I still miss my Atari 2600, back when it made sense to put a wood-style finish on a games console and when you could play Breakout using a paddle dial thingy instead of a joystick.
The paddles are exactly the reason I recently rebought a 2600. The feel is as close to moving a physical object as can be. I noticed some of that feel is lost through a modern TV. I tried a tube tv and I nearly double my recent breakout hi score on the first run. I dont care what anyone says about perceptible latency, it made a huge difference. Emulation with a mosue doesnt even come close to capturing the feel. And the local multiplayer (up to 4 at once) games are a blast.
IIRC the paddle's circuit was a simple resistor/capacitor combo that was tied to the beam scanning timing of the TV. It felt physical because it kind of was.
I've only had a 'true' panic attack once. I was running for a train and I slipped on the stairs and landed hard on my back. My throat closed up, my back ached and I couldn't shout, or call for help. Suddenly I couldn't breathe at all. I didn't know it was panic; I thought maybe I'd broken my back or something. Which of course made the panic worse.
I remember thinking "This is it. This is how I die, here on the station platform, alone, with nobody noticing." It was a terrifying, helpless feeling. It passed after maybe 30 seconds, as soon as I managed to take a gasp of air.
It was only once and more than a decade ago but even typing this is kind of freaking me out.
>My throat closed up, my back ached and I couldn't shout, or call for help. Suddenly I couldn't breathe at all. I didn't know it was panic; I thought maybe I'd broken my back or something. Which of course made the panic worse.
I had that happen once on my home's stairs -- hurt my back, and then opened my mouth but couldn't speak, breath, etc for a couple or minutes (or so it seemed).
But it's not a panic attack itself. Had 2 of those quite young (at 15 and like 22 or something like that) and never had them again since, but they're different experience (and quite scary), like people here described it.
Possible that it might have been, or proceeded by, by your diaphragm spasming. A hard blow to the chest or back can cause it to spasm for a while and you literally cannot breathe, which is pretty terrifying.
I'm working with a pre-launch company that's building a tool to map companies' stacks (among other things). They've shared some of their research with me from and it's insane.
Large software companies have no idea what dependencies, libraries, or even languages are in their stacks. Companies are using multiple versions of the same library, replicated in a bunch of different repos. Different teams in he same company end up re-implementing solutions over and over, sometimes in a whole other framework than the team next to them because nobody knows what anyone else is using. Makes compliance a nightmare.
1. Biggest issue with serverless is debugging when you can't make a local environment and can't install anything like a conventional debugger in the serverless environment. I know of at least one company with a new and very elegant solution for this problem.
2. Visibility and monitoring is also a challenge and there are a bunch of serverless monitoring startups.
3. Security is interesting because, again, you can't install anything to protect your code: no Web Application Firewalls, for example. And there are several interesting theoretical attacks on serverless apps. Already, there are specialist serverless security companies.
A lot of companies don't 'migrate' to serverless. They use a Lambda or GCP Function to handle one small part of a backend task like image processing or some other form of backend tooling. Serverless is often just a good way of gluing other microservices together.
you can't always create the full environment locally, though, including inputs and connections to other services... local Lambda is an option but there are more elegant solutions too.
You have full control over the incoming event object, so you should have complete control over inputs. Connections to services depends on your setup of course. If you can route to your VPC, you can access those private resources too. By default, it will use your local AWS keypair, but I believe there is a way to assume an IAM role as well.
Really interesting. Makes me think of Daisyworld and the Gaia Hypothesis.
Daisyworld is a model Earth covered in black and white daisies, that either absorb or reflect light. In the model, black daisies need less light because they absorb more, increasing the Earth's heat absorption. White daisies absorb less so need more light, but also reflect more light back, increasing the surface albedo of the planet and lowering its ambient temperature.
Because of this, there's a feedback loop were even if the sun gets a little hotter or colder, the successful daisy would spread and either warm or cool the Earth in response, effectively acting as a stabilizer. Gaia theory suggests that the world is full of these stabilizing systems.
