Skip to content

Author: dailylinks

Links for 2022-02-14

Published February 14, 2022

  • a short story about pandemic misinformation & biased reporting

    Well-illustrated case study from 2021 in how misinformation evolves in the mainstream press. First, an Irish Times journalist concocted a thesis ("Given that only 1 in 1,000 cases of COVID-19 come from an outdoor setting, is the government too prohibitive on people meeting outdoors?"), and got a weakly confirmatory response from the HPSC (who should have known better). Through poor reporting by other newspapers around the world, this quickly became a "fact" reported by an Irish "study" -- despite being nothing of the sort -- and published in the New York Times and NPR. Eventually it became a research reference in several academic papers and the BMJ. Naturally, warnings from experts, and the Minister for Health, about its inaccuracy, were ignored. What a mess...

    (tags: misinformation irish-times fail health covid-19 safety hpsc new-york-times npr bmj)

  • A decade of major cache incidents at Twitter

    a massive list of cache-related outages from Dan Luu -- I still have fear of large scale cache reliance, inherited from Amazon, and this terrifying list doesn't help!

    (tags: caching architecture twitter ops outages history)

Links for 2022-02-10

Published February 10, 2022

  • COVID-19 takes serious toll on heart health—a full year after recovery | Science

    In an analysis of more than 11 million U.S. veterans’ health records, researchers found the risk of 20 different heart and vessel maladies was substantially increased in veterans who had COVID-19 1 year earlier, compared with those who didn’t. The risk rose with severity of initial disease and extended to every outcome the team examined, including heart attacks, arrhythmias, strokes, cardiac arrest, and more. Even people who never went to the hospital had more cardiovascular disease than those who were never infected. The results are “stunning … worse than I expected, for sure,” says Eric Topol, a cardiologist at Scripps Research. “All of these are very serious disorders. … If anybody ever thought that COVID was like the flu this should be one of the most powerful data sets to point out it’s not.” He adds that the new study “may be the most impressive Long Covid paper we have seen to date.” [...] “In the post-COVID era, COVID might become the highest risk factor for cardiovascular outcomes,” greater than well-documented risks such as smoking and obesity, says Larisa Tereshchenko.

    (tags: covid-19 health medicine long-covid sars-cov-2 heart stroke)

  • Radio station snafu in Seattle bricks some Mazda infotainment systems

    Bananas. Crappy code in Mazda Connectivity Master Units (CMUs), a component in the Mazda infotainment system in models built between 2014 and 2017, had a massive bug: they would crash and enter a crash/reboot cycle on receiving unexpected input via radio.

    The problem, according to Mazda, was that the radio station sent out image files in its HD radio stream that did not have extensions, and it seems that Mazda's infotainment system of that generation needs an extension (and not a header) to tell what a file is. No extension, no idea, and the system gets corrupted.
    Just to add insult to injury, there's no way to field-repair this embedded system -- no "factory reset" switch was provided -- so the only way to fix it is to install a new CMU at the cost of $1,500, and none are available due to "supply chain issues". Goes to show you that image decoding libraries remain a fine source of vulnerability surfaces...

    (tags: radio security mazdas infotainment cars embedded-systems fail bugs images)

  • We won! UK Home Office to stop using racist visa algorithm

    Spectacular inbuilt algorithmic discrimination in the UK:

    The visa algorithm discriminated on the basis of nationality - by design. Applications made by people holding ‘suspect’ nationalities received a higher risk score. Their applications received intensive scrutiny by Home Office officials, were approached with more scepticism, took longer to determine, and were much more likely to be refused. We argued this was racial discrimination and breached the Equality Act 2010. Entrenched bias and racism in the visa system breaks hearts and tears families apart, like the four siblings from Nigeria unable to travel to the UK for their sister's wedding, or the countless skilled professionals refused unable to contribute to conferences and events in the UK just because they don't come from a rich white country - including scores of African academics and artists denied entry for no good reason. The streaming tool was opaque. Aside from admitting the existence of a secret list of suspect nationalities, the Home Office refused to provide meaningful information about the algorithm. It remains unclear what other factors were used to grade applications. The algorithm suffered from a feedback loop — a vicious circle in which biased enforcement and visa statistics reinforce which countries stay on the list of suspect nationalities. In short, applicants from suspect nationalities were more likely to have their visa application rejected. These visa rejections then informed which nationalities appeared on the list of ‘suspect’ nations. This error, combined with the pre-existing bias in Home Office enforcement (in which some nationalities are targeted for enforcement because they are believed to be easier to remove), accelerated bias in the Home Office’s visa process. Such feedback loops are a well-documented problem with automated decision systems.

    (tags: algorithms racism uk immigration automation home-office)

  • Environmental Reporting Dashboards for OpenStack

    A neat integration of Scaphandre into an OpenStack cluster by BBC R&D:

    While researching tools to monitor VM power usage, we evaluated Scaphandre – an open-source monitoring agent for energy consumption metrics created by Hubblo and Benoit Petit. Scaphandre can measure the CPU power consumption of the whole server and its processes using Intel RAPL alongside CPU utilisation statistics stored in proc/stat. Scaphandre estimates how many CPU watts each process is responsible for by looking at the CPU time spent on it, and the CPU power consumption for the whole server reported by Intel RAPL. Each running VM appears as a process running on the server – therefore, Scaphandre can report the CPU power consumption for each VM. We then used the Carbon Intensity API, created by the UK National Grid ESO, to calculate the carbon dioxide emissions corresponding to each VM’s CPU power consumption. This API provides the number of grams of carbon dioxide (gCO2) emitted to generate a kilowatt-hour (kWh) of electricity consumed at a UK regional level. This figure, referred to as the carbon intensity of electricity generation, varies over time according to the type of generation and electricity demand. Multiplying the carbon intensity figure by the CPU power consumption of a VM at a given point in time results in the carbon dioxide emissions the VM is responsible for.

    (tags: scaphandre bbc openstack co2 climate emissions power)

Links for 2022-02-09

Published February 9, 2022

  • Energy crisis: Is net zero and environmental policy responsible for rising energy bills?

    If we're serious about replacing fossil fuels with renewables we will have to build an awful lot of them, and while the eventual lifetime cost could be lower than fossil fuels, the short-term cost per MWh is way, way higher. So if we're serious about net zero you'd expect our governments and companies to be spending extraordinary amounts on new primary power projects right now. But glance at the statistics and it turns out we're not. On the contrary, investment in primary energy -- those plans and solar panels and wind turbines we need to give us power -- has flatlined since 2015.

    (tags: energy future climate-change power fossil-fuels renewables research net-zero)

  • braided cables

    prized by audiophiles, but TBH I think they just look pretty cool

    (tags: cables braiding cool)

  • Missing Manuals - io_uring worker pool

    'Calling io_uring just an asynchronous I/O API doesn’t do it justice, though. Underneath the API calls, io_uring is a full-blown runtime for processing I/O requests. One that spawns threads, sets up work queues, and dispatches requests for processing. All this happens “in the background” so that the user space process doesn’t have to, but can, block while waiting for its I/O requests to complete. A runtime that spawns threads and manages the worker pool for the developer makes life easier, but using it in a project begs the questions: 1. How many threads will be created for my workload by default? 2. How can I monitor and control the thread pool size? [.....] 3. What is an unbounded worker? 4. How does it differ from a bounded worker? Things seem a bit under-documented as is, hence this blog post. Hopefully, it will provide the clarity needed to put io_uring to work in your project when the time comes.'

    (tags: linux io_uring apis runtime kernel system-calls coding performance)

Links for 2022-02-08

Published February 8, 2022

  • Long-term cardiovascular outcomes of COVID-19 | Nature Medicine

    Yikes:

    beyond the first 30 days after infection, individuals with COVID-19 are at increased risk of incident cardiovascular disease spanning several categories, including cerebrovascular disorders, dysrhythmias, ischemic and non-ischemic heart disease, pericarditis, myocarditis, heart failure and thromboembolic disease. These risks and burdens were evident even among individuals who were not hospitalized during the acute phase of the infection and increased in a graded fashion according to the care setting during the acute phase (non-hospitalized, hospitalized and admitted to intensive care). Our results provide evidence that the risk and 1-year burden of cardiovascular disease in survivors of acute COVID-19 are substantial. Care pathways of those surviving the acute episode of COVID-19 should include attention to cardiovascular health and disease.

    (tags: covid-19 papers nature disease health long-covid sars-cov-2)

  • Crypto, NFTs, and sports betting: Money is now a hobby - Vox

    "The internet turned “money” into a hobby -- Why (mostly) 20- and 30-something dudes made crypto and sports betting their personality":

    Jeff, like most skeptics for whom the system has actually worked pretty well, is eager to cash out once the price of ethereum goes back up. But talking to him, and to the rest of the (almost entirely) men who’ve turned money into a hobby, made me more than anything feel like I was too late to something that hadn’t even really happened yet. Because of course it isn’t “too late” to become an overnight crypto millionaire or to cash out on an incredibly lucky bet; it’s just highly unlikely that that person will be you. Nobody wants to be a cynical spoilsport, stewing in resentment of these men who have won and will probably keep winning, who look a lot like the ones who have always won: the men who have the time, the knowledge, the energy, and, most importantly, the money to turn “having money” into its own hobby.

