Fancy Bear Goes Phishing by Scott Shapiro review – a gripping study of five extraordinary hacks

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/may/22/fancy-bear-goes-phishing-by-scott-shapiro-review-a-gripping-study-of-five-extraordinary-hacks

What are the takeaways from this absorbing tour of cyberspace’s netherworld? Four things stand out. One: “Hacking is not a dark art, and those who practise it are not 400lb wizards or idiot savants.” Two: it’s not a hobby, but a business, conducted by rational people out to make a living, or a killing. Just like bankers, in fact. Three: we could do a lot to reduce our vulnerability to it, but governments will first have to make it a crime not to take precautions. And four: mass media plays a really malignant role by providing an endless loop of scare stories and zero understanding of the problem. 

‘Naked-person-on-bus is surprisingly common’: meet the cool-headed controllers who really run the country

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/feb/18/meet-the-cool-headed-controllers-who-really-run-the-country

When my train is delayed, or I find myself on a motorway suddenly closed, I don’t get irate. With a job like mine, you appreciate what’s happening behind the scenes. Trust me, countless people are working flat out to minimise disruption.

Some on the Right Flirt With a Voting Method the Left Loves

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/08/us/ranked-choice-voting-elections.html

If an election can be compared to choosing where to go on vacation, voters typically get one choice, no matter how many options — mountains, seashore, resort, big city — are under consideration. With ranked choice, voters state their preferences in order: First, the seashore, and if not that, a resort, and if not that, then the city.

With ranked choice, the race is over if any candidate nets more than half of the first-place votes that are cast. If no candidate exceeds 50 percent, the candidate with the fewest first-place choices is discarded, and the votes for the others are tallied. The lowest-ranking candidate continues to be tossed out until one candidate gets more than half of all top preferences.

The system allows voters to support outsider candidates without worrying about using their vote on a candidate who can’t win. Candidates can win only with support — or at least tolerance — from a majority of the electorate, thus reducing polarization. And proponents say that ranked choice lessens the chance that minor candidates become spoilers in close elections.

Triple whammy: Nine-year-old boy in Singapore suffers Covid-19, myocarditis and stroke

https://www.straitstimes.com/life/triple-whammy-nine-year-old-boy-in-singapore-suffers-covid-19-myocarditis-and-stroke

Matt is unvaccinated against Covid-19 because his parents were worried that the vaccination could lead to myocarditis. “The reverse happened,” Ms Reyes says.

In October 2023, The Straits Times reported the Ministry of Health as saying that the incidence of vaccine-related myocarditis has remained rare, with reporting rates of one per 100,000 doses (0.001 per cent) for the monovalent vaccines and 0.4 per 100,000 doses (0.0004 per cent) for the bivalent vaccines.

A wing and a prayer : the dramatic personal story of the 100th Bomb Group Navigator who survived more than 30 missions in B-17s

https://archive.org/details/wingandprayerdra0000cros/mode/2up

A humble book about a lucky man and his experience in World War II.

How Jimmy Finkelstein Wooed Me to The Messenger—And Left Me High and Dry

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/amie-parnes-jimmy-finkelstein-the-messenger

I spent weeks agonizing about it. I talked to colleagues and friends who said I almost had to take the job. After all, I knew the owner, and he had never let me fail. I had hours-long conversations with my parents. I talked to Bob who emphasized the durability and steadiness of my current job.

But mostly, I talked to Jimmy.

“As a single mom, I have no net,” I emphasized on each call with him to the point where even I was tired of hearing it. “If this fails, I have nothing to fall back on.”

During some of those calls, I remember pacing the room, on the outlines of my rug, as if I had been walking an actual tightrope. He was reassuring and had the confidence of a man who never had to worry about the balance in his checking account.

“You will be fine,” he told me again and again. “I will make sure of it.”

When I was having those conversations with Jimmy, I never once thought that the site would implode more than eight months later.

