Peter Todd @pete@petertodd.org

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/1938-nazi-law-forced-jews-register-their-wealthmaking-it-easier-steal-180968894/

"A 1938 Nazi Law Forced Jews to Register Their Wealth—Making It Easier to Steal"

Remember this, next time someone pushes AML/KYC. Or the literal mandatory wealth reporting laws that some lobby groups are pushing - literal Nazi policy, for everyone.

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.

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.

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...

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%

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."

🤔

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

"What Trump recognized was that there are millions of Americans who do not oppose or even care about abortion or same-sex marriage, much less stem-cell research or any of the other causes that had animated traditional social conservatives. Instead he correctly intuited that the new culture war would be fought over very different (and more nebulous) issues"

https://theweek.com/articles/964006/rise-barstool-conservatives

The economy is doing so badly one of the payday loans places near me has gone out of business.

No paydays, no loans.

Israel's test positivity rate is going up, while their testing rate is going down... Sweden's testing rate is fairly steady, and their positivity rate is going down.

Fact is, Israel's drop in cases/deaths might not even be real. I could certainly see people being in denial about the fact that they've gotten covid after getting vaccinated.

Makes you wonder how many people tested positive after getting vaccinated, and then got another test to confirm that they really were infected.

Israel's covid cases and deaths are just beginning to decline a bit, after vaccinating 54% of the population (30% two weeks ago), and after having been in strict lockdown since _September_. Israeli flu season usually peaks between December and February, and weather right now is perfect for fighting flu.

Meanwhile, Sweden's cases and deaths have been falling since late December, having had hardly any lockdown (or even voluntary measures) the whole time, and Sweden is freezing and dark right now.