    (tags: crypto finance gambling internet nfts ethereum scams hobbies betting)

Links for 2022-02-07

Published February 7, 2022

Links for 2022-02-03

Published February 3, 2022

Links for 2022-02-02

Published February 2, 2022

Links for 2022-01-26

Published January 26, 2022

  • Resurrecting Nikolai Fedorov

    The original "rapture of the nerds":

    [Fedorov's] thought was powerfully shaped by both Orthodox Christianity and Hegelian philosophy. [...] Rather than passively waiting for God to bring on the Millennium, being a good Christian meant participating in the building of heaven on Earth. It was the way in which he expected this to come about that really separated Fedorov from the others. In his thinking there is only one evil in the world that really counts, death. Moreover, rather than being accepted as a part of “the human condition,” part of the human mission is the technological conquest of death. This means not only achieving immortality, but restoring all the people who have ever walked the Earth to life so that they may share the gift as well, making the heaven of the afterlife a physical reality. [...] To help bring the dead back to life, Fedorov believed that humanity would eventually launch expeditions across the cosmos to recover particles that once belonged to their ancestors in order to reconstitute their bodies. Additionally, since Earth would not be big enough to accommodate all of the people who had ever lived at once, room would be found for them on other planets.
    (via Charlie Stross)

    (tags: via:cstross rapture nerds singularity futurism posthumanism space biotechnology death immortality life-extension future nikolai-fedorov philosophy religion)

  • Long Covid risk reduced by double vaccination

    _Self-reported long COVID after two doses of a coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccine in the UK_ - report from the UK Office for National Statistics. Tl;dr: 'reduced odds of Long Covid if SARS-CoV-2 infection occurs after double vaccination in adults. Almost half less likely (OR 41%) compared to unvaccinated when infected.' See also this preprint https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.05.22268800v2

    (tags: long-covid covid-19 ons uk vaccines vaccination)

  • rMA 15 - 15 passages resulted in a very pathogenic variant of SARS-CoV

    "A Mouse-Adapted SARS-Coronavirus Causes Disease and Mortality in BALB/c Mice": "We adapted the SARS-CoV (Urbani strain) by serial passage in the respiratory tract of young BALB/c mice. Fifteen passages resulted in a virus (MA15) that is lethal for mice following intranasal inoculation." This is the scary paper which Anthony J Leonardi refers to regularly -- 15 passages through mice resulted in SARS-CoV (the first one) becoming much more pathogenic.

    (tags: viruses rma-15 sars-cov)

Links for 2022-01-25

Published January 25, 2022

Links for 2022-01-24

Published January 24, 2022

Links for 2022-01-21

Published January 21, 2022

  • My custom solar monitoring system (PVS6)

    Nelson's telegraf/grafana setup for monitoring his domestic solar power setup. Very nice indeed, I'll be taking some inspiration from this when I (finally) get around to getting panels on my roof

    (tags: solar-power solar home graphs grafana dashboards monitoring telegraf via:nelson)

  • DeliverMe.ie

    another UK / Northern Ireland delivery address parcel-forwarding service. Extremely expensive compared to the now-obsolete Parcel Motel, at 25 euros per parcel, but if there's no other option for ordering from Brexitland, at least it's there.

    (tags: delivery brexit uk parcels shipping ireland)

  • zzh Multiprotocol RF Stick

    Apparently the bees knees for Zigbee usage with an open platform like Home Assistant:

    zzh is the original "USB stick" form-factor development board for TI's new generation CC2652R chips. It features: TI CC2652R1 2.4 GHz multi-protocol wireless microcontroller targeting Thread, Zigbee, Bluetooth 5 Low Energy, IEEE 802.15.4g, IPv6-enabled smart objects (6LoWPAN) and proprietary systems; Communicates with the host computer via the common CH340 USB-UART bridge, no manual driver installation needed in most cases (Windows and Linux); Self-programming via the TI CC-series serial bootloader. As long as it is not explicitly disabled in code, no external programmer needed! Pushbutton on the default pin to trigger this mode; cJTAG debug header, in case you disable BSL by accident or want a proper debug interface; SMA antenna port for an external antenna of your choice

    (tags: ha hardware toget gadgets zha home home-assistant zigbee bluetooth ble usb)

Links for 2022-01-20

Published January 20, 2022

Links for 2022-01-19

Published January 19, 2022

Links for 2022-01-17

Published January 17, 2022

  • Prof. Akiko Iwasaki Twitter thread on a significant long COVID paper

    'Significant long-term neurologic damage can occur after a mild respiratory-only SARS-CoV-2 infection.' [...] 'In a nutshell, this study illustrates that respiratory-only mild SARS-CoV-2 infection can lead to detrimental changes in the brain, likely mediated by inflammatory factors. Similar neuropathobiology may be shared in chemo-brain, post-ICU syndrome and ME/CFS.'

    (tags: neurology long-covid papers medicine health me cfs inflammation cytokines)

  • Reverse Engineering Nike Run Club Android App Using Frida

    walkthrough of using Frida to decompile, hook into and reverse an Android app

    (tags: android scripting frida reverse-engineering security mobile)

  • Immunological dysfunction persists for 8 months following initial mild-to-moderate SARS-CoV-2 infection | Nature Immunology

    Nature Immunology paper on Long COVID, suggesting a clear physiological syndrome, and a set of reliable biomarkers that may be usable to diagnose it:

    In summary, our data indicate an ongoing, sustained inflammatory response following even mild-to-moderate acute COVID-19, which is not found following prevalent coronavirus infection. The drivers of this activation require further investigation, but possibilities include persistence of antigen, autoimmunity driven by antigenic cross-reactivity or a reflection of damage repair. These observations describe an abnormal immune profile in patients with COVID-19 at extended time points after infection and provide clear support for the existence of a syndrome of LC. Our observations provide an important foundation for understanding the pathophysiology of this syndrome and potential therapeutic avenues for intervention.

    (tags: nature papers covid-19 sars-cov-2 long-covid t-cells immunology)

  • Fever is good for you

    Fever -- the feeling of having a high temperature, sweats, shivering etc. -- is actually a *good* thing:

    Fever is preserved evolutionarily, suggesting benefit; There is a metabolic cost to fever which may partly explain why we’re not just evolving to be hotter; The benefit relates to its direct anti-pathogen effects and its ability to augment innate and adaptive immunity; Antipyretics are overused.
    In particular, a randomised controlled trial of fever treatment in trauma ICU patients was halted early, due to a significant difference in deaths during the trial!

    (tags: fever temperature body health medicine rcts metabolism trials)

  • The State of Web Scraping 2022

    Blog post from ScrapeOps.io (whoever they are). Interesting to see where web scraping has gone over the years -- looks like an arms race has taken place:

    Websites and anti-bot providers have continued to develop more sophisticated anti-bot measures. They are increasingly moving away from simple header and IP fingerprinting, to more complicated browser and TCP fingerprinting with webRTC, canvas fingerprinting and analysing mouse movements so that they can differentiate automated scrapers from real-users. But as of yet no anti-bot has found the magic bullet to completely prevent web scrapers. With the right combination of proxies, user agents and browsers, you can scrape every website. Even those that seem unscrapable. However, whilst scraping a website might be still possible, anti-bots can make it not worth the effort and cost if you have to resort to ever more expensive web scraping setups (using headless browsers with residential/mobile IP networks, etc).

    (tags: scraping web bots arms-races web-scraping)

  • Tek Fog in Action

    "Investigating claims behind the use of 'Tek Fog', a sophisticated app used by political operatives affiliated with the Bharatiya Janata Party to drive propaganda at scale in India." This is grim stuff -- a custom app to bulk-post harassment en masse on various social media platforms, targeting women and driving right-wing pro-BJP spam. Can't imagine this methodology will stay in India in future, either.

    (tags: india tek-fog grim-meathook-future spam abuse harassment bjp politics social-media)

Links for 2022-01-11

Published January 11, 2022

  • Long COVID in a very large Norwegian cohort study

    New preprint, "Excess risk and clusters of symptoms after COVID-19 in a large Norwegian cohort": 'Physical, psychological and cognitive symptoms have been reported as post-acute sequelae for COVID-19 patients but are also common in the general, uninfected population. We aimed to calculate the excess risk and identify patterns of 22 symptoms up to 12 months after COVID-19 infection. We followed more than 70,000 participants in an ongoing cohort study, the Norwegian Mother, Father and Child Cohort Study (MoBa) during the COVID-19 pandemic. Infected and noninfected cohort participants registered presence of 22 different symptoms in March 2021. One year after the initial infection, 13 of 22 symptoms were associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection, based on relative risks between infected and uninfected subjects. For instance, 17.4% of SARS-CoV-2 infected cohort participants reported fatigue that persist 12 months after infection, compared to new occurrence of fatigue that had lasted less than 12 months in 3.8% of non-infected subjects (excess risk 13.6%). The adjusted relative risk for fatigue was 4.8 (95 % CI 3.5 to 6.7). Two main underlying factors explained 50% of the variance in the 13 symptoms. Brain fog, poor memory, dizziness, heart palpitations, and fatigue had high loadings on the first factor, while shortness of breath and cough had high loadings on the second factor. Lack of taste and smell showed low to moderate correlation to other symptoms. Anxiety, depression and mood swings were not strongly related to COVID-19. Our results suggest that there are clusters of symptoms after COVID-19 due to different mechanisms and question whether it is meaningful to describe long COVID as one syndrome.' The participants were all unvaccinated, so hopefully vaccination has a decent protective effect...

    (tags: covid-19 long-covid papers medicine norway preprints)

  • sibbl/hass-lovelace-kindle-screensaver

    'generates a PNG from a Home Assistant Lovelace view, which can be displayed on a Kindle device which has the Online Screensaver plugin installed.' There's a lovely demo at https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/s0m4b9/kindle_eink_home_info_display/ -- although I'd be pretty worried about Kindle updates bricking the jailbreak. In my experience Amazon devices are not very jailbreak-friendly.

