the British government is giving strong backing to ‘Covid passports’ – five weeks after saying they wouldn’t be needed. CC-licensed photo by Marco Verch Professional Photographer on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 10 links for you. Papers, please. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Myanmar’s military shuts down Internet, two months after coup • The Washington Post

Miriam Berger:

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Myanmar’s military government ordered broadband Internet shutdowns Thursday amid ongoing violent suppression of opposition to its ouster of the country’s democratically elected government.

The escalation came as the country marked two months since the army’s toppling of the civilian-led government, which has faced widespread public resistance despite the military’s lethal response: More than 500 civilian protesters have been killed and more than 2,000 arrested since Feb. 1, according to local activists.

The United Nations’ special envoy for Myanmar, Christine Schraner Burgener, on Wednesday warned that “a bloodbath is imminent” if the international community did not act to quell the violence.

Last Saturday marked the bloodiest day since the coup, with troops reportedly killing over 140 protesters in more than 40 locations across the country.

As Myanmar death toll climbs, a soldier’s wife is caught between protesters and military
Reuters reported Thursday that official orders to halt wireless broadband services did not provide any explanation. Myanmar’s military previously shut down mobile Internet access and slowed service.

A lawyer for Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s deposed leader, also Thursday said that the detained opposition leader had been charged the week before in Yangon with breaking the country’s secrets law, the most serious allegation against her yet. The lawyer told Reuters that he had heard about the charges against Suu Kyi and several other members of her National League for Democracy only two days ago.

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It really is a calamity: hundreds dead, and Myanmar has essentially rewound to 2005 or so. This is a pretty good explainer of why: Aung San Suu Kyi could have been in a position to change the constitution so that the military wouldn’t have had any political power.
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Biden’s infrastructure plan would make electricity carbon-free by 2035 • Scientific American

Scott Waldman:

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The backbone of President Biden’s plan to use infrastructure spending to advance climate policy is a clean electricity standard for the power sector that has the potential to be the most aggressive ever enacted by the federal government.

Tucked into his $2.3 trillion infrastructure proposal is the aim of “achieving 100% carbon-free electricity by 2035,” according to a fact sheet released yesterday by the White House.

“If we act now, in 50 years people are going to look back and say: ‘This was the moment that America won the future,'” Biden said during a rollout of the proposal in Pittsburgh.

While details are vague about how the “energy efficiency and clean electricity standard” would be enacted, it remains — at minimum — a significant symbolic milestone in the U.S. push to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

And at best, it could be a transformative measure that loosens U.S. reliance on fossil fuels in less than 15 years. The United States is currently at about 40% clean energy on the grid.
The difference depends on whether the 2035 goal is mandatory, or simply aspirational. Congress will have a big role to play in determining how much power is behind it.

“This really will be the backbone for decarbonizing the power sector,” said Lindsey Walter, deputy director for Third Way’s Climate and Energy Program. Previous iterations of a clean energy standard have set a goal of 100% carbon-free energy by 2050 so Biden is significantly advancing the timeline, she said.

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Involves tax rises, so of course it’s completely opposed by Republicans. The Democrats are looking to find a way to finagle it so they don’t need that.
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It took the Suez Canal crisis to highlight the scale of the polluting shipping sector • Climate Change News

Madeline Rose:

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Today there are around 60,000 ships carrying 11 billion tonnes of cargo every year — around 80% of world trade.

Most of everything we own – clothes, shoes, food, technology – at one points sits on a giant container ship like the Ever Given that rose to fame last week.

Every single one of these ships in operation runs on fossil fuels, but not just your everyday petrol or diesel. Container ships run on the world’s cheapest, dirtiest liquid fossil fuel – known as “heavy fuel oil”. This is the gunky black tar-like substance that comes out the bottom of an oil refinery once all the transparent road fuels like gasoline and diesel have been separated out.

