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Articles by John Levine
ATG exposure in T replete transplant for hematological malignancies: Real world analysis from BMT CTN 1202
Abstract Traditional weight-based dosing results in variable rabbit anti-thymocyte globulin (rATG) clearance, delaying CD4+Tcell-immune-reconstitution (CD4 + IR) and impacting outcomes. In a retrospective pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic analysis of patients undergoing first T-replete hematopoietic cell transplantation (HCT), enrolled on BMT CTN 1202, we estimated post-HCT rATG-exposures as area under the curve (arbitrary unit per day/milliliter [AUxd/mL]) using a validated pharmacokinetic-model.
John Levine: The World of Wild Turkeys
John Levine Dec 9, 2025 Failed to save article Please try again John Levine at KQED in San Francisco on Aug. 29, 2025. (Jennifer Ng/KQED) John Levine shares his experience with wild turkeys and what makes them interesting birds. Traffic slowed down, then suddenly stopped. I was on my way home from running errands and, though I was not in a huge hurry, I found myself tensing up. I got out of my car to see what the holdup was.
Have LLMs Broken Fair Use?
Two sets of authors sued Anthropic and Meta in San Francisco for copyright infringement, arguing that the companies had pirated their works to train their LLMs. Everyone agreed that a key question was whether fair use allowed it, and in both cases, the courts looked at the fair use issue before dealing with other aspects of the cases. Even though the facts in both cases were very similar, last week, two judges in the same court wrote opinions, coming to very different conclusions.
Prediction and Prognostication of Acute Graft‐Versus‐Host Disease by MAGIC Biomarkers
Conflicts of Interest Research support from Biogen, Incyte, and Mesoblast; royalties from a GVHD biomarker patent licensed to Viracor, and consulting fees from Bluebird Bio, Editas, Equillium, Inhibrx, Ironwood, Kamada, MaaT Pharma, Mesoblast, Sanofi, and X4 Pharmaceuticals. References 1, , , et al., “Post-Transplantation Cyclophosphamide-Based Graft-Versus-Host Disease Prophylaxis,” New England Journal of Medicine 388, no. 25 (2023): 2338–2348.
Correction: Anti-CD3/CD7 immunoconjugate (T-Guard) for severe, steroid-refractory GVHD: final report of BMT CTN 2002 - Bone Marrow Transplantation
Correction to: Bone Marrow Transplantation https://doi.org/10.1038/s41409-023-02110-4, published online 25 September 2023 In this article the funding support is correct within the paper but during the submission process, it appears that the wrong grant number was selected. This paper is a BMT CTN protocol only, and is not CIBMTR related. As such only the BMT CTN Grant number (U24HL138660) should be selected. The original article has been corrected.
Trump and Trudeau discuss tariffs, Ukraine and border during 'excellent conversation' at Mar-a-Lago
Original Article Posted By: 4250Luis, 11/30/2024 2:32:11 PM President-elect Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau covered a long menu of topics from tariffs to China during their roughly three hour dinner at Mar-a-Lago, it emerged Saturday Trudeau called the surprise meeting at Trump's Palm Beach golf club an "excellent conversation" but didn't elaborate as he left a hotel, according to CNN.
Internet Archive Loses Their CDL Appeal
The Internet Archive’s Controlled Digital Lending (CDL) lends out scans of physical books, ensuring that each scan is lent to one person at a time. Publishers sued, and the Archive lost thoroughly in April 2023. The Archive appealed the decision to the Second Circuit court in New York. As I said at the time, the appeal seemed like a long shot since that is the same court that said that Google Books was OK, mostly because it didn’t provide full copies of the books.
subject:"Bitcoin P2P e\-cash paper"
I've been working on a new electronic cash system that's fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party. The paper is available at: http://www.bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf The main properties: Double-spending is prevented with a peer-to-peer network. No mint or other trusted parties. Participants can be anonymous. New coins are made from Hashcash style proof-of-work. The proof-of-work for new coin generation also powers the network to prevent double-spending.
Long‐term outcomes after unrelated donor transplantation for severe sickle cell disease on the BMT CTN 0601 trial
To the Editor: HLA-matched sibling donor transplantation accounts for the majority of transplants performed for sickle cell disease (SCD). However, only about 18% of patients in the United States with SCD will have unaffected human leukocyte antigen (HLA)-matched siblings or one with sickle trait, limiting applicability.
Do You Need a License to Look for Spam?
