Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the maintaining-a-position department: A cloud company's CTO argues on CTO that the "hypocrite commits" controversy "is symptomatic, on every side, of related trends that threaten the entire extended open-source ecosystem and its users."
That ecosystem has long wrestled with problems of scale, complexity and free and open-source software's (FOSS) increasingly critical importance to every kind of human undertaking. Let's look at that complex of problems:
- The biggest open-source projects now present big targets.
- Their complexity and pace have grown beyond the scale where traditional "commons" approaches or even more evolved governance models can cope.
- They are evolving to commodify each other. For example, it's becoming increasingly hard to state, categorically, whether "Linux" or "Kubernetes" should be treated as the "operating system" for distributed applications. For-profit organizations have taken note of this and have begun reorganizing around "full-stack" portfolios and narratives.
- In so doing, some for-profit organizations have begun distorting traditional patterns of FOSS participation. Many experiments are underway. Meanwhile, funding, headcount commitments to FOSS and other metrics seem in decline.
- OSS projects and ecosystems are adapting in diverse ways, sometimes making it difficult for for-profit organizations to feel at home or see benefit from participation.
Meanwhile, the threat landscape keeps evolving:
- Attackers are bigger, smarter, faster and more patient, leading to long games, supply-chain subversion and so on.
- Attacks are more financially, economically and politically profitable than ever.
- Users are more vulnerable, exposed to more vectors than ever before.
- The increasing use of public clouds creates new layers of technical and organizational monocultures that may enable and justify attacks.
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Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the knows-when-you're-awake department: The New York Times' On Tech newsletter shares a thought-provoking story:
This week, a top official in the Roman Catholic Church's American hierarchy resigned after a news site said that it had data from his cellphone that appeared to show the administrator using the L.G.B.T.Q. dating app Grindr and regularly going to gay bars. Journalists had access to data on the movements and digital trails of his mobile phone for parts of three years and were able to retrace where he went.
I know that people will have complex feelings about this matter. Some of you may believe that it's acceptable to use any means necessary to determine when a public figure is breaking his promises, including when it's a priest who may have broken his vow of celibacy. To me, though, this isn't about one man. This is about a structural failure that allows real-time data on Americans' movements to exist in the first place and to be used without our knowledge or true consent. This case shows the tangible consequences of practices by America's vast and largely unregulated data-harvesting industries. The reality in the United States is that there are few legal or other restrictions to prevent companies from compiling the precise locations of where we roam and selling that information to anyone.
This data is in the hands of companies that we deal with daily, like Facebook and Google, and also with information-for-hire middlemen that we never directly interact with. This data is often packaged in bulk and is anonymous in theory, but it can often be traced back to individuals, as the tale of the Catholic official shows...
Losing control of our data was not inevitable. It was a choice — or rather a failure over years by individuals, governments and corporations to think through the consequences of the digital age.
We can now choose a different path.
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Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the harmful-yeasts department: "U.S. health officials said Thursday they now have evidence of an untreatable fungus spreading in two hospitals and a nursing home," reports the Associated Press:
The "superbug" outbreaks were reported in a Washington, D.C, nursing home and at two Dallas-area hospitals, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported. A handful of the patients had invasive fungal infections that were impervious to all three major classes of medications. "This is really the first time we've started seeing clustering of resistance" in which patients seemed to be getting the infections from each other, said the CDC's Dr. Meghan Lyman...
Health officials have sounded alarms for years about the superbug after seeing infections in which commonly used drugs had little effect. In 2019, doctors diagnosed three cases in New York that were also resistant to a class of drugs, called echinocandins, that were considered a last line of defense. In those cases, there was no evidence the infections had spread from patient to patient — scientists concluded the resistance to the drugs formed during treatment. The new cases did spread, the CDC concluded....
Those cases were seen from January to April. Of the five people who were fully resistant to treatment, three died — both Texas patients and one in Washington.
Lyman said both are ongoing outbreaks and that additional infections have been identified since April. But those added numbers were not reported.
