1,506 karma · joined November 12, 2015
https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-kontos/
> In Europe, however, non-secure shopping was already happening online as early as the 1980s. Terminal-based services including Germany’s Bildschirmtext (launched in 1983), and Minitel in France (launched in 1982), offered various services including the ability to purchase air and train tickets.
https://www.kevin.eu/blog/history-of-online-payments/
Which would appear to be a whole decade before PayPal?
Nice to see more Firefox related forks though, hopefully help gain more ground on the web for alternative engines.
From what I can see elsewhere, the tone seems to have changed slightly since then?
> “We welcome the news that there will be extra funding for medical school places as this desperate need for more doctors in training is a recommendation that we made in our Medical Staffing in England report, which we issued last month.“
> “However, this increase in student places must not come at the expense of extra funding for the existing workforce or reductions in funding in future years, because tackling the waiting lists and backlog are going to require sustained investment over many years. And the government must make clear that there will be sufficient clinical placements for all those who succeed at medical school.
https://www.bma.org.uk/bma-media-centre/bma-says-increased-m...
A generous take on it seems that the BMA don’t want to make things worse for existing doctors.
I suppose if the government funded the NHS more, ensured that existing doctors wouldn’t be worse off, one would hope that the BMA would be fully supportive of training new doctors?
It’s an awful excuse; I agree with you. If we were to be quite "cold" about this and think of it in a purely beneficial sense to the economy, surely the economic benefits of a healthy population far outweigh the costs, although I imagine it’s quite hard to "quantify" such a measurement?
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10170226/
The study is from 1997, and the NHS has definitely changed in the 25 years since, arguably becoming more privatised since the Health and Social Care Act 2012 (among other decisions).
> Despite the NHS’s clear need for more medics, the number of medical and dentistry students each year is capped by the government to control costs, as it subsidises the courses.
> The Secretary of State for Education, James Cleverly, commented recently that it's not possible to "flick a switch" to increase the numbers of doctors undergoing training, due to having to ensure there is enough funding and capacity for teaching and placements.
1. https://www.newstatesman.com/spotlight/healthcare/2022/08/am...
* Will this be open source?
* Will this support WebExtensions? Assuming they'll have to develop their own implementation since they are using the operating system's own rendering engines, so they will most likely have to have their own implementation.
* Will this allow ad-blocking and tracking protection? Once again, seems they will have to develop this feature themselves. Will the ad-blocking whitelist their own properties or does the user have granular control?
* Will this allow usage of other search engines within the browser, or are you locked in to DDG only? (Of course, ignoring actually navigating directly to the relevant search engines own website).
Interestingly enough, from their blog post[1]:
> Instead of forking Chromium or anything else, we’re building our desktop app around the OS-provided rendering engines (like on mobile), allowing us to strip away a lot of the unnecessary cruft and clutter that’s accumulated over the years in major browsers.
On macOS, Safari is probably the most anaemic "major" web browser out there. Interested to see how it compares to that. I'm not convinced a more minimalist browser compared to Safari is actually useful?
* OpenH264 Codec for H264 playback
* Widevine (if you enable DRM, it's disabled by default on Waterfox)
* Extension blocklists
* Phishing/malware website blocklists
* Certificate downloads and HSTS Preload Lists
* Captive portal detection
* And a few other security related bits and bobs I can't remember off the top of my head.
I did try to migrate to offline dumps so these things would only get updated at browser update time, but it causes a few issues with the browser doing so.
> WF was obstinately trying to record each and every info about me into a network of servers.
That would be rather shocking to me if it's true - the browser should be making requests to download things, but not upload anything? If this isn't the case do let me know what is going where as that is most definitely not by design!
> WF Classic froze the whole operating system, the keyboard went unresponsive so I had to do a hard shutdown! You know each hard power off could destroy the SSD.
That is definitely not ideal, but unfortunately Classic is very long in the tooth now and compatibility is getting harder with each release.
Sorry you had those issues though, definitely not what we want happening.
Just thought it was a nice way to get people familiar with Waterfox since - at least at the time (years ago now) I wasn't too sure how to introduce people to it.
> Nice, they even give money to Microsoft Edge!
I never did, that's just the structure of the sentence mentioning that they also talk about Edge in the article.
Waterfox G3+ supports installing bootstrapped/XPCOM extensions :-)
There are two versions of Waterfox: Classic, based on Gecko 56 that has backported security patches (but is not recommended to be used unless you are desperate to use XUL extensions) and the 3rd Generation (G3) based on ESR releases.
Waterfox Classic is based on XUL and while we back port security patches as best we can, I always try motivate existing users to migrate to the newer versions. I’m not going to force an upgrade on Classic users as it will break their current setup and instead leave it their choice.
