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Security News


TLS 1.3 is finalized and should start rolling out everywhere soon. Adoption is expected to be quick. Link

Burp continues to impress with its massive campaign of improvements and blog posts describing them. They recently just talked about how they’re adding point-and-shoot scan functionality, where you basically just select Scan from the interface and you get the type of interface you might see in a tool like WebInspect or NetSparker. This is functionality that was leaving them out of a number of purchase conversations, and now that they have it—combined with all the other functionality they’re adding—they just jumped even further ahead of the market. Definitely head over to the blog and check out all the various things they’re doing—including the new Dashboard and the new Crawler, which are probably the two most significant things I’ve seen so far. Link

Google has released a searchable database of US political ads. Link

Germany is considering acquiring its own nuclear weapons. Link

The State Department is quite concerned about the apparently very strange behavior of a new Russian satellite, with the implication being that it may be some sort of weapon. Link

Advisories: Adobe, Phillips Medical


Technology News


Amazon is supposedly looking to buy a movie theater chain. I see this as quite likely at some point, and I wouldn’t be surprised at all if the play was e-sports and a tie-in with Twitch. Yes, please. Bring it. Link

Google has given control of the cooling of a number of datacenters to an AI algorithm. Before it just made recommendations to humans, and now it’s being enabled to make the decisions itself. Link

Square has reduced its chip reader processing time by 44%, down to 2 seconds. Link

A team of researchers has constructed a single-atom transistor. Link

It’s taken massive collaboration and over 13 years, but we’ve finally sequenced the wheat genome. Evidently it’s actually five times larger than the human one, which is remarkable to me. Link

Walmart is looking remarkably strong in its fight against Amazon. Link


Human News


The Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) will be the world’s most powerful scope when it’s finished in 2024. It’ll be able to take images roughly ten times clearer than the Hubble telescope. Link

A massive meta-study finds a U-shaped association between carbohydrate consumption ratios and mortality. In short, getting too little or too much of your daily calories from carbohydrates increases your risk, and the magic number appeared to be around 50-55%. They also noted that risk is reduced further by getting your protein from plants rather than meats. Link

A new study just showed that reducing exercise in the legs of mice brought down the number of neural stem cells by 70%. Their conclusion seemed to be that exercise is critical for neural health, and that carrying weight on the legs is a big part of that. Link

NYU has made tuition completely free for all its medical students. I hope more schools follow, and not just for medical students. Link

Karma is a company that wants to help restaurants and grocery stores sell their unused food instead of wasting it. Link

Ketamine is continuing to show itself as a legitimate and effective treatment for serious depression. Link


Ideas, Trends, & Analysis


Stop hiring for culture fit. Link


Discovery


 This is the DEFCON 26 Media Server, containing the content from talks, music, videos, presentations, etc. Link

Some mathematical analysis shows that Napolean was the best general ever. Link

15 Tips on How to Use Curl in Linux Link

Singularity of Origin — A DNS Rebinding Attack Framework Link

The Psychology of Intelligence Analysis — A manual given to new intelligence analysts. Link


Notes


I just finished like 4 books, and I’m now reading Extreme Ownership, by Jocko Willink. The best one by far was Superforecasting, which is also this week’s recommendation. 


Recommendations


Superforecasting is the most important, practical book that I’ve read in perhaps 10 years. It’s a practical guide to removing bias in yourself and the teams you work in, for the purpose of being more accurate in how you think. You’d think it’d only be for people who make predictions, but it’s more universal than that. It’s about how to think as clearly as possible. Absolute must. Adjust your reading lists accordingly. Link
 

Aphorism


“People only see what they are prepared to see”.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson