Short Takes – 6-6-23

Customer Ratings Have Become Meaningless. ‘People Hand Out 5 Stars Like It’s Candy.’. WSJ.com article. Pull quote: “Confusion over what constitutes 5-star behavior for certain services, combined with the guilt of potentially hurting someone’s livelihood, has people defaulting to perfect scores. Ratings padding is particularly rampant for services involving personal interactions.” Anyone that did not see this coming does not understand people.

NATO-trained units will serve as tip of spear in Ukraine’s counteroffensive. WashingtonPost.com article. Pull quote: “Though still unproven on the battlefield, the 47th brigade is armed almost entirely with Western weapons and, in a first, nearly every one of the unit’s soldiers has undergone a weeks-long course with foreign instructors. The 47th’s leadership is also especially young — all born after the fall of the Soviet Union. Alongside Shalamaha, who is 25, Lt. Col. Oleksandr Sak, the brigade’s top commander, is 28. Markus, the chief master sergeant, is 29.”

SBOMs – Software Supply Chain Security’s Future or Fantasy? SecurityWeek.com article. Pull quote: “Pete Morgan, co-founder and CSO at Phylum, explains the issue. “I have a little test lab setup at home where I have six or seven tools that can take a piece of code and generate an SBOM from it. And then I have five or six other tools that will take in the output, and try to interpret it and do something with it. I run these tests against the same codebase – and each tool produces a different SBOM; and none of them are interpretable by the other tools.””

Interest-Only Loans Helped Commercial Property Boom. Now They’re Coming Due. WSJ.com article. Pull quote: “A rise in defaults could ripple through the commercial real-estate market by forcing distressed sales and pushing down property values. It could also hit regional and community banks that are heavily exposed to the sector, forcing them to write down the value of commercial mortgages on their books and set aside more cash to cover for losses.”

Avoiding Armageddon: Researchers narrow down list of potentially hazardous asteroids. Colorado.edu article. Pull quote: “To find out which ones could get a little too close for comfort, the researchers used a set of innovative mathematical tools to predict the paths 851 large asteroids might take in the next millennium. Most seemed to keep a safe distance from Earth, but a few were less predictable. The orbit of one asteroid called 7482 (1994 PC1), for example, appeared to overlap a lot with Earth’s orbit in the coming centuries. This one, Fuentes-Muñoz said, is worth keeping an eye on.”

Conservatives revolt against GOP leaders on House floor. TheHill.com article. Political war short of vacate motion. Pull quote: “Eleven Republicans — most of whom are members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus — joined Democrats in voting against a rule to advance four bills related to gas stoves and regulatory reform, enough opposition to tank the rule and block the legislation from advancing to the floor.”