People who are the victim of stalkers have a startlingly different cybersecurity risk profile. I heard the idea articulated and clearly defended by Allison Bishop at CyberWeek. Here is her twitter, proof that she is funny and evidence that she is wicked smart. She articulated several specific positions that are worth carefully articulating. First, she […]
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No Shit In The Ranch House
Please forgive my use of a four-letter word. But it is central to my overall point, as I hope you will soon see. Ranches are shit-management systems. There are other ways to think about a ranch, more refined and polite. But this way of looking at a ranch is useful. A ranch is all about […]
How to be Cyber Woke for patients. Facebook lesson 1
So I wrote a post supporting the notion that Facebook could do some good by integrating with hospital data. That blew up on Twitter, and so much so that it eventually ended up on CNBC. Before I go on, I must recommend the continued reporting from @chrissyfarr who broke the original story. I also recommend […]
Facebook and Healthcare data, the contrarian view.
(Update May 2019.) Publishing this article was part of what started my recent investigation into Facebook’s cybersecurity and privacy practices. The outcome of that investigation means that I do not have any hopeful or positive things to say regarding Facebook and I believe that I was… and we all were, naive. I no longer hold […]
Cascading Configuration Design Pattern
I have not been able to find simple plain-language descriptions of what the Cascading Configuration Design Pattern is. And really not that many complicated descriptions either. Basically, this pattern is used to simplify very complicated configuration problems, by simplifying what would be a matrix of configuration decisions into a “cascade” of configurations using a hierarchy. […]
Harris Health Ben Taub Refusal to Triage
This week I went to the Harris Health Ben Taub ED because I was passing a kidney stone. I was refused triage and told that I would have to wait 7 hours for treatment, behind a waiting room full of people who were obviously in the ED for urgent issues that were not as acute as […]
Self-driving cars and healthcare. A brain dump.
Here are my thoughts on how self-driving cars related to healthcare. In no particular order. First, it is very likely that self driving technology is already well past the reliability and safety of any human driver. This makes for a classic engineering ethics debate. How long will our society tolerate a technical solution to a […]
Google Intrusion Detection Problems
(Update: Less than four hours after tweeting out this blog post, we got our access turned back on. So the Google support team is definitely listening on social media. We very much appreciate that, because it resolves this issue as a crisis. We are still concerned by the “auto-off” trend and the missing button. But […]
Does Epic resist or support interoperability? Hell if I know.
I just realized that my somewhat infamous question at the ONC annual meeting is recorded on video! The background on my question, which I made me very popular at the meeting afterwards, was that I had heard that Epic hired a lobbyist to convince congress that it is an interoperable company. That lobbyist and others at […]
Libel and Discourse in the Digital Age
Libel, like copyright, is one of the central legal frameworks for governing online activities. It sets the bounds for what can and cannot be said about people in the new media area. Like copyright law, libel law is a legal framework designed in a pre-digital era, that is somewhat strained in this new digital media […]