    (tags: jailbreaking kindle homeassistant devices gadgets home)

Links for 2021-12-21

Published December 21, 2021

  • _SARS-CoV-2 on surfaces and HVAC filters in dormitory rooms_

    Interesting new preprint on fomite transmission of SARS-CoV-2 from Linsey Marr et al. tl;dr: "SARS-CoV-2 RNA was found on more than half of surface samples and HVAC filters in dormitory rooms [housing students who were in quarantine or isolation]; the virus was not infectious."

    (tags: fomites transmission covid-19 sars-cov-2 surfaces university students dormitories linsey-marr)

  • Mass rapid tests in Liverpool cut hospital stays by a third

    Rapid antigen tests, deployed carefully to include serial testing of presymptomatic and asymptomatic people, saved lives:

    An analysis has shown that it was more successful than Liverpool’s scientists and public health teams had anticipated, after they compared Covid cases and outcomes in the region with other parts of England. Professor Iain Buchan, dean of the Institute of Population Health, who led the evaluation, said: “This time last year, as the Alpha variant was surging, we found that Liverpool city region’s early rollout of community rapid testing was associated with a 32% fall in Covid-19 hospital admissions after careful matching to other parts of the country in a similar position to Liverpool but without rapid testing. “We also found that daily lateral flow testing as an alternative to quarantine for people who had been in close contact with a known infected person enabled emergency services to keep key teams such as fire crews in work, underpinning public safety.”

    (tags: rapid-tests antigen-tests testing covid-19 sars-cov-2 liverpool public-health lfts serial-testing)

Links for 2021-12-20

Published December 20, 2021

Links for 2021-12-19

Published December 19, 2021

  • The CFS quota container throttling problem

    Well, this is quite a messy one:

    Almost all services at Twitter run on Linux with the CFS scheduler, using CFS bandwidth control quota for isolation, with default parameters. The intention is to allow different services to be colocated on the same boxes without having one service's runaway CPU usage impact other services and to prevent services on empty boxes from taking all of the CPU on the box, resulting in unpredictable performance, which service owners found difficult to reason about before we enabled quotas. The quota mechanism limits the amortized CPU usage of each container, but it doesn't limit how many cores the job can use at any given moment. Instead, if a job "wants to" use more than that many cores over a quota timeslice, it will use more cores than its quota for a short period of time and then get throttled, i.e., basically get put to sleep, in order to keep its amortized core usage below the quota, which is disastrous for tail latency1. Since the vast majority of services at Twitter use thread pools that are much larger than their mesos core reservation, when jobs have heavy load, they end up requesting and then using more cores than their reservation and then throttling. This causes services that are provisioned based on load test numbers or observed latency under load to over provision CPU to avoid violating their SLOs. They either have to ask for more CPUs per shard than they actually need or they have to increase the number of shards they use.
    Note that Kubernetes uses CFS to implement CPU quotas by default, too. In the twitter thread about this post, a commenter noted: "'By shrinking the CFS period, the worst case time between quota exhaustion causing throttling and the process group being able to run again is reduced proportionately'. Our P99s at previous gig reduced in line after I petitioned cloud provider to adjust setting." --- this at least seems like a relatively easy setting to tune.

    (tags: cgroups kubernetes linux k8s cfs scheduling containers quotas)

Links for 2021-12-17

Published December 17, 2021

  • The Web3 Fraud | USENIX

    By now effectively all ;login:’s readers have heard the term “web3” and “dapps” bandied about as if they are some great revolution.  They are not.  The technical underpinnings are so terrible that it is clear they exist only to hype the underlying cryptocurrencies.  The actual utility of these “decentralized” systems is already available in modern distributed systems in ways that are several orders of magnitude more efficient and more capable.

    (tags: bitcoin criticism cryptocurrency web3 crypto ethereum hype scams dapps)

Links for 2021-12-16

Published December 16, 2021

  • Consumer warranties and statutory rights

    wow, I didn't realise we had statutory right to redress for faulty goods for 6 years:

    Statutory rights are provided for by legislation (Irish law and EU law as transposed in Ireland). These act as a kind of “legal guarantee”, entitling consumers to seek redress where an item is faulty. Consumers may rely on their statutory rights regardless of whether an item has a warranty or not. Under Irish law, consumers have up to six years to seek redress for faulty or defective items (both new and second-hand). If the product is defective, the seller is generally responsible for providing redress. If a fault arises within six months of purchase, it is presumed to have existed at the time of purchase. For this reason, the consumer should not have to provide proof of the defect. If the fault arises more than six months after purchase, the seller may request that the consumer prove the fault did not arise as a result of misuse – for instance, by obtaining a report from an independent expert. Where an item is faulty, the seller may first offer a repair or replacement item. If this is not possible or fails to correct the problem, a refund may then be provided. Remedies for faulty goods must be provided free of charge.

    (tags: rights repair support defective-goods guarantee warranty defects ireland eu)

Links for 2021-12-15

Published December 15, 2021

  • Web3 is going just great

    the ongoing shitfest that is crypto/NFTs

    (tags: blockchain crypto cryptocurrency nfts shitfest web3)

  • rTMS RCT produces excellent results

    This is pretty amazing:

    A recent randomized control trial, published in The American Journal of Psychiatry, shows astounding results are possible in five days or less. Almost 80% of patients crossed into remission — meaning they were symptom-free within days. This is compared to about 13% of people who received the placebo treatment. Patients did not report any serious side effects. The most common complaint was a light headache. [...] “This study not only showed some of the best remission rates we've ever seen in depression,” said Shan Siddiqi, a Harvard psychiatrist not connected to the study, “but also managed to do that in people who had already failed multiple other treatments.” Siddiqi also said the study’s small sample size, which is only 29 patients, is not cause for concern. “Often, a clinical trial will be terminated early [according to pre-specified criteria] because the treatment is so effective that it would be unethical to continue giving people placebo,” said Siddiqi. “That's what happened here. They'd originally planned to recruit a much larger sample, but the interim analysis was definitive.”

    (tags: depression fmri health neuroscience medicine rtms brain rcts)

Links for 2021-12-10

Published December 10, 2021

  • Bug #1624320 “systemd-resolved appends 127.0.0.53 to resolv.conf...” : Bugs : systemd package : Ubuntu

    Wow; recent Ubuntu versions force name resolution to operate via the systemd-resolved DNS resolver, which has some pretty major bugs and omissions:

    This bug just compromised every ubuntu machine on my network. It falsely says that DNSSEC is not supported by the nameserver and resorts to non-DNSSEC resolution. So every machine on my network just accepted bogus DNS replies from a MITM. Thanks.
    Is there anything systemd can't break :(

    (tags: systemd fail dns dnssec mitm security resolvers ubuntu bugs linux)

  • Birds Aren’t Real, or Are They? Inside a Gen Z Conspiracy Theory

    This is glorious. Well done, this chap... very reminiscent of the Subgenii

    (tags: birds conspiracies qanon funny birds-arent-real us-politics)

  • The Stockdale Paradox

    On the one hand, they stoically accepted the brutal facts of reality. On the other hand, they maintained an unwavering faith in the endgame, and a commitment to prevail as a great company despite the brutal facts. [..] “I never lost faith in the end of the story,” [Stockdale] said, when I asked him. “I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.” I didn’t say anything for many minutes, and we continued the slow walk toward the faculty club, Stockdale limping and arc-swinging his stiff leg that had never fully recovered from repeated torture. Finally, after about a hundred meters of silence, I asked, “Who didn’t make it out?” “Oh, that’s easy,” he said. “The optimists.” “The optimists? I don’t understand,” I said, now completely confused, given what he’d said a hundred meters earlier. “The optimists. Oh, they were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.” Another long pause, and more walking. Then he turned to me and said, “This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.” To this day, I carry a mental image of Stockdale admonishing the optimists: “We’re not getting out by Christmas; deal with it!”

    (tags: paradoxes jim-stockdale stoicism philosophy optimism pessimism)

Links for 2021-12-09

Published December 9, 2021

Links for 2021-12-07

Published December 7, 2021

  • Life360 sells kids' location data to "approximately a dozen data brokers"

    This is shocking: Wolfie Christl says "Life360, a popular family safety app used by 33 million people worldwide, has been marketed as a great way for parents to track their children’s movements." Also, it sells "data on kids’ and families’ whereabouts to approximately a dozen data brokers". Former employees of data brokers "described Life360 as one of the largest sources of data for the industry" -- "A former X-Mode engineer said the raw location data the company received from Life360 was among X-Mode’s most valuable offerings". X-Mode sold data to the US military. An app that claims to be a family safety service selling exact location data to several other companies, this is a total disaster. It would be a problem if it’s any other app, and it’s even more a problem when it’s an app that claims to be a family safety service. Selling data on children to companies who sell to the military is probably the most extreme form of decontextualizing sensitive data for profit." Life360 are now planning to buy Tile.

    (tags: refractive-surveillance surveillance children privacy data-privacy location gps life360 tile data-brokers)

Links for 2021-12-06

Published December 6, 2021

  • An upper bound on one-to-one exposure to infectious human respiratory particles | PNAS

    Masks just work:

    Our results show that face masks significantly reduce the risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection compared to social distancing. We find a very low risk of infection when everyone wears a face mask, even if it doesn’t fit perfectly on the face.

