Wuhan Institute of Virology 'highly probably' the source of COVID-19
The former lead investigator who spearheaded a taskforce for the US government into the origins of COVID-19 has declared the virus may have been the result of work done for a biological weapons program in Wuhan.
David Asher – a now senior fellow at the Hudson Institute – spoke to Sky News about investigations into the origins of COVID-19 and suspicions as to who may have been first infected with the virus in Wuhan.
FAUCI DIDN’T TELL SEN. PAUL HE FUNDED CHINA VIRUS CREATION AT WUHAN VIROLOGY LAB.
As such in October 2014, because of public health concerns, the US government banned all federal funding on efforts to weaponize three viruses – influenza, Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS).
Novel Chinese coronavirus likely was circulating in October 2019, U.S. researchers say.
Plus: “Scientists also used epidemic simulations to understand the early phase of the pandemic. Experiments showed only 29.7% of simulated epidemics went on to become ‘self-sustaining epidemics.’ ‘The remaining 70.3% of epidemics went extinct,’ scientists said.”
Well, in the real world the Chinese were allowing/encouraging people from Wuhan to travel internationally well into 2020, so there’s that.
Your face is not yours The New York Times – “When a secretive start-up scraped the internet to build a facial-recognition tool, it tested a legal and ethical limit — and blew the future of privacy in America wide open…Computers once performed facial recognition rather imprecisely, by identifying people’s facial features and measuring the distances among them — a crude method that did not reliably result in matches. But recently, the technology has improved significantly, because of advances in artificial intelligence. A.I. software can analyze countless photos of people’s faces and learn to make impressive predictions about which images are of the same person; the more faces it inspects, the better it gets. Clearview is deploying this approach using billions of photos from the public internet. By testing legal and ethical limits around the collection and use of those images, it has become the front-runner in the field…Clearview has now raised $17 million and, according to PitchBook, is valued at nearly $109 million. As of January 2020, it had been used by at least 600 law-enforcement agencies; the company says it is now up to 3,100. The Army and the Air Force are customers. ICE signed a $224,000 deal in August; Erin Burke, of the Child Exploitation Investigations Unit, said she now supervises the deployment of Clearview AI for a variety of criminal investigations at H.S.I., not just child-exploitation cases. “It has revolutionized how we are able to identify and rescue children,” Burke told me. “It’s only going to get better, the more images that Clearview is able to scrape.” …
Cryptocurrency Explained
I run across this immaculate one-line explanation of Bitcoin/cryptocurrency every few months and today I finally decided to save it here for posterity:
imagine if keeping your car idling 24/7 produced solved Sudokus you could trade for heroin
*applause*
Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues
Via LLRX – Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, March 14, 2021 – Privacy and security issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly… Continue Reading
Guido van der Werve. Casually setting himself on fire, walking in front of an icebreaker and running from Warsaw to Paris
Setting himself on fire, walking in front of an icebreaker while the frozen water cracks behind him, going on a 1600 km triathlon from Warsaw to Paris, standing on the North Pole for 24 hours… Guido van der Werve knows how to catch viewers’ attention
Congressional Testimony: The Leading Activists for Online Censorship Are Corporate JournalistsGlenn Greenwald
China’s arms sales drop as ‘other nations buy American’ South China Morning Post
China’s tech giants test way around Apple’s new privacy rules Financial Times. If Chinese firms can find ways to track Apple users, you can be sure the NSA already can. The only way to not be tracked is use a Faraday bag or leave your phone at home
- “Philosophers have been the source of many of the ideas that have become damaging clichés, so I see nothing puzzling about trying, as a philosopher, to sort out where we’ve collectively gone wrong” — Theodore Gracyk (Minnesota State U. Moorhead) on philosophy and all that jazz
- Live interview with John Martin Fisher (UC Riverside) this Wednesday — viewers can send in questions for him to answer during the interview (via Taylor Cyr)
- The morality of exposing children to a significant risk of harm in the search for a better life — Lisa Hecht (Stockholm) on how it is reasonable to rely on “rights-weighted expected wellbeing” rather than a precautionary approach in the ethics of migration
- Nietzsche in the style of Dr. Seuss — John Holbo (NUS) is making progress on his “On Beyond Zarathustra”
- “Astell’s collection has been hiding in plain sight” — Magdalene College Cambridge discoveres a collection of books and pamphlets that had belonged to Mary Astell, many annotated with her notes
- The Kit Kat Problem — no, it’s not about what to do if you open one up around more than three other people. Jason Brennan (Georgetown) explains
- Philosophy of Art Workshops — an ongoing video series from Aesthetics for Birds