Photographer Frank Relle revels in Louisiana’s otherworldly swampland, which he's been captivated with since childhood.

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2026/03/frank-relle-until-the-water-bayou-louisiana-swamps-photographs/

#photography #nature

I teach cybersecurity. And I genuinely don't know what to tell my students after this one. Federal reviewers spent years trying to get basic encryption documentation from Microsoft for its GCC High government cloud. They couldn't get it. One reviewer called the system a "pile of spaghetti pies," with data traveling from point A to point B the way you'd get from Chicago to New York: a bus to St. Louis, a ferry to Pittsburgh, and a flight to Newark. Each leg is a potential hijacking. They knew this. They said this out loud in writing. Then they approved it anyway in December 2024, because too many agencies were already using it. 🔐 That's not a security review. That's a hostage negotiation. Two things in this story should make every CISO and CIO uncomfortable:

🧩 Microsoft built its federal cloud on top of decades of legacy code that it apparently can't fully document itself
👮 "Digital escorts" often ex-military with minimal software engineering backgrounds are the firewall between Chinese engineers working on the system and classified U.S. networks 🤦🏻‍♂️

The scariest line in the whole ProPublica investigation isn't the "pile of shit" quote. It's this: FedRAMP determined that refusing authorization wasn't feasible because agencies were already using the product. Read that again. The security review process reached a conclusion based on sunk cost, not risk. Ex Post Facto Fallacy

If that logic holds, the compliance framework is just documentation theater. And right now, CISA is being hollowed out, so there are fewer people left to even run the theater.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/03/federal-cyber-experts-called-microsofts-cloud-a-pile-of-shit-approved-it-anyway/
#Cybersecurity #Microsoft #FedRAMP #Leadership #RiskManagement #security #privacy #cloud #infosec

Trump pardoned nursing home owner Joseph Schwartz just 3 months into his sentence for a $39 million fraud scheme.

Meanwhile, families who won multimillion-dollar wrongful death suits against Schwartz haven’t collected a cent.
https://www.propublica.org/article/joseph-schwartz-trump-pardon-skyline-nursing-home-patients?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=mastodon-post

#News #Trump #Arkansas #Health #Fraud #Law #Legal #USPolitics

Mathematicians are threatening to boycott the field’s largest, most prestigious gathering this summer
if it takes place in the U.S., as currently planned.

Every four years since the turn of the twentieth century,
the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) has brought together mathematicians from all over the world to share the latest breakthroughs and plot the field’s future.

Famous speeches delivered at the congress have gone on to redefine entire subfields of math.

The ICM is also where math’s most hallowed prize, the Fields Medal, is awarded.

This July, the ICM is slated to take place in Philadelphia
—the first time in 40 years that it’s been held in the U.S.

Now a petition to move the event elsewhere is circulating among mathematicians.

It cites the recent American military actions in Venezuela and Iran,
the suspension of visas from 75 countries
and the continued presence of federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents across major U.S. cities
as contrary to the ICM’s goal of fostering “a sense of international unity amongst mathematicians.”

As of this writing, more than 1,500 mathematicians have signed the petition,
which states that they plan to boycott the event if it isn’t moved outside the U.S.

The list of signatories includes many of the field’s most prominent names,
more than 50 of whom have spoken at previous congresses.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-mathematicians-are-boycotting-their-biggest-conference/

Donald Trump showed a classified map he retained from his first term in office to passengers on a 2022 private plane flight

and retained another record so sensitive that only six high-ranking government officials had access to it,
according to a prosecution memo released to Congress this week.


The Justice Department shared those findings, detailed in a January 2023 briefing document written by then-special counsel Jack Smith’s team,
with lawmakers as they conduct a review of Smith’s efforts
now-abandoned efforts to prosecute Trump.

The memo, which was obtained by The Washington Post, was penned as investigators moved toward indicting Trump on charges of illegally retaining sensitive government material after he left the White House.

It offers a snapshot of an early moment in Smith’s investigation and adds new shading to the public understanding of Smith’s probes,
-- even as a final report on his findings remains under court seal
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/03/25/trump-classified-map-private-plane/