Thursday, December 01, 2022

US says Hive ransomware gang has made $100 million in ransom since June 2021


“We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edge of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.”

-Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale


Analysis: while other jurisdictions are trialing law by artificial intelligence, there are many reasons why this might not be a good idea


Fraudsters use real ABNs on their sham sites. Here's what we can learn from tractor scammers about how to spot a fake


Star Entertainment sued by AUSTRAC for alleged money-laundering breaches


David French: An Open Letter To Those Who Think I’ve Lost My Christian Faith Because I Support The Respect For Marriage Act


Billionaires Provided 15 Percent of Funding for the Midterm

In the 2022 midterms, the 100 largest donors collectively spent 60 percent more than every small donor in the United States combined, according to a Brennan Center analysis of publicly available data. (Small donors are those who give $200 or less.) The wealthy have always wielded disproportionate power over American government. In 1895, GOP strategist Mark Hanna famously said, “There are only two important things in politics. The first is money, and I can’t remember the second.” But money’s outsized influence has ebbed and flowed through U.S. history.”


JEFF GOLDSTEIN:  Kings and Queens and Guillotines. “The criminalization of speech is coming. In fact, it’s already here.”


Astronauts will soon live and work on the moon: NASA.


US says Hive ransomware gang has made $100 million in ransom since June 2021


“We can build workplaces that are engines of well-being, showing workers that they matter, that their work matters, and that they have the workplace resources and support necessary to flourish…Centered on the worker’s voice and equity, these Five Essentials support workplaces as engines of well-being. Each essential is grounded in two human needs, shared across industries and roles. Creating a plan to enact these practices can help strengthen the essentials of workplace well‑being. This 30-page Surgeon General’s Framework for Workplace Mental Health and Well-Being offers a foundation that workplaces can build upon. Download the document PDF or continue scrolling to learn more…”


  1. “Our democracies are already gamified. Our goal should be to do it better” — we can go “beyond gamification’s traditionally thoughtless application of points and badges” and use “game design principles put the oft-dashed ideals of digital democracy into practice,” argues Adrian Hon
  2. “Agency appears to be an occasional, remarkable property of matter, and one we should feel comfortable invoking when offering causal explanations of what we’re observing” — an attempt to provide a scientifically respectable explanation of agency that doesn’t explain it away, from Philip Ball
  3. “The value of the humanities is, upon exposure to real humanistic practice, self-evident… a society that acts as if this were not true, that threatens artists and philosophers and poets with oblivion or obscurity if they cannot justify their existence, is a profoundly sick culture” — John Michael Colón on the confusions of the “canon wars”
  4. “Decades of research have revealed a deeper truth [about protons], one that’s too bizarre to fully capture with words or images” — but it doesn’t stop this writer and graphics editor from trying. One example of the weirdness: “the proton contains traces of particles… that are heavier than the proton itself”

  5. Now Open Access: 7 articles by Kripke and 12 articles and book chapters by others about Kripke’s work — “The Legacy of Saul Kripke” is a memorial collection put together by Wiley (via Eric Piper)
  6. “Ask your kids questions and question their answers. Really get them thinking about issues. Don’t be afraid of these conversations with your kids. You don’t know all the answers. But you don’t have to know the answers” — Scott Hershovitz (Michigan) interviewed about kids and philosophy
  7. “Instead of supposing that physics must be queen of all we survey, I recommend we construct our image of what an ultimate science might be like on the basis of what current science is like when it is most successful. Physics does not act as queen in these cases” — “Rather,” says Nancy Cartwright (Durham), “she does her bit as part of a motley assembly of scientific… and engineering disciplines”