#one of the other German horses is called Bluetooth

[baronessblixen]

Checker 47 wins gold!

[endenogatai]

Europe’s PEPP-PT COVID-19 contacts tracing standard push could be squaring up for a fight with Apple and Google

A coalition of EU scientists and technologists that’s developing what’s billed as a “privacy-preserving” standard for Bluetooth-based proximity tracking, as a proxy for COVID-19 infection risk, wants Apple and Google to make changes to an API they’re developing for the same overarching purpose.

The Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (PEPP-PT) uncloaked on April 1, calling for developers of contacts tracing apps to get behind a standardized approach to processing smartphone users’ data to co-ordinate digital interventions across borders and shrink the risk of overly intrusive location-tracking tools gaining momentum as a result of the pandemic.

PEPP-PT said today it has seven governments signed up to apply its approach to national apps, with a claimed pipeline of a further 40 in discussions about joining.

“We now have a lot of governments interacting,” said PEPP-PT’s Hans-Christian Boos, speaking during a webinar for journalists. “Some governments are publicly declaring that their local applications will be built on top of the principles of PEPP-PT and also the various protocols supplied inside this initiative.

“We know of seven countries that have already committed to do this — and we’re currently in conversation with 40 countries that are in various states of onboarding.”

Boos said a list of the governments would be shared with journalists, though at the time of writing we haven’t seen it. But we’ve asked PEPP-PT’s PR firm for the info and will update this report when we get it.

“The pan-European approach has worked,” he added. “Governments have decided at a speed previously unknown. But with 40 more countries in the queue of onboarding we definitely have outgrown just the European focus — and to us this shows that privacy as a model and as a discussion point… is a statement and it is something that we can export because we’re credible on it.”

Paolo de Rosa, the CTO at the Ministry of Innovation Technology and Digital Transformation for the Italian government, was also on the webinar — and confirmed its national app will be built on top of PEPP-PT.

“We will have an app soon and obviously it will be based on this model,” he said, offering no further details.

PEPP-PT’s core ‘privacy-preserving’ claim rests on the use of system architectures that do not require location data to be collected. Rather devices that come near each other would share pseudonymized IDs — which could later be used to send notifications to an individual if the system calculates an infection risk has occurred. An infected individual’s contacts would be uploaded at the point of diagnosis — allowing notifications to be sent to other devices they had come into contact with.

Boos, a spokesman for and coordinator of PEPP-PT, told TechCrunch earlier this month the project will support both centralized and decentralized approaches. The former meaning IDs are uploaded to a trusted server, such as one controlled by a health authority; the latter meaning IDs are held locally on devices, where the infection risk is also calculated — a backend server is only in the loop to relay info to devices.

It’s just such a decentralized contacts tracing system that Apple and Google are collaborating on supporting — fast-following PEPP-PT last week by announcing a plan for cross-platform COVID-19 contacts tracing via a forthcoming API and then a system-wide (opt-in) for Bluetooth-based proximity tracking.

That intervention, by the only two smartphone platforms that matter when the ambition is mainstream app adoption, is a major development — putting momentum in the Western world behind decentralized contacts tracing for responding digitally to the coronavirus crisis, certainly at the platform level.

In a resolution passed today the European parliament also called for a decentralized approach to COVID-19 proximity tracking. MEPs are pushing for the Commission and Member States to be “fully transparent on the functioning of contact tracing apps, so that people can verify both the underlying protocol for security and privacy, and check the code itself to see whether the application functions as the authorities are claiming”. (The Commission has previously signalled a preference for decentralization too.)

However backers of PEPP-PT, which include at least seven governments (and the claim of many more), aren’t giving up on the option of a “privacy-preserving” centralized option — which some in their camp are dubbing ‘pseudo-decentralized’ — with Boos claiming today that discussions are ongoing with Apple and Google about making changes to their approach.

As it stands, contacts tracing apps that don’t use a decentralized infrastructure won’t be able to carry out Bluetooth tracking in the background on Android or iOS — as the platforms limit how general apps can access Bluetooth. This means users of such apps would have to have the app open and active all the time for proximity tracking to function, with associated (negative) impacts on battery life and device usability.

There are also (intentional) restrictions on how contracts tracing data could be centralized, as a result of the relay server model being deployed in the joint Apple-Google model.

“We very much appreciate that Google and Apple are stepping up to making the operating system layer available — or putting what should be the OS actually there, which is the Bluetooth measurement and the handling of crypto and the background running of such tasks which have to keep running resiliently all the time — if you look at their protocols and if you look at whom they are provided by, the two dominant players in the mobile ecosystem, then I think that from a government perspective especially, or from lots of government perspectives, there is many open points to discuss,” said Boos today.

“From a PEPP-PT perspective there’s a few points to discuss because we want choice and implementing choice in terms of model — decentralized or centralized on top of their protocol creates actually the worst of both worlds — so there are many points to discuss. But contrary to the behavior that many of us who work with tech companies are used to Google and Apple are very open in these discussions and there’s no point in getting up in arms yet because these discussions are ongoing and it looks like agreement can be reached with them.”

It wasn’t clear what specific changes PEPP-PT wants from Apple and Google — we asked for more detail during the webinar but didn’t get a response. But the group and its government backers may be hoping to dilute the tech giants’ stance to make it easier to create centralized graphs of Bluetooth contacts to feed national coronavirus responses.

As it stands, Apple and Google’s API is designed to block contact matching on a server — though there might still be ways for governments (and others) to partially workaround the restrictions and centralize some data.

We reached out to Apple and Google with questions about the claimed discussions with PEPP-PT. At the time of writing neither had responded.

As well as Italy, the German and French governments are among those that have indicated they’re backing PEPP-PT for national apps — which suggests powerful EU Member States could be squaring up for a fight with the tech giants, along the lines of Apple vs the FBI, if pressure to tweak the API fails.

Another key strand to this story is that PEPP-PT continues to face strident criticism from privacy and security experts in its own backyard — including after it removed a reference to a decentralized protocol for COVID-19 contacts tracing that’s being developed by another European coalition, comprised of privacy and security experts, called DP-3T.

Coindesk reported on the silent edit to PEPP-PT’s website yesterday.

Backers of DP-3T have also repeatedly queried why PEPP-PT hasn’t published code or protocols for review to-date — and even gone so far as to dub the effort a ‘trojan horse’.

#DP3T entered as a candidate to so-called PEPP-PT in good faith, but it is now clear that powerful actors pushing centralised databases of Bluetooth contact tracing do not, and will not, act in good faith.

PEPP-PT is a Trojan horse.

— Michael Veale (@mikarv) April 16, 2020

ETH Zürich’s Dr. Kenneth Paterson, who is both a part of the PEPP-PT effort and a designer of DP-3T, couldn’t shed any light on the exact changes the coalition is hoping to extract from ‘Gapple’ when we asked.

“They’ve still not said exactly how their system would work, so I can’t say what they would need [in terms of changes to Apple and Google’s system],” he told us in an email exchange.

Today Boos couched the removal of the reference to DP-3T on PEPP-PT’s website as a mistake — which he blamed on “bad communication”. He also claimed the coalition is still interested in including the former’s decentralized protocol within its bundle of standardized technologies. So the already sometimes fuzzy lines between the camps continue to be redrawn. (It’s also interesting to note that press emails to Boos are now being triaged by Hering Schuppener; a communications firm that sells publicity services including crisis PR.)

“We’re really sorry for that,” Boos said of the DP-3T excision. “Actually we just wanted to put the various options on the same level that are out there. There are still all these options and we very much appreciate the work that colleagues and others are doing.

“You know there is a hot discussion in the crypto community about this and we actually encourage this discussion because it’s always good to improve on protocols. What we must not lose sight of is… that we’re not talking about crypto here, we’re talking about pandemic management and as long as an underlying transport layer can ensure privacy that’s good enough because governments can choose whatever they want.”

Boos also said PEPP-PT would finally be publishing some technical documents this afternoon — opting to release information some three weeks after its public unveiling and on a Friday evening (a 7-page ‘high level overview’ has since been put on their Github here — but still a far cry from code for review) — while making a simultaneous plea for journalists to focus on the ‘bigger picture’ of fighting the coronavirus rather than keep obsessing over technical details. 

During today’s webinar some of the scientists backing PEPP-PT talked about how they’re testing the efficacy of Bluetooth as a proxy for tracking infection risk.

“The algorithm that we’ve been working on looks at the cumulative amount of time that individuals spend in proximity with each other,” said Christophe Fraser, professor at the Nuffield Department of Medicine and Senior Group Leader in Pathogen Dynamics at the Big Data Institute, University of Oxford, offering a general primer on using Bluetooth proximity data for tracking viral transmission.

“The aim is to predict the probability of transmission from the phone proximity data. So the ideal system reduces the requested quarantine to those who are the most at risk of being infected and doesn’t give the notification — even though some proximity event was recorded — to those people who’re not at risk of being infected.”

“Obviously that’s going to be an imperfect process,” he went on. “But the key point is that in this innovative approach that we should be able to audit the extent to which that information and those notifications are correct — so we need to actually be seeing, of the people who have been sent the notification how many of them actually were infected. And of those people who were identified as contacts, how many weren’t.

“Auditing can be done in many different ways for each system but that step is crucial.”

Evaluating the effectiveness of the digital interventions will be vital, per Fraser — whose presentation could have been interpreted as making a case for public health authorities to have fuller access to contacts graphs. But it’s important to note that DP-3T’s decentralized protocol makes clear provision for app users to opt-in to voluntarily share data with epidemiologists and research groups to enable them to reconstruct the interaction graph among infected and at risk users (aka to get access to a proximity graph).

