Billy Goats and Patent Trolls

Patent trolls, a subset of non-practicing entities, have simultaneously stifled innovation and increased the prices of technological goods.  Their modus operandi is to buy patents off dying companies at low prices and then use those patents to sue practicing entities for hundreds of thousands of dollars.  I’m sure these overpaid litigators enjoy the high financial rewards of such lawsuits, especially since they have the unfair advantage of not needing to specify their charges until after legal charges have been mounted.  However, I believe that behind the scaly green exterior of the cold-hearted patent troll is a human being itching to escape.  If anyone reading this is a patent troll, consider the harmful effects that such meaningless litigation has on the United States economy:  the prices of technological goods rise while the rate of innovation falls.  Because of a harsh litigious environment, many tech companies go bankrupt defending against patent troll lawsuits while the tech companies that do survive also have to raise the prices of their goods to compensate for legal expenses.  Unless these litigators don't want to see the cure for cancer anytime soon, they had better apply their gifted legislation skills elsewhere.

Bad Security Habits Die Hard

In Clifford Stoll’s book, “The Cuckoo’s Egg,” Stoll tells about his cyber-manhunt to find a hacker of government computers several years before the World Wide Web.   Hopefully, the government has learned a few things about cyber-security since then: Stoll mentioned that the hacker accessed classified information using factory-default passwords and even at times through “low-privileged” guest accounts.  For the unlearned in computer-security, this makes a computer about as secure as a house with its front door hanging open.  At that point, be a good host and just leave the family credit card on the table for the uninvited houseguests. 

With the introduction of the Obamacare data hub, 27 years after Stoll’s manhunt, the government better start building an impenetrable stone wall around its citizens’ data.  Without proper security measures, sensitive data can land in the hands of an imposter and bring about a tempest of financial peril.  The average cost of a compromised identity runs about $5,000 and around 10 million Americans already pay that cost every year.  

The stone wall has not been built yet, unfortunately.  The current implementation of the Obamacare website doesn’t even employ some of the most basic security measures.  The website allows “all-access requests for other sites,” which could end up in an all-access request from a website of unscrupulous origin.  The site also doesn’t prevent access to browser cookies, allowing an attacker to get financial and marital status information if the user has cookies enabled.  Moreover, the site doesn’t even prevent automated login attacks by requiring a photo captcha after login to verify that the user is human.  Without such basic security measures, hackers can attack the system until they exploit its vulnerabilities and obtain what they want: someone’s identity.

Easy access to highly sensitive information may be the quality of security expected from the public sector, but it is certainly not the quality that the American people need to keep their identities secure.   Although Obamacare has the noble aspiration of bringing healthcare to the nation’s most vulnerable citizens, its supporters had better look past its politics and take its technical challenges more seriously.  When the Obamacare data hub becomes fully functional, so will thousands of identity thieves trying to extract its data.  At this point, there would not be enough Clifford Stolls in the world to stop them.  

Self-fulfilling educational prophecies

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/business/deciding-who-sees-students-data.html?hp&_r=0&_r=3&

InBloom, a data repository currently in development, would collect information on school students and their academic performance all throughout their years of grade school.  The data of previous school performance would then assist teachers in how to better instruct their students, either by shaping lesson plans accordingly or creating a seating chart which would spread out the “good” and “bad” students.  While this development has admirable aspirations, it runs the risk of creating negative self-fulfilling prophecies.  When a student is labeled as a “good” or “bad” student from the start of each year, the student may end up carrying this self-identity throughout grade school.  Moreover, if teachers see students in “green,” “yellow,” or “red” (as inBloom labels them), the teachers may help reinforce the identity, good or bad.  When Albert Einstein underperformed in his first years of school, would it have been beneficial to label him as a “RED” student?

Reinventing the Tree

Unless you live in a time paradox and your great grandma Elizabeth was born in both Massachusetts and overseas in England, you probably would be alarmed to find two online records of Elizabeth with mostly identical information. Since most of the non-CS population is completely unaware of the intricacies of data integrity, many people happily sign onto family history websites to input their family information only to inadvertently duplicate an already existing record. Features exist on these websites to suggest possible duplicates, but in no way can those features detect all of them. I am most definitely pleased that so many people are passionately researching their family history, but I also believe that people who use family history websites should carefully search to see if their ancestors' records already exist in the website's data before submitting new records. This way, we can make sure that we can complete more family trees instead of continually reinventing the wheel – or rather – reinventing the tree.

LAUSD gets more than what it bargains for

http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2013/09/25/lausd-halts-home-ipad-use-after-students-hack-security-locks/

Most politicians espouse the virtues of technological education during this age of such rapid technological advancement, but they may need to be careful what they wish for: hundreds of kids in the Los Angeles Unified School District hacked district-issued iPads within one week of receiving them.  The iPads were originally configured to disable counter-productive websites such as Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter, but such security measures have been breached by the technologically competent students.  As a computer science student, I feel that the ultimate irony is that school officials are discouraging this “unwanted behavior.” The high school students have demonstrated an ability to find security loopholes in software, and such skills are very valuable in software development.  Just search “security” on dice.com and over 16,000 search results will appear on the page.  Besides, saying “detected security hole on iPad software” looks a lot more impressive on a resume than simply saying “used an iPad.”