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Japanese firm reck­ons new tech is “difficult to op­er­ate in­tu­itively” for func­tions such as air con­di­tion­ing, mov­ing against grow­ing in­dus­try norm

The new Jazz has a touch­screen for many func­tions, but not tem­per­a­ture con­trol

Honda has done what no other car maker is do­ing, and re­turned to ana­logue con­trols for some func­tions on the new Honda Jazz.

While most man­u­fac­tur­ers are mov­ing to touch­screen con­trols, iden­ti­fy­ing smart­phone use as their in­spi­ra­tion - most re­cently seen in Audi’s lat­est A3 - Honda has de­cided to rein­tro­duce heat­ing and air con­di­tion­ing con­trols via a dial rather than touch­screen, as in the pre­vi­ous-gen­er­a­tion Jazz.

Jazz pro­ject leader Takeki Tanaka ex­plained: “The rea­son is quite sim­ple - we wanted to min­imise dri­ver dis­rup­tion for op­er­a­tion, in par­tic­u­lar, for the heater and air con­di­tion­ing.

“We changed it from touch­screen to dial op­er­a­tion, as we re­ceived cus­tomer feed­back that it was dif­fi­cult to op­er­ate in­tu­itively. You had to look at the screen to change the heater seat­ing, there­fore, we changed it so one can op­er­ate it with­out look­ing, giv­ing more con­fi­dence while dri­ving.”

More and more man­u­fac­tur­ers are mov­ing to touch­screen-only con­trols. The new Audi A3’s elec­tron­ics boss Melanie Limmer told Autocar re­cently its de­ci­sion to re­move some phys­i­cal but­tons was made as “more and more peo­ple are get­ting into touch func­tions with smart­phones” and added that the new sys­tem is as user-friendly as the pre­vi­ous one.

While Honda’s de­ci­sion to re­turn to phys­i­cal con­trols will be pop­u­lar with some - in­clud­ing, no doubt, its age­ing owner base in the UK - the pre­dicted move to­wards more voice-con­trolled ac­tions in cars could elim­i­nate the de­bate around touch­screens ver­sus ana­logue con­trols in the fu­ture.

The new Honda Jazz is big­ger than ever thanks to a new chas­sis and longer wheel­base, but does it come with a more en­gag­ing drive

Ford aims to take the crossover class by storm as it re­vives the Puma name

A quick, classy and quiet elec­tric SUV that builds on the solid foun­da­tions…

Mazda’s fuel-sav­ing tech trick­les down to its iconic two-seater sports…

Honda to ditch diesel in Europe by 2021

Honda to elec­trify European line-up by 2022, not 2025

Are you as pas­sion­ate about cars as we are? Get all the best car news, re­views and opin­ion di­rect to your in­box.

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Ford aims to take the crossover class by storm as it re­vives the Puma name

A quick, classy and quiet elec­tric SUV that builds on the solid foun­da­tions…

Mazda’s fuel-sav­ing tech trick­les down to its iconic two-seater sports…

Free and open source soft­ware for video record­ing and live stream­ing.

Download and start stream­ing quickly and eas­ily on Windows, Mac or Linux.

The OBS Project is made pos­si­ble thanks to gen­er­ous con­tri­bu­tions from our spon­sors and back­ers. Learn more about how you can be­come a spon­sor.

High per­for­mance real time video/​au­dio cap­tur­ing and mix­ing. Create scenes made up of mul­ti­ple sources in­clud­ing win­dow cap­tures, im­ages, text, browser win­dows, we­b­cams, cap­ture cards and more.

Set up an un­lim­ited num­ber of scenes you can switch be­tween seam­lessly via cus­tom tran­si­tions.

Intuitive au­dio mixer with per-source fil­ters such as noise gate, noise sup­pres­sion, and gain. Take full con­trol with VST plu­gin sup­port.

Powerful and easy to use con­fig­u­ra­tion op­tions. Add new Sources, du­pli­cate ex­ist­ing ones, and ad­just their prop­er­ties ef­fort­lessly.

Streamlined Settings panel gives you ac­cess to a wide ar­ray of con­fig­u­ra­tion op­tions to tweak every as­pect of your broad­cast or record­ing.

