Author: dailylinks

gProfiler

'a system-wide profiler, combining multiple sampling profilers to produce unified visualization of what your CPU is spending time on.' -- claims to have little impact on performance of running code, supports Linux, java and Ruby

(tags: gprofiler profiling performance testing measurement coding ruby java linux perf via:reddit)

Why Is the Intellectual Dark Web Suddenly Hyping an Unproven COVID Treatment?

Ivermectin, in this case, but hydroxychloroquine before that, and other treatments for cancer and so on before that. 'What seems to really be at work here, in the end, is a political battle, not a medical one. The laetrile wars of the 1970s also launched what’s known as the “health freedom” movement — a libertarian-tinged social tendency that holds Americans should have unrestricted access to alternative treatments—into the spotlight. [...] It's a familiar set of claims, amounting to an assertion that being given the broadest possible platform is the same as being silenced, and that one's theories being tested is the same as them having been suppressed.' I think part of the appeal of these drugs is that you can claim that they _are_ a miracle cure, and that they are being suppressed by a conspiracy of silence by Big Pharma. The conspiracy part is a key selling point for the promoters. Interesting phenomenon, though.

(tags: conspiracy-theories hcq hydroxychloroquine laetrile ivermectin treatments covid-19 medicine big-pharma miracle-cures)

QUIC at Snapchat - Snap Engineering

Snapchat are fans, using cronet on the Android/iPhone client side. The HN comment thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27626394 is also a decent read, some insightful discussion

(tags: http3 quic tcp networking mobile udp cronet snapchat)

Interesting AWS performance tip

we determined that calls to time.Now() or time.Since(time.Time) in Golang were taking about 200 times longer on new servers than they were on old servers. We found similar impacts in Python, which lead us to the clocksource. It turns out that in our Grub boot parameters for AL2, we had added clocksource=hpet about two years ago, but all of our servers launched prior to 6/17 had a clocksource of kvm-clock, apparently ignoring the Grub config. Servers launched after 6/17 (with the same AMI, Grub config, everything) were honoring the specified clocksource, which caused our performance issue.

(tags: ec2 aws clocksource linux kvm)

Apollo Flight Controller 101: Every console explained | Ars Technica

Amazing level of detail on how the Apollo mission control room operated! (plus more from Ken Shirriff at https://twitter.com/kenshirriff/status/1409241533757345792 )

(tags: apollo nasa moon mission-control)

COVID-19 symptoms vary depending on vaccination status

It seems that 'symptoms vary slightly based on whether you're fully vaccinated, half vaccinated or unvaccinated.'

(tags: vaccination covid-19 sars-cov-2 symptoms medicine health)

French spyware bosses indicted for their role in the torture of dissidents | MIT Technology Review

Senior executives at a French spyware firm have been indicted for the company’s sale of surveillance software to authoritarian regimes in Libya and Egypt that resulted in the torture and disappearance of dissidents. While high-tech surveillance is a multibillion-dollar industry worldwide, it is rare for companies or individuals to face legal consequences for selling such technologies—even to notorious dictatorships or other dangerous regimes. But charges in the Paris Judicial Court against leaders at Amesys, a surveillance company that later changed its name to Nexa Technology, claim that the sales to Libya and Egypt over the last decade led to the crushing of opposition, torture of dissidents, and other human rights abuses. The former head of Amesys, Philippe Vannier, and three current and former executives at Nexa technologies were indicted for “complicity in acts of torture” for selling spy technology to the Libyan regime. French media report that Nexa president Olivier Bohbot, managing director Renaud Roques, and former president Stéphane Salies face the same charges for surveillance sales to Egypt.

(tags: spyware surveillance france nexa amesys libya egypt torture human-rights)

Turn Your Old, Cracked Android Phone Into a Backup Server

It's gratifying to see that an apk called 'Linux Deploy' will run a chrooted Debian install on a rooted Android phone -- that's a great way to reuse and recycle old, nearly-dead hardware

(tags: backup android servers linux ops home)

google/fully-homomorphic-encryption

This repository contains open-source libraries and tools to perform fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) operations on an encrypted data set. [...] Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) is an emerging data processing paradigm that allows developers to perform transformations on encrypted data. FHE can change the way computations are performed by preserving privacy end-to-end, thereby giving users even greater confidence that their information will remain private and secure.

(tags: cryptography encryption google security fhe homomorphic privacy data-privacy)

GPRS was deliberately backdoored by its designer (probably)

Matthew Green writes: "This is an amazing paper. It implies (with strong statistical evidence) that the design of a major mobile-data encryption algorithm — used in GPRS data — was deliberately backdoored by its designer."

Instead of providing full 64-bit security, we show that the initial state of GEA-1 can be recovered from as little as 65 bits of known keystream (with at least 24 bits coming from one frame) in time 240 GEA-1 evaluations and using 44.5 GiB of memory. The attack on GEA-1 is based on an exceptional interaction of the deployed LFSRs and the key initialization, which is highly unlikely to occur by chance. This unusual pattern indicates that the weakness is intentionally hidden to limit the security level to 40 bit by design.

(tags: gprs protocols security crypto gea-1 telecoms matthew-green backdoors)

Apache Pulsar: Seamless Storage Evolution

Impressive performance figures from the distributed messaging/streaming platform using NVMe and DCPMM persistent memory devices: 'Pulsar architecture can accommodate different types of hardware which allows users to balance performance and cost based on required throughput and latency. Pulsar has the capability to adapt to the next generation of storage devices to achieve better performance. We have also seen that persistent memory excels in the race to achieving higher write throughput by maintaining low latency. '

(tags: streaming distcomp distributed apache pulsar dcpmm nvme persistent-memory performance architecture storage)

Amazon S3 is quietly deprecating BitTorrent support

...apparently. (via Last Week in AWS)

(tags: bittorrent aws s3 deprecation features)

Photopea

'Online Photo Editor' -- basically, a really decent clone of The Gimp, running fully in the browser.

(tags: editor photoshop images graphics the-gimp editing photos photopea)

Trino on Ice IV: Deep Dive Into Iceberg Internals

Good writeup of the innards of the Iceberg format for writable ORC data lakes and how Trino can query them

(tags: trino iceberg data big-data data-lakes formats s3 avro orc)

The Three DynamoDB Limits You Need to Know

there are a few limits you must understand to model properly in DynamoDB. If you’re not aware of them, you can run into a brick wall. But if you understand them and account for them, you remove the element of surprise once your app hits production. Those limits are: The item size limit; The page size limit for Query and Scan operations; and The partition throughput limits. Notice how these limits build on each other. The first is about an individual item, whereas the second is about a collection of items that are read together in a single request. Finally, the partition throughput limit is about the number and size of concurrent requests in a single DynamoDB partition.

(tags: dynamodb aws storage gotchas limits ops architecture)

Met Éireann's IREPS weather forecasting system

The Irish Meteorological Service blog the innards of their current forecasting system, IREPS -- lots of juicy technical detail! Apparently it is a HARMONIE-AROME based model configuration: 'In 2018, Met Éireann developed its first ensemble-based NWP system, known as the Irish Regional Ensemble Prediction System (IREPS). Originally run twice per day, this system produced 11 forecasts (known as members) for weather conditions over the next 36 hours. On April 15th 2020, the IREPS system was upgraded to a 54-hour, 11-member ensemble which is run four times per day.'

(tags: harmonie met-eireann weather forecasting modelling ireps ireland)

The 17 Ways to Run Containers on AWS - Last Week in AWS

This is both (a) correct and (b) a nightmare. AWS need a coherent product plan where containers are involved...

(tags: containers aws ec2 eks k8s docker architecture)

nocodb

'The Open Source Airtable alternative' -- looks nifty as a quick and easy way to hook up an SQL database to a web-based spreadsheet view

(tags: airtable database sql mysql nocodb spreadsheets ui web)

US Soldiers Expose Nuclear Weapons Secrets Via Flashcard Apps

For US soldiers tasked with the custody of nuclear weapons in Europe, the stakes are high. Security protocols are lengthy, detailed and need to be known by heart. To simplify this process, some service members have been using publicly visible flashcard learning apps — inadvertently revealing a multitude of sensitive security protocols about US nuclear weapons and the bases at which they are stored. [...] the flashcards studied by soldiers tasked with guarding these devices reveal not just the bases, but even identify the exact shelters with “hot” vaults that likely contain nuclear weapons. They also detail intricate security details and protocols such as the positions of cameras, the frequency of patrols around the vaults, secret duress words that signal when a guard is being threatened and the unique identifiers that a restricted area badge needs to have.

(tags: army dystopia nuclear nukes privacy flashcards apps security weapons)

What are Scope 3 emissions?

I was looking for a decent definition of this over the weekend, and couldn't find it, so bookmarking for future reference. 'Greenhouse gas emissions are categorised into three groups or 'Scopes' by the most widely-used international accounting tool, the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol. Scope 1 covers direct emissions from owned or controlled sources. Scope 2 covers indirect emissions from the generation of purchased electricity, steam, heating and cooling consumed by the reporting company. Scope 3 includes all other indirect emissions that occur in a company’s value chain.'

(tags: ghgs climate-change scopes ghgp emissions carbon sustainability)

Fly.io

Looks extremely nifty -- a global CDN for your code: 'Fly is a platform for applications that need to run globally. It runs your code close to users and scales compute in cities where your app is busiest. Write your code, package it into a Docker image, deploy it to Fly's platform and let that do all the work to keep your app snappy.' Decent pricing, too.

(tags: cdn serverless docker containers fly.io hosting internet ops platforms)

Tetris used to prevent PTSD

'Our hypothesis was that after a trauma, patients would have fewer intrusive memories [from post-traumatic stress] if they got to play Tetris as part of a short behavioural intervention while waiting in the hospital Emergency Department,' says Professor Holmes. 'Since the game is visually demanding, we wanted to see if it could prevent the intrusive aspects of the traumatic memories from becoming established i.e. by disrupting a process known as memory consolidation.' The study involved 71 motor vehicle accident victims, of whom half received the intervention (recalled the trauma briefly and then played Tetris) while waiting in the hospital emergency department, and half performed another task, all doing so within six hours of the accident. Results showed that the researchers’ hypothesis was right: those who had played Tetris had fewer intrusive memories of the trauma in total over the week immediately following the accident than the controls. The researchers also found that the intrusive memories diminished more quickly.

(tags: brain neurochemistry memory long-term-memory memory-consolidation ptsd trauma medicine gaming tetris)

Chicago PD automated policing program got this man shot twice

What the hell. This is incredibly dystopian shit.

They told McDaniel something he could hardly believe: an algorithm built by the Chicago Police Department predicted [...] that McDaniel would be involved in a shooting. That he would be a “party to violence,” but it wasn’t clear what side of the barrel he might be on. He could be the shooter, he might get shot. They didn’t know. But the data said he was at risk either way. McDaniel was both a potential victim and a potential perpetrator, and the visitors on his porch treated him as such. A social worker told him that he could help him if he was interested in finding assistance to secure a job, for example, or mental health services. And police were there, too, with a warning: from here on out, the Chicago Police Department would be watching him. The algorithm indicated Robert McDaniel was more likely than 99.9 percent of Chicago’s population to either be shot or to have a shooting connected to him. That made him dangerous, and top brass at the Chicago PD knew it. So McDaniel had better be on his best behavior.

