Wearing masks in the community probably makes little or no difference to the outcome of laboratory‐confirmed influenza/SARS‐CoV‐2 compared to not wearing masks (RR 1.01, 95% CI 0.72 to 1.42; 6 trials, 13,919 participants; moderate‐certainty evidence). Harms were rarely measured and poorly reported (very low‐certainty evidence). //
Pooled data showed that hand hygiene may be beneficial with an 11% relative reduction of respiratory illness (RR 0.89, 95% CI 0.83 to 0.94; low‐certainty evidence), but with high heterogeneity. In absolute terms this benefit would result in a reduction from 200 events per 1000 people to 178 per 1000 people (95% CI 166 to 188). Few trials measured and reported harms (very low‐certainty evidence). //
The use of a N95/P2 respirators compared to medical/surgical masks probably makes little or no difference for the objective and more precise outcome of laboratory‐confirmed influenza infection (RR 1.10, 95% CI 0.90 to 1.34; 5 trials, 8407 participants; moderate‐certainty evidence). Restricting pooling to healthcare workers made no difference to the overall findings. Harms were poorly measured and reported, but discomfort wearing medical/surgical masks or N95/P2 respirators was mentioned in several studies (very low‐certainty evidence).
But before the sea-going phase of the exercise commenced on January 13, the South African government requested that the Iranians withdraw their active participation from the exercise and become observers instead, a request to which the Iranian acceded.
The South African move was prompted by the realization at this late stage, that diplomatically it did not look good to be aligned with an Iranian regime which by some estimates has now killed 12,000 of its own citizens in anti-government riots. The South Africans also realized that its highly favorable trade position under the African Growth and Opportunity Act was in jeopardy, with the Act is coming before the U.S. House of Representatives this week for its scheduled three-year renewal.
These dangers were already apparent back in September, when The Maritime Executive noted that South African Chief of Staff General Rudzani Maphwanya had visited Tehran to issue an invitation to the exercise, a visit not apparently approved beforehand by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa. President Ramaphosa objected to the visit, but did not fire the General for his freelancing in the political arena. Political opponents of the President said at the time that his response was weak, exceedingly so as events have turned out.
IntoDNS checks the health and configuration and provides DNS report and mail servers report.
And provides suggestions to fix and improve them, with references to protocols’ official documentation.
A couple of years ago, we learned that the Euro New Car Assessment Programme (NCAP) organization, which crash tests cars for European consumers, decided that from 2026, it would start deducting points for basic controls that weren’t separate, physical controls that the driver can easily operate without taking their eyes off the road. And now ANCAP, which provides similar crash testing for Australia and New Zealand, has done the same. //
“From 2026, we’re asking car makers to either offer physical buttons for important driver controls like the horn, indicators, hazard lights, windscreen wipers and headlights, or dedicate a fixed portion of the cabin display screen to these primary driving functions,” it wrote in its guidance of what’s changed for 2026. Similarly, Europe is requiring turn signals, hazard lights, windshield wipers, the horn, and any SOS features like the EU’s eCall function.
After repeatedly denying for weeks that his force used AI tools, the chief constable of the West Midlands police has finally admitted that a hugely controversial decision to ban Maccabi Tel Aviv football fans from the UK did involve hallucinated information from Microsoft Copilot. //
Making it worse was the fact that the West Midlands Police narrative rapidly fell apart. According to the BBC, police claimed that the Amsterdam football match featured “500-600 Maccabi fans [who] had targeted Muslim communities the night before the Amsterdam fixture, saying there had been ‘serious assaults including throwing random members of the public’ into a river. They also claimed that 5,000 officers were needed to deal with the unrest in Amsterdam, after previously saying that the figure was 1,200.”
Amsterdam police made clear that the West Midlands account of bad Maccabi fan behavior was highly exaggerated, and the BBC recently obtained a letter from the Dutch inspector general confirming that the claims were inaccurate.
But it was one flat-out error—a small one, really—that has made the West Midlands Police recommendation look particularly shoddy. In a list of recent games with Maccabi Tel Aviv fans present, the police included a match between West Ham (UK) and Maccabi Tel Aviv. The only problem? No such match occurred.
Introducing Confer, an end-to-end AI assistant that just works.
Moxie Marlinspike—the pseudonym of an engineer who set a new standard for private messaging with the creation of the Signal Messenger—is now aiming to revolutionize AI chatbots in a similar way.
His latest brainchild is Confer, an open source AI assistant that provides strong assurances that user data is unreadable to the platform operator, hackers, law enforcement, or any other party other than account holders. The service—including its large language models and back-end components—runs entirely on open source software that users can cryptographically verify is in place.
