Month: September 2017

(credit: Alex Proimos)

Shoddy healthcare practices at Cooley Dickinson Hospital in Northampton, Massachusetts, led to the preventable deaths of two babies and a pregnant woman between 2013 and 2014. That’s according to federal regulators who threatened to cut the hospital’s federal funding over its poor performance. Yet most of the hospital’s patients had no idea of the dangerous state of affairs at the time—the hospital maintained its accreditation throughout the three tragedies, and, according to an investigation by The Wall Street Journal, it was even called a top performer by its accreditor, the Joint Commission.

The situation at Cooley Dickinson is not unique; patients nationwide are being potentially misled about the quality of their care. According to data collected by the Journal, hundreds of hospitals with federal safety violations continue to boast accreditation and a “Gold Seal of Approval” from the Joint Commission, a nonprofit that the government relies on to accredit almost 80 percent of US hospitals.

Hospitals can use state inspections to prove they’re in compliance with federal safety standards and eligible to receive money from federal health programs. But many rely on accreditations and programs from private organizations such as the Joint Commission, which is the largest of the private accreditors. Some states have even allowed private accreditors to take over much of their role inspecting hospitals.

(credit: Public Affairs Books)

"I find myself having to frequently explain completely incomprehensible nonsense," game maker Zoe Quinn writes in her new book Crash Override. "And it's hard to bond with someone when they can't understand you."

This sentence sums up Quinn's memoir-length attempt to grapple with her Internet experience, which has become too common: as Gamergate's "patient zero" as she puts it, she was a highly visible target in an Internet harassment, abuse, and threat campaign. To give us a sense of what that was like, she writes about her early life growing up poor, offers a primer on the hate-filled corners of the Internet, guides us through how the judicial and police systems view the online world, and tries to deliver a comprehensive look at the ways marginalized people face abuse on online platforms. That's a pretty tall order for 238 pages.

Quinn hasn't necessarily written a guide to online hate that can be handed to Internet-culture outsiders, and she sometimes struggles to connect larger social issues to her complicated personal history. But she doesn't fumble this effort, either. Crash Override combines a brisk pace, candid stories, and embedded insight. Quinn's first book has its uneven moments, but it's important stuff for anybody interested in how online discourse has shifted over the past two decades.

Enlarge / Equifax's site for enrolling in credit report security has gotten off to a bumpy start after the company's massive breach.

As Equifax moved to provide consumers the ability to protect their credit reports on the heels of a major data breach, some of the details of the company's response were found lacking. As consumers registered and moved to lock their credit reports—in order to prevent anyone who had stolen data from opening credit in their name—they found that the security personal identification number (PIN) provided in the locking process was potentially insecure.

A number of customers discovered that the PINs generated by enrolling in Equifax's TrustedID Premier Service were non-random and apparently sequential—in fact, they were essentially date-time stamps of the time of enrollment. Such PINs could potentially be brute-forced by someone attempting to unlock a credit report for the purpose of identity theft.

OMG, Equifax security freeze PINs are worse than I thought. If you froze your credit today 2:15pm ET for example, you'd get PIN 0908171415.

— Tony Webster (@webster) September 9, 2017

Equifax is moving to improve the PIN generation process. In response to an inquiry from Ars, an Equifax spokesperson said:

Enlarge / ShareBeast piracy site visitors are greeted with this FBI anti-piracy warning today.

The admin for a prolific file-sharing site that helped pirates score more than 1 billion tracks now faces five years in prison after pleading guilty to a single count of criminal copyright infringement.

Artur Sargsyan, the 29-year-old owner and operator of ShareBeast, is to be sentenced in Atlanta federal court in December for operating (PDF) what the Recording Industry Association of America said was the most prolific US-based file-sharing site. The defendant also forfeited $185,000 in ill-gotten gains, the government said.

The authorities in 2015 seized the ShareBeast domain and a few others connected to the site, which regularly allowed users to score pre-release music. Sargsyan was charged last month.

Enlarge (credit: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg)

China has become the latest country to publicly discuss plans to ban the production and sale of gasoline- or diesel-powered vehicles. In July, both France and the UK published plans to phase out sales of conventionally powered vehicles by 2040. China will now add another nail to the coffin of the internal combustion engine. However, unlike the French or British plans, in this case there's no target date—yet.

The news comes from an automotive policy forum in Tianjin. China's vice minister of industry and information technology, Xin Guobin, said that his ministry has begun work on a timetable to phase out fossil fueled vehicles. The Xinhua news agency also reports that Xin told automakers they need to begin to "readjust their strategies" accordingly. For foreign car companies hoping to sell EVs in China, that will mean investing in the country, as imported vehicles come with stiff import duties attached.

Keeping EVs cheap to the consumer is very much part of the plan to get China to an all-electrified fleet. It is already leading the world when it comes to sales of electric vehicles, although EVs as a percentage of the country's light vehicle fleet remain small. China's government has helped increase the popularity of alternative powertrain vehicles with subsidies, and, according to Xinhua, it will continue to do so for the time being.

Enlarge / Teams looks good, but it's unfortunate that its chat is quite bulky in a vertical direction. (credit: Microsoft)

Teams, Microsoft's Slack-like, IRC-like, collaboration tool, picked up an important new feature today: guest access. While announcing the new feature, Redmond also revealed that in the six months since launch, the product has grown to be used by over 125,000 organizations each month.

We asked how many individual users there are, but Microsoft said it had nothing to share on that front.

When it debuted, Teams had a big flaw when compared to Slack—it was only for Office 365 users. Each organization's Teams chatrooms could only be accessed by people who were part of the organization, essentially individuals with an account in the organization's Active Directory. This left these chats off-limits to, for example, contract workers—people outside the organization who were nonetheless collaborating on projects.