https://www.keionline.org/36698

Investigational COVID-19 Drug Molnupiravir Redacts IP Terms, Contains Donation Clause and Very Limited Technology Transfer License

Knowledge Ecology International (KEI) has obtained a copy of the $1.2 billion contract between the U.S. government and Merck to advance purchase 1,696,629 treatment courses of molnupiravir, an investigational COVID-19 drug that is taken in pill form. (PDF Link)

According to the contract, the price per treatment course is $712.

KEI obtained the contract as part of its Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Department of Health and Human Services and the Army related to COVID-19 contracts executed by the U.S. government.

The contract, No. W911QY21C0031, was awarded by the Army on June 7, 2021. It has an upper limit of $3.7 billion. The agreement includes options to purchase additional courses of the drug, but quantities for those possible future purchases are redacted.

https://www.keionline.org/misc-docs/FOIA/DOD-Merck-Contract-W911QY21C0031-7June2021.pdf

https://www.rt.com/usa/536576-facebook-offices-chaos-dns-outage/

Facebook plunged into chaos as employees ‘CAN’T ACCESS’ servers – or even their workspaces

Facebook’s offices are as much of a mess for employees as its social media platforms are for users, according to anonymous workers who’ve spoken to reporters in the midst of the apparent companywide breakdown.

As the major Facebook outage dragged into hours, a Reddit poster claiming to be a member of the “recovery/investigation team” wrote the companywide snafu was indeed a “global outage for all FB-related services/infra[structure]” and explained that while repairs were underway, “the people with physical access is [sic] separate from the people with knowledge of how to actually authenticate to the systems and people who know what to actually do, so there is now a logistical challenge with getting all that knowledge unified.”

Facebook’s DNS [Domain Name Servers] were down due to what several commenters suggested was a configuration change that took effect right before the mega-crash.

“Something BIG seems to have died inside Facebook’s network,” Jim Salter, a reporter at ArsTechnica tracking the crashing-and-burning at Facebook HQ, observed, while DDoS protection provider Cloudflare’s senior vice president reported the entire Facebook network was unreachable.

A New York Times tech reporter had earlier confirmed that internal tools and communications platforms were down, including employee email and Workplace, which employees from different divisions use to communicate. “No one can do any work,” employees told him, likening the chaos to a “snow day” at the trillion-dollar company.

Reportedly, employees can’t even get into some of the buildings they need to access to evaluate the extent of the outage, as worker badges aren’t opening doors like they are supposed to.

Rumors and theories about what happened at Facebook have proliferated, including a report that the personal data of some 1.5 billion users is being sold on a dark-web hacker forum, coinciding with the outage. However, the alleged dump is said to have initially been posted two weeks ago, and may not be related to the Monday events.

https://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press-releases/press-releases-2021/item/2246-iarpa-announces-launch-of-the-resilience-program

WASHINGTON, D.C. - The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, the research and development arm of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, announced today a multi-year research effort called the Robust Energy Sources for Intelligence Logistics In Extreme, Novel and Challenging Environments (RESILIENCE) program.

RESILIENCE will develop portable power solutions for electronics that can operate under the demanding operational conditions experienced by Intelligence Community (IC) officers. If successful, it will provide power sources to extend the function of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with vertical take-off and landing capability and unattended electronic devices, which must operate in extreme environmental conditions for years.

“Most people assume that they can recharge the batteries in their electronics wherever they go,” said RESILIENCE program manager, Dr. Dawson Cagle. “The goal of the RESILIENCE program is to assure maximum power source reliability in extreme conditions where recharging is not possible. We also plan to provide UAVs with an all-important burst of power for vertical landing at the end of a long flight.”