Software

Het RIVM, het “Outbreak Management Team” en het kabinet werken samen aan gedegen adviezen. Uiteindelijk worden dit ook wel de juiste adviezen, al blijft men soms lang aan oude dingen hangen: mensen zonder symptomen zijn niet besmettelijk (oeps, toch wel), maskers hebben geen zin (oeps, ze helpen wel voorkomen dat je andere mensen besmet). Uiteindelijk maakt men de draai wel, maar het kost even. Nu de scholen weer opengaan vroeg ik me af, wat weten we eigenlijk over hoe mensen besmet raken met COVID-19?

Ik blog al maanden over SARS-CoV-2 aka COVID-19 aka “het coronavirus”, waarbij ik grotendeels dingen uitleg en verwijs naar positieve ontwikkelingen. Ook zijn er stukjes over medische experimenten, over ons immuunsysteem en recent iets korts over het vermoedelijke belang van goede ventilatie om COVID-19 besmettingen tegen te gaan. Ik houd van de wetenschap en ben trots op het mooie onderzoek wat hier in internationale samenwerking verricht wordt. Maar nu dan toch een zeurstuk: waarom weten we niet waar en hoe mensen in Nederland besmet raken?

Ja, daar zijn we weer. Bij het beëindigen van de serie dagelijkse Corona updates had ik aangekondigd nog terug te komen als er weer wat te melden was. Bij deze een aflevering “hoe gaat het nu met”, met daarin nieuws over hoe het verder gaat met eerder gemelde ontwikkelingen. Daarnaast twee stukjes op veler verzoek: hoe gaat het met het testen en kan de economie al weer open. Om te beginnen, op 25 maart zei ik “De samenvatting is dat als iedereen zich aan de regels houdt (BLIJF THUIS, HOUD AFSTAND) we het waarschijnlijk net binnen de capaciteit gaan houden in Nederland”, en dat bleek dus te kloppen.

bert@hubertnet.nl / @bert_hu_bert / LinkedIn Very quick post. The Dutch government just launched a tender for “digital technologies that can help with Corona”. The tender includes words on privacy sensitive contact tracing, it explicitly refers to PEPP-PT, the Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing project. Responses are due on Tuesday the 14th of April, 12:00 (noon). The question/answer form asks if you can do a demo on the 18th of April and have something that could be rolled out on the 28th.

As many countries are now managing to drive down their COVID-19 epidemic, thoughts are turning to how to manage the outbreak beyond the “lockdown”. The restrictions we live under now do appear to work, but for multiple reasons, they’ll be hard to maintain. When the epidemic was small, it was possible to trace every new infection and isolate potential new cases. This did buy time, but for most countries, “the cat was out the bag already”.

Ik heb op Facebook beloofd iedere dag een "Corona Update" te sturen met ontwikkelingen die hoopgevend zijn, terwijl ik het wel realistisch houd. Hier verzamel ik de updates zodat ze ook buiten Facebook te bekijken zijn. Er is genoeg nieuws om je zorgen over te maken dat ik het nodig vind ook dingen die kunnen helpen te belichten. Mensen die me kennen weten dat ik geen optimist ben, het is geen “goed nieuws show” hier.

Many many possible medicines are being touted as possibly being helpful in fighting COVID-19. Here’s a small list where we have some initial results or at least anecdotes: (hydroxy)chloroquine, with azithromycin or zinc: This is the “tech-bro” favorite right now, partially based on recommendations from Elon Musk and Donald Trump, two noted medical professionals. There have been a few reports on this working or not working. This article argues that an alternation of negative and positive results actually is to be expected, even if the treatment is fairly effective, which it might be.

(On this page in Dutch I post daily bits of realistic but hopeful Corona news. Here is a somehat rough translation of an article on our immune system I posted there, because I think it might also be useful for people that don’t speak Dutch). Wednesday, April 1st COVID-19 can only live thanks to us. Viruses cannot reproduce independently, they need our help. And our immune system makes this very hard, as aptly explained in this excellent xkcd comic:

Hello and welcome to this stream of consciousness I dare to call "the Corona Science Journal". Latest update: 30th of March 11:34 UTC. View history of this page [on GitHub](https://github.com/ahupowerdns/corona-science/commits/master) ([RSS](https://github.com/ahupowerdns/corona-science/commits/master/corona-science.md.atom)), where you can also submit changes, fixes and updates. Note: I have been unable to keep up with the latest developments as I have shifted my efforts to a Dutch-language daily blog about positive COVID-19 developments, while keeping it real.

