“Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.” - Vincent Van Gogh
Here’s my take on a few things in tech that have been happening recently:
If I didn’t track my run, did it even happen? Anyone who owns a Garmin device (myself included) will know that on Thursday, the Garmin Connect app became unusable, with an innocuous message explaining the situation: “Server maintenance: Sorry, we’re down for maintenance. Check back shortly.” Like many others, I expected this to be a temporary outage, but when I checked back the next day and this message persisted, a mildly suspect feeling arose - it wouldn’t make sense for the app to be down for this long for general maintenance. A brief Google was fruitless - there wasn’t any information on the Garmin Twitter account or anywhere obvious online. I did however notice a mysterious comment on one website (Downdetector), suggesting that they had been hacked. After a few days of silence and continued “maintenance,” the first news stories about this situation appeared on Saturday. It appears that there was an attack using a ransomware called WastedLocker, which is operated by a Russian hacker group called Evil Corp. This malware infects computers and locks user data, only agreeing to release it in exchange for ransom. One source suggests that the attackers are demanding a $10 million ransom from Garmin, though it seems this hasn’t been confirmed. While this sounds relatively dire for Garmin users, WastedLocker doesn’t seem to have the ability to exfiltrate data and the group doesn’t have a history of publishing or selling stolen data, unlike other ransomware. Garmin seems hopeful that this is the case - their website states, “Garmin has no indication that this outage has affected your data, including activity, payment or other personal information.” Interestingly, Garmin still hasn’t properly addressed the situation, and with each day that passes they will continue to lose the trust of their millions of users around the world. In addition to people using Garmin devices to track their activity, users of the flyGarmin aviation navigation service, such as pilots who are now not able to fly, were also affected by this attack. I think this will be an example for future of how not to handle a security breach - crises such as hacking can happen, but it’s how you respond that is important: quick and transparent communication will help to garner trust with the people that use your product. Evidently Garmin hasn’t taken this approach, and users are growing increasingly frustrated as there doesn’t seem to be an end to this service outage in sight.
Links:
Garmin Outage (Garmin)
Garmin outage caused by confirmed WastedLocker ransomware attack (Bleeping Computer)
Threat spotlight: WastedLocker, customized ransomware (MalwareBytes Labs)
Test tube burgers. The Not Company, a Latin American company producing plant-based meat substitutes, such as milk, ice cream and burgers, has recently announced an $85 million funding round. They’ve also just signed a deal to supply Burger King’s plant-based burgers. There are a few similar companies in the plant-based meat-substitute market, such as Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, and plant-based diets are becoming increasingly popular, in part due to the impact that animal agriculture has on climate change. While plant-based meat substitutes are getting better and better, it seems that eating a plant burger, even if it bleeds like real meat, remains unappealing to many meat eaters. I think the answer to this problem potentially lies with lab-grown meat. KFC in Russia is partnering with a company called 3D Bioprinting Solutions to make 3D-printed cell-based meat products. Lab-grown meat would be environmentally friendly and would also satisfy the meat evangelist complaints that “plant substitutes are just not the same.” However, producing meat in a lab isn’t easy - and even if you succeed, you will face the challenge that people aren’t quite ready to accept lab-grown food products. I must admit, this confuses me a bit. Test tube babies are relatively commonplace these days, but for some reason the idea of test tube burgers seems to provoke a reaction of mild disgust. But who ever said humans were logical…
Links:
The Not Company, a maker of plant-based meat and dairy substitutes in Chile, will soon be worth $250M (TechCrunch)
Meat of the future: KFC and 3D Bioprinting Solutions to use a bioprinter to produce KFC nuggets (KFC)
School from home. The coronavirus quarantine has shown that we can do a lot more than we might have expected from home, and lots of people are talking about the future of work and how working from home might become more of the norm. Universities are doing online lectures, and platforms for online courses targeted towards adults, such as Coursera and Udemy, have been around for a while. However, something I haven’t seen discussed as much is “school from home.” Our current education system is based on old assumptions and beliefs on how children learn, and I’m interested in how we might apply some of the concepts we’ve encountered in the WFH environment to improving education. A fairly significant part of school, particularly at a young age, is learning how to interact with your peers. However, as we know in the working world, the most effective way to progress is not always with a group of other people - we’re all familiar with the classic meeting that could have been an email. We currently assume that the best way for a child to learn facts is in a room with 30 other children, but I’m not quite sure that this is correct - are there elements of school education that are better done asynchronously? If so, how do we ensure all students have access to the tools needed for this? There’s probably something we can learn from ed-tech start-ups like Byju’s and Vedantu in India, who are helping to educate school-aged children who wouldn’t have necessarily had access to such learning opportunities otherwise. These are just a few of my thoughts on this topic - I’ll be publishing a longer piece on it soon (watch this space!).
Links:
The COVID-19 pandemic has changed education forever (World Economic Forum)
Covid-19 is changing education for the better (Financial Times)
This is a newsletter of three things in tech and science that I've found interesting this week. It's a 5 minute read every Sunday, in which I’m hoping you’ll learn something new.
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