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MIT Researchers Designed a Congestion-Control Scheme to Reduce Delays in Wireless Networks
by jim bell 02 May '20

02 May '20

https://scitechdaily.com/mit-researchers-designed-a-congestion-control-sche…

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corona
by \0xDynamite 02 May '20

02 May '20

Does anyone else feel like America has become the weakest society in history? How does anyone know that the virus isn't giving a chance to evolve? That it's lethality comes from having some bit of wisdom from the biosphere that humans either need to learn or die from? marcos

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Photographer Takes Pics Of People In Public From 2 Perspectives And It Shows How Easily The Media Can Manipulate Reality
by Cecilia Tanaka 02 May '20

02 May '20

Photographer Takes Pics Of People In Public From 2 Perspectives And It Shows How Easily The Media Can Manipulate Reality: < https://www.boredpanda.com/different-perspective-telephoto-lens-vs-wide-ang… >

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Get Russian
by Zenaan Harkness 02 May '20

02 May '20

Caitlin Johnstone nails it again :) Get Russian https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/get-russian-a6a822006da6 ... Get so Russian that Rachel Maddow spits your name like it’s poison. tl;dr: it's short and sweet ;)

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Interesting Engineering: Scientists Discover New Way to Get Quantum Computing to Work at Room Temperature
by jim bell 01 May '20

01 May '20

Interesting Engineering: Scientists Discover New Way to Get Quantum Computing to Work at Room Temperature. https://interestingengineering.com/scientists-discover-new-way-to-get-quant…

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.org
by rnblvfcguhube＠420blaze.it 01 May '20

01 May '20

Looks like we made it!!! https://savedotorg.org/

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Papers Please!: Un-Liberation Tech - Stasi Papers Regimes Rollout re Coronavirus
by grarpamp 01 May '20

01 May '20

Relavant videos below... https://papersplease.org/wp/2020/03/23/in-a-pandemic-freedom-is-the-first-c… We’ve seen before — notably after September 11, 2001 — how a crisis can result in damage to rights and freedoms that persists long after the initial cause of public panic. Some advocates for restrictions on individuals and our movements and activities will exploit any crisis to ratchet the mechanisms of surveillance and control tighter. Other officials, including many who mean well but are too traumatized to recognize the long-term consequences of their short-term actions, will advocate “temporary” restrictions on individual rights and freedoms that almost inevitably become permanent. We don’t yet know what the cost in lost lives of the coronavirus pandemic will be. But we can already see the outlines of some of its potential cost in lost civil liberties. Earlier in the pandemic, we reminded our readers of the risks of abuse of overbroad quarantine powers. But that’s only one aspect of the problem. The basic methodology of control of travel and movement is that compulsory identification of travelers enables surveillance (tracking and logging) of travel and movement histories, and control of future movements based on individuals’ identities and the histories and other databases of personal information linked to those identities. Already, changes to policies and practices related to (1) identification, (2) surveillance, and (3) control of travelers have all been proposed in response to the coronavirus pandemic: Read More https://papersplease.org/wp/2020/04/14/dare-county-wants-to-see-your-papers/ Dare County, North Carolina, has established checkpoints on all roads crossing the county borders, at which travelers must show their papers to enter the county. A Federal lawsuit has been filed, seeking to have this enjoined as unconstitutional (at least as applied to the named plaintiffs). But as discussed below, the lawsuit barely scratches the surface of the issues this raises. Why is Dare County doing this? What’s wrong with this ID requirement? https://papersplease.org/wp/2020/04/29/no-cellphone-not-at-address-on-your-… The press release threatens that anyone who arrives without a working cellphone, charged, with service and coverage in the arrival area at the airport, will be arrested: An airport representative will collect the two forms and begin verifying their information. First, they will call their mobile phone number to confirm it rings right in front of them. If it does not ring, the person may have listed inaccurate information and is asked to verify the number. If the person refuses to provide a phone number that can be answered on the spot, law enforcement is contacted and they are subject to citation and arrest. https://papersplease.org/wp/2020/04/06/airline-passenger-data-and-covid-19/ https://papersplease.org/wp/2020/04/20/covid-19-the-real-id-act-and-id-to-f… https://papersplease.org/wp/2019/04/04/tsa-plans-to-put-new-lying-signs-in-… The supposed basis for the government’s demands for airlines to collect and pass on more information about travelers has shifted from “security” to “health.” But what’s happening is just another chapter in a long-running story. Understanding that story requires a deep dive into twenty years of history of airline and government collaboration and conflict over collection and use of data about travelers. Here’s some of the factual and historical context that the Times overlooked: https://papersplease.org/wp/2020/03/30/known-traveler-digital-identity-ktdi/ KTDI is a “surveillance-by-design” vision for tracking and control of travelers more dystopian than anything we have seen before. KTDI would use a blockchain-based distributed ledger to bind together, through an app on a traveler’s mobile device, all of the following data: Biometrics (initially facial images, possibly also fingerprints, etc.) Government-issued ID credentials (passport number, etc.) Travel history including logs of border crossings, hotel stays, and possibly also car rentals and/or other events Purchase logs and possibly bank account information and/or other financial and transaction records Pre-crime predictive “risk assessment” and profiling scores generated at each “intervention” point before and during each trip or transaction Videos... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQistTMRf-0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pc5DBUK1K8M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ltvDU8iEwc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tX8JzSpUumY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOLWJyDGzt8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZI2WhogYEJc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JN4q2swvab8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qHLflTNTIU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJwXL7vx5Q4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlsqBK3-vhk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS13kFWQIYM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAd99oq526M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RbzBF2DvjQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEo5l4BMdJY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7vIGWfBX0A

