Thursday, May 28, 2020

Conservative Review: Could half the uninfected population already be partially immune?

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Horowitz: Bombshell study: Could half the uninfected population already be partially immune?
Daniel Horowitz, May 27, 2020

Could nearly half the population not already infected with SARS-CoV-2 be immune to it from having already contracted other forms of coronavirus in recent years?

That is one implication of a major study conducted by over a dozen researchers from several microbiology and immunology institutions in the U.S.

The purveyors of panic are warning of a second wave of the virus and that even if we are correct in asserting that the general fatality rate is extremely low for most people, it will still result in millions of deaths worldwide if we need 70 percent of the population to get the virus in order to achieve herd immunity. Putting aside the fact that their strategy of lockdown doesn’t provide a solution to this hypothetical problem either, even as it kills more people from the collateral damage, there is now promising evidence that more people might already be immune to the virus.

The study is built upon the principle that T cells play a central role in destroying viruses and providing immunity. Not only were these cells discovered in all the blood samples of confirmed recovered COVID-19 patients, but they were also found in 6 of the 11 blood samples from 2015-2018, before those individual donors could possibly have contracted the virus.

It's still too early to be sure, but if further studies come to the same conclusion, this will be great news.

Daily Caller: Andrew Cuomo’s Nursing Home Order Deleted From New York Health Department Website

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Andrew Cuomo’s Nursing Home Order Deleted From New York Health Department Website
Peter Hasson, May 27, 2020

Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s March 25 order requiring nursing homes and other long-term care facilities to accept recovering coronavirus patients has disappeared from the New York State Department of Health’s website.

The webpage for Cuomo’s order says the document is “not found,” though it can still be seen on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. It took the governor roughly six weeks to reverse the order, which has been blamed for the high death rate among New York’s elderly.

The order’s disappearance, which was first reported by Fox News on Tuesday, comes as Cuomo has faced increasing levels of criticism for his handling of coronavirus. A Cuomo spokesperson told Fox News the order’s disappearance was part of a routine website update.

Revisionist history all the way down. Make a horrible decision that kills thousands of people. Then blame other people. Then delete the evidence.

Next up, we should expect Democrats to deny that the order ever existed and accuse the rest of us of making it up.

Too bad all those nursing home administrators have signed paper copies of their orders. It won't be nearly as easy to delete all of them.

Wednesday, May 27, 2020

Washington Free Beacon: YouTube Censors Criticism of China

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YouTube Censors Criticism of China
Yuichiro Kakutani -

YouTube is deleting comments that contain two terms Chinese dissidents use to criticize the government, raising concerns about the tech industry's willingness to censor content to gain favor with the communist regime.

Comments on YouTube videos containing the terms 共匪 (Gòngfěi), meaning "communist bandit," and 五毛党 (wǔmáodǎng), meaning "fifty-cent party," are automatically deleted from the site shortly after they are posted. The latter is a derogatory term referring to Chinese internet censors who are allegedly paid 50 cents for every internet post that they erase.

A YouTube spokeswoman acknowledged to the Washington Free Beacon that the website's algorithm has been deleting any comments containing either of the two terms within seconds of their submission. She blamed "an error in our enforcement mechanism" for the deletions, rather than an effort to stymie criticism of the authoritarian government. The deletions have raised eyebrows among Republican lawmakers, one of whom is calling on the Department of Justice to investigate.

Does this come as a surprise to anyone?

I wonder if Google will allow me to post this or if they'll delete it too.

Friday, May 22, 2020

SiliconAngle: GitLab runs phishing test against employees – and 20% handed over credentials

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GitLab runs phishing test against employees – and 20% handed over credentials
by Duncan Riley. UPDATED 22:26 EDT / MAY 21 2020

There’s always a lot of talk in cybersecurity about the importance of training employees to be aware of phishing attempts. Training does work but it’s not a panacea, the reality being is that there will always be employees who get tricked even with training.

Although there are various industry estimates, code repository management firm GitLab Inc. decided to phish their own employees to see what would happen. The result was not good: One in five employees fell for the fake emails.

Sadly, this is why cybersecurity research can only go so far. When 20% of employees working for a technology site can be phished like this, no technology product can solve the problem.

I am reminded of the Beagle/Bagle worm. In 2004, this worm was spreading rapidly throughout the Internet via e-mail. When virus scanners got definitions to identify and delete it, the authors created a variation (described in the linked article) which wrote itself to an encrypted zip file, putting the password in the mail message's body. This variation continued to spread despite requiring the recipient to manually save and decrypt an attached zip file, and then run the application contained within.