Modular ‘Dock’ UI al­lows you to re­arrange the lay­out ex­actly as you like. You can even pop out each in­di­vid­ual Dock to its own win­dow.

OBS sup­ports all your fa­vorite stream­ing plat­forms and more.

Choose from a num­ber of dif­fer­ent and cus­tomiz­able tran­si­tions for when you switch be­tween your scenes or add your own stinger video files.

Set hotkeys for nearly every sort of ac­tion, such as switch­ing be­tween scenes, start­ing/​stop­ping streams or record­ings, mut­ing au­dio sources, push to talk, and more.

Studio Mode lets you pre­view your scenes and sources be­fore push­ing them live. Adjust your scenes and sources or cre­ate new ones and en­sure they’re per­fect be­fore your view­ers ever see them.

Get a high level view of your pro­duc­tion us­ing the Multiview. Monitor 8 dif­fer­ent scenes and eas­ily cue or tran­si­tion to any of them with merely a sin­gle or dou­ble click.

OBS Studio is equipped with a pow­er­ful API, en­abling plu­g­ins and scripts to pro­vide fur­ther cus­tomiza­tion and func­tion­al­ity spe­cific to your needs.

Utilize na­tive plu­g­ins for high per­for­mance in­te­gra­tions or scripts writ­ten with Lua or Python that in­ter­face with ex­ist­ing sources.

Work with de­vel­op­ers in the stream­ing com­mu­nity to get the fea­tures you need with end­less pos­si­bil­i­ties.

Browse or sub­mit your own in the Resources sec­tion

Zoom, the video con­fer­enc­ing ser­vice whose use has spiked amid the Covid-19 pan­demic, claims to im­ple­ment end-to-end en­cryp­tion, widely un­der­stood as the most pri­vate form of in­ter­net com­mu­ni­ca­tion, pro­tect­ing con­ver­sa­tions from all out­side par­ties. In fact, Zoom is us­ing its own de­f­i­n­i­tion of the term, one that lets Zoom it­self ac­cess un­en­crypted video and au­dio from meet­ings.

With mil­lions of peo­ple around the world work­ing from home in or­der to slow the spread of the coro­n­avirus, busi­ness is boom­ing for Zoom, bring­ing more at­ten­tion on the com­pany and its pri­vacy prac­tices, in­clud­ing a pol­icy, later up­dated, that seemed to give the com­pany per­mis­sion to mine mes­sages and files shared dur­ing meet­ings for the pur­pose of ad tar­get­ing.

Still, Zoom of­fers re­li­a­bil­ity, ease of use, and at least one very im­por­tant se­cu­rity as­sur­ance: As long as you make sure every­one in a Zoom meet­ing con­nects us­ing “computer au­dio” in­stead of call­ing in on a phone, the meet­ing is se­cured with end-to-end en­cryp­tion, at least ac­cord­ing to Zoom’s web­site, its se­cu­rity white pa­per, and the user in­ter­face within the app. But de­spite this mis­lead­ing mar­ket­ing, the ser­vice ac­tu­ally does not sup­port end-to-end en­cryp­tion for video and au­dio con­tent, at least as the term is com­monly un­der­stood. Instead it of­fers what is usu­ally called trans­port en­cryp­tion, ex­plained fur­ther be­low.

In Zoom’s white pa­per, there is a list of “pre-meeting se­cu­rity ca­pa­bil­i­ties” that are avail­able to the meet­ing host that starts with “Enable an end-to-end (E2E) en­crypted meet­ing.” Later in the white pa­per, it lists “Secure a meet­ing with E2E en­cryp­tion” as an “in-meeting se­cu­rity ca­pa­bil­ity” that’s avail­able to meet­ing hosts. When a host starts a meet­ing with the “Require Encryption for 3rd Party Endpoints” set­ting en­abled, par­tic­i­pants see a green pad­lock that says, “Zoom is us­ing an end to end en­crypted con­nec­tion” when they mouse over it.