The fungus, Candida auris, "is a harmful form of yeast that is considered dangerous to hospital and nursing home patients with serious medical problems," they add — and it's spread through contaminated surfaces or contact with patients.
Newsweek points out that while it's only recently appeared in America, "infections have occurred in over 30 countries worldwide."
Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the international-relations department: "Hackers working for the Chinese government compromised more than a dozen U.S. pipeline operators nearly a decade ago, the Biden administration revealed Tuesday while also issuing first-of-its-kind cybersecurity requirements on the pipeline industry," reports the Wall Street Journal.
The disclosure of previously classified information about the aggressive Chinese hacking campaign, though dated, underscored the severity of foreign cyber threats to the nation's infrastructure, current and former officials said. In some cases, the hackers possessed the ability to physically damage or disrupt compromised pipelines, a new cybersecurity alert said, though it doesn't appear they did so. Previously, senior administration officials had warned that China, Russia and others were capable of such cyber intrusions. But rarely has so much information been released about a specific and apparently successful campaign.
Chinese state-sponsored hackers between 2011 and 2013 had targeted nearly two dozen U.S. oil and natural gas pipeline operators with the specific goal of "holding U.S. pipeline infrastructure at risk," the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security said in Tuesday's joint alert. Of the known targets, 13 were successfully compromised and an additional eight suffered an "unknown depth of intrusion," which officials couldn't fully assess because the victims lacked complete computer log data, the alert said. Another three targets were described as "near misses" of the Chinese campaign, which relied heavily on spear phishing attacks.
Newsweek adds that the same day the U.S. Department of Homeland Security "announced new requirements for U.S. pipeline operators to bolster cybersecurity following a May ransomware attack that disrupted gas delivery across the East Coast."
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Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the pandemic-profits department: In April of 2020, Jeff Bezos announced Amazon would spend their next quarter focusing on people instead of profits, remembers the New York Times:
At the end of July 2020, Amazon announced quarterly results. Rather than earning zero, as Mr. Bezos had predicted, it notched an operating profit of $5.8 billion — a record for the company. The months since have established new records. Amazon's margins, which measure the profit on every dollar of sales, are the highest in the history of the company, which is based in Seattle... Amazon's pandemic triumph was echoed all over the world of technology companies.
Even as 609,000 Americans have died and the Delta variant surges, as corporate bankruptcies hit a peak for the decade, as restaurants, airlines, gyms, conferences, museums, department stores, hotels, movie theaters and amusement parks shut down and as millions of workers found themselves unemployed, the tech industry flourished. The combined stock market valuation of Apple, Alphabet, Nvidia, Tesla, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook increased by about 70 percent to more than $10 trillion. That is roughly the size of the entire U.S. stock market in 2002. Apple alone has enough cash in its coffers to give $600 to every person in the United States. And in the next week, the big tech companies are expected to report earnings that will eclipse all previous windfalls.
Silicon Valley, still the world headquarters for tech start-ups, has never seen so much loot. More Valley companies went public in 2020 than in 2019, and they raised twice as much money when they did. Forbes calculates there are now 365 billionaires whose fortunes derive from tech, up from 241 before the virus.
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Today in London, a large a rally was held as part of a series of global gatherings against masks, vaccine passports, and lockdowns. And for some reason, a person at Saturday’s event was spotted waving around a flag connected to a popular Minecraft roleplay server.
Three Die After Untreatable 'Superbug' Fungus Infections in Two Different Cities 2021-07-24 14:40:01
If you’ve ever logged into Twitter, Instagram or some other social media platform that can track your interests lately, you’ve most likely seen two things. One, a ton of depressing news because that’s just the world right now. And two, you’ve likely seen those weird ads for some zombie game or other. While most people…
Red Dead Online’s last update, Blood Money, added some new missions and small features to the game. It also seems to have broken something. Now, whenever players log on, they are encountering dead random horses or living ones that just round around forever, causing mayhem.
