An American bitcoin trader and his girlfriend became the first couple to actually live on a "seastead" -- a 20-meter octagon floating in international waters a full 12 nautical miles from Thailand.

Long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike shared this article from the libertarian Foundation for Economic Education describing what happened next: [W]hile they got to experience true sovereignty for a handful of weeks, their experiment was cut short after the Thai government declared that their seastead was a threat to its national sovereignty... Asserting that [their seastead] "Exly" was still within Thailand's 200-mile exclusive economic zone, the government made plans to charge the couple with threatening Thailand's national sovereignty, a crime punishable by death. However, before the Thai Navy could come detain the couple, they were tipped off and managed to escape. They are now on the run, fleeing for their lives.
Venture capitalist and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel has donated over $1 million to the Seasteading Institute -- though news about this first experiment must be discouraging. "We lived on a floating house boat for a few weeks and now Thailand wants us killed," one of the seasteaders posted on his Facebook feed.

Last week the Arizona Republic reported that since the Thai government dismantled his ocean home, he's been "on the run" for over two weeks.

"An unprotected and public-facing MongoDB database containing over 275 million records of personal information on Indian citizens has been discovered on search engine Shodan," writes Slashdot reader helpfulhecker.

BleepingComputer reports that the detailed personally identifiable information was exposed online for over two weeks: Security Discovery researcher Bob Diachenko discovered the publicly accessible MongoDB database hosted on Amazon AWS using Shodan, and as historical data provided by the platform showed, the huge cache of PII data was first indexed on April 23, 2019. As he found out after further investigation, the exposed data included information such as name, gender, date of birth, email, mobile phone number, education details, professional info (employer, employment history, skills, functional area), and current salary for each of the database records.

While the unprotected MongoDB database leaked the sensitive information of hundreds of millions of Indians, Diachenko did not find any information that would link it to a specific owner. Additionally, the names of the data collections stored within the database suggested that the entire cache of resumes was collected "as part of a massive scraping operation" for unknown purposes.
Two months ago Diachenko also helped uncover over 800 million exposed email addresses in another unprotected MongoDB database. And in January an investigation with TechCrunch also discovered millions of highly sensitive financial documents from tens of thousands of individuals who took out loans or mortgages.

The same month Diachenko also discovered an exposed 854 gigabyte MongoDB database filled with resumes from over 200 million job-seekers in China.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Earlier this week, Apple CEO Tim Cook visited an Apple Store in Orlando, Florida to meet with 16-year-old Liam Rosenfeld, one of 350 scholarship winners who will be attending Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference next month. Echoing comments he shared with the Orlando Sentinel, Cook told TechCrunch's Matthew Panzarino that it is "pretty impressive" what Rosenfeld is accomplishing with code at such a young age, serving as a perfect example of why he believes coding education should begin in the early grades of school. "I don't think a four year degree is necessary to be proficient at coding," says Cook. "I think that's an old, traditional view. What we found out is that if we can get coding in in the early grades and have a progression of difficulty over the tenure of somebody's high school years, by the time you graduate kids like Liam, as an example of this, they're already writing apps that could be put on the App Store."

One year after banning all blockchain-related ads, Facebook is updating its ad policies for financial services and products and allowing ads for "blockchain technology, industry news, education or events related to cryptocurrency" without the need for pre-approval. TechCrunch reports: Facebook's goal was to prevent users from getting scammed by Initial Coin Offerings and other cryptocurrency deals where providers had little to no accountability. In January 2018 at the height of the crypto craze, it blocked all blockchain related ads. In June 2018 it began allowing some if they received pre-approval. When Facebook users get scammed, they don't just blame the scammer but the social network too. Facebook initially cast a wide net in its ban to prevent this.

Users began seeing ads for blockchain education yesterday. Additionally, beginning June 5th Facebook will ban ads for "promoting contracts for difference (CFDs), complex financial products that are often associated with predatory behavior. These products, due to their complexity, often mislead people."

dryriver asks a philosophical question: The producer of a tech product -- thanks to internet data mining -- may know all sorts of things about me, the buyer of a product. Gender, age, income level, education level, profession, geolocation, what I read online, who my social media friends are, what interests me intellectually, which way I swing politically, and more. For a few dollars spent, I am no "mystery" to the producer of this tech product.

