Author: easyfilo

Enlarge / A tray of prepared syringes for booster vaccinations with Moderna’s vaccine. (credit: Getty | Picture alliance)

Amid the stratospheric rise of the omicron variant, real-world data on the effectiveness of COVID-19 booster doses is now rolling in—and it is only looking up for boosters.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported three studies Friday, two published in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) and another, appearing in JAMA, by CDC scientists.

One of the MMWR studies looked at the vaccination status of nearly 10 million COVID-19 cases from 25 state and local health departments. CDC scientists and health officials compared weekly rates of COVID-19 infections between unvaccinated people, fully vaccinated people, and fully vaccinated people who were also boosted. In the month of December, as cases of the ultra-transmissible omicron variant skyrocketed, unvaccinated people were nearly three times more likely to report a case of COVID-19 than people fully vaccinated. Compared with fully vaccinated and boosted people, the unvaccinated were five times more likely to report a case.

Enlarge / Don’t try this at home. Seriously. We mean it. (credit: Anna Efetova)

Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers have tested a wide range of drugs to see if they inhibit the virus. Most of these tests didn’t end up going anywhere; even the few drugs that did work typically required concentrations that would be impossible to achieve inside human cells. And a few (looking at you, ivermectin and chloroquine) took off with the public despite iffy evidence for effectiveness, seemingly causing nearly as many problems as they would have solved if they actually worked.

Nevertheless, two years on, word of yet another one of these drug experiments caused a bit of a stir, as the drug in question was a cannabinoid. Now, the full data has gone through peer review, and it looks better than you might expect. But the number of caveats is pretty staggering: the effect is small, it hasn’t been tested in patients, the quality assurance of commercial cannabidiol (CBD) products is nearly nonexistent, and—probably most importantly—another cannabinoid blocks the effect entirely.

With that out of the way, on to the data.

Enlarge / The Steam Deck, from Valve. (credit: Valve)

Back in October, Valve laid out the specific review guidelines that a Steam game would have to follow to earn an optional “Deck Verified” badge on its Steam Store page. Now, the results of the first of those verification reviews are starting to leak out, and they’re showing some minor input and interface issues across a handful of games running on Steam Deck.

While the Deck Verified badges have yet to show up on the Steam Store itself, the metadata surrounding the program is already being added to the Steam backend for some titles ahead of the Steam Deck’s planned launch next month, as picked up by services like SteamDB. Of the 86 games with verification review results so far, 41 have at least one issue preventing them from receiving a full “Verified” badge.

First, the good news: Almost all of those un-verified games are still rated as “Playable” under Steam’s guidelines. Only five reviewed games so far have received the dreaded Steam Deck “Unsupported” badge from Valve. Four are virtual reality games, which fail for the simple listed reason that “Steam Deck Does Not Support VR Games.” The fifth, Persona 4 Golden, seems to fail because in-game videos use a problematic Windows Media Player codec that could be difficult to implement through Steam Deck’s Linux Proton compatibility layer. “Valve is still working on adding support for this game on Steam Deck,” the game’s metadata says.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Dozens of legitimate WordPress add-ons downloaded from their original sources have been found backdoored through a supply chain attack, researchers said. The backdoor has been found on “quite a few” sites running the open source content management system.

The backdoor gave the attackers full administrative control of websites that used at least 93 WordPress plugins and themes downloaded from AccessPress Themes. The backdoor was discovered by security researchers from JetPack, the maker of security software owned by Automatic, provider of the WordPress.com hosting service and a major contributor to the development of WordPress. In all, Jetpack found that 40 AccessPress themes and 53 plugins were affected.

Unknowingly providing access to the attacker

In a post published Thursday, Jetpack researcher Harald Eilertsen said timestamps and other evidence suggested the backdoors were introduced intentionally in a coordinated action after the themes and plugins were released. The affected software was available by download directly from the AccessPress Themes site. The same themes and plugins mirrored on WordPress.org, the official developer site for the WordPress project, remained clean.

Enlarge (credit: Sean Gallup | Getty Images)

Here’s a fun new report from Bloomberg: Google is forming a blockchain division. The news comes hot on the heels of a Bloomberg report from yesterday that quoted Google’s president of commerce as saying, “Crypto is something we pay a lot of attention to.” Web3 is apparently becoming a thing at Google.

Shivakumar Venkataraman, a longtime Googler from the advertising division, is running the blockchain group, which lives under the nascent “Google Labs” division that was started about three months ago. Labs is home to “high-potential, long-term projects,” basically making it the new Google X division (X was turned into a less-Google-focused Alphabet division in 2016). Bavor used to be vice president of virtual reality, and Labs contains all of those VR and augmented reality projects, like the “Project Starline” 3D video booth and Google’s AR goggles.

Just like “algorithms,” “AI,” and “5G,” “blockchain” is often used as the go-to buzzword for rudderless tech executives hoping to hype up investors or consumers. A blockchain is really just a distributed, P2P database, sort of like if BitTorrent hosted a database instead of pirated movies and Linux ISOs. The database is chopped up into blocks, and each new block contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block, forming a chain of records that protect each other against alterations. On a traditional database, transactions are verified by the database owner, but on a blockchain, nobody owns the database, so each transaction needs to be verified by many computers. This is the big downside of blockchains: everyone’s constant transaction verifications use a massive amount of electricity and computing power.