Jay Fink had an interesting little business. If you lived in California, you could give him access to your email account; he’d look through the spam folder for spam that appeared to violate the state anti-spam law and give you a spreadsheet and a file of PDFs. You could then sue the spammers, and if you won, you’d give Fink part of the money as his fee. While the federal CAN-SPAM law largely preempts state laws, it lets states add their own penalties for fraudulent or misleading spam.
Galectin-3 predicts acute GvHD and overall mortality post reduced intensity allo-HCT: a BMT-CTN biorepository study - Bone Marrow Transplantation
Abstract Identifying plasma biomarkers early after allo-HCT may become crucial to prevent and treat severe aGvHD. We utilized samples from 203 allo-HCT patients selected from the Blood & Marrow Transplant Clinical Trials Network (BMT CTN) to identify new biomarker models to predict aGvHD and overall mortality. Two new biomarkers (Gal-3 and LAG-3), and previously identified biomarkers (ST2/IL33R, IL6, Reg3A, PD-1, TIM-3, TNFR1) were screened.
Anti-CD3/CD7 immunoconjugate (T-Guard) for severe, steroid-refractory GVHD: final report of BMT CTN 2002 - Bone Marrow Transplantation
This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution Access options Subscribe to this journal Receive 12 print issues and online access $259.00 per year only $21.58 per issue Rent or buy this article Prices vary by article type from$1.95 to$39.95 Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout Data availability The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
Risks Digest 33.78
RISKS Forum mailing list archives From: RISKS List Owner <risko () csl sri com> Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2023 18:00:35 PDT RISKS-LIST: Risks-Forum Digest Tuesday 15 August 2023 Volume 33 : Issue 78 ACM FORUM ON RISKS TO THE PUBLIC IN COMPUTERS AND RELATED SYSTEMS (comp.risks) Peter G. Neumann, founder and still moderator ***** See last item for further information, disclaimers, caveats, etc.
The Internet Archive Hops Out of the Copyright Frying Pan Into a New and Different Fire
In 2020 a group of book publishers sued the Internet Archive over their Controlled Digital Lending program, which made PDF scans of books and lent them out from the Archive’s website. For books still in copyright, the Archive usually limited the number of copies of a book lent to the number of physical copies of the book they had in storage.
Barack Obama told ex, 'I make love to men daily, but in the imagination,' letter shows
Original Article Posted By: Beardo, 8/12/2023 3:13:39 PM Former President Barack Obama wrote of his own "androgynous" mind and "mak[ing] love to men daily, but in the imagination," according to the redacted portion of a now-notorious 1982 letter, obtained by The Post. The more than 40-year-old letter to an ex-girlfriend recently resurfaced after Obama biographer David Garrow gave a long and winding interview on the one-time commander-in-chief.
Risks Digest 33.76
RISKS Forum mailing list archives From: RISKS List Owner <risko () csl sri com> Date: Sat, 15 Jul 2023 18:01:29 PDT RISKS-LIST: Risks-Forum Digest Saturday 15 July 2023 Volume 33 : Issue 76 ACM FORUM ON RISKS TO THE PUBLIC IN COMPUTERS AND RELATED SYSTEMS (comp.risks) Peter G. Neumann, founder and still moderator ***** See last item for further information, disclaimers, caveats, etc.
Cornel West says Biden committed 'crime against humanity' against black Americans
Original Article Posted By: Mercedes44, 7/15/2023 7:17:11 PM Cornell West bashed President Joe Biden's history of supporting the 90s crime bill. AP Likely Green Party presidential candidate Cornel West ripped President Biden's record on race issues, calling the Democrat's history with black Americans nothing short of a "crime against humanity," in an exclusive interview with The Post.
Can Large Language Models Use the Contents of Your Website?
Large Language Models (LLM) like GPT-4 and its front-end ChatGPT work by ingesting gigantic amounts of text from the Internet to train the model and then responding to prompts with text generated from those models. Depending on who you ask, this is either one step (or maybe no steps) from Artificial General Intelligence, or as Ted Chiang wrote in the New Yorker, ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web.
Spam Filtering and Social Media Moderation Are the Same Thing
CDA Section 230 has been called “The 26 Words that Created the Internet”. While it is obvious how Sec 230 protects the World Wide Web, it is equally important for e-mail. A recent Pennsylvania court case emphasizes this point. Dr. Thomas, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, forwarded an article about another professor Dr. Monge to an online e-mail discussion list. Dr. Monge claimed the article was defamatory and sued Dr. Thomas, the university, and many others.