But if I were to ask the producer of the product simple questions like "How much did the GPU component in this laptop you are selling me cost you?" or "What portion of the final asking price of this product is profit that goes to you?" I likely wouldn't get an answer. Information asymmetry is at play now -- the producing party in the buying transaction knows far, far more about me than I can possibly know about the producing party. And unlike the producing party, I cannot simply open my wallet and purchase "data mined information" about the producing party. Company secrets are company secrets. The "info buying" works in one direction only.

Is it a good thing for consumers that this "information asymmetry" exists in the first place? That pretty much any tech producer can learn about me with a few bucks spent, but I cannot get simple information like "How much did the Nvidia 1060 Mobile GPU in this 1,200 Dollar notebook cost the producer"?
Anyone have an answer? Leave your own thoughts in the comments. Is this information asymmetry between producers and consumers good?

Dan Drollette calls our attention to America's Strategic National Stockpile for Biodefense, "a little-publicized $7 billion federal agency...key to defending the country from a biological attack."

"Its operators have to prepare for the unthinkable, such as what to do if 100,000 cases of some new disease with pandemic potential appears -- what global health officials have sometimes dubbed 'Disease X.'"

From the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: [O]ne of the most surprising features about the stockpile is that in all likelihood, it is probably incomplete. The reason for this is that although the stockpile includes what are presumed to be the best medical countermeasures for a broad range of potential biothreats -- we don't know the exact inventory because the identity of the contents are closely held -- there is an even broader range of potential biothreat agents that an adversary could use in an attack. And stockpiling countermeasures for every conceivable individual agent is currently not feasible because countermeasures for some biothreat agents do not even exist yet -- and even if they did, the continuous maintenance of copious countermeasures may not be logistically or financially feasible. There is also the possibility that an adversary could select or engineer an agent that is simply resistant to all-known medications.

To address this problem, future stockpiles may benefit from an emerging approach to disease treatment: shifting countermeasures from today's emphasis on protein-based vaccines and antitoxins to a new system primarily focused on nucleic acid (DNA and RNA) coding for genes that help the body protect itself from myriad infectious diseases and toxins. This approach offers the long-term prospect of a stockpile that could simultaneously be more comprehensive and vastly cheaper to establish and maintain. Such a future is conceivable because of the accelerated pace of molecular biology research and development of methods to safely transfer (or what specialists refer to as "deliver") synthetic genes into people.

DNA vaccines, for example, are based on the delivery of synthetic genes that code for individual proteins found on a bacteria or a virus -- instead of using the whole pathogen itself as a basis for the vaccine... Once the immune system has established a long-term memory of these recognizable markers, the next time the same pathogen protein appears (now in the context of an infection), the body can immediately identify it as foreign and begin producing large quantities of protective antibodies to fight it. More tantalizing for a future Strategic National Stockpile than improved vaccines -- which would still have a lag time of one-to-two weeks until protection -- is the possibility of bypassing the requirement for immune "education" entirely, and directly delivering genes that code for pathogen-specific antibodies, thereby achieving more rapid protection. The process involves determining the genetic sequence for an antibody that is known to offer protection against a pathogen and then delivering that gene to cells. The body's own cells re-use their existing protein production machinery and become antibody factories, a method termed "antibody gene transfer." It is a form of immunotherapy that has been garnering significant attention lately as a new approach for treating some chronic diseases, such as cancer.

Despite the spread of anti-vaccine misinformation, "censorship cannot be the only answer," argues the EFF, adding that "removing entire categories of speech from a platform does little to solve the underlying problems."

"Tech companies and online platforms have other ways to address the rapid spread of disinformation, including addressing the algorithmic 'megaphone' at the heart of the problem and giving users control over their own feeds... " Anti-vax information is able to thrive online in part because it exists in a data void in which available information about vaccines online is "limited, non-existent, or deeply problematic." Because the merit of vaccines has long been considered a decided issue, there is little recent scientific literature or educational material to take on the current mountains of disinformation. Thus, someone searching for recent literature on vaccines will likely find more anti-vax content than empirical medical research supporting vaccines. Censoring anti-vax disinformation won't address this problem.

Even attempts at the impossible task of wiping anti-vax disinformation from the Internet entirely will put it beyond the reach of researchers, public health professionals, and others who need to be able to study it and understand how it spreads. In a worst-case scenario, well-intentioned bans on anti-vax content could actually make this problem worse. Facebook, for example, has over-adjusted in the past to the detriment of legitimate educational health content...

