Franklin Faraday Insights Roundup for February 12, 2021
Technology + Common Sense
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Welcome to our weekly roundup of actionable and interesting thoughts from all over!
This week:
-- So much activity in the cybersecurity space that we will have to save some for more detailed discussions next week.
— A must listen Tim Ferris interview of Marc Randolph, a co-founder of Netflix.
— A must read long article on why searching WebMD always returns a potential cancer diagnosis.
— 3 space probes arrive at Mars.
— Tesla flubs memory chips, never fire a cannon at home, and that lawyer who looked like a cat… yeah that was Dell bloatware from more than 10 years ago…
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Let’s gets started…
Cybersecurity
1.) The New York Times obtained cell phone ad ID data from a source and used it to track protestors who were at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. We’ll have more to say on this topic soon…
2.) A hacker gained remote access to an Oldsmar, Florida water facility and changed a setting that would have dumped a dangerous amount of sodium hydroxide into the water supply. Fortunately, an alert operator caught the change before any damage was done.
Sodium hydroxide is used in small amounts to increase the pH and reduce pipe corrosion. Normal levels are 100 parts per million, but the hacker changed this to 11,100 parts per million.
Our take: Early reports in these situations are almost always wrong in key areas. Expect this incident to be cited for decades in the cyber security community, just like the Queensland, Australia sewage hack in 2000 (https://www.theregister.com/2001/10/31/hacker_jailed_for_revenge_sewage/)
While Industrial Control Systems (ICS) have long been seen as vulnerable, actual attacks that inflict damage (apart from ransomware) are rare, or at least are rarely disclosed, making this case highly unusual. Also unusual is that an operator immediately noticed and caught the intruder.
While investigators are primed to suspect a hacker with malicious intent, especially in a location next to the Super Bowl, we remain cautiously skeptical. A hacker poisoning a city’s water supply is an international story that plays directly into decades of fears and warnings by security experts. Absent additional technical details from the investigation—which obviously aren’t public—Occam’s razor would suggest a disgruntled insider, or possibly even operator/coordination errors, to be equally plausible. (Who hasn’t accidentally typed 11100 instead of 100 with a stuck keyboard…)
The story:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/88ab33/hacker-poison-florida-water-pinellas-county
Whatever happened, the experts at Dragos provided some excellent observations and suggestions:
3.) Cisco Talos conducted an outstanding interview with a Russian ransomware operator. It’s a good reminder that cybercrime is more than technology—there are people on the other end of the keyboard.
https://blog.talosintelligence.com/2021/02/interview-with-lockbit-ransomware.html
4.) Russia may be jamming GPS signals near Putin’s suspected palace on the black sea…
https://www.dw.com/en/is-russia-distorting-gps-signals-to-protect-vladimir-putin/a-56484479
Entrepreneurship
1.) Here is a fantastic Tim Ferris interview with Marc Randolph, a co-founder of Netflix. Marc explains why “there’s no such thing as a good idea. Every idea is a bad idea. No idea performs the way you expect once you collide it with reality.”
Also… Netflix’s first name was kibble.com… they didn’t like the name Netflix (it was just better than anything else)… and you won’t believe what their business ideas were before DVDs…
Marc also talks about early acquisition talks with Amazon and Blockbuster as well as Netflix’s near death experience during the 2000 dot com crash
https://tim.blog/2021/02/01/marc-randolph/
Transcript if you prefer to read:
https://tim.blog/2021/02/01/marc-randolph-transcript/
2.) Chris Frantz tells us how to kill a unicorn… with a freemium pricing model.
https://www.chrisfrantz.com/how-to-kill-a-unicorn/
Environment
1.) Pollution levels on the New York Subway were up to 77 times higher than above ground – equivalent to being next to a wildfire or demolition site! That’s okay, transiting the Christopher Street station was worth it to get to the pizza…
Oh yeah, you DC people… your subways were almost as bad – even when they aren’t on fire due to maintenance issues!
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/feb/10/subway-air-pollution-new-york-washington-dc
2.) A Kenyan woman got tired of waiting for the government to address pollution, so she made a factory that turned recycled plastic into bricks stronger than concrete. #WIN
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-kenya-environment-recycling-idUSKBN2A211N
#FAIL
1.) Tesla had to recall 134,951 cars last week because they shipped touchscreens with a lifespan of 5 to 6 years. The problem was that Tesla engineers used memory chips that degrade and eventually fail after enough erase/write cycles.
As this is a known and well-studied design consideration, it seems plausible that Tesla assumed customers would pay for the repair like any other part that wears out on a vehicle after that much time. Unfortunately for the company, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration determined that the screens were used for safety-critical features, resulting in a recall.
If you want to deep dive into the eMMC Flash lifespan issue, we found a good reference here:
https://www.cnx-software.com/2019/08/16/wear-estimation-emmc-flash-memory/
2.) Please don’t fire cannons at home for baby showers, or ever. (This is a truly sad story; worse it is not unique.)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/02/08/baby-shower-cannon-explosion/
Health
If you read one long article this month, it should be this entry from Scott Alexander’s Astral Codex Ten blog (formerly known as Slate Star Codex) on “WebMD, and the Tragedy of Legible Expertise.” Scott explains why checking any symptom on WebMD returns the result that “you might have cancer” as well as why Moderna had to inform the FDA that a vaccine recipient was struck by lighting.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/webmd-and-the-tragedy-of-legible
And here’s the actual FDA disclosure about the lightning strike, just to prove this isn’t internet myth.
https://www.fda.gov/media/144434/download
Science
From the “everything you learned in school was wrong” department, it turns out there are actually 8 continents. Zealandia just happens to be 94% underwater…
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210205-the-last-secrets-of-the-worlds-lost-continent
Space
Three spacecraft – from the US, China, and UAE – arrive in Mars orbit this month. All were launched in July 2020, taking advantage of a transfer orbit that takes place every 26 months.
You can watch NASA’s Perseverance Rover’s landing online on February 18, 2021 starting at 1415 EST/1115 PST:
https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/timeline/landing/watch-online/
Random
1.) You saw “I’m not a cat” lawyer this week… but did you know that this was actually caused by old software preinstalled on Dell laptops? Ah, how we all hate bloatware!
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56010156
2.) Also, the great Bucatini pandemic shortage mystery has been solved! Soon the United States will be safe again for authentic Amatriciana.
The original investigation:
https://www.grubstreet.com/2020/12/2020-bucatini-shortage-investigation.html
Finally answers from the company:
https://www.grubstreet.com/2021/02/de-cecco-bucatini-shortage-interview.html
From our fast talking lawyers:
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