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Engineer who attended cybersecurity event contracts coronavirus

128 points by apaprocki 7y ago

QUFB 7y ago
Meanwhile, CONEXPOAGG is on with 130,000 attendees: https://twitter.com/LasVegasLocally/status/1237148919898836994 https://twitter.com/LasVegasLocally/status/12371489198988369...
- ghaff 7y ago
  ADDED: The Houston Rodeo with a couple million attendees is also going ahead. My anecdotal impression is that tech and tech adjacent events are canceling in significantly great numbers than non-tech. Part of the difference is probably that so many tech companies are telling employees not to attend large events, or even events at all, that even if a tech conference organizer wanted to go ahead, they'd lose half their attendees.
  - syntheticnature 7y ago
    While not a universal (I see replies to that tweet about CONEXPOAGG that mention folks from Canada), I feel like tech conferences have an increased amount of international attendance -- definitely I expect a greater worldwide contingent at most tech conferences vs. the Houston rodeo. Imagine if this had gotten loose at CES...
    - ghaff 7y ago
      There's probably truth to that. Certainly it was a factor in MWC canceling while there were still other events, including RSA, going forward as planned. (Some companies did pull out of RSA but it didn't reach the critical mass for the organizers to pull the plug on the event.)
  - topkai22 7y ago
    I think the amount of international travel is huge part (the Houston rodeo might have 2M+ attendees, but I'll bet 90% of them are from Texas), but so are economics- It wouldn't suprise me if cancelling CONEXPOCONAGG or the Houston Rodeo would bankrupt the sponsoring organizations, whereas google won't even notice cancelling their events.
    - ghaff 7y ago
      >whereas google won't even notice cancelling their events That's something of an overstatement. Companies don't put these things on for fun. But, yeah, they'll manage. And, to a first approximation, all the other companies and individuals who were sponsoring/attending/etc. will manage too and relatively few individuals will be directly and personally out of pocket. That said, there will be startups who were planning launches around the Google events, there will be indirect downstream effects on people who organize events, do professional speaking, etc.
      - wpietri 7y ago
        Google doesn't exactly do it for fun, but I'm sure it isn't a significant source of revenue. Given that most corporate conferences are essentially about marketing, the incentive is to be break-even, or even run at a loss. That's very different than people trying to make a living from an event.
        topkai22 7y ago
        Yeah, obviously it's not an easy decision, but my definition of "won't even notice" is that it even if it's a $20M write off, it's like 0.06% of their 2019 net income. For a lot of independent events (like SWSX) canceling the event means losing most of their operating budget.
    - departure 7y ago
      SXSW in Austin was recently cancelled and the organization is considering bankruptcy. They laid off 1/3 of their full-time staff due to the cancellation. https://twitter.com/efindell/status/1237156566564048898?s=19 https://twitter.com/efindell/status/1237156566564048898?s=19 https://www.wsj.com/articles/south-by-southwest-hit-hard-by-coronavirus-cancellation-11583711311 https://www.wsj.com/articles/south-by-southwest-hit-hard-by-...
  - arman_ashrafian 7y ago
    Coachella is being delayed till October.
    - tlb 7y ago
      Source? Neither their website nor Twitter says so. EDIT: Confirmed. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/arts/music/coronavirus-coachella-postponed.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/arts/music/coronavirus-co...
  - gravelc 7y ago
    Unbelievable these events are going ahead. A number of travelers returning to Australia from the USA have contracted COVID19, indicating the disease is more widespread than admitted by the government. The Formula 1 Grand Prix is going ahead in Australia this weekend, which is equally poor.
    - dathinab 7y ago
      I always thought the majority of income for F1 is unrelated to the live visitors. and as such it should be fine to do it just without live publicum. ... I wonder if I'm wrong about it or they are just too irresponsible to cancel the parts involving crowdes?
      - deerIRL 7y ago
