Thursday, August 31, 2023

Czech Republic sees online crime double; set up new cyber crime unit

After the tourists go home, a museum’s collection tells its own story


Social Catfish releases report on State of Internet Scams, using FTC and IC3 data, as well as their own survey

  • Losses have at least quadrupled over the last five years, from $2.7 billion to $103 billion
  • Estimate real annual losses to romance scams at $200 billion
  • Massive increase in victims 20 and under
  • Most common apps used were Facebook, Google Hangouts, WhatsApp; Instagram and Plenty of Fish
  • State by state breakdown
DOJ announces nationwide coordinated effort to fight Covid 19 fraud;
  • 371 arrested; losses of $836 million
  • Many, or most, cases involved PPP fraud or unemployment fraud
UK jury finds t wo teenagers guilty of ransomware attacks, hacking; victims in include City of London Police, Nvidia, Rockstar Games, and Uber

FBI identifies crypto accounts containing more than $40 million stolen by North Korea

Australia arrests Chinese man involved in scam that took $100 from US victims in crypto romance scams
 
Review and Recommendation: I highly recommend To Rule the Waves, by Arthur Herman.  A great history of the Royal Navy, how it developed and enriched the world by making the sea lanes safe for everyone. And ended the transatlantic slave trade.  


Fraud Studies: Here are links to the studies I’ve written for the Better Business Bureau: puppy fraud, romance fraud; BEC fraud, sweepstakes/lottery fraud,  tech support fraud, romance fraud money mules, crooked movers, government imposters, online vehicle sale scams, rental fraud, gift cards,  free trial offer frauds,  job scams,  online shopping fraud,  fake check fraudand crypto scams
 
Fraud News Around the worldHumor FTC and CFPBVirus Benefit Theft Social mediaIRS and tax fraudRansomwareBitcoin and cryptocurrencyATM SkimmingJamaica and Lottery FraudRomance Fraud and SextortionPeople:   
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Social media giants urged to tackle data-scraping privacy risks

 Why we must replace the American nuclear family with a “postgenerational” society. Big Think. Micael T: “Yeah, this is great if you want an atomized neoliberal hell where only the rich procreate.”



Government Stupidity Is By Design Matt Stoller. Companies and their lawyers howl over having to make more pre-merger disclosures. Individually they do not sound hard, which means the issue is not the alleged burden but having to provide more information.


Social media giants urged to tackle data-scraping privacy risks


Tech Crunch: “A joint statement signed by regulators at a dozen international privacy watchdogs, including the U.K.’s ICO, Canada’s OPC and Hong Kong’s OPCPD, has urged mainstream social media platforms to protect users’ public posts from scraping — warning they face a legal responsibility to do so in most markets. “In most jurisdictions, personal information that is ‘publicly available’, ‘publicly accessible’ or ‘of a public nature’ on the internet, is subject to data protection and privacy laws,” they write. “Individuals and companies that scrape such personal information are therefore responsible for ensuring that they comply with these and other applicable laws. 

However, social media companies and the operators of other websites that host publicly accessible personal information (SMCs and other websites) also have data protection obligations with respect to third-party scraping from their sites. These obligations will generally apply to personal information whether that information is publicly accessible or not. Mass data scraping of personal information can constitute a reportable data breach in many jurisdictions.” 

The timing of the statement, which was also signed by privacy regulators in Australia, Switzerland, Norway, New Zealand, Colombia, Jersey, Morocco, Argentina and Mexico — who are all members of the Global Privacy Assembly’s international enforcement cooperation working group — coincides with the ongoing hype around generative AI models which typically require large amounts of data for training and could encourage more entities to scrape the Internet in a bid to acquire data-sets jump on the generative AI bandwagon…”

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The real-life Mowglis: Men and women who were raised by animals… from a wolf pack to a troop of monkeys

How to write a biography without biographical information | Washington Examiner


Gesture is a uniquely powerful tool. Here’s how to make the most of it New Scientist 


The real-life Mowglis: Men and women who were raised by animals… from a wolf pack to a troop of monkeys Daily Mail

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Sestica 6: Can lightning strike twice for Ljubljana’s traditional restaurant?

A walled Roman encampment was built In Ljubljana in the mid-1st century BCE by Roman legionnaires and developed into the settlement of Emona (Iulia Aemona), though the area had been settled earlier by the Veneti, the Illyrians, and the Celts, beginning about 1000 BCE. 

Sitting on the route to Pannonia and commanding the Ljubljana Gap, the strategically located city was destroyed by Attila in the mid-5th century. The Slovene Slavic tribes, migrating westward, rebuilt it in the 12th century, when its name was recorded first as Laibach (1144) and then as Luvigana (1146). It gained city rights in 1220.



