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The Internet

Vint Cerf on COVID-19's Impact on the Future of Internet (medianama.com) 53

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Vint Cerf on the great many lessons that the coronavirus crises has taught us about infrastructure writ large: More directly associated with COVID-19 is the need for detecting exposure and tracking contacts to reduce the spread of the disease. Mobiles and the Internet appear to have roles to play for at least some tracking and tracing system designs. The application of machine learning to large medical datasets may help identify the ways in which SARS-COV-2 actually works. It seems that we are finding new syndromes triggered by this virus as research progress is made. We don't know enough and we must learn more.

Among the stark lessons we have learned is the fragility of food and medical equipment supply chains, either because of excessive concentration or because transport connections are broken. We are seeing this dramatically in the United States where farmers have been unable to sell to restaurants that are closed or operating at much reduced capacity out of concern for the propagation of the virus. These lessons should teach us to create much more resilient infrastructure in every dimension. We need to refresh national stockpiles of protective equipment, medical devices and vaccines. More generally, we must imagine other potential global catastrophes and put in place plans to mitigate. The time to agree on best practices for emergency response is before the emergency, not during. We must not allow this pandemic or a future one to become our society's Titanic.
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Vint Cerf on COVID-19's Impact on the Future of Internet More

Vint Cerf on COVID-19's Impact on the Future of Internet

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  • No, we don't need contact tracing, violation of privacy and liberty. back to the drawing board you goose stepping authoritarian goons

    • We don't need it, but it would sure make opening up sooner easier to do safely. Otherwise it is the same ol' 1% dead, X% with 10 years of organ damage. While I share concerns about privacy, on the other hand this data is probably already held by the cell phone companies, so it is just a few SQL join statements away and is probably already being done by people who aren't sharing the data in a way useful to us.

      • I think you're being trolled there. To see why, just change your 1% mortality number. What if Covid-19 killed 20% of the people who caught it? Or 70%, like some varieties of Ebola? We were SOOOO lucky this time, but we should be thinking about the next one...

        Y'know, that's the problem with success. Maybe no one will notice.

        How many of us remember the big Ebola outbreak of 2014? Because it was successfully contained, the answer is almost no one. But the mortality was over 30%, killing over 11,000 people. If

    • Re:fallacy of asserting the consequent (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Rick Schumann ( 4662797 ) on Thursday May 14, 2020 @12:08PM (#60060140) Journal
      I don't like you, we don't get along, but that doesn't mean it's impossible to agree with you on some things; I cross the aisle in this case and say 'you are right' in this case. Everything eventually needs to go back to the Real Normal (there is no 'new normal' bullshit), and in fact this is inevitable. People in general are not going to tolerate living like they're in an 80's disaster movie forever, sooner or later they'll revolt.
      We either develop a vaccine or we don't. We either develop immunities or we don't. That's the real reality.

      • and we *may* have a vaccine this time, but in over five decades of trying a human coronavirus vaccine has never been approved, and so the money is on not having one. So I'm against any governor that makes vaccine a criteria for reopening (like the boob running my state) fully.

        Some kind of antibody treatment is slightly more likely, natural immunity in those that don't die the most likely outcome.

        • "Call it evolution in action". We don't have any natural predators for our species, except our own species, and our numbers grow too large. So disease taking some of us out is more-or-less inevitable. I would even go so far as to say 'natural selection' includes our scientific ability to create a vaccine or an effective treatment.

    • I believe you mean that we don't need automated "contact" tracking via smartphones [wikipedia.org], correct?

      Traditional contact tracing [wikipedia.org] will be instrumental in containing future flare ups as we re-open.

      • funny, all the cold and flu pandemics with massive body count in my lifetime of over half a century, and no one was contract tracing around here

    • I can haz meme? Internets for meme? Only meme?

    • I see you are unfamiliar with the Apple/Google contact tracing protocol and haven't read the comments in the stories about it here on Slashdot.

