Fire operations-prescribed burning combo reduces wildfire severity up to 72%

PENN STATE

Research News

 

IMAGE: REPEAT PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE SAME LOCATION WITHIN LASSEN VOLCANIC NATIONAL PARK SHOWING INCREASES IN TREE DENSITY IN A JEFFREY PINE-WHITE FIR STAND THAT BURNED AT HIGH SEVERITY DURING THE READING... view more 

CREDIT: A.E. WEISLANDER, U.S. FOREST SERVICE / ALAN H. TAYLOR, PENN STATE

Firefighters battling wildfires in the western United States use a variety of suppression tactics to get the flames under control. Prescribed burns, or controlled fires intentionally set to clear shrubs and forest litter before a wildfire ever ignites, can make fire suppression operations almost three times as effective in limiting wildfire severity, according to a new study by researchers from Penn State, the U.S. National Park Service and the U.S. Forest Service.

"A lot happens once a fire starts burning," said Lucas Harris, a postdoctoral scholar in geography at Penn State. "Crews on the ground remove vegetation and construct fire lines, and planes and helicopters drop flame retardant to stop the spread of the fire. In this study, we measured the effectiveness of suppression operations and previous prescribed fires on fire severity, which is something that really hasn't been done before."

The researchers measured tree mortality in Lassen Volcanic National Park, California, one year after the 2012 Reading Fire burned more than 28,000 acres in the park and nearby communities. They combined this data with data on fuels, vegetation and previous prescribed fires, and they worked with fire managers to reconstruct the suppression operations that took place during the fire.

The researchers classified the fire suppression operations as being of low, moderate or high intensity and ran computer simulations to determine tree mortality rates in the forest with and without operations. They ran similar computer models to measure the impact of prescribed burns. They report their findings in the International Journal of Wildland Fire.

The scientists found that in areas with moderate to high operations intensity, suppression operations reduced tree mortality by 22%. Also, prescribed fires reduced tree mortality by 32%. The combination of prescribed fires and suppression operations, however, reduced tree mortality by 72%.

"We know that prescribed fires reduce the potential for the next fire in areas where they're used, and firefighters know them (these areas) as places where fire activity will be reduced and can use those areas as anchors to try to catch wildfires before they spread," said Alan Taylor, professor of geography and ecology and associate in the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute at Penn State. "Prior to this study, no one looked at the combined effectiveness of fire suppression operations and prescribed fires and quantified how important this interaction is in terms of fire severity. Those operations wouldn't have been as successful without the prescribed burns."

The study results show that prescribed fires have a strong moderating effect and help to provide good anchor points for operations during a wildfire, Harris added.

Harris and Taylor attributed the success of the study to Taylor's long-standing working relationships with local and federal partners in the area, especially with fire managers from the U.S. National Park Service and the U.S. Forest Service. They hope to continue working with these partners to conduct similar studies in other areas of California and the American West.

"This research demonstrates that the strategy of using prescribed fire to reduce potential fire activity and to facilitate fire suppression strategies works," said Taylor. "Fire managers have known that prescribed fire works, but they haven't been able to say how well it works. Here we're saying that it works really well."

###

Also contributing to the study were Stacy Drury, U.S. Forest Service, and Calvin Farris, U.S. National Park Service Fire Management. The U.S. National Park Service funded this research.

 

Have you ever wondered how many species have inhabited the earth?

SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY

Research News

 

IMAGE: EARTH AND ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES PROFESSORS LINDA IVANY (LEFT) AND BRUCE WILKINSON. view more 

CREDIT: SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY

Professors in Syracuse University's College of Arts and Sciences explored whether or not the scientific community will ever be able to settle on a 'total number' of species of living vertebrates, which could help with species preservation. By knowing what's out there, researchers argue that they can prioritize places and groups on which to concentrate conservation efforts.

Research professor Bruce Wilkinson and professor Linda Ivany, both from the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, recently co-authored a paper in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society where they determined that forecasting the total number of species may never be possible.

When asking the question, 'how many species?,' it is important to note that only a fraction of existing species have been named. In order to make a prediction on a total number, researchers project the curve of new species descriptions each year into the future until eventually reaching a point when all species should have been found.

Wilkinson, a geologist, noticed parallels between the discovery curves of new species and the total reservoir size of nonrenewable resources like oil or mineral ores. Similar to the species curve, by extending the oil reservoir curve researchers thought they should be able to estimate the total global reservoir and how long it will take to get to it all. The theory of resource exploitation suggests that the number of discoveries over time follows a bell-shaped curve: The curve rises as production rate increases due to new discoveries and then decreases as production declines, despite all the effort continuing to go into finding the resource. The time of maximum discovery is known as Hubbert's peak, after M. King Hubbert who predicted it. Following that time, the resource is being evermore depleted until it is used up.

"The problem with using that curve to predict how much is left is that you have to assume that the effort invested and the approach used to discover new oil, or species, is consistent and known," says Wilkinson. "We used to think we'd gone over the peak for oil and gas around 1972, but then 15 or so years ago someone figured out how to do horizontal drilling and all of the sudden there was a new bump in the amount being discovered."