Why Facebook Is Not a Common Carrier
The ever-entertaining Fifth Circuit has recently upheld a strange Texas law that forbids most kinds of social media moderation. (Techdirt explains many of the reasons the court is wrong, so I won’t try.) This brings us to the trendy question of whether Facebook, Twitter, et al. should be treated as common carriers. You can make a good argument to separate the point-to-point data transport from the ISP and make the former common carriage.
Risks Digest 33.36
Nmap Announce Nmap Dev Full Disclosure Security Lists Internet Issues Open Source Dev RISKS Forum mailing list archives From: RISKS List Owner <risko () csl sri com> Date: Wed, 3 Aug 2022 15:22:43 PDT RISKS-LIST: Risks-Forum Digest Wednesday 3 August 2022 Volume 33 : Issue 36 ACM FORUM ON RISKS TO THE PUBLIC IN COMPUTERS AND RELATED SYSTEMS (comp.risks) Peter G. Neumann, founder and still moderator ***** See last item for further information, disclaimers, caveats, etc.
Risks Digest 33.22
Nmap Announce Nmap Dev Full Disclosure Security Lists Internet Issues Open Source Dev RISKS Forum mailing list archives From: RISKS List Owner <risko () csl sri com> Date: Thu, 19 May 2022 16:13:37 PDT RISKS-LIST: Risks-Forum Digest Thursday 19 May 2022 Volume 33 : Issue 22 ACM FORUM ON RISKS TO THE PUBLIC IN COMPUTERS AND RELATED SYSTEMS (comp.risks) Peter G. Neumann, founder and still moderator ***** See last item for further information, disclaimers, caveats, etc.
Cryptographic Catastrophe Theory
Technologists and law enforcement have been arguing about cryptography policy for about 30 years now. People talk past each other, with each side concluding the other side are unreasonable jerks because of some fundamental incompatible assumptions between two conceptual worlds in collision. In the physical world, bank branches have marble columns and granite counters and mahogany woodwork to show the world that they are rich and stable.
The Supreme Court Decides that Compatible Software is Still Legal
Back in the 1980s, everyone used the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet on their PCs. In 1989, Borland released a competitor, Quattro Pro. It used the same menu commands as 1-2-3 so that users could import their 1-2-3 spreadsheets with keyboard macros. Lotus sued Borland, and after a loss in the district court, Borland won on appeal, arguing that the keyboard commands are a "method of operation" and not subject to copyright.
Why the Internet is Not Like a Railroad
When one person transmits the speech of another, we have had three legal models, which I would characterize as Magazine, Bookstore, and Railroad. The Magazine model makes the transmitting party a publisher who is entirely responsible for whatever the material says. The publisher selects and reviews all the material it published. If users contribute content such as letters to the editor, the publisher reviews them and decides which to publish.
Trump rages at Supreme Court for rejecting Texas election lawsuit
The New York Post Published: Dec. 12, 2020 at 11:39 a.m. ET US Supreme Court dismisses on December 11, 2020, Texas suit challenging election result (Photo by MANDEL NGAN / AFP) (Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images) President Trump harshly condemned the Supreme Court for its decision not to hear a Texas lawsuit looking to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. The decision came despite Trump having appointed a third of the current Justices.
Risks Digest 32.33
RISKS Forum mailing list archives By Date By Thread Risks Digest 32.33 From: RISKS List Owner <risko () csl sri com> Date: Sat, 24 Oct 2020 17:57:10 PDT RISKS-LIST: Risks-Forum Digest Saturday 24 October 2020 Volume 32 : Issue 33 ACM FORUM ON RISKS TO THE PUBLIC IN COMPUTERS AND RELATED SYSTEMS (comp.risks) Peter G. Neumann, founder and still moderator ***** See last item for further information, disclaimers, caveats, etc.
The Good Old Days in the Cryptography Wars
A Lorenz SZ42 cipher machine at The National Museum of Computing on Bletchley Park Photo: Wikipedia The 20th century was the golden age of surveillance. High-speed communication went either by telegraph and telephone, which needed a license from the government, or by radio, which anyone can listen to. Codes were manual or electromechanical and were breakable, e.g., the Zimmermann telegram and Bletchley Park.
