I remember reading about a year ago how thieves have been seen using BLE scanner apps walking through parking garages looking for computers and phones to steal. Even in "sleep state" many of them are discoverable through bluetooth.
From what I understand, ransomware insurance is already a thing. With the policy you get someone who negotiates the price and pays the ransom directly to the ransomware gang, which bypasses some laws against paying ransomware directly.
In theory, this helps with lower prices, negotiated support policies with the ransomware criminals to ensure the decryption process goes well, and they keep cryptocurrency available so the policy holding company doesn't have to scramble to get millions of dollars in crypto in a day or two.
Similar to kidnapping negotiators, ransomware negotiators often have the experience to produce a better outcome
It's getpocket.com, actually. The io one is just a domain for sale.
You know, I was furious about the pocket integration and partnership when it first happened almost six years ago. I didn't like the idea of third-party integrations. I was also mad that they didn't bow to pressure from the community and remove the integration...
But now, I kind of respect Mozilla for keeping it despite the community pressure. They were making money with the partnership, and money from sources OTHER than Google is a good thing.
After two years of this, Mozilla realized that Pocket was making so much money on paid memberships that it was smarter to use some of their war-chest to buy Pocket outright.
That's right, Pocket is owned by Mozilla now and has been for 4 years. [1]
Now it's an important part of their financials. In their Auditors report covering all of 2019 [2], they say "Mozilla’s subscription revenues primarily consist of revenue from subscriptions to a service known as Pocket Premium". The subscription revenue for 2019 was over 14 million, triple what it was in 2018.
This makes me more comfortable because I don't mind, in theory, subscribing to services that actually fund Mozilla.
Yeah thanks for mentioning that. The pocket integration would come across better if they put it under the mozilla domain name. I installed Firefox for the first time in a while about a month ago. I plugged it into a proxy to see what it does. When I saw all the Pocket telemetry I was afraid they had gone the Dell "bundling" route, until I looked it up and discovered it was owned by Mozilla.
This looks very promising. I use several self-hosted solutions to handle several of the things this provides.
The one thing that will keep me using Monica instead of this is the ability to access my contact info and their birthdays using CardDav and CalDav. CalDav for the Calendar would also be very useful.
Cloudflare lets you create custom error pages [1]. I would recommend making one for any geo-restricted pages. The benefit is that you can emulate your site theme and have an opportunity to explain the reasoning for the geographic restrictions.
I find it interesting that there were spikes of readings at certain times of day and night. Coupled with the information that the apartments have a VoC barrier, my intuition is that there is a timer somewhere that turns on a fan to clear out the VoC capture space created by the barrier and exhaust the contaminated air to the outside.
If the VoC that's bothering her is heavier than air, it could be being blown upwards from the ground level and then settling back over the building and falling back down and finding its way back into her apartment somehow, like through the range hood, dryer exhaust, plumbing stacks, open windows, or just cracks due to poor craftsmanship.
If she was still at the site, I would recommend looking for what appears to be an exhaust vent of some kind that might be tied to the VOC barrier system and putting a sensor there and seeing if the readings correlate to the timeline of unusual readings in her home
I had a condo in San Francisco. The building was on an old gas station site. The site remediation included a vapor barrier placed below the foundation, and a vent pipe from the soil to 10 feet (I don't remember the exact height, but it was prescripted in the permit) over the roof. Said soil vent had a fan that ran nightly exactly as you suggest, again prescripted by the permit to continue for at least 10 years. So I find this quite plausible. Perhaps her apartment was next to a similar vent pipe which had a leak.
Gas stations are this big elephant that nobody speaks of. Essentially every gas station site has polluted soil that makes the site either uninhabitable or uneconomical to remediate.
Huh, that's really surprising. How does it happen? I assume it has something to do with gasoline, but I was under the assumption that most of the gasoline at gas stations was stored in giant underground concrete containers.
Fuel tanks leak. Cars leak. Waste fluids (fuel, oil, brake fluid, transmission fluid, coolant, refrigerant) leak and are improperly disposed of. Fuel spills when being pumped in or out of tanks.
Until 1996, leaded gasoline was generally legal in the United States (California phased it out in 1992). It remains legal as avgas and possibly for some specialised uses. Tetraeythyl lead is a toxic heavy metal compound thought to be a factor in the rise in urban crime, a phenomenon which traces its use and phase-out closely, though lagged about 20 years.
Among the compounds used as an alternative to lead was MTBE (Methyl tert-butyl ether), an oxygenate and ground-water contaminant, itself banned as a fuel additive in 2004 (2002 in California), though again it remains legal for other uses.
Petrol (gasoline) itself is often formulated with numerous other additives, and "is a mixture of a large number of different hydrocarbons", averaging hydrocarbon length of about 5-6. ("Naptha", shorter chains make more volatile fuels, longer chains heavier, e.g., kerosene, diesel fuel, fuel oil, bunker oil. "Octane" is an 8-chain compound with lower volatility, increasing the ignition point and reducing engine knocking due to premature ignition.) Various of the naturally-occuring, added, and refining-induced compounds themselves may be harmful or toxic, and include VOCs.
Generally the tanks are fiberglass. I don't know why they leak. From reading site reports, my impression is these leaks are usually detected by the tax authorities, who can see that the reported sales of fuel don't add up to the reported deliveries of fuel. See page 40 of this report for an idea of what an underground fuel tank looks like.
There's an old illustration from Popular Mechanics that suggests dumping used motor oil into holes in the ground. At one time that was considered a reasonable way to dispose of it.