We follow the ESR release currently for “current” versions (the default download on the website) and since ESR78 didn’t support ARM on macOS there were no builds for it.
Now that we have the beta out for the ESR91 version, ARM support for macOS is available: https://github.com/WaterfoxCo/Waterfox/releases/tag/G4.0.0b2
I’d like to think that Waterfox G3+ does fit in your criteria.
“ The committee has come to a clear scientific conclusion: This is a safe and effective vaccine. Its benefits in protecting people from COVID19 with the associated risks of death and hospitalization outweigh the possible risks.”
[1] https://youtu.be/qYmP02SIQNI"To test for asymptomatic infections, participants in COV002 in the UK were asked to provide a weekly self-administered nose and throat swab for NAAT testing from 1 week after first vaccination using kits provided by the UK Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC)."
With notes:
"In Brazil, there was no testing plan for asymptomatic infections. In South Africa, asymptomatic infections were detected from swabs obtained at study visits attended, but are not summarised here as there were only a small number of timepoints for detection of these cases."
And you can see results here [2], which includes both symptomatic and asymptomatic cases (if someone could confirm)?
From Pfizer study [3]:
"Confirmed Covid-19 was defined according to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) criteria as the presence of at least one of the following symptoms: fever, new or increased cough, new or increased shortness of breath, chills, new or increased muscle pain, new loss of taste or smell, sore throat, diarrhea, or vomiting, combined with a respiratory specimen obtained during the symptomatic period or within 4 days before or after it that was positive for SARS-CoV-2 by nucleic acid amplification–based testing, either at the central laboratory or at a local testing facility (using a protocol-defined acceptable test)."
And per their news release [4]:
"Data from this study, including longer term safety, comprehensive information on duration of protection, efficacy against asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection, and safety and immunogenicity in adolescents 12 to 15 years of age will be gathered in the months ahead."
[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)32661-1/fulltext#cesec100
[2] https://www.evaluate.com/vantage/articles/news/snippets/astrazeneca-looks-us-data-and-next-gen-vaccine
[3] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2034577
[4] https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-detail/pfizer-and-biontech-announce-publication-results-landmarkYes, this is in reference to B.1.351 and the AZ SA study.
There’s too much out there and I found Twitter quite difficult to search for things like this.
If you search for “chise vaccine” on LinkedIn[4], a few people in the field also referencing her tweets.
Wish I had something more definitive to give you.
[1] https://twitter.com/sailorrooscout/status/1371159231618019337?s=20
[2] https://twitter.com/sailorrooscout/status/1358118660737540097?s=21
[3] https://twitter.com/andrew_croxford/status/1356312317714169856?s=20
[4] https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/all/?keywords=chise%20vaccine&origin=GLOBAL_SEARCH_HEADERTwitter thread: https://twitter.com/sailorrooscout/status/135886946241446708...
Easier to read version: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1358869469125296135.html
> Let’s talk about immunity and why it’s important to take certain factors into consideration when we look at these studies and maybe why the most recent one on AstraZeneca’s effectiveness on the B.1.351 is a tad bit bothersome. For starters this beauty wasn’t tweeted initially.
> See that last bullet point? The one of T-cell immunity. Yeah, that’s vital. Why? The study failed to discuss this aspect. You cannot disregard T-cells in the same breath you are discussing B-cells, vaccines and their respective induced antibody responses. It’s a package deal.
> T-cells help protect against severe disease. Their analysis shows 76 out of 87 TCB sites (87%) are NOT impacted by the mutations seen in B.1.351. What does this mean? It means the T-cell response generated by AstraZeneca’s vaccine should be highly effective against this variant.
> How are you going to disregard our actual immune systems and their ability to make antibodies for later? Which may I remind you are DRIVEN by vaccines. They teach our bodies to make antibodies for later, not just during active infection (memory T-cells anyone). That’s immunity!
If I’m not mistaken, this study doesn’t have enough information on severe disease and hospitalisations since there were no cases in either group. I think we still need more information from the looks of it.
> They have made crazy claims about their Covid research since March 2020 while serious scientists who have produced stuff that actually works were more focused on stuff in the lab. They continue to make outlandish claims, for example claiming they had developed the first ever monoclonal antibody drug for Covid. This was in the weeks after Trump and ex NJ Gov Christie were successfully treated with Regeneron's and Eli Lilly's monoclonal antibody drugs respectively, and of course the British press and Oxford boosters spread it around in the media.
From what I can tell, it looks like Oxford started their trial in September [1] and all other reference I can find for the other drug you are mentioning, "bamlanivimab", seems to come after that date. Not sure why this is such an issue? The trials for example started in October [2]. The second reference there also seems quite critical of the drug you are mentioning:
* Bamlanivimab showed no benefit in the ACTIV-3 trial involving hospitalized patients with COVID-19.