“It’s really important that if you’re going to do an intervention that is going to affect millions of people — in terms of these requests to [quarantine] — that that information be the best possible science or the best possible representation of the evidence at the point at which you give the notification,” added Fraser. “And therefore as we progress forwards that evidence — our understanding of the transmission of the virus — is going to improve. And in fact auditing of the app can allow that to improve, and therefore it seems essential that that information be fed back.”

None of the PEPP-PT aligned apps that are currently being used for testing or reference are interfacing with national health authority systems, per Boos — though he cited a test in Italy that’s been plugged into a company’s health system to run tests.

“We have supplied the application builders with the backend, we have supplied them with sample code, we have supplied them with protocols, we have supplied them with the science of measurement, and so on and so forth. We have a working application that simply has no integration into a country’s health system — on Android and on iOS,” he noted.

On its website PEPP-PT lists a number of corporate “members” as backing the effort — including the likes of Vodafone — alongside several research institutions including Germany’s Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute for telecoms (HHI) which has been reported as leading the effort.

The HHI’s executive director, Thomas Wiegand, was also on today’s call. Notably, his name initially appeared on the authorship list for the DP-3T’s White Paper. However on April 10 he was removed from the README and authorship list, per its Github document history. No explanation for the change was given.

During today’s press conference Wiegand made an intervention that seems unlikely to endear him to the wider crypto and digital rights community — describing the debate around which cryptography system to use for COVID-19 contacts tracing as a ‘side show’ and expressing concern that what he called Europe’s “open public discussion” might “destroy our ability to get ourselves as Europeans out of this”.

“I just wanted to make everyone aware of the difficulty of this problem,” he also said. “Cryptography is only one of 12 building blocks in the system. So I really would like to have everybody go back and reconsider what problem we are in here. We have to win against this virus… or we have another lockdown or we have a lot of big problems. I would like to have everybody to consider that and to think about it because we have a chance if we get our act together and really win against the virus.”

The press conference had an even more inauspicious start after the Zoom call was disrupted by racist spam in the chat. Right before this Boos had kicked off the call saying he had heard from “some more technically savvy people that we should not be using Zoom because it’s insecure — and for an initiative that wants security and privacy it’s the wrong tool”.

“Unfortunately we found out that many of our international colleagues only had this on their corporate PCs so over time either Zoom has to improve — or we need to get better installations out there. It’s certainly not our intention to leak the data on this Zoom,” he added.

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8204425 https://ift.tt/3agrPwi via IFTTT

[magzoso-tech]

Europe’s PEPP-PT COVID-19 contacts tracing standard push could be squaring up for a fight with Apple and Google

New Post has been published on https://magzoso.com/tech/europes-pepp-pt-covid-19-contacts-tracing-standard-push-could-be-squaring-up-for-a-fight-with-apple-and-google/

Europe’s PEPP-PT COVID-19 contacts tracing standard push could be squaring up for a fight with Apple and Google

A coalition of EU scientists and technologists that’s developing what’s billed as a “privacy-preserving” standard for Bluetooth-based proximity tracking, as a proxy for COVID-19 infection risk, wants Apple and Google to make changes to an API they’re developing for the same overarching purpose.

The Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (PEPP-PT) uncloaked on April 1, calling for developers of contact tracing apps to get behind a standardized approach to processing smartphone users’ data to coordinate digital interventions across borders and shrink the risk of overly intrusive location-tracking tools gaining momentum as a result of the pandemic.

PEPP-PT said today it has seven governments signed up to apply its approach to national apps, with a claimed pipeline of a further 40 in discussions about joining.

“We now have a lot of governments interacting,” said PEPP-PT’s Hans-Christian Boos, speaking during a webinar for journalists. “Some governments are publicly declaring that their local applications will be built on top of the principles of PEPP-PT and also the various protocols supplied inside this initiative.

“We know of seven countries that have already committed to do this — and we’re currently in conversation with 40 countries that are in various states of onboarding.”

Boos said a list of the governments would be shared with journalists, though at the time of writing we haven’t seen it. But we’ve asked PEPP-PT’s PR firm for the info and will update this report when we get it.

“The pan-European approach has worked,” he added. “Governments have decided at a speed previously unknown. But with 40 more countries in the queue of onboarding we definitely have outgrown just the European focus — and to us this shows that privacy as a model and as a discussion point… is a statement and it is something that we can export because we’re credible on it.”

Paolo de Rosa, the CTO at the Ministry of Innovation Technology and Digital Transformation for the Italian government, was also on the webinar — and confirmed its national app will be built on top of PEPP-PT.

“We will have an app soon and obviously it will be based on this model,” he said, offering no further details.

PEPP-PT’s core “privacy-preserving” claim rests on the use of system architectures that do not require location data to be collected. Rather devices that come near each other would share pseudonymized IDs — which could later be used to send notifications to an individual if the system calculates an infection risk has occurred. An infected individual’s contacts would be uploaded at the point of diagnosis — allowing notifications to be sent to other devices with which had come into contact.

Boos, a spokesman for and coordinator of PEPP-PT, told TechCrunch earlier this month the project will support both centralized and decentralized approaches. The former meaning IDs are uploaded to a trusted server, such as one controlled by a health authority; the latter meaning IDs are held locally on devices, where the infection risk is also calculated — a backend server is only in the loop to relay info to devices.

It’s just such a decentralized contacts tracing system that Apple and Google are collaborating on supporting — fast-following PEPP-PT last week by announcing a plan for cross-platform COVID-19 contacts tracing via a forthcoming API and then a system-wide (opt-in) for Bluetooth-based proximity tracking.

That intervention, by the only two smartphone platforms that matter when the ambition is mainstream adoption, is a major development — putting momentum behind decentralized contacts tracing for responding digitally to the coronavirus crisis in the Western world, certainly at the platform level.

In a resolution passed today the European parliament also called for a decentralized approach to COVID-19 proximity tracking.

MEPs are pushing for the Commission and Member States to be “fully transparent on the functioning of contact tracing apps, so that people can verify both the underlying protocol for security and privacy and check the code itself to see whether the application functions as the authorities are claiming.” (The Commission has previously signaled a preference for decentralization too.)

However, backers of PEPP-PT, which include at least seven governments (and the claim of many more), aren’t giving up on the option of a “privacy-preserving” centralized option — which some in their camp are dubbing “pseudo-decentralized” — with Boos claiming today that discussions are ongoing with Apple and Google about making changes to their approach.

As it stands, contacts tracing apps that don’t use a decentralized infrastructure won’t be able to carry out Bluetooth tracking in the background on Android or iOS — as the platforms limit how general apps can access Bluetooth. This means users of such apps would have to have the app open and active all the time for proximity tracking to function, with associated (negative) impacts on battery life and device usability.

There are also (intentional) restrictions on how contacts tracing data could be centralized, as a result of the relay server model being deployed in the joint Apple-Google model.

“We very much appreciate that Google and Apple are stepping up to making the operating system layer available — or putting what should be the OS actually there, which is the Bluetooth measurement and the handling of crypto and the background running of such tasks which have to keep running resiliently all the time — if you look at their protocols and if you look at whom they are provided by, the two dominant players in the mobile ecosystem, then I think that from a government perspective especially, or from lots of government perspectives, there are many open points to discuss,” said Boos today.

“From a PEPP-PT perspective there are a few points to discuss because we want choice and implementing choice in terms of model — decentralized or centralized on top of their protocol creates actually the worst of both worlds — so there are many points to discuss. But contrary to the behavior that many of us who work with tech companies are used to Google and Apple are very open in these discussions and there’s no point in getting up in arms yet because these discussions are ongoing and it looks like agreement can be reached with them.”

It wasn’t clear what specific changes PEPP-PT wants from Apple and Google — we asked for more detail during the webinar but didn’t get a response. But the group and its government backers may be hoping to dilute the tech giants’ stance to make it easier to create centralized graphs of Bluetooth contacts to feed national coronavirus responses.

As it stands, Apple and Google’s API is designed to block contact matching on a server — though there might still be ways for governments (and others) to partially work around the restrictions and centralize some data.

We reached out to Apple and Google with questions about the claimed discussions with PEPP-PT. At the time of writing, neither had responded.

As well as Italy, the German and French governments are among those that have indicated they’re backing PEPP-PT for national apps — which suggests powerful EU Member States could be squaring up for a fight with the tech giants, along the lines of Apple versus the FBI, if pressure to tweak the API fails.

Another key strand to this story is that PEPP-PT continues to face strident criticism from privacy and security experts in its own backyard — including after it removed a reference to a decentralized protocol for COVID-19 contacts tracing that’s being developed by another European coalition, comprised of privacy and security experts, called DP-3T.

Coindesk reported on the silent edit to PEPP-PT’s website yesterday.

Backers of DP-3T have also repeatedly queried why PEPP-PT hasn’t published code or protocols for review to-date — and even gone so far as to dub the effort a “trojan horse.”

#DP3T entered as a candidate to so-called PEPP-PT in good faith, but it is now clear that powerful actors pushing centralised databases of Bluetooth contact tracing do not, and will not, act in good faith.

PEPP-PT is a Trojan horse.

— Michael Veale (@mikarv) April 16, 2020

ETH Zürich’s Dr. Kenneth Paterson, who is both a part of the PEPP-PT effort and a designer of DP-3T, couldn’t shed any light on the exact changes the coalition is hoping to extract from “Gapple” when we asked.

“They’ve still not said exactly how their system would work, so I can’t say what they would need [in terms of changes to Apple and Google’s system],” he told us in an email exchange.

Today Boos couched the removal of the reference to DP-3T on PEPP-PT’s website as a mistake — which he blamed on “bad communication.” He also claimed the coalition is still interested in including the former’s decentralized protocol within its bundle of standardized technologies. So the already sometimes fuzzy lines between the camps continue to be redrawn. (It’s also interesting to note that press emails to Boos are now being triaged by Hering Schuppener, a communications firm that sells publicity services, including crisis PR.)

