Landslide South of Yakima
The landslide of approximately 20 acres on Rattlesnake Ridge south of Union Gap south of Yakima along Interstate 82 is currently moving at a rate of apx. 18 inches per week in a southward direction. Some 40 GPS sensors have been placed on the slide, and the movement of each of these is constantly monitored. The movement is ongoing, and geologists and engineers monitoring it predict a more rapid slide, a “slip,” is likely to occur in late January or February. The type of movement expected is a mostly sideways slide composed of blocks of basalt sliding on a weaker sedimentary layer. The scientists suggest the landslide will probably move south and accumulate into a quarry. Rockfall west and south may fall on Thorpe County Rd. which has been closed since late December. There is smaller chance that the slide could reach I-82 and hit homes south of the quarry, or reach the Yakima River. Many residents have evacuated as a precaution. Other preparations are in place and ready for actions as needed.
Apple asked to address cellphone addiction and resulting mental health issues
Several of Apple’s largest investors sent a letter to Apple on Saturday urging it to develop new software tools that would help parents control and limit phone use more easily and to study the impact of overuse on mental health.
The letter said, “There is a developing consensus around the world including Silicon Valley that the potential long-term consequences of new technologies need to be factored in at the outset, and no company can outsource that responsibility.”
Some have raised concerns about increased rates in teen depression and suicide and worry that phones are replacing old-fashioned human interaction. It is part of a broader re-evaluation of the effects on society of technology companies such as Google and Amazon.com Inc. and social-media companies like Facebook Inc. and Snap chat owner Snap Inc., which are facing questions about their reach into everyday life.
Excerpted from The Wall Street Journal for Jan. 7, 2018
Facebook charged by investors and former executives with causing psychological addiction and harm to democracy.
When scientists started linking cigarettes to cancer, the tobacco industry silenced them—only acknowledging the extent of the truth decades later, under legal duress.
Imagine if, instead, they had given these researchers license to publish papers, or even taken the information to heart and crippled their own moneymaking machines for the good of their addicted users.
No one has accused Facebook FB 0.77% of causing cancer, but Mark Zuckerberg now stands at a similar crossroads.
In the face of pressure brought by a growing roster of Facebook investors and former executives, many of whom have publicly stated that Facebook is both psychologically addictive and harmful to democracy, the Facebook founder and chief executive has pledged to “fix” Facebook by doing several things, including “making sure that time spent on Facebook is time well spent.”
Excerpted from The Wall Street Journal for Jan. 7, 2018
Smartphones Hijack Our Minds
Research suggests that as the brain grows dependent on phone technology, the intellect weakens.
In a 2015 Gallup survey, more than half of iPhone owners said that they couldn’t imagine life without the device.
We love our phones for good reasons. It’s hard to imagine another product that has provided so many useful functions in such a handy form. But while our phones offer convenience and diversion, they also breed anxiety. Their extraordinary usefulness gives them an unprecedented hold on our attention and vast influence over our thinking and behavior. So what happens to our minds when we allow a single tool such dominion over our perception and cognition?
Researchers recruited 520 undergraduate students at UCSD and gave them two standard tests of intellectual acuity. One test gauged “available cognitive capacity,” a measure of how fully a person’s mind can focus on a particular task. The second assessed “fluid intelligence,” a person’s ability to interpret and solve an unfamiliar problem. The only variable in the experiment was the location of the subjects’ smartphones. Some of the students were asked to place their phones in front of them on their desks; others were told to stow their phones in their pockets or handbags; still others were required to leave their phones in a different room. The results were striking. In both tests, the subjects whose phones were in view posted the worst scores, while those who left their phones in a different room did the best.
A second experiment conducted by the researchers produced similar results, while also revealing that the more heavily students relied on their phones in their everyday lives, the greater the cognitive penalty they suffered.
Excerpted from The Wall Street Journal for Jan. 6, 2018.
LightPhone is credit card size, offers nothing but voice phone calls.
Light Phone is a game-changing gizmo, a second device—smaller and lighter than a real phone and, at roughly credit-card size, less conspicuous—designed to be used as little as possible.
