Access Management in Healthcare Evolves (InfoRiskToday) SANS ISC SecNewsFeed(cached at February 21, 2017, 11:30 pm)

An anonymous reader writes from a report via BleepingComputer: The PHP team has unanimously voted to integrate the Libsodium library in the PHP core, and by doing so, becoming the first programming language to support a modern cryptography library by default. Developers approved a proposal with a vote of 37 to 0 and decided that Libsodium will be added to the upcoming PHP 7.2 release that will be launched towards the end of 2017. Scott Arciszewski, the cryptography expert who made the proposal, says that by supporting modern crypto in the PHP core, the PHP team will force the WordPress team to implement better security in its CMS, something they avoided until now. Additionally, it will allow PHP and CMS developers to add advanced cryptography features to their apps that run on shared hosting providers, where until now they weren't able to install custom PHP extensions to support modern cryptography. Other reasons on why he made the proposal are detailed here. Arciszewski also says that PHP is actually "the first" programming language to support a "modern" cryptography library in its core, despite Erlang and Go including similar libraries, which he claims are not as powerful and up-to-date as PHP's upcoming Libsodium implementation.

CBC's origin story of podcasting

davewiner

A couple of months ago I went to a studio across from the NY Public Library on 42nd St and did an interview with people from CBC, who were in Toronto, I think. We talked about the work I did with Chris Lydon when we were both research fellows at Berkman Center, in 2003.

I always worry about interviews, they can be like ransom notes, you never know how they're going to reassemble your words and if the result will make sense or accurately represent what you believe or know.

I'm happy to report they did a good job of putting the story together. It's an 8-minute podcast, and if you've been following this blog, it's imho totally worth a listen.

I should add that podcasting started before I met Chris, and continued after I left Berkman. CBC chose this thread, but there are others they could have just as easily picked up.

And it's nice to see Chris get the credit he deserves. A lot of people thought it was too weird an idea. When I pitched him, he showed up, and while they don't mention this on the CBC show, his series of podcasts are the only audio documentation of the early political blogosphere. His interviews were first class, and he picked a very interesting group of people to cover, some of whom went on to have amazing careers as bloggers and political leaders.

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CBC's origin story of podcasting

davewiner

A couple of months ago I went to a studio across from the NY Public Library on 42nd St and did an interview with people from CBC, who were in Toronto, I think. We talked about the work I did with Chris Lydon when we were both research fellows at Berkman Center, in 2003.

I always worry about interviews, they can be like ransom notes, you never know how they're going to reassemble your words and if the result will make sense or accurately represent what you believe or know.

I'm happy to report they did a good job of putting the story together. It's an 8-minute podcast, and if you've been following this blog, it's imho totally worth a listen.

I should add that podcasting started before I met Chris, and continued after I left Berkman. CBC chose this thread, but there are others they could have just as easily picked up.

And it's nice to see Chris get the credit he deserves. A lot of people thought it was too weird an idea. When I pitched him, he showed up, and while they don't mention this on the CBC show, his series of podcasts are the only audio documentation of the early political blogosphere. His interviews were first class, and he picked a very interesting group of people to cover, some of whom went on to have amazing careers as bloggers and political leaders.

According to several scientists, fitness apps might be doing more harm than good because they don't work but force people to focus on ambitious goals that they will never reach. Some are so appalled by these apps that they have called it "snake oil salesmen of the 1860s." From a report on The Guardian: Greg Hager, professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University, said that in the absence of trials or scientific grounding it was impossible to say whether apps were having the intended effect. "I am sure that these apps are causing problems," he told the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Boston. [...] Hager claimed the 10,000 steps target dated back to a 1960s Japanese study that showed there were health benefits for men who burned at least 2,000 calories per week through exercise -- roughly equivalent to 10,000 steps each day. An early pedometer was known as the manpo-kei, which means "10,000-step meter" in Japanese. "But is that the right number for any of you in this room?" Hager asked. "Who knows. It's just a number that's now built into the apps." "We have an incredible number of apps in the wild basically being downloaded by people who may or may not understand what they are actually telling them or what the context for that is," he said. "Until we have evidence-based apps you could amplify issues. I mean, imagine everyone thinks they have to do 10,000 steps but you are not actually physically capable of doing that, you could actually cause harm or damage by doing so."