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Singapore to Open Source Bluetooth Contact Tracing

bluetrace.io

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Re: Singapore to Open Source Bluetooth Contact Tracing

#101

Post by TeMPOraL »

GordonS wrote: post #97
TeMPOraL wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you propose a XXI-century technologically advanced society can do to ensure its biosafety? The current pandemic is force majeure, the next one might be accidental, the one after that purposeful. Advancement of science and technology in large parts means making more and more potentially destructive power available to individuals and small groups. Society needs a defense to compensate. Biology is particularly na…

> The current pandemic is force majeure, the next one might be accidental, the one after that purposeful Being honest, I don't think there is any need for such alarmism. If anything, this pandemic has demonstrated that a viral bioweapen could ensure MAD just as well as the nuclear variety. > Advancement of science and technology in large parts means making more and more potentially destructive power available to indi…

> Being honest, I don't think there is any need for such alarmism.

Looks at JHU map... I think there is.

> If anything, this pandemic has demonstrated that a viral bioweapen could ensure MAD just as well as the nuclear variety.

A viral bioweapon is like trying to enact MAD by being the only ones with nukes and threatening to nuke everyone including yourself unless others do as you wish. It's a domain of mad men.

> You are implying that individuals could release a bioweapon upon the world - sorry, but again I think this is pure alarmism, and absolutely not what we need right now.

I'm implying that small groups could do it now, and individuals perhaps a decade for now. Biohacking has been a thing for a while now, and the main limiting factor is still that a) most people are sane, b) this is still difficult and you're more likely to give yourself diarrhea than weaponize a pathogen.

> I don't doubt that the WHO and experts from across the globe will be making plans to more rapidly contain future outbreaks. I'm certainly interested to learn more about such plans when they exist though.

Contact tracing seems like a no-brainer here. Great payoff for relatively little effort.

Re: Singapore to Open Source Bluetooth Contact Tracing

#102

Post by bosie »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #84
bosie wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We (the US) are currently in a state were suppression is the only prudent tool How do you know that this is the current state? > As SK has shown, contact tracing & testing help a lot once you're not completely inundated by cases (and actually have a meaningful supply of equipment) "meaningful supply of equipment" means this option is not possible in the US?

> How do you know that this is the current state? Look at the number of cases and their regional distribution, realize that those are tested cases and thus, with a) asymptomatic carriers and b) really bad testing in the US, the number of active cases is at least 10x that. Then realize you're dealing with an exponential process. United States are thoroughly infected already. > "meaningful supply of equipment" means th…

I guess i misunderstood surpression. Thought surpression is the early stages and not when you have been thouroughly infected already.

"meaningful supply" was in the context of avoiding a lockdown and hence i don't undrestand your answer. if you don't have the equipment now, how do you avoid the lockdown and make the levels go down without large quantities of dead people?

Re: Singapore to Open Source Bluetooth Contact Tracing

#103

Post by SahAssar »

shadowgovt wrote: post #66
mardifoufs wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't the same said after 9/11 and the patriot act? I'd guess it was just a tin foil hat conspiracy to think several three letter agencies would use the provisions from the patriot act to track pretty much all communications? You can't just accuse people of being conspiracy theorists over and over again and tell them that this time would be different because... Reasons? Also, who needs martial law when you can just…

"Every time you give up a right, it's taken away forever" is still hyperbole. People gave up the right to fly at all after 9/11. That was re-instituted for almost everyone in short order.

There is no right to fly. There was a right to privacy (at least as argued before the supreme court) and I think it could be said that is revoked because of the three-letter-agencies data collection that was justified by 9/11.

Re: Singapore to Open Source Bluetooth Contact Tracing

#104

Post by Proziam »

throwanem wrote: post #94
seph-reed wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm curious how many people who now say "give me privacy or give me death!" will change their tune in a hurry once they are themselves, perhaps for the first time in their lives, in real danger of dying. The weak ones we shouldn't be prioritizing over the strong. Harboring weakness is just asking to be taken advantage of. It may seem empathetic at first, but all you end up doing is undermining the individuals growt…

It's a mercy you won't be held to this when you get sick, and find it's somewhat easier to talk in the abstract about coming to terms with death than to face the imminent possibility. edit: Well, you won't be held to it assuming we haven't reached a need for sufficiently severe triage, I suppose. Otherwise, you might get a chance to quite literally put your life on the line for the principle you've just espoused! I w…

All the soldiers, firefighters, and doctors/nurses/EMTs (and many more) are putting their lives on the line for what they believe in. Some of them believe in the constitution and some of them simply desire to help their fellow man. Not everyone is so weak that they sell out others for their own benefit, and assuming the worst of others only serves to expose your values, or lack thereof.

