Daily Archives: March 18, 2020

Private By Design: Free and Private Voice Assistants

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Science fiction has whetted our imagination for helpful voice assistants. Whether it’s JARVIS from Iron Man, KITT from Knight Rider, or Computer from Star Trek, many of us harbor a desire for a voice assistant to manage the minutiae of our daily lives. Speech recognition and voice technologies have advanced rapidly in recent years, particularly with the adoption of Siri, Alexa, and Google Home.

However, many in the maker community are concerned — rightly — about the privacy implications of using commercial solutions. Just how much data do you give away every time you speak with a proprietary voice assistant? Just what are they storing in the cloud? What free, private, and open source options are available? Is it possible to have a voice stack that doesn’t share data across the internet?

Yes, it is. In this article, I’ll walk you through the options.

WHAT’S IN A VOICE STACK?

Some voice assistants offer a whole stack of software, but you may prefer to pick and choose which layers to use.

» WAKE WORD SPOTTER — This layer is constantly listening until it hears the wake word or hot word, at which point it will activate the speech-to-text layer. “Alexa,” “Jarvis,” and “OK Google” are wake words you may know.

» SPEECH TO TEXT (STT) — Also called automatic speech recognition (ASR). Once activated by the wake word, the job of the STT layer is just that: to recognize what you’re saying and turn it into written form. Your spoken phrase is called an utterance.

» INTENT PARSER — Also called natural language processing (NLP) or natural language understanding (NLU). The job of this layer is to take the text from STT and determine what action you would like to take. It often does this by recognizing entities — such as a time, date, or object — in the utterance.

» SKILL — Once the intent parser has determined what you’d like to do, an application or handler is triggered. This is usually called a skill or application. The computer may also create a reply in human-readable language, using natural language generation (NLG).

» TEXT TO SPEECH — Once the skill has completed its task, the voice assistant may acknowledge or respond using a synthesized voice.

Some layers work on device, meaning they don’t need an internet connection. These are a good option for those concerned about privacy, because they don’t share your data across the internet. Others do require an internet connection because they offload processing to cloud servers; these can be more of a privacy risk.

Before you pick a voice stack for your project you’ll need to ask key questions such as:

• What’s the interface of the software like — how easy is it to install and configure, and what support is available?

• What sort of assurances do you have around the software? How accurate is it? Does it recognize your accent well? Is it well tested? Does it make the right decisions about your intended actions?

• What sort of context, or use case, do you have? Do you want your data going across the internet or being stored on cloud servers? Is your hardware constrained in terms of memory or CPU? Do you need to support languages other than English?

ALL-IN-ONE VOICE SOLUTIONS

If you’re looking for an easy option to start with, you might want to try an all-in-one voice solution. These products often package other software together in a way that’s easy to install. They’ll get your DIY voice project up and running the fastest.

Jasper  is designed from the ground up for makers, and is intended to run on a Raspberry Pi. It’s a great first step for integrating voice into your projects. With Jasper, you choose which software components you want to use, and write your own skills, and it’s possible to configure it so that it doesn’t need an internet connection to function.

Rhasspy also uses a modular framework and can be run without an internet connection. It’s designed to run under Docker and has integrations for NodeRED and for Home Assistant, a popular open source home automation software.

Mycroft is modular too, but by default it requires an internet connection. Skills in Mycroft are easy to develop and are written in Python 3; existing skills include integrations with Home Assistant and Mozilla WebThings. Mycroft also builds open-source hardware voice assistants similar to Amazon Echo and Google Home. And it has a distribution called Picroft specifically for the Raspberry Pi 3B and above.

Almond is a privacy-preserving voice assistant from Stanford that’s available as a web app, for Android, or for the GNOME Linux desktop. Almond is very new on the scene, but already has an integration with Home Assistant. It also has options that allow it to run on the command line, so it could be installed on a Raspberry Pi (with some effort).

The languages supported by all-in-one voice solutions are dependent on what software options are selected, but by default they use English. Other languages require additional configuration.

WAKE WORD SPOTTERS

PocketSphinx is a great option for wake word spotting. It’s available for Linux, Mac, Windows platforms, as well as Android and iOS; however, installation can be involved. PocketSphinx works on-device, by recognizing phonemes, which are the smallest units of sound that make up a word.