Wilkinson and Ivany say that the discovery curve for new species of vertebrate animals shows a similar bump. Like the increase in the oil curve caused by horizontal drilling in the early 2000s, there was a surge in new species discovery beginning around 1950, when new funding was being dedicated to science after the World War II, more scientists were going into biology, and new molecular techniques were leading to an increase in the ability to distinguish species from one another.

In both cases, unforeseen changes in the effort and method of discovering new oil or species altered the way the discovery curves were playing out.

If researchers had estimated the total number of species based on data prior to 1950, their estimates would be much different from any estimate made today, and both would likely be wrong because those new advents cannot be predicted.

In some ways, this is a reflection of the scientific method, in which hypotheses stand until new facts are discovered, which lead to changes in the hypothesis.

"As much as we'd like to know 'the number,' the total species richness of the planet will remain an elusive target," says Ivany.

###

Read their full paper, Estimating vertebrate biodiversity using the tempo of taxonomy - a view from Hubbert's peak, in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society.

 

The delicate balance of protecting river deltas and society

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN

Research News

 

IMAGE: PAPER AUTHOR AND POSTDOCTORAL RESEARCH FELLOW ANDREW MOODIE ON THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER DELTA. view more 

CREDIT: THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN

Hundreds of millions of people live on river deltas around the world, making them central to rich diversity in culture and thriving economies. As deltas face environmental degradation and ongoing climate change, governments have sought ever more drastic measures to prevent flooding and protect society and its infrastructure. But, these policies can harm the natural environment and lead to loss of precious land. Striking a balance between limiting deltaic land loss and maximizing cultural and economic benefit to society is a top priority in sustainability policy.

Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin and Texas Tech University created a novel analysis tool that seeks to protect the millions of people living on urban river deltas, while preserving the environmental and commercial viability of these landscapes. Their study, published recently in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, applies a cost-benefit model to the concept of delta management, for the first time, by examining how to balance the natural function of river deltas with societal desire for landscape stability.

"By restricting river channels on deltas, we have limited the delivery of sediment to the coast where it is needed to sustain land in the face of rising sea level," said Andrew Moodie, lead author of the paper and a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellow working in associate professor Paola Passalacqua's lab in the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering in the Cockrell School of Engineering. "The irony here is that by preventing the river from flooding naturally, we have exacerbated land loss, and in the long run, made society more susceptible to catastrophic floods."

In their paper, the researchers note that levees and other flood prevention measures are often placed near the coast because it costs less and minimizes the impact on major population centers. But these downstream locations restrict the natural function of delta land building, which requires sediment to reach the coast.

Moodie's study leverages recent scientific advancements from two highly populated deltas, the Yellow River in China and the Mississippi River, to investigate nature-based solutions that mimic how rivers naturally behave to stop land loss. They analyzed the best location for channel diversions, which are engineered structures that create new pathways for rivers to flow through. Finding the right placement required balancing the benefits of diversions in terms of land building, with the cost of the structure. The balance of costs and benefits will vary with every delta, so there is no one catchall answer. However, the framework can be applied to a variety of systems worldwide.

The analysis found that to maximize the efficacy of diversions, structures need to be placed farther upstream than existing designs and structures, which are often away from population centers and near the coast. The tradeoff with building diversions upstream is that it usually costs more and is more likely to displace people.

"A lot of studies have said that society, in particular major cities like New Orleans, is doomed, and that engineering efforts leveraging nature-based solutions can't coexist with large population centers," Moodie said. "What we've shown with our optimizable framework is that having cities nearby actually makes it even easier to justify doing these large projects, because they protect communities."

Moodie started this work as part of his Ph.D. studies while at Rice University. His dissertation explored the impacts of river channel avulsions on deltas -- a process by which a channel abruptly abandons its course in favor of a new pathway to the sea.

"Avulsions are quite similar to diversions that humans are trying to implement on river deltas, for the sake of nourishing the landscape," Moodie said.

Focusing on the Yellow River delta of China, Moodie recognized an unaddressed problem: a lack of research integrating geomorphology and hydrology with economics, when considering how to manage deltas with diversions.

"We as humans want stability; we want stable landscapes we can count on year after year to provide ecosystem services such as fisheries, growing beds for oysters and more," Moodie said. "All these things are impacted by natural avulsions, and if we effectively harness this behavior, we can sway the scale to better the chances of sustaining deltas and the people and cultures that exist there."

###

 

Virtual schooling exposes digital challenges for Black families, MU study finds

UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI-COLUMBIA

Research News

 

IMAGE: ADAOBI ANAKWE IS A POST-DOCTORAL FELLOW AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI SCHOOL OF HEALTH PROFESSIONS. view more 

CREDIT: MU SCHOOL OF HEALTH PROFESSIONS

COLUMBIA, Mo. -- A new study from the University of Missouri found the unanticipated transitions to virtual schooling due to COVID-19 exposed the lack of digital resources among Black families in the United States, including access to Wi-Fi and technological savviness. As two-thirds of the country's Black children are born into single-parent households, the findings help explain the extensive stress virtual schooling caused for many Black families trying to keep their children learning and engaged online while at home during the pandemic.

