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[wierd]

I would say "ineffective" for several major reasons.

1) The app is going to burn battery like a catholic monastery burns candles. Bluetooth is a power hog, because it uses the 2.4ghz band, and because of the way it needs to use bluetooth to be able to immediately ping nearby devices.
2) Range is very low. Bluetooth attenuates rapidly over about 20 to 30ft. The creators will bill this as a good thing, as it restricts the number of responses a ping message will get in return, but it also restricts the effectiveness of the idea, since it has a hard time getting around or through obstacles.
3) Relies on 2 levels of voluntary reporting. The first, is that it relies on people installing the app.  The second, is that it relies on the people using the app to report when/if a friend of loved one catches covid.  Self-reported statistics are INFAMOUS, and the main reason why we have so much anti-vaxx, is because of fomented conspiracy theory bullshit, which makes the voluntary enrollment process dodgy as fuck.

I think the idea (use cellphones as unique data tags to track population movement) is perfectly viable. The issue is that it would have to be completely non-elective, and essentially be state mandated spyware, done using cellular signals recorded at the cellular network towers, cross referenced with customer records, then via facebook or other social media heirarchy models, and then against the local state level health department and hospital records (via subpoena.)

You would get everyone that way, would have mandatory reporting, and would have no discernable change in how the cellphones themselves operate.


The issue is "BIIIIGGG BROOOTHER!!"

(Protip-- Snowden said that the NSA was already basically doing all of this, except for the hospital and health department bits. Nobody is forced to carry a cellphone in this fashion, the net is not universal.)

[Gentlefish]

Your point #1 is totally fair. Active polling is fecking expensive, along with 3. There's no way mandating something like this would happen quietly or smoothly.

However, the range is kind of the point. You're not going to be "in contact" with someone in a meaningful manner outside of bluetooth range.

But yeah. Cellphones are the tracking chips all the anti-vax QAnoners are afraid of and it'd be so funny if it wasn't actively harmful.

[None]

I'd imagine it probably uses about as much juice as it does to passively detect bluetooth devices in range that might be pairable, and the the reciprocating device pretty much just has to say 'bool=true got covid', soooo

No way I'd install that, though, but no way I'd go out if I was pinging positive on a covid test.

[Bumber]

What does conservative even mean in 2021? Not trying to be rude or provocative, but I really don't know. To be frank, I've only ever known it as a byword for those who do not care and do not want to care about others (on both a personal and vaguely national level).

Smaller federal government and "traditional" (Christian) morals? There's also a distinction to be made between fiscal and social conservatism.

Most references to it are references to this and the funny original video, not how it's used and abused by neo-nazism. The way he's using it is about as nazism related as going "FEGELEIN! FEGELEIN! FEGELEIN!".

👍

Bumber this is highly insulting. Most of the topics in the news have research and evidence we can look at to fact-check. All the anti-vax stuff flies in the face of international cooperation and research. Evidence from actual legitimate published studies is being shot down by the Right's media. The "evidence" or "facts" the Right pushes are consistently pre-published and poorly done studies. Ivermectin is a great example of this particular issue. Institutional racism, transgenderism, and even economic strategies all have plenty of evidence from real scientific studies that goes against what the Right is pushing.

You know what else is highly insulting? Being told you're guzzling a river of shit.¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Here's something the MSM jumped on and had to retract, because they didn't actually bother to fact-check it:
https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/07/politics/fact-check-oklahoma-ivermectin-story/index.html
That dastardly horse medicine! (Never mind that it won a Nobel prize in 2015 for use in humans.)

There's a randomized, controlled trial showing ivermectin may reduce the duration of COVID-19: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33278625/
Meta-analyses of multiple trials: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8088823/

There was that Lancet study debunking hydroxychloroquine the MSM was touting that had to be retracted because nobody had any idea where the data actually came from.

A number of the studies the MSM cite are also pre-published or poorly done. It's not okay for people to cherry pick the studies they agree with and then censor discussion of the ones they don't.

