Dr Stephen Duckett of the Grattan Institute wrote a particularly poor piece on the My Health Record system. His article is available here:
This post is my response, lightly edited with some footnotes added.
Blog
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MyHR – “designed” for patients?
Today on a mailing list I frequent someone accused the Australian Government’s MyHR (“MyHealthRecord”) system of being designed for the bureaucrats, not to further patients’ interests. Another person responded, saying that it was wrong to accuse people of deliberately designing the system that way. Strangely enough I agree with both of them – but the former more than the latter.
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Accessing network shares from Thunderbird
Thunderbird in Linux, for some reason, still does not understand GIO filesystems. If you have a network location connected in your file manager (such as Nautilus) you can browse around, copy files and so on – but Thunderbird cannot see those locations. In particular, it can’t attach files out of those locations, not can it save attachments to those locations. Luckily,
gvfsprovides a workaround. -
AWS MFA QR Code tool
As someone with administrator responsibilities on several AWS accounts, I have MFA (multi-factor authentication) enabled for lots of AWS identities – SSO logins, IAM users and root users. I use a virtual MFA device – i.e., a mobile phone running Google Authenticator. The QR codes that AWS displays when activating MFA have some irritating properties…
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Ode to a ThinkPad T30
Way back in 2003, I bought a ThinkPad T30. Yesterday, July 10 2017, I turned it off for probably the last time.
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Two-factor authentication – do it now.
The online world has become too dangerous for us to keep protecting ourselves with no more than a username and a password. Especially when most of us choose stupidly simple passwords. Even if you choose a good one – upper and lower case, special characters, letters and numbers – you now need such a long one that no human can remember it. Tools like LastPass are great, but only if you also use ridiculously long passwords. Pretty much the best protection you can give yourself is a simple thing called two factor authentication. It’s simple, it’s free, and it’s very effective.
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The cure for darkness is light. Not more darkness.
The matter of data centre security was raised recently on a network mailing list I subscribe to. Someone was wondering if data centres checked incoming equipment for “bad stuff” – explosives and what-not.
The reaction from some was “don’t talk about that, we don’t want to give people ideas”. What a muddle-headed response!
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Use a Mikrotik as a wifi converter
The situation: You have a computer with no wifi, and you have an access point. No wifi, so no Internet. Sad face. But if you have a MikroTik router with a wifi interface and a couple of Ethernet interfaces, you can set up a private Ethernet network and connect your computer to wifi through the MikroTik.