Favorites April 21 2020

Ezra Klein @ezraklein

Fascinating read on why nuclear power is so expensive, with a lot of blame placed on overly stringent regulatory standards. I don’t know enough to evaluate it, but I’d love to hear from any energy wonks who want to weigh in.

rootsofprogress.orgWhy has nuclear power been a flop?Nuclear is expensive, but it should be cheap

I was particularly surprised regarding the details of how radiation danger is measured.

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

The White House can spin this however it likes but going from 2.5m doses last Tuesday to 1.8m today is fairly discouraging.

Drew Armstrong @ArmstrongDrew

And it is, as @WHCOS points out, the second-highest Tuesday so far (though about even w/ the March 23 + March 30 Tuesdays). https://t.co/dCIV2No7zi

Vaccination rate trend line suddenly not looking so hot. The rate was increasing and peaked the day the J&J pause was announced. Probably a coincidence, but it doesn’t look great in retrospect.

Ryan J. Reilly @ryanjreilly

NEW: The FBI arrested a Capitol rioter today who they acknowledged tracking down using facial recognition. The feds say got a hit off of his girlfriend’s publicly available Instagram page. More:

huffpost.comFeds Track Down Capitol Rioter With Facial Recognition Hit On His Girlfriend’s InstagramStephen Chase Randolph was arrested in Kentucky. Federal authorities say he told undercover agents it was “f**king fun” to be in the Capitol mob.

I assumed they're using facial recognition for a while now, but I don't think I've ever seen it confirmed like this before. On the other hand, a public post by the suspect’s girlfriend seems like a pretty easy thing to catch, even without facial recognition.

Chad P. Bown @ChadBown

Xi to attend Biden-led climate summit, bolstering hopes of co-operation between the world’s two largest emitters despite US-China tensions on trade, technology, human rights, democracy and more. The two-day meeting begins Thursday. By @cdcshepherd

ft.comSubscribe to read | Financial TimesNews, analysis and comment from the Financial Times, the worldʼs leading global business publication

Talking about CO2 Emissions pretty much requires bringing in China, hopefully something comes of it.

John Gordon @jgordonshare

“Once Starlink becomes effectively the dominant ISP in America, it will also become the dominant ISP in the world. And all at no cost to SpaceX since the expansion will have been financed from our phone bills.” bit.ly/3n5tKfb. Bond villains have all the luck.

bit.lyStarlink is a global ISP built at ZERO COST to SpaceX, enabling NASA’s Artemis launch | I, CringelyYour phone bill is building Elon’s space empire.

I had heard of the Starlink system before, but I didn't realize how it was being paid for, or how it interacted with keeping SpaceX's rockets fully booked.

Moxie Marlinspike @moxie

A few months ago Cellebrite announced that they would begin parsing data from Signal in their extraction tools. It seems they're not doing that very carefully. Exploiting vulnerabilities in Cellebrite's software, from an app's perspective:

signal.orgExploiting vulnerabilities in Cellebrite UFED and Physical Analyzer from an app’s perspectiveCellebrite makes software to automate physically extracting and indexing data from mobile devices. They exist within the grey – where enterprise branding joins together with the larcenous to be called “digital intelligence.” Their customer list has included authoritarian regimes in Belarus, Russi...

This post is a wild ride, highly recommended.

Swear Trek @swear_trek

This may or may not be the original dialog, also, my eyes are definitely getting worse.