DEFCON 201 Hacker Resource Guide To Combat The Coronavirus Epidemic
We interupt your normal copying and pasting command lines from Stack Overflow to bring you this important update!
Coronavirus AKA COVID-19. We know you are sick of hearing it because like the virus itself it is EVERYWHERE! This plague is creating massive repercussions to our fellow humans from social distancing lockdowns, deaths, privacy invasions and massive buying of toilet paper.
It can be very easy alone at home in your pajamas eating M&M’s in the shower for dinner to feel that since you are not a doctor there is nothing you can do to help.
But this is a lie.
Even sitting on your ass doing nothing, with the right resources and set up, there is plenty you can be doing that can make a HUGE impact on flatting the curve, treating sick people and saving lives.
We at DEFCON 201, have reached out to various open source communities, biohackers, STEM enthusiasts and others and have complied a list of various activities YOU can do at home to help yourself and others during these trying times while under house lockdown:
JOIN THE FOLDING@HOME DEFCON 201 TEAM
Folding@home (FAH or F@h) is a distributed computing project for simulating protein dynamics, including the process of protein folding and the movements of proteins implicated in a variety of diseases. Currently F@h is simulating the dynamics of COVID-19 proteins to hunt for new therapeutic opportunities.
We want to contribute and you can help!
Join the DEFCON 201 Folding@Home Team: 241960
All you need to do is Download and run Folding@home for Windows/Mac/Linux: https://foldingathome.org/start-folding/
FreeBSD Version: https://www.freshports.org/biology/linux-foldingathome/
While you should target the machine that has the highest CPU and GPU specs, any computer that can run it will help. You can also configure the computer how much resources it will use for the project and when it will cycle those resources from your machine(s).
MINE CRYPTOCURRENCY TO COMBAT COVID-19
Gridcoin implements the novel Proof-of-Research (POR) scheme, which rewards users with Gridcoin for performing useful scientific computations on BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing), a well-known distributed computing platform. Computing on these scientific projects supplants the cryptographic calculations involved in Bitcoin mining.
This protocol rewards users of the network once they have completed the computational work unit (WU) in BOINC by linking their Cross-Project ID (CPID) to their Gridcoin cryptocurrency wallet. The reward for computation is a proportional payment of Gridcoin (GRC) based on calculations involving the user’s recent average credit (RAC).
Currently, the Rosetta@Home research project is using a list of proteins provided by the Seattle Structural Genomics Center for Infectious Disease (SSGCID) are being processed by the platform to reverse-engineer the SARS-CoV-2 genome sequences to find a cure for Coronavirus.
If you are a Cryptocurrency bro, just sign up to BOINC, install the Gridcoin Wallet on Windows/Mac/Linux and start mining Gridcoin to contribute to combating COVID-19!
In addition Join our Rosetta@Home Team 19808!
In addition to the one above here is another guide to Gridcoin:
STAKE & MINE PINKCOIN TO DONATE FUNDS
PinkCoin is a cryptocurrency designed as a charitable platform from a company of the same name in Vancouver. Based on the blockchain, it is a PoW/PoS coin that uses the X11 hashtag algorithm. It was developed to support their #Donate4life campaign; having received around 3,000,000 donations till date. The campaign turns a one-time donation into a permanent investment, with the profit being transferred directly to a supported charity for lifetime.
DEFCON 201 will create a #Donate4Life Campaign for PinkCoin (and other cryptocurrencies) to stake in, with 100% of all earnings donated to the COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund for the World Health Organzation (who, no pun intended, you can also donate directly for you sh!tcoin phobes).
Donations support WHO’s work to track and understand the spread of the virus; to ensure patients get the care they need and frontline workers get essential supplies and information; and to accelerate efforts to develop vaccines, tests, and treatments.
Stake and Boost PinkCoin to raise funds for WHO at this link:
PLAY BIOHACKING GAMES TO DEFEAT THE VIRUS
Foldit is a game designed to tackle the problem of protein folding. Proteins are small “machines” within our bodies that handle practically all functions of living organisms. By knowing more about the 3D structure of proteins (or how they “fold”), we can better understand their function, and we can also get a better idea of how to combat diseases, create vaccines, and even find novel biofuels.