But when reached for com­ment about whether video meet­ings are ac­tu­ally end-to-end en­crypted, a Zoom spokesper­son wrote, “Currently, it is not pos­si­ble to en­able E2E en­cryp­tion for Zoom video meet­ings. Zoom video meet­ings use a com­bi­na­tion of TCP and UDP. TCP con­nec­tions are made us­ing TLS and UDP con­nec­tions are en­crypted with AES us­ing a key ne­go­ti­ated over a TLS con­nec­tion.”

The en­cryp­tion that Zoom uses to pro­tect meet­ings is TLS, the same tech­nol­ogy that web servers use to se­cure HTTPS web­sites. This means that the con­nec­tion be­tween the Zoom app run­ning on a user’s com­puter or phone and Zoom’s server is en­crypted in the same way the con­nec­tion be­tween your web browser and this ar­ti­cle (on https://​thein­ter­cept.com) is en­crypted. This is known as trans­port en­cryp­tion, which is dif­fer­ent from end-to-end en­cryp­tion be­cause the Zoom ser­vice it­self can ac­cess the un­en­crypted video and au­dio con­tent of Zoom meet­ings. So when you have a Zoom meet­ing, the video and au­dio con­tent will stay pri­vate from any­one spy­ing on your Wi-Fi, but it won’t stay pri­vate from the com­pany. (In a state­ment, Zoom said it does not di­rectly ac­cess, mine, or sell user data; more be­low.)

For a Zoom meet­ing to be end-to-end en­crypted, the video and au­dio con­tent would need to be en­crypted in such a way that only the par­tic­i­pants in the meet­ing have the abil­ity to de­crypt it. The Zoom ser­vice it­self might have ac­cess to en­crypted meet­ing con­tent, but would­n’t have the en­cryp­tion keys re­quired to de­crypt it (only meet­ing par­tic­i­pants would have these keys) and there­fore, would not have the tech­ni­cal abil­ity to lis­ten in on your pri­vate meet­ings. This is how end-to-end en­cryp­tion in mes­sag­ing apps like Signal work: The Signal ser­vice fa­cil­i­tates send­ing en­crypted mes­sages be­tween users, but does­n’t have the en­cryp­tion keys re­quired to de­crypt those mes­sages and there­fore, can’t ac­cess their un­en­crypted con­tent.

“When we use the phrase ‘End to End’ in our other lit­er­a­ture, it is in ref­er­ence to the con­nec­tion be­ing en­crypted from Zoom end point to Zoom end point,” the Zoom spokesper­son wrote, ap­par­ently re­fer­ring to Zoom servers as “end points” even though they sit be­tween Zoom clients. “The con­tent is not de­crypted as it trans­fers across the Zoom cloud” through the net­work­ing be­tween these ma­chines.

Matthew Green, a cryp­tog­ra­pher and com­puter sci­ence pro­fes­sor at Johns Hopkins University, points out that group video con­fer­enc­ing is dif­fi­cult to en­crypt end to end. That’s be­cause the ser­vice provider needs to de­tect who is talk­ing to act like a switch­board, which al­lows it to only send a high-res­o­lu­tion videostream from the per­son who is talk­ing at the mo­ment, or who a user se­lects to the rest of the group, and to send low-res­o­lu­tion videostreams of other par­tic­i­pants. This type of op­ti­miza­tion is much eas­ier if the ser­vice provider can see every­thing be­cause it’s un­en­crypted.

“If it’s all end-to-end en­crypted, you need to add some ex­tra mech­a­nisms to make sure you can do that kind of ‘who’s talk­ing’ switch, and you can do it in a way that does­n’t leak a lot of in­for­ma­tion. You have to push that logic out to the end­points,” he told The Intercept. This is­n’t im­pos­si­ble, though, Green said, as demon­strated by Apple’s FaceTime, which al­lows group video con­fer­enc­ing that’s end-to-end en­crypted. “It’s doable. It’s just not easy.”

“They’re a lit­tle bit fuzzy about what’s end-to-end en­crypted,” Green said of Zoom. “I think they’re do­ing this in a slightly dis­hon­est way. It would be nice if they just came clean.”

