Reinstalling the Healthcare OS

The American Healthcare system is broken.

Or, as the geek would say, the OS needs to be reinstalled. If I may coin an analogy here, the American Healthcare system is to Socialized Medicine as Microsoft Windows is to Linux. Now, before you jump down my throat and rip out my innards with your vastly superior Conservative claws, let me elaborate. Linux works. Nobody doubts that. On a small scale, in an ideal environment, where everyone involved knows the system and help is just a Google search away, Linux is the best OS out there. And it’s free. Unfortunately, we don’t live in that world; users break the unbreakable, they know nothing about computers, and they can’t take care of themselves when things go south. Windows isn’t the most stable or cheap OS out there. But it is comfortable, packed with user-friendly features, and if you have a minor problem, it can be solved by most people with basic computer literacy. Unfortunately, there’s a price tag. And it’s not only the money. If you ever have a serious problem in Windows, the back-end infrastructure is so vast and bottomless that even the most grizzled IT pro out there needs help from time to time. There are entire libraries of back-end architecture support tools that less than 1% of the population will ever even look at. Look up WMI on Wikipedia for a great example. Here’s an excerpt from the overview:

In order to unify the management techniques for the sake of simplicity, the DMTF defined CIM to represent real-world manageable entities in a unified way. The CIM object model is an object database model using terms and semantics that are unique to all constructors and software developers. This object model is implemented in a database called the CIM repository.

Based on the CIM model, WMI includes real-world manageable components, available from the DMTF standards with some specific extensions that represent the various Windows components. Moreover, WMI exposes a collection of COM-scriptable objects that allow various applications to take advantage of the management information.

As part of the installation process, most of the Microsoft applications available today (e.g. SQL Server, Exchange Server, Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer, Host Integration Server, Automated Deployment Services) extend the standard CIM object model to add the representation of their manageable entities in the CIM repository. This representation is called a WMI class, and it exposes information through properties and allows the execution of some actions via methods. The access to the manageable entities is made via a software component, called a “provider” which is simply a DLL implementing a COM object written in C/C++. Because a provider is designed to access some specific management information, the CIM repository is also logically divided into several areas called namespaces. Each namespace contains a set of providers with their related classes specific to a management area (i.e. RootDirectoryDAP for Active Directory, RootSNMP for SNMP information or RootMicrosoftIISv2 for Internet Information Services information).

To locate the huge amount of management information available from the CIM repository, WMI comes with a SQL-like language called the WMI Query Language (WQL).

See what I mean?

Windows is shiny and sleek, with an absolutely huge set of tools mostly inaccessible to the average user, and expensive to boot. It puts on a good show; it makes people think they’re being treated to a 5-star hotel when they’re really just staying in a souped up Econo Lodge with free HBO, Continental Breakfast, and a concierge that pretends to care (The Taskbar!!!! It Will Change The World!!!!). No matter how much free food Econo Lodge throws at you, the building is still on the verge of collapsing on you while you sleep. Free HBO doesn’t make up for the cigarette burns in the carpet or the slight stink in your sheets. However, the price of admission isn’t high, you know it when you see it, and you don’t get confused figuring out what to do once you pull into the parking lot.

I believe that’s what our Healthcare system is like right now. The concept is great. The whole triangle of patient-insurance-caregiver is a good model, and it does what it needs to do. However, when it breaks, it breaks hard. The seemingly simple interface of the triangle opens up to be the most complicated geometric object in Euclidian reality, and when something isn’t working, when insurance decides not to follow the triangle and doesn’t reimburse the caregiver, you are left to traverse the insurmountable labyrinth of private insurance to get answers. This leads to inefficient care, inefficient spending, and consumer apathy. The consumer becomes a simple pawn in the complex chess game of coverage, and is forced into premiums and charges that will break the system. This sounds a lot like Vista.

Now, let’s look at Linux. Back to the hotel example, Linux is like a hostel. Yeah, it’s free. But go there alone for the first time without a friend, and you might get raped.

Just sayin’.

