NPT session approves steps on nuclear-free Middle East

nited Nations: A landmark conference to curb the spread of nuclear weapons agreed here Friday on talks toward the establishment of a nuclear weapon-free zone in the Middle East. It was the first agreement in a decade on the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which since 1970 has set the global agenda for keeping countries from getting the...

July Workshop Devoted to Improving Usability of Health Care IT

July Workshop Devoted to Improving Usability of Health Care IT


For Immediate Release: May 25, 2010



Contact: Ben Stein

301-975-3097





Improving the ease of use of information systems for the health care industry could significantly facilitate the adoption of technology that has great potential to improve the quality of health care while reducing costs. The goal is to allow medical professionals interact with health care information technology quickly and easily to support their primary tasks rather than complicate them. Along the way, steps must be taken to ensure that health IT systems are accessible to people with disabilities.



Toward these ends, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) will be hosting a one-day workshop on improving the usability—ease of use—of health IT. Co-sponsored by the Department of Health and Human Services Office of the National Coordinator and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the workshop will take place on July, 13, 2010, at the NIST Gaithersburg campus.



The goal of the workshop is to promote collaboration in health IT usability among federal agencies, industry, academia and others. Attendees will discuss ways to prioritize, align and coordinate short-, medium-, and long-term strategies and tactics to improve the usability of electronic health records (EHRs). Specific objectives of the workshop will be to establish an immediate-term set of actions to inform the national initiative to drive the adoption and meaningful use of EHRs; develop a strategic approach to measure and assess the use of EHRs and the impact of usability on their adoption and innovation; develop strategies to drive best practices and innovation in health care IT; and inspire follow-on activities in health care IT usability.

PCI tokenization guidance could benefit payment processors

In a recent interview, Bob Russo, general manager of the PCI SSC said he didn't expect any major changes to the data security standards (PCI DSS), which is undergoing a revision this year. But guidance documents are being developed to help merchants decide whether investing in encryption or PCI tokenization technologies is a wise move.

"We're creating a framework right now where we map these technologies out and lay them next to the standards, so if somebody is using one of these technologies, [the framework] will let them know if they would satisfy certain requirements," Russo said.

Some payment processors and encryption vendors have rallied around a mixture of encryption and tokenization software to protect card data at the time a customer swipes their credit card at a payment terminal. RSA, the security division of EMC Corp. is working with First Data to provide tokenization technology in the encryption services that First Data sells to merchants. Voltage Security Inc. sells an encryption combined with tokenization and is working closely with Heartland Payment Systems to provide encryption and tokenization services.

Time to kill the private cloud?

Amazon.com CTO weighs in on vendor marketing.

Public cloud compute pioneer Amazon.com has slammed the marketing campaigns of the world's largest hardware and software vendors over the use of the phrase "private cloud."

"Private cloud" is used by a variety of vendors to describe virtualised hardware, software and networking stacks that are able to offer an enterprise a consolidated pool of server compute and storage in a "utility-like" fashion.

The "public cloud", by contrast, sees these same IT resources delivered over the internet in an "on-demand" elastic fashion by large external service providers and sold on a "pay as you go" pricing model.

IT equipment labelled "private cloud" is often sold on the basis that organisations may choose to operate in a "hybrid" model in future - choosing which applications and services are hosted in-house and easily pushing others to public clouds as the need arises.

But Amazon web services, which pioneered Infrastructure-as-a-service (via its EC2 product) and storage-as-a-service (via its S3 product) has had a gutful of the terminology.

Amazon.com chief technology officer Dr Werner Vogels [pictured] told delegates at CeBIT this week that even analyst group Gartner's definition of cloud computing is flawed, as it omits important considerations such as "on demand" and "pay as you go pricing".

Dr Vogels compared buying your own "private cloud" computing equipment with relying exclusively on your own diesel generators instead of connecting to the electricity grid.

Google rolls out IT-friendly Android OS upgrade

Google detailed on Thursday its Android 2.2 OS, featuring enterprise-level enhancements as well as a speed boost and Flash support.

