Interesting Links for 6-7-2011

[andrewducker]

• Why Did L.A. Noire Take Seven Years to Make? (Enough to put you off ever working in the games industry)
  (tags: games work)
• Cutting down on salt doesn't reduce your chance of dying
  (tags: health salt)
• Conservative MEPs defeat new climate change targets (against instructions too - want to bet if they get punished?)
  (tags: politics conservatives climatechange europe)
• C.S. Lewis reviews Childhood's End (He liked it. I agree.)
  (tags: CSLewis ArthurCClarke review)
• Amazon just bought The Book Depository
  (tags: books amazon uk)
• Google's lack of decent testing on Android makes it unfit to be used in the enterprise
  (tags: google android testing email EpicFail)
• A collection of awful sci-fi book covers
  (tags: scifi art books)
• Chinese coal blamed for global warming er... cooling
  (tags: china globalwarming environment coal)

Comments

[andrewducker]

Because the feature is not tied to the app. If someone has your phone, and doesn't run the app, they can still get to the data. Therefore Security want to be able to trigger a remote wipe of the email and any attachments, etc. that you might have downloaded. They can't depend on whatever email program you're running to do so, so they have to remotely trigger a wipe of the whole phone.

[strawberryfrog.livejournal.com]

Hm, I see.

The sensible compromise may be to allow a remote wipe of an app and all its data. not the whole phone. I can see how you want the OS to do this, not the app itself, which might not be running before app the data is siphoned out.

However saving attachments out of the email app into general storage is not a new security hole, nor is it specific to phones. Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V gets around a lot of security.

[andrewducker]

And this is why my work don't allow access to email on home PCs, because it would be insecure. You have to use a virtual session over Citrix to connect to it.

(By law we have to do everything we can to avoid data-leakage - it's a legal responsibility. Not all companies will be as strict, obviously.)

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

I have a similar arrangement at my office, and the privacy concerns are enormous... because we handle health data now, so PHIPPA (Personal Health Information Privacy Protection Act, read as "pee-hippa" by most, read as "bane of my existance" by me) absolutely forbids a lot of forms of data-sharing most companies use routinely. To the point of insane restrictions on how "ctrl-c" and "ctrl-v" work... we lean on Citrix pretty heavily to comply.

-- Steve isn't quite so quick as others to blame corruption and incompetance for the mess that resulted from Ontario's attempt to move patient charts online... PHIPPA was *not* written with the Internet in mind, and forbidding the use of IP (and related infrastructure) because the packets might venture out-of-province absolutely cripples the enterprise from the get-go.

[andrewducker]

They forbade IP??? WTF?

People are frequently surprised that we have all of our USB ports and the like locked down. Enterprise thinking doesn't come naturally to most people.

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

If I understand the mess correctly (IANAL) the phrasing of the law is archaic and badly needs changing; it doesn't distinguish between data and packets when it forbids allowing health information to leave the province.

IP packet switching doesn't distinguish by geography. So in order to use IP, eHealth would have had to lay down its own network without access out-of-province. And laying down a dedicated, separate network (particularly to rural and remote regions) is prohibitively expensive.

Soooo, billion-dollar boondoggle that gets nowhere because government can't seem to ammend PHIPPA while trying to both conform to it and to allow doctors to use the existing Internet.

-- Steve calls it the bane of his existance for a reason.