Saving the Monarch Butterfly Migration

Sadly, as of July 2022, monarch butterflies have become another member of the endangered species list. At Atmos Magazine Romina Cenisio visits the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve in Mexico to learn about the hazards and odds these amazing creatures face for survival and what some humans are doing to help them thrive.

Though the butterflies’ numbers fluctuate yearly, they’ve been trending downward. In July 2022, monarch butterflies officially joined the endangered species list.

From loss of habitat to the instability and unpredictability of climate change, the butterflies’ vast migration that traverses Canada, the U.S., and Mexico faces a patchwork of different threats. In the U.S., habitat loss and pesticides threaten milkweed, a native perennial flowering plant that’s a crucial piece of the migratory species’s survival. It’s the one plant on which monarchs lay their eggs and the one food source for the monarch caterpillars during the spring migration. In Mexico, deforestation due to illegal logging threatens the butterflies’ winter home. With such mounting challenges, the very survival of the monarch butterflies is at stake.

Their awe-inspiring migration is a cycle that repeats each year, spanning three countries. This journey is part of a deeply interconnected symbiosis with other species that ultimately supports us too. From grasslands to roadsides to forests, monarchs are essential pollinators that enrich diversity in flowering plants across North America.

Read the story

from Longreads https://ift.tt/QP7BUjD

---

Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/2Uu9wfO

On the Trail of the Dark Avenger

Welcome to 1980s Bulgaria, a country on the brink of economic collapse and a hotbed of computer viruses. In an excerpt from his new book, Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks, Scott J. Shapiro details the work of a notorious virus creator known only as the Dark Avenger, who wreaked havoc on computer systems because, well, he could:

Others had been pumping out viruses for months, but Dark Avenger built his to be lethal. His first creation would be known as Eddie. When a user ran a program infected with Eddie, the virus would not start by attacking other files. It would lurk in computer memory and hand back control to the original program. However, when a user loaded another program, skulking Eddie would spring into action and infect that program. These infected programs would be Eddie’s new carriers.

Eddie also packed a payload that slowly and silently destroyed every file it touched. When the infected program was run the 16th time, the virus overwrote a random section of the disk in the computer with its calling card: “Eddie lives … somewhere in time.” After enough of these indiscriminate changes, programs on the disk stopped loading.

Destructive viruses were not new. Vienna, for example, destroyed every eighth file. But Eddie was far more malicious. Because Eddie infections took a while to produce symptoms, users spread the virus and backed up contaminated files. When users discovered that their disk had turned into digital sawdust, they also learned that their backups were badly damaged. Dark Avenger had invented what are now called “data diddling” viruses — viruses that alter data in files.

Dark Avenger was proud of his cruel creation and claimed credit in the code. First, he inserted an ironic copyright notice: “This program was written in the city of Sofia (C) 1988–89 Dark Avenger.” The “Eddie lives” string that wreaked such destruction was a tribute to his love of heavy metal music. “Eddie” refers to the skeletal mascot of the band Iron Maiden; Somewhere in Time is the name of Iron Maiden’s sixth album, in which Eddie appears on the cover as a muscular cyborg in a Blade Runner setting, next to graffiti that reads “Eddie lives.”

Read the story

from Longreads https://ift.tt/MGHkDZT

---

Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/2Uu9wfO

Amor Eterno

Kimberly Mata-Rubio didn’t consider herself a political person. She voted, but she wasn’t an activist; she had opinions, but she was soft-spoken. Then her daughter Lexi was murdered at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, on May 24, 2022, along with 18 other students and two teachers. In the year that followed, Kim got political. She got loud. With her husband, Felix, at her side, Kim joined the ever-growing ranks of parents whose children have been killed by guns in schools, malls, parks, and homes — parents who, touched by unspeakable tragedy, are begging for U.S. politicians to enact serious gun control:

Kim and Felix each wore a button with Lexi’s image on it. [Ted] Cruz sat casually, with one of his trademark cowboy boots crossed over his knee. A staffer handed him a Diet Dr Pepper.

Felix pulled out his cellphone and showed Cruz a photo of Lexi in her casket. “That’s our daughter who was murdered at Robb Elementary.” Kim then said she and Felix hoped they could count on the senator’s support for an assault weapons ban. She was about to say more, but Cruz jumped in and told Kim and Felix about his own plan to stop school shootings: he wanted to put more law enforcement officers and more mental health services on school campuses. 

A staffer gently interrupted the senator to say he had another appointment. The meeting had lasted less than five minutes, and Kim was not happy. As Cruz stood up to leave, Kim also rose, looked him in the eye, and snapped “You have no idea what you’re talking about, and I’m going to do everything I can to make sure you are not reelected.” Before Cruz had a chance to say anything else, Kim walked out of the office, followed by Felix. A spokesman for the senator later said the senator “saw firsthand” the Rubios’ “pain and grief.” But Cruz wasn’t changing his position on guns. In fact, the spokesman said, right after his meeting with the Rubios, Cruz went to the Senate floor “to fight for his school safety legislation.” 