Codenamed "Froyo," for frozen yogurt, Android 2.2 includes more than 20 new features geared to enterprises, said Google's Vic Gundotra, vice president of engineering. Among these is integration with the Microsoft Exchange messaging system, with such capabilities as account auto-discovery and linkage with the Exchange global address book. Calendar synchronization is offered as well.

[ InfoWorld's Paul Krill reported that HTML5 also is getting a lot of attention at the I/O conference. | Stay up on tech news and reviews from your smartphone at infoworldmobile.com. | Keep up on key mobile developments and insights with the Mobile Edge blog and Mobilize newsletter. ]

 "Number 1, we've become Microsoft Exchange-friendly," Gundotra said in introducing Android 2.2 at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco.

Also in the enterprise space, APIs are featured for device policy management, enabling developers to write applications that control security features like remote wipe, minimum password, and lockscreen timeout, according to Google.

"As Android adoption [has] skyrocketed, people have been taking these devices to work," Gundotra said.

Froyo offers an application data backup API and a cloud-to-device messaging API. Devices running Android 2.2 also can serve as a portable hotspot for network access.

The OS upgrade features a two-to-five-times speed improvement for applications via use of a just-in-time compiler functioning with the Dalvik virtual machine.  

Android 2.2 will be made available to equipment manufacturers and the open source community in coming weeks; developers can download the Android SDK and NDK (native development kit) from the Android developer site.

Android 2.2 supports the Flash 10.1 browser and Adobe AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtme). "It turns out that people actually use Flash," Gundotra said, in an obvious swipe at Apple's refusal to allow Flash on devices such as the iPhone and iPad. Adobe, meanwhile, has just released the public beta version of Flash Player 10.1 for Android, an Adobe representative said.

Browser capabilities in Android 2.2 are being enhanced with inclusion of the V8 JavaScript engine now featured in the Google Chrome browser.

"It's critically important for us to make the Android browser rock, and we're going to constantly improve that browser. Froyo is a major step in that direction," Gundotra said.

"We can claim Froyo has the world's fastest mobile browser," he said.

Users also will be able to access Android camera capabilities via the browser. Voice input is again featured as well, for informational queries.

"We're going to make it very simple to use voice input," as a way to interact with an Android device, said Gundotra.

Gundotra said there are now 100,000 Android activations daily.

Novell, for its part, is announcing MonoDroid, a software development kit for building Android applications using code and libraries written for the Microsoft .Net development framework and languages like C#. MonoDroid functions with the Android SDK.

In the consumer vein, Google Thursday morning also announced Google TV, an effort to integrate Web browsing  capabilities into TV sets.

This article, "Google rolls out Android OS upgrade," was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in business technology news and get a digest of the key stories each day in the InfoWorld Daily newsletter and on your mobile device at infoworldmobile.com.

One in four households now has only mobile phones

One in four U.S. households now has only wireless telephone service, a recent U.S. government study has found.

The report also drew some interesting correlations with the health of wireless users, whose homes were exposed to binge drinking at nearly twice that of adults in homes with landlines.

Mobile phone-only adults were also more likely to be current smokers and more likely to experience "serious psychological distress," said the report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention , released May 12.

The CDC did not say wireless phones caused any of the noted health problems it noted, but it documented that wireless-only homes were more heavily populated by younger people and unrelated adults, groups generally exposed to more drinking and smoking.

The percentage of homes with only mobile phones, 24.5% in the last half of 2009, represented an increase of 1.8 percentage points since the first half of 2009, the survey of more than 21,000 households found.

The steady increase in wireless-only homes has been reported by the CDC since 2003, when about 3% of homes in the U.S. were wireless.

Carl Howe, an analyst at Yankee Group, said in a blog post that the growth of wireless-only homes was "an amazing statistic."

However, he and other analysts are keenly aware of ways telecom providers in the U.S. have been gradually converting networks and business plans toward wireless.

