perestroika

Under the laws of war, Turkey and other parties to an armed conflict must not attack, destroy, remove, or make useless objects indispensable to the civilian population’s survival, including for water distribution and sanitation

Turkey fighting what it claims to be a terrorist group by attacking power plants and water treatment stations is level 9000 irony, I don't know whether to laugh or cry. :o

Some thoughts:

• maybe international pressure will make Turkey think twice, one can always hope
• maybe the folks in Rojava manage to decentralize some of their infrastructure, making the targets too small to be "high reward" in the eyes of the Turkish military
• maybe they can harden some locations, making the targets too hard for a drone, and hope Turkey doesn't dare to send piloted planes
• or maybe the folks in Rojava learn from the fight in Ukraine and come up with anti-drone systems, since after all, Turkish-made Bayraktars stopped flying when Russians got their air defense set up, and Iranian-made Shaheds get shot down by Ukrainians in great numbers, and I've also seen Ukrainians soldiers with pocket-sized "Lancet warning devices" which alert of another drone type which they cannot currently jam
• their first step would probably be to understand what hit them
• they might deploy listening stations with radio scanners and spectrum analyzers (read: cheap TV reception dongles) at first, to get some clue about the nature of the system, and a bit of early warning (by noticing the control signal of the attack drone)
• they might deploy spies near Turkish airfields to notify of bigger attack drones (that need runways) lifting off

...at the point of needing to do air defense - alas, DIY methods are unlikely to work.

For example, a Bayraktar tends to bomb targets from altitude with laser-guided bombs, staying outside the range of simple / improvised air defense. Acquiring missiles capable of downing the drones may be beyond the political connections and economic abilities of Rojava's people. Manufacturing air defense systems in a rural back woods area... is probably going to be very, very hard. But possible with great determination, if the menace doesn't stop.

I recall reading about related discoveries elsewhere. The studies were:

• Bridging the Gap: Virus Long-Distance Spread via Tunneling Nanotubes (2020)
• Tunneling nanotubes provide a route for SARS-CoV-2 spreading (2022)

...and it describes a mode of viral spread which does not depend on cell surface receptors, and is used by multiple viruses from different viral genera. The mechanism is forming a cytoplasm tunnel to physically reach the adjascent cell.

To infect cells on a different host, or elsewhere in the body with a ready-made viral particle, COVID needs the target cell to express the ACE2 receptor... but to infect the direct neighbour of an infected cell with unencapsulated viral RNA, it does not require the target to express ACE2.

As far as I can reason one o'clock at night:

• it is infecting and replicating in neurons
• since patients often lose sense of smell or taste, it definitely kills some neurons
• since the senses typically recover (although altered), it does not kill all neurons

As for why most people are OK - I think because neurons are not an environment which COVID has adapted to "work with". This mode of infection may be slow (the immune system catches up and deploys antibodies). It may be unreliable (cells may stop forming cytoplasm projections when they sense that they are compromised, or other cells may start rejecting such projections) and there may be defenses against it (stress / death signals from one cell may trigger universal antiviral defense mechanisms in adjascent cells).

I've read about them, and considered, but so far I have done nothing with solar concentrators. I've been thinking about solar thermal + thermal storage, and about solar thermal + Stirling motors, but haven't had the time to make any workable solutions.

What I have done, though, is to use dumpster-dived white plastic sheets (to be painted reflective sometime in the next summer) to increase the amount of radiation falling on my "solar fence" (which is literally a fence, about 1 meter tall, made of solar panels). They just sit on the ground 30 cm sunward from the fence, and due to being bright white, relfect additional sunlight onto the fence. :)

In winter, they make no difference, snow does the same job. :)

At their very simplest, anarchist beliefs turn on to two elementary assumptions. The first is that human beings are, under ordinary circumstances, about as reasonable and decent as they are allowed to be, and can organize themselves and their communities without needing to be told how. The second is that power corrupts.

I would add a third assumption: that capital tends to accumulate (while power and capital are exchangeable). Together with the "power corrupts" presumption, it gives a conclusion that power will too accumulate, and corruption will accumulate, unless the process is actively resisted - thus, a society without processes that balance the accumulation will eventually go bad.

Perhaps indeed.

A TTL of 64 supeficially suggests to me that the attack occurred on the server / in the hosting location. Network hardware is supposed to decrease it on every hop, is it not?

18 July 2023 issuing time is about the same when Hetzner server has lost network link for several seconds.

Seems to support a hypothesis that the attack occurred at the hosting location.

