Welcome to Thursday Things! If you enjoy this edition, please click the heart icon in the header or at the end of the post to let me know.
Your gut microbiome will thank you. Photo by little plant on Unsplash
Read Along rolls along
In case you missed it, the second edition of the Read Along, the new Books section for Thursday Things, went out on Tuesday. If you’re a Happy Subscriber to Thursday Things, then you are automatically also subscribed to the Read Along, so check your inbox!
While Thursday Things is mostly about things I find online, Read Along is a companion section focused on books I am reading, have read, or want to read. Same vibe, different material!
I’m currently reading The Histories by Herodotus. I also spotlighted a couple of presidential election novels (The Hell Candidate (candidate possessed by the devil! 😈) and Interface (candidate controlled by a brain implant! 🤕)) you might enjoy.
If you don’t want to receive the Read Along, you can go to your profile on the Substack website or app to unsubscribe. Under “Manage your subscription” there is a slider where you can select or deselect Read Along. If you have any difficulty doing that, let me know and I can unsubscribe you from my side. But I hope you’ll enjoy the Read Along!
I’m pretty sure this guy did it. Photo by Clint Patterson on Unsplash
You’ve been hacked. Probably.
We don’t usually do breaking news here at Thursday Things, but this item deserves your attention. There has apparently been the “mother of all breaches” (or MOAB), a massive hack of billions of accounts across multiple sites:
Mother of all breaches reveals 26 billion records: what we know so far
The supermassive leak contains data from numerous previous breaches, comprising an astounding 12 terabytes of information, spanning over a mind-boggling 26 billion records. The leak, which contains LinkedIn, Twitter, Weibo, Tencent, and other platforms’ user data, is almost certainly the largest ever discovered.
There are data leaks, and then there’s this. A supermassive Mother of all Breaches (MOAB for short) includes records from thousands of meticulously compiled and reindexed leaks, breaches, and privately sold databases. The full and searchable list is included at the end of this article.
Bob Dyachenko, cybersecurity researcher and owner at SecurityDiscovery.com, together with the Cybernews team, has discovered billions upon billions of exposed records on an open instance whose owner is unlikely ever to be identified.
Digging deeper, much of the exposed data, including passwords, is compiled from previous date breaches. Only know some anonymous black hat has conveniently brought it all together into a single massive database for the convenience of evildoers!
Read the article for all the details, but the takeaway is you can use the Cybernews Personal Data Leak Checker to see if your passwords or other personal information was involved in this, or previous data breaches. Just type in an email address and the site will report if your personal data was found in any data links. Then you can change passwords and enable 2FA as needed.
It’s worth taking few minutes to check and to secure your accounts! And, as always, feel free to share this post with a friend.
What it looks like when your data was leaked. Not shown: A list of hacked sites and leaks in which my data turned up.
Go with your gut
In recent years, scientists have found more and more evidence that our gut microbiome — the community of bacteria that live in our stomachs and digestive system — has a strong, and not thoroughly understood, effect on our overall health.
As the article puts it:
A person's gut health is considered important for their overall health because the gut microbiome, or microbes that populate it, has a symbiotic relationship with our bodies and plays a key role in its functions. The food you eat contributes to the health of those microbes.
So keeping your microbiome in balance is an important part of maintaining your health. This article shares a few tips for doing that:
5 simple things a top nutrition scientist who studies the gut microbiome does to stay healthy
I’ll give you the topline list. Read the article for more details!
Eat 30 different plants each week — variety is good!
Eat as many brightly colored fruits and vegetables as possible — polyphenols, baby!
Eat plenty of fermented foods every day — gut bacteria love that stuff!
Give your gut a rest by limiting your eating hours — bacteria need time off, apparently
Eat fewer ultraprocessed foods — you already knew this, right? If you can’t pronounce it, you probably shouldn’t eat it.
Be good to your gut bacteria and your gut bacteria will be good to you.
Gut Avengers assemble! Photo by Viktor Forgacs on Unsplash
Thank you for reading!
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