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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.

From my email yesterday:

From: Riley Mitchell <Marcel@virtualfirefox.com>
Sent: Thursday, December 13, 2018 11:59 AM
To: sales@comicbase.com
Subject: Rescue service will complicate the situation

Hello.  My recruited person carried a bomb (Hexogen) into the building where your business is located. My man assembled the bomb according to my instructions. It  is small and it is hidden very carefully, it can not damage the building structure, but in case of its explosion there will be many wounded people.

My man is watching the situation around the building. Ifany strange behavior, panic or policeman is noticed the bomb will be exploded.

I can call off my recruited person if you make a transfer. 20’000 usd is the price for your life. Pay it to me in BTC and I guarantee that I will withdraw my recruited person and the device will not detonate. But do not try to cheat- my guarantee will become valid only after 3 confirmations in blockchain.

My payment details (btc address)-1CF9VQhwjJutPxwVq5QLFA7j7baq4RDb3w

You must pay me by the end of the workday. If the workday is over and people start leaving the building the device will detonate.

This is just a business, if you don’t transfer me the bitcoin and the bomb explodes, next time other commercial enterprises will send me more bitcoins, because it is not an isolated incident.

To stay anonimous I will no longer enter this email account. I check my  wallet every 25 min and if I see the money I will order my man to get away.

If an explosion occurred and the authorities read this letter: We arent the terrorist society and dont assume any  liability for acts of terrorism in other places.

Standing strong with heroic resolve in the face of this terrifying threat, I refused to negotiate with this international criminal mastermind. It was a tough decision, but these are the times where it’s critical to show these thugs what Americans are made of. 

I’m sure you’ll all be relieved to know that the building (my house) still stands, although frighteningly, we did lose Bob the Minion, one of our beloved inflatable Christmas decorations, whose lifeless body was found in the center of our lawn this morning.

I’m sure many in the sleeping outer world must think Bob’s death was a mere blower malfunction of a four year old $30 Christmas decoration. But we can now reveal that his demise was almost certainly an orchestrated hit job to let us know that These Men Were Serious.

But even as we mourn the loss of Bob–a faithful employee whose warmth and goofy appearance always brought a smile to all who knew him–we owe it to his memory to remain steadfast, and to never give in to shadowy forces such as these which would terrorize innocents in search of financial gain.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m getting increasingly creeped out by the constant surveillance that we’re all under, particularly in the Google/FaceBook environment. To summarize but a few of the highlights:

• Your physical movements are being constantly noted and aggregated via your phone’s GPS and location services–even when you seemingly opt out of those services.
• Even if you’re not logged in to Google or FaceBook (or Amazon, or Microsoft), the tech giants are actively tracking your movements around the web by the use of omnipresent ad tracking cookies which their ad networks serve up on almost any major site you visit.
• Every time you sign in to a site using social sign-on (that “Log in with FaceBook” or “Log in with Google” code that so many sites–and yes, even ComicBase and Atomic Avenue–use to allow you to avoid adding yet another password to your no-doubt huge list) your login is noted on FaceBook or Google’s servers–and the IP and tracking cookie information allows them to know that you’re the same person who visited any site where one of their ads appears–and now that formerly anonymous site usage is tied to a verifiable identity.
• Everything you say within range of your Smart TV or Alexa speaker can be recorded and saved on their servers when they’re activated.
• Every search you type in a search engine or browser is recorded, logged, and aggregated–along with your IP and device information.
• Every time you call out “Hey Google” or trigger Siri, Cortana, or Bixby, your voice and search are recorded and stored.

And as if this wasn’t enough to complete the panopticon of your life, Google Chrome, the dominant web browser in the world today, recently released a change which automatically logs you in to help “sync” your information between devices.  Of course, keeping all your bookmarks current is the visible benefit to you–but firmly establishing your identity and correlating everything you do while using a web browser or mobile device is the true benefit to Google.

Unless you’re a noted crime figure, it’s likely you’ve never been under anything like the level of surveillance that you’re under today, courtesy of our web browsers and our smartphones. Note also that it’s enormously difficult to escape any of it, even using tools like VPNs, since there are so many redundant mechanisms and tripwires scattered around the web–all with the common mission of aggregating who you are, where you are, and recording as much of what you do and where you go as possible.

