Yahoo! Hacked

Towards the end of September, there was news that Yahoo! had a massive security breach. 500 million accounts of Yahoo users were compromised. Like always, I was hoping, I was not among the ones breached. Unfortunately, that ain't true. I got this message in my Yahoo! mailbox recently:


It further reads below:



Getting my password stolen is the least of my worries. Passwords are easy to change. And as long as you don't use your same password for different accounts, that piece of information is not much of use for the hackers (unless they physically logged into my account).

What really scares me is this - there is a database of 500 million people out there which contains our - Secret questions, Birth-dates, Telephone nos, and full legal names. That information is just enough to impersonate as me in this online world and then wreak havoc with my life. The hard part of this information is - I can't change my birth-date, my secrets and compromising this is pretty much something that can't be ever undone. The full impact of this hack will not be realized soon enough. And random identity thefts somewhere in the future will be linked to this hack.

I am assuming this is just the beginning of more ominous attacks bound to happen going forward on the internet (state-sponsored actors or not - doesn't matter!). Further investigation reveals that this might not be even the work of a state sponsored actor, and the database has already been put on sale for other people to have access to.

It's time companies are made liable for securing the information about the users that they possess. And if you can't protect it, then don't store it.

Small victories

After almost 7 years of shying away from the gym, I finally gave in and signed up for a membership. My swimming pool ain't that great (opens too late in the morning), and I don't have the discipline to go in the evening. I ain't that regular with my gym, but well, something is better than nothing.

What I find starkly different this time around is - I saw remarkable progress in the first few weeks. I will credit it to the fact that I hadn't been doing any weights or cardio for 7 over years and this time my instructors asked me to increase the number of repetitions I do for each set without worrying about the weights too much. Earlier, I used to focus more on increasing the weights, than worry about increasing my repetitions. This has been the single most effective improvement for me.

Anyway, gyms are a source of inspiration. Everyone I look around are fighting their own battles. The ultra-fit guys and gals are either trying to go that extra mile in the same amount of time, or lift that extra kg. The beginners like me meanwhile are just trying to be better than yesterday. I love the feeling of being marginally better than yourself from yesterday. That's all you need to aim for. Nothing more.

And if you need motivation, this poster by the oatmeal is all you need.

Sensational News

We have come to a point in time in history of human evolution where we almost consume all our news from social media (62% of U.S adults use Facebook as their primary source of information, and I am pretty sure the story is similar elsewhere).

Now, things that get shared and clicked on Facebook, generally don't tend to be of the garden variety. These are necessarily sensational, controversial or down right false. To add to it, Facebook fired it's human editors that curated news and used news bots to decide the "Trending topics" that we got to consume. This led to a false but sensational news to trend on Facebook for a long while sometime ago. While I am sure over a period of time, these bots will be intelligent enough to sniff out the false and bury, sensationalism shall remain.

When I was young, I subscribed to the fact that we were being manipulated by big giant corporations with their hidden agendas. Now as I am getting older, I have realized that we are just getting fed what we desire. If you click on "5 ways to lose 10 pounds by next Friday" that's what you are going to get more of. There may not be any hidden agendas. After all, everyone has a profit motive. In the big bad world of the internet, our clicks are the currency. What we click is what we get more of!

 

Briefest History of Time

I loved this webcomic by XKCD this week. Though it's written to counter climate change skepticism, it also serves as a super compressed explanation of human history and it's associated events on a beautifully drawn timeline explaining the average global temperatures back then.

I highly recommend taking some time off your busy schedule and reading it. I spent a few hours reading about events that he has mentioned and I didn't know about. I have always had problems relating things in history to each other (Like what was happening in India when Roman empire was at it's peak etc.). This timeline sort of manages to clear the relations.

Please note that I have cut off the period between 19500 CE to 500 CE here. See the complete timeline on XKCD