Thursday, January 30, 2020

Corornavirus and media scare tactics

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Before I begin, let me make it clear that I believe the coronavirus outbreak in China is extremely serious. This is not something to take lightly and reasonable precautions are important to prevent it from becoming an outbreak in other countries.

That having been said, the media is using very misleading reporting in an attempt to exaggerate the facts. I guess they believe panicking the population is a good way to sell newspapers. Or demand unnecessarily aggressive action by the government.

Case in point, take a look at this article from the Palm Beach Post: Coronavirus scare: 30 students, 3 teachers at Benjamin School await word on exposure.

After reading that click-bait headline, you are led to believe that 33 people have been exposed and that an outbreak is imminent. But if you actually read the text of the article, the person who allegedly infected these 33 people had the flu, not the coronavirus. Lots of people are being tested, but none have tested positive. And "breaking news" that the students have been allowed back to school. In other words, lots of people were scared but there was no coronavirus infection.

The article goes on with the fear-mongering when it misrepresents the CDC's statistics. The article quotes a very short excerpt from a CDC press statement, saying "So far, the CDC has confirmed only five cases of coronavirus in the United States. It is also following 110 potential cases, or 'persons under investigation' in 26 states and that 'this is a cumulative number and will only increase.'".

Despite being a direct quote, it is very misleading. It implies that we need to be scared because an ever increasing number of people are being tested. But if you go look at the CDC's summary of cases in the US you will see that the count of "patients under investigation" includes all the people who have tested negative. The number of people who have tested positive in the US remains at 5, where it has been all week.

Maybe I'm not understanding this correctly, but if you test hundreds of people and only five are positive, with the rest of the completed results being negative, why is that a sign of an imminent problem?

If you actually click the link to the press briefing cited by the Palm Beach Post, you see the rest of the quote, omitted by the newspaper because that part is reassuring, not scary:

... To date we have 110 of what we’re calling persons under investigation or PUIs from 26 states. This is a cumulative number and will only increase. We still only have five confirmed positives and 32 that have tested negative. There have been no new confirmed cases overnight. ...

In other words, follow the same common sense that you should follow all the time. Wash frequently. Avoid spending time around sick people. If you feel sick, see a doctor. And don't trust the media to give you accurate information.

Update: The CDC has updated their status page. As of February 19th, there have been 15 people (3% of patients under investigation) in the US who have tested positive, 412 people (86%) tested negative and 52 people (11%) whose tests are still pending.

It is worth noting that a TV news report from February 17th was claiming that were 29 confirmed cases in the United states, even though the CDC report from two days later reports half that number. Either the media is lying or they are getting their numbers from some source other than the CDC, but have chosen to not name that source. Just another example of media scare-tactics.

Thursday, January 16, 2020

Worlds first keylogger?

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How the KGB Bugged American Typewriters During the Cold War
By Kyle Mizokami,

  • In the 1970s, U.S. intelligence believed the embassy in Moscow was leaking information.
  • Repeated searches for a secret transmitter in the embassy turned up nothing.
  • Finally, engineers discovered a typewriter with a transmitter hacked into it.

Fascinating story about how the Soviets modified an IBM Selectric typewriter to covertly transmit every keystroke to a KGB monitoring station. Electronically, this hack is a work of art.

h/t the Michael Tsai Blog

Tuesday, January 07, 2020

Michael Tsai Blog: Beware Spinlocks in User Space

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This week, the Michael Tsai Blog (a great source of interesting system software discussions) summarized a discussion thread between Malte Skarupke (a game developer) and Linus Torvalds about different kinds of locking primitives.

See Beware Spinlocks in User Space for Tsai's summary.

If you find that interesting, I strongly recommend also reading the original article (Measuring Mutexes, Spinlocks and how Bad the Linux Scheduler Really is) and the discussion thread (on Real World Technologies forum). Although there is a bit of trolling, the discussion has a very high signal-to-noise ratio, including some very good points by Linus Torvalds about why it is incredibly difficult to roll your own locking primitives and not screw it up.