        Irresponsible mostly. Bahrain has already said it plans to hold their Grand Prix in an empty grandstand. I do think the host tracks would prefer to have a full Grand Stand, due to ticket sales, but I'm not sure how much it would affect F1 as a whole. Sadly, there seems to be a sense of invincibility almost towards the virus in Western Countries until all of a sudden it arrives and you are dealing with hundreds or thousands of cases.
  - raverbashing 7y ago
    One non-tech even that was cancelled: Arnold Fitness Expo (Columbus, OH)
- allovernow 7y ago
  >Take THAT, coronavirus! :P It's really hard at this point not to feel like people deserve what's coming. The vast majority of regular Joes still don't care and think I'm crazy for simply telling them to be responsible and buy some non perishable goods. Meanwhile Mecca is shut down, Italy instituted a Nationwide lockdown overnight, UK hospitals are running out of capacity, China shut down it's entire industry for two months, Independent reports Trump admin may be considering declaring a Nationwide state of emergency...I'm losing track of all the clear, obvious evidence of imminently approaching danger from literally all over the world.
  - throwaway55554 7y ago
    > It's really hard at this point not to feel like people deserve what's coming. The vast majority of regular Joes still don't care and think I'm crazy for simply telling them to be responsible and buy some non perishable goods. Because you have a lot of so-called authority figures (in the USofA at least) telling people it's all under control. At what point will the lies become criminal?
    - everybodyknows 7y ago
      Have officials in the US ever been prosecuted for telling voters lies that they want to hear in order to validate their own delusions? We can draw a meandering line from this tweet back through at least 2000, when a US presidential candidate dismissed his opponent's quantitative reasoning about climate change as "fuzzy math". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzy_math_(politics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzy_math_(politics)
  - theredbox 7y ago
    You are not crazy you are simply overreacting like a typical american.
    - phailhaus 7y ago
      > Meanwhile Mecca is shut down, Italy instituted a Nationwide lockdown overnight, UK hospitals are running out of capacity, China shut down it's entire industry for two months Those countries are not American. They are reacting reasonably to a virus that has 20x the mortality rate of the flu, with no known vaccine.
- speedgoose 7y ago
  This is the dumbest tweet I read today.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
vsareto 7y ago
The one year DEFCON might really get cancelled
- weej 7y ago
  You didn't hear? DEFCON is cancelled. ;-)
  - forkexec 7y ago
    Let's play "spot the fed."
- RealityVoid 7y ago
  They actually DID cancel DEFCON China.
alonmower 7y ago
This is so sad, I really hope he pulls through. My office is a couple of blocks away from Moscone and I was pretty surprised by the fact that RSA didn't cancel. It seemed clear at the time that the spread wasn't going to be contained and getting a bunch of people to fly in from all over the world to sit in cramped auditoriums and shake hands with one another was a really bad idea. All of the restaurants, streets, and coffee shops around the conference center were packed that week, and I fear that it will have made a material contribution to the speed with which this virus will have spread.
apaprocki 7y ago
Headline just came across that there is a 2nd confirmed attendee...
buboard 7y ago
At least he did not contract a computer virus. That would be embarassing (this is a joke. The coronavirus is not very lethal for young people. In italy, the average age of people who died is 81. Only one case <50 died)
- grimjack00 7y ago
  That probably happened, too, but nobody will admit to it. https://www.csoonline.com/article/3500437/auscert-2017-you-are-the-universal-attack-vector.html https://www.csoonline.com/article/3500437/auscert-2017-you-a...
- djrogers 7y ago
  I will give you the benfit of the doubt and assume you didn't read TFA - If you had, I assume you wouldn't have made this joke as the individual in question had a pre-existing condition that made him succeptible to pneumonia, and is now in a medically induced coma. Please try a bit harder in the future.
  - buboard 7y ago
    indeed there is a paywall.
marcyb5st 7y ago