"What we found was parents and caregivers often felt disempowered in the rapidly changing environment, as they did not necessarily feel equipped with the tools or technological savviness to effectively engage in their children's education the way they felt they needed to," said Adaobi Anakwe, an MU post-doctoral fellow and the study's lead author. "Schools were sending students home with devices for online learning without first ensuring families had reliable, consistent internet access to utilize those devices, and this was a big contributor to parental stress and burnout."

Anakwe and Wilson Majee, an associate professor in the MU School of Health Professions, interviewed parents and primary caregivers of Black families in Missouri with school-aged children to better understand their experiences suddenly shifting to virtual schooling due to COVID-19.

Anakwe explained the sudden shift to virtual schooling highlighted the digital divide that already existed for many Black families, as a lack of access to reliable internet can have long-term negative impacts on learning and health outcomes.

"The COVID-19 vaccine rollout showcased how important technological resources can be for making an appointment online," Anakwe said. "And the sudden shift from in-person health care visits to telehealth highlights the role technology can play in facilitating access to health care as well as education."

Anakwe added that even before the pandemic, Black families were already disproportionately faced with single-parent households, disparities in income and unequal access to transportation, housing, healthy foods and recreational facilities.

"We already have a cafeteria menu of social determinants of health that impact Black and minority populations," Anakwe said. "We need to be proactive to prevent the digital divide from becoming another issue that gets added on to an already very long list of challenges Black families deal with."

The COVID-19 pandemic also caused an increase in technology use among students, causing some Black parents to worry about the potential impact on their children's mental health.

"Before the pandemic, parents were tasked with minimizing screen time for their kids and ensuring they spent enough time outside engaged in physical activity," Anakwe said. "Then all of a sudden, parents were forced to encourage their children to use technology to stay engaged in their school work while at home. As COVID-19 lockdowns are starting to end, it will be interesting to see how the messaging around screen time evolves."

Majee said MU Extension and the University of Missouri System Broadband Initiative have helped increase access to broadband internet for rural Missourians, but more collaborative partnerships among community leaders, schools, local governments and families are needed to assist underprivileged Black families.

"Technology is becoming increasingly necessary for success in our lives, so this research can help us better understand the technological challenges facing Black families," Majee said. "Our overall goal is to improve the health of Black families by helping our community members who are most disadvantaged - it's a labor of love."

###

"Sink or swim: Virtual life challenges among African American families during COVID-19 lockdown" was recently published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. This project was done in collaboration with Saint Louis University, where Anakwe completed her doctoral studies.

She Was Sent To Prison For Losing Her Baby. Now She Wants To Clear Her Name.

In 2012, Sara was sentenced to 30 years in prison under El Salvador’s strict anti-abortion laws. Last month, she was freed thanks to a growing movement to defend the women facing decades in prison on similar charges. Now she hopes to clear other women’s names.

Karla ZabludovskyBuzzFeed News Reporter
Reporting From
Mexico City
Posted on July 13, 2021,

Erica Canepa for BuzzFeed News
Sara inside the Izalco Prison in San Salvador, El Salvador, on Sep. 14, 2019.

MEXICO CITY — On June 7, nearly nine years after police had detained her, Sara was getting ready to leave prison. After lunch, she slipped out of her white uniform and into civilian clothes, eager to get to the other side of the walls and hug her family.

The close friends she had made in prison walked her as far as they could inside the facility, crying. They begged her to speak out for them and the particular plight they all shared: Following miscarriages or stillbirths, the women had been convicted of homicide and sentenced to 30 years in prison in El Salvador under the country’s strict anti-abortion laws.

“It hurts to have left them behind,” Sara, 29, told BuzzFeed News during a Zoom interview from San Salvador, the country's capital.

Sara, who asked that her last name be withheld to protect her family’s privacy, is the latest in a slow trickle of women convicted on similar charges who are having their sentences commuted — 11 since 2017, according to the Agrupación Ciudadana por la Despenalización del Aborto, a pro–abortion rights advocacy group. The country has filed aggravated homicide charges against at least 129 women for alleged abortions since 2000. At least a dozen remain in prison.

But even as they hail each new release as a victory, women’s rights groups warn that the state’s insistence on treating each case as unique rather than grouping them together means that many people remain behind bars for crimes that others are being freed for, resulting in a patchwork and somewhat arbitrary rollback of severe sentences.

El Salvador has one of the harshest anti-abortion laws in the world, with no exceptions made even when the pregnant person’s life is in danger. Virtually all of those who have been jailed for abortion-related crimes have been poor, and many have lacked access to prenatal care. Some have said they were handcuffed to their hospital beds and then taken straight to prison.

Some countries in Latin America have loosened abortion restrictions over the last decade. Uruguay legalized it in 2012. In Mexico, the state of Oaxaca became the second area in the country to permit it in 2019. And in December, Argentina’s senate approved it for the first 14 weeks of pregnancy.