Heavy fuel oil contains up to 500 times as much cancer-causing sulphur dioxide than the legal maximum allowed in road fuels. Sometimes even chemical waste and melted car tires, that companies don’t want to pay to dispose of safely, are just blended into shipping fuel.

…Even after somewhat improved sulphur standards finally came into effect in 2020, decades after equivalent rules for power plants, shipping’s dirty air pollution is still linked to 250,000 deaths and 6.4 million childhood asthma cases every year — just the cost of doing business, apparently.

Meanwhile, shipping continues to emit one billion tons of climate-heating greenhouse gases into the atmosphere each year. That’s more than all but the top five largest emitting countries in the world, we just never talk about it. Swedish activist Greta Thunberg is right — governments typically exclude shipping emissions from their climate action plans, pretending the problem doesn’t exist.

Just like other sectors, shipping is capable of running on renewable energy — there are over 100 pilot projects for zero-emission shipping underway. But consumers and governments have not yet demanded that ships make this energy transition.

The shipping industry is in bed with the fossil fuel industry (40% of the sector’s global cargo consist of coal, oil, and fossil gas) so transitioning ships off fossil fuels will require sustained pressure, action, and outrage.

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The Greta Thunberg tweet is quite something. A very cutting meme for a big problem.
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Social distancing changes things we have seen • Stray Reprints

Ben Greenman:

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NOTE: These are all things I made during quarantine from the coronavirus pandemic in March of 2020. Some are funny but almost all are, once you think about them, sad.

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Reimagined pictures: American Gothic, Creation of Adam, Wish You Were Here (the best, I feel), Meet The Beatles, Abbey Road, Forrest Gump (close second), E.T. and plenty more.
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Scientists just killed the EmDrive • Popular Mechanics

Caroline Delbert:

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The crux of the EmDrive is if you bounce microwaves around inside the tube, they exert more force in one direction than the other, creating a net thrust without the need for any propellant. And when NASA and a team at Xi’an in China tried this, they actually got a small-but-distinct net force.

Now, however, physicists at the Dresden University of Technology (TU Dresden) are saying those promising results showing thrust were all false positives that are explained by outside forces. The scientists recently presented their findings in three papers at Space Propulsion Conference 2020 +1, with titles like “High-Accuracy Thrust Measurements of the EmDrive and Elimination of False-Positive Effects.” (Read the other two studies here and here.)

Using a new measuring scale and different suspension points of the same engine, the TU Dresden scientists “were able to reproduce apparent thrust forces similar to those measured by the NASA team, but also to make them disappear by means of a point suspension,” researcher Martin Tajmar told the German site GreWi.

The verdict:

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“When power flows into the EmDrive, the engine warms up. This also causes the fastening elements on the scale to warp, causing the scale to move to a new zero point. We were able to prevent that in an improved structure. Our measurements refute all EmDrive claims by at least 3 orders of magnitude.”

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Damn you scientists with your facts and tests! I guess they’ll have to call the EmDrive something else so they can start hyping it again.
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Survey XII: Digital New Normal 2025 – after the outbreak • Imagining the Internet

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Nearly half of experts worry that changes in the ongoing evolution of digital life tied to the COVID-19 outbreak and societies’ responses to it may make digital life in 2025 mostly worse for most people. Threats they cite include inequality and injustice; security risks and privacy’s fall; automation; misinformation and worsening mental health. Their hopes are for improved social relations and social justice; that tech and government may come to more highly value the needs of people and planet over profit and power; and that smarter and fairer human and technological systems will emerge.

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There’s plenty more, in quite a lot of depth. I read the summary and thought “Sure, but surveys like this are easy to do, and who’s going to hold you to account for them? What did they all forecast for 2020, back in the day?”