There are distributions like Ubuntu that attempt to make the experience user-friendly, but in the end, the terminal will still be the only way to do things properly. If you don’t learn yourself some command-line, you won’t really be using Linux, and your experience will be second-rate at best. There’s an amazing amount of free tools and flexibility in Linux, but unless you know how to get around, or know someone who can teach you, you’re doomed to a bare-bones, barely functional OS, with maybe half of your hardware having the right drivers. The success of Linux is completely dependent on the ability of the user to learn how to get around. Help is out there, but it can be hard to understand and usually depends on your knowledge of other obscure command-line tools. Most users will simply give up and say that they have a working system when in fact they don’t know what they’re missing.

I believe that this is the state of Socialized medicine. Everyone seems to be happy with it, but they don’t know what they’re missing because they don’t bother to try harder. For them, a month wait for a surgery may be awesome, but nobody in America would even consider waiting that long. Sure, there are plenty of people who have learned how to navigate the Socialized medicine system and come out with a great experience, but that won’t be the case for the majority of people. So, does the potential to be a great OS make it a great OS? Does the fact that a healthcare system should work make it a good system?

I know that this analogy is somewhat controversial, as I am impinging on two separate religious flame wars at the same, and I don’t expect everyone to agree with me. This is just a framework with which to understand the questions and the problems. I think I may have some theoretical answers, but I’ll save that for another post. I need to flesh it out a bit more.


P.S. Mac OSX is like the healthcare system of Sweden. They think they’re so special and awesome, but they’re still Sweden. Nobody cares.

Edit: Thanks to the Benjamin at The Daily Harangue for fixing up my graphic. Sorry, I was using MS Paint. I'm old school like that.

The Pathology of a Viral Video

YouTube is force of nature. It is a law of Physics all to itself, and it is unstoppable. It is an open medium with which people share their thoughts and ideas in the form of badly-produced, low-quality videos. It is free, and it is easy to use. It has become the preferred method of comedic outlet in the digital era, and it created this thing called the Viral Video. The viral video has its roots in the Internet Meme. A meme is something, usually a word or phrase, that has no inherent value or comedy other than the fact that it has been arbitrarily applied all over the Internet to a certain situation. A good example is "fail". Nobody knows the exact source of this meme, but when someone does something stupid, a label of "FAIL" gets applied. If it is utterly stupid, that person gets an "EPIC FAIL". Now, these things only mean what they do because of the amount of people using them, and that's a testament to the power of the Internet, and the vast numbers of people using it.

The Viral Video is the Web 2.0 version of a meme. Take the Rick Roll. A musician by the name of Rick Astley made a music video once. It was horrendous. At some point in time, that video was used in a prank where a seemingly innocuous link on the Interwebs brought you not to your intended destination, but to a Rick Astley music video. Shorty thereafter, the RickRoll was canonized in the Interwebs  lexicon of Funny Things That Only People Who Are On YouTube For At Least 2 Hours A Day Find Funny. Rickrolling became an Internet sensation, and only a select few people actually know who Rick Astley even is. Look it up on Youtube. If you dare.

The example I want to focus on today is viral on a much smaller scale, but it happened so quickly and so decisively,  and it disappeared just as fast, that it's a great example of how Viral Videos do their thing.

So, there's this show that used to be really popular with the angsty teens. It was called 'The OC', and those who remember the fad know how indescribably terrifying the specter of watching that abomination was, and how all your guy friends who started watching were obviously either doing it for their girlfriends, or subtly coming out of the closet.

Well, here's the last scene of the 2nd season.



Got that?

Good.

Now here's Andy Samberg's take on it from SNL.



That's comedy gold, friends.

Now, in a pre-youtube world, that would be the end. We would all have a laugh, and walk away. But nooooooo, this little juicy nibblet of comedy had an appointment with destiny, and it was about to smash in the office door with impunity.

People started doing parodies of the parody. It started innocently enough, with people adding the idea to video game scenes, like this one.



It then got applied to other famous youtube videos. Like this one.



And then, dear readers, things only went downhill. Or, I should say, things threw themselves off a sheer cliff into the neverending abyss of the pop culture comedic hell that is the YouTube population en masse. In rapid fire, here's some of the main offenders.







There's so much more, and a simple Youtube search will uncover startling amounts of these videos, all starting from one finale of a season of the OC. They definitely didn't have this in mind when filming that.

So, here's my favorite. I laughed out loud. At work. Very awkward.




Oh, and I forgot about this one. Very similar to the original SNL version.



pwned by the Astley. If you didn't see that coming from at least a few miles out, you haven't been spending enough time on YouTube.

