Quick Security Notes

Here are some quick security notes:

* One reason why health care innovation is so relatively slow pertains to intense levels of regulation.  The first point in this article touches upon this.  I get that patients, and thus hospitals and physicians, likely want a higher safety margin in the health market, but that would imply that HIPAA and co. actually do anything of the sort—they don’t.
* California leaks Social Security Numbers twice in a year.  I like to point out these examples of government failure because many people in the security industry want governments to create regulations forcing secure behavior.  If governments cannot protect their own systems, we can’t trust them to ensure that other systems are secure.
* Bruce Schneier on terms of service.  It seems that his reading of the particular TOS he includes isn’t quite correct, but I think there is an important point that one could make from this:  a relatively well-educated layman has trouble understanding what, exactly, the terms of service indicate for any proprietary information he might wish to store using that service.  If you need lawyers to use web applications, your entire society is in trouble…  My favorite bit was the comment about how Domino’s Pizza required that you agree to terms of service before they would deliver a pizza to you.  Presumably, the reason was not so that you wouldn’t sue them for providing you an inferior product.

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