Bert Hubert

If we just hadn't centralized control of the inverters to a few (chinese) companies... Great read on the risks to our power infrastructure from remote controlled solar inverters: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/the-gigantic-unregulated-power-plant…

I suspect there is going to be a flood of money in the EU for the creation of replacements for any US-based technology any of the EU countries are dependent upon (e.g., https://www.joindns4.eu). The real questions are whether there will be regulatory reform in the EU to facilitate this and will the money NOT flow to the usual dinosaurs. My impression is that Trump has sufficient pissed off EU governments such that there is some (small) hope for both. EC bureaucrats and MEPs might do well to read https://berthub.eu.

Germany: the country with World’s Dumbest Energy Policy https://www.wsj.com/articles/worlds-dumbest-energy-policy-11548807424 Yep, the Gas that was needed due to ... the World's Dumbest Energy Policy. https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/mecklenburg-vorpommern/nord-stream-2-ge… Schon während seiner Kanzlerschaft sei die damalige Bundesregierung der Auffassung gewesen, die deutsche Energiepolitik aus der Abhängigkeit der Kernenergie zu befreien. "Wir fanden deshalb, dass es Sinn macht, auf Gas zu setzen." Uranium is cheap, widely available (largest known reserves in Australia, 3rd in Canada, also Sweden recently had a large find), compact, solid, storable. Security: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/the-gigantic-unregulated-power-plant… In Ukraine, nuclear is what's keeping the lights on.

I mean, same story in Belgium, The Netherlands, and (I'm gonna assume) every other EU government. Specifically for The Netherlands, https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/demystifying-european-digital-sovere… is a good read, from someone that really understands how this works in government. Sadly, I understand why: they have a tonne of systems, that all, at least somewhat, work, that people know how to use, with established contacts and support contracts. IT departments trained and certified on how to run and deploy MS software. And that's before we start talking about lobbying. edit: added a link to a good resource about the topic. We should have started moving over yesterday, but it's a long and difficult process, I just hope we start moving forward on this.

I highly recommend checking out P1 Security's presentations around mobile telco security: https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/day1-hacking-telcoequipmentthehlr… It's old but there's no reason to believe things have improved as there are zero incentives to. Also, software security vulnerabilities are only part of the problem - the other part is that telcos willingly outsource control and critical access to the lowest bidder: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/5g-elephant-in-the-room/

That quote is from https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/immune-system/ Could have also seen it via https://jsomers.net/i-should-have-loved-biology/ which quotes it directly

You are welcome. I think your question was reasonable although it sometimes can be difficult for us laypeople to correctly interpret laws and the context in which they apply. NB: I would also recommend everyone read the recitals (aka explenations and justifications) preceding the actual articles. While they are not law directly they also are (it's difficult). https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/eu-cra-recitals-comments-compiler-ju…

Bert Hubert has a great series of posts about European Innovation & Technical Capabilities which cover this whole topic very well, here: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/european-innovation-and-capabilities…

You might be interested in reading some of Bert Hubert's articles, specifically "DNA seen through the eyes of a coder": https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/amazing-dna/

This is Bert Hubert [1]. Explaining why he left (in English): 'On my resignation as regulator of the Dutch intelligence and security services' [2]. [1] https://berthub.eu/ [2] https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/resignation-as-intelligence-regulato…

The EU can do some amazing things, however there are also many problems. The recent https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/eu-cra-secure-coding-solution/ seems particularly dangerous. Also don't read about the Pfizer vaccine deal with the EU/ von der Leyen. You might loose your trust/ happiness very quickly. Of course, the EU's handling of the Ukraine/ Russia crisis is particularly bad as well, the war could have been over by now. I mean, many Ukrainian people are dying in vain.

Bert Hubert had an excellent talk which exactly describes the problem of this phenomenon[0]. [0]: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/how-tech-loses-out/

Bert Hubert, “Our amazing immune system”: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/immune-system/

mRNA vaccines, for me. I'm sure most people read this fantastic write-up of how the covid vaccine works back in December: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source-code-of-t… It really opened my eyes to how far we've come over the years in learning to game our immune system. And the existence of printers for custom DNA blew my mind. I can't even get printers to reliably put ink on paper, let alone create the building blocks of life.

One amazing thing about this vaccine is that it is basically open-source. We can look at the genetic code so you know exactly what is going into your body if you choose to take it. This guy does an amazing job of breaking it down in detail: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source-code-of-t… I agree the CDC has done a terrible job of representing science and establishing trust, but the virus is less politicized in other countries. Look at what those health institutions with better track-records are recommending.

