Month: December 2020

Solarwinds

Solarwinds was ‘secured’ with the password solarwinds123

All 5 branches of the military. The NSA. The IRS. The USPS. DHS. The Treasury Department. Nearly every Fortune 500 company. All 10 of the top 10 telcos. The list goes on and on. And with this access, attackers could move laterally, using compromised credentials to eavesdrop on mutuals of targeted entities. And all of this “secured” by a password so simple an idiot could have created it.

Solarwinds sounds like security theater specifically set up to compromise the gullible.

Social media research

Increased data access would enable researchers to perform studies on a broader scale, allow for improved characterization of misinformation in real-world contexts, and facilitate the testing of interventions to prevent the spread of misinformation. The current paper highlights 15 opinions from researchers detailing these possibilities and describes research that could hypothetically be conducted if social media data were more readily available. As scientists, our findings are only as good as the dataset at our disposal, and with the current misinformation crisis, it is urgent that we have access to real-world data where misinformation is wreaking the most havoc.

Busy Beaver

The goal of the “busy beaver” game is to find the longest-running computer program. Its pursuit has surprising connections to some of the most profound questions and concepts in mathematics. The rub is that BB(27) is such an incomprehensibly huge number that even writing it down, much less running the Goldbach-falsifying machine for that many steps, isn’t remotely possible in our physical universe. Nevertheless, that incomprehensibly huge number is still an exact figure whose magnitude represents “a statement about our current knowledge” of number theory.

Path to Herd Immunity

We believe COVID-19 herd immunity (>60% of population immune) will be reached in the US during summer 2021 (Jul-Sep 2021). At the time herd immunity is reached, 50% of the immunity will be achieved through natural infection, and the other half will be achieved through vaccination. New infections may become minimal before herd immunity is reached (Jun-Aug 2021). But due to imported cases and localized clusters, it is unlikely that new infections will drop to zero until 2022. Deaths may drop to low levels even earlier (May-Jul 2021), in part due to a vaccine distribution strategy that initially prioritizes high-risk individuals. Once deaths fall to minimal levels, we may begin seeing a relaxation of restrictions. Summarizing the above findings, our best estimate of a complete “return to normal” in the US is mid-summer 2021 (Jun-Aug 2021).

Elsevier Star Trek problem

An undergraduate student in the United Kingdom has taken to task the editors of a purportedly scholarly journal for having published more than 100 papers by a Maltese researcher with a deep affinity for Star Trek.

this is both hilarious as well as clear evidence that peer review / scientific publishing is a complete joke.

Most dangerous path

The Broomway is surrounded on both sides by quicksand and deep, sucking mud. It has no markers and no guideposts. And if you mistime your walk, you won’t outrun the tide. Oh, and it’s in the middle of a Ministry of Defence firing range.