But here we are, and obviously, I am not fine. Neither are the nearly 300 colleagues of mine who lost their jobs in the most cruel and inhumane way imaginable, without warning and without a day of severance. Typically, employers offer COBRA, as a way of keeping your insurance for many months after termination, but ours will be pulled at the end of this month.

Future employers don’t readily have access to our work because the site has been shut down.

For me, it has been the ultimate betrayal.

A Marketplace of Girl Influencers Managed by Moms and Stalked by Men

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/22/us/instagram-child-influencers.html

Thousands of accounts examined by The Times offer disturbing insights into how social media is reshaping childhood, especially for girls, with direct parental encouragement and involvement. Some parents are the driving force behind the sale of photos, exclusive chat sessions and even the girls’ worn leotards and cheer outfits to mostly unknown followers. The most devoted customers spend thousands of dollars nurturing the underage relationships.

The large audiences boosted by men can benefit the families, The Times found. The bigger followings look impressive to brands and bolster chances of getting discounts, products and other financial incentives, and the accounts themselves are rewarded by Instagram’s algorithm with greater visibility on the platform, which in turn attracts more followers.

How Google is killing independent sites like ours

https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/

HouseFresh has published over 60 hands-on reviews that were written on the basis of multiple performance tests. 

We can tell you that testing and reviewing products takes a lot of time, money, and effort. 

But if our small team can publish real reviews, then these big publishers and private equity surely have the resources to do the same. 

Unfortunately, right now, these companies are using all their resources to publish more and more pages peppered with the right ‘ingredients’ to dish up a tasty E-E-A-T meal for Google.

We have no doubt that these big publications could build their own labs, where they could run actual tests in order to make product recommendations backed by actual firsthand data. 

CNET bought an entire smart home back in 2015 in order to test products. That was before they were acquired by Red Ventures and found themselves selling the house after reporters told The Verge they were feeling pressured to change their reviews to be more favorable to brands that were being advertised on CNET. 

How many other ‘parent companies’ are using commerce or shopping editors to pass off promotional articles as editorial content?

Jon Stewart Is Back to Weigh In (2020)

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/15/magazine/jon-stewart-interview.html

It’s like the Levittown thing with Bill O’Reilly. He talks all about Levittown: ‘‘That’s where I learned my values. Bootstrapping it. I grew up in Levittown, and we learned that work does it.’’ Well, guess what? The deed to the properties said you were not allowed to sell them to a black person. (The standard leases, which included an option to buy, for the first houses built by Levitt & Sons in the late 1940s for the Long Island community soon to be called Levittown included a clause barring the houses from being sold to or occupied by nonwhites. The clause was dropped in 1948, but the racial dynamics remained.)

 Racism is built into this system. But not all the people in it are malevolent and active racists. There is an inert racism that exists, and it’s pernicious, but I don’t believe everybody who’s part of it is evil. So it’s more a question of trying to remove a right-left axis from the conversation and instead create a conversation around conditions. Poverty is poverty. The right will talk about poverty a certain way, and the left will talk about poverty a different way, but poor people are still poor people. They’re still without political power. 

The Day I Put $50,000 in a Shoe Box and Handed It to a Stranger

https://www.thecut.com/article/amazon-scam-call-ftc-arrest-warrants.html

The man on the phone knew my home address, my Social Security number, the names of my family members, and that my 2-year-old son was playing in our living room. He told me my home was being watched, my laptop had been hacked, and we were in imminent danger. “I can help you, but only if you cooperate,” he said. His first orders: I could not tell anyone about our conversation, not even my spouse, or talk to the police or a lawyer.

Now I know this was all a scam — a cruel and violating one but painfully obvious in retrospect. Here’s what I can’t figure out: Why didn’t I just hang up and call 911? Why didn’t I text my husband, or my brother (a lawyer), or my best friend (also a lawyer), or my parents, or one of the many other people who would have helped me? Why did I hand over all that money — the contents of my savings account, strictly for emergencies — without a bigger fight?

