D&D and the rising pandemic

[Enevhar Aldarion]

And apparently this is an issue in Canada, as well as the US:

Coronavirus closes meat plants in Canada and the United States as world's largest pork producer warns of shortages

Here are some facilities that have shut or reduced production

business.financialpost.com

 

[Zardnaar]

You guys are getting where we were 2-3 weeks ago on a different forum.

Pre Covid

The polite way of saying it by the time summer rolls around more than a few Americans are gonna get to play the dodge the lingering Covid as they get to wait in breadlines and soup kitchens.

I read history, did some economic papers. Things are falling apart faster than 1929.

Great Depression - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

Best case scenario somewhere between the above and GFC of 2008. Here the government converted a stadium to a food bank. That was a week ago.

They've point blank told us things are gonna get worse for an indeterminate amount if time.

Hell when this started our PM did a US style presidential speech. That's practically unheard of here. She had a picture of Michael Savage behind her, he's the WW2 NZ equivalent of FDR. Message sent.

They're trying to avoid panic but they've been invoking the war years both directly and indirectly.

It's not going to be can people I know play D&D it's more going to be like do people I know have enough to eat. Or am I going to have enough to eat.

She spent most of yesterdays daily update tamping down questions of business as usual post lockdown.

 

[Umbran]

But at the end of the day, anyone can be filmed in public without giving consent

The "in public" is relevant.

An element of this is the expectation of privacy. I have an expectation of privacy in my own home, for example, but I have no such expectation when out in the town square. Unless your application can selectively disregard contacts in places where there's an expectation of privacy, it has a problem. And the device has no real way of knowing when that expectation exists.

This is why the Google and Apple approach has to be voluntary - you have to opt in to the violation of your privacy. If it becomes a requirement, it is an abridgement of rights. This makes the inclusion of features for this on the OS level... an issue that will need close examination. Users have to be able to easily turn it off.

 

[NotAYakk]

There are a pile of precident that, given a compelling government interest, rights (and especially derived rights) can be infringed to the least they can to fullfill the interest.

So tracking and contacting everyone exposed to the coronovirus seems like the kind of thing that would survive scrutiny, even if not voluntary.

 

[Umbran]

So tracking and contacting everyone exposed to the coronovirus seems like the kind of thing that would survive scrutiny, even if not voluntary.

And if it were limited to people who had contact, that'd be fine. That is normal contact tracing.

But we are potentially talking about tracking everyone, at all times and then using that data for contact tracing after the fact. That there's nothing fundamentally keeping those who hold the data from tracking on any other metadata must also be considered in its Constitutionality.

 

[Deset Gled]

An element of this is the expectation of privacy. I have an expectation of privacy in my own home, for example, but I have no such expectation when out in the town square. Unless your application can selectively disregard contacts in places where there's an expectation of privacy, it has a problem. And the device has no real way of knowing when that expectation exists.

There are lots of ways to work around this.

First, I probably should have been more clear, I'm not exclusively talking about this being a cell phone app. A simple camera network reading license plates on roads, highways, and public parking areas would be just as useful for many applications. And in the US most of these cameras already exist; they're just not being used for this purpose. Add in information from security check points in public buildings like airports and hospitals, and you've got even more data. Add in sci-fi level facial recognition and you've got more data than you could process.

On a phone app, though, there are still a lot of work-arounds with varying levels of grayness as to their morality and/or legality. The most obvious one being that software simply could selectively disregard information in places where there's an expectation of privacy. It's possible the phone may not know if something is public or private in certain inbetween areas, but it will also know when it's definitely in public areas such as the street or public buildings.

Alternately, just lower the resolution of the data. If your location voxel is larger than your house, it's implicit that it's not taking private data from inside your house. But you'll still be able to get plenty of useful tracking data even at low resolution.

Another option: don't continuously track a phone. Just place "checkpoints" at multiple places in public areas. Any time a phone is near the checkpoint, it connects and checks in. Since the checkpoints are only in public areas, there is no expectation of privacy. Still delivers plenty of data. This one also wouldn't require a phone. Conspiracy theorists have been talking about systems like this built into ID cards and credit cards and even dollar bills for decades. With RFID tags being reality instead of sci-fi, this is easier than ever.

