Thursday, April 08, 2021

Billions of records have been hacked already. Make cybersecurity a priority or risk disaster, warns analyst

Money-laundering case highlights law enforcement’s cryptocurrency challenge


Fallout from Greensill Collapse Splatters British Government, As Taxpayers Face Big Losses

Downing Street’s dodgy dealings with Citi and Greensill show just how far the British government is willing to go to line the pockets of banks and other financial firms while bleeding taxpayers dry. 


William E. Foster (Arkansas; Google Scholar) & Andrew Lawson (Arkansas; Google Scholar), Executive Tax Discretion, 73 Ala. L. Rev. ___ (2021):

Increasingly, Congress allows the president to determine tax consequences with the stroke of a pen. For example, if the president declares a major disaster under the Stafford Act, affected taxpayers are allowed a deduction for net personal casualty losses. This Article surveys instances of executive tax discretion scattered throughout the code, with a focus on disaster declarations.



Why Did the Slave Trade Survive So Long? New York Review of Books - why does world breed characters like Bully Brown and Nail Tackage



Spain To Try Nationwide 4-Day Workweek Treehugger


The Collapse of Puerto Rico’s Iconic Telescope New Yorker


The Slow Travel Trend Is Here to Stay Conde Nast Traveler From December, still germane.



ZDNet – “A new report warns against relegating cybersecurity to the bottom of the to-do list. More data records have been compromised in 2020 alone than in the past 15 years combined, in what is described as a mounting “data breach crisis” in the latest study from analysis firm Canalys.  Over the past 12 months, 31 billion data records have been compromised, found Canalys. This is up 171% from the previous year, and constitutes well over half of the 55 billion data records that have been compromised in total since 2005.  


Cases of ransomware – a specific type of attack that encrypts servers and data to block access to a computer system until a sum of money is paid – have been on the rise, with the number of reported incidents up 60% compared to 2019.  “Prioritize cybersecurity and invest in broadening protection, detection and response measures or face disaster,” said Canalys chief analyst Matthew Ball. According to Canalys, this unprecedented boom in attacks can be in part attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced organizations across the world to digitize at pace, without putting enough thought into the new security requirements that come with doing business online…”



New:   

  1. Simpson’s Paradox, by Jan Sprenger and Naftali Weinberger

Revised:

  1. Gorampa [go rams pa], by Constance Kassor
  2. Xenocrates, by Russell Dancy
  3. Idiolects, by Alex Barber and Eduardo Garcia Ramirez
  4. William Godwin, by Mark Philp
  5. Philo of Larissa, by Charles Brittain and Peter Osorio
  6. Hans Reichenbach, by Clark Glymour and Frederick Eberhardt
  7. Moore’s Moral Philosophy, by Thomas Hurka
  8. Dependence Logic, by Pietro Galliani

IEP   

  1. Empirical Aesthetics, by Aenne Brielmann
  2. Critical Thinking, by Jamie Carlin Watson
  3. Humility Regarding Intrinsic Properties, by Lok-Chi Chan

NDPR     

  1. Daniel Telech reviews The Moral Psychology of Hope, by Claudia Blöser and Titus Stahl (eds.).

1000-Word Philosophy      ∅

Recent Philosophy Book Reviews in Non-Academic Media 

  1. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms Volume 1: Language, Volume 2: Mythical Thinking, and Volume 3: Phenomenology of Cognition, by Ernest Cassirer, reviewed by Adam Kirsch in The New York Review of Books.
  2. The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science by Michael Strevens, reviewed by Peter Bernhardt on Australian Broadcasting Corporation Radio.