[continued from previous message]

guise of news articles.

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Date: Sun, 25 Jul 2021 21:25:41 PDT
From: Peter G Neumann <neumann@csl.sri.com>
Subject: What Should Happen to Our Data When We Die?] (NYTimes)

... expect to be victimized by deep fakes, simulations, and questionable ethical practices ... What could possibly go wrong? PGN

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/24/style/what-should-happen-to-our-data-when-we-die.html

------------------------------

Date: Fri, 23 Jul 2021 08:42:16 -0700
From: "Lauren Weinstein" <lauren@vortex.com>
Subject: Breast Cancer Patient Attacked by Violent Anti-Mask Protest
Outside Los Angeles Clinic (Vice)

[Enough!!! LW]

https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkbxmg/breast-cancer-patient-attacked-anti-mask-protest

------------------------------

Date: Mon, 26 Jul 2021 12:52:06 -0700
From: "Henry Baker" <hbaker1@pipeline.com>
Subject: 'STFU' is anti-science

'Science' is an institution dedicated to improving human knowledge about natural phenomena, and this institution must progress through amplifying the tiniest bits of 'signal' drowned in vast amounts of 'noise'. For example,
the LIGO experiment amplifies its signals at least 21 orders of magnitude to produce a legitimate reading.

More cynically, science progresses by a first scientist coming up with an hypothesis, and then amplifying this signal by 10 orders of magnitude until
a majority of the O(10 billion) people on the planet are convinced.

Unfortunately, this amplification process has to deal not only with noise
from Nature, but also active *jamming* from people with political
agendas. Jamming is, of course, the active attempt to drown out a signal by brute force: overpowering the signal with counteracting signals which starve the new signal for attention (and funding).

Unfortunately, for some scientists, the Hippocratic Oath ('first do no
harm') has been replaced by the Hypocritic Oath ('first shoot the
messenger').

The famous evolutionary biologist Matt Ridley has been calling out this
jamming (albeit without using this term) regarding the so-called COVID 'lab leak hypothesis' (LLH). It's not as if LLH hasn't happened before -- Google sheep in Dugway, Utah and ask the victims from a SARS leak in Beijing in
2004 (see www.cdc.gov).

Under the previous administration, the Chinese govt and the main-stream
media excoriated everyone who seriously considered LLH. However, MSNBC hosts nearly broke their necks with an Orwell-like whiplash when the Biden administration broke ranks and decided to investigate LLH further.

The following is a long article, behind a paywall, but Matt Ridley hasn't
been shy about these issues, so there are plenty of other places to read his uncomfortable thoughts.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-china-media-lab-leak-climate-ridley-biden-censorship-coronavirus-11627049477

Tunku Varadarajan 23 Jul 2021
How Science Lost the Public's Trust

From climate to Covid, politics and hubris have disconnected scientific institutions from the philosophy and method that ought to guide them.

'Science' has become a political catchword. "I believe in science," Joe
Biden tweeted six days before he was elected president." Donald Trump
doesn't. It's that simple, folks."

But what does it mean to believe in science? The British science writer Matt Ridley draws a pointed distinction between "science as a philosophy" and "science as an institution." The former grows out of the Enlightenment,
which Mr. Ridley defines as "the primacy of rational and objective
reasoning." The latter, like all human institutions, is erratic, prone to falling well short of its stated principles. Mr. Ridley says the Covid
pandemic has "thrown into sharp relief the disconnect between science as a philosophy and science as an institution."

Mr. Ridley, 63, describes himself as a "science critic, which is a
profession that doesn't really exist." He likens his vocation to that of an
art critic and dismisses most other science writers as "cheerleaders."[...] With the Canadian molecular biologist Alina Chan, [Ridley is] finishing a
book called "Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19," to be published
in November.

It will likely make its authors unwelcome in China. As Mr. Ridley worked on
the book, he says, it became "horribly clear" that Chinese scientists are
"not free to explain and reveal everything they've been doing with bat viruses." That information has to be "dug out" by outsiders like him and
Ms. Chan. The Chinese authorities, he says, ordered all scientists to send their results relevant to the virus for approval by the government before
other scientists or international agencies could vet them: "That is shocking
in the aftermath of a lethal pandemic that has killed millions and
devastated the world."

