Hacker News Reader

This is more a stand on principles against governments rather than if the app is actually malicious in nature. People are rightly making a stand that a project of this nature should require at the bare minimum for source code to release concurrently with protection laws. Blame successive governments if individuals aren't overly welcoming to putting their blind faith in promises of a government that has let them down in the past.

Exactly this.

The Aus Gov - especially the current one is massively lacking in trust.

Encryption laws, metadata laws. Scope creep on metadata access (ie local councils, horse racing bodies). Lack of transparent reporting when these laws are in use.

Raids on journalists.

Not to mention their lack of transparency over bushfires, sports grants, angus taylor's family connections with mining / paying $90m? for water to associated company. Ministers failing to declare gifts granted by airlines because they fell into previous parliament and not current one. Climate change vs mining interests. Loading the grid management team so they simply push renewables down the road instead of taking action to get wind/solar take up.

Marking spin vs real substance in every single press conference from all the top federal ministers.

The PM waiting for states to take charge of quarantine measures so he didn't get the blame for bringing those in (and get bad PR) early in the covid-19 crisis before we knew how bad it was. School closures. Ruby Princess.

So after all that they want to trust us with an privacy breaching app because it's the right thing to do?

I wouldn't install a hello-world built by current government even if my life depended on it.

To put it in words they will understand "Nothing to hide, nothing to fear"

You may be right (probably are, as I am from Spain).

But you should not focus on this specific government: the dangers of overstepping are great whatever the color or the chirality or even the deeds of a government.

On the contrary o think we should very much be focusing g on this government: Peter Dutton in particular has pushed repeatedly for increasingly authoritarian measures.

I’m super cautious about handing over data or enabling him at all.

This specific government are the ones releasing the app and telling people to “trust us”.

I know what you're saying, but we _also_ need to focus on this specific government, because they make the situation bad from the get-go, rather than just potentially bad.

Agreed -- trust has to be earned, but definitely hasn't been. Quite the opposite. I thought it was very unfortunate that the Australian Nurses' Association was asked to provide their endorsement of the government BS spin at the launch of the app. Wasn't surprised that the AMA did though. The promotional video is hilarious -- indistinguishable from an episode of "Utopia" -- LOL.

> You can choose to get the virus - but that’s a pretty silly choice IMHO. And if you do, please stay home and don’t give it to anyone else.

I don't think this is unreasonable. Most people on HN are under 65 and thus will only get mild symptoms and likely just be out for a few days. Considering we're all probably working remotely, it is also easy to not infect others. Alternatively, a government overreach can last decades and these typically compound. This is a classic marshmallow now or two later problem.

So a few days to a week of being pretty sick vs potential government overreach? IMO it seems silly not to take the sick days (if we're assuming gov overreach).

> Most people on HN are under 65 and thus will only get mild symptoms and likely just be out for a few days.

This is the most likely case for people how are not vulnerable, but by no means a sure thing. Plenty of people without preexisting conditions have died or had to be hospitalized for days or weeks.

Data is a bit difficult to filter, but as an example 4.5% of deaths in NY are from the 18-44 age group[1]. Presumably a large fraction of those were not vulnerable, or not aware that they were. The fatality rate in that group is somewhere between 0.2% and 0.4%. You are not likely to die, but those are not chances to take without a second thought.

[1]https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-se...

Understand I'm replying not because I think people should necessarily want/try to infect themselves with the virus, but because I'm against spreading misinformation and a misuse of statistics.

Australia is approaching 100 deaths and has several thousand confirmed cases through more widespread testing than new York, doing so at a higher and wider rate than New York who's stats/testing and medical regime show signs of severe failure/ problems.

Australia is yet to record a covid death under 40, and the one we have under 50 was technically a foreigner on a cruise ship.

All evidence from sources I'm familiar with that include widespread testing, good statistics and a healthy population point to a sub 0.2% for healthy young (young defined as sub 40 say, no comorbidities).

Now that being said, what I have seen repeatedly is a misclassification of sedentary young people with worrying lifestyle choices (think overweight/ smokers) as thinking of themselves as healthy with no comorbidities. Especially in some parts of the US, you can't think of yourself as healthy just because you live/look like everyone else.

And obviously, death rates in individual parts of the world will tend to be a function of age distribution, underlying health conditions, medical access, communication and the ability to rest and recuperate.

I personally wouldn't infect myself (the same way I wouldn't ride a motorcycle as my chosen mode of transport), but the relative risks and who the disease targets with mortalities should be better understood, and I'm not supportive of propaganda telling young people they're comparably at risk. They aren't.

