COVID doesn't care for surveillance; it's just that surveillance giants are exploiting COVID for their own agenda

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New COVID-19 strain UK: What is the new coronavirus variant?

Summary: Media hype about a solution to COVID-19 being foreseeable and even imminent is really just hype and erosion of civil liberties has been put 'on steroids'; we need to assess the need for a balance instead of blindly accepting every proposal, including futile ones such as contact-tracing (not even remotely effective at this stage)

THOSE who keep abreast of key issues will already know that the virus is mutating (the virus everyone keeps talking about is a moving target) and, as we've noted in the previous post, vaccination will be too scarcely adopted -- if it's truly effective at all -- to eradicate the virus and all its mutations. To quote a headline from yesterday (for impeding Daily Links), 'Fauci Describes Vaccine Rollout as “Below Where We Want to Be” Right Now' and it's barely surprising. Russia has had the same problem. Confidence is generally low and we're not trying to induce/reinforce defeatism, we're just pointing out what's going on.

As we also pointed out earlier today, human rights are at growing/great risk because governments -- not just large businesses and institutions like the EPO -- are looking to exploit these things. Benoît Battistelli used terror attacks to justify his attacks on staff and António Campinos uses COVID-19 to justify breaking the law.

Back in October, Marco Fioretti wrote 'Contact Tracing remains irrelevant' and we'd like to quote what he said back then (we found his article yesterday; he's a Free software advocate): "I have just come across the last of a long series of article on why Immuni [Italian app] has become half problematic, all irrelevant

"As of last week, says that article, about 18% of italian smartphone owners 14 and 75 years old had installed Immuni. Installing however, does not mean “actually using as intended”, and the fact that there has been, until now, very little transparency on this makes it harder to convince more people.

"The real problem that magnifies all the others, however, is another. Installing Immuni and being 100% committed to use it as intended does not mean at all that you will be able to do so.

"All is certain for Immuni users is that if they get a notification that they got too close to someone then tested positiv, they should immediately “contact their family doctor, and voluntarily self-quarantine”.

"Immuni users who are tested positive, instead, should immediately get, from a public healthcare servant, the authorization codes necessary to transmit the anonymous notifications mentioned above."

Towards the end Fioretti concludes: "All in all, Immuni seems (and it is a shame) another example of the Soviet-like solutionism of yore that I reported two days ago."

The awful, awful Linux Foundation has been promoting this horrible thing, which we've compared to "Stalin's Dream" (to quote Richard Stallman). To make matters worse, the awful Linux Foundation lets Microsoft control the code in its proprietary and monopolistic trap. This isn't a solution to COVID-19 (or whatever comes after it) but a solution to the 'problem' of some people being difficult to spy on. Already, in 2020, many EPO staff members (examiners for the most part) have been forced to install malware on their home PCs, monitoring their every action and movement. Many are not even aware of what the secret code does. ⬆