I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Golden Rice, developed in the 1980s, which offered similar nutritional benefits. Golden Rice failed to gain significant traction because of dogmatic opposition to bioengineered foods. Personally, I hope Golden Lettuce receives more pragmatic review and support.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rice

Golden rice attempts to solve a real problem: Vitamin A deficiency in many parts of the world, where rice is also a food staple and where the poorest cannot afford a diet with enough vitamin A in it.

Golden lettuce solves what?

Isn't it similar? Beta carotene turns into vitamin A in the body.

Golden rice is a solution which works in a specific context by virtue of it being rice. People who will benefit from it already eat rice, know how to grow rice, how to store it and how to distribute it. When they could produce a fresh vegetable like lettuce and distribute it year round at a price that everyone can afford, they could very likely grow and distribute any vegetable. Particularly those which are already rich in beta carotene.

Hence my question: What problem does golden lettuce solve...

Purports to solve the same problem, but picking lettuce- which consumes huge amounts of water to produce very little- is even worse than rice.

I wonder if this is a cyber incident. Curious if any telecom folks know what the most likely explanation for an event like this would be, and what telltale signs/symptoms might first indicate this was caused by something nefarious.

Due to the gross incompetence these companies operate at, it's too hard to tell the difference.

Unfortunately, unlike cyber security, there are no off the shelf products that are being sold to help companies with general incompetence.

> However, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is “working closely with AT&T to understand the cause of the outage and its impacts, and stand[s] ready to offer any assistance needed,” Eric Goldstein, the agency’s executive assistant director for cybersecurity, said in a statement to CNN.[1]

[1] - [https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/22/tech/att-cell-service-outage/...

This isn't telling of anything, right? Wouldn't CISA be involved with anything that impacts Public Infrastructure at this level?

by itself, not telling of anything per se.

like, you could commit a dumb BGP config and break lots of stuff. have done that in the past, actually...

but any time a national-tier ISP has a national-level outage, that warrants a look from multiple orgs. and given the number of threat actors like china, NK, iran, and russia, who are, and have, made aggressive efforts in this space -- and have strong reasons to do so now -- its not crazy for the US fed'gov to want to know a little more, and offer to help. but again, entirely possible it's unrelated.

This is normal for high profile outages, even if you are small you can still engage with the CISA if you think there's foul play.

from the same article above, it seems like it's a critical part of this.

> “Everybody’s incentives are aligned,” the former official said. “The FCC is going to want to know what caused it so that lessons can be learned. And if they find malfeasance or bad actions or, just poor quality of oversight of the network, they have the latitude to act.”

If AT&T gets to decide if they are at fault, they will, of course, never be at fault. So a third-party investigation makes a lot of sense.

I would also suspect that the FCC would not be as well versed in determining if there was a hack or even who did it, which is why I feel like CISA would need to get involved in the investigation.

I wonder if this is a cyber incident. Curious if any telecom folks know what the most likely explanation for an event like this would be, and what telltale signs/symptoms might first indicate this was caused by something nefarious.

Kind of weird that there's been almost no coverage of this event this morning. CNBC has barely mentioned it. All 3 carriers having a major outage seems like it should be major news.

When I go to cnn, Washington Post, and NY Times all three have big stories about it prominently on their website, so it does seem like it’s being reported on fairly widely.

The fact that it's gone on as long as it has already makes me suspect the same.

Reminiscent of Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson; any chance you have read that book recently? If so, there is additional comedy in the fact that, perhaps, Stephenson's meme reappeared in your dream.

Thank you all. To synthesize: - learn what I want to learn, probably by speaking with team to prioritize - leverage team + online to structure learning, starting high-level, 'courageous play' - periodically look for current weaknesses, or future strengths, from [lack of] operational integration within company (likely a benefit of technical learnings)