Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
UK's Contact Tracing App Will Reportedly Use Apple/Google Solution After All
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
my bad, will make the edit in my post. I hadn't checked recently what they ended up doing
it also seems that Immuni pledges to delete all data by end of this year so props to thatNHSX, or whoever was in charge of this farce, claimed that they had found a way around the need for the app the be open in the foreground in order for it to work. This would suggest that, if they were not lying in order to buy themselves more time to actually find such a work-around, they were relying on a bug in iOS or some other kind of hack.
This would be a stupid thing to rely upon, as it would be unintended behaviour as far as Apple would be concerned, and therefore could not be considered to be reliable, and also could very likely be patched at any time (perhaps this is what actually happened, it'd be interesting to know).
Does anyone know who the development contractor(s) were behind this? Or was it just in-house at the suddenly well-known NHSX?
I haven't heard anything about that — got a link? My understanding is that nothing has changed other than the UK's understanding that they couldn't pull it off and relented their aversion to a third-party solution.
Wonder how much time and money has been wasted on these shenanigans. Someone needs to be held accountable.
Don’t worry, as usual the US is working hard to do an even worse job. They can’t even agree contact tracing is a good thing, let alone put together a coherent response complete with an app. Hopefully a major non-profit will launch a decent app soon that can get a decent adoption rate.
It's funny how hard the government in Australia was pushing their stupid app (which never worked properly on iPhones anyway). Now there's been complete silence from them about it and they haven't reported a single contact initiated using the database. It's also not been reported how much they spent on it, but given government incompetence I'm guessing millions.
It's government so there's no such thing as accountability!
Last edited:
If you've ever worked in IT in Britain you'll know how bloody minded the attitudes can be, so I imagine they only did this as the very last resort.
If the NHSX does go with the Apple/Google API, they can't change anything in regards to data, how it's transmitted or where it's stored. All they can do is create an interface for submission and reception of secured data within the confines of the API.
Hope you're right.. As much as people don't have faith that the gov't can do anything right, I have full faith that the gov't can hack something together to take advantage of it
Why are we forever to be governed by absolute morons and sheisters in the UK?
NHSX? What's the X for?
Yup, our government has royally screwed up. My partner is a doctor at A&E and although we haven't had many cases down in Norfolk, the PPE support was poor from the start. Plus testing being available WAY too late to be useful. She's an Indian national and deserves citizenship after the major screw ups our government has done, but I ain't holding my breath.
Confusing instructions on what you can and can't do during lockdown since they started easing has been very poor, and they are opening shops way too early in my opinion. The amount of idiots I saw on Monday queuing outside primark.... This coupled with the protests are going to cause another peak for sure.
It isn’t a surprise to me either, its Baroness Dildo Harding of TalkTalk hacking fame who is running the Track & Trace programm.
From my understanding of how the API works, the third-party app has no hooks into the secure enclave that hashes the local data, it just gets the hashed output. I would be surprised if they would be able to hack it — as it would need to hack the secure enclave and governments haven't been too successful in that regard. The Android side though, I don't know how it works there. Not throwing shade, just don't want to assume when I don't know, though I'd imaging that if both companies are partnering together, they must have come up with a solution.Hope you're right.. As much as people don't have faith that the gov't can do anything right, I have full faith that the gov't can hack something together to take advantage of it
NHSX is the NHS's technology and innovation unit, or something like that:
Home
NHS Transformation Directorate - transformation to improve health and care for everyone
www.nhsx.nhs.uk
I'd never heard of it before the coronavirus news blast, but my guess is that the X stands for 'dynamic'.
It does seem to be becoming more and more apparent that the government has handled this poorly. Here in Essex there seems to have been some kind of collective decision that we're all finished with any lockdown/social distancing measures, as with the good weather the parks have recently been busy throughout the days and well into the nights. The government's muddled guidelines on what's now permitted have surely contributed to this.
NHSX is the NHS's technology and innovation unit, or something like that:
Home
NHS Transformation Directorate - transformation to improve health and care for everyone
I'd never heard of it before the coronavirus news blast, but my guess is that the X stands for 'dynamic'.
It does seem to be becoming more and more apparent that the government has handled this poorly. Here in Essex there seems to have been some kind of collective decision that we're all finished with any lockdown/social distancing measures, as with the good weather the parks have recently been busy throughout the days and well into the nights. The government's muddled guidelines on what's now permitted have surely contributed to this.
Slight difference in nuance but the NHSX is the government's unit for creating 'best-practices' for the NHS, in theory it doesn't have a direct tie to the NHS it self and should be understood and treated more as a government branch on dealing with modernising the NHS. Was created in 2019 so still pretty new
It's a bit of a mess really...
According to https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/en...ITgz4rYRs_hk2WivEOiMADM68s0mU3I1XkUbQfdjifUSm
NHS X subsequently hedged its bets in early May by awarding a £4m contract to Zuhlke, a Swiss firm, to explore a decentralised model. The Department of Health confirmed to the Bureau that Zuhlke would now support the live service “once the NHS Covid-19 app is ready to be launched”.
"The agency had already awarded nearly £2m to Pivotal, a subsidiary of VMWare, to develop the original centralised data version of the app. According to insiders a large part of the work Pivotal had been doing was recently transferred to another company commissioned by NHS X. Asked about this transfer, a spokesman from VMWare said only: “We continue to work closely with NHS X to build the app.”
one of democracy's flaws is that everyone gets a vote
Apparently the google-apple app can’t process thrbsiactabce of two devices well enough. Be interested to hear apple’s take on that.
If I had understood correctly - the Apple/Google API stores the bluetooth connection data between phones and manages the alerting between users - but presumably the logic around converting the signal data to distance calculation is managed by the apps that countries create? and so the statement that the Apple app (calling it an app was an absolute inaccuracy by the Health sec) doesn't calculate the distance well enough would seem to be nonsense (unless I am misunderstanding the way the API works???)?
Of course... no one would have installed it otherwise making it completely useless...
The WHO has proven completely incapabale of handling the pandemic so far... reactive instead of proactive in first place, political, slow and incompetent as when looking at their tweets.
Not just the US... when I heard that in Europe every country is doing their own app I was reminded of how well the concept of the EU works... It's ridicolous that in an united Europe every country is developing their own app... In fact you would need to install the app of every country... which brings me to the real issue... it would have been the job of the WHO to coordinate the whole thing so we have one app on the planet. That would have worked... A federated plattform; every country can setup their ministry of health who can delegate further or provide their own national API to laboratories (as an example). It's not like this concept doesn exist in the IT since decades...
The WHO has proven completely incapabale of handling the pandemic so far... reactive instead of proactive in first place, political, slow and incompetent as when looking at their tweets.
Most likely. But this pandemic is good preparation for the next one which I'm afraid most of us here will experience.
Yes it is. But as a matter of fact no country can claim that they handled the pandemic professionally. Some countries where even stupid enough (yes, stupid is absolutely the right term) to outsource their mild Corona cases from hospitals to care homes (where all there elderly risk patients are)... Even a 100% failure on developing that app would not come close to the incompetence described above.
It is predictable that the government couldn't do the software but whoever makes the app I'm not downloading it.
They probably won't be any more successful developing a vaccine. They've got to try but I think they have given the public expectations which are too high.
They probably won't be any more successful developing a vaccine. They've got to try but I think they have given the public expectations which are too high.
Last edited: