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The Record: “The US Federal Bureau of Investigations has published today its first-ever public advisory detailing the modus operandi of a “ransomware affiliate.” A relatively new term, a ransomware affiliate refers to a person or group who rents access to Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) platforms, orchestrates intrusions into corporate networks, encrypt files with the “rented ransomware,” and …
Scientific American: “The U.S. has reached a worrying plateau in its COVID-19 vaccination coverage, with just half of the population fully vaccinated. This coincides with pandemic fatigue, or weak compliance with COVID-19 risk-mitigation measures such as masking and distancing, and the highly infectious Delta variant, which accounts for more than 83 percent of infections. We’re …
Census Bureau: “Building permits are one of the earliest indicators of economic activity. For decades, building permit data has been available online in a very unusable, clunky format. The Census Bureau’s new visualization and extraction tool empowers users to engage this rich, sub county-level source of information about the critical first step in construction – …
CRS Report – U.S. Military Withdrawal and Taliban Takeover in Afghanistan: Frequently Asked Questions, August 20, 2021: “On August 15, 2021, the Taliban entered the Afghan capital of Kabul, completing a rapid takeover over the country that surprised many Afghans and Americans alike. The Taliban’s advance came as the United States was completing the military …
CDC: “HHS announced a plan to begin offering COVID-19 vaccine booster shots this fall. CDC’s independent advisory committee, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, will continue to meet and discuss data on the evolution of the pandemic and the use of COVID-19 vaccines. ACIP will make further recommendations on the use of boosters for the …
The Atlantic – If you’re confused about what you can do right now, you should be: “For the past year and a half, humans around the world have been asked to do something we’re pretty bad at, even in the best of circumstances: figure out what constitutes safety, and act accordingly. A well-understood risk doesn’t …
In Custodia Legis: “At the end of July, Andrew shared the enhancements from the last Congress.gov release, which included adding Key Word In Context (KWIC) search results for the Bound Congressional Record and new customization options for bill alerts. With this month’s release, a link to the treaty errata tab from the overview section on …
Follow up to previous posting – The Afghanistan Papers A secret history of the war – see also two new reports from Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR): SIGAR released its 11th lessons learned report examining the past 20 years of the U.S. reconstruction effort in Afghanistan. After spending $145 billion trying to rebuild …
“A confidential trove of government documents obtained by The Washington Post reveals [Dec. 9, 2019] that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable. The documents were generated by …
Vox: “Humans have warmed the planet by an average of 1.2 degrees Celsius since industrialization began in the 19th century. This small-sounding change has helped fuel severe wildfires, record-breaking heatwaves, floods, and an ever-growing list of other disasters. What’s worrying is that Earth will continue to heat up — likely past 1.5 degrees — even …
ZDNet – “The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has criticized Facebook for claiming that a consent decree handed down by the organization was the reason they had to shut down New York University’s Ad Observatory. Facebook has faced significant backlash this week after they closed the researchers’ accounts working for the Ad Observatory project, which let Facebook …
Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center – 2020-21 “Smart City” Cautionary Trends & 10 Calls to Action to Protect and Promote Democracy – “…This report is an urgent warning of where we are headed if we maintain our current trajectory of augmenting our public space with trackers of all kinds. In this report, I outline how …
