$2 million worth of Dai was stolen Thursday from the cryptocurrency borrowing/lending service Akropolis, reports ZDNet — after which the service's admins paused all transactions. These attacks have been growing in numbers since early February this year, and one of the biggest flash loan attacks took place last month, in October, when hackers stole $24 million worth of cryptocurrency assets from decentralized finance service Harvest Finance. The good news is that Akropolis says it has already identified the attacker's Ethereum account, which would allow it to track funds as they move around the blockchain. The DeFi platform says it already notified major cryptocurrency exchanges about the hack and the attacker's wallet in an attempt to have funds frozen and prevent the attacker from laundering funds into other forms of cryptocurrencies, lose the investigators' tracks, and cash out the funds. Akropolis said it is currently exploring ways to reimburse users for the loss.

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"Fifteen Asia-Pacific economies formed the world's largest free trade bloc on Sunday," reports CNBC, "a China-backed deal that excludes the United States, which had left a rival Asia-Pacific grouping under President Donald Trump." Amid questions over Washington's engagement in Asia, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) may cement China's position more firmly as an economic partner with Southeast Asia, Japan and Korea, putting the world's second-biggest economy in a better position to shape the region's trade rules... RCEP could help Beijing cut its dependence on overseas markets and technology, a shift accelerated by a deepening rift with Washington, said Iris Pang, ING chief economist for Greater China. RCEP groups the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), China, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. It aims in coming years to progressively lower tariffs across many areas... RCEP will account for 30% of the global economy, 30% of the global population and reach 2.2 billion consumers, Vietnam said... "For the first time, China and Japan reached a bilateral tariff reduction arrangement, achieving a historic breakthrough," China's finance ministry said in a statement, without giving further details. The deal marks the first time rival East Asian powers China, Japan and South Korea have been in a single free trade agreement.

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New webcam-based anti-cheating monitoring is so stressful, it's made some students cry, the Washington Post reports: "Online proctoring" companies saw in coronavirus shutdowns a chance to capitalize on a major reshaping of education, selling schools a high-tech blend of webcam-watching workers and eye-tracking software designed to catch students cheating on their exams. They've taken in millions of dollars, some of it public money, from thousands of colleges in recent months. But they've also sparked a nationwide school-surveillance revolt, with students staging protests and adopting creative tactics to push campus administrators to reconsider the deals. Students argue that the testing systems have made them afraid to click too much or rest their eyes for fear they'll be branded as cheats... One system, Proctorio, uses gaze-detection, face-detection and computer-monitoring software to flag students for any "abnormal" head movement, mouse movement, eye wandering, computer window resizing, tab opening, scrolling, clicking, typing, and copies and pastes. A student can be flagged for finishing the test too quickly, or too slowly, clicking too much, or not enough. If the camera sees someone else in the background, a student can be flagged for having "multiple faces detected." If someone else takes the test on the same network — say, in a dorm building — it's potential "exam collusion." Room too noisy, Internet too spotty, camera on the fritz? Flag, flag, flag. As an unusually disrupted fall semester churns toward finals, this student rebellion has erupted into online war, with lawsuits, takedowns and viral brawls further shaking the anxiety-inducing backdrop of college exams. Some students have even tried to take the software down from the inside, digging through the code for details on how it monitors millions of high-stakes exams... Some students said the experience of having strangers and algorithms silently judge their movements was deeply unnerving, and many worried that even being accused of cheating could endanger their chances at good grades, scholarships, internships and post-graduation careers. Several students said they had hoped for freeing, friend-filled college years but were now resigned to hours of monitored video exams in their childhood bedrooms, with no clear end in sight.... [T]he systems' technical demands have made just taking the tests almost comically complicated. One student at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario shared the instructions for his online Introduction to Linear Algebra midterm: five pages, totaling more than 2,000 words, requiring students to use a special activity-monitoring Web browser and keep their face, hands and desk in view of their camera at all times... Students who break the rules or face technical difficulties can be investigated for academic misconduct. "The instructions," the student said, "are giving me more anxiety than the test itself." Company executives "say a semester without proctors would turn online testing into a lawless wasteland" according to the article. But one long-time teacher counters that "the most clear value conveyed to students is 'We don't trust you.'" Yet the education tech nonprofit Educause reported that 54% of higher education institutions they'd surveyed "are currently using online or remote proctoring services. "And another 23% are planning or considering using them."

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The BBC reports: Crowdfunding website Kickstarter has surprised some of its users by replying to complaints they made seven years ago. Users who received responses to long-expired projects from 2013 took to Twitter to congratulate the company on its response times. Kickstarter said the emails were "auto-generated in error... The emails folks received yesterday was due to an unfortunate human error while working on a clean-up task completely unrelated to the ticket from 2013," a company spokeswoman said. "It's important to remember we are still a small team at Kickstarter and mistakes can happen."

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Nate Silver put together a quick and dirty table with the share of each state's population ever infected with Covid. 39 % of people in North Dakota have been infected. In New York, 18%, California 13%.