• The attacker managed to issue multiple SSL/TLS certificates via Let’s Encrypt for jabber.ru and xmpp.ru domains since 18 Apr 2023
• The Man-in-the-Middle attack for jabber.ru/xmpp.ru client XMPP traffic decryption confirmed to be in place since at least 21 July 2023 for up to 19 Oct 2023, possibly (not confirmed) since 18 Apr 2023, affected 100% of the connections to XMPP STARTTLS port 5222 (not 5223)
• The attacker failed to reissue TLS certificate and MiTM proxy started to serve expired certificate on port 5222 for jabber.ru domain (Hetzner)

Too bad they didn't discover how the forged certificate was obtained.

My guess, since those were .ru domains and that's a hot topic: spooks from three letter agencies spooking around. Either Russian agencies trying to catch dissidents or other agencies trying to catch someone working for Russian agencies.

The confusing bit: solar is (thermo)nuclear - but we with our mirrors and panels are just a side effect of solar energy. A peculiar flavour of biomass created by the reactor, so to say. :P

...and space elevator cables - but alas, for that an even stronger material is needed. :)

The toughest spider silk, made by Darwin's bark spider, allows the critters to weave webs over a river. If Kevlar as a known quantity has a tensile strength of 3.6 GPa, then this material, described as 10 times tougher, would be 36 GPa. Carbon nanotubes are 63 GPa, and they are considered insufficient. :(

Depending on the "caliber" of frog whose entry you are trying to prevent, maybe drill a few holes through the pipe and insert a few pieces of wire (TIG welding rods or random wire), forming bars. If stuff clogs behind the bars, pull them out again and reinsert.

Authoritarian tactics to suppress protest typically intend to have a chain of effects like this:

• protest will decrease
• those who protest will protect themselves better, legally (in terms of planning and considering how to avoid charges)
• those who protest will protect themselves better, physically (in terms of not being detained and overcoming the police)
• in the second scenario, police will then be able to depict the protests as "violent" and call it an "insurrection"
• consequently, they can press heavier charges against anyone they do manage to detain
• organizing a protest becomes dangerous
• participating in a protest will be perceived as dangerous
• people with families and a job and elderly people will fear to participate
• protest will lose effect due to few participants
• that will prompt some individuals to anonymous protest and actual sabotage
• nobody should want that, yet that's where the path leads to

The solutions?

• fixing the problematic laws via political process, adding a freedom-of-protest agenda to other goals
• disputing the problematic laws where the legal system allows (appealing to constitutions, conventions and charters)
• bypassing the laws after analysis, protesting in ways that cannot be criminalized
• in rare cases where it's worthwhile and there is exceptional mass support, just ignoring the laws, because if there's a million people blocking streets for some reason, cops are powerless

All of that won't be doable in every country, and in some countries, something else might be doable instead.

Ebay denied the charges in a public statement, saying it has blocked "more than 99.9% the listings for the products cited by the DOJ, including millions of listings each year."

A court will determine if that claim is true, but if yes, EBay as a market platform won't be liable. A 99.9% interception rate would indicate a considerable effort to prevent illicit trades.

All true, or likely to be so (I'm not up-to-date on some matters).

I thought something would change in the early nineties, but then an Israeli extremist shot their own prime minister Rabin, sabotaging the peace negotiations. Subsequently, Fatah spent all of its political capital without achieving tangible results. Israel didn't give things back, at least not considerably. Life did get better, but only marginally. Hamas rose in popularity.

I haven't paid attention to which factions helped prop up Trump, but I've followed Netanyahu's corruption story for a long while, and I'm dismayed to see that he's still prime minister (they managed to oust him for a while, but he climbed back into office). The comparison between the two is adequate.

So, one one side, we've got Hamas calling shots - a bunch of people's whose high ideal is probably the Islamic Republic of Iran. Their competitor is Fatah - only a bit more moderate, but perfectly capable of fighting a civil war with Hamas, they are such friendly competitors.

On the other side, there's Neanyahu, who whole-heartedly welcomes a war when offered one - since his corruption trial then doesn't get the spotlight. War would likely decrease mass protest in Israel too (they've had mass protest since spring due to constitutional issues - that's one thing which is possible in Israel but not in Palestine, they still have democracy but it's not great)... and historically, even before there was a politician named Netanyahu, Israeli tactics have played into the hands of Palestinian extremists.

Both sides have surely been aware that the opposing negotiator must be able to bring tangible results to their people (a lack of attacks, a removal of blockade measures, a clear map of which settlements stay and which ones go) - this is needed for negotiation to gain legitimacy and become the preferred method.

If they stonewall each other, negotiation loses legitimacy and those who want to fight can see if it helps. Then they will find out it doesn't - at great cost. :(

P.S.

I hope that the West Bank of Jordan is still not involved, and doesn't get involved in fighting. Many people there are likely sympathetic to Hamas and opposed to Israel, but hopefully smart enough to stay out of it.