Zuck’s great loss, Taiwan on alert, Kirk in space

SPOTLIGHT

What is freedom? Surviving the Facebook outage in Bulgaria

“Do you understand how big it is? It’s been two hours now …”

No, I did not understand its size. Most of the time, I was amazed that Daniel spoke both in full sentences and making eye contact – I had never seen him muted and hunched over his computer screen scrolling through charts and columns. But now he was reclining and turning his office chair in the freshly remodeled common area of ​​the co-working space that I have called “the office” for the past four weeks.

“If Facebook is left down, some of my customers will lose six digits,” he said, looking half amused, half panicked.

Daniel (who turned out to be quite talkative during the social media outages) had quit his day job after becoming “nearly rich” in bitcoin, and was now dividing his time between crypto trading, public relations consulting and independent “growth hacking”.

Her story isn’t particularly original here at the shared office in central Sofia, Bulgaria. Lots of people I’ve spoken to since arriving in September are doing something IT and crypto-related – mostly expats, some having moved here for the flat 10% corporate tax rate, d others passing through before the next nomadic destination.

Whatever their job, their angle or their life, each person gives the same reason as Daniel for moving their life online and on the road: more freedom.

“Did you check the bitcoin?… Upstairs. Decentralization, man,” Daniel continued. More people had fallen into the common room, unable to work or waste time in the usual way on Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp. Suddenly there was a lot more social interaction in this kitsch four-story building than I had seen since arriving.

A full-fledged debate revolved around what this all meant: “If they built Facebook on a blockchain, it wouldn’t have happened,” said an Estonian top-floor web designer. “How secure is our data if they can even keep their platforms operational?”

The discussion continued as evening came. Sitting there, listening to the technical analysis that I couldn’t quite understand – and the philosophical riffs that no one could understand – I realized how addicted the world is to our battery of alerts, likes and digital noise. My only (unshared) thought was this: it couldn’t be “more freedom”.

After all, who really made understand all this? Who really knows where the blockchain will take us? Who has actually read Facebook’s privacy policy?

We’ll be sure that a single problem destroyed the Facebook empire, and now it’s all back online – and Mark Zuckerberg will even get his lost billions back. But the forces underlying our economy are more complex than ever, and anyone ruled by forces beyond comprehension can never be considered truly free. And we, the digital nomads of Bulgaria, who want Facebook and Whatsapp to come back online, are the final and illusory proof of that.

– Carl Johan Karlsson

🌎 7 THINGS TO KNOW NOW

• Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp back after an outage: The platforms operated by Facebook are back online after an unusually long outage on Monday, affecting more than 3.5 billion people. Failure detector reported that it was the biggest blackout they had ever seen, with 10.6 million problem reports worldwide. After the failure, with new revelations unethical business practices, Facebook shares fell 4.8%, losing Mark Zuckerberg’s fortune $ 5.9 billion.

• Pandora Papers, Day 2: Russian President Vladimir Putin, the King of Jordan and the president of a large Indian conglomerate were among the world figures deny wrongdoing, after the revelations Monday of the journalistic investigation of Pandora Papers involving a huge leak of 12 million financial documents from offshore companies.

• COVID update: New Zealand abandoned long-standing COVID-19 elimination strategy, amid a lingering Delta outbreak, easing some lockdown restrictions in its largest city, Auckland. Authorities said they would focus on increasing vaccination rates and learning to live with the virus.

• Taiwan “on alert” for China: The island nation claimed that Beijing had stolen a total of 148 military jets in its air defense zone since China celebrated its national day on Oct. 1. Taiwanese Foreign Minister Joseph Wu has warned that “China will launch a war against Taiwan at some point, although the threat may not be imminent.”

• Results: 216,000 children mistreated since 1950 by French priests: Major investigation into sexual abuse in the Catholic Church in France found French clergy sexually abused approximately 216,000 children since 1950. Its authors accused the leadership of the Catholic Church of turning a blind eye for too long and called for major reform.