For example, hello and world each have four phonemes:

hello H EH L OW

world W ER L D

The downside of PocketSphinx is that its core developers appear to have moved on to a for-profit company, so it’s not clear how long PocketSphinx or its parent CMU Sphinx will be around.

Precise by Mycroft.AI uses a recurrent neural network to learn what are and are not wake words. You can train your own wake words with Precise, but it does take a lot of training to get accurate results.

Snowboy is free for makers to train your own wake word, using Kitt.AI’s (proprietary) training, but also comes with several pre-trained models, and wrappers for several programming languages including Python and Go. Once you’ve got your trained wake word, you no longer need an internet connection. It’s an easier option for beginners than Precise or PocketSphinx, and has a very small CPU footprint, which makes it ideal for embedded electronics. Kitt.AI was acquired by Chinese giant Baidu in 2017, although to date it appears to remain as its own entity.

Porcupine from Picovoice is designed specifically for embedded applications. It comes in two variants: a complete model with higher accuracy, and a compressed model with slightly lower accuracy but a much smaller CPU and memory footprint. It provides examples for integration with several common programming languages. Ada, the voice assistant recently released by Home Assistant, uses Porcupine under the hood.

SPEECH TO TEXT

Kaldi has for years been the go-to open source speech-to-text engine. Models are available for several languages, including Mandarin. It works on-device but is notoriously difficult to set up, not recommended for beginners. You can use Kaldi to train your own speech-to-text model, if you have spoken phrases and recordings, for example in another language. Researchers in the Australian Centre for the Dynamics of Language have recently developed Elpis , a wrapper for Kaldi that makes transcription to text a lot easier. It’s aimed at linguists who need to transcribe lots of recordings.

CMU Sphinx , like its child PocketSphinx, is based on phoneme recognition, works on-device, and is complex for beginners.

DeepSpeech, part of Mozilla’s Common Voice project , is another major player in the open source space that’s been gaining momentum. DeepSpeech comes with a pre-trained English model but can be trained on other data sets — this requires a compatible GPU. Trained models can be exported using TensorFlow Lite for inference, and it’s been tested on an RasPi 4, where it comfortably performs real-time transcriptions. Again, it’s complex for beginners.

INTENT PARSING AND ENTITY RECOGNITION

There are two general approaches to intent parsing and entity recognition: neural networks and slot matching. The neural network is trained on a set of phrases, and can usually match an utterance that “sounds like” an intent that should trigger an action. In the slot matching approach, your utterance needs to closely match a set of predefined “slots,” such as “play the song [songname] using [streaming service].” If you say “play Blur,” the utterance won’t match the intent.

Padatious is Mycroft’s new intent parser, which uses a neural network. They also developed Adapt which uses the slot matching approach.

For those who use Python and want to dig a little deeper into the structure of language, the Natural Language Toolkit is a powerful tool, and can do “parts of speech” tagging — for example recognizing the names of places.

Rasa  is a set of tools for conversational applications, such as chatbots, and includes a robust intent parser. Rasa makes predictions about intent based on the entire context of a conversation. Rasa also has a training tool called Rasa X, which helps you train the conversational agent to your particular context. Rasa X comes in both an open source community edition and a licensed enterprise edition.

Picovoice also has Rhino, which comes with pre-trained intent parsing models for free. However, customization of models — for specific contexts like medical or industrial applications — requires a commercial license.

TEXT TO SPEECH

Just like speech-to-text models need to be “trained” for a particular language or dialect, so too do text-to-speech models. However, text to speech is usually trained on a single voice, such as “British Male” or “American Female.”

eSpeak  is perhaps the best-known open source text-to-speech engine. It supports over 100 languages and accents, although the quality of the voice varies between languages. eSpeak supports the Speech Synthesis Markup Language format, which can be used to add inflection and emphasis to spoken language. It is available for Linux, Windows, Mac, and Android systems, and it works on-device, so it can be used without an internet connection, making it ideal for maker projects.

Festival is now quite dated, and needs to be compiled from source for Linux, but does have around 15 American English voices available. It works on-device. It’s mentioned here out of respect; for over a decade it was considered the premier open source text-to-speech engine.