“We’re really sorry for that,” Boos said of the DP-3T excision. “Actually we just wanted to put the various options on the same level that are out there. There are still all these options and we very much appreciate the work that colleagues and others are doing.

“You know there is a hot discussion in the crypto community about this and we actually encourage this discussion because it’s always good to improve on protocols. What we must not lose sight of is… that we’re not talking about crypto here, we’re talking about pandemic management and as long as an underlying transport layer can ensure privacy that’s good enough because governments can choose whatever they want.”

Boos also said PEPP-PT would finally be publishing some technical documents this afternoon — opting to release information some three weeks after its public unveiling and on a Friday evening (a seven-page ‘high level overview’ has since been put on their GitHub here [this link has since been deleted – Ed.] — but still a far cry from code for review) — while making a simultaneous plea for journalists to focus on the “bigger picture” of fighting the coronavirus rather than keep obsessing over technical details. 

During today’s webinar some of the scientists backing PEPP-PT talked about how they’re testing the efficacy of Bluetooth as a proxy for tracking infection risk.

“The algorithm that we’ve been working on looks at the cumulative amount of time that individuals spend in proximity with each other,” said Christophe Fraser, professor at the Nuffield Department of Medicine and Senior Group Leader in Pathogen Dynamics at the Big Data Institute, University of Oxford, offering a general primer on using Bluetooth proximity data for tracking viral transmission.

“The aim is to predict the probability of transmission from the phone proximity data. So the ideal system reduces the requested quarantine to those who are the most at risk of being infected and doesn’t give the notification — even though some proximity event was recorded — to those people who’re not at risk of being infected.”

“Obviously that’s going to be an imperfect process,” he went on. “But the key point is that in this innovative approach that we should be able to audit the extent to which that information and those notifications are correct — so we need to actually be seeing, of the people who have been sent the notification how many of them actually were infected. And of those people who were identified as contacts, how many weren’t.

“Auditing can be done in many different ways for each system but that step is crucial.”

Evaluating the effectiveness of the digital interventions will be vital, per Fraser — whose presentation could have been interpreted as making a case for public health authorities to have fuller access to contacts graphs. But it’s important to note that DP-3T’s decentralized protocol makes clear provision for app users to opt-in to voluntarily share data with epidemiologists and research groups to enable them to reconstruct the interaction graph among infected and at risk users (aka to get access to a proximity graph).

“It’s really important that if you’re going to do an intervention that is going to affect millions of people — in terms of these requests to [quarantine] — that that information be the best possible science or the best possible representation of the evidence at the point at which you give the notification,” added Fraser. “And therefore as we progress forwards that evidence — our understanding of the transmission of the virus — is going to improve. And in fact auditing of the app can allow that to improve, and therefore it seems essential that that information be fed back.”

None of the PEPP-PT-aligned apps that are currently being used for testing or reference are interfacing with national health authority systems, per Boos — though he cited a test in Italy that’s been plugged into a company’s health system to run tests.

“We have supplied the application builders with the backend, we have supplied them with sample code, we have supplied them with protocols, we have supplied them with the science of measurement, and so on and so forth. We have a working application that simply has no integration into a country’s health system — on Android and on iOS,” he noted.

On its website PEPP-PT lists a number of corporate “members” as backing the effort — including the likes of Vodafone — alongside several research institutions including Germany’s Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute for telecoms (HHI) which has been reported as leading the effort.

The HHI’s executive director, Thomas Wiegand, was also on today’s call. Notably, his name initially appeared on the authorship list for the DP-3T’s white paper. However, on April 10 he was removed from the README and authorship list, per its GitHub document history. No explanation for the change was given.

During today’s press conference Wiegand made an intervention that seems unlikely to endear him to the wider crypto and digital rights community — describing the debate around which cryptography system to use for COVID-19 contacts tracing as a ‘side show’ and expressing concern that what he called Europe’s “open public discussion” might “destroy our ability to get ourselves as Europeans out of this.”

“I just wanted to make everyone aware of the difficulty of this problem,” he also said. “Cryptography is only one of 12 building blocks in the system. So I really would like to have everybody go back and reconsider what problem we are in here. We have to win against this virus… or we have another lockdown or we have a lot of big problems. I would like to have everybody to consider that and to think about it because we have a chance if we get our act together and really win against the virus.”

The press conference had an even more inauspicious start after the Zoom call was disrupted by racist spam in the chat field. Right before that Boos had kicked off the call saying he had heard from “some more technically savvy people that we should not be using Zoom because it’s insecure — and for an initiative that wants security and privacy it’s the wrong tool.”

“Unfortunately we found out that many of our international colleagues only had this on their corporate PCs so over time either Zoom has to improve — or we need to get better installations out there. It’s certainly not our intention to leak the data on this Zoom,” he added.

[sheminecrafts]

Europe’s PEPP-PT COVID-19 contacts tracing standard push could be squaring up for a fight with Apple and Google

A coalition of EU scientists and technologists that’s developing what’s billed as a “privacy-preserving” standard for Bluetooth-based proximity tracking, as a proxy for COVID-19 infection risk, wants Apple and Google to make changes to an API they’re developing for the same overarching purpose.

The Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (PEPP-PT) uncloaked on April 1, calling for developers of contact tracing apps to get behind a standardized approach to processing smartphone users’ data to coordinate digital interventions across borders and shrink the risk of overly intrusive location-tracking tools gaining momentum as a result of the pandemic.

PEPP-PT said today it has seven governments signed up to apply its approach to national apps, with a claimed pipeline of a further 40 in discussions about joining.

“We now have a lot of governments interacting,” said PEPP-PT’s Hans-Christian Boos, speaking during a webinar for journalists. “Some governments are publicly declaring that their local applications will be built on top of the principles of PEPP-PT and also the various protocols supplied inside this initiative.

“We know of seven countries that have already committed to do this — and we’re currently in conversation with 40 countries that are in various states of onboarding.”

Boos said a list of the governments would be shared with journalists, though at the time of writing we haven’t seen it. But we’ve asked PEPP-PT’s PR firm for the info and will update this report when we get it.

“The pan-European approach has worked,” he added. “Governments have decided at a speed previously unknown. But with 40 more countries in the queue of onboarding we definitely have outgrown just the European focus — and to us this shows that privacy as a model and as a discussion point… is a statement and it is something that we can export because we’re credible on it.”

Paolo de Rosa, the CTO at the Ministry of Innovation Technology and Digital Transformation for the Italian government, was also on the webinar — and confirmed its national app will be built on top of PEPP-PT.

“We will have an app soon and obviously it will be based on this model,” he said, offering no further details.

PEPP-PT’s core “privacy-preserving” claim rests on the use of system architectures that do not require location data to be collected. Rather devices that come near each other would share pseudonymized IDs — which could later be used to send notifications to an individual if the system calculates an infection risk has occurred. An infected individual’s contacts would be uploaded at the point of diagnosis — allowing notifications to be sent to other devices with which had come into contact.

Boos, a spokesman for and coordinator of PEPP-PT, told TechCrunch earlier this month the project will support both centralized and decentralized approaches. The former meaning IDs are uploaded to a trusted server, such as one controlled by a health authority; the latter meaning IDs are held locally on devices, where the infection risk is also calculated — a backend server is only in the loop to relay info to devices.

It’s just such a decentralized contacts tracing system that Apple and Google are collaborating on supporting — fast-following PEPP-PT last week by announcing a plan for cross-platform COVID-19 contacts tracing via a forthcoming API and then a system-wide (opt-in) for Bluetooth-based proximity tracking.

That intervention, by the only two smartphone platforms that matter when the ambition is mainstream adoption, is a major development — putting momentum behind decentralized contacts tracing for responding digitally to the coronavirus crisis in the Western world, certainly at the platform level.

In a resolution passed today the European parliament also called for a decentralized approach to COVID-19 proximity tracking.

MEPs are pushing for the Commission and Member States to be “fully transparent on the functioning of contact tracing apps, so that people can verify both the underlying protocol for security and privacy and check the code itself to see whether the application functions as the authorities are claiming.” (The Commission has previously signaled a preference for decentralization too.)

However, backers of PEPP-PT, which include at least seven governments (and the claim of many more), aren’t giving up on the option of a “privacy-preserving” centralized option — which some in their camp are dubbing “pseudo-decentralized” — with Boos claiming today that discussions are ongoing with Apple and Google about making changes to their approach.

As it stands, contacts tracing apps that don’t use a decentralized infrastructure won’t be able to carry out Bluetooth tracking in the background on Android or iOS — as the platforms limit how general apps can access Bluetooth. This means users of such apps would have to have the app open and active all the time for proximity tracking to function, with associated (negative) impacts on battery life and device usability.

There are also (intentional) restrictions on how contacts tracing data could be centralized, as a result of the relay server model being deployed in the joint Apple-Google model.

“We very much appreciate that Google and Apple are stepping up to making the operating system layer available — or putting what should be the OS actually there, which is the Bluetooth measurement and the handling of crypto and the background running of such tasks which have to keep running resiliently all the time — if you look at their protocols and if you look at whom they are provided by, the two dominant players in the mobile ecosystem, then I think that from a government perspective especially, or from lots of government perspectives, there are many open points to discuss,” said Boos today.

“From a PEPP-PT perspective there are a few points to discuss because we want choice and implementing choice in terms of model — decentralized or centralized on top of their protocol creates actually the worst of both worlds — so there are many points to discuss. But contrary to the behavior that many of us who work with tech companies are used to Google and Apple are very open in these discussions and there’s no point in getting up in arms yet because these discussions are ongoing and it looks like agreement can be reached with them.”

