In the dog days of last week, a shadowy group of secret sources in U.S. Cyber Command whispered to reporters that they’d disrupted a huge, ransomware-spewing botnet. Trickbot, closely related to Emotet and Ryuk, is believed to be managed by Russian criminals.
But today, Microsoft and friends are saying the disruption was actually down to them—awks. The consortium of industry players has developed a new legal mechanism to remove the botnet’s servers from the net and they say it’s working.
They’re basically using international copyright law to do takedowns, arguing that “malicious use” of Windows and Office is actionable in court. In today’s SB Blogwatch, we DMCA ur C2 and pwn ur zombies.
August was the second-highest month for sales ever.
Colorado has seen over $1.1 billion in marijuana sales since the COVID-19 pandemic began in this country, according to figures from the state Department of Revenue.
Legal marijuana sales topped $200 million in August for the second month in a row, reaching the second-highest monthly total since recreational sales started in 2014. Counting back to March of this year, when Colorado and the rest of the nation began shutting down over the pandemic, dispensaries have sold over $1.1 billion in marijuana products — and that’s not counting sales in September and October.
Dispensaries sold over $218.6 million worth of marijuana products in August, DOR data shows. Recreational sales accounted for more than $176.5 million (also the second-highest monthly total since 2014), while medical marijuana sales remained strong at just over $42 million.
International Business Machines, still the legal name of century-plus-old IBM, has managed over the years to pull off a dubious feat. Despite selling goods and services in one of the most dynamic industries in the world, the IT sector the company helped create, it has managed to avoid growing.
The company that was synonymous with mainframes, that dominated the early days of the personal computer (a “PC” once meant a device that ran software built to IBM’s technical standards), and that reinvented itself as a tech-consulting goliath, lagged while upstarts and a few of its old competitors zoomed past it.
What IBM excelled at more often was marketing a version of its aspirational self. Its consultants would advise urban planners on how to create “smart cities.” Its command of artificial intelligence, packaged into a software offering whose name evoked its founding family, would cure cancer. Its CEO would wow the Davos set with cleverly articulated visions of how corporations could help fix the ills of society.
What IBM did not do was grow or participate sufficiently in the biggest trend in business-focused IT, cloud computing. Now, in the words of veteran tech analyst Toni Sacconaghi of research shop Bernstein, new IBM CEO Arvind Krishna is pursuing a strategy of “growth through subtraction.” The company is spinning off its IT outsourcing business, a low-growth, low-margin portion of its services business that rings up $19 billion in annual sales. Krishna told Aaron and Fortune writer Jonathan Vanian that he plans to bulk back up after the spinoff via acquisitions. “We’re open for business,” he said.
The move is bold, if risky. The reason it took so long, and presumably a new leader, to jettison the outsourcing business is that it was meant to drive sales of IBM hardware and other services. But Krishna, promoted for his association with IBM’s nascent cloud-computing effort—just as Microsoft Satya Nadella ran his company’s cloud arm before taking the top job—recognizes that only by discarding a moribund business can IBM focus and invest properly in the one that matters.
IBM CEO Arvind Krishna is spinning off IBM’s IT outsourcing services unit to focus on cloud and quantum computing.
Ira Pastor, ideaXme life sciences ambassador, interviews Bakary Tandia, Co-Founder of the Abolition Institute, a group working to promote awareness of, and dedicated to ending, the practice of slavery in the west African country of Mauritania.
Slavery and enslavement are defined of the state and condition of being a slave, where the individual cannot quit their service to another person and is treated like property.
In chattel slavery, the enslaved person is legally rendered the personal property of the slave owner. In economics, the term de facto slavery describes the conditions of unfree labor and forced labor that most slaves endure. In the course of human history, while slavery was often a feature of civilization and legal in most societies, it is now outlawed in all countries of the world.
In 2019, approximately 40 million people, of whom 26 percent were children, were enslaved throughout the world despite it being illegal. In the modern world, more than 50 percent of enslaved people provide forced labor, usually in the factories and sweatshops of the private sector of a country’s economy. In the industrialized countries, human trafficking is the modern variety of slavery; in the unindustrialized countries, enslavement by debt bondage is a common form of enslaving a person, such as captive domestic servants, forced marriage, and child soldiers.
Modern day slavery is a multibillion-dollar industry with just the forced labor aspect generating US $150 billion each year.
Bakary Tandia:
Bakary Tandia is a well-respected and dynamic human rights advocate with an extensive background in promoting human rights and social justice causes and Co-Founder of the Abolition Institute, a group working to promote awareness of, and dedicated to ending, the practice of slavery in the west African country of Mauritania, where it is estimated that around 90,000 people (over 2% of Mauritania’s population) are chattel slaves.
Psilocybin startup Compass Pathways goes public at more than $1B. Here’s why Wall Street is starting to see the value in psychedelics.
For several years, investors and psychonauts have predicted that psychedelic medicine would become the next billion-dollar industry, with some value estimates as high as $100 billion. They said substances like MDMA or psilocybin mushrooms would follow a similar regulatory path that cannabis took to the mainstream, going from a Schedule 1 narcotic to a legal, regulated, and highly lucrative medicine.