Platforms must address one of the root causes behind disinformation's spread online: the algorithms that decide what content users see and when. And they should start by empowering users with more individualized tools that let them understand and control the information they see.... Users shouldn't be held hostage to a platform's proprietary algorithm. Instead of serving everyone "one algorithm to rule them all" and giving users just a few opportunities to tweak it, platforms should open up their APIs to allow users to create their own filtering rules for their own algorithms. News outlets, educational institutions, community groups, and individuals should all be able to create their own feeds, allowing users to choose who they trust to curate their information and share their preferences with their communities.

In America, 10% of Twitter's users create 80% of its tweets, according to a new study by the Pew Research Center: The median user in the top 10% by tweet volume creates 138 tweets per month, "favorites" 70 posts per month, follows 456 accounts, and has 387 followers. By comparison, the median user in the bottom 90% of tweeters creates just two tweets per month, "favorites" one post per month, follows 74 accounts, and has 19 followers. And when asked to report how often they use the platform, fully 81% of these highly active tweeters say they do so every day; 47% of other Twitter users visit the platform with this regularity...

Twitter users also tend to have higher levels of household income and educational attainment relative to the general adult population. Some 42% of adult Twitter users have at least a bachelor's degree -- 11 percentage points higher than the overall share of the public with this level of education (31%). Similarly, the number of adult Twitter users reporting a household income above $75,000 is 9 points greater than the same figure in the general population: 41% vs. 32%.

pgmrdlm shares a report from CBS News: Half of American parents are unable to save as much as they'd like to for retirement, and their grown offspring -- whom they still count as dependents -- are to blame, according to a new Bankrate.com study. While they likely mean well, parents who support children into young adulthood often end up encumbered when they reach retirement age. They can inadvertently hamstring their kids, too.

Seventeen percent of the couples surveyed by Bankrate.com said that they sacrificed their own retirement savings by "a lot" to help their adult children. Another 34 percent said they'd "somewhat" sacrificed their savings plans. Not surprisingly, the lowest earners saved the least. Seventeen percent of couples making less than a combined $50,000 a year and have at least one child who is 18 or older said they were helping pay their adult children's bills but not setting aside any money for retirement. The study found a generational divide when it comes to perceptions of parents supporting adult children. "Millennials between the ages of 23 and 38 believe they should be supported for longer, and expect some expenses, like student loans, to be covered up to the age of 23," reports CBS News. "Baby boomers, meanwhile, think parents should wean children off their bank accounts sooner across almost every category of expense, including cell phone bills, car payments and travel costs." Millennials and baby boomers both agree that young adults by age 23 should be wholly response for bigger ticket expenses like health insurance.

Economic analyst Mark Hamrick says the 2008 financial crisis, Great Recession and lack of substantial wage growth are to blame for this dynamic. Changing societal norms also come in to play, as many young adults are "opting to pursue higher education, thereby delaying their entries into the workforce," the report says. "And by the time these degree-holders enter the workforce, they're saddled with student debt..."

"I want to just take my Chromebook back and tell them I'm not doing it anymore," said Kallee Forslund, 16, a 10th grader in Wellington.

The New York Times reports on a "rebellion" that started in Kansas against an online "personalized learning" program funded by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, and developed by Facebook engineers -- including a classroom walk-out, a sit-in, and parent protests at public school board meetings.

Read the Times' pay-walled original article or this free alternate version. Some highlights: Eight months earlier, public schools near Wichita had rolled out a web-based platform and curriculum from Summit Learning... Many families in the Kansas towns, which have grappled with underfunded public schools and deteriorating test scores, initially embraced the change. Under Summit's program, students spend much of the day on their laptops and go online for lesson plans and quizzes, which they complete at their own pace. Teachers assist students with the work, hold mentoring sessions and lead special projects. The system is free to schools. The laptops are typically bought separately.

Then, students started coming home with headaches and hand cramps. Some said they felt more anxious. One child began having a recurrence of seizures. Another asked to bring her dad's hunting earmuffs to class to block out classmates because work was now done largely alone. "We're allowing the computers to teach and the kids all looked like zombies," said Tyson Koenig, a factory supervisor in McPherson, who visited his son's fourth-grade class. In October, he pulled the 10-year-old out of the school. In a school district survey of McPherson middle school parents released this month, 77 percent of respondents said they preferred their child not be in a classroom that uses Summit. More than 80 percent said their children had expressed concerns about the platform...

The resistance in Kansas is part of mounting nationwide opposition to Summit, which began trials of its system in public schools four years ago and is now in around 380 schools and used by 74,000 students. In Brooklyn, high school students walked out in November after their school started using Summit's platform. In Indiana, Pa., after a survey by Indiana University of Pennsylvania found 70 percent of students wanted Summit dropped or made optional, the school board scaled it back and then voted this month to terminate it. And in Cheshire, Conn., the program was cut after protests in 2017...

