World science fiction collection offered by Story Bundle

The bundle contains at least four collections of short stories, and many of the books look quite interesting. I'm a big fan of short story collections as it gives you good samples of lots of writers or lots of samples of hopefully a good writer.

The bundle is up for another 22 days. You can designate part of your purchase to a charity, English PEN, whose motto is 'Freedom to write, freedom to read.'

The books are DRM-free and conveniently come down in one zip, rather than having to click 20 download links and hope you got them all. All of the books seem to be standalone rather than a later part of a series, though they may be set in existing author worlds.

https://storybundle.com/scifi

Selected reviews of the books:
Unto the Godless What Little Remains by Mário Coelho: "Rock'n'roll for the eyes." – The Times

Signal to Noise by Silvia Moreno-Garcia: "Haunting and beautifully nuanced, Signal to Noise is a magical first novel." – The Guardian

Ion Curtain by Anya Ow: "An addictive space opera" – Publishers Weekly

Nova Hellas: Stories from Future Greece by Francesca T Barbini and Francesco Verso: "Often underwater, sometimes entirely virtual, facing calamities from austerity to beepocalypse, near future Greece comes to life in these stories. Forget everything you learned in school, on vacation, or from the faded memories of your immigrant γιαγιά. Λοιπόν, this is the real deal." – Nick Mamatas, author of The Planetbreaker's Son and The Second Shooter

The Love Machine & Other Contraptions by Nir Yaniv: "In short, this collection of short stories is: outstanding. Buy more copies than one if you give special books to people you respect... I don't mean 'outstanding' in relation to other books this year, but in relation to any in any." – World Fantasy Award nomineee Anna Tambour

& This is How to Stay Alive by Shingai Njeri Kagunda: "A beautiful and rending look at family, loss, and grief, all while sharply dissecting time travel tropes and delivering a powerful message about memory, storytelling, and responsibility. It's a story that hurts in the best of ways, confronting death and healing without losing its sense of humor or its impulse for rebellion." – Charles Payseur, author of The Burning Day and Other Stories

And What Can We Offer You Tonight by Premee Mohamed: "And What Can We Offer You Tonight is a deep dive into sacred revenge, a vivid, devastating and exquisite story of love and loyalty, among three friends who can ill afford such luxuries." – L.X. Beckett, author of Gamechanger and Dealbreaker

Hadithi & the State of Black Speculative Fiction by Eugen Bacon and Milton Davis: "Eugen Bacon and Milton Davis come together for Hadithi & The State of Speculative Black Fiction to share a compelling addition to the commentaries and canon of black literature" – Aurealis

Of Dragons, Feasts and Murders by Aliette de Bodard: "Delightful… Beautiful writing, weird and magical world, fascinating culture and politics, and compelling characters: what more do you need?" – KJ Charles, author of Slippery Creatures

HebrewPunk by Lavie Tidhar: "Imagine Hard-Boiled Kabbalah... If you like your otherworld fun noir, have I got a book for you!" – Kage Baker, author of In the Garden of Iden

Bitcoin ATMs (BATMs) hit with zero-day exploit, people lose $1.5mil in cryptocurrency

First off, terms: A Zero-Day is an exploitable flaw or flaws that the software makers don't know about, and therefore, it hasn't been fixed. Sometimes it takes multiple zero-days being chained together to truly exploit a system.

Bitcoin Wallet: a wallet is where you store the crypto keys that identify you as holding bitcoins. There are two types, Hot and Cold. A Cold Wallet is not available on the internet and is fairly safe. But a BATM needs a Hot Wallet to access your funds, which is connected to the internet.

What happened here was that the BATMs were vulnerable to exploits, and were hit. The exploits let the attackers get to the administrative interface, which gave them access to logs that included crypto keys, which gave them access to people's hot wallets which were then hit.

As the article says: "The incident underscores the risk of storing cryptocurrencies in Internet-accessible wallets, commonly called hot wallets. Over the years, hot wallets have been illegally drained of untold amounts of digital coin by attackers who exploit various vulnerabilities in cryptocurrency infrastructures or by tricking wallet holders into providing the encryption keys required to make withdrawals.