I reckon most of the people in this thread you deem as lefties don't ingest mainstream media - mostly because we're actual leftists, not The Democrats (who are objectively center-right.) And even there, we have a broad range of differing opinions, the nuances of which seem to escape you.

The nuance doesn't escape me. My comments were primarily directed to Lord Shonus (who insulted me first,) not you, nor anybody not involved in this discussion.

Sure, I'll give you this - but what is the issue here, if it isn't governmental censorship? As roboto says - if I get banned from r/StoptheSteal, should I winge about not having a real debate?

Censorship in a meaningful public square. You could complain in your own r/DebunktheSteal, because you aren't banned from a significant part of reddit as a whole.

You yourself called it misinformation - which it is, objectively.

That's what those censoring it are calling it, to be clear. How is the determination made if a given post is misinformation or not? Seems to be anything that disagrees with the position of a certain political party.

[Bumber]

There's always the occasional dumb event that every conservative media group talks about at once, because they need every single instance they can point to to defend their insane beliefs. One group of college students acts poorly, and 4 years later it's used as evidence that there is a national (if not global) attempt to silence conservatives.

Would you call it a "manufactured crisis"? XD

Here's a story from the WaPo:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/college-students-support-free-speech--unless-it-offends-them/2018/03/09/79f21c9e-23e4-11e8-94da-ebf9d112159c_story.html

11 incidents you could look into just from 2017-2018:
https://www.thecollegefix.com/11-times-campus-speakers-were-shouted-down-by-leftist-protesters-this-school-year/

Funny how there were no links for the other examples. Perhaps a little less defensible, hmmmm?

Just didn't want to waste my time, but if you insist...

Looks like the VAERS one was by Greene, but she never actually linked the database, just gave the 6000 number. This got her a week suspension, and people still can't like or respond to the tweet.

Other COVID-related censorship:
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/05/26/facebook-ban-covid-man-made-491053 (Facebook no longer taking down posts about lab leak theory.)

https://jonathanturley.org/2021/07/31/twitter-suspends-science-writer-after-he-posts-results-of-pfizer-clinical-test/comment-page-1/
WaPo had already run an article mentioning lack of effectiveness to delta variant:

Walter A. Orenstein, associate director of the Emory Vaccine Center, said he was struck by data showing that vaccinated people who became infected with delta shed just as much virus as those who were not vaccinated. The slide references an outbreak in Barnstable County, Mass., where vaccinated and unvaccinated people shed nearly identical amounts of virus.

https://www.aier.org/article/twitter-censors-famed-epidemiologist-martin-kulldorff/

https://thefederalist.com/2021/06/29/twitter-censors-video-of-mother-describing-daughters-covid-19-vaccine-side-effects/
https://twitter.com/SenRonJohnson/status/1407849233986854912
https://twitter.com/SenRonJohnson/status/1411075959801921539

The laptop:
https://www.businessinsider.com/jack-dorsey-ny-post-remains-locked-out-twitter-hunter-biden-2020-10
Nearly a year later, Politico just confirmed some of the laptop material (skip to FIRST IN PLAYBOOK.) Politico was among those reporting it as Russian disinformation last year.

Depictions of Trump assassinations on twitter, youtube:
https://twitter.com/kathygriffin/status/1323893513226870786
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmzRksWdvpI
https://youtu.be/E4i3bAtEuJE?t=184

I get the feeling that if someone was convicted of trying to falsify the DNC giving orders to media to silence someone, Bumber wouldn't suddenly go "O! this attempt to frame the DNC for giving order to the media means other accusations that they gave orders to the media are false!". But he will declare that the Steele dossier is wrong because someone else forged a separate claim (assuming it's actually forged. There isn't exactly a good track record for accuracy here and the link that Bumber provided doesn't necessarily say this).

It's just more evidence of a concerted effort by the Hillary campaign to start an investigation against Trump regardless of what they knew to be false.

What actually shows the dossier is false is that the primary sub-source doesn't stand behind it, characterizing it as raw intelligence, speculative, thirdhand information, and also saying that he's not responsible for how Steele characterized it. Steele stated "pee tape" story was "confirmed", but the source actually found "zero" corroboration (alt NYT link.) The C.I.A. called the dossier "internet rumor" (in same articles.) 12 of Steele's conspiracy charges versus the Mueller report.

