"..ICE patterns formed and reformed on the screen as he probed for gaps, skirted the most obvious traps, and mapped the route he'd take through Sense/Net's ICE. It was good ICE. Wonderful ICE... ...His program had reached the fifth gate. He watched as his icebreaker strobed and shifted in front of him, only faintly aware of his hands playing across the deck, making minor adjustments. Translucent planes of color shuffled like a trick deck. Take a card, he thought, any card.

The gate blurred past. He laughed. The Sense/Net ice had accepted his entry as a routine transfer from the consortium's Los Angeles complex. He was inside. Behind him, viral subprograms peeled off, meshing with the gate's code fabric, ready to deflect the real Los Angeles data when it arrived."

William Gibson

This is most likely billing info. Until healthcare is free, you're going to have billing info. No way around it. The clinical info isn't really useful to your common crook - hard to make a buck out of knowing who has herpes since the pharmaceutical companies have already gleaned that information by paying your local pharmacist to tell them (legal and lucrative).

So, it's the old name, rank and social security number routine.

They weren't on the 'public' Internet. They got hacked. Why was this stuff even on the network? Excellent question. The quick answer is that the hospital would like to get paid. So they have to create claims. Claims these days are electronic, little to no paper. The claims have to be sent from the hospital to the insurance companies -- through a network. And that network is .... the Internet.

Yes. hospitals could just go back to point to point dialup but that's not very convenient. They most likely had firewalls and other fancy things to prevent this sort of thing from happening but got caught either mis configuring something or more likely, fooled some witless employee into divulging something they shouldn't have. And before you get all high and mighty about this sort of thing, stop and reflect that the next witless employee might well turn out to be you.

You should have seen him before the lobotomy.

Uh Oh. Here we go again.

Can we just say op. cit. and have it done with?

Easier for you, easier for me, but not easier for the PEBKAC folk that outnumber us by a couple of orders of magnitude.

A well organized and vetted store can be a big help to naive users. The annoying part is that even Apple can't figure out how to do this properly.

That's exactly what Apple is doing. The OS and assorted upgrades and patches are delivered through the app store.

One store to rule them ...

Except that one limiting factor in the jihad is the ability to get the starry eye idealist soon-to-be-martyr over on this side of the pond. Blowing oneself to tiny bits appears to be a hard sell to westernized folk. The concern here would be that an autonomous vehicle could alleviate that problem.

Of course, it's not a perfect solution. You have to purchase or steal the thing which now are in rather short supply. An autonomous vehicle is going to be fairly tightly regulated once let out into the wild - one of the basic tenets is that it communicates with other vehicles and presumably some sort of central command. Driving into a crowd or a chemical factory might be frowned upon.

Much easier to just blow up a chemical factory somewhere in New Jersey. Or start a forest fire near LA.

But it's the FBI's task to get all paranoid and look at all potential possibilities to ensure our ultimate freedom. USA! USA!

You perhaps might see collision rates go down but there are many other liabilities that one typically insures a vehicle for - weather related damage, medical, liability and others (usually bundled under the rubric of 'comprehensive').

You are also assuming, without any data, that the future Johnny Cab will never get itself into an accident. I'm not so sure I would make such a bold claim.

Huh? I pay quite a bit of money for subscriptions - technical sites, reference sites even (crosses self) Adobe. I don't expect a group of people to curate, collate and organize information for free. Yes, I know that happens and I use those sites frequently as well.

But the subscription web is a useful concept. The problem comes when the value is relatively low. Like, for example, Slashdot. I'm certainly not going to spend several hundred dollars a year here. I have subscribed in the past - the benefits are unclear enough that I usually forget about it. As we've discussed innumerable times, a micropayment system would be an improvement. However, it's not going to get rid of the trolls.

Nothing short of a cosplay version of the Baroque Cycle is likely to do that.

Ads?

Too bad he (or she) didn't create it. It was a Heinleinism.

You are forgetting d) Nuke 'em from orbit.

It's the only way to be sure.

Naw, for the equipped Slashdotter, you will want one of these bad boys.

Gotta cover all your bases.

Not a sensible strategy (at least if you are a sensible terrorist). All you need is a single victim which, presumably, you would knock on the head, drain a couple of liters of blood and poof, you have a crude bio weapon. If you were planning on doing more sophisticated things, you would likely just need a couple of vials.

No need for all the fuss.