But others, including El Salvador, have skirted the trend. And as legislation loosening abortion restrictions has spread across the region, so has the backlash. Evangelical politicians have gained influence, powerful segments of civil society have successfully fought back against sex education in public schools, and the Catholic Church has quietly forced young rape victims to carry their pregnancies to term even after they’ve sought legal abortions.

“It’s painful to see the state punishing girls so unjustly” in El Salvador, said Paula Ávila-Guillén, executive director of the Women’s Equality Center, a New York–based organization that monitors reproductive rights in Latin America. Those facing charges are often young people who have little access to healthcare and education, she added: “Girls who were marginalized and abandoned by the state to begin with.”


Jose Cabezas / Reuter

A woman holds a placard that reads, "Justice for Sara" as Sara, who was sentenced to 30 years in prison for a suspected abortion, attends a hearing in Cojutepeque, El Salvador, on May 31, 2

In prisons in El Salvador, a staunchly Catholic country, people believed to have undergone abortions have been shunned and beaten by other incarcerated people, according to women who have been released from prison.

In September 2019, BuzzFeed News visited Sara and two women convicted of killing their newborn babies, who were serving time at the Centro de Detención Menor para Mujeres in Izalco, a women’s prison near the country’s Pacific coast. During a 90-minute interview in a gated-off area near the main courtyard, Sara sat on a white plastic chair as Kenia Hernández, then 24, braided her hair. With a handful of guards hovering nearby, Sara whispered her story: In 2012, nearing her due date, she slipped as she was washing dishes and passed out. Sara woke up in a hospital bed, her baby was dead, and a police officer was getting ready to detain her. A court sentenced her to 30 years in prison for aggravated homicide.

The women said they rarely had access to sanitary pads and soap, and the previous months had been particularly tough: President Nayib Bukele had declared a state of emergency in the country’s prisons in order to curb gang activity, tightening confinement measures — including banning all visitors. Sara had bags under her deep-set eyes, and her voice was heavy with yearslong exhaustion.

Bukele has said women should not be jailed for suffering “spontaneous abortions,” but two years into his presidency, he has not pardoned any.

One of them, Hernandez, was 17 when she got pregnant. One day in 2014, her father, a strict man who she frequently feared would beat her, became irate at Hernandez for not cleaning the house sufficiently and started chasing her, she said. Hernandez tripped and fell and went into labor shortly after. Her father fled, and her baby died. She, too, was sentenced to 30 years.

Attorneys for Hernandez presented a petition to have her sentence commuted in 2018. It was approved in 2020, but she will not finish her shortened sentence until June 2023.

Each case is analyzed individually by the Justice Ministry, a criminological team that includes psychologists, and the Supreme Court.

Last year, the Working Group on Arbitrary Detentions, a United Nations human rights panel, published a report on the case of Sara and two other women imprisoned in El Salvador under similar circumstances, Berta Margarita Arana, 28, and Evelyn Beatriz Hernández, 23. It concluded that the three women had been arbitrarily detained and urged El Salvador to free them immediately and provide financial compensation.


Jose Cabezas / Reuters
Sara is embraced by her mother as she is released from jail in Zacatecoluca, El Salvador, on June 7, 2021.

Sara's lawyers petitioned for the state to commute her sentence, which was approved in February 2020. Shortly after, they requested that she be released early on parole.

On her final day in prison, Sara awoke to take her regular 4 a.m. shower, had breakfast, went to work mowing grass, sat through lunch, and attended a crocheting workshop. She hadn't known she was getting out that day until the afternoon, when the guards told her to get ready to go home.

Her attorneys say they are going to request a revision of Sara’s sentencing in order to have her declared not guilty — until then, she worries that her criminal record will make it hard for her to find a job.
In the four weeks since her release, Sara has been spending time at home with her family. So much has changed, she said. Her stuffed animals and school books are no longer there. Her brother died just as she was sent to prison. Now able to rebuild her life, she wants to go back to school to become a nurse.

Looking a decade younger than during her interview at Izalco two years earlier, with her hair in a tight bun and her eyes sparkling under blue eyeshadow, Sara described her hopes for the future: to clear her name and help free her friends still behind bars.

The women she left behind “are in bad shape, sad and desperate,” said Sara. Many of them have children they are eager to get back to, she added, “to take care, to raise.”
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MORE ON THIS
This Woman Had A Stillbirth And Is On Trial For It — AgainKarla Zabludovsky · Aug. 14, 2019
When The Horror Of Losing Your Baby Turns Into Years Behind BarsKarla Zabludovsky · Oct. 24, 2019


Karla Zabludovsky is the Mexico bureau chief and Latin America correspondent for BuzzFeed News and is based in Mexico City

 

'Get out of the water!' Monster shark movies massacre shark conservation

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA

Research News

 

IMAGE: 96% OF SHARK MOVIES OVERTLY PORTRAY SHARKS AS A THREAT TO HUMANS. view more 

CREDIT: UNSPLASH

Undeniably the shark movie to end all shark movies, the 1975 blockbuster, Jaws, not only smashed box office expectations, but forever changed the way we felt about going into the water - and how we think about sharks.