Mr. Ridley notes that the question of Covid's origin has "mostly been
tackled by people outside the mainstream scientific establishment." People inside not only have been "disappointingly incurious" but have tried to shut down the inquiry "to protect the reputation of science as an institution."
The most obvious reason for this resistance: If Covid leaked from a lab, and especially if it developed there, "science finds itself in the dock."

Other factors have been at play as well. Scientists are as sensitive as
other elites to charges of racism, which the Communist Party used to evade questions about specifically Chinese practices "such as the trade in
wildlife for food or lab experiments on bat coronaviruses in the city of Wuhan."

Scientists are a global guild, and the Western scientific community has
"come to have a close relationship with, and even a reliance on, China." Scientific journals derive considerable "income and input" from China, and Western universities rely on Chinese students and researchers for tuition revenue and manpower. All that, Mr. Ridley says, "may have to change in the wake of the pandemic."

In the U.K., he has also noted "a tendency to admire authoritarian China
among scientists that surprised some people." It didn't surprise
Mr. Ridley. "I've noticed for years," he says, "that scientists take a
somewhat top-down view of the political world, which is odd if you think
about how beautifully bottom-up the evolutionary view of the natural world
is."

He asks: "If you think biological complexity can come about through
unplanned emergence and not need an intelligent designer, then why would you think human society needs an 'intelligent government'?" Science as an institution has "a naive belief that if only scientists were in charge, they would run the world well." Perhaps that's what politicians mean when they declare that they "believe in science." As we've seen during the pandemic, science can be a source of power.

But there's a "tension between scientists wanting to present a unified and authoritative voice," on the one hand, and science-as-philosophy, which is obligated to "remain open-minded and be prepared to change its mind."
Mr. Ridley fears "that the pandemic has, for the first time, seriously politicized epidemiology." It's partly "the fault of outside commentators"
who hustle scientists in political directions. "I think it's also the fault
of epidemiologists themselves, deliberately publishing things that fit with their political prejudices or ignoring things that don't." [...]

The politicization of science leads to a loss of confidence in science as an institution. The distrust may be justified but leaves a vacuum, often filled
by a "much more superstitious approach to knowledge." To such superstition
Mr. Ridley attributes public resistance to technologies such as genetically modified food, nuclear power--and vaccines. [...]

Vaccines have been central to the question of "misinformation" and the White House's pressure campaign against social media to censor it. Mr. Ridley worries about the opposite problem: that social media "is complicit in enforcing conformity." It does this "through 'fact checking,' mob pile-ons,
and direct censorship, now explicitly at the behest of the Biden administration." He points out that Facebook and Wikipedia long banned any mention of the possibility that the virus leaked from a Wuhan laboratory.

"Conformity," Mr. Ridley says, "is the enemy of scientific progress, which depends on disagreement and challenge. Science is the belief in the
ignorance of experts, as [the physicist Richard] Feynman put it."
Mr. Ridley reserves his bluntest criticism for "science as a profession,"
which he says has become "rather off-puttingly arrogant and political, permeated by motivated reasoning and confirmation bias." Increasing numbers
of scientists "seem to fall prey to groupthink, and the process of peer-reviewing and publishing allows dogmatic gate-keeping to get in the way
of new ideas and open-minded challenge." [...]

In Mr. Ridley's view, the scientific establishment has always had a tendency "to turn into a church, enforcing obedience to the latest dogma and
expelling heretics and blasphemers."

------------------------------

Date: Sun, 25 Jul 2021 16:26:31 -0400
From: "Gabe Goldberg" <gabe@gabegold.com>
Subject: The Problem With Stealing High-End Electronics and Beer (Now I Know)

If you’re reading this on a smartphone, you have something valuable in
your hands — and I’m not talking about the story you’re about to read. The device you’re holding weighs less than 200 grams (7 ounces) and
retails for as much as $1,000. It’s not quite worth its weight in gold,
but it’s worth more than its weight in silver, which it to say, it’s
both valuable and easily portable.