(On this page in Dutch I post daily bits of realistic but hopeful Corona news. Here is a somehat rough translation of an article on antibodies I posted there, because I think it might also be useful for people that don’t speak Dutch). Friday March 27: antibodies on demand? Those who have read the previous posts will recall that antibodies from people who have already been cured can help us to be vaccinated temporarily, or even heal us faster from disease.

Several sites are now shipping “COVID-19 self test kits” or perhaps “Coronavirus self test kits”. These claim to detect the virus in 10 minutes based on a drop of blood. These rapid self-test kits are currently: Likely fake Even if not fake, they do NOT test for the virus, they do NOT do what you think they do Even if they do what they are supposed to, these tests have not been validated and could be wrong a lot.

Gisteren verscheen het rapport “Patiëntveiligheid bij ICT-uitval in ziekenhuizen” van de Onderzoeksraad voor veiligheid. Omdat ik een bescheiden bijdrage heb geleverd aan dit rapport voel ik me geroepen een stukje te schrijven over wat in het rapport het “ICT-fundament” wordt genoemd. Voor de volledige duidelijkheid, wat ik hier schrijf heeft niets te maken met de Onderzoeksraad en ook niet specifiek met de inhoud van het rapport. Zie het als een overdenking over bedrijfskritische ICT.

This article is part of a series on (European) innovation and capabilities. In a break from the usual GPS/Galileo, DNA and C++ posts, here is a bit on 5G and national security. It turns out that through PowerDNS and its parent company Open-Xchange, we know a lot about how large scale European communication service providers work - most of whom are our customers in some way. In addition, in a previous life I worked in national security and because of that I have relevant knowledge of how governments (your own and foreign ones) “interact” with telecommunication providers.

Welcome to the Galmon project! Our goals are to monitor the major Global Navigation Satellite Systems, including GPS, GLONASS, Galileo and BeiDou, but also Space Base Augmentation Systems like WAAS, EGNOS and GAGAN. Galmon is an open source & open data project with a community of over 30 station operators running more than 50 receivers. Some history of the project may be found in the second part of this blog post, and on this page on the big Galileo 2019 outage.

Last year I wrote a post listing what I had been doing in 2018, because it turned out it was a lot, so much that it was useful to summarise it somewhat. This year there is less to report, but people have wondered what I’ve been up to. And I’ve learned that if you leave room for speculation about your intentions, wrong answers tend to come up. This (professional) year for me mostly consisted of two things: DNS over HTTPS and Galileo.

What is life? This question keeps many people awake at night and has led to rafts of definitions, some involving features (procreation, metabolism and so forth), some involving chemistry, entropy or energy flux and some are of a more philosophical bent. A BBC article noted there are over 100 definitions of life and it claims all are wrong. And indeed it does appear to be quite a challenge - every hard and fast rule is violated somewhere in biology.

Note: This article covers a lot of well-trodden ground, although this post has the benefit of 1) being rather brief and 2) advancing slightly on from earlier work. Noam Chomsky wrote 39 dense pages of philosophy on this subject in “Mysteries of Nature: How Deeply Hidden”. Evolutionary’s leading light Ernst Meyr wrote a whole book called “What makes biology unique”. Finally, a lot of this thinking is also covered in the quite philosophical work “The way of the Cell” by Franklin M.

Dear anonymous internet user, dear corporate employee hiding behind a gmail.com address, dear “GitHub account with a single issue”, Thank you for your interest in my free software, my project or the documentation I wrote for you. I am happy to hear you want to ask a question, have a problem, or perhaps even inform me of a new requirement you have. But with some small exceptions (do read on), I’m afraid I will not be able to help you.

This page collects links to raw and live sources on how well the planet, including its vital infrastructure, is doing right now, potentially visualised attractively. But the key thing is, we want Real Data, from the most direct sources. Sources are expected to be realtime or at least updated frequently. Mere estimates of things based on questionable inputs are explicitly not welcome, no matter how pretty their output. Please submit new links or fixes to @bert_hu_bert or bert@hubertnet.