Let Me Tell You A Secret

https://blog.glyph.im/2024/02/let-me-tell-you-a-secret.html

So the intended audience for this piece is potential clients, leaders of teams (or organizations, or companies) who have a general technology problem and are wondering if they need a consultant with my skill-set to help them fix it. Before you decide that your issue is the need to implement a complex distributed system consensus algorithm, check if that is really what’s at issue. Talk to your ICs, and — taking care to make sure they understand that you want honest feedback and that they are safe to offer it — ask them what problems your organization has.

During this meeting it is important to only listen. Especially if you’re at a small company and you are regularly involved in the day-to-day operations, you might feel immediately defensive. Sit with that feeling, and process it later. Don’t unload your emotional state on an employee you have power over.

“Only listening” doesn’t exclusively mean “don’t push back”. You also shouldn’t be committing to fixing anything. While the information you are gathering in these meetings is extremely valuable, and you should probably act on more of it than you will initially want to, your ICs won’t have the full picture. They really may not understand why certain priorities are set the way they are. You’ll need to take that as feedback for improving internal comms rather than “fixing” the perceived problem, and you certainly don’t want to make empty promises.

The media's circular logic and destructive obsession with Biden's age

https://margaretsullivan.substack.com/p/the-medias-circular-logic-and-destructive

Biden’s advanced age is, granted, far from ideal for a president seeking a second term, even the very effective president that he has been. Yes, he’s old; and, never a gifted public speaker, he makes cringe-inducing mistakes. It would be great if he were 20 years younger. His age really is a legitimate concern for many voters.

But for the media to make this the overarching issue of the campaign is nothing short of journalistic malpractice.

That’s especially the case when Trump is poised to take down American democracy, starting on Day One, and when he has been criminally charged 91 times in multiple states, including for trying to overturn the legitimate 2020 election. Also, he’s old and gaffe-prone himself.

Much more alarmingly, this very weekend, Trump was out there threatening to abandon our NATO allies and let Russia “do whatever the hell they want.” Appropriately, that story was leading major news sites by Sunday afternoon, but, in a week, count the news stories and commentary pieces on that versus those involving Biden’s age.

I think we all know the winner.

Is there no one at these major outlets who is capable of taking a step back and exercising some judgment?

Biden moving closer than ever to a breach with Netanyahu over war in Gaza

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/02/11/biden-netanyahu-closer-to-a-breach/

White House officials have increasingly concluded that Netanyahu is focused on his own political survival to the exclusion of any other goal, and is eager to position himself as standing up to Biden’s push for a two-state solution. During a news conference last month, Netanyahu publicly rebuked Biden over his support for a Palestinian state, saying an Israeli prime minister needs to be “capable of saying no to our friends.”

“Netanyahu is playing to his politics at home, and if he thinks it helps him to trash Biden publicly, he’ll do it,” said Frank Lowenstein, a former State Department official who helped lead Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in 2014.

One of the biggest reasons Biden has not been quicker to criticize Netanyahu, aides say, is his decades-long relationship with the prime minister. Biden often says he tells Netanyahu, “I love you, Bibi, even if I can’t stand you.”

Netanyahu has at times helped reinforce Biden’s view of Israel as a heroic bulwark against global antisemitism. During one visit when Biden was vice president, Netanyahu showed him photos of grossly antisemitic depictions that came from Hamas and argued such incitement was the reason he could not make peace with the Palestinians, according to a person familiar with the interaction, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe a private exchange.

Grammys Winners

https://billychilds.bandcamp.com/album/the-winds-of-change

https://blindboysofalabama.bandcamp.com/album/echoes-of-the-south

Hailed as "gospel titans" by Rolling Stone, the Blind Boys of Alabama defied the considerable odds stacked against them in the segregated South, working their way up from singing for pocket change to performing for three different presidents over the course of an 80-year career that saw them break down racial barriers, soundtrack the Civil Rights movement, and help redefine modern gospel music forever. The five-time Grammy-winners’ latest album, Echoes Of The South, draws its name from the Birmingham radio program that hosted the group’s very first professional performance back in 1944.