      It's actually pretty trivial to mathematically prove security of the system, to show that the government can gain no non-trivial information. That's fine by showing that the bits they receive are indistinguishable from random bits. Because what they receive IS random bits, it is of course indistinguishable from random bits and there is no information they can glean

      • Okay, so that isn't the weak link, but security is a chain. You only need to find one weak link to break the chain. So even if I accept your premise that this part is perfect (but I always expect bugs), then I can break it elsewhere.

        Easy example involves a target person some government suspects of something. Doesn't matter what the suspicions are, but "they" want to know everyone the target meets. Solution: Periodic exposures of the target to a disease carrier. Doesn't even need to be a real carrier, but ju

        • > who is going to trigger the contact tracing protocol. As a result, the target's encrypted data is decrypted and sent up the chain for contact tracing and the privacy is gone.

          There is no encrypted data that can be decrypted.
          The only thing "sent up the chain" is randomly generated bits.

          The government gets "somebody who tested positive randomly cjoose the number 9473957373â and that's all they get.

          Information about which tokens you have been nearby is computed by you, on your phone. The health depart

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by shanen ( 462549 )

            Do you understand that there have to be identifiable people connected to the system at some point? The number 9473957373 does NOT have Covid-19 or possible exposure to SARS-CoV-2.

            Any identifier, no matter how disguised, represents a person, and unless that person can be found the system accomplishes nothing. Now the official point of the system is to make it possible to find that person to see whether or not the person had or has been exposed to a disease. But that is NOT the motivation of the abuser of the

            • Go back and read where I explained how it works.
              You have a fundamentally mistaken idea of the overall system.
              Maybe because you're guessing, making up a system in your head, instead of reading, I don't know.

              > Do you understand that there have to be identifiable people connected to the system at some point?

              No, no there does not. The only identity that matters to me, the user of the system, is me. I already know my identity.

              > Any identifier, no matter how disguised, represents a person, and unless that

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by shanen ( 462549 )

                Maybe you could ask more nicely? No thanks to you, but I did accidentally run across a mathematician's detailed explanation of the latest version. Actually, I'm not sure it was the latest, but certainly much better than the first versions that I'd read about. I'd even describe it as theoretically elegant. It matches your description because the onus is put back on the person who might have been exposed.

                It sort of worries me, but I could immediately see at least four new ways to attack the more sophisticated

    • We've been doing it for decades with epidemic diseases.

    • I do wonder sometimes about the noise about the abhorrence for a healthcare tracking app whilst the actual government just passed a bill to record everybody's internet usage and what they looked at for the rest of their lives. Am I missing something here?

  • Cost (surveillance state) versus benefit (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    the need for detecting exposure and tracking contacts to reduce the spread of the disease.

    Anyone care to elaborate -specifically- on how this "reduces the spread of the disease", with actual metrics?

    • I'm more concerned about the return of Leprosy stigma [wikipedia.org], Covid19 style.

      • howso, seems the percent contagious is similar.

        Anyway, after most the populace gets covid19 it won't matter any more. Most people are asymptomatic and the real percentage of already infected people is many times the known cases as testing is proving

        • https://www.isciii.es/Noticias... [isciii.es] Spain has some prelim data on that. Looks like they're sitting at around 5% It's good we can start putting that data together but I'm not sure that it indicates that the 'hidden immune' is a nontrivial proportion of people, unfortunately.

          • I was only speaking in USA, for example the 25 percent in New York City and 32 percent in Chelsea Mass.