> I wish you joy of it.

That was straight-up evil. Whatever empathy and respect you may have had just went out the window. I'm almost in disbelief that you would edit your post just to literally wish someone the "joy" of having a chance to die.

Re: Singapore to Open Source Bluetooth Contact Tracing

#105

Post by Reelin »

Barrin92 wrote: post #50
mellow2020 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The point of contact tracing is to find out who to quarantine, so you don’t have to lock down the entire population. But "stay at home" has been a mantra for weeks anyway, with everybody acting as if they and everyone else is infected. > It’s why most of them don’t get to this point. But we are at this point already.

>But "stay at home" has been a mantra for weeks anyway, with everybody acting as if they and everyone else is infected.[..] But we are at this point already. Singapore isn't. (the government that is building this app). Neither is Taiwan. Through a combination of contact tracing, surveillance, national health databases and enforcing compliance of quarantined individuals by for example regularly checking in on them the…

> I will continue to be mystified ... people in Singapore give some data to authorities and they can still go out and live their lives. I want material freedom ... not some sort of religious dogmatic privacy ...

For what it's worth, I think open source, opt-in, decentralized, user controlled contact tracing such as that being discussed above is about as good a solution as we can hope for in such a situation.

That being said, I think you've completely failed to understand why some people respond the way they do. Their concerns aren't about freedom in the short term, but rather civil liberties in the long term. Quarantines will necessarily be lifted, but government surveillance has a nasty tendency not to go away. More generally, civil liberties are permanently lost with a disturbing consistency no matter how temporary the original intent.

Nobody out there is either fully informed or perfectly rational, so it's important to understand the underlying motivations behind other's viewpoints if you want to get anywhere. I'm certainly dissatisfied by the incredible ineptitude the US has displayed, but I also value my civil liberties highly and wouldn't want to live in Taiwan. Make of that what you will.

Re: Singapore to Open Source Bluetooth Contact Tracing

#106

Post by Proziam »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #90
Proziam wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Put another way, would you want your children to live in a world where their government abused and spied on them? Borrowing from the future seems free at the time, but the true cost can be enormous. Everyone has to make their own value judgment, but I fall on the side of protecting the freedoms of people now and in the future. If people in the future choose differently for themselves, that will be their choice when t…

Cancer isn't like a pandemic. Cancer multiply within a body; pathogens multiply within societies. I disagree with "you can only surrender your rights once"; unlike life, rights can be won back. There's plenty of places on the planet in which you couldn't freely speak or assemble just a couple decades ago, but now you can. Things aren't going monotonically from bad to worse (though I admit, there's a strong directiona…

I want both freedom and a competent government. However, there's no need to spy on people to properly prepare for a pandemic. That said, given that governments have proven to be both incompetent and evil, why should I want to give them more power?

My comment regarding illness is only to reinforce the point that everyone is mortal, and the vast majority of us have empathy for others and value the lives of at least one other person.

> unlike life, rights can be won back

This costs lives. How many wars have been fought to overthrow evil regimes? How many journalists or 'other' people are killed or enslaved in the world today by evil regimes?

Re: Singapore to Open Source Bluetooth Contact Tracing

#107

Post by golemiprague »

tomcooks wrote: post #27
mshroyer wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is needlessly cynical. TraceTogether uses client-side logging so as to leave data in the hands of the users up until it's actually needed for contact tracing. Would you suggest that we not have public health departments engage in contact tracing at all to combat the pandemic? If so, I'm not sure what to tell you. Otherwise, apps may go a long way to improve the speed and accuracy of contact tracing. Here in the…

Cynical for sure, don't know about that "needlessly" given it's an endless fight where everytime you give up a right it's taken away forever. This time they give you the opensource bit, next time it's "a matter of emergency", then they stop asking and just punish you if you don't comply. >Would you suggest that we not have public health departments engage in contact tracing at all to combat the pandemic? If so, I'm n…

Israel already moved from a central system to a different one called Hamagen which is not centralised and keeps the privacy of the people. This is the one they recommend for Italy. It is open source so you can verify it yourself. https://github.com/MohGovIL/hamagen-react-native