Now, more than 40 years (and 100+ shark movies) on, people's fear of sharks persists, with researchers at the University of South Australia concerned about the negative impact that shark movies are having on conservation efforts of this often-endangered animal.

In a world-first study, conservation psychology researchers, UniSA's Dr Briana Le Busque and Associate Professor Carla Litchfield have evaluated how sharks are portrayed in movies, finding that 96 per cent of shark films are overtly portraying sharks as a threat to humans.

Dr Le Busque says sensationalised depictions of sharks in popular media can unfairly influence how people perceive sharks and harm conservation efforts.

"Most of what people know about sharks is obtained through movies, or the news, where sharks are typically presented as something to be deeply feared," Dr Le Busque says.

"Since Jaws, we've seen a proliferation of monster shark movies - Open Water, The Meg, 47 Metres Down, Sharknado - all of which overtly present sharks as terrifying creatures with an insatiable appetite for human flesh. This is just not true.

"Sharks are at much greater risk of harm from humans, than humans from sharks, with global shark populations in rapid decline, and many species at risk of extinction.

"Exacerbating a fear of sharks that's disproportionate to their actual threat, damages conservation efforts, often influencing people to support potentially harmful mitigation strategies.

"There's no doubt that the legacy of Jaws persists, but we must be mindful of how films portray sharks to capture movie-goers. This is an important step to debunk shark myths and build shark conservation."

###

Notes to editors:

* Shark Week is 12-18 July 2021

* Shark Awareness Day is 14 July 2021

Monster, book review: Technology rules our lives - but what to do about it?

Mary Branscombe 

© Provided by ZDNet

 Monster: A Tough Love Letter On Taming the Machines that Rule our Jobs, Lives, and Future • By Paul Roehrig & Ben Pring • Wiley • 176 pages • ISBN 9781119785910 • $25 / £18.99

Have we inadvertently created a technological 'monster' that is, in some nebulous sense, making everything worse -- and if so, what can we do about that?

If you have any technology-related worries -- from your kids being glued to their phone, to the influence of the Chinese government and the role of technology in the 2016 and 2020 US elections -- the authors of Monster: A Tough Love Letter On Taming the Machines that Rule our Jobs, Lives, and Future are worried about it too. And if you weren't already concerned, they'll tell you why you should be.

As IT consultants and futurists who fear that, in the past, they have avoided difficult questions in their enthusiasm for technology, Paul Roehrig and Ben Pring are trying to distil the entire modern world into a somewhat simplistic formula: that the economic incentives for some kinds of technology are out of balance, and that's dragging everything down.

"Once cool disruptive 'tech rock stars' are being exposed as nothing more than the latest robber barons", they say. The security of cars, pacemakers and elections are all poor (although driverless technology is apparently "working very well"), while democracy, privacy and being polite to other people are all going out of fashion.

Decrying the loss of civility, blaming social media echo chambers rather than societal inequities, and talking about income inequality as if it's produced only by technology rather than socioeconomic systems, suggests that technology is somehow created outside of society rather than all-too-intimately enmeshed with it. Some interesting questions about the role of technology in society are obscured by the authors' enthusiasm for new technology like quantum computing, and the dystopian fantasies they entertain about the impact of the technology we already have.

© ZDNet

Treating Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft as if they all have the identical business model of "snorkel[ing] code from every move we make" simply because they have stock market valuations that outweigh most other companies ignores the different impacts they have, and the different issues that will need to be addressed in dealing with them.

The authors rightly point out that widely used technologies are developed in relatively few countries, which may be driving a global power shift. But there's no discussion of what it means if tech giants gain some of the powers of nation states, or how bytes might have a different impact from bullets in terms of how their influence is applied.

There's no mention of Russia or ransomware in the book at all (except for noting that Ukraine attracts an unusual level of cyberattacks), and no analysis of where the line of separation might fall between the Chinese government, whose approach Roehrig and Pring dub 'surveillance communism', and Chinese technology companies.

The usual misunderstanding of the original Luddites -- who were protesting not the machinery itself but the business models of the mill owners who refused to share the fruits of improved productivity with workers, and targeted their destruction appropriately -- actually undermines the point the authors try to make about the drivers of modern Luddism: inequality and exclusion caused by the irresponsible deployment of technology.
Cyber war & social tech addiction

Suggesting we're already engaged in a cyber war, given the current level of attacks, ransomware and nation-state hacking, would be more plausible if the authors didn't maintain that Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) are "technologically very advanced" when they often target very basic security mistakes and long-patched vulnerabilities. Talking about how poorly security is implemented across government, industry and society isn't nearly as exciting as talking about Stuxnet and hackers in basements, but it would paint a truer picture of the issues.

Despite admitting there's "no solid causal link between tech and our aching heads yet", the authors spend a chapter calling smartphones and social media "digital fentanyl", suggesting that social technology is an addiction that's destroying a generation of children and claiming tech is changing how our minds work. Evolutionary psychology combines with nostalgia for the days when commuters were staring at newspapers rather than phones, resulting in the usual suggestions about limiting your screen time. After the last 18 months, asserting that community, faith and friendship can't be found online is as unhelpful as the latest 'technology rock stars' announcing that there's an app for mindfulness. It might also be more useful to explain how Elon Musk's Neuralink isn't actually that revolutionary compared to existing medical devices than to announce that it's the equivalent of Theranos.

