Login
CDC Says You Should Wear a Mask While Traveling — for Monkeypox
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is stepping up its guidance concerning monkeypox. While the risk of monkeypox is still thought to be low for the general public, the agency is now warning people to take more precautions while traveling. These precautions include avoiding contact with visibly sick people as well as wearing a mask.
The CDC changed its language over the weekend. As detailed in its travel notice concerning monkeypox, it now considers the situation to be a level 2 alert, which merits some enhanced precautions. The highest level is 3, which recommends against any non-essential travel to affected areas.
Monkeypox is thought to be native to rodents, and up until recently, it has only occasionally caused human outbreaks in parts of Africa where it may be endemic. This year, however, there have been around 1,000 cases confirmed or suspected in more than two dozen countries, including the United States. Many of these cases have had no recent travel history to Africa, suggesting that the virus is spreading locally between people.
Monkeypox Offers New Cause for Contact Tracing
With 31 monkeypox cases confirmed in 12 states and the District of Columbia and growing concern about community spread, federal and state public health officials are turning to a frayed page in the pandemic playbook: Using contact tracing to track exposure risk.
Why it matters: Contact tracing proved an ineffective tool for an airborne virus like COVID-19 with a short incubation period, but monkeypox is different.
Driving the news: Officials are turning to contact tracing in the hopes that identifying close, high-risk contacts of infected people will prevent further spread of the virus.
- “Health departments should be capable of doing contact tracing — the only thing that concerns me is the public reaction to it,” Richard Garfein, an epidemiologist at the University of California San Diego School of Public Health, told Axios.
- If close contacts of people who test positive are too crisis-fatigued or suspicious to pick up the phone when a public health worker calls, contact tracing will become less effective, Garfein added.
Oracle Quietly Closes $28B Deal To Buy Electronic Health Records Company Cerner
At the end of last year, just before Christmas, Oracle made a big move when it announced it was acquiring electronic health records company Cerner for $28 billion, thrusting it quickly into the top enterprise deal for 2021, just under the wire.
Today, the company announced it has closed the deal, effective tomorrow.
The announcement was anticlimactic in a way, full of corporate financial speak: “Oracle Corporation (NYSE: ORCL) announced that a majority of the outstanding shares (the “Shares”) of Cerner Corporation (Nasdaq: CERN) were validly tendered, and the other conditions to the tender offer have been satisfied or waived. The deal will close on June 8, 2022,” the company wrote in statement.
Will Anti-Abortionists Use ‘Uterus Surveillance’ Against Women in the U.S.?
If you are looking for a cheerful column that will make you giggle and distract you from everything that is wrong with the world, click away now. This week I have nothing but doom, gloom and data trackers for you. If you are hoping to sink into a well of existential despair, maybe let out a few screams into the void, then you’ve come to the right place.
Here goes: the U.S. Supreme Court, as you are no doubt aware, is expected to overturn Roe v Wade and the federal right to an abortion very soon. At least 13 Republican-led states have “trigger laws” in place, which means that the moment Roe is overruled, abortion will be fully or partly banned. Other states will follow suit. According to the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-choice research organisation, 26 states are certain or likely to ban abortion when Roe falls.
Perhaps you are the glass half-full sort. Perhaps you are thinking: “Well, at least people can travel to a state where abortion is legal.” Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. There are the obvious logistical and financial constraints, for one thing. Then there’s the fact that we live in a world of mass surveillance: pretty much everything we do these days leaves a digital footprint – one that anti-abortion extremists will not hesitate to weaponise. One Democratic senator has described the potential of new technology to track down and punish anyone who might even be thinking of having an abortion as “uterus surveillance.” Expect to see a big rise in this, not least because some anti-abortion states are providing financial incentives to snitch on your fellow citizens. Texas, for example, has passed “bounty hunter” laws promising at least $10,000 to individuals who help enforce the abortion ban by successfully suing an abortion provider.
Fertility and Period Apps Can Be Weaponized in a Post-Roe World
When the draft of the Supreme Court’s decision on Roe v. Wade was leaked to the public in early May, Elizabeth C. McLaughlin kicked off a social media storm. The founder of the Gaia Leadership Project, a company that trains women leaders and entrepreneurs, tweeted: “If you are using an online period tracker or tracking your cycles through your phone, get off it and delete your data. Now.” It had never occured to many women, until then, that their data could be weaponized against them. But experts that spoke to WIRED say that fertility and period-tracking apps — along with the myriad other data trails that users leave behind — could be a rich source of data for law enforcement looking to punish women if abortion is outlawed or criminalized.