Foldit is run by academic research scientists. It is free to play and not-for-profit. The puzzles are designed for people who have zero medical or biochemistry background and will educate you while you fight the diesese!
To get started, download Foldit and create a username.
After you practice with the Foldit Intro Puzzles, move on to the Science Puzzles and try out the Beginner: Coronavirus puzzle. There are also advanced puzzle NEW advanced puzzle where you can try to design an antiviral protein from scratch!
JOIN BIOHACKERS ON SOLVING THE PANEDMIC
Despite all measures governments have been taking around the world, the Health care system might not be able to treat all infected patients. And, even if it could, the absence of efficient treatments will lead to millions of deaths.
The goal of the OpenCovid19 initiative as a program is to collectively develop open-source and low-cost tools and methodologies that are safe and easy to use to fight the Covid19 Pandemic.
Join these brave biohackers here:
In addition, there is also a COVID-19 Crowdsourcing Campaign for Researchers and Medical Voulenteers that you can contribute to online:
3D PRINT & BUILD MEDICAL DEVICES TO DONATE
As you may have heard on the news, the United States and everywhere else is running low on many basic medical supplies and tools thanks to mass buying hysteria, lack of funds and horrid infrastructure.
If you have sealed dispoable N95 — N99 masks, face sheilds, safety goggles, non-latex gloves PLEASE REACH OUT TO YOUR NEAREST MEDICAL CENTER OR EMERGENCY SERVICES AND DONATE!
For those who have 3D Printers, here is a list of open sourced, medically approved face shields you can print out and donate to your nearest medical center or emergency services:
Here is a newer model that has been NIH approved:
For a more complicated robust build, you can print the Maker Mask; a fully 3D Printable respirator style mask created by Rory Larson at the request of Several local hospitals in Seattle. All the materials used in making this mask are readily available in hardware stores and can be made from bulk products. The mask also features a HEPA Filters system that can be easily replaced.
And if you are more of a sewing and crochet type, here is Operation #SewTogether who are giving away $50 Tieks Gift Card to anyone who stitches and donates 25 masks, or a $100 Tieks Gift Card for 50 or more masks:
In addition for you hardware hackers, here are a list of low-cost open source Ventalator projects you can git pull, edit, upgrade and create that have extensive instructions on how to build a low-cost respirator, which may save lives if hospitals’ supplies of standard respirators become exhausted:
Finally, the Raspberry Pi3 GNU Health is an OpenSUSE Linux Desktop that is a full, independent server. It includes postgreSQL, Thalamus, GNU Health, E20 desktop environment and SSH for remote access. Once flashed to a Raspberry Pi3 they provide real-time monitoring of vital signs in hospital settings and retrieve information from laboratory instruments:
For more COVID-19 Open Source Hardware Medical Projects please refer to:
Please reach out to medical and emergency services before manufacturing to deterimine if there are accepting donations and the proceedures you must follow for the donation proccess.
RUN LINUX TO KICK COVID-19’S ASS
The LinuxServer team recently published two docker images to help scientists with COVID-19 research.
The images are for Folding@home and BOINC, both of which distribute compute jobs to the machines of users from all over the world in order to crowd-source scientific research related computations (as seen in the first two options in this blog post). They are both currently prioritizing COVID-19 related research such as “predicting the atomic-scale structure of an important coronavirus protein (spike)” and “understanding how it binds to the ACE2 receptor required for viral entry into cells”.
They also just published docker addons so you can easily install them on your LibreELEC devices to help out. You can also install them on a Rasberry-Pi.
Here’s some LibreELEC specific info on the images:
Both addons are avaliable through the Linuxserver.io repo. Go to addons, install from repository, Libreelec addons, Addon repository and install the Linuxserver.io repo.
