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Government

Obama Proposes Digital Health Records 563

Posted by CmdrTaco from the cuts-both-ways dept.
An anonymous reader writes "'President-elect Barack Obama, as part of the effort to revive the economy, has proposed a massive effort to modernize health care by making all health records standardized and electronic.' The plan includes having all conventional records converted to digital within 5 years. Independent studies are fixing this cost somewhere in the range of $75 to $100 Billion, with most of the money going to paying and training technical staff to work on the conversion. Early government estimates are showing 212,000 jobs could be created by this plan."

Comment Re:damn. That was quick. (Score 1) 150

by windex (#22236064) Attached to: Hacking Asus EEE
An exception to the above, I have an eee running XP and I did a bluetooth hack, which was totally worth it in my case because I can use my blackberry as a bluetooth modem.

Bluetooth is pretty easy as the extra express card pin out has an integrated USB port and works well, it's actually a little easier in the eee's they removed the express card socket from, since you no longer have to build an adapter and can instead just solder it right to the board.

It's also not odd that it boots XP (or linux, or anything) fast, because it's got a solid state drive. No seek time leads to fast I/O responses, and 90% of booting windows is I/O.
Government

Submission + - Could EFF Bring Case Against ATT Under the DMCA?

Submitted by
johns582
johns582 writes: "The EFF's case against ATT is based largely on the claim that ATT was complicit in the violation of consumers' privacy when it cooperated with the NSA to create a secret room at its San Francisco facility which, when put together with similar facilities, may have diverted as much as half of ATT's domestic traffic to the NSA for analysis. But perhaps an alternative strategy would be for the EFF to bring the case against ATT as a violation of the DMCA. Since the device used to divert traffic to the NSA (a "splitter") makes copies of all of the traffic passing through the network, what happens when an ATT customer downloads a legal copy of Fireworks, for example, and the packets transferred from Macromedia to the end-user are duplicated by ATT? There must be massive illegal copying involved in this operation — numerous counts of violations of the DMCA. Wouldn't it be, er, poetic if government spying was struck down under the DMCA? Or better yet: let ATT's lawyers find a way to weaken the DMCA by getting ATT off and, in the process, setting precedent that weakens the DMCA's application."
Security

Submission + - Is the Boeing 787 Hackable By Passengers? (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by jessiej
jessiej writes: According to the BBC 'Boeing has been ordered to ensure passengers on its new 787 Dreamliner jet cannot hack into the flight system and take control of the plane.' Boeing claims their new line, shipping out in November, has 'appropriate safeguards'. The AP reports, however, that 'navigation and communications systems could be vulnerable.'
Security

Journal SPAM: 5-Year-Old Boy Detained as US National Security Threat 1

Journal by Jeremiah Cornelius

It's a case of a mistaken identity for a 5-year-old boy from Normandy Park. He had trouble boarding a plane because someone with the same name is wanted by the federal government. "When his mother went to pick him up and hug him and comfort him during the proceedings, she was told not to touch him because he was a national security risk. They also had to frisk her again to make sure the little Dilling
Music

Submission + - Judge Says RIAA "Disingenuous", Decision S

Submitted by
NewYorkCountryLawyer
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: "Judge Lee R. West in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, has rejected the arguments made by the RIAA in support of its "reconsideration" motion in Capitol v. Foster as "disingenuous" and "not true", and accused the RIAA of "questionable motives". In the decision (pdf), reaffirming his earlier decision that defendant Debbie Foster's is entitled to be reimbursed for her attorneys fees, the Court, among other things, emphasized the Supreme Court's holding in Fogerty v. Fantasy, Inc. that "because copyright law ultimately serves the purpose of enriching the general public through access to creative works, it is peculiarly important that the boundaries of copyright law be demarcated as clearly as possible. Thus, a defendant seeking to advance meritorious copyright defenses should be encouraged to litigate them to the same extent that plaintiffs are encouraged to litigate meritorious infringement claims." Judge West also noted that he had found the RIAA's claims against the defendant to be "untested and marginal" and its "motives to be questionable in light of the facts of the case"; that the RIAA's primary argument for its motion — that the earlier decision had failed to list the "Fogerty factors" — was belied by unpublished opinions in which the RIAA had itself been involved; that the RIAA's argument that it could have proved a case against Ms. Foster had it not dropped the case was "disingenuous"; and that the RIAA's factual statements about the settlement history of the case were "not true". This is the same case in which an amicus brief had been filed by the ACLU, Public Citizen, EFF, AALL, and ACLU-Oklahoma in support of the attorneys fees motion, the RIAA questioned the reasonableness of Ms. Foster's lawyer's fees and was then ordered to turn over its own attorneys billing records, which ruling it complied with only reluctantly."
Games