You can’t check email, text, browse the internet or swipe left with it. It harbors no seductive apps, has no color LCD screen. Tethered to your existing phone and number, it’s for voice calls only. Once you’ve pocketed the barely noticeable device, you leave your smartphone at home (or maybe in your glove box).
Light Phone costs $125, uses your existing number, is simple to set up, and it feels great to walk around with a device that’s only 1.3 ounces—miraculously about a third of what an iPhone weighs. It helped a user feel more engaged all weekend. And when he needed it, the Light Phone’s call quality was surprisingly good.
Relying on it, even a little, however, comes with drawbacks if you haven’t planned ahead. Because it can’t send or receive messages, browse the web or offer map directions.
Light Phone can be pre-ordered now, will start shipping by the end of February.
https://www.thelightphone.com/ – thephone
Scary Chip Flaws Raise Spectre of Meltdown
Apple, Google, Microsoft and other tech giants have released updates for a pair of serious security flaws present in most modern computers, smartphones, tablets and mobile devices. Here’s a brief rundown on the threat and what you can do to protect your devices.
At issue are two different vulnerabilities, dubbed “Meltdown” and “Spectre,” that were independently discovered and reported by security researchers at Cyberus Technology, Google, and the Graz University of Technology. The details behind these bugs are extraordinarily technical, but a Web site established to help explain the vulnerabilities sums them up well enough:
“These hardware bugs allow programs to steal data which is currently processed on the computer. While programs are typically not permitted to read data from other programs, a malicious program can exploit Meltdown and Spectre to get hold of secrets stored in the memory of other running programs. This might include your passwords stored in a password manager or browser, your personal photos, emails, instant messages and even business-critical documents.”
“Meltdown and Spectre work on personal computers, mobile devices, and in the cloud. Depending on the cloud provider’s infrastructure, it might be possible to steal data from other customers.”
The Meltdown bug affects every Intel processor shipped since 1995, although researchers said the flaw could impact other chip makers. Spectre is a far more wide-ranging and troublesome flaw, impacting desktops, laptops, cloud servers and smartphones from a variety of vendors. However, according to Google researchers, Spectre also is considerably more difficult to exploit.
In short, if it has a computer chip in it, one or both of the flaws likely affect it. For now, there don’t appear to be any signs that attackers are exploiting either to steal data from users. But researchers warn that the weaknesses could be exploited via Javascript — meaning it might not be long before we see attacks that leverage the vulnerabilities being stitched into hacked or malicious Web sites.
Microsoft this week released emergency updates to address Meltdown and Spectre in its various Windows operating systems. But the software giant reports that the updates aren’t playing nice with many antivirus products; the fix apparently is causing the dreaded “blue screen of death” (BSOD) for some antivirus users. In response, Microsoft has asked antivirus vendors who have updated their products to avoid the BSOD crash issue to install a special key in the Windows registry. That way, Windows Update can tell whether it’s safe to download and install the patch.
But not all antivirus products have been able to do this yet, which means many Windows users likely will not be able to download this patch immediately. If you run Windows Update and it does not list a patch made available on Jan 3, 2018, it’s likely your antivirus software is not yet compatible with this patch.
Google has issued updates to address the vulnerabilities on devices powered by its Android operating system. Meanwhile, Apple has said that all iOS and Mac systems are vulnerable to Meltdown and Spectre, and that it has already released “mitigations” in iOS 11.2, macOS 10.13.2 (but not yet macOS 10.12 Sierra used by the Shopper), and tvOS 11.2 to help defend against Meltdown. The Apple Watch is not impacted.
Excerpted from KrebsOnSecurity of Jan. 5, 2018
Editor Note: We have learned that some of our “Shopper For Your Information” shpr.fyi shortened-to-make-type-able links were not SSL authenticated, not https addresses, thus were rejected by properly-configured browsers. Sorry about that, and we believe all shpr.fyi links will now be SSL, will now be recognized as safe sites by all browsers.