Then go to addons, install from repository, Linuxserver.io addons, services and you can find Boinc and Folding@home.
When you install either addon, it will first download and unpack the docker images, which can take some time. Be patient. You can watch the logs via the following commands:
journalctl -u docker.linuxserver.boinc -f
journalctl -u docker.linuxserver.foldingathome -f
You can find more information as well as the Docker image at this link:
In addition, GNU Health HMIS patchset 3.6.3 has been released with Coronavirus COVID-19 coding information.
GNU Health is a free / libre health and hospital information system whose functionality includes management of electronic health records and laboratory information management system and has been adopted by the United Nations University. It is designed to be multi-platform, supporting GNU/Linux distributions and FreeBSD on the server side. It uses PostgreSQL as its database engine. It is written in Python and uses the Tryton framework as one of its components.
Starting GNU Health 3.x series, you can do automatic updates on the GNU Health HMIS kernel and modules using the GNU Health control center program.
You must apply previous patchsets before installing this patchset. If your patchset level is 3.6.2, then just follow the general instructions.
You can find the patchsets at GNU Health main download site at GNU.org (https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/health/)
In most cases, GNU Health Control center (gnuhealth-control) takes care of applying the patches for you.
Follow the general instructions at
After applying the patches, make a full update of your GNU Health database as explained in the documentation:
ENTER A CORONAVIRUS BUSTING HACKATHON
This is NOT an April Fools Joke!
Launching April 1st 2020, The Decentralized AI Alliance (DAIA) and lead organizers SingularityNET, NEM Foundation and Ocean Protocol are hosting an online hackathon to bring together the decentralized AI community to find solutions to combat COVID-19 and its various consequences.
COVIDathon is the world’s first decentralized AI hackathon with a mission to develop and launch open-source code and tools, by experts in the medical, AI, and blockchain sectors. By working together to develop such tools, we hope to reduce the risk of current and future infectious outbreaks, and cope with the COVID-19 pandemic. The hackathon will bring together developers, doctors and engineers to work together on four different tracks: Data Privacy, Epidemiology & Medicine, Informational & Coping Tools, and Open Innovation; developing solutions to leverage AI and blockchain technology to maximise social impact.
COVIDathon is open to all participants and projects who wish to contribute to such a worthy initiative. The hackathon kicks off on April 1st, running for eight weeks across its four distinct tracks. The founding members of the initiative, SingularityNET and Ocean Protocol, will provide tech assistance, technology and 1-on-1 mentorship to participants over the course of the hackathon.
An expert panel of judges will be assembled, including AI, blockchain and medical experts, to assess the contributions for each track.
Join this event with the link below, look out for our DEFCON 201 Team when you join!
PRINT AND POST COVID-19 SURIVAL GUIDES
While there is much social distancing and people under quarentine, there are people walking around your local neighborhood and picking up food.
Thankfully, the World Health Organization (WHO) has created a great online guides and videos to share on social media. Included in these guides are PNG images of posters that teach guidlines from washing your hands, social distancing and contacts for mental health support during these trying times. Print them out and post them at common public places (with permission) so that people can see them, including talking to and distributing them to any central businesses that are allowed to remain legally open.
Share this link and print them out here:
Here are also two links to keep updated on this pandemic worldwide as well as locally here in New Jersey:
TEACH KIDS STEM EDUCATION AT HOME
#StayInPlayIn is a community wide effort to publish short clips from the homes of, young scientists, makers, STEM advocates and world changers, to help kids do/play/stay during the pandemic.
One is posted each day until this is over and is a great tool to keep young hacker mentally engauged and to have something educational to do during these trying times.
For example, here is DEFCON 201 & DC215 Alumni BiaSciLab from Girls Who Hack talking about various Cryptography Ciphers:
Link: https://www.instagram.com/p/B94bwtcAah2/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
Our friends at Hackaday have partnered with Digi-Key for the #TechAtHome challenge during COVID-19. The goal is to come up with any project from parts that you have lying around the house. Digi-Key will be providing a grab bag of parts to replace what you use to 30 very lucky winners. Contest runs from 9AM April 30th to noon July 30th. All times are in Pacific Standard Time.
