Our picksL.A.’s quake-warning app; Hurricane Florence & raw sewage; the coming technological Cold War, and more

L.A.’s long-awaited earthquake warning app is ready for download (Rong-Gong Lin II, Los Angeles Times)
Smartphone users will finally have access to the ShakeAlertLA app, an early warning system meant to give residents in the earthquake-prone city seconds to prepare for an impending event.

Trump escalates his assault on civil-military relations (Tom Nichols, Defense One)
The president’s public disparagement of retired generals compounds the damage he has done.

Hurricane Florence bathed North Carolina in raw sewage. New figures show it was even worse than we thought (John Murawski, The News & Observer)
Polluted flood waters swamped coal ash ponds at power plants. Rising waters engulfed private septic systems in back yards. The unwholesome mix inundated hog waste lagoons on farms. And the torrent overwhelmed municipal waste water treatment plants in towns large and small.

China, Huawei, and the coming technological Cold War (Adam Segal, Defense One)
2019 might be the year that splinters the global technology system into distinct spheres of influence.

Oregon offers new online resource for potential flooding around the state (Dylan Darling, The Register-Guard)
The tool includes an interactive map and a list of how many stream gauges are expected to be nearing flood stage, or have minor flooding, moderate flooding or major flooding.

The Dark Overlord hackers release documents allegedly tied to 9/11 civil lawsuits (Jeff Stone, Cyberscoop)
A group of hackers has released documents stolen from high-profile firms allegedly detailing litigation and real-estate development deals after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
The Dark Overlord, a hacking group known for breaching entertainment companies and harassing U.S. school systems, said Wednesday it released “a small sample of documents” to verify prior claims that the group breached international firms. In a Dec. 31 Pastebin post, the group said it hacked New York-based real estate developer Silverstein Properties along with insurers Hiscox Syndicates and Lloyds of London to find sensitive security information tied to the 9/11 attacks. The group also claims it obtained classified material from U.S. agencies including the FBI, the Department of Justice, the Federal Aviation Administration and others.
The files, released Wednesday with access instructions and a decryption key, includes various documents and powerpoint presentations tied to liability cases regarding the World Trade Center attacks. The documents refer to cases that were open as of 2003, and contain contributions from people who were Hiscox and Lloyd’s employees at the time.

The elite intel team still fighting Meltdown and Spectre(Lily Hay Newman, Wired)
A year ago today, Intel coordinated with a web of academic and independent researchers to disclose a pair of security vulnerabilities with unprecedented impact. Since then, a core Intel hacking team has worked to help clean up the mess—by creating attacks of their own.

Known as Spectre and Meltdown, the two original flaws—both related to weaknesses in how processors manage data to maximize efficiency—not only affected generations of products that use chips from leading manufacturers like Intel, AMD, and ARM, but offered no ready fix. The software stopgaps Intel and others did roll out caused a slew of performance issues.
On top of all of this, Meltdown and particularly Spectre revealed fundamental security weaknesses in how chips have been designed for over two decades. Throughout 2018, researchers inside and outside Intel continued to find exploitable weaknesses related to this class of “speculative execution” vulnerabilities. Fixing many of them takes not just software patches, but conceptually rethinking how processors are made.