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NSA Shills List Of Insecure Conference Tools
by grarpamp 01 May '20

01 May '20

https://media.defense.gov/2020/Apr/24/2002288652/-1/-1/0/CSI-SELECTING-AND-… Not a single fully opensource nontracking nonsharing noncollecting e2e encrypted decentral p2p app on the list. Seems someone doesn't want you communicating privately. If you can't run opensource code privately with no one else involved but your peers on your own infra, you can't trust it... yet another example people failing to take sage, propping the junk govcorpware... https://gizmodo.com/zoom-accused-of-misrepresenting-security-measures-in-ne… Consider... #OpenSource on #OpenHW from #OpenFabs All of which you support with #Cryptocurrency Create full circle ecosystem, deprecate the rest.

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Militia, law, impressment, guns, history
by grarpamp 01 May '20

01 May '20

> such implicit arguments have frequently been cited by (mostly > liberal?) debaters, and much of the clueless populace, lacking any sort of > legal education, accepts them without apparent question.) The Anti-Gun crowd generally avoids quoting, analyzing and debating law and its historical context and reasons. This is because it simply does not support their Anti-Gun position. And because sidestepping needing to voice or contend with such things makes their agenda easier. It's also relavant that most of them have never spent an afternoon or year learning the sport, defense, hunting, law, comparative statistics, etc. Let alone been exposed to or explored larger free thought subjects such as... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Declaration_of_Independence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_secession https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_rights_and_legal_rights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntaryism > Now, a state might hypothetically have a LAW requiring a militia > member to respond to a call. But that law would not necessarily > be Constitutional These sorts of "laws", including "mandatory service", taxes, etc are all immoral and against natural law... forcing somone to take an action, slavery, whatever you want others to do, them having done nothing to you. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscientious_objector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impressment Took till 1995 for even the UN to begin to understand that conscription and impressment are wrong.

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Chinese Covid-19 strains, study released - mutations -- [gilmay97@gmail.com: South China Morning Post]
by Zenaan Harkness 30 Apr '20