    (tags: masks covid-19 papers face-masks infection)

  • Ikea Vindriktning Air Quality Sensor Review and Accuracy

    'Ikea recently came out with a range of air purifiers and also an air quality sensor. The Vindriktning does not have a display but shows the air quality data in the form of a traffic light with red, yellow and green LEDs. One of the most striking features is actually the price as it costs only around EUR 10 depending where you live. It looks very nice and the build quality is quite good but this article will look beyond the looks and see how good it is at actually measuring the air quality.' The results are mixed: 'I really want to like the Vindriktning! It has a great built quality and price and is very simple to use. The addition of a small fan to improve the air flow through the sensor is a good upgrade and shows that Ikea wants to provide accurate measurements -- even with a cheap sensor. However, the defined cut off values for the air quality and its description as “Good”, “OK”, and “Not Good” are not based on science or international recommendations and create the false understanding that the air is good, when in fact it is not good at all. I do hope that in one of the next upgrades of the Vindriktning, Ikea will bring its traffic light indicators more in line with WHO recommendations on healthy air quality.' Personally, this sounds useful -- as long as one remembers that the "OK" air quality level is in fact well into the "unhealthy" zone. Bit mysterious as to why IKEA made this choice though...

    (tags: ikea air-quality pm2.5 pm10 particulates home devices gadgets)

Links for 2021-12-03

Published December 3, 2021

  • The Labyrinth Stone

    In medieval times the labyrinth underwent a revival and became primarily a symbol of pilgrimage, and in particular pilgrimage to the holy shrine of Jerusalem (Coleman & Elsner 1995, 112). Shortly after the loss of Jerusalem to the Muslims in the twelfth century, large labyrinths of mosaic or paving stones were incorporated into the western nave bays of a number of European cathedrals in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (Connolly 2005, 286). [....] By walking, or in some cases crawling on their knees, along the labyrinth, pilgrims could perform an imagined pilgrimage to Jerusalem (Westbury 2001, 51-52).

    (tags: pilgrimage history labyrinths mazes via:neil-jackman)

Links for 2021-11-24

Published November 24, 2021

  • FIND

    "Framework for Internal Navigation and Discovery" -- track device locations using active or passive (wifi-based) scan methods within a house or office, then trigger Home Assistant automation based on device locations -- e.g. turning on or off heating in specific rooms, etc.

    (tags: location home-assistant home automation tracking devices)

Links for 2021-11-23

Published November 23, 2021

  • Google Cloud incident was caused by a race condition which triggered 30 minutes before the bugfix deployment was due to complete

    Wow, this was tragic! "A Google engineer discovered this bug on 12 November, which caused us to declare an internal high-priority incident because of the latent risk to production systems. After analyzing the bug, we froze a part of our configuration system to make the likelihood of the race condition even lower. Since the race condition had existed in the fleet for several months already, the team believed that this extra step made the risk even lower. Thus the team believed the lowest-risk path [...] was to roll out fixes in a controlled manner as opposed to a same-day emergency patch. [...] Gradual rollouts of both patches started on Monday, 15 November, and patch B completed rollout by that evening. On Tuesday, 16 November, as the patch A rollout was within 30 minutes of completing, the race condition did manifest in an unpatched cluster, and the outage started."

    (tags: cloud outages tragic google race-conditions gclb patching deployment ops)

  • "Risk compensation" is garbage

    Risk compensation does occur in very narrow and specific circumstances, but all the studies purporting to show that it is a widespread, predictable outcome of any safety regulation have failed to replicate. [...] Risk compensation and health-and-safety panic are both part of a safety nihilism campaign that serves big business's deregulatory agenda, and the cruel moralizing of right wing religious maniacs, the traditional turkeys-voting-for-Christmas coalition. But risk compensation is especially salient in these covid days, where it's being used to fight rapid testing ("encourages risky behavior").

    (tags: risk-compensation risks safety)

Links for 2021-11-09

Published November 9, 2021

Links for 2021-11-08

Published November 8, 2021

Links for 2021-11-02

Published November 2, 2021

Links for 2021-10-26

Published October 26, 2021

Links for 2021-10-22

Published October 22, 2021

  • GNI report on biomethane generation in Ireland

    Good news for biogas feasability here: 'This report seeks to provide scientific analysis and real-world data on the key questions and knowledge gaps concerning the sustainability of an Irish agricultural-led biomethane industry. The core aim of this report is to assess whether Ireland can develop an environmentally sustainable biomethane industry without creating unintended negative consequences. [...] This report provides evidence that the development of a sustainable biomethane industry in Ireland is technically feasible and so long as it is developed in a co-ordinated manner, can avoid any negative unintended consequences. As such, a number of proven methodologies have been provided to drive the rollout of a biomethane industry whilst ensuring continued agricultural productivity and improved environmental sustainability.'

    (tags: biogas biomethane methane fuel ireland sustainability climate-change gni farming)

Links for 2021-10-20

Published October 20, 2021

  • Datamuse API

    This is extremely cool! "a word-finding query engine for developers. You can use it in your apps to find words that match a given set of constraints and that are likely in a given context. You can specify a wide variety of constraints on meaning, spelling, sound, and vocabulary in your queries, in any combination. Applications use the API for a wide range of features, including autocomplete on text input fields, search relevancy ranking, assistive writing apps, word games, and more." (via Rob Manuel)

    (tags: dictionary nlp words writing apis rhymes sounds-like adjectives nouns suggestions)

Links for 2021-10-18

Published October 18, 2021

  • Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 After COVID-19 Screening and Mitigation Measures for Primary School Children Attending School in Liège, Belgium

    This paper from a school in Belgium is really worrying, given Ireland's approach to schools and COVID-19. "Despite the implementation of several mitigation measures, the incidence of COVID-19 among children attending primary school in this study was comparable to that observed among teachers and parents. Transmission tree reconstruction suggests that most transmission events originated from within the school."

    Question: What is the possible role of children in SARS-CoV-2 transmission? Findings: This cohort study including 63 children and 118 adults found no significant difference between the number of children and the number of adults testing positive for SARS-CoV-2 infection during the study period; children were asymptomatic significantly more often compared with adults (46% vs 13%). In addition, a reconstruction of the outbreak showed that most transmission events originated from within the school. Meaning: These results suggest that children may play a larger role in the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 than previously assumed.

    (tags: transmission schools education covid-19 sars-cov-2 papers belgium infection)

Links for 2021-10-17

Published October 17, 2021

  • "Grievance Mining"

    What a great term for what the Tories are up to in the UK: "Facing chaos and needing a scapegoat, the Tories seek an endless fight with Europe" --

    Frost is well aware of the futility of his demands – indeed, it is the whole point of his Lisbon performance. Instead of declaring victory, accepting the EU’s munificent offers and turning down the heat in Northern Ireland, he and Johnson prefer to make an impossible demand so that they can blame the EU for rejecting it. They are, as the South Belfast MP, Claire Hanna, has put it, “mining for grievance”.

    (tags: grievances neologisms phrases boris-johnson uk brexit politics northern-ireland eu)

Links for 2021-10-14

Published October 14, 2021

  • Fruit fly brains include a variant of a Bloom filter data structure

    Wow, this is incredible!

    We found that the fruit fly olfactory circuit evolved a variant of a Bloom filter to assess the novelty of odors. Compared with a traditional Bloom filter, the fly adjusts novelty responses based on two additional features: the similarity of an odor to previously experienced odors and the time elapsed since the odor was last experienced. We elaborate and validate a framework to predict novelty responses of fruit flies to given pairs of odors. We also translate insights from the fly circuit to develop a class of distance- and time-sensitive Bloom filters that outperform prior filters when evaluated on several biological and computational datasets. Overall, our work illuminates the algorithmic basis of an important neurobiological problem and offers strategies for novelty detection in computational systems.

    (tags: fruit-flies data-structures algorithms brains neuroscience smell)

Links for 2021-10-08

Published October 8, 2021

  • Let's Encrypt Root Expiration - Post-Mortem

    Overall, I think the expiration of the Let's Encrypt CA certificates went really quite well, largely due to the work Let's Encrypt did around arranging for a new cross-signed chain to be available beyond the expiration of the IdenTrust root. That said, there were far more issues in areas we didn't anticipate. Modern devices, all the way through to latest versions of iOS and macOS hit issues when connecting to servers that had a misconfigured certificate chain and quite serious issues from huge companies like Google and Microsoft in their cloud products that could no longer validate certificate chains was surprising to say the least. In all, I think this just highlights something that many of us that work in this space have known for some time, that TLS/PKI are complex and fragile systems that often go overlooked for long periods of time because they 'just work' most of the time. [....] One thing that's certain is that this event is coming again. Over the next few years we're going to see a wide selection of Root Certificates expiring for all of the major CAs and we're likely to keep experiencing the exact same issues unless something changes in the wider ecosystem.

    (tags: postmortem ssl tls pki fail post-mortems lets-encrypt cas)

Links for 2021-10-06

Published October 6, 2021

  • Frances Haugen says Facebook's algorithms are dangerous. Here’s why. | MIT Technology Review

    This is a good article on FB's disastrous situation, which would be bad enough were it not endangering our societies. Despite warnings from Google and others, they switched their engagement optimization tactics to rely heavily on machine learning, which (as noted elsewhere) devolves into a situation where it's thoroughly inscrutable:

    It developed an internal tool known as FBLearner Flow that made it easy for engineers without machine learning experience to develop whatever models they needed at their disposal. By one data point, it was already in use by more than a quarter of Facebook’s engineering team in 2016. Many of the current and former Facebook employees I’ve spoken to say that this is part of why Facebook can’t seem to get a handle on what it serves up to users in the news feed. Different teams can have competing objectives, and the system has grown so complex and unwieldy that no one can keep track anymore of all of its different components. [...] “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools,” the presentation said, predominantly thanks to the models behind the “Groups You Should Join” and “Discover” features. [...] These phenomena are far worse in regions that don’t speak English because of Facebook’s uneven coverage of different languages. [...] When the war in Tigray[, Ethiopia] first broke out in November, [AI ethics researcher Timnit] Gebru saw the platform flounder to get a handle on the flurry of misinformation. [...] When fake news, hate speech, and even death threats aren’t moderated out, they are then scraped as training data to build the next generation of [language models]. And those models, parroting back what they’re trained on, end up regurgitating these toxic linguistic patterns on the internet."
    What. A. Mess.

