Sarah Thompson:

There is a large network of websites using political content to draw an audience to the sites where some dubious advertising techniques are being employed. All of the content published on these websites is lifted from other sources. Some is current news, some is old – but true – news, published without a byline or date. And many stories are fake-news classics.

But most of what is published is satire stolen from “America’s Last Line of Defense,” a group of websites run by a self-described liberal troll named Christopher Blair. Many people do not recognize the ALLOD-branded watermark left behind on the swiped satire stories. Published without context, these stories mislead many people into believing they are actually new news. Adding to the confusion is the legibility problem – many of the stories have been spun.

Steven Levy:

LARRY BRILLIANT SAYS he doesn’t have a crystal ball. But 14 years ago, Brilliant, the epidemiologist who helped eradicate smallpox,  spoke to a TED audience and described what the next pandemic would look like. At the time, it sounded almost too horrible to take seriously. “A billion people would get sick,” he said. “As many as 165 million people would die. There would be a global recession and depression, and the cost to our economy of $1 to $3 trillion would be far worse for everyone than merely 100 million people dying, because so many more people would lose their jobs and their health care benefits, that the consequences are almost unthinkable.”

Now the unthinkable is here, and Brilliant, the Chairman of the board of Ending Pandemics, is sharing expertise with those on the front lines. We are a long way from 100 million deaths due to the novel coronavirus, but it has turned our world upside down. Brilliant is trying not to say “I told you so” too often. But he did tell us so, not only in talks and writings, but as the senior technical advisor for the pandemic horror film Contagion, now a top streaming selection for the homebound. Besides working with the World Health Organization in the effort to end smallpox, Brilliant, who is now 75, has fought flu, polio, and blindness; once led Google’s nonprofit wing, Google.org; co-founded the conferencing system the Well; and has traveled with the Grateful Dead.

Der Tagespiegel Checkpoint:

Freiburg: First Large German City Under Curfew

“I don’t give a damn about Corona”, said an acquaintance at a recent gathering. That was exactly two weeks and two days ago. It sounded crude and nonchalant but not absurd. Now this is a sentence from another world. The tragedy is that many of the presumed main carriers of the virus –young adults– carry on living by this motto.

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Federal electronic medical record data sharing rules have been released, many years after the $38B+ federal taxpayer backdoor subsidy, which promised “interoperability”.

David Wahlberg:

Rick Pollack, CEO of the American Hospital Association, said in a statement Monday that the final ONC rule fails to protect patient information. “The rule lacks the necessary guardrails to protect consumers from actors such as third-party apps that are not required to meet the same stringent privacy and security requirements as hospitals,” he said.



Nick Hatt, a product designer at Madison-based health care data-sharing company Redox and a former Epic employee, said Epic “didn’t really get very much in the final (ONC) rule. The content did not change substantially, so it was kind of a win for the patient-access side.”

The rule requires full exports of patient data, beginning in three years, to patients or hospitals if requested, Hatt said. “You’re being asked to develop something that helps your customers switch from your software to someone else,” he said.

Also, screen shots of electronic medical records will become more public, which Epic didn’t want, Hatt said. “They really don’t want to have screen shots of their software out on the internet, and now essentially it’s illegal for them to put those kinds of clauses in their contracts,” he said.

But the scope of data that must be shared will be limited for two years, and companies such as Epic will be able to warn patients about the dangers of sharing data with third-party apps — changes that were in Epic’s favor, Hatt said.

The rules apply to scenarios such as patients wanting to share clinical data and check lab results with Apple’s Health app, Hatt said.



Epic has said the proposed ONC rule could threaten patient privacy and intellectual property, and increase health care costs. CEO Judy Faulkner urged customers to support a letter in opposition to the rule. More than 60 health system CEOs, including those at UW Health, UnityPoint Health-Meriter and Gundersen Health System, signed the letter sent in February to HHS Secretary Alex Azar.

Related:

1. Paying – Repeatedly – for Epic’s Walled Garden

2. Airdrop trumps $40B Taxpayer Medical Record Subsidies.

3. Madison’s Property Tax Base Growth; $38B+ Federal Taxpayer EMR Subsidy.

4. $37,920,077,070 in Taxpayer Electronic Medical Record Subsidies: 2009 – January 2018

5. Epic Electronic Medical Record Implementation: $100,000,000 for Stanford Hospital in 2005.

6. Epic Systems Clearing Storm Landscape Images.

7. A failed 2007 attempt to use Wisconsin taxpayer funds for electronic medical record subsidies.

7. More notes and links on Epic Systems and its founder: Judy Faulkner

8. Federal electronic medical record data sharing rules: 474 page pdf.

Charles Levinson:

Federal agencies have big contracts with Virginia-based Babel Street. Depending on where you’ve traveled, your movements may be in the company’s data.

U.S. law enforcement agencies signed millions of dollars worth of contracts with a Virginia company after it rolled out a powerful tool that uses data from popular mobile apps to track the movement of people’s cell phones, according to federal contracting records and six people familiar with the software.

The product, called Locate X and sold by Babel Street, allows investigators to draw a digital fence around an address or area, pinpoint mobile devices that were within that area, and see where else those devices have traveled, going back months, the sources told Protocol.

They said the tool tracks the location of devices anonymously, using data that popular cell phone apps collect to enable features like mapping or targeted ads, or simply to sell it on to data brokers.

Greg Kogan:

Ships contain simple systems that are easy to operate and easy to understand, which makes them easy to fix, which means they have less downtime. An important quality, considering that “downtime” for a ship could mean being stranded thousands of miles from help.

Take the ship’s steering system, for instance. The rudder is pushed left or right by metal rods. Those rods are moved by hydraulic pressure. That pressure is controlled by a hydraulic pump. That pump is controlled by an electronic signal from the wheelhouse. That signal is controlled by the autopilot. It doesn’t require a rocket scientist or a naval architect to find the cause of and solution to any problem:

Keep it simple and elegant: amuz and My Verse.