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Tuesday Morning: I Don’t Want It Good

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I don’t want it good. I want it Tuesday.
— Jack Warner

Pretty sure Mr. Warner would get it just the way he wanted it today.

Surprise: Saudis and Russia agree mutual economic destruction = bad
Expect a rocky market today after a hush-hush agreement by Saudi Arabia and Russia to hold oil production levels to January levels. The FTSE and Brent crude have already taken a hit, though why Brent’s price dropped when supply firmed/tightened makes no sense to me. Good thing I’m not a commodities broker.

Predictable outcome: Dropbox account hacked, contents posted, then teacher fired
I feel awful for this poor teacher, whose privacy was violated and his job lost after someone hacked his Dropbox account, then posted a personal sex tape on his school’s website. Unfortunately, this is another painful real-life lesson: Do NOT store content in the cloud if the content hurt you if leaked.

Shaken by a quake? There’s an app for that
UC Berkeley Seismological Lab released an Android app called MyShake. The application detects vibration fitting earth tremor profiles and reports them to the lab for diagnostics. Enough data combined with other seismic monitoring can confirm an earthquake. The Seismological Lab hopes to build a global seismic detection network which can help detect earthquakes before they begin. With enough advance notice, humans may be able to reduce damage and injury. The Lab says the app runs silently in your phone’s background and doesn’t use up the battery, but this seems like an impossibility. Only one way to find out, though, and only one way for the lab to improve the app’s performance. An iOS version is expected in the near future.

Volkswagen fined by Mexico over emissions — but not the defeat device
Looks like VW imported more than 45,000 vehicles into Mexico without dotting all the Is and crossing all the Ts. The automaker has been fined nearly $9 million dollars (168 million pesos) for failing to obtain mandatory emission and noise certifications. Sounds like VW needs to overhaul its management culture.

Air-gapped computers may not be safe from hacking
A team of researchers from Tel Aviv University and Technion identified a means for hacking air-gapped computers in a completely separate room in order to snag data. Their method only required an antenna, amplifiers, a software-defined radio, and a laptop to measure electromagnetic waves created by a target computer as it deciphered a specific message.

There it is: it ain’t good, but you’ve got it on a Tuesday.

Monday Morning: Java Junky Jonesing

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This morning will not launch without coffee. I don’t care how you deliver it, just bring it or nothing will start and finish today without it.

Need more of it than usual given the wacky stuff I’ve been reading into the wee hours over the weekend — like this stuff:

Former DHS Secretary now University of California prez surveils staff emails
Holy cats. This is ugly. After an alleged network security breach in June last year at UCLA’s medical center, an outside party was contracted by University of California president Janet Napolitano to monitor networks at all of University of California’s campuses. Collection of content both inbound and outbound, in violation of UoC-Berkeley’s IT policy, is alleged. UCOP has been opaque about the reason for the monitoring or data collection. Keep an eye on this case.

DDoS attack on HSBC crimps UK freelancers’ tax filing
The end of January in the United Kingdom is the filing deadline for the self-employed. Unfortunately, those who banked with HSBC lost access to their records for roughly four hours on Friday due to a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. It’s the second service outage inside a month for HSBC. The last outage lasted roughly two days but was not attributed to a DDoS.  If UK lawmakers were testy after the first outage in January, they’re going to be ugly today.

Oil crash: massive wealth transfer, or increased dependency on oil?
Francisco Blanch, Commodities and Derivatives Strategist at BofA Merrill Lynch, claims plummeting oil prices have transferred roughly $3 trillion to consumers away from oil producers, and the resulting uptick in consumption will spur the economy. This assumption neatly ignores the likelihood consumers will have to pay one way or another for increasing losses due to unchecked climate change. Buying more insurance against weather damage and paying more taxes to replace infrastructure, as well as paying more for food due to crop losses won’t stimulate anything but consumer frustration.

War of words inside military about F-35’s readiness
In a December memo, the Defense Department’s director of operational test and evaluation Michael Gilmore wrote that the Joint Program Office’s July 2017 deadline for the F-35 jet’s full warfighting capability is “not realistic.” Software completion, testing and debugging is the risk. Folks in JPO are pushing back, with at least one official grousing online. So not cool, JPO. Address the concerns and then get to work on that software. Americans are paying for a working jet, not trash talk on Facebook.

Speaking of military…Sonic boom(s) caused minor earthquake in New Jersey
Just for fun, browse through a Twitter search for tweets from last Friday. Something caused more than one sonic boom — perhaps as many as nine — loud enough to register as an earthquake on USGS’ meters. At first, the military said it knew nothing about it, claiming there are no training exercises or other missions in the area. NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility-Virginia, Federal Aviation Administration, and the North American Aerospace Defense Command had no knowledge of flights in the area capable of generating sonic booms. But then the Navy piped up later, saying the Naval Test Wing Atlantic had been conducting test flights. Though not named, the F-35 fighter is believed to be the source of the booms. Were JPO and Lockheed Martin trying to make a rather loud and indiscreet point?

Or were the sonic booms due to some other unknown/unspecified cause, given Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst’s inability to explain the booms when asked? USGS’ website is still taking feedback from folks in New Jersey — did you feel the earth move, too?

Time to taper off from espresso and move to an Americano. Hope your Monday is as caffeinated as you need it to be.