As an Italian, I really hoped the horror stories that are coming out of Italy right now could help raise awareness of how things could look like when a government reacts too late to this threat. However, it seems every major country is sadly going down the same path: https://twitter.com/MarkJHandley/status/1237119688578138112 https://twitter.com/MarkJHandley/status/1237119688578138112 . I hope you won't have to be as scared as I currently am for my parents. My dad is in one of the categories that has low priority for an ICU bed. Older than 65 and diabetic. If he gets sick and require an ICU chances are he'll die because medics, rightly so, will choose someone with better survival chances.
- mrits 7y ago
  "will choose someone with better survival chances." How does this differ from the death panels that used to be brought up in the US? Serious question as I didn't follow politics too much when I was younger.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - davidw 7y ago
    It's called 'triage'. It's what they do anywhere, including the US, when there are too many casualties to deal with. And it's the doctors deciding based on who is most likely to pull through if they get care, not bureaucrats.
    - jacquesm 7y ago
      That; and who on balance has the most benefit from being saved to begin with. There is a definite negative weight assigned to age, they would rather save a teenager than someone who is 95. (presented without any kind of bias towards whether this practice is good or bad)
    - ggreer 7y ago
      Normal triage is when you prioritize the most seriously injured patients so they don't die waiting for treatment. That's what hospitals typically do. In a mass casualty event, hospitals engage in reverse triage which optimizes for throughput. They prioritize cases that can be discharged quickly so that they can treat as many people as possible. This means they'll label the most serious cases "expectant" and let them die. After all, it's better to save two or three easier people than to squander limited resources on one person who is unlikely to survive. It is extremely rare for hospitals in the US to use reverse triage. I think the most recent time was during Katrina. The stories of that are not pretty.[1] 1. https://www.newsweek.com/vindicated-katrina-doc-tells-her-story-99333 https://www.newsweek.com/vindicated-katrina-doc-tells-her-st...
Will_Do 7y ago
It is breathtaking that conferences organized and attended by affluent tech employees are not being canceled when conferences like SXSW and ComicCon are being canceled. It hurts the people behind SXSW and Comiccon much more to cancel their events but they did it anyways. Is our industry really so much more unethical than average?
- selimthegrim 7y ago
  Austin pulled their permit; they were left with no choice (SXSW)
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
uptown 7y ago
If anyone is interested in donating, here's the GoFundMe page setup to help the family of the engineer from Connecticut mentioned in the story: https://www.gofundme.com/f/xpcwgy-conquering-covid19 https://www.gofundme.com/f/xpcwgy-conquering-covid19
ej3 7y ago
I'm not sure I need a tinfoil hat at this point to imply that the people who are supposed to mitigate the effects of this pandemic have no objective quantification of how pervasive the spread of this disease is already. I'd be willing to wager that if there was a good enough historic and near enough to realtime dataset of individuals entering the ER with pneumonia, and this disease is actually atypical for the season: that the ramp actually started more than a month ago in some regions. Although I do wonder if the necessity of some pre-existing condition to perpetuate the development of the disease might present some type of choke in the significance of the anomalous nature of the thing.. Anyone know of any dataset like this? It would be really interesting to consider.
- Maxious 7y ago
  The Seattle Flu Study collects sample from people in the community, even before they are sick. Those samples will now be retested to look for this new coronavirus https://seattleflu.org/updates https://seattleflu.org/updates
  - ej3 7y ago
    Yeah, I'm not entirely sure this is interesting. The media seems overly concerned with 'COVID-19' specifically and I'm sure the backers of this project like to see relevant keywords, but I think in terms of an outbreak it would be more useful to consider specifically how this has immediately contributed to deviance from normal. "... we've found 19 cases of covid-19 in [insert place]", or "35 deaths from coronavirus" deprived of context has nearly no utility.

