CORONAVIRUS: 10 ITALIAN TOWNS IN LOCKDOWN
February 21st, 2020Via: AFP:
Authorities in northern Italy on Friday ordered the closure of schools, bars and other public spaces in 10 towns following a flurry of new coronavirus cases.
Five doctors and 10 other people tested positive for the virus in Lombardy, after apparently frequenting the same bar and group of friends, with two other cases in Veneto, authorities said at a press conference.
Over 50,000 people have been asked to stay at home in the areas concerned, while all public activities such as carnival celebrations, church masses and sporting events have been banned for up to a week.
Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said “everything is under control”, and stressed the government was maintaining “an extremely high level of precaution”.
Sweden Is Now Testing Digital Version of Cash, the e-Krona
February 21st, 2020Via: MIT Technology Review:
The Riksbank, Sweden’s central bank, has announced the launch of a year-long pilot project of its proposed e-krona. The project will use distributed ledger technology inspired by the blockchains that run cryptocurrencies.
Cashless in Sweden: Physical cash is headed toward obsolescence in Sweden. Nearly everyone uses a mobile payment application called Swish, and it’s been estimated that retailers could stop accepting cash by 2023. This concerns the country’s central bankers, for two reasons. First, they fear that if the payment infrastructure is left completely to the private sector, certain groups might be excluded. Second, if people lose the ability to convert what’s in their commercial bank accounts into a form of “cash” backed by the government, it might undermine their faith in the money system.
That’s why, a few years ago, the Riksbank began investigating the possibility of a state-backed digital currency that might play a similar role to the one physical cash plays today.
Tesla Autopilot Tricked Into Accelerating from 35 to 85 MPH by Speed Limit Sign Modified with Two Inches of Tape
February 21st, 2020Via: MIT Technology Review:
Hackers have manipulated multiple Tesla cars into speeding up by 50 miles per hour. The researchers fooled the car’s Mobileye EyeQ3 camera system by subtly altering a speed limit sign on the side of a road in a way that a person driving by would almost never notice.
This demonstration from the cybersecurity firm McAfee is the latest indication that adversarial machine learning can potentially wreck autonomous driving systems, presenting a security challenge to those hoping to commercialize the technology.
Mobileye EyeQ3 camera systems read speed limit signs and feed that information into autonomous driving features like Tesla’s automatic cruise control, said Steve Povolny and Shivangee Trivedi from McAfee’s Advanced Threat Research team.
The researchers stuck a tiny and nearly imperceptible sticker on a speed limit sign. The camera read the sign as 85 instead of 35, and in testing, both the 2016 Tesla Model X and that year’s Model S sped up 50 miles per hour.
Aided by Machine Learning, Scientists Find a Novel Antibiotic Able to Kill Superbugs in Mice
February 21st, 2020Via: STAT:
A study published Thursday in the journal Cell describes how researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology used machine learning to identify a molecule that appears capable of countering some of the world’s most formidable pathogens.
When tested in mice, the molecule, dubbed halicin, effectively treated the gastrointestinal bug Clostridium difficile (C. diff), a common killer of hospitalized patients, and another type of drug-resistant bacteria that often causes infections in the blood, urinary tract, and lungs.
CHINA: 92% PERCENT DROP IN CAR SALES IN FIRST HALF OF FEBRUARY
February 21st, 2020Via: South China Morning Post:
A 92 per cent drop in car sales in China in the first half of February provided the first real indicator of the economic impact of the coronavirus epidemic, with officials also warning of a sharp decline in Chinese exports and imports for the first two months of the year.
The China Passenger Car Association (CPCA) on Friday said that sales dropped to just 4,909 units in the first 16 days of the month, down from 59,930 vehicles in the same period a year earlier.
“Very few dealerships opened in the first weeks of February and they have had very little customer traffic,” said the CPCA.
Coronavirus: China’s Manufacturing Supply Chain Pummelled from All Sides in Efforts to Restart
February 21st, 2020Let me know if you start to notice product shortages, or unusual events related to the coronavirus situation. Assuming anything major is going to happen outside of China, my guess is that a lot of mainstream media will go with censorship, diversion, and lies for as long as possible.
The only obvious coronavirus related shortages I’ve seen so far where I live (New Zealand) are N95 masks and hand sanitizer.
I walked around my local Warehouse (which is a bit like Walmart) and it’s still packed with mostly low quality garbage from China.
Via: South China Morning Post:
Choked off from suppliers, workers, and logistics networks, China’s manufacturing base is facing a multitude of unprecedented challenges, as coronavirus containment efforts hamper factories’ efforts to reopen.
Many of those that have been granted permission to resume operations face critical shortages of staff, with huge swathes of China still under lockdown and some local workers afraid to leave their homes. Others cannot access the materials needed to make their products, and even if they could, the shutdown of shops and marketplaces around China means demand has been sapped.
Related: U.S. Exposed To Immediate Impact From “Supply-Chain Shock”, Deutsche Says
Coronavirus Infections Outside Of China Are Growing Exponentially
February 20th, 2020Via: Peak Prosperity:
Hackers Were Inside Citrix for Five Months
February 20th, 2020Via: KrebsonSecurity:
Networking software giant Citrix Systems says malicious hackers were inside its networks for five months between 2018 and 2019, making off with personal and financial data on company employees, contractors, interns, job candidates and their dependents. The disclosure comes almost a year after Citrix acknowledged that digital intruders had broken in by probing its employee accounts for weak passwords.
Cruise Ship Is a Coronavirus Factory
February 19th, 2020Via: The Times:
Japan’s incompetent quarantining of thousands of passengers on a British cruise ship created a “coronavirus machine” that risks further spreading the disease, one of the country’s leading experts has said.
Kentaro Iwata, a professor of infectious disease, condemned the decision to release most of the passengers following two weeks of quarantine today because of the danger that infected people who are showing no symptoms of the disease will return to families and jobs unaware that they are passing on the contagion.
More: Coronavirus Quarantine on Diamond Princess Cruise Ship ‘Chaotic,’ Japanese Expert Claims
How China Is Working to Quarantine the Truth About the Coronavirus
February 19th, 2020“Censorship, diversion, and lying.”
Google’s core principals?
*I crack myself up*
This piece is useful in understanding state behavior, in general, and their large, lapdog media and social networking organizations.
Via: DefenseOne:
In its battle to contain the coronavirus, the Chinese government has undertaken a wide range of measures, from shutting down cities to using drones to monitor and compel public compliance with public health edicts. But the regime is also waging a second battle: a campaign to control the world’s discussions of the first.
The weapons in this information war are Beijing’s massive media and online control mechanisms. Its three prevailing tactics—all too common across authoritarian regimes and wider online warfare— are censorship, diversion, and lying. China’s efforts show how an online battle for public security sometimes works in opposition to public health, and it reveals the priorities of an authoritarian regime.