Fortunately, the website goes back with predictions from as far back as 2004. So to give you an idea of how seriously to take the predictions from III, below is what the 2020 predictions, made in 2008, said.
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The 2008 Survey • Imagining the Internet

Looking forward to the world in 2020:

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Among the quantitative results from the expert group:

• Some 77% said the mobile computing device (the smartphone) with more significant computing power will be 2020’s primary global Internet-connection platform.
• 64% favored the idea that 2020 user interfaces will offer advanced touch, talk and typing options and some added a fourth “T” – think.
• Nearly four out of five respondents (78%) said the original Internet architecture will not be completely replaced by a next-generation ‘net by 2020.
• Three out of five respondents (60%) disagreed with the idea that legislatures, courts, the technology industry, and media companies will exercise effective intellectual property control by 2020.
• A majority—56%—agreed that in 2020 “few lines (will) divide professional from personal time, and that’s OK.”
• 56% said while Web 2.0 is bringing some people closer, social tolerance will not be heightened by our new connections
• 45% agreed and 44% disagreed with the notion that the greater transparency of people and institutions afforded by the Internet will heighten individual integrity and forgiveness.
• More than half (55%) agreed that many lives will be touched in 2020 by virtual worlds, mirror worlds, and augmented reality, while 45% disagreed or did not answer the question.

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I’d say those are pretty good, actually (apart perhaps from the “few lines divide professional from personal time”?). The smartphone in December 2008 was a shadow of its current incarnation.
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Boris Johnson gives backing to domestic use of Covid passports • The Guardian

Jessica Elgot:

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Boris Johnson has given firm backing to the use of Covid passports after the Labour leader, Keir Starmer, suggested the measure would be against “British instinct”.

Johnson, who has faced criticism from his own party over the proposed use of Covid certification in small venues such as pubs and restaurants, has noticeably warmed to the idea in recent weeks. Government sources have suggested the certificates could be used by businesses as a way to relax social distancing measures inside venues. An interim report into the measure is due to be published on Monday.

Speaking on a visit to Middlesborough, Johnson said a certificate could be used to prove a person was safe in an number of different ways – not just vaccination. He suggested businesses would welcome the idea.

“When it comes to trying to make sure that we give maximum confidence to business and to customers here in the UK, there are three things: your immunity, whether you’ve had it before, so you’ve got natural antibodies anyway; whether you’ve been vaccinated; and then, of course, whether you’ve had a test. And so those three things working together will, I think, be useful,” he said.

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February 23: “The UK government reassured people on Tuesday they will not face major restrictions if they refuse to have a coronavirus jab with officials considering a recent Covid-19 test result as an alternative to ‘vaccine passports’.”

April 1: Johnson gives firm backing to Covid passports. Five weeks.

Though this does set up the possibility that the “libertarian” end of the Tory party will team up with Labour to defeat the measure in Parliament. A strange situation where the right-wing end of the right-wing party finds common cause with the ostensibly left-wing opposition party.
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Update on campaign targeting security researchers • Google Threat Analysis Group

Adam Weidemann:

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In January, the Threat Analysis Group documented a hacking campaign, which we were able to attribute to a North Korean government-backed entity, targeting security researchers. On March 17th, the same actors behind those attacks set up a new website with associated social media profiles for a fake company called “SecuriElite.”

The new website claims the company is an offensive security company located in Turkey that offers pentests, software security assessments and exploits. Like previous websites we’ve seen set up by this actor, this website has a link to their PGP public key at the bottom of the page. In January, targeted researchers reported that the PGP key hosted on the attacker’s blog acted as the lure to visit the site where a browser exploit was waiting to be triggered.

The attacker’s latest batch of social media profiles continue the trend of posing as fellow security researchers interested in exploitation and offensive security. On LinkedIn, we identified two accounts impersonating recruiters for antivirus and security companies. We have reported all identified social media profiles to the platforms to allow them to take appropriate action. 

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Claims to be a company called “SecuriElite”, an “offensive security company”. Quite the turn of phrase.
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A French route to Europe’s EV future • Bloomberg

Colin McKerracher:

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The latest vehicle sales data for France tell an interesting story about the future of the auto sector in Europe.