Some would say you should keep it that way.

Identity Theft Madness

Identity Theft in The Matrix

There is nothing I hate more than being lied to.

Ok, that's not really true, but using 'hate' in the first sentence really makes the blood boil, doesn't it?

Good. Now that your blood is at a slow simmer, I can explain to you from whence this hatred comes. I was watching the television last night, enjoying the feeling of my brains rotting from the inside out, when a commercial came on that grabbed my attention. If I could find a video of it, I would post it. For now, you'll have to take my word for it, because I don't remember the company's name.

A lonely man is buying something over the Interwebs and he whips out the ol' credit card to pay. He types the numbers into the appropriate field and hits Enter. Cut to a squalid slum in a desert in some country in Africa (Nigeria, I think), where a dirty, poor-looking man is staring intently at a LED-backlit, super-awesome computer connected to the Internet, waiting for something to happen. All of a sudden, credit card numbers appear in bold font, one number at a time, and he smiles smiles of joy and pleasure as he quickly prints out the numbers and hands it off to an emaciated little boy, also smiling like he was just given double rice rations by the Nigerian government. The boy runs along the dirty city market streets, where chickens squawk and burly men rip off the destitute horde with impunity, until he reached a small shack where the purchased items are stored. The man in charge takes the slip of paper with the card number, smiling like his 4th wife just gave birth to a boy, and packs up the item for the lonely man. Cut to an ominous warning about identity theft, and how it will happen to you unless you buy our product..

Now, I know that commercials lie. I mean, marketing is just a word for that blurry area between lie and truth that businesses pour money into and cultivate to capitalize on the almost-lie that compels people to purchase their products. But sometimes the line of falsehood is crossed, and when it happens in a subject that I am somewhat educated in, it drives me nuts.

Let's go over some factual knowledge. This is how eCommerce functions these days.

The basic rule of ID security on the Interwebs is that the last person to see credit card numbers in unencrypted clear text is you. Once you finish entering data and submit it, assuming you're using a legit eCommerce service (more on that later), the relevant data is encrypted using a cryptography algorithm. The common algorithms used today are all variants of RSA (Rivest, Shamir, Aldeman, the people who wrote it) and are typically encased in a protocol called TLS (Transport Layer Security, the successor to the ever-popular SSL [Secure Socket Layer]) that uses RSA encryption with 1024 or 2048-bit keys.

Now, for some cryptography 101 (5 in binary). Plaintext is encrypted through the use of keys. Keys both encrypt and decrypt data by using whatever algorithm you choose to apply the key to the data. There are two ways to increase security in a data transfer. You can make the algorithm stronger and less vulnerable to computational flaws and vulnerabilities, or you can simply make the key longer and thus harder to guess. This is where the terminology can get confusing.

Saying an algorithm has 12 bits of security is very different than saying the algorithm has a 12-bit key, and people tend to get confused. When I say that an algorithm has 12 bits of security, I'm saying that there has been a proven method to break the algorithm and find a key with 11 bits of complexity. So the effective security is 12 bits. When I say the key is 12 bits, I'm saying that the key itself is 12 bits long. Just for perspective, 12 bits (11111111111) means that there are  4096 possibilities for the key.

If you want to know how complex the RSA algorithm is (the original one written in the 70's) just take a gander here and hope your brain doesn't explode. I'm going to discuss the details of that. The relevant point is that the algorithm uses keys that are 1024 or 2048 bits in length. That means that there are 2^{2048 or 1024} possibilities that the key could be. Just for some perspective once again, IP addresses are 32-bits. There are 4,294,967,296 possibilities there. The number is bigger than anyone can imagine, and binary represents it in 2048 digits (Any internet calculator in which you type in 2^2048 will return 'Infinity'. So, unless someone comes up with an efficient way to break RSA as it stands today (Hint: Nobody has), if you transfer data over the Interwebs with TLS, nobody will know your credit card numbers.

