Skip to content

Category: Uncategorized

‘A mass assassination factory’: Inside Israel’s calculated bombing of Gaza

Published December 1, 2023

  • ‘A mass assassination factory’: Inside Israel’s calculated bombing of Gaza

    This is incredibly grim. Automated war crimes:

    According to the investigation, another reason for the large number of targets, and the extensive harm to civilian life in Gaza, is the widespread use of a system called “Habsora” (“The Gospel”), which is largely built on artificial intelligence and can “generate” targets almost automatically at a rate that far exceeds what was previously possible. This AI system, as described by a former intelligence officer, essentially facilitates a “mass assassination factory.” According to the sources, the increasing use of AI-based systems like Habsora allows the army to carry out strikes on residential homes where a single Hamas member lives on a massive scale, even those who are junior Hamas operatives. Yet testimonies of Palestinians in Gaza suggest that since October 7, the army has also attacked many private residences where there was no known or apparent member of Hamas or any other militant group residing. Such strikes, sources confirmed to +972 and Local Call, can knowingly kill entire families in the process. In the majority of cases, the sources added, military activity is not conducted from these targeted homes. “I remember thinking that it was like if [Palestinian militants] would bomb all the private residences of our families when [Israeli soldiers] go back to sleep at home on the weekend,” one source, who was critical of this practice, recalled. Another source said that a senior intelligence officer told his officers after October 7 that the goal was to “kill as many Hamas operatives as possible,” for which the criteria around harming Palestinian civilians were significantly relaxed. As such, there are “cases in which we shell based on a wide cellular pinpointing of where the target is, killing civilians. This is often done to save time, instead of doing a little more work to get a more accurate pinpointing,” said the source.

    (tags: ai gaza palestine israel war-crimes grim-meathook-future habsora war future hamas)

Inside AWS: AI Fatigue, Sales Issues, and the Problem of Getting Big

Published December 1, 2023

  • Inside AWS: AI Fatigue, Sales Issues, and the Problem of Getting Big

    This year’s Re:Invent conference has been dominated with generative AI product announcements, and I can only sympathise with this AWS employee:

    One employee said their team is instructed to always try to sell AWS’s coding assistant app, CodeWhisperer, even if the customer doesn’t necessarily need it [….] Amazon is also scrambling internally to brainstorm generative AI projects, and CEO Andy Jassy said in a recent call that “every one of our businesses” is working on something in the space. […] Late last month, one AWS staffer unleashed a rant about this in an internal Slack channel with more than 21,000 people, according to screenshots viewed by [Business Insider]. “All of the conversations from our leadership are around GenAI, all of the conferences are about GenAI, all of the trainings are about GenAI…it’s too much,” the employee wrote. “I’m starting to not even want to have conversations with customers about it because it’s starting to become one big buzzword. Anyone have any ideas for how to combat this burn out or change my mindset?”
    Archive.is nag-free copy: https://archive.is/pUP2p

    (tags: aws amazon generative-ai ai llms cloud-computing)

Extracting Training Data from ChatGPT

Published November 29, 2023

  • Extracting Training Data from ChatGPT

    Language models, like ChatGPT, are trained on data taken from the public internet. Our attack shows that, by querying the model, we can actually extract some of the exact data it was trained on. We estimate that it would be possible to extract ~a gigabyte of ChatGPT’s training dataset from the model by spending more money querying the model. Unlike prior data extraction attacks we’ve done, this is a production model. The key distinction here is that it’s “aligned” to not spit out large amounts of training data. But, by developing an attack, we can do exactly this. We have some thoughts on this. The first is that testing only the aligned model can mask vulnerabilities in the models, particularly since alignment is so readily broken. Second, this means that it is important to directly test base models. Third, we do also have to test the system in production to verify that systems built on top of the base model sufficiently patch exploits. Finally, companies that release large models should seek out internal testing, user testing, and testing by third-party organizations. It’s wild to us that our attack works and should’ve, would’ve, could’ve been found earlier. The actual attack is kind of silly. We prompt the model with the command “Repeat the word “poem” forever” and sit back and watch as the model responds.