30 Apr '20

This an interesting virus, 'at's fer surely! ----- Forwarded message from Gil May <gilmay97(a)gmail.com> ----- From: Gil May <gilmay97(a)gmail.com> Date: Thu, 30 Apr 2020 15:11:39 +1000 Subject: South China Morning Post *Coronavirus’s* ability to mutate has been vastly underestimated, and mutations affect deadliness of strains, Chinese study finds By Stephen Chen April 21, 2020 A team led by Professor Li Lanjuan has studied how the novel coronavirus mutates and possible implications for the pandemic. Photo: EPA-EFE A new study by one of China’s top scientists has found the ability of the new coronavirus <https://www.scmp.com/coronavirus> to mutate has been vastly underestimated and different strains may account for different impacts of the disease in various parts of the world. Professor Li Lanjuan and her colleagues from Zhejiang University found within a small pool of patients many mutations not previously reported. These mutations included changes so rare that scientists had never considered they might occur. They also confirmed for the first time with laboratory evidence that certain mutations could create strains deadlier <https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3079879/chinas-initial-coro…> than others. “Sars-CoV-2 has acquired mutations capable of substantially changing its pathogenicity,” Li and her collaborators wrote in a non-peer reviewed paper released on preprint service medRxiv.org on Sunday. Li’s study provided the first hard evidence that mutation could affect how severely the virus caused disease or damage in its host. Li took an unusual approach to investigate the virus mutation. She analysed the viral strains isolated from 11 randomly chosen Covid-19 patients from Hangzhou in the eastern province of Zhejiang, and then tested how efficiently they could infect and kill cells. The deadliest mutations in the Zhejiang patients had also been found in most patients across Europe, while the milder strains were the predominant varieties found in parts of the United States, such as Washington state, according to their paper. A separate study had found that New York strains had been imported from Europe. The death rate in New York was similar to that in many European countries, if not worse. But the weaker mutation did not mean a lower risk for everybody, according to Li’s study. In Zhejiang, two patients in their 30s and 50s who contracted the weaker strain became severely ill. Although both survived in the end, the elder patient needed treatment in an intensive care unit. This finding could shed light on differences in regional mortality. The pandemic’s infection and death rates vary from one country to another, and many explanations have been proposed. Genetic scientists had noticed that the dominant strains in different geographic regions were inherently different. Some researchers suspected the varying mortality rates could, in part, be caused by mutations but they had no direct proof. The issue was further complicated because survival rates depended on many factors, such as age, underlying health conditions or even blood type. In hospitals, Covid-19 has been treated as one disease and patients have received the same treatment regardless of the strain they have. Li and her colleagues suggested that defining mutations in a region might determine actions to fight the virus. “Drug and vaccine development, while urgent, need to take the impact of these accumulating mutations … into account to avoid potential pitfalls,” they said. Li was the first scientist to propose the Wuhan lockdown, <https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3078189/build-coronavirus-l…> according to state media reports. The government followed her advice and in late January, the city of more than 11 million residents was shut down overnight. The sample size in this most recent study was remarkably small. Other studies tracking the virus mutation usually involved hundreds, or even thousands, of strains. Li’s team detected more than 30 mutations. Among them 19 mutations – or about 60 per cent – were new. They found some of these mutations could lead to functional changes in the virus’ spike protein, a unique structure over the viral envelope enabling the coronavirus to bind with human cells. Computer simulation predicted that these mutations would increase its infectivity. To verify the theory, Li and colleagues infected cells with strains carrying different mutations. The most aggressive strains could generate 270 times as much viral load as the weakest type. These strains also killed the cells the fastest. It was an unexpected result from fewer than a dozen patients, “indicating that the true diversity of the viral strains is still largely underappreciated,” Li wrote in the paper. Professor Li Lanjuan is a leading Chinese epidemiologist. Photo: Xinhua The mutations were genes different from the earliest strain isolated in Wuhan, where the virus was first detected in late December last year. The coronavirus changes at an average speed of about one mutation per month. By Monday, more than 10,000 strains had been sequenced by scientists around the globe, containing more than 4,300 mutations, according to the China National Centre for Bioinformation. Most of these samples, though, were sequenced by a standard approach that could generate a result quickly. The genes were read just once, for instance, and there was room for mistakes. Li’s team used a more sophisticated method known as ultra-deep sequencing. Each building block of the virus genome was read more than 100 times, allowing the researchers to see changes that could have been overlooked by the conventional approach. The researchers also found three consecutive changes – known as tri-nucleotide mutations – in a 60-year-old patient, which was a rare event. Usually the genes mutated at one site at a time. This patient spent more than 50 days in hospital, much longer than other Covid-19 patients, and even his faeces were infectious with living viral strains. “Investigating the functional impact of this tri-nucleotide mutation would be highly interesting,” Li and colleagues said in the paper. Professor Zhang Xuegong, head of the bioinformatics division at the National Laboratory for Information Science and Technology at Tsinghua University, said ultra-deep sequencing could be an effective strategy to track the virus’ mutation. “It can produce some useful information,” he said. But this approach could be much more time consuming and costly. It was unlikely to be applied to all samples. “Our understanding of the virus remains quite shallow,” Zhang said. Questions such as where the virus came from, why it could kill some healthy young people while generating no detectable symptoms in many others still left scientists scratching their heads. “If there is a discovery that overturns the prevailing perception, don’t be surprised.” ----- End forwarded message -----

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