[FRIAM] COVID tracking

Tue Dec 15 19:15:38 EST 2020

Eric -

You understood, and yes, the false positives between flat-dwellers with
BT would be obviated somewhat.   I was mostly just spectulating on: A)
is there anything intrinsically less safe about recording (encrypted)
BT:Mac addresses and the kind of mutual handshake required without that
(as with sound)...   and B) other "nefarious" ways apps might
speak/listen outside human range to covertly communicate (even while you
might be tracking RF comms...  I suppose I am falling back into habits
from nearly 30 years inside the belly of a high security environment
and/or too much paranoia about "them" vs "us" (pick your affiliation).

This discussion  dovetails nicely with This Article
<https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/human-activity-changing-space-too-180963369/>
on VLF and cosmic radiation...

Thanks,

 - Steve

> Hi Steve,
>
> You probably have read more on this already than I have, but I believe
> the reason for using sound rather than bluetooth is that RF can see
> through walls, and very high-frequency sound can’t.  They wanted a
> signal that would be positive for people in the same interior space,
> but not for people who were on opposite sides of a wall through which
> there wouldn’t be air connection.  
>
> I forget where I got that, possibly from the company’s site, though
> several months ago.
>
> Or did I misunderstand the subject you meant?
>
> Thx,
>
> E
>
>
>> On Dec 15, 2020, at 5:43 PM, Steve Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com
>> <mailto:sasmyth at swcp.com>> wrote:
>>
>> Eric -
>>
>> Great story/shout-out to those who create/maintained a "pocket of
>> sanity" for you.  I feel similarly with the Los Alamos County
>> swimming pool which manages to be hyper-welcoming whilst managing
>> things in a convincingly safe manner (w/o seeming arbitrary?).   It
>> helps that there is chlorinated water everywhere, though I don't know
>> the relevant concentrations in this case...  
>>
>> Also fascinating that it uses hypersonic audio (mic and speaker) to
>> exchange "public keys".  I have a camera/app that does this but in
>> the audible spectrum which is vaguely annoying.   In the camera case
>> it works a bit like a two-factor authentication, or an ID-free
>> bootstrapping.   I think the camera starts by chattering gibberish
>> that the app hears and recognizes as "one of it's own" which then
>> triggers the app or camera to reach out over wifi and make a
>> connection there.   I have a few tone generator apps and an
>> oscilliscope app which samples the headphone/mic input... I'm
>> guessing I could kludge a simple NOVID detector and even do some kind
>> of reverse engineering of it?   I don't see any particular reason
>> that an audio "detection" is better than a BT one excepting maybe
>> that the latter can be power hungry (compared to a frequent
>> ultrasonic chirp? or that the BT apps use BT:MAC addresses at some
>> level (implying less privacy)?
>>
>> I'm mildly disturbed by the implications of a hypersonic "dogwhistle"
>> app, though current low-tech modes of signaling one's proclivities
>> and loyalties is plenty effective (Mason's rings, secret handshakes,
>> code words, etc.)
>>
>> Next thing we'll all be putting bandaids over our microphones on our
>> devices?
>>
>> - Steve
>>
>>
>> On 12/15/20 12:14 PM, David Eric Smith wrote:
>>> Yes, seems to be a good app.
>>>
>>> Georgia Tech has set up a group account that one can log into, and
>>> it is part of their campus surveillance system.
>>>
>>> I do have to stop, and do something probably nobody on the list has
>>> any reason to care about, to give a shout-out to them.  The current
>>> GT monitoring system was designed, I think mostly if not entirely,
>>> by a young biophysics faculty (Josh Weitz) working with the
>>> department head (Greg Gibson).  Since early in the year, maybe April
>>> or May, they have had a streamlined testing pipeline, and their
>>> target (which I think they mostly approach) is to test the entire
>>> on-campus community weekly.  Their positivity return rate during the
>>> summer was around 0.3% for a couple of months; in the autumn it
>>> climbed back up through 0.7% and toward a percent, and the messages
>>> and exhortations started to come in fast and thick.  All that went
>>> together with refitting many buildings, including the old biology
>>> building where my office is, built in the middle Stone Age, with
>>> HEPA filters and UV irradiators in the HVAC ducts, occupancy
>>> protocols, and various else.  Certainly the effort involved was
>>> enormous work from a large number of people, and the two main guys
>>> were mainly designers and participants in the choreography.  But
>>> overall it has had the feeling of a pocket of sanity and good
>>> practice that would have been in place in any number of civilized
>>> countries in the Eastern hemisphere.  With the expected results of
>>> providing mostly excellent protection for a community of people.
>>>  And that, for a state school.
>>>
>>> I do not know (have asked a CDC epidemiologist friend, who also
>>> doesn’t know) how much efficacy data has been compiled for
>>> NOVID-using communities: that is; what fraction of cases that would
>>> have escaped to potentially transmit, did they catch and get safely
>>> into a quarantine before anybody else was exposed?  Iceland did a
>>> great job of that with manual contact tracing back in the earliest
>>> days.  The real figure of merit for NOVID will be how much of that
>>> effect it can contribute through a decentralized computer app, which
>>> at least offers better scaling cost than manual contact tracing once
>>> the distribution is wide.  If somebody on the list finds good data
>>> on that, I would be interested to know.
>>>
>>> Eric
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>> On Dec 15, 2020, at 1:12 PM, Tom Johnson <tom at jtjohnson.com
>>>> <mailto:tom at jtjohnson.com>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> NOVID is the first pre-exposure notification app to fight COVID-19.
>>>> It’s free, anonymous, and shows you cases close in your network
>>>> before you’re exposed. It only takes one minute to download. Please
>>>> visit novid.org
>>>> <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2fnovid.org&c=E,1,VwlMJTw8gqSVqbo2jJiXmT5NM5NAq_5yttP-l2lMZNpp2VMc6PbSqDKtDArm04wXuOsKAwniiJ1YmGYvBupyCA7hDVU8uZl6NwnstOOkPcPVwTSWJKXWKZ6Q6A,,&typo=1> 
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