            • Oh I hadn't heard they had good data yet, do you have any links to the studies? I'd be excited to see which serological test they landed on out there, there are a lot of different ones on the market right now.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by PPH ( 736903 )

          the real percentage of already infected people is many times the known cases as testing is proving

          If you can get that testing done. Our state is still resisting doing proper (statistically valid population sampling) testing. Because doing so might undermine their claims of the virulence of the disease and its use to cause politically useful panic. If we can claim an infection rate of 2-3%, then Covid-19's fatality rate is high and so is R0. If 30% of the population has it, then most are asymptomatic, the fatality rate is low and so is R0. A large part of the population is already infected and opening up

          • What state is that? You can probably extrapolate from the 2 hardest hit states. California had 5% infection mid April and about 12% as of last week (before reopening started). NY had about 20% and 30% for the same time period. They got to that 30% by having more infections and deaths per capital than anywhere else in the country. So your state isn't anywhere near that unless there are trucks full of dead bodies like NY has.

            • Re: (Score:3)

              by PPH ( 736903 )

              Or the death rate has been exaggerated for political effect.

              NY had about 20% and 30% for the same time period.

              Unofficially. And when those numbers came out, the politicians shrieked. Because their official numbers [covid19stats.global] are a tenth of that, putting their published fatality rate at 10x what it actually is.

          • Oregon is about to test 100k for antibodies, from all communities, to determine our actual rate.

            But we put doctors is charge, instead of conspiracy theorists.

        • I'm at least 90% sure I for one already had the damned thing back in late February, didn't know what it was, got over it in 10 days just staying at home, and took 6 weeks to get to feeling back to fully 100% again. I would imagine my experience, if I'm right about having had it, is any sort of outlier. I imagine the asymptomatic people are having their immune systems handle it quietly in the background and stay immune, eventually the virus itself goes away, and many others get mild symptoms, get over it, an
      • For a while anyway, if this shit goes on long enough, it'll come in the form of 'mask shaming', i.e. the public shaming of both people who do wear masks and people who don't wear masks, to the point where there might even be outright violence against individuals.

  • Wrong lessons (Score:5, Informative)

    by argStyopa ( 232550 ) on Thursday May 14, 2020 @11:03AM (#60059880) Journal

    "Among the stark lessons we have learned is the fragility of food and medical equipment supply chains, either because of excessive concentration or because transport connections are broken."

    Well, they're fragile, yes. But those aren't the reasons.
    The reasons are about specialization, cost, and disruption tolerance, and the decisions made along these lines since WW2.

    I've been in logistics for 30 years, and I fight this battle literally every day.

    Like an ecosystem, the longer something is stable, species evolve to better exploit those conditions as optimally as possible. The cost they pay is in tolerance for change and disruption. As long as those conditions persist, these highly specialized entities will outcompete anything in their niche because they don't waste resources that aren't focused on that specialized niche. For example, if they ONLY operate during the day, why have night vision? Probably the best example would be a number of ocean species evolved to tolerate only a very narrow range of temperature, salinity, clarity, chemistry because it's been stable for so long. Then when shit goes sideways, all these delicate species die off and the the 'generalists' pushed to the margins (horseshoe crabs, jellies) because they can't cope vs the expert specialists...suddenly flourish.

    Business is exactly the same. I listened this morning to an NPR paen to the disruptions facing the US pork industry: millions of hogs will have to be euthanized/disposed because the processing plants are optimized around a specific size input animal, and the farmers' stocks backing up (because of a lack of processing capacity due to covid) are growing too large to be processed. Everyone is wringing their hands over how terrible this is.

    This was a DELIBERATE decision by easily hundreds of people in the processing chain, repeatedly, over decades. Not just the processors, but the farmers and their customers (us) They chose to build a just-in-time system because they could then squeeze out every penny of cost. They succeeded (admirably, really - it's an amazingly precise clockwork of systems)...and they all benefited from those choices. Excessive concentration is merely a symptom of a larger issue.
    They chose to build a business based on spinning plates, and now they're complaining that something's jostled their elbow.

    Rainy days come. If you didn't plan for it, then Darwin's decree is adapt or die. That's how evolution proceeds - those that fail to plan die off.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kackle ( 910159 )
      I was going to say the same thing (albeit in a condensed way).

      "These lessons should teach us to create much more resilient infrastructure in every dimension."

