Read what you want into it :
Dow Plunges 600 Points To Lowest Level In Two Months As Experts Fear Great Recession-Style Collapse With Evergrande
Monday, September 20, 2021
True it was "A Small Emolument' Disclosed by Sly Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema, but What A Fragrant Story by Tom Gogola!
NO WINE BEFORE ITS TIME: A Personal Note: Once upon a time long ago, your MesaZona blogger and a friend were taking an economical trans-continental trip driving (and sleeping) in a Porsche 912 east-to-west from Prince Edward Island all the way to Vancouver and points-in-between across Canada to scout the potential for investments by an unknown-party in Avocado farming in the Great State of California. Before we got there in a certain conservative county, it was time to go on vineyard tours in California's Wine Country - Napa, Sonoma and Mendocino
Flash-Forward ! It's worth a Whiff ...Let's Pop-the-Cork and Inhale
Kyrsten Sinema’s Grapes of Wealth
The Arizona senator’s wine-soaked politics offer a bold and colorful bouquet of disparate notes, with a hint of corruption.
By Tom Gogola
September 16, 2021
Insert "A curious news story popped up in the Sonoma County Press-Democrat this summer, just as a bipartisan group of US senators was trimming the sails on Joe Biden’s infrastructure plans and sending their own $1.2 trillion package to the Senate floor: The Wine Country paper of record reported that one of those senators, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, had traveled to the city of Sonoma in August 2020, where she earned $1,117.40 as a paid intern at a winery. ..
According to the Press-Democrat, Senator Sinema worked at the California winery for three weeks last summer, and has also traveled to Sonoma for a fundraiser held on her behalf at a luxury inn that charges $950 a night for a room during peak season. Why would a sitting senator—earning a taxpayer-funded salary of $174,000—take a paid internship at a winery? Well, Sinema is apparently a serious wine buff, in her own way, who perhaps subscribes to literary lush Charles Bukowski’s view that politics is like “sucking wine through a bent straw.” (Bukowski was sucking wind in the original.)
> Around the same time as the Press-Democrat internship article appeared, back in Washington, D.C., all the headlines were about how Sinema played a key role in keeping the infrastructure negotiations on track by encouraging her fellow “moderates” to guzzle some more wine and get back to work when talks broke down. She supplied the wine, . .It all sounded rather immoderate, if not completely decadent, if you ask me. And anyway, isn’t excessive alcohol consumption supposed to impair your judgment, not enhance it? ..."
READ MORE Go there > https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/sinema-internship-wine/
OK...'Looking to Clamp Down' but they don't > An FTC study showed how big Silicon Valley companies bought startups to eliminate future competitors
Statement: "Tech mergers and acquisitions of all sizes have reached new highs in 2021, partly because companies bolstered digital capabilities as millions of people embraced the Internet and ecommerce during the pandemic.
I think of serial acquisitions as a Pac-Man strategy—the collective impact of hundreds of smaller acquisitions can lead to a monopolistic behemoth
Big tech companies snap up smaller rivals at record pace
"Pac-Man" buying spree comes as US regulators look to clamp down on some acquisitions.
Insert "The world’s largest technology companies have snapped up smaller rivals at a record pace this year in a buying spree that comes as US politicians and regulators prepare to crack down on “under the radar” deals.
Data from Refinitiv analyzed by the Financial Times show that tech companies have spent at least $264 billion buying up potential rivals worth less than $1 billion since the start of 2021—double the previous record registered in 2000 during the dotcom boom.
The glut of acquisitions comes amid much tougher scrutiny from the White House, regulators and members of Congress, who have accused large technology companies—particularly Apple, Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft—of stifling competition and harming consumers.
The Federal Trade Commission is investigating Facebook’s long-completed acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, and the organization has warned that it could scrutinize other transactions even after they have gone through. It has the power to unwind deals if it deems them illegal and to block others in the future. . .
TRUST-BUILDING EXERCISE?
The FT’s data analysis shows that despite such warnings, the dealmaking has increased pace since the end of the report’s timeframe. Since the start of the year, tech companies have inked a record 9,222 transactions to buy start-ups worth less than a billion dollars, about 40 percent above the 2000 levels.
Barry Lynn, director of the Washington-based Open Markets Institute, said: “This was entirely foreseeable—in hard times, the companies which are already entrenched get that much more entrenched.
“This dealmaking is bad because it makes these corporations that much more powerful. It increases their power over the people who work for them, over capital markets and investors, and it blocks off the kind of competition that can bring innovation.”
HACKED AGAIN! . . .This Time Your Health Data Got Stolen Somehow, but That's One More Months-Long Saga
He'll YEAH! Another report taken from Techdirt with some of the same old Cybersecurity firms telling how they caught it. O yeah - and the same tired free offer: "In response, the state of Alaska is offering free credit monitoring to "any concerned Alaskan." All Alaskan citizens who have applied for a Permanent Fund Dividend will receive an email notification describing the breach and offering a code for the free credit-monitoring service. Concerned Alaskans who do not receive an emailed code will need to contact a toll-free hotline which will be available at the DHSS website beginning Tuesday, September 21."
Loops.aspx —
Nation-state espionage group breaches Alaska Department of Health
Fallout continues from an advanced persistent threat first detected in May 2021.
Insert: "Last week, Alaska's Department of Health and Social Services (DHSS) disclosed a security breach apparently made by a sophisticated nation-state level attacker.
According to DHSS—which contracted with well-known security firm Mandiant to investigate the breach—the attackers gained a foothold inside DHSS' network via one of its public-facing websites, from which it pivoted to deeper resources.
A months-long saga
This is not the first report of the DHSS breach. The organization first publicly announced the intrusion on May 18, with a June update announcing a multipronged investigation, and one more in August on completion of the first of three investigatory steps.
In the August update, DHSS disclosed that Mandiant—a subset of larger infosec firm FireEye—completed its initial investigation and concluded that the intrusion was a direct, sophisticated attack rather than a simple drive-by ransomware infestation. . .
Data leaked, and Alaskan response
A security monitoring firm performing proactive surveillance first noticed signs of an intrusion on May 2. Alaska's Office of Information Technology (Security Office) notified DHSS of unauthorized computer access on May 5, after which DHSS reports it immediately shut down systems to deny attackers further access to protected data
WHAT THEY STOLE The 'attackers' potentially had access to personal data, some of which constitutes breach of both HIPAA and Alaska Personal Information Protection Act (APIPA). The number of individuals involved in the attack is still unknown, as is exactly what data may have been exhilarated ---- but the attackers potentially had access to "any data stored on the department's information technology infrastructure," including but not limited to the following:
- Full names
- Dates of birth
- Social Security numbers
- Addresses
- Telephone numbers
- Driver’s license numbers
- Internal identifying numbers (case reports, protected service reports, Medicaid, etc.)
- Health information
- Financial information
- Historical information concerning a person’s interaction with DHSS
If Alaska's native Ursus arctos population could be enlisted for cyber defense patrols, attackers might need paws for reflection before committing a criminal breach.
Jared Lloyd via Getty Images
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