SEE: Network security policy (TechRepublic Premium)

In the middle of all this, there's a fictional account of a naïve and inflammatory startup that will confirm the prejudices of everyone who dislikes Facebook without ringing true to anyone with actual startup experience.

Similarly, the book ends with a poorly conceived 'debate' between the two authors about whether we shouldn't just turn this whole disturbing internet social media thing off that would get roundly ratioed if they were to perform it on social media. It may be intended to satirise the kind of inconsequential arguments often found online, because it's formatted as if it was a sequence of texts or private messages (without noting the irony), but a more comprehensive chapter would be welcome. The potted history of guns in Japan is mildly interesting, but it ends the book on a strangely flat note that makes you long for the substance of an expert explaining their field in a Twitter thread.
Manifesto, or wish-list?

What you would hope would be the meat of the book -- a manifesto for 'taming the machines -- is more of a wish-list. You'll probably skim past the actual suggestions for how to tackle the very real problems Roehrig and Pring are rightly concerned about in the introduction, unless you're used to the way executive reports put the actionable items right at the beginning. The suggestions range from sensible (legislation for data portability and audits of algorithms) to knee jerk (overriding anonymity on social media, doing away with Section 230 and creating a 'driver's licence' for getting on social media at the age of 18).

The discussion of the complex and difficult task of regulating technology is probably the most realistic part of the book. However, it's disappointing that the authors' obvious concern and desire to provoke a reaction leads them to focus more on listing the harms that technology has already created, rather than digging further into the "many types of law, policy and regulation: net neutrality, privacy, patent and IP law, taxation, data protection, industry regulation, AI ethics, labor laws, health data laws, job licensure [and] sharing economy regulation".

It might be harder to enliven these critical but "mind-numbingly dull" issues than to point out that Facebook makes a lot of money and that it's hard to stop your family accessing TikTok. But doing so would make for a more meaningful discussion about 'Taming the Machines'.

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SHE IS INFORMED NOT BIASED

Facebook joins Amazon in requesting the FTC's new chairwoman be removed from any investigations, saying she's biased

insider@insider.com (Katie Canales) 

© Provided by Business Insider NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP via Getty Images; GRAEME JENNINGS/POOL/AFP via Getty Images; Insider

Facebook filed a petition with the FTC to have its chair removed from any company deliberations.

Facebook's petition comes two weeks after Amazon made a similar one.

Both companies said Khan is biased given her past criticism of Big Tech.

Facebook wants Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan removed from any investigation of the company and has accused her of bias, citing her past criticisms of the tech industry.

Facebook filed a petition on Wednesday with the agency, arguing that Khan should recuse herself since she "has already drawn factual and legal conclusions and deemed the target a lawbreaker." The company shared the petition with Insider as the FTC does not make them public. The Wall Street Journal first reported the news.

A Facebook spokesperson told Insider: "Chair Khan has consistently made well-documented statements about Facebook and antitrust matters that would lead any reasonable observer to conclude that she has prejudged the Facebook antitrust case brought by the FTC."

"To protect the fairness and impartiality of these proceedings, we have requested that Chair Khan recuse herself from involvement with the FTC's antitrust case against Facebook," Facebook continued.

The FTC filed an antitrust lawsuit against Facebook in December, but a judge threw it out in late June since he said the agency failed to show evidence that Facebook had monopoly power in the online market. The FTC is now deliberating about filing a new lawsuit against the company.

Facebook's request to have Khan removed from any deliberations involving the company comes two weeks after Amazon made a similar plea as the e-commerce giant remained under investigation at the FTC.

Amazon argued in June that "Chair Khan's body of work and public statements demonstrate that she has prejudged the outcome of matters the FTC may examine during her term and, under established law, preclude her from participating in such matters."

President Joe Biden appointed Khan to FTC Chair in June, and her extensive background in antitrust law paired with her new role has made waves in the tech and antitrust worlds. Khan wrote an influential paper in 2017 drawing attention to how today's outdated antitrust framework allowed Amazon to escape scrutiny.

She also helped the House investigate Facebook, Amazon, Google, and Apple over antitrust concerns in online competition.

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Study using laser technology suggests Canada overlooks key sources of methane emissions

Inayat Singh 

CBC

© Submitted by Matthew Johnson A plane equipped with laser technology from methane-detection company Bridger Photonics flies over a storage tank at an oil and gas site in B.C.

The largest sources of methane emissions from oil and gas sites are not the pieces of equipment commonly thought to be the main culprits, a new study from a leading Canadian researcher suggests.

The result is that Canada may be underestimating its emissions of the potent greenhouse gas and may be overlooking effective ways to meet its reduction targets, says Matthew Johnson, director of the Energy and Emissions Lab at Carleton University and co-author of the paper.

"This is suggesting it is time for a rethink," he told CBC News.

"Maybe we can be a little bit more efficient in achieving reductions in going after the things that matter."

