111–120 of 140 posts
Singapore is anyway a totalitarian state, Lee Kuan Yew was basically a "benevolent" dictator, if there is such a thing.
I always recall William Gibson's description of the city-state as 'Disneyland with the Death Penalty'. The accompanying 1993 article for those who haven't seen it previously: https://www.wired.com/1993/04/gibson-2/
One thing that drives me crazy about this is that Apple and Google partnered to come up with a brilliant Bluetooth solution to contact tracing right at the beginning of the pandemic. It was privacy first, well designed, and it works. It was hamstrung by being opt-in instead of opt-out, relying on state level cooperation and misunderstood by people who didn’t even attempt to try to understand it (including here on HN)…
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You keep using this word "fallacy". I don't think it means what you think it means [1] (a) a deceptive, misleading, or false notion, belief, etc.: That the world is flat was at one time a popular fallacy. (b) a misleading or unsound argument. (c) deceptive, misleading, or false nature; erroneousness. (d) Logic. any of various types of erroneous reasoning that render arguments logically unsound. [1] to paraphrase "The…
This usage fits definitions a, b, and c. This very definition draws a distinction between a 'fallacy' and a 'logical fallacy'
No, it doesn't.
Government: - "We will use data just for medical purposes"
Government (later): - "Guess what, we lied/we recant: we will use them for other state purposes too".
There's nothing fallacious in (a), (b) or (c) way about either statement or the whole situation.
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The API/protocol is a good way of implementing the idea in a privacy-friendly way although I think everyone should have been clear that it is not as private as simply disabling Bluetooth or not carrying a phone. It is pretty benign. But being honest about that is important if for no other reason than to build trust. However, the apps built on top of the API have (at least in some instances) clearly fallen victim of s…
I agree with you that relying on state/country cooperation to build the apps was part of the problem. I don’t agree that it’s useless, 15min of close proximity to a confirmed positive COVID patient within the timeframe is the best possible determination of exposure and people should quarantine if they get it. I could be persuaded that too many are notified if there’s decent evidence of it, but with the massive case l…
The issue in particular is that Bluetooth proximity isn't reliably able to distinguish between "next to but with a meaningful barrier in between" and "actually next to".
In my office, for example, we have areas adjacent to one another separated by floor to ceiling glass walls. People working on one side of the wall don't work with people on the other side and are not allowed to access the other area. There are quite a few scenarios like this (apartment blocks with thin partition walls between apartments, sat in a traffic jam next to another car, etc.
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It's really optimistic to think mass rollout of Apple/Google protocol wouldn't be abused. Once government makes it compulsory to use such app in some scenarios (and society actually agrees to do that instead of protesting it en masse) it's over. There's nothing fundamentally stopping government from later changing the technical mechanism ("Please install our national app; it's more trustworthy than foreign megacorps"…
Apple/Google pushing their specific privacy preserving implementation of exposure notifications out via an OS update is not the same as a government mandating surveillance app installs. The existence of the first does not lead to the second.
It's another example of the persistent, naive belief amongst technologists that clever implementation can trump legislation.
Singapore is anyway a totalitarian state, Lee Kuan Yew was basically a "benevolent" dictator, if there is such a thing.
Singapore has democratic pressure points than it looks, and that's largely the reason why LKY acted "benevolently" where he did. He was essentially forced to. He was still a thug. Firstly the fact that the leaders and all the population are squashed up against one another exerts a massive influence on the government. They're much more vulnerable to protest than other governments because they can't hide as easily. Thi…
Singaporean here. They've done well in the 55 years we've been around to make sure that people don't protest — people here value wealth and personal comfort over the thought of going to jail for their freedoms.
Even a solo person holding up a smiley face might get charged and indicted for an "assembly" in Singapore: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-55068007
According to this article ( https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53146360 ) the Singapore contact tracing app works the same way the iOS and Android do, so no location tracking. From my read of the situation, there is some worry that activists might be cracked down upon.
The difference is that Apple/Google contact tracing gives the user control over their data. Singapore's app works differently. Once someone's app picks up your signal, it's logged on their device and there's no way to delete it. The data is handed over to the authorities who have a list of everyone that they interacted with. Source: https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/apple-google-contact-...
Unless they've changed the schema, it should be just a SQLite database [1].
Most people with some competence at app development should be able to access the data file on their (Android) phones, and delete any rows which might prove troublesome.
They could also just uninstall the app and wipe all data if they want.
[1] https://medium.com/@frankvolkel/tracetogether-under-the-hood...
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Singapore also has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, at only 1.16 children per woman. Living in a controlled and apartment-dominated country seems to crush the desire and ability to have many children.
I suspect the fact that it's very densely populated and extremely expensive to live in has more to do with it. Couples can generally only afford to move out into their own apartments in their thirties, and the ancillary costs of schooling (tuition etc) if you want your kids to succeed rack up so fast that few can afford more than 1 or 2.
It's also a cultural thing. Most people can afford to rent in their twenties, but plenty of families discourage it.
Subsidised public housing is available to married couples, and to singles 35 and above — but the wait time for new public housing with a 99-year lease is 3-4 years [1], which probably also affects the birth rate.
[1] https://www.hdb.gov.sg/cs/infoweb/about-us/news-and-publicat...
Singapore is a surveillance state. Don't be fooled by its corporate friendliness and general societal progress. The government is every bit authoritarian which at this point increasingly looks like a euphemism for totalitarian. https://www.aristeon.net/2019/04/singapore-as-pioneer-of-cap...
> Singapore is a surveillance state. And the Australian Covid tracing app is a copy/paste from the public open sourced github repo the Singapore government shared. I guess being part of FiveEyes makes any fantasy of me _not_ living in a surveillance state pretty lame...
The GitHub repo has a "reference" implementation of the published BlueTrace protocol [1].
Encryption keys aside, it's not possible to reproduce the Singapore TraceTogether builds currently released on both the iOS and Google App stores.
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Having an app per country was unnecessary to begin with. All that Google and Apple had to do is supply the UI and accept government requests to enable the system in their country.
Apple and Google’s “exposure notification” is less useful in some important ways - it isn’t capable of backtracking to find associated contacts of infections further back in the chain. Bunnie has a good blog post about that here: https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?cat=69 Apple and Google’s thing was late to the party too, both Singapore and Australia had published their apps before the in built OS exposure notificat…
The article seems to blame the lack of uptake.
Singapore doesn't have this problem, having dangled further relaxation of lockdown restrictions if more of its residents downloaded the app: https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/phase-3-unlikely-by-e...