June 8

 Nice day. I was about to say sunny but it has become a bit cloudy. Not rain cloudy but still the sun is definitely filtered. The gardens appreciated the slightly lower temperatures and rain of yesterday.  Everything that should be blooming is and the others have nice lush foliage.

Two interesting tech stories over the last day, one good and the other not. The good is that the FBI and other government agencies managed to trace and retrieve most of the ransom paid for the Colonial Pipeline hack. No details, of course, because the government wants to be able to do it again next time. The bad is another outage of unknown cause that crashed one of the major cloud servicing companies. It is one I have never heard of but the report said it is one of the large ones. The crash took down web sites running on that site across the globe including the U.K. government, BBC, parts of Amazon for starters. Another indication of how fragile our systems are. I read a number of prepper and homesteader blogs and they have a saying that fits: two is one and one is none. If you have two of anything (or any system or procedure) and one breaks the other is available. Unfortunately, too many companies, organizations, and governments only have one tech system and no backup.

File this story under "What??? Again???" Brazil has declared a Water Emergency Alert because of their drought. Most of their energy grid runs off hydropower and, guess what, hydro doesn't work without water. This is the second time within a very few years I have read about. The last if my memory serves had people desperately trying to find water where ever they could. The main reservoir had almost dried up. I guess we can expect our morning coffee and anything made from soybeans to get more expensive.

Note on the cloud server that went down this morning--it was a glitch not an attack. That is according to this article on CityA.M. I still think backups are a good idea.