The thesis of all this, which is moving farther and farther away from COVID19 as I type more examples, is that there are ways that the government could get large amounts of tracking data. The legal and technological barriers exist, but are only minor obstacles if someone had the proper motivation.

 

[Zardnaar]

We're looking at cellphone tracking in my SPPS.

No constitution but we have constitutional law. Constitutional head of state QE2.

Next time I sing God Save the Queen I think I'll do it with a bit more gusto. Wish succession laws could skip a generation. Nothing's perfect.

Things move a bit faster.

Mass shooting. Semi automatics banned 3 days later.

Covid community transmission, lockdown 2 days later.

Stimulus package about 3 days after that.

Friends small business got 3 months wage subsidy already of 30k.

We trust our government more without one than the US does with one. Health department and police are basically running the country the polititians just sign the paperwork and checks.

Local government set up the foodbank in stadium, goverments signed the check.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

This will surprise nobody familiar with the drugs being tested or who have listened to the experts who were:

Small Chloroquine Study Halted Over Risk of Fatal Heart Complications

A small study in Brazil was halted early for safety reasons after coronavirus patients taking a higher dose of chloroquine developed irregular heart rates that increased their risk of a potentially fatal heart arrhythmia.Chloroquine is closely related to the more widely used drug hydroxychloroquine.

www.yahoo.com

 

[Zardnaar]

This will surprise nobody familiar with the drugs being tested or tp who have listened to the experts who were:

Small Chloroquine Study Halted Over Risk of Fatal Heart Complications

A small study in Brazil was halted early for safety reasons after coronavirus patients taking a higher dose of chloroquine developed irregular heart rates that increased their risk of a potentially fatal heart arrhythmia.Chloroquine is closely related to the more widely used drug hydroxychloroquine.

www.yahoo.com

Who would have thunk it?

Anyone got a meme of the statue of liberty crying with a facemask?

 

[Hussar]

There are lots of ways to work around this.

First, I probably should have been more clear, I'm not exclusively talking about this being a cell phone app. A simple camera network reading license plates on roads, highways, and public parking areas would be just as useful for many applications. And in the US most of these cameras already exist; they're just not being used for this purpose. Add in information from security check points in public buildings like airports and hospitals, and you've got even more data. Add in sci-fi level facial recognition and you've got more data than you could process.

/snip
Another option: don't continuously track a phone. Just place "checkpoints" at multiple places in public areas. Any time a phone is near the checkpoint, it connects and checks in. Since the checkpoints are only in public areas, there is no expectation of privacy. Still delivers plenty of data. This one also wouldn't require a phone. Conspiracy theorists have been talking about systems like this built into ID cards and credit cards and even dollar bills for decades. With RFID tags being reality instead of sci-fi, this is easier than ever.

The thesis of all this, which is moving farther and farther away from COVID19 as I type more examples, is that there are ways that the government could get large amounts of tracking data. The legal and technological barriers exist, but are only minor obstacles if someone had the proper motivation.

The technological barriers might only be minor, but, the legal barriers are a LOT stronger than I think you appreciate. Number one, most of those roads are not federal. They are state, or even county (provincial or county in Canada), meaning that the federal government has zero rights to monitor traffic cameras (for example) to track individuals. While I'm sure that traffic camera data is used for some purposes, I really, really doubt it would survive any challenge if you were actually tracking individuals. Remember, you cannot even require travel papers within the country. Police have zero right to ask you for identification without probably cause. Police, while they might be able to randomly check your license plate, would have a serious issue if they were surveilling you without a warrant or probable cause for any length of time.

The chance for abuse of this information is massive. The security you'd need around this information is incredible and you'd have to trust that, for effectively perpetuity, people in government positions would be free of any sort of improperiety. There are all sorts of business and governmental agencies that would pay all the monies for access to this information.