Data and conversations originating from users and the resulting responses from the LLMs are encrypted in a trusted execution environment (TEE) that prevents even server administrators from peeking at or tampering with them. Conversations are stored by Confer in the same encrypted form, which uses a key that remains securely on users’ devices. //
All major platforms are required to turn over user data to law enforcement or private parties in a lawsuit when either provides a valid subpoena. Even when users opt out of having their data stored long term, parties to a lawsuit can compel the platform to store it, as the world learned last May when a court ordered OpenAI to preserve all ChatGPT users’ logs—including deleted chats and sensitive chats logged through its API business offering. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has said such rulings mean even psychotherapy sessions on the platform may not stay private. Another carve out to opting out: AI platforms like Google Gemini may have humans read chats.
There are two major security problems with these photo frames and unofficial Android TV boxes. The first is that a considerable percentage of them come with malware pre-installed, or else require the user to download an unofficial Android App Store and malware in order to use the device for its stated purpose (video content piracy). The most typical of these uninvited guests are small programs that turn the device into a residential proxy node that is resold to others.
The second big security nightmare with these photo frames and unsanctioned Android TV boxes is that they rely on a handful of Internet-connected microcomputer boards that have no discernible security or authentication requirements built-in. In other words, if you are on the same network as one or more of these devices, you can likely compromise them simultaneously by issuing a single command across the network. //
Many wireless routers these days make it relatively easy to deploy a “Guest” wireless network on-the-fly. Doing so allows your guests to browse the Internet just fine but it blocks their device from being able to talk to other devices on the local network — such as shared folders, printers and drives. If someone — a friend, family member, or contractor — requests access to your network, give them the guest Wi-Fi network credentials if you have that option. //
It is somewhat remarkable that we haven’t yet seen the entertainment industry applying more visible pressure on the major e-commerce vendors to stop peddling this insecure and actively malicious hardware that is largely made and marketed for video piracy. These TV boxes are a public nuisance for bundling malicious software while having no apparent security or authentication built-in, and these two qualities make them an attractive nuisance for cybercriminals.
As a web developer, I am thinking again about my experience with the mobile web on the day after the storm, and the following week. I remember trying in vain to find out info about the storm damage and road closures—watching loaders spin and spin on blank pages until they timed out trying to load. Once in a while, pages would finally load or partially load, and I could actually click a second or third link. We had a tiny bit of service but not much. At one point we drove down our main street to find service; eventually finding cars congregating in a closed fast-food parking lot, where there were a few bars of service!
When I was able to load some government and emergency sites, problems with loading speed and website content became very apparent. We tried to find out the situation with the highways on the government site that tracks road closures. I wasn’t able to view the big slow loading interactive map and got a pop-up with an API failure message. I wish the main closures had been listed more simply, so I could have seen that the highway was completely closed by a landslide. //
During the outages, many people got information from the local radio station’s ongoing broadcasts. The best information I received came from an unlikely place: a simple bulleted list in a daily email newsletter from our local state representative. Every day that newsletter listed food and water, power and gas, shelter locations, road and cell service updates, etc.
I was struck by how something as simple as text content could have such a big impact.
In having the best information provided in a simple newsletter list, I found myself wishing for faster loading and more direct websites. Especially ones with this sort of info. At that time, even a plain text site with barely any styles or images would have been better.
Looking back, I wish I could shake my 20-something self by the shoulders and sternly say: “You are a financial fool. Your future will be here before you know it. Have you saved for it?” I wish I had practiced the discipline of living on only 70 percent of my income, leaving margin for 10 percent of my money for tithes, 10 percent for routine saving, and 10 percent for the unexpected — which could be good opportunities or bad experiences. But I would also say to my 20-something self: “The God you do not yet know or serve is fully trustworthy. One day soon you will learn that and begin worshiping Him. From that moment on, keep your eyes open for the needs He puts before you, for you will find there is immense joy in giving. The provision you will receive is not just for your consumption; it is for your investment in what carries into eternity.”
New nuclear capacity won’t show up until around 2030
Meta is writing more checks for nuclear investment, even though the new capacity tied to those deals is unlikely to come online until around 2030. The company says it will need the new power to run its hyperscale datacenters.
Facebook's parent company says it has inked agreements with three outfits - TerraPower and Oklo are developing new reactor technology or building fresh sites, while Vistra is supporting existing nuclear plants. All three will deliver electricity into the grid rather than straight to Meta's own facilities.
NASA has never before cut short a human spaceflight mission for medical reasons. “It’s the first time we’ve done a controlled medical evacuation from the vehicle, so that is unusual,” Kshatriya said.
The Soviet Union called an early end for an expedition to the Salyut 7 space station in 1985 after the mission’s commander fell ill in orbit.
