France Gets Its First Museum Of Cheese (What Took So Long?)
Sydney, Australia’s Plan To Try To Stabilize Its Creative Sector
An American Novelist, Telling Immigrant Stories Anew
In an Era of Fakes, How to Know When Someone Online Is Real
WSJ via MSN: “You’re on Facebook, LinkedIn or X and get a message. Maybe it’s from a stranger in your industry, maybe someone from your hometown claiming to know you from way back when. The person wants to reconnect or get your advice. This could all be wonderful. Or it could be the start of a scam. Unfortunately, security experts say, the latter is more likely, because personalized schemes to dupe internet users are on the rise.
Trouble is, it is harder than ever to know whether that person showing up in your messages is real or not. A check mark next to someone’s name on social media used to mean their identity had been verified. That’s now not the case on all sites. Artificial intelligence can help bad actors replicate the voices and appearances of strangers.
Online transactions—such as selling furniture on Facebook Marketplace—are magnets for fraud, banks and security experts warn. And schemers are cozying up to people online and pretending to kindle romance to gain access to their money, a form of fraud called “pig butchering.” The single best step to determine someone’s identity online and protect yourself is to slow down.
Don’t rush to respond to an intriguing message. Instead do some vetting before taking things further. Tech companies are beginning to help, too, with Google, LinkedIn and Bumble introducing features to detect suspicious messages and users…”
Here is the NYT list of the 100 best books of the new millennium. The NYT did enlist me as a voter, and here were my choices. Note these were off the top of my head, without much thought, and in no particular order. The defining category was when they appeared in English, not in the original language. It is no accident that all my choices are fiction:
Living to Tell the Tale, Gabriel García Márquez
To the End of the Land, David Grossman
Pachinko, Min Lee
The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolaño
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, Alice Munro
The Three-Body Problem, Cixin Liu
Solenoid, Mircea Cartarescu
My Brilliant Friend (and the entire quadrology), Elena Ferrante
Submission, Michel Houellebecq
My Struggle, volumes 1 and 2, Karl Knausgaard
Jack Kerouac’s List of 30 Beliefs and Techniques for Writing and Life Included in The Portable Jack Kerouac:
- Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
- Submissive to everything, open, listening
- Try never get drunk outside yr own house
- Be in love with yr life
- Something that you feel will find its own form
- Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
- Blow as deep as you want to blow
- Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
- The unspeakable visions of the individual
- No time for poetry but exactly what is
Find the other 20 on The Marginalian.
Found on London Inheritance.
Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, July 6, 2024 – 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.
Eight highlights from this week: US car dealerships are recovering from massive cyberattack: 3 things you should know; Deepfake attacks will cost $40 billion by 2027; FTC – Who’s who in scams: a spring roundup; Cloudflare is taking a stand against AI website scrapers; Microsoft tells more customers their emails have been stolen; Tips to Make Facebook and Instagram Fun Again; and How to Stop ChatGPT Training On Your Data.
What the internet looked like in 1994, according to 15 webpages born that year
Fast Company: “What was the World Wide Web like at the start? Long before it became the place we think and work and talk, the air that we (and the bots) now breathe, no matter how polluted it’s become? So much of the old web has rotted away that it can be hard to say; even the great Internet Archive‘s Wayback Machineonly goes back to 1996. But try browsing farther back in time, and you can start to see in those weird, formative years some surprising signs of what the web would be, and what it could be.
In 1994, the modern Internet (which was almost always capitalized back then, and sometimes called just “Internet”) was itself just 11 years old, and mostly the domain of researchers and hobbyists and hackers and geeks, who used an array of globe-spanning services for communicating (email and Usenet newsgroups, in addition to local BBS and IRC), for downloading files via FTP, and for searching for documents and texts with services like Gopher and WAIS.
The Web was a relatively new addition to the mix that tied a few of these systems together, with a twist. Tim Berners-Lee, a scientist at CERN in Geneva, had built it in 1989 to organize the lab’s sprawling pool of physics research by combining three technologies he’d invented: a language (HTML), a protocol (HTTP), and a way to locate things on the network (URLs).
Now, the Web was growing rapidly, in part because it was free. In April 1993, shortly after the University of Minnesota decided to charge licensing fees for servers that used its Gopher protocol, managers at CERN chose to put the Web’s source code in the public domain and make it available on a royalty-free basis. That opened it to anyone who wanted to set up their own server.
The Web was also increasingly popular because it was easy to use and to look at, and even relatively easy to make. Instead of navigating folder hierarchies and plaintext files, users could browse pages with clickable hypertext. Now, anyone who could use a keyboard and mouse could traverse cyberspace.
And by January 1994, when then-Vice President Al Gore presided over a summit at UCLA to hail the possibilities of the new “information superhighway,” millions of people suddenly had a slick new ride…”