I think it's time for you to prove anything about the dossier is true if you want to stand behind it at this point.

Social media has no special privileges of any kind. They are not "quasi-government organizations" whatever the hell that means. More importantly, it is your orange God who was doing all the threatening,  entirely because they allowed people to criticize him rather than allowing only blind worship.

https://www.cnet.com/news/section-230-how-it-shields-social-media-and-why-congress-wants-changes/
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/quasi-governmental

[Micro102]

-snip-

Yep, as I thought, they weren't anywhere near defensible.

You went from "students will kick teachers and students out and threaten them" to "Students will shout down speakers", and by no means is just spamming a bunch of examples of this happening any sort of argument towards whether or not it should happen. Just that you don't like it and need to... yes... manufacture a crisis to play the victim.

Greene's tweet wasn't being censored for citing the data, it was Greene citing misleading numbers and being marked as misleading. "O, the tragedy of having a label next to your comment telling you you are wrong! Censorship!"/s And you again spam a bunch of links of something other than what you were asserting. Are you spamming these articles because you want to distract how you were full of shit in the first place? I'm not going over how suspicious/wrong each of these are or why it's not some "gotcha" you have because the last time I tried pressing you on one point, you just refused to respond to that part. You know you are being dishonest.

And the real irony of this is that if republicans weren't such incessant science deniers who endanger people's lives every day, we wouldn't have this level of defenses against covid misinformation. A true story could very well have gotten caught up by bots or something, but the only ones to blame here are the ones who caused the need for such preventative measures in the first place.

The Hunter Biden's Laptop story was, as expected, dodgy as fuck. You are literally upset that the republican party isn't allowed to spread these mindless rumors about their political opponents right before an election. This is a common tactic by republicans. Sling a bunch of mud at the wall to see what sticks, and blame your opponent for doing the same when they don't. And no, politico verifying two emails is not evidence that it wasn't a republican hit piece.

And the 2 assassination implications (third one isn't one) are only about people NOT being censored. There were also people who said Obama should have been assassinated. Again, we have an argument detached from your original point.

It's just more evidence of a concerted effort by the Hillary campaign to start an investigation against Trump regardless of what they knew to be false.

I don't know what to make of this. It just seems like gibberish.

And those links don't demonstrate the Dossier is false. It doesn't even rock the boat too much. But that's just another white lie to throw on the pile. The Steele dossier has only been corroborated thus far, and if the pee tapes turned out to be a rumor spread by hotel staff, then so what? To say that that makes the dossier false is just malicious. And for the facts behind it, do you read your own sources? It literally says that "We determined that the Crossfire Hurricane team’s receipt of Steele’s election reporting on September 19, 2016 played a central and essential role in the FBI’s and Department’s decision to seek the FISA order. ". This question has been brought up over and over across all sorts of news sites. The Steele dossier has only ever been corroborated, not debunked. Considering that you constantly manage to zero in to these scant few sentences in articles from dozens of sources ranging from obscure right-wing tabloids to MSM, but have the audacity to ask if this well established fact is a fact, tells me only one thing. You know you are wrong but think that if you just keep asking questions and acting cynical and avoid looking for the answers, you will somehow "win" the argument without having to face actual evidence.

[Starver]

I would say "ineffective" for several major reasons.

[...]

This looks (as advertised) very like the NHS app in the UK (as advertised, again). Whether because a common development (either way), shared ideas or just parallel evolutionary pressures.

I never actually used it (like I never use my bluetooth, or GPS, or NFC, or anything that is useful for one or other of the methodologies in use - not even a QR scanner!), which might or might not make me unable to properly (and unhypocritically) comment further on it. My excuse is that, aside from passing people in supermarket aisles, which would not have registered as long enough record a potential future proximity warning, I was not actually ever going to be in the presence of anybody except my 'bubble', in which I was the sole owner of any variety of "smartphone" anyway. More luddite precautions and (potential) response were far more failsafe. And it meant I waa never tempted to leap into any illegal moshpits to risk both my own health and my fragile device.