The obvious point is that the pandemic and related lockdowns are still affecting European auto markets in a big way. Overall vehicle sales were down 21% year-on-year in February. The other big story is that sales of electric vehicles continue to rise quickly. The plug-in vehicle share of new sales is now running at around 13%. That’s up from of 11% in 2020 and just 3% in 2019. Sales of plug-in hybrid vehicles rose a remarkable 134% in February.

There are two big factors driving this. The first is Europe’s tightening automotive CO2 regulations. Automakers across Europe pushed a record number of EVs onto the market last year to drive down the average emissions of the vehicles they sold and avoid paying large fines. The EU targets effectively tighten again this year, since automakers are no longer allowed to remove their 5% of worst-performing vehicles from the calculations – a carve-out they negotiated years ago.

The other factor at play is taxes. France recently updated what’s known as the bonus malus vehicle taxation scheme, which punishes buyers of high emitting vehicles and rewards those choosing electric or low emissions options. The updates make the program even more stringent and are a big part of the buoyant EV sales on display in the latest numbers.

The highest taxes for the bonus malus scheme are for vehicles that emit 220g or more of CO2 per km. This can include models like the Land Rover Discovery and BMW X7, depending on configuration. Buyers of these vehicles face an additional tax of a whopping 30,000 euros ($35,300). At the other end of the spectrum, buyers of vehicles emitting 0-20g CO2 per km benefit from a 7,000 euro ($8,240) rebate. All battery electric vehicle models fall in this latter category. That’s quite an incentive.

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Making ICE (internal combustion engines) much more expensive than EVs (electric vehicles) seems like a better path to “banning” them.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: apparently managed to get through a day without screwing things up.

A big US Army contract means Microsoft’s Hololens bet is going to pay off handsomely. CC-licensed photo by NASA Johnson on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 9 links for you. Boom! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

You and the algorithm: it takes two to tango • Medium

Nick Clegg is not the Liberal Democrat leader or deputy British Prime Minister, he’s the chief PR for Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook:

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Every piece of content that could potentially feature [in your News Feed] — including the posts you haven’t seen from your friends, the Pages you follow, and Groups you joined — goes through the ranking process. Thousands of signals are assessed for these posts, like who posted it, when, whether it’s a photo, video or link, how popular it is on the platform, or the type of device you are using. From there, the algorithm uses these signals to predict how likely it is to be relevant and meaningful to you: for example, how likely you might be to “like” it or find that viewing it was worth your time. The goal is to make sure you see what you find most meaningful — not to keep you glued to your smartphone for hours on end. You can think about this sort of like a spam filter in your inbox: it helps filter out content you won’t find meaningful or relevant, and prioritizes content you will.

Before we credit “the algorithm” with too much independent judgment, it is of course the case that these systems are designed by people. It is Facebook’s decision makers who ultimately decide what content is acceptable on the platform. Facebook has detailed Community Standards, developed over many years, that prohibit harmful content — and invests heavily in developing ways of identifying it and acting on it quickly.

Of course, whether Facebook draws the line in the right place, or according to the right considerations, is a matter of legitimate public debate. And it is entirely reasonable to argue that private companies shouldn’t be making so many big decisions about what content is acceptable on their own. It would clearly be better if these decisions were made according to frameworks agreed by democratically accountable lawmakers. But in the absence of such laws, there are decisions that need to be made in real time.

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The News Feed is determined by machine learning systems, not people. Engagement is the critical metric, and measured by dwell time. And we have no way to tweak the levers of the algorithm except by Liking content and trying to ban content.

It’s very different from just choosing for yourself what you want to read on, say, Reddit. I find it impossible to read anything Clegg writes without constantly thinking it’s covering something up or skewing something. That’s not so much a hangover from his time in politics (where his big problem was that he wasn’t good enough at lying and scheming) as from how Facebook has been and continues to be. The culture won’t change while the leader doesn’t change.

