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

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

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. My parents are in that category, but I attach a very high negative value to using violence (or threat of it) to control people's behaviour. From my perspective it's extremely immoral…

Your conclusions are highly emotional and based on speculated consequences and thus any decisions you believe should be made would be too, ie the opposite of what you think ought to be the case. It's all about how you may be affected financially and psychologically and may therefore suffer a lower quality of life and lose 2 or 3 years of life decades hence. And for you, that trumps your parents' generation's well bei…

I would be prepared to raise lockdowns and "sacrifice the elderly" (no, I don't hope they die, I would just advocate instead for better equipping care homes with PPE and sealing them off from visitors) for the sake of younger people. But it isn't really how I myself may be affected, as my existing lifestyle of remote work and reclusive living in the countryside handles the lockdown quite well. Rather, I am concerned about a generation much younger than myself which strict lockdowns prevent from engaging in the perennial rituals of youth. All the reasonable outlets for courtship have been closed in some places for months. You might laugh and say that young people can just suck it up, but lack of courtship opportunities is such a stressor and a source of social instability that large numbers of young men without such prospects are a major focus of their country’s domestic intelligence service around the world.

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

#102

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

Is available for download in the whole country, not only the 4 testing regions

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

#103
post #59

Summary of all European (EU+) apps initiatives: https://github.com/ct-report/summary

Maybe a bit of a weird question, but does anyone know why there isn't just a single EU-wide effort? Or is it just politics as usual?

Commercial interests and national ambitions mainly. Some corporations found it much easier to sell to specific EU countries than to lobby the EU, so deals were made.

Also, the EU is more keen to protect privacy whereas specific EU member states want (to sell) free reign on their citizens.

This lobbying game plays out all the time. You just cherry-pick your targets, find the weakest link so to speak. In this case, he more authoritarian and neo-liberal the parties in charge of the country/region, the easier you will net them.

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

#104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your conclusions are highly emotional and based on speculated consequences and thus any decisions you believe should be made would be too, ie the opposite of what you think ought to be the case. It's all about how you may be affected financially and psychologically and may therefore suffer a lower quality of life and lose 2 or 3 years of life decades hence. And for you, that trumps your parents' generation's well bei…

I would be prepared to raise lockdowns and "sacrifice the elderly" (no, I don't hope they die, I would just advocate instead for better equipping care homes with PPE and sealing them off from visitors) for the sake of younger people. But it isn't really how I myself may be affected, as my existing lifestyle of remote work and reclusive living in the countryside handles the lockdown quite well. Rather, I am concerned…

I agree with you but people being intimate with one or two other people from their locale is a whole different scenario to the protests I've seen where people are ignoring the most basic precautions in crowds numbering thousands.

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

#105

This shows the application and gives an overview of how the product works for the citizen: https://github.com/immuni-app/immuni-documentation/blob/mast... This the main technical documentation document: https://github.com/immuni-app/immuni-documentation/blob/mast... All the documentation is here: https://github.com/immuni-app/immuni-documentation

I have looked a bit at the documentation (not the code yet) and I have to say that I am pleasantly surprised.

They seem to be doing this right, including an attention to the reproducibility of the builds, which IMO is of utter importance in such a sensitive app:

https://github.com/immuni-app/immuni-documentation/blob/mast...

(long story short: Android builds are substantially reproducible, iOS are not because there doesn't seem to be a way to achieve that. They are doing the best they can.)

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

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. My parents are in that category, but I attach a very high negative value to using violence (or threat of it) to control people's behaviour. From my perspective it's extremely immoral…

Your conclusions are highly emotional and based on speculated consequences and thus any decisions you believe should be made would be too, ie the opposite of what you think ought to be the case. It's all about how you may be affected financially and psychologically and may therefore suffer a lower quality of life and lose 2 or 3 years of life decades hence. And for you, that trumps your parents' generation's well bei…

>It's all about how you may be affected financially and psychologically and may therefore suffer a lower quality of life and lose 2 or 3 years of life decades hence.

It's not affecting me at all; I work in finance, in a role that's fine with working from home. I actually made a bunch of money from the massive volatility that the lockdown announcements caused. If you're incapable of making decisions that aren't solely based on self-interest, that doesn't mean it's correct to project and assume everybody else thinks the same.

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

#107
post #59

Summary of all European (EU+) apps initiatives: https://github.com/ct-report/summary

Maybe a bit of a weird question, but does anyone know why there isn't just a single EU-wide effort? Or is it just politics as usual?

there was an attempt at initial coordination around the DP-3T and PEPP-PT working groups to get a single shared protocol, but that fell apart, while at the same time many countries decided to go different ways.

Timing was relevant, plus different countries also have different regulations that make specific implementations possible or not.

In the middle of this Google and Apple announced their contract tracing framework so some switched once more.

This can be seen clearly in the documents that the italian governmental task force submitted when evaluating the various apps: proponents suggested home grown protocols, reusing existing apps, or deferred to PEPP-PT or DP-3T.

Even the Immuni app which won the selection was supposed to use PEPP-PT, but then switched to the Google/Apple CTF.

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

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Is available for download in the whole country, not only the 4 testing regions

just for completeness: it's even available abroad, though that probably doesn't impact the numbers much.

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

#109
Interesting. I am curious to see how well it works. The UK (which is developing two apps in parallel, one based on the Google/Apple API and one based on a proprietary protocol similar to PEPP-PT) has found in a large scale trial that though the technology worked relatively well, people did not respond well to being told to isolate by an app.

It would be ironic if after weeks of passionate arguments on HN and other places about the technology and about finding the right balance between efficacy and privacy, the whole thing fails because people don't like the principle.

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

#110

Interesting. I am curious to see how well it works. The UK (which is developing two apps in parallel, one based on the Google/Apple API and one based on a proprietary protocol similar to PEPP-PT) has found in a large scale trial that though the technology worked relatively well, people did not respond well to being told to isolate by an app. It would be ironic if after weeks of passionate arguments on HN and other pl…

Where are you getting information about the UK trial? I don't think I've heard the finding you said from ministers, they just seem to say it's all great and refuse to engage on it. I don't think they've even admitted developing the second app actually.
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