The big thing that happened over here was the "Pingdemic". People with positive tests for Covid (who needed to isolate themselves) created a whole lot more people with the App telling them they were close contacts (and therefore, at that time, also had to isolate themselves). Complaints abounded that the bluetooth ranging mechanism worked through shared walls between terrace houses, so even without actual meaningful contact (brick- or stone-cored walls, no risk of aerosol dispersal through those!) a family on a sofa in one living room could end up recorded as being within feet of the future-positively-testing neigbours as they sit on their own sofa.

(And then, while the precautionary contactee-isolation waited for theirvown home-test to be negative, their tentatively-reopened place of work/education had to adapt to their absence, etc, etc.)


That unsubtle ranging issue aside, and my own non-participation, I was annoyed that to combat the Pingdemic they turned down the sensitivity. I reasoned that if the phones weren't more likely to register than a real infection was to take the opportunity to hop, then it was going to miss too many cases. We already had disruption, and better just a little too much more than necessary than even very slightly less. (The rush to end the first, second and third lockdowns undoubtedly helped to set up the need to have the second and third ones, then leaving us where we are now which looks more like normal, but probably more to do with the vaccine availability (for those that take it up) than any safe-contact communal mentality.

[Andux]

Looks like the VAERS one was by Greene, but she never actually linked the database, just gave the 6000 number. This got her a week suspension, and people still can't like or respond to the tweet.

I must note that VAERS reports are akin to raw intelligence; anyone can file a report, and as noted in the article, "VAERS does not verify the accuracy or veracity of reports, nor does it require a causal attribution." Also, since the system only gets reports on adverse events, it's easy to fall prey to survivorship bias if you don't have proper context; maybe we need a Non-Event Reporting System for all those millions of Americans who had no/minor side effects from the vaccine.

jonathanturley.org

ಠ_ಠ

SenRonJohnson

ಠ_ಠ

Section 230

I refer you to LegalEagle's short: Section 230 Repeal: What Would Happen?

[delphonso]

-snip-

Bumber, you absolute melon.

You're arguing against MSM (in your convention, MSNBC and left, I guess). I was not arguing in support of the 24 hour news cycle, which is the root of the problem for both Republicans and Democrats. I am arguing that the news you are watching is undeniably false and is preying on your own logical biases. We agree that one should not jump on pre-print studies, and that one needs to be willing to review data as research is continued. So why the fuck are you so adamant not to do that?

Here's 5 articles from the highly reputable Science Based Medicine that point out all the flaws in the Ivermectin tale.
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/ivermectin-is-the-new-hydroxychloroquine/
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/ivermectin-is-the-new-hydroxychloroquine-take-2/
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/ivermectin-is-the-new-hydroxychloroquine-take-3-conspiracy-theories-vs-science/
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/ivermectin-is-the-new-hydroxychloroquine-take-4-bret-weinstein-misrepresents-meta-analyses/
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/ivermectin-is-the-new-hydroxychloroquine-take-5-the-nobel-prize-gambit/

It's not okay for people to cherry pick the studies they agree with and then censor discussion of the ones they don't.

Censoring the falsified studies is part of the process.
Providing new evidence, testing it, and reacting to new data is how this works.
Clearly you don't get that since you're still talking about hydroxychloroquine.

A faulty debunk of a drug does not mean the drug works.
Faulty evidence of a drug does not mean a drug works.
Vice versa is also true. This is the pursuit of knowledge.

-=-=-=-

How is the determination made if a given post is misinformation or not? Seems to be anything that disagrees with the position of a certain political party.

Look, bud, you can take the stance that the only party who even occasionally makes evidence-based decisions in the Dems, but that's your own prerogative, my dude.
Misinformation is exactly what you were talking about - prepublished or dubious studies being brought out on the news as if fact. It's a symptom of a 24 hour, news-as-entertainment business we have going. It sucks and is wrong. The best thing you could do is arm yourself with knowledge rather than ignorance.

