Foresight strategy (scenario planning), as a discipline, requires setting up signal and sensemaking mechanisms to have the most unique ideas, projects, and mental models on hand when devising futures.

The experience economy, or experiential learning, is a rewarding method for sensemaking.  The technology industry, government agencies, and scientific communities provide annual events which are designed to foster community, collaboration, and competition.  Technical breakthroughs and performance benchmarks are made experiential by these competitions and grand challenges.  A few come to mind: The IBM Watson Challenges (Chess, Jeopardy! and AI), The Google DeepMind GO Challenge Match and, of course, DefCon CTF. There is an upcoming competition as well: the inaugural U.S. CyberGames.

The Liberty Experience caught our eye, and we thought the OODA Loop Network would find the exhibit of interest.

A British cybersecurity researcher uncovered his own personal data exposed online after discovering an unsecured database. The unprotected Elasticsearch database was found by Bob Diachenko, leader of security research at Comparitech, on August 22 of this year. Diachenko found 200GB of digital index records dating back a decade. The information

Human Rights First, an activist group based in the US, is encouraging Afghans to delete their data in order to protect themselves from the Taliban. The human rights group believes that the Taliban may use Afghans’ data against them. The militant organization seized control of Afghanistan on August 15, and

Just days after LinkedIn was targeted in another data-scraping attack consisting of 700 million LinkedIn profiles, the victims of the attack are being targeted by cybercriminals. The data scraping incident resulted in the trove of information being posted to a popular hacker forum. The vast amount of lifted data is

Companies and individuals operating older models of Western Digital network-attached storage (NAS) drives suffered from what appears to be an attack that exploited a 2018 vulnerability. The exploit reset the drives to factory defaults and deleted data, according to customer comments and statements made by the company. Western Digital suspects

Google is attempting to validate whether app developers are real people by changing the information requirements for people with Play Store developer accounts. Currently, developers simply need to provide an email address and phone number to create an account. Google plans to change the requirements to asking developers whether the

TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, is currently being sued for billions of dollars over allegedly mishandling and using data pertaining to minors. Internal company data from July 2020 found that 18 million of TikTok’s total 800 million worldwide users are aged 14 years or younger. The

Earlier this week, Amazon released a transparency report which revealed that government requests for user data increased by 800% between the first and second half of 2020. The company reportedly processed over 3,000 demands within the first six months of 2020 and over 27,000 in the second six months. Nearly

On Tuesday, Singapore passed new legislation that restricts law enforcement’s ability to access Covid-19 contact tracing data after extensive public backlash. The bill, called the Covid-19 Temporary Measures Amendment Bill, was passed under a Certificate of Urgency, which allows the government to speed up the adoption process for legislation considered

SocialArks exposed 318 million records from Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn in a misconfig of the cloud. Details for social-media influencers and celebrities from the U.S were among the public and personal profile data exposed. An ElasticSearch database owned by a Chinese social-media company, SocialArks, was misconfigured leading to the leak.