The research, which relied on laser technology mounted on a plane that flew over oil and gas sites in British Columbia in 2019, suggests methane emissions are 1.6 to 2.2 times higher than current federal estimates.

Methane, the chief component of natural gas, is released during oil and gas extraction from various pieces of equipment on a production site. It is about 70 times more potent as a heat-trapping greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, but only lasts in the atmosphere for about nine years. Canada's goal is to reduce methane emissions 40-45 per cent below 2012 levels by 2025.

Cutting down on methane is seen as a way to get more immediate positive benefits in the fight against climate change, but Canada can only do that if it knows where the colourless and odourless gas is coming from.

Large methane sources being missed

Regulations in Canada are mostly based on surveys that use optical gas imaging (OGI) cameras at oil and gas sites to detect sources of methane leaks. But the study suggests there is a "stark difference" between what the OGI surveys find and what the new airplane-mounted technology can see, and "policy and regulations relying on OGI surveys alone may risk missing a significant portion of emissions."

More than half of methane emissions were attributed to storage tanks, reciprocating compressors and unlit flares, according to the study. Storage tanks were found to be a particularly concerning source of emissions, since they alone accounted for a quarter of methane emissions at oil and gas sites.

These sources are harder to detect with OGI surveys because they are elevated and might be missed by a camera at ground level.

"So those three sources tend to be really quite important," Johnson said. "And if your entire inventory is based on camera work, then it starts to make sense why we keep seeing these persistent differences."

Total emissions likely undercounted

Methane currently accounts for 13 per cent of Canada's total greenhouse gas emissions, based on official estimates, but multiple studies that rely on field measurements have suggested the actual amount of methane emitted is much higher. Until this new study, it was not known exactly which pieces of equipment were causing this discrepancy.

Tom Green, policy analyst at the David Suzuki Foundation in Vancouver, has been following the methane issue closely. He says the new study's finding that methane emissions are likely much higher than the official estimates is unsurprising but still "alarming" due to the potential climate impact.

"Right now, we're doing something quite unfair, which is that we're reporting relatively low methane emissions to the United Nations," Green said.

"For such a large country globally, in terms of where we fit in the natural gas exports, we should be doing much, much more and we should be showing leadership in this file."

Green said a key issue is that the current regulations put too much emphasis on looking for leaks in general rather than identifying more basic problems.

"When you see that like a quarter of emissions are coming from tanks, that's not a leak," Green said.

"That's the tank is designed to allow the methane to off-gas. So that's a design problem."

Regulations under review

B.C. has brought in limits for the leaks from tanks, but the study found leak rates with tanks that are much higher than the limits. Federal methane regulations, which form a backstop to provincial regulations, don't directly regulate the leaks from compressors and unlit flares.

The study was done in collaboration with the B.C. government, which along with Alberta and Saskatchewan, has its own methane regulations. The federal government has granted the three provinces equivalency agreements to have their own regulations rather than have the federal regulations imposed on them.

"The results of the new methane study require additional research and measurement to ensure we have the most accurate estimate of total emissions from the sector and we're continuing to support that effort," the B.C. Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy said in a statement.

The ministry said it will consider the new information while developing its detailed plan to meet its 2030 emissions targets, to be released later this year.

In a statement to CBC News, Environment and Climate Change Canada acknowledged the uncertainties in estimating methane emissions and said it is working on improving the methodology of its official estimates.

"ECCC will review the author's research for its relevance for both the evaluation of existing regulations, and regarding the development of new policy options to further reduce methane emissions from the oil and gas sectors."

Firm hacked to spread ransomware had previous security flaws


For 21 years, the software company Kaseya labored in relative obscurity — at least until cybercriminals exploited it in early July for a massive ransomware attack that snarled businesses around the world and escalated U.S.-Russia diplomatic tensions.  

© Provided by The Canadian Press

But it turns out that the recent hack wasn't the first major cybersecurity problem to hit the Miami-based company and its core product, which IT teams use to remotely monitor and administer workplace computer systems and other devices.

“It feels a little like déjà vu,” said Allie Mellen, a security analyst at Forrester Research.

In 2018, for instance, hackers managed to infiltrate Kaseya's remote tool to run a “cryptojacking” operation, which channels the power of afflicted computers to mine cryptocurrency — often without its victims noticing. It was a less harmful breach than the recent ransomware attack, which was impossible to miss since it crippled affected systems until their owners paid up. But it similarly relied on Kaseya's Virtual System Administrator product, or VSA, as a vehicle to get access to the companies that rely on it.

A 2019 ransomware attack also rode into computers through another company's add-on software component to the Kaseya VSA, causing more limited damage than the recent attack. Some experts have tied that earlier assault to some of the same hackers who later formed REvil, the Russian-language syndicate blamed for the latest attack.

And in 2014, Kaseya’s own founders sued the company in a dispute over responsibility for a VSA security flaw that allowed hackers to launch a separate cryptocurrency scheme. The court case does not appear to have been previously reported outside of a brief 2015 mention in a technical blog post. At the time, the founders denied responsibility for the vulnerability, calling the company's charges against them a “bogus assertion.”