Anyone who ever played SimEarth in the 90s, it was based on this theory and even had a Daisyworld simulation built in.
In this case, the paper is suggesting that seaweed grows much faster in response to raised CO2, and then sequesters some of that carbon underwater.
One question I have is how sequestered the undersea carbon really is and whether it will have other, unknown effects on the deep see ecosystem.
We know that there are a number of homeostatic (self-regulating) processes that affect the proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere; if it wasn't homeostatic it would have drifted off to an extreme long ago. The key question is how well and how rapidly these mechanisms can respond to an increase in CO2 levels.
The homeostasis might work in a limited range under which the biological world evolved in the recent past. Exceeding that range could quickly turn to a runaway geological event of rapid climate change, a state transition in a complex and unpredictable system.
Take for example the great oxidation event happening 2.5 billion years ago. As oxygen excreting algae began to take over methane producing organisms, oxygen started to build up in the atmosphere - first slowly, as there were lots of stuff to oxidize, like methane and iron. Eventually, these naturals sinks were saturated and oxygen levels reached the critical toxic point for the other species, leading to a runaway die-off where more and more oxygen was released and methane - a strong green house gas - rapidly disappeared from the atmosphere. This shock was so massive it produced the 400 million year Huronian glaciation - a whole planet freeze unlike any since.
So I have full faith life on Earth will eventually restore the feedback loops and get the temperatures back in the sweet spot. I have less faith that this will happen soon, or that most species, humans included, can survive such a massive transition event.
> So I have full faith life on Earth will eventually restore the feedback loops and get the temperatures back in the sweet spot.
Or just broadly adapt to the new state of things, historical data suggests that atmospheric CO2 levels did reach ~1000PPM up to the Cretaceous, with complete lack of continental ice sheets and temperate forests at the poles.
The current sweet spot is a sweet spot for us and the ecosystems we grew up in as a species, it's not a life-wide sweet spot.
Yes, the comment you replied to seems to imply that the earth is an organism that seeks to maintain a particular balance. There may be homeostatic processes, but they're not part of a grand plan to preserve life on earth.
Agreed, homeostasis is something we observe in evolved organisms, not in planets whose inhabitant organisms became self aware and industrialized suddenly.
If the role is "get the carbon, that was for hundreds of millions of yeas trapped in the crust, back to the atmosphere in just a hundred or so of years and perish," yes, we’re success up to now.
A recent comment of a recent article about who's the most responsible:
"Wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world."
edited to say:
It's interesting that on a long enough time-line, all life on earth is destined for extinction, e.g. the sun expands and vaporizes the earth. So, in the long run, our technological prowess is likely the only hope for our furry (and not so furry) friends.
I believe the "Cretaceous Greenhouse" would make quite a good movie, considering the massive inland seas that formed during the period over the continental shelf. The majority of people on Earth would have to move house to higher altitudes.
It's mind-boggling to consider that we increased the CO2 levels from 280 to 410 ppm during the industrial age. We went a quarter of the way to the Cretaceous super-greenhouse of 1000 ppm, with most of the change accumulating in recent decades. And we are accelerating.
It's hard to see how most complex ecosystems would survive that kind of change in just a century or so, evolution is simply not that rapid. Forget moving house, imagine a world where the only functional natural ecosystems are bacterial.
> I believe the "Cretaceous Greenhouse" would make quite a good movie, considering the massive inland seas that formed during the period over the continental shelf. The majority of people on Earth would have to move house to higher altitudes.
Many breadbasket lands are also fairly low-lying. The northern china plain is mostly under 50m. Even if it doesn't get covered in water, saline intrusion will seriously hurt it, as it's already starting to hurt countries with extensive coastlines and river deltas like Vietnam or Bangladesh.
I’m reading the three Wikipedia pages “Ice Age”, “Geologic Temperature Record”, and “Carbon Dioxide in Earth’s Atmosphere”. They are imo not tendentious at this time and give a fascinating introduction to the extremely complex geologic climate. For example, it’s remarked that the high temperatures in the Cretaceous were likely mostly due to the formation of Pangea and the resulting change in ocean circulation.
