The announcement comes as a result of scientific research showing screens have negative effect on young children.
Swedish Minister for Schools [Liberal politician] Lotta Edholm, who took office 11 months ago as part of a new center-right coalition government, was one of the biggest critics of the all-out embrace of technology.
[…]
The minister announced last month in a statement that the government … plans to go further and to completely end digital learning for children under age 6, the ministry also told The Associated Press.
[…]
“There’s clear scientific evidence that digital tools impair rather than enhance student learning,” Sweden’s Karolinska Institute said in a statement last month on the country’s national digitalization strategy in education.
It’s a strong statement that digital tools impair learning. The liberal politician leading the charge seems to have decades of experience in schools, so this is apparently a long time coming. Even more interesting is that it’s happening under a coalition led by conservatives.
The change makes sense, however, given how writing and reading without screens is proven to sharpen the mind. Screens instead destroy attention span, destroy the sense of satisfaction and motivation that comes from physical work. The impairment can be critical with kids under six, because it’s the optimal time to learn basic skills.
Screens are an integrity disaster. They still are overloaded with saccharin distractions and irrelevant noise, not to mention predatory promotions, rarely if ever designed with the kind of mental clarity found with a pen and blank sheet of lined paper.
The best way to prevent harms stemming from blurred advertising is to not blur advertising,” the agency writes in the report, “Protecting Kids from Stealth Advertising in Digital Media.”
Clearly America is far behind, but maybe if they can get liberal and conservative politicians to form a coalition… haha, who am I kidding. Heavy screen use causes the exact kind of attention deficit that prevents formation of lasting and meaningful coalitions.
Why would yet another Tesla driver suddenly “veer” into a pole, killing herself?
The crash happened shortly after midnight near the intersection of Pelandale Avenue and Carver Road. Police said the eastbound Tesla Model Y struck a corner lightpole, claiming the life of the driver. The passenger, a man from Fresno, suffered moderate injuries. The Tesla was the only involved vehicle in the collision, police said.
Source: Google Maps
Jasjit Gill of Modesto reportedly was a nurse who worked nearby in Ceres, California and only 33 years old when her Tesla suddenly drove off the road and killed her.
Source: Modesto Fire Department
She fits a pattern of wealthy professional Asian-Americans in California being an increasingly common victim profile of the Tesla scams.
Notable is how Tesla have been suddenly “veering” into very obvious road-side poles (trees included), in stark contradiction to how the company CEO very loudly promoted to potential customers that by 2018 they no longer have to touch their steering wheel.
I’ve written about such basic engineering problems before as evidence of an advance fee fraud. Tesla has been in a careless, negligent pace to the bottom of safety, taking huge payments up front for low or even no quality control, while tragically misrepresenting to customers what a phrase like “pole position” will likely mean for them (death).
Rescuers were able to pull the victim, 22-year-old Placentia resident Jeremy Breen, from his Mitsubishi Lancer, said Officer Javier Navarro, a CHP spokesman. But he was pronounced dead about 25 minutes later, the Riverside County Coroner’s Office said. The other driver, in a Tesla Model 3, could not be rescued, Navarro said. That driver was not publicly identified. Both drivers were traveling alone. Investigators were trying to determine where the Tesla entered the freeway and why it was headed in the wrong direction, Navarro said.
The incident reminds me of Canada, where an official statement condemned Tesla for putting society at risk with poorly engineered low-quality cars operated with predictable disregard for laws.
ICBC released a statement Tuesday afternoon saying that the incident captured on video by a Richmond News reader – which showed a driverless Tesla coasting on the wrong side of the road in Richmond Centre – is not permitted under B.C. laws. …it doesn’t appear as if the owner in question on Monday afternoon read the instructions properly, as the driverless car entered the lot on the complete wrong side of an intersection and continued for at least 50 yards on the wrong side of the road.
There have been many, many examples posted of Tesla choosing the wrong side of a road to drive on. It’s a horrible reality of a company that doesn’t seem to care at all about the extremely high risk they pose to human life.
Here’s a five-year old clarion warning from greentheonly in 2018, where the Tesla “vision” had two sides of a yellow line and chose the obviously wrong side. On a dangerously blind hill, while still thinking it was on the other side (see lower left diagram), the Tesla launches into an oncoming traffic lane.
This research was picked up and became more widely known in 2019 by attention-seeking “hackers” who gave a conference presentation on why and how greentheonly was right.
…the Autopilot system will [misread lines, become overconfident and] make an abnormal judgement, which causes the vehicle to enter into the reverse lane
It wasn’t theoretical, however. A conference wasn’t necessary. Wrong-way Tesla were in 2019 news for real risks on real roads.
The CHP said multiple reports came in of the vehicle going the wrong way — eastbound in westbound lanes — on Interstate Highway 80 near Fremont Street at 2:46 a.m.. The suspect, who wasn’t identified, continued the full length of the San Francisco Bay Bridge, through the toll plaza and onto northbound Interstate Highway 880, where a CHP spike strip stopped him around Fifth Avenue in Oakland, police said. The driver is in custody, and the CHP is investigating what prompted the wrong-way driving.
What prompted wrong-way driving? Tesla design failures with culpable negligence seems to be the simple answer.
Sadly by 2021 these warnings still did not stop Tesla from pushing its unsafe cars onto public roads, as documented by the NHTSA.
I tried to turn the wheel to avoid it from going into the wrong lane but the car by itself took control and forced itself into the incorrect lane
I recently discussed the controversial security firm known as Wiz in one of my previous articles. In that post, I just mentioned briefly a dispute between Wiz and another security company named Orca, which has now brought to light an intriguing revelation about Wiz’s security product.
