The $10 Trillion Case for Decentralized Cybersecurity | The Good News About Vaccine Hesitancy | Software Supply Chain Risk, and more

Companies like Naoris Protocol are leading the charge with a new approach to technology that transforms centrally managed computer networks with traditionally un-trusted devices and services such as mobiles, servers and laptops. A whole new category of startups across the decentralized cybersecurity landscape have popped up including Anchore, Dig Security, Project Discovery, and Twingate.
David Holtzman, security advisor and architect of DNS, echoes this new approach, “The rapid ascension of Web 3.0 acknowledges the evolution from centralized to decentralized architecture, including a decentralized cybersecurity mesh. 

Software Supply Chain Risk Is Growing, but Mitigation Solutions Exist  (Sasha Romanosky, The Hill)
Software supply chain risk has emerged as a leading concern for private sector firms and government agencies of all sizes. Unpacking this supply chain, and finding methods to estimate and reduce the risk, is a massive problem for a number of reasons.

Responding to the Firearm Violence Crisis: Are Some Newly Enacted Laws Making Things Worse?  (Andrew R. Morral and Rosanna Smart, RAND))
The science is increasingly clear that while some restrictive gun laws seem to reduce gun violence, other more-permissive gun laws worsen it. And with more than 40,000 gun deaths a year in America, the stakes could hardly be higher.
After declining for two decades, firearm violence began rising in 2014 and surged in 2020.
Mass shootings reached record highs in 2021 and 2022, according to the Gun Violence Archive, which has been tracking events where four or more people were shot since 2014.
In response, federal and state governments passed a raft of gun laws last year reflecting divergent views on how to address firearm violence while protecting gun owners’ rights.

Could a Chatbot Teach You How to Build a Dirty Bomb?  (Matt Korda, Outrider)
New artificial intelligence programs like ChatGPT raise troubling questions about nuclear security. And chatbots can be fooled.

The Pentagon Saw a Warship Boondoggle. Congress Saw Jobs.  (Eric Lipton, New York Times)
The Navy pushed to retire nine of its newest ships, after years of breakdowns and as its mission shifted to countering global rivals. Then the lobbying started.

An Even Deadlier Pandemic Could Soon Be Here  (Zeynep Tufekci, New York Times)
As the world is just beginning to recover from the devastation of Covid-19, it is facing the possibility of a pandemic of a far more deadly pathogen.
Bird flu — known more formally as avian influenza — has long hovered on the horizons of scientists’ fears. This pathogen, especially the H5N1 strain, hasn’t often infected humans, but when it has, 56 percent of those known to have contracted it have died. Its inability to spread easily, if at all, from one person to another has kept it from causing a pandemic.
But things are changing. The virus, which has long caused outbreaks among poultry, is infecting more and more migratory birds, allowing it to spread more widely, even to various mammals, raising the risk that a new variant could spread to and among people.
Alarmingly, it was recently reported that a mutant H5N1 strain was not only infecting minks at a fur farm in Spain but also most likely spreading among them, unprecedented among mammals. Even worse, the mink’s upper respiratory tract is exceptionally well suited to act as a conduit to humans, Thomas Peacock, a virologist who has studied avian influenza, told me.
The world needs to act now, before H5N1 has any chance of becoming a devastating pandemic.

The Good News About Vaccine Hesitancy  (Daniel Engber, The Atlantic)
America can’t shake the feeling that vaccination rates are about to plummet. The facts say otherwise.