[continued from previous message]

Subject: Airbnb guest in luxury rental has refused to leave or pay
(L.A. Times)

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-10-04/airbnb-guest-refuse-pay-leave-luxury-rental

------------------------------

Date: Mon, 9 Oct 2023 18:20:58 -0400
From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com>
Subject: WhatsApp says warnings of a cyberattack targeting Jewish people
are baseless (NBC News)

The warning uses language copied from a previous faux warning that was
spread following earthquakes in Morocco.

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/misinformation/whatsapp-says-warnings-cyberattack-targeting-jewish-people-are-baseles-rcna119463

------------------------------

Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2023 20:30:55 -0400
From: Gabe Goldberg <gabe@gabegold.com>
Subject: Inside FTX's All-Night Race to Stop a Billion Crypto Heist
(WiReD)

The same chaotic day FTX declared bankruptcy, someone began stealing
hundreds of millions of dollars from its coffers. A WIRED investigation
reveals the company's “very crazy night” trying to stop them.

By the evening of 11 Nov 2023 , FTX's staff had already endured one of the worst days in the company's short life. What had recently been one of the world's top cryptocurrency exchanges, valued at $32 billion only 10 months earlier, had just declared bankruptcy. Executives had, after an extended struggle, persuaded the company's CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried, to hand over the reins to John Ray III, a new chief executive now tasked with shepherding the company through a nightmarish thicket of debts, many of which it seemed to
have no means to pay.

FTX had, it seemed, hit rock bottom. Until someone -- a thief or thieves who have yet to be identified -— chose that particular moment to make things far worse. That Friday evening, exhausted FTX staffers began to see mysterious outflows of the company's cryptocurrency, publicly captured on the Etherscan website that tracks the Ethereum blockchain, representing hundreds of
millions of dollars worth of crypto being stolen in real time.

“Holy sh*t,” one former FTX staffer, who asked not to be named because they weren't authorized to speak about internal company matters, remembers
thinking. “After all this, we’re being hacked?”

According to its own accounting, FTX would ultimately lose between $415
million and $432 million worth of its cryptocurrency holdings to those unidentifie thieves, numbers it has publicly confirmed as part of its bankruptcy process. What FTX hasn't previously revealed is how close it may have come to losing vastly more -- how its staff and outside consultants
raced to move more than $1 billion worth of crypto to more secure storage before it could be stolen by the malevolent presence on its network -- even,
at one point, scrambling to send close to half a billion dollars to a
physical USB drive in one consultant's office in an effort to keep it out of the thieves' hands.

https://www.wired.com/story/ftx-1-billion-crypto-heist/

------------------------------

Date: Sun, 8 Oct 2023 15:11:17 +0100
From: Martin Ward <mwardgkc@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: False news spreads faster than the truth (RISKS-33.88)

As Mark Twain famously wrote: "Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth
isn't."*--Following the Equator*, Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar

False news is carefully crafted to be titilating and to spread quickly while also promoting a particular political viewpoint.

True news is carefully selected to be titilating and to spread quickly while also promoting a particular political viewpoint.

But false news is crafted from the set of all plausible news stories, while true news is selected from the set of events which actually happened. This latter set is much smaller than the former, which explains why the false
news spreads faster than the truth: it is easier to craft spreadable false
news than to select spreadable true news. Truth is not an advantageous trait
in news stories.

This research seems to be empirical confirmation of Alvin Plantinga's "evolutionary argument against naturalism". Plantinga's argument is that natural selection does not directly select for true beliefs, but rather for advantageous behaviours: truth is not an advantageous trait. This means
that the probability that our minds are reliable under a conjunction of philosophical naturalism and naturalistic evolution is low or inscrutable. Therefore, to assert that naturalistic evolution is true also asserts that
one has a low or unknown probability of being right. Therefore, naturalism
is self-defeating.