Nearly all of Kaseya's security problems have as their root cause well-understood coding vulnerabilities that should have been addressed earlier, said cybersecurity expert Katie Moussouris, the founder and CEO of Luta Security.

“Kaseya needs to shape up, as does the entire software industry," she said. “This is a failure to incorporate the lessons the bugs were teaching you. Kaseya, like a lot of companies, is failing to learn those lessons.”

Many of the attacks relied at least in part on what's known as SQL injection, a technique hackers use to inject malicious code into web queries. It's an old technique that Mellen said has been considered a “solved problem” in the cybersecurity world for a decade.

“It points to a chronic product security issue in Kaseya’s software that remains unaddressed seven years later," she said. “When organizations choose to brush over security challenges, the incidents continue, and, as in this case, get worse."

Kaseya has noted that it's long been a target because many of its direct customers are “managed-services providers” that host IT infrastructure for hundreds, if not thousands, of other businesses.

“In the business we’re in, and the number of endpoints we manage around the world, as you might expect, we take security extremely seriously," Ronan Kirby, president of the company's European operations, said at a Belgian cybersecurity conference Thursday. “You attack a company, you get into the company. You attack a service provider, you get into all their customers. You get into Kaseya, that’s a very different proposition. So obviously we’re an attractive target.”

Kaseya declined to answer questions from The Associated Press about the previous hacks or the legal dispute involving its founders.

Mark Sutherland and Paul Wong co-founded Kaseya in California in 2000. They had previously worked together on a project protecting the email accounts of U.S. intelligence workers at the National Security Agency, according to an account on the company's website.

Video: McGill's Fort: Hacking Costs Go Beyond Ransom Demands (Bloomberg)

But more than a year after selling Kaseya in June 2013, court records show that Sutherland, Wong and two other former top executives sued the company to recoup $5.5 million in stock buybacks they said they were unfairly denied.

At the heart of the dispute was an attack by hackers who used Kaseya's VSA as a conduit to deploy Litecoin mining malware that secretly hijacks a victim computer's power to make money for the hacker by processing cryptocurrency payments.

Kaseya publicly disclosed the attacks in a March 2014 notice to customers. Privately, it was blaming the company's previous leadership for not warning about “serious vulnerabilities” in Kaseya's software. It sought to deprive them of the final $5.5 million of the acquisition price to compensate for the loss of business and damaged reputation.

The founders, in turn, blamed the new leadership for scaling back on coding expertise and eliminating a “hotfix” system for rapidly fixing bugs, according to the lawsuit from Sutherland, Wong, former CEO Gerald Blackie and former Chief Operating Officer Timothy McMullen.

They also argued that the SQL injection technique used by the hackers was highly common and “inherent in any computer code" that uses the SQL programming language.

“Ensuring that each and every piece of database access code is immune to SQL injection is essentially impossible," said their lawsuit. Mellen and Moussouris both rejected that assertion.

“That is a bold statement and provably false,” Moussouris said. “It highlights the fact they lacked the security knowledge and sophistication to protect their users.”

None of the plaintiffs or their lawyers responded to requests for comment. They agreed to dismiss the case in December 2013, just a month after they filed it. It's not clear how it was settled. Kaseya is privately held.

LinkedIn profiles for Sutherland and Wong list them as retired. Blackie went on to become CEO of another Miami-based provider of remote-control software, Pilixo, where he was joined by McMullen. Pilixo didn't return a request for comment.

New vulnerabilities affecting Kaseya's VSA — including the one exploited by the REvil ransomware gang — were discovered this year by a Dutch cybersecurity research group that says it confidentially warned Kaseya in early April. "In the wrong hands, these vulnerabilities could lead to the compromise of large numbers of computers managed by Kaseya VSA,” the Dutch Institute for Vulnerability Disclosure said in a blog post last week explaining the timeline of its actions.

Some of those Kaseya fixed by May, including another SQL injection flaw, but the Dutch group said others were still unpatched when ransomware started hitting hundreds of businesses in early July. Kaseya has said up to 1,500 businesses have been compromised as a result of the attack. Kaseya on Sunday rolled out patches to the vulnerabilities used in the REvil attack.

With Kaseya in the spotlight, a cybersecurity responder assisting clients stricken by the July 2 ransomware attack discovered what he called a glaring Kaseya security omission: a vulnerability in a public-facing customer portal that had been identified in 2015 but left unpatched.

Alex Holden of Hold Security said he notified Kaseya and that the portal was quickly taken down. But the vulnerability troubled him, he said, because it granted unauthenticated users access to a configuration file that is highly protected on Microsoft web servers — one that often contains passwords and can grant access to core functions.

Moussouris said there's a pattern of ransomware syndicates going after easily detectable software flaws.

“It’s collective technical debt around the world and the ransomware gangs are technical debt collectors,” she said. “They’re coming after organizations like Kaseya" and others that haven't invested in better security.

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This article has been corrected to note that news of a court case involving Kaseya and its founders was previously described in a 2015 technical blog post.

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AP technology reporter Frank Bajak contributed to this article.

Matt O'brien, The Associated Press