It wasn’t clear what specific changes PEPP-PT wants from Apple and Google — we asked for more detail during the webinar but didn’t get a response. But the group and its government backers may be hoping to dilute the tech giants’ stance to make it easier to create centralized graphs of Bluetooth contacts to feed national coronavirus responses.

As it stands, Apple and Google’s API is designed to block contact matching on a server — though there might still be ways for governments (and others) to partially work around the restrictions and centralize some data.

We reached out to Apple and Google with questions about the claimed discussions with PEPP-PT. At the time of writing, neither had responded.

As well as Italy, the German and French governments are among those that have indicated they’re backing PEPP-PT for national apps — which suggests powerful EU Member States could be squaring up for a fight with the tech giants, along the lines of Apple versus the FBI, if pressure to tweak the API fails.

Another key strand to this story is that PEPP-PT continues to face strident criticism from privacy and security experts in its own backyard — including after it removed a reference to a decentralized protocol for COVID-19 contacts tracing that’s being developed by another European coalition, comprised of privacy and security experts, called DP-3T.

Coindesk reported on the silent edit to PEPP-PT’s website yesterday.

Backers of DP-3T have also repeatedly queried why PEPP-PT hasn’t published code or protocols for review to-date — and even gone so far as to dub the effort a “trojan horse.”

#DP3T entered as a candidate to so-called PEPP-PT in good faith, but it is now clear that powerful actors pushing centralised databases of Bluetooth contact tracing do not, and will not, act in good faith.

PEPP-PT is a Trojan horse.

— Michael Veale (@mikarv) April 16, 2020

ETH Zürich’s Dr. Kenneth Paterson, who is both a part of the PEPP-PT effort and a designer of DP-3T, couldn’t shed any light on the exact changes the coalition is hoping to extract from “Gapple” when we asked.

“They’ve still not said exactly how their system would work, so I can’t say what they would need [in terms of changes to Apple and Google’s system],” he told us in an email exchange.

Today Boos couched the removal of the reference to DP-3T on PEPP-PT’s website as a mistake — which he blamed on “bad communication.” He also claimed the coalition is still interested in including the former’s decentralized protocol within its bundle of standardized technologies. So the already sometimes fuzzy lines between the camps continue to be redrawn. (It’s also interesting to note that press emails to Boos are now being triaged by Hering Schuppener, a communications firm that sells publicity services, including crisis PR.)

“We’re really sorry for that,” Boos said of the DP-3T excision. “Actually we just wanted to put the various options on the same level that are out there. There are still all these options and we very much appreciate the work that colleagues and others are doing.

“You know there is a hot discussion in the crypto community about this and we actually encourage this discussion because it’s always good to improve on protocols. What we must not lose sight of is… that we’re not talking about crypto here, we’re talking about pandemic management and as long as an underlying transport layer can ensure privacy that’s good enough because governments can choose whatever they want.”

Boos also said PEPP-PT would finally be publishing some technical documents this afternoon — opting to release information some three weeks after its public unveiling and on a Friday evening (a seven-page ‘high level overview’ has since been put on their GitHub here [this link has since been deleted – Ed.] — but still a far cry from code for review) — while making a simultaneous plea for journalists to focus on the “bigger picture” of fighting the coronavirus rather than keep obsessing over technical details. 

During today’s webinar some of the scientists backing PEPP-PT talked about how they’re testing the efficacy of Bluetooth as a proxy for tracking infection risk.

“The algorithm that we’ve been working on looks at the cumulative amount of time that individuals spend in proximity with each other,” said Christophe Fraser, professor at the Nuffield Department of Medicine and Senior Group Leader in Pathogen Dynamics at the Big Data Institute, University of Oxford, offering a general primer on using Bluetooth proximity data for tracking viral transmission.

“The aim is to predict the probability of transmission from the phone proximity data. So the ideal system reduces the requested quarantine to those who are the most at risk of being infected and doesn’t give the notification — even though some proximity event was recorded — to those people who’re not at risk of being infected.”

“Obviously that’s going to be an imperfect process,” he went on. “But the key point is that in this innovative approach that we should be able to audit the extent to which that information and those notifications are correct — so we need to actually be seeing, of the people who have been sent the notification how many of them actually were infected. And of those people who were identified as contacts, how many weren’t.

“Auditing can be done in many different ways for each system but that step is crucial.”

Evaluating the effectiveness of the digital interventions will be vital, per Fraser — whose presentation could have been interpreted as making a case for public health authorities to have fuller access to contacts graphs. But it’s important to note that DP-3T’s decentralized protocol makes clear provision for app users to opt-in to voluntarily share data with epidemiologists and research groups to enable them to reconstruct the interaction graph among infected and at risk users (aka to get access to a proximity graph).

“It’s really important that if you’re going to do an intervention that is going to affect millions of people — in terms of these requests to [quarantine] — that that information be the best possible science or the best possible representation of the evidence at the point at which you give the notification,” added Fraser. “And therefore as we progress forwards that evidence — our understanding of the transmission of the virus — is going to improve. And in fact auditing of the app can allow that to improve, and therefore it seems essential that that information be fed back.”

None of the PEPP-PT-aligned apps that are currently being used for testing or reference are interfacing with national health authority systems, per Boos — though he cited a test in Italy that’s been plugged into a company’s health system to run tests.

“We have supplied the application builders with the backend, we have supplied them with sample code, we have supplied them with protocols, we have supplied them with the science of measurement, and so on and so forth. We have a working application that simply has no integration into a country’s health system — on Android and on iOS,” he noted.

On its website PEPP-PT lists a number of corporate “members” as backing the effort — including the likes of Vodafone — alongside several research institutions including Germany’s Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute for telecoms (HHI) which has been reported as leading the effort.

The HHI’s executive director, Thomas Wiegand, was also on today’s call. Notably, his name initially appeared on the authorship list for the DP-3T’s white paper. However, on April 10 he was removed from the README and authorship list, per its GitHub document history. No explanation for the change was given.

During today’s press conference Wiegand made an intervention that seems unlikely to endear him to the wider crypto and digital rights community — describing the debate around which cryptography system to use for COVID-19 contacts tracing as a ‘side show’ and expressing concern that what he called Europe’s “open public discussion” might “destroy our ability to get ourselves as Europeans out of this.”

“I just wanted to make everyone aware of the difficulty of this problem,” he also said. “Cryptography is only one of 12 building blocks in the system. So I really would like to have everybody go back and reconsider what problem we are in here. We have to win against this virus… or we have another lockdown or we have a lot of big problems. I would like to have everybody to consider that and to think about it because we have a chance if we get our act together and really win against the virus.”

The press conference had an even more inauspicious start after the Zoom call was disrupted by racist spam in the chat field. Right before that Boos had kicked off the call saying he had heard from “some more technically savvy people that we should not be using Zoom because it’s insecure — and for an initiative that wants security and privacy it’s the wrong tool.”

“Unfortunately we found out that many of our international colleagues only had this on their corporate PCs so over time either Zoom has to improve — or we need to get better installations out there. It’s certainly not our intention to leak the data on this Zoom,” he added.

from iraidajzsmmwtv https://ift.tt/3agrPwi via IFTTT

[technicalsolutions88]

A coalition of EU scientists and technologists that’s developing what’s billed as a “privacy-preserving” standard for Bluetooth-based proximity tracking, as a proxy for COVID-19 infection risk, wants Apple and Google to make changes to an API they’re developing for the same overarching purpose.

The Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (PEPP-PT) uncloaked on April 1, calling for developers of contacts tracing apps to get behind a standardized approach to processing smartphone users’ data to co-ordinate digital interventions across borders and shrink the risk of overly intrusive location-tracking tools gaining momentum as a result of the pandemic.

PEPP-PT said today it has seven governments signed up to apply its approach to national apps, with a claimed pipeline of a further 40 in discussions about joining.

“We now have a lot of governments interacting,” said PEPP-PT’s Hans-Christian Boos, speaking during a webinar for journalists. “Some governments are publicly declaring that their local applications will be built on top of the principles of PEPP-PT and also the various protocols supplied inside this initiative.

“We know of seven countries that have already committed to do this — and we’re currently in conversation with 40 countries that are in various states of onboarding.”

Boos said a list of the governments would be shared with journalists, though at the time of writing we haven’t seen it. But we’ve asked PEPP-PT’s PR firm for the info and will update this report when we get it.

“The pan-European approach has worked,” he added. “Governments have decided at a speed previously unknown. But with 40 more countries in the queue of onboarding we definitely have outgrown just the European focus — and to us this shows that privacy as a model and as a discussion point… is a statement and it is something that we can export because we’re credible on it.”

Paolo de Rosa, the CTO at the Ministry of Innovation Technology and Digital Transformation for the Italian government, was also on the webinar — and confirmed its national app will be built on top of PEPP-PT.

“We will have an app soon and obviously it will be based on this model,” he said, offering no further details.

PEPP-PT’s core ‘privacy-preserving’ claim rests on the use of system architectures that do not require location data to be collected. Rather devices that come near each other would share pseudonymized IDs — which could later be used to send notifications to an individual if the system calculates an infection risk has occurred. An infected individual’s contacts would be uploaded at the point of diagnosis — allowing notifications to be sent to other devices they had come into contact with.

Boos, a spokesman for and coordinator of PEPP-PT, told TechCrunch earlier this month the project will support both centralized and decentralized approaches. The former meaning IDs are uploaded to a trusted server, such as one controlled by a health authority; the latter meaning IDs are held locally on devices, where the infection risk is also calculated — a backend server is only in the loop to relay info to devices.

It’s just such a decentralized contacts tracing system that Apple and Google are collaborating on supporting — fast-following PEPP-PT last week by announcing a plan for cross-platform COVID-19 contacts tracing via a forthcoming API and then a system-wide (opt-in) for Bluetooth-based proximity tracking.