> I have less faith that this will happen soon, or that most species, humans included, can survive such a massive transition event.
This stuff doesn't happen in a year. And we have a bunch of ways of ego-engineering, what's missing is an acute need and the economics/political incentives, which again, an acute need would provide.
The freezing point of water creates a discontinuity in the effects of temperature change. That is, a ten degree swing that results in water freezing (or melting) for most of the year is far different than than a ten degree swing in a range far above (or below) 32 degrees.
On the other hand, a positive 10 degree global increase will include regions where water freezes regularly. This will either completely change the climate of those regions, or would mean that temperature swings in the rest of the world will increase much higher to compensate.
The big cycle is caused by the reaction of magnesium silicate with carbon dioxide. Mg silicate is the chief component of Earth's mantle. As temperature increases, silicate rocks are worn away faster by rain and wind, and absorb more CO2. This CO2 eventually sinks down into the mantle as magnesium carbonate, where it is very slowly re-released by volcanoes (the majority of Earth's carbon is in the mantle). As CO2 is sequestered, the Earth cools, and the weathering of silicate rocks slows, especially when they are covered by glaciers. Then the release of CO2 by volcanoes starts to outpace the absorption by olivine, and the atmosphere warms up again.
Eventually as the Sun gets brighter, the equilibrium amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is expected to drop below the requirements for plant life, and the Earth will die. By heating the atmosphere, we hasten the arrival of the next glacial cycle, but we are (thankfully) at low risk of starving the biosphere.
This is actually not at all what the paper is saying.
It's saying that a natural carbon-sequestration process we already knew about is more effective than we thought. It says nothing about the way seaweed growth changes with increased carbon levels.
In other words, it sounds like the above commenter is suggesting that seaweed might unexpectedly save us. But the actual point is almost the opposite: this means we’ve been relying on something all along that we didn’t know we needed to protect.
I hadn't thought about it that way! Although I'm actually not sure in which direction it changes their priors - I'm not sure if this adds to the negative-carbon side of the scales in models taking this into account, or if this was already factored into some kind of separate measurement of total natural carbon sequestration and so the loss of seaweed now adds a bigger positive-carbon term.
> Gaia theory suggests that the world is full of these stabilizing systems.
Or stable feedback loops exist longer (because they are stable) and that's all there is to it. Life managed to almost kill itself a couple of times during Huronian glaciation.
It is exceedingly unlikely that raised temperatures or sea levels would end humanity. Even if all ice melts there would still be a lot of land, and humans can and do currently survive in hot climates. The habitable zone will just shrink a bit, but it will also expand in other places. Siberia + 5 degrees is still cold.
No, this is very wrong. It’s not about having land to live on and being able to continue to breathe on it. Of course we would be able to do that.
The issue is all the parts of the ecosystem we have come to rely on. Animals, plants, insects... the entire global economy and our ways of live are tightly intertwined with everything else and even small disruptions can have enormous repercussions, especially on more vulnerable populations in the world.
This description is full of hyperbolic generalities. The available land example may or may not be comprehensive, but at least it's specific.
I think the biggest problem that I have about everything climate change / global warming is that we are making laws to force (don't forget that force means pointing guns at people regardless of the warm and fuzzy intentions used to sell it) entire populations and their economies in the absence of so much specific knowledge. That doesn't make me a denier because accept / deny is not really the issue. Just because I accept the general premise doesn't mean that I trust the depth of the understanding to the point that I am willing to turn a gun on my neighbor to either reduce their liberty and / or confiscate their personal property in the name of said premise.
Ultimately though, the state derives its power from a legitimate monopoly on violence.
If an entity continues to defy the laws and softer enforcement doesn't work (fines levied, assets frozen, etc.), eventually the state must use physical force to maintain the rule of law.