In the late 13th century, rule passed to the Habsburgs, and in 1335 Ljubljana became the capital of the Habsburg-Austrian province of Carniola.

From 1461 Ljubljana was the seat of a bishop. Taken by the French in 1809, it became the government seat of the Illyrian Provinces. In 1821 the Congress of Laibach, a meeting of members of the Holy Alliance, was held in Ljubljana. The completion of the southern (Vienna-Trieste) railway line in 1849 stimulated the economic and cultural growth of Ljubljana, which became a centre of Slovene nationalism under Austrian rule. Ljubljana gained a sugar refinery, a brewery, a foundry, and a paper and textile mill (later converted into a tobacco factory).


Oldest restaurant, circa 1776, with largest catering gardens for about 100 guests in the center of Ljubljana 



Šestica has been in business since 1776 and is an ideal setting to explore traditional Slovene cuisine. All the famous dishes are on the menu, along with many less well-known items and wines from each of the country’s regions as well as a food prepared in a wood-fired oven and on a grill. 

WHY TO ŠESTICA?

As the oldest restaurant in town it’s long-played host to local artists, writers and politicians and in addition to the central dining area has a set of smaller rooms and corners to relax and discuss business or pleasure. We usually head to one of the backroom tables to enjoy a steak helped along few glasses of Teran.

Sestica

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Wednesday, August 30, 2023

What makes The Bear 🐻 (Not The Dragon 🐉) such an irresistible and beautiful piece of TV?

 What makes The Bear 🐻 (Not The Dragon 🐉) such an irresistible and beautiful piece of TV?

