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Unusual activity at a nuclear power reactor in China has drawn international attention, as two French companies involved in the plant acknowledged problems on Monday but said they could be handled safely. From a report: The companies were responding to a report by CNN on Monday that Framatome, one of the companies, had sought help from the United States, citing an "imminent radiological threat" at the Taishan Nuclear Power Plant in Guangdong Province. EDF, France's main power utility and part owner of the power plant, said in a statement that certain gases had accumulated in the water and steam surrounding the uranium fuel rods at the heart of the reactor. But it said that the reactor had procedures for dealing with such a buildup of gases, which it described as a "known phenomenon." Framatome, an EDF affiliate and the builder of the reactors, said that there had been a "performance issue" but that the plant was operating within its safety parameters. In China, the power plant said in a statement on Sunday night that no leak into the environment had been detected.

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The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday gave Microsoft's LinkedIn another chance to try to stop rival hiQ Labs from harvesting personal data from the professional networking platform's public profiles -- a practice that LinkedIn contends threatens the privacy of its users. From a report: The justices threw out a lower court ruling that had barred LinkedIn from denying hiQ access to the information that LinkedIn members had made publicly available. At issue is whether companies can use a federal anti-hacking law called the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which prohibits accessing a computer without authorization, to block competitors from harvesting or "scraping" vast amounts of customer data from public-facing parts of a website. The justices sent the dispute back to the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to reconsider in light of their June 4 ruling that limited the type of conduct that can be criminally prosecuted under the same law. In that case, the justices found that a person cannot be guilty of violating that law if they misuse information on a computer that they have permission to access.

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tomhath writes: Economists are predicting a massive wave of resignations in the coming months. Up to 40% of employees at some companies are considering career changes after working from home or living on unemployment supplement for a year. The reasons are varied -- burnout, unwillingness to return to the office, opportunity to change while on unemployment all factor into it.

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Reality Winner, a former NSA intelligence contractor who leaked a classified hacking report to the press in 2017, was released on Monday from prison for good behavior, her attorney said. From a report: Winner is not yet at large. She has been transferred from prison to a Residential Reentry Management facility in San Antonio, Texas, where she will remain until November 2021, when she will be fully released under supervised release, her lawyer said. Winner, who worked for NSA contractor Pluribus International Corporation, was initially arrested in June 2017 on charges that a month earlier, she leaked a classified NSA report to online news outlet The Intercept. In the report, the NSA detailed a hacking campaign linked to Russia's military intelligence service, the General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU), which compromised the email accounts of multiple employees of election software maker VR Systems ahead of the 2016 US Presidential Election. The hack, which took place in August 2016, was used by the GRU hackers as a springboard to send spear-phishing emails with malware-laced documents to US government employees. Winner's leak, although not extensive, served as the base material for an article titled "Top-Secret NSA Report Details Russian Hacking Effort Days Before 2016 Election."

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Amazon's new Luna game streaming service is offering no-invite access on Prime Day, June 21 and 22. From a report: During that time, Prime subscribers in most of the US will be able to start a 7-day Luna trial, and can now get discounts on a Luna controller and Fire TV bundle. To access Luna currently, you must request an invitation or own a supported Fire TV device. It's available on Windows and Mac PCs, Fire TV, iPhone and iPad (via the web) and on supported Android phones. It costs $5.99 a month to access games including Resident Evil 7, Control, Tacoma, Rez Infinite and Metro Exodus. Amazon is discounting the dedicated Luna controller by 30 percent from today until June 22, reducing it to $49 from the list price $70 for Prime members. On top of that, it's offering the Fire TV stick 4K and Luna Controller in the Fire TV Gaming Bundle for $74, a discount of around $45.

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Winter through spring, the French Alps are wrapped in austere white snow. But as spring turns to summer, the stoic slopes start to blush. Parts of the snow take on bright colors: deep red, rusty orange, lemonade pink. Locals call this "sang de glacier," or "glacier blood." Visitors sometimes go with "watermelon snow." From a report: In reality, these blushes come from an embarrassment of algae. In recent years, alpine habitats all over the world have experienced an uptick in snow algae blooms -- dramatic, strangely hued aggregations of these normally invisible creatures. While snow algae blooms are poorly understood, that they are happening is probably not a good sign. Researchers have begun surveying the algae of the Alps to better grasp what species live there, how they survive and what might be pushing them over the bleeding edge. Some of their initial findings were published this week in Frontiers in Plant Science. Tiny yet powerful, the plantlike bacteria we call algae are "the basis of all ecosystems," said Adeline Stewart, an author of the study who worked on it as a doctoral student at Grenoble Alpes University in France. Thanks to their photosynthetic prowess, algae produce a large amount of the world's oxygen, and form the foundation of most food webs. But they sometimes overdo it, multiplying until they throw things out of balance. This can cause toxic red tides, scummy freshwater blooms -- or unsettling glacier blood. While it's unclear exactly what spurs the blooms, the color -- often red, but sometimes green, gray or yellow -- comes from pigments and other molecules that the snow algae use to protect themselves from ultraviolet light. These hues absorb more sunlight, causing the underlying snow to melt more quickly. This can change ecosystem dynamics and hasten the shrinking of glaciers.