Security practitioners have long advised people to store funds in cold wallets, meaning they’re not directly accessible to the Internet. Unfortunately, BATMs and other types of cryptocurrency ATMs generally can’t follow this best practice because the terminals must be connected to hot wallets so that they can make transactions in real time. That means BATMs are likely to remain a prime target for hackers."

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/03/hackers-drain-bitcoin-atms-of-1-5-million-by-exploiting-0-day-bug/

Why you should opt out of sharing data with your mobile provider

An excellent article on how your private data gets shared and what you can do about it.

The WHY you should is pretty simple: 9 million AT&T customers were compromised in a hack at an advertising affiliate, T-Mobile has had 70 million accounts compromised in the last decade or so, etc.

These data breeches are so common as to be ridiculous. And that information can be used against you in possible fraud schemes. As an article that I posted recently said, Americans lost a record amount to fraud schemes in 2022, and breeches like these help fuel said schemes.

The article explains how to opt-OUT of data sharing for the Big Three: AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2023/03/why-you-should-opt-out-of-sharing-data-with-your-mobile-provider/

DirecTV puts Newsmax back on its services

Shows the power of lobbying when the lobbyist is a former U.S. Senator with lots of friends still in office who can threaten all sorts of regulatory difficulties.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/03/directv-puts-newsmax-back-on-the-air-after-republicans-angry-protests/

Beethoven's genome analyzed!

Very interesting stuff. The scientists/researchers had multiple hair samples available to them with varying levels of provenance and chain of ownership. The analysis showed many things, among which he was suffering from Hep-B. No solid conclusions as to what caused his deafness.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/03/beethovens-genome-sequenced-for-first-time-yields-clues-on-cause-of-death/

A sad day for photographers: the DPReview web site is going away

The worst part is that they were bought up by Amazon. Amazon is shedding jobs and trying to cut costs, and this is one casualty.

I'm hoping the founders might start up another similar site in the near future, and avoid any ties with Amazon!

https://www.dpreview.com/news/5901145460/dpreview-com-to-close

This year's Turing Award goes to the co-inventor of Ethernet, Dr. Bob Metcalfe

The Slashdot summary: "In June 1972, Bob Metcalfe, a 26-year-old engineer fresh out of graduate school, joined a new research lab in Palo Alto, Calif., as it set out to build something that few people could even imagine: a personal computer. After another engineer gave up the job, Dr. Metcalfe was asked to build a technology that could connect the desktop machines across an office and send information between them. The result was Ethernet, a computer networking technology that would one day become an industry standard. For decades, it has connected PCs to servers, printers and the internet in corporate offices and homes across the globe.

For his work on Ethernet, the Association for Computing Machinery, the world's largest society of computing professionals, announced on Wednesday that Dr. Metcalfe, 76, would receive this year's Turing Award. Given since 1966 and often called the Nobel Prize of computing, the Turing Award comes with a $1 million prize. When Dr. Metcalfe arrived at the Palo Alto Research Center -- a division of Xerox nicknamed PARC -- the first thing he did was connect the lab to the Arpanet, the wide-area network that later morphed into the modern internet. The Arpanet transmitted information among about 20 academic and corporate labs across the country. But as PARC researchers designed their personal computer, called the Alto, they realized they needed a network technology that could connect personal computers and other devices within an office, not over long distances."

I am really happy to see Bob get this recognition - it is certainly well-earned - and very glad that they gave it to him while he's still alive! Too many very important people in the history of computing did not receive proper acknowledgement of their contributions prior to their death.

The invention of Ethernet was core to networking computers together, we probably wouldn't have the internet in its current form without it. While there are other networking standards, or were - most fell by the wayside - they didn't really have the scalability to connect literally billions of devices together. While I kinda doubt Bob envisioned anything like the internet that we enjoy when he invented it and was working on ARPAnet, it is something to see a technology grow.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/22/technology/turing-award-bob-metcalfe-ethernet.html

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/23/03/22/1356221/turing-award-won-by-co-inventor-of-ethernet-technology

While Ethernet provides the backbone for the internet, the World Wide Web was invented at CERN in Switzerland in 1989 by Dr. Tim Berners-Lee. It became open to the public two years later. Tim invented the HTTP standard to make it easier for scientists within CERN to share information, and it kinda grew.