(tags: precrime predictive-policing policing chicago dystopia future ai heat-list)

The Unwritten Contract of Solid State Drives

We perform a detailed vertical analysis of application performance atop a range of modern file systems and SSD FTLs. We formalize the "unwritten contract" that clients of SSDs should follow to obtain high performance, and conduct our analysis to uncover application and file system designs that violate the contract. Our analysis, which utilizes a highly detailed SSD simulation underneath traces taken from real workloads and file systems, provides insight into how to better construct applications, file systems, and FTLs to realize robust and sustainable performance.

(tags: via:nelson optimization performance ssd disks storage coding architecture)

COVID-19 correlate of protection identified

Via Keith Dawson:

A large study out of Australia has added to the accumulating evidence that the level of neutralizing antibodies circulating in the blood is highly correlated with protection against symptomatic Covid-19. Ars Technica has a good summary of the research and what it means. It’s known that antibody levels decline with time. This work also gave hints about how long protection against disease might last after natural infection or vaccination — which bears on whether or when we might need a booster shot. The Ars reporter writes: 'A vaccine with 95% efficacy after the second dose would still have an estimated 77% efficacy 250 days out. And that’s for protection against a symptomatic infection. The protection against severe COVID-19 is much stronger and would likely take far longer to decline… A starting efficacy of 70% would be down to 33% efficacy at 250 days.' The model the researchers developed was able to predict, with good accuracy, the efficacy a vaccine should show in Phase III trials based on the antibody levels measured in Phase I and II.

(tags: vaccination virology vaccines covid-19 sars-cov-2 via:kdawson antibodies)

Using shared memory for low-latency, intra-node communication in AWS Batch | AWS Compute Blog

Crazy HPC-oriented feature in current AWS offerings: shared memory buffers over EFA:

HPC workloads use algorithms that require parallelization and a low latency communication between the different processes. The two main technologies used for the parallel communications are message-passing with distributed memory and shared memory. Message Passing Interface (MPI) is a message-passing standard used for the communication in a parallel distributed environment. Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) enables your MPI applications to use low-latency, inter-node communication. The shared memory paradigm allows multiple processors in the same system to communicate using a memory (RAM) portion that is shared between the processes. This method takes advantage of the high-speed memory bus.

(tags: shared-memory hpc mpi shmem ram coding efa aws ec2 low-latency)

Extreme HTTP Performance Tuning: 1.2M API req/s on a 4 vCPU EC2 Instance | talawah.io

This is very cool. Updating the old "C10K" problem space to C1.2M -- the current state of Linux userspace networking -- using libreactor and a whole load of up-to-date tweaks. Interesting to note that this scale is feasible to run in Docker (using --network=host, of course).

(tags: http servers c10k linux performance scalability ops tuning libreactor networking tcp)

Scaleway and Chia

Scaleway dealing with the storage-driven cryptocurrency:

This cryptocurrency is a few months old, and at Scaleway, we are already witnessing the impact of Chia on all our products, from Object Storage and instances, to dedicated servers. Speculative farmers are forcing their way in to make as much money as possible, as quickly as possible. [....] In order to service as many clients as possible, we have decided that from today: Chia plotting is forbidden on all SSD and NVMe powered instances, dedicated servers, RPN-SAN, BMaaS and Block Storage services. Chia plotting is extremely I/O intensive and destroys most SSDs in under a few weeks Important notice: Chia plotting engages client responsibility according to Section 9 of our contract. We will bill clients for any SSDs and NVMes destroyed due to Chia plotting activities.

(tags: chia cryptocurrency scaleway hosting ssds storage)

Alex Steffen on the discontinuity in our future

To believe that our choices are the restoration of continuity or the breakdown of society paradoxically is to not take the planetary [climate] crisis seriously enough — and that's terrible, because the unexpected boon of seriousness is awakening to possibility, to the capacities we gain amidst disruption and acceleration. Seen through 20th century eyes, everything is about to get really weird, really fast. But discontinuity is not just danger. Discontinuity means change in our selves and our societies. [....] It is too late to avoid huge losses, enormous suffering. But it is absolutely not too late to limit our losses to those we’ve already set in motion, and to seize our opportunities to build a better human world — indeed, quite possibly a better world than the one we have now.

(tags: climate-change biodiversity crisis future alex-steffen green)

File Descriptor Limits

tl;dr: 'Don't use select() anymore in 2021.' Select(2) on Linux has a limit of 1024 fds

(tags: linux programming select system-calls coding libc fds)

Bad Machinery: Managing Interrupts Under Load

'Each day, try to do either projects or interrupts, not both. If you’re oncall, don’t try to do projects, and vice versa. People aren’t machines, context switches are really expensive, and usually assumed to be free in process planning. People who are constantly interrupted end up with delayed and sloppy project work, and vice versa (people who have a lot of project work are sloppy at interrupts unless time is carved out for them). Your team’s oncall and interrupt-handling should be structured around funneling interrupts at the people who are supposed to be interrupted. If that’s too much for those people, add more people until it isn’t. “Spreading the load” by assigning items across the entire team randomly is counter-productive.'

(tags: sre devops coding ops planning teams work on-call interrupts)

Was a flying killer robot used in Libya? Quite possibly - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Great. Lethal machine learning is now in prod:

Last year in Libya, a Turkish-made autonomous weapon — the STM Kargu-2 drone — may have “hunted down and remotely engaged” retreating soldiers loyal to the Libyan General Khalifa Haftar, according to a recent report by the UN Panel of Experts on Libya. [....] the Kargu-2 signifies something perhaps even more globally significant: a new chapter in autonomous weapons, one in which they are used to fight and kill human beings based on artificial intelligence. The Kargu is a “loitering” drone that can use machine learning-based object classification to select and engage targets, with swarming capabilities in development to allow 20 drones to work together. The UN report calls the Kargu-2 a lethal autonomous weapon. Its maker, STM, touts the weapon’s “anti-personnel” capabilities.

(tags: machine-learning ai kargu-2 drones war grim-meathook-future stm un)

Mukama

'Essentials for your daily round' -- a really lovely set of EDC products, and not _too_ crazy expensive....

(tags: edc keys wallets tools gadgets design)

The freenode IRC network is under new management

crikey. Freenode ops resign en masse and move to another service due to a dodgy-sounding "change of management" by some MtGox dude

(tags: irc freenode ops takeovers)

PiDP-11

A modern -- working! -- replica of the DEC PDP-11/70. Truly a thing of retrocomputing beauty

(tags: pdp-11 retrocomputing raspberry-pi emulation computing history electronics digital)

Boosting Dropbox upload speed—and making Windows’ TCP stack resilient to network reordering - Dropbox

Featuring an interesting dig into the current state of Windows system and network-level diagnostic tools:

netsh trace [...] correlates events on the wire with events that happen on the TCP layer, timers, buffer management, socket layer, and even the Windows asyncio subsystem (IOCP).

(tags: windows tools cli networking dropbox iocp tcp ip internet kernel)

Tabula

'Extract Tables from PDFs - If you’ve ever tried to do anything with data provided to you in PDFs, you know how painful it is — there's no easy way to copy-and-paste rows of data out of PDF files. Tabula allows you to extract that data into a CSV or Microsoft Excel spreadsheet using a simple, easy-to-use interface. Tabula works on Mac, Windows and Linux.'

(tags: converter data pdf tools cli tabula tables csv extraction)

Facebook moderator: ‘Every day was a nightmare’ - BBC News

Wow, this is not OK -- Facebook are massively mistreating these contract workers.

“Every day was a nightmare,” she said, adding that the support given was “insufficient.” Facebook says psychological help is available to all its moderators 24 hours a day, but Isabella claims its wellness coaches are not qualified psychiatrists. “I was seeing the wellness team but didn’t feel I got the support I needed. I can’t say I left work feeling relieved or knowing I could go home and have a good night's sleep - that’s not possible,” she added. “It would follow me home. I could just be watching TV at home and think back to one of the horrible, really graphic tickets.”

(tags: facebook ptsd exploitation trauma moderators moderation covalen violence)

The epidemiological impact of the NHS COVID-19 App

Nature paper on the UK contact notification app's impact on the COVID-19 pandemic:

Here we investigated the impact of the NHS COVID-19 app for England and Wales, from its launch on 24 September 2020 through to the end of December 2020. It was used regularly by approximately 16.5 million users (28% of the total population), and sent approximately 1.7 million exposure notifications: 4.4 per index case consenting to contact tracing. We estimated that the fraction of app-notified individuals subsequently showing symptoms and testing positive (the secondary attack rate, SAR) was 6.0%, comparable to the SAR for manually traced close contacts. We estimated the number of cases averted by the app using two complementary approaches. Modelling based on the notifications and SAR gave 284,000 (108,000-450,000), and statistical comparison of matched neighbouring local authorities gave 594,000 (317,000-914,000). Roughly one case was averted for each case consenting to notification of their contacts. We estimated that for every percentage point increase in app users, the number of cases can be reduced by 0.8% (modelling) or 2.3% (statistical analysis). These findings provide evidence for continued development and deployment of such apps in populations that are awaiting full protection from vaccines.

(tags: covid-19 contact-tracing apps pandemics npis)

Twitter thread on droplet transmission

An extremely long and detailed discussion from Jose-Luis Jimenez of how, exactly, the science of airborne transmission of disease via 5-micron infective droplets wound up wrong, and remained incorrect for much of modern medicine, culminating in the disastrous treatment of COVID-19

(tags: aerosols airborne medicine history covid-19 droplets infection transmission science)

Dr Rory Hearne: The Government does not want you to be able to afford to buy a home

This nails the issue with housing in Ireland:

The Government has been called on to do something to stop this. Even Fianna Fáil politicians have come out crying crocodile tears of outrage. But the truth is the investor purchase of housing in Ireland on a major scale is actually Government policy and has been for the last decade. The Government does not actually want you to be able to buy or rent an affordable home. They have created an unaffordable housing system that is focused on delivering housing as an investment asset, not a home.[...] This current crisis has been brewing for a long time. It goes back to the Celtic Tiger days of the late 1990s and early 2000s when the Fianna Fáil-PD Governments encouraged the shift from housing to be treated as a home, to people buying it up as an investment asset. They told people to speculate in the property market and gave tax breaks for landlords to buy a second, or third, home to rent out. These became the ‘buy-to-let’ investors. The banks lent out massively which added fuel to the fire of rising housing prices, and the inevitable crash happened in 2008 and 2009. As their response to the disaster they had created, Fianna Fáil turned to global ‘vulture’ funds to buy up the bad loans and failed housing projects. They set up the ‘bad bank’ NAMA, which went on, under the Fine Gael Government from 2011 to the current day, to sell off (at a discount) huge land banks and billions of euro worth of properties to vulture and real estate investment funds.

(tags: reits real-estate ireland politics housing homes rory-hearne)

mjg59 | Exploring my doorbell

Nice walkthrough of rooting and extending a bit of IOT hardware

(tags: linux exploits security iot gadgets embedded u-boot)

Interviews with Loyalist kids

It's a depressing read, as ever. Ulster Unionism is a mess, is falling apart, and is vulnerable to being taken over by the paramilitaries:

“Unionism is losing power and control. It needs leaders who have the skill to say, look, we have cards to play and if we are sensible we can save this place. Instead, Arlene said if there was a united Ireland she’d leave. People are left feeling unappeased but it is not a definite thing. It is more a kind of grief or sense they have lost something intangible. It is about shattered dreams.”

(tags: ulster unionism loyalists northern-ireland politics brexit)

MegaBlock

"Nuke tweets in one click" --

Don't like a bad tweet? Block the tweet, its author, and every single person who liked it—in one click.