So, how do companies use this? Enter Public Key Cryptography. Also developed in the 70's, PKC revolutionized the way messages were ciphered and deciphered, and is the standard operating procedure of all eCommerce and other data sensitive services on the Interwebs. An analogy widely used is that of a mail slot. I own a locked mailbox with a slot. People know where the box is and where the slot is to deliver mail, but only I have the key that unlocks the box to get access to the mail. The mail slot is the public key, and my unique access to the mailbox is the private key. The keys are related in that they both are relevant to the mailbox, and this is reflected mathematically in practice. There has to be a trust system that guarantees the keys are related, just as the post office is responsible for relating mailboxes to keys. When I drop my mail in the mailbox, I want to know that the private key to that mailbox is only owned by the one person that belongs to the mailbox. This is accomplished using the PKI (Public Key Infrastructure). It is a system that sets up companies to distribute certificates that guarantee relationships between private and public keys on the Internet. The biggest company these days in Verisign.

Oh, and all this, all this complex infrastructure and cryptography, is symbolized in your browser by one letter. Normally, in your URL, you'll see http://blabla.bla. If you're using TLS, and therefore RSA and PKI, you'll see https://blabla.bla. The s stands for secure, and you know you're dealing with a legit and secure website.

So, how does this all go down in real life?

When you buy a product from amazon.com, this is what happens to your information. If you'll notice the address bar on the page that asks you for your credit card information,

it has changed to https. This means that any data entered into this paged will be encrypted with a public key given to Amazon by a certification company (VeriSign is this case) that tells my computer to trust that encrypted communication between me and amazon will be only readable by amazon. Since you purchased a product from amazon, you are authorizing them to draft payment from your account. If you don't Amazon to keep your information safe, then you shouldn't ever spend with anything other than cash from now on. And then get some professional help, because you are a hopeless paranoid. Anytime you swipe your card, you are giving some business your numbers. They don't steal those numbers because it is in their best interests not to. If you ever find unauthorized transactions on your statement, banks are very lenient about cancelling those charges, and re-issuing a card if needed. And if Amazon ever steals your credit card information, the entire company would face huge lawsuits and litigation and would not come out profiting from the venture.

The other, potentially more vulnerable, method of purchase is through third-party portals like Ebay. Things are a little different there. They use Paypal. What paypal does is manage both sides of the transaction through their own TLS certificates, and this way the seller never sees any payment information. Paypal drafts the account and pays the seller, so the only security vulnerability is PayPal's trustworthiness. Being that their entire business model hinges on that one attribute, I wouldn't worry about them too much.

So, basically, it's just as safe, if not safer, to shop online than to shop in a store. Nobody in Nigeria is reading your numbers and smiling like a moron.

Oh, and the whole pitch of Identity Theft? Ya, you can't get that from a credit card number. Unless you can access bank records that match credit accounts to SS numbers, and then match SS numbers to whatever else you need, your "Identity" is safe. Nobody is going to be walking around with your Passport and ID pretending to be you. The only possible theft here is from your bank account.

I guess that says a lot about what people perceive as their identity, and that's sad.

Google Brings the Chutzpah

I write a lot about Google. They're an interesting phenomena whose true agenda and nature is constantly fluctuating between good, bad, evil, righteous, and various other complex moral states. Sometimes, one word sums it all up, and fits so well that you wonder why you hadn't thought of this earlier. That word is Chutzpah. From Wikipedia (or "The Ultimate and Omniscient Source of Universal Knowledge and Stuff"):

In Hebrew, chutzpah is used indignantly, to describe someone who has over-stepped the boundaries of accepted behavior with no shame. But in Yiddish and English, chutzpah has developed ambivalent and even positive connotations. Chutzpah can be used to express admiration for non-conformist but gutsy audacity. Leo Rosten in The Joys of Yiddish defines chutzpah as "gall, brazen nerve, effrontery, incredible 'guts,' presumption plus arrogance such as no other word and no other language can do justice to." In this sense, chutzpah expresses both strong disapproval and a grudging admiration.

Or, for the reading impaired:

On that note, I would like to announce that Google has deemed me worthy of giving me a developer preview of their new collaborative content platform called Google Wave. It's really hard to put the idea into words and give it proper identification, but in their own words: Google Wave is what email would look like if it was invented today. Meaning, Email was modeled off the snail mail system, in which you wrote a letter, and the recipient received that letter and now owned it. Wave does away with that silly notion and innovates the way we look at cloud collaboration. Put simply, when you write a message to somebody, he can see you typing the message at the same time as you. Both sender and recipient own the content, and both edit it along the relationships formed by normal mail contact information.

