A hacker stole $31 million from the blockchain company MonoX Finance, by exploiting a bug in software the service uses to draft smart contracts.

The article goes on to talk about how common these sorts of attacks are. The basic problem is that the code is the ultimate authority — there is no adjudication protocol — so if there’s a vulnerability in the code, there is no recourse. And, of course, there are lots of vulnerabilities in code.

To me, this is reason enough never to use smart contracts for anything important. Human-based adjudication systems are not useless pre-Internet human baggage, they’re vital.

Criminal groups have been sending threatening messages in the past couple of months to companies that manage broadband phone services all over the world, promising they'll flood the digital phone lines with traffic and take them offline unless victims pay a ransom.

What those extortionists have discovered is that the number of phone calls that take place at least partially over the internet has quietly and dramatically increased over recent years — and there's a lot at stake when major providers go down. //

if there were going to be a kinetic war with an adversary — Russia, North Korea, Iran, whatever — look how fragile this is that some probably teenage kids with a botnet are able to take out major communication providers and demand ransoms from them," Wisniewski says. "What if it was a sophisticated, well equipped adversary like a nation state could wipe out our communication in minutes?"

During connecting to a SSH server, the client stores the few details like Server’s Hostname, IP Address and Host key in a file name known_hosts. This file will be located in you ~/.ssh directory as shown below :

This file contains list of all servers to which you connect in a plaintext. It poses a small security risk if the host is shared or your client gets compromised. This can be avoided by Hashing the known_hosts file. Hashing known_hosts file is easy, you just use the ssh-keygen command as shown below :

 $ ssh-keygen -H -f known_hosts
 known_hosts updated.
 Original contents retained as known_hosts.old
 WARNING: known_hosts.old contains unhashed entries
 Delete this file to ensure privacy of hostnames

Note : You need to delete the backup file known_hosts.old

Vagus Nerve Acupuncture for Dysautonomia / POTS Relief
The Vagus nerve point is one of the most potent acupuncture points to use when treating people who have the challenge of managing dysautonomia and is therefore included in our acupuncture POTS protocol. The Vagus nerve is the longest, cranial “wandering” nerve that covers the heart and innervates most major organs, impacting the cardiovascular, endocrine, immune, respiratory, and digestive systems. The Vagus nerve also impacts the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems.

A recent conversation about the dangers of false claims of expertise stimulated me to revise and republish a nearly 11 year-old post.

It provides documented proof that Jimmy Carter was not a “nuclear engineer” and never served on a nuclear submarine. He left the Navy in October 1953, about 15 months before Jan 17, 1955, the day the the world’s first nuclear submarine went to sea. //

Here is a quote from the first debate between President Ford and Governor Jimmy Carter during the 1976 presidential campaign as transcribed in the Sep 24, 1976 issue of the New York Times:

Q: Governor Carter, I’d like to turn to what we used to call the energy crisis. Yesterday a British Government commission on air pollution, but one headed by a nuclear physicist, recommended that any further expansion of nuclear energy be delayed in Britain as long as possible. Now this is a subject that is quite controversial among our own people and there seems to be a clear difference between you and the President on the use of nuclear power plants, which you say you would use as a last priority. Why, sir, are they unsafe?

‘Capabilities of Atomic Power’

CARTER: Well among my other experiences in the past, I’ve been a nuclear engineer, and did graduate work in this field. I think I know the capabilities and limitations of atomic power. //

Since you remember enough about the 1950s/early 1960s to have been traumatized by “duck and cover” drills, you are old enough to personally recall the public’s interest in the energy crisis that was precipitated by the October 1973 Arab Oil Embargo. Do you recall how interested some people were in stimulating investments in more nuclear power as a means of reducing America’s vulnerability to another attempt to use oil as a weapon?

My interpretation of the history is that Carter’s friends in the upper elites of the hydrocarbon economy took advantage of his political ambition and his tenuous connection to nuclear energy to help put him into position to sabotage “the plutonium economy.” He might have had other goals and priorities, but once his purpose had been served, he lost enough support to make him a single term president.

Do you happen to recall that the title of Carter’s campaign book was “Why not the best?” and that he explained that choice of title in homage to the influence that Admiral Rickover had on his performance in life? //

Yes, Carter had an affinity for the coal industry. When Carter was running for President, roughly 40% of US coal production was from companies that were oil company subsidiaries. Here is a supporting quote from an Oct 3, 1976 NY Times article titled “Breaking Up Big Oil.”

Right now oil companies control between 26 percent and 40 percent of coal production (the lower figure comes from the Haskell committee, the higher from the United Mine Workers). Seven of the 15 largest coal companies are subsidiaries of oil companies. As Big Oil’s coal ownership climbed, so did coal prices: 300 percent. There was probably a connection. The nuclear‐energy industry is also being swallowed by the oil industry, which owned about 30 percent of our uranium reserves 10 years ago and today holds between 50 and 55 percent. As for shale and geothermal lands, virtually all of those leased to date have gone to oil companies.

Note: Like many commenters on the energy industry, the author of the NY Times piece did not understand that uranium was (and remains) only a small portion (5-20% depending on how it’s counted) of the nuclear energy business. //

In my opinion, it is the height of vanity for someone with a general engineering degree and service on diesel power submarines who did not even finish nuclear power school — which is the first baby step in a lengthy process of developing nuclear energy expertise in the US Navy program — to assert that he “knew nuclear engineering.”

When Carter made his policy decisions, he was asserting that he understood more about nuclear engineering and safety than thousands of nuclear scientists and engineers who had, by then, spent a couple of decades adding professional experience to their formal education on the topic while Carter, who left the Navy in Oct 1953 and never again focused on nuclear physics or engineering, raised and processed peanuts, made a fortune, and served as the governor of Georgia.