(tags: twitter blocking killfile)

Tesla Car Hacked Remotely From Drone via Zero-Click Exploit

Here's the best bit:

Tesla patched the vulnerabilities with an update pushed out in October 2020, and it has reportedly stopped using ConnMan. Intel was also informed since the company was the original developer of ConnMan, but the researchers said the chipmaker believed it was not its responsibility. The researchers learned that the ConnMan component is widely used in the automotive industry, which could mean that similar attacks can be launched against other vehicles as well. Weinmann and Schmotzle turned to Germany’s national CERT for help in informing potentially impacted vendors, but it’s currently unclear if other manufacturers have taken action in response to the researchers’ findings.

(tags: intel tesla connman security hacks exploits fuzzing cars)

Lateral flow test sensitivity

Solid paper in PLOS - 'Validation testing to determine the sensitivity of lateral flow testing for asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 detection in low prevalence settings: Testing frequency and public health messaging is key':

Our data show that the Innova LFD can successfully detect SARS-CoV-2 infection in people with a viral titre above approximately 100 viral copies/ml. However, as determined at our site using the ThermoFisher COVID-19 TaqPath assay, it is incapable of detecting infection at comparable PCR Ct values of 30 and over. These levels of infection are indicative of very early or very late stages of infection, and as such, we would strongly recommend that LFD testing is used to screen people at very regular frequency and that a negative result should not be used to determine that someone is free from SARS-CoV-2 infection.

(tags: testing covid-19 sars-cov-2 lfa rapid-tests pcr papers)

Sidecar injection and transparent traffic hijacking process in Istio explained in detail · Jimmy Song

A solid explanation of Istio's traffic-hijacking mode using iptables and its sidecar pattern

(tags: kubernetes iptables sidecars istio service-mesh networking k8s eks routing)

The lost art of 'booleying' in Ireland's uplands

If you visit the west of Ireland or Achill, you can still see the traces of booleying today. Fascinating part of Irish rural history:

by the 1800s, it was mostly young people and teenage girls especially who had the job of looking after cows at these seasonal ‘boolies’. This gave rise to a vibrant but now largely forgotten cultural scene in Ireland’s uplands. Oral history collected in the 1930s and 1940s in Connemara, Mayo, Donegal, and the Galtee Mountains makes clear that booleying facilitated the transmission of a lot of important cultural knowledge. One man from Cloch Cheannaola in Donegal states that his mother had learned her songs from other dairymaids in the hills, while another account from Iorras Aintheach in Galway outlines how the girls not only sang but played musical instruments and danced as well. [....] The small degree of independence which young women gained as participants in booleying was sometimes missed later on in life. There is an unmistakeable sense of loss in songs like Na Gamhna Geala and Aililiú na Gamhna, in which married women reminisce about their time looking after cows and calves in the hills.

(tags: transhumance booleying history ireland rural achill galway donegal mayo connemara)

Cryptocurrency is an abject disaster

Hard not to sympathise with this take --

I’ve had to develop a special radar for reading product pages now: a mounting feeling of dread as a promising technology is introduced while I inevitably arrive at the buried lede: it’s more crypto bullshit. Cryptocurrency is the multi-level marketing of the tech world. “Hi! How’ve you been? Long time no see! Oh, I’ve been working on this cool distributed database file store archive thing. We’re doing an ICO next week.” Then I leave. Any technology which is not an (alleged) currency and which incorporates blockchain anyway would always work better without it. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of cryptocurrency scams and ponzi schemes trussed up to look like some kind of legitimate offering. Even if the project you’re working on is totally cool and solves all of these problems, there are 100 other projects pretending to be like yours which are ultimately concerned with transferring money from their users to their founders. Which one are investors more likely to invest in? Hint: it’s the one that’s more profitable. Those promises of “we’re different!” are always hollow anyway. Remember the DAO? They wanted to avoid social arbitration entirely for financial contracts, but when the chips are down and their money was walking out the door, they forked the blockchain.

(tags: blockchain bitcoin crypto cryptocurrency abuse capitalism bullshit tech)

Medieval Archaeology of Ireland – Google My Maps

An exhaustive copy of the official Sites and Monuments Record annotated on Google Maps (via ITS Slack)

(tags: via:its maps ireland history monuments castles archaeology)

Regular HIIT Exercise Enhances Health via Histamine | The Scientist Magazine®

The precise molecular mechanisms connecting regular activity to improved health have been unclear. A study published April 14 in Science Advances makes major gains in this understanding. Building off previous work on single bouts of exercise, researchers at Ghent University in Belgium found that when humans perform long-term training, histamine receptors are activated, improving a variety of cardiometabolic risk factors, from insulin sensitivity to aerobic capacity and blood vessel health. “It’s awesome, it’s a very cool paper,” says University of Oregon exercise physiologist John Halliwill, who was not involved in the study. “This is one of a few studies out there finally looking at these molecular transducers, and this is the only one out there on histamine that showed that it has this lasting impact on how we adapt to exercise. . . . It’s not just a signal associated with allergies and asthma, wound healing. It seems to have a hand in everything related to exercise, which is quite amazing.”

(tags: histamine health medicine exercise hiit training)

Estimating AWS EC2 Instances Power Consumption

attempting to estimate the carbon footprint of cloud computing at AWS, by estimating the power consumption of individual EC2 instances running a workload.

(tags: aws ec2 cloud-computing energy carbon footprint power estimation ops)

From WinZips to Cat GIFs, Jacob Ziv’s Algorithms Have Powered Decades of Compression - IEEE Spectrum

'The lossless-compression pioneer received the 2021 IEEE Medal of Honor' -- well deserved

(tags: ziv compression lz77 lempel-ziv lz78 algorithms history computing ieee)

Genomics and epidemiology of P.1 SARS-CoV-2 lineage

The numbers are in, in this _Science_ paper --

Cases of SARS-CoV-2 infection in Manaus, Brazil, resurged in late 2020, despite previously high levels of infection. Genome sequencing of viruses sampled in Manaus between November 2020 and January 2021 revealed the emergence and circulation of a novel SARS-CoV-2 variant of concern. Lineage P.1, acquired 17 mutations, including a trio in the spike protein (K417T, E484K and N501Y) associated with increased binding to the human ACE2 receptor. Molecular clock analysis shows that P.1 emergence occurred around mid-November 2020 and was preceded by a period of faster molecular evolution. Using a two-category dynamical model that integrates genomic and mortality data, we estimate that P.1 may be 1.7–2.4-fold more transmissible, and that previous (non-P.1) infection provides 54–79% of the protection against infection with P.1 that it provides against non-P.1 lineages. Enhanced global genomic surveillance of variants of concern, which may exhibit increased transmissibility and/or immune evasion, is critical to accelerate pandemic responsiveness.

(tags: p1 sars-cov-2 covid-19 epidemiology transmission science papers)

Bert Hubert on the Huawei/5G backdoor controversy

Some context -- European telcos no longer operate their equipment:

As an icebreaker, [telco operators] were asked if they thought the Chinese could eavesdrop through “backdoors” in Huawei equipment. Every single hand went up. One of the bankers then asked, for balance, if they thought the US could access communications through key Cisco equipment. “All the hands went straight back up without hesitation” [....] In a modern telecommunications service provider, new equipment is deployed, configured, maintained and often financed by the vendor. Just to let that sink in, Huawei (and their close partners) already run and directly operate the mobile telecommunication infrastructure for over 100 million European subscribers. The host service provider often has no detailed insight in what is going on, and would have a hard time figuring this out through their remaining staff. Rampant outsourcing has meant that most local expertise has also left the company, willingly or unwillingly.

(tags: telcos telecoms ops networking eu 5g china huawei nsa tapping)

Ten scientific reasons in support of airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2 - The Lancet

"The evidence supporting airborne transmission is overwhelming, and evidence supporting large droplet transmission is almost non-existent" (Greenhalgh et al., Lancet, 2021) (via Daniel Lemire)

(tags: via:lemire aerosols airborne transmission covid-19 sars-cov-2)

Indice de réparabilité

France's official "Repairability Index" site

(tags: repair repairability france shopping)

COVID-19 vaccine extended dose intervals for early vaccine rollout and population protection in Canada: NACI recommendations - Canada.ca

Very impressive level of detail here

(tags: canada vaccines covid-19 sars-cov-2 medicine)

I Thought My Job Was To Report On Tech In India. Instead, I’ve Watched Democracy Decline.

This is chilling:

I love tech. But watching it intersect with a Hindu nationalist government trying to crush dissent, choke a free press, and destroy a nation’s secular ethos doesn’t feel like something I bought a ticket to. Writing about technology from India now feels like having a front-row seat to the country’s rapid slide into authoritarianism. “It’s like watching a train wreck while you’re inside the train,” I Slacked my boss in November.

(tags: india technology whatsapp facebook twitter scary authoritarianism dystopia tech)

Green Atlantic at Moneypoint

This is the best news to happen in Ireland's emissions situation for a while! The ESB plan to turn off the highly polluting coal power station at Moneypoint, switching it to be a hub for offshore wind energy, including energy storage using hydrogen. Moneypoint has massive connections to the Irish grid, and the amount of available wind power on the west coast is simply huge. Great stuff!

(tags: moneypoint ireland green energy emissions carbon future wind-energy hydrogen)

Parental control - DD-WRT Wiki

Using DD-WRT to turn off the internet for certain devices during night-time hours

(tags: dd-wrt networking parenting parental-controls kids internet home)

Fan-tastic misuse of Raspberry Pi's GPIO

'[River] wanted to use a Raspberry Pi to bring the fans into his home automation system, but the Raspberry Pi doesn’t have a 304.2 MHz radio. What it does have is user-programmable GPIO and the rpitx package, which converts a GPIO pin into a basic radio transmitter. Of course, the Pi’s GPIO pin’s aren’t long enough to efficiently transmit at 304.2 MHz, so [River] added a proper antenna, as well as a low-pass filter to clean up the transmitted signal. The rpitx package supports OOK out of the box, so [River] was quickly able get the Pi controlling his fan in no time'

(tags: home automation gpio raspberry-pi hacks hardware wireless)

The Gaslighting of Science - Insight

Zeynep Tufekci hits the nail on the head here -- 3 particular factors were wilfully overlooked in Western countries' early response to the COVID pandemic:

Put all three together: airborne transmission, clusters driving the epidemic, and presymptomatic transmission. Not only do we get a clear and consistent picture of many things that have happened since, we also get the mitigation strategy. Further, all three dimensions support each other: transmission from people not (yet) coughing or sneezing very much argues in favor of aerosol transmission, which explains how large clusters can be driving the epidemic and how transmission in a situation like that ship can occur. And the mitigation and other strategies become clear: pay attention to clusters and ventilation, universal masks, different policies for indoors and outdoors, etc. 

(tags: zeynep-tufekci coronavirus science covid-19 aerosols transmission clusters)

Tui plane in ‘serious incident’ due to software bug

Holy cow this could have been pretty serious:

A software mistake caused a Tui flight to take off heavier than expected as female passengers using the title “Miss” were classified as children, an investigation has found. The departure from Birmingham airport to Majorca with 187 passengers on board was described as a “serious incident” by the Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB). An update to the airline’s reservation system while its planes were grounded due to the coronavirus pandemic led to 38 passengers on the flight being allocated a child’s “standard weight” of 35kg as opposed to the adult figure of 69kg. This caused the load sheet – produced for the captain to calculate what inputs are needed for take-off – to state that the Boeing 737 was more than 1,200kg lighter than it actually was.