------------------------------

Date: Sat, 7 Oct 2023 17:12:11 -0700
From: "David E. Ross" <david@rossde.com>
Subject: Re: Rooftop Solar ongoing maintenance issues (RISKS-33.88)

We had a solar electric system installed on our roof late in 2022.
Having read about problems transferring leases and realizing that we
might not live in our house to see the end of a lease (we are both in
our 80s), I decided we should buy the system instead of leasing it.

We chose solar electric, not out of a concern for the environment nor to
save money on our electric bills. Instead, we chose it because our
declining health requires us to have medical equipment operating on electricity, 24/7 for my wife and while I am sleeping. Southern
California Edison (SoCalEd), however, might fail several times a year,
summer or winter with no regard for the weather. Sometimes the failure
lasts less than 5 minutes; sometimes it lasts several hours. Thus, we
included a 12-hour backup battery in the installation.

The only problem with the installation was that the backup battery was
the primary source of electricity at night even when SoCalEd was
available. This drained the battery. This year, we bought an electric automobile and had a different contractor install a charging station. I
told that contractor about the battery problem, which they fixed in less
than 24 hours with no extra charge.

I monitor the performance of the system through a Web site owned by
SolarEdge, which supplies solar electric equipment but does not do installations. SolarEdge supplied some of the equipment in my system
but not all. Not being an installer or a lessor, I feel comfortable
trusting the validity of what I see on SolarEdge's Web site. It
indicates that so far in 2023, I have exported about three times more electricity to SoCalEd than I have imported. Interestingly, charging my
EV on a day with intense sunshine requires me to import some of the electricity. On the other hand, I am exporting electricity while our
central air-conditioner maintains an inside temperature of 78 while the
outside temperature is over 100.

------------------------------

Date: Sat, 7 Oct 2023 15:22:03 -0700
From: "Jim" <jgeissman@socal.rr.com>
Subject: Re: Google accused of directing motorist to drive off
collapsed bridge (RISKS-33.86-87

I wonder if Google finds some of its "roads" by algorithmically interpreting Google Maps air photos. I frequently see railways and pedestrian/bicycle
trails on abandoned railways overprinted with a grey line suggesting a road.

------------------------------

Date: Sat, 1 Jul 2023 11:11:11 -0800
From: RISKS-request@csl.sri.com
Subject: Abridged info on RISKS (comp.risks)

The ACM RISKS Forum is a MODERATED digest. Its Usenet manifestation is
comp.risks, the feed for which is donated by panix.com as of June 2011.

SUBSCRIPTIONS: The mailman Web interface can be used directly to

subscribe and unsubscribe:
http://mls.csl.sri.com/mailman/listinfo/risks

SUBMISSIONS: to risks@CSL.sri.com with meaningful SUBJECT: line that

includes the string `notsp'. Otherwise your message may not be read.
*** This attention-string has never changed, but might if spammers use it.

SPAM challenge-responses will not be honored. Instead, use an alternative

address from which you never send mail where the address becomes public!

The complete INFO file (submissions, default disclaimers, archive sites,

copyright policy, etc.) has moved to the ftp.sri.com site:
<risksinfo.html>.
*** Contributors are assumed to have read the full info file for guidelines!

OFFICIAL ARCHIVES: http://www.risks.org takes you to Lindsay Marshall's

searchable html archive at newcastle:
http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/VL.IS --> VoLume, ISsue.
Also, ftp://ftp.sri.com/risks for the current volume/previous directories
or ftp://ftp.sri.com/VL/risks-VL.IS for previous VoLume
If none of those work for you, the most recent issue is always at
http://www.csl.sri.com/users/risko/risks.txt, and index at /risks-33.00
ALTERNATIVE ARCHIVES: http://seclists.org/risks/ (only since mid-2001)
*** NOTE: If a cited URL fails, we do not try to update them. Try
browsing on the keywords in the subject line or cited article leads.
Apologies for what Office365 and SafeLinks may have done to URLs.

Special Offer to Join ACM for readers of the ACM RISKS Forum:

<http://www.acm.org/joinacm1>

------------------------------

End of RISKS-FORUM Digest 33.89
************************

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)