The Finnish Parliament said on Monday that hackers gained entry to its internal IT system and accessed email accounts for some members of Parliament (MPs)fin. From a report: Government officials said the attack took place in the fall of 2020 and was discovered this month by the Parliament's IT staff. The matter is currently being investigated by the Finnish Central Criminal Police (KRP). In an official statement, KRP Commissioner Tero Muurman said the attack did not cause any damage to the Parliament's internal IT system but was not an accidental intrusion either. Muurman said the Parliament security breach is currently being investigated as a "suspected espionage" incident. "At this stage, one alternative is that unknown factors have been able to obtain information through the hacking, either for the benefit of a foreign state or to harm Finland," Muurman said. "The theft has affected more than one person, but unfortunately, we cannot tell the exact number without jeopardizing the ongoing preliminary investigation.

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I was determined a few nights ago to find a way to watch the Knicks, but I didn't want to pay a ridiculous amount of money for it. I saw that Spectrum now has a streaming option, with no set top box. I remember before I cut the cable, they had MSG, which is the broadcast network for the Knicks. So I thought there was a decent chance they had it on their streaming app.

Of course they make you sign up to find out what the channels are. I was stupidly impulsive. I clicked the button. A minute later I was looking through their channel guide. MSG is not included. So now I figured I'd just go click another button to kill the 7-day free trial. Nowhere to be found. Typical.

I ended up on hold for an hour, documented on Twitter, where they were polite but couldn't help. There was no other way to cancel the trial without calling. The operator was a jerk, raised her voice, tried to upsell, asked me to explain myself, I said I just don't want it, which is a legal reason for cancelling a free trial imho. All of it, the wait, the bad manners must be scientifically proven to drive people to keeping their subscription and even buying more, when they called to cancel. But I wouldn't discuss it. I called to cancel and that's it.

This approach is no longer competitive. Hulu, Disney, HBO, YouTube -- they all make it one click to unsub. Maybe with a confirmation, but that's all. They get that if it's not easy to unsub no one is going to sign up because we understand how this bullshit works.

I will remember hopefully never to sign up for anything with Spectrum again. Let me say it a few times to let it sink in.

I won't add new Spectrum services.

Canon could take a page from DJI's playback for its next camera. From a report: The company has filed a patent, first spotted by Canon News, that showcases a handheld camera that combines an Osmo Pocket-like design with its RF series of mirrorless lenses. The camera features a swivel mechanism that allows the sensor and lens mount to easily switch between forward-facing and selfie orientations. The design offers several advantages to your traditional camera when it comes to vlogging. The most notable of which is you wouldn't have to contort your hand to properly frame yourself in the shot. The fact the screen is always in front of you would also make it easier to keep tabs on your footage as it's recording.

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I've been hearing Serious Things about my writing here, and that's a bit intimidating. Now when I read over what I've published, I see all the mis-capitalized proper nouns, missing words, chopped out accidentally in rushed edits. Please note the caveat at the top of every page on this blog: It's even worse than it appears. That means what it appears to mean. However it is lovely to hear from people who read this stuff. I esp like to hear what time you read it. In Europe they read it with their breakfast it seems and in California, before retiring for the night. I tend to read it in the middle of the night, around 2AM or so.

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on Monday said it is issuing long-awaited rules to allow for small drones to fly over people and at night, a significant step toward their use for widespread commercial deliveries. From a report: The FAA is also requiring remote identification of most drones, which are formally known as unmanned aerial vehicles, to address security concerns. "The new rules make way for the further integration of drones into our airspace by addressing safety and security concerns," said FAA Administrator Steve Dickson in a statement. "They get us closer to the day when we will more routinely see drone operations such as the delivery of packages." The race has been on for companies to create drone fleets to speed deliveries.