Nuclear power is expensive and complicated, but not inherently so. A lot of the causes of the problem is political decisions and bureaucratic processes.
There are many designs for nuclear reactors that are simpler, safer, and more suitable for smaller communities, but various government nuclear regulation agencies around the world have such a high bar for entry that those designs will never be put into practice.
In the US, if you want to operate a nuclear reactor, the design has to be vetted first. To vet the reactor, you have to convince the agency to let you build a full-scale test reactor and convince them that the design is likely safe before building the test reactor. If anything about the test reactor makes them uncomfortable, the design will be denied and the reactor won't be allowed to operate and cannot work as a template for future reactors.
This creates a very difficult and expensive bar for entry into the market. For a large reactor, a company would have to invest billions of dollars for a decade before they could even begin to hope to operate to pay back the loans, and even then there is no guarantee that they'll be allowed to operate the reactor to sell the electricity.
That is, unless they use one of the existing pre-approved reactor concepts that were designed in the 70's and have known flaws (albeit, with known ways to reduce the risks of those flaws)
Nuclear radiation might be damaging, but it's not really a big deal as long as the design prevents accidents and there are safeguards to prevent the uncontrolled release of radiation.
You are incorrect about the availability of uranium. There is a LOT of uranium available for use, and we could run entirely on it for thousands, or tens-of-thousands of years. Many mines are shut down simply because there is far more supply than demand.
Solar is an excellent source of energy, with long life spans of the equipment but it's only functional for anywhere from 6 to 16 hours a day, depending on your latitude and the weather. The ideal places for solar farms are often far from the highest concentrations of consumers.
Wind is also great, but it wears out fast because of the moving parts and friction, even the friction of the air moving across the blades wears them down. It's not uncommon for lifespans to just last a decade.
Both wind and solar suffer from risk because manufacturing predominately takes place over seas and trade wars, or real war, could interrupt supply. For solar, that's not as big of a deal for existing infrastructure, but for wind it could cause problems.
Our grid, in the US, is pretty interconnected. There are improvements that can be made, but it's pretty redundant in general.
The ideal solution would be small but safer nuclear reactors, no bigger than an office building, that can supply power to 50k or 100k homes. Place them within 20 miles of urban centers.
The problem is that it takes a lot of political will to build a nuclear power plant because everyone is afraid of that. Bigger plants are often desired because plant owners need to invest the decade and tens of millions of dollars getting not just approval from the NRC, but approval from the people and government within 20 miles of the plant.
Smaller and safer plants might be cheaper to build, but there is no savings when it comes to that approval and acceptance process.
> You are incorrect about the availability of uranium. There is a LOT of uranium available for use, and we could run entirely on it for thousands, or tens-of-thousands of years. Many mines are shut down simply because there is far more supply than demand.
This is interesting. I thought without breeder reactors and continued widespread nuclear use we would run out in ~50 years. Maybe you have more current sources.
> Wind is also great, but it wears out fast because of the moving parts and friction, even the friction of the air moving across the blades wears them down. It's not uncommon for lifespans to just last a decade.
Yes and I additionally worry about the fiber material being slowly rubbed off and being spread downstream by the wind (google wind turbine leading edge erosion). Because wind turbines on land are often built on farming land. Thus I put a lot of hope in improved wind "turbine" designs like: https://vortexbladeless.com/technology-design/
> Our grid, in the US, is pretty interconnected. There are improvements that can be made, but it's pretty redundant in general.
I thought the US grid is pretty old and some parts (Texas?) are on their own. Maybe investments in that area could help, in addition to storage (mechanical or hydrogen connected with solar).
> Both wind and solar suffer from risk because manufacturing predominately takes place over seas and trade wars, or real war, could interrupt supply. For solar, that's not as big of a deal for existing infrastructure, but for wind it could cause problems.
Combine this statement (risk of "real war") with this suggestion...
> The ideal solution would be small but safer nuclear reactors, no bigger than an office building, that can supply power to 50k or 100k homes. Place them within 20 miles of urban centers.
...and you get great savings in making that hated opponents main population centers uninhabitable and the irradiated ruins a monument to remember. Even if only by unfortunate "accident". In WW2 cities were burned down using "firestorm" tactics here in Germany. I heard the anniversary bells ring an annoyingly long time a few days back in the rebuilt city of Würzburg... why would humanity change character and suddenly become more civil in the next conflict?
> Smaller and safer plants might be cheaper to build, but there is no savings when it comes to that approval and acceptance process.
I agree that this is probably due to the hard lessons learned from the risks in older experimental and larger commercial designs. But are we willing to learn the hard lessons of 10000s (or more) of handy, small reactors spread in everyones backyard?
Better put some solar panels on some roofs and hydrogen metal hydride storage in a few basements. Maybe not under a school or kindergarden or the likes.
A grid like this could be made incredibly resilient and hard to destroy by any opponent.
I think it might just be a way for staff at embassies to make some money on the side. Embassy employees are allowed to import vehicles without paying import duties or taxes.
Buying a car every month or two and reselling it to auto dealers could provide a reasonable profit.
A few years ago, tariffs accounted for 25% of a cars price for SUV's and Light-Duty Trucks from the EU. I'm not sure if it's changed since the new administration has started.
I get that you're trying to say that Ransomware is a kind of evolutionary pressure to force IT ecosystems to adapt and improve, but that's far from saying it should be legal.
It's like trying to justify armed robbery as a method of convincing people to take self defense lessons, or burglary as a method to get people to upgrade their windows to lexan.
The middle ground, which is always a bit in flux, does already exist. It's known as Bug/Security bounties, similar to what HackerOne tries to make above-board.