128 points by apaprocki 7y ago

QUFB 7y ago

Meanwhile, CONEXPOAGG is on with 130,000 attendees: https://twitter.com/LasVegasLocally/status/1237148919898836994 https://twitter.com/LasVegasLocally/status/12371489198988369...

ghaff 7y ago
ADDED: The Houston Rodeo with a couple million attendees is also going ahead. My anecdotal impression is that tech and tech adjacent events are canceling in significantly great numbers than non-tech. Part of the difference is probably that so many tech companies are telling employees not to attend large events, or even events at all, that even if a tech conference organizer wanted to go ahead, they'd lose half their attendees.
- syntheticnature 7y ago
  While not a universal (I see replies to that tweet about CONEXPOAGG that mention folks from Canada), I feel like tech conferences have an increased amount of international attendance -- definitely I expect a greater worldwide contingent at most tech conferences vs. the Houston rodeo. Imagine if this had gotten loose at CES...
  - ghaff 7y ago
    There's probably truth to that. Certainly it was a factor in MWC canceling while there were still other events, including RSA, going forward as planned. (Some companies did pull out of RSA but it didn't reach the critical mass for the organizers to pull the plug on the event.)
- topkai22 7y ago
  I think the amount of international travel is huge part (the Houston rodeo might have 2M+ attendees, but I'll bet 90% of them are from Texas), but so are economics- It wouldn't suprise me if cancelling CONEXPOCONAGG or the Houston Rodeo would bankrupt the sponsoring organizations, whereas google won't even notice cancelling their events.
  - ghaff 7y ago
    >whereas google won't even notice cancelling their events That's something of an overstatement. Companies don't put these things on for fun. But, yeah, they'll manage. And, to a first approximation, all the other companies and individuals who were sponsoring/attending/etc. will manage too and relatively few individuals will be directly and personally out of pocket. That said, there will be startups who were planning launches around the Google events, there will be indirect downstream effects on people who organize events, do professional speaking, etc.
    - wpietri 7y ago
      Google doesn't exactly do it for fun, but I'm sure it isn't a significant source of revenue. Given that most corporate conferences are essentially about marketing, the incentive is to be break-even, or even run at a loss. That's very different than people trying to make a living from an event.
      - topkai22 7y ago
        Yeah, obviously it's not an easy decision, but my definition of "won't even notice" is that it even if it's a $20M write off, it's like 0.06% of their 2019 net income. For a lot of independent events (like SWSX) canceling the event means losing most of their operating budget.
  - departure 7y ago
    SXSW in Austin was recently cancelled and the organization is considering bankruptcy. They laid off 1/3 of their full-time staff due to the cancellation. https://twitter.com/efindell/status/1237156566564048898?s=19 https://twitter.com/efindell/status/1237156566564048898?s=19 https://www.wsj.com/articles/south-by-southwest-hit-hard-by-coronavirus-cancellation-11583711311 https://www.wsj.com/articles/south-by-southwest-hit-hard-by-...
- arman_ashrafian 7y ago
  Coachella is being delayed till October.
  - tlb 7y ago
    Source? Neither their website nor Twitter says so. EDIT: Confirmed. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/arts/music/coronavirus-coachella-postponed.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/arts/music/coronavirus-co...
- gravelc 7y ago
  Unbelievable these events are going ahead. A number of travelers returning to Australia from the USA have contracted COVID19, indicating the disease is more widespread than admitted by the government. The Formula 1 Grand Prix is going ahead in Australia this weekend, which is equally poor.
  - dathinab 7y ago
    I always thought the majority of income for F1 is unrelated to the live visitors. and as such it should be fine to do it just without live publicum. ... I wonder if I'm wrong about it or they are just too irresponsible to cancel the parts involving crowdes?
    - deerIRL 7y ago
      Irresponsible mostly. Bahrain has already said it plans to hold their Grand Prix in an empty grandstand. I do think the host tracks would prefer to have a full Grand Stand, due to ticket sales, but I'm not sure how much it would affect F1 as a whole. Sadly, there seems to be a sense of invincibility almost towards the virus in Western Countries until all of a sudden it arrives and you are dealing with hundreds or thousands of cases.
- raverbashing 7y ago
  One non-tech even that was cancelled: Arnold Fitness Expo (Columbus, OH)
allovernow 7y ago
>Take THAT, coronavirus! :P It's really hard at this point not to feel like people deserve what's coming. The vast majority of regular Joes still don't care and think I'm crazy for simply telling them to be responsible and buy some non perishable goods. Meanwhile Mecca is shut down, Italy instituted a Nationwide lockdown overnight, UK hospitals are running out of capacity, China shut down it's entire industry for two months, Independent reports Trump admin may be considering declaring a Nationwide state of emergency...I'm losing track of all the clear, obvious evidence of imminently approaching danger from literally all over the world.
- throwaway55554 7y ago
  > It's really hard at this point not to feel like people deserve what's coming. The vast majority of regular Joes still don't care and think I'm crazy for simply telling them to be responsible and buy some non perishable goods. Because you have a lot of so-called authority figures (in the USofA at least) telling people it's all under control. At what point will the lies become criminal?
  - everybodyknows 7y ago
    Have officials in the US ever been prosecuted for telling voters lies that they want to hear in order to validate their own delusions? We can draw a meandering line from this tweet back through at least 2000, when a US presidential candidate dismissed his opponent's quantitative reasoning about climate change as "fuzzy math". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzy_math_(politics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzy_math_(politics)
- theredbox 7y ago
  You are not crazy you are simply overreacting like a typical american.
  - phailhaus 7y ago
    > Meanwhile Mecca is shut down, Italy instituted a Nationwide lockdown overnight, UK hospitals are running out of capacity, China shut down it's entire industry for two months Those countries are not American. They are reacting reasonably to a virus that has 20x the mortality rate of the flu, with no known vaccine.
speedgoose 7y ago
This is the dumbest tweet I read today.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

vsareto 7y ago

The one year DEFCON might really get cancelled

weej 7y ago
You didn't hear? DEFCON is cancelled. ;-)
- forkexec 7y ago
  Let's play "spot the fed."
RealityVoid 7y ago
They actually DID cancel DEFCON China.

alonmower 7y ago

This is so sad, I really hope he pulls through. My office is a couple of blocks away from Moscone and I was pretty surprised by the fact that RSA didn't cancel. It seemed clear at the time that the spread wasn't going to be contained and getting a bunch of people to fly in from all over the world to sit in cramped auditoriums and shake hands with one another was a really bad idea. All of the restaurants, streets, and coffee shops around the conference center were packed that week, and I fear that it will have made a material contribution to the speed with which this virus will have spread.

apaprocki 7y ago

Headline just came across that there is a 2nd confirmed attendee...