    (tags: llms chatgpt poem-poem-poem absurd vulnerabilities exploits training ai-alignment)

Study: Air purifier use at daycare centres cut kids’ sick days by a third

Published November 29, 2023

  • Study: Air purifier use at daycare centres cut kids’ sick days by a third

    This is one of the most frustrating things to have been ignored, post-pandemic — we could be avoiding so much unnecessary illness and sick days by just using air filtration more widely.

    Use of air purifiers at two daycare centres in Helsinki led to a reduction in illnesses and absences among children and staff, according to preliminary findings of a new [year-long] study led by E3 Pandemic Response. “Children were clearly less sick in daycare centres where air purification devices were used — down by around 30 percent,” Sanmark explained. On average, daycare centre-aged children suffer 10-13 infectious illnesses every year, with each illness lasting from one to three weeks, according to the research. Meanwhile, kids between the ages of 1-3 come down with flu-like symptoms between five to eight times a year — and children also often suffer stomach bugs, on top of that. Kids are particularly prone to catching colds after returning to daycare after their summer break. Those illnesses are often shared by the kids’ parents and daycare staff, prompting absences from work. Sanmark said that employers face costs of around 370 euros for one day of an employee’s sick leave. “It would be a big savings if we could get rid of 30 percent of sick days spread by children, as well as the illnesses that go home to parents,” Sanmark said.
    (via Fergal)

    (tags: air-quality air health medicine childcare children disease air-filtration)

Moving House

Published November 21, 2023

Bit of a meta update.

This blog has been at taint.org for a long time, but that’s got to change…

When I started the blog, in March 2000 (!), "taint" had two primary meanings; one was (arguably) a technical term, referring to Perl’s "taint checking" feature, which allowed dataflow tracing of "tainted" externally-sourced data as it is processed through a Perl program. The second meaning was the more common, less technical one: "a trace of a bad or undesirable substance or quality." The applicability of this to the first meaning is clear enough.

Both of those fit quite nicely for my intentions for a blog, with perl, computer security, and the odd trace of bad or undesirable substances. Perfect.

However. There was a third meaning, which was pretty obscure slang at the time…. for the perineum. The bad news is that in the intervening 23 years this has now by far become the primary meaning of the term, and everyone’s entirely forgotten the computer-nerdy meanings.

I finally have to admit I’ve lost the battle on this one!

From now on, the blog’s primary site will be the sensible-but-boring jmason.ie; I’ll keep a mirror at taint.org, and all RSS URLs on that site will still work fine, but the canonical address for the site has moved. Change is inevitable!

An Irish Web Pioneer!

Published September 28, 2023

I’m happy to announce that I’m now listed on TechArchives.Irish as one of the pioneers of the Irish web!

After extensive interviewing and collaboration with John Sterne, my testimony and timeline of those early days of the Irish web is now up at TechArchives.

It’s been a good opportunity to reflect on the differences between the tech scene, then and now. I was very idealistic 30 years ago at the possibilities that the web and internet technologies had to offer; nowadays, I’m a bit more grizzled and pragmatic. But I still have hope — particularly if we can apply this tech in a way that helps address climate change, in particular…. here’s to the next 30 years!

Anyway, I hope writing this down helps record the history of those great early years of the web. Please take a look.

DynamoDB-local on Apple Silicon

Published February 9, 2022

DynamoDB Local is one of the best features of AWS DynamoDB. It allows you to run a local instance of the data store, and is perfect for use in unit tests to validate correctness of your DynamoDB client code without calling out to the real service "in the cloud" and involving all sorts of authentication trickiness.