Risks Digest 32.31
RISKS Forum mailing list archives By Date By Thread Risks Digest 32.31 From: RISKS List Owner <risko () csl sri com> Date: Sat, 10 Oct 2020 17:32:14 PDT RISKS-LIST: Risks-Forum Digest Saturday 10 October 2020 Volume 32 : Issue 31 ACM FORUM ON RISKS TO THE PUBLIC IN COMPUTERS AND RELATED SYSTEMS (comp.risks) Peter G. Neumann, founder and still moderator ***** See last item for further information, disclaimers, caveats, etc.
Risks Digest 32.29
RISKS Forum mailing list archives By Date By Thread Risks Digest 32.29 From: RISKS List Owner <risko () csl sri com> Date: Fri, 25 Sep 2020 15:47:35 PDT RISKS-LIST: Risks-Forum Digest Friday 25 September 2020 Volume 32 : Issue 29 ACM FORUM ON RISKS TO THE PUBLIC IN COMPUTERS AND RELATED SYSTEMS (comp.risks) Peter G. Neumann, founder and still moderator ***** See last item for further information, disclaimers, caveats, etc.
Is Booking.com a Generic Term?
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) had claimed that since "booking" is a generic term, if you add ".com" to it, it's still generic, just like adding "company" to a name. The case law on this issue seems to be pretty thin since everyone cites the same two cases. The first is an 1888 case Goodyear's Rubber Manufacturing Co. et al. vs.
Once Again, Why Internet Voting Doesn't Work
An acquaintance said, "We trust our electronic systems to transfer millions of dollars of value; I suspect we will eventually develop schemes we will trust to record and count votes." Unfortunately, this is one of the chronic fallacies that make voting security experts tear their remaining hair out. The security models are entirely different, so what banks do is completely irrelevant to voting. There are no secrets in banking.
Political Email Placement or, You're Not Special
A recent piece in The Markup called Swinging the Vote? attempts to figure out how Google decides where to deliver political e-mail. They were startled to discover that only a small fraction of it was delivered into the main inbox, and a fair amount was classed as spam. They shouldn't have been. This is an example of the fallacy We're so nice that the rules don't apply to us, which is far too common among non-profit and political mailers.
Crypto Back Doors Are Still a Bad Idea
In the always interesting Lawfare blog, former FBI counsel Jim Baker in a piece called Rethinking Encryption reiterates his take on the encryption debates. There's a certain amount that makes me want to bang my head against the wall, e.g. After working on the going dark problem for years, I'm confident that this problem can be addressed from a technical perspective. In most cases, it's just software, and software can be rewritten.
What Does Blockchain Have to Do With Voting?
Apropos of recent news stories about a blockchain-based voting system that was hacked before its first election, someone asked: "Perhaps final recognition that a lot of blockchain is hype? Or simply an interesting side-story?" A blockchain can ensure that the lies you see are the same lies that were published, but that doesn't have much to do with voting.
What Does It Mean to Deploy DMARC?
The IETF's DMARC working group is thinking about a maintenance update to the DMARC spec, fixing bits that are unclear and perhaps changing it where what mail servers do doesn't exactly agree with what it says. Someone noted that a lot of mailers claim to have "deployed DMARC," and it's not at all clear what that really means. Deploying DMARC seems to mean any subset of these: 1a.
Domain Name Variants Still Won't Work
ICANN has spent years trying to figure out what to do with domain name variants, strings that look different but mean the same thing, for some definition of "the same." They've been trying to deal with them in second level domains for a decade, and are now working on rules to allow variant top-level domains. Unfortunately, variants don't work. The problem isn't putting them in the DNS; it's that once they're in the DNS, they don't work anywhere else.
Domain Name Variants Still Won’t Work
ICANN has spent years trying to figure out what to do with domain name variants, strings that look different but mean the same thing, for some definition of “the same.” They’ve been trying to deal with them in second level domains for a decade, and are now working on rules to allow variant top-level domains. Unfortunately, variants don’t work. The problem isn’t putting them in the DNS; it’s that once they’re in the DNS, they don’t work anywhere else.
A Short History of DNS Over HTTP (So Far)
The IETF is in the midst of a vigorous debate about DNS over HTTP or DNS over HTTPS, abbreviated as DoH. How did we get there, and where do we go from here? (This is somewhat simplified, but I think the essential chronology is right.) Javascript code running in a web browser can't do DNS lookups, other than with browser.dns.resolv() to fetch an A record, or implicitly by fetching a URL which looks up a DNS A or AAAA record for the domain in the URL.
