replace Daniel Craig as the next James Bond? BBC
5 tech trends that will impact businesses well beyond 2022 - Tech Republic
Tech Republic: “Understanding the impact of technology on businesses and society at large is hard. This year’s annual Thoughtworks Looking Glass report attempts to put a broad range of technologies into perspective so business leaders can get an idea of where tech is taking them. The report takes a holistic approach to analyzing the impact of 100 current and emerging technologies. Broken out into sections called lenses, the report “offers industry leaders recommendations on how to best compete and become disruptors themselves. “We use the lenses in the Looking Glass to help make sense of all of the individual trends with the lenses akin to the big ‘storylines’ that we think will be important,” said Michael Mason, Thoughtworks global head of technology. “What’s interesting is to also consider the lenses in combinations. If we overlay the evolution of the human-machine experience with an explosion in AI, what ramifications will that have for a particular industry or organization? Whilst we offer some of these combinations in the report, this exercise is also a good one for readers to use to stimulate their thinking.”
Quartz: “In 2021, readers of English Wikipedia were most focused on notable deaths, American politics and political institutions, sports, and topics inspired by popular entertainment. It was the same story last year. And yet, none of the most popular Wikipedia pages in 2021 were related to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, according to Quartz’s analysis of Wikipedia’s statistics. The page with highest daily visitor count was Prince Philip’s with 3.87 million on April 9, the day he died. Readers in June, July, and August sought information on the big sporting events postponed from the year before, including pages associated with the Tokyo Olympics, and the UEFA Euro 2020. In September and October, top pages were overwhelmingly related to Netflix’s hit show Squid Game…”
MIT Researchers Just Discovered an AI Mimicking the Brain on Its Own.
Earth’s Tilted Magnetic Field 41,000 Years Ago Pushed The Auroras to Unexpected Places.
COLLUSION: Confronted by investigators, Harvard scientist admits to payments from Chinese university, video shows. “Prosecutors have told jurors it wasn’t a crime for Lieber to accept money from the university or the Thousand Talents program, created by the Chinese government to recruit high-level scientists, but it was illegal for him to hide his financial arrangement from the US Department of Defense and the National Institutes of Health, which funded much of his research at Harvard. He is charged with making false statements to the government, filing false tax returns, and failing to file reports of foreign bank and financial accounts.”
Charging Julian Assange with espionage is a greater threat to democracy than Jan. 6 The Week
The ‘most serious’ security breach ever is unfolding right now. Here’s what you need to know.
Washington Post: “Much of the Internet, from Amazon’s cloud to connected TVs, is riddled with the log4j vulnerability, and has been for years…
The fact that log4j is such a ubiquitous piece of software is what makes this such a big deal. Imagine if a common type of lock used by millions of people to keep their doors shut was suddenly discovered to be ineffective.
Switching a single lock for a new one is easy, but finding all the millions of buildings that have that defective lock would take time and an immense amount of work. Log4j is part of the Java programming language, which is one of the foundational ways software has been written since the mid-90s.
Huge swaths of the computer code that modern life runs on uses Java and contains log4j. Cloud storage companies such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft, which provide the digital backbone for millions of other apps, are affected. So are giant software sellers whose programs are used by millions, such as IBM, Oracle and Salesforce. Devices that connect to the Internet such as TVs and security cameras are at risk as well.
Hackers who try to break into digital spaces to steal information or plant malicious software suddenly have a massive new opportunity to try to get into nearly anywhere they want. That doesn’t mean everything will be hacked, but it just got a lot easier to do so — just as if the locks on half of the homes and businesses in a city suddenly stopped working all at once…”