registerme
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Post by registerme on Apr 9, 2020 20:52:35 GMT
Triangulation / location identification using mobile phone location data is... unlikely to be achievable with that fidelity. As an example, the reason you're not meant to use a mobile on a plane is not because of any risk to the plane. It's because you throw the mobile cells you pass over a wobbly because you're moving too quickly.
Bluetooth however, is a different matter. And that is what I think the systems in SK and Singapore have been using. Whilst there are privacy / state monitoring etc concerns, I think, in the circumstances, the benefit probably outweighs the costs and risks. It's not hard to imagine an architecture designed roughly along the following lines:-
1. All phones report all phones that they've been able to touch by Bluetooth over the last two weeks to a central database. Naturally encrypted up the wazzoo. - in my case that would probably catch my lodger, the neighbours either side of me, and all the people I had passed on my way to the supermarket or at the supermarket. 2. Should anybody in that database test positive for covid-19 then "it" pings a message at all phones that have been in contact with it within the last x days, advising the owners to self-isolate. It flags those numbers as being of higher risk than unknown numbers. 3. n days after the initial report it deletes the data about the original "positive" number (either dead, or survived and no longer contagious), or maybe puts it on a "not an issue" list? 4. y days after that it deletes the data for all people notified in 2. unless one of them has tested positive.
(This is me postulating after a bottle of wine so is likely rough around the edges, but you get the idea).
Assuming that people behave remotely rationally something like this should be a) effective, and b) self limiting as in the more it works the less people there are to be infected, the less data it collects, and the less people "monitoring" it undertakes.
My main concern is switching the system off again afterwards. Remember that scene in Batman Begins when Lucius Fox resigns? As an aside, I suspect there's also a trove of interesting data buried in credit card spending patterns.
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Post by bracknellboy on Apr 9, 2020 20:56:58 GMT
... As an aside, I suspect there's also a trove of interesting data buried in credit card spending patterns. or if you are a cyclist or runner, Strava data. Or similar apps. I suspect that anonymised data from such apps are already being shared with Govt. At least I hope they are.
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registerme
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Post by registerme on Apr 9, 2020 20:58:53 GMT
... As an aside, I suspect there's also a trove of interesting data buried in credit card spending patterns. or if you are a cyclist or runner, Strava data. Or similar apps. I suspect that anonymised data from such apps are already being shared with Govt. At least I hope they are. Like all that Fitbit data that the Russian's scooped up? From some of ours who probably didn't want to be monitored by said Russians?
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Post by bracknellboy on Apr 9, 2020 20:58:55 GMT
World's first coronavirus film set for release
Believe it or not, a movie has already been made about coronavirus.
"Corona: Fear is a Virus" - which will be available on streaming platforms later this month - is about seven people trapped in a lift and the chaos that ensues when one of them starts to cough.
Director Mostafa Keshvari started the film after the outbreak in China but before it became a global pandemic.
Film critic Noah Gittell says it might be too soon for people to process the trauma but adds there is nothing unethical about releasing a coronavirus film now.
Nice. Must make a point of not watching it, however bored I might be.
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angrysaveruk
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binomial
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Post by angrysaveruk on Apr 9, 2020 21:09:40 GMT
Some interesting information from the Korean CDC who seem to believe the Virus can reactivate in people who are thought to have recovered. This confirms what some Chinese Doctors were saying about people being reinfected, but the Koreans seem to think it just reactivates. Interestingly a guy who I was following on YouTube who was pretty sick with the Virus in early March and thought he had recovered is still testing positive for the Virus - it seems instead of recovering he has just moved into an asymptomatic phase. This virus is a nightmare.
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Post by dan1 on Apr 9, 2020 21:10:40 GMT
Looks like BJ might be out of the woods. At least he is said to be in "extremely high spirits" presumably because he moves away from a room full of lights, bleeps and bodys to the more pleasant ward on top of the building with lovely views of the Thames. Good luck to him and everyone else who has or is suffering. Very good news, let's hope his recovery isn't rushed - he'll need all his strength and stamina in the coming months and years. I suspect he's on a "ward" of one
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travolta
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Post by travolta on Apr 9, 2020 21:12:52 GMT
IBS sufferers nationwide receive letters from NHS to advise that they too are classified as vulnerable. Exclusive shopping hours to accommodate need for fibre.
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registerme
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Post by registerme on Apr 9, 2020 21:31:26 GMT
Some interesting information from the Korean CDC who seem to believe the Virus can reactivate in people who are thought to have recovered. This confirms what some Chinese Doctors were saying about people being reinfected, but the Koreans seem to think it just reactivates. Interestingly a guy who I was following on YouTube who was pretty sick with the Virus in early March and thought he had recovered is still testing positive for the Virus - it seems instead of recovering he has just moved into an asymptomatic phase. This virus is a nightmare. If confirmed that would be bad news. But if confirmed it would still leave us with "manage to herd immunity until (and if) we have a vaccine". It would make the process of "unlocking" a lot more complicated though.
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registerme
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Post by registerme on Apr 9, 2020 21:41:55 GMT
bracknellboy speaking of which my largely technophobe mother just sent me this covid.joinzoe.com/dataI think I'll likely wait for an "official" one but I don't have any inherent objection to the idea of installing it / using it. That having been said apparently my area has 5%-6% "People with symptomatic COVID". Even given my self-scored 9/10 self-isolating / social distancing, I find it hard to believe I haven't stumbled across somebody who's contagious on my shopping trips every three to four days. Like I've been banging on about for ages.... denominator denominator denominator denominator......