And it’s worth noting that all this is just the stuff that we personally signed up for by installing our various tech gadgets and apps, and by clicking through the “Agree” buttons on all those end-user licenses we never read. At the same time, actual law enforcement (and even private companies) are participating on a more global scale to monitor our every movement using everything from both fixed and roaming license-plate scanners and facial recognition, easy-pass toll devices, car GPS transponders, and wholesale processing of entire networks of internet and cellular data — no search warrants required, so long as a particular individual isn’t being targeted. All the information just sits there until it’s needed, which ever-cheaper storage ensures can be a long time indeed.

A Few Countermeasures

To start at the end: I don’t believe there’s a practical way to keep any real sort of privacy in today’s world, but there’s much you can do to at least staunch the river of information you’re constantly sending to the tech companies. Call it pure cussedness on my own part, but even if the battle to escape a surveillance state is a losing one, I see no reason to staff up my own Stasi command post with the personal mission of spying on myself.

It’s been months since I uninstalled the constantly-snooping FaceBook app from my mobile devices, and try to make sure I “log out” whenever I (more and more rarely) visit the FaceBook web site. But this is merely Orwell’s equivalent of blocking the hidden camera in the television when Big Brother has dozens of other listening devices hidden around your house, as well as thousands dangling from street lamps.

Also, do yourself a favor and take a trip over to the Google Privacy Settings and FaceBook Privacy Settings–particularly the deeper “Profile” and “History” sections. After you get over the shock of seeing that both sites can meticulously trace that road trip you took in 2015 down to pictures of the lunch you had at that out-of-the-way cafe, do yourself a favor and delete it all, and turn off as much of the tracking as you can. Then come back every month or so and do it all over again, as you’ll discover that any number of things you did–as simple as putting in a direction request in Google Maps, or buying concert tickets to a show–will continue to add new information to your personal dossier. I’d personally never assume that anything deleted is gone forever–backups often exist, after all–but it’s a start.

Log out of Google, Bing, and other search engines whenever possible, and turn off their “sync” options. Yes, it’s less convenient to check your favorite news sites this way, but remember that–as currently implemented–anything you sync, like your web history–is also synched to Google’s servers.

(And speaking of Google’s servers: all those saved passwords are being backed up too–and the passwords to your local wifi networks are apparently saved as clear-text on Google’s servers. Even when data is encrypted, however, it’s a safe bet to assume that the people doing the encrypting have a copy of the keys.)

Giving the Brave Browser a try

Since the recent Chrome sign-in fiasco (which Google is currently backing away from slightly), I’ve decided to see what else I can do to stem the flood of personal information to the Silicon Valley tech giant. On a recommendation, I recently gave the Brave browser a shot, and I like what I’m seeing so far.

Built built a crew led by ex-Mozilla chief and Javascript inventor Brendan Eich, it’s a browser that embraces the clean design of early Chrome, while combining it with very smooth and user-controllable privacy settings which seem to do an excellent job of blocking intrusive ads, tracking cookies, and the like. Best of all, by getting rid of all this surveillance foo, it seems to load and display pages noticeably faster than any of the more established alternatives like Chrome, Safari, and Edge.

Eich and the crew over at Brave also seem to be rethinking the whole online ad ecosystem. Since the ability to block ads also threatens to undercut the financial basis that supports the sites you use, they’re trying to rebalance the financial incentives by letting you directly support sites you visit using cryptocurrency-based “Basic Attention Tokens” or BATs, which act to funnel your voluntary donations to the sites you view the most. I’m not sure how I feel about the whole scheme at this point (and I’m more than a little skeptical of cryptocurrencies in general), but I do appreciate that the Brave crew is thinking about the overall problem, and I applaud their view that we ought to be moving beyond the place where we, the web’s users, must effectively become the product to be sold in order to provide all the great “free” new and information the web provides.

For now, however, I’m giving Brave a spin, and so far I’ve been impressed enough to make it my default browser on both my desktop and mobile devices. Here’s a decent video review of the whole thing by ThioJoe.