The only fea­ture of Zoom that does ap­pear to be end-to-end en­crypted is in-meet­ing text chat. “Zoom E2E chat en­cryp­tion al­lows for a se­cured com­mu­ni­ca­tion where only the in­tended re­cip­i­ent can read the se­cured mes­sage,” the white pa­per states. “Zoom uses pub­lic and pri­vate key to en­crypt the chat ses­sion with Advanced Encryption Standard (AES-256). Session keys are gen­er­ated with a de­vice-unique hard­ware ID to avoid data be­ing read from other de­vices.” A Zoom spokesper­son wrote, “When end-to-end en­cryp­tion for chat is en­abled, the keys are stored on the lo­cal de­vices and Zoom does not have ac­cess to the keys to de­crypt the data.”

Without end-to-end en­cryp­tion, Zoom has the tech­ni­cal abil­ity to spy on pri­vate video meet­ings and could be com­pelled to hand over record­ings of meet­ings to gov­ern­ments or law en­force­ment in re­sponse to le­gal re­quests. While other com­pa­nies like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft pub­lish trans­parency re­ports that de­scribe ex­actly how many gov­ern­ment re­quests for user data they re­ceive from which coun­tries and how many of those they com­ply with, Zoom does not pub­lish a trans­parency re­port. On March 18, hu­man rights group Access Now pub­lished an open let­ter call­ing on Zoom to re­lease a trans­parency re­port to help users un­der­stand what the com­pany is do­ing to pro­tect their data.

“Transparency re­ports are one of the strongest ways for com­pa­nies to dis­close threats to user pri­vacy and free ex­pres­sion. They help us un­der­stand sur­veil­lance laws in dif­fer­ent ju­ris­dic­tions, pro­vide use­ful in­for­ma­tion on net­work shut­downs and dis­rup­tions, and they show us which com­pa­nies are push­ing back against im­proper re­quests for user in­for­ma­tion,” said Isedua Oribhabor, U. S. pol­icy an­a­lyst at Access Now. Access Now’s Transparency Reporting Index shows a down­ward trend in con­sis­tent trans­parency re­port­ing, which Oribhabor said re­moves an es­sen­tial tool for users and civil so­ci­ety to hold gov­ern­ments and com­pa­nies ac­count­able.

Oribhabor pointed out that Zoom could be com­pelled to hand over data to gov­ern­ments that want to mon­i­tor on­line as­sem­bly or con­trol the spread of in­for­ma­tion as ac­tivists move protests on­line. The lack of a trans­parency re­port makes it dif­fi­cult to de­ter­mine whether there’s been an in­crease in re­quests and un­clear how Zoom would re­spond.

“Companies have a re­spon­si­bil­ity to be trans­par­ent about these kinds of re­quests, to help users and civil so­ci­ety see where gov­ern­ment abuse is oc­cur­ring and how the com­pany is push­ing back,” Oribhabor said.

“Zoom com­plies with our le­gal oblig­a­tions or the le­gal oblig­a­tions of our cus­tomers. This in­cludes re­spond­ing to valid le­gal process, or as rea­son­ably nec­es­sary to pre­serve Zoom’s le­gal rights. Zoom is legally re­quired to work with law en­force­ment when there is a vi­o­la­tion of Zoom’s Online Terms of Service,” a Zoom spokesper­son said in an email.

It’s pos­si­ble that Zoom’s mar­ket­ing could be con­sid­ered an un­fair or de­cep­tive trade prac­tice that would run afoul of the Federal Trade Commission. In 2014, both Fandango and Credit Karma set­tled charges with the FTC af­ter fail­ing to prop­erly im­ple­ment SSL en­cryp­tion for pro­cess­ing credit card in­for­ma­tion, de­spite their se­cu­rity promises. This left cus­tomer’s per­sonal data vul­ner­a­ble to man-in-the-mid­dle at­tacks.

Independent tech­nol­o­gist Ashkan Soltani, who for­merly served as the FTC’s chief tech­nol­o­gist, said it’s un­clear to him whether Zoom is ac­tu­ally im­ple­ment­ing end-to-end en­cryp­tion; he was un­aware that it claimed to do so prior to speak­ing with The Intercept. But he said that if a rea­son­able con­sumer makes a de­ci­sion to use Zoom with the un­der­stand­ing that it has end-to-end en­cryp­tion for video chat when, in fact, it did not, and if Zoom’s rep­re­sen­ta­tion is de­cep­tive, it could be a de­cep­tive trade prac­tice.