DOHA and ZIPPO Make Forty Five
Forty five what? Forty five abandoned top-level domains. On November 7, ICANN received a notice from the Communication Regulatory Authority of the State of Qatar that they are terminating the registration agreement for .DOHA. Two weeks before that, the Zadco company terminated .ZIPPO. In addition to the $180,000 application fee, applicants had to hire consultants, make arrangements with back-end operators, go through the certification process to get their TLD online.
M3AAWG and APWG Do the Best Survey Yet on WHOIS Redaction
M3AAWG, the Messaging, Malware, and Mobile, Anti-Abuse Working Group and APWG, the Anti-Phishing Working Group, surveyed their members about recent WHOIS changes. With over 300 results from security researchers, it's the broadest report yet on WHOIS use. The survey results confirm our concerns that WHOIS was a vital resource for security research, and its loss is a serious and ongoing problem.
GDPR Didn't Affect Spam? Not So Fast
I have recently become aware of a blog post from Recorded Future that attempts to analyze the effects of the GDPR on online security. Unfortunately, it starts by asking an irrelevant question and then goes on to use irrelevant metrics to come to a meaningless answer. The premise of Recorded Future's article — that spammers would send more spam and register more domains because GDPR came into effect — tells us nothing useful about how GDPR affects anything.
How Big Is the Domain Business?
When you're standing close to ICANN, the domain business may seem pretty big, but when you stand farther away, not so much. Verisign's revenues are about $1 billion/year. The .COM and .NET top-level domains together have about 150M names. The next biggest gTLDS are .ORG with 25M and .INFO with 12M. The biggest new TLDs are TOP with 2.9M and .XYZ with 1.8M, with both bloated by firesale prices. The rest are smaller, mostly much smaller.
GDPR, ICANN, and Registrar WHOIS
On Friday I was on a surprisingly interesting session at Rightscon 2018 in Toronto about GDPR and WHOIS. The panel consisted of Eleeza Agoopian from ICANN staff; Avri Doria who was recently appointed to the ICANN board; Elliot Noss who runs large registrar Tucows; Stephanie Perrin who has done a lot of privacy work for the Canadian government and as an ICANN volunteer, and me; Milt Mueller, who is now at Georgia Tech, moderated. There was a lot of overlap of roles on the panel.
Schneier and Kerr on Encryption Workarounds
Bruce Schneier is a famous cryptography expert and Orin Kerr a famous cyberlaw professor. Together they've published a law journal article on Encryption Workarounds. It's intended for lawyers so it's quite accessible to non-technical readers.
Blockchain's Two-Flavored Appeal
A recent story in Medium describes yet again quite well why blockchains don't solve any real problems: Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future. So what is their irresistible appeal? Bitcoins remind me of a story from the late chair of the Princeton University astronomy department.
Choosing Internationalized Email Addresses
Recently I've been working on Email Address Internationalization (EAI), looking at what software is available (Gmail and Outlook/Hotmail both handle it now) and what work remains to be done. A surprisingly tricky part is assigning EAI addresses to users. In traditional ASCII mail, the local part of the address, what goes before the @ sign, can be any printable ASCII characters. Although an address like is valid, and mail systems will handle it, users don't want addresses like that.
Why Is It So Hard to Run a Bitcoin Exchange?
I make a point of reading CircleID. There is no getting around the utility of knowing what thoughtful people are thinking and saying about our industry. ... this is for you. More and more professionals are choosing to publish critical posts on CircleID from all corners of the Internet industry. If you find it hard to keep up daily, consider subscribing to our weekly digest. We will provide you a convenient summary report once a week sent directly to your inbox. It's a quick and easy read.
How Do You Turn a Typesetting Language Into an Identifier System? (Not Easily)
Unicode's goal, which it meets quite well, is that whatever text you want to represent in whatever language, dead or alive, Unicode can represent the characters or symbols it uses. Any computer with a set of Unicode typefaces and suitable layout software can display that text. In effect, Unicode is primarily a typesetting language. Over in the domain name system, we also use Unicode to represent non-ASCII identifiers.
Monte Carlo tree search
Using Monte Carlo simulation to find the best state inside tree of actions In other words, Monte Carlo simulation allows you to build forecasts models by randomly sampling given collection of states. Which can be very useful in building a vast range of forecasts and game ai development. At First step, we starting from State(0) we have to ask: “Is current Node is a leaf node?
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