US Income Inequality Worsens, Widening to a New Gap
Some Voting Machines Still Have Decade-Old Vulnerabilities ; Why Japan's Trains Work So Well ; and More Picks
Some Voting Machines Still Have Decade-Old Vulnerabilities (DonkeyHotey)
From Wired: “The types of vulnerabilities participants [in Defcon’s Voting Village] found included poor physical security protections that could allow undetected tampering, easily guessable hardcoded system credentials, potential for operating system manipulations, and remote attacks that could compromise memory or integrity checks or cause denial of service.”
Google Faces Scrutiny From Congress, DOJ Over Plans to Encrypt DNS (DonkeyHotey)
The author writes, “Google’s bid to encrypt domain name requests appears to be raising hackles among American officials. The Wall Street Journal has learned that the House Judiciary Committee is investigating Google’s plans to implement DNS over TLS in Chrome, while the Justice Department has “recently received complaints” about the practice. While Google says it’s pushing for adoption of the technology to prevent spying and spoofing, House investigators are worried this would give the internet giant an unfair advantage by denying access to users’ data.”
Hunter Biden’s Legal, Socially Acceptable Corruption (Celia)
The author writes, “All too often, the scandal isn’t that the conduct in question is forbidden by federal law, but rather, how much scandalous conduct is perfectly legal — and broadly accepted.”
Why Japan’s Trains Work So Well (Gerry)
From CityLab: “Tokyo is home to the world’s busiest train stations, with the capital’s rail operators handling a combined 13 billion passenger trips annually. Ridership of that volume requires a deft blend of engineering, planning, and psychology. Beneath the bustle, unobtrusive features are designed to unconsciously manipulate passenger behavior, via light, sound, and other means. Japan’s boundless creativity in this realm reflects the deep consideration given to public transportation in the country.”
A Worm With Three Sexes Has Been Discovered Thriving in a Nearly Lifeless Lake (Mili)
The author writes, “Researchers at the California Institute of Technology have recently discovered eight more species of microscopic worm thriving in and around [Mono] lake, and one of them is a brand new kind of weird. One of the newly-discovered species of nematode — for now called Auanema sp. — has not one, not two, but three different sexes, the team reports, and it can survive a dose of arsenic 500 times what is humanly possible.”