(tags: flight aviation bugs risks software flying tui titles i18n)

critique of the Digital Green Certificate (DGC) proposal

Excellent thread on privacy and security of the proposed Digital Green Certificate for intra-EU safe travel during the COVID-19 pandemic, from Carmela Troncoso. tl;dr:

My conclusion is: this is an immature design of an extremely complex infrastructure with no guaranteed security. The proposed scheme is likely to go down the slippery slope of discrimination and surveillance. I'd like to end reminding my wild thought: Given that fraud is possible anyway, a simple paper-based solution with enough protection to deter cheating may be sufficient to get us through this summer, avoiding long-term consequences.

(tags: surveillance dgc vaccination eu carmela-troncoso travel)

GeyserMC

Allow Minecraft Bedrock Edition clients on mobile devices, Switch, PS4 and XBox to connect to your Java edition Minecraft server. Works particularly nicely as a plugin in a PaperMC server -- will definitely give this a go and see how the kids get on....

(tags: kids minecraft interop bedrock papermc switch games)

Bufferbloat Test by Waveform

Handy link to test bufferbloat effects on your internet connection

(tags: bufferbloat buffering internet networking isps congestion)

Science Brief: SARS-CoV-2 and Surface (Fomite) Transmission for Indoor Community Environments | CDC

Official guidance from the CDC is toning down the "bleach everything!" messaging:

People can be infected with SARS-CoV-2 through contact with surfaces. However, based on available epidemiological data and studies of environmental transmission factors, surface transmission is not the main route by which SARS-CoV-2 spreads, and the risk is considered to be low. The principal mode by which people are infected with SARS-CoV-2 is through exposure to respiratory droplets carrying infectious virus. In most situations, cleaning surfaces using soap or detergent, and not disinfecting, is enough to reduce risk. Disinfection is recommended in indoor community settings where there has been a suspected or confirmed case of COVID-19 within the last 24 hours. The risk of fomite transmission can be reduced by wearing masks consistently and correctly, practicing hand hygiene, cleaning, and taking other measures to maintain healthy facilities.

(tags: covid19 infection pandemic washing fomites disinfection cleaning)

Defer disabling TLS 1.0/1.1 by default?

Colm MacCárthaigh:

The short version is this: we think about 1% of applications and traffic "out there" are still using TLS1.0/TLS1.1. Given where browsers are at, I think this percentage is an under-estimate of the usage on Java applications - I suspect it's even higher there. When we dig in with customers "Why are you still using TLS1.0 or TLS1.1" the most common reasons are legacy appliances and applications. Think of hardware load balancers that were never updated, or can't be, to support TLS1.2 or better. Compliance mandated traffic inspection devices that force TLS1.0 in certain industries are another reason. For these applications, the change will break them, and they'll get a low-level exception. The users can re-enable TLS1.0 and TLS1.1, but they may suffer an outage because they likely weren't expecting a breaking change low in the networking stack.

(tags: colmmacc java jdk tls ssl versioning backwards-compatibility internet)

10 Things I Hate About PostgreSQL | by Rick Branson

oh god this brings back painful memories --

On a particularly large deployment, I eventually had to layer in a second pgbouncer tier. One tier ran on the application servers and another tier on the database servers. Altogether it aggregated connections for around 1 million client processes. Tuning it was 40% dark art, 40% brute force, and 10% pure luck.

(tags: database postgresql coding postgres pgbouncer ops rick-branson)

Covid aerosols: Avoiding coronavirus infection in indoor spaces: don’t breathe other people’s air

Good article on the topic of COVID-19 airborne transmission, with some decent graphics and charts

(tags: coronavirus disease transmission covid-19 aerosols airborne)

Why indoor spaces are still prime COVID hotspots

This is going to be one of the big scandals of COVID-19, when we get around to looking back from a position of safety in the future:

On 28 March 2020, two months after the WHO had declared COVID-19 a global health emergency, the agency broadcast a public-health message on Twitter and Facebook. “FACT: #COVID19 is NOT airborne,” it said, labelling claims to the contrary as misinformation. But evidence quickly established that the virus is transmitted by air, and researchers roundly criticized the agency. The WHO updated its advice on SARS-CoV-2 transmission three months later, acknowledging the possibility that airborne transmission might occur in some community settings. Airborne transmission in “crowded and inadequately ventilated spaces over a prolonged period of time with infected persons cannot be ruled out”, the updated advice says. Yuguo Li, a building environment engineer at the University of Hong Kong, says that he is disappointed it took the WHO and other health authorities so long. “We would have saved a lot of people” if airborne transmission was recognized earlier, he says.

(tags: aerosols transmission airborne who covid-19 misinformation air-quality air)

Kids and COVID-19

Keith Dawson has written up a great summary of a paper by Dr. Zoë Hyde:

The general perception and belief for the last year has been that children are less likely than adults to be infected with SARS-CoV-2. A new paper in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases casts serious doubt on this assumption. The author of that paper, Zoë Hyde of the University of Western Australia, argues that there are two principal reasons why the myth of a lower attack rate in children developed: we don’t test kids much, and they may only be infectious for a very short window of time. The CDC’s stance on kids and Covid seems to be overly sanguine. The metric used in their paper is hos­pit­alization rate. It is true that hospitalization rates for teenagers and younger people are extremely low, but that may not be strongly indicative of infection rate. Kids’ infections are more likely to result in a mild or even asymptomatic case of Covid-19 — about twice as likely as for adults, according to Hyde. Combine this fact with the US bias towards testing only once symptoms appear, and you can see how this could contribute to an undercount of childhood cases. Compounding the dearth of testing is the (fairly robust) finding that, when infected, children may be shedding virus for a shorter time than adults: only two days on average, compared to five days for adults. So kids are more than twice as likely to show up PCR-negative even in the rare instances in which they are tested. Looking at seroprevalence surveys, Hyde cites studies from Italy and Brazil pointing to similar levels of children and adults who have antibodies indicating they have recovered from the disease. (In the Italian study from last year, children’s seroprevalence was even higher than that of the oldest adults, the result of what Hyde calls “survivorship bias” — i.e., the older people who got Covid-19 mostly died.) The hosts on This Week in Virology went over Hyde’s paper in last week’s podcast, TWiV #731. If you can spare the time, listen to 11 minutes’ worth of their discussion beginning at 23:33. One compelling point the TWiV team brought out: children are not immune from long Covid. A UK study found that 12.9% of kids had symptoms weeks after clearing the disease, compared with 22% of adults. The belief that children don’t get infected much should no longer be used as an argument for why schools ought to be reopened.

(tags: kids covid-19 schools safety bias kdawson)

NPHET's secret models

Turns out they accidentally released some charts back in Feb, modelling vaccination/reopening scenarios -- these were probably used in private briefings to the cabinet, and not intended for public consumption (via Andrew Flood)

(tags: nphet secrecy via:andrewflood models covid-19 vaccination)

vaccines performed as an ambient tune

'Pfizer (left channel) & Moderna (right channel) vaccine DNA sequences as ambient MIDI'

(tags: ambient music funny vaccines pfizer moderna dna)

The impact of population-wide rapid antigen testing on SARS-CoV-2 prevalence in Slovakia | Science

Well done, Slovakia -- massive decrease in prevalence after 2 rounds of mass testing.

Slovakia conducted multiple rounds of population-wide rapid antigen testing for SARS-CoV-2 in late 2020, combined with a period of additional contact restrictions. Observed prevalence decreased by 58% (95% CI: 57-58%) within one week in the 45 counties that were subject to two rounds of mass testing, an estimate that remained robust when adjusting for multiple potential confounders. Adjusting for epidemic growth of 4.4% (1.1-6.9%) per day preceding the mass testing campaign, the estimated decrease in prevalence compared to a scenario of unmitigated growth was 70% (67-73%). Modelling indicated that this decrease could not be explained solely by infection control measures, but required the additional impact of isolation and quarantine of household members of those testing positive.

(tags: testing slovakia via:luke-oneill covid-19 screening mass-testing)

Testcontainers

Testcontainers is a Java library that supports JUnit tests, providing lightweight, throwaway instances of common databases, Selenium web browsers, or anything else that can run in a Docker container.

(tags: docker java junit testing containers tests)

Peak map

Lovely little service to draw a map with ridgelines, Joy Division "Unknown Pleasures" style (via Nelson)

(tags: via:nelson ridgelines peak-lines mapping maps elevation peaks joy-division)

Chicken Story

'tl;dr: The time when Microsoft banned my entire country for cheating at Club Bing.' This is a great story -- though it must have been driving the MS Asirra anti-abuse team up the wall. Quite interesting to hear about low-cost/grassroots ways to accomplish some of the tech tasks, e.g. instead of firing up a farm of EC2 instances to crack a Captcha, he farmed out that work using thumbdrives, manually distributed to his friends.

(tags: coding asirra microsoft club-bing bing cheating usb-drives)

The unlikely story of how 'Dundee United' became an insult in Nigeria

'The club’s name is synonymous with idiocy in Africa’s most populous nation. How on earth did this happen?' -- what a great story! (via Ben)

(tags: via:bwalsh football language nigeria scotland dundee dundee-united slang)

Speedify and multipath

Interesting blog post from Nelson about Speedify, a proprietary multipath VPN service to bond two internet links to improve reliability

(tags: speedify multipath vpn vpns internet networking via:nelson)

The human footprints of Ojo Guareña | CENIEH

Amazing well-preserved human footprints from between 4200 and 4600 years ago:

The Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH) has participated in chapter 17, which covers the prints of bare feet preserved in the soft floor sediment of Palomera Cave in the Ojo Guareña Karst Complex (Merindad de Sotoscueva, Burgos, Spain). These footprints, ascribed to traces left by about ten individuals who explored the caves between 4200 and 4600 years ago, were discovered in 1969 by Grupo Espeleológico Edelweiss (GEE) at the Sala y Galerías de las Huellas site, some 1200 m from the entrance to Palomera Cave. The fragility of the footprints and their environment meant it was not possible to study them, and doing so has had to await the development of the new non-invasive teledetection techniques.

(tags: footprints history humans prehistory archaeology spain)

“THE ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES WITH CRYPTOART WILL BE SOLVED SOON, RIGHT?" | Medium

Great essay on the shitfest that is NFTs and cryptoart:

During unprecedented temperature increases, sea level rise, the total loss of permanent sea ice, widespread species extinction, countless severe weather events, and all the other hallmarks of total climate collapse, this kind of gleeful wastefulness is, and I am not being hyperbolic, a crime against humanity.

(tags: art bitcoin capitalism environment green cryptoart nfts ethereum)

Are the COVID-19 vaccines helping people with long COVID?

Prof. Akiko Iwasaki on Twitter: "This video shows that vaccines have helped some people with #longCOVID with their symptoms. While the numbers are still small in some groups, there are encouraging signs (also via @DanielGriffinMD). I present my hypothesis on how vaccines might improve #LongCovid (1/)"

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

How Competitive Matchmaking and Rating Works In Overwatch

Reverse-engineered by an external user, it seems: 'This information below is gathered from sporadic developer posts and videos, salted with my own experience and experiments, various forum threads, and watching streams. Note that since Blizzard does not give exact algorithms, I do have to fill in some gaps, or leave some items unknown.' The matchmaking systems are very complex and a key component of what makes games like Overwatch playable, so this is interesting stuff. (via Shevaun)

(tags: matchmaking overwatch gaming games pvp player-rating)

Amulet version 1

This is great. An amulet is 'a kind of poem that depends on language, code, and luck. To qualify, a poem must satisfy these criteria: Its complete Unicode text is 64 bytes or less; and the hexadecimal SHA-256 hash of the text includes four or more 8s in a row.'

