A widely shared essay recounts how Australian gold prospector Mick Leahy, while pushing inland from New Guinea's coast in 1930, stumbled upon a densely populated highland region previously unknown to colonial governments and coastal peoples alike. The essay draws on the book 'First Contact: New Guinea's Highlanders Encounter the Outside World' to explain how roughly a million people had lived isolated in the island's mountainous interior, unaware of any world beyond it.
notnottalmud.substack.com
· 2026-09-15
Group-IB researchers found that the Chinese-speaking threat group GoldFactory has been abusing Google's Work Profile feature to clone victims' banking apps into isolated, hidden environments where fraud-detection tools can't reach. The campaign, powered by the Gigabud Android Trojan and a cloning tool called Vwork, compromised roughly 1,469 devices and 1,281 logins in Indonesia between February and July, causing nearly $1 million in losses.
darkreading.com
· 2026-09-11
When Krakatau erupted on August 27, 1883, obliterating most of three islands between Java and Sumatra, telegraph wires carried real-time reports of destruction across the world for the first time. More than 36,000 people died, mostly from tsunamis triggered by the explosion, while sulfur aerosols lofted into the atmosphere cooled Northern Hemisphere summer temperatures by roughly 0.6°C for years afterward.
arstechnica.com
· 2026-08-23
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