Kirk Franklin - All Things

Lil Durk - All My Life ft. J. Cole (Official Video)

https://www.thebirdsongproject.com/for-the-birds

For the Birds: The Birdsong Project is a collection of 172 pieces of new music inspired by the beauty of birdsong, performed by artists from across the musical spectrum. 

https://open.spotify.com/track/7pmcbKshNKb7XEfkTlFKrx?si=53218502678a43f3

The Peacemaker

http://media2.sbhla.org.s3.amazonaws.com/missionjournals/hm/hm_1972_12.pdf

Peace has one thing in common with its enemy, with the fiend it battles, with war.

Peace is active, not passive.
Peace is doing, not waiting.
Peace is aggressive—attacking.
Peace plans its strategy and encircles the enemy.
Peace marshals its forces and storms the gates.
Peace gathers its weapons and pierces the defense.

Peace, like war, is waged.

The weapons of peace are love, joy, goodness. longsuffering
The arms of peace are justice, truth, patience, prayer.
The strategy of peace brings safety, welfare. happiness
The forces of peace are the children of God. 

Yes. Christ has turned it all around: I am to love my enemy

Kyed: Remembering Hallie and covering the Patriots through unimaginable circumstances

https://www.bostonherald.com/2024/02/11/kyed-remembering-hallie-and-covering-the-patriots-through-unimaginable-circumstances/

If there’s one thing I want you to know about Hallie, it’s that she never stopped fighting.

My daughter, Hallie James Kyed, died on Jan. 21 of acute myeloid leukemia. She was 2 years old — just two months shy of her third birthday.

One day before she passed away at Boston Children’s Hospital, Hallie gave us a gift. Her counts, which had been precipitously declining, improved. Her white blood cell counts had dropped. The percentage of leukemia blasts in her blood had fallen. Her electrolyte levels had settled. Hallie’s team of doctors – among the best in the world at what they do – couldn’t fully explain why it was happening, but they also didn’t want to give us false hope. We had already been told in the previous week and thereafter in no uncertain terms that Hallie was not going to make it. 

The Mount Pleasant Miracle

https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2021/01/25/mount-pleasant-washington-dc-gentrification/

In recent decades, a tide of gentrification has swept across America’s urban centers. In Washington, office blocks have sprung up along North and South Capitol streets, while whole new neighborhoods have been created around previously underused real estate: Union Market in a Northeast warehouse district, Nationals Park on the Anacostia River waterfront. And some communities have all but vanished: From 1980 to 2010, Shaw went from being 80 percent Black to 30 percent.

Mount Pleasant, meanwhile, has followed an unusual trajectory: It hasn’t changed much at all. It has long been a haven for immigrants, activists, punk rockers, entrepreneurs, revolutionaries and returning Peace Corps volunteers — and it still is. The residential streets sloping down to Rock Creek Park are thick with do-gooders: social workers, wonks, economists, immigration lawyers, musicians, ministers, artists, florists, yoga instructors, divorce lawyers and even the odd journalist. The apartment buildings along Mount Pleasant Street are more diverse: home to busboys, cooks, cashiers, waitresses, teachers, security guards and esquineros (corner guys), the older Latin men who drink coffee and play dominoes outside the paint store.

Marking the Moment: Coding It Forward’s Leadership Transition

https://blog.codingitforward.com/marking-the-moment-coding-it-forwards-leadership-transition-f254ce8a0b7d

We cannot tell the story of Coding It Forward without telling the story of Rachel and Ariana’s involvement to date. We are tremendously lucky as an organization to have two such talented leaders on the team, with the opportunity to transition seamlessly between them.

After serving in the inaugural cohort of Fellows at the U.S. Census Bureau, Rachel became Coding It Forward’s first (and only) full-time employee from her graduation in 2018 until the staff grew in 2020. She has dedicated the past 7 years to building Coding It Forward in ways large and small, and as such, her impact on the organization is nearly impossible to quantify. During her tenure, Coding It Forward grew from its dorm room roots into an established, national public interest tech organization. We are so very grateful to her for her tireless contributions, thoughtful leadership, and for all that she has done to set the organization up for stability and scale. We cannot wait to witness her next chapter.