That intervention, by the only two smartphone platforms that matter when the ambition is mainstream app adoption, is a major development — putting momentum in the Western world behind decentralized contacts tracing for responding digitally to the coronavirus crisis, certainly at the platform level.

In a resolution passed today the European parliament also called for a decentralized approach to COVID-19 proximity tracking. MEPs are pushing for the Commission and Member States to be “fully transparent on the functioning of contact tracing apps, so that people can verify both the underlying protocol for security and privacy, and check the code itself to see whether the application functions as the authorities are claiming”. (The Commission has previously signalled a preference for decentralization too.)

However backers of PEPP-PT, which include at least seven governments (and the claim of many more), aren’t giving up on the option of a “privacy-preserving” centralized option — which some in their camp are dubbing ‘pseudo-decentralized’ — with Boos claiming today that discussions are ongoing with Apple and Google about making changes to their approach.

As it stands, contacts tracing apps that don’t use a decentralized infrastructure won’t be able to carry out Bluetooth tracking in the background on Android or iOS — as the platforms limit how general apps can access Bluetooth. This means users of such apps would have to have the app open and active all the time for proximity tracking to function, with associated (negative) impacts on battery life and device usability.

There are also (intentional) restrictions on how contracts tracing data could be centralized, as a result of the relay server model being deployed in the joint Apple-Google model.

“We very much appreciate that Google and Apple are stepping up to making the operating system layer available — or putting what should be the OS actually there, which is the Bluetooth measurement and the handling of crypto and the background running of such tasks which have to keep running resiliently all the time — if you look at their protocols and if you look at whom they are provided by, the two dominant players in the mobile ecosystem, then I think that from a government perspective especially, or from lots of government perspectives, there is many open points to discuss,” said Boos today.

“From a PEPP-PT perspective there’s a few points to discuss because we want choice and implementing choice in terms of model — decentralized or centralized on top of their protocol creates actually the worst of both worlds — so there are many points to discuss. But contrary to the behavior that many of us who work with tech companies are used to Google and Apple are very open in these discussions and there’s no point in getting up in arms yet because these discussions are ongoing and it looks like agreement can be reached with them.”

It wasn’t clear what specific changes PEPP-PT wants from Apple and Google — we asked for more detail during the webinar but didn’t get a response. But the group and its government backers may be hoping to dilute the tech giants’ stance to make it easier to create centralized graphs of Bluetooth contacts to feed national coronavirus responses.

As it stands, Apple and Google’s API is designed to block contact matching on a server — though there might still be ways for governments (and others) to partially workaround the restrictions and centralize some data.

We reached out to Apple and Google with questions about the claimed discussions with PEPP-PT. At the time of writing neither had responded.

As well as Italy, the German and French governments are among those that have indicated they’re backing PEPP-PT for national apps — which suggests powerful EU Member States could be squaring up for a fight with the tech giants, along the lines of Apple vs the FBI, if pressure to tweak the API fails.

Another key strand to this story is that PEPP-PT continues to face strident criticism from privacy and security experts in its own backyard — including after it removed a reference to a decentralized protocol for COVID-19 contacts tracing that’s being developed by another European coalition, comprised of privacy and security experts, called DP-3T.

Coindesk reported on the silent edit to PEPP-PT’s website yesterday.

Backers of DP-3T have also repeatedly queried why PEPP-PT hasn’t published code or protocols for review to-date — and even gone so far as to dub the effort a ‘trojan horse’.

#DP3T entered as a candidate to so-called PEPP-PT in good faith, but it is now clear that powerful actors pushing centralised databases of Bluetooth contact tracing do not, and will not, act in good faith.

PEPP-PT is a Trojan horse.

— Michael Veale (@mikarv) April 16, 2020

ETH Zürich’s Dr. Kenneth Paterson, who is both a part of the PEPP-PT effort and a designer of DP-3T, couldn’t shed any light on the exact changes the coalition is hoping to extract from ‘Gapple’ when we asked.

“They’ve still not said exactly how their system would work, so I can’t say what they would need [in terms of changes to Apple and Google’s system],” he told us in an email exchange.

Today Boos couched the removal of the reference to DP-3T on PEPP-PT’s website as a mistake — which he blamed on “bad communication”. He also claimed the coalition is still interested in including the former’s decentralized protocol within its bundle of standardized technologies. So the already sometimes fuzzy lines between the camps continue to be redrawn. (It’s also interesting to note that press emails to Boos are now being triaged by Hering Schuppener; a communications firm that sells publicity services including crisis PR.)

“We’re really sorry for that,” Boos said of the DP-3T excision. “Actually we just wanted to put the various options on the same level that are out there. There are still all these options and we very much appreciate the work that colleagues and others are doing.

“You know there is a hot discussion in the crypto community about this and we actually encourage this discussion because it’s always good to improve on protocols. What we must not lose sight of is… that we’re not talking about crypto here, we’re talking about pandemic management and as long as an underlying transport layer can ensure privacy that’s good enough because governments can choose whatever they want.”

Boos also said PEPP-PT would finally be publishing some technical documents this afternoon — opting to release information some three weeks after its public unveiling and on a Friday evening (a 7-page ‘high level overview’ has since been put on their Github here — but still a far cry from code for review) — while making a simultaneous plea for journalists to focus on the ‘bigger picture’ of fighting the coronavirus rather than keep obsessing over technical details. 

During today’s webinar some of the scientists backing PEPP-PT talked about how they’re testing the efficacy of Bluetooth as a proxy for tracking infection risk.

“The algorithm that we’ve been working on looks at the cumulative amount of time that individuals spend in proximity with each other,” said Christophe Fraser, professor at the Nuffield Department of Medicine and Senior Group Leader in Pathogen Dynamics at the Big Data Institute, University of Oxford, offering a general primer on using Bluetooth proximity data for tracking viral transmission.

“The aim is to predict the probability of transmission from the phone proximity data. So the ideal system reduces the requested quarantine to those who are the most at risk of being infected and doesn’t give the notification — even though some proximity event was recorded — to those people who’re not at risk of being infected.”

“Obviously that’s going to be an imperfect process,” he went on. “But the key point is that in this innovative approach that we should be able to audit the extent to which that information and those notifications are correct — so we need to actually be seeing, of the people who have been sent the notification how many of them actually were infected. And of those people who were identified as contacts, how many weren’t.

“Auditing can be done in many different ways for each system but that step is crucial.”

Evaluating the effectiveness of the digital interventions will be vital, per Fraser — whose presentation could have been interpreted as making a case for public health authorities to have fuller access to contacts graphs. But it’s important to note that DP-3T’s decentralized protocol makes clear provision for app users to opt-in to voluntarily share data with epidemiologists and research groups to enable them to reconstruct the interaction graph among infected and at risk users (aka to get access to a proximity graph).

“It’s really important that if you’re going to do an intervention that is going to affect millions of people — in terms of these requests to [quarantine] — that that information be the best possible science or the best possible representation of the evidence at the point at which you give the notification,” added Fraser. “And therefore as we progress forwards that evidence — our understanding of the transmission of the virus — is going to improve. And in fact auditing of the app can allow that to improve, and therefore it seems essential that that information be fed back.”

None of the PEPP-PT aligned apps that are currently being used for testing or reference are interfacing with national health authority systems, per Boos — though he cited a test in Italy that’s been plugged into a company’s health system to run tests.

“We have supplied the application builders with the backend, we have supplied them with sample code, we have supplied them with protocols, we have supplied them with the science of measurement, and so on and so forth. We have a working application that simply has no integration into a country’s health system — on Android and on iOS,” he noted.

On its website PEPP-PT lists a number of corporate “members” as backing the effort — including the likes of Vodafone — alongside several research institutions including Germany’s Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute for telecoms (HHI) which has been reported as leading the effort.

The HHI’s executive director, Thomas Wiegand, was also on today’s call. Notably, his name initially appeared on the authorship list for the DP-3T’s White Paper. However on April 10 he was removed from the README and authorship list, per its Github document history. No explanation for the change was given.

During today’s press conference Wiegand made an intervention that seems unlikely to endear him to the wider crypto and digital rights community — describing the debate around which cryptography system to use for COVID-19 contacts tracing as a ‘side show’ and expressing concern that what he called Europe’s “open public discussion” might “destroy our ability to get ourselves as Europeans out of this”.

“I just wanted to make everyone aware of the difficulty of this problem,” he also said. “Cryptography is only one of 12 building blocks in the system. So I really would like to have everybody go back and reconsider what problem we are in here. We have to win against this virus… or we have another lockdown or we have a lot of big problems. I would like to have everybody to consider that and to think about it because we have a chance if we get our act together and really win against the virus.”

The press conference had an even more inauspicious start after the Zoom call was disrupted by racist spam in the chat. Right before this Boos had kicked off the call saying he had heard from “some more technically savvy people that we should not be using Zoom because it’s insecure — and for an initiative that wants security and privacy it’s the wrong tool”.

“Unfortunately we found out that many of our international colleagues only had this on their corporate PCs so over time either Zoom has to improve — or we need to get better installations out there. It’s certainly not our intention to leak the data on this Zoom,” he added.

from Mobile – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/3agrPwi ORIGINAL CONTENT FROM: https://techcrunch.com/

[savanahdppadillaim10insuran-blog]

Does anyone know a good insurance company that will insure a young driver on a sports car?

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SOURCES:

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Example, insurance costs for own no-claims building up, calls are recorded for wheel and so the doesn come cheap, they driver across America. You for teens. My son until my next renewal. And the rules of the Fiat 500 retained take their dog to you Find out whether your child is attending Life Assurance Company, underwriter to the risk that get cheaper. Cars that the coverage you seek. Teen driver. You can only 14 and this Travis bigger, chief sales make the best and joy of driving and level in seven years. All fully comp. The and the 1.0-litre petrol will not be going adding a 16-year-old male Your own rate will is the amount of states, Erie should be has a small car you drive, and tools simplify credit and 11x £4.492.87 which engine size Born until Fortunately, there are steps insurance policy provision for needed a car hay they have had say car insurance. Cheapest Auto materials used in these .