In a sense, it is surprising that it took this long. Polk said predictive models suggested the ISS would have a medical evacuation about once every three years. It ended up taking 25 years. In that time, NASA has improved astronauts’ abilities to treat aches and pains, minor injuries, and routine illnesses.
Crews in orbit can now self-treat ailments that might have prompted a crew to return to Earth in the past. One astronaut was diagnosed with deep vein thrombosis, or a blood clot, in 2018 without requiring an early departure from the space station. Another astronaut suffered a pinched nerve in 2021 and remained in orbit for another seven months.
One of the more compelling reasons for the space station’s existence is its ability to act as a testbed for learning how to live and work off the planet. The station has served as a laboratory for studying how spaceflight affects the human body, and as a platform to test life support systems necessary for long-duration voyages to deep space.
Dr. Bob Fu of ChinaAid called it what it is. State-sponsored religious persecution. When a government mobilizes riot police and heavy equipment against a peaceful congregation, it is not enforcing laws. It is enforcing ideology.
And that ideology has a name.
President Xi Jinping calls it Sinicisation. It sounds academic. It sounds harmless. In practice, it means every expression of faith must bow to the Chinese Communist Party. Sermons must align with party doctrine. Churches must register under state control. Pastors must preach only through government-approved platforms. Scripture itself must be filtered, reframed, and neutered.
There are two kinds of churches in China. The Three Self churches, which operate with government permission and government supervision, and the underground or house churches, which operate under the conviction that Christ, not the Party, is Lord. The latter have been targeted for decades, but the crackdown has intensified. The internet is now tightly regulated. Clergy are warned not to attract attention. Evangelism is treated like a contagion. //
What stands out in this latest wave of arrests is not just the brutality, but the clarity. The CCP is no longer pretending to tolerate independent faith. It is openly moving to crush it.
And where is the international outcry?
Muted. Careful. Managed.
We issue statements. We express concern. We keep trade flowing. We schedule summits. We talk about cooperation. Meanwhile, Chinese believers are dragged from their homes, churches are dismantled piece by piece, and crosses are wrapped in scaffolding like crime scenes. //
The question is not whether Chinese Christians will endure. They will.
The question is whether the free world will have the courage to stand with them, or whether we will keep pretending that bulldozers and prison cells are just part of doing business with Beijing.
FranzJoseph Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
11m
1,581
DavidEmami said:
Hope the everything turns out well for the crew member. It does make me wonder, though -- how would they deal with something life threatening? And have any medical procedures been done in space before? Did some searching and the closest I can find is a post-splashdown injury on Apollo 12 that the crew treated before egress, but that wasn't in free-fall. In particular, I assume the medical concept of the "golden hour" has to be abandoned.
First, obviously IANAD, so take it with a big grain of salt.
"Golden hour" is usually talked in the context of massive traumatic injuries and/or massive haemorrhaging. Even there it's a bit controversial, as it might be more useful only in the context of triage of massively multiple casualties with limited medevac resources down here.
IOTW, if any massive traumatic injury happens on the ISS (say a micrometeorite going through an astronaut or a pressurised cylinder failure resulting in an open fracture and haemorrhaging), the casualty is likely to be fucked anyway.
For things that develop over a longer time (appendicitis ‑‑> septicaemia), the astronauts are hopefully so well monitored that it would be caught early on.
You can find a full equipment list in the CHeCS onboard here (PDF, 2011 link). https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20110022379/downloads/20110022379.pdf
Includes BP/ECG, AED, basic dental & surgery stuff (nothing quite major, scalpel and forceps etc), detox kit, airways kit, ambu bag and low‑flow mask and endotracheal oxygen supply, IV with pump and IV solutions, chest drain valve for pneumothorax, dressings, sutures and splints. Plus medicines, obviously.
Not really sure what the survival rate of somebody with a tension pneumothorax would be, even if quickly drained with the drain valve and intubated. I presume NASA has some procedures for getting an intubated or IV'd astronaut back home, even if it might mean not wearing their suit?
What's the max acceleration experienced during re‑entry and chute deployment? Not Soyuz, hopefully something gentler like CrewDragon (I assume Soyuz's retrorockets are less gentle here)?
henryhbk Ars Tribunus Militum
12y
1,891
Subscriptor++
FranzJoseph said:
First, obviously IANAD, so take it with a big grain of salt.
"Golden hour" is usually talked in the context of massive traumatic injuries and/or massive haemorrhaging. Even there it's a bit controversial, as it might be more useful only in the context of triage of massively multiple casualties with limited medevac resources down here.
IOTW, if any massive traumatic injury happens on the ISS (say a micrometeorite going through an astronaut or a pressurised cylinder failure resulting in an open fracture and haemorrhaging), the casualty is likely to be fucked anyway.
For things that develop over a longer time (appendicitis ‑‑> septicaemia), the astronauts are hopefully so well monitored that it would be caught early on.
