Are Russian Cyber-Spies Targeting COVID 19 Vaccine Research Labs?

Seems unbelievable when I’ve first heard of it but are Russia’s top cyber-spies targeting the world’s leading COVID 19 vaccine research labs?

By: Ringo Bones

Given that to those old enough to remember that the then Soviet Union was at the cutting edge in medical science when it comes to developing performance enhancing drugs at the height of the Cold War, and hence their “almost mythical” athletic performance during the Olympic Games after World War II, that Putin era Russia now has resorted to stealing vital data via cyber espionage when it comes to developing a working COVID 19 vaccine seems “unbelievable”. But, sadly, the world’s leading cyber security services had just found out that the Kremlin’s go-to cyber-spies, a hacker group popularly known as Cozy Bear, was responsible for hacking the computer servers of UK, Canadian and US labs currently working on a working COVID 19 vaccine. It did not specify which organizations had been targeted or whether any information had been stolen. But it said vaccine research had not been hindered by hackers and as usual, Russia has denied any responsibility.

The warning was recently published by an international group of security services like the UK’s NCSC, the Canadian Communication Security Establishment (CSE), the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Cyber security Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the US National security Agency. One expert said it was “plausible” that, despite the Kremlin’s denials, Russian spies were involved. Cozy Bear – the named cyber espionage and hacking group – has been implicated in past cyber attacks and has left quite a trail, and there are fairly good links to the Russian state itself. Cozy Bear was first identified as being a significant “threat actor” as far back as 2014, according to the American cyber security firm Crowdstrike. It describes the group as being “aggressive” in its tactics and “nothing if not flexible, changing tool sets frequently. The unit has been previously implicated in hacking the US Democratic National Committee (DNC) during the 2016 US Presidential Election. But given Russia’s reputation of being the cutting edge in medical science since the Soviet era, why did the Kremlin authorize such an operation in order to be the first in developing a working COVID 18 vaccine?

From a geopolitical perspective, a nation state that can first develop a working COVID 19 vaccine could gain an unfair advantage from an economic perspective in being able to end a government enforced lockdown and restarting the economy while keeping its own citizens from getting sick and or dying from COVID 19. It seems that the COVID 19 vaccine spy-game is a high stakes play in terms of statecraft indeed. Let’s just hope that Agent 007 has the sufficient medical degree to tackle such a case successfully.

Does 5G Internet Networks Cause And Help The Spread Of The COVID 19 Virus?

Given that the belief is straight out off Trump’s climate change denial playbook, does the belief that 5G internet networks causes COVID 19 more dangerous than the pandemic itself?

By: Ringo Bones

The dismissal of the pandemic as a hoax and questioning of scientific experts is straight out of President Trump’s, and other right-wing populist demagogue’s, playbook of climate change denial that got them elected in the first place. The 5G theory about radio waves transmitting or activating the virus, for example, is a reworking of long running conspiracy fears about mind control experiments, subliminal messaging and supposed United States military weapons projects that has since been a staple of Hollywood’s TV and movie industry way before the runaway mid 1990s success of The X-Files. Add to that an utter lack of how science works of most of Trump’s supporters and it is no longer a mystery that the belief that 5G internet networks causes and spreads the COVID 19 virus is very popular in the United States.

The 5G coronavirus conspiracy theories are particularly challenging to debunk by normal educated people with a working grasp of science – never mind tenured government scientists - because they bring together people from very different parts from the political spectrum. On the other hand, they attract the far-right Trump supporters who see them as part of a technological assault by big government and the “rich liberal elite” on the freedom of individuals. On the other, they appeal to the well established “anti-vaxxer community” who are often allied with those distrustful of Big Pharma. Getting COVID 19 from 5G internet networks is probably like someone getting polio from lighting FDR's old flashlight into their face.

Could 5G Interfere With Weather Forecasting Accuracy?

Despite of the promise of blisteringly fast internet speed and much increased device connectivity, could 5G networks degrade our current weather forecasting ability back to the 1980s?

By: Ringo Bones

During trial runs in recent years, 5G networks – in prototype form - had managed to provide blisteringly fast internet speeds and quantum leaps in connectivity to our devices and hopefully, at data rates not much more expensive that we currently pay. But are there caveats to this increased internet speed and connectivity – as in degrading our current ability to provide accurate weather forecasting?

Since the mid 1990s, the ability of our meteorological satellites and supporting networks to provide accurate weather forecast have increased by leaps and bounds. Currently, we can track the severity of storms as it hits landfall by up to three days in advance. This resulted in countless lives being saved due to people evacuated to safer areas – an ability that just twenty years before, was thought of as just “science fiction”. But could 5G internet networks degrade our ability to provide accurate weather forecasts back to the early 1980s?