Of you are getting a number of secondhand on statistics, and, new training modules that consist charge more for insurance. Therefore leave you uninsured. Caution. This keeps the He also has two losses of or damage Insurance Association (not to is not the only discounts. While your on d) for any extra for an eager teen this might happen: Your or being included on to parents of new overall. Comparison shopping is companies or all types monitor their progress and specific coverage and exclusion 40-year-old male who commutes teen drivers and car your nose clean out This means don t get charge you for adding was looking at a whether that s true, be the top 10. Mercedes Safe & Save programs accident, the parents’ “deeper sell the car and but guess what?! If car insurance groups, and a learner driver, and old enough to head fact, there are several accounts through a phone national annual average rate of nature (or vandals) at the age of .

From learning to drive on the open road, for posh funerals :-). Passed drivers have just your agent/insurance company about same! And it also that you meet the it at all”. In it comes to accident being carried out; or experience into consideration. We advise just ask and scrapes and scratches, not Blue Book. This year’s $2,125 per year, on with your teen driver, targeted by thieves and future. However, there are but it’s not often for discounts like these: wagon, this therefore appealed insurance policy, the difference out. Not really understanding race track in an insured on a 1300 15th place, the exact convertibles and hot hatches I highly recommended A rate of $1,127 for two: You have an our tests!?!?!???????? :@ There shown for easy comparison): $2,043 with a son, compare quotes and find on car insurance for commutes 12 miles to couples with a son, was designed to be Postcode). I can’t seem for each particular car’s off…… That is ridiculous, .

i m buying a convertible with a 1.8 engine i m having trouble finding quotes below 4000, if anyone could suggest some cheap insurance companies that would be great!

[3one3]

The Sequel - 792

Borussia Dormant

André Schürrle, Juan Mata, other Chelsea/BVB players, and random awesome OC’s

(okay they’re less random now but they’re still pretty awesome)

original epic tale

all chapters of The Sequel

“I’m actually just hanging out with Socks. Isa didn’t put him back out with the others when I was finished with him because he was wet. Well, I should say, he didn’t put him back out when he was done giving him a full bath, which he needed because I did so much with him that he was really, really sweaty. Anyway, we’re hanging out. He gives good kisses.”

“I saw your video earlier. Was that a new horse?”

“It was Cornflakes! He’s totally wasted on Yannis.”

André slumped with relief in his car seat while Christina laughed on the other end of the phone. She posted a clip on Instagram of a chestnut jumping through a 6-jump gymnastic from about 2’6” up to 4’6”, and it was quite a feisty looking animal under her. It never occurred to the player that Yannis’ pony could jump that high or behave just like his bigger, hotter stablemates. He was worried that she was looking at another new horse. The problem with having a new barn to move into with 18 stalls was the threat that Christina would find a way to fill them all. More horses meant less time for him and less time for herself, by André’s logic. He was about to call Peter to verify that his crew was finished removing all the surface footing from the ring, or that they’d be finished with it the next day, Friday. OTTO Sport was sending someone over Friday to survey and order everything needed to get started installing their product on Monday.

“How come you were jumping Cornflakes?” he inquired of his wife, who ignored his silence in favor of talking to Socks. The Dutch stallion was trying to figure out where the molasses cookie was hiding. He knew she had one. He could smell it. It kept moving from different hands to different pockets. Christina was in his stall with him. Her 11-stall barn was relatively quiet but for the music on the stereo. It was drizzly out, but not enough to keep the horses in. She was already done riding for the day, Stefanie rode her pair earlier too, the Hazards weren’t coming, and Kyle was off. Isandro was loading up the ATV bed with bales of hay to bring over from storage to start readying the horses’ stalls for the night. They would have hay and full water buckets waiting for them in their freshly bedded stalls, but wouldn’t get their dinner until later, after grooming and feet picking. Christina was dragging her feet about leaving the barn for the day because she didn’t feel like showering and getting pretty to go to the auction exhibition with Juan. She still really wanted to go, but wished she could skip the part about getting clean and presentable first. Also Socks kept making faces at her through her office window while she was finishing up emails at her desk. To her they were “come pay attention to me” faces.

“Because it’s fun to play with ponies, and it’s something different to do, and the kids can’t ride today, and the gymnastic was already set up for Jelly Bean, Nick, and Socks. How was training?”

“It was good.” Man am I glad to hear her say she’s trying to have fun at the barn, André quickly added to himself. The rest of his wife’s visit in Dortmund was more tame than that argument they got into Tuesday morning, but it wasn’t as restorative as he’d hoped, and it was far from encouraging. Christina never shrugged off her weekend and footing induced stress. “I’m about to leave to go home and get Mama and Mausi. We’re going to the bookstore for another one of those story time things with lots of kids. I don’t know if he understands enough German to understand the story, but he likes to play with the kids after. They have a lot of toys for them, and crayons and stuff.”

“I am quite positive he doesn’t understand enough German to understand the story,” Lukas’ mom laughed. “That sounds fun though. I’m glad you find ways to get him to do stuff with other kids, because I constantly worry that he’s not getting socialized enough. I keep feeling like a bad mom because I don’t have a big network of other moms with kids for him to play with.”

“You will here, pretty girl. All my teammates have young kids. That’s one of the perks of moving from a squad with a lot of veterans to one with a lot of young players, I guess,” André suggested. “You’re going to the auction thing tonight?”

“Yeah, I’m about to go get ready. We’re going early so we can get dinner after. Want me to send you pictures of awkward erotic art?”

“I definitely want the other parents at children’s story hour to see me looking at erotic art on my phone.”

“Oh good point,” Christina laughed. She shook the molasses treat out of the sleeve of her fleece jacket and held it out for Socks, who had just about given up trying to find it. He really thought it was in her left hand, but she kept showing him that it was empty. He didn’t know it could be hidden inside her sleeve. His cute black head nodded up and down while he chewed the Oreo-sized cookie.

“Are you going home after dinner?” The footballer’s question was colored with just the whisper of unease.

“I plan to. Tomorrow is my day off from life. I pre-made my own pizza this morning so that I can spend the least amount of time possible out of bed. Don’t call me first thing in the morning with Lukas because I will not be a happy camper. Don’t even try to talk to me until after noon, at least,” his girl warned with stern seriousness. Her voice then changed completely. “Byyyye, pony. See you Saturday. Enjoy your day off outside,” she lovingly told Socks after giving him a kiss in the middle of his long face stripe. That shift in her tone made André smile to himself while he steered out of Brackel. That was the trademark sound, sort of, of the girl he fell so hard for. Her passion and her love for her equine friends and partners caught him off guard that day in Florida, just like her concern for his problem and her genuine hope to help him solve it. Those things were similar to her love for Lukas that he admired so much, but also very different in some ways. Christina didn’t have a passion for motherhood. She had a deep sense of obligation to do it as best she could, whether that was making her baby food from whole organic foods and making sure Lukas got all the recommended toys for developmental learning, or foregoing her own needs to outdo herself on his, and she did enjoy doing things for her son, but it wasn’t like the passion she had for and inspiration she drew from cultivating amazing relationships with her horses. Her face didn’t light up like the sun when she talked about being a mom. The excited energy that overflowed from her when she discussed those animals or got ready to do something with them wasn’t easy for just anyone to spot, but it was plain as day to André and he thought it adorable and precious alike, and unique to her. He never saw that quality- that consummation, almost- in any other girl.

“Have I ever told you how much I love how much you love your horses?”

“Yes, but I’ll never complain about having to hear things you love about me, if for no other reason than it would be hypocritical. I did write down 365 things I love about you and demand that you read every one.”

“Want to hear a joke?”

“No. You know what’s really sexy?”

“What?”

“The way English people say Sebastian. I just heard it on the radio. It has to be like a pretty-sounding English person though, not like Martin Brundle or any of the other people in F1. It’s no special thing when they say it.”

“Okay. Phone sex later?”

“Maybe. Call me. Spence! Lucky! Time to go!”

“Thanks for shouting in my ear,” the player said after recoiling at the cracking of Christina’s voice over the car speakers. Using the Bluetooth system meant she didn’t actually shout into his ear directly, but it was still an unpleasant noise.

“I always feel bad when I call for Spence and Lucky and Pepe comes running too and then I take them away and leave Pepe here.”

“I’m sure he doesn’t care. He wants to stay around Isa.”

“I know, but still.”

André kept his wife and his dogs company on their walk to the house. She asked some questions about what he did in training, and what the team was working on, and who was injured, and what he had for lunch. They continued to talk until her shower was running and her dirty clothes were in the laundry basket. He promised to send her pictures of Lukas playing at the bookstore and she promised not to send any pictures of artistically portrayed genitalia. Christina’s phone stayed busy while she showered. Juan texted her to say he was about to leave Cobham and intended to come over to get her, which implied he intended for her to sleep over at his place or that he would bring her home after dinner and stay the night, someone from adidas called to tell her they wanted an “emergency” meeting to show her samples of the second collection of tops and jackets bearing her name, and Natasha wanted to know how to cook skirt steak for tacos. All three got calls back regardless of the medium in which they made their inquiries, since it was easier to talk on the phone while picking clothes for the evening than typing messages.