Re: Singapore to Open Source Bluetooth Contact Tracing

#108

Post by Reelin »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #87
alkonaut wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Moreover, what I am addressing is how the tracking is NEVER going to go away even after the emergency is gone. Wouldn’t people just stop using any tracking applications once there is no tracking needed? The way I see it is so long as there is a pandemic we have no freedom anyway. It might seem like tracking your citizens is infringing a freedom, but if the option is house arrest I don’t mind. Any government that wo…

> Wouldn’t people just stop using any tracking applications once there is no tracking needed? There's a risk that once the capacity is tried and tested, governments and private companies alike will try to make it enticing and useful for different means. The role of privacy activists should be nipping all these follow-up ideas in the bud. Ensuring that emergency measures are used only during actual emergencies. But no…

I completely agree. To that end, it actually seems like fully decentralized client side contract tracking would be a useful technology to have a set of government supported open specifications for. Building the functionality into the OS, securely encrypting (no key escrow!) with a user supplied password, and requiring a warrant to seize (but good luck without the password) would proactively enable a robust response to future pandemics.

Actually I suppose this matches my view on location histories. I like them as an idea, but current implementations exfiltrate all the data off of my device which bothers me to no end.

Re: Singapore to Open Source Bluetooth Contact Tracing

#109

Post by groby_b »

bosie wrote: post #102
TeMPOraL wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do you know that this is the current state? Look at the number of cases and their regional distribution, realize that those are tested cases and thus, with a) asymptomatic carriers and b) really bad testing in the US, the number of active cases is at least 10x that. Then realize you're dealing with an exponential process. United States are thoroughly infected already. > "meaningful supply of equipment" means th…

I guess i misunderstood surpression. Thought surpression is the early stages and not when you have been thouroughly infected already. "meaningful supply" was in the context of avoiding a lockdown and hence i don't undrestand your answer. if you don't have the equipment now, how do you avoid the lockdown and make the levels go down without large quantities of dead people?

I'm not an epidemiologist, or an MD, so with a large grain of salt:

Containment: Testing & contact tracing - you try to contain the disease before it widely spreads. Usually one of the early stages of fighting.

Mitigation: You can't contain any more, and you're trying to slow down the progress to avoid a large peak. Test & treat those with severe symptoms, encourage people with mild symptoms to stay home, encourage people to keep distance.

Suppression: Things have hit the fan. You need to drastically halt the progress of the epidemic. This is shelter-in-place, lockdown, quarantine etc. #staythefuckhome has become a bit more mandatory. That's pretty much where we are right now. You want to drastically reduce the number of infections in a short amount of time.

"Meaningful supply" was in the context of suppression actually taking hold. At some point, you're hopefully down to illness levels where containment or mitigation make sense again. But for that to happen, you need tests, you need PPE, you need infrastructure so you actually can contain. We're at suppression/lockdown because we failed at that the first time round.

So, it's not about avoiding the lockdown now.

The goal is lockdown now to prevent catastrophic overload and buy time to get supplies in place for later containment stages.

Hope that clarifies? But, of course, containment is not guaranteed to work, so we might be cycling back and forth between those measures

The report #9 from the Imperial College of London details the ideas behind that cycling approach: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/s...

Re: Singapore to Open Source Bluetooth Contact Tracing

#110

Post by kazinator »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #101
GordonS wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The current pandemic is force majeure, the next one might be accidental, the one after that purposeful Being honest, I don't think there is any need for such alarmism. If anything, this pandemic has demonstrated that a viral bioweapen could ensure MAD just as well as the nuclear variety. > Advancement of science and technology in large parts means making more and more potentially destructive power available to indi…

> Being honest, I don't think there is any need for such alarmism. Looks at JHU map... I think there is. > If anything, this pandemic has demonstrated that a viral bioweapen could ensure MAD just as well as the nuclear variety. A viral bioweapon is like trying to enact MAD by being the only ones with nukes and threatening to nuke everyone including yourself unless others do as you wish. It's a domain of mad men. > Yo…

> A viral bioweapon is like trying to enact MAD by being the only ones with nukes and threatening to nuke everyone including yourself unless others do as you wish.

Someone with a viral bioweapon will develop it together with a vaccine. They will let only their people and allies have the vaccine, ensuring it is distributed secretly ahead of time, and wipe out everyone else.

Or possibly use it for blackmail: surrender everything to us, and those of you still left alive will be spared.

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