Mimic2 is a Tacotron fork from Mycroft AI, who have also released the to allow you to build your own text-to-speech voices. To get a high-quality voice requires up to 100 hours of “clean” speech, and Mimic2 is too large to work on-device, so you need to host it on your own server or connect your device to the Mycroft Mimic2 server. Currently it only has a pre-trained voice for American English.

Mycroft’s earlier Mimic TTS can work on-device, even on a Raspberry Pi, and is another good candidate for maker projects. It’s a fork of CMU Flite.

Mary Text to Speech supports several, mainly European languages, and has tools for synthesizing new voices. It runs on Java, so can be complex to install.

So, that’s a map of the current landscape in open source voice assistants and software layers. You can compare all these layers in the chart at the end of this article. Whatever your voice project, you’re likely to find something here that will do the job well — and will keep your voice and your data private from Big Tech.

WHAT’S NEXT FOR OPEN SOURCE VOICE?

As machine learning and natural language processing continue to advance rapidly, we’ve seen the decline of the major open source voice tools. CMU Sphinx, Festival, and eSpeak have become outdated as their supporters have adopted other tools, or maintainers have gone into private industry and startups.

We’re going to see more software that’s free for personal use but requires a commercial license for enterprise, as Rasa and Picovoice do today. And it’s understandable; dealing with voice in an era of machine learning is data intensive, a poor fit for the open source model of volunteer development. Instead, companies are driven to commercialize by monetizing a centralized “platform as a service.”

Another trajectory this might take is some form of value exchange. Training all those neural networks and machine learning models — for STT, intent parsing, and TTS — takes vast volumes of data. More companies may provide software on an open source basis and in return ask users to donate voice samples to improve the data sets.Mozilla’s Common Voice follows this model.

Another trend is voice moving on-device. The newer, machine-learning-driven speech tools originally were too computationally intensive to run on low-end hardware like the Raspberry Pi. But with DeepSpeech now running on a RasPi 4, it’s only a matter of time before the newer TTS tools can too.

We’re also seeing a stronger focus on personalization, with the ability to customize both speech-to-text and text-to-speech software.

WHAT WE STILL NEED

What’s lacking across all these open source tools are user-friendly interfaces to capture recordings and train models. Open source products must continue to improve their UIs to attract both developer and user communities; failure to do so will see more widespread adoption of proprietary and “freemium” tools.

As always in emerging technologies, standards remain elusive. For example, skills have to be rewritten for different voice assistants. Device manufacturers, particularly for smart home appliances, won’t want to develop and maintain integrations for multiple assistants; much of this will fall to an already-stretched open source community until mechanisms for interoperability are found. Mozilla’s WebThings ecosystem (see page 50) may plug the interoperability gap if it can garner enough developer support.

Regardless, the burden rests with the open source community to find ways to connect to proprietary systems (see page 46 for a fun example) because there’s no incentive for manufacturers to do the converse.

The future of open source rests in your hands! Experiment and provide feedback, issues, pull requests, data, ideas, and bugs. With your help, open source can continue to have a strong voice.

click the image to view full size. Alternatively, you can download this data as a spreadsheet by clicking here.

Source: Private By Design: Free and Private Voice Assistants

Avoid taking ibuprofen for COVID-19 symptoms: WHO

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The World Health Organization recommended Tuesday that people suffering COVID-19 symptoms avoid taking ibuprofen, after French officials warned that anti-inflammatory drugs could worsen effects of the virus.

The warning by French Health Minister Olivier Veran followed a recent study in The Lancet medical journal that hypothesised that an enzyme boosted by anti-inflammatory drugs such as ibuprofen could facilitate and worsen COVID-19 infections.

Asked about the study, WHO spokesman Christian Lindmeier told reporters in Geneva the UN health agency’s experts were “looking into this to give further guidance.”

“In the meantime, we recommend using rather paracetamol, and do not use ibuprofen as a self-medication. That’s important,” he said.

Source: Avoid taking ibuprofen for COVID-19 symptoms: WHO

Virus Travel Bans Threaten Labor for Global Food Harvests

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Across the globe, governments are imposing travel limits in a bid to stem the spread of coronavirus. The unintended consequence is a squeeze on migrant labor that’s a cornerstone of food production.

