Technology

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

Needless but highly profitable forced-upgrades are the bread and butter of the tech industry.

As tensions between the U.S. and North Korea mount, the DHS and FBI have just issued a pair of technical alerts about cyber attacks which they say are sponsored by the North Korean government and that have been targeting the aerospace, telecommunications and financial industries since 2016.  According to the alert, North Korean hackers have used a type of malware referred to as “FALLCHILL” to gain entry to computer systems and compromise network systems.

In a whimsical, 100+ page report, meant to literally drum up interest in investing in an entirely new frontier, Bank of America tries to address the untapped "space" opportunity from the perspective investors. The Primer "sets out the challenges and opportunities posed by Space" and, predictably, concludes that lots of money is to be made, just call now to book your piece of timeshared monorail equity as "we are entering an exciting era in Space where we expect more advances in the next few decades than throughout human history." More:

Authored by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth blog,

An entire library of articles about Big Tech is coming out these days, and I find that much of it is written so well, and the ideas in them so well expressed, that I have little to add. Except, I think I may have the solution to the problems many people see. But I also have a concern that I don’t see addressed, and that may well prevent that solution from being adopted. If so, we’re very far away from any solution at all. And that’s seriously bad news.

Authored by Roger McNamee, op-ed via The Guardian,

The sad truth is that Facebook and Google have behaved irresponsibly in the pursuit of massive profits. And this has come at a cost to our health...

In an interview this week with Axios, Facebook’s original president, Sean Parker, admitted that the company intentionally sought to addict users and expressed regret at the damage being inflicted on children.