* Bamlanivimab failed to achieve the primary endpoint of viral load reduction in a trial involving outpatients with COVID-19 (BLAZE-1). It may have caused some debatable improvements in secondary endpoints.
* Eli Lilly is now testing a cocktail of bamlanivimab plus another antibody. The company seems to realize that bamlanivimab might have some efficacy, but it’s far from a wonder drug.
* The IDSA and NIH guidelines recommend against generally using bamlanivimab.
* Somehow, bamlanivimab has nonetheless achieved an Emergency Use Authorization via the FDA and is being used at some centers.
> The "studies" that were published that show "efficacy" had vanishingly few over 65s in the treated population but had over 65s in the control. If you look at it carefully, it's not clear the claimed efficacy is much more than a difference in population characteristics. Their apologists claim they performed worse than Pfizer/Moderna because it's possible the treated took more risks because they had symptoms from the vaccine and so knew they were immune. The only problem with this claim is that the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines caused more flu-like symptoms.
A few things here:
1. It doesn't seem any of the Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna or Oxford trials have enough data for over 65s. You can see MHRA public assessments here saying the same thing. Pfizer vaccine In this document on page 48 [3]. Oxford/AZ vaccine on page 53 [4]. Moderna (not the full public assessment report) page 9 [5].
For example, even the FDA says the same about the Moderna vaccine trial:
> The small number participants and cases in some subgroups, such as participants >75 years of age and participants in certain racial subgroups, limits the interpretability of the individual VE results, but are displayed for completeness. [6]
2. Oxford seem to be the only ones who have published their studies on the vaccines, unless I have missed anything? So it's hard to scrutinise the other vaccine studies.
3. Your last comment seems unsubstantiated.
> This is pure conjecture, but I suspect the UK and EU approvals have more to do with Brexit politics than actual science. It also has to do with the fact that the head of the Oxford team is from the "right" family background. Unlike the US, this sort of thing matters a lot in the EU, even the UK. The UK government is looking good but the reduction in UK deaths is only partially real. More than half the decrease in Covid deaths in the UK is fake because excess deaths went up simultaneously with a decrease Covid deaths. Of course the EU doesn't want to look bad post Brexit so they had to approve and show they were vaccinating their population just as quickly as the UK was. Despite the EU approval, Poland, Germany and France are taking steps to limit the usage of this vaccine in their countries. I wouldn't be surprised if more European countries do so as well.
That is pure conjecture, do you have anything to try and justify this? Especially for your last sentence there, it does seem odd countries are not allowing for over 65s considering there isn't enough data from the other vaccines (unless I have misunderstood this, happy to be corrected). They have more data, but it is still not enough data?
> I for one sincerely hope the Astra Zeneca vaccine is NOT approved by the FDA. Would you rather have a real vaccine or pretend to have been vaccinated and get infected later? Even if the Astra Zeneca vaccine has the claimed 70% efficacy (it doesn't against the new strains), and if R0 is >5 as it is for the new South African and UK variants, it will only slow, not stop the epidemic.
I think calling the vaccine not real is a bit inflammatory. Why is it not real? The new study pre-print seems to support that is a very good "real" vaccine [7]. It also does appear that all the vaccines are less efficacious against other variants such as the one in SA, but seems to be similarly effective to the UK one [8]:
> Oxford researchers say their analysis found similar levels of efficacy against the old variant (84%) and the "Kent" B117 one (74.6%), which was spotted in the South East in September and caused a sharp rise in cases before Christmas. > Dr June Raine, chief executive of the UK's regulator, the MHRA, said the findings were "very reassuring". Dr Peter English, consultant in communicable disease control, said: "This is excellent news, as it indicates that the vaccine works effectively at preventing illness, even with the variant virus."
---
> I can't say this will cause Thalidomide like side effects but I would happily take a bet at 10-1 odds that within 5 years, data will come to light that shows serious problems with either the safety of efficacy of the Astra Zeneca vaccine. That implies that I think the chances there are problems are >10%, which is much too high for approval given the IFR of Covid.
The results from the UK rolling out the Oxford vaccine should be released next week I believe. I dare say you will be proved wrong. Mass issues with the vaccine would surely be out in the wild right now and be reported on.
All-in-all, this seems like quite a different understand of the information out there, and I think much of what you say isn't justified. You definitely seem to have a strong dislike for the Oxford team and the vaccine, nor do you seem to be fond of the UK and/or EU institutions from my understanding of your comment. I'd rather place my trusts in the MHRA, EMA and JCVI and similar agencies who have access to all the data and are happy with the information provided to them.