(Side note: was his post on Medium, not Facebook, because anyone can read Medium?)
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Clubhouse feels like a party. But is it a good one? • The New Yorker

Anna Wiener:

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Over time, I found myself moving quickly from room to room on Clubhouse, restive and unsatisfied, as if at a party that hadn’t yet found its groove—staying home with a book would have been more nurturing, but maybe my friends would show up. For a while, I was content to eavesdrop. There were strangers telling stories, and discussing optimistic science fiction, and practicing second languages, and engaging in wild financial speculation. There were occasional flashes of revelation and inspiration.

It seemed plausible that somewhere on the app people were falling in love, or at least meeting future business partners. It was nice to stumble across friends’ avatars in rooms where I was also a listener—like spotting a familiar face at a lecture, or the bar—and exciting to see the names of people I admired from afar, their avatars flickering with the potential for a serendipitous encounter, a shared stage.

Yet I was always dropping in, swinging by. In so many rooms, I couldn’t remember what had drawn me inside; I knew only that I was just passing through, and wouldn’t stay for long.

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Data withheld from WHO team probing COVID-19 origins in China: Tedros • Reuters

Stephanie Nebehay, John Miller:

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Data was withheld from World Health Organization investigators who travelled to China to research the origins of the coronavirus epidemic, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Tuesday.

The United States, the European Union and other Western countries immediately called for China to give “full access” to independent experts to all data about the original outbreak in late 2019.

In its final report, written jointly with Chinese scientists, a WHO-led team that spent four weeks in and around Wuhan in January and February said the virus had probably been transmitted from bats to humans through another animal, and that a lab leak was “extremely unlikely” as a cause.

One of the team’s investigators has already said China refused to give raw data on early COVID-19 cases to the WHO-led team, potentially complicating efforts to understand how the global pandemic began.

“In my discussions with the team, they expressed the difficulties they encountered in accessing raw data,” Tedros said. “I expect future collaborative studies to include more timely and comprehensive data sharing… “I do not believe that this assessment was extensive enough,” he told member states in remarks released by the WHO. “Further data and studies will be needed to reach more robust conclusions.”

The inability of the WHO mission to conclude yet where or how the virus began spreading in people means that tensions will continue over how the pandemic started – and whether China has helped efforts to find out or, as the United States has alleged, hindered them.

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China won’t ever let a closer examination of the lab happen. That’s not because the lab is the cause (the report discusses the various possibilities pretty fairly), but because China hates being the source of the problem.
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Microsoft wins contract to make modified HoloLens for US Army • CNBC

Jordan Novet:

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The Pentagon announced that Microsoft has won a contract to build more than 120,000 custom HoloLens augmented reality headsets for the U.S. Army. The contract could be worth up to $21.88bn over 10 years, a Microsoft spokesperson told CNBC on Wednesday.

Microsoft shares moved higher after the announcement. The stock was up 1.7% to $235.77 per share at the end of Wednesday’s trading session.

The deal shows Microsoft can generate meaningful revenue from a futuristic product resulting from years of research, beyond core areas such as operating systems and productivity software.

It follows a $480m contract Microsoft received to give the Army prototypes of the Integrated Visual Augmented System, or IVAS, in 2018. The new deal will involve providing production versions.

The standard-issue HoloLens, which costs $3,500, enables people to see holograms overlaid over their actual environments and interact using hand and voice gestures. An IVAS prototype that a CNBC reporter tried out in 2019 displayed a map and a compass and had thermal imaging to reveal people in the dark. The system could also show the aim for a weapon.

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That’s the Hololens R&D all paid for, then. Does this push Apple’s plans for a headset forward, do we think?
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Big breakthrough for ’massless’ energy storage • Chalmers

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Researchers from Chalmers University of Technology have produced a structural battery that performs ten times better than all previous versions. It contains carbon fibre that serves simultaneously as an electrode, conductor, and load-bearing material. Their latest research breakthrough paves the way for essentially ’massless’ energy storage in vehicles and other technology.

