Science & Digital Briefs for April 10, 2019
By Dave Bunting, Shopper Editor
Payroll employment increases
by 196,000 in March;
unemployment rate
remains at 3.8%:
Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 196,000 in March, and the unemployment rate was unchanged at 3.8 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Notable job gains occurred in health care and in professional and technical services.
Info: shpr.fyi/2IlYg1K
Carbon Monoxide Detectors
look for biological life
on exo-planets
The detectors similar to those in our homes could be used on telescopes looking at planets similar to earth. If they found a little CO2, it could mean life. But if they found a lot of CO2, it would mean no life.
Info: shpr.fyi/2uSSkp0
Unemployment Applications
at 49-year low
The number of Americans filing applications for unemployment benefits fell to a 49-year low last week, pointing to sustained labor market strength despite slowing economic growth. In the week ending March 30, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 202,000, a decrease of 10,000 from the previous week’s revised level. This is the lowest level for initial claims since December 6, 1969 when it was 202,000.
Info: shpr.fyi/2Kty6Nc
Recent Widespread
DNS Hijacking Attacks
The U.S. government — along with a number of leading security companies — recently warned about a series of highly complex and widespread attacks that allowed suspected Iranian hackers to siphon huge volumes of email passwords and other sensitive data from multiple governments and private companies. But to date, the specifics of exactly how that attack went down and who was hit have remained shrouded in secrecy.
The post linked below seeks to document the extent of those attacks, and traces the origins of this overwhelmingly successful cyber espionage campaign back to a cascading series of breaches at key Internet infrastructure providers.
Before we delve into the extensive research that culminated in this post, it’s helpful to review the facts disclosed publicly so far. On Nov. 27, 2018, Cisco’s Talos research division published a write-up outlining the contours of a sophisticated cyber espionage campaign it dubbed “DNSpionage.”
The DNS part of that moniker refers to the global “Domain Name System,” which serves as a kind of phone book for the Internet by translating human-friendly Web site names (example.com) into numeric Internet addresses (192.168.123.456) that are easier for computers to manage.
The researcher said the perpetrators of DNSpionage were able to steal email and other login credentials from a number of government and private sector entities in Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates by hijacking the DNS servers for these targets, so that all email and virtual private networking (VPN) traffic was redirected to an Internet address controlled by the attackers.
Some DNS servers such as those set for us by our internet service provider (ISP) carriers, without our knowledge, redirect our addresses to sites from which they can earn money by putting ads onto our screens. Some DNS servers are known to be less reliable at getting us to the web site we want, some are more vulnerable, more easily hijacked. Hackers can change the DNS servers so that they direct us to criminal sites that steal our passwords and credit card numbers. We need to specify DNS servers that are known reliable. Generally we specify two DNS servers, a primary and a secondary.
Known reliable and free DNS servers are those by Cloudflare.com: 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1, and those by OpenDNS.com: 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220. These are known and verified to not be hackable, and they keep no record of the sites we visit. They just simply and purely translate our words like google.com or highwayshopper.com into their correct computer addresses.
This is pretty deep for most computer users, even though every computer user, especially every user who buys and turns on a router or computer, within that setup process, actually chooses the DNS server they will use.
If you delve deep enough into your router or computer to be able to set the DNS servers you want to use, a good choice would be 1.1.1.1 for primary, and 208.67.222.222 for secondary.
Info: shpr.fyi/2IhN8TG
Einstein once asked:
“If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind,
what is an empty desk a sign of?”
Earth Day April 22
in past years
There are currently 7.7 billion people worldwide and we (sometimes literally) burn through natural resources quickly, leaving an indelible mark on the planet. We’ve known about this impact for a long time—since well before environmentalism became a topic of politics—but it’s hard to change our ways.
- March 1879: Cutting down so many trees helped boost the industrial revolution, but even in the late 19th century “disastrous effects” were recognized.
- August 1948: The dust storms of 1948 were a reminder of how farming on “marginal lands” created the “dustbowl.”
- August 1974: “The ocean is a plausible place” to dump garbage. Although plastic pollution back then was a matter of “aesthetics.”
- September 2016: Modernity is great! But the long-lasting planetary transition caused by human activity now has a name: The Anthropocene.
Info: shpr.fyi/2UpA2ef
We might improve the health
of our blood veins and arteries
by killing the bacteria in our gut.
Researchers gave young mice and old mice broad-spectrum antibiotics to kill off the majority of bacteria living in their gut, aka their gut microbiome. After three to four weeks of the treatment, the young mice saw no change in vascular health. The old mice, however, saw vast improvements on all measures.
“When you suppressed the microbiome of the old mice, their vascular health was restored to that of young mice.
Info: shpr.fyi/2U4ceHV
“To create oversight that would assess the impact of algorithms, first we need to see and understand them in the context for which they were developed. That, by itself, is a tall order that requires impartial experts backtracking through the technology development process to find the models and formulae that originated the algorithms. Then, keeping all that learning at hand, the experts need to soberly assess the benefits and deficits or risks the algorithms create. Who is prepared to do this? Who has the time, the budget and resources to investigate and recommend useful courses of action? This is a t-century job description – and market niche – in search of real people and companies. In order to make algorithms more transparent, products and product information circulars might include an outline of algorithmic assumptions, akin to the nutritional sidebar now found on many packaged food products, that would inform users of how algorithms drive intelligence in a given product and a reasonable outline of the implications inherent in those assumptions.”