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In IT and Need Cash? Cybersecurity Whistleblowers Are Earning Big Bucks (Maria)
The author writes, “Matthew Decker is the former chief information officer for Penn State University’s Applied Research Laboratory. As of October, he’s also $250,000 richer. In his Penn State position, Decker was well placed to see that the university was not implementing all of the cybersecurity controls that were required by its various contracts with NASA and the Department of Defense (DoD). It did not, for instance, use an external cloud services provider that met the DoD’s security guidelines, and it fudged some of the self-submitted ‘scores’ it made to the government about Penn State’s IT security. So Decker sued the school under the False Claims Act. … In October, Penn State agreed to a $1.25M settlement with the government; Decker got $250,000.”
Elon Musk Put $277 Million Into the Election. He’s $200 Billion Richer This Year. (Reader Jim)
The authors write, “Elon Musk’s net worth has climbed by more than $200 billion in 2024, a massive increase in the same year that the world’s richest person spent at least $277 million backing Donald Trump and other Republican candidates. The bulk of the increase, more than $170 billion, has come since Election Day.”
Ken Paxton Sues New York Doctor Accused of Prescribing Abortion Pills to Texas Woman (Sean)
From The Texas Tribune: “Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has filed a lawsuit accusing a New York doctor of prescribing abortion drugs to a Texas resident in violation of state law. This lawsuit is the first attempt to test what happens when state abortion laws are at odds with each other. New York has a shield law that protects providers from out-of-state investigations and prosecutions, which has served as implicit permission for a network of doctors to mail abortion pills into states that have banned the procedure.”
A Day Without Mexicans in Mammoth? Locals Mull How To Get a Message to Trump (Reader Steve)
From the Los Angeles Times: “If all the service workers born in Mexico stayed home from their jobs for just one day in this thriving resort town perched high in California’s Sierra Nevada, the humming tourist economy would probably faceplant harder than a first-time skier on an icy expert slope. Most of the restaurants would have no staff, residents say. Hotels and Airbnbs would suffer the same fate. Construction projects across this posh skiing destination would come to a grinding halt.”
America’s Decline & Fall (Al)
From Commonweal: “The founders anticipated someone like Trump partly because they’d been reading Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which was hot off the presses in the 1770s. We should read Gibbon now, too, paying close attention to his account of how the Roman republic slipped into tyranny when powerful men had seduced or intimidated its citizens so that they became a stampeding mob, hungry for bread and circuses.”
‘Extreme’ Solar Radiation Storm Could Hit Earth, Study Warns (Gerry)
The author writes, “Every so often, the Sun throws such a furious tantrum that it hurls highly damaging radioactive atoms towards Earth. These so-called ‘superflares’ release more than one octillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) joules of energy in one go — that’s like 16 trillion trillion atomic bombs detonating simultaneously. New research suggests that solar tantrums happen far more frequently than we thought, and there’s no telling when another might happen.”
Syrian Artists Envision a Future After Assad: ‘I’m Drunk With Ideas’ (Dana)
From Artnet: “During the five decades of rule by the Assad family, artists and other culturally minded people fled the country, whether to avoid oppression or simply for lack of ability to speak freely in their own country. … Those artists have often been forced to take to coded messages to express themselves on the situation in their home country, especially if they have family there who would be subject to retaliation.”