This kind of mar­ket­ing could im­pact not just con­sumers, but also other busi­nesses.

“If Zoom claimed they have end-to-end en­cryp­tion, but did­n’t ac­tu­ally in­vest the re­sources to im­ple­ment it, and Google Hangouts did­n’t make that claim and you chose Zoom, not only are you be­ing harmed as con­sumer, but in fact, Hangouts is be­ing harmed be­cause Zoom is mak­ing claims about its prod­uct that are not true,” he said. “So it’s ac­tu­ally ben­e­fit­ing from false claims, and peo­ple are es­sen­tially re­ceiv­ing more mar­ket share be­cause of those false claims.”

Zoom busi­ness cus­tomers with a min­i­mum of 10 hosts have the op­tion of us­ing an on-premises Meet­ing Connector, which al­lows com­pa­nies to es­sen­tially host a Zoom server on their in­ter­nal cor­po­rate net­work. With this setup, meet­ing meta­data, like the names and times of meet­ings and which par­tic­i­pants join them, goes through Zoom’s servers, but “the meet­ing it­self is hosted in cus­tomer’s in­ter­nal net­work,” ac­cord­ing to the white pa­per. “All real-time meet­ing traf­fic in­clud­ing au­dio, video, and data shar­ing go through the com­pa­ny’s in­ter­nal net­work. This lever­ages your ex­ist­ing net­work se­cu­rity setup to pro­tect your meet­ing traf­fic.” Even though Zoom meet­ings are not end-to-end en­crypted, the com­pany should not have ac­cess to the video and au­dio of meet­ings that go through a cus­tomer’s Meeting Connector server; only the cus­tomer should have ac­cess to that.

Zoom pro­vided the fol­low­ing state­ment to The Intercept: “Zoom takes its users’ pri­vacy ex­tremely se­ri­ously. Zoom only col­lects data from in­di­vid­u­als us­ing the Zoom plat­form as needed to pro­vide the ser­vice and en­sure it is de­liv­ered as ef­fec­tively as pos­si­ble. Zoom must col­lect ba­sic tech­ni­cal in­for­ma­tion like users’ IP ad­dress, OS de­tails and de­vice de­tails in or­der for the ser­vice to func­tion prop­erly. Zoom has lay­ered safe­guards in place to pro­tect our users’ pri­vacy, which in­cludes pre­vent­ing any­one, in­clud­ing Zoom em­ploy­ees, from di­rectly ac­cess­ing any data that users share dur­ing meet­ings, in­clud­ing — but not lim­ited to — the video, au­dio and chat con­tent of those meet­ings. Importantly, Zoom does not mine user data or sell user data of any kind to any­one.”

78 — Select an el­e­ment or list of el­e­ments

Today we have some im­por­tant and ex­cit­ing news to share: Dark Sky has joined Apple.

Our goal has al­ways been to pro­vide the world with the best weather in­for­ma­tion pos­si­ble, to help as many peo­ple as we can stay dry and safe, and to do so in a way that re­spects your pri­vacy.

There is no bet­ter place to ac­com­plish these goals than at Apple. We’re thrilled to have the op­por­tu­nity to reach far more peo­ple, with far more im­pact, than we ever could alone.

There will be no changes to Dark Sky for iOS at this time. It will con­tinue to be avail­able for pur­chase in the App Store.

The app will no longer be avail­able for down­load. Service to ex­ist­ing users and sub­scribers will con­tinue un­til July 1, 2020, at which point the app will be shut down. Subscribers who are still ac­tive at that time will re­ceive a re­fund.

Weather fore­casts, maps, and em­beds will con­tinue un­til July 1, 2020. The web­site will re­main ac­tive be­yond that time in sup­port of API and iOS App cus­tomers.

Our API ser­vice for ex­ist­ing cus­tomers is not chang­ing to­day, but we will no longer ac­cept new signups. The API will con­tinue to func­tion through the end of 2021.