    (tags: machine-learning social-networking facebook the-algorithm llms models frances-haughen)

  • The Verica Open Incident Database (VOID)

    'A community-contributed collection of software-related incident reports' -- this looks like it'll be a great resource.

    (tags: resilience engineering ops outages post-mortems rcas five-whys incidents)

  • debunking "it takes 48,000 miles for an EV to be greener than an ICE vehicle"

    Looks like this is disinformation produced by an Aston-Martin-affiliated lobbyist/PR company -- the true figure is 18,000 miles

    (tags: debunking pr lobbying cars evs aston-martin spin greenwashing)

Links for 2021-10-05

Published October 5, 2021

  • _Endgame: A zero-carbon electricity plan for Ireland_

    A report commissioned by Wind Energy Ireland in June 2021 -- key findings:

    Reducing power sector CO2 emissions in Ireland from around 9 million tonnes today to a target of less than 2 million tonnes of CO2 per year is very achievable by 2030, using the approach currently underway to achieve the ‘70 by 30’ target, and implementing more of existing and proven technologies; The current Programme for Government renewable capacity targets of 8.2 GW of onshore wind and 5 GW of offshore wind by 2030 should be maintained, with an additional target of 5 GW of solar PV. This target can be achieved at a lower cost to the end consumer in Ireland, compared to delivery of the less ambitious ‘70 by 30’ target. A zero-carbon power system is possible by 2030 and represents an achievable target in the 2030s.

    (tags: wind-energy energy ireland future 2030 climate-change co2 solar-power carbon)

Links for 2021-10-04

Published October 4, 2021

  • Wanghong

    At the simplest level, [wanghong] means “internet famous,” referring in its earliest iterations to viral personalities or social media influencers. The word has since mutated, expanding and venn-diagramming with a particular hipster aesthetic, strands of urban design and kinds of tech platform architecture.

    (tags: celebrity china photography internet neologisms wanghong instagram fame viral internet-famous)

  • The Three DynamoDB Limits You Need to Know

    tl;dr: the item size limit, the pagination page size limit for query and scans; and the partition throughput limits (which bit me earlier this year).

    (tags: dynamodb limits aws coding ops)

  • Orthodoxy, illusio, and playing the scientific game: a Bourdieusian analysis of infection control science in the COVID-19 pandemic

    I remember seeing discussion of aerosol and airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2 observed in Asia, right back at the start of 2020. This paper is right; the WHO in particular were careful to write this off as incorrect, and tell people that it was transmitted mainly via droplets, which we now know was a massive failure.

    Scientific and policy bodies’ failure to acknowledge and act on the evidence base for airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in a timely way is both a mystery and a scandal. In this study, we applied theories from Bourdieu to address the question, “How was a partial and partisan scientific account of SARS-CoV-2 transmission constructed and maintained, leading to widespread imposition of infection control policies which de-emphasised airborne transmission?”. [...] Results: Political and policy actors at international, national, and regional level aligned — predominantly though not invariably — with medical scientific orthodoxy which promoted the droplet theory of transmission and considered aerosol transmission unproven or of doubtful relevance. This dominant scientific sub-field centred around the clinical discipline of infectious disease control, in which leading actors were hospital clinicians aligned with the evidence-based medicine movement. Aerosol scientists — typically, chemists, and engineers — representing the heterodoxy were systematically excluded from key decision-making networks and committees. Dominant discourses defined these scientists’ ideas and methodologies as weak, their empirical findings as untrustworthy or insignificant, and their contributions to debate as unhelpful.

    (tags: via:naomi-wu covid-19 discourse infection bourdieu transmission aerosols droplets)

  • Microsoft’s million-tonne CO2-removal purchase — lessons for net zero

    Via David Roberts: "Microsoft is trying to go carbon-negative. Its recent RFP solicited bids for 154 million tonnes of negative emissions; of those, only *2 million tonnes* met its criteria for real, permanent CO2 removal. It has written up its challenges in Nature." "We write as a team composed of Microsoft staff working on the company’s carbon-negative programme, and research scientists who analyse carbon reduction and removal strategies. We highlight three ‘bugs’ in the current system: inconsistent definitions of net zero, poor measurement and accounting of carbon, and an immature market in CO2 removal and offsets. These challenges need to be overcome if the world is to reach net zero by mid-century."

    (tags: earth co2 microsoft stripe carbon carbon-capture climate-change net-zero)

Links for 2021-10-03

Published October 3, 2021

  • Forrest Fleischman on "trillion trees" projects

    Some good points:

    A project whose goal is to plant a certain number of trees is particularly vulnerable to failure because its counting the wrong thing. If the goal is to absorb emissions, we should count the carbon, not the trees. A few small large absorb more carbon than a bunch of little trees. When we plant trees with carbon uptake or forest restoration as a goal, we don't try to maximize the number of trees. We try to maximize long-term carbon uptake, and this might actually mean planting fewer trees up front.

    (tags: forestry science data climate-change planting trees forests carbon-capture carbon)

Links for 2021-09-30

Published September 30, 2021

  • Introducing Echo Show 15

    Amazon's new "Full HD 15.6" smart display for family organisation with Alexa". I've built something similar (though much more basic) for our home using an e-Paper display and a Raspberry Pi, so I'm interested. My take: it looks very busy, heavy on the Alexa lock-in, would omit lots of useful data sources (like Home Assistant), and of course the spyware factor is a biggie -- although on that note it's interesting that there's a prominent "mic/camera off" switch...

    (tags: alexa amazon echo-show devices home family)

  • CR2032 battery review

    IKEA-branded CR2032 batteries last about 70% as long as Duracell or Energizer, or 50% if your devices turn off at 2.7V

    (tags: cr2032 batteries data power via:itc ikea)

  • Big tech relies on refugee labour

    Holy shit this is dystopian.

    All of the largest companies in the world are today powered by a covert crowd of the system’s castoffs. Platforms have found amid those struggling to stay afloat in informal work — or else barely clinging onto a life in formal employment — a desperate mass to be tempted with the promise of a better life. Such a promise, however, is broken as soon as it is made; the petty services of the informal sector resemble little more than a blueprint for the microtasks of big tech, without offering anything in the way of rights, routine, role, security, or a future.

    (tags: colonialism refugees ai data machine-learning amazon google tesla uber mechanical-turk)

Links for 2021-09-29

Published September 29, 2021

  • Partitioning GitHub’s relational databases to handle scale

    wow this is complex. Vitess playing a key part

    (tags: github mysql architecture database)

  • VR-based work setup

    "VR Productivity in (or above) a WFA world" --

    This week, I’ll spend 40–50 hours in Virtual Reality (Immersed), like I did last week and every (work) week for the last 2½ years. [...] Yes, really: 8–10 hours a day strapped in.
    Basically, it's using an Oculus Quest 2 to render multiple desktop displays from a laptop into a huge, full-visible-range virtual world:
    The resolution of these very large displays is surprisingly average—1080p (Reference, Communication) and 4k (Main). This makes the dot pitch unimpressive by the numbers, though still more than twenty-five times that of a roadside billboard display. Higher resolutions are available, but this is my calculated trade-off between pixel parity (more on that below), computer performance, and latency. Applications are tuned for readability and crispness, emphasizing information density over anti-aliasing or smoothness.
    The article sounds fairly solid, with good tips on how to make a VR headset suitable for constant daily use.

    (tags: oculus vr future work headsets display screens)

  • LEB128

    'a variable-length code compression used to store arbitrarily large integers in a small number of bytes.'

    (tags: encoding compression integers storage codes leb128)

  • Troll farms reached 140 million Americans a month on Facebook before 2020 election

    This is a staggering stat: "19 of Facebook's top 20 pages for American Christians in 2019 were run by troll farms in Kosovo and Macedonia, internal documents leaked to MIT Technology Review reveal [...] funded by the Russian Internet Research Agency." (via Charlie Stross)

    (tags: facebook politics russia disinfo kosovo macedonia us-politics manipulation)

Links for 2021-09-27

Published September 27, 2021

Links for 2021-09-24

Published September 24, 2021

  • Do I have COVID or a cold?

    Data-driven results from the UK ZOE symptom survey!

    Currently, the most common COVID-19 symptoms in people who have been fully vaccinated [...] are: Runny nose, Headache, Sneezing, Sore throat, Loss of smell (anosmia)
    And "loss of smell (anosmia) or loss of taste is still one of the most important predictors of testing positive for COVID-19 rather than a regular cold".

    (tags: covid-19 colds health symptoms diseases zoe)

Links for 2021-09-23

Published September 23, 2021

  • Steve Yegge on deprecation policies

    "Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy is Killing You":

    This lack of a support culture, combined with a “let’s break it in the name of making it prettier” deprecation treadmill, is alienating their developers. And that’s not a good thing if you want to build a long-lived platform. Google, wake the fuck up. It’s 2020. You are still losing. It’s time to take a hard look in the mirror and answer for yourselves whether you really want to be in the Cloud business. If you do, then stop breaking shit. You guys are rich. We developers are not. So when it comes to shouldering the burden of compatibility, you need to pay for it. Not us.
    This is absolutely correct -- API deprecation is a lovely thing when you're the one doing the deprecating, but it's a disaster for the user experience, and sometimes that should be the most important thing.