Speaking of next chapters, Coding It Forward’s future is exceedingly bright under the leadership of incoming CEO Ariana.

Ariana, too, has been a part of Coding It Forward’s founding team from her student days, beginning her work with Coding It Forward years ago while still a sophomore in college. As Deputy Director, Ariana has been a fierce and eloquent champion for the mission, a source of empathy and expertise as the primary face of Coding It Forward to government partners on the ground, and a key driver of Coding It Forward’s expansion into an offering for state and local governments in addition to federal. It is hard to leave a conversation with Ariana not feeling inspired into action. We are all so excited for her tenure.

Fast Car at the Grammys - Tracy Chapman, Luke Combs

https://www.grammy.com/videos/tracy-chapman-luke-combs-fast-car-2024-grammys-performance-66th-annual-grammy-awards?streamUrl=https://nomad-content.grammy.com/pmc/2f/6d/c5/2f6dc584-337d-4a9e-8b03-916f21017e49/tra-apple-hls-acc/0312-cbsperf2-gmypgmbug-tp.m3u8&title=Tracy%20Chapman%20and%20Luke%20Combs%20Perform%20%E2%80%9CFast%20Car%E2%80%9D%20%7C%202024%20GRAMMYs

Why You’ve Never Been In A Plane Crash

https://asteriskmag.com/issues/05/why-you-ve-never-been-in-a-plane-crash

Sometimes disasters happen anyway, and when they do, it’s equally critical that the just culture is upheld. Although it can be hard to accept that a mistake that led to loss of life might go unpunished, just culture doesn’t permit us to discriminate based on the magnitude of the consequences — only on the attitude of the person who committed the error. If they were acting in good faith when the mistake occurred, then a harsh reaction would undermine the trust between employees and management that facilitates the just culture. But even more importantly, it would undermine the blameless investigative process that makes modern aviation so safe. Investigative agencies like the NTSB rely on truthful statements from those involved in an accident in order to determine what happened and why, and the truth can’t be acquired when individuals fear punishment for speaking it. Indeed, if Wascher were charged with a crime, her lawyers would have been required to produce a defense, and the investigative waters would have been forever clouded.

Apple Vision Pro review: magic, until it’s not

https://www.theverge.com/24054862/apple-vision-pro-review-vr-ar-headset-features-price

The Apple Vision Pro is the best consumer headset anyone’s ever made — and that’s the problem.

 

My Self-Publishing Journey & Lessons Learned (73 Page Slide Deck)

https://pathlesspath.com/selfpublishinglessons/

If you want to read my step-by-step journey of how I self-published my book, you can read my 8,000-word post explaining every step of the process.

But if you want a more fun PowerPoint-based story (only something a former strategy consultant would ever say), you can check out the deck I put together below.

Tracy Chapman Earns Rapturous Standing Ovation After Rare Live Performance of ‘Fast Car’ With Luke Combs

https://variety.com/2024/music/news/tracy-chapman-luke-combs-duet-performance-2024-grammys-fast-car-1235894485/

Tracy Chapman always knew she “could be someone.” But could the folk singer have predicted in 1988, the year she released “Fast Car,” that she would perform her now-iconic song alongside country artist Luke Combs at the 66th Grammy Awards?

The two singers, though hailing from different generations and musical genres, took the stage together on Feb. 4 for a duet rendition of the song that has generated massive success for both of them. Decades after its initial release, “Fast Car” re-entered the charts when Combs’ cover of the track, infused with a country sensibility, became immensely popular in 2023.