It comes from a very explicit reading of Ayn Rand, who frequently likens law and regulation to the explicit use of force. To be fair, it's true but the literal statement of the fact misses a lot of the nuance of living in a civil society.
Of course it's true, no need for your generosity of fairness. Just don't obey the law and see what happens. Continue to do so and eventually you'll be looking down the barrel of a gun. Pointing this out is not Randian. It's just reality.
There are no nuances of living in a civil society when solutions are implemented by law. If it's by law, then it's by gun. I don't know of any law that works otherwise.
I think the nuance you're referring to is when people's minds are (actually) changed such that they work together on a common goal. There becomes a natural supply and demand of a certain behavior. But most of the effort that I see is not convincing people to support a certain shared goal per se, but rather to join a tribe to crowd source the passage of laws.
The more important thing to me - and the point I meant to make, though I didn't fully articulate it - is that pointing a gun at someone (or indeed entire sectors of an economy) should be reserved for situations in which there is a very high bar of confidence in the detailed facts and predictions of the outcomes. While we may all agree that global warming causes climate change and even that it is anthropomorphic, it doesn't appear to me that we have a level of specific knowledge to say that "a reduction of carbon emission by x will result in a climate of y in the year z". If we don't have that, then I question both the morality and practicality of what appears to be a witch hunt in the form of policy making.
Even in a fully laizes fair community you would sooner or later be “looking down the barrel of a gun” for some reason or other. Laws at least makes it a bit easier to predict what reasons that would be.
But regarding the need for knowing exactly how things works and who should have rights to do what. I could equally argue that your contribution to raising the CO2 concentration of our shared resource, the atmosphere, is not sanctioned by me. So why is it not you that should prove it is safe before asking me to just accept your doing so?
> I could equally argue that your contribution to raising the CO2 concentration of our shared resource, the atmosphere, is not sanctioned by me.
Then I suppose you should do us all a favor and stop breathing because your breathing is not sanctioned by me. (Just kidding, it is :))
Seriously though, that's just the way it's always been. We're born into the world and we act w/out permission to survive. I don't have to prove to anyone that the next step I take is safe. But if it harms you in some way, then yes, I'm liable.
I guess there is a fundamental difference in how we see the commons. I take the view that it is not simply “there” as a first come first serve basis, but rather something we have an equal right to, the basis from which private property must be derived. Locke started here.
But I think the breathing thing is actually a good retort. Where do the principles meet...
I guess in the case the differenence is between drinking from the well and pissing in it. It might very well be safe, but certainly not nice
> I take the view that it is not simply “there” as a first come first serve basis, but rather something we have an equal right to, the basis from which private property must be derived. Locke started here.
I think I'm with you there. I don't have a problem paying property tax because as a person born on this earth, you're also entitled to my land. I'm paying a tax for the privilege of it being mine.
What if your neighbor was dumping liquid radioactive waste on your land, right outside your house? Greenhouse gases should be considered harmful pollution, and because they eliminate vast swathes of habitable land they should be treated similarly to other forms of toxic waste.
I understand your general comparison to toxic waste. The problem is not the comparison, it's the level of specificity. If someone is dumping an amount of say Parathion on my lawn, it is well within our ability to accurately determine the nature and amount of damage to me and my property given the amount and frequency of the dumping. And given that, it's a short step to monetizing the damage. In terms of accuracy, can we say the same for carbon? I don't believe we can. So while there may be a valid comparison at a high level, when it gets to actually determining damages to individuals or society, we just aren't there imo.
I realize the simulations we're using to extrapolate the potential damage are just that -- extrapolations. However, we've been using the actual effects of the existing warming to improve those simulations. These simulations are increasingly indicating that we will raise sea levels by several meters, and that vast swathes of temperate land will become uninhabitable. While we don't know for certain this will happen, the hazards posed in the event that it does happen mean we need to take steps now.