At least some of these predictions have rung true. On September 18th, Compass Pathways Plc., a London-based company developing psilocybin into a prescription drug in assisted psychotherapy, went public, listing on Nasdaq. The company’s stock jumped 71 percent on its first day of trading and is now estimated to be worth $1.3 billion. Compass Pathways declined to comment for this article. Numinus Wellness Inc and Champignon Brands Inc are two other psychedelic companies that have gone public this year.
Berlin, 27 September 2020. – A New York bankruptcy judge has sent OneWeb’s Chapter 11 plan for creditor vote and approved OneWeb’s financing plan, Law360 reported.
“A New York bankruptcy judge on Wednesday sent OneWeb Global’s $181 million equity-swap Chapter 11 plan to a creditor vote while approving $235 million in new financing that the satellite internet startup said will go toward restarting its launch program,” Law 360 reported.
According to the report, OneWeb’s counsel told U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Robert Drain that it had secured full creditor consent for the plan.
RS: The third world war is at our gate, and it will be about water, if we don’t do something about this crisis. These walks are to raise awareness—this year we covered 17 countries, and in nine of them there were displaced people. So many people in the Middle East and African countries are moving to places like Europe, in part because of water scarcity—after forced migration comes, tension, conflict, and terrorism. Where terrorism is active, there is usually a scarcity of water. Look at Syria—a long time ago, it had very good agriculture, but then Turkey built a dam that changed things. It’s a similar story with Libya. If we want a safe future, we need to start conserving water.
What role can regulation play in conservation? Do you think privatizing water is a good way to promote its efficient use?
RS: If we really think about legal changes, we have to first think about river rights, or the rights of nature, and only then about water rights for humans. This type of thinking doesn’t exist today but we need this kind of legal framework that assures that the land of the river is only for the river, that the flow of the river is kept clean, and that the river has greenery on both banks to prevent erosion and silting. Only with all these factors can we ensure that rivers are healthy and only then that we are healthy.
Axiom Space Inc. is a Houston, Texas start-up, founded by Michael Suffredini who served as NASA’s International Space Station (ISS) Program Manager from 2005 to 2015. He was responsible for overseeing ISS transition from assembly to the initiation of commercial operations. Axiom is mostly staffed by NASA ex-employees, including former NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. – “The leadership team also includes world-class, specialized expertise in commercial utilization of microgravity, on-orbit operations, astronaut training, space financing, engineering, space system architecture/design/development, space medicine, marketing, and law,” the company states. Together, they are all working towards the commercialization of space.
Axiom aims to build a space station in low Earth orbit to continue operations once NASA retires the ISS program and moves beyond the orbiting laboratory to focus operations on the lunar surface. The company also offers spaceflights for regular civilians to experience microgravity and amazing views of Earth from ISS. “While making access to Low Earth Orbit global during the remainder of ISS’ lifetime, Axiom is constructing the future platform that will serve as humanity’s permanently growing home, scientific and industrial complex in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) – the cornerstone of human activity in space,” company states on its website.
13.8000000000 years ago, a speck of energy burst into life. We call it the big bang space and time pushed out in all directions ever since our universe has expanded. But the way it’s expanding makes finding an edge a major challenge. Universe is expanding and expands, according to a very simple law that the farther way the galaxy is from us. the faster it appears to be receding away from us. The furthest galaxies are moving at very high speeds. the most distant galaxy we’ve ever spotted. GNC Eleven seems to have moved 32000000000 light years away from us in just 13.4000000000 years that’s faster than the speed of light. We can measure the speed with which galaxies are moving away from us and many galaxies are moving away from us at speeds faster than the speed of light. This sounds like it’s breaking the law right. There’s this idea that you’ve all been told that Relativity says nothing goes faster than the speed of light. Okay you’ve been lied to. Space itself can do it once it makes the rules it can break the rules that rule applies to matter not the space itself. space can expand at whatever it wants simple way to think of this expansion law is imagine standing on an infinite rubber sheet that stretches all the way out into the distance and you’re standing on the same place. you can mark it with a little X now all the sheet expands in every direction so it expands. Two another galaxy that will say one foot away from you is now two feet away from you as we stretch the sheet, but another galaxy was ten feet away from you expand that by a factor of two and now it’s twenty feet away from you. So in the same amount of time, one galaxy move one foot where another galaxy moved ten feet. so the more stuff there is the more elastic between you and another galaxy the more it seems to expand away from you. Expansion means our observable universe stretches for a colossal 46000000000 light years in all directions 92000000000 light years across. Getting bigger by the second. This number is so incomprehensible large that it’s difficult to wrap your brain around. there are trillions of galaxies within this volume. It’s staggering. It’s so much larger than anything we’re familiar with.
Berlin, 27 September 2020. – A New York bankruptcy judge has sent OneWeb’s Chapter 11 plan for creditor vote and approved OneWeb’s financing plan, Law360 reported.