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Campaigners say government position is 'a step in the right direction but 'not yet on the money'.

A group of seven tech companies urged the Securities and Exchange Commission to require businesses to regularly disclose climate-related matters to their shareholders. From a report: In a letter to SEC Chairman Gary Gensler on Friday, Google parent Alphabet, Amazon, Autodesk, eBay, Facebook, Intel and Salesforce shared their view in response to a request for public input on such disclosures. The tech industry has been vocal on climate issues in the past, even as employees have pressed the companies themselves to do better. "We believe that climate disclosures are critical to ensure that companies follow through on stated climate commitments and to track collective progress towards addressing global warming and building a prosperous, resilient zero-carbon economy," the companies wrote.

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In light of the recent wave of high-profile ransomware attacks that have caused havoc in the US and Europe, the member states of the G7 group have called on Russia and other countries to crack down on ransomware gangs operating within their borders. From a report: "We call on all states to urgently identify and disrupt ransomware criminal networks operating from within their borders, and hold those networks accountable for their actions," the G7 group said in a communique published on Sunday, at the end of a three-day conference held in Cornwall, UK. "In particular, we call on Russia [â¦] to identify, disrupt, and hold to account those within its borders who conduct ransomware attacks, abuse virtual currency to launder ransoms, and other cybercrimes," the G7 group added. The joint statement was signed by the governments of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK, and the US -- more commonly known as the Group of Seven (G7). It comes after a series of ransomware attacks that caused disruptions at hospitals during the COVID-19 pandemic, fuel outages on the US East Coast following the Colonial Pipeline attack, and beef supply issues across Australia and the US following the JBS Foods ransomware incident.

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BTW, this is a non-smoking weblog since June 14, 2002.

Proof by induction. If a statement is true for 0, and if it being true for n implies it's true for n+1, then it's proven for all positive integers. When we let Dubya off for his sins, and when we didn't restructure the banking industry after the crash in 2008, we set the stage for it to happen again, only worse. And Trump isn't done with us yet. He's the weird case of a former president who hasn't relinquished power. He hasn't learned how to use it yet, but he'll get more effective in his new role.

The new Instant Outlines toolkit. Over the last few days I've been tweeting and blogging like a fool about why importing and exporting outlines from one app to another isn't enough. We can do much better. In the background I was working on a new toolkit for developers who want to be part of a network of outline producer and consumer apps based on OPML and web sockets. With source code of course, and an example application to test against. All my outliners support the feature as well, it's the basis for sharing outlines, or Instant Outlines. This is my vision for an open ecosystem based on outlining. It's what I dreamt of when I started UserLand in 1988.

NBC reports that America's "Teamsters" labor union was hit by a ransomware attack demanding $2.5 million back in 2019. "But unlike many of the companies hit by high-profile ransomware attacks in recent months, the union declined to pay, despite the FBI's advice to do so, three sources familiar with the previously unreported cyberattack told NBC News." Personal information for the millions of active and retired members was never compromised, according to a Teamsters spokesperson, who also said that only one of the union's two email systems was frozen along with other data. Teamsters officials alerted the FBI and asked for help in identifying the source of the attack. They were told that many similar hacks were happening and that the FBI would not be able to assist in pursuing the culprit. The FBI advised the Teamsters to "just pay it," the first source said. "They said 'this is happening all over D.C. ... and we're not doing anything about it,'" a second source said. Union officials in Washington were divided over whether to pay the ransom — going so far as to bargain the number down to $1.1 million, according to the sources — but eventually sided with their insurance company, which urged them not to pony up... The Teamsters decided to rebuild their systems, and 99 percent of their data has been restored from archival material — some of it from hard copies — according to the union's spokesperson. The FBI's communications office did not reply to repeated requests for comment. The FBI's stance is to discourage ransomware payments. NBC News draws a lesson from the fact that it took nearly two years for this story to emerge. "An unknown number of companies and organizations have been extorted without ever saying a word about it publicly."

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A marine biologist says it’s the first time he’s ever seen a long-snouted seahorse in the wild.