American produce growers preparing to harvest crops are warning of a devastating impact on fruit and vegetables after the U.S. Embassy in Mexico announced a halt to visa interviews for seasonal farm workers. Slaughterhouses also may face labor shortages.

In Australia, growers say the country may face shortages of some fruits and vegetables because of travel curbs, with the nation traditionally using overseas workers for one third of seasonal farming jobs. Kiwifruit pickers are in short supply in New Zealand. And in Canada, travel limits threaten meat processors that rely on temporary foreign workers to fill chronic labor shortages.

“There won’t be anyone to harvest the crops,” said Robert Guenther, senior vice president for public policy for the United Fresh Produce Association, which represents U.S. growers, distributors, wholesalers and retailers. “It will be devastating to growers and ultimately to the supply chain and consumers. They won’t have the food.”

Vulnerable supply chains

Expectations for a labor crunch reveal how interconnected the world of global agriculture has become, and expose the strains of production and areas of vulnerability to the supply chain. In many key food-making nations, the industry relies heavily on migrant and immigrant workers to fill jobs that middle-class citizens shun. Think of the back-breaking work of tomato pickers, the dangerous conditions at slaughter houses and what many would consider the unpalatable environment of large livestock-feed operations.

The timing for the disruptions in some ways couldn’t be worse. In the Northern Hemisphere, farmers are gearing up for their peak spring and summer growing seasons. Ranchers also tend to sell more animals to slaughter at this time of year.

Source: Virus Travel Bans Threaten Labor for Global Food Harvests | Time

Volunteers 3D-Print Unobtainable $11,000 Valve For $1 To Keep Covid-19 Patients Alive; Original Manufacturer Threatens To Sue

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Techdirt has just written about the extraordinary legal action taken against a company producing Covid-19 tests. Sadly, it’s not the only example of some individuals putting profits before people. Here’s a story from Italy, which is currently seeing more new coronavirus cases and deaths than anywhere else in the world. Last Thursday, a hospital in Brescia, in the north of Italy, needed supplies of special valves in order to use breathing equipment to help keep Covid-19 patients alive in intensive care (original in Italian). The manufacturer was unable to provide them because of the demand for this particular valve. The Metro site explains what happened next:

With the help of the editor of a local newspaper Giornale di Brescia and tech expert Massimo Temporelli, doctors launched a search for a 3D printer — a devise that produces three dimensional objects from computer designs.

Word soon reached Fracassi, a pharmaceutical company boss in possession of the coveted machine. He immediately brought his device to the hospital and, in just a few hours, redesigned and then produced the missing piece.

Actually, it wasn’t quite as simple as that suggests. Business Insider Italia explains that even though the original manufacturer was unable to supply the part, it refused to share the relevant 3D file with Fracassi to help him print the valve. It even went so far as to threaten him for patent infringement if he tried to do so on his own. Since lives were at stake, he went ahead anyway, creating the 3D file from scratch. According to the Metro article, he produced an initial batch of ten, and then 100 more, all for free. Fracassi admits that his 3D-printed versions might not be very durable or re-usable. But when it’s possible to make replacements so cheaply — each 3D-printed part costs just one euro, or roughly a dollar — that isn’t a problem. At least it wouldn’t be, except for that threat of legal action, which is also why Fracassi doesn’t dare share his 3D file with other hospitals, despite their desperate need for these valves.

And if you’re wondering why the original manufacturer would risk what is bound to be awful publicity for its actions, over something that only costs one euro to make, a detail in the Business Insider Italia article provides an explanation: the official list price for a single valve is 10,000 euros — about $11,000. This is a perfect example of how granting an intellectual monopoly in the form of a patent allows almost arbitrarily high prices to be charged, and quite legally. That would be bad enough in any situation, but when lives are at stake, and Italian hospitals struggle to buy even basic equipment like face masks, demanding such a sum is even worse. And when a pandemic is raging out of control, for a company to threaten those selflessly trying to save lives in this way is completely beyond the pale.