The hash is a cold hexadecimal spew – 9a120001cc88888363fc67c45f2c52447ae64808d497ec9d699dba0d74d72aab – and, like a fingerprint, it doesn’t tell you anything about the entity it identifies. That’s by design, but even so, it feels strange for a value so pivotal to be totally disconnected from the underlying content, especially when it is this value that’s being collected and traded in cryptographic marketplaces. Ostensibly, the hash provides an immutable link between unique cryptographic object and free-floating digital media. The amulet asks: what if we took that link seriously? In a sense, the definition of the SHA-256 hash function created, at a stroke, all amulets of all rarities. Common to mythic, trashy to lovely, they have been hiding in the manifold combinations of language; we just didn’t know we ought to be looking for them. Until now!

(tags: poetry blockchain amulets poems sha-256 crypto)

Nestbox Designs for Birds and Wildlife - BirdWatch Ireland

might put one up this year, to join the swift and bat boxes

(tags: nestbox birds garden home diy)

want to ace an AI-based interview? add a bookshelf in the background

This is comedy gold. Turns out some digital phrenology software used for AI-aided interviewing will produce higher results for candidates who simply have a bookshelf as a background. As Daniel Bilar puts it: it's the "Clever Hans" phenomenon, [...] 'spurious correlations, can occur when there is a feature in the data that is highly correlated with the correct outcome, but is not the cause for the answer being correct.'

(tags: correlation clever-hans funny ai ml interviewing statistics phrenology)

Facebook knew for years ad reach estimates were based on ‘wrong data’ but blocked fixes over revenue impact, per court filing | TechCrunch

Via Colman Reilly -- this really sounds like outright fraudulent behaviour by FB:

The filing also reveals that a Facebook product manager for the “potential reach” tool warned the company was making revenue it “should never have” off of “wrong data”. The unsealed documents pertain to a U.S. class action lawsuit, filed in 2018, which alleges that Facebook deceived advertisers by knowingly including fake and duplicate accounts in a “potential reach” metric. Facebook denies the claim but has acknowledged accuracy issues with the “potential reach” metric as far back as 2016 — and also changed how it worked in 2019. [...] Redacted documents from the lawsuit, reported by the WSJ last year, included the awkward detail that a Facebook employee had asked “how long can we get away with the reach overestimation?”

(tags: fraud facebook ads ad-fraud bots revenue metrics via:colman)

UK ONS data showing school transmission of COVID-19

This is pretty solid real-world data, IMO -- even if they're not testing correctly to find it, it's there in the ONS data

(tags: ons uk covid-19 schools education)

'Classic triad' of symptoms misses positive COVID-19 cases, study finds

Testing people with any of the three ‘classic’ symptoms would have spotted 69% of symptomatic cases, with 46 people testing negative for every person testing positive. However, testing people with any of seven key symptoms - cough, fever, anosmia, fatigue, headache, sore throat and diarrhoea - in the first three days of illness would have detected 96% of symptomatic cases. In this case, for every person with the disease identified, 95 would test negative. Researchers also found users of the Symptom Study App were more likely to select headache and diarrhoea within the first three days of symptoms, and fever during the first seven days, which reflects different timings of symptoms in the disease course. Data from the ZOE app shows that 31% of people who are ill with COVID-19 don’t have any of the triad of symptoms in the early stages of the disease when most infectious.

(tags: covid-19 symptoms medicine diseases)

The Calculus of Service Availability - ACM Queue

working on the maths on outage probabilities.

(tags: sre availability architecture ops outages maths uptime)

SARS-CoV-2 variants in Ireland

via Paddy Mallon on twitter: 'results (pre-print) of an analysis examining SARS-CoV-2 variants in Ireland from hospital cases during 2020. This is the largest analysis of its kind to date in Ireland and provides some important insights into #COVID19Ireland."

1. Effective lockdown leading to low transmission rates can essentially eliminate common #SARS_CoV_2 variants contributing to disease ..BUT.. 2. ..new variants can be introduced (likely [via] travel) that seed new waves of #COVID19. As daily infections fall, hopefully correct implementation of new travel restrictions can help stop future W4 of #COVID19Ireland. We also hope that this data helps people understand how travel contributes to new #COVID19 infections (and new variants) coming into the country.

(tags: variants ireland papers covid-19 transmission)

12 of the Biggest Spreadsheet Fails in History

(via Yoz)

(tags: via:yoz spreadsheets excel fail bugs software)

Imperial College report on premature reopening under vaccination [pdf]

via John McClean: Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team report on premature reopening under different vaccination strategies in the UK. They find significant risk of a large 3rd wave of infections: 'For all gradual easing of NPI scenarios explored, unless vaccination is rapidly ramped up to 3 million doses a week, gradual lifting of NPIs from 1st March to 1st July will lead to a third wave of hospitalisations which will exceed our indicative threshold of 25,000 beds national hospital capacity.'

(tags: uk covid-19 vaccination imperial-college lockdowns epidemiology models)

Variants v. Vaccines - Tomas Pueyo

Excellent article from Tomas Pueyo on the new COVID-19 variants:

In the race between the variants and the vaccines, the variants are the hare and the vaccines are the tortoise. We all know that, in the end, the vaccines will win. Like the tortoise. By this summer, in developed countries, vaccination rates will likely range between 50% and 80%. Since there will also be some herd immunity, and summer means outdoors in the Northern hemisphere, it’s likely that the pandemic will die down some time during the summer. The question is: Will they also be rolled out in time to prevent the new variants from taking over? Now we have our answer: Unfortunately, no.

(tags: tomas-pueyo virology covid-19 sars-cov-2 variants vaccines herd-immunity via:cormac)

Informative Twitter thread on "herd immunity" vs eradication re COVID-19

Adam Kucharski on Twitter: "I've noticed people sometimes use 'herd immunity' to mean 'pathogen fades to zero and stays there' rather than the technical definition (i.e. R drops below 1 because of accumulated immunity, without NPIs). Why is the distinction important? ...."

(tags: immunity herd-immunity eradication covid-19 sars-cov-2 epidemiology epidemics pandemics r-value)

Fast Tar And Rsync Transfer Speed For Linux Backups Using Zstd Compression

I can confirm, zstd is awesome -- must use xxHash more, too.

Newer Tar 1.32+ and Rsync 3.2.3 versions have added Facebook’s zstd compression algorithm and Rsync has added lz4 and xxHash checksum algorithms which give Tar and Rsync a tremendous boost in transfer speed.

(tags: tar rsync backups xxhash hashing performance speed zstd compression lz4)

Cyan4973/xxHash: Extremely fast non-cryptographic hash algorithm

significantly faster than Murmur3 and City32; SSE code is even faster than sequential RAM reads :)

(tags: hashing hash xxhash performance coding speed algorithms)

Herd immunity failed against the South African COVID-19 variant

Kai Kupferschmidt on Twitter: "Natural immunity: This was maybe the worst bit of news buried here. In the placebo group there were previously infected people and people that had not been infected. In the trial both groups ended up getting #covid19 with the same likelihood: 2%."

(tags: herd-immunity covid-19 variants vaccines immunity)

Brazil coronavirus variant crushes Manaus - The Washington Post

Jaysus, this is terrifying.

Galvão, the lead physician in the coronavirus ward at a public hospital in the Brazilian city of Manaus, had been haunted by the wave that crashed last spring. In less than 10 days, it ruptured the city’s bewildered medical system. Sick patients were turned away. The dead were piled into mass graves. So Galvão’s hospital organized contingency plans. Additional beds were reserved, and a detailed schedule for opening them was created. But the new surge, when it came, was different. The virus had mutated, with a suite of alterations that probably made it more transmissible — and perhaps more lethal. Manaus was hit by what scientists call the P.1 variant. This time, it didn’t take 10 days to overwhelm Galvão’s hospital. It took 24 hours.

(tags: p.1 variants covid-19 manaus brazil medicine)

pascalw/kindle-dash: Power efficient dashboard for Kindle 4 NT devices

oh my, I didn't realise you could jailbreak a Kindle and do this! Simple dashboard that HTTP fetches a rendered PNG periodically and refreshes the Kindle screen with it

(tags: e-ink kindle jailbreak hacks dashboards e-paper)

Toxic Positivity

"Toxic Positivity" Is Doing More Harm Than Good:

Call it FONO, or fear of a negative outlook. Also known as “dismissive positivity,” it’s expressed as an overbearing cheerfulness no matter how bad things are, a pep that denies emotional oxygen to anything but a rictus grin.

(tags: happiness psychology culture positivity fono outlook mindset via:johnke)

FixTheMask.com

DIY mask braces, and a shop selling premade ones, from a former Apple designer

(tags: masks covid-19 mask-fitters facemasks)

Badger Seal (Mask Fitter)

What is a mask fitter? A soft, flexible and adjustable “frame” that significantly improves the outer seal of a mask. Why use it? Adding the Badger Seal to a 3-ply disposable mask reduces the effective particle penetration by typically 15x (see the Performance section below). What makes the Badger Seal unique? It’s cheap (< $1 in materials), easy to assemble, made from readily available materials and tools, comfortable, quickly customizable and open source. There are other fitters out there, though none seem to excel in all of these areas.

(tags: masks diy covid-19 badger-seal facemasks aerosols transmission makers)

Association between survival rates in intensive care and the level of ICU occupancy on the day of admission

Recent preprint paper from the UK --

Adjusting for patient-level factors, mortality was higher for admissions during periods of high occupancy (>85% occupancy versus the baseline of 45 to 85%) [OR 1.19 (95% posterior credible interval (PCI): 1.00 to 1.44)]. In contrast, mortality was decreased for admissions during periods of low occupancy (<45% relative to the baseline) [OR 0.75 (95% PCI: 0.62 to 0.89)]. [...] The results of this study suggest that survival rates for patients with COVID-19 in intensive care settings appears to deteriorate as the occupancy of (surge capacity) beds compatible with mechanical ventilation (a proxy for operational pressure), increases. Moreover, this risk doesn’t occur above a specific threshold, but rather appears linear; whereby going from 0% occupancy to 100% occupancy increases risk of mortality by 92% [...]

(tags: risk icu hospitals covid-19 pandemics medicine papers preprints mortality)

6-month consequences of COVID-19 in patients discharged from hospital: a cohort study - The Lancet

A recent preprint from China -- lots of "long COVID" impact, still:

Fatigue or muscle weakness (63%, 1038 of 1655) and sleep difficulties (26%, 437 of 1655) were the most common symptoms. Anxiety or depression was reported among 23% (367 of 1617) of patients. The proportions of median 6-min walking distance less than the lower limit of the normal range were 24% for those at severity scale 3, 22% for severity scale 4, and 29% for severity scale 5–6.

(tags: covid-19 long-covid china preprints papers)

Buying From Amazon UK After Brexit

christ, what a mess

(tags: brexit shipping shopping amazon uk ireland)

restaurants/pubs and Ireland's third wave of COVID-19

Andrew is keeping the receipts on restaurants and pubs reopening being a major driver for Ireland's third wave of COVID-19: Andrew Flood on Twitter: "#Covid19Ireland cases by epi date are pretty suggestive with the sudden 50% jump Dec 14th as if something must have changed radically 10 days earlier on the 4th creating a big additional opportunity for the virus. https://t.co/aos9qb7M6T" "A Christmas season like no other", indeed.

(tags: covid-19 restaurants pubs ireland rai pandemics epidemiology)

Code Review Stack Exchange

I never knew this existed! Code golf galore.

(tags: code-review algorithms coding review refactoring stack-exchange)

Slovakia implemented "ZeroCOVID" in March 2020

I had forgotten about this, but it's a good example: Maros Bonsai on Twitter: 'March - April 2020 in Slovakia. Border controls, mandatory quarantines for travellers from abroad in designated facilities with testing on arrival and before departure from facility. Cases brought to zero. Then abandoned suddenly. Now we have third highest fatality rate globally.' Given that Slovakia has a capital city close to the border with another country, it's an interesting example.

