2020-04-02 12:49 from triLcat
easier to fake a passport than a chip

 

Which is kind of another problem, since the main reason for governments to keep registries is to either tax things or keep the ability to destroy or confiscate the registered things.

If chipping is basically your passport and shot record, that'll have

The problem here isn't identifying the patient. The problem is that doctors and hospitals can know who the patient is using conventional forms of identification, but they still do not have access to the patient's medical records from other providers.

The task of building a universal medical record for each patient requires federating the data (possibly by mandate) in a secure way, which probably cannot be done. The alternative is to grant the government a monopoly on storing and maintaining everyone's medical records, which has obvious huge problems.

Chipping an animal only identifies the animal's human companion. Chipping a human would only identify who the person is.

Since we're already at a point where biometric identification works (and with facial recognition, it can already be done without consent) it's not a big deal to give each person a universal, unique, non-transferrable, biometric identifier. It won't solve the medical record problem, but it might perhaps be used to prove, for example, that a doctor or hospital has the patient in question on site -- for example, if a medical record at some distant hospital can only be remotely accessed using a challenge that requires the patient's biometric private key.

It could also be used to prevent things like voter fraud.

The task of building a universal medical record for each patient

requires federating the data (possibly by mandate) in a secure way,

which probably cannot be done. The alternative is to grant the
government a monopoly on storing and maintaining everyone's medical

records, which has obvious huge problems.

Universal medical records sound like a mess to me.

Each doctor fills his medical record archives using his own style of organizing things. I mesh of disjointed records from different doctors sounds hellish. Small hospitals that have such a thing usually have lots of access control issues regarding them. I am not optimistic enough to think that problem will disappear if the scope of the database gets bigger.

On the other hand, I have seen a couple of electronic identifycation systems by governments, each created to replaced the failed system that came before it. They are total shit and a moneygrab. I doubt the ability of the government to create something like that and keep it working.

Each doctor fills his medical record archives using his own style of

organizing things. I mesh of disjointed records from different doctors

sounds hellish. Small hospitals that have such a thing usually have
lots of access control issues regarding them. I am not optimistic
enough to think that problem will disappear if the scope of the
database gets bigger.

I agree that one big database to supplant all of the others would be a disaster.

That's why I think a universal medical "record" would actually be an index of records kept at individual health care providers, perhaps encrypted with the patient's private key or something like that to prevent abuse.

When I started going to an orthopedist here in NY, she wasn't able to look at the medical records from the hospital in Texas where I was initially treated for the broken ankle. Some of the records could not be sent, and others had to be delivered by paper mail. Later on, she had me get a CT scan at another location, which I had to physically bring to her on a CD.

But do you know who had no trouble getting access to everything? My worker's comp carrier. Because if they don't get the information, the bills don't get paid. This tells me that it's totally possible.

The details are not that important because they can be worked out. It probably would involve something like the patient cryptographically signing a provider's key with their personal key to give that provider consent to participate in the patient's medical record federation.

In other news, apparently the next version of Microsoft 365 (the product formerly known as "Office") will begin flagging two spaces after a period as a grammatical error.

2020-04-27 09:23 from IGnatius T Foobar
In other news, apparently the next version of Microsoft 365 (the
product formerly known as "Office") will begin flagging two spaces
after a period as a grammatical error.

I think LibreOffice has been doing that for some time now. At least for dobble spaces between sentences.

They're trying to make certain you're not using extraneous diskspace by lessening the spaces between sentences. It makes perfect sense to me. <Sarcasm for those who cannot see the blue font>

It is the current year. There should be at least six feet between sentences.

Nice.

I refuse to single space between sentences. It just looks bad.

I doubt I could get out of the habit without putting a lot of effort into it, and it isn't worth the effort. Besides, many of us still spend a lot of time working in monospace fonts, where the double space convention started because it looks good.

"Microsoft was on the wrong side of history when open source exploded at the beginning of the century and I can say that about me personally. The good news is that, if life is long enough, you can learn that you need to change."
-- Microsoft president Brad Smith

Doesn't every wife-beater say that at some point? It isn't the first time I've compared Microsoft to domestic abuse.

There is a leaked bunch of Windows NT source code floating around i2p. They say you can compile an operating system out of it. hmmm.

When you fail at simply copying Apple...

Back in March, Micro$oft closed all of its retail stores because of the China Virus. Now they have announced that the closures are permanent and the stores will not be re-opening at all. The only exceptions will be the flagship stores in London, New York City, Sydney, and Redmond, which will become "Microsoft Experience Centers".

No surprise here. Before the plague you could go to any mall and see an Apple store full of people, and a Microsoft store deliberately sited right across the aisle, completely empty all the time.

The press release is padded full of fluff talking about how great they feel about their online retail presence, but the bottom line is that they've completely failed here. Couldn't have happened to a more deserving bunch of people.

[ https://news.microsoft.com/2020/06/26/microsoft-store-announces-new-approach-to-retail/ ]

WDDM-based GPU acceleration is coming to future versions of WSL2:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/directx-heart-linux/

Obviously this is a plot to co-opt Linux and take over the world...

You know what ... at this point I wouldn't even mind, at least not on the desktop. When they made that announcement it sounded like they were focusing on Linux software using the GPU as a compute engine. If they're actually targeting it for actual GUI use, as long as it's even reasonably usable, I'm in. As I've pointed out before, the philosophical reasons for resisting Windows on the desktop are largely gone, because Linux owns pretty much the rest of the world.


I'm probably the exact opposite of lots of people who didn't move *to* desktop Linux because they had "that one Windows application" they couldn't live without.
I actually have one Linux application I can't live without (Kdenlive) and everything else is either cross-platform or lives inside a console window.

Oh, and they're saying "How are the pixels going to flow between Linux applications and the Windows desktop hosting them and how are the various window going to be integrated into unified and seamless experience? Thatbs going to be a story for another time."

Well let me tell Microsoft how to do its job, then. Microsoft, you want to turn the Windows desktop into a Wayland compositor. That is what will make it "unified and seamless". Linux and Windows programs will happily live side by side, and everything will "just work" (to the extent that it does on Wayland today, of course, but this will be a huge incentive for the Linux community to complete the transition from X to Wayland).

Oh, and Microsoft should switch Windows over to systemd of course ;)