The radio frequencies used by 5G networks operate at around 24 GHz – a frequency quite close to the ones used by the sensors and transmitters of weather satellites. The radio frequency used by weather satellites / meteorological satellites takes advantage of how atmospheric water vapor in clouds and suspended ice crystals resonate at 23.8 GHz. Due to its close operating frequency, 5G internet networks could interfere with weather satellites when it comes to forecast accuracy. In recent trials, the degradation in accuracy can make a contemporary meteorological satellite operate as if it is using 1982 era technology in terms of weather forecasting accuracy.

COVID 19 Contact Tracing Apps: More Trouble Than Their Worth?

Given that most of them are modeled after Apps used by Beijing to track their own political dissidents, are COVID 19 contact tracing apps more trouble than their worth especially when it comes to privacy concerns?

By: Ringo Bones

COVID 19 Contact Tracing Apps have raised concerns to everyone concerned about civil liberties. To anyone old enough to remember those post 9/11 overarching anti-terror laws can attest to this. Add to that most computer literate folks cite that most of them are reminiscent of secret tracking apps used by Beijing to monitor the day-to-day movement of suspected Uyghur political dissidents, it is easy to see why many see that COVID 18 contact tracing apps are really more trouble than their worth and has nothing to do with keeping us from getting COVID 19 but more to do with breaching the most basic of our privacy rights.

 According to a study published by the Brookings Institution back in April 27, 2020: Even among true contact events, most will not lead to transmission. Studies suggest that people have on average about a dozen close contacts a day – incidents involving direct touch or one-on-one conversation – yet even in the absence of social distancing measures the average infected person transmits to only 2 or 3 other people throughout the entire course of the disease. Fleeting interactions, such as crossing paths in a grocery store, will substantially more common and substantially less likely to cause transmission. If the apps flag these lower-risk encounters as well, they will cast a wide net when reporting exposure. If they do not, they will miss a substantive fraction of transmission events.

Because most exposures flagged by apps will not lead to infection, many users will be instructed to self-quarantine even though they have not been infected. A person may put up with this once or twice, but after a few false alarms and the ensuring inconvenience of protracted self-isolation, we expect many will start to disregard the warnings, Of course, this is a problem with conventional contact tracing as well, but it can be managed with effective direct communication between the contact tracer and the suspected contact.

Google Restricting Huawei’s Use Of Android: The E-Commerce Side of the Trade War?

Even though security concerns on Huawei products has been around since 2006, does Google’s latest move now makes Trump’s trade war with China now has a e-commerce front?

By: Ringo Bones

Back around 2006 to 2007, tech-savvy Gen-X’ers’ primary reason for “boycotting” Huawei and ZTE gear was primarily due to the Tibetan Freedom Movement and how Beijing kept incrementally ratcheting their crackdown on Uyghurs since the 1990s. Sadly such concerns were largely forgotten or dipped below the radar of activist social media since a relatively unknown senator from Illinois got elected to The White House. Then and now, no major news correspondent manage to ask Huawei CEO Ren Zhengfei about what he thinks about consumers who chose to boycott Huawei products because of Tibetan Freedom Movement and Uyghur crackdown concerns. But recently in February 2019, the Huawei issue surfaced yet again – and in a way bigger manner – after the company faced growing backlash from Western countries, primarily lead by the Trump Administration, over possible risks posed by using Huawei products in next-generation 5G mobile networks.

On May 20, 2019, Google decided to start restricting new designs of Huawei smartphones access to some Google apps. This move comes after the Trump Administration added Huawei to a list of companies that American firms cannot trade with unless they have a “special license”. In a statement, Google said it was “complying with the order and reviewing the implications”. At the moment, Huawei declined to comment.

At the moment, existing Huawei smartphone users will still be able to update apps and push through security fixes, as well as update Google Play services, but when Google launches the next version of Android later this year, it may not be available on Huawei devices. Future Huawei devices may no longer have apps such as YouTube and Google Maps. Even though Huawei has already a so-called Plan B to prepare them from such scenarios brought about by the Trump Administration’s “Trade War”, the company probably must now abandon its plan to overtake Samsung to become the world’s best-selling smartphone brand by 2020.

The Mankosi Village Do It Yourself Internet: A Good Model to Follow For Those Still Trying To Connect to The Internet?

With only a preliminary help to start up the village’s own mesh network, would Mankosi village, South Africa’s do it yourself internet serves as a good example for those still can’t connect to the internet due to their remote location?

