Despite myriad health information standards and a landmark law to protect patient privacy, it appears insurance giant Anthem (ANTM) didn't encrypt personal data of 80 million of its customers, according to several news reports.
Update: After this article appeared, Werner Koch informed us that he was awarded a one-time grant of $60,000 from Linux Foundation's Core Infrastructure Initiative. Werner told us he only received permission to disclose it after our article published. Meanwhile, since our story was posted, donations flooded Werner's website donation page and he reached his funding goal of $137,000. In addition, Facebook and the online payment processor Stripe each pledged to donate $50,000 a year to Koch's project.
This week, though, I started to think there was something else to that lonely sound, and my connection with it. Technology was still at the root - a book about tech, actually. Michael Harris's fascinating The End of Absence, which should be required reading for anyone born before 1985 (and anyone else interested in tech). Harris's topic is us - "digital immigrants". The last generation that will remember the world before the internet. He writes: "We have in this brief historical moment… a very rare opportunity… These are the few days when we can still notice the difference between Before and After… There's a single difference that we feel most keenly; and it's also the difference that future generations will find hardest to grasp. That is the end of absence - the loss of lack. The daydreaming silences in our lives are filled; the burning solitudes are extinguished."
Today's banks must be able to market to so-called digital natives - twenty-somethings who grew up with computers in the house, phones in their pockets, and a Facebook page to chronicle their exploits. For them, checking balances and paying bills online is not a convenience - it is banking. They may make the rare branch visit to address a problem, but they'd much prefer handling those issues via FaceTime, if only their banks could get their act together and make that service available.
Don't let the word "digital" fool you in all this talk about how difficult it is for digital natives and digital immigrants to communicate. The truth is that this generational gap between the so-called digital natives (the generation of people born during or after the rise of digital technologies) and the digital immigrants (people born before the advent of digital technology) doesn't actually have to do with technology. The real issue is that the two worldviews that they represent are so different.
Whenever the terrorist threat is increased, as it has been since the tragic events in Paris last week, so too are the calls from politicians to increase the powers of the people they employ to protect the public from such threats.
President Barack Obama said Friday that police and spies should not be locked out of encrypted smartphones and messaging apps, taking his first public stance in a simmering battle over private communications in the digital age.
This document provides a minimum set of guidelines for Network
Etiquette (Netiquette) which organizations may take and adapt for
their own use. As such, it is deliberately written in a bulleted
format to make adaptation easier and to make any particular item easy
(or easier) to find. It also functions as a minimum set of
guidelines for individuals, both users and administrators. This memo
is the product of the Responsible Use of the Network (RUN) Working
Group of the IETF.
This discourse on politics of lies, distortion and disinformation, completes the trilogy of the "The Politics of" series put together to debunk the recent anti-Buhari campaign. It is only natural that I make reference to some of the earlier so-called "Sixteen 'Sins' of General Buhari" in the course of addressing the impulsive mendacity of the Buhari traducers.
The Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC), the largest coalition of Palestinian civil society organisations that leads the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement, has condemned the Canadian government's ramped up disinformation campaign and repressive measures against the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian rights.
They are currently discussing whether to combine armies with Lithuania and Poland. This vast force increase will provide equipment and personnel to cover Kiev's heavy losses in the war Poroshenko is waging in Donbass. I don't know what combining armies with NATO member countries will ultimately mean. I do know that both countries are very close to following in Ukraine's Ultra-National footsteps internally because of pressure from their own nationalist diasporas.
Last week I shared with you the examples of disinformation in the unfunny recent Cracked.Com parody of Walt Disney giving a TED Talk. I only got through a fraction of the video before I reached 2,000 words! So I went back to the video (I sacrificed so you don't have to watch it) and found even more examples of the type of disinformation that the Left makes up to try and destroy Walt Disney. Here are four more of them, along with rebuttals based in fact.