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-54120753 [2] https://emcrit.org/pulmcrit/bamlanivimab/ [3] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/... [4] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/... [5] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/... [6] https://www.fda.gov/media/144673/download [7] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3777268 [8] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-55951920
> In a nutshell, the Apple Developer Agreement is the biggest "problem" preventing a Pidgin build for iOS devices. We won't quote the exact text here, but the Agreement requires that developers allow Apple to impose additional restrictions on applications above and beyond the application's own license. Among these additional restrictions are the well-known "5-device limit" and a prohibition on redistribution of the application. It is also quite clear from the terms of the Agreement that the developer of an application is not the distributor of the application in the App Store--Apple is.
> The additional restrictions required by Apple directly violate the GPL Pidgin is licensed under (Pidgin is licensed as "GPLv2 or later," and cannot transition to GPLv3 for a number of reasons not suited for this topic). GPLv2 forbids adding restrictions above and beyond those included in the GPL's own text, thus any distribution via Apple's App Store is a direct violation of the GPL. This is the root of the problem.
* It treats the Browser Sync service as spyware
* It treats automatic updates as something spyware does
* The initial launch connections it has issue with are the captive portal detection, TLS certificate updates, addon blocklist updates, safebrowsing updates and the release notes.
For comparison it rates Pale Moon as "Top Tier". PM does similar to the above (including auto-updates), and it also connects to start.me as it is the default home page, which loads Google Ads and Analytics. According to its privacy policy:
"Among the types of Personal Data that start.me collects, by itself or through third parties, there are: Cookies; Usage Data; first name; last name; email address."
What definition is it using for spyware and why does it only apply to browsers it doesn't like is beyond me, but the author clearly has a bone to pick.
* Cost of vaccine
* Ease of manufacturing
* Ease of distribution
* Prevention of severe cases and hospitalisations
It seems all vaccines currently approved so far prevent hospitalisations completely. It won’t stop the epidemic completely depending on coverage but it’s enough to stop killing people.
> No hospitalisations or severe disease observed in the vaccinated groups from three weeks after first dose
https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2020-12-08-first-peer-reviewed-res...
> Simulation experiments revealed that to prevent an epidemic (reduce the peak by >99%), the vaccine efficacy has to be at least 60% when vaccination coverage is 100% (reproduction number=2.5–3.5). This vaccine efficacy threshold rises to 70% when coverage drops to 75% and up to 80% when coverage drops to 60% when reproduction number is 2.5, rising to 80% when coverage drops to 75% when the reproduction number is 3.5.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7361120/
Also, it prevents hospitalisations completely which is crucial.
I asked elsewhere but seems this thread is the busiest:
Also, does anyone know - supposedly the Oxford vaccine had swab tests for the virus every week to catch cases even if trial participants weren’t showing symptoms, whereas for the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine they were only swabbing if someone showed symptoms. Would that not have a large effect on efficacy numbers?
Also a separate study seemed to show anywhere between 60% to 80% efficacy is needed depending on vaccine coverage - 70% requires 75% coverage [2].
> Simulation experiments revealed that to prevent an epidemic (reduce the peak by >99%), the vaccine efficacy has to be at least 60% when vaccination coverage is 100% (reproduction number=2.5–3.5). This vaccine efficacy threshold rises to 70% when coverage drops to 75% and up to 80% when coverage drops to 60% when reproduction number is 2.5, rising to 80% when coverage drops to 75% when the reproduction number is 3.5.
Also, does anyone know - supposedly the Oxford vaccine had swab tests for the virus every week to catch cases even if trial participants weren’t showing symptoms, whereas for the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine they were only swabbing if someone showed symptoms. Would that not have a large effect on efficacy numbers?
[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
The independent regulator was aware at every stage and recommended they continue with trying the half dose trial. [1](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-55308216).
The regulator was aware at every step and recommended Oxford should continue the study with the half dose.
> The Italian manufacturers used a different technique to Oxford to check the concentration of the vaccine - effectively how many viral particles are floating in each dose. When the Oxford scientists used their method, it appeared that the Italian vaccine was double strength. What to do? Calls were made to the medical regulators. It was agreed that volunteers should be given a half measure of the vaccine, on the basis that it was likely to equate to something more like a regular dose. This was partly a safety issue - they preferred to give them too little rather than too much.
> But after a week, the scientists became aware that something unusual was going on. The volunteers were getting none of the usual side-effects - such as sore arms or fever. About 1,300 volunteers had only received a half-dose of the vaccine, rather than a full one. The independent regulators said the trial should continue and that the half-dose group could remain in the study.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-55308216
The amount of speculation in this thread is appalling.
> https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2...
I imagine they will do what they did for the vaccine candidate ChAdOx1 nCoV-2019 and swab at least every week to test for infection.
Do you have any source to back up your claim that a challenge trial wouldn’t work for SARS-CoV-2?
https://www.darksky.org/light-pollution/lighting-crime-and-s...
Also, the AZ trial was given the go-ahead along with the J&J trial.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-astraz...