Boomtown
Welcome to the 13th edition of Boomtown. If you’re reading this for the first time, welcome to Boomtown. We’re tripping as usual and the day couldn’t have gone better, as of this writing. Time and again we’ve managed to look past our own issues and problems, in light of the more pressing challenges still prevalent in the world of ours today. This is not saying that our own issues and problems do not have value. This simply means that personal issues and problems are more common than we think. As the noted historian Yuval Noah Harrari notes in ‘21 Lessons for the 21st Century’ – ‘you’re not the center of the world, no one is’. We only think we are.
Let’s start blazing.
The Distractions are Blazing Everywhere
It’s everywhere and hitting our ability to pay attention to one thing at a time.
There’s the lure of the flesh in our content choices. There’s the swaying bodies all over short form video apps. There’s the sweets, the sugary delights swarming and coursing along our mouths, as piles of pleasures swim through our sweetened blood. There’s the monstrous, primal, urge to hate and be angry, label abuses and allegations of all sorts towards imagined or real enemies or threats. There’s the hyper-sexualized imagery all over social media. It is so easy to get lost, yet for the right individual, it’s also a great time to do something.
Guard your attention. Let’s keep blazing.
The GrowDiaries Breach
Make no mistake, GrowDiaries is awesome.
Its focus on its community of cannabis growers helps people from across the world become better cannabis growers, so that growers can then decide how best to use their plants for recreational or medicinal use or both, leading to a healthy craft, honing patience and most importantly, in creating a process to grow their own food as well in the future. Who wouldn’t like to grow their own food? We’re sure we would. It’s just that we’ve to be serious and start the learning process instead of sitting on our butt and reading all day about growing things, without growing them in the first place.
A security breach was reported on the website by a cybersecurity researcher as reported by The Hindu in India.
“GrowDiaries, a community website of cannabis growers, has left email addresses, passwords, IP address records and posts of 1.4 million cannabis growers without a password. A total 3.4 million user records exposed was discovered by cybersecurity researcher Volodymyr Bob Diachenko on October 10, 2020. He found a database that included two large indexes of user data. The first had 1.4 million email id and password records, and second consisted of 2 million records with user posts and hashed account passwords. According to Diachenko, the passwords were hashed using MD5, a deprecated algorithm that an attacker could easily crack to access passwords in plain-text. The IP addresses spanned a range of provinces and countries, in some of which marijuana is not legal.”
While cybersecurity threats are nothing new (the world needs more people to take up cybersecurity in their profession, just saying), it is prudent to say that many cannabis growers reside in countries like India where cultivation of cannabis plants by individuals for any purpose is prohibited and attracts jail time. India’s Narcotics Control Bureau, in case they’re feeling adventurous would capitalise on this breach. If they did, they needed to have done so before October 15th.
“After reporting the matter to GrowDiaries, they secured the data on October 15, but Diachenko does not know if any other third party accessed the data while it was exposed. He added that no payment data was exposed. He said that users of GrowDiaries could be at risk of possible attacks and threats as attackers will use an automated bot to try the same email and password combinations on other sites and apps. The users who belong to locations where growing and using marijuana is not legal could face legal repercussions or possibly extortion if their growing activities come to light.”
Let’s keep blazing ahead.
Pot Stocks Flying High As Expected
In a previous newsletter we had talked about Canada’s cannabis companies’ – the world’s largest owing to Canada’s early mover advantage with regards to research in medical and recreational cannabis – shares being bought by public investors like you and me in the United States and Canada, because of Vice President elect, Kamala Harris publicly claiming that they would legalize cannabis use at the federal level (equivalent to the Indian central government).
In not much of a surprise, as Joe Biden nears the US presidency, Canada’s largest cannabis company and the world’s, Aurora Cannabis is blazing. As per Business Insider:
“Shares of Canada-based marijuana producer Aurora Cannabis soared as much as 40% on Thursday as Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s election lead inched higher pointing to a major boost for the US cannabis industry. Democrats have touted commitment to decriminalize marijuana at the federal level in the US if they win.”
Of course while this does not mean that cannabis use will be legalized immediately the day a new president reaches office, it does herald a new dawn for the cannabis ecosystem. A 100 years ago, in the 1920s was when cannabis use began to be associated more and more with racist and unscientific dialogue, and another 100 odd years later, 2020-2030 will be the decade when cannabis makes a spectacular comeback among the mainstream again as part of modern science and healthcare.
Let’s keep blazing. Have a great day 🙂
Marijuana Maharaj 