2021 Oscar-Nominated Short: "Yes-People" | The Screening Room | The New ...

Why I Made... Murder Among The Mormons | The Story Behind The Documentary

Sun and Mega-Droughts, Disaster Review, Veil Nebula | S0 News Apr.3.2021

U.S. Drought Monitor: Update

Here we have it >

U.S. Drought Monitor Update for March 30, 2021

Courtesy of Pixabay.com

According to the March 30, 2021, U.S. Drought Monitor, moderate to exceptional drought covers 36.7% of the United States including Puerto Rico, a slight increase from last week’s 36.4%. The worst drought categories (extreme to exceptional drought) increased from 15.1%last week to 15.6%. 

The upper-level circulation pattern was a continuation of the pattern that has existed for much of the winter. Several Pacific weather systems moved through the jet stream flow across the contiguous United States. They tended to move southward and weaken over the West, and then were re-energized over the Plains and moved northeastward. This resulted in a long-wave trough in the upper levels over the West and a ridge over the East. The associated weekly temperature pattern was colder than normal in the West and warmer than normal east of the Rockies. 

The weather systems generally dried out as they crossed the West, although they gave parts of the Four Corners states some precipitation. The systems picked up Gulf of Mexico moisture as they moved east, spreading above-normal precipitation over much of the Deep South as well as the Upper Midwest and parts of the Northeast. The beneficial precipitation contracted drought and abnormal dryness in parts of the South and Midwest, while drought or abnormal dryness expanded or intensified across parts of the Northwest, northern Plains, and Northeast.  

Drought expansion was more than contraction, so the overall U.S. drought footprint increased a little this week.

Abnormal dryness and drought are currently affecting over 148  million people across the United States including Puerto Rico—about 47.8% of the population.

The full U.S. Drought Monitor weekly update is available from Drought.gov.

In addition to Drought.gov, you can find further information on the current drought as well as on this week’s Drought Monitor update at the National Drought Mitigation Center. See their recent news releases.

The most recent U.S. Drought Outlook is available from NOAA’s Climate Prediction Centerand the U.S. Department of Agriculture provides information about the drought’s influence on crops and livestock.

For additional drought information, follow #DroughtMonitor on Facebook and Twitter.

Plasma Strike in Antarctica, Mars Quakes, US Quake Watch | S0 News Apr.2...

Earth Disaster | A Science Revolution

Failures of National Defense Cybersecurity (mostly from Tim Cushing at Techdirt)

Here's a clipped short version: ..."Hindsight is 20/20. Foresight appears to be almost nonexistent, even with the tech tools the NSA has at its disposal. If it couldn't mitigate the damage before it turned federal agencies into unwitting honeypots for data exfiltration (and that includes the supposed securers of the Homeland, the Department of Homeland Security and its cybersecurity branch), it shouldn't be given all access passes to domestic networks under the theory that it might be able to do marginally better with greater "visibility."

Never let a good crisis go to waste.

The federal government is always on the lookout for expansion opportunities and a bad actor known colloquially as "Current Events" keeps handing the government what it's looking for.

NSA Director Says More Domestic Surveillance Might Stop Foreign Hacking; Fails To Explain Why NSA Isn't Stopping Much Foreign Hacking

Overhype

from the what-if-we-just-did-the-thing-we-already-do-but-not-through-the-back-door dept

Thu, Apr 1st 2021 10:57am — Tim Cushing

More > The blockbuster breach of widely-used SolarWinds network software affected dozens of federal agencies and millions of users around the world. In response to this travesty, the director of the NSA and its military counterpart CYBERCOM (Cyber Command) floated the idea of allowing the NSA (and others) to gaze inwardly at the country's moving (computer) parts.

Here's Spencer Ackerman, writing for The Daily Beast:

“We truly need to look at the ability for us to see ourselves and right now it's difficult for us to see ourselves,” [General Paul] Nakasone testified on Thursday to the Senate Armed Services Committee. Adversaries like China and Russia “are operating with increased sophistication, scope [and] scale, including operations that can end “before a warrant can be issued,” he warned.

“If we have a problem where we only see our adversaries when they operate outside of their country and we don't see them when they operate inside our country it's very difficult for us to be able to—to, as I say, connect those dots,” Nakasone said. “That's something that—that the administration and obviously, others are addressing right now.”

The NSA thinks it doesn't have enough visibility. And it's true, information sharing has long been an intergovernmental problem. Information sharing between the government and private companies has also been less than ideal, largely due to the fact that the government demands more than it's willing to share -- and that includes known exploits and bugs it's currently using to engage in worldwide surveillance.

What Nakasone is suggesting sounds like domestic surveillance of private networks to potentially thwart attacks and root out persistent threats. That doesn't sound much like America though. And there's no reason to believe the NSA and DoD are better qualified to do this job than the private sector. The NSA and others have suffered their own security breaches and carelessly handled sensitive tools/information. Giving up privacy (and some security) for nominal gains in "visibility" would be a really bad idea . . .
more