As a result, it’s a good target for thieves. In fact, most high-end electronics are. They’re expensive when sold through proper channels and there’s a lot of demand for them. So if you’re able to steal a lot of
tech, you can probably find buyers simply by offering a discount. All
you need is an easy target and you’ll find yourself a nice, albeit
illegal, payday.

That’s likely what a couple of thieves were thinking when they learned about a tech startup in their area. Called “Roambee,” the company probably didn’t
have a lot of money for things like office security or the like. In June of 2017, they rather easily broke into Roambee's offices. As Roambee'os co-founder, Vidya Subramanian, told the Verge, they simply “jimmied the lock” and gained intro into “the room where we charge our devices, and needless to say there’s computer equipment everywhere, so they thought it
was a good place to steal stuff.” The robbers stole computers and boxes filled with what they probably thought were cellphone chargers. Then they grabbed a beer from Roambee's office refrigerator to celebrate.

That was a mistake.

[This is a long-ish tale of theves. Gabe did not include the last part,
omitting the final punchline, so I will simply tell you what they stole --
GPS trackers -- and why they were so easily caught. PGN]

http://nowiknow.com/the-problem-with-stealing-high-end-electronics-and-beer/

------------------------------

Date: Fri, 23 Jul 2021 17:15:09 +0100
From: anthony <antmbox@youngman.org.uk>
Subject: Re: Traffic Analysis and Herd Immunity (Slade, RISKS-32.77)

Once we reach herd immunity, the number of cases will drop quite dramatically.

By that measure, we will NEVER reach herd immunity. The number of people
being RE-infected is rising.

Getting infected, or vaccinated, there's not much difference, only
protects you from being (re-)infected by THAT SPECIFIC variant.

It prevents the development of new and more dangerous variants.

NOT true! Be it a new or old variant, the biggest indicator of danger is whether you've met CoVid-19 before. The new variants are "more
transmissible", i.e., easier to catch. They have to be, given the number of people who are partially or completely immune, if they want to stand a
chance of spreading.

So yes, get vaccinated. Tell your friends and family to get vaccinated. It *will* protect you and them. What it *won't* do is protect you from catching CoVid (again (and again)). What it *will* do is protect you from ending up
in hospital - or worse. [...]

Unfortunately, I don't think vaccination has any effect on whether you will suffer long haul CoVid. I suspect I may be one of the UK's earliest CoVid victims. I didn't even realise it was likely to have been CoVid until long after, it was that minor. And the doctor now suspects I may be suffering
from long CoVid.

We need to drop this focus on how many cases we have, and look at how many
of those cases end up in hospital. We're not going to eradicate CoVid, we
need to live with it. We need to stop thinking of it as a pandemic that will
go away, and think of it as what it is -- a new *en*demic illness -- JUST
LIKE THE COMMON COLD. And we've been here before -- it's now thought that
the 1890 pandemic was a previous occasion when a corona virus "jumped
species". A few years later it had mostly disappeared, and is now thought to
be the most common cause of the common cold.

------------------------------

Date: Sat, 24 Jul 2021 12:00:01 -0700
From: "Jim Garrison" <jhg@jhmg.net>
Subject: Re: Rounding errors could make certain stop-watches pick wrong race
winners (RISKS-32.77)

Where rounding errors occurred, they usually resulted in changes of one one-hundredth of a second. One raw time of 28.3194 was converted to a displayed time of 28.21.

Sorry, but rounding 28.3194 to 28.21 is not a "rounding error", it's just
bad arithmetic due to some other programming error. Unless of course the article is misquoting or misinterpreting the actual numbers.

------------------------------

Date: Mon, 26 Jul 2021 11:08:37 -0400
From: "Dick Mills" <dickandlibbymills@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: YouTube fined 100 000 Euros delaying court order to restore
video (RISKS-32.77)

It seems like hubris for the "Higher Regional Court at Dresden" to expect
that everyone in the world will recognize that title and recognize the
court's authority. A global outfit like Google may receive dozens of
official sounding crackpot mail messages every day. It could even come
from another Dresden rather than Dresden Germany. It should take a
reasonable time to investigate such a message for authenticity.

