Lifeboat Foundation

These attacks — along with news of several high-profile data breaches linked to the Russian government-backed hack of American software company SolarWinds, including at tech titans like Microsoft — have prompted questions about how these attacks have occured, and how to better guard against them.

State and local leaders testified June 17 before the Senate about how cyber threats they face have grown. And along with the increased penalties for cybercriminials included in a bipartisan Senate infrastructure package, a second bipartisan Senate bill would require public and private entities to report cybersecurity breaches to the government within 24 hours, as well as add liability protections to help encourage businesses to come forward.

Here’s what you should know as debate over cybersecurity and how to fight ransomware continues.

Such changes, multiplied across thousands of businesses in dozens of industries, could significantly change workers’ prospects. Professor Warman, the Canadian economist, said technologies developed for one purpose tend to spread to similar tasks, which could make it hard for workers harmed by automation to shift to another occupation or industry.

The need for social distancing led restaurants and grocery stores to seek technological help. That may improve productivity, but could also cost jobs.

In some cases, chain reactions fed more widespread disruption.

The Swedish Coop grocery store chain had to close hundreds of stores on Saturday because its cash registers are run by Visma Esscom, which manages servers for a number of Swedish businesses and in turn uses Kaseya.

Brett Callow, a ransomware expert at the cybersecurity firm Emsisoft, said he was unaware of any previous ransomware supply-chain attack on this scale.

Businesses around the world rushed Saturday to contain a ransomware attack that has paralyzed their computer networks, a situation complicated in the U.S. by offices lightly staffed at the start of the Fourth of July holiday weekend.

It’s not yet known how many organizations have been hit by demands that they pay a ransom in order to get their systems working again. But some cybersecurity researchers predict the attack targeting customers of software supplier Kaseya could be one of the broadest ransomware attacks on record.

It follows a scourge of headline-grabbing attacks over recent months that have been a source of diplomatic tension between U.S. President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin over whether Russia has become a safe haven for cybercriminal gangs.

We know less about the planet’s seabed than we do about the surface of the Moon or Mars. By the end of the decade, scientists are hoping to create a detailed map of these unexplored, submerged territories. They’ve already uncovered some spectacular features.

#Oceans #Moonshot #BloombergQuicktake.
——-
Like this video? Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/Bloomberg?sub_confirmation=1
Become a Quicktake Member for exclusive perks: https://www.youtube.com/bloomberg/join.

Continue reading “Mapping the Secrets of Earth’s Seabed” »

The US power grid needs all of support it can get. Sad that some would stand in the way of progress.

There is no love lost between the notorious Koch brothers and the nation’s railroad industry, and the relationship is about to get a lot unlovelier. A massive new, first-of-its-kind renewable energy transmission line is taking shape in the Midwest, which will cut into the Koch family’s fossil energy business. It has a good chance of succeeding where others have stalled, because it will bury the cables under existing rights-of-way using railroad rights-of-way and avoid stirring up the kind of opposition faced by conventional above-ground lines.

The Koch brothers and their family-owned company, Koch Industries, have earned a reputation for attempting to throttle the nation’s renewable energy sector. That makes sense, considering that the diversified, multinational firm owns thousands of miles of oil, gas, and chemical pipelines criss-crossing the US (and sometimes breaking down) in addition to other major operations that depend on rail and highway infrastructure.

Continue reading “Railroads To Pour Cold Renewable Energy Water On Koch Industries” »

Generational shifts in the workforce are creating a loss of operational expertise. Veteran workers with years of institutional knowledge are retiring, replaced by younger employees fresh out of school, taught on technologies and concepts that don’t match the reality of many organizations’ workflows and systems. This dilemma is fueling the need for automated knowledge sharing and intelligence-rich applications that can close the skills gap.

Industrial organizations are accumulating massive volumes of data but deriving business value from only a small slice of it. Transient repositories like data lakes often become opaque and unstructured data swamps. Organizations are switching their focus from mass data accumulation to strategic industrial data management, homing in on data integration, mobility, and accessibility—with the goal of using AI-enabled technologies to unlock value hidden in these unoptimized and underutilized sets of industrial data. The rise of the digital executive (chief technology officer, chief data officer, and chief information officer) as a driver of industrial digital transformation has been a key influence on this trend.

Livestreaming is a trillion-dollar industry in China, where social networking and entertainment meet marketing and e-commerce. China’s retail economy has become influencer-driven, with almost all online consumers buying products based on recommendations by their idols. That trend has enabled livestreaming and video platforms like Kuaishou and Douyin, which cultivated a roster of hugely popular influencers, to participate in the e-commerce market through partnerships with the online sales platforms.

Many people and businesses would not have survived the pandemic if it were not for the gig economy, says the co-founder of Asia Innovations Group, the start-up behind the live-streaming platform Uplive.

Fusion energy has the potential to supply safe, clean, and nearly limitless power. Although fusion reactions can occur for light nuclei weighting less than iron, most elements will not fuse unless they are in the interior of a star. To create burning plasmas in experimental fusion power reactors such as tokamaks and stellarators, scientists seek a fuel that is relatively easy to produce, store, and bring to fusion. The current best bet for fusion reactors is deuterium-tritium fuel. This fuel reaches fusion conditions at lower temperatures compared to other elements and releases more energy than other fusion reactions.

Deuterium and tritium are isotopes of hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe. Whereas all isotopes of hydrogen have one proton, deuterium also has one neutron and tritium has two neutrons, so their ion masses are heavier than protium, the isotope of hydrogen with no neutrons. When deuterium and tritium fuse, they create a helium nucleus, which has two protons and two neutrons. The reaction releases an energetic neutron. Fusion power plants would convert energy released from fusion reactions into electricity to power our homes, businesses, and other needs.

Fortunately, deuterium is common. About 1 out of every 5000 hydrogen atoms in seawater is in the form of deuterium. This means our oceans contain many tons of deuterium. When fusion power becomes a reality, just one gallon of seawater could produce as much energy as 300 gallons of gasoline.