Live data from Hacker News

The Italian Covid contact-tracing app is now developed in open source

github.com

81–90 of 156 posts

Re: The Italian Covid contact-tracing app is now developed in open source

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how is it bizarre? people naturally want to show solidarity with the cause in the US, it's a massive deal for the whole western world.

Hundreds of thousands are dead in Europe from a virus and these people are breaking the rules to stop its further spread because of one incident thousands of miles away that happened to be captured on a smartphone

>Hundreds of thousands are dead in Europe from a virus

The majority of whom where very old and/or in ill-health and had a 5-10% chance of dying in the next year anyway.

Re: The Italian Covid contact-tracing app is now developed in open source

#83
These will fail. 1) Not accurate enough; 2) Don’t account for walls/floors; 3) Will have low adoption where anything less than full adoption means fail; 4) can’t account for actually having a virus.

False positives and false negatives combined with lack of rapid result testing will also make this useless. This is why Google and Apple looked around the room and slowly tiptoed away.

Then we have the GDPR. Beat of luck making sure you’re compliant.

Just don’t. Humans do a better job with contact tracing. Not everything needs to be hit over the head with a technology cudgel.

Re: The Italian Covid contact-tracing app is now developed in open source

#84
post #73

Stop building tools to enable fascists. Has anyone not learned the lessons of history?

I would encourage you to read up on the technology behind it. It was intended to be anonymous to such an extend that some governments went out and said they wouldn't use it because of the lack of tracking. The methodology has also been laid out quite extensively, and it's an opt-in approach.

Re: The Italian Covid contact-tracing app is now developed in open source

#85
post #60
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just unrestricted usage, exclusive unrestricted usage, which is why it could be a problem (instead of just being a simple case of dual licencing) if the contract claims rights to off-hours work. German law has a clear distinction between authorship rights and usage rights. Usage rights, including reproduction, can be sold, rented, perhaps even taken illegally at gunpoint, I don't know. It's just your run off the…

What does it mean to inherit authorship? Can I be th author of something my grandmother created? Can I bequeath my athorship to some corporation?

I suppose the idea is Copyright.AuthorId is immutable but its member functions myCopyright.grantPrint() or whatnot() are callable

Re: The Italian Covid contact-tracing app is now developed in open source

#86
post #84
post #73

Stop building tools to enable fascists. Has anyone not learned the lessons of history?

I would encourage you to read up on the technology behind it. It was intended to be anonymous to such an extend that some governments went out and said they wouldn't use it because of the lack of tracking. The methodology has also been laid out quite extensively, and it's an opt-in approach.

It's not about tracking locations, it's about tracking social connections. I'm a skeptic it won't see abuses.

Re: The Italian Covid contact-tracing app is now developed in open source

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hundreds of thousands are dead in Europe from a virus and these people are breaking the rules to stop its further spread because of one incident thousands of miles away that happened to be captured on a smartphone

>Hundreds of thousands are dead in Europe from a virus The majority of whom where very old and/or in ill-health and had a 5-10% chance of dying in the next year anyway.

You don't seem to attach much value to the lives of the elderly and those who have underlying health conditions. I presume that's because no one you care about, including yourself, is in that category. That's a pretty callous attitude. At 78 you have about a 5% chance of dying in the next year but if you've lived to 78 then your life expectancy is about 10 years. 10 years thrown away so some people can go on a march because they're angry about someone dying. You couldn't make it up.

Re: The Italian Covid contact-tracing app is now developed in open source

#88
post #2

Some other countries recently took same path, relevant discussion here : 1) Singapore : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22702701 2) India : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23311298 3) Germany : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23376682 ( no discussion, link to repository ) 4) France : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23321137

Wonder if any of the official apps are using reproducible builds, that can be built from their published source?

Re: The Italian Covid contact-tracing app is now developed in open source

#89

These will fail. 1) Not accurate enough; 2) Don’t account for walls/floors; 3) Will have low adoption where anything less than full adoption means fail; 4) can’t account for actually having a virus. False positives and false negatives combined with lack of rapid result testing will also make this useless. This is why Google and Apple looked around the room and slowly tiptoed away. Then we have the GDPR. Beat of luck…

I don't think these apps will be a success either but Immuni (the Italian contact tracing app) had more than 500k downloads in a single day on iOS and it's still in testing regime, available only in 4 regions out of 20

Re: The Italian Covid contact-tracing app is now developed in open source

#90

Has anyone done an analysis of the various open source government contract tracing app? I’d love to read some tear down/code review articles on what each country has released.

Not exactly what you're asking for but a friend of mine is running a bunch of static analysis tools on these apps, looking for security/privacy warnings:

https://github.com/iivanoo/covid-apps-observer

Post reply on HN