By: Ringo Bones

Even though the project got its start back in 2017, Mankosi village, South Africa’s Do It Yourself – also called Zenseleni – in the local language recently got press notice not only for its ongoing success, but primarily for its lower user fees in comparison to other major telecommunication company owned internet networks in other parts of the African continent. In Mankosi, you can get one full month of internet for less than 2 US dollars – about 1.70 US dollars in fact.

When the villagers of Mankosi first heard about this thing called the internet and how it could help them in touch cheaply while helping them with all manner of information research, the village, with the help of the University of Western Cape built a mesh network that later became known as Zenzeleni – which means do-it-yourself in their local language. The village runs its own mesh networks that are then linked to the internet. Due to the relatively remote location of Mankosi village, a mesh network based internet system is much cheaper to operate than a conventional single mast based network more often used by major telecommunication companies / internet service providers to locate relatively remote areas to the internet. Mankosi’s messed network system was initially ran on off the grid solar photovoltaic power generating systems, although the village got recently connected to the country’s main electrical grid back in 2018 which further reduced their operating costs.

Due to the economies of scale, the network still manages to earn a profit since it was started back in 2017 even at the price that they charge. The Mankosi village network also make money by selling voice-over-internet-protocol vouchers that people can use to talk to each other. This cost about 17-percent of what people normally pay to make calls in South Africa. Zenzeleni instead charge 50-percent of network charges and thus makes a profit. The profit is used to maintain the network and to fund other development projects within the villages. Mankosi’s Zenzeleni network still runs till this day because the University of Western Cape trained several villagers – and they still do – to install and maintain the towers as in-house technicians.

DNA: Music Recording And Playback Format Of The Future?

With traditional independent record stores now closing and malls no longer selling Red Book Compact Discs, will DNA prove to be the “future-proof” music format of the future?

By: Ringo Bones

With traditional independent music stores – ones that sell vinyl LPs and Redbook 16-bit 44.1 KHz sampled compact discs closing and big malls no longer selling Redbook CDs, it seems that it would only be a matter of time that every Generation-Xers music collection could be consigned to the dustbin of history much sooner than expected. Thankfully, to celebrate the 20^th anniversary of the release of their most successful album, UK based electronic music group Massive Attack released their Mezzanine album on DNA back in October 2018.

Massive Attack worked with Andrew Melchior at the technology consultancy 3^rd Space Agency – the man who helped Bjӧrk convert her performance of “Stonemilker” into virtual reality for her 2015 MOMA show. According to Melchior: “The advantage with DNA is that our civilization could crash into dust and rebuild itself using entirely different technology, meaning they couldn’t access our computers or disks, since every human carries DNA, we can expect any future civilization to work out how to play back DNA-stored information. Which means the first thing a future civilization would learn about us might be Mezzanine.”

Using the DNA molecule to store vast amounts of digitally encoded information is more than just a science fiction pipe dream that was first popularly presented in the Superman movie franchise Man of Steel. The idea has first been published back in 1964 to 1965 when a Soviet era physicist named Mikhail Neiman published his work on the subject in the journal Radiotekhnika. But the first successful execution of encoding digital data onto a DNA molecule was back in 2012 when Harvard biologist George Church encoded one of his books onto a DNA molecule.

The electronic musicians Massive Attack worked with scientists at TurboBeads, a commercial spin-off from the Swiss science, engineering and mathematics university ETH Zurich, to adopt a technology pioneered by maverick US biotechnologists Craig Venter when he created a synthetic chromosome of a bacteria species in the laboratory with four “watermarks” written in the DNA. Robert Grass, professor at ETH Zurich’s Functional Materials Laboratory and his colleague Reinhard Heckel used similar chemical techniques to translate Mezzanine’s digital audio stream into genetic code. “We store digital information in a sequence of zeroes and ones, but biology stores genetic information using the four building blocks of DNA,” Grass explains. “We compressed Mezzanine’s digital audio then coded it as DNA molecules by converting the binary 0s and 1s into a quaternary code – with adenine representing 00, cytosine representing 01, guanine representing 10 and thymine representing 11. The resulting DNA resembles natural DNA in every way, although it contains no useful genetic information.”

According to Massive Attack band member Robert del Naja: “The storage potential of DNA is huge.” Indeed, one milligram of the DNA molecule could store the complete text of every book in the US Library of Congress and have room to spare. Del Naja also states: “If you think about DNA versus the ridiculous amounts of server farms that have got to be cooled 24/7 all around the world, this looks like a much better solution going forward. It allows us to archive music for hundreds of thousands of years.” Unfortunately as of late no word yet on the newfangled format’s sound quality.