Links and micro-summaries from my 1000+ daily headlines. I filter them so you don't have to.
First posted on my Steem blog: SteemIt, SteemPeak*, StemGeeks.
- What you need to know about stalkerware - This TED talk by Eva Galperin was posted in December of 2019, and it came across the ted.com RSS feed on February 28. Galperin is a security researcher who began researching this topic in 2017, when she found that a colleague was an alleged serial rapist, and that women who knew the colleague were terrified that he was stalking them through their devices. After learning this, she posted a Tweet offering to secure devices for anyone who had been abused and was concerned about the safety of their devices. The Tweet struck a nerve, and she received close to 10k retweets. To lock your device, she suggests that people should use unguessable passwords, not share them with intimate partners, make security questions that can't be guessed by someone that knows you, and use the highest security Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) that you're comfortable with. She goes on to discuss the common stalkerware programs that are available, also noting that many antivirus programs don't recognize stalkerware programs as malicious, so it can be very difficult to find them. She has, however, worked with some antivirus companies to get stalkerware included as "malicious" or "potentially unwanted". Even those programs do not automatically uninstall, because that could "tip off" an abuser, but they give the target the opportunity to know about the software and choice to delete it. At the time of her talk, companies that flagged stalkerware included Kaspersky, Lookout, and MalwareBytes. Her goal is to get stalkerware recognized by every major antiviral program on the market.
- Why Blue Whales Don't Get Cancer - Peto's Paradox - According to naive theories, the larger and longer-lived an animal is, the more susceptible it should be to contracting cancer. This is because larger animals have many more cells so there are many more opportunities over a larger animal's longer lifespan for its cells to develop cancer. The fact that it doesn't work this way in practice is known as Peto's Paradox. One possible explanation for the paradox is the fact that larger animals have evolved to incorporate more Tumor supressor genes. As a result, even though the larger animals develop cancerous cells more often, they don't get sick from cancer as much, because the cancer gets killed off by the suppressor genes. In short, larger animals, "are not immune, but they are more resilient" to cancer. A second explanation is the existence of Hyper-tumors, which are tiered tumors where a "child tumor" grows out of a "parent tumor" (non-scientific terms that I slapped in for explanatory power), and winds up protecting the host by choking off the blood supply to the parent tumor, killing off both itself and the parent tumor in the process. Some research suggests that larger and longer-lived animals are more likely to develop hypertumors, which means they're less likely to become ill from cancer. Overall, however, the solution to Peto's Paradox remains unknown.
Here is the video:
-h/t RealClear Science
- Microsoft to introduce a free tier of its Cosmos DB NoSQL database - Should be live by the time this post gets scheduled. The release was accidentally preannounced from Twitter on March 4, but becomes official on March 6. This product joins other freemium products from Microsoft including Teams and Power BI. Officials emphasized that this is not free for a limited time, but instead, it is free forever.
- Twitter is testing tweets that last just 24 hours, called “fleets” - Twitter has begun testing in Brazil with its own version of "stories" like the ones on Instagram and Snapchat. These so-called "fleets" will only last for a period of 24 hours, and then get deleted automatically. The feature doesn't come as a surprise, because the firm has already been testing it internally for more than a year. Twitter says that they're going in this direction because people want their social media to be less permanent. This comes at a time when LinkedIn is also working on a similar feature for its platform. Critics contend that the transient nature of the communications makes it harder for law enforcement to collect evidence, and might encourage abuse on the platform.
- Brave now protects users from being fingerprinted by making them appear subtly different to each website. - Last minute add-on, just prior to scheduling this post. From the article:
Brave is releasing a new form of browser fingerprinting protection, available today (March 5) in our Nightly version. These new protections both provide the strongest fingerprinting protections of any popular browser, and work without introducing bothersome permission prompts or breaking websites.
Brave’s approach differs from existing fingerprinting protection tools by randomizing fingerprintable values in ways that are imperceptible to humans, but which confuse fingerprints. As trackers switch from traditional cookie based tracking to fingerprinting, having practical and effective fingerprinting protections will be an increasingly important way to maintaining a user serving, privacy-respecting Web. - Steem @tomlee: Concepts of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD): Causes, Symptoms and Treatments - In this essay, the author covers the topic of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), also known as "battle fatigue" or "shell shock". The disorder is described as a reaction to a traumatic experience such as physical or sexual assault, natural disaster, war, or accident. However, it says that not all people who experience such events go on to develop PTSD. Instead, the ones who experience some form of assault are more likely to develop it. Symptoms of PTSD typically emerge about three months after the traumatic incident, and they include difficulties with: intrusive memories, avoidance, arousal and reactivity, as well as cognition or mood. Some treatment options for people who experience PTSD include cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), prolonged exposure therapy, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), stress inoculation training, and medications - including anti-depressants. (A 10% beneficiary setting has been applied to this post for @tomlee.)
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