How A Simple New Tool Helps Doctors Care For Patients -- After They Leave The Office

Lisa Wirthman | Forbes | May 11, 2016

We live in an increasingly connected world, but patients who receive treatment from multiple doctors and healthcare systems still face a lack of coordination in their care, which can put their health outcomes at risk. PatientPing is working to help doctors collaborate and create a more consistent experience for patients with simple technology that connects healthcare providers across facilities, systems and geographies...

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Coopetition: All's Fair in Love and Open Source

PostgreSQL vs. MySQL. MongoDB vs. Cassandra. Solr vs. Elasticsearch. ReactJS vs. AngularJS. If you have an open source project that you are passionate about, chances are a competing project exists and is doing similar things, with users as passionate as yours. Despite the "we're all happily sharing our code" vibe that many individuals in open source love to project, open source business, like any other, is filled with competition. Unlike other business models, however, open source presents unique challenges and opportunities when it comes to competition...

Winners And Losers With The 21st Century Cures Bill

Sydney Lupkin and Steven Findlay | NPR | December 2, 2016

A sprawling health bill that passed the Senate Thursday by a 94 to 5 vote and is expected to gain President Obama's signature is a grab bag for industries, academic institutions and patient groups that spent oodles of time and money lobbying to advance their interests. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell calls it "the most important legislation that Congress will pass this year." Who wins and who loses? Here's the rundown of what's at stake in the 21st Century Cures Act...

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Healthcare Top Target for Cyberattacks in 2017, Experian Predicts

Bernie Monegain | Healthcare IT News | December 1, 2016

Global information services company Experian has released its 2017 data breach industry forecast, and the news is sobering. Among the report's top five predictions? "Healthcare organizations will be the most targeted sector, with new sophisticated attacks emerging." Experian sees healthcare as particularly vulnerable to cyberattacks because medical identity theft remains so lucrative and relatively easy for hackers to exploit – and they continue to find markets for reselling patient data...

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A New Way Forward for Power Utilities: The Open Smart Grid Platform

After energy balancing software PowerMatcher was released as open source at Alliander in 2014, I was able to convince more of my colleagues to invest in making more technologies open source. I started the conversation with a question about the Open Smart Grid Platform: "How open is open? Where can I find the code?" The development of the Open Smart Grid Platform started after research was done on how to give municipalities control over their public lighting switching schedule. This schedule is based on ecomomic sense, and is a list of rules for when to switch on and off the street lights. For example, streets lights switch off ten minutes after sunrise...

Martin Shkreli Congratulates Australian Students for Recreating Life-Saving Drug

Staff Writer | Fortune | December 2, 2016

Former pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli has congratulated a group of Australian students who reproduced the active ingredient for a life-saving, anti-parasitic drug at the centre of a drug-price controversy involving his former company. The students from Sydney Grammar School drew global media attention this week after they said they had produced the drug Daraprim for about $2 a dose, a fraction of the current list price of $750 per dose. Shkreli is a former chief executive of Turing Pharmaceuticals, where he sparked outrage among patients and U.S. lawmakers for raising the price of Daraprim by more than 5,000%...

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Security Experts Warn Congress That the Internet of Things Could Kill People

Mike Orcutt | MIT Technology Review | December 5, 2016

A growing mass of poorly secured devices on the Internet of things represents a serious risk to life and property, and the government must intervene to mitigate it. That’s essentially the message that prominent computer security experts recently delivered to Congress. The huge denial-of-service attack in October that crippled the Internet infrastructure provider Dyn and knocked out much of the Web for users in the eastern United States was “benign,” Bruce Schneier, a renowned security scholar and lecturer on public policy at Harvard, said during a hearing last month held by the House Energy and Commerce Committee...

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IoT Botnets Are Growing—and Up for Hire

Jamie Condliffe | MIT Technology Review | November 30, 2016

The army of Internet-connected devices being corralled and controlled to take down online services is active, growing—and up for grabs. Internet of things botnets—collections of devices hacked to work with one another to send debilitating surges of data to servers—have been blamed for several recent Internet failures. Most notably, the servers of domain name system host Dyn were taken down last month, affecting connectivity across large swaths of the East Coast of the U.S...

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Can a Hollywood Techie Grow Government's Innovation Shop?

Adam Mazmanian | FCW | December 2, 2016

By his own admission, Rob Cook was "failing at semi-retirement" when he was offered the top job at the Technology Transformation Service, the government innovation shop based at the General Services Administration that includes 18F. Cook, 63, left his California home behind – as well as the Oscar statuette he keeps dressed in GI Joe clothes – and moved to a rented apartment in Washington, D.C., for a three-year term appointment in the Senior Executive Service as TTS commissioner...

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How DOD Embraced Bug Bounties -- And How Your Agency Can, Too

Sarah Lai Stirland | FCW | October 24, 2016

It was a Tuesday in April, and Mark Litchfield was poking around the Defense Department's Defense Video Imagery Distribution System, looking for security holes. It didn't take him long to find one. He soon uncovered a vulnerability known as a blind persistent cross-site script. It could enable any maliciously minded hacker to log in as a site administrator and broadcast whatever content he or she wanted from the DVIDS website -- which is the primary way the U.S. military keeps the public informed about its activities around the world...

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