Source: Volunteers 3D-Print Unobtainable $11,000 Valve For $1 To Keep Covid-19 Patients Alive; Original Manufacturer Threatens To Sue | Techdirt

Tesla’s Removal Of Features On Used Cars Appears To Be In Violation Of Its Own Rules

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Last month we reported about Tesla’s occasional practice of removing features like Autopilot and Ludicrous mode from used cars after they’d been purchased by people who bought the cars with those features enabled. While Tesla eventually restored the removed features to the subject of the original story, I’ve been in touch with a number of people with similar stories, and, perhaps even more importantly, with Tesla employees who have confirmed that often Tesla’s actions have been directly counter to the company’s own policies, at least as understood by Service Techs and help center workers.

It’s also worth mentioning that, while I have spoken with Tesla employees at call centers and seen correspondence from service techs about this issue, Tesla corporate has so far not responded to any of my inquiries, not from the previous story, and not from this one.

[…]

I called Tesla’s customer support line at its call center in Draper, Utah. I spoke with two different representatives, and asked each if a feature that was on and available on a used Tesla—I used Ludicrous Mode as an example for one and Autopilot as an example for the other—was a feature that would stay with the car, or if the feature would need to be re-purchased by the next owner.

Both representatives assured me that the features are connected to the car’s VIN, and remained with the car for “the life of the car.” I had them clarify that these features were not subscriptions and were more like installing features in any car, which they confirmed.

I wanted to hear from a Tesla Service Tech as well, right from a Tesla-owned dealership, and I was able to do so when another Tesla owner, Michele, reached out to tell me about issues she had with her purchased-new Model 3, and specifically getting her Autopilot system purchase registered with Tesla’s systems.

I asked her to email her local Tesla dealer (this one was in Santa Barbara) and find out exactly if those features she paid for could be sold with her car if she decided to sell it, and this was the response she got (emphasis mine):

Good Morning Michele,It looks like Tesla did a full-fleet audit of Autopilot which cause this on your vehicle since it was purchased through the service center and not online or the mobile app. Autopilot once purchased stays with the life of the vehicle.

So, we’ve got two very different stories coming from Tesla. On the one side we have what has been actually happening to buyers of used cars. On the other we have the responses I got from call center representatives and an official dealer service advisor are very clear that any feature that was ordered with the car, be it FSD or Autopilot or Ludicrous Mode, stays with that car, keyed to that car’s VIN, for the life of the car.

This fits with how cars have been bought and sold for over a century: the original buyer of the car picks a set of factory-installed options, and if those options are on the car at the time of sale, unless specifically addressed otherwise, those options are considered intergral parts of the car that is being sold.

That means that whatever price was agreed upon for the car is expected to include those options, and if the automaker decides to remove any of those features post-sale, that’s theft.

Again, this is in opposition to what we’ve seen in the examples sent to us directly and appearing in various forums online—Tesla has treated add-on features like FSD and Ludicrous mode as being non-transferable when the car is sold—such as in the cases mentioned here of Alec, Brad, and the used car dealer who bought a Model X for his father.

These both can’t be right. The way that makes the most sense and seems the most fair is to treat these features as any car features like air conditioning or heated seats have been treated. They’re part of the car. When you sell the car, they go with it. Period.

If Tesla does not want to employ this method, it needs to make that absolutely clear to potential buyers of used and new Teslas alike. If you’re buying a used Tesla, the features that need to be re-purchased should not be available on the car when it’s being sold, and if you’re buying a new Tesla, the customer has a right to know they cannot count on those expensive features being part of the car to maintain its resale value.

If Tesla wants to make Autopilot and Ludicrous mode a subscription-type service, then it needs to own up to it and accept its lumps for deciding to do something so craven and greedy. We don’t have to like it, but we’d have to accept it if they made it obvious this was how it worked.

As things are now, it’s confusion. Customers are told one thing very clearly and simply from service centers and help lines—features stay with the car for life—but some customers, without any clear pattern, are told the opposite, in what feels like a brazen attempt to extract thousands of dollars for the company from every Tesla sold used.

I’ve given Tesla plenty of chances to set the record straight here, and if it somehow decides to finally reach out, I’m happy to present its side here, and hopefully bring some clarity to this mess.

As it stands now, though, I’d encourage every Tesla potential buyer, new or used, to get everything clarified and in writing when it comes to your expensive options.

Source: Tesla’s Removal Of Features On Used Cars Appears To Be In Violation Of Its Own Rules

High Court in NL likes monopolies and destroys cusomter oversight decision to open KPN and VodafoneZiggo networks (copper and cable) to 3rd parties

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KPN and VodafoneZiggo do not have to open their networks to third parties. That is what the Board of Appeal for Business has decided today.