“If there’s an app out there that’s collecting health data, it will soon be a target,” says Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP). “One of the sad ironies of this is that people who are actively trying to get pregnant will have a harder time using the technology to do it for fear of how that technology might be used against them in a court of law.”
Fertility and period-tracking apps vary, but most allow users to manually enter when their periods start and end, whether they use birth control, the length of their cycle, and their moods. Some allow users to track their periods as well as pregnancy. Many apps also allow users to sign in with their Google or Facebook accounts. Some also collect geolocation data.
Apple Just Killed the Password — For Real This Time
Your passwords are terrible. Year after year, the most popular passwords leaked in data breaches are 123456, 123456789, and 12345 — “qwerty” and “password” come close behind — and using these weak passwords leaves you vulnerable to all sorts of hacking. Weak and repeated passwords are one of the most significant risks to your online life.
For years, we’ve been promised a more secure, password-free future, but it seems like 2022 will actually be the year that millions of people start to move away from passwords. At Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) yesterday, the company announced it will launch passwordless logins across Macs, iPhones, iPads, and Apple TVs around September of this year. Instead of using passwords, you will be able to log in to websites and apps using “Passkeys” with iOS 16 and macOS Ventura. It’s the first major real-world shift to password elimination.
So how does it work? Passkeys replace your tired old passwords by creating new digital keys using Touch ID or Face ID, Apple’s vice president of internet technologies, Darin Adler, explained at WWDC. When you are creating an online account with a website, you can use a Passkey instead of a password. “To create a Passkey, just use Touch ID or Face ID to authenticate, and you’re done,” Adler said.
Technocracy’s High Tech War Is Just As Effective as Rockets, Bullets, Tanks
The object of war is to kill or maim as many people as possible, by whatever means. However, outright killing is often less efficient than wounding because more of the enemy’s resources are consumed in caring for the wounded than burying dead bodies. The overall goal of war is to conquer and subdue a people. In the process of conquering, the enemy must be psychologically and physically broken to the point that they give up their will to fight and their will to assert self-determination.
The current pandemic war has all the markings of more traditional militaristic war except that it is still unrecognized by those who are under attack. It is the perfect stealth war. History is full of examples of stealth attacks that were extremely successful. The victims never saw the attackers until it was too late to resist.
In today’s war, the entire health system has been weaponized and turned into a giant Trojan horse. Obey, obey, obey it cries. Humiliate yourself by donning a face mask, by staying home and retreating from normal society. Mutilate yourself by giving up your job, closing your business, injecting harmful substances into your body.
Our Country Moves Closer to a Federal Privacy Law, and I Move Closer to Losing My Mind
After years of fizzled talks and stalled negotiations on a federal data privacy bill, House and Senate committee leaders finally set aside enough of their differences to release a draft of a new bipartisan tech privacy bill this past Friday.
The legislation, called the “American Data Privacy and Protection Act,” is being spearheaded by House Energy and Commerce Chair Frank Pallone (D-N.J.), Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) and Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), ranking member of the Senate Commerce Committee.
And at least from a brief reading of the 10-pager outlining the bill’s basics, it looks pretty good! Upon a deeper reading though, the thing is … well, it’s not pretty good, or even remotely good. It carves out exemptions for bad bosses and law enforcement officials, while letting data brokers continue buying and selling vast amounts of our personal data with impunity.
Big Tech Calls for Biden Administration To Let Foreign Workers’ Adult Kids Stay in the U.S.
A backlog of U.S. green card applications has Silicon Valley giants calling on the Biden administration for new measures to keep adult children of high-skilled immigrant workers from being deported.
Tech titans led by Google (GOOG) and including Amazon (AMZN), IBM (IBM), Salesforce (CRM), Twitter (TWTR) and Uber (UBER) sent a letter to the Department of Homeland Security on Monday urging the agency to extend the immigration benefits of green card applicants to the applicants’ children who are turning 21. Those children should be allowed to stay in the U.S. and be eligible to work, the letter said.
“The children of many long-term nonimmigrant workers face tremendous obstacles staying united with their families in the U.S. due to the ever-growing immigrant visa backlogs and archaic rules that punish them for merely growing up,” the letter read.