Kim was so dismayed by the meeting with Cruz that she began wearing a T-shirt—yellow for Lexi—with the phrase “You f@#ked with the wrong mom” on the back. She had a tattoo artist ink one of Lexi’s drawings of her and Lexi on her upper left arm, and she rolled up her sleeves so that anyone could see it. “The inaction of our political leaders is the reason my daughter is no longer here,” she told me. “And I am never going to let them forget that.”

Read the story

from Longreads https://ift.tt/a0oBCF8

---

Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/b1vNw4p

Bad Manors

In this smart critical essay, Kate Wagner, the writer behind the popular blog McMansion Hell, examines the McMansion: the uniquely American, 3,000-square-foot-plus, made-to-order home that’s a “durable emblem of our American way of life.”

Wagner explores the aesthetic of the latest generation of McMansions (from manufactured modern farmhouse to Disneyfied Craftsman), the evolution of its floor plan, its enduring popularity, and its alternatives in a time of environmental crisis.

We need, quite literally, a revolution. And every revolution, lest we forget, is an architectural revolution. The Industrial Revolution brought about the dawn of modernism; the Russian Revolution initially saw the demise of bourgeois opulence in favor of Constructivism. The French revolutionaries looked upon the palace of Versailles with disgust, for it represented everything loathsome about monarchist French society: inequality, waste, and excessive filigree. So, too, under increasingly dire material conditions spurred by climate change and intersecting political catastrophes, will we look upon the McMansion. Maybe sooner than we think.

Read the story

from Longreads https://ift.tt/prxUt6Q

---

Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/b1vNw4p

Land Ownership Makes No Sense

“The problem with the right to land is that it’s all been taken.” This thought-provoking essay discusses Georgism, land-value tax, and anti-landlordism, and asks whether our descendants will look back on our time and view land ownership as immoral. The piece is part of Wired‘s Next Normal series, which explores the “future of morality and how our ethical beliefs may change in the years to come.”

Everyone today is born with a kind of existential debt. From the moment you emerge, you’re in a space that belongs to someone else, and from then on, money is spent each day to give you access to the space you require to exist. Land ownership, and the accompanying system of sales and rentals, merely allows some people to make money by gatekeeping a resource that no more belongs to one of us than any of us. Economists call this “rent seeking,” and most of us call it “immoral.”

Read the story

from Longreads https://ift.tt/IXdQyvG

---

Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/b1vNw4p

The Untold Story of the Boldest Supply-Chain Hack Ever

In 2019, hackers used SolarWinds software as a vector into thousands of the company’s customers to steal data from U.S. federal government agencies and tech giants like Intel, Cisco, and Microsoft. For WIRED Kim Zetter recounts what little is known about the hackers, their intents, and the repercussions, four years later.

Adair and his colleagues dubbed the second gang of thieves “Dark Halo” and booted them from the network. But soon they were back. As it turned out, the hackers had planted a backdoor on the network three years earlier—malicious code that opened a secret portal, allowing them to enter or communicate with infected machines. Now, for the first time, they were using it. “We shut down one door, and they quickly went to the other,” Adair says.

The perpetrators had indeed hacked SolarWinds’ software. Using techniques that investigators had never seen before, the hackers gained access to thousands of the company’s customers. Among the infected were at least eight other federal agencies, including the US Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, and the Treasury Department, as well as top tech and security firms, including Intel, Cisco, and Palo Alto Networks—though none of them knew it yet. Even Microsoft and Mandiant were on the victims list.

Read the story

from Longreads https://ift.tt/pg7Zk8V

---

Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/b1vNw4p

Andreessen Horowitz Saw the Future — But Did the Future Leave It Behind?

Andreessen Horowitz is more than just a Silicon Valley investment firm — it’s a media hype machine. Its tech-can-do-no-wrong mentality bolstered some of the most charismatic CEOs of our era, including now-disgraced founders like Elizabeth Holmes (Theranos) and Adam Neumann (WeWork). As Elizabeth Lopatto points out in The Verge, this strategy is ill-suited to a post-pandemic landscape of tech layoffs and higher interest rates, yet the firm presses on, making recent investments in Neumann’s new venture, as well as Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover. Can Andreessen continue using the same tired script or will they be able to pivot to the times? As is always true in Silicon Valley, it’s the returns that will have the final say.

In many ways, a16z created the playbook for the boom times in tech. During the era of fawning tech journalism and low interest rates, valuations of private companies exploded. Founders were “geniuses” and “rockstars”; it was easy to raise and easy to spend. There were herds of “unicorns,” companies that are valued at more than $1 billion. (This is to say nothing of “decacorns.”) Startups stopped running lean and instead got fat, attempting to outspend their competition.

This strategy is now at least two vibe shifts behind.

Read the story

from Longreads https://ift.tt/yfspaCY

---

Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/b1vNw4p