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There’s a report on silicon.com this morning about details of 6,500 Floridan HIV patients being emailed by mistake to 800 medical staff:

The list was accidentally attached to an email by a Palm Beach County Health Department statistician and sent to hundreds of health workers who weren’t normally granted access to it, according to a report by the Associated Press.

The department’s tech staff shut down the email system within minutes of the email being sent, by which time an estimated 10 people had opened it. Additional reports put the number at 16 although it isn’t yet known how many actually opened the attachment, AP reports.

Mistakes of this type are something that we’ve all done at some point – that sinking feeling as you realise that you really shouldn’t have clicked the ’send’ button, although thankfully for most people their mistakes aren’t quite as catastrophic as this one.

This is a great example of another reason why email is broken. There’s no practical way to control the dissemination of confidential information by email, whether it’s by mistake as in this case or deliberate. The practical benefit of email – that it’s quick and easy to send information to anyone – is its downfall. Once you’ve sent the message, you’ve got no control over it, as the system administrators in this situation will be able to testify.

If, on the other hand, the Palm Beach County Health Department were using RSS to disseminate this information, the problem would never have occurred in the first place. It’s trivial to wrap a webfeed in the same level of security as you would a secure webpage. You can control access to a feed, and you can keep track of who’s accessing it, and when, and from where. The risks of accidental disclosure are minimised and you have an audit trail – in other words, when the auditors ask whether you’ve done everything you can to protect the information assets of your organisation, you can reply ‘yes’.

Fortunately in this case, the damage appears to have been relatively contained – save for the reputation of the Health Department and the distress of those on the list. But it’ll happen again, you can be sure of that.

There’s an awful lot of rubbish being spouted presently about the semantic web, classification, tagging and folksonomies – from both sides of the argument. Euan Semple works in the field for the BBC, and has come up with one of the more intelligent summaries of the situation that I’ve read:

The web works because it is broken and not owned.

Yes, there is rubbish on the web but the availability of relevant, accurate information at your fingertips has exploded in ways that even ten years ago most people couldn’t have imagined and which have never ever been delivered by “conventional” means.

There were nay-sayers then, and indeed there still are, but I would be cautious about assuming that the collective, applied intelligence of millions of people is more fallible than a small group of experts with the power to confer meaning.

It’s probably not too far an exaggeration to say that it’s changes that kill projects. Whether it’s because requirements were incorrectly specified at the start, or the business environment has changed – moving the goalposts mid-way through the game can really screw things up.

So it’s no suprise that most methodologies have a lot to say on the subject of capturing and managing requests for change (RFCs). And a well-run project environment will have some kind of formal process for dealing with requests as they arise.

Some of the problems

But often a project environment won’t have a process – and what processes exist are actually irrelevant in day-to-day use. Do any of these situations sound familiar?
Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve noticed a number of interesting blogs over the past couple of weeks that are hosted on Blogger – mostly because there are comments or trackbacks to postings here. As a rule, I’ll go and read a few posts on the blog that’s linking, and more often than not I’ll subscribe to it – but that’s almost impossible to do if it’s a Blogger blog.

Why? They don’t have RSS feeds.

Apparently (after digging through the Blogger FAQs) RSS feeds are a Blogger Pro feature. The standard service doesn’t provide any kind of syndication – instead they recommend you go to Feedburner

Which strikes me as quite frankly daft. What’s the point of offering any kind of blog service – free or paid for – that doesn’t provide syndication? Surely that’s an integral part of what blogs are about – it’s a bit like a rental company offering their cars without steering wheels unless you upgrade to their premium rates. I can understand wanting to hold back some features as an incentive to upgrade to a higher revenue service – but surely syndication is a fundamental?

UPDATE: Commenters have commented, and I stand corrected: standard Blogger does have syndication – Atom 0.3 to be precise – but it’s not necessarily obvious if the blogger (this could get complicated – “I’m a Blogger blogger”) uses custom templates and doesn’t push their feed.

Which is just as bizarre as a blogging service not having feeds in the first place if you think about it – why would you want to have a blog without a feed? It’s a bit like hiring a rental car, but then declining the rear offside wheel along with the collision damage waiver…

Filed under ‘reactionary old farts’:

A blog is a species of interactive electronic diary by means of which the unpublishable, untrammeled by editors or the rules of grammar, can communicate their thoughts via the web.

That’s the president-elect of the American Library Association, reacting to some criticism of his article in the Los Angeles Times which suggested that Google digitizing texts and making them available for search might not be such a good idea.

Which actually illustrates rather neatly the intersection of two rather 20th century viewpoints – on the one hand, you’ve got Mr Gorman who seems to view bloggers in much the same light as he no doubt views people who chew gum in his library. Information, it seems, isn’t for everyone – instead it’s to be handed down piece by carefully-selected piece to the great unwashed masses by those who have made it their lives’ work to mediate, filter and carefully shelve it.

And on the other, you’ve got the Los Angeles Times, who have locked the original article away behind their paywall, neatly removing it – and them – from any relevance as far as the web is concerned. I could have linked to them, sending a few visitors their way perhaps, or used my fair use rights and quoted a line or two.

The irony given the subject of Mr Gorman’s rant is that rather than hand over $5 or so to the LA Times, his article was available for free after a few minute’s Googling…

If you’re not in the mood to read a rant, now might be the time to hit the ‘back’ button. If you are, bear with me while I get something off my chest.

If you follow the news in the UK and you haven’t been living under a rock for the last couple of days, then you’ll have found it difficult to miss the announcement of the UK Government’s new initiative to make the net safe for us all – IT Safe. I quote:

ITsafe is designed to provide both home users and small businesses with proven, plain English advice to help protect computers, mobile phones and other devices from malicious attack.    It consists of both the Advice on this website, and a low-volume Alerting Service.

All laudable enough, you’d think, so why the rant?

THERE’S NO *&$£@*& RSS FEED!!!

I’m not going to foam at the mouth about how the front page is less to do with securing you against electronic attack than it is a pre-election publicity stunt for headline-grabbing lobby-fodder responsible for the biggest assault on civil rights since the ink dried on the Magna Carta.. Or that they’ve launched the site to provide ‘alerts’ without actually providing any. Or that they specifically disclaim “responsibility for the accuracy, availability, completeness or usefulness of any of the information which is available on, or via, the website or our e-mails.” Or that the site itself looks like it’s been knocked up in a 12-year old’s lunch hour using Frontpage.

But launching a site where the only means of communicating with the target audience is email is cluelessness writ large. Fantastically useful that will be, as the emails pile up in Outlook Express inboxes surrounded by viruses, spam and phishing attempts.

And I don’t care about the argument that says ‘RSS is for geeks, and no-one will know what an RSS feed is’. This is a site (allegedly) put together by people who know enough about IT and technology to at least have heard of RSS. The effort of creating an RSS feed would have been trivial in the scale of the no-doubt six-figure sum that has been spent on creating this. It was an opportunity to show that there IS an alternative to email as a means of distributing this kind of information, and it’s been wasted.

I predict that this site will be updated spasmodically until after May 5th, and will then decay quietly as it collects digital tumbleweed like the pre-election stunt it is.

There, I feel better now. Rant over.

Spotted in Computing:

Nearly a third of managers experience IT project failure rates of between 41 and 70 per cent, according to research by Accenture.

In a survey of 300 executives, 35 per cent of business managers and 27 per cent of IT managers admitted to IT project failures between these levels.

But of these executives, only 17 per cent (for both business managers and IT managers) consider the alignment of business and IT goals in their companies to be ’strong’ or ‘totally aligned’, the survey found.

Full article here.