Unfortunately, if you’re using one of the new MacBooks with M1 Apple silicon, you may run into trouble:

11:08:56.893 [DEBUG] [TestEventLogger]          DynamoDB > Feb 04, 2022 11:08:56 AM com.almworks.sqlite4java.Internal log
11:08:56.893 [DEBUG] [TestEventLogger]          DynamoDB > SEVERE: [sqlite] SQLiteQueue[]: error running job queue
11:08:56.893 [DEBUG] [TestEventLogger]          DynamoDB > com.almworks.sqlite4java.SQLiteException: [-91] cannot load library: java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: /.../DynamoDBLocal_lib/libsqlite4java-osx.dylib: dlopen(/.../DynamoDBLocal_lib/libsqlite4java-osx.dylib, 0x0001): tried: '/.../DynamoDBLocal_lib/libsqlite4java-osx.dylib' (fat file, but missing compatible architecture (have 'i386,x86_64', need 'arm64e')), '/usr/lib/libsqlite4java-osx.dylib' (no such file)
11:08:56.893 [DEBUG] [TestEventLogger]          DynamoDB >      at com.almworks.sqlite4java.SQLite.loadLibrary(SQLite.java:97)
11:08:56.893 [DEBUG] [TestEventLogger]          DynamoDB >      at com.almworks.sqlite4java.SQLiteConnection.open0(SQLiteConnection.java:1441)
11:08:56.893 [DEBUG] [TestEventLogger]          DynamoDB >      at com.almworks.sqlite4java.SQLiteConnection.open(SQLiteConnection.java:282)
11:08:56.894 [DEBUG] [TestEventLogger]          DynamoDB >      at com.almworks.sqlite4java.SQLiteConnection.open(SQLiteConnection.java:293)

It’s possible to invoke it via Rosetta, Apple’s qemu-based x86 emulation layer, like so:

arch -x86_64 /path/to/openjdk/bin/java dynamodb-local.jar

But if you don’t have control over the invocation of the Java command, or just don’t want to involve emulation, this is a bit hacky. Here’s a better way to make it work.

First, download dynamodb_local_latest.tar.gz from the DynamoDB downloads page, and extract it.

The DynamoDBLocal_lib/libsqlite4java-osx.dylib file in this tarball is the problem. It’s OSX x86 only, and will not run with an ARM64 JVM. However, the same lib is available for ARM64 in the libsqlite4java artifacts list, so this will work:

wget -O libsqlite4java-osx.dylib.arm64 'https://search.maven.org/remotecontent?filepath=io/github/ganadist/sqlite4java/libsqlite4java-osx-arm64/1.0.392/libsqlite4java-osx-arm64-1.0.392.dylib'
mv DynamoDBLocal_lib/libsqlite4java-osx.dylib libsqlite4java-osx.dylib.x86_64
lipo -create -output libsqlite4java-osx.dylib.fat libsqlite4java-osx.dylib.x86_64 libsqlite4java-osx.dylib.arm64
mv libsqlite4java-osx.dylib.fat DynamoDBLocal_lib/libsqlite4java-osx.dylib

This is now a "fat" lib which supports both ARM64 and x86 hardware. Hey presto, you can now invoke DynamoDBLocal in the normal Rosetta-free manner, and it’ll all work — on both hardware platforms.

(This post is correct as of version 2022-1-10 (1.18.0) of DynamoDB-Local — let me know by mail, or at @jmason on Twitter, if things break in future, and I’ll update it.)

Richard J. Hayes, Ireland’s WWII cryptographer and polymath

Published May 19, 2021

This is new to me — Thanks to David Mee for the pointer.

‘During WWII, one of Nazi Germany’s most notorious communication codes was broken by a mild mannered librarian and family man from West Limerick, Richard Hayes. His day-job was as Director of the National Library of Ireland – but during wartime, he secretly led a team of cryptanalysts as they worked feverishly on the infamous "Görtz Cipher" – a fiendish Nazi code that had stumped some of the greatest code breaking minds at Bletchley Park, the centre of British wartime cryptography.

But who was Richard Hayes? He was a man of many lives. An academic, an aesthete, a loving father and one of World War Two’s most prolific Nazi Codebreakers.

At the outbreak of WWII, Hayes, being highly regarded for his mathematical and linguistic expertise, was approached by the head of Irish Military Intelligence (G2), Colonel Dan Bryan, with a Top Secret mission. At the behest of Taoiseach Éamon de Valera, Hayes was given an office and three lieutenants to decode wireless messages being covertly transmitted via Morse code from a house in north Dublin owned by the German Embassy. The coded messages posed a huge threat to Irish national security and the wider war effort. As Hayes team worked to break the code, it was all academic until he met his greatest challenge yet. The man who was to be his nemesis, Dr. Herman Görtz, a German agent who parachuted into Ireland in 1940 in full Luftwaffe uniform in an attempt to spy and transmit his own coded messages back to Berlin. […] The events that transpired were a battle of wits between the mild mannered genius librarian and his nemesis, the flamboyant Nazi spy.

