Weekly Cyber security issues, August 19, 2023 – Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, finance, 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 online security, often without our situational awareness.
Four highlights from this week: National Archives will make its AI use case inventory public; Data Breaches and Lawyers: Highlights from IBM’s 2023 Report; Microsoft limits use of AI Services in upcoming Services Agreement update; and Two Women Accuse Tile of Marketing Its Devices as Stalking Aids.
How Geology Shapes History
Library of Congress, By M. Amelia Raines, Reference Librarian, Geography and Map Division: “Many of the most important cities in the eastern United States owe much of their history to a geological phenomenon which began 250 million years ago.
The results of the processes which shaped the Earth itself can be seen on modern maps – not just geological maps, but topographic, political, and even highway maps. Geology North America, like every landmass, is made up of physiographic provinces – regions of land with characteristic geology, morphology, soils, and other environmental features.
All through the eastern United States, from New Jersey to Alabama, runs a line where two of these provinces – the Atlantic Coastal Plain and the Piedmont – meet. The Piedmont – essentially the foothills of the Appalachian mountain range – is made up of undulating belts of metamorphic rocks running northeast-southwest. The geology here is complex, and produces a landscape of gently rolling hills.
The Atlantic Coastal Plain, by contrast, is flat and sandy. Over millennia, rivers have deposited Appalachian sediments in an alluvial plain stretching from Texas to Cape Cod. Where these two regions meet, elevation drops…and the landscape changes. This line of transition is called the Atlantic Seaboard Fall Line.”