Release Notes

Here’s the best overall wrap-up of the actual data that I’ve seen. Worth checking all the linked articles, particularly the Financial Times piece on Sweden, and Daniel Horowitz’s wrap-up of the data on masks and their actual (vs. theoretical) effectiveness in preventing virus spread.

In case you want the TL;DR version re: masks, see this review of the CDC guidelines summary. In short: N95 masks–if anyone had them–are useful in stopping something like Covid, but the cloth/surgical ones everyone is wearing don’t actually do much to stop Covid transmission.

Despite everyone’s diligence and best intentions, it looks like the only thing which stops Covid from spreading is letting 15-25% of the population catch it, trigger an immune response, and (in almost all cases) shrug off the effects. It then becomes harder to pass on to the next person, and the overall infection rate tapers off, along the lines suggested by of Farr’s Law on epidemics.

Within this framework, I’d like to believe that it’s still possible to largely shield old folks from catching the disease, and that seems to be where our energy ought to be devoted. But as hard as we all tried to live in our little hermetic bubbles, there’s been virtually no correlation between lockdown efforts and the overall fatality rates, world-over. At great economic and human cost, it’s been possible to delay infection, but in the end, there’s been no stopping it from working its way through the populations, even of countries like Peru which used a heavily militarized approach to ensure enforcement of their draconian lockdown measures.

Mask use seems similarly ineffective. See if you can spot the correlation between mask use and deaths/100,000 in the scatter graph below. If you can, I’ll buy you the socially-distanced drink of your choice:

So what are we to do?

I can’t believe I’m typing this, but as an American, I’m jealous of Sweden. They didn’t lock down, and didn’t destroy their economy. Instead, they took their hit, moved on, and now their Covid death rate is now essentially nil.

For all practical purposes, Covid in Sweden is done. Hell, they were done almost two months ago:

As for us, at least the trend lines say we’re well on our way to reducing this to a tolerable nuisance in life, even given the incentives to overcount on both infections and deaths:

Source: CDC. Green trend lines added to emphasize post-inflection direction.

Granted, all of this is as of September 14th, 2020, and things can change. At this point, though, my money is on the trends continuing until it falls into the range of “background threat” of a type with the seasonal flu. Covid-19’s never going away entirely, but it’s far past time for us to drop the posturing and political shenanigans associated with it and get back to living life.

…but given the nature of politics (and that this thing long ago morphed into an issue more political than public health-related), I for one, am not holding my breath.

Several days ago, I decided that I needed to rearrange my entire office space in order to set it up for better videoconferencing–maybe even a podcast. As such, having a giant window immediately behind me as I sat at my desk was hardly ideal, since it turned every videocam shot of me into a backlit silhouette. While this sort of picture has its uses–particularly when portraying informants against the drug cartels–it didn’t make for a particularly photogenic teleconference image.

In the process of knocking about all the desks, office equipment, and electronics in my office, I unfortunately managed to send my venerable M-Audio AV40 speakers crashing to the ground, rendering them forevermore silent. My meager skills with a soldering iron could not resurrect my old friends, so I had to consign them to the trash heap.

After doing my usual rounds of internet searching on the current state of semi-affordable audio speakers for my computer, I was about to sink $499 into some decently reviewed AudioEngine A5+ speakers, when at the last minute, I decided to give the PC Editors Choice Edifier 1280Ts a shot. “What the heck” I thought–they’re only $99.99, so if they wind up being terrible, I can pass them on to [one of the less audio-obsessive members of the household] and go buy the AudioEngines…” Yes, I’m that awful.

As it turned out, Amazon came through even in the midst of a worldwide Coronavirus shutdown and dropped off a package with the new speakers less than a day after I’d ordered them. A couple of minutes later, I had them plugged in and sitting on the stands to either side of my computer, and fired up Pandora.

Nothing. Dead silence.

“Oh yeah” I remembered, and actually turned them on by pressing the power button in the back of the left speaker.