(tags: slovakia zerocovid covid-19 pandemics europe)

Seasonality of Respiratory Viral Infections | Annual Review of Virology

tl;dr: temperature, humidity, vitamin D are all important:

The seasonal cycle of respiratory viral diseases has been widely recognized for thousands of years, as annual epidemics of the common cold and influenza disease hit the human population like clockwork in the winter season in temperate regions. Moreover, epidemics caused by viruses such as severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) and the newly emerging SARS-CoV-2 occur during the winter months. The mechanisms underlying the seasonal nature of respiratory viral infections have been examined and debated for many years. The two major contributing factors are the changes in environmental parameters and human behavior. Studies have revealed the effect of temperature and humidity on respiratory virus stability and transmission rates. More recent research highlights the importance of the environmental factors, especially temperature and humidity, in modulating host intrinsic, innate, and adaptive immune responses to viral infections in the respiratory tract. Here we review evidence of how outdoor and indoor climates are linked to the seasonality of viral respiratory infections. We further discuss determinants of host response in the seasonality of respiratory viruses by highlighting recent studies in the field.

(tags: infection viruses colds flu covid-19 seasonality diseases)

Endemic SARS-CoV-2 will maintain post-pandemic immunity

This article in _Nature Reviews Immunology_ suggests that "SARS-CoV-2 is likely to become the fifth endemic common cold virus, causing largely asymptomatic infections."

Endemic SARS-CoV-2 will ensure maintenance of seroprevalence and mucosal immunity in the population, which will increase over time in new generations. As such, most infected individuals will ultimately endure a largely asymptomatic or mild course of disease, although similarly to the other common cold HCoVs, SARS-CoV-2 may cause fatalities in extremely vulnerable elderly or immunocompromised individuals. SARS-CoV-2 mutants will arise as already reported, but new variants will unlikely differ sufficiently to escape established immunity. Cross-reactive immunity, critically boosted by natural reinfections, should conserve good levels of population protection also against new variants, thereby preventing the occurrence of severe disease, including in the vulnerable. Therefore, we predict that the need for large-scale vaccination programmes will be transient until an endemic state for SARS-CoV-2 is reached.

(tags: sars-cov-2 covid-19 diseases immunology nature)

scaphandre

Electrical power consumption metrology agent. Let scaph dive and bring back the metrics that will help you make your systems and applications more sustainable!

(tags: monitoring metrics power energy sustainability green ops)

Modern Retro Terminals

God, these are gorgeous yokes

(tags: retrocomputing computing art 3d-printing terminals retro 1970s)

Derctuo

Kragen's followup to Dercuano:

a book of notes on various topics, mostly science and engineering with some math, from the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, 02020 CE.  Its primary published form is a gzipped tarball of 9MB of HTML files and sources, although there’s also an inferior PDF version of about 1000 pages for reading on hand computers or printing. It uses a page size slightly smaller than standard for improved readability on hand computers. [....] It contains some novel discoveries, but some of it is just my notes from exploring the enormous feast of knowledge now available on the internet to anyone who takes the time to taste of it, and some other parts are explorations that didn’t pan out — left here only as a cautionary tale to the next explorer. There are lots of notes in here that aren’t “finished” in the usual sense; they end in the middle of a sentence, or say “XXX”, or have a note in them that the foregoing is wrong in such-and-such a way.  But I am publishing the final version of Derctuo today.  I might make future versions of some of these notes, but not of Derctuo itself.

(tags: derctuo kragen notes books reading essays)

A large scale analysis of hundreds of in-memory cache clusters at Twitter | USENIX

Modern web services use in-memory caching extensively to increase throughput and reduce latency. There have been several workload analyses of production systems that have fueled research in improving the effectiveness of in-memory caching systems. However, the coverage is still sparse considering the wide spectrum of industrial cache use cases. In this work, we significantly further the understanding of real-world cache workloads by collecting production traces from 153 in-memory cache clusters at Twitter, sifting through over 80 TB of data, and sometimes interpreting the workloads in the context of the business logic behind them. We perform a comprehensive analysis to characterize cache workloads based on traffic pattern, time-to-live (TTL), popularity distribution, and size distribution. A fine-grained view of different workloads uncover the diversity of use cases: many are far more write-heavy or more skewed than previously shown and some display unique temporal patterns. We also observe that TTL is an important and sometimes defining parameter of cache working sets. Our simulations show that ideal replacement strategy in production caches can be surprising, for example, FIFO works the best for a large number of workloads.

(tags: caching memcached memory twitter usenix via:marc-brooker)

Is there a tool that tells you which IAM actions to allow if you give it an API operation? : aws

'For example, say I want to allow an IAM role to aws s3 sync to a given S3 bucket. Is there a tool that will tell me the list of actions to permit on the bucket, if I input that command to the tool?' tl;dr: nope there is not. Good list of links to related tools to ameliorate the IAM shitfest though

(tags: iam aws permissions security apis)

The PHIA probability yardstick

the UK government's official terminology to clearly describe the probability of events occurring, ranging from "REMOTE CHANCE" to "ALMOST CERTAIN"

(tags: chance probability terminology words uk phia odds)

Mason, Thomas Holmes (1877-1958)

My illustrious great-grandfather:

Mason was a keen cyclist; his tours through the Irish countryside as a youth, as well as his interest in photography from the age of twelve (he would take over 20,000 pictures by his death), led him to the study of the natural world and Irish archaeology. This culminated in his publication of The islands of Ireland: their scenery, people, life and antiquities (1936), visually recording the minutiae of Irish folk life and the natural beauty of the island landscapes. Mason did not restrict his interests to any one discipline and was involved in a multifarious range of organisations: member of the Dublin Field Club, one-time president of the Irish Society for the Protection of Birds, member of the Dublin Zoological Council (serving as honorary vice-president from 1952), member and president (1926) of the Photography Society of Ireland, member of the Geographical Society of Ireland, and member of the National Monuments Council as well as president (1951) of An Taisce. He was also president of the Dublin Mercantile Association (1923) and the Dublin Rotary Club and a fellow of the RSAI. He was elected MRIA (1931) and contributed numerous articles to the Academy's Transactions and Proceedings on subjects ranging from the history of the optical profession in Dublin to Celtic archaeology. Mason provided meteorological information to Irish newspapers from his home observatory at 39 Kenilworth Square before the establishment of the Irish meteorological service (1936). His other interests included Irish moths as well as Irish lantern slides, on which he published Catalogue of photographic lantern slides of Irish scenery and antiquities [n.d.] and Catalogue of lantern slides of Irish antiquities (1928). Mason was the seventh member of his family to be made an honorary freeman of the city of Dublin (29 April 1903), one of the last such hereditary appointments. His wife Margaret Evelyn, whom he married c.1909, was a fellow presbyterian. Three of his four sons succeeded him in the family business, which celebrated its bicentenary in 1980 and traded into the third millennium. He died on 12 February 1958, leaving his library to the Old Dublin Society and TCD.

(tags: family thomas-mason history ireland archaeology photography)

Asymptomatic COVID-19 cases may account for more than half of all transmission

In this decision analytical model assessing multiple scenarios for the infectious period and the proportion of transmission from individuals who never have COVID-19 symptoms, transmission from asymptomatic individuals was estimated to account for more than half of all transmission. Meaning: The findings of this study suggest that the identification and isolation of persons with symptomatic COVID-19 alone will not control the ongoing spread of SARS-CoV-2.

(tags: epidemiology covid-19 transmission sars-cov-2 papers jama asymptomatic symptoms)

Practical tips for if you test positive for COVID-19

good video from MedCram ("Evidence based updates on COVID-19 and CME for clinicians.") -- I don't need it -- yet -- but bookmarking just in case...

Practical tips from Dr. Seheult if you test positive for COVID-19: - Use of a pulse oximeter at home; - Who gets monoclonals? - Immune boosting vitamins: D, NAC, C, Quercetin, Zinc; - The data on sleep (& melatonin); - Data on core temp. elevation (Sauna etc)

(tags: medcram medicine covid-19 treatment immunity)

Reduction in risk from inward travel with/without a negative COVID-19 PCR test

good graph from Paul Dempsey. tl;dr: the effect is pretty tiny; a negative PCR test within 72 hours will not significantly improve infection rates from inbound travel.

(tags: covid-19 travel flying medicine sars-cov-2 pcr twitter graphs)

How to interact with journalists

A joint work between Quinn Norton and Alexandre Dulaunoy on how to interact with journalists. The presentation was given at OHM2013:

You've reached out, or they've reached out to you. It could be everything from a formal request to PR to someone who sat down beside you in a bar. It could be a 30 second breaking news piece, or a book 10 years in the making. Knowing a little bit about the media can make the whole exchange more fruitful and useful not only for you and the journalist, but a public that hasn't had a lot of good information about our world.

(tags: howto journalists newspapers pr news media journalism)

Derek Lowe on the "delayed second dose" vaccination idea

The delayed-dose idea had been floated before, and I wasn’t exactly an early adopter, but the more contagious [B. 1.1.7] version of the virus has made me reconsider. But as I was going on about on Twitter the other day, we have to be clear that this is, in fact, an experiment on the population. It seems likely that delaying these doses will likely work out OK. But we don’t have much evidence either way. I’m in favor of doing it, but I’m not happy about ending up in that position. I don’t trust immunology to always work the way that I think it should work, but it seems that we have little choice.

(tags: vaccines b117 covid-19 vaccination immunology derek-lowe medicine)

the current Irish COVID-19 spike starts from the date of pubs reopening

Andrew Flood on Twitter:

NPHET slide from tonights press conference appears to show almost 2,000 cases by December 23rd when shown by collection date. And escalation from 10 days after restaurant pubs opened on Dec 4th is unmistakable.

(tags: pubs ireland covid-19 via:andrew-flood nphet cases)

Derek Lowe on the UK authorities' plan to spread out the two doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine

'The UK government is thus running a real-time experiment on its population in the hopes that the benefits of a first dose of its available vaccines (AZ/Oxford, Pfizer/BioNTech) will outweigh the risks of then messing with the dosing schedule. The horrible part is that there’s a good case to be made that running this big experiment (and taking on the risk of lowering the overall effect of the two-dose schedule) is still the right decision. Things are bad. But don’t pretend it’s not an experiment, or that we know what the outcome will be. This is a desperation move, and it’s a terrible thing that such a strategy has made it to the top of the list. I hope it works.'

(tags: vaccines vaccination covid-19 uk dosing)

I'm a consultant in infectious diseases. 'Long Covid' is anything but a mild illness | Long Covid | The Guardian

With the excitement of the Covid vaccine’s arrival, it may be easy to forget and ignore those of us with “long Covid”, who are struggling to reclaim our previous, pre-viral lives and continue to live with debilitating symptoms. Even when the NHS has managed the herculean task of vaccinating the nation, Covid-19 and the new mutant variants of the virus will continue to circulate, leaving more people at risk of long Covid. Data from a King’s College London study in September suggested as many as 60,000 people in the UK could be affected, but the latest statistics from the Office for National Statistics suggest it could be much higher.

(tags: via:sdempsey long-covid covid-19 health medicine)

Characterizing Long COVID in an International Cohort: 7 Months of Symptoms and Their Impact | medRxiv

'From a cohort of 3762 Long COVID respondents, probability of symptoms lasting >35 weeks was 91.8%'; 'Most frequent lingering symptoms reported after 6 months were: fatigue 77.7%, post-exertional malaise* 72.2% and cognitive dysfunction 55.4%.'