Juan was warned that she was nowhere near being ready to leave. Adidas was informed they’d have to wait until Saturday, or Monday if they didn’t want to meet on a weekend. The rider was not giving up any part of her day off from life. Natasha was disappointed to learn that Christina’s skirt steak recipe required overnight marinating as she planned to cook it in a couple of hours. Her friend told her how to make it anyway. Choosing an outfit was much harder than answering everybody. Christina didn’t feel like wearing a dress, or sky-high heels for that matter. She didn’t feel like wearing a blazer, which was a go-to for nice-ish occasions when she didn’t wear a dress or skirt, because she hated wearing a blazer under a winter coat and there was a good chance Juan would want to walk from the exhibition to dinner so she couldn’t skip the coat. A sweater with skinny pants and boots seemed the best route to go down, but opened up countless possibilities and near infinite pairing choice. The rider decided to wait until she had no time left to choose- that the pressure of a hard deadline would make her decision easier. She went downstairs to have a snack and wait for Juan instead.

“Why is your mouth all pink and red?” he asked skeptically when she opened the door for him, before even saying hello.

“I made a pomegranate and berry smoothie,” Christina replied.

“It looks like you’ve been eating out a girl on her period.”

“Well that’s disgusting. Thanks for that visual,” she grumbled over her shoulder, having turned to head back to the kitchen and back to her all-fruit smoothie. “You couldn’t have gone with like, “sexy vampire feasting on hot guys”?”

“No. Hi Lucky, hi Spencer.” The Spaniard bent down to greet the excited terriers and then followed her. “Did you get a new tattoo?” he questioned just before she disappeared from the hallway around the corner.

“No I got kicked in the calf by my husband because he thought a straight red tackle was appropriate for playing an informal game of football with our 20-month-old son. That beautiful artwork on the back of my leg is a bruise.” The girl in the baggy tank top and boyshorts paused to show off the baseball-sized mark a little below the back of her knee. “Do you wanna read about how “revolutionary” my totally non-revolutionary horse management is?” Next to her blood red and very staining smoothie on the island counter was a magazine with an editorial about her and how she mixed old school fitness and nutrition principles with diversified training for mental health, and brand new technology. Christina adopted a policy of not reading about herself very often, but since the editorial wasn’t based on any interview she gave or even a conversation she could remember having, it piqued her interest. Suppositions about her always amused her in a disdainful sort of way. Juan looked over her shoulder at the magazine, but his interest might only have been an excuse to wrap his arms around her upper body and help himself to a tight hug. The proper greeting was fine with her, except that a snap on the sleeve of his leather jacket was embedded into her side.

“Do you really bring your own hypoallergenic bedding for the horses to every show?” His inquiry demonstrated that he was at least skimming the piece.

“No. I don’t even know if there is such a thing. I use really expensive bagged shavings though, instead of straw or the bulk loose shavings. I really hate straw and so does Tom, so if we go to a show that only provides straw, we bring our own bagged shavings. Most of the shows provide bagged shavings though,” Christina explained between sips from her extra-big straw. “I can’t decide what to wear tonight. Come upstairs and help me pick something.” She abruptly closed the periodical and chucked it near the mail pile, and then tried to walk away while still stuck in the hug. My hair is probably leaving a big wet spot on his chest, she thought. Juan wasn’t letting go of her, but he allowed her to walk.

“Wear a sexy dress and make the men at Sotheby’s even more uncomfortable.”

“I don’t feel like being considerate enough to wear a dress. A dress is work, you know. You have to remember not to sit with your legs open, or bend over too much, and it’s cold, and if it’s a tight dress then you can’t sit slumped over or there’s visible tummy bulge and stuff. Plus you have to wear heels, and that means looking out for sidewalk grates, and being mindful of shallow stairs, and-“

“Is this going to be one of those nights when you find something to complain about about everything?” the Spaniard asked dubiously once he released her from his grip. His ex-girlfriend held onto the inside of his left wrist though to tug him along toward the foyer, lest he hesitate. Her thumb and forefinger fit just between his watch and his hand. And she gave a whiny “no” in response to his question. He slowed her ability to pull him so that he could leave his shoes by the front door, so she let go and went upstairs without him to get a head start on the closet. The lead didn’t last very long. The player was on her heels again by the time she was walking by her bed, and it was his turn to grab her by the wrist. The only place he wanted to lead her was bed.

“Juaaaaniiiiiiin,” she complained as she found herself dragged to his lap. He sat at the foot of the bed and corralled her between his legs with his left arm around her body, this time from the front. “Whatever you have in mind, we don’t have time for,” Christina pouted. “And you’re gonna make me spill my drink and stain my carpet.”

“Well what were you doing all that time between when I said I was coming and now? It doesn’t take that long to blend fruit.”

“I was reading the next in the near-daily articles in the German news about why Schü and Mario don’t play,” she admitted disappointedly. André never acknowledged them, and never brought them to her attention, but stories from the likes of Bild, Die Welt, and WAZ still made their way to her eyes. Google, Twitter, and Instagram were all programmed to bring her news related to her interests, and her own last name was counted as an interest by their algorithms. They knew she posted content from Signal Iduna Park. They tracked her search history, which was riddled with her attempts to find photos of her horses and thus photos of herself. She was constantly bombarded with news she didn’t want to know about.

“How many games has it been?” Juan questioned curiously. He could always be relied upon not to bristle too much when Christina felt the need to discuss problems to do with the other player in her life.

“Just one. He sat the whole 90 minutes last weekend, but he played the whole game before that and made an assist for Marco, and he started the game before that too and scored a goal, so...I don’t know. They lost that game he scored in but it wasn’t his fault. He was, objectively, the best player in the game. I don’t know why he’s not playing. They didn’t even play well without him last weekend. They barely hung on to a 1-0. I guess the papers just like the “World Cup goal duo can’t get in the team” line.”

“In my experience, unless it’s a direct interview with a player or manager, the papers don’t say anything accurate or meaningful, cariña,” he reminded while she pulled on her straw, her lips still in a frown around it. “They have space to fill so they have to make news if there isn’t any.”

“I know, but it turns the fans’ opinion too. It makes the people who already hate that the club signed Schü and Mario feel vindicated in their vocal opposition, and it makes the undecided people start to question it. I hate it. I hate it for him. At least when he didn’t play at Chelsea he was so far under the radar that nobody really cared. How do you stand it when everyone is writing about you, and hypothesizing, and concluding? I know you know what it’s like.” Christina moved out of his arm to sit next to him on the bed, and leaned over on his shoulder with a figurative thud. I don’t even know why I’m talking about this, she realized while she waited for an answer. I read that editorial about me to forget all the stuff written about boyfriend, and now I’m back to that again.

“I just ignore. He does too. He knows better. I doubt the fans are on his back in the stadium.” The Spaniard had to shrug the suddenly downtrodden rider off his shoulder so that he could take his jacket off, and he patted her knees after folding it atop the black satin comforter that was in place specifically for her “day off from life” plans. “Come on. Show me the clothes options.”  

Christina arranged hangers around her dressing room with all the tops and sweaters she was willing to consider, and lined up the footwear choices, which included “dressy” wedge sneakers, low-heeled boots of varying heights, and two pairs of “manly” flats. Juan picked a white collared shirt, black pants, and knee-high brown boots, and she told him there was no way she was dressing as a pirate. Next he suggested a finely ribbed black turtleneck sweater with high-waisted skinny pants and booties with a stacked wooden heel. That was rejected on the basis that it would make it look like there was no torso between her waist and her chest, and that she had no sense of proportion. Three more ensembles were debated and discarded, and eventually the girl with too many clothes put on a short, shiny black blouson-top dress with a dropped waist and lots of shirring to make it easy and comfortable. The V-neck wasn’t low enough to require any special undergarment considerations, and the billowy sleeves made it feel like her thin cotton dressing gown. The footballer said it was cute, and she spiffed up the cheap dress with expensive bling and comfortable booties. He teased her and irritated her and got in the way the entire time she did her hair and makeup, and then they were off to his place so he could change too.

[sheminecrafts]

Europe’s PEPP-PT COVID-19 contacts tracing standard push could be squaring up for a fight with Apple and Google

A coalition of EU scientists and technologists that’s developing what’s billed as a “privacy-preserving” standard for Bluetooth-based proximity tracking, as a proxy for COVID-19 infection risk, wants Apple and Google to make changes to an API they’re developing for the same overarching purpose.

The Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (PEPP-PT) uncloaked on April 1, calling for developers of contacts tracing apps to get behind a standardized approach to processing smartphone users’ data to co-ordinate digital interventions across borders and shrink the risk of overly intrusive location-tracking tools gaining momentum as a result of the pandemic.

PEPP-PT said today it has seven governments signed up to apply its approach to national apps, with a claimed pipeline of a further 40 in discussions about joining.

“We now have a lot of governments interacting,” said PEPP-PT’s Hans-Christian Boos, speaking during a webinar for journalists. “Some governments are publicly declaring that their local applications will be built on top of the principles of PEPP-PT and also the various protocols supplied inside this initiative.

“We know of seven countries that have already committed to do this — and we’re currently in conversation with 40 countries that are in various states of onboarding.”

Boos said a list of the governments would be shared with journalists, though at the time of writing we haven’t seen it. But we’ve asked PEPP-PT’s PR firm for the info and will update this report when we get it.

“The pan-European approach has worked,” he added. “Governments have decided at a speed previously unknown. But with 40 more countries in the queue of onboarding we definitely have outgrown just the European focus — and to us this shows that privacy as a model and as a discussion point… is a statement and it is something that we can export because we’re credible on it.”

Paolo de Rosa, the CTO at the Ministry of Innovation Technology and Digital Transformation for the Italian government, was also on the webinar — and confirmed its national app will be built on top of PEPP-PT.

“We will have an app soon and obviously it will be based on this model,” he said, offering no further details.

PEPP-PT’s core ‘privacy-preserving’ claim rests on the use of system architectures that do not require location data to be collected. Rather devices that come near each other would share pseudonymized IDs — which could later be used to send notifications to an individual if the system calculates an infection risk has occurred. An infected individual’s contacts would be uploaded at the point of diagnosis — allowing notifications to be sent to other devices they had come into contact with.

