steve2470
steve2470's JournalSan Francisco housing market near bubble risk....Majority of Bay Area renters plan to leave
San Francisco housing market near bubble risk according to UBS report. Majority of Bay Area renters plan to leave. (full headline)
http://www.doctorhousingbubble.com/san-francisco-real-estate-mania-ubs-renters-leaving/
The San Francisco housing market is the most overvalued market in the United States. People over inflate the market because tech is sexy and cool and many are chasing the next Google, Amazon, or Facebook. Everyone wants to strike it rich with as little work as possible. And what better way to do that than in real estate? In San Francisco the typical crap shack will cost you $1.2 to $1.5 million. The response from many housing cheerleaders is the typical logic you see in manias – hey, someone paid for it! You also get similar stories from the tulip bubble, dotcom bubble, and other bubbles where the justification for higher prices is simply that some other sucker paid for it at that level. And there is now signs that we may be in a rental bubble in the Bay Area. 83 percent of renters surveyed in the Bay Area said they plan on leaving. Tie that in with the UBS Global Real Estate Index showing that San Francisco is dangerously close to bubble territory and you have indicators that something is rotten in SF.
Some people understand the business cycle and the waves that ripple through our economy. The housing market and economy has been booming since 2009. People forget that recessions happen. And now that we have added millions of renter households with higher rents, what happens when that next correction hits? While you can sit in a home and let it flow into foreclosure like many did during the housing crisis, there is a smaller window for renters should cash flow issues occur.
It is rather clear that San Francisco real estate is in a bubble. Even conservative UBS is showing that prices are inflated:
(see graphic above)
But our neighbors to the north in Canada are taking it to another level with their housing bubble. It is nutty how obsessed people are with real estate in the Bay Area. People are drinking the Kool-Aid by the gallons. For those that own, you have a confirmation bias occurring and who could blame them? If you owned a piece of crap house and suddenly Zillow gives you a $1.5 million Zestimate why wouldn’t you believe it? I suppose you should never ask a barber if you need a haircut.
Renters clearly think something is wrong since many are voicing their displeasure and have plans on leaving:
(rest at link)
Amazon Key flaw makes entering your home undetected a possibility
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/11/amazon-key-flaw-makes-entering-your-home-undetected-a-possibility/Security research firm Rhino Security Labs found a vulnerability in the Amazon Key in-home delivery service's security procedures that could allow either the courier or even a savvy and malicious bystander to enter your home undetected after the delivery is completed. Amazon has promised to change how Key works in order to make it easier for you to tell when something unusual is happening in this event, but the changes proposed by Amazon don't necessarily resolve the vulnerability.
Amazon Key is available to Amazon customers who have bought and installed Amazon's own Cloud Cam security camera and installed it at their front door. If you're one of those customers, you can select "in-home delivery" as a delivery method when purchasing something on Amazon. Amazon couriers can then authenticate themselves with your Cloud Cam to unlock the door and enter your home to leave the package. However, they can only do this at a home to which they're assigned to make a delivery and only at the scheduled time. They are recorded by your security camera as they make the delivery, and they must lock the door when they leave. Amazon also tracks which courier is assigned to the delivery, and only that courier has access.
Rhino Labs discovered that a courier equipped with a simple program can use their laptop to fake a command from your Wi-Fi router to disconnect the Cloud Cam from your network. This causes the camera to stop functioning by freezing the image at the last frame. At that point, the courier could re-enter your home, do whatever it is that they want there, and then exit, reactivate the camera, and lock the door as usual. This re-entry would be undetectable by the resident, and it would appear like a normal delivery in Amazon's data.
In theory, a bystander could also do this as a courier is leaving, but this is less likely for a few reasons. First, the bystander would have to know that delivery was scheduled and that it was to be an in-home delivery. Second, they'd have to do it before the courier locked the door, but the hack prevents the door from locking, and the courier is instructed not to leave until they've locked up.
Just one more reason never to participate.
Crouching cyber Hidden Cobra: US warns (North Korean) hackers are at it again with new software
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/15/hidden_cobra_north_korea_malware_fallchill/The FBI and US Homeland Security have issued an alert about a new strain of malware infecting American corporate systems and stealing sensitive data.
The remote access trojan (RAT), dubbed Fallchill, is the work of a North Korean hacking group called Hidden Cobra, which some at US-CERT believe was responsible for the WannaCry ransomware outbreak. Businesses are urged to remove Fallchill as "the highest priority." The Feds have published a list of IP addresses of public-facing machines infected by the software nasty, and sets of network intrusion detection rules, so IT admins can quickly find out if they've been hit.
Fallchill essentially opens a backdoor into infiltrated corporations, allowing its masterminds – likely to be Kim Jong-un's North Korean government – to extract highly confidential blueprints and other documents.
"According to trusted third-party reporting, HIDDEN COBRA actors have likely been using FALLCHILL malware since 2016 to target the aerospace, telecommunications, and finance industries," the Feds' warning states. "The malware is a fully functional RAT with multiple commands that the actors can issue from a command and control (C2) server to a victim’s system via dual proxies."
Bizarre! Indore man declares himself King of 800-square-mile unclaimed land on Egypt-Sudan border
http://www.indiatvnews.com/news/world-bizarre-indore-man-declares-himself-king-of-800-square-mile-unclaimed-land-on-egypt-sudan-border-412151
In a bizarre incident, an Indian adventurer has declared himself the ruler of an unclaimed strip of land in North Africa and is encouraging parties to apply for citizenship.