"The Radiophonic Workshop has always broken new sonic ground, from the Doctor Who theme to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Now they're at it again — this time using the internet as a musical instrument," reports the Guardian. "The band includes composers from the original BBC Radiophonic Workshop, which created soundtracks for most BBC shows from the 60s to the 90s and influenced generations of musicians from Paul McCartney, Pink Floyd and Mike Oldfield to Aphex Twin, Orbital and Mary Epworth..." A performance of Latency will take place at a special online event on 22 November using a technique inspired by lockdown Zoom calls... The internet has an unpredictable natural lag, or latency, caused by the milliseconds it takes for electrical signals from one computer to reach another, as anyone using Zoom has experienced. The trick that Bob Earland and Paddy Kingsland discovered was that they could extend the internet's delay from a few milliseconds into several seconds. Instead of trying to play at the same time, the Radiophonic Workshop will play one after another — in sequence, rather than in parallel. "We had the bright idea of using that latency to make a loop of music," Earland said. "The sound gets sent to someone, and they add to it, and it keeps going round. So you're not relying on everyone being on the same clock..." Workshop member Peter Howell, who is also a lecturer in film and TV music, said: "It does feel like live playing, it's just that every person has a little bubble of time in which they're playing live." The performance comes the day before 23 November, the anniversary of the first transmission of Doctor Who in 1963 which is also Delia Derbyshire Day, in honour of the Radiophonic Workshop's leading light, who created the sound of the show's famous theme tune.

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Right now there are only two stories about Trump that matter imho. 1. How he is leaving and when. 2. What damage will he do before he leaves. Anything else is just him trying to cling to a dream that is over.

Right now there are only two stories about Trump that matter imho. 1. How he is leaving and when. 2. What damage will he do before he leaves. Anything else is just him trying to cling to a dream that is over.

I pay $65 a month for YouTube TV, which I use to watch CNN and MSNBC for a couple of hours each night. I wonder if there's a less expensive way to get these services. Seems like a lot of money, considering both channels have ads.

I pay $65 a month for YouTube TV, which I use to watch CNN and MSNBC for a couple of hours each night. I wonder if there's a less expensive way to get these services. Seems like a lot of money, considering both channels have ads.

I pay $65 a month for YouTube TV, which I use to watch CNN and MSNBC for a couple of hours each night. I wonder if there's a less expensive way to get these services. Seems like a lot of money, considering both channels have ads.

Saturday saw 2020's virtual observation of the annual Aaron Swartz Day and International Hackathon, which the EFF describes as "a day dedicated to celebrating the continuing legacy of activist, programmer, and entrepreneur Aaron Swartz." Its official web site notes the wide-ranging event includes "projects and ideas that are still bearing fruit to this day, such as SecureDrop, Open Library, and the Aaron Swartz Day Police Surveillance Project." The event even included a virtual session for the Atlas of Surveillance project which involved documenting instances of law enforcement using surveillance technologies like social media monitoring, automated license plate readers, and body-worn cameras. And EFF special advisor Cory Doctorow, director of strategy Danny O'Brien, and senior activist Elliot Harmon also spoke "about Aaron's legacy and how his work lives on today," according to the EFF's announcement: Aaron Swartz was a brilliant champion of digital rights, dedicated to ensuring the Internet remained a thriving ecosystem for open knowledge. EFF was proud to call him a close friend and collaborator. His life was cut short in 2013, after he was charged under the notoriously draconian Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for systematically downloading academic journal articles from the online database JSTOR. Federal prosecutors stretch this law beyond its original purpose of stopping malicious computer break-ins, reserving the right to push for heavy penalties for any behavior they don't like that happens to involve a computer. This was the case for Aaron, who was charged with eleven counts under the CFAA. Facing decades in prison, Aaron died by suicide at the age of 26. He would have turned 34 this year, on November 8. In addition to EFF projects, the hackathon will focus on projects including SecureDrop, Open Library, and the Aaron Swartz Day Police Surveillance Project. The full lineup of speakers includes Aaron Swartz Day co-founder Lisa Rein, SecureDrop lead Mickael E., researcher Mia Celine, Lucy Parsons Lab founder Freddy Martinez, and Brewster Kahle — co-founder of Aaron Swartz Day and the Internet Archive. All of the presentations are now online.

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People are tweeting that Substack is building its own version of Google Reader. I'd be surprised. Imho more likely they're creating a place to read stories published on Substack, as they are published. I'd bet this is more like the reading function in Medium than Google Reader.

"A software company that provides services for insurance groups disclosed this week that about 27.7 million Texas driver's license records were exposed in a data breach earlier this year," reports The Hill: The company, Vertafore, said in a statement posted on a website set up to address the breach that the data was exposed between March and August and affected licenses issued before February 2019. Exposed data included driver's license numbers, addresses, dates of birth and vehicle registration history, according to the company. The group said that no Social Security numbers or financial account information were compromised. The breach happened after three files were accessed by an unauthorized user after the files were "inadvertently stored in an unsecured external storage service," Vertafore said in its statement.... Vertafore said that it is providing a year of free credit monitoring and identity restoration services to all Texas residents whose driverâ(TM)s license data was exposed... Vertafore emphasized in disclosing the breach that it was taking steps to enhance employee cybersecurity and privacy training, reinforcing security procedures and policies, and further enhancing the security of its systems.

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"A software company that provides services for insurance groups disclosed this week that about 27.7 million Texas driver's license records were exposed in a data breach earlier this year," reports The Hill: The company, Vertafore, said in a statement posted on a website set up to address the breach that the data was exposed between March and August and affected licenses issued before February 2019. Exposed data included driver's license numbers, addresses, dates of birth and vehicle registration history, according to the company. The group said that no Social Security numbers or financial account information were compromised. The breach happened after three files were accessed by an unauthorized user after the files were "inadvertently stored in an unsecured external storage service," Vertafore said in its statement.... Vertafore said that it is providing a year of free credit monitoring and identity restoration services to all Texas residents whose driverâ(TM)s license data was exposed... Vertafore emphasized in disclosing the breach that it was taking steps to enhance employee cybersecurity and privacy training, reinforcing security procedures and policies, and further enhancing the security of its systems.

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