As part of this tran­si­tion, use of Dark Sky by Apple is sub­ject to the Apple Privacy Policy, which can be found at ap­ple.com/​pri­vacy.

To our cus­tomers, fam­ily and friends, we are grate­ful for your sup­port over the past eight years. We look for­ward to con­tin­u­ing to build great prod­ucts, so stay tuned…

(Reuters) - Elon Musk’s rocket com­pany SpaceX has banned its em­ploy­ees from us­ing video con­fer­enc­ing app Zoom, cit­ing “significant pri­vacy and se­cu­rity con­cerns,” ac­cord­ing to a memo seen by Reuters, days af­ter U. S. law en­force­ment warned users about the se­cu­rity of the pop­u­lar app.

Use of Zoom and other dig­i­tal com­mu­ni­ca­tions has soared as many Americans have been or­dered to stay home to slow the spread of coro­n­avirus.

SpaceX’s ban on Zoom Video Communications Inc il­lus­trates the mount­ing chal­lenges fac­ing aero­space man­u­fac­tur­ers as they de­velop tech­nol­ogy deemed vi­tal to na­tional se­cu­rity while also try­ing to keep em­ploy­ees safe from the fast-spread­ing res­pi­ra­tory ill­ness.

In an email dated March 28, SpaceX told em­ploy­ees that all ac­cess to Zoom had been dis­abled with im­me­di­ate ef­fect.

“We un­der­stand that many of us were us­ing this tool for con­fer­ences and meet­ing sup­port,” SpaceX said in the mes­sage. “Please use email, text or phone as al­ter­nate means of com­mu­ni­ca­tion.”

Two peo­ple fa­mil­iar with the mat­ter con­firmed the con­tents of the mail.

A rep­re­sen­ta­tive for SpaceX, which has more than 6,000 em­ploy­ees, did not re­spond to a re­quest for com­ment. Chief Executive Musk also heads elec­tric car maker Tesla Inc.

NASA, one of SpaceX’s biggest cus­tomers, also pro­hibits its em­ploy­ees from us­ing Zoom, said Stephanie Schierholz, a spokes­woman for the U. S. space agency.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Boston of­fice on Monday is­sued a warn­ing about Zoom, telling users not to make meet­ings on the site pub­lic or share links widely af­ter it re­ceived two re­ports of uniden­ti­fied in­di­vid­u­als in­vad­ing school ses­sions, a phe­nom­e­non known as “zoombombing.”

Investigative news site The Intercept on Tuesday re­ported that Zoom video is not end-to-end en­crypted be­tween meet­ing par­tic­i­pants, and that the com­pany could view ses­sions.

“We want to start by apol­o­giz­ing for the con­fu­sion we have caused by in­cor­rectly sug­gest­ing that Zoom meet­ings were ca­pa­ble of us­ing end-to-end en­cryp­tion,” the com­pany said in a blog post. “Zoom has al­ways strived to use en­cryp­tion to pro­tect con­tent in as many sce­nar­ios as pos­si­ble, and in that spirit, we used the term end-to-end en­cryp­tion.” (bit.ly/​2x­H3Et8)

The com­pany added that it en­crypts all con­tent from Zoom meet­ings where every­one is us­ing the Zoom app and the ses­sions are not be­ing recorded. It said it was un­able to cur­rently en­crypt con­tent when users log in us­ing other de­vices.

Zoom did not im­me­di­ately re­spond to re­quests for com­ment on SpaceX’s de­ci­sion.

As a de­fence con­trac­tor, California-based SpaceX has been clas­si­fied as an es­sen­tial busi­ness, al­low­ing it to stay open through shut­downs in California and Texas, the de­vel­op­ment and test­ing hub for its Starship rocket that could be used to get to the moon and Mars and send na­tional se­cu­rity satel­lites to space.

Please make sure your browser sup­ports JavaScript and cook­ies and that you are not block­ing them from load­ing. For more in­for­ma­tion you can re­view our Terms of Service and Cookie Policy.