If people will blindly do whatever they're told in e-mail, then they're doomed no matter what security experts say and do.

Update May 26, 2020: I updated the article to include a link to an article about the Beagle/Bagel worm. At the time I originally wrote the article, I couldn't remember its name, but I was able to do some searching and found it (in one of my own blog posts from 2005: Encryption and security: an overview).

Thursday, May 14, 2020

Washington Free Beacon: DOJ Dropping Criminal Case Against Ex-Trump Adviser Flynn

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DOJ Dropping Criminal Case Against Ex-Trump Adviser Flynn
Reuters - May 7, 2020 3:08 PM

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Justice Department on Thursday abruptly sought to drop the criminal charges against President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn, following mounting pressure from Trump’s political allies on the right.

Reposted because I accidentally clicked the "Delete" button and Blogger has no mechanism to undo that. Shame on you, Google.

- - -

And now Flynn needs to sue everybody involved in this bogus prosecution. We now know that not only is there no evidence of any crime, there never was any evidence and the FBI knew it from day one. We also know that the FBI agents investigating the case wanted to drop it right from the start, but they were pressured by their politically-appointed bosses to try and invent a crime. We even have a hand-written memo stating that the interview at which Flynn supposedly lied was conducted for the express purpose of trying to trip him up in order to create an excuse for a prosecution. And even then, the agents conducting the interview said that Flynn didn't lie - an opinion that was only changed several months later when the top brass was demanding an excuse for a prosecution.

The people responsible for this need to lose their jobs and their pensions. They need to reimburse Flynn for the millions of dollars he spent defending himself against these bogus charges, plus punitive damages to make sure nobody ever tries a stunt like this again.

And no, I don't care that he plead guilty in 2017. He went bankrupt paying lawyers and the government had started threatening his family. I guarantee that you (whoever you are) would have confessed under far less pressure. A confession given under duress is no confession under any concept of justice.

Monday, May 04, 2020

Comparison: New 13" Mac Book Pro vs Air

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Today, Apple announced a new version of their 13" MacBook Pro. You can read a pretty good summary of it at MacRumors or on Apple's product page. But the real important question (at least to me) is whether it is worth getting this computer or the 13" MacBook Air. Both are very lightweight and relatively inexpensive so it's not necessarily a clear-cut decision.

Friday, May 01, 2020

IEEE Spectrum: ‘Hydrogen-On-Tap’ Device Turns Trucks Into Fuel-Efficient Vehicles

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‘Hydrogen-On-Tap’ Device Turns Trucks Into Fuel-Efficient Vehicles
Maria Gallucci. 01 May 2020 | 14:16 GMT

The city of Carmel, Ind., has trucks for plowing snow, salting streets, and carrying landscaping equipment. But one cherry-red pickup can do something no other vehicle can: produce its own hydrogen.

A 45-kilogram metal box sits in the bed of the work truck. When a driver starts the engine, the device automatically begins concocting the colorless, odorless gas, which feeds into the engine’s intake manifold. This prevents the truck from guzzling gasoline until the hydrogen supply runs out. The pickup has no fuel cell module, a standard component in most hydrogen vehicles. No high-pressure storage tanks or refueling pumps are needed, either.

Instead, the “hydrogen-on-tap” device contains six stainless steel canisters. Each contains a 113-gram button of an aluminum and gallium alloy. A small amount of water drips onto the buttons, causing a chemical reaction that splits the oxygen and hydrogen contained in the water. The hydrogen releases, and the rest turns into aluminum oxide, a waste product that can be recycled to create more buttons. Back in the garage, the driver can replace spent canisters with news ones to replenish the hydrogen supply.

It's not the fictional dream of running on water, but it's the closest I've seen. I wonder how many miles you get per canister and how much replacements cost.

Telecoms: Huawei and China Mobile bring 5G connectivity to Everest’s summit

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Huawei and China Mobile bring 5G connectivity to Everest’s summit
By Ryan Daws. . TechForge Media

Huawei and China Mobile have partnered up to bring 5G connectivity to the summit of the world’s highest mountain.

The partners set up a 5G base station 6,500 metres above ground which provides access to China Mobile’s dual-gigabit network. Other base stations were built at the Base Camp (5,300 metres) and the Transition Camp (5,800 metres).

So, if you're planning to climb Mt. Everest, be sure to bring along a 5G cell phone.