Like I said, it's hard to explain. A more robust definition can be found in the 2-hour long presentation given by Google Product managers a while back. Or there's an abridged version for fakers. Regardless, this post is not about Wave. Well, sort of. Let me explain.

After I got my invite (and danced the dance of joy and happiness), I opened up IE (no choice; it was a work laptop) and I opened up Google Wave. I was then hit with a splash screen that blew my face off (very messy). It was the most chutzpah I've seen on the Interwebs in a long time, and it may signal the start of a new era in the browser wars.

IE is not supported by Google Wave.

Ok, read that again.

Are you still with me?

I'm not.

You do realize how unbelievably mind-shattering this is, right? You don't just release a product that isn't supported under IE (Just to be clear - it does run in IE if you install the Google Chrome Frame Activex control that may or may not break IE. But the point still holds. IE out of the box does not work with Wave). It's like releasing a car that doesn't drive on interstates. Or a music player that doesn't play mp3 files. It doesn't make sense, it's audacious, it's arrogant, it's brazen, it's non-conforming, and it's straight up Chutzpah.

It's also the stuff that revolutions are made of.

The age of IE (Internet Exploder, Internet Exploiter, take your pick) is coming to a close. Years of chipping away by browsers like Opera, Chrome, and most importantly and successfully, Mozilla Firefox, are finally bringing the industry to a point where things like can happen. Google Wave is going to change the way we collaborate in the Interwebs (many are calling it the harbinger of Web 3.0), and IE has been left out of the party. It's a blatant act of war, and one that's been a long time coming.

This may all be sensationalist thinking, as the restriction may be a quirk of the developer preview, but hey, the sensationalist way is typically the fun way, and I will indulge.

Don't worry, as soon as I get some more time with Wave, I'll let you know not if it rocks my world, but how much it rocks my world.

Google Is Up To Something

At first glance, this is awesome.

Wi-fi in airports has always been a diabolical scam that frustrates people to no end. Well, there is an end. It's murder. I haven't gotten to that end yet, but I've gotten close. Now Google, the Great Provider Of Free Stuff and also The Ones Who Punched Me In The Face, are going to give it for free this holiday season. You sit down at your gate, turn on your computer, and you have Internet connectivity. They even offer a "donate" option for those in the holoday spirit. Yipee.

Now, for the paranoia.

What does Google stand to gain by this? All they are doing is paying companies like Boingo for their service so that they can give it to the user for free. Let's say you pay 10 bucks for 20 minutes of Internet. Google will not make that much off of you in 20 minutes. So they will likely lose cash on this.

Why is it only for the holiday season? If they wanted entry into the airport wifi market, they would set something up a little more permanent. I guarantee you that they are not doing this out of pure holiday jubilation.

Let's start with this: Google is not in the business of service delivery. They are in the business of data. And they have the best business model ever. Everything they give you for free, you really are giving them your data. This data is more valuable then you'll ever know, because it isn't your data that's valuable, rather the same data coming from millions of people. You may get access to all that data, but in the end, it belongs to them. And it makes them very powerful.

So this is what I think: Google doesn't want to make you happy. It wants data on travellers. It wants to know where you browse, what you search for, how long you stay on sites, if you're working or goofing off, and if it is worth it for them to make permanent deals with wi-fi providers to grant them that data. If this little data experiment shows that data mining air travellers is profitable, you'll likely see google search as a default search option in the Boingo browser home page. You'll get an option to download google toolbar when you install the Boingo client, and your data will belong to them.

Another option would be that Google is considering acquiring Boingo (or others) and actually rolling out a free wifi service based on ads, but that doesn't seem likely given the insane profit margins Boingo likely has.

This is something to keep track of, and it should not be dismissed as philanthropy.

Edit: I'm probably wrong about my theory. Here's an article that gives a much better motive to the madness.
The Article

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How The Internet Has Changed The Way We Think About Politics

I found myself at lunch with a co-worker engaging in a heated debate (read: reality flame war) about the current state of politics and government. As usual, nobody won (except for me) and we all went about our geeky ways, thankfully without any bloodshed. A point was raised that made me think (even more so than the thinking I do all day). The other guy was saying that the corporations run the government, that we, as voters, don't really have power, and various other silly things like the CIA killed JFK and that the government knew about 9/11 and let it happen. He was right about one thing. As voters, we have close to no influence on national politics. At first, this bothered me. Then it didn't. And now I'll tell you why.