buboard 7y ago

At least he did not contract a computer virus. That would be embarassing (this is a joke. The coronavirus is not very lethal for young people. In italy, the average age of people who died is 81. Only one case <50 died)

grimjack00 7y ago
That probably happened, too, but nobody will admit to it. https://www.csoonline.com/article/3500437/auscert-2017-you-are-the-universal-attack-vector.html https://www.csoonline.com/article/3500437/auscert-2017-you-a...
djrogers 7y ago
I will give you the benfit of the doubt and assume you didn't read TFA - If you had, I assume you wouldn't have made this joke as the individual in question had a pre-existing condition that made him succeptible to pneumonia, and is now in a medically induced coma. Please try a bit harder in the future.
- buboard 7y ago
  indeed there is a paywall.

marcyb5st 7y ago

As an Italian, I really hoped the horror stories that are coming out of Italy right now could help raise awareness of how things could look like when a government reacts too late to this threat. However, it seems every major country is sadly going down the same path: https://twitter.com/MarkJHandley/status/1237119688578138112 https://twitter.com/MarkJHandley/status/1237119688578138112 . I hope you won't have to be as scared as I currently am for my parents. My dad is in one of the categories that has low priority for an ICU bed. Older than 65 and diabetic. If he gets sick and require an ICU chances are he'll die because medics, rightly so, will choose someone with better survival chances.

mrits 7y ago
"will choose someone with better survival chances." How does this differ from the death panels that used to be brought up in the US? Serious question as I didn't follow politics too much when I was younger.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- davidw 7y ago
  It's called 'triage'. It's what they do anywhere, including the US, when there are too many casualties to deal with. And it's the doctors deciding based on who is most likely to pull through if they get care, not bureaucrats.
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    That; and who on balance has the most benefit from being saved to begin with. There is a definite negative weight assigned to age, they would rather save a teenager than someone who is 95. (presented without any kind of bias towards whether this practice is good or bad)
  - ggreer 7y ago
    Normal triage is when you prioritize the most seriously injured patients so they don't die waiting for treatment. That's what hospitals typically do. In a mass casualty event, hospitals engage in reverse triage which optimizes for throughput. They prioritize cases that can be discharged quickly so that they can treat as many people as possible. This means they'll label the most serious cases "expectant" and let them die. After all, it's better to save two or three easier people than to squander limited resources on one person who is unlikely to survive. It is extremely rare for hospitals in the US to use reverse triage. I think the most recent time was during Katrina. The stories of that are not pretty.[1] 1. https://www.newsweek.com/vindicated-katrina-doc-tells-her-story-99333 https://www.newsweek.com/vindicated-katrina-doc-tells-her-st...

Will_Do 7y ago

It is breathtaking that conferences organized and attended by affluent tech employees are not being canceled when conferences like SXSW and ComicCon are being canceled. It hurts the people behind SXSW and Comiccon much more to cancel their events but they did it anyways. Is our industry really so much more unethical than average?

selimthegrim 7y ago
Austin pulled their permit; they were left with no choice (SXSW)
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

uptown 7y ago

If anyone is interested in donating, here's the GoFundMe page setup to help the family of the engineer from Connecticut mentioned in the story: https://www.gofundme.com/f/xpcwgy-conquering-covid19 https://www.gofundme.com/f/xpcwgy-conquering-covid19

ej3 7y ago

I'm not sure I need a tinfoil hat at this point to imply that the people who are supposed to mitigate the effects of this pandemic have no objective quantification of how pervasive the spread of this disease is already. I'd be willing to wager that if there was a good enough historic and near enough to realtime dataset of individuals entering the ER with pneumonia, and this disease is actually atypical for the season: that the ramp actually started more than a month ago in some regions. Although I do wonder if the necessity of some pre-existing condition to perpetuate the development of the disease might present some type of choke in the significance of the anomalous nature of the thing.. Anyone know of any dataset like this? It would be really interesting to consider.

Maxious 7y ago
The Seattle Flu Study collects sample from people in the community, even before they are sick. Those samples will now be retested to look for this new coronavirus https://seattleflu.org/updates https://seattleflu.org/updates
- ej3 7y ago
  Yeah, I'm not entirely sure this is interesting. The media seems overly concerned with 'COVID-19' specifically and I'm sure the backers of this project like to see relevant keywords, but I think in terms of an outbreak it would be more useful to consider specifically how this has immediately contributed to deviance from normal. "... we've found 19 cases of covid-19 in [insert place]", or "35 deaths from coronavirus" deprived of context has nearly no utility.