      It won't happen, long term. Why not? Money. Even removing "greed" up front won't help because someone else will do it cheaper and hence everyone will migrate to that/buy from them instead.
    • How can I vote you up when (a) I don't have any points, and (b) you're already maxed out at 5?

      That's the thing. There's always SOMETHING wrong somewhere if you just look; it's never ABSOLUTELY right. We continually make mountains out of molehills to have something to talk / complain / worry about.

      The 24 hour news cycle (how can it be a cycle when it's always ON? That's more like a broken switch) helps to push this because -- can you just imagine: "Urgent Alert! Today, nothing of any actual importa

      • If people can't learn for themselves to turn off push notifications and newsvertainment there might not be anything that can be done for them. Once they fall in, they are simply lost. Like zombies. They used to be human. It is sad. So sad. But they're not coming back.

    • Re:Wrong lessons (Score:4, Insightful)

      by alvinrod ( 889928 ) on Thursday May 14, 2020 @12:07PM (#60060132)

      They chose to build a business based on spinning plates, and now they're complaining that something's jostled their elbow.

      While I agree with everything you'd said, I think this oversteps your own point. They really had no choice because the companies that didn't specialize were either bought out or run out of business by the companies that did. The only difference between humans and other lifeforms in nature is that we're conscious of this entire process and can try to avoid getting pushed to the margins, but we're not magically exempt. Sure you can say that all of this was a DELIBERATE decision, but it was a DELIBERATE decision to remain in business because the alternative was to slowly wait to get driven under or to hope for something to disrupt the market enough to kill off the specialists.

      • And any attempt to solve these issues with regulation would be framed as hobbling the industry and giving an unfair advantage to foreign competitors.

        Thank you argStyopa [slashdot.org] and alvinrod [slashdot.org] for making me a better informed person.

    • And a much bigger part of this is the fact that all we have now are HUGE meat processing plants because the government forces processing plants to pay for a full time FDA employee to be on site to oversee things and gum up the works, which small processing plants can't afford. So we have 4 main companies doing almost all of the processing. This is the supply chain version of the potato famine due to focusing on only 4 varieties of potato. The solution is simple: PRIME Act (H.R. 3187), which says a meat pr
    • Here in Finland, I'm particularly worried about all the subsidies to entrepreneurs; it's like supporting the horse-whip industry or concentration camp guards while the world around them has changed. But we've had the same story of capitalism in a welfare state for decades already: profits are private, but losses are shared among taxpayers. Of course, now is a bad time to discuss whether this is a generally good idea, because we're in a crisis and we just need to give the poor businessmen all the help we ca
  • So much FAIL in this quote.

    • I've never understood why so many technically-educated people can understand computer networks, even invent networking technologies, but can't understand supply chains deeper than whatever nonsense they they heard from a professional script-reader on their teevee.

      Farmers couldn't sell their product because food distribution is JIT and things hadn't been packaged properly to serve the shift in demand. Retailers made no provision to attempt to acquire and sell different products to customers in response to th

  • Seriously: all these people offering their 'opinions', educated or not, are not helping, they are causing greater and greater harm, they are contributing to dragging people's hopes and moods down into the muck; they need to shut the fuck up.
    Anyone spouting bullshit about 'The New Normal' should be taken out and shot for the same reason we arrest people for shouting "FIRE!!!" in a crowded theatre; you're panicking the cattle, knock it off!

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by DarkOx ( 621550 )

      The better thing to do is take a lesson from all this. Fancy degrees, having been right about something a decade ago and gotten rich off it, holding some elected office, etc - does not translate all that well to being able to predict the future.

      For the most post people win life's little lottery by spotting something new first. I don't care if you are theoretical physicist, currency trader, medical doctor, or Ron Popeil. Mostly if you are anyone of import you got that way by spotting something unusual, chall

    • "Anyone spouting bullshit about 'The New Normal'"

      Also, anyone spouting bullshit about 'The Real Normal'.

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