Shout out to @BioNTech_Group who found time to answer this small time blogger's question! @hildabast I have it in writing now, a 30 microgram dose of BNR162b2 actually contains 30 micrograms of mRNA. And in addition, there are the lipids, salts, sucrose and water.
This means that by my calculations, every shot of this vaccine contains around 2000 billion mRNA strands that encode the stabilised spike protein. At 0,53*10^-21 grams per RNA nucleotide, this represents ~25 petabyte of mRNA per injection. #cantwait
If this doesn't give you the shivers I don't know what will:
So it turns out the mRNA Spike in the vaccine is around 25% different than that in the virus itself! How can this be? The vaccine is.. codon optimized. This means the viral RNA has been replaced by synonymous RNA that is more readily translated into proteins by human cells:
The top row of letters is the vaccine, the bottom row of letters is the actual virus. ! denotes a mismatch. And the row with digits denotes "the third codon position". And you can see a near complete match between '!' and '2'
And this in turn is the codon optimization - you can typically change the third codon position at will without changing the protein. But you CAN make the RNA "look more human" this way!
A blog post is forthcoming - the codon optimization appears to have multiple functions.
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So the fine writeup of SIGRed (CVE-2020-1350) includes a brief discussion of a neat technique to make a Microsoft browser perform DNS lookups to arbitrary nameservers, which can then also be infected. /cc @EyalItkin & @omriher 1/9 research.checkpoint.com/2020/resolving…
Normally, you can't really do DNS lookups using the DNS protocol from browsers. Sure, the browser will resolve names for you, but it chooses how to do that. You can't direct the query anywhere, or do non-standard lookups. This is pretty good. 2/9
But what if you really really want to talk to a nameserver, for example to attack it? Browsers do speak HTTP, and do so very well. Some browsers, notably from Microsoft, are even prepared to send HTTP queries to the DNS port (53). 3/9
Governments are pondering if apps can help them perform contact tracing for COVID-19 infected people. The "why" of this is explained very well here: 1/16
Some countries just track the location of everyone all the time and perform matching on a government server. This is a privacy nightmare. 2/16 www1.cbn.com/cbnnews/israel…
Can we do better? An international team has designed a protocol that allows tracing, while preserving privacy: DP-3T
/cc @marcelsalathe@mikarv 3/16
The discussion on if Huawei should power 5G networks misses the point. Most European service providers have long lost control over their networks. Banning Huawei will do nothing to change that. Instead, providers should focus on regaining technical skills berthub.eu/articles/posts…
It is remarkable how the current debate would make one think that picking a specific vendor for 5G would suddenly change things. Instead, most service providers have already outsourced their operations to companies far away. /cc @shashj@cryptoron
This articles does not argue for simply picking Huawei for 5G. It does however argue that if we truly care about our privacy, about the availability of our communication systems even in times of conflict, and about our digital autonomy, much much more needs to be done.
Fellow geeks - if after all the Galileo outage stuff you feel the need to go down the wire and receive every GPS/Galileo/GLONASS/Baidu/whatever health message, I can recommend the "NAVILOCK 62524 GPS". It has a stonking chipset (u-blox 8) which delivers the goods. 1/5
There is a huge PDF with full details on how to get the chipset to emit what you need, find it here: u-blox.com/sites/default/… 2/5
To get you going, there is the free u-blox 'u-center' tool which, although Windows only, runs under Wine and it helps to get to know the chipset. The device itself is very Linux friendly. 3/5
Mozilla confirms it will default Firefox DNS to @Cloudflare DNS based on an "Ok, got it" style notification, but will include a button to not accept that. Some further details & nuance can be found in this statement:mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/doh/p…
Note that if Mozilla likes your ISP and it also offers DoH, Firefox may offer the user the option of continuing to use that ISP DNS. But you have to be on the Mozilla "approved list":
Further context on if default handover of your DNS to a third party is a good idea can be found on blog.powerdns.com/2019/02/07/the…
DNS has two kinds of servers: Authoritative and Caching/Resolving servers. Back in 1999, an extension to DNS was defined called EDNS. It was then also defined how any kind of server that receives a question with EDNS on it should respond. In 1999! 2/
The problem now is that some authoritative servers (that host domain name details), go crazy when you send them an EDNS query. They provide no response, a crazy response or sometimes a confusing response ("I support EDNS, but not that kind"). 3/