Wednesday, September 04, 2024

1982 Bear Pit and NSA releases copy of internal lecture delivered by computing giant Rear Adm. Grace Hopper

Hiker rescued after workmates left him on mountain, says search crew BBC. During an office retreat

 

A woman clocked in for work at Wells Fargo on Friday at 7 a.m. 4 days later, she was found dead at her desk. 12News


 Book Review: Technology and chaotic government programs doom family farms in ‘Land Rich Cash Poor’ Associated Press


Oldest Wine in History Discovered in Ancient Roman Tomb


Lexus and Toyota are the most reliable used-car brands, Consumer Reports says.

Americans in the market for a used vehicle can cut their risk of having trouble down the road by considering some brands over others, with Lexus and Toyota topping a newly published list by Consumer Reports.

The nonprofit research and advocacy group’s first-ever ranking of 26 brands has Lexus and Toyota holding a commanding advantage over third-placed Mazda. All three brands have held consistent average or better reliability ratings over the years, Consumer Reports noted.

“Brands like Lexus and Toyota have a history of conservative redesigns, incrementally improving their entire product line, rather than introducing many all-new systems,” said Steven Elek, senior automotive data analyst at Consumer Reports. “Our data consistently shows over time that cars from those brands are reliable when new and they continue to be reliable as they age,” he added.

1990s-era Toyota Corrolas and pickups appear to be particularly reliable

FORT MEADE, Md. — “In one of the more unique public proactive transparency record releases for the National Security Agency (NSA) to date, NSA has released a digital copy of a lecture that then-Capt. Grace Hopper gave agency employees on August 19, 1982. The lecture, “Future Possibilities: Data, Hardware, Software, and People,” features Capt. Hopper discussing some of the potential future challenges of protecting information. She also provided valuable insight on leadership and her experiences breaking barriers in the fields of computer science and mathematics. Rear Adm. Hopper was an American computer scientist, mathematician, and United States Navy rear admiral. One of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer, she was a pioneer of computer programming. Hopper was the first to devise the theory of machine-independent programming languages, and the FLOW-MATIC programming language she created using this theory was later extended to create COBOL, an early high-level programming language still in use today. In 2016, President Obama posthumously awarded Rear Adm. Hopper the Presidential Medal of Freedom — the Nation’s highest civilian honor, awarded to individuals who have made especially meritorious contributions to the security or national interest of the U.S. — for her remarkable influence on the field of computer science. While NSA did not possess the equipment required to access the footage from the media format in which it was preserved, NSA deemed the footage to be of significant public interest and requested assistance from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to retrieve the footage. NARA’s Special Media Department was able to retrieve the footage contained on two 1’ APEX tapes and transferred the footage to NSA to be reviewed for public release. NSA recognizes Rear Adm. Hopper’s significant contributions as a trailblazing computer scientist and mathematician, but also as a leader.
“The most important thing I’ve accomplished, other than building the compiler, is training young people,” Rear Adm. Hopper once said. “They come to me, you know, and say, ‘Do you think we can do this?’ I say, ‘Try it.’ And I back ’em up. They need that. I keep track of them as they get older and I stir ’em up at intervals so they don’t forget to take chances.” [h/t Mike Ravnitzky]



 Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, August 24, 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. 

Five highlights from this week: Meta’s new crawler could scrape your page, even when you don’t want it to; Don’t trust Google for customer service numbers. It might be a scam; Cox Communications Battles Copyright Case That Could Disrupt TV Streaming for Millions; U.S. government urging to update Galaxy phones due to vulnerability; and IRS still faces security challenges in aftermath of taxpayer data leak.


CBS News: “Nestled in the Northern Catskills, the tiny village of Hobart, New York, is home to around 400 residents, and millions of fascinating characters, all stacked high on shelves. Hobart is a book village. Within one brief block of Main Street, there are sevendifferent bookstores. When Kathy Duyer retired, she moved to Hobart to surround herself with beautiful scenery and plenty of books. She initially had no intention of selling them – she was buying them.
 “For about the first two years we were here, we were the best customers of the booksellers that they’d ever had,” she said. But she and her husband eventually opened two small shops – one, Creative Corner Books, that sells cooking and crafting books; and another, New York Books and Ephemera, focused on all aspects of New York. 
“We really try not to overlap very much on what we carry so that there’s something different in every shop,” Duyer said… You won’t find all the latest bestsellers in Hobart; almost everything here is secondhand. And nobody here is getting rich. 
For the shop owners, these stores are a labor of love – a new chapter in their lives. Two dollars will get you a book and a cookie at young Mixali Asgarian’s table at the Hobart Farmers’ Market. Who knows? He may one day open the village’s eighth bookstore…”
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