Interesting Links: June 5, 2019

in #rsslog5 years ago (edited)

America's 14 coolest drive-in theaters; The cost of cybercrime; Forced password changes are ancient and obsolete; IBM accused of retirement fund malinvestment; and more...


Business, News, Science, Technology, or whatever gets my attention.

Straight from my RSS feed:


Ten links and micro-summaries from my 1000+ daily headlines. I filter them so you don't have to.


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pixabay license: source.

  1. The 14 Coolest Drive-In Movie Theaters in America - @cmp2020, @lisa.palmer, and I have been to Shankweiller's. I'm disappointed that Becky's didn't make the list. The list includes drive in theaters in New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Texas, Massachusetts, Washington, Idaho, Florida, Nebraska, and California.

  2. The Cost of Cybercrime - The summary points are interesting. Here are a few: Payment fraud is up, but credit card purchases are up more; New scams are facilitated by cryptocurrency, but the old scams still cause the most damage; Telecom fraud is down because skype is free; Anti-virus fraud is mostly gone, but tech support fraud is on the rise; And more is spent on cyberdefense than is lost in damages.

  3. Microsoft says mandatory password changing is “ancient and obsolete” - This was covered in Interesting Links: April 27, 2019, and it should be old news, but it bears repeating because apparently most businesses still haven't received the memo. The more often users are forced to change their password, the more likely they are to make it guessable or write it down, and the right time to change a compromised password is now, not in 30 or 60 or 90 days.

  4. IBM accused of pumping staff retirement funds into a tanking stock... IBM's to be exact - IBM is headed to the Supreme Court to defend a suit about its retirement benefit. Plaintiffs claim that IBM violated the US Employee Retirement Income Security Act by investing Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) funds in IBM stock in 2013, when the company knew that IBM's stock price was overvalued. The company subsequently divested its microelectronics business to GlobalFoundries, and when it did, the ESOP plan lost substantial value. If the plaintiffs prevail, the case goes back to lower courts for trial proceedings (or a possible settlement).

  5. Six of the best works by Louise Farrenc - Louise Farrenc was born in 1804 into a French family of sculptors and artists, who encouraged her to pursue her creative passions. As a result, she studied piano and composition as a teen at the Paris Conservatory with Anton Reicha, who later trained Berlioz and Liszt. She became the only female professor at the Paris Conservatory during the 19th century, and her performance was popular, but her compositions only caught on when they were discovered later. This article contains youtube embeds for five of her compositions and another one that's on spotify.



    You may enjoy the 3rd movement from her Nonet while you continue reading:


  • New Finding Advances the Search for a Universal Flu Vaccine - A new paper in Nature Medicine reports that scientists have found a way to target a part of the flu virus that varies very little between different strains. Vaccines target a protein called, hemagglutinin, which is shaped like a mushroom with a stalk and a cap. Current vaccines target the cap, which varies greatly between flu strains. The new method targets the stalk, which is largely similar among different strains of flu. The first-ever test in humans was done over two consecutive years in Nicaragua, to make sure that the vaccine offered benefits against multiple strains. The next few years will reveal whether this is a viable candidate for a universal flu vaccine.

  • Animated chart of US oil production by state, 1981-2018 - The post, [Interesting Links: June 1, 2019] had animated oil production by country. This link has a similar animation for the individual states in the US.

  • Upgrade Your Boxed Mac and Cheese With a Simple Ingredient Swap - Use buttermilk instead of milk.

  • STEEM Finding the Cells That Make Regeneration Possible in Tadpoles - @ribbitingscience comments on a recent paper in Science where scientists tracked the activation of individual genes in African Clawed Frog (Xenopus laevis) tadpoles in order to identify a new type of epidermal cell that is responsible for tail generation. The scientists termed the cells, Regeneration-Organizing Cells. (5% of the rewards from this post will go to @ribbitingscience.)

  • STEEM AT&T Now Accepts Bitcoin, Is This What Adoption Looks Like? by Kieran Smith - As noted in [Interesting Links: May 25, 2019], AT&T has begun accepting bitcoin payments (processed by BitPay). This post contains @bravenewcoin's commentary on the subject. The article notes that this has been tried by a variety of platforms since 2015, but has not led to wide-spread adoption due to high fees and large backlogs, but ends on the optimistic note that early adopters are slowly building a bridge to the future where cryptocurrency will be stable and cost-effective. (@bravenewcoin will receive 5% of the rewards from this post.)

  • About this series
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