A few months ago, I was playing with msfvenom and wanted to experiment with making a payload designed to bypass the antivirus of both Windows Defender and an antivirus that my work uses(with my boss's permission). I worked on it all day, but I could not get around internet-connected Windows Defender. Any time a port was bound or web connection was attempted, it shut me down.
It made way more impressed with Defender. I was always told it's inferior, but its sandboxing and heuristics scanning are quite good.
I've done the same before, but nowadays I'd look into uPnP since Tor has many costs to it. Slow transfer speeds, exit node data interference, and possible ISP throttling or attention are all potential downsides.
Bad nodes could not interfere with onion services because the onion address itself is the public key (it's E2EE). If you're using TLS to access internet services or just accessing onions you should be fine.
On websites where covid vax hesitancy is rampant, I often see posts discussing antibody mediated enhancement, vascular damage caused by circulating spike protein increasing vascular damage and causing death from heart attack and stroke in a few years, prion disease development from misfolded protein propagation, and fertility issues. For most of these issues, long term data is needed to rule them out.
All issues are political. However, this article is not an opinion piece, but a nice set of analysis based on public data. You can comment/criticize the analysis, bring out counterfactuals, point to other analysis etc.
The censorship isn't indiscriminate, it actually discriminates against and suppresses users who trend towards flamebait. Without careful moderation, this site would quickly turn into a worse version of Reddit.
You're 100% right. This isn't Ebola or SARS where everyone who gets sick has obvious symptoms and becomes gravely ill. Asymptomatic carriers and transference to other animals like birds and cattle will ensure that it will persist in our population permanently.
The good news is that viruses tend to get less dangerous over time. Death of the host provides selective pressure against those variants. Syphilis used to be extremely dangerous and rapidly fatal, but it has been around for so long that it has changed. But that process takes years typically.
> The good news is that viruses tend to get less dangerous over time.
One notable exception was Marek's disease in chickens, where the widespread administration of leaky vaccines (which suppressed symptoms and complications but not transmission) led to the breeding of hotter and hotter strains in the vaccinated flocks, which became more lethal to unvaccinated chickens.
What it showed is that when you take a group of chickens, infect them with multiple strains of different virulence at the same time, and partially protect all of them with a vaccine, the ones with the most severe infection live longer, which allows them to spread more of the most severe virus than they would otherwise.
Said differently: if you don't let the "bad" virus kill the hosts, it can spread more.
"In recent years, experts have wondered if leaky vaccines were to blame for the emergence of these hot strains. The 1970s introduction of the Marek’s disease immunizations for baby chicks kept the poultry industry from collapse, but people soon learned that vaccinated birds were catching 'the bug' without subsequently dying. Then, over the last half century, symptoms for Marek’s worsened. Paralysis was more permanent; brains more quickly turned to mush.
'People suspected the vaccine, but the problem was that it was never shown before experimentally,' said virologist Klaus Osterrieder of the Free University of Berlin, who wasn’t involved in the study. 'The field has talked about these types of experiments for a very long time, and I’m really glad to see the work finally done.' "
Not trying to raise alarm here or say that this necessarily will happen with SARS-CoV-2, there are tons of big differences. In general, we should expect it to become less lethal over time, but the vaccines may have introduced a confounding factor to the usual selection for milder disease.
> Then, over the last half century, symptoms for Marek’s worsened. Paralysis was more permanent; brains more quickly turned to mush.
Sigh. Could the author choose more inflammatory language?
This is half of the problem with Covid-related reporting today: hack journalists who simply cannot resist using horror-movie language to describe illness.
> Not trying to raise alarm here or say that this necessarily will happen with SARS-CoV-2, there are tons of big differences. In general, we should expect it to become less lethal over time, but the vaccines may have introduced a confounding factor to the usual selection for milder disease.
As I said, I think that's an over-statement, having read the original paper. But sure, theoretically, if you have a vaccine that only partially protects against some really severe strain, that strain could escape and go on to become more severe over time.
I'm not sure what we're supposed to do with this information. Not vaccinate? Stay inside forever and suck our thumbs?
In chickens, we probably don't care enough to invest a ton of money into in creating a new vaccine every year. In humans, that's not a problem. If a more virulent form of SARS comes along that escapes the vaccines, we'll make a new vaccine. We're getting pretty good at it now!
(I realize you're not on this side of the argument. I'm just reacting generally.)
> I'm not sure what we're supposed to do with this information. Not vaccinate? Stay inside forever and suck our thumbs?
Switch from vaccinating everyone to vaccinating the most vulnerable and using antivirals to treat the illness when it's severe.
> If a more virulent form of SARS comes along that escapes the vaccines, we'll make a new vaccine. We're getting pretty good at it now!
And what if we can't one year --- for any reason? Then billions of people have their brains turn to mush. I don't want human survival to depend on an annual drug refresh.
> I'm not sure what we're supposed to do with this information. Not vaccinate?
If the actual progression of Covid shows something like it is happening I would say that would be called for for everyone except the high-risk groups, yes.
> It's putting a scarlet letter on these people and shaming them for making their own choice about their own bodies.
Yes, that's how de Blasio phrases it, but I think there's more to it than how he's talked about it.
The way I see these mandates is an effort to have people maintain a person R-naught of less than 1. How each person achieve that is up to them. They can wear masks, they can get vaccinated, they can avoid places with high transmission rates (such as indoor dining/shopping), or a combination of all these things. And ideally we find more options for people to take so that that everyone can help achieve a personal R-naught in a way that best fits their needs.
Ultimately, the goal is to create a win-win scenario where on a personal level individuals can choose what degree of transmission prevention they want to pursue, and on a social level we're organized so that everyone is (hopefully) not infecting others, or doing so so sparsely that the infection rate is going down.
The goal now is to find a comfortable equilibrium in which society can continue to do its thing without explosive outbreaks of Covid. These sort of mandates help get us there. This is all still very new and we need to find more methods in which we can reach that equilibrium, and we should continue to look for them, but we can't let Covid-19 run rampant until we feel we've all the options we like.
> we can't let Covid-19 run rampant until we feel we've all the options we like.
What makes you say this? There is literally no other city in our country doing a lockdown like this. Many places are still opened up and not experiencing a surge. Even in Missouri, cases have dropped in many regions in the last few days without such lockdowns, and hospitals have not been overloaded.
Expansion of covid wards is not overload. Mortality rates aren't skyrocketing, and people aren't dying in the streets like we saw in Italy and China in the first weeks.
Don't get me wrong, there has been an increase in cases and the R0 needs to be lowered. But draconian measures aren't necessarily required, as Greene County MO's recent infection rates have shown[1]. The R0 sits at below 0 now, and hospital case loads have stabilized.