By [this] winter, many McPherson and Wellington students were fed up. While Summit's program asks schools to commit to having students meet weekly in person with teachers for at least 10 minutes, some children said the sessions lasted around two minutes or did not happen.
The Parent Coalition for Student Privacy says the program also "demands an extraordinary amount of personal information about each student and plans to track them through college and beyond." But the real concern is whether the programs are effective. The Times also spoke to a senior scientist at the RAND corporation who's studied digital customized learning programs, who acknowledges "There has not been enough research." And a Wellington city councilman told them that 12 parents actually pulled their children out of the school system after this year's first semester -- and nearly 40 more plan to do so by summer vacation.

One church secretary (with two school-age children) even coined a pithy slogan for her yard sign: "Don't Plummet With Summit."

A former student of The College of Saint Rose in Albany, New York, has pled guilty to charges that he destroyed tens of thousands of dollars worth of campus computers using a USB device designed to instantly overwhelm and fry their circuitry. The plea was announced today by the Department of Justice, FBI, and Albany Police Department. The Verge reports: Vishwanath Akuthota, the former student, now faces up to 10 years in prison (with up to three years of supervision after release) and a fine totaling up to $250,000. He was arrested and taken into custody in North Carolina on February 22nd, just over a week after he went on a spree of inserting the "USB Killer" device into 66 of Saint Rose's computers around various locations on campus. Such devices can be easily and freely purchased online and can overload the surge protection in many PCs.

Akuthota, 27, apparently made video recordings of himself inserting the malicious USB device into the computers and said "I'm going to kill this guy" as the PCs were overloaded and permanently ruined. So it's fair to say the FBI and APD had all the evidence they needed. In total, Akuthota caused $58,471 worth of damage. As part of his guilty plea, he has agreed to pay back that amount to the college, a small private school in New York's capital city. The Verge reached out to The College of Saint Rose for a statement on today's news, but a spokesperson said the college had been asked by law enforcement to refrain from commenting.

So-called "bad bots," tasked with performing denial-of-service (DoS) attacks or other malicious activities like automatically publishing fake content or reviews, are estimated to make up roughly 37.9 percent of all internet traffic. "In 2018, one in five website requests -- 20.4 percent -- of traffic was generated by bad bots alone," reports ZDNet, citing Distil Networks' latest bot report, "Bad Bot Report 2019: The Bot Arms Race Continues." From the report: According to Distil Networks' latest bot report, the financial sector is the main target for such activity, followed by ticketing, the education sector, government websites, and gambling. Based on the analysis of hundreds of billions of bad bot requests over 2018, simple bots, which are easy to detect and defend against, accounted for 26.4 percent of bad bot traffic. Meanwhile, 52.5 percent came from those considered to be "moderately" sophisticated, equipped with the capability to use headless browser software as well as JavaScript to conduct illicit activities.

A total of 73.6 percent of bad bots are classified as Advanced Persistent Bots (APBs), which are able to cycle through random IP addresses, switch their digital identities, and mimic human behavior. Amazon is the leading ISP for bad bot traffic origins. In total, 18 percent of bad bot traffic came from the firm's services, a jump from 10.62 percent in 2017. Almost 50 percent of bad bots use Google Chrome as their user agent and 73.6 percent of bad bot traffic was recorded as originating from data centers, down from 82.7 percent in 2017. The United States outstrips all other countries as a generator of bad bots. In total, 53.4 percent of bad bot traffic came from the US, followed by the Netherlands and China. The most blocked country by IP is Russia, together with Ukraine and India.

Last year, NBA superstar LeBron James opened an experimental school that focuses on teaching a STEM curriculum to students who have a higher probability of failing academically or dropping out of school. The New York Times is now reporting that "the inaugural classes of third and fourth graders at [the I PROMISE School] posted extraordinary results in their first set of district assessments. Ninety percent met or exceeded individual growth goals in reading and math (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source), outpacing their peers across the district." From the report: The students' scores reflect their performance on the Measures of Academic Progress assessment, a nationally recognized test administered by NWEA, an evaluation association. In reading, where both classes had scored in the lowest, or first, percentile, third graders moved to the ninth percentile, and fourth graders to the 16th. In math, third graders jumped from the lowest percentile to the 18th, while fourth graders moved from the second percentile to the 30th.

