Today tech entrepreneur-turned-politician Andrew Yang candidly reflected on the pitfalls of power that he’d learned about during his 2020 run for president. “In national politics, it turns out, you’re not as much the CEO as you are yourself the product…
Call Center-Pranking ‘Scambaiters’ Amass Millions of Fans on Social Media
The Guardian reports on “a new breed of scambaiters…taking over TikTok and YouTube.”
And one of them has more than 1.5 million followers across both video platforms. “Three to four days a week, for one or two hours at a time, Rosie Okumura, 35, tel…
New Zealand Might Launch Its Own Digital Currency
“New Zealand’s central bank is exploring the possibility of issuing a digital currency, saying the benefits it would bring include its potential use as a monetary policy tool,” reports Bloomberg. The central bank cites “the declining use, acceptance an…
Facebook Whistleblower Speaks, Shares Documents on Deliberate Lies and Disregard of Misinformation, Contacts US Regulators
An Iowa data scientist with a computer engineering degree and a Harvard MBA has come forward as the whistleblower leaking damaging information about Facebook to the Wall Street Journal — and that’s just the beginning. They’ve now also filed at le…
Why Chip-Constrained Carmakers Can’t Just Transition To Newer Chips
Car buyers are discovering that supply chain constraints “have thrusted prices upwards considerably for new and used vehicles alike,” notes Jalopnik.
But while last month Fortune ran an article headlined “Chipmakers to carmakers: Time to get out of t…
Ancient Footprints Could Be Oldest Traces of Humans in the Americas
Opyros writes: Fossil footprints in New Mexico have been dated to 21,000-23,000 years before present. As a result, human habitation of the Americas can be pushed back several thousand years. The footprints were found in sedimentary rock at White Sands …
Java’s Enhancement Proposals Pursue Virtual Threads, Data Aggregate Types, and Better Communication with C Libraries
Oracle’s Java magazine takes a look at some current JDK Enhancement Proposals, “the vehicle of long standing for updating the Java language and the JVM.”
Today, concurrency in Java is delivered via nonlightweight threads, which are, for all intents, w…
Gas-Powered Leaf Blowers: the Most Polluting Machinery Still in Legal Use
“Pound for pound, gallon for gallon, hour-for-hour, the two-stroke gas powered engines in leaf blowers and similar equipment are vastly the dirtiest and most polluting kind of machinery still in legal use,” James Fallows writes.
“According to the Ca…
Is the Coronavirus Just Getting Better at Airborne Transmission?
A New York Times science/global health reporter reminds us that “Newer variants of the coronavirus like Alpha and Delta are highly contagious, infecting far more people than the original virus.”
But then they add that “Two new studies offer a possible…
Ransomware Gangs are Complaining That Other Crooks are Stealing Their Ransoms
“Cyber criminals using a ransomware-as-a-service scheme have been spotted complaining that the group they rent the malware from could be using a hidden backdoor to grab ransom payments for themselves,” reports ZDNet:
REvil is one of the most notorious…