A new study – repeated by many newspapers – claims genes that rescue even in severe Mendelian disorder: cystic fibrosis, Smith-Lemli-Opitz syndrome, familial dysautonomia, epidermolysis bullosa simplex, Pfeiffer syndrome, autoimmune polyendocrinopathy syndrome, acampomelic campomelic dysplasia and atelosteogenesis.

A comprehensive screen of 874 genes in 589,306 genomes led to the identification of 13 adults harboring mutations for 8 severe Mendelian conditions, with no reported clinical manifestation of the indicated disease.

But we know about the reliability of 23andme results

Finally! 23 and the FDA warning

who even mixed up samples in the past.

Searching for genes that makes your resilient to disease is interesting of course but not very new with more examples of cystic fibrosis survivors available. Any new proof by the 23andme study is missing so far as the authors were unable to recontact any of the 13 resilient indiviuduals for whatever reasons.

This still not a trivial task given the patchwork of code pieces floating around. When writing a route finder app I came up with the following solution

# html
<form id="myform" enctype="multipart/form-data" action="upload.php" method="POST" target="_parent">
  <input type="hidden" name="uuid" value="1"/>
  <input id="myfile" type="file" name="file"  style="display: none;"/>
  <input type="submit" value="send" style="display: none;"/>
</form>

# query javascript that starts the upload
$("input[id='myfile']").click();

# upload.php
# note the redirect with javascript not with php allows to pass state parameters
$uuid=htmlspecialchars($_POST["uuid"]);
$uf = basename($_FILES['file']['name']);
$fn='data/'.$uuid.'.gpx';
if (move_uploaded_file($_FILES['file']['tmp_name'], $uf)) {
  rename($_FILES['file']['name'],$fn );
  file_put_contents ($fn , $txt, FILE_APPEND );
  echo '<script type="text/javascript">window.parent.location = "index.php";</script>';
}

The upload needs a quick refresh of the webpage (which could be avoided by posting to an hidden iframe and controlling response by an ajax call). The download doesn’t need a refresh:

# note the combined get and post commands
# don't know why this is necessary
$.ajax({
  data: "uuid="+fn,
  type: "post",
  url: "download.php",
  success: function() {
    window.location = 'download.php?uuid='+fn;
  }
});

There is a huge economical interest in bitcoins. And reading a bit more about the blockchain technology behind, I expect that scientific data will soon move towards the same path as soon as we drop Nature, Science and many more journals as gatekeepers

A block chain or blockchain is a permissionless distributed database based on a protocol that maintains a continuously growing list of data records hardened against tampering and revision, even by its operators. The initial and most widely known application of block chain technology is the public ledger of transactions for bitcoin,which has been the inspiration for similar implementations often known as altchains.

Although people are talking so much about releasing study data into the public domain – allowing reviewers to test central claims of a paper – there is no progress at all. Even being part of an EU funded collaborative study, I could never get the full data set.

Maybe it isn’t block chain alone – it may be also cooperative storage cloud as in the following video example.

Added 31 Dec 2016: Blockchain started back in Jan 2009, occupies currently 105 GB and is distributed among 5400 nodes. Zündfunk (in German) has a nice feature about the blockchain referring mainly to the “Blockchain Revolution“, a new book by Don and Alex Tapscott.

Note to myself

* backup system data to SD card
* get new Honor 6 firmware (H60-L04,Android 5.1.1,EMUI 3.1,West Europe) from Huawei (mirror), copy it to the SD card and install it using the existing emui app
* restore system data
* get bootloader unlock code from Huawei and send it via open usb connection to phone (fastboot oem unlock ****************)
* install kingroot root app from playstore and root
* install droidwall

It’s such a pain – my log files show that 80% of all traffic is being generated by robots. This is such a waste of energy
Even worse it slows down my site and makes me loose visitors. Unfortunately most of these bots ignore the robots.txt in the server root, so the only way is to block them by the server. My current .htaccess is taken from stackoverflow but far from being exhaustive

Options +FollowSymlinks  
RewriteEngine On  
RewriteBase /  
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^$" bad_user
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^GbPlugin" bad_user
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^Wget" bad_user
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^EmailSiphon" bad_user
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^EmailWolf" bad_user
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^libwww-perl" bad_user
Deny from env=bad_user

Unfortunately even that did not prevent unwanted crawler – very much like spam bot lists, IP ranges, etc. But there are some more solutions – bots can be recognized by their behavioral pattern: the try to get prohibited and non existent pages. Let’s dive into the first option

One of my favorite security measures here at Perishable Press is the site's virtual Blackhole trap for bad bots. The concept is simple: include a hidden link to a robots.txt-forbidden directory somewhere on your pages. Bots that ignore or disobey your robots rules will crawl the link and fall into the trap, which then performs a WHOIS Lookup and records the event in the blackhole data file. Once added to the blacklist data file, bad bots immediately are denied access to your site.

To make things a bit more attractive, I modified the Perishable approach by generating dynamic blackholes with permanently changing rules (in robots.txt) and redirects (in .htaccess).

My second approach is to monitor clicks to non-existent pages and put these IPs on a blacklist as well.

ErrorDocument 400 /404.php
ErrorDocument 401 /404.php
ErrorDocument 403.1 /404.php
ErrorDocument 403.14 /404.php
ErrorDocument 404 /404.php
ErrorDocument 500 /404.php

The 404 page does a quick database lookup and whenever the limit is reached the IP is blacklisted. Only last approaches (blackhole and 404 blacklist) finally reduced my traffic.

Note added in proof: As most spiders come have different IP addresses – I am blocking now everything from top level 172.168.255.xxx

Es ist immer mit etwas Bauchweh verbunden, ein neues Release von onwcloud einzuspielen. Diesmal kommt die Fehlermeldung

Update failed.Unable to move owncloud/_oc-upgrade/8.2.2.2/core/resources to owncloud/resources

Lässt sich aber relativ einfach beheben, Continue reading owncloud 8.2.2 update →