During the  COVID-19, unemployment numbers have been rising and more people are looking for work. Some people have unknowingly gotten involved in breaking the law. According to the article from Idaho News 6 linked below, police found thousands of dollars worth of stolen merchandise in a garage belonging to a homeowner who thought he was renting space to people  working on a reshipping job.

The article warns that malicious actors post legitimate looking “work from home” help wanted or job openings on places like social media, message boards and even job posting sites. These ads will claim the work will be easy, pays big, and can be done from home. The malicious actor uses stolen credit cards to purchase goods and has the victim reship the items. In fact, the malicious actor is using the victim as part of a money laundering operation.

The article encourages readers to stay safe while job searching, to make sure that the employer has a readily available phone number for human resources, and has a company website. Scammers on the other hand usually will communicate through email or messenger only and are very secretive about the work, their business, and what the employee will be doing. The article also warns against paying upfront fees since malicious actors will often ask for fees for background checks or other pre-employment checks.

For more information, please check out:

https://www.kivitv.com/news/bbb-watch-for-work-from-home-scams

Quantum scrambling and the growth of mutual information

Quantum information scrambling refers to the loss of local recoverability of quantum information, which has found widespread attention from high energy physics to quantum computing. In the present analysis we propose a possible starting point for the development of a comprehensive framework for the thermodynamics of scrambling. To this end, we prove that the growth of entanglement as quantified by the mutual information is lower bounded by the time-dependent change of out-of-time-ordered correlator. We further show that the rate of increase of the mutual information can be upper bounded by the sum of local entropy productions, and the exchange entropy arising from the flow of information between separate partitions of a quantum system. Our results are illustrated for the ion trap system, that was recently used to verify information scrambling in an experiment, and for the Sachdev–Ye–Kitaev model.

Spinach Bagels 

An Invitation to Return...