    (tags: deprecation compatibility google apis support culture)

  • Managing Log Output in Buildkite

    Nice, simple way to collapse long log streams into collapsable/hidable sections, from BuildKite

    (tags: logging cli hacks buildkite streams)

Links for 2021-09-20

Published September 20, 2021

  • Orange-OpenSource/bmc-cache

    In-kernel memcache based on eBPF (via Brendan Gregg):

    BMC (BPF Memory Cache) is an in-kernel cache for memcached. It enables runtime, crash-safe extension of the Linux kernel to process specific memcached requests before the execution of the standard network stack. BMC does not require modification of neither the Linux kernel nor the memcached application. Running memcached with BMC improves throughput by up to 18x compared to the vanilla memcached application.

    (tags: memcached bpf ebpf linux performance kernel via:brendangregg)

Links for 2021-09-15

Published September 15, 2021

  • why Apple devices have wifi problems on non-Apple APs

    I've always suspected some bullshit like this -- Apple devices (Macs and iPhones) expect a specific non-standard wifi setting. If you've noticed Apple devices falling off the network and taking a long time (many seconds) to rejoin, where devices with other OSes do not have the same problem, this may be the cause. tl;dr: the DTIM (delivery traffic indication message) setting, which defaults to 1 in a standards-compliant AP, is expected to be set to 3 by Apple devices, in order to improve battery life. Source: https://twitter.com/revolutionwifi/status/725489216768106496 ("Apple engineers have strongly suggested a DTIM of 3.")

    (tags: dtim wifi wireless 802.11 apple aps hardware networking)

Links for 2021-09-14

Published September 14, 2021

  • Covid-19 and the new merchants of doubt

    How best can scientists push back against [science denialists]? There is a range of evidence-based strategies. These include: “Public inoculation”–warning people about the risk of being misled and drawing attention to who is pushing the contentious information and their financial competing interests; Highlighting scientific consensus; and Mapping the institutional networks who are pushing controversial information and then using political and legal strategies to counter them. For physicians, scientists, and public health officials to be effective countering efforts like the [Great Barrington declaration], it will be absolutely critical for them to realize that they are not dealing with an orthodox scientific debate based on sound data and evidence, but a well-funded sophisticated science denialist campaign based on ideological and corporate interests.

    (tags: denialism climate-change covid-19 science communication astroturf fakes evidence fake-news)

Links for 2021-09-08

Published September 8, 2021

  • Oracle Cloud Always Free Tier

    Whoa, this is unexpected -- Oracle Cloud has a really good deal for hobby projects, including: '4 Arm-based Ampere A1 cores and 24 GB of memory usable as one VM or up to 4 VMs; 2 Block Volumes Storage, 200 GB total; 2 AMD based Compute VMs with 1/8 OCPU** and 1 GB memory each.' The catch is that at the end of the 30 day trial period, the 4 ARM-based VMs will be terminated, but the other resources remain intact.

    (tags: arm oracle hobbies projects hacks hosting cloud free)

Links for 2021-09-07

Published September 7, 2021

  • doctorray117/minecraft-ondemand

    'Almost-free serverless on-demand Minecraft server in AWS':

    Instead of paying a minecraft hosting service for a private server for you and your friends, host it yourself. By utilizing several AWS services, a minecraft server can automatically start when you're ready to use it, and shut down when you are done. The final cost will depend on use but can be as little as a a dollar or two per month. The cost estimate breakdown is below. This is a reasonably cost effective solution for someone that doesn't need their server running 24/7. If that's you, read on! The process works as follows: Open Minecraft Multiplayer, let it look for our server, it will time out. The DNS lookup query is logged in Route 53 on our public hosted zone. CloudWatch forwards the query to a Lambda function. The Lambda function modifies an existing ECS Fargate service to a desired task count of 1. Fargate launches two containers, Minecraft and a watchdog, which updates the DNS record to the new IP The watchdog optionally sends a text message through Twilio when the server is ready. Refresh Minecraft server list, server is ready to connect. After 10 minutes without a connection or 20 minutes after the last client disconnects (customizable) the watchdog sets the desired task count to zero and shuts down.
    This is a very neat hack, actually quite potentially usable, and a good illustration of how viable Fargate+EFS are at hosting transient but not transitory workloads!

    (tags: minecraft fargate efs aws lambda hacks hosting)

Links for 2021-09-03

Published September 3, 2021

  • Climate Adaptation and Equity

    Great read from EARTH3R:

    We have traditionally treated disaster management like we’re trying to build things back to what they were before the disaster. Climate change increasingly is showing us that’s not what we should be doing. Climate adaptation is not about maintaining the status quo. Frankly, the status quo sucks for a lot of people. [...] We have to think about doing things differently. New Orleans 100 years ago didn’t look exactly like it does today, and it won’t look like it does now 100 years from now. Things will change. Adaptation is deciding what things from 100 years ago we want to hold onto, and what things will change -- and making sure a bunch of rich white people aren’t the only ones deciding what to hold onto.

    (tags: climate-change adaptation future flooding hurricane-ida)

Links for 2021-08-31

Published August 31, 2021

  • Build-To-Rent (BTR), Aparthotels, and Irish housing policy

    Good Twitter thread detailing the (IMO disastrous) history of these "new and exciting" ways in which Ireland's Fine Gael government were lobbied successfully in 2015 and 2018 to rewrite housing policy and permit co-living, communal living, very small studios, and 1-bedroom apartments. This then resulted in many property developers scrapping existing plans and going back to the drawing board to cram in as many tiny apartments as possible to maximise their returns

    (tags: living ireland apartments rental btr aparthotels housing policy fg)

Links for 2021-08-27

Published August 27, 2021

Links for 2021-08-26

Published August 26, 2021

  • How Data Brokers Sell Access to the Backbone of the Internet

    Interesting, didn't realise this data was being resold....

    "I'm concerned that netflow data being offered for commercial purposes is a path to a dark fucking place," one source familiar with the data told Motherboard. [...] At a high level, netflow data creates a picture of traffic flow and volume across a network. It can show which server communicated with another, information that may ordinarily only be available to the server owner or the ISP carrying the traffic. Crucially, this data can be used for, among other things, tracking traffic through virtual private networks, which are used to mask where someone is connecting to a server from, and by extension, their approximate physical location. Team Cymru, one threat intelligence firm, works with ISPs to access that netflow data, three sources said. Keith Chu, communications director for the office of Senator Ron Wyden which has been conducting its own investigations into the sale of sensitive data, added that Team Cymru told the office "it obtains netflow data from third parties in exchange for threat intelligence." Companies that may source Team Cymru's data include cybersecurity firms hired to respond to data breaches or proactively hunt out hackers. On its website, Team Cymru says it works with both public and private sector teams to "to help identify, track and stop bad actors both in cyber space and on the ground." "I'm less worried about a bad guy hacker and more worried about a bad guy government or company or politician," one source familiar with the data said. A source in the threat intelligence industry added that they "always thought it was kinda bonkers," referring to Team Cymru's sale of netflow data.

    (tags: vpns surveillance web privacy team-cymru netflow isps threat-intelligence)

Links for 2021-08-25

Published August 25, 2021

  • Back Market

    "Your Refurbished (Super) Marketplace" -- an eBay for refurbished devices. "Back Market has created a transparent grading system that takes into account both the cosmetic appearance and technical condition of every device. Every device is guaranteed to be 100% functional on our site—so ”technical condition” refers to the durability one can expect from a product given its refurbisher’s operations/processes and historical quality data). Everything is fully transparent so you can choose from three conditions based on your needs." Looks decent, Paris-based.

    (tags: refurbs devices hardware smartphones iphones gadgets shopping)

Links for 2021-08-18

Published August 18, 2021

Links for 2021-08-11

Published August 11, 2021

  • DCC's greenwashing PR

    Excellent demonstration via Robbie Semple on Twitter: "Ireland’s biggest fossil fuel company is @dccplc. They are a FTSE100 company. Last year they made £13.4 billion in revenue and £530.2 million in profit. 71% of the profit came from their fossil fuel businesses. ‘In the face of a global crisis, Ireland’s biggest fossil fuel company refuses to stop selling fossil fuels ’: Why is this not more of a story? DCC are very good at communications. Given how they make their money, most publicity is bad for business, so they keep a low profile. And what they do communicate is very skilful. [...] "We have adopted a Net Zero 2050 target for our group Scope 1 and 2 emissions. Our interim target is a 20% reduction by 2025." This is a masterclass in how to tell the world you won’t stop selling fossil fuels without telling the world you won’t stop selling fossil fuels. The key is referring only to scope 1 and 2 emissions, meaning the emissions produced in running their business. For DCC, that will include things like electricity for their factories, and fuel for their trucks. But they don’t mention scope 3 emissions, which would include emissions produced in their supply chain, or by their customers. For DCC, that means they don’t have to worry about the methane that escapes when it's fracked out of the earth, or the carbon emitted as their oil and gas they sell is burned by end users. DCC’s 2021 sustainability report refers to scope 3 emissions, but doesn’t quantify them and has set no targets for reducing them. So with their current banner commitments, they could double the amount of fossil fuels they sell and still meet their 2050 targets." Scope 1/2/3 emissions are a hard concept to get your head around, but very important in dissecting greenwashing PR.

    (tags: pr greenwashing dcc ireland via:robbie-semple net-zero fossil-fuels climate-change emissions scope-3 scope-1 scope-2)

  • Identity verification would not help racist abuse on Twitter

    Twitter UK analysed the racist abuse directed at England football players on the night of the Euro 2020 final, and noted: "our data suggests that ID verification would have been unlikely to prevent the abuse from happening -- as of the permanently suspended accounts, 99% of account owners were identifiable."

