Ongoing coronavirus happenings

I expect any disease that causes massive cellular damage like this simply overwhelms the immune system, making other infections likely.

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Wouldn’t it be a shocker if our contact tracing strategy only worked for relatively wealthy people?

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/04/2-billion-phones-cannot-use-google-and-apple-contract-tracing-tech

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Oh when it’s their life they’re scared for, they are suddenly for it huh?

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I’m not, but probably hit the reply on your comment instead of the reply at the bottom and now I can’t edit. Thank you for your continued patience while we work out the remaining issues with the use of the user interface.

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I’ve been following this with a certain “what the actual fuck” state of mind, since the main point still stands: Bluetooth in its current form does not allow such an app to work.

So, while everyone is discussing privacy and security and whatnot, RSSI simply will not work as advertised.

I’m still asking myself if I missed a very crucial part which would make it work.

I tried to contact some journalists who could possibly use their leverage to find out. I am at a dead end. I don’t know who to ask. My contacts either have no grasp of the technology and admit as much - or, if they have some, they tell me I should forget about it because it won’t work, causing massively false negatives and comparatively massively false positives.

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Are you trying to figure out if a Bluetooth device can deduce its position absolutely in space, or if it can detect relative proximity to another Bluetooth device?

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This sounds fun: probably won’t be able to do it myself.

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ETA: I’m trying to figure out if an app could work to determine the distance between two smartphones accurately enough to be of use to trace contacts without to many false positives, and even less false negatives.

Have a look at what @Aciantis wrote.

While you can use Bluetooth to measure the distance between two phones, the results aren’t useful for this kind of app. You would have to determine if you have been closer that, say, two meters. It would be better if you even had an additional measure about the time you spent together.

Using RSSI, on smartphones, is not accurate enough for this, as @Aciantis tells us, and thus confirms an engineer I asked about this. Physics and technical limitations of even most recent smartphone seem to say: forget it.

This looks bad.

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I think that should be an “and”, not an “or”.

I’m looking forward to seeing other mods of that photo.

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Yes. It seems highly unlikely to be a good solution on a technical level as well. That is also a bit down in the weeds for policymakers.

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It seems to me that if this is for contact tracing, even being able to say “these two Bluetooth devices scanned each other and were probably 5-20 feet apart” is going to be superior to conventional methods (assuming the majority of people have a Bluetooth devices with the protocol enabled), even if it isn’t perfect (“Oh, you were exactly 7 feet apart? No worries then.”)

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And if you live in a city that thinks this is a bad idea? Well, fuck you I guess.

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Yes, there’s that as well, and plenty of room to account for false positives and negatives.

Luther started a whole thread for this discussion too.

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Probably doesn’t matter, because we’re out of cake. We only had three bits and didn’t expect such a rush. So your choice is “or death.”

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ETA: And holy shit! I had no idea how vicious the online attacks are against Stacey Abrams until I searched for the above image. How vile the RWers are!

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