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Ireland donates contact tracing app to Linux Foundation

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Re: Ireland donates contact tracing app to Linux Foundation

#121

Post by bigiain »

markdown wrote: post #92
dividuum wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure where you get the 1000 lines from. That's ridiculous. `cloc` counts 16k lines of Kotlin for the Android app and 22k lines of Swift for the iOS app. That does not even include other aspects like the server side code or support documentation. Also it's not only the app that had to be build: It required all the notification infrastructure and coordination to deliver test result to the app. This is really one of…

$10M for two mobile apps, some server side code, and docs? And you're defending this as if it's reasonable? One could build 100 apps with server code and docs with that money, and still have a few million left over for hookers and blow. Stop defending corruption.

Where I come from (.au) we paid Boston Consulting $8mil to copy/paste the source code from the Singapore governments open sourced implementation.

The government was then talking it up with "If enough people download the app, we'll let you go to football games again!!!"

Current media reports say none of our local health departments have found _any_ contacts using it that they hadn't already found via manual contact tracing.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-15/coronavirus-app-limit...

(I think 100 apps+backends for $10mil is a bit optimistic, if those backends are required to be HA and support a significant percentage of a countries population. As a single datapoint, where I work has many iOS+Android+backend app projects for gov departments that serve tens to hundreds of thousands of users that cost them high 5 or low 6 figures plus 4 figures a month support/hosting, but if they wanted me to support the 60% of the population (~15mil users) that our CovidSafe app was targeting it'd most likely come to more like mid to high 6 figures, and certainly 5 figures a month to host/support it. So I'd have said maybe 20 apps realistically for that price. Still just as fraudulent a rorting of taxpayer money though...)

Re: Ireland donates contact tracing app to Linux Foundation

#122

Post by bigiain »

tester756 wrote: post #99
markdown wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$10M for two mobile apps, some server side code, and docs? And you're defending this as if it's reasonable? One could build 100 apps with server code and docs with that money, and still have a few million left over for hookers and blow. Stop defending corruption.

>One could build 100 apps with server code and docs with that money, and still have a few million left over for hookers and blow. 100 random apps or app that have to handle pandemic in country? Also what about support and infrastructure to handle those milions of concurrent users

Infrastructure for the one we have here in .au, which started out as a copy/paste from the .sg opentrace app's git repo, is minuscule.

The only backend touches that apps do is a few login/register APIs when you first launch it, and if you ever test positive and agree to send your data it sends a big json blob to an AWS Lambda nodejs function that pretty much just uploads the json to S3.

I don't recall how complex the login/register stuff is, but I don't remember thinking "That's gonna need heroics to register 10 or 20 million users quickly" when reviewing the code.

(If you wanna go look yourself, try here: https://github.com/opentrace-community )

Re: Ireland donates contact tracing app to Linux Foundation

#123

Post by bigiain »

markdown wrote: post #119
tester756 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>One could build 100 apps with server code and docs with that money, and still have a few million left over for hookers and blow. 100 random apps or app that have to handle pandemic in country? Also what about support and infrastructure to handle those milions of concurrent users

> 100 random apps or app that have to handle pandemic in country? The contract tracing apps are really basic... a step above torch apps.

Simpler really. No need to get the Facebook SDK, DoubleClick SDK, and Cambridge Analytics plugins set up and configured with your payment details correct and tested...

(And the MSS/GRU/NSA/Mossad will all insert their code into your app bundles without you needing to do anything...)

Re: Ireland donates contact tracing app to Linux Foundation

#124

Post by bigiain »

johannes1234321 wrote: post #42
quonn wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I said a few 1000 and I actually browsed the code on Github when it came out. There were just six weeks to develop it. And the concepts where developed before by public research institutes for a tiny fraction of that price (not included). (If you insist, here is a small calculation. Let‘s say we charge a whopping 500 Euros per hour per engineer. In other words an engineer that costs 1 million per year. And we have 6…

First mistake: you calculate 6 weeks of dev time ignoring that SAP got 11.5M including maintenance for 2 years. Certainly amount of work in two years time is lower than initial dev work, but not zero. Secondly you are only taking in "development work", but such a contract entails other things - certainly there is a penalty if they deliver too late - there is legal risk to cover, if they deliver crap in some legal sen…

> but such a contract entails other things - certainly there is a penalty if they deliver too late - there is legal risk to cover,

... celebratory cocaine for the entire sales team, new yacht bonuses for the entire executive team, another few mil into the CTO's golden handshake fund, and a brown paper bag full of unmarked notes for the gov procurement guy. Poor bastards probably barely broke even on the project - certainly not enough to pay out any bonuses to the devs or project managers...

