gVisor

Sandboxing and Workload Isolation

gVisor implements basically all of Linux in userland. Processes. Devices. Tasks. Address spaces and page tables. Filesystems. TCP/IP; the entire IP network stack, all reimplemented, in Go, backended by native Linux userland.

The pitch here is straightforward: you’re unlikely to have routine exploitable memory corruption flaws in Go code. You are sort of likely to have them in the C-language Linux kernel. Go is fast enough to credibly emulate Linux in userland. Why expose C code if you don’t have to?

Cordoba Thunderstorms

From what the team could gather, each of the storms had generated such large, powerful updrafts that they’d eventually merged together and begun to spawn other, smaller updrafts, creating what’s called a “mesoscale convective system” — in short, a giant, organized complex of perhaps 50 or more updrafts, which becomes self-sustaining as it germinates more and more offspring.

2022-02-01:

 The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has established 2 new world records for megaflashes of lightning.

  • The longest single flash that covered a horizontal distance of 768 ± 8 km across parts of the southern United States on 29 April 2020.
  • The greatest duration for a single lightning flash of 17.102 ± 0.002 seconds from the flash that developed continuously through a thunderstorm over Uruguay and northern Argentina on 18 June 2020.

Coronaviruses

Eventually I think we will categorize all the recent betacoronavirus outbreaks (Sars-1, Sars-2, MERS) as part of this broader process, and require a vaccination strategy that can be quickly deployed against new recombinations from this original ancestral betacoronavirus as they randomly emerge from the primordial stew across many animal species, including ours. The evidence thus far points to recombinations resulting in the emergence of a distinct dangerous variant with some regularity.

2020-11-23: Horseshoe bat origin?

2 lab freezers in Asia have yielded surprising discoveries. Researchers have found a coronavirus that is closely related to SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for the pandemic, in horseshoe bats stored in a freezer in Cambodia. A team reported the discovery of another closely related coronavirus — also found in frozen bat droppings.

The viruses are the first known relatives of SARS-CoV-2 to be found outside China, which supports the World Health Organization’s search across Asia for the pandemic’s animal origin. Strong evidence suggests that SARS-CoV-2 originated in horseshoe bats, but whether it passed directly from bats to people, or through an intermediate host, remains a mystery.