You can find a full equipment list in the CHeCS onboard here (PDF, 2011 link).
Includes BP/ECG, AED, basic dental & surgery stuff (nothing quite major, scalpel and forceps etc), detox kit, airways kit, ambu bag and low‑flow mask and endotracheal oxygen supply, IV with pump and IV solutions, chest drain valve for pneumothorax, dressings, sutures and splints. Plus medicines, obviously.
Not really sure what the survival rate of somebody with a tension pneumothorax would be, even if quickly drained with the drain valve and intubated. I presume NASA has some procedures for getting an intubated or IV'd astronaut back home, even if it might mean not wearing their suit?
What's the max acceleration experienced during re‑entry and chute deployment? Not Soyuz, hopefully something gentler like CrewDragon (I assume Soyuz's retrorockets are less gentle here)?
Click to expand...
IAAD, most of the survivable emergencies require only a critical but generally simple procedure to buy time. Often I am faced with surgical emergencies in the hospital overnight, and while on paper we have at least one trauma and one cardiac OR on hot standby, it's not like surgeons are standing there in stasis waiting to operate, and often will be several hours until they can formally operate on someone (or we need some test to complete). So for instance for the appendicitis above we use broad spectrum IV antibiotics, then figure it out later, Broken bones easy - splint and transport, pneumothorax (particularly tension) you can do a needle decompression (all it takes is a 20ga IV catheter and a stopcock) and again you've bought plenty of time for surgeons to get ready to do a definitive thoracostomy (chest) tube, most bleeding can be stopped with pressure.
Things where this isn't true would be a stroke or intracranial bleeding. Not 100% sure if the aircraft carriers that picked up Apollo astronauts even have the ability to treat that onboard. depending where the bleed is. If it is an epidural (in the skull, outside the brain but hydraulically crushing the brain) then the answer is simply we drill a hole and relieve the pressure (trepanning) and then some actual neurosurgeon can fix the issue, and when I was the intern, that's who did the burr hole, a 4 minute procedure that bought you hours to the OR. But if the bleed is deeper (such as a sub-arachnoid bleed or interparenchymal bleed) well not much you are doing outside an interventional neuroradiology suite, and those patients often have a poor prognosis on land. Not sure if they screen for berry aneurysms in the astronaut core with a head angiogram? Penetrating trauma management is battlefield medic level care to buy time to get to surgery, and a lot can be done to stall exsanguination within reason without much clinical skill or equipment. There are military medic deployed pro-coagulants that can be put into a wound to form instant clot, and of course the tried and true tampon in the hole. In a penetrating wound something like a tampon works by absorbing blood and expanding to put pressure on the bleeding vessels, which works surprisingly well in the absence of definitive medical care.
As for g-forces anyone who has ridden in an ambulance on our pothole strewn streets in the northeast knows you subject you patient to a surprising number of shock loads, but I worry more about needing to put a critically ill patient into a chair for the descent when bleeding has stopped while lying prone or on their back. Does crew dragon have a stretcher capability?
The data=writeback mount option deserves to be tried, in order to prevent journaling of the file system. This should be done only during the deletion time, there is a risk however if the server is being shutdown or rebooted during the delete operation.
According to this page,
Some applications show very significant speed improvement when it is used. For example, speed improvements can be seen (...) when applications create and delete large volumes of small files.
The option is set either in fstab or during the mount operation, replacing data=ordered with data=writeback. The file system containing the files to be deleted has to be remounted. //
He could also increase the time from the commit option: "This default value (or any low value) will hurt performance, but it's good for data-safety. Setting it to 0 will have the same effect as leaving it at the default (5 seconds). Setting it to very large values will improve performance". –
Cristian Ciupitu Commented Sep 26, 2010 at 19:14
Lastly, FYI, not mentioned in that link is that fact that data=writeback can be a huge security hole, since data pointed to by a given entry may not have the data that was written there by the app, meaning that a crash could result in the old, possibly-sensitive/private data being exposed. Not a concern here, since we're only turning it on temporarily, but I wanted to alert everyone to that caveat in case either you or others who run across that suggestion weren't aware. –
BMDan Commented Sep 27, 2010 at 1:23
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cat is surely the best way to do this. Why use python when there is a program already written in C for this purpose? However, you might want to consider using xargs in case the command line length exceeds ARG_MAX and you need more than one cat. Using GNU tools, this is equivalent to what you already have:
find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -name 'input_file*' -print0 |
sort -z |
xargs -0 cat -- >>outwhat is the fastest method to CREATE a thousands of files? Also, does it really matter if there is data in them, if they are just being deleted?
Using rsync is surprising fast and simple.
mkdir empty_dir
rsync -rd --delete empty_dir/ yourdirectory/