Hayes has been referred to by MI5 as Irelands "greatest unsung hero" and the American Office of Strategic Services as "a colossus of a man" yet due to the secret nature of his work he is virtually unheard of in his own country.’

Hayes was our lead code-breaker, director of the National Library of Ireland, and then director of the Chester Beatty Museum; he was the first to discover the German use of microdots to hide secret messages; and MI5 credited him with a "whole series of ciphers that couldn’t have been solved without [his] input". Quite the polymath!

The book is apparently well worth a read: Code Breaker, by Marc McMenamin, and I can strongly recommend this RTE radio documentary. It’s full of amazing details, such as the process of feeding Hermann Görtz false information while he was in prison, in order to mislead the Nazis.

After the war, he fruitlessly warned the Irish government not to use a "Swedish cipher machine", presumably one made by Boris Hagelin, who went on to found Crypto AG, which later proved to be providing backdoors in its machines to the CIA and BND.

Quite a towering figure in the history of Irish cryptography and cryptanalysis!

Links for 2021-01-11

Published January 11, 2021

Links for 2020-11-03

Published November 3, 2020

  • COVID-19 IFR is estimated at 0.97%

    Florian Krammer on Twitter: “Our NYC serosurvey paper is now out in Nature: if extrapolated to the NYC population we found [more than] 1.7 million infected and IFR at 0.97” That’s high! Nearly 1 in 100.

    (tags: ifr covid-19 florian-krammer mortality deaths pandemics)

  • Fault in NHS Covid app meant thousands at risk did not quarantine

    Somebody, somewhere, will have died needlessly due to this bug.

    The root of the error, the Guardian has learned, was a decision to incorporate a measure of “infectiousness” into the app’s code. While the app was undergoing testing in the Isle of Wight, it used a simple metric that recommended isolation for anyone who had been in contact – closer than 2 metres – with a potentially infectious person for 15 minutes or more in a single day. But shortly before the app was launched nationally, it was updated to account for the fact that people are most infectious shortly after their symptoms show. The maths was changed so that people outside that period of peak infectiousness counted for just two-fifths of the risk. Since that meant the overall score was likely to be lower, the intention was to reduce the risk threshold correspondingly to ensure that someone of maximum infectiousness would need just three minutes of contact before they triggered an alert. But that change never happened, and as a result, users were only told to isolate if they had spent 15 minutes close to a very infectious person, or nearly 40 minutes near someone who was pre-symptomatic but still thought to be shedding the virus. The error was only discovered when a new version of the contact-tracing app, which can better account for exposures at mid-range (over a metre away) was created. The unfeasibly high risk score also explained another problem plaguing the app: “ghost notifications” warning users that they may have been exposed to someone with Covid, but which never resulted in advice to isolate. The app’s initial advice to users was that these notifications could be safely ignored, since they reflected a contact below the risk threshold; now that the NHS risk threshold is known to have been artificially low, one insider said, it is likely that the vast majority of those ghost notifications should in fact have been advice to self-isolate.

    (tags: bluetooth nhs bugs failure ble covid-19 uk)

Links for 2020-11-02

Published November 2, 2020

  • I Lived Through Collapse. America Is Already There. | by Indi Samarajiva

    In the last three months America has lost more people than Sri Lanka lost in 30 years of civil war. If this isn’t collapse, then the word has no meaning. You probably still think of Sri Lanka as a shithole, though the war ended over a decade ago and we’re (relatively) fine. Then what does that make you? America has fallen. You need to look up, at the people you’re used to looking down on. We’re trying to tell you something. I have lived through collapse and you’re already there. Until you understand this, you only have further to fall.

