Reading.am | Chris Aldrich

🎧 “Risen” | Our Daily Bread | Eat This Podcast

Listened to Risen | Our Daily Bread 15 by

Jeremy Cherfas from Eat This Podcast

August 15th is Ferragosto, a big-time holiday in Italy that harks back to the Emperor Augustus and represents a well-earned rest after the harvest. It is also the Feast Day of the Assumption, the day on which, Catholics believe, the Virgin Mary was taken, body and soul, into heaven.

Is there a connection between them? And what does it have do with wheat?

Apologies to listeners in the southern hemisphere; this may not reflect your experience.

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I love the thesis given here and it most certainly fits.

It hasn’t gotten past me how much brilliance and thought went into the wonderful dense rich crumb that is the title of this episode. The audio is excellent as always, but I also notice there’s some fantastically overlaid background music that some may miss because it’s so subtly done. This is my favorite episode of the series so far.

The more I think about these episodes, which I like to listen to when I can devote my full attention rather than as background noise while I’m commuting or doing something else, I think they could be easily strung together to make a fantastic documentary.

🎧 Tech Was Supposed to Be Society’s Great Equalizer. What Happened? | Crazy/Genius | The Atlantic

Listened to Tech Was Supposed to Be Society’s Great Equalizer. What Happened? by

Derek Thompson from The Atlantic

In a special bonus episode of the podcast Crazy/Genius, the computer scientist and data journalist Meredith Broussard explains how “technochauvinism” derailed the dream of the digital revolution.

I was excited to hear Dr. Meredith Broussard, a brilliant colleague I’ve met via the Dodging the Memory Hole series of conferences, on this podcast from The Atlantic. I would recommend this special episode (one of their very best) to just about anyone. In particular there’s something to be gained in the people side of what the IndieWeb movement is doing as well as for their efforts towards inclusion.

From a broader perspective, I think there’s certainly something to be learned from not over-sensationalizing artificial intelligence. Looking at the history of the automobile as a new technology over a century ago is a pretty good parallel example. While it’s generally done a lot of good, the automobile has also brought along a lot of additional societal problems, ills, and costs with it as well.

I hadn’t yet heard about her new book Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World which I’m ordering a copy of today. I suspect that it’s in the realm of great books like Cathy O’Neill’s Weapons of Math Distraction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy which was also relevant to some of the topics within this podcast.

👓 The Cybersec World Is Debating Who to Believe in This Story About a Massive Hack | Motherboard | Vice

Read The Cybersec World Is Debating Who to Believe in This Story About a Massive Hack (Motherboard)

No one is really sure who to believe after Businessweek's bombshell story on an alleged Chinese supply chain attack against Apple, Amazon, and others.

👓 The breach that killed Google+ wasn’t a breach at all | The Verge

Read The breach that killed Google+ wasn’t a breach at all by Russell Brandom (The Verge)

A bug in the rarely used Google+ network has exposed private information for as many as 500,000 users. Should Google have shared more sooner?

👓 China Used a Tiny Chip in a Hack That Infiltrated U.S. Companies | Bloomberg

Read The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies by Jordan Robinson, Michael Riley (Bloomberg)

The attack by Chinese spies reached almost 30 U.S. companies, including Amazon and Apple, by compromising America’s technology supply chain, according to extensive interviews with government and corporate sources. In 2015, Amazon.com Inc. began quietly evaluating a startup called Elemental Technologies, a potential acquisition to help with a major expansion of its streaming video service, known today as Amazon Prime Video. Based in Portland, Ore., Elemental made software for compressing massive video files and formatting them for different devices. Its technology had helped stream the Olympic Games online, communicate with the International Space Station, and funnel drone footage to the Central Intelligence Agency. Elemental’s national security contracts weren’t the main reason for the proposed acquisition, but they fit nicely with Amazon’s government businesses, such as the highly secure cloud that Amazon Web Services (AWS) was building for the CIA.

👓 Project Strobe: Protecting your data, improving our third-party APIs, and sunsetting consumer Google+ | Google

Read Project Strobe: Protecting your data, improving our third-party APIs, and sunsetting consumer Google+ (Google)

Findings and actions from Project Strobe—a root-and-branch review of third-party developer access to Google account and Android device data and of our philosophy around apps’ data access.

👓 Typhus Outbreak Spreads To SGV | South Pasadena, CA Patch

Read Typhus Outbreak Spreads To SGV (South Pasadena, CA Patch)

About 20 residents in Pasadena have been sickened with flea-borne typhus. LA health officials confirmed an outbreak Downtown as well.