If it could be reasonably expected the dumper knew Parathion were toxic at certain levels in the groundwater and they continued to increase those amounts, it would be reasonable to sanction them before the levels become unsafe. If you only apply sanctions after the damage is done, the sanctions don't really do anything. The best thing to do is to try to mitigate the risk rather than waiting for more information.
I agree 100%. For some reason environmental discussions always have to include the "cost" to business in the decision whether we do anything about it.
I imagine if I told my neighbor that I felt it was cost prohibitive to pay for trash pickup service, so I was just going to dump my trash in their yard, they'd have a problem with that. Why do we allow companies to pollute water, land and air that doesn't belong to them?
That it would hurt vulnerable populations who live in a region that becomes uninhabitable is undoubtedly true and I didn't argue against that, but that is not the end of humanity, which is what you claimed.
It’s always funny to me when people say “we’re killing the planet!” Uh no, we’re just making it uninhabitable for ourselves and some other species. Earth doesn’t give a damn either way
This is surely the case. Nobody really thinks humans have the ability to wipe out all life on Earth do they? We might be able to destroy ourselves, but life will probably continue at least until the Sun turns into a red giant. Life on Earth has survived far more catastrophic events than anything we can manage.
>Nobody really thinks humans have the ability to wipe out all life on Earth do they?
'all life on earth' as in down to microorganisms, amoeba etc? No, I would hope not. Short of wiping out the atmosphere in it's entirety, PLUS destroying the surface of the entire earth do an as-yet-unknown depth sufficient to reach every existing colony of microorganisms etc, humanity's destructive abilities don't extend that far, yet.
But do humans have the ability to wipe out all sophisticated life on earth i.e. all plants, mammals, fish, and so on such to turn the clock back on a few billion years of evolution? Yeah I certainly believe that's within our abilities, and indeed likely if current activities continue uninterrupted.
Something I think of often when people say things like "we need to stop climate change and save the world!" The world will be fine, it's not going anywhere: humans and the species we like on the other hand...
Side note: something I've never seen before on that Youtube video: it links the Wikipedia page for climate change right under the video. An attempt to battle misleading videos perhaps?
> Because of this, there's a feedback loop were even if the sun gets a little hotter or colder, the successful daisy would spread and either warm or cool the Earth in response, effectively acting as a stabilizer. Gaia theory suggests that the world is full of these stabilizing systems.
There are several mechanisms in place on earth to stabilize changes in atmospheric composition and temperature (otherwise an sporadic eruption of a volcano or glacial eras would have thrown things out of whack long time ago). I don't think this is an hypothesis. We have seen some of them in action in recent years, like the advanced rate of reforestation due to larger levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.
The problem is we don't know what would happen if we push these to the limit or what their limit really is. And they are very complex in the way the interact. For example. Warmer oceans and larger levels of CO2 will make phytoplankton grow faster, absorbing more CO2 in return, but it will also accelerate the growth of zooplankton, that feeds on it. This creates a bottleneck.
So TL;DR: yeah, it's cool we have these mechanisms around but the goal should still be to keep things as close to the baseline as possible (and we have been really bad about it in the last century)
More like don't do one of these on accident... :-)
"One of the major questions is whether the Siberian Traps eruptions were directly responsible for the Permian–Triassic mass extinction 250 million years ago.
A recent hypothesis put forward is that the volcanism triggered the growth of Methanosarcina, a microbe that spewed enormous amounts of methane... altering the Earth's carbon cycle.
This extinction event, also called the Great Dying, affected all life on Earth, and is estimated to have killed about 95% of all species living at the time"
What specific baseline do you pick, and why? are there multiple variables involved in that "baseline"? have these variables changed over the 10k years preceding the Industrial Revolution? together or separately? what about these same variables over the last 200k years?
Good questions. You also have to consider the variables that have changed since the Industrial Revolution. There are more people on earth to feed and provide a modern standard of living. We should work to reduce the costs on the planet for these things, but we can't eschew the progress we've made in order to return to some arbitrary baseline.