    (tags: anonymity abuse racism twitter social-media id-verification)

  • 'I don't want to be seen as a zealot': what MPs really think about the climate crisis

    Well, this is a problem --

    Running these workshops was a fascinating experience. In each, there was a definite point which I came to think of as a “penny-drop moment”, when the participants came to realise the significance of the climate crisis and the way it would shape our collective future. In one workshop, for example, a very eminent scientist explained to MPs how crop yields are likely to be severely affected by extreme weather, a likely scenario if global average temperatures rise by 2C or more – and that this could lead to food shortages. The response was striking. There was a silence, a collective intake of breath, a recognition of the significance of the changes that could be upon us if we don’t act. And then, at the end of our workshop, they walked out of the door and back to their normal lives. [...] It became clear to me that there were two main reasons why MPs struggled with the issue: first, because it didn’t fit easily into the culture of political life and their own identity as a parliamentarian; and second, because they worried that public support for climate action was limited, and that, as representatives, they needed to be led by their electorate.
    I have some confidence that a Citizen's Assembly approach is the right answer here. In Ireland it was clear that politicians felt more comfort with gay marriage and abortion as topics once those CAs had delivered their findings and demonstrated how an electorate really felt about them.

    (tags: democracy elections future climate-change uk politics politicians)

Links for 2021-08-10

Published August 10, 2021

  • Lambda vs EC2 costs

    BBVA run the numbers on AWS Lambda vs bare-EC2 cost effectiveness. This is a good analysis, as of Dec 2020 pricing at least:

    With traffic profiles where requests arrive in at periodic intervals, and a low total amount of requests, serverless architecture seems to be a great architecture in terms of cost, speed of delivery and effort. Thus, Lambda is probably the way to go if our application has sufficiently large periods of inactivity. Once the break-even point is reached, when EC2 is more cost-effective than Lambda, the cost difference grows rapidly, making Lambda less and less attractive in terms of cost. Thus, it is of great importance to know if the expected amount of traffic will be around the break-even point. Be aware of the CPU throttling you will get with the smaller memory flavors of Lambda. If your code is CPU-bound, choosing the smaller memory flavors might not be an option, since execution times, and thus latency, might grow beyond your requirements. On the other hand, if your code is I/O bound, the CPU throttling might not affect you significantly. Break-even point (if there is one, that is) strongly depends on the application itself. Without measuring the target application code, knowing the intended usage of the service, the SLA and the capabilities of the team in charge of building the application it is almost impossible to know for sure which service, Lambda or EC2, is more convenient.
    IMO there are still significant costs in organisational and infrastructure terms around replacing a working EC2 infrastructure with a Lambda-based one; deployment and other integration points with AWS are extremely tricky to deal with. But this is good data on the $ point alone.

    (tags: serverless aws lambda costs cost-control ec2 hosting architecture)

  • For want of a screenless MP3 player

    Yes, I know about Pi-Hole. If you are telling me about Pi-Hole you are inadvertently proving my point, which is that responsibility or intentionally parenting these days involves a frankly unreasonable and untenable amount of both content moderation both passive and interactive and at this point a quite enraging amount of goddamn systems administration.

    (tags: culture tech ads spam pi-hole home parenting life)

Links for 2021-08-07

Published August 7, 2021

  • Edward Luper’s "36 Views of the BT Tower"

    These are fantastic -- "Much like Hokusai’s views of Mt. Fuji, Edward Luper’s prints capture London’s BT Tower from various vantage points and throughout different weather patterns and seasons. And while initiative’s like these run the risk of coming across a kitschy copies, Luper’s attention to detail and artistic execution renders them an artful adoration for a city. “[BT Tower] became a point of stability for me; like a lighthouse. My life seems to revolve around it in some way or form. Much in the same way Mount Fuji was to the artist Katsushika Hokusai.”"

    (tags: hokusai ukiyo-e art prints london mt-fuji edward-luper)

Links for 2021-08-05

Published August 5, 2021

  • 'Machine Learning: The High-Interest Credit Card of Technical Debt'

    Cannot agree more with this paper from Google: 'One of the basic arguments in this paper is that machine learning packages have all the basic code complexity issues as normal code, but also have a larger system-level complexity that can create hidden debt. Thus, refactoring these libraries, adding better unit tests, and associated activity is time well spent but does not necessarily address debt at a systems level. In this paper, we focus on the system-level interaction between machine learning code and larger systems as an area where hidden technical debt may rapidly accumulate. At a system-level, a machine learning model may subtly erode abstraction boundaries. It may be tempting to re-use input signals in ways that create unintended tight coupling of otherwise disjoint systems. Machine learning packages may often be treated as black boxes, resulting in large masses of “glue code” or calibration layers that can lock in assumptions. Changes in the external world may make models or input signals change behavior in unintended ways, ratcheting up maintenance cost and the burden of any debt. Even monitoring that the system as a whole is operating as intended may be difficult without careful design. Indeed, a remarkable portion of real-world “machine learning” work is devoted to tackling issues of this form. Paying down technical debt may initially appear less glamorous than research results usually reported in academic ML conferences. But it is critical for long-term system health and enables algorithmic advances and other cutting-edge improvements.' (via Grady Booch)

    (tags: via:gradybooch ai ml machine-learning google papers coding research production glue)

  • Fronius Smart Meter 63A-3

    Regarding smart home power management -- Niall Douglas on ITC says "If you choose your solar inverter components right, they'll come with a LAN capable mains AC meter which you stick just after the mains. It essentially duplicates the smart meter, should get very close, but it's on your LAN and you can Home Assistant script the lot. My notes here suggest [this meter] for €385 inc VAT delivered, it talks to all the other Fronius kit such as inverter and thermal store immersions over your LAN. All with high quality Home Assistant support."

    (tags: fronius home-assistant smart-home home power energy solar-power)

  • Forecast.Solar - Home Assistant

    The Forecast.Solar service provides solar production forecasting for your solar panel system, based on historic averages combined with weather forecasting. This integration provides an estimated forecast on how much energy your solar panels are going to produce, allowing you to plan ahead on how you spend your produced energy in most efficiently.

    (tags: solar-power home forecasting home-assistant)

  • source for the Irish digital COVID cert checker app

    a nice simple, human-readable Javascript validateRules() method

    (tags: javascript covid-19 source via:itc)

Links for 2021-08-04

Published August 4, 2021

Links for 2021-08-02

Published August 2, 2021

Links for 2021-07-30

Published July 30, 2021

  • Apache Helix

    @KishoreBytes notes: "Helix [is] not well known but widely used at LinkedIn, Airbnb, Pinterest, Uber, Yahoo to build distributed systems. Helix is probably managing hundreds of thousands of servers today!" It is "a generic cluster management framework used for automatic management of partitioned, replicated and distributed resources hosted on a cluster of nodes, [providing] the following features: Automatic assignment of resource/partition to nodes; Node failure detection and recovery; Dynamic addition of Resources; Dynamic addition of nodes to the cluster; Pluggable distributed state machine to manage the state of a resource via state transitions; Automatic load balancing and throttling of transitions" Sounds handy for automatic shard-based scaling. Built on Zookeeper.

    (tags: zookeeper helix sharding scalability scaling via:kishorebytes partitioning architecture)

  • Half cooked & half raw: the Irish tradition of spuds with a moon

    [...] a method of cookery practiced by the rural poor in the early to mid 19th century Ireland [...] Parboiling or half-roasting rendered a potato that was at once half-cooked and half-raw, with the inner core hard to the bite. Potatoes cooked in this way were called potatoes with the moon (an ghealach) or potatoes with the bone. William Wilde, father of Oscar, describes the practice in some detail in his essay, ‘The Food of the Irish’, which was published in 1854 in the Dublin University Magazine. Here is his explanation of the practice: "the heart of the potato was allowed, by checking the boiling at a particular point, to remain parboiled, hard and waxy; when the rest of the potato has been masticated in the usual manner, this hard lump, about the size of a walnut, was bolted; and in this manner nearly a stone of the root was taken into the stomach of the Irish labourer per diem… it was grounded on a certain knowledge of physiology. "The stomach digested the well boiled farinaceous portion of the potato within the space of a few hours, and that having all been disposed of, the half-boiled lumps remained behind, and a second digestion was commenced to assimilate this portion of food, and convert it into nutritious, life-sustaining material; which latter process lasted some hours longer, and thus the craving of hunger were warded off for five or six hours after the original meal."

    (tags: parboiling potatoes history hunger ireland rural spuds moon physiology)

Links for 2021-07-29

Published July 29, 2021

  • Funding GIMP developers for sustainable development

    This is a great idea and a good way to approach OSS funding, IMO:

    We have seen skilled developers come and go for years, the latter becoming a growing concern. Contributing takes a crazy amount of time and people have family, work and other responsibilities to take care of. Thus when core team contributors are willing to be paid for making Free Software, we have decided that GIMP as a project should encourage such endeavours by putting more emphasis on their funding. There are currently 2 such crowdfunding projects. You can consider these crowdfundings as “official” as can be and completely endorsed by the GIMP project.

    (tags: oss funding via:hn gimp open-source crowdfunding gnome)

Links for 2021-07-28

Published July 28, 2021

  • Long-term Symptoms After SARS-CoV-2 Infection in Children and Adolescents

    Paper in JAMA, mentioned by Daniel Griffin in his COVID-19 Clinical Updates on TWIV. "We compared symptoms compatible with long COVID in children and adolescents reported within 6 months after SARS-CoV-2 serologic testing [... using] a longitudinal cohort study investigating SARS-CoV-2 seroprevalence in 55 randomly selected schools in the canton of Zurich in Switzerland." Results: 4% -- so 1 in 25 -- reported at least one symptom lasting more than 3 months after the initial infection date, particularly fatigue, or difficulty concentrating.

