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Comment Separate from the rebranding of covid.gov... (Score 5, Insightful) 213

...an article worth considering from Princeton University's Zeynep Tufekci:

We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives

Since scientists began playing around with dangerous pathogens in laboratories, the world has experienced four or five pandemics, depending on how you count. One of them, the 1977 Russian flu, was almost certainly sparked by a research mishap. Some Western scientists quickly suspected the odd virus had resided in a lab freezer for a couple of decades, but they kept mostly quiet for fear of ruffling feathers.

Yet in 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks. Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory, insisting that the virus had emerged from animals in a seafood market in Wuhan, China. And when a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance lost a grant because it was planning to conduct risky research into bat viruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology â" research that, if conducted with lax safety standards, could have resulted in a dangerous pathogen leaking out into the world â" no fewer than 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies lined up to defend the organization.

So the Wuhan research was totally safe, and the pandemic was definitely caused by natural transmission â" it certainly seemed like consensus.

We have since learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story. And as for that Wuhan laboratoryâ(TM)s research, the details that have since emerged show that safety precautions might have been terrifyingly lax.

Full article

User Journal

Journal Journal: It is 2025 and Slashdot doesn't support IPv6?

I've been migrating all my stuff to IPv6 because I'm retarded and felt like (another) winter project.

So I have a Debian VM that is IPv6-only for testing things out, general browsing, etc. and see that Slashdot doesn't support IPv6? One would think a tech site would have been onboard with this years ago.

Comment Can't stop the older stuff from getting out. (Score 5, Informative) 91

People were freaking out about FPGAs, microcontrollers, etc. that were in some of these drones. Fact is most (all?) of it was older & EOL things that you can find on Ali Express and other sites for peanuts.

There's no way to stop the recyclers from selling the parts off.

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