Jason at zx2c4.com

Previous mes­sage (by thread): wg sync­conf changes end­point to IPv4 and re­moves fw­mark

Next mes­sage (by thread): [ANNOUNCE] WireGuard 1.0.0 for Linux 5.6 Released

Hi folks,

Earlier this evening, Linus re­leased [1] Linux 5.6, which con­tains our first re­lease of WireGuard. This is quite ex­cit­ing. It means that ker­nels from here on out will have WireGuard built-in by de­fault. And for those of you who were scared away prior by the “dOnT uSe tHiS k0de!!1!” warn­ings every­where, you now have some­thing more sta­ble to work with.

The last sev­eral weeks of 5.6 de­vel­op­ment and sta­bi­liza­tion have been ex­cit­ing, with our code­base un­der­go­ing a quick se­cu­rity au­dit [3], and some real head­way in terms of get­ting into dis­tri­b­u­tions.

We’ll also con­tinue to main­tain our wire­guard-linux-com­pat [2] back­ports repo for older ker­nels. On the back­ports front, WireGuard was back­ported to Ubuntu 20.04 (via wire­guard-linux-com­pat) [4] and Debian Buster (via a real back­port to 5.5.y) [5]. I’m also main­tain­ing real back­ports, not via the com­pat layer, to 5.4.y [6] and 5.5.y [7], and we’ll see where those wind up; 5.4.y is an LTS re­lease.

Meanwhile, the usual up-to-date dis­tri­b­u­tions like Arch, Gentoo, and Fedora 32 will be get­ting WireGuard au­to­mat­i­cally by virtue of hav­ing 5.6, and I ex­pect these to in­crease in num­ber over time.

Enjoy! Jason

[1] wi9ZT7Stg-uS­pX0UWQza­m6OP9Jz­z6X­u1Ck­Yu1­ci­cpD5OA@mail.gmail.com/“>https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=wi9ZT7Stg-uS­pX0UWQza­m6OP9Jz­z6X­u1Ck­Yu1­ci­cpD5OA@mail.gmail.com/ [2] https://​git.zx2c4.com/​wire­guard-linux-com­pat/ [3] https://​lore.ker­nel.org/​net­dev/​20200319003047.113501-1-Ja­son@zx2c4.com/ [4] https://​git.launch­pad.net/~​ubuntu-ker­nel/​ubuntu/+​source/​linux/+​git/​fo­cal/​tree/​de­bian/​dkms-ver­sions?h=mas­ter-next [5] https://​salsa.de­bian.org/​ker­nel-team/​linux/-/​tree/​mas­ter/​de­bian%2F­patches%2F­fea­tures%2Fall%2Fwire­guard [6] https://​git.zx2c4.com/​wire­guard-linux/​log/?​h=back­port-5.4.y [7] https://​git.zx2c4.com/​wire­guard-linux/​log/?​h=back­port-5.5.y

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In 2002, my hus­band and I be­came se­ri­ously ill af­ter a va­ca­tion to Martha’s Vineyard. It took ten doc­tors and a year to dis­cover the root cause: We’d been bit­ten by un­seen ticks har­bor­ing the par­a­sites that cause Lyme dis­ease and babesio­sis, a malaria-like dis­ease.

Our road to re­cov­ery was gru­el­ing, re­quir­ing five years of in­ter­mit­tent an­timi­cro­bial treat­ments. Later, I dis­cover that my sit­u­a­tion was­n’t all that un­com­mon. About one in five Lyme pa­tients con­tinue to suf­fer from on­go­ing symp­toms af­ter be­ing treated with the rec­om­mended course of an­tibi­otics. After that ex­pe­ri­ence, it was abun­dantly clear that we need bet­ter treat­ments.

That’s why I was ex­cited to hear about a study from Stanford Medicine re­searchers and their col­lab­o­ra­tors that pro­vides ev­i­dence that the drug azlocillin elim­i­nates the bac­te­ria that cause Lyme dis­ease at the on­set of in­fec­tion in lab mice and cul­tures.