…and they were amazing.

After taking off the cheap-looking and sound-coloring speaker grilles, these little speakers really shone. There’s simply no way you can reasonably expect to get this sort of sound from speakers in this price range. I haven’t gotten out any audio analysis tools yet, but to my ear, they deliver a beautifully flat sound, uncolored by either the fake bass boosts of most smaller speakers, or the tinniness that tends to color cheaper speakers of this class. Better yet, they deliver a beautifully detailed stereo image that manages to crisply reproduce percussion and guitar while keeping a full warmth throughout the midrange and into the very (but not extremely low) bass.

The only real limits that are apparent after an hour of listening are for extremely low–even sub-sonic bass (think: 80hz and below). There are, after all, some physical limits to what speakers of this dimension can do. That said, while these wouldn’t be either my movie soundtrack or industrial dance club speakers of choice, they’re performing brilliantly throughout the range of actual music. In all, they perform much more like a high-end set of bookshelf recording studio monitors than the “better than your average computer speaker” M-Audios they replaced. I couldn’t be happier.

And I still can’t get over the idea that they only cost $99.95.

Clearly I have to destroy my tech gear more regularly…

For the past few weeks, we’ve been engaged in a big move of our servers back down from the Amazon cloud to on-premises servers. While Amazon runs an amazing service, the bandwidth bill for ComicBase is a killer, and we can afford to throw way more processing power and disk storage at it if we simply buy the hardware than if we rent it from Amazon. By using on-premise hardware, we get to go way faster, way cheaper, and keep more control of our data.

Although I’m quite looking forward to not writing my largest single check of each month to Amazon, Running your own gear means running your own data center–with all that entails. Namely, you’re completely responsible for everything from backups to firewalls to even power. (I used to keep a generator and set of power cords at the ready back in California for when our infamous “rolling blackouts” would hit, in order to minimize server downtime).

On the backup front, we’re actually improving our position, using multiple layers of RAID, traditional disk backups, and off-site cloud storage. Basically, even if the place burns to the ground, we should be able to pick up the pieces and carry on pretty quickly.

What really gets old, however, is dealing with the network security foo. Unless you’ve run a site yourself, it’s hard to believe how fast and frequent the attacks come on every part of your system, courtesy of our friend the internet.

Mind you, these are not, for the most part, targeted attacks by the sort of ace hackers you see on TV and movies. Instead, it’s a constant barrage of “script kiddies” — drones and bored teens using automated “hacking” tools to assault virtually every surface of a publicly facing server using the computer-equivalent of auto-dialers and brute-force guessing.

Whether it’s the front-facing firewall, web sites, email servers, or what have you, looking at the logs shows that mere hours after the servers went live, they were being perpetually pounded with password-guessing attacks, attempts to relay spam, port scans, etc. None of these stood a chance in hell of succeeding (sorry, kiddies, the password to our admin account is not “password”) but it was amazing to see how quickly “virgin” servers, on new IP addresses, started getting pounded on. In one case, we started seeing automated probes of a server before it had even gone live to our own production team!

All this is to say that it’s a jungle out there, folks. For heaven’t sake use decent passwords (a good start: don’t let your password be any word that’s in a dictionary); change the default account passwords and user names for all your various networking hardware, don’t re-use passwords from system to system, and look for a good password manager to keep them all straight for yourself (I’m personally partial to 1Password, although I got hip to that program before they switched to a monthly billing model).

And yeah, watch those server logs. Most of the script-kiddie attacks are about as effective as the robocalls which start with a synthesized voice claiming, “HELLO, THIS IS IRS CALLING. YOU ARE LATE IN MAKING PAYMENT.” But we’ve also seen some more sophisticated attacks employing publicly known email addresses, names of company officers and more. Bottom line: watch yourself when you’re on the internet, and realize the scumbags are always looking for targets. Don’t make it easy on them.