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Post by dan1 on Apr 9, 2020 21:47:14 GMT
A damning indictment of the government's scientific experts. The expert modellers of SPI-M didn't model a UK lockdown at first because no one thought it would be acceptable politically “to shut the country down.”
The more I read the more I become convinced of the East (China, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea etc) vs West (Europe, North America) approach is really a SARS vs influenza difference. "cognitive bias" pretty much sums it up for me. Ok, I'm a little slow on the uptake here but... ...the implication of the bold bit above is that the scientific experts thought it would be acceptable politically for a large numbers of deaths.
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angrysaveruk
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Post by angrysaveruk on Apr 9, 2020 21:53:04 GMT
Some interesting information from the Korean CDC who seem to believe the Virus can reactivate in people who are thought to have recovered. This confirms what some Chinese Doctors were saying about people being reinfected, but the Koreans seem to think it just reactivates. Interestingly a guy who I was following on YouTube who was pretty sick with the Virus in early March and thought he had recovered is still testing positive for the Virus - it seems instead of recovering he has just moved into an asymptomatic phase. This virus is a nightmare. If confirmed that would be bad news. But if confirmed it would still leave us with "manage to herd immunity until (and if) we have a vaccine". It would make the process of "unlocking" a lot more complicated though. Lets hope it is not the case, but this "you will get antibodies and then your body can fight it off and you are cured" seems to be a big assumption for something we don't know a great deal about yet. I know very little about virology, but I can name at least one very well known virus where that certainly is not true. One thing that definitely caught my eye was the Feds seizing supplies of PPE from hospitals in the US: www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-04-07/hospitals-washington-seize-coronavirus-supplies
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michaelc
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Post by michaelc on Apr 9, 2020 21:54:53 GMT
These moral questions seem to me to be very difficult to solve. What is worse 1 death or a million sacked? How about 1 death vs 100 made redundant ?
I suppose one might be able to place moral upper and lower bounds but the gap between them would be very large.
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registerme
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Post by registerme on Apr 9, 2020 21:59:05 GMT
A damning indictment of the government's scientific experts. The expert modellers of SPI-M didn't model a UK lockdown at first because no one thought it would be acceptable politically “to shut the country down.”
The more I read the more I become convinced of the East (China, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea etc) vs West (Europe, North America) approach is really a SARS vs influenza difference. "cognitive bias" pretty much sums it up for me. Ok, I'm a little slow on the uptake here but... ...the implication of the bold bit above is that the scientific experts thought it would be acceptable politically for a large numbers of deaths. You're losing a lot of context and nuance by presenting it so starkly, but.... yes. I wonder did those modellers to talk to a few politicians to get their input (prior to all this)?
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Post by dan1 on Apr 9, 2020 22:30:47 GMT
Ok, I'm a little slow on the uptake here but... ...the implication of the bold bit above is that the scientific experts thought it would be acceptable politically for a large numbers of deaths. You're losing a lot of context and nuance by presenting it so starkly, but.... yes. I wonder did those modellers to talk to a few politicians to get their input (prior to all this)? Good question. It's worth remembering they (the scientists that is) were dealing with an inexperienced government with a cabinet filled with Brexit ideologues, and a civil service under attack from said ideologues (remember the resignation Priti Patel's cabinet secretary) and focused on Brexit negotiations and delivery. e.g. how many of the above were involved in previous pandemic planning exercises (Cygnus in 2016)?
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Post by southseacompany on Apr 10, 2020 2:23:29 GMT
Triangulation / location identification using mobile phone location data is... unlikely to be achievable with that fidelity. As an example, the reason you're not meant to use a mobile on a plane is not because of any risk to the plane. It's because you throw the mobile cells you pass over a wobbly because you're moving too quickly. Bluetooth however, is a different matter. And that is what I think the systems in SK and Singapore have been using. Whilst there are privacy / state monitoring etc concerns, I think, in the circumstances, the benefit probably outweighs the costs and risks. It's not hard to imagine an architecture ... Here in China, the mobile carriers (all three of them) now offer a service where you send a text message from your phone and get a response showing a list of all municipalities you have been in in the last 2 weeks. (You need to include part of your ID number when sending the message, to prevent SIM spoofing attacks I assume.) To enter your workplace, you have to get an access pass. For that, you must show (a screenshot of) this message, basically to confirm you haven't been to a high risk area like Hubei recently. Now, you may already see the two obvious holes in this system: - If you have two phones and leave one at home, you completely circumvent these checks.
- The people controlling access to office buildings and workplaces have no direct access to the system and must work on the basis of a screenshot, which takes a couple of minutes to fake in Photoshop.
However, the way China tracks potential contacts of the infected is not based on phone triangulation, which is not granular enough, as registerme has pointed out. Surveillance cameras in public places like train carriages are connected to centralised systems (made by Megvii and SenseTime, some of the most Orwellian tech companies on the planet) which use face recognition to match to a database containing the facial features of every ID card holder in China. This even works with high reliability despite face masks. For even more accuracy, these are cross-referenced with spyware contained in some of the most popular phone apps, specifically Alipay (used in place of credit cards) and Wechat (a.k.a Weixin, a sort of Facebook, Whatsapp and Paypal in one). Since China tracks everyone all the time, it is not surprising that potentially infected people can be identified with high accuracy. I don't think any other country has surveillance nearly this comprehensive. Yet.
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