​The batteries in today’s electric cars constitute a large part of the vehicles’ weight, without fulfilling any load-bearing function. A structural battery, on the other hand, is one that works as both a power source and as part of the structure – for example, in a car body. This is termed ‘massless’ energy storage, because in essence the battery’s weight vanishes when it becomes part of the load-bearing structure. Calculations show that this type of multifunctional battery could greatly reduce the weight of an electric vehicle.

The development of structural batteries at Chalmers University of Technology has proceeded through many years of research, including previous discoveries involving certain types of carbon fibre. In addition to being stiff and strong, they also have a good ability to store electrical energy chemically. This work was named by Physics World as one of 2018’s ten biggest scientific breakthroughs.

The first attempt to make a structural battery was made as early as 2007, but it has so far proven difficult to manufacture batteries with both good electrical and mechanical properties. 

But now the development has taken a real step forward, with researchers from Chalmers, in collaboration with KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, presenting a structural battery with properties that far exceed anything yet seen, in terms of electrical energy storage, stiffness and strength.

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He downloaded the Trezor app on iOS. It was a scam and stole $1 million in bitcoin • The Washington Post

Reed Albergotti:

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Phillipe Christodoulou wanted to check his bitcoin balance last month, so he searched the App Store on his iPhone for “Trezor,” the maker of a small hardware device he uses to store his cryptocurrency. Up popped the company’s padlock logo set against a bright green background. The app was rated close to five stars. He downloaded it and typed in his credentials.

In less than a second, nearly all of his life savings — 17.1 bitcoin worth $600,000 at the time — was gone. The app was a fake, designed to trick people into thinking it was a legitimate app.

But Christodoulou is angrier at Apple than at the thieves themselves. He says Apple marketed the App Store as a safe and trusted place, where each app is reviewed before it is allowed in the store.

Christodoulou, once a loyal Apple customer, said he no longer admires the company. “They betrayed the trust that I had in them,” he said in an interview. “Apple doesn’t deserve to get away with this.”

…Trezor, based in the Czech Republic and owned by a company called Satoshi Labs, is a well-known maker of hardware wallets. Trezor doesn’t have a mobile app, but crypto thieves created a fake one and put it on Apple’s App Store in January and the Google Play Store in December, according to those companies, tricking some unsuspecting Trezor customers into entering their seed phrases.

Kristyna Mazankova, a spokeswoman for Trezor, said the company has been notifying Apple and Google for years about fake apps posing as a Trezor product to scam its customers. Trezor has never had a mobile app, though the company is working on one. She said the process of reporting the apps is “painful” and that representatives of Apple and Google haven’t been in contact.

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Maybe a placeholder app, Trezor? It’s asking a lot of Apple to police all of these – though there could be a list of names to watch for. (Except if the app updates itself to a different name; that though should trigger a check.)
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The Tories are getting away with corruption on an epic scale – how can Labour make them pay? • New Statesman

Paul Mason:

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While nobody in their right mind thinks Line of Duty is real, its metaphoric truth is: when dealing with the commercialised and fragmented British state, you have to assume that everybody is on the make, everyone is gaming the system, everyone has something to hide, and that behind every investigation there is a cover-up.

Beyond this general feeling of numbness and indifference towards malfeasance in public office, there is also something more specific. For a minority of the electorate, so long as Johnson and his ministers go on delivering a steady diet of prejudice, illiberalism and provocations against “wokeness”, they will be forgiven any mistake. Tens of thousands of elderly people dead because of an unconscionably late lockdown? Christmas cancelled? The fishing industry destroyed? A trade border now drawn in the Irish Sea? None of it matters so long as Johnson, Priti Patel and the rest are prepared to fight the culture war.

But it should matter and the opposition needs to make it matter. Labour’s Rachel Reeves has carved out a strong position by meticulously pursuing evidence and explanations over the Covid cronyism scandals. Translating this into a potent political narrative requires Labour to go further.