As the ubiquitous kitchen-wall slogan has it, every second counts in The Bear (Disney+). And every scene matters. Immersed in the messy business of discarding the old and welcoming the new, the two seasons of the brilliant restaurant procedural tell a straightforward story about the complicated business of change. But it’s how creator Christopher Storer and his team go about telling that story that makes it so distinctive.
All it begins, chef Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) has returned home to Chicago to take over the failing family business, The Original Beef of Chicagoland, a small sandwich shop nestled in the shadows of the River North neighbourhood’s high-rises. He’s there because his charismatic but deeply troubled older brother, Mikey (Jon Bernthal), took his own life, leaving his family to deal with the consequences.
Mikey appears in several sequences – which are marked as flashbacks only by his presence – but it’s his absence that drives much of what happens outside them. He’s like a ghost haunting the series. Perfectionist Carmy is still measuring his own worth against the big brother he’s lost. Down-to-earth sister Natalie, aka “Sugar” (Abby Elliott), has been keeping her distance from The Beef because of its painful connections to the past. And abrasive cousin Richie Jerimovich (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) continues to work there in front-of-house not only because of his limited options but also out of a sense of duty to Mikey.
It’s a family nightmare with Carmy at the centre of things. His way of dealing with the past is to build a different future. His goal is to turn The Beef into The Bear, named after a moniker given to him in childhood and modelled on the fine-dining restaurants where he’d worked before coming back to Chicago. Showing fatherly interest as well as providing financial support and sage advice is Jimmy (Oliver Platt), who’d been best friend to the Berzatto siblings’ late father.
Inheriting some of the old staff – prickly Latina Tina (Liza Colon-Zayas) and taciturn Somalian refugee Ebra (Edwin Lee Gibson) in the kitchen, as well as Fak and “Sweeps”, a handymen duo (played by real-life chef Matty Matheson and Corey Hendrix) – Carmy also takes on ambitious young African-American chefs Sydney (Ayo Edebiri) and Marcus (Lionel Boyce). But not everyone approves of his plan.
Richie tells Sydney that “the neighbourhood is held together by a shared history and love and respect”, and that changing The Beef represents a betrayal of that. And one of the key motifs of the series is the intertwining of The Beef’s melting pot and Chicago’s daily life. Every episode offers masterful montages of streets with their hustle and bustle, buildings, storefronts, monuments, the “L” train and its tracks and tunnels, the kitchen staff, and the dishes they’re preparing.
Ebra’s worried about the changes because he doesn’t want the land of promise he’s found in America to become something different. For him, the small things matter, and he doesn’t want to wear the “uniform” that would be required because it reminds him of the war-torn Somalia he’d fled. Like almost everyone else in the series, he is prey to the dark anxieties lurking at the edge of his consciousness.
The Bear brings all of its characters to vibrant life, the tightness of the bond between the culinary dreamers in the kitchen embodied in the way they always respectfully address each other as “chef”, even when they’re at loggerheads. Richie, Fak and Sweeps mightn’t earn that particular acknowledgement, but each in his own way connects to the sense of family that has evolved in the eatery, even if the shared love often looks and sounds more like loathing, especially when Richie is making his presence felt.
However, as it dares to venture into places where few TV series are willing to go, the source of the series’ dramatic urgency is its bold style. Most notably, the hand-held camera moves that take us inside the world of the kitchen do much more than lend the series a decorative immediacy.
When they follow the chefs’ manoeuvring around the kitchen’s tight spaces, the soundtrack constantly punctuated by calls of “corner” and “behind” as the characters alert each other to their whereabouts, it’s as if the camera has joined itself to the chaotic choreography. The results might lack the grace of a polished musical, but the communal flow is a joy to watch, a glorious dance born – like the series itself – of the everyday, prone to the kind of missteps that never happened to Fred and Gene but that are common occurrences for the rest of us.
Then there are the extended takes that allow what’s happening in front of the camera to unfold in a naturalistic way. Monologues that last as long as seven minutes without a cut in which the camera brings us face to face with a character’s humanity. As in the medium close-up of Carmy’s attempt to give voice to his inner life at an Al-Anon meeting early in season two. “I felt I could speak through the food,” he explains regarding the difficulties he has communicating.
Or conversations in which the specific words spoken matter less than the interactions between the characters in the frame. Like the one towards the end of season two in which Carmy and Sydney reassure each other that the future is firmly in place as they go about the business of mending a table.
The strategy is taken further in the stunning episode seven in season one, a series highlight. Accompanied by Sufjan Stevens’ (This Is) Chicago on the soundtrack, it begins with a brief montage of the characters making their way to work.
Then everything that follows is claustrophobically locked inside a single take. As Ebra reads a review of The Beef out loud – “Can the Windy City evolve without losing its true essence?” it asks – the camera darts here and there around the kitchen, trapping us inside the increasing chaos as it peeks past obstacles and closes in on escalating tempers.
By way of contrast are scenes in which the camera lingers on what’s happening in front of it, insisting on an appreciation of the beauty of the moment rather than rushing us on to what happens next. Like Tina’s pleasure at the applause she gets after her rendition of Freddy Fender’s Before the Next Teardrop Falls in a karaoke bar. Or the closing shot of the episode in which Marcus travels to Copenhagen’s lauded Noma to train with a dessert maestro (Will Poulter), and glows with satisfaction as he finally tastes his own successful creation.
Or the scene where Claire (Molly Gordon), who went to school with Carmy, re-enters his life like a breath of fresh air in a chance encounter in a grocery store. Prompting a recall of the incident in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet(1996) where the would-be lovers first glimpse each other through a fish tank, Carmy catches sight of her through a misty refrigerator door. It proves to be not by chance that she’s working as a doctor in the ER department of a Chicago hospital.
There’s also the telling look on Richie’s face after Sydney has calmed a brawl by the front door of The Beef by offering food to the combatants. Possessed by a peculiar American madness, he’d rushed to retrieve a gun from his locker when the fighting began, returning only to discover that she’d wielded a far more powerful weapon.
Her soothing way in the face of the threat also has its roots deep in American cinema, in John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), when Henry Fonda’s folksy Abe pacifies a lynch mob in front of an Illinois jail.
The Bear’s embrace of the lives of its characters and its affection for all of them stems from a winning romanticism. But it’s the adventurousness of its storytelling that makes it downright irresistible. To appropriate the vernacular of the show when an experimental dish dazzles, it’s something.
Lifeline 13 11 14 or lifeline.org.au.





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Antipodean Misbehaving Cold Rivers: Snowy 2.0 mega project costs double to $12b in six months

Feeling 10 hours Younger as Slovenian Ljubljana Kind of MEdia Dragon and Digesting the absurd Snowy River Story By Lake Bled


Shock over cost blowout for NSW pumped hydro scheme


Florence, the 2400-tonne machine that came to symbolise Snowy 2.0’s woes

Inside the Florence Tunnel Boring Machine being used for some of the tunnelling at Snowy 2.0.

The massive pumped hydroelectricity project high in the Australian Alps has been on a downward trajectory since the day it was announced.



Snowy 2.0 mega project costs double to $12b in six months

The cost of the Snowy 2.0 pumped hydro project has doubled within the past six months to be close to $12 billion, according to a new cost estimate, forcing the Albanese government to make a critical and costly decision about the project’s future.

The massive 2000 megawatt expansion of the Snowy pumped hydro scheme was announced by former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull in March 2017 with a completion date of 2021 and a price tag of $2 billion. By May this year that had blown out to $5.9 billion and a 2029 deadline.