In a well-documented lawsuit, Orca alleges that Wiz unlawfully appropriated their concepts across various domains, spanning from patents to marketing strategies. To provide some context, the complaint begins with an incident in which the founder of Orca had a meeting with the Microsoft Cloud Security team to present his innovative ideas. Subsequently, members of the Microsoft Cloud Security team departed from Microsoft and established a competing company that directly utilized these very ideas, thus competing with Orca.
Now, at first glance, this may seem audacious and apparent, but it’s essential to understand the context. We’re talking about a closely-knit group of former military intelligence personnel from Israel who have quickly earned a reputation in the civilian market for employing very aggressive and unfair competitive tactics more akin to wartime espionage.
Speaking of espionage, the Orca complaint recently was amended with some proof that Wiz seems to be sneaking data from customers with what seems to be an intentionally unsafe snapshot scanning architecture.
One common practice in cloud management is taking snapshots of customer workloads to create backups or facilitate disaster recovery. And the critical importance of keeping cloud snapshots private is hard to overstate. A supposed security vendor should never roll up to take snapshots of your workloads and read them out somewhere else, especially when claiming to care about your privacy.
The $10m Acoustic Kitty project as documented in “The Wizards of Langley” by Jeffrey Richelson in 2001. A new security firm named itself “Wiz” in a boast about their espionage roots, as if untouchable.That just sounds like spying to me.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
A cloud snapshot is essentially a very fast point-in-time copy of a virtual machine (VM), it captures an entire workload’s state. It has the data, as well as configuration, and storage at a specific moment. Typically this allows a workload to be restored to that exact state, revolutionizing both backups and restores. Snapshots quickly became indispensable for many uses including tests, migrations as well as aiding business continuity, disaster recovery and reduced downtime.
The snapshots, like the name implies, can contain all kinds of sensitive information, including proprietary data, intellectual property, or customer records. Exposing snapshots to third-party vendors brings to mind huge risks of unauthorized access or data breaches. Given how many industries and regions have strict regulations governing data privacy and security, the very idea of transferring snapshots to external vendors probably trips compliance violations and legal consequences.
FTC are you listening?
So why would Wiz even think of moving snapshots into their cloud account? Terrible idea and totally unnecessary, a violation of basic safety. Yet here it is, as captured on page 46 in the new Orca amended complaint of September 15th.
Scan configuration — The list of disks for scanning is composed by the cloud fetcher leveraging the cloud provider APIs and sent to the Wiz workload scanner. Snapshot creation — The workload scanner, which runs in a dedicated account, creates the snapshot and shares it with the scanner cluster. These snapshots are created with ‘wiz:auto-gen-snapshot’ tag to help identify them. Snapshot scan — The snapshot is mapped as a read-only volume and scanned. The scan results include metadata on packages, vulnerabilities and mis-configurations and are sent to the backend. Cleanup — The snapshot is deleted from the customer tenant.
Note the flow at the bottom right, where Wiz takes a snapshot and then exfiltrates it out of the customer environment. Source: Exhibit 4: Orca v. Wiz Amended Complaint Exhibits 2023-09-15
Orca’s complaint calls out a marketing detail here. Apparently they pitched and grew their technology using the concept of their scanner looking at cloud machines like an MRI scans the human body.
Orca realized early on that its cloud-native approach could be
analogized to a medical MRI, providing a full model of the cloud environment without affecting it in any way. Early Orca marketing materials noted: “An apt analogy is to think of a medical MRI. Instead of probing inside the body with needles and scalpels, such imaging is an out-of-band method of obtaining a detailed picture of the organs and tissue within. The person is never physically touched.”
Page 10 of the complaint says Wiz then copied this MRI language from Orca almost word-for-word into their own marketing.
Just like an MRI performs a 3D scan of the body without affecting the body itself, snapshot scanning achieves deep analysis of the workload without any impact or interruption to the live workload
The problem, beyond stealing the marketing, seems to be that Wiz documentation also says snapshots are “always remaining within the customer tenant” yet their architecture illustrates that is NOT true: a “shared snapshot” is read into the Wiz cloud account and outside customer control.
That’s not “always remaining within” if you believe Wiz themselves when they jump up and down and scream at Microsoft for having a private key configured to be read by someone other than the person who owns that key. No joke, Wiz couldn’t be more excited to tell the world that Microsoft was “breached” yet here in their own documentation they seem to have designed a safety breach as inherent to their product architecture.
For comparison, Orca documentation has a very important statement that says basically the exact opposite to Wiz.
Note that these snapshots can only be accessed from your account for security.
Again, looking at the Wiz documentation in the complaint, it seems like Wiz created a snapshot flow that setup access from outside the customer account. How could they be so upset with Microsoft, their former employer, for excessive permissions in cloud when they just build an entirely new cloud scan empire based on excessive permissions?
Security vendors, no matter how reputable (no matter if they call themselves the untouchable “Wiz”ards), are not inherently safe and of course may themselves become targets. Their handling of snapshots increases attack surface and exposure to potential breaches.
Also data is subject to the laws and regulations of the country or region where it is located. Wiz shifting snapshots could mean they “somehow” show up in Israel with its different rules, creating compliance challenges.
What do I mean, could mean?
Read the Orca complaint in full, which documents how Wiz allegedly built their company from a culture of cynical extrajudicial military-espionage that goes even beyond industrial theft.
And then ask yourself why their architecture allegedly was built for stealing customer data in snapshots…
I know it’s fashionable to say cloud security means an ever-changing landscape, but in reality our book “Securing the Virtual Environment: How to Defend the Enterprise From Attack” from ten years ago still lays out principles that remain steadfast cornerstones. Safeguarding customer workloads and data is a top priority, such that it is unequivocally recommended to refrain from shifting snapshots to third-party security vendors. Keep them private, under strict access control so you can monitor activities, and ensure compliance with regulations, laws and security policies.