Human Head Offices Destroyed, Company Bands Together 49

Posted by Zonk from the warning-games-may-be-flammable dept.
Yesterday, Gamasutra reported the sad news that the offices of Human Head studios were destroyed in a fire. Based out of Madison, Wisconsin, the indie developer recently signed up to do the next Mark Ecko game, riding high on their success with Prey from last year. Today, thankfully, Next Generation has the news that the company has survived more or less intact. "[Office Manager Carol] Smith said, 'I work with an incredible group of guys, and as soon as we got over the shock of oh my gosh, we had a fire--what if we lost data, what if we lost art? ...the next words out of everybody's mouths were, What can we do to help?' An update on Human Head's website confirmed that there were no injuries in the blaze that occurred at 2:30 a.m. on Friday and that the Prey developer 'suffered no significant data loss.'"
United States

Submission + - Facist America in 10 Easy Steps

Submitted by zyl0x
zyl0x writes: What would you do if your country was secretly being turned into a fascist regime? An article at The Guardian outlines the 10 steps taken by all fascist countries to rob their citizen's of freedom. Apparently, we're already at step 8. How far will they have to go before we start standing up for ourselves? Or is it too late?
From the article:

It is very difficult and arduous to create and sustain a democracy — but history shows that closing one down is much simpler. You simply have to be willing to take the 10 steps. As difficult as this is to contemplate, it is clear, if you are willing to look, that each of these 10 steps has already been initiated today in the United States by the Bush administration.
Businesses

Submission + - How an Email Rant Jolted a Big HMO

Submitted by Radon360
Radon360 writes: From the WSJ Article:

On a Friday morning last November, Justen Deal, a Kaiser Permanente employee, blasted an email throughout the giant health maintenance organization. His message charged that HealthConnect — the company's ambitious $4 billion project to convert paper files into electronic medical records — was a mess.

Mr. Deal signed the email. Before sending it, he says, he printed out a copy and handed it to his boss. Soon afterward, his office phone was ringing off the hook. IT staffers later arrived to seize his computers, and Mr. Deal was placed on paid leave from his $56,000-a-year job.

Despite Kaiser's efforts to squelch and downplay the incident, the email episode shows that, in the digital age, flicking away whistle-blowers isn't as easy as it once was.
Security

Submission + - The 2007 Underhanded C Contest is Online

Submitted by
Xcott Craver
Xcott Craver writes: "The Third Annual Underhanded C Contest is underway. This is a contest to write innocent-looking C code that conceals malicious behavior — behavior that is not obvious under casual inspection of the source. This year's challenge is to write an encryption program that unnoticeably fails on about 1 percent of all files, suitable for an eavesdropper. The prize is a gift certificate to ThinkGeek.com."

Feed Another Day, Another Set Of Prior Art Discovered Against Verizon's VoIP Patents (techdirt.com)

From feed by techdirtfeed
It seems like every day people discover even more prior art concerning the patents Verizon is using to cut off Vonage. First there was evidence from the VoIP forum that came out before Verizon applied for its patents. Then people turned up some evidence of a patent from 3Com that predates the Verizon patents that appears to cover the same thing. Now, Jeff Pulver has been reminded that the work he did on Free World Dialup (FWD) also appears to predate Verizon's patents by quite some time. Of course, all this prior art is great... but it likely comes way too late for Vonage. The process to get the Patent Office to even begin reviewing the patents in question will take some time, as will various responses and reviews. So don't think that just because there's a ton of prior art means that the patents are toast. Of course, the fact that these patents were granted in the first place despite all this prior art should get people to question how the patent office (doesn't) work, but it seems that few people are actually interested in digging deep into that question.

Forgent Settles JPEG Patent Cases 167

Posted by Zonk from the why-can't-i-think-of-scams-like-this dept.
eldavojohn writes "As many of you know, the JPEG image compression is actually proprietary. This has resulted in many lawsuits between its owner, Forgent Networks, and other companies that have used it. Yesterday Microsoft and about 60 other defendants settled with Forgent to the tune of $8 million. For a company with annual revenues of $15 million, that's nothing to sneeze at. You haven't heard the last of Forgent yet, as the article states, 'It is currently pursuing claims against cable companies over a patent that it says covers technology inside digital video recorders.' Sounds like that one could be worth a little bit of cash, wouldn't you think?"

Why Gaming Sucks On Linux 357

Posted by Zonk from the penguins-without-joysticks dept.
lseltzer writes "Efforts have been made to improve the situation, but things have actually gotten worse for gaming on Linux rather than better. If you're a gamer you're just plain better off running Windows and dual-booting (or VMing) between the two operating systems than hoping your games will run in Cedega or some such product." From the article: "So where does all of this leave Linux gamers? One word: Windows. Yep, you read that right. If you're a gamer, do yourself a favor and just buy a copy of Windows and set up a dual-boot system. Why bother to torture yourself with the headaches presented by Linux gaming? Why should you continually not have the games you want to play? Why settle for half-assed solutions that might or might not run the games you crave so desperately?"

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