EDIT WIKIPEDIA TO DOCUMENT THE PANDEMIC
WikiProject COVID-19 is a WikiProject dedicated to Wikipedia’s coverage of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the COVID-19 disease, and the 2019–20 COVID-19 pandemic. The project is an offshoot of WikiProject Disaster management, WikiProject Medicine (including the Pulmonology and Society and medicine task forces), and WikiProject Viruses.
For those who are academically minded, this is a great an important project to work on to document and archive with accurate information the ongoing COVID-19 Pandemic. For those who have never edited Wikipedia, it’s design is insanely easy to learn and after abiding by the posting guidelines you will be on your way to archiving history and combating falese information (as seen below.)
As of May 26 2020, there are 1,082 articles within the scope of WikiProject COVID-19. Including non-article pages, such as talk pages, redirects, categories, project pages, etcetera, there are 4,792 pages in the project.
FIGHT FAKE NEWS AND PHISHING SCAMS
It was idealized during the early internet that with so much data out there easily accessible via the web that we would enter a new enlightenment age where pranks and false data would be a thing of the past.
As we know now in this nightmare hell, the reverse is the case.
During this epidemic, tons of fake news and false information is spreading like wildfire on social media. This information has been manipulated by malicious ass-hats to scam people and put their lives in danger.
You are on the front lines in combating that.
Here are a few resources that you can research and send to others to help sort the Coronavirus facts from fiction:
TOR Onion COVID-19 News: http://darknetd7j7nekh7.onion/corona
LIVE STREAM ON TWICH AND WATCH DEFCON 201
With the COVID-19 pandemic creating hardship and uncertainty, Twitch streamers and community members have reached out looking for ways to use Twitch to help support those affected.
DEFCON 201 will be using Tiltify to raise funds for Fred Hutch, one of the top ten biomedical research institutions that has reacted with unprecedented speed and cooperation to curb the threat of the novel coronavirus and the disease it causes, COVID-19. They are using the coronavirus DNA crowd-sourced from scientists around the world, experts at Fred Hutch and the University of Basel in Switzerland are tracking how the virus is changing as it moves through people and countries. They’re sharing their data on their open source platform, Nextstrain.org and scientists and public health officials around the world are using it to monitor the pandemic and slow the spread of infection. They are hoping to raise $250,000 to help additional labs sequence the virus and share the information — not just for Nextstrain.org, but for all scientists working to address this health crisis.
Make sure to follow the DEFCON 201 Twitch Channel here for future meet ups and live streams so you can donate to charity!
CODE AND DEBUG CRITICAL MEDICAL APPS
Finally if coding, git commands, debugging and app are your thing; here are free software, open source projects you can help code and debug that will contribute to fighting COVID-19:
One of the most cited open COVID-19 datasets is provided by Johns Hopkins University (JHU). Epidemiologists, journalists, and statisticians from around the world are treating this as one of the canonical sources of data on the outbreak. The data is also used to power this interactive dashboard, which tracks reported cases of COVID-19 in real time. As they explain in their article in The Lancet, the Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering developed the dashboard “to provide researchers, public health authorities, and the general public with a user-friendly tool to track the outbreak as it unfolds.”
Another high-quality dataset made available to the public is the nCoV2019 dataset by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. The data is presented in this dashboard. The dataset contains highly individual data for each patient such as date of symptom onset, date of laboratory confirmation, and more. It’s intended to aid in calculating key statistics of COVID-19 such as reproduction number, incubation period, and other important factors.
The most comprehensive data source on US testing and infection rates is the COVID-19 Tracker project. The project’s numbers are available on a web page and Google sheet, and via a public API. This project was started in early March, led by a partnership of The Atlantic and the founder of Related Sciences out of concern about the lack of testing information being provided by the CDC. The partners put out a call for volunteers, who quickly developed a collection of software packages to crawl state websites, aggregate the data, and make the dataset available to the public via APIs. The project was developed quickly, and the team shared its source code and datasets. Our World in Data’s page on COVID-19 testing used to list COVID19 Tracker numbers alongside CDC numbers, but now only reports the COVID19 Tracker numbers.
