Month: March 2021

Enlarge / A Donald Trump supporter holds an false anti-vaccine sign while protesting in Washington, DC, on Tuesday, Jan. 5, 2021. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

While the Biden administration anticipates having enough COVID-19 vaccine doses to vaccinate all adults by May 1, health experts and policy advisors are trying to figure out how to actually get those shots into the arms of people—particularly people who are hesitant or distrustful of the vaccines, many of whom are Republicans.

For most of the country—about 69 percent—getting vaccinated and being able to return to some normal activities is an easy sell. Over 21 percent of people in America have already gotten at least one dose of an authorized vaccine. Three vaccines are currently authorized for use in the US, all of which are highly effective and safe. For the remaining pro-vaccine people, it’s just a matter of time before they can get one. In fact, many people around the country are anxiously trying to get in line and scouring online sign-up websites for an open vaccination slot.

But about 30 percent of adults are not getting in line, according to a poll by the Pew Research Center reported March 5. About 15 percent of people said they would probably not get vaccinated and an additional 15 percent said they would definitely not get a shot. That’s enough people to dash any hopes of ending the pandemic through vaccination. It’s also enough to ruin the Biden administration’s plans of celebrating our independence from the virus on July 4.

Enlarge / FreeBSD is getting its own in-kernel WireGuard module in the near future, thanks to a sponsored code contribution from Netgate, followed by additional code and review from Jason Donenfeld and several FreeBSD and OpenBSD developers. (credit: WireGuard / Jim Salter)

This morning, WireGuard founding developer Jason Donenfeld announced a working, in-kernel implementation of his WireGuard VPN protocol for the FreeBSD 13 kernel. This is great news for BSD folks—and users of BSD-based routing appliances and distros such as pfSense and opnSense.

If you're not familiar with WireGuard, it establishes connections more quickly than traditional VPNs like OpenVPN. It's also, in our personal experience, overwhelmingly more reliable when managing large numbers of connections. Your author used to spend several hours a month shelling into machines and manually re-establishing broken OpenVPN tunnels, even after writing watchdog scripts to attempt to detect and re-establish them automatically—tearing it all out and replacing this several-hundred-machine-monitoring network with WireGuard-based infrastructure cut that down to "zero hours per month."

In addition to performance and reliability, WireGuard brings modern protocols, versioned crypto that literally cannot be set up incorrectly, and a far cleaner, lighter codebase than most competitors—Linus Torvalds once declared it "a work of art" by comparison to OpenVPN and IPSec.

Enlarge / Artist concept of the Space Launch System. (credit: NASA/MSFC)

NASA is conducting an internal review of the Space Launch System rocket's affordability, two sources have told Ars Technica.

Concerned by the program's outsized costs, the NASA transition team appointed by President Joe Biden initiated the study. The analysis is being led by Paul McConnaughey, a former deputy center director of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, as well as its chief engineer.

The SLS rocket program has been managed by Marshall for more than a decade. Critics have derided it as a "jobs program" intended to retain employees at key centers, such as Alabama-based Marshall, as well as those at primary contractors such as Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and Aerojet Rocketdyne. Such criticism has been bolstered by frequent schedule delays—the SLS was originally due to launch in 2016, and the rocket will now launch no sooner than 2022—as well as cost overruns.