Snowy Hydro’s pumped hydro project has been beset by delays. JAMILA TODERAS

But amid concerns it was falling behind schedule, Snowy’s chief executive Dennis Barnes ordered an internal review. Three sources familiar with the details of the review – who asked not to be named so they could speak freely – said the revised cost had now reached close to $12 billion.

Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen was due to receive advice from Snowy on Tuesday about the huge upwards revision in costs. The board of the Commonwealth-owned company on Thursday will discuss the review and revised corporate plan, which is due to be published after the meeting.

This masthead was told the review will for the first time blame a failure to adequately account for geological conditions such as soft soil in Snowy 2.0’s design, which was produced under the former Coalition government, alongside inflation, wages and delays due to COVID-19 restrictions.

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A Snowy spokesperson said the company would not comment on speculation, but it would provide a “full and transparent” update of the project at the appropriate time.

“In May, Snowy Hydro indicated it was working towards a reset of the delivery timeline and budget for the Snowy 2.0 national energy storage project, with its principal contractor, Future Generation Joint Venture,” the spokesperson said.

“The process in relation to the budget reset is advanced, but ongoing.” 

Construction was delayed for months earlier this year when Florence, Snowy’s massive tunnel-boring machine, got stuck in soft rock beneath Kosciuszko National Park.

Snowy 2.0 is considered an important project in driving the shift to clean energy, as it can back up renewables when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining. The scheme uses surplus electricity to pump water uphill and then releases it to spin turbines at times of high demand.

It’s been around for decades but pumped hydro power is gaining attention as a potential back up for renewable energy, which is increasing its share of the electricity grid. It’s also technology the federal government is interested in.

Bowen declined to comment, but has previously said Snowy 2.0 was critical to the government’s pledge to more than double the amount of power the electricity grid sources from renewables to 82 per cent by 2030 – the main source of greenhouse cuts needed for its target of reducing emissions 43 per cent by the end of the decade.

Snowy 2.0 will bring the scheme’s total generation capacity to 375,000 megawatts hours, or 2000 megawatts for an entire week. By comparison, Tesla’s big battery in South Australia can only supply 150 megawatts for 195 megawatts hours - meaning maximum power for roughly 1.5 hours.

Grattan Institute climate change and energy director Tony Wood, commenting on the potential for massive cost blowouts, said it raised questions about Snowy 2.0’s value for money.

He said the government must declare if it will stick with the megaproject or nominate an alternative to back up electricity supply as more renewables pour into the grid.

“There has always been a sound case for serious long-term energy storage like pumped hydro, and Snowy 2.0 has got a much better combination of megawatts and megawatt-hours than alternatives,” Wood said.

“The government could say Snowy 2.0 will cost this much, and it’s still worth doing at $12 billion. They could also say we’re not going to do it, and why, and what we are going to do instead.

“Or they could blame the previous government and say we are sitting down with [electricity grid operator] the Australian Energy Market Operator to understand what the consequences will be if we do or don’t go ahead and we will report back.”

The government could opt to double down on its support for the Battery of the Nation project, which will use the Marinus Link undersea cable to link Tasmanian hydroelectric dams to the eastern seaboard, or potentially boost gas-peaking plants and batteries.

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Snowy 2.0 pumped hydro project hit with new delays, cost blowouts

The Victorian and NSW governments are nervous about energy security and the risks of blackouts as the grid is weaned off fossil fuels, with coal plants closing at a rapid rate as cheaper renewables come on the market.

Victoria has committed taxpayers’ dollars to cover the potential costs of keeping two of its largest coal plants operating until their expected closure dates, and NSW is considering subsidising Eraring, its biggest coal power plant.

NSW’s Liddell coal-fired generator closed in April and at least another seven of the remaining 14 coal plants on the eastern seaboard are due to shut within 12 years.

Power line projects in NSW and Victoria are being delayed by objections to projects such as HumeLink in NSW – which will link both states to Snowy 2.0, as well as the Western Renewables Link and VNI West in Victoria, which locals say will have negative impacts on property values, the environment and the landscape.

Cut through the noise of federal politics with news, views and expert analysis from Jacqueline Maley. Subscribers can sign up to our weekly Inside Politics newsletter here.

CORRECTION

An earlier version of this story made an incorrect comparison between Snowy 2.0 and Tesla’s South Australian battery. The story has been updated with the correct figures.


Tale of another cold river: paddling the mighty Snowy

Kayaking the Byadbo Wilderness section of the Snowy River takes you back to an earlier age as you join the flow of this famous waterway through a remote and wild landscape.
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