Yankee Group also said that the national average of wireless-only homes understates results that it has found in surveys of 14,000 consumers, conducted in 2009. At that time, it found wireless-only homes exceeded 28%. In states such as Arkansas, North Carolina and Ohio, more than 40% of the homes had only wireless service, Howe said.

In some rural states where wired telecommunications are expensive or complicated to install, a majority of homes have cut their landlines -- at least based on survey results using a sample size of less than 50 people, Yankee said. Those states include Idaho, Wyoming and North Dakota.

The CDC didn't say that wireless phones caused binge drinking or smoking or psychological distress and merely reported a correlation. Binge drinking was reported in 34.5% of wireless-only homes, compared with 18.7% of homes with wired phones.

The CDC didn't report how much more likely wireless-only homes had smokers or those with psychological problems.

In another correlation, the CDC discovered that wireless phones were used widely in homes occupied by unrelated adult roommates, confirming the prevalence of wireless by young people and college residents seen by wireless carriers and college administrators.

The CDC said nearly two-thirds (62.9%) of adults living only with unrelated adults were also in homes that were wireless-only.

Forty-three percent of renters had wireless phones only, and 49% of adults aged 25 to 29 had only wireless phones in their homes.

For groups aged between 18 and 24, and between 30 and 34, about 37% lived in wireless-only homes. Men were slightly more likely than women (by 25% to 21%) to live in homes with only wireless phones

Microsoft Security - Six Years Later

On January 15, 2002, Bill Gates sent email to every full-time employee at Microsoft, in which he describes the company’s new strategy emphasizing security in its products. In the email Gates referred to the new philosophy as “Trustworthy Computing” and called it the “highest priority”.

The Computerworld posting Microsoft Can’t Claim Victory in Security Battle picks up the story.

As Gates officially retires from his job at Microsoft, he leaves behind a company that by most accounts is doing better on security. But fully convincing users of that is an elusive goal. And increasing competition from Web 2.0 and software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendors is posing new challenges for the security development model implemented after Gates wrote his memo.

There is general agreement that bugs are inevitable and that Microsoft’s massive user base makes it a big target for attackers. But the steady drumbeat of patch releases has tarnished the company’s efforts to improve its security standing, …

The original blog posting “Trustworthy Computing” - Yea, Right, Sure

was posted soon after the “Trustworthy Computing” memo hit the Web. It has been updated since.

Yea, right, sure, Bill. Sending Microsoft coders off to security and reliability coding school is going to make thing all better real soon. If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you. Anyone sent off to training comes back knowing some new buzzwords and maybe even understanding a couple new concepts.

I applaud the effort, but it takes a very long time to break old coding habits and internalize new ones, no matter what the punishments and rewards are. No one comes back cleansed of old habits. I’m reminded of the limerick that you can train a dog but you can’t make it think.

I think the problem facing Microsoft is systemic. In my opinion, poorly designed code and poor coding practices may be at the heart of the Microsoft security and stability epidemic. Detecting and eradicating them may be impossible.

If it could be done, the effort may cost many times that of developing and testing the product line in the first place. Automated tools will help pick off the very low hanging fruit, but won’t get anywhere near the really nasty problems that seem to exist throughout Microsoft’s product line.

Bill Gates seems to have made choices about security and reliability early on. There’s no practical way to rectify them now, except maybe by starting from scratch.

Even starting over with Vista won’t fix the problem. The real culprit may be Microsoft’s corporate culture created by Bill Gates. Getting a culture’s head straight is a very difficult, if not an impossible task.

In my opinion, the fundamental problem facing Microsoft isn’t a technology one but a human one. I don’t think any amount of training or engineering will fix it.

Besides corporate culture, I don’t think starting over is a likely option for Microsoft, as I discussed in the Obese Windows blog posting.

Microsoft security issues are getting better. I don’t foresee them improving to the state of common contemporary operating systems such as Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris, HP/UX, AIX, Free BSD, Open BSD, etc…

I also don’t expect seeing the company culture change radically. Bill Gates may have left the building but he is still Chairman of the Board and the company’s largest share holder.