Folding@home is a distributed-computing project that uses the personal computers of volunteers to model molecular dynamics for, among other things, computational drug design. They have started an effort focused on COVID-19 to find potentially druggable protein targets. Data for this effort is stored in this repository. Folding@home is an open-source project, and all of its datasets and software are available.
The World Healthcare Organization app collective is rapidly putting together a mobile application to help people around the world cope with COVID-19. The team, led by Dr. Daniel Kraft, is rapidly putting together a first version of the app. Their goal is to have the app provide local information for people and have their data feedback to public health officials to improve accuracy for other users.
Nextstrain is an open-source project for tracking and analyzing pathogen genomes. They run a dashboard of the genomic epidemiology of COVID-19. The dashboard shows the evolutionary relationships of the mutations of the HCoV-19 viruses, which can help to trace the origins of the virus. Nextstrain’s goal is to aid epidemiological understanding of viruses to improve outbreak response. They state explicitly on their website that “current scientific publishing practices hinder the rapid dissemination of epidemiologically relevant results,” and they are dedicated to providing high-quality data quickly to minimize the damage done by pandemic outbreaks. Nextstrain’s COVID-19 dashboard sources its data from GISAID, which has strict sharing guidelines, but its software is all open source.
Safe Paths is a ‘privacy-first’ app that allows you to log your GPS trails on your own phone. The information is stored locally and never shared with anyone (not even with us or MIT) until you explicitly decide to manually export the data. The location log generated by Safe Paths cannot be accessed from outside the user’s device. Location information can be imported and exported by the user and used in other projects and applications. Safe Paths logs your device’s location once every five minutes and stores 28 days of data in under 100KB of space — less space than a single picture. But what is truly exciting about Safe Paths is its privacy protection.
Smaller scientific datasets abound, such as this repository of chest X-ray images, aimed at developing AI to improve diagnostic accuracy and predict the infection.
There are numerous smaller-scale scientific visualization projects on COVID-19. The Novel Coronavirus Infection Map provides visualizations of infection histories globally or broken down by country. It’s the work of the Humanistic GIS Lab at the University of Washington and pulls in data from numerous government and public health organizations.
COVID-19 Scenarios is a COVID-19 outbreak simulator designed to determine strain on the health care systems in various regions as the outbreak unfolds.
COVID-19 Dashboards is a set of interactive visualizations of the Johns Hopkins COVID-19 data built in Jupyter Notebooks and converted to blog posts with fastpages. GitHub Actions are used to keep the COVID-19 Dashboards dataset up to date, so the visualizations are always current. This entire site is open source and has been built by a group of volunteer programmers and data scientists. The site includes predictions as well as visualizations, and so is well suited to an open source approach where the source code of the predictive model can be directly examined (fastpages presents the source code directly embedded in the generated web page).
In a similar vein, Predict COVID-19 (repository) allows users to compare the number of COVID-19 cases between different countries, which gives an idea of how the epidemic might progress in the coming days.
A number of projects like this one have been developed to simplify programmatic access to COVID-19 data. This API, serving out the Johns Hopkins data, drives numerous COVID-19 visualization sites, including almost 20 responsive live visualizations.
The country of Italy is sharing all its latest COVID-19 data. This data is used to power a dashboard, which tracks infections throughout the country in real time. In this same vein, various metropolitan areas like Tokyo and Zurich are storing and sharing real-time infection information via GitHub repositories.
The Wuhan2020 community project is a self-organized, open source community project aimed at “establishing a data service for real-time synchronization of hospitals, factories, procurement and other information, and convening all those who want to contribute to this fight against viruses”.
If you know of any open source medical project fighting COVID-19 that is not listed here, please comment below or email us at INFO <AT> DEFCON201 {DOT} ORG with a link to the project.