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The Labour Party seems stunned by Johnson: while Keir Starmer easily bests him in Parliament, that’s not where the real fight is won. Nor does Labour seem to have any policies discernible from the Tories. Starmer hasn’t been helped by the pandemic. But he hasn’t helped himself.
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Dark web bursting with COVID-19 vaccines, vaccine passports • Ars Technica

Tim De Chant:

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Tired of waiting to get your vaccine appointment? For just $500, you could get a COVID-19 vaccine dose tomorrow (overnight shipping not included). Too rich for your blood? How about a vaccination card for just $150?

Security researchers have seen a spike in listings on dark web marketplaces in recent weeks. The sites are advertising everything from vaccine doses to falsified vaccine certifications and negative test results. Currently, more than 1,200 listings are offering a variety of vaccines, including Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca, Sputnik, and Sinopharm.

Investigations by researchers at security firm Check Point have been monitoring the sites for COVID-19-related activity since January, and they report a three-fold increase in such activity over the last three months. It’s unclear if the doses are legitimate, and even if they were, there’s no guarantee that the vials have been stored at the correct temperature, potentially rendering them useless. 

Last week, Check Point researchers based in Israel attempted to buy the Sinopharm vaccine from one vendor, said Ekram Ahmed, a spokesperson for the company. “We tried to negotiate and buy the Chinese vaccine through one of the vendors,” he told Ars. The team messaged the vendor, who directed them to continue the negotiations on Telegram. Once there, the vendor provided reassurances that the vaccine doses were legitimate. The researchers sent $500 to a Bitcoin wallet, and while they have received a FedEx shipping label, they have yet to receive the shipment.

Dark web vendors are probably doing better business selling falsified vaccine cards and negative test results. “Lately, we’re seeing more vaccination certificates being offered” than vaccines, Ahmed said. “It’s probably a two-to-one ratio.”

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The fake vaccination certificates is the sort of thing the late, great British SF writer John Brunner predicted – in his case it was AIDS, but same sorta thing.
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Suez Canal: QAnon’s cargo ship conspiracies are getting wild(er) • Vice

David Gilbert:

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Within minutes of the Ever Given ship getting stuck in Egypt’s Suez Canal last week, an incident that created chaos in global supply chains, QAnon supporters were spreading wild conspiracies that the ship was operated by Hillary Clinton and carrying a cargo of child sex slaves.

The claims were based on the fact that the Taiwanese shipping company that operates the ship is called Evergreen, which was Clinton’s secret service name when she was first lady.

The baseless theory was given further credence — in the minds of QAnon followers at least — when it emerged that the ship’s call sign was “H3RC” which is close enough to Clinton’s own initials (HRC) for QAnon followers to make the link.

The theory quickly spread on Telegram and Gab, the platforms QAnon followers have fled to in the wake of a purge by mainstream social networks in recent months.

But the claims also made their way to Twitter and Facebook, where fact-checking group PolitiFact flagged and debunked them.

“There is no evidence that an Evergreen ship stuck in the Suez Canal is linked to a human trafficking operation run by Hillary Clinton. That claim has been pushed by supporters of the baseless QAnon conspiracy theory,” Daniel Funke, an expert in online misinformation at PolitiFact, wrote.

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This actually ran last week, while the Ever Given was up the spout, and it’s unintentionally hilarious in what it says about the ARG* that is QAnon.

(* Alternative Reality Game.)

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida:Pretty much everyone got in touch by some means or another to point out that the bomb dropped over Nagasaki was not a hydrogen (fusion) bomb but was a fission bomb – the difference from the Hiroshima bomb being that it used plutonium rather than uranium. The first “hydrogen” (H-) bomb – so called because the initial fission blast triggers a fusion process on a small amount of heavy hydrogen, thus unleashing a colossal amount of energy – was tested in 1952.