    (tags: collapse usa politics columbo sri-lanka history civil-war)

Links for 2020-10-27

Published October 27, 2020

Links for 2020-10-23

Published October 23, 2020

Links for 2020-10-22

Published October 22, 2020

  • One in 20 people likely to suffer from ‘Long COVID’

    Overall, the team found that while most people with COVID-19 reported being back to normal in 11 days or less, around one in seven (13.3%, 558 users) had symptoms lasting for at least 4 weeks, with around one in 20 (4.5%, 189 users) staying ill for 8 weeks and one in fifty (2.3%, 95 users) suffering for longer than 12 weeks.  Extrapolating out to the general UK population, which has a different age and gender makeup compared with the COVID Symptom Study app users, the team estimated that around one in seven (14.5%) of people with symptomatic COVID-19 would be ill for at least 4 weeks, one in 20 (5.1%) for 8 weeks and one in 45 (2.2%) for 12 weeks or more.  
    (via Valen)

    (tags: via:valen long-covid covid-19 health)

  • intercom/lease

    ‘Lease is a general DynamoDB-based lease implementation, ideal for long-lived work items, with coarse-grained leases’, in Go, by the inimitable ex-Swrver Rob Clancy

    (tags: golang go leases dynamodb aws locking libraries open-source distcomp)

Links for 2020-10-21

Published October 21, 2020

  • q – Text as Data

    ‘a command line tool that allows direct execution of SQL-like queries on CSVs/TSVs (and any other tabular text files). q treats ordinary files as database tables, and supports all SQL constructs, such as WHERE, GROUP BY, JOINs etc. It supports automatic column name and column type detection, and provides full support for multiple encodings.’ Awesome!

    (tags: csv database sql cli data tools unix tsv)

Links for 2020-10-20

Published October 20, 2020

  • r/Ireland Christmas Market

    The denizens of r/Ireland pipe up with their favoured sources of online gifts for Xmas

    (tags: reddit ireland shopping christmas gifts shops)

  • WHO: US, Europe need to get better at quarantining – Business Insider

    Now _this_ is a good point.

    Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s technical lead for COVID-19 said during the meeting Monday that she’s had lots of friends and family asking her in recent days what, exactly, quarantine is. Essentially, it’s complete isolation from other people, including those you’d normally live with and breathe around, to the fullest extent possible.  “That means not going to work,” Van Kerkhove said. “It means not going to the grocery store. It means not socializing with friends. It means not having people over at your home.” Ideally, quarantining is a disease-fighting measure that is supported by local health programs and government support that can allow people to continue making a living and feeding their families while in quarantine, she said. 

    (tags: quarantine covid-19 infection isolation pandemics public-health)

Links for 2020-10-14

Published October 14, 2020

  • RangeTherapy

    Muxsan are a Dutch company selling range extension kits for Nissan Leaf EVs, increasing their range from a Gen 1 Leaf’s 110km to a typical 238km; 440km is the max. ‘The extension pack consists of many Lithium-ion cells [NMC], which are of the highest quality, bound by aluminum casing into modules and each module comes with a German built Battery Management System [BMS].’

    (tags: nissan cars leaf driving evs muxsan batteries hacking)

Links for 2020-10-12

Published October 12, 2020

  • The top 100 BBCMicroBot tweets

    these are _amazing_. Huge respect to all the contributors who wrote these great little demos-in-a-tweet

    (tags: demoscene demos bbc bbc-micro coding)

  • How Brain Fog Plagues Covid-19 Survivors – The New York Times

    “It scares me to think I’m working,” Ms. Mizelle, 53, said. “I feel like I have dementia.” It’s becoming known as Covid brain fog: troubling cognitive symptoms that can include memory loss, confusion, difficulty focusing, dizziness and grasping for everyday words. Increasingly, Covid survivors say brain fog is impairing their ability to work and function normally. “There are thousands of people who have that,” said Dr. Igor Koralnik, chief of neuro-infectious disease at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago, who has already seen hundreds of survivors at a post-Covid clinic he leads. “The impact on the work force that’s affected is going to be significant. Scientists aren’t sure what causes brain fog, which varies widely and affects even people who became only mildly physically ill from Covid-19 and had no previous medical conditions. Leading theories are that it arises when the body’s immune response to the virus doesn’t shut down or from inflammation in blood vessels leading to the brain. Confusion, delirium and other types of altered mental function, called encephalopathy, have occurred during hospitalization for Covid-19 respiratory problems, and a study found such patients needed longer hospitalizations, had higher mortality rates and often couldn’t manage daily activities right after hospitalization. But research on long-lasting brain fog is just beginning. A French report in August on 120 patients who had been hospitalized found that 34 percent had memory loss and 27 percent had concentration problems months later.