Hopefully I laid that out simple enough for you to understand it.

[wierd]

I'd imagine it probably uses about as much juice as it does to passively detect bluetooth devices in range that might be pairable, and the the reciprocating device pretty much just has to say 'bool=true got covid', soooo

No way I'd install that, though, but no way I'd go out if I was pinging positive on a covid test.

No, in order for it to work, it has to send active pings at a reasonably fast interval to detect when another device is in range.  (it also must be listening for said pings.)

When another device gets pinged, it will send a message identifying the device, its owner, and then telling the responding device that it must go online and search the database/update the database for contact occurrence.


Suppose this happens in a crowded area, such as a movie theater.  Each device will get pinged by all other nearby devices, and must communicate with all of them in this fashion. The app will have to talk to the mothership for each and every device it exchanges data with, to be able to present that to the user should a positive trace event occur.

That is a lot of pings, both to nearby devices, and to the mothership, and a lot of bluetooth communication for the identification information exchange handshakes.


Again, this is a bit more sophisticated than a passive communication stream done using a bluetooth headset.

[Dostoevsky]

I live five minutes from the WA border and I had a full-screen popup today for a bluetooth-based contact tracer from the Washington Health Department.

why the FUCK wasn't this developed sooner? It pings nearby phones with the same app over bluetooth (a secure protocol) and checks if they've reported a positive test in the past 14 days, then alerts you that you've been near/in contact with someone who might be contagious. All anonymously and locally without "scary gubmint tracking" due to the design of bluetooth.

God I'd love to see something like this become popular enough to actually be useful.

In the DC area this app has been around for well over a year now. Though, as wierd said, even though I keep it on I doubt it's terribly effective in practice (and have yet to get a single ping, although I don't really go out too much). And, as he postulated, it does have a noticeable effect on my battery life compared to keeping bluetooth off.

[Vector]

I have the app (in CA) and have also had it for close to a year. So far the university's contact tracing system has been much more informative.

[None]

Pardon my assumption then, I don't know much about bluetooth- shoulda kept my trap shut, eh.

[Starver]

There are many ways to do it, but the one thing it won't be is someone with Covid then carrying around a phone just doing the Information Age of ringing a leprosy bell and shouting "Unclean! Unclean!" to warn those that might otherwise come close.

The design choices don't just include how the link-ups are made (whether NFC/Bluetooth/cross-checking-GPS-records/cell-tower-geolocation/etc), but when the linkages are established.

Probably the most obvious method that doesn't involve passing absolutely everything to a central data-scraper (which many people dislike evenespecially if it's their government and not a corporate digital superpower) is for anonymised userIDs to be passed (to be given a timestamp, and/or a time-range and/or total cumulative-proximity) and held onto for a given amount of time.

Then you arrange either a push or pull mechanism to bring the "officially tested positive in the last two weeks" list of anonymisations to the attention of the device, that quickly runs through to see if there are any concerns to pass on. (With finer details to be worked out at the junction of anon<->identifiability, to taste, and you'd hope an extra layer of secure packaging on top of the 'standard' application-data obfuscation, so you can't easily farm or spoof device info to one end or the other.)



Actual implementations might vary a lot, either by desire, mistake or other externalities. This is my own idea of the design, mostly unchanged by the reality of the last 18 months or so since I probably first realised it might be needed. It is therefore almost certainly painfully naive in some way.

(But it really does need a lot of communication. Not "Unclean!" from those few(?) unfortunates, but "Pleased to meet you, I hope you'll remember me..." between everyone as much as can be reasonably engineered.)

[delphonso]

In China, it's a QR code you scan (so, a webapp rather than a downloaded app) which grabs some data from your GPS, phone number, and some personal info. It keeps track of vaccination as well (a little symbol for one or two doses) and is scanned to enter any major building like malls, government buildings, hospitals, or cinemas.

Certainly privacy is an issue - as it is surely not anonymized. But if someone catches the rona, everyone who was in the same place around the same time in that last two weeks gets a message and recommended to get tested.

It works well, and could easily be made to work better and with more privacy, if someone wanted to make that.