Lyme dis­ease, the most com­mon vec­tor-borne dis­ease in the United States, af­fects more than 300,000 peo­ple a year. It is caused by the bac­terium Borrelia burgdor­feri, which is trans­mit­ted to hu­mans through the bite of in­fected black­legged ticks. If the dis­ease is­n’t treated promptly, it can lead to life-threat­en­ing heart is­sues and chronic neu­ro­log­i­cal prob­lems. Common per­sis­tent Lyme symp­toms in­clude fa­tigue, joint pain, mus­cle pain, numb­ness, tin­gling, burn­ing pains, and changes in mood, mem­ory or men­tal clar­ity.

Standard treat­ment of Lyme dis­ease is oral an­tibi­otics, typ­i­cally doxy­cy­cline, in the early stages of the dis­ease; but for rea­sons that are un­clear, the an­tibi­otics don’t work for up to 20% of peo­ple with the tick-borne ill­ness. One pos­si­bil­ity is that drug-tol­er­ant bac­te­ria cause the lin­ger­ing symp­toms.

This drug study, pub­lished on­line in Scientific Reports, was con­ducted by a team led by Jayakumar Rajadas, PhD, as­sis­tant pro­fes­sor of med­i­cine and di­rec­tor of Stanford’s Biomaterials and Advanced Drug Delivery Laboratory, and re­search as­so­ci­ate Venkata Raveendra Pothineni, PhD.

The team ze­roed in on azlocillin as a promis­ing drug can­di­date through the use of high through­put drug screen­ing. This process en­tails ac­quir­ing “libraries” of thou­sands of known chem­i­cal com­pounds and drugs, then mix­ing Lyme bac­te­ria with each in tiny wells to see which ones are best at killing the or­gan­isms. The best drug can­di­dates were retested in larger cul­ture dishes, then the safest of these were tested in vivo in seven mice.

Early re­sults of this team’s screen­ing process, first pub­lished in 2016, led to the dis­cov­ery of an­other promis­ing Lyme drug can­di­date, disul­fi­ram, which is ap­proved by the Food and Drug Administration for the treat­ment of al­co­hol abuse dis­or­der. This drug is cur­rently be­ing eval­u­ated in a clin­i­cal trial with pre­vi­ously-treated Lyme pa­tients. The trial co­or­di­na­tors are still look­ing for vol­un­teers.

According to the re­cent study, azlocillin shows promise be­cause it ap­pears to be able to kill the two mor­pho­log­i­cal forms of the Lyme bac­te­ria — the ac­tively repli­cat­ing spi­ral forms and the semi-dor­mant round-body forms.

Azlocillin also ap­pears to kill drug-tol­er­ant per­sis­ters very ef­fec­tively. These pro­tec­tive per­sis­ters form when the bac­te­ria are threat­ened with de­fen­sive im­mune sys­tem bio­chem­i­cals or an­tibi­otics. After the threat has passed, the bac­te­ria can reemerge to cause ac­tive dis­ease. Many re­searchers be­lieve that doxy­cy­line’s in­abil­ity to clear the per­sis­ters may ac­count for the on­go­ing symp­toms of some Lyme suf­fer­ers.

Although azlocillin is an FDA-approved drug, more re­search needs to be done be­fore it is used to treat Lyme pa­tients. Rajadas and Pothineni have patented the com­pound for the treat­ment of Lyme dis­ease and are work­ing with a com­pany to de­velop an oral form of the drug. Researchers plan to con­duct a clin­i­cal trial.

As Pothineni said in the Stanford Medicine news re­lease:

“We have been screen­ing po­ten­tial drugs for six years … We’ve screened al­most 8,000 chem­i­cal com­pounds. We have tested 50 mol­e­cules in the dish. The most ef­fec­tive and safest mol­e­cules were tested in an­i­mal mod­els. Along the way, I’ve met many peo­ple suf­fer­ing with this hor­ri­ble, lin­ger­ing dis­ease. Our main goal is to find the best com­pound for treat­ing pa­tients and stop this dis­ease.”

A for­mer sci­ence writer with Stanford Medicine, Kris Newby is the au­thor of Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons. She is now work­ing on a doc­u­men­tary based on the book.

Photo by Image by Gabor Tinz/Shutterstock. Image cour­tesy of Michal Tal, PhD, in­struc­tor at Stanford’s Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine.