Quick Tidbit Summary of interesting Crypto news

 

One of my study topics is blockchains and cryptocurrency. In the past year or three, I learned a wealth about this new money that will inevitably become our default method of payment this decade.

Slightly off-topic: I am subscribed to the RSS feeds of almost 250 websites, mostly news ones, and around 50 websites dealing with blockchains and cryptocurrencies.

Obviously it is impossible to work through 5000+ news articles per day, but an RSS reader is very handy to spot trending and breaking news. It's great to check in on favorite websites without having to subscribe to their annoying email newsletters. If you want a great (and free!) RSS reader yourself, get either FeedBro or Bamboo's add-ons. I use both on two different browsers on my laptop and can recommend both RSS readers wholeheartedly. I also use InoReader, which works on the freemium model, on my cellphone. It was the best out of the 20 most popular ones I reviewed three years ago.

Back to the topic of the day.
I browsed a few feeds from crypto sites, then checked out articles I found interesting. So here is a summary, with a blurb of why I found each article noteworthy.

ChatGPT makes South Africa a hacker paradise

I am astonished at how some companies in South Africa operate. A few days ago, a friend asked me to log into their computer system to see what's wrong with it. Well, they have a bad month laying ahead. 

The particular family business is - here in 2023 - still using Windows 7. That operating system is way outdated and Microsoft is not supporting it anymore, for three years now, I think. It is very vulnerable to hackers at this stage, and shouldn't be connected to the internet at all. And... you guessed it... they got hacked. 

Two tails of WTF

 
Early this morning with the sun already up, I went on a quick solo hiking trip. Mainly to please my grand, expensive day hiking backpack I bought recently. It was looking all too disparagingly at me for not using it as much as I planned when I bought it a month ago.

At just after eight I crossed a bridge over a major highway here. Traffic was light. On my right, four lanes afar, I suddenly spotted movement. Two dark gray animals popped up. They looked like squirrels, but bigger, so I was pretty sure they were something else. Have never seen all-gray, and that dark, squirrels. And their heads looked different too, and they were slightly larger than I know most squirrels are. Maybe plattepoesies? (Platypuses.)  Will have to ask around. (UPDATE: Google to the rescue, I found out a bit later they were two mongoose, or is the plural for that mongeese?)