Hailing from Indore, the 24-year-old businessman travelled 319 km to Bir Tawil – an 800-square-mile strip of land south of the Egyptian border and the only place on Earth where humans can live and survive that is not a part of any state or country – and declared it his own.
On November 7, he added a life event on Facebook that read:
"I, Suyash Dixit, first of my name and the protector of the realm, declare myself as the king of “Kingdom of Dixit”. I call myself, King Suyash First from today. I declare this unclaimed land of Bir Tawil as my country from now to the eternity of time. I pledge to continue to work for the prosperity of my people of the country and this motherland."
Orange County decides to allow medical marijuana dispensaries
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/politics/political-pulse/os-medical-marijuana-orange-20171114-story.htmlAdvocates cried and cheered as Orange County commissioners unanimously voted to allow medical marijuana dispensaries in the county at their meeting Tuesday night.
The vote halts the tide of Central Florida cities — including several in Orange County — that have banned dispensaries because of the restrictions placed upon them by the Florida Legislature.
In what Mayor Teresa Jacobs called a “poison pill,” the Legislature passed a law allowing dispensaries but also mandated that cities and counties couldn’t regulate them any more than pharmacies. The controversial provision came even though more than 70 percent of Florida voters approved medical marijuana in a November 2016 referendum.
But despite those concerns, commissioners said they did not want to go against the wishes of the people of Florida. More than two dozen gave emotional testimony in favor of approval.
Teresa Jacobs needs to be defeated, poison pill my ass.
Tales from Tech Support: Client drives software developer over the edge
https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/6yggpa/the_one_where_our_coworker_snaps/(this is an account by a reddit poster, not me)
I'm ba-ack! Yes, I left a cryptic message in my last post about our coworker going insane. I admit, I may have been just a bit hyperbolic to cause anticipation, but I reserve my right to literary license for funsies. Anyway, on to the tale:
This was many years ago, around the same time as my previous posts, and involved the consulting company I (and Mark and Pink) worked for at the time (let's call it $ConsCo), a couple of good developers who also worked at $ConsCo ($D1 and $D2 for simplicity), and a client of ours (let's say $WorldCo).
I can't say much at all about $WorldCo without flat out identifying them. Suffice to say that they tried to do good things for people all over the world, which meant they had consultants-slash-employees all around the world, often in rural areas in developing countries. They came to us with a problem for which they needed a solution. We had worked with employees of $WorldCo before, so we got recommended and got the job.
This particular problem involved $WorldCo's consultants and the fact that they were frequently off the grid. They needed a system that would be able to securely sync forms and files from their laptops to a central server when they did come back online. This was long ago when likely those laptops had Windows 98, or maybe Windows 2000 on them. Much before the availability of any real off-the-shelf solutions. We actually recommended they use Lotus Notes, since it could do pretty much what they wanted with just a bit of development work. They had some issue with Notes, though, and didn't want to use it, so it was up to us to engineer something else.
have a couple more stories waiting in the wings.)
eta: there is a copyright on this sub-reddit, so only 4 paragraphs.
https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/ more potentially interesting stories there
New Microsoft Word attacks infect PCs sans macros
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/11/russia-linked-fancy-bear-attacks-abuse-macro-less-ms-word-to-infect-pcs/Fancy Bear, the advanced hacking group researchers say is tied to the Russian government, is actively exploiting a newly revived technique that gives attackers a stealthy means of infecting computers using Microsoft Office documents, security researchers said this week.
Fancy Bear is one of two Russian-sponsored hacking outfits researchers say breached Democratic National Committee networks ahead of last year's presidential election. The group was recently caught sending a Word document that abuses a feature known as Dynamic Data Exchange. DDE allows a file to execute code stored in another file and allows applications to send updates as new data becomes available.
In a blog post published Tuesday, Trend Micro researchers said Fancy Bear was sending a document titled IsisAttackInNewYork.docx that abused the DDE feature. Once opened, the file connects to a control server to download a first-stage of piece of malware called Seduploader and installs it on a target's computer. DDE's potential as an infection technique has been known for years, but a post published last month by security firm SensePost has revived interest in it. The post showed how DDE could be abused to install malware using Word files that went undetected by anti-virus programs.
A day after Trend Micro published its report about Fancy Bear, Microsoft posted an advisory explaining how Office users can protect themselves from such attacks. The easiest way to stay safe is to remain wary of unfamiliar messages that get displayed when opening a document. As SensePost first disclosed, before the DDE feature can be used, users will see a dialog box that looks something like the following:
(had to stop to comply with DU ToS, lots of good comments at the article)
Neil deGrasse Tyson: "I love the smell of the universe in the morning"
https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/929759236606824448Thought this was cool.
Feeling too hot ? -61 F (wind chill) at Summit Camp Greenland
https://www.wunderground.com/weather/gl/summit-camp
Strange bug in Twitter on 3 browsers now
Here is the bug:
https://twitter.com/donasarkar/status/929391524059549696
Try to see the replies to her. I cannot, on Edge, Chrome or Opera Beta so far. You normally see replies by left-clicking to the left of the quote icon. eta: add Firefox Nightly, Seamonkey, Vivaldi and Opera stable to that list.
Now see the difference here:
https://twitter.com/donasarkar/status/929370661465702400
If you click to the left of the quote icon, you can easily see the replies.
Ever seen this bug in Twitter before? I have not.
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Gender: Do not displayMember since: Sat Oct 16, 2004, 01:04 PM
Number of posts: 37,457