The Internet changed the way we see ourselves relative to the world. It brought the world closer to us. Anything we ever wanted to know, Wikipedia knew it. Any news story was on the Interwebs within minutes, and had 100 comments in just a few minutes more. Since the important national and global issues became so easily accessible and immediate, we only cared about those stories because the local stuff seemed banal compared to presidential scandals and health care reform.

The problem started when we drew a logical connection between our ability to voice our opinion and our ability to control the vast quantities of information we were fed. If we could know all this information so easily, it must also be easy to control all that. Knowing this, the news media highlighted story after story of individual Interwebs users changing the face of government. Tools like Facebook and Twitter became key buzzwords in the news for their ability to empower the anonymous individual.

Once the power of the individual became an entitlement, we started treating our system like a true democracy, instead of the representative republic that it really is. We assumed that since we could post our status on Facebook and people would listen, that our congressmen would do the same. We assumed that since we now had a voice that our government really wanted to listen.

So, it becomes a shock when we find out that the big businesses and bigger pocketbooks actually run the country, not the people. All of a sudden, the corporation is seen as a usurper of our right to change and our right to influence the powers that be. That makes them evil.

People don't realize that it's always been this way, and it always will be this way. Greed and power will always be the main element of politics, and philanthropy will almost always be a power tool. When faced with listening to the people and protecting a revenue stream/job security, the voter almost always loses. Politics never rewards altruism and dedication to country, because that doesn't pay the bills. What you see in the media is not what really goes on behind the scenes, and the big players are always more important than the small fries.

But it isn't all cynicism and gloom. There's a whole level of politics and policy that the average Joe has power over and shouldn't in any way ignore.
The media has portrayed the national political scene as a somehow accessible environment that a little hope and a little spunk can change. And that's when we started ignoring our local governments.

Local government is where the real battles are fought. Local governments are made up of community leaders who understand that for a city council vote, every vote does count. Every person that they do good by will tell other people about it, and get votes. City officials live in the city and therefore care about your community as much as you do. Yes, money and greed are still the impetus, but here it's on a level that the layperson can get into and affect. In the hullabaloo over health care, my personal state government passed two laws directly affecting taxes. Why was this ignored? If anything, I should have wanted to know about that more than healthcare news because I could have tried to affect the state legislature. I could have talked to my district's representative and he may have actually listened. I could have gotten involved on a personal level and I would have been much more satisfied than engaging in flame wars about the government's knowledge of 9/11.

If you really care about politics outside of the desire to argue with people, then you absolutely can. Join some society's, lead some community projects, meet people, talk to people, and make yourself known in the local scene. Write some editorials, attend city council meetings, and before you know it, you'll be "in politics".

Unfortunately, the Internet has eroded our sense of local community. We all live in a country, but we also live in our community, and the local community has issues that directly affect the way you live that you actually have control over.

So I humbly ask the denizens of the Interwebs: If you all really do know everything (which you allegedly do), then stop wasting your breath on the forum trolls. No matter how vehemently you oppose gay marriage, and no matter how big you can make your words defending that stance, you will not change anything. If you think your opinions should matter to somebody, and to legislative policy, get off my Interwebs. We don't do stuff like that here.

Finishing with my original point, people have to stop thinking that our federal government cares what you think. Let’s get this straight: you are one in a few hundred million. They don’t care about you. Getting all upset at government putting businesses over individuals is futile, because it’s a fact you’re going to have to deal with. On behalf of the Interwebs, I apologize for making you think you matter. You don’t, and your Twitter followers won’t change that. In order to regain our individual importance, we need to get back in to local politics, and make a scene. If we do that, I think we can change the face of national politics, slowly but surely. And to bring this to a technology standpoint, local politics needs some serious Interwebs help. If you can run a decent viral marketing campaign, you can win a local election. I don’t think local campaigns have leveraged the power of digital communities yet, and now would be a great time to take advantage of that.

I know this wasn’t a tech post really, but thank you for sticking with me. I needed to get it off my chest. And I have no friends.