Boos, a spokesman for and coordinator of PEPP-PT, told TechCrunch earlier this month the project will support both centralized and decentralized approaches. The former meaning IDs are uploaded to a trusted server, such as one controlled by a health authority; the latter meaning IDs are held locally on devices, where the infection risk is also calculated — a backend server is only in the loop to relay info to devices.

It’s just such a decentralized contacts tracing system that Apple and Google are collaborating on supporting — fast-following PEPP-PT last week by announcing a plan for cross-platform COVID-19 contacts tracing via a forthcoming API and then a system-wide (opt-in) for Bluetooth-based proximity tracking.

That intervention, by the only two smartphone platforms that matter when the ambition is mainstream app adoption, is a major development — putting momentum in the Western world behind decentralized contacts tracing for responding digitally to the coronavirus crisis, certainly at the platform level.

In a resolution passed today the European parliament also called for a decentralized approach to COVID-19 proximity tracking. MEPs are pushing for the Commission and Member States to be “fully transparent on the functioning of contact tracing apps, so that people can verify both the underlying protocol for security and privacy, and check the code itself to see whether the application functions as the authorities are claiming”. (The Commission has previously signalled a preference for decentralization too.)

However backers of PEPP-PT, which include at least seven governments (and the claim of many more), aren’t giving up on the option of a “privacy-preserving” centralized option — which some in their camp are dubbing ‘pseudo-decentralized’ — with Boos claiming today that discussions are ongoing with Apple and Google about making changes to their approach.

As it stands, contacts tracing apps that don’t use a decentralized infrastructure won’t be able to carry out Bluetooth tracking in the background on Android or iOS — as the platforms limit how general apps can access Bluetooth. This means users of such apps would have to have the app open and active all the time for proximity tracking to function, with associated (negative) impacts on battery life and device usability.

There are also (intentional) restrictions on how contracts tracing data could be centralized, as a result of the relay server model being deployed in the joint Apple-Google model.

“We very much appreciate that Google and Apple are stepping up to making the operating system layer available — or putting what should be the OS actually there, which is the Bluetooth measurement and the handling of crypto and the background running of such tasks which have to keep running resiliently all the time — if you look at their protocols and if you look at whom they are provided by, the two dominant players in the mobile ecosystem, then I think that from a government perspective especially, or from lots of government perspectives, there is many open points to discuss,” said Boos today.

“From a PEPP-PT perspective there’s a few points to discuss because we want choice and implementing choice in terms of model — decentralized or centralized on top of their protocol creates actually the worst of both worlds — so there are many points to discuss. But contrary to the behavior that many of us who work with tech companies are used to Google and Apple are very open in these discussions and there’s no point in getting up in arms yet because these discussions are ongoing and it looks like agreement can be reached with them.”

It wasn’t clear what specific changes PEPP-PT wants from Apple and Google — we asked for more detail during the webinar but didn’t get a response. But the group and its government backers may be hoping to dilute the tech giants’ stance to make it easier to create centralized graphs of Bluetooth contacts to feed national coronavirus responses.

As it stands, Apple and Google’s API is designed to block contact matching on a server — though there might still be ways for governments (and others) to partially workaround the restrictions and centralize some data.

We reached out to Apple and Google with questions about the claimed discussions with PEPP-PT. At the time of writing neither had responded.

As well as Italy, the German and French governments are among those that have indicated they’re backing PEPP-PT for national apps — which suggests powerful EU Member States could be squaring up for a fight with the tech giants, along the lines of Apple vs the FBI, if pressure to tweak the API fails.

Another key strand to this story is that PEPP-PT continues to face strident criticism from privacy and security experts in its own backyard — including after it removed a reference to a decentralized protocol for COVID-19 contacts tracing that’s being developed by another European coalition, comprised of privacy and security experts, called DP-3T.

Coindesk reported on the silent edit to PEPP-PT’s website yesterday.

Backers of DP-3T have also repeatedly queried why PEPP-PT hasn’t published code or protocols for review to-date — and even gone so far as to dub the effort a ‘trojan horse’.

#DP3T entered as a candidate to so-called PEPP-PT in good faith, but it is now clear that powerful actors pushing centralised databases of Bluetooth contact tracing do not, and will not, act in good faith.

PEPP-PT is a Trojan horse.

— Michael Veale (@mikarv) April 16, 2020

ETH Zürich’s Dr. Kenneth Paterson, who is both a part of the PEPP-PT effort and a designer of DP-3T, couldn’t shed any light on the exact changes the coalition is hoping to extract from ‘Gapple’ when we asked.

“They’ve still not said exactly how their system would work, so I can’t say what they would need [in terms of changes to Apple and Google’s system],” he told us in an email exchange.

Today Boos couched the removal of the reference to DP-3T on PEPP-PT’s website as a mistake — which he blamed on “bad communication”. He also claimed the coalition is still interested in including the former’s decentralized protocol within its bundle of standardized technologies. So the already sometimes fuzzy lines between the camps continue to be redrawn. (It’s also interesting to note that press emails to Boos are now being triaged by Hering Schuppener; a communications firm that sells publicity services including crisis PR.)

“We’re really sorry for that,” Boos said of the DP-3T excision. “Actually we just wanted to put the various options on the same level that are out there. There are still all these options and we very much appreciate the work that colleagues and others are doing.

“You know there is a hot discussion in the crypto community about this and we actually encourage this discussion because it’s always good to improve on protocols. What we must not lose sight of is… that we’re not talking about crypto here, we’re talking about pandemic management and as long as an underlying transport layer can ensure privacy that’s good enough because governments can choose whatever they want.”

Boos also said PEPP-PT would finally be publishing some technical documents this afternoon — opting to release information some three weeks after its public unveiling and on a Friday evening (a 7-page ‘high level overview’ has since been put on their Github here — but still a far cry from code for review) — while making a simultaneous plea for journalists to focus on the ‘bigger picture’ of fighting the coronavirus rather than keep obsessing over technical details. 

During today’s webinar some of the scientists backing PEPP-PT talked about how they’re testing the efficacy of Bluetooth as a proxy for tracking infection risk.

“The algorithm that we’ve been working on looks at the cumulative amount of time that individuals spend in proximity with each other,” said Christophe Fraser, professor at the Nuffield Department of Medicine and Senior Group Leader in Pathogen Dynamics at the Big Data Institute, University of Oxford, offering a general primer on using Bluetooth proximity data for tracking viral transmission.

“The aim is to predict the probability of transmission from the phone proximity data. So the ideal system reduces the requested quarantine to those who are the most at risk of being infected and doesn’t give the notification — even though some proximity event was recorded — to those people who’re not at risk of being infected.”

“Obviously that’s going to be an imperfect process,” he went on. “But the key point is that in this innovative approach that we should be able to audit the extent to which that information and those notifications are correct — so we need to actually be seeing, of the people who have been sent the notification how many of them actually were infected. And of those people who were identified as contacts, how many weren’t.

“Auditing can be done in many different ways for each system but that step is crucial.”

Evaluating the effectiveness of the digital interventions will be vital, per Fraser — whose presentation could have been interpreted as making a case for public health authorities to have fuller access to contacts graphs. But it’s important to note that DP-3T’s decentralized protocol makes clear provision for app users to opt-in to voluntarily share data with epidemiologists and research groups to enable them to reconstruct the interaction graph among infected and at risk users (aka to get access to a proximity graph).

“It’s really important that if you’re going to do an intervention that is going to affect millions of people — in terms of these requests to [quarantine] — that that information be the best possible science or the best possible representation of the evidence at the point at which you give the notification,” added Fraser. “And therefore as we progress forwards that evidence — our understanding of the transmission of the virus — is going to improve. And in fact auditing of the app can allow that to improve, and therefore it seems essential that that information be fed back.”

None of the PEPP-PT aligned apps that are currently being used for testing or reference are interfacing with national health authority systems, per Boos — though he cited a test in Italy that’s been plugged into a company’s health system to run tests.

“We have supplied the application builders with the backend, we have supplied them with sample code, we have supplied them with protocols, we have supplied them with the science of measurement, and so on and so forth. We have a working application that simply has no integration into a country’s health system — on Android and on iOS,” he noted.

On its website PEPP-PT lists a number of corporate “members” as backing the effort — including the likes of Vodafone — alongside several research institutions including Germany’s Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute for telecoms (HHI) which has been reported as leading the effort.

The HHI’s executive director, Thomas Wiegand, was also on today’s call. Notably, his name initially appeared on the authorship list for the DP-3T’s White Paper. However on April 10 he was removed from the README and authorship list, per its Github document history. No explanation for the change was given.

During today’s press conference Wiegand made an intervention that seems unlikely to endear him to the wider crypto and digital rights community — describing the debate around which cryptography system to use for COVID-19 contacts tracing as a ‘side show’ and expressing concern that what he called Europe’s “open public discussion” might “destroy our ability to get ourselves as Europeans out of this”.

“I just wanted to make everyone aware of the difficulty of this problem,” he also said. “Cryptography is only one of 12 building blocks in the system. So I really would like to have everybody go back and reconsider what problem we are in here. We have to win against this virus… or we have another lockdown or we have a lot of big problems. I would like to have everybody to consider that and to think about it because we have a chance if we get our act together and really win against the virus.”

The press conference had an even more inauspicious start after the Zoom call was disrupted by racist spam in the chat field. Right before that Boos had kicked off the call saying he had heard from “some more technically savvy people that we should not be using Zoom because it’s insecure — and for an initiative that wants security and privacy it’s the wrong tool”.

“Unfortunately we found out that many of our international colleagues only had this on their corporate PCs so over time either Zoom has to improve — or we need to get better installations out there. It’s certainly not our intention to leak the data on this Zoom,” he added.

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