Yep :) > The same holds for the genome. To create a new ‘binary’ of a specimen, a living copy is required. The genome needs an elaborate toolchain in order to deliver a living thing. The code itself is impotent. This toolchain is commonly called ‘your parents’. https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/amazing-dna/

I thought they solved that by replacing U by 1-methyl-3'-pseudouridylyl in mRNA vaccines? I can imagine it's not great for vaccines either, you want the immune system attack the spike the mRNA codes for, not destroy the mRNA before it can do it's thing. https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source-code-of-t…

There's a lot of daft DNS code out there that makes strange assumptions. My favorite example isn't quite relevant here but I'll mention it anyway because I think it paints the picture well: PowerDNS purportedly added compression support in its responses because a common stub resolver required answer owner names to be a compression pointer to the question. EDIT: Found a reference: "Turns out some customers were using a CPE router that thought ‘C0 0C’ was some kind of ‘answer starts here’ marker. And if it did not find that marker, its DNS component would crash. And at that time, PowerDNS did not compress that first response record, so there was no ‘C0 0C’." -- https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/history-of-powerdns-2003-2013/

Thanks! I greatly enjoyed https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source-code-of-t… before, and somehow missed the same author had one on the adenovirus vaccines.

The Pfizer vaccine indeed contains an important parser differential exploit to evade a security system. Ctrl+F "1-methyl-3’-pseudouridylyl" in this excellent post: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source-code-of-t…

The other day I read an article about which language C programmers should use, and how Go is better thought of than Rust but that in the end his suggestion is to go for C++ [0]. Interesting observation was that the Rust community had more fanatic followers who believe in Rust and nothing else, whereas the Go community was more relaxed about it. That makes me wonder: if something had been written in Rust, would a Go, Python, or C++ developer ask why not in their language? Or would they just not care? [0] https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/cpp-rust-go/

If you haven't seen Bert Hubert's breakdown of the Covid vaccine source code, worth a look: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source-code-of-t… Think he describes a reality where we know a lot today and yet still have ways to go in order to do something that intentional to an apple. His presentation on DNA computing in general (linked at bottom) goes into some depth there. What caught my eye is that a common apple has a DNA size roughly as large and complex as the human genome itself, with a disclaimer that the DNA size doesn't translate to complexity. But meanwhile, we don't even know how many genes a human being has (estimate changed in 20 years from 100k down to ~20k), but a level beneath that complexity we don't even know "how our own cells know where a gene begins" (quoted from his presentation).

In the the footer of the blog post 'BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine', the author links to many of his previous blog posts and talks, videos that do just that. Key Sentence 'In addition, I’ve been maintaining a page on ‘DNA for programmers’ since 2001.' https://berthub.eu/amazing-dna

Sorry I should have been more clear. The following link from the article was dead at the time: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/history-of-powerdns-1999-2003/

Looks like he got the idea for PowerDNS from a URL shortening service [1]. They wanted better performance for visitors from the US, and Bert just went ahead and founded a company that made DNS load balancing software. Sounds like 1999 indeed. I got to work a lot with PowerDNS during my internship, which was at a web hosting company that wanted to implement DNSSEC. What a fantastic piece of software it has become. Thanks for your involvement Bert, and best of luck at the TIB! [1] https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/history-of-powerdns-1999-2003/

Reading through this article reminding me of this one: "DNA seen through the eyes of a coder" https://berthub.eu/amazing-dna/

DNA seen through the eyes of a coder: https://berthub.eu/amazing-dna/ Molecular Biology Made Simple and Fun https://www.amazon.com/dp/1889899070

I really love Jesse Frazelle's[1] blog. She posts things about low-level (firmware/open-hardware/system) security. Her work is already well known here on HN[2]. A few more of my fav: The grugq (NatSec, Tradecraft, OpSec): https://gru.gq/ Pinboard (aka Maciej Cegłowski): https://idlewords.com/ Adam Aelkus: https://aelkus.github.io/ Bert Hubert: https://berthub.eu/ ____ [1] https://blog.jessfraz.com/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=jessfraz.com

> years of work prior to COVID It's worth highlghting the importance of years of basic science-research and testing, all little pieces which were mostly there when we finally needed them, work that was always under-threat from people saying "what use is this, why would we ever need that?" One example [0] (of many contributions): > But the thing is, our vaccine is only generating the spikes itself, and we’re not mounting them on any kind of virus body. It turns out that, unmodified, freestanding Spike proteins collapse into a different structure. If injected as a vaccine, this would indeed cause our bodies to develop immunity.. but only against the collapsed spike protein. And the real SARS-CoV-2 shows up with the spiky Spike. The vaccine would not work very well in that case. > In 2017 it was described how putting a double Proline substitution in just the right place would make the SARS-CoV-1 and MERS S proteins take up their ‘pre-fusion’ configuration, even without being part of the whole virus. This works because Proline is a very rigid amino acid. It acts as a kind of splint, stabilising the protein in the state we need to show to the immune system. The people that discovered this should be walking around high-fiving themselves incessantly. Unbearable amounts of smugness should be emanating from them. And it would all be well deserved. [0] https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source-code-of-t…