Dresden, Kansas, Dresden, Maine, Dresden, Missouri, Dresden, New York,
Dresden, North Dakota, Dresden, Ohio, Dresden, Tennessee, Dresden, Ontario, Canada, Dresden, Staffordshire, England

------------------------------

Date: Fri, 23 Jul 2021 04:13:23 +0000 (UTC)
From: "Black Michael" <mdblack98@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: A secret algorithm is transforming DNA evidence. This
defendant could be the first to scrutinize it. (RSKS-32.77)

The article on the DNA testing reminds me of working on weighted non-linear least squares problems years ago where I learned how to distrust this
process which is used in multiple disciplines to this day (like chemical analysis and I suspect DNA analysis too). I started with doing gamma ray spectroscopy and fitting libraries of radioactive elements to find the best "fit" for a collected spectrum.  This was the technique used by the Naval Research Laboratory for decades to do such fitting on nuclear collections
done by them.  Without going into the math it's like finding the best combination of coins to make a certain $ amount.  So to get $1.01 you would get 4 quarters and 1 penny.  And if all you know is quarters and pennies that's the only answer.  But when you add dimes and nickels the number of possible solutions grows dramatically.  Mind you in the real world fits
aren't as exact as this example. I was in a meeting with leading people
from USAF, NRL, LANL, PNL, SRI, and DOE and a rather aggressive argument
broke out between NRL's representative who was doing the least-squares
approach and a mathematician from PNL who said he didn't care what the underlying data was but that weighted linear least squares was the wrong way
to do it.  NRL took offense as they (he) had been doing it for 30 years and was the national expert on the matter. Our PNL dude ended up creating
software to do "all possible combinations" which had been considered intractable but he had a special technique from a Russian mathematician to
do it...I wish I still had that reference/software. What the PNL software
did was produce a binary matrix and used an F-Test for a cutoff.  So imagine you have a library of 4 elements and you get this matrix where 1 represents
the presences of a library element in the fit.  Rank ordered by residual value.1 0 1 1 -- what a least square solution will find 0 1 0 11 1 0 10 0 1
1 -- last item in f-test cutoff0 0 1 00 1 1 01 1 1 01 0 1 01 1 1 10 1 1 10 0
0 10 0 1 10 1 0 01 0 0 11 0 0 0 What we found was if the column was ALWAYS present in all good fits than it was in the sample -- which in the sample
above would be elemen#4.  And it turned out to be true in every test we
did.  If the items drops in and out of the good solutions presence in the sample was questionable.  One thing the PNL software did not do was try to estimate how much was in the sample as it could not be supported by statistics.  Generally not enough good solutions to provide a valid standard deviation.

------------------------------

Date: Fri, 23 Jul 2021 20:18:49 -0400
From: "David B. Horvath, CCP" <dhorvath@cobs.com>
Subject: Re: Some locals say a bitcoin mining operation is ruining one of
the Finger Lakes. Here's how. (NBC News, RISKS-32.78)

On 10 Jul 2021 18:30:46 -0400, "John Levine" <<mailto:johnl@iecc.com>johnl@iecc.com> mentions:

A bill to ban fossil fuel powered cryptocoin

mining has passed the NY Senate and is currently in front of the house.

Given that electric power (whether created through the use of fossil fuel or other means -- renewable or not) is a fungible commodity, how does the State
of New York actually plan on banning it? While they could ban a power plant dedicated to creating power for mining, the fossil plant could sell power to the grid while the mining operation buys power from another state off the
grid. Or the power could be sold to the grid and the mining occur in another state. Yet another meaningless law that seems to do good but is really just the wizard hidden behind the curtains.

Just to be clear: I'm not complaining about the purpose of the bill, just
the implementation or ability to cause a good outcome.

------------------------------

Date: Fri, 23 Jul 2021 20:19:53 -0400
From: "David B. Horvath, CCP" <dhorvath@cobs.com>
Subject: Re: RFI on scientific integrity (Baker, RISKS-32.77)

Innovation in science is a messy, chaotic business ...

Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" should be mandatory reading.

------------------------------

Date: Mon, 1 Aug 2020 11:11:11 -0800
From: RISKS-request@csl.sri.com
Subject: Abridged info on RISKS (comp.risks)

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