• Joint Nobel Prize in Physics: A century after Albert Einstein, the The Nobel Prize in Physics jointly awarded to the American Syukuro Manabe and to the German Klaus Hasselmann “for the physical modeling of the Earth’s climate, the quantification of variability and the reliable forecast of global warming”, as well as to the Italian Giorgio Parisi “for the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in the physical systems of the atom at planetary scales. “

• Teleport me, Jeff! Star Trek icon William Shatner has confirmed that he will go to space this month, on the second launch hosted by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ space travel company, Blue Origin, making him the oldest person to ever reach space.

️ HOME PAGE

Swedish Daily Dagens Nyheter presents a photograph of police officers mourning the deaths of their two colleagues who were killed along with artist Lars Vilks in a traffic accident. Vilks had been under police protection since 2007 after receiving death threats following his drawing of the Prophet Muhammad with the body of a dog.

STORY OF THE DAY

How far non-vaccines will go to dodge vaccination mandates

Countries are rolling out increasingly aggressive campaigns in an international effort to immunize the world out of the COVID-19 pandemic. But with increased pressure comes increased resistance: From anti-vaccine encounters to bogus vaccine passports, skeptics are finding new, and sometimes creative, ways to dodge mandates and organize against their governments. Here’s how people around the world are bending the vaccination rules:

🤧 In Italy, where the government recently approved a new measure to make digital vaccination certificates mandatory for all employees, strategies to bypass signing a consent form are multiplying. According to the Italian daily La Stampa, skeptics bring lawyers to immunization appointments, requiring the doctor to sign guarantees that the vaccine is safe or requiring the meeting to be videotaped. Others claim to be allergic to vaccines, to take immunosuppressive therapy, or to suggest that they have had vaccine reactions such as anaphylactic shock in the past.

📄 A recent study by Check Point Research shows that fake COVID-19 vaccination certificates as well as test results from 29 different countries are being sold on Telegram. In India, the biggest market for the popular messaging app, a fake vaccination certificate sells for $ 75 as prices have halved since March 2021, india Economic times reports.

📲 In Indonesia, one of the first countries to establish a comprehensive mandate for immunization, anti-vaccines are turning to social media to undermine government authority. According to Nikkei Asia, Indonesian authorities removed 2,000 vaccine-related hoaxes from social media platforms. For example, a TV report with manipulated captions had a scientist saying “our people will be killed by Chinese vaccines” and the jabs “make the virus wilder” – receiving 182,000 shares before Facebook removes it.

➡️ Learn more about Worldcrunch.com

# ️⃣ IN FIGURES

Global warming is responsible for the destruction of 14% of the world’s coral reefs between 2009 and 2018, according to a Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network report, with corals in South Asia and the Pacific, around the Arabian Peninsula and off the Australian coast being the hardest hit.

IN OTHER NEWS

A polluted pink lake in Argentina has turned red

In July, Argentine authorities told residents of Trelew, in the coastal province of Chubut, don’t worry – a local lake that had turned pink, probably by chemicals, would soon be fine again. But instead, it’s now turned red – or some sort of red to purple violet – like everyday life Jornada by Chubut reported.

And again, locals don’t know why.

The main suspect is the effluent from a nearby fish company, RASA, according to in the Buenos Aires newspaper Clarin. In July, the people of Trelew denounced the stench of the effluent entering the lake for two years, as well as the bugs and vermin they attracted, and were clearly unhappy when Juan Michelou, a senior provincial environmental officer said “It will pass, the lake will return to its normal color within a few days.” But instead, it seems to have gotten worse.

➡️ Learn more and see images of the lake turned pink and red Worldcrunch.com

VERBATIM

Taiwan must be on alert. China is more and more exaggerated.

– Taiwanese Prime Minister Su Tseng-chang told reporters in Taipei, after a record 56 Chinese planes landed in the country’s air defense zone on Monday. He added that the country must “strengthen itself” to defend its freedoms and democracy against China, which considers Taiwan to be its own territory.