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Apple and Google partner on Covid-19 contact tracing technology

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Re: Apple and Google partner on Covid-19 contact tracing technology

#441

Post by BiteCode_dev »

jimbokun wrote: post #236
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it was already terrible before. But it was labelled as terrible. I was for the secret service. Now it's going to be culturally accepted, and in the hand regular administrators. This is on order or magnitude worse, for something that was awful.

Because it's being used to fight something even more awful. There are no good choices in a pandemic.

This is a false dichotomy and assumes there are only two choices:

- not handling the pandemic

- tracking the population

You can get information about people assembling in other ways:

- helicopters

- intel gathering

- cops and army patrolling dressed as civilian

- create groups of citizen in town responsible to patrolling

And probably many I don't know about.

Then you add to that: keeping to communicate with the public, testing a lot, providing masks, etc.

The fact you are using this argument shows how much powerful the culture about "the end justify the mean" and "trusts the authority to deal with this" is.

I remember the first time I saw Jack Bauer on TV decapitating a terrorist in 24 to get an information. I though, "wow, they are really creating a new normal here".

That's what it is about: creating a new normal. And pretending there is no other choice, while nobody is trying to provide any.

Re: Apple and Google partner on Covid-19 contact tracing technology

#442

Post by guscost »

It’s odd that the folks picking this apart looking for surveillance risks don’t seem to be one-tenth as bothered by Facebook censoring wackos (and indeed anyone determined to be guilty of wrong-thinking), or you know, the government literally arresting people for leaving their houses.

Re: Apple and Google partner on Covid-19 contact tracing technology

#443

Post by ddmma »

SlowRobotAhead wrote: post #232
ddmma wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry for that but sharing files in between iOS or Android wasn’t possible, that is my point

This contact tracing has nothing to do with “sharing files”.

Please refer to the BlueTrace and iOS bluetooth issues, now Apple is willing to open up .. https://abe-winter.github.io/2020/04/10/leaky.html

Re: Apple and Google partner on Covid-19 contact tracing technology

#444

Post by tastroder »

jka wrote: post #440
ericlavigne wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The approach outlined by Apple and Google is very similar to, and likely based on, the TCN protocol developed by a coalition of open source projects. If you'd like to discuss possible vulnerabilities and propose further improvements, there's an active community already doing that who would be happy to have one more contributor. :-) https://tcn-coalition.org/

Thank you, I'll take a look into TCN and the protocol. Do you know whether TCN have worked with and/or compared notes with OpenTrace[1]? [1] - https://github.com/OpenTrace-Community

The projects I've seen inside of TCN seem aware of OpenTrace and the code / data they put out over the last few days, not sure if direct contacts exist yet.

Re: Apple and Google partner on Covid-19 contact tracing technology

#445

Post by tastroder »

devit wrote: post #341
The_Double wrote: post #240

There is surprisingly little discussion about the actual spec here. It looks really good to me! - Advertisements change every 15 minutes, are not trackable unless keys are shared. - The only central bit is a repository of "infected" daily keys. - No knowledge about contacts is shared with a central authority. Nothing is shared unless you are infected and decide to share your keys, which are only valid for one day. I…

I think it has a flaw: if you find out you are infected mid-day, then if you reveal your key for the day others can impersonate you for the rest of the day, and if you don't those who you had contact with in the first part of the day won't be notified. So my suggestion for a minimal fix would be to also reveal all advertised rolling IDs for the current day in addition to the keys for the past days. A better fix would…

Your suggestions don't seem different from what the spec already describes. Tests are not immediate and the incubation period of the disease dictates that you have to share multiple diagnosis keys (days) of infected persons anyway. You don't have to share timeslots within a day, they can be derived from the daily key. Impersonation risk is unlikely, whatever health authority applies can just invalidate all newly identified keys from generating new contacts, preventing replay attacks derived from known infected with simple and coarse timestamps.

Re: Apple and Google partner on Covid-19 contact tracing technology

#446

Post by nielsole »

guscost wrote: post #442

It’s odd that the folks picking this apart looking for surveillance risks don’t seem to be one-tenth as bothered by Facebook censoring wackos (and indeed anyone determined to be guilty of wrong-thinking), or you know, the government literally arresting people for leaving their houses .

This is a fallacy. You don't know how people commenting on this thread think about other topics. Just because there is worse (apparently to you) things happening, doesn't mean you can't be critical of contact tracing.

Re: Apple and Google partner on Covid-19 contact tracing technology

#447

Post by camelite »

arcticbull wrote: post #381
camelite wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firstly, the German study analysed one small particularly hard hit town, so how you are extrapolating this to "people" in general is puzzling. Secondly, there is a very wide range of reported fatality rates, with myriad factors known and unknown, so why you've chosen the lowest one globally (which, by the by, has always been an outlier and in any case is edging up past 1%) as the "actual" rate is, again, puzzling. Fi…

> Finally, you are making a giant but unfortunately common logical error in using these already questionable death counts to make the case for an overreaction without attending to the obvious fact that without this "overreaction" every town, village and city on Earth would be Bergamo, where army lorries are conscripted to transport the dead from overwhelmed mortuaries, or worse. Italy has the highest average age in E…

You don't see me claiming that the global death rate is 10% though, do you?

Re: Apple and Google partner on Covid-19 contact tracing technology

#448

Post by guscost »

nielsole wrote: post #446
guscost wrote: post #442

It’s odd that the folks picking this apart looking for surveillance risks don’t seem to be one-tenth as bothered by Facebook censoring wackos (and indeed anyone determined to be guilty of wrong-thinking), or you know, the government literally arresting people for leaving their houses .

This is a fallacy. You don't know how people commenting on this thread think about other topics. Just because there is worse (apparently to you) things happening, doesn't mean you can't be critical of contact tracing.

I guess so, but you gotta pick your battles!

Re: Apple and Google partner on Covid-19 contact tracing technology

#450

Post by lultimouomo »

joshuamorton wrote: post #349
lultimouomo wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One issue I see is that when I query the central repository of infected IDs I expose to the central server the IDs I've been in contact with (unless I always download all of them, but that doesn't seem feasible). It seems like this could be solved by providing a K-anonymous query interface like the one exposed by Have I Been Pwned. I wrote to the contact email address of Pepp-Py, which is a European initiative do dev…

Ah you mentioned the HIBP example, although for this search space you may be able to get by with just a download of all of them. If you stick to, say, state by state sharding, you get around 30 MB of hashes for the worst case (NYC). If you further reduce that by only providing new confirmed hashes since a timestamp, the client can track when they last downloaded the data and pull only the delta, you end up with a few…

Geographical based sharding seems to break down once people travel though. Just a single visit to a hub airport might have gotten you in contact with people form all around the world (I assume that the objective of this initiative is to try and get us at least part way back to normal). Even if you don't travel, but other people are, you will be in contact with people who are registered as infected in a different region.

Also I don't think NYC is at all the worst case in the world, there are a lot of megacities that dwarf it in size...

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