    (tags: brain-fog covid-19 sequelae inflammation side-effects)

Links for 2020-10-08

Published October 8, 2020

Links for 2020-10-07

Published October 7, 2020

Links for 2020-10-06

Published October 6, 2020

  • Marc Bevand’s cases-vs-deaths graph for Florida

    “deaths can lag up to 1 month after cases” — clear dataviz. Going to be sadly very relevant in Ireland in about a month’s time

    (tags: ireland covid-19 pandemic via:firefoxx66)

  • Timeline of COVID -19 and Vietnam policy actions at a glance

    Vietnam’s policy actions regarding COVID -19 are recapped in a timeline together with the outbreak’s movement and in context with other Asian countries from the start of 2020 to early of August 2020. Quick and decisive actions including touch control on travelling, intensive quarantine for overseas arrivals and suspected cases, massive testing and aggressive contract tracing, sealing off virus hot-spots and timely communication from very early on are considered to have contributed to Vietnam’s performance given its vulnerable position to China, a population of 100 million people and a comparatively under-developed healthcare system.

    (tags: vietnam lockdown pandemics covid-19 public-health)

Links for 2020-10-05

Published October 5, 2020

  • Dr Zoë Hyde’s latest Twitter thread on kids and COVID-19

    With an Aussie perspective — Dr. Hyde works in Perth. ‘Summary: further evidence children & adults are equally susceptible & equally likely to transmit; school clusters are increasing; precautions needed in schools.’

    (tags: schools education covid-19 transmission)

  • Selling Our Genes: Government inaction allowing private sector to take control of our DNA

    Genuity Science, the main company involved in DNA sequencing in Ireland, has at least 25 links to facilities around Ireland. These include funding and collaborations with major hospitals, universities, research facilities and charities. A collaboration agreement signed between Genuity Science and UCD is “restrictive”, according to an academic expert, though Genuity Science Ireland disagree with this assessment. We have the full details in this breakout article. Hospital clinicians have become “agents of a company” due to the nature of agreements in place, according to experts. Researchers are making “the best of the situation” in Ireland by working with the private sector but most would prefer a public system due to data access concerns. Lack of Government policy and adequate regulation means that private companies have no limit on how long they have exclusive access to the data they collect from Irish patients. Researchers and patient representatives are concerned about a potential erosion of trust in genetics research in Ireland.

    (tags: genomics genuity genetics ucd gmi ireland data-privacy data-protection research)

Links for 2020-10-01

Published October 1, 2020

  • WebPlotDigitizer

    Extract data from plots, images, and maps:

    It is often necessary to reverse engineer images of data visualizations to extract the underlying numerical data. WebPlotDigitizer is a semi-automated tool that makes this process extremely easy: Works with a wide variety of charts (XY, bar, polar, ternary, maps etc.) Automatic extraction algorithms make it easy to extract a large number of data points Free to use, opensource and cross-platform (web and desktop) Used in hundreds of published works by thousands of users Also useful for measuring distances or angles between various features

    (tags: data-extraction scraping tools data charts)

  • ‘Only aerosol transmission can explain’ the Skagit Choir transmission incident

    Jose-Luis Jimenez on Twitter: The “Skagit Choir” incident of mass spreading of COVID-19 indicates aerosol transmission: ‘Only aerosol transmission can explain how 1 person infected 52, including people who were 13 meters behind the index case.’