Re: Ireland donates contact tracing app to Linux Foundation

#125

Post by Lammy »

rootusrootus wrote: post #94
cj wrote: post #22

Where has a contact tracing app been successfully deployed at a large scale? Have those places seen any positive effect? Apple/Google's APIs were widely discussed a couple months ago, but (at least in the US) it seems to have fallen off everyone's radar.

Most iPhones now have the API available, but for some reason it has fallen to the states to provide apps that work with those APIs, and (no surprise) 90% have elected not to. I expect the feature to be quietly dropped in a future release since it's clear nobody really wants it.

Nobody wants it, except the three-letter agencies who now have this baked into everyone's phones.

Re: Ireland donates contact tracing app to Linux Foundation

#126

Post by quonn »

patentatt wrote: post #120
tlarkworthy wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

20M for the boost of Germany's worldwide status is a drop in the ocean. The money was well spent, Germany did not embarrass themselves by penny pinching. It needed to work, and it appears to. Compare this to the UK who is still flapping around.

Yeah, I don’t get all these people criticizing the cost. Also, when a government is dealing with a flagship corporation of their country, cost is a secondary or tertiary concern anyways. It’s a subsidy in part, and it’s also just that $10m for a nation state government to get it right the first time is just so so so inexpensive. I think SAP let them off easy this time, if anything.

> It‘s a subsidy in part

An illegal subsidy. Public contracts require a bidding process, usually across Europe.

It‘s unfair that smaller companies don‘t get a chance.

I reject the idea that Germany should prop up its biggest companies, excluding what really is the backbone of the German economy (which works very differently from the US one) and also excluding our partners across all of Europe.

Re: Ireland donates contact tracing app to Linux Foundation

#127

Post by taejo »

unholiness wrote: post #96
dividuum wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is that this is being worked on. See here: https://www.coronawarn.app/en/faq/#international

Sadly, no. It's been left to the states, and almost none of the states are planning on using apps[0]. This boggles my mind. Sure, it will take a reasonable effort to get widespread use of these apps. But the impact would be huge. Even low rates of app use have a real chance of lowering the reproduction rate significantly, and reasonably broad usage bring it less than 1.0. The technology is designed in the right way,…

Different issue. ttpush is talking about using it in Germany, just with a US Apple account.

Re: Ireland donates contact tracing app to Linux Foundation

#128

Post by rkachowski »

johannes1234321 wrote: post #83
rkachowski wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what sense are most of the bugs from the "system framework"?

There is this contact tracing framework in iOS and Google Play Services and that causes a few errors. Some users get a message like "not possible in your region" and some get some random error codes about rate limits and such errors, which bubble up from those frameworks and can only be fixed there.

That's what I thought, it seems that the entire project is basically a fancy wrapper around the Exposure Notification apis provided by Apple and Google.

There's some kind of cognitive dissonance around your idea that these companies deserve so much compensation for designing a solution that relies so heavily (entirely) on these features, and yet be free from responsibility for serious bugs that arise from this decision.

Re: Ireland donates contact tracing app to Linux Foundation

#129

Post by blocked_again »

rsynnott wrote: post #29
blocked_again wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's around 1.5 million downloads. Meanwhile, Play Store says India's Covid tracing app was downloaded by more than 100 million+ people. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=nic.goi.aarogy...

With these things, you're really trying to get saturation (I think it's usually estimated that they need to get to about 60% adoption to be very useful), so in that context 1.5 million downloads in Ireland is more successful than 100m in India (though neither is good enough).

Makes sense.
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