The 90 percent of I Promise students who met their goals exceeded the 70 percent of students districtwide, and scored in the 99th growth percentile of the evaluation association's school norms, which the district said showed that students' test scores increased at a higher rate than 99 out of 100 schools nationally. The students have a long way to go to even join the middle of the pack. And time will tell whether the gains are sustainable and how they stack up against rigorous state standardized tests at the end of the year. To some extent, the excitement surrounding the students' progress illustrates a somber reality in urban education, where big hopes hinge on small victories.

Microsoft "has been quietly lobbying against Right to Repair legislation, which would prevent Microsoft from penalizing customers when they open up their devices," claims MSPoweruser: Jeff Morris, Democratic member of the [Washington state] House of Representatives claims Microsoft has blocked legislation from being passed despite strong bipartisan support. In an interview on iFixit's Repair Radio [YouTube], Rep. Jeff Morris said that "word on the street" was that Microsoft, "marshalled forces to keep the bill from moving out of the House Rules committee." He claimed "there was a tax proposal here ... to pay for STEM education," and that "in exchange for Microsoft support[ing that tax,] having Right to Repair die..." was a condition, as well as another privacy policy Microsoft wanted to advance.
The state representative hedged that "I can't confirm or deny this, because I have not seen a smoking gun."

But he also told his interviewer that to paint a discouraging picture of the landscape after passage of the bill, "Microsoft was going around telling our members that they wouldn't sell Surface Tablets in Washington any longer."

"A growing cadre of neuroscientists is using sophisticated technology -- and some very complicated math -- to capture what happens in one brain, two brains, or even 12 or 15 at a time when their owners are engaged in eye contact, storytelling, joint attention focused on a topic or object, or any other activity that requires social give and take," reports Scientific American. "Although the field of interactive social neuroscience is in its infancy, the hope remains that identifying the neural underpinnings of real social exchange will change our basic understanding of communication and ultimately improve education or inform treatment of the many psychiatric disorders that involve social impairments." Here's an excerpt from the report: [T]he first study to successfully monitor two brains at the same time took place nearly 20 years ago. Physicist Read Montague, now at Virginia Tech, and his colleagues put two people in separate functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machines and observed their brain activity as they engaged in a simple competitive game in which one player (the sender) transmitted a signal about whether he or she had just seen the color red or green and the other player (the receiver) had to decide if the sender was telling the truth or lying. Correct guesses resulted in rewards. Montague called the technique hyperscanning, and his work proved it was possible to observe two brains at once.

Initially, Montague's lead was followed mostly by other neuroeconomists rather than social neuroscientists. But the term hyperscanning is now applied to any brain imaging research that involves more than one person. Today the techniques that fit the bill include electroencephalography (EEG), magnetoencephalography and functional near-infrared spectroscopy. Use of these varied techniques, many of them quite new, has broadened the range of possible experiments and made hyperscanning less cumbersome and, as a consequence, much more popular. The report also mentions a study from earlier this year that "used hyperscanning to show that eye contact prepares the social brain to empathize by activating the same areas of each person's brain simultaneously: the cerebellum, which helps predict the sensory consequences of actions, and the limbic mirror system, a set of brain areas that become active both when we move any part of the body (including the eyes) and when we observe someone else's movements."

Longtime Slashdot reader johnnyb (Jonathan Bartlett) shares the findings of a new study he, along with co-author Asatur Zh. Khurshudyan, published this week in the journal DCDIS-A: Recently a longstanding flaw in elementary calculus was found and corrected. The "second derivative" has a notation that has confused many students. It turns out that part of the confusion is because the notation is wrong. Note -- I am the subject of the article. Mind Matters provides the technical details: "[T]he second derivative of y with respect to x has traditionally had the notation 'd2 y/dx 2.' While this notation is expressed as a fraction, the problem is that it doesn't actually work as a fraction. The problem is well-known but it has been generally assumed that there is no way to express the second derivative in fraction form. It has been thought that differentials (the fundamental 'dy' and 'dx' that calculus works with) were not actual values and therefore they aren't actually in ratio with each other. Because of these underlying assumptions, the fact that you could not treat the second derivative as a fraction was not thought to be an anomaly. However, it turns out that, with minor modifications to the notation, the terms of the second derivative (and higher derivatives) can indeed be manipulated as an algebraic fraction. The revised notation for the second derivative is '(d 2 y/dx 2) - (dy/dx)(d 2 x/dx 2).'"

The report adds that while mathematicians haven't been getting wrong answers, "correcting the notation enables mathematicians to work with fewer special-case formulas and also to develop a more intuitive understanding of the nature of differentials."

