Cancel Culture and the Problem of Woke Capitalism – The Atlantic
‘How Capitalism Drives Cancel Culture: Beware splashy corporate gestures when they leave existing power structures intact.’
(tags: cancel-culture cancelling capitalism society)
The inside story of how the UK government failed to develop a contact-tracing app
A classic Tory fuckup. Spoofing, over-promising, a behind-the-scenes desire to collect a database of citizen’s private medical info, and hubris.
(tags: nhsx palantir bluetooth covid-19 uk tories data-privacy nhs)
Ireland donates its contact tracing app to the Linux Foundation
This is awesome. Congrats to NearForm and the HSE for making some great choices here:
Ireland’s Health Service Executive (HSE) announced today that it is donating the code for the COVID Tracker app as Open Source to the not-for-profit Linux Foundation. This will enable jurisdictions worldwide to quickly build and deploy their own contact tracing apps using a wildly successful proven base. The donated app has been named COVID Green. […] The rapid adoption of the COVID Tracker app in Ireland exceeded all expectations. One million people installed it in the first 36 hours, and the app currently has over 1.3 million installations. That figure represents more than 30% of people in Ireland with compatible devices. The code is also being used in the app for Gibraltar and the upcoming apps for Northern Ireland, other jurisdictions in EMEA and multiple US states. NearForm continues to enable public health authorities to get a contact tracing application into production within four weeks of project start. By donating the source code to the new Linux Foundation Public Health (LFPH) project, under the Apache License 2.0, the HSE is playing an active role in helping to fight Covid-19 worldwide. Source code for the COVID Green mobile app is available now on GitHub and soon will be followed by all matching backend code. The Linux Foundation is dedicated to building sustainable ecosystems around open source projects to accelerate technology development and industry adoption. LFPH is launching with a mission to use open source software to help public health authorities (PHAs) around the world combat Covid-19 and future epidemics. One of the roles of LFPH is to serve as a forum for collaboration between PHAs, developers, technology companies and academics to ensure the implementation and dissemination of best practices, including privacy and security.
(tags: hse nearform covid-19 contact-tracing exposure-notification apps mobile open-source linux-foundation lfph)