> One question I have is how sequestered the undersea carbon really is
Depends on how you interpret "sequestered". In the sense that it's locked away somewhere for a long time, like organic matter frozen into tundra, it's not very sequestered. But as long as there's lots of seaweed there'll be a lot of carbon taken up. Even though individual plants may die and release their carbon on a relatively short timeline, new growth will take up carbon.
> In this case, the paper is suggesting that seaweed grows much faster in response to raised CO2, and then sequesters some of that carbon underwater.
Makes you wonder about news like this seaweed deluge in the Caribbean and how it's related to an increase in CO2
"In 2011 it was the first time we'd seen it...says Professor Hazel Oxenford, an expert in fisheries biology and management at the University of the West Indies...It came as a complete shock and no-one had a clue what to do with it."
"For us, the worst year we had for sargassum still remains 2015'..says Carla Daniel of Barbados Sea Turtle Project"
"Now it is happening again and everything suggests 2018 could be the worst year yet."
Also reminds me of Richard Lindzen's Iris hypothesis, which suggest that temperature increases in the tropics will reduce cirrus clouds and thus let more heat escape from the atmosphere.
Lindzen and his theories are controversial, but I do think there may not have been enough focus on possible negative feedback mechanisms like this.
First, the soundtrack, songs by Jami Sieber and Shira Kamman, were phenomenal. The gorgeous cello and violin are so atmospheric, and they also sound good backwards and sped up -- necessary for a game like Braid, and chosen for that reason.
Secondly, the artwork - that naive 2D platformer style but combined with gorgeous and subtle shading and depth that really showed it was something special. We're used to games doing this now, maybe.
Thirdly, the structure of the game itself as a critique of the traditional Mario-style platformer with its jumps, princesses and castles. It was like playing a postmodern game.
Then there's the relationship between the level's gameplay theme and the lesson it's trying to teach. This was something I saw Elizabeth Sandifer point out. The first level is all about being able to undo the mistakes of the past. But then we learn some mistakes are too big to undo. We learn about how a ring can change things in a relationship...
And then there's the two levels of twist ending and how they relate to games and gaming, especially a decade ago when it was much more a male pursuit.
> Urban Mushrooms has already stopped six tonnes of coffee grounds from going to landfill.
As a late 80s kid I remember being told that nutrients sent to Landfill were there forever, essentially lost because landfills are sealed off from the wider ecosystem. I mean some gases get out and I guess some stuff gets eaten by birds, but mostly it's good organic matter locked away forever. So anything which saves organic gunk is good with me.
> Urban Mushrooms currently employs two staff and several apprentices
The impact on youth unemployment, though, seems kind of minimal.
> Urban Mushrooms has already stopped six tonnes of coffee grounds from going to landfill.
What happens to the coffee grounds after the mushrooms are done growing? Not trying to be a smartass. Genuinely curious given this is a core claim.
Regarding landfill, I've wondered if these site will be come super valuable in 100 years type thing. There must be huge mineral wealth someone will mine from these one day. Kinda like us mining old mines tailings now our extraction methods are better.
Spent mushroom substrate is really good in compost (particularly vermicompost). I worked on a small scale gourmet mushroom farm earlier this year, it's easy enough to sell the spent medium to gardening businesses when you're done growing mushrooms.
coffee grounds alter the pH of whatever you use them in so you can't just blindly use it as fertilizer. Just an FYI before people start throwing their coffee grounds everywhere. It's worth researching whatever your growing to see what pH it prefers and then treat accordingly.
Yes I've wondered the same. 1970s solid-state electronics full of gold, metals lying around everywhere, rare earth metals in old cellphones, recylcable glass and plastics... Wanna co-found a startup that buys old landfills?
It is already being done. Dealing with old piles of trash is somewhat dangerous (all sorts of volatile gasses build up there) but once you get around this you can burn the thrash (releasing quite a bit of energy) and go through the ashes later. The ash can be used for various purposes, such as construction, but needs to be sorted by grain size first. While going through the ashes you do indeed encounter precious metals. I recently read about a company that performs this sorting as a service. They are not paid for the work directly, but get to keep the gold (and possibly other metals?) they find. Apparently you can expect to find a gram or two of gold in a tonne of ash.
