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Ever since the Walt Disney Company began work on the Magic Kingdom near Orlando in the late 1960s, the Mouse, as locals call it, has wielded considerable political power in the state. During the legislature’s 2019 session, which ended on May 3, another lawmaker, State Representative Bruce Antone, contemplated filing a bill that would block the Walt Disney Company’s ability to build a nuclear reactor. According to Rick Foglesong, professor emeritus at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, and the author of Married to the Mouse: Walt Disney World and Orlando, the Walt Disney Company asked for a lot more powers than nuclear fission.

There is an entire research discipline that studies joint cognitive systems called cognitive systems engineering, initially developed by David Woods and Erik Hollnagel, both of whom would both later go on to play a significant role in developing the field of resilience engineering. Because resilience engineering researchers like Woods and Hollnagel have their roots in cognitive systems engineering, and because of the ever-increasing use of software automation in society, this community is very concerned about the potential brittleness associated with poor use of automation. David Woods uses the metaphor of a system moving within a boundary in his writings on resilience engineering, but in a slightly different way than Rasmussen.

Perhaps not surprisingly, then, peer-to-peer car-sharing companies like Turo are facing major resistance from the $30-billion-a-year car rental industry. So the peer-to-peer car-sharing model has expanded mightily in recent years, with companies like Turo and Getaround offering an Airbnb-like platform that allows regular individuals to rent out personal vehicles to other users at whatever price they set. Peacock also points out that Turo’s hosts don’t enjoy the advantages that traditional rental companies get, such as fleet discounts when purchasing their vehicles.

A federal district court in San Francisco has ruled strongly in favor of our Freedom of Information Act lawsuit seeking records of how and when the FBI lifts gag orders issued with National Security Letters (NSLs). One provision of the law required the FBI to develop “termination procedures” to lift NSL gag orders if they were no longer necessary to protect national security or other important government interests. It claimed that the very letters it sends to NSL recipients to tell them it is terminating a gag order—documents that by their very nature were created to be public—could allow criminals and terrorists to learn sensitive information about the FBI’s investigative techniques.

On the morning of 2 September 1939, the Polish painter Józef Czapski, then 43 years old, slipped a slim volume of the memoirs of André Gide into his greatcoat pocket and headed off to war with invading Nazi forces. He was released in September 1941, when Stalin amnestied his Polish prisoners in order that they could fight his former Nazi ally following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June of that year. He spent eight years in cosmopolitan prewar Paris, exchanging ideas with French and Russian artists and writers, forming passionate attachments with both women and men (including one with Vladimir Nabokov’s younger brother Sergey, who would perish in a Nazi camp where gay men were subjected to hideous medical experiments) and devoting himself to realising a vision of painting he found pursued in the work of Cézanne.

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EPA

President Donald Trump has declared a national emergency to protect US computer networks from “foreign adversaries”. The president signed an executive order effectively barring US companies from using foreign telecoms believed to pose a security risk to the country. According to a statement from the White House, Mr Trump’s order aims to “protect America from foreign adversaries who are actively and increasingly creating and exploiting vulnerabilities in information and communications technology infrastructure and services”.

Together with some related microbes, they are prodding biologists to reconsider one of the greatest events in the history of life on Earth — the appearance of the eukaryotes, the group of organisms that includes all plants, animals, fungi and more. What’s at stake is a deeper understanding of the biological leap that produced eukaryotes: “The biggest thing that happened since the origin of life,” according to evolutionary biologist Patrick Keeling at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. For scientists half a century ago, life on Earth was split between two categories: eukaryotes, living things with cells that contain membrane-wrapped internal structures, such as a nucleus; and prokaryotes, single-celled organisms that generally lack internal membranes.

At Google Cloud Next ‘19 we announced GKE Sandbox in beta, a new feature in Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) that increases the security and isolation of your containers by adding an extra layer between your containers and host OS. In addition to limiting potential attacks, GKE Sandbox helps teams running multi-tenant clusters, such as SaaS providers, who often execute unknown or untrusted code. “GKE Sandbox’s userland kernel acts as a firewall between applications and the cluster node’s kernel, preventing a compromised application from exploiting other applications through it,” said Jones.

Scientists have created the world’s first living organism that has a fully synthetic and radically altered DNA code. In a two-year effort, researchers at the laboratory of molecular biology, at Cambridge University, read and redesigned the DNA of the bacterium Escherichia coli (E coli), before creating cells with a synthetic version of the altered genome. The redesigned genetic code was then chemically synthesised and, piece by piece, added to E coli where it replaced the organism’s natural genome.