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Kontaktverfolgung in Island

„Nearly 40% of Icelanders are using a covid app – and it hasn’t helped much – The country has the highest penetration of any automated contact tracing app in the world, but one senior figure says it ‚wasn’t a game changer.‘ – The country had already been testing some people at high risk of catching the virus, thanks to DeCode genetics, a local biotech company. Once the arrival of the disease was confirmed, it began rapidly rolling out public testing on a much wider scale. The government, meanwhile, quickly built a team of contact tracers to interview those with a positive diagnosis and track down people they’d been in contact with. … And it gained traction quickly: according to MIT Technology Review’s Covid Tracing Tracker, it has the largest penetration rate of all contact trackers in the world, having been downloaded by 38% of Iceland’s population of 364,000. – But despite this early deployment and widespread use, one senior figure in the country’s covid-19 response says the real impact of Rakning C-19 has been small, compared with manual tracing techniques like phone calls. – ‚The technology is more or less … I wouldn’t say useless,‘ says Gestur Pálmason, a detective inspector with the Icelandic Police Service who is overseeing contact tracing efforts. ‚But it’s the integration of the two that gives you results. I would say it [Rakning] has proven useful in a few cases, but it wasn’t a game changer for us.‘ – That perspective should be cautionary for other countries currently working on their own automated contact tracing services. Many other governments are still in the early stages with their own standalone apps, or are building services based on the as-yet-unreleased technology being developed by Apple and Google.“

MIT Technology Review

Fakenews und die Pandemie

„Diese Feindbilder einen die Corona-Querfront – Auf den ‚Hygiene-Demos‘ tummeln sich Rechts- und Linksradikale, Autonome und Antisemiten. Der Kitt dieser Allianz sind Verschwörungsmythen, die ihren Anfang im Netz nehmen. – Unter normalen Umständen würde ein Großteil der Menschen, die derzeit gemeinsam auf die Straße gehen, wohl eher gegen- als miteinander demonstrieren. Rechtsextreme marschieren neben Linksextremen, Antisemiten verbrüderen sich mit Autonomen, und neben radikalen Wirrköpfen stehen alleinerziehende Mütter, gerade arbeitslos geworden und voller berechtigter Sorge um sich und ihre Kinder. … Das Coronavirus beschwört Ängste herauf, die zu ungewöhnlichen Allianzen führen. Doch trotz aller politischen Diversität teilen die Demonstranten Gemeinsamkeiten. Viele haben im Netz von den Protesten erfahren. Sie wurden durch Youtube-Videos mobilisiert, tauschen sich in Facebook-Gruppen aus oder organisieren ihren Widerstand über den Messenger Telegram.“

SZ

Websites sind immer ähnlicher

„Yes, websites really are starting to look more similar – Over the past few years, articles and blog posts have started to ask some version of the same question: ‚Why are all websites starting to look the same?‘ … We decided to investigate the claim to see if there were any truth to the notion that websites are starting to look the same and, if so, explore why this has been happening. So we ran a series of data mining studies that scrutinized nearly 200,000 images across 10,000 websites. … You might think that these sites are simply copying each other’s code, but code similarity has actually significantly decreased over time. However, the use of software libraries has increased a lot. … This outsize power is part a larger story of consolidation in the tech industry – one that certainly could be a cause for concern. We believe aesthetic consolidation should be critically examined as well.“

The Conversation

Apple und die Cloud-Infrastruktur

„Some of the world’s best cloud talent is assembling in an unlikely place: Apple – Apple has for years been considered a bit of a backwater in the tech infrastructure community, far behind companies like AWS, Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Netflix. … As the smartphone and personal computer markets mature, Apple has turned to services for much of its revenue growth over the past few years. Now it appears to be getting serious about running more of the behind-the-scenes technology that powers those services.“

Protocol

Amazon: Kendra für die Wirtschaft

Amazon launches cognitive search service Kendra in general availability – Amazon today launched Kendra in general availability, an AI and machine learning-powered service for enterprise search. It debuted in preview last December during Amazon Web Services (AWS) re:Invent 2019 in Las Vegas, and it’s now available to all AWS customers.“

VentureBeat