I appreciate this. I have not had an easy time finding any data that goes deeper than the 0.2% data point, which clearly doesn't give a full picture because it doesn't dive into the effect of comorbidity. Your sibling post links to data that puts the risk for people under 40 without comorbidity at roughly 1/6 of the 0.2, which is a big difference. Do you have any data, or any sources for your comment about the situation in Australia.

https://www.health.gov.au/news/health-alerts/novel-coronavir...

It's a live updated page, so I don't know what stats will be displayed each day, but I'm relatively confident they will support my claim unless things change drastically.

You will find an infographic with breakdowns of positive diagnosis (known cases) and deaths. Both are helpfully split by age groups and gender.

We have quite a lot of mortality data from different countries around the world at this point so I am a bit disappointed that people are still spreading these unsubstantiated claims. I seem to be posting this link a lot lately, but here are the latest Italian stats on their deceased:

https://www.epicentro.iss.it/en/coronavirus/bollettino/Repor...

Over 23,000 deaths and deaths under 30 have not even passed double digits yet. Only 1.1% of all deaths were people under 50; and that's deaths, not infected.

This is nuts. A 30yo gets sick, infects a 60yo who goes to hospital and lands in ICU.

30yo then gets unrelated disease (chain saw accident. Burst appendix. Slipped in the shower.) Goes to hospital.

Repeat this often enough and suddenly you have a crisis in which there are not enough health care workers and beds, and now all ages are dying equally.

The idea that young people are not affected by this is just braindead stupid. Older people like me are directly affected; younger people indirectly. But we are all in this together.

This was in the context of people choosing to get the virus, where the risk of infecting a 60yo is essentially nil.

At this point, I'd volunteer for infection where I'm locked in a prison cell with a box of Clif bars and some books and am not permitted any human contact until I'm no longer infectious. Am also willing to sign up for periodic re-infection to ensure that I do actually have immunity.

Thank you. I was trying to stress that I believed it was likely that the average HN user could 1) work from home and 2) more easily self isolate than the average person (considering that we're more likely to be "computer people").

I'll admit though, I didn't consider the chances of a chainsaw accident while sick. But you probably shouldn't be using a chainsaw if you're sick.

But we aren’t all in it together. It’s the young loosing jobs, facin a lifetime of higher taxes, moving to a world of mass surveillance and digital dictatorships.

> moving to a world of mass surveillance and digital dictatorships.

that has already happened if you use any website that has google analytics or facebook. Ad for digital dictatorship - is it any different if the dictatorship has a friendly name like google?

I think you're conflating many different issues together: inequality of income, and societal injustice, with the actions needed to return economic activity back to a semblance of normalcy. It's as though you're asking for economic reforms as part of the economic life-line.

You've really lost me with

> You can chose to get the virus

That wasn't your original argument and this does nothing to stop individual people getting the virus.

And the source code is worth nothing. The legal structure is already there to have the app changed without anyone being notified.

If they released an entire buildable set of source that I could use to build and install the app myself, maybe.

But that's about the only time I'd use this.

do you make the same requirement of all software you are using? If not, why would this particular one be differently treated?

Location tracking is indeed a dangerous piece of information. But in the short time that the gov't had to face the issue, the best option is to do this tracking to re-enable the economy. Until proven otherwise, it would be wise to not assume there's already malware. I'm not saying there isn't, but given the probabilities, it's unlikely, while the health and economic benefits are high.

And the source code is going to be released. It's easy (for a professional software engineer) to track down changes to the original code if they released a bad/altered version of the source that doesn't match the released version. And there'd be a track record, and it will be plainly obvious.

I would be much more scared of the unknown apps from dodgy shops that offer their apps for free in exchange for all your contacts, file and camera access.

> why would this particular one be differently treated?

- Because the issuer has vastly more ability to use the app and the data it might collect in ways that impact you.

- Because it's the first app of this kind and scale being issued by the government in Australia.

- Because it's being pushed onto as much of an entire population as possible with great urgency, limiting the time and opportunity for proper precautions to be taken.

- Because the issuer has an objectively _terrible_ track record on technology and privacy related matters.

- Because the ratchet effect means that once granted, privileges are highly unlikely to be ever rolled back.

> I would be much more scared of the unknown apps from dodgy shops

You shouldn't be. No matter how bad an adware mobile game is, the publisher can't put you in jail.

Stop pushing myths. There is no location tracking. You look at the OpenTrace source code or the BlueTrace whitepaper, and see where this is taking place, and let me know. The only way they could location track is if the app data was enriched/correlated with other data, which basically means they can do fuck-all location tracking with this. They only have timestamps, temporary identifiers, mobile device models, transmit power etc. https://github.com/opentrace-community https://bluetrace.io/static/bluetrace_whitepaper-93806365659...

how does running the app stop you from getting the virus?

It doesn’t