Peter Todd @pete@petertodd.org

blogTO: Dozens of Toronto businesses plan to reopen next week in defiance of lockdown orders.
https://www.blogto.com/city/2021/02/toronto-businesses-opening-defiance-lockdown-orders/

Good. And better to do it sooner rather than later, before the zero covid crowd use these new variants as their excuse to lock down even further.

@robep00@bitcoinhackers.org apparently yes!

http://blog.zorinaq.com/my-experience-with-the-great-firewall-of-china/

tl;dr: Someone tests ExpressVPN and other methods to get past the Great Firewall. Turns out ExpresVPN uses weak 1024bit RSA keys, which can probably be cracked by about $10 million worth of specialized hardware... and ExpressVPN actually fixes the problem.

https://www.theblaze.com/op-ed/horowitz-congressman-accuses-cdc-of-misleading-the-public-about-need-for-vaccine-for-those-already-recovered-from-covid-19

CDC got caught lying about the vaccines, claiming they provided a benefit to those already infected. A message tons of people have been pushing - probably because of an attempt to discount natural immunity.

In fact, while the Pfizer trials excluded people with prior infections, 1,300 managed to get included anyway. Of that subset, the % infected was identical in both vaccine and placebo groups.

I've personally caught the CDC lying about masks. So I'm not surprised.

DES cracking as a service: https://crack.sh/

"Behind crack.sh is a system with 48 Xilinx Virtex-6 LX240T FPGAs. Each FPGA contains a design with 40 fully pipelined DES cores running at 400MHz for a total of 16,000,000,000 keys/sec per FPGA, or 768,000,000,000 keys/sec for the whole system. This means that it can exhaustively search the entire 56-bit DES keyspace in ~26 hours"

Amazing enough stuff still uses DES that this is a thing.

@waxwing Suppose that immediately after every new Bitcoin block an anonymous twitter account tweeted out a new block header, building on that block, that was totally valid except that it's block hash started with ones rather than zeros...

@orionwl Ok, compromise: they're all bad hexadecimal numbers, and they're all required to be unique...

How many names can we really come up with using just 32-bits that'll make a schoolboy giggle?

@waxwing Would make for a good sci-fi plot: we receive an alien transmission. But when we eventually decode it, we realize it's an impossibly low valued pre-image.

Or for extra spooky: the alien transmission turns out to be an impossibly low-value SHA256 digest.

https://thepostmillennial.com/julie-payette-public-school-may-change-name-after-abuse-allegations

Fact is, @orionwl - AKA 74810b012346c9a6 - is right: all schools should be named after randomly chosen hexadecimal byte strings.

0xD1B0178B023E never abused nobody.

<later>

Ok, so I'm suspicious that you didn't actually choose 0xDEADCAFEBABE randomly...

@verretor It might not be the cure you want. But it may be the cure you deserved.

@pox @orionwl @timp Though Israel is doing one thing very right: IIUC they've been keeping schools open. Kids don't seem to spread it much in schools. But they *do* get infected. And they probably contribute to spread in other situations, eg at home. So might as well get them infected earlier rather than later. And besides, missed in-person education is an *enormous* problem that disproportionately affects the worst off in society. Both the kids, and their working parents.

@pox @orionwl @timp No, if Israel is actually practicing a strict lockdown they're not following the strategy I'm proposing. I'm proposing *selective* lockdown, allowing those not at risk to get infected while attempting to protect those who are. That's closer to what Sweden, Florida, etc. have been doing (whether they admit it or not).

@verretor That's not necessarily unexpected. If it's actually more infectious it'll make covid burn out faster. That might show up as a drop in cases if they were a bit late to identifying it, the people who are getting infected don't get sick enough to get tested, and they respond with an effective effort at protecting those at risk of getting sick.

Sources re: diabetes risk: https://www.healio.com/news/endocrinology/20200407/diabetes-may-worsen-outcomes-in-covid19

https://www.statnews.com/2020/10/01/why-people-with-diabetes-are-being-hit-so-hard-by-covid-19/

Those estimates are an approximately 2x to 3x increase in hospitalization risk. Quite compatible with hospitalization leading to undetected diabetes accounting for the entire 14%

@kekcoin @Zachary_BTC Easy: she ingests a small amount, and gives him a large amount. Obvious deniability.

She wound up in hospital and recovered; he died almost immediately. That doesn't sound like the same dose to me.

CDC source: https://www.cdc.gov/diabetes/pdfs/data/statistics/national-diabetes-statistics-report.pdf

https://web.archive.org/web/20210202001704/https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/02/01/covid-new-onset-diabetes/

Press: "14% OF PEOPLE HOSPITALIZED WITH COVID-19 DEVELOPED DIABETES!!!"

Reality: the CDC estimates 27% of US adults 65 and over have diabetes. 5.4% are undiagnosed, and diabetes is a major risk factor for covid.

How many of those patients just had their undiagnosed diabetes, diagnosed?

"He was hospitalized with covid-19 in early July. During a follow-up visit with his doctor, he learned he had dangerously high blood glucose levels and was readmitted."

🤔

@kekcoin @Zachary_BTC I mean, the mainstream story was these were idiot Trump supporters. The actual facts looks much more like an abusive spouse killing her husband and using the politics to get away with it. Police investigated - as is standard procedure - but didn't lay charges IIUC. I would not be surprised if the media fuss made them disinclined to investigate fully. Of course, even with a full investigation, it could be hard to prove beyond a reasonable doubt.

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-55706855

"Israeli Ministry of Health (MoH) figures show 531 over-60s, out of almost 750,000 fully vaccinated, tested positive for coronavirus (0.07%)."

Good example of useless reporting: provides no real info on the time scales involved, making it impossible to figure out what % you'd expect to get infected without the vaccine.

Alex Berenson interprets it as "one week". But truth is we just don't know: https://twitter.com/AlexBerenson/status/1356382809955430400