I dug up the original article for some fact checking, and it seems my previous post has a few mistakes in it. There are "grams" of silver and gold (each or together? The article does not specify.) and "kilograms" of copper in a tonne of ashes. Other metals are also extracted, but their amount or value is not specified.
It further turns out that there is a monetary payment for the service, but it is low because of the valuable metals. The article also tells that the machine can sort around 100000 tonnes of ashes annually.
I built a forge a few years ago with a bucket, plaster of paris, some quartz sand, some iron pipe and a blow dryer. Then I started hammering on steel when it turned red.
Metal reclamation is just chemistry so youtube and grainger are all you really need.
> . I mean some gases get out and I guess some stuff gets eaten by birds, but mostly it's good organic matter locked away forever.
...essentially sequestered carbon.
I generally support recycling and climate action, but I actually wonder if the net benefit of throwing organic matter in landfills could be carbon negative if the gases are controlled. For organic matter, putting it in a landfill could potentially be a net positive versus recycling it or composting it (which also releases gases).
The landfills often tap the fill for methane generated by the contents. I happened to run into a guy the other day who worked at the power generation plant for one of these. The theory is that burning the methane to produce electric, and breaking it down to CO2 is generally preferable than the slow leak of it into the atmosphere where methane has a stronger greenhouse gas effect than CO2.
For youth unemployment, I would propose granting kids some credits toward college/uni for doing summer farm work. It’s dirty and rough, but the more people are connected to their food the better.
Having worked with some small farms that sell boutique $VEGETABLE at absurd prices I don't think those are the kinds of businesses I want to subsidize with cheap labor (i.e. higher quality than they could otherwise get at that price point as a result of the college credits).
Construction is probably a better choice because there's far more diversity to what the field entails and it provides real world context for many more degree programs than farming does.
I was not as honest as the author of this article. I didn't buy Paint Shop Pro and I didn't write to its creator. I got a free trial on a cover-disk of some PC magazine and managed to extend the trial indefinitely via some hack or other.
Until then my only image editing tool was Microsoft Paint(brush), and PSP was a whole new world. Layers, clone tools, airbrushing. It was amazing. I was one of the few kids in my school who could edit images like that -- there were a couple who had Photoshop because their parents did design or photography.
Then at some point they clamped down on dodgy users, but by then Adobe had old versions of Photoshop out for free and eventually the GIMP made it to Windows.
I had a ZX Spectrum at home so that made me one of the 'techie' kids in my school who could use the class BBC better than the teachers. It was my second experience with BASIC, and BBC BASIC was a little different to ZX Basic so I had to learn to adapt the syntax of my kiddie code.
And the games! Anyone else play Podd? I still remember the first time I figured out you could make him explode.
"On December 19, 2017 an authorized administrative user's credentials were used by an unauthorized user to log into our Cloud Computing Provider. This unauthorized user created a new administrative user account, and began conducting reconnaissance activities within our Cloud Computing Environment. For the next two days, and on one day in March, 2018, and one day in June, 2018, the unauthorized user logged in again and continued to conduct reconnaissance."
So someone logged into their Cloud Provider backend using a user/pass, created an admin account, and watched for 6 months before trying database extraction.
Means a few things went wrong:
* First, they had a guessable user/pass or, more likely, it was compromised some other way (social engineering, former employee, or it was in an email account that was itself compromised).
* Second, they had no 2FA on their cloud provider logins. Given that this login allows the creation of admin accounts, that's a pretty big oversight
* Third, they had an account with admin privileges running around for 6 months without anyone noticing. It kept its activity very limited, but a routine audit of all admin accounts would have found the new account. An alert that warned if a new admin account was created would have found it.
So well done to TimeHop for coming forward with such a full and clear explanation, but this was a very preventable attack.