This means that providers without their own network cannot enforce access to those networks for the provision of services.

The ACM had stipulated that KPN and VodafoneZiggo should both open up their fixed networks to other providers. This was laid down in the wholesale fixed access market analysis decision. This regulation took into consideration on 1 October 2018.

KPN and VodafoneZiggo are very strong in this market and can use that position according to the regulator to raise prices, adjust conditions to their advantage or slow down investments.

However, the CBb considers that ACM has not (sufficiently) proven the existence of such a joint market power. This eliminates the basis for the regulation imposed on KPN and VodafoneZiggo and therefore the access obligations are also lost.

The ACM is ‘disappointed’ by the ruling and is now studying its consequences.

Source: Hoogste rechter vernietigt besluit ACM over openstellen netwerken KPN en VodafoneZiggo – Emerce

Google Translate launches Transcribe for Android in 8 languages

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Google Translate today launched Transcribe for Android, a feature that delivers a continual, real-time translation of a conversation. Transcribe will begin by rolling out support for eight languages in the coming days: English, French, German, Hindi, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Thai. With Transcribe, Translate is now capable of translating classroom or conference lectures with no time limits, whereas before speech-to-text AI in Translate lasted no longer than a word, phrase, or sentence. Google plans to bring Transcribe to iOS devices at an unspecified date in the future.

Source: Google Translate launches Transcribe for Android in 8 languages | VentureBeat

Theranos vampire lives on: Owner of failed blood-testing biz’s patents sues maker of actual COVID-19-testing kit

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Remember Theranos? The blood-testing company worth billions whose CEO Elizabeth Holmes became a celebrity right up until the point when it became clear its revolutionary testing machines didn’t actually work as described?

Well, Theranos is dead, and Holmes is still dealing with the legal repercussions, but her vampire company has come alive again – and in the very worst way: its reincarnation is suing another medical testing company for patent infringement.

It gets worse. While Theranos’ patents, obtained by an outfit called Fortress Investment Group in 2018, do not relate to a testing machine that actually works, they are being used to sue a manufacturer whose medical-testing machine not only works but is being used to detect the presence of the COVID-19 coronavirus.

That’s right: a private-equity-turned-investment group is using patents it picked up from a collapsed testing company – which imploded because its tech didn’t work – to sue a company whose machines actually do work and which is on the front-line of tackling the worst pandemic that the world has known for 100 years.

The lawsuit [PDF] comes by a company called Labrador Diagnostics, which is a part of Fortress, which is itself a part of investment monster Softbank. It’s worth noting that Apple and Intel sued Fortress late last year for stockpiling patents with sole aim of suing other companies.

“Labrador is informed and believes, and on that basis alleges, that Defendants individually and collectively have infringed and, unless enjoined will continue to infringe, one or more claims of the ‘155 [US 8,283,155] Patent, in violation of 35 U.S.C. § 271, by, among other things, making, using, offering to sell, and selling within the United States, and/or supplying or causing to be supplied in or from the United States, without authority or license, the Accused Products for use in an infringing manner,” the lawsuit reads.

The other patent in question is US 10,533,994.

Short life

It’s dense legal language designed solely to extract money out of a legitimate business. And while Labrador Diagnostics may sound like a legitimate testing company, there is no evidence that it exists on anything but paper. It was created as a limited liability company in Delaware literally this month. Within three days of it existing, it sued the testing equipment maker in question: BioFire.

BioFire, meanwhile, is a real company with real people doing actual work. The technology that “Labrador” claims is infringing its patent – which it calls FilmArray technology – is being used to develop three much-needed tests for COVID-19.

Since the lawsuit was filed in America on March 9, Labrador/Fortress has claimed it had no idea BioFire was working on COVID-19 tests; although that claim is questionable given that on March 3 there was an article in the Wall Street Journal specifically identifying BioFire and the fact it was working in two diagnostic tests for the coronavirus.

Faced with a wave of extremely critical commentary from the diagnostics industry, the IP industry, and now the press, Labrador/Fortress put out a statement on Tuesday in which it said it would “offer to grant royalty-free licenses to third parties to use its patented diagnostics technology for use in tests directed to COVID-19.”