Udacity, the $1 billion online education startup, has laid off about 20 percent of its workforce and is restructuring its operations as the company's co-founder Sebastian Thrun seeks to bring costs in line with revenue without curbing growth, TechCrunch has learned. From the report: The objective is to do more than simply keep the company afloat, Thrun told TechCrunch in a phone interview. Instead, Thrun says these measures will allow Udacity from a money-losing operation to a "break-even or profitable company by next quarter and then moving forward." The 75 employees, including a handful of people in leadership positions, were laid off earlier today as part of a broader plan to restructure operations at Udacity. The startup now employs 300 full-time equivalent employees. It also employs about 60 contractors.

Udacity, which specializes in "nanodegrees" on a range of technical subjects that include AI, deep learning, digital marketing, VR and computer vision, has been struggling for months now, due in part to runaway costs and other inefficiencies. The company grew in 2017, with revenue increasing 100 percent year-over-year thanks to some popular programs like its self-driving car and deep learning nanodegrees, and the culmination of a previous turnaround plan architected by former CMO Shernaz Daver. New programming was added in 2018, but the volume slowed. Those degrees that were added lacked the popularity of some of its other degrees. Meanwhile, costs expanded and their employee ranks swelled.

A number of businesses are rushing in to watch everything kids do on their school-issued tech, reports the Outline. From the story: As schools struggle to catch up with the fast-moving online environment, technology can seem like both the cause of and solution to life's problems. Increasingly, schools are turning to high-tech surveillance tools to supervise students online. As Nelson, who has worked in education for 20 years, told The Outline: "There has always been a small proportion of the student body that are going to be jerks or are struggling. With technology, they're able to [do harm] much more quickly and intensely."

[...] Apps like Apple Classroom, DyKnow, and ClassDojo extend these common disciplinary practices into online spaces. Apple Classroom and DyKnow, which bills itself as "classroom-management software for teachers," allow teachers to remotely lock students' computers or tablets into particular apps in order to cut off distractions and the temptation to cheat. These apps also let teachers call up real-time images of students' screens and histories of apps each student has used during class to check who has been following instructions and who was off-task.

An anonymous reader quotes the Washington Post: Griffin Spikoski spends as much as 18 hours a day glued to his computer screen playing the wildly popular, multiplayer video game "Fortnite." His YouTube channel -- where he regularly uploads videos of himself playing the online game -- has nearly 1.2 million subscribers and more than 71 million views; figures that have netted him advertisers, sponsorships and a steady stream of income. Last year, that income totaled nearly $200,000... "It's kind of like my job," Griffin told ABC affiliate WABC-TV, noting he plays about eight hours a day in his Long Island home...

His big break came last year when Spikoski beat a well-known Fortnite player and uploaded a video of the battle to YouTube, quickly resulting in 7.5 million views, according to WABC-TV. It didn't take long, the station reported, for the teenager to make his first $100 from Twitch. Not long after, his father, Chris said, everything changed. "Two months went by and we were like, 'Alright, we're going to need to get an accountant and get a financial adviser,'" he said.

Spikoski's parents told filmmakers that they decided to remove their son from high school as his dedication to gaming deepened... Spikoski's parents said their son had been pushing them to allow him to pursue online schooling. With his success growing, they eventually relented. "It's been his dream to be a gamer, to be in e-sports, just to be in this field since he was a kid," Spikoski said, noting that his son began playing video games at age three. "We don't really see that you need a 9-to-5 job to get by in life and you can actually have fun with a career and enjoy your love and do what you love and make a living out of it," he added.

"A test of UK university defences against cyber-attacks found that in every case hackers were able to obtain 'high-value' data within two hours," writes the BBC.

Bruce66423 shares their report: The tests were carried out by "ethical hackers" working for Jisc, the agency providing internet services to the UK's universities and research centres. They were able to access personal data, finance systems and research networks....

The simulated attacks, so-called "penetration testing", were carried out on more than 50 universities in the UK, with some being attacked multiple times. A report into their effectiveness, published by Jisc (formerly the Joint Information Systems Committee) and the Higher Education Policy Institute (Hepi), showed a 100% success rate in getting through the cyber-defences. Within two hours, and in some cases one hour, they were able to reach student and staff personal information, override financial systems and access research databases.

The tests were carried out by Jisc's in-house team of ethical hackers, with one of the most effective approaches being so-called "spear phishing"...where an email might appear to be from someone you know or a trusted source but is really a way of concealing an attack, such as downloading "malware".