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Monday Links from the Bench vol. CCCLXXXV

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    Monday Links from the Bench vol. CCCLXXXV

    Some stuff to read on your phone while you wait for the IT department to get the malware off your PC - assuming you aren't actually the IT department, in which case you're ****ed anyway so you might as well just read stuff
    • How to Accidentally Stop a Global Cyber Attacks - Explanation by the chap who stopped the worm that’s been attacking the NHS in its tracks, at least temporarily, of how it happened: ”Although ransomware on a public sector system isn’t even newsworthy, systems being hit simultaneously across the country is (contrary to popular belief, most NHS employees don’t open phishing emails which suggested that something to be this widespread it would have to be propagated using another method)… Upon running the sample in my analysis environment I instantly noticed it queried an unregistered domain, which i promptly registered.”

    • The Thieves Who Steal Sunken Warships, Right Down to the Bolts - "Last November, a team of international divers departed the Indonesian island of Java on a mission to survey sunken World War II warships… What these divers should have found was a 6,440-ton cruiser, complete with tower, turrets, and catapult—a ship long and large enough to launch a seaplane. Instead, they found only the impression of a hull on an empty seafloor.” As if nicking plaques off war memorials wasn’t bad enough, now some scrotes are stealing actual war graves

    • Mappin’ the Floor - On the more salubrious side of deep sea exploration: ”At the tail end of 2016 I flew to Guam to take up my position as Artist-in-Residence aboard R/V Falkor, a state-of-the-art oceanographic research vessel owned by the Schmidt Ocean Institute. Over the next three weeks at sea, we covered thousands of miles of the rolling Pacific Ocean on our way to Honolulu, mapping the ocean floor below with the use of multibeam sonar as we went… I scribbled furiously to distill some of the new information I’d picked up into the following comic—all drawn at sea!” Lucy Bellwood is an Adventure Cartoonist, which has to be one of the best job titles ever


    • The equipment aboard an EP-3E electronic surveillance plane - From the Snowden papers, a look at the equipment and capabilities of a US spy plane in 2001: ”A large part of the NSA's job is to collect data for tactical military purposes. A good example of the latter task comes from an internal NSA damage assessment report about the 2001 Hainan Island incident, in which an EP-3E electronic surveillance aircraft collided with a Chinese fighter jet and had to make an emergency landing on the Chinese island of Hainan… the report provides many details about both the interception and the encryption equipment aboard the EP-3E.”

    • Reddit Users Lose Real Money After Meme Currency Bot Dies - "Another day, another cryptocurrency cluster****. This week, the creator of the tipping bot “dogetipbot”—a service that let Reddit users “tip” each other in Dogecoin—announced that his company is broke, he’s broke, and the bot is broke because he spent all the coins, after he himself ran out of money." It’s almost as if regulation of financial services is actually a good thing

    • Colouring in the past - "The old sculptures in museums have lost their original colour, but chemistry can help us discover how they used to look.” Rachel Brazil on the techniques chemists are using to discover the long-lost colours of ancient statuary.

    • Arcade Raid: The Duke of Lancaster Ship - Recovering classic arcade games from an abandoned ship: ”Someone had managed to gain access to the inside of the ship in the middle of the night. Amongst the set of haunting pictures they took was a single tantalising glimpse of the stash of cabs… The only way the arcade machines could be removed from the ship was via the outer deck, and given the height of that, a full sized crane would have to be used. What was supposed to be an easy, smash and grab affair, was turning into a logistical nightmare.”



    • Slaughter at the bridge: Uncovering a colossal Bronze Age battle - "About 3200 years ago, two armies clashed at a river crossing near the Baltic Sea. The confrontation can’t be found in any history books—the written word didn’t become common in these parts for another 2000 years—but this was no skirmish between local clans. Thousands of warriors came together in a brutal struggle, perhaps fought on a single day, using weapons crafted from wood, flint, and bronze, a metal that was then the height of military technology." Our understanding of early societies in northern Europe is being fundamentally modified in the light of archaeologists’ findings.

    • The five universal laws of human stupidity - "In 1976, a professor of economic history at the University of California, Berkeley published an essay outlining the fundamental laws of a force he perceived as humanity’s greatest existential threat: Stupidity. Stupid people, Carlo M. Cipolla explained, share several identifying traits: they are abundant, they are irrational, and they cause problems for others without apparent benefit to themselves, thereby lowering society’s total well-being."

    • Why Are There So Many 17th Century Paintings of Monkeys Getting Drunk? - "Monkeys stood in for intoxicated humans on a surprisingly frequent basis in 17th century culture. In early modern paintings, tippling primates can frequently be seen in human clothing, smoking tobacco, playing cards, rolling dice, and just plain getting wasted."



    Happy invoicing!

    #2
    Great set. Nice to see that the only discussion of bottom was in the sea.

    I go past Duke of Lancaster on the train often. I never knew...

    The laws of stupidity missed number 6 - sasguru is the uber cretin. That link probably needs posting in general....

    Comment


      #3
      Originally posted by BrilloPad View Post
      I go past Duke of Lancaster on the train often. I never knew...
      I think the whole story of the ship would make for quite an interesting yarn by itself, even without the arcade games

      Comment


        #4
        "In 1976, a professor of economic history at the University of California, Berkeley published an essay outlining the fundamental laws of a force he perceived as humanity’s greatest existential threat: Stupidity. Stupid people, Carlo M. Cipolla explained, share several identifying traits: they are abundant, they are irrational, and they cause problems for others without apparent benefit to themselves, thereby lowering society’s total well-being."
        Rubbish, without us they'd be no Brexit.

        Comment


          #5


          It's a map of client co office!

          Comment

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