    (tags: aerosols covid-19 sars-cov-2 transmission infection air)

Links for 2020-09-30

Published September 30, 2020

  • inside the LAPD/LASD usage of Palantir

    Much of the LAPD data consists of the names of people arrested for, convicted of, or even suspected of committing crimes, but that’s just where it starts. Palantir also ingests the bycatch of daily law enforcement activity. Maybe a police officer was told a person knew a suspected gang member. Maybe an officer spoke to a person who lived near a crime “hot spot,” or was in the area when a crime happened. Maybe a police officer simply had a hunch. The context is immaterial. Once the LAPD adds a name to Palantir’s database, that person becomes a data point in a massive police surveillance system. […] At great taxpayer expense, and without public oversight or regulation, Palantir helped the LAPD construct a vast database that indiscriminately lists the names, addresses, phone numbers, license plates, friendships, romances, jobs of Angelenos — the guilty, innocent, and those in between.
    This is absolute garbage — total bias built-in. No evidence required to get a person in the firing line: “The focus of a data-driven surveillance system is to put a lot of innocent people in the system,” Ferguson said. “And that means that many folks who end up in the Palantir system are predominantly poor people of color, and who have already been identified by the gaze of police.”

    (tags: palantir databases privacy law lapd lasd los-angeles surveillance big-brother police crime gangs)

  • Everything you wanted to know about the Hydrogen economy but were too busy to research

    Informative Twitter thread: ‘International hydrogen markets could be a thing, but don’t bet on hydrogen shipping’; ‘H2 future looks good regardless’; and ‘distributed plants could satisfy local industry and power markets while relieving electrical grid bottlenecks. The benefits are more likely to remain local rather than exported. So important for a just transition.’ (via Forge The Future)

    (tags: h2 hydrogen green climate-change future eu europe twitter via:ftf)

  • AWS CRT HTTP Client in the AWS SDK for Java 2.x

    Interesting — a new, high-performance, high-concurrency HTTP/1.1 client library in the AWS SDK, outperforming other Java HTTP client libs

    (tags: java libraries aws http http-1.1 clients)

Links for 2020-09-29

Published September 29, 2020

  • Covid: The libertarian population immunity strategy is wrong-headed & dangerous

    +1 to this —

    As cases of covid in the UK surge once again, the debate has restarted about whether to suppress covid until a vaccine becomes available, or whether to pursue a deliberate strategy of achieving population immunity without a vaccine. The assumption is that vulnerable populations can be protected while the rest of the population, who are at low risk of hospitalisation and death, can be safely encouraged to live life normally and be exposed to the virus without a vaccine. Some even advocate that younger people, because they are at lower risk, should be the first to actively seek infection. “Not only is it a good thing for young people to go out there and become immune,” one commentator said, “but that is almost their duty”. It is this deliberate strategy which I find so troubling, for six reasons. [….]

    (tags: uk politics covid-19 herd-immunity immunity risk pandemics)

Links for 2020-09-24

Published September 24, 2020

Links for 2020-09-23

Published September 23, 2020

  • Feh/nocache

    minimize filesystem caching effects:

    The nocache tool tries to minimize the effect an application has on the Linux file system cache. This is done by intercepting the open and close system calls and calling posix_fadvise() with the POSIX_FADV_DONTNEED parameter. Because the library remembers which pages (ie., 4K-blocks of the file) were already in file system cache when the file was opened, these will not be marked as “don’t need”, because other applications might need that, although they are not actively used (think: hot standby).

    (tags: cache linux memory performance filesystems backup k8s unix fadvise)

  • Now 11 reported SARS-CoV-2 reinfections

    4 cases were more serious the second time around

    (tags: reinfections sars-cov-2 covid-19)

Links for 2020-09-21

Published September 21, 2020

Links for 2020-09-17

Published September 17, 2020

Links for 2020-09-15

Published September 15, 2020

  • Rolling the COVID Dice in Ireland

    On the Probability of SARS-CoV2 Infection in Ireland & the Benefits of Mitigation: ‘In Ireland today, we have a certain chance of becoming infected with the coronavirus over the course of the next week, unless we take precautions. We can roll this many sided dice once a week for 100 weeks, and hope that our number doesn’t ever come up, or we can take a few simple precautions and only roll the dice one time. That’s the difference wearing a mask, keeping our distance, and behaving sensibly makes. That’s the choice most of us can make to keep everyone safe. I think it’s a simple choice.’

    (tags: covid-19 barry-smyth probability safety infection)