Linked List: April 10, 2020

Friday, 10 April 2020

How the Rolling Stones Made Tequila a Hit With the Tequila Sunrise ★

Ted Genoways, writing for The Daily Beast:

Jagger took a sip — and instantly loved it. He ordered a round for the rest of the band. “They started sucking them up,” Lozoff remembered. One round became another and then another and another. The anxiety about returning to the Bay Area seemed to melt away as the band partied until the actual sunrise. Before leaving, Jagger had the Stones’ tour manager collect the recipe for the drink and add a requirement to the band’s official rider: two bottles of José Cuervo, a gallon of orange juice and a bottle of grenadine, all delivered to the dressing room before each show. By the time the band reached San Diego, a letter sent to promoters warned, “It would be very strange to see Keith Richards in top form without the company of a good tequila.”

Matthew Panzarino on Google and Apple’s Joint COVID-19 Contact Tracing Project ★

Matthew Panzarino, writing at TechCrunch:

The project was started two weeks ago by engineers from both companies. One of the reasons the companies got involved is that there is poor interoperability between systems on various manufacturer’s devices. With contact tracing, every time you fragment a system like this between multiple apps, you limit its effectiveness greatly. You need a massive amount of adoption in one system for contact tracing to work well.

At the same time, you run into technical problems like Bluetooth power suck, privacy concerns about centralized data collection and the sheer effort it takes to get enough people to install the apps to be effective.

Great overview of how the project will work, and how it preserves privacy.

Draft Technical Documentation for Apple and Google’s Privacy-Preserving Contact Tracing ★

Bluetooth, cryptography, and framework API documentation.

Apple and Google Partner on COVID-19 Contact Tracing Technology ★

Joint announcement from Google and Apple:

Since COVID-19 can be transmitted through close proximity to affected individuals, public health organizations have identified contact tracing as a valuable tool to help contain its spread. A number of leading public health authorities, universities, and NGOs around the world have been doing important work to develop opt-in contact tracing technology. To further this cause, Apple and Google will be launching a comprehensive solution that includes application programming interfaces (APIs) and operating system-level technology to assist in enabling contact tracing. Given the urgent need, the plan is to implement this solution in two steps while maintaining strong protections around user privacy.

First, in May, both companies will release APIs that enable interoperability between Android and iOS devices using apps from public health authorities. These official apps will be available for users to download via their respective app stores.

Second, in the coming months, Apple and Google will work to enable a broader Bluetooth-based contact tracing platform by building this functionality into the underlying platforms. This is a more robust solution than an API and would allow more individuals to participate, if they choose to opt in, as well as enable interaction with a broader ecosystem of apps and government health authorities. Privacy, transparency, and consent are of utmost importance in this effort, and we look forward to building this functionality in consultation with interested stakeholders. We will openly publish information about our work for others to analyze.

Strange times make for strange bedfellows, but this is clearly a problem both companies are fully aligned to help solve.

‘How the U.S. Ended Up With Nurses Wearing Garbage Bags’ ★

Susan B. Glasser, reporting for The New Yorker:

What they did not foresee was that the federal government might never come to the rescue. They did not realize this was a government failure by design — not a problem to be fixed but a policy choice by President Trump that either would not or could not be undone. “No one can believe it. That’s the No. 1 problem with the whole situation: the facts are known, but they are inconceivable,” Ries told me. “So we are just in denial.”

Independent reporting has corroborated what Ries and other volunteers saw for themselves: “a fragmented procurement system now descending into chaos,” as the Associated Press put it. The news agency found that not a single shipment of medical-grade N95 masks arrived at U.S. ports during the month of March. The federal government was not only disorganized; it was absent. Federal agencies waited until mid-March to begin placing bulk orders for the urgently needed supplies, the A.P. found. The first large U.S. government order to the big U.S. producer 3M, for a hundred and seventy-three million dollars’ worth of N95 masks, was not placed until March 21st — the same day that Ries got his first phone call about the Kushner effort. The order, according to the A.P., did not even require the supplies to be delivered until the end of April, far too late to help with the thousands of cases already overwhelming hospitals.

Pixelmator Photo 1.2 ★

Pixelmator blog:

The latest major update — months in the making — brings Magic Keyboard, trackpad, and mouse support, Split View support, the machine-learning powered ML Match Colors, and more. Let’s take a closer look.

The machine-learning-based color matching is fascinating. More here, on their What’s New page. Pixelmator Photo exemplifies what a great iPad app should be.

There Is No Plan to Return to Normalcy in 2020 ★

Ezra Klein, writing at Vox:

Over the past few days, I’ve been reading the major plans for what comes after social distancing. You can read them, too. There’s one from the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, the left-leaning Center for American Progress, Harvard University’s Safra Center for Ethics, and Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Romer.

I thought, perhaps naively, that reading them would be a comfort — at least then I’d be able to imagine the path back to normal. But it wasn’t. In different ways, all these plans say the same thing: Even if you can imagine the herculean political, social, and economic changes necessary to manage our way through this crisis effectively, there is no normal for the foreseeable future. Until there’s a vaccine, the US either needs economically ruinous levels of social distancing, a digital surveillance state of shocking size and scope, or a mass testing apparatus of even more shocking size and intrusiveness.

Brutal, but we need to look this square in the eye. A lot of this just seems politically unviable in the U.S. Especially so with a president who — despite spending over an hour on TV every single evening — has not spoken in even vague terms about any actionable plan whatsoever.

Any feasible plan starts with massive testing, completely subsidized by the government. And yet just yesterday the president claimed we don’t need mass testing. The one thing that everyone who knows what they’re talking about agrees on is that we need mass testing — and the president is arguing we don’t need it.