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Tips, Links and Tidbits Newsletter

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Read or Condemn Yourself to Death by Ignorance

For those courageous souls brave enough to look and see what is,

who are unwilling to blindly accept

the lies and rules of tyrannical authority.


Wednesday 13th November 2019


G’day #Name#,

Hope this finds you fit and well.

Here is a sampling of what crossed my digital desk over the last week.

Take A Walk Not A Pill

Keystone Pipeline Leak

The World Needs More Smiles

Hackers Can Use Lasers to ’Speak’ to Your Amazon Echo or Google Home

Success Is Like An Iceberg

State of Ransomware in the U.S.: 2019 Report for Q1 to Q3

Masters In Fine Arts

No Jobs For Aussies

Travel With Tom

Thieves - Techniques They Use

Speech pathologist teaches her dog to use a soundboard and now it communicates in sentences

Doomsday Maps Of The World And The Billionaire Escape Plans

5 Common Recycling Mistakes

The Political Illiterate

I hope you get something from it!

Cheers!

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Take A Walk Not A Pill
 
Take A Walk Not A Pill
 
 
 

Excellent advice! Even just walking around your neighborhood and looking at things is healthy.

 
 
 
 
Keystone pipeline shut down after leaking oil in North Dakota and nobody’s talking about it
 
Keystone Pipeline Leak
 
 
 

This is why I opposed it in the first place.

 
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The World Needs More Smiles
 
The World Needs More Smiles
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
Hackers Can Use Lasers to ’Speak’ to Your Amazon Echo or Google Home
 
Security Google Echo
 
 
 

Here is a REALLY interesting development!

In the spring of last year, cybersecurity researcher Takeshi Sugawara walked into the lab of Kevin Fu, a professor he was visiting at the University of Michigan. He wanted to show off a strange trick he’d discovered. Sugawara pointed a high-powered laser at the microphone of his iPad—all inside of a black metal box, to avoid burning or blinding anyone—and had Fu put on a pair of earbuds to listen to the sound the iPad’s mic picked up. As Sugawara varied the laser’s intensity over time in the shape of a sine wave, fluctuating at about 1,000 times a second, Fu picked up a distinct high-pitched tone. The iPad’s microphone had inexplicably converted the laser’s light into an electrical signal, just as it would with sound.

Six months later Sugawara—visiting from the Tokyo-based University of Electro-Communications—along with Fu and a group of University of Michigan researchers have honed that curious photoacoustic quirk into something far more disturbing. They can now use lasers to silently “speak“ to any computer that receives voice commands—including smartphones, Amazon Echo speakers, Google Homes, and Facebook’s Portal video chat devices. That spy trick lets them send “light commands“ from hundreds of feet away; they can open garages, make online purchases, and cause all manner of mischief or malevolence. The attack can easily pass through a window, when the device’s owner isn’t home to notice a telltale flashing speck of light or the target device’s responses.

“It’s possible to make microphones respond to light as if it were sound,“ says Sugawara. “This means that anything that acts on sound commands will act on light commands.“

 
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Success Is Like An Iceberg
 
Success Is Like An Iceberg
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
State of Ransomware in the U.S.: 2019 Report for Q1 to Q3
 
 
 
 

In the first nine months of 2019, at least 621 government entities, healthcare service providers and school districts, colleges and universities were affected by ransomware. The attacks have caused massive disruption: municipal and emergency services have been interrupted, medical practices have permanently closed, ER patients have been diverted, property transactions halted, the collection of property taxes and water bills delayed, medical procedures canceled, schools closed and data lost.

Email and attachments and RDP continue to be the attack vectors of choice. The latter is vulnerable to ransomware via exploitation on unpatched systems, misconfigured security settings and brute force attacks on weak login credentials.

“There is no reason to believe that attacks will become less frequent in the near future,” said Fabian Wosar, CTO at Emsisoft. “Organizations have a very simple choice to make: prepare now or pay later.”

 
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Masters In Fine Arts
 
Masters In Fine Arts
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
No Jobs For Aussies
 
No Jobs For Aussies
 
 
 

Stupidity at a level of bloody amazing!

 
 
 
 
Travel With Tom
 
Travel With Tom
 
 
 

But as one commenter posted, he always makes it home!

 
 
 
 
Thieves - Techniques They Use
 
 
 
 

In public places where this could happen, keep your bag on your person or your hand on it.

Click the Read More button to view the video:

 
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Speech pathologist teaches her dog to use a soundboard and now it communicates in sentences
 
Christina And Stella
 
 
 

Christina Hunger, 26, is a speech-language pathologist in San Diego, California who believes that “everyone deserves a voice.”

Hunger works with one- and two-year-old children, many of which use adaptive devices to communicate. So she wondered what would happen if she taught her two-month-old puppy, a Catahoula/Blue Heeler named Stella, to do the same.

“If dogs can understand words we say to them, shouldn’t they be able to say words to us? Can dogs use AAC to communicate with humans?” she wondered.

Hunger and her fiancé Jake started simply by creating a button that said “outside” and then pressed it every time they said the word or opened the door. After a few weeks, every time Hunger said “outside,” Stella looked at the button.

Soon, Stella began to step on the button every time she wanted to go outside.

They soon added more buttons that say “eat,” “water,” “play,” “walk,” “no,” “come,” “help,” “bye,” and “love you.”

“Every day I spent time using Stella’s buttons to talk with her and teach her words just as I would in speech therapy sessions with children,” she wrote on her blog.

“Instead of rewarding Stella with a treat for using a button, we responded to her communication by acknowledging her message and responding accordingly. Stella’s voice and opinions matter just as our own do,” she continued.

If Stella’s water bowl is empty, she says “water.” If she wants to play tug of war, she says, “play.” She even began to tell friends “bye” if they put on their jackets by the door.

Stella soon learned to combine different words to make phrases.

One afternoon, shortly after daylight savings, she began saying “eat” at 3:00 pm. When Hunger didn’t respond with food, she said,“love you no” and walked out of the room.

Today, Stella has learned over 29 words and can combine up to five at a time to make a phrase or sentence.

“The way she uses words to communicate and the words she’s combining is really similar to a 2-year-old child,” Hunger says of her blog.

She believes her work has the potential to transform the bond between humans and dogs.

“I think how important dogs are to their humans,” Hunger says. “I just imagine how much deeper the bond will be.”

 
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Doomsday Maps Of The World And The Billionaire Escape Plans
 
Doomsday Map ANZO
 
 
 

Some interesting scenarios.

 
Button
 
 
 
5 Common Recycling Mistakes
 
Recycled_In_Bag
 
 
 

Most of us understand the need for recycling, and want to do the right thing by our community and planet. But sometimes it can be confusing. Should we be leaving the lids on bottles? Can we put milk cartons in the yellow bin?

 
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The Political Illiterate
 
The Political Illiterate
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Until next time,
dream big dreams,
plan out how to achieve them,
be continually executing your plans,
enlist people to your causes,
travel and/or read widely, preferably both,
all the while observing what you observe
rather than thinking what you are told to think,
think well of your fellow man,
take time to help your fellow man,
he sorely needs it and it will help you too,
eat food that is good for your body,
exercise your body,
take time to destress,
and do the important things
that make a difference -
they are rarely the urgent ones!

Tom

 
 

Most of the content herein has been copied from someone else. Especially the images. My goodness some people are talented at creating aesthetics! The small bits that are of my creation are Copyright 2014-2019 © by Tom Grimshaw - ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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