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Twenty-Six Thousand Rented Servers Went Quiet in One Weekend, and the Attackers' Reach Ran to More Than Seventy Brokerages

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For a few days in late October, twenty-six thousand seven hundred and thirty-nine rented Windows servers stopped doing the one thing they were paid to do. They belonged to Onamae.com Desktop Cloud, a GMO Internet product that leases virtual private servers by the month to people who need a machine that never sleeps. Retail currency traders form the natural market: the foreign-exchange market runs around the clock five days a week, humans do not, and software such as MetaTrader 4 and MetaTrader 5 will keep placing orders all night on its owner’s behalf. Doing that requires the program to store the customer’s brokerage credentials on the rented machine — login ID, password, frequently a PIN — and to read them again at every reconnect. Break into the host, and those credentials become readable at scale. The accounts under attack were not GMO’s; they belonged to customers and were held at dozens of separate brokers. An intruder sitting inside the host could therefore reach past GMO’s o...
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Countries That Might Not Exist in Fifty Years (An inundation ledger — vanishing republics, drowning deltas, and the strange law being written so that a nation can outlive its own ground)

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By September 2023, the Parliament of Tuvalu had amended the national constitution to declare that the country would exist in perpetuity, even if the physical territory of the islands went under. Tuvalu would remain a state, the text reads, “notwithstanding the impacts of climate change or other causes resulting in loss to the physical territory of Tuvalu.” Eleven thousand people were legislating for the possibility that they might one day have no ground to stand on. Bookkeeping, not flourish. Over the twentieth century the global sea rose by around 7.5 inches, and the World Meteorological Organization now puts the floor at half a metre more by 2100, with the pessimistic tail running to two. Pacific waters have climbed at two to three times the global rate — almost thirty centimetres in the western basin since 1990 alone — and the reasons lie as much in wind and ocean circulation as in meltwater. Violent, erratic weather arrives over the top of that: storms out of season, king tides rea...
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