Much has been written about the Apple + Google Covid-19 Exposure Notification framework. This is the software that is now part of Android and iOS (13.5+) and powers Covid-19 detection apps for Android and iPhone like COVID Alert (much of Canada), COVIDWISE (Virginia) and dozens of other jurisdictions around the world . I’m in Ontario and use COVID Alert on my iPhone 8 Plus. The apps are fantastic pieces of work from the Canadian Digital Service and its private sector partners Shopify and BlackBerry.

Based on “Test web apps on iOS by DNS spoofing your LAN with Ettercap” by Henrique Barosso. Modified to work on a Mac running OS X. To access a website or service that uses a virtual host but isn’t in DNS, you need to add it to the hosts file of the machine you’re using for testing. Unfortunately, you can’t edit the hosts file of a (non-jailbroken) iPhone or iPad. This makes testing difficult.

Robert Scoble had a great post yesterday about how location-based services will integrate to automatically provide you with help and useful information as you move around. He got a lot of it right, but my main concerns are with his beliefs that: users are smart and motivated enough to figure this out, and don’t mind sharing all of their location data, all the time, with everyone – this is consistent with Scoble’s belief in the end of privacy carriers will sit back and just let this happen; carriers have been screwing up location based services since the dawn of the mobile web – they could easily interfere and botch this, too, by pushing their own solutions and making it difficult for users to use alternatives device manufacturers and users will continue to let all of the logic move to the cloud; phones are incredibly powerful computers, and will get even more so – why not have my handset decide when to disclose my location, for whom and why?