(tags: long-covid covid-19 health medicine papers)

The carbon footprint sham

BP created the concept of a 'carbon footprint' as a devious, manipulative PR tactic:

A few years after BP began promoting the “carbon footprint,” MIT researchers calculated the carbon emissions for “a homeless person who ate in soup kitchens and slept in homeless shelters" in the U.S. That destitute individual will still indirectly emit some 8.5 tons of carbon dioxide each year. “Even a homeless person living in a fossil fuel powered society has an unsustainably high carbon footprint,” said Stanford’s Franta. “As long as fossil fuels are the basis for the energy system, you could never have a sustainable carbon footprint. You simply can’t do it.”

(tags: carbon co2 bp emissions climate-change pr)

Reverse Engineering the source code of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine - Articles

This is really fascinating. Detailed teardown of how the Pfizer vaccine is coded

(tags: biology rna science covid-19 sars-cov-2 vaccines biontech)

"Glutamate plumes" as a potential origin for migraines

Mice that get migraines have helped scientists in the US to uncover what might be going on in the more than 10 per cent of us who suffer from the condition. What K.C. Brennan at the University of Utah has done is to make a genetic change in his mice, so they mimic the make-up of one group of humans who suffer regular migraines. By watching the brains of these animals, they’ve found that, periodically, surges appear of an excitatory nerve signal called glutamate. This, they speculate, causes overstimulation of the nearby nerve cells, starting the neurological equivalent of a Mexican wave that ripples across the brain. As it does so, it activates pain pathways that cause the ensuing headache.

(tags: glutamate neurotransmitters neurology brains health medicine mice migraines headaches)

Wall Mounted Family Calendar and Dashboard with a Raspberry Pi and cheap monitor

nice HOWTO. might try this out as a project, particularly if I can get it working with an e-ink screen

(tags: dashboards family home raspberry-pi calendar screens)

Rocky Flats

Absolutely bananas Twitter thread -- it is frankly miraculous that they didn't have multiple criticality incidents on their hands. TIL about "infinity rooms":

'They made plutonium "pits" for nuclear bombs, either from new plutonium sources or reprocess parts of old bombs, from 1957 until 1988. In 1988, the EPA investigated the site, shrieked in horror, and shut the place down. the DOE stuck their fingers in their ears and went LA LA LA DON'T WANNA DEAL WITH IT for about five years afterward, but finally started cleanup in '94. Among the tasks: cleaning 13 "infinity rooms" - areas so radioactive that plant instruments went off the scale, and were just sealed in place. One had been welded shut and abandoned as far back as '72. One had been piled full of contaminated equipment and filled with concrete. US Gov: your task is finding the 1,100 pounds of plutonium that somehow became lost in ductwork, drums and industrial gloveboxes. The amount of missing plutonium at Rocky Flats is enough to build 150 Nagasaki strength bombs. "Occasionally you'd feel a drip on your head and you'd be contaminated with plutonium nitrate," DeMaiori said."'

(tags: infinity-rooms horror military-industrial-complex us-politics nuclear nuclear-weapons plutonium environment history bombs epa doe)

How to Send SMS Messages with Google Sheets and your Android Phone - Digital Inspiration

Particularly impressive demo of MIT AppInventor, which lets you build an Android app with block-based GUI programming

(tags: appinventor apps android mit coding blocks gui sms google-sheets texting)

Long-term Covid-19 effects: The many strange symptoms, explained - Vox

Almost a year into the pandemic, there have not yet been thorough, large-scale studies to determine the true prevalence of long Covid. But preliminary research suggests that somewhere between 10 percent and 88 percent of Covid-19 patients will experience at least one symptom for many weeks or months. Some of these can be life-altering; one study found that 50 percent of non-ICU patients reported a significant change to their cognitive functioning. Doctors at the seminar said they were surprised by the scope of long Covid and its potential socioeconomic impacts. “This is a phenomenon that is really quite real and quite extensive,” said Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who spoke at the event.

(tags: long-covid covid-19 disease health symptoms)

Cycling Injury Risk in London: Impacts of Road Characteristics and Infrastructure | Published in Findings

'protected cycle infrastructure reduced odds of injury by 40-65% in the morning commute, whereas advisory lanes *increased* injury odds by 34%'

(tags: cycling infrastructure roads driving safety london)

webPOISONCONTROL Triage

Very useful (if you have kids) -- US poison control has a web-based tool with a "this is not a real case" for when you're trying to figure out risk levels of kids getting access to potentially toxic substances. (via r/parenting)

(tags: parenting kids children poison danger risk poisons poison-control triage)

hexops/dockerfile

'Dockerfile best-practices for writing production-worthy Docker images.' (via r/programming)

(tags: docker best-practices advice tips containers ops)

The SolarWinds compromise is massive

This list is mind-boggling:

SolarWinds says it has over 300,000 customers including: -more than 425 of the U.S. Fortune 500 -all ten of the top ten US telecommunications companies -all five branches of the U.S. military -all five of the top five U.S. accounting firms -the Pentagon -the State Department -the National Security Agency -the Department of Justice -The White House.

(tags: security fail solarwinds hacks)

Cryptographic Right Answers

A really solid list of good crypto choices for modern code

(tags: cryptography advice tips programming security crypto coding)

Updated thread on children & COVID-19, summarising recent research

from Dr. Zoe Hyde, on Twitter. Summary: further evidence children and adults are equally susceptible, and similarly likely to transmit. Schools have been a driver of the second wave in Europe, Canada, and elsewhere.

(tags: schools covid-19 transmission kids children research twitter)

A technical deep dive into processing €5 million in donations in 2 hours using Cloudflare Workers

'A deep dive into the serverless architecture behind the Late Late Toy Show donation platform and the challenges we faced in putting it together in just a couple of weeks.' Nice demand-spike-oriented architecture using CloudFlare Workers. Pity the Stripe backend hit its rate limits though!

(tags: stripe architecture cloudflare serverless demand-spikes spikes load)

Amazon, Amex to Fund Software Developers in New GitHub Program - Bloomberg

'Amazon.com Inc., American Express Co., Daimler AG and Stripe Inc. are among those joining a new GitHub program that will let companies directly fund open-source projects and software developers that are key to their businesses.' interesting

(tags: github funding open-source oss work software)

Ventilation | CDC

This is significant -- the CDC is _finally_ detailing mitigation strategies against airborne SARS-CoV-2.

When indoors, ventilation mitigation strategies help to offset the absence of natural wind and reduce the concentration of viral particles in the indoor air. The lower the concentration, the less likely some of those viral particles can be inhaled into your lungs; contact your eyes, nose, and mouth; or fall out of the air to accumulate on surfaces. Protective ventilation practices and interventions can reduce the airborne concentration, which reduces the overall viral dose to occupants. Below is a list of ventilation interventions that can help reduce the concentration of virus particles in the air, such as SARS-CoV-2. They represent a list of “tools in the mitigation toolbox,” each of which can be effective on their own.  Implementing multiple tools at the same time is consistent with CDC mitigation strategies and increases overall effectiveness. These ventilation interventions can reduce the risk of exposure to the virus and reduce the spread of disease, but they will not eliminate risk completely.

(tags: covid-19 advice cdc best-practices ventilation air air-quality sars-cov-2)

dropbox/setsum

Via Robert Escriva - 'the set-based checksum algorithm we made. Add items in any order and still get the same checksum. Union two independently created sets and get the same result as having done it as one iteration.'

(tags: checksums hashing dropbox sums summarising algorithms streaming)

GCEasy.io

'Java Garbage collection log analysis made easy: Industry's first machine learning guided Garbage collection log analysis tool. GCeasy has in-built intelligence to auto-detect problems in the JVM & Android GC logs and recommend solutions to it.' Looks pretty simple to use, decent free tier. Haven't tried it yet though....

(tags: java gc tuning performance jvm logs ops)

Amazon.com: MaBeee MB-3002WB Smart Battery Controller for AA-Battery-Powered Devices: Home Audio & Theater

This is genius. a Bluetooth-controllable power supply in the form factor of an AA battery.

MaBeee, the smart IoT battery case, makes your devices powered by AA batteries controllable from your smartphone. Inputs to your smartphone such as shakes, tilt, and voice enable you to get moving, control the speed and stop motor-powered products. For example, MaBeee in an electric toothbrush and the timer function of "MaBeee Control app" tell you how long you should brush your teeth. MaBeee is also suitable for wire LED lights for Christmas and party. MaBeee is an easy-to-use product. You can use MaBeee just putting in the product instead of an AA battery (You need to put an AAA battery into MaBeee). MaBeee Control App (or MaBeee Racing App) allows you to connect your phone to your battery-powered device.

(tags: iot hacks batteries bluetooth mabeee power aa aaa)

The effectiveness of population-wide, rapid antigen test based screening in reducing SARS-CoV-2 infection prevalence in Slovakia | CMMID Repository

'Conclusions: Mass testing combined with other control measures was highly successful in rapidly reducing SARS-CoV-2 infection prevalence in Slovakia.'

(tags: slovakia rapid-testing antigen-testing testing sars-cov-2 covid-19 pandemics screening)

Hammerspoon

'a tool for powerful automation of OS X. At its core, Hammerspoon is just a bridge between the operating system and a Lua scripting engine. What gives Hammerspoon its power is a set of extensions that expose specific pieces of system functionality, to the user. You can write Lua code that interacts with OS X APIs for applications, windows, mouse pointers, filesystem objects, audio devices, batteries, screens, low-level keyboard/mouse events, clipboards, location services, wifi, and more.' (via Tony Finch)

(tags: via:fanf automation osx mac lua scripting hammerspoon)

matryer/bitbar

'Put the output from any script or program in your Mac OS X Menu Bar' -- via @natfriedman

(tags: osx mac hacking scripts menu-bar desktop usability)

The Gig Economy Is White People Discovering Servants | by Indi Samarajiva

This century the vaunted American middle class has bottomed out and the place has started to look more like the ‘developing’ world, with a definite underclass. However, lacking generations of feudal tradition and clinging to the myth of being a classless society, Americans couldn’t just bring servants into their homes. So venture capitalists did it for them. Uber and Postmates and DoorDash and all of these ‘gig’ economy companies simply created a giant pool of servants that you could call on demand. That’s all they really do. The gig economy is just a giant collection of servants.

(tags: inequality economics servants america gig-economy class uber postmates doordash)

COVID-19 Rapid Antigen Test from MöLab - Box of 10 Tests - Mybio

Interesting -- 10 antigen tests for EUR135. "Point-Of-Care Covid-19 antigen test that reveals if a person is currently infected with SARS-CoV-2 virus", "a rapid in vitro immunochromatographic assay for the qualitative detection of SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid protein antigen." Accuracy figures are decent: relative sensitivity of 97.3%, relative specificity of > 99.9%. Provides a result after 15 minutes. (Obligatory caveat: "for professional use only")

(tags: rapid-tests covid-19 sars-cov-2 testing antigen-tests)

SLA & Uptime calculator

aka, 'How much downtime corresponds to 99.9% uptime'. Great utility, plug in your number and see the results

(tags: uptime sla service downtime outages calculators tools)

How io_uring and eBPF Will Revolutionize Programming in Linux

Nice writeup of how io_uring works, and how it improves performance

(tags: io_uring linux coding libc io performance)

Moving Quicksilver into production

Incredible effort by Cloudflare, moving from Kyoto Tycoon to a new, self-built, replicated K/V store called Quicksilver built atop LMDB. Also good to see positive things written about RocksDB, too

(tags: rocksdb lmdb cloudflare kyoto-tycoon quicksilver ops storage key-value-storage replication architecture)

Gnome launched into space in a real-life reenactment of a Half Life 2 achievement

A new achievement called "Gnome Alone" was added to [Half-Life 2: Episode Two, Half-Life: Alyx, and Left 4 Dead 2], and the description sums up exactly what's going on. "If you are reading this achievement, Gabe Newell has successfully launched Gnome Chompski into space. If you did not also receive the achievement 'Manufacturing Ascent', Newell has abandoned his plans to shoot Noam Chomsky into space." ...There's an Amelie-inspired achievement for picking up the gnome at the start of [Half Life 2: Episode Two] and bringing it all the way to the rocket at White Forest Base, an arduous task involving lots of item juggling and repeated cramming of the gnome into a crevice in Episode Two's muscle car. Similar challenges made their way into Alyx and Left 4 Dead 2 as well.