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The Nordic region once again has become a lucrative place to mine crypto-currencies, thanks to a plunge in electricity prices. From a report: The wettest weather in at least 20 years boosted production from hydro-electric plants, leaving Sweden and Norway with some of the lowest power prices in the world. The resulting glut in the most important raw material for making the virtual coins coincided with a year when the price of Bitcoin almost quadrupled. The currencies are made in giant computer farms that process complex algorithms in halls as big as airport hangars. That makes electricity one of the key inputs, with operations sometimes consuming as much power as that used by 70,000 households. The current market dynamics give big miners alternatives to places where Bitcoin are usually created such as China, Kazakhstan and Canada. Their luck follows several years of poor margins from higher electricity costs and lower prices for most virtual currencies. Many of the the miners that were attracted to the region during the last rally in 2017 have left. "The ones that stayed through the difficult period, like us, are quite happy now," said Philip Salter, head of operations at Hong Kong-based Genesis Mining, which operates a data center in Boden, Sweden. "There were times we were not making any profit at all, but during the last year our profitability has more than tripled." Unusually wet weather along with mild temperatures boosted hydro reservoirs across Nordic region to the highest level in more than 20 years, leaving the area awash in generation capacity. The result is power prices close to zero for extended periods. Average prices this year are about a third of those in Germany, Europe's biggest power market.

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Tesla will begin its operations in India "early" 2021, a top Indian minister said on Monday, a day after the tech carmaker said it was confident it would enter the world's second most populated market next year. From a report: The American car company will begin operations with sales in early 2021 and then "maybe" look at assembling and manufacturing of cars in the country, India's transport minister Nitin Gadkari told newspaper Indian Express. How early? Definitely not next month, Musk tweeted over the weekend. Tesla, which broke ground in early 2019 on a $5 billion factory in China -- its first outside of the U.S. -- has for years expressed interest in expanding to India. But in a 2018 tweet, Tesla chief executive Elon Musk shared that "some government regulations" in India had emerged as a roadblock.

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A group of mysterious hackers has carried out a clever supply chain attack against Vietnamese private companies and government agencies by inserting malware inside an official government software toolkit. From a report: The attack, discovered by security firm ESET and detailed in a report named "Operation SignSight," targeted the Vietnam Government Certification Authority (VGCA), the government organization that issues digital certificates that can be used to electronically sign official documents. Any Vietnamese citizen, private company, and even other government agency that wants to submit files to the Vietnamese government must sign their documents with a VGCA-compatible digital certificate. The VGCA doesn't only issue these digital certificates but also provides ready-made and user-friendly "client apps" that citizens, private companies, and government workers can install on their computers and automate the process of signing a document.

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Somewhat editable tweets. An interesting idea from Alec Moffat. As you may know, you can put metadata in a web page that Twitter will display when you link to it in Twitter. For example, here's a page with an obvious spelling error in the metadata. And here's a tweet that links to the page (screen shot). If I correct the spelling error in the metadata, and eventually Twitter will notice, and the tweet will include the changed version. Voila. I've corrected a spelling error in a tweet. It's a really roundabout way to do it, but it works.

Researchers may have found a way to reduce the environmental impact of air travel in situations when electric aircraft and alternative fuels aren't practical. Wired reports that Oxford University scientists have successfully turned CO2 into jet fuel, raising the possibility of conventionally-powered aircraft with net zero emissions. From a report: The technique effectively reverses the process of burning fuel by relying on the organic combustion method. The team heated a mix of citric acid, hydrogen and an iron-manganese-potassium catalyst to turn CO2 into a liquid fuel capable of powering jet aircraft. The approach is inexpensive, uncomplicated and uses commonplace materials. It's cheaper than processes used to turn hydrogen and water into fuel. There are numerous challenges to bringing this to aircraft. The lab method only produced a few grams of fuel -- you'd clearly need much more to support even a single flight, let alone an entire fleet. You'd need much more widespread use of carbon capture. And if you want effectively zero emissions, the capture and conversion systems would have to run on clean energy.

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What's the difference between a citizen journalist and a journalist? It's not a useful term. A distinction without a difference. Are journalists who work for AP or the Washington Post not citizens? I like to walk. That doesn't make me a citizen walker. Putting an adjective in front of it is a priesthood thing. Condescending. Do they think somehow it's acceptable for the Chinese government to jail a citizen journalist, but it would be a problem if they jailed a real journalist?