    (tags: covid-19 via:daniel-griffin via:twiv long-covid children kids jama zurich switzerland)

  • “Brides to be” & Bullshit – A case study in Irish astroturf

    There was a "protest" outside the Dail in Dublin yesterday purporting to be "brides-to-be" disappointed at ongoing COVID-19 restrictions on weddings. As this Reddit post notes, however, it seems extremely likely that this "protest" is an astroturfed PR campaign. Sadly the Irish news media were happy to report it straight and gloss over the astroturfing. 'Nothing I've said here will really be a surprise to anyone, and it's not exactly the Reichstag Fire, but I hope it's a useful example of just how poorly Irish media serves the audience, and how easily astroturfing is done here. This protest couldn't muster the hundred or so "real" people they expected to show up, as the padding they'd have needed to look convincing, but others can - and do. Something worth remembering for how our national media covers major, minor, totally or partly fake protests in future, and how protests are organised in the first place. Not all their instigators are as mostly-harmless as Wedding Planners.'

    (tags: protests ireland pr astroturf)

  • Outdoor Swimming Pools in Ireland

    Pretty short list, unfortunately :(

    (tags: swimming ireland outdoors heated pools kids)

Links for 2021-07-26

Published July 26, 2021

  • lengstrom/falcon

    Chrome extension for flexible full text browsing history search. Press f, then space or tab, in the omnibar to start searching your previously visited websites! Every time you visit a website in Chrome, Falcon indexes all the text on the page so that the site can be easily found later. Then, for example, if you type f mugwort, Falcon will show the websites you visited containing the text "mugwort"! Install from the Chrome store here or get the CRX file!

    (tags: extension chrome search falcon indexing)

Links for 2021-07-25

Published July 25, 2021

  • a 20-year patent blocked gallium doping for solar panels

    'the reason we have been stuck using boron instead of gallium over the past 20 years is that the process of doping silicon with gallium was locked under a patent.' IP destroying the world now....

    (tags: ip climate-change solar-panels energy gallium patents)

  • The known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns of COVID-19 - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

    Finally, a decent article on the origins of COVID-19 from The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, by Ian Lipkin:

    Over the past 40 years, I have personally been involved in addressing several: HIV/AIDS, West Nile encephalitis, SARS, MERS, Lujo, Lassa, Nipah, Dandenong, Ebola, Marburg, dengue, monkeypox, Zika, influenza, and COVID-19. Estimates of numbers of unknown viruses lurking in mammals range from 320,000 to 1,000,000. If even 1 percent of them can infect humans or domestic animals, we may be ignorant of thousands of potential threats to human health and food security. In an increasingly interconnected world, diseases that might once have been contained to a region are now global. Accordingly, the international community can have zero tolerance for wildlife markets and wildlife trafficking for food, medicinal, or pet trade purposes. Our current focus in on China. However, trafficking in wildlife is a global threat and should be banned everywhere. It may have contributed to the emergence of HIV/AIDS and to outbreaks of Ebola and Marburg

    (tags: known-knowns sars-cov-2 diseases zoonoses covid-19 ian-lipkin health future wildlife)

Links for 2021-07-08

Published July 8, 2021

  • robhagemans/hoard-of-bitfonts

    Wow, this is Proustian --

    This repository contains bitmapped fonts from disused operating systems and graphical user interfaces. As operating systems and GUIs have moved on to scalable vector fonts, the bitmap fonts that dominated the 1980s and 1990s languish away in non-obvious and often binary formats that are rapidly falling into obscurity. The main purpose of this repository is to liberate these fonts from their binary shackles, preserving the ancient art of monochrome bitmap typography for human appreciation.

    (tags: fonts typography via:hackernews bitmap retrocomputing history)

Links for 2021-07-07

Published July 7, 2021

Links for 2021-07-05

Published July 5, 2021

  • What's Inside the EU Green Pass QR Code?

    Including a Python script to decode a Green Pass code:

    As you can see, 23 year-old Gabriele was vaccinated in February, once, with BioNTech/Pfizer's Comirnaty. What is not included is the date during which she is considered immune. Those are calculated from the number of shots received and the date of vaccination, as well as the circumstances (going to a restaurant vs. going to work, for example) by the scanner app. Apart from the name/manufacturer of the received vaccine, there is no superfluous data inside, so the QR code is not a privacy nightmare, as some have feared.

    (tags: covid19 vaccination coronavirus green-pass eu qr-codes python data-privacy)

  • HSE Decision Aid for 18-34 year olds considering the AZ/J&J vaccine

    Given the increased risk of vaccine-induced thrombosis, the HSE have produced this leaflet to advise young people. IMO it should really include details of Long Covid, although I guess that's hard to quantify at this stage

    (tags: covid-19 hse astra-zeneca j-and-j vaccines vitt)

  • 6502 “Illegal” Opcodes Demystified

    This is fantastic! I spent a week or two as a kid attempting to reverse-engineer these "illegal" opcodes, 30 years ago, but never got into this level of depth...

    (tags: 6502 6510 history cpus via:craig opcodes microcode)

  • Freespin

    Amazing C=64 demo, running on a 1541 disk drive connected directly to the monitor! What an insane hack. I too ran demo code on the 1541 in one of my demos, but the only video output in that case was to flash the LED on the drive in time with the music :) (thanks Craig!)

    (tags: via:craig c=64 commodore-64 1541 hacks demos intros)

  • Anthony Costello on Long COVID in the UK

    what does the ONS data tell us with their very large datasets? They looked at 313,000 people aged 2 or over, surveyed in the month to June 6. On July 1 the new data shows 962,000 people in private households in the UK (1.5% of the population) were experiencing self-reported "long COVID" (symptoms persisting for more than four weeks). https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/bulletins/prevalenceofongoingsymptomsfollowingcoronaviruscovid19infectionintheuk/1july2021 856,000 (89.0%) first had (or suspected they had) COVID-19 at least 12 weeks previously, and 385,000 (40.0%) first had (or suspected they had) COVID-19 at least one year previously. They estimate that 13,000 children aged 2-11, 20,000 aged 12-16 and 71,000 aged 17-24 had Long Covid of any duration. Most in these 3 age groups had had symptoms for AT LEAST 12 weeks (10,000, 16000, 65000 respectively). Perhaps most worrying is that the latest UK Long Covid estimate for children aged 12-16 who experience prolonged symptoms for at least ONE YEAR is 0.12% (0.06-0.17) or 1 in 830, with possible but unknown effects on developing brain structure based on recent adult studies.
    Costello is a member of Independent SAGE and an ex-director of the WHO

    (tags: sage anthony-costello long-covid covid-19 children kids)

Links for 2021-07-01

Published July 1, 2021

Links for 2021-06-30

Published June 30, 2021

  • OpenStreetMap looks to relocate to EU due to Brexit limitations

    One “important reason”, Rischard said, was the failure of the UK and EU to agree on mutual recognition of database rights. While both have an agreement to recognise copyright protections, that only covers work which is creative in nature. Maps, as a simple factual representation of the world, are not covered by copyright in the same way, but until Brexit were covered by an EU-wide agreement that protected databases where there had been “a substantial investment in obtaining, verifying or presenting the data”. But since Brexit, any database made on or after 1 January 2021 in the UK will not be protected in the EU, and vice versa. Other concerns Rischard listed include the increasing complexity and cost of “banking, finance and using PayPal in the UK”, the inability for the organisation to secure charitable status, and the loss of .eu domains. The increased importance of the EU in matters of tech regulation also played a role: “We could more effectively lobby the EU [and] EU governments and have more of an impact, especially in countries where there is no local chapter,” Rischard wrote.

    (tags: mapping brexit uk osm openstreetmap eu copyright databases ip)

  • Discourses of climate delay

    This is an excellent classification for a particular style of climate denialism: '‘Discourses of climate delay’ pervade current debates on climate action. These discourses accept the existence of climate change, but justify inaction or inadequate efforts. In contemporary discussions on what actions should be taken, by whom and how fast, proponents of climate delay would argue for minimal action or action taken by others. They focus attention on the negative social effects of climate policies and raise doubt that mitigation is possible. Here, we outline the common features of climate delay discourses and provide a guide to identifying them. [...] * Someone else should take actions first: redirect responsibility * Disruptive change is not necessary: push non-transformative solutions * Change will be disruptive: emphasise the downsides * It's not possible to mitigate climate change: surrender.'

    (tags: ecology climate climate-change discourse denialism policy politics)

Links for 2021-06-29

Published June 29, 2021

  • Hackers exploited 0-day, not 2018 bug, to mass-wipe My Book Live devices

    All looking pretty shite for Western Digital -- one of their engineers *removed* the need for authentication on the factory-reset PHP script for the My Book Live devices:

    A Western Digital developer created five lines of code to password-protect the reset command. For unknown reasons, the authentication check was [....] commented out as indicated by the double / character at the beginning of each line. [...] The discovery raises a vexing question: if the hackers had already obtained full root access by exploiting CVE-2018-18472 [a separate bug], what need did they have for this second security flaw? There’s no clear answer, but based on the evidence available, Abdine has come up with a plausible theory — that one hacker first exploited CVE-2018-18472 and a rival hacker later exploited the other vulnerability in an attempt to wrest control of those already compromised devices.

    (tags: hacks exploits fail western-digital iot hardware php)