(tags: garden-gnomes gnomes funny noam-chomsky achievements games half-life history gabe-newell rockets space)

Home Assistant Data Science

Great feature:

The Home Assistant Data Science portal is your one stop shop to get started exploring the data of your home. We will teach you about the data that Home Assistant tracks for you and we'll get you up and running with Jupyter Lab, a data science environment, to explore your own data.

(tags: docs data home-assistant iot data-science graphs o11y home han)

Excel error causes 1,500 deaths

Excerpted from _Does contact tracing work? Quasi-experimental evidence from an Excel error in England_: 'we find 120,000 COVID-19 cases & 1,500 deaths linked to those cases that were not referred to contact tracing in time. This represents ~20% of all new COVID19 cases [in England] during weeks 39-44.' Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/fetzert/status/1331139902965227520

(tags: excel fail public-health contact-tracing england nhs covid-19 deaths papers)

misleading reliance on pointing to "household transmission" for COVID-19 in Ireland

This article is a perfect example. It's headlined: "Virus spread: How a single household transmission led to 46 Covid-19 cases"

A team of public health specialists in the midlands traced how a case of household transmission led to 26 cases of Covid-19 in a manufacturing plant and a further 20 cases in other households, a nursing home and a school. The first case, or “index case” they became aware of was a woman who worked in a manufacturing plant. Household transmission of the virus occurred when a person she was living with, who had acquired Covid in a pub, passed the virus to her.

(tags: pubs restaurants covid-19 safety epidemiology ireland contact-tracing public-health households transmission)

What Facebook Fed the Baby Boomers - The New York Times

The feed goes on like this — an infinite scroll of content without context. Touching family moments are interspersed with Bible quotes that look like Hallmark cards, hyperpartisan fearmongering and conspiratorial misinformation. Mr. Young’s news feed is, in a word, a nightmare. I know because I spent the last three weeks living inside it.

(tags: grim-meathook-future facebook newsfeed america nytimes)

Home Assistant Data Science

Great feature:

The Home Assistant Data Science portal is your one stop shop to get started exploring the data of your home. We will teach you about the data that Home Assistant tracks for you and we'll get you up and running with Jupyter Lab, a data science environment, to explore your own data.

(tags: docs data home-assistant iot data-science graphs o11y home han)

Excel error causes 1,500 deaths

Excerpted from _Does contact tracing work? Quasi-experimental evidence from an Excel error in England_: 'we find 120,000 COVID-19 cases & 1,500 deaths linked to those cases that were not referred to contact tracing in time. This represents ~20% of all new COVID19 cases [in England] during weeks 39-44.' Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/fetzert/status/1331139902965227520

(tags: excel fail public-health contact-tracing england nhs covid-19 deaths papers)

I made a fully playable Map of Europe in Minecraft, 1:230 scale, using NASA and ESA satellite data

This is _incredible_.

To make this fully playable Minecraft map of Europe I used the program QGIS to analyze and adapt the NASA Elevation data, GEBCO Bathymetry data, ESA Land Cover data and WWF HydroSHEDS River data. The layers were then exported and worked on in the program WorldPainter to make the Minecraft world. The whole process took me 1 month, but this was the result of years of researching and mapmaking.

(tags: qgis nasa gebco esa mapping maps europe ireland minecraft)

Pavement's "Harness Your Hopes" And Spotify's Algorithm - Stereogum

Songs emerging from obscure back-catalogue status thanks to glitches in the "Autoplay" algorithm:

Spotify appears to have the capacity to create “hits” without even realizing it. When it comes to Galaxie 500, “there’s just no way this would have happened before this flip in the Spotify plays,” Krukowksi notes. “And now we’re becoming identified as a band with that song, because if they learn about the band through Spotify, that’s what they’re hearing. So it becomes, like, our emblem.”

(tags: technology music spotify streaming galaxie-500 pavement autoplay)

OSHA issues ventilation guidance to workplaces for airborne SARS-CoV-2

OSHA issues ventilation guidance to workplaces for airborne #SARSCoV2: - HVAC systems should be fully functional; - Prevent personal fans from blowing air from one worker to another; - Use HVAC filters w/MERV rating 13 or higher; - Increase HVAC's outdoor air intake; - Open windows/sources of fresh air; - Be sure exhaust air isn't pulled back into the building from HVAC air intakes or open windows; - Use portable HEPA fan/filtration to increase clean air; - Restrooms fans should operate max capacity, and remain on.

(tags: aerosols covid-19 airborne diseases sars-cov-2 transmission air fans hvac air-conditioning workplaces work)

Can’t open apps on macOS: an OCSP disaster waiting to happen | CryptoHack Blog

Finally, a good take on Apple's OCSP crapfest over the past weekend.

If Apple’s OCSP check was built to soft-fail [which is apparently the case], then why did apps hang when the OCSP Responder was down? Probably because this was actually a different failure case: the OCSP Responder was not completely down, it was performing badly. Due to the load added by millions of users worldwide upgrading to macOS “Big Sur”, Apple’s servers slowed to a crawl, and although they weren’t properly answering OCSP queries, they were working just enough that the soft-fail didn’t trigger.

By adding several mundane failure modes to the verification process, OCSP spoils any cryptographic elegance the code signing and verifying process has. While OCSP is also widely used for TLS certificates on the internet, the large number of PKI certificate authorities and relaxed attitude of browsers means that failures are less catastrophic. Moreover, people are accustomed to seeing websites become unavailable from time to time, but they don’t expect the same from apps on their own devices. macOS users were alarmed at how their apps could become collateral damage for an infrastructure issue at Apple. Yet this was an inevitable outcome arising from the fact that certificate verification depends on external infrastructure, and no infrastructure is 100% reliable. Scott Helme also has concerns about the power that Certificate Authorities gain when certification revocation actually works effectively. Even if you aren’t bothered about the potential for censorship, there will be occasional mistakes and these must be weighed against the security benefits. As one developer discovered when Apple mistakenly revoked his certificate, the risk of working within a locked down platform is that you may get locked out.

(tags: apple ocsp fail fail-safe hystrix osx macos)

Risk Assessment and Management of COVID-19 Among Travelers Arriving at Designated U.S. Airports, January 17–September 13, 2020 | MMWR

MMWR from the CDC on passenger entry screening at US airports (via Anthony Staines):

Passenger entry screening was resource-intensive with low yield of laboratory-diagnosed COVID-19 cases (one case per 85,000 travelers screened). Contact information was missing for a substantial proportion of screened travelers in the absence of manual data collection. What are the implications for public health practice? Symptom-based screening programs are ineffective because of the nonspecific clinical presentation of COVID-19 and asymptomatic cases. Reducing COVID-19 importation has transitioned to enhancing communication with travelers to promote recommended preventive measures, strengthening response capacity at ports of entry, and encouraging predeparture and postarrival testing. Collection of contact information from international air passengers before arrival would facilitate timely postarrival management when indicated.

(tags: screening travel air air-travel airports via:astaines cdc mmwr covid-19)

Inky Impression

Wow, this looks spectacular!

5.7", 600 x 448 pixel 7 colour electronic paper (ePaper / eInk / EPD) display for Raspberry Pi. plenty of screen real estate for text or graphics. The low power consumption e-paper display is crisp and readable in bright sunlight and the image will persist when unpowered. In a first for the Inky series, we've also added four tactile buttons on the back, so you can control what's on the screen without the need for extra hardware. But the best bit is that this time you get seven whole colours to play with, which means this Inky is very suitable for displaying graphics, drawings or art - we've found pixel art, panels from comics and retro video game art look particularly good.

(tags: e-ink displays raspberry-pi hacking video devices e-paper)

Charles proxy for web scraping

wow, Charles is nifty. must give it a go next time I'm scraping something

(tags: scraping mitm charles web http proxies web-scraping automation)

Risk Assessment and Management of COVID-19 Among Travelers Arriving at Designated U.S. Airports, January 17–September 13, 2020 | MMWR

MMWR from the CDC on passenger entry screening at US airports (via Anthony Staines):

Passenger entry screening was resource-intensive with low yield of laboratory-diagnosed COVID-19 cases (one case per 85,000 travelers screened). Contact information was missing for a substantial proportion of screened travelers in the absence of manual data collection. What are the implications for public health practice? Symptom-based screening programs are ineffective because of the nonspecific clinical presentation of COVID-19 and asymptomatic cases. Reducing COVID-19 importation has transitioned to enhancing communication with travelers to promote recommended preventive measures, strengthening response capacity at ports of entry, and encouraging predeparture and postarrival testing. Collection of contact information from international air passengers before arrival would facilitate timely postarrival management when indicated.

(tags: screening travel air air-travel airports via:astaines cdc mmwr covid-19)

Covid Winter is Coming. Could Humidifiers Help? | WIRED

Add humidity to the list:

after three months of data crunching, they found that the most powerful correlation between national numbers of daily new coronavirus cases and daily Covid-19 deaths was indoor relative humidity. Even controlling for dozens of other factors, the data showed that as indoor relative humidity went up during the summer months in the northern hemisphere, deaths plummeted. In the southern hemisphere, the opposite was true—as humidity fell during those nations’ winter months, deaths began to climb. “It’s so powerful, it’s crazy,” says [Stephanie] Taylor. That work has not yet been published. But Taylor believes it’s the strongest evidence yet that humidity needs to be as much a part of the conversation about containing Covid-19 as is discussion of ventilation, masks, and hand hygiene. “It’s hard to prioritize one intervention over another; we need all of them,” says Taylor. “Humidifiers aren’t a replacement for masks or social distancing or ventilation. But when you have more humidification, it enhances all these other things we’re already doing.” At higher humidities, respiratory particles grow faster and fall to the ground earlier, so there’s a better chance that staying 6 feet apart from infectious people really will dilute how many bits of their aerosolized virus you might happen to inhale. In a recent modeling study, Japanese researchers found that air with 30 percent relative humidity can carry more than twice the number of infectious aerosols, compared to air with relative humidity levels of 60 percent or higher. That also means masks are more likely to block more of the particles coming out of people’s noses and mouths, because they tend to be better at trapping bigger particles than smaller ones. And it means that air purifiers (even cheap, DIY ones) will filter out a larger proportion of potentially infectious particles.

(tags: covid-19 aerosols humidity humidifiers air air-quality health infection)

50 beautiful Irish crafts to buy, and the people who make them

so many good things here

(tags: crafts art ireland irish gifts xmas)

'The saga about the 'Swedish strategy' as told by the public health agency of Sweden'

Overlaid on the cases-per-million graph over time. Bookmarking for future reference, for the next time some ratlicker says we need to follow Sweden

(tags: sweden covid-19 herd-immunity pandemics)