A Chinese citizen journalist who covered Wuhan's coronavirus outbreak has been jailed for four years. From a report: Zhang Zhan was found guilty of "picking quarrels and provoking trouble", a frequent charge against activists. The 37-year-old former lawyer was detained in May, and has been on hunger strike for several months. Her lawyers say she is in poor health. Ms Zhang is one of several citizen journalists who have run into trouble for reporting on Wuhan. There is no free media in China and authorities are known to clamp down on activists or whistleblowers seen as undermining the government's response to the outbreak.

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America's next president takes office in three weeks and two days. What changes should he make to America's space program? An opinion writer at Bloomberg tackles the question: Donald Trump badly wanted to be the president who sent Americans back to the moon. Instead, his administration has presided over Artemis, a lunar-landing program plagued by "uncertain plans, unproven cost assumptions, and limited oversight," according to a new watchdog report. Pieces of the program, including the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft, are billions of dollars over budget, years past deadline and poised to eat into NASA's more promising projects. As a result, the U.S. space agency will almost certainly miss its goal of landing Americans on the moon again by 2024. President-elect Joe Biden inherits the task of deciding what to do next. - He should focus on what has made the U.S. space program distinctive in recent years: the power of private competition... - The government bears all the risk of missed deadlines and rising costs. A more efficient alternative is fixed-price contracts, in which a company keeps as profit whatever's left over after it completes its assigned task. Beginning in 2006, NASA has used such contracts to boost the development of private space companies capable of reaching the International Space Station. The initiative has worked far better than anyone could've expected. In a 2011 report, NASA expressed bewilderment that SpaceX, then a young upstart, managed to develop its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket for just $390 million — as opposed to a likely cost of $1.7 billion to $4 billion under traditional cost-plus assumptions. Today, the rocket delivers hardware and astronauts for companies and space agencies around the world. Come January, the Biden administration should take a similar approach to the troubled Artemis system. Step one should be eliminating SLS and Orion altogether in favor of cheaper private-sector alternatives.... Currently, there are a number of Artemis elements being developed under fixed-price contracts, including future lunar landers. The new administration should use a similar approach with as many aspects of the project as possible, thereby harnessing the efficiency and inventiveness of private competition.

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A dozen ocean species new to science could already be threatened by climate change, scientists find.

The price of Bitcoin increased 50% — in the last four weeks. Now priced at $26,579, "Bitcoin is crashing — upward," quips CNN Business: The digital currency has a market value north of $500 billion. Think Bitcoin is just a fad? It's worth more than Visa or Mastercard. Or Walmart... Its rapid rise has been remarkable — or insane, depending on your appetite for risk. But there's some logic to the run-up: Investors are pouring money into bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies during the Covid-19 pandemic as the Federal Reserve sent interest rates near zero (and expects to keep them there for several more years), severely weakening the US dollar. That makes bitcoin, comparatively, an attractive currency. There's a set limit to the number of bitcoins on the planet, and investors believe that once the supply runs out, the digital coin's value can only increase. Also aiding in bitcoin's soaring valuation: Big, name-brand investors are stockpiling it, and huge consumer companies are embracing it. That's adding a dose of validity and appeal to cryptocurrency for mainstream investors. For example, a top executive at BlackRock [the world's largest asset manager, with $7.81 trillion in assets under management] recently said the cryptocurrency can replace gold, and Square and PayPal have both embraced bitcoin. The article also includes some advice from Anthony Scaramucci, founder and managing partner of the global investment firm Skybridge Capital (who was also, for 10 days, White House Communications Director): Scaramucci said people have begun to accept bitcoin — and since it appears in so few portfolios, it has plenty of room to grow. Still, bitcoin is a volatile asset and will be a risky holding if you invest in it. "This thing has a tendency to crash up," he said. "It is due for a correction, and these corrections can be violent." Scaramucci said bitcoin could suddenly tumble 20% to 50%. "You have to be very cautious," he added. But he also highlighted bitcoin's staying power over the course of the past decade: If you took $1 and put 99 cents of it in cash and a penny in bitcoin, that investment strategy would have outperformed $1 invested in the S&P 500 over the last 10 years, he noted. "Bitcoin's best days are ahead of it, but it's going to be volatile and I think people need to be prepared for it," Scaramucci told CNN Business.

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