Dressed all in black, Chapman kicked off her performance at the Grammys playing the iconic first few bars on her guitar, sparking voracious cheers from the star-studded audience which included Kacey Musgraves, Taylor Swift and Kelly Clarkson. Chapman and Combs bounced back and forth sharing the spotlight and but sang together in beautiful harmony for the chorus. After they finished, the crowd leapt to their feet in a thunderous applause. 

Georgia Baptists sell old headquarters at a big loss

https://www.timesfreepress.com/news/2024/jan/18/georga-baptists-sell-old-headquarters-at-a-big/

After seeking a buyer for years, the donor-funded Georgia Baptist Mission Board has sold its former Duluth headquarters (6405 Sugarloaf Pkwy) for about half what the organization originally paid for the land and building.

The $23.5 million sale, reported early this month by the convention's newspaper, stands in contrast to the $43.5 million the mission board has said it spent on the property, where it built the stately building in 2006.

Noted — and sometimes critiqued — for its grandeur, the five-story building sits on a roughly 40-acre plot on Duluth's Sugarloaf Parkway, across from the county sports and convention center, Gwinnett County property records show.

Georgia Baptists eliminate retiree benefits, citing budget concerns (2021)

https://baptistnews.com/article/georgia-baptists-eliminate-retiree-benefits-citing-budget-concerns/#.YrJsCezMKDE

Phil Pilgrim, a recent retiree, served as a Georgia pastor, convention vice president, member of both the Nominating Committee and Executive Committee, and state missionary. He says the retiree cuts are unprecedented nationally and fears it could set a precedent for other states to follow Georgia’s lead.

“It seems that the board now sees retirees as an old candy bar,” he said. “They have used people in the prime of their lives and have eaten out the good center and thrown away the wrapper. They see no moral, ethical or spiritual problem in breaking promises made to retirees simply because, they rationalize, they did not make those commitments.”

Pilgrim sees many biblical comparisons between what has happened to women like Willis in music ministries being single and Newman, as a widow.

Hubris

https://www.smallwood-us.com/work/case-study/arch-georgia-baptist-convention-headquarters-office

The Georgia Baptist Convention (now Mission Board) was located in a conventional office building environment, with the various missions located in separate office suites with no relation to one another. The project was seen as an opportunity to forge a new sense of shared purpose among groups which had traditionally pursued their goals with little or no coordination. To help realize the vision of this alliance of independent ministries, Smallwood led focus group discussions which allowed everyone in the organization to have input on the environment, technology, and culture of the new facility. This process confirmed the desire for closer collaboration and a sense of greater community among the various ministry groups. In response, a shared public level includes a formal reception area, a pre-function space leading to the tiered chapel/meeting room and multipurpose meeting room, and an exhibit on the history of the Convention. 

Disinfo and Elections in the Global Majority

https://ethanzuckerman.com/2023/12/02/disinfo-and-elections-in-the-global-majority/

These narratives emerge online, from hired guns and from individual partisans. The language for the narratives online differs between countries. Brazil has firm policies, set by the electoral court, allowing them to order removal of disinformation, and so that’s the term of choice in the Brazilian context. Jonathan and team see the problem as broader than disinformation, including different forms of propaganda, and refer to this online speech as “influence operations”. I like this term, as it includes a particularly tricky type of speech: participatory propaganda, where partisans spread and shape narratives on their own, not necessarily because they are receiving commands as part of a “cyber army”.

What I wish someone had told me about starting a meditation practice

https://sashachapin.substack.com/p/what-i-wish-someone-had-told-me-about

Here is a better set of beginner meditation instructions: “Settle in a posture that, for you, provides a good compromise between comfort and alertness. Open yourself to the detail of your experience. Allow yourself to be interested in, and receptive to, the rich, particular texture of what’s happening—look beyond the concept of experience into what’s actually going on with your mind, and senses, and emotions. Don’t argue with what’s there. If you wish, bring your attention to a meditation object, like a mantra, or the flow of your breath, and notice how this tends to make your experience more collected and calmer. Orient towards whatever brings relief, wakeful relaxation, and pleasantness. Do this for anywhere between thirty seconds and ninety minutes.”