But it continues to claim that the “lawsuit was not directed to testing for COVID-19. The lawsuit focuses on activities over the past six years that are not in any way related to COVID-19 testing.” It also claims that as soon as it learned of BioFire’s COVID-19 testing it “promptly wrote to the defendants offering to grant them a royalty-free license for such tests.”

In other words, we’ll give you a free license for COVID-19 testing machines, but the lawsuit against BioFire’s tech in general is still going ahead.

And more depressing news

And if all that wasn’t enough, there is another infringement case that could delay vital medical treatment in COVID-19-slammed Italy. The manufacturer of critical breathing equipment has threatened to sue a man, technician Christian Fracassi, for 3D-printing a valve for the machine after the company said it was unable to provide a replacement due to demand.

The valve normally costs $11,000, but Fracassi was able to reproduce it in plastic using 3D printing for just $1 and get the machines working again. The 3D-printed version is not going to last very long, and may need to be swiftly replaced and discarded, but it will work long enough to keep someone alive until a replacement is delivered. And, according to local reports, his swift actions have already saved 10 people.

But despite hospitals asking for the 3D plans, Fracassi is wary about providing them because the manufacturer has threatened to sue. And has refused to share the blueprints too.

“I am holding my hands because in a world where money matters more than someone’s health, nothing else can be done,” he said, according to UK paper Metro. ®

Bootnote

As noted by tech journalist Mike Masnick, the law firm representing Labrador is Irell & Manella, the same legal eagles who represented the monkey in that obnoxious macaque selfie copyright battle.

Source: Theranos vampire lives on: Owner of failed blood-testing biz’s patents sues maker of actual COVID-19-testing kit • The Register

Wow. What a shining example of how well the patent system doesn’t work.

Pervasive digital locational surveillance of citizens deployed in COVID-19 fight

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Pervasive surveillance through digital technologies is the business model of Facebook and Google. And now governments are considering the web giants’ tools to track COVID-19 carriers for the public good.

Among democracies, Israel appears to have gone first: prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has announced “emergency regulations that will enable the use of digital means in the war on Corona. These means will greatly assist us in locating patients and thereby stop the spread of the virus.”

Speaking elsewhere, Netanyhau said the digital tools are those used by Israeli security agency Shin Bet to observe terrorists. Netanyahu said the tools mean the government “will be able to see who they [people infected with the virus] were with, what happened before and after [they became infected].”

Strict oversight and a thirty-day limit on the use of the tools is promised. But the tools’ use was announced as a fait accompli before Israel’s Parliament or the relevant committee could properly authorise their use. And that during a time of caretaker government!

The idea of using tech to spy on COVID-carriers may now be catching.

The Washington Post has reported that the White House has held talks with Google and Facebook about how the data they hold could contribute to analysis of the virus’ spread. Both companies already share some anonymised location with researchers. The Post suggested anonymised location data be used by government agencies to understand how people are behaving.

Thailand recently added a COVID-19-screening form to the Airports of Thailand app. While the feature is a digital replica of a paper registration form offered to incoming travellers, the app asks for location permission and tries to turn on Bluetooth every time it is activated. The Register has asked the app’s developers to explain the permissions it seeks, but has not received a reply in 48 hours.

Computer Emergency Response Team in Farsi chief incident response officer Nariman Gharib has claimed that the Iranian government’s COVID-diagnosis app tracks its users.

China has admitted it’s using whatever it wants to track its people – the genie has been out of the bottle there for years.

If other nations follow suit, will it be possible to put the genie back in?

Probably not: plenty of us give away our location data to exercise-tracking apps for the sheer fun of it and government agencies gleefully hoover up what they call “open source intelligence

Source: Pervasive digital surveillance of citizens deployed in COVID-19 fight, with rules that send genie back to bottle • The Register

Fake News sites pull in around $72m over the EU in advertising

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Research Brief: Ad Tech Fuels Disinformation Sites in Europe – The Numbers and Players

The report shows how adverts for high street brands are inadvertently funding some of the most well-known sites for spreading disinformation in Europe.

Five companies account for 97% of ad revenues paid to EU disinformation sites: Google, Criteo, OpenX, Taboola and Xandr.

Source: Research – GDI