Tag Archives: tech

Republican Clown Show on Obamacare Has Already Started

by pwh63qn7 Posted on October 24, 2013

Mother Jones

Today’s hearing into the Obamacare website almost immediately descended into farce. Emma Roller provides the basics:

With a look of what can only be described as pure glee, Rep. Joe Barton (R-Tex.) pointed out a warning on healthcare.gov saying the information users enter is less private than typical medical forms.

He went on to press Campbell an executive at CGI, trying to get her to say the website violates the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. “You know it’s not HIPAA compliant,” he told her. “Admit it! You’re under oath!” Campbell demurred, and Rep. Frank Pallone swooped in to save the day:

Pallone: I started out in my opening statements saying there was no legitimacy to this hearing, and the last line of questioning certainly confirms that. HIPAA only applies when there’s health information being provided. That’s not in play here today—no health information is required in the application process, and why is that? Because pre-existing conditions don’t matter! So once again, here we have my Republican colleagues trying to scare everybody—

Etc.

That’s all funny enough. But the cherry on top comes from Sarah Kliff, who provides a snapshot of the HTML code that Barton is upset about:

The warning that Barton is objecting to isn’t even active code. The HTML tag in the pink oval means that everything which follows has been “commented out.” The seven lines of code above don’t show up anywhere on the actual website and are never executed in any way. It’s just boilerplate that was taken from somewhere else, and then edited.

This is what I was talking about earlier this morning when I suggested that Republicans are unlikely to hold serious hearings. This kind of thing is just embarrassingly ignorant. A few more like this, demonstrating that Republicans are flailing around looking for partisan cudgels rather than genuinely trying to investigate a procurement process gone wrong, and the press will simply lose interest. And they’ll be right to.

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Republican Clown Show on Obamacare Has Already Started

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Could Obama’s Campaign Tech Gurus Fix Healthcare.gov? Let’s Ask ‘Em!

by mklabs1234 Posted on October 24, 2013

Mother Jones

On the 23rd day, Harper Reed finally broke down. Tired of being beseeched to save Healthcare.gov, the glitchy three-week-old website designed to help people shop for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, Reed, the chief technology officer for President Obama’s 2012 campaign (I
wrote the first national profile of his role), began compulsively retweeting requests for his assistance on matters entirely unrelated to web forms, government databases, and subsidized health care: “Hey @harper, I have 56 people I need to invite to a dinner that maxes at 50. Can you fix this?”; “Listen @harper, get Firefly back on the air. Whatever it takes”; “@harper I’m out of coffee”; “@harper Can you do anything about the fact that I hear Zooey Deschanel’s voice in every coffee shop?”; “@harper I am unable to get past Belial’s poison attack on Diablo III…help!”

Those sarcastic tweets were meant to point out that even Reed’s formidable code-wrangling skills can’t solve every problem under the sun. And by retweeting them, he was doing his part to knock down a false parallel that’s been spreading across mainstream political circles over the last two weeks. It goes a little something like this: How can the same president whose re-election campaign was widely praised for its startup ethos watch his signature accomplishment go down at the hands of a broken website?

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Could Obama’s Campaign Tech Gurus Fix Healthcare.gov? Let’s Ask ‘Em!

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How Healthcare.gov Could Be Hacked

by gwm6zjf3 Posted on October 24, 2013

Mother Jones

With Healthcare.gov plagued by technical difficulties, the Obama administration is bringing in heavyweight coders and private companies like Verizon to fix the federal health exchange, pronto. But web security experts say the Obamacare tech team should add another pressing cyber issue to its to-do list: eliminating a security flaw that could make sensitive user information, including Social Security numbers, vulnerable to hackers.

According to several online security experts, Healthcare.gov, the portal where consumers in 35 states are being directed to obtain affordable health coverage, has a coding problem that could allow hackers to deploy a technique called “clickjacking,” where invisible links are planted on a legitimate web page. Using this scheme, hackers could trick users into giving up personal data as they enter it into the web site, potentially placing Americans at risk of identity theft or allowing fraudsters to file bogus health care claims. And it’s not just the federal exchange that has security problems. Some of the 15 states that have established their own online exchanges aren’t using standard encryption throughout their Obamacare websites—leaving user information at risk.

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How Healthcare.gov Could Be Hacked

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Obamacare: It’s in Trouble, But the Fat Lady Hasn’t Sung Yet

by CareySargent Posted on October 22, 2013

Mother Jones

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I’ve been reading a lot about the problems with the Obamacare website over the past week, but I haven’t commented much about it lately. That’s largely because there’s a huge fire hose of reports coming in, some of them contradictory, and it’s really hard to make any concrete sense out of them. But here’s where I am right now. No links to specific reports, just my sort of holistic feel for what’s going on:

Take everything you hear with a grain of salt. Most of it—both good and bad—is coming from people who don’t have direct, first-hand experience with the code.
That said, the problems are obviously pretty severe. Don’t let wishful thinking persuade you otherwise.
Throwing programmers at the problem isn’t likely to help. It takes months to get up to speed on a big piece of software, and you can’t contribute fixes until you’ve done that. Like it or not, the website is going to get fixed by roughly the same team that wrote it in the first place.
Things do seem to be improving a bit. This is a hopeful sign because it suggests that the problems aren’t entirely intractable. It’s possible that fixes to half a dozen key pieces of code could get the system hobbling along.
Phones and paper forms aren’t a panacea, but we should all keep in mind that, in a pinch, they’ll do the job. As recently as a decade ago, that’s all we would have had, and it would have worked OK.
This isn’t the first time something like this has happened, so don’t panic. Not yet, anyway.

I hate to say this because I know it’s so typically Drummish, but the evidence so far suggests to me that we saw an underreaction during the first couple of weeks of October (probably shutdown related) followed by an overreaction now. Everybody is piling on based on news reports that offer up a steady stream of worrying tidbits. But that’s no better than pretending everything is OK. Right now, most of us are still in the dark about what’s truly wrong with the system. None of us should pretend to know more than we do.

That said, the reaction to Obamacare’s problems really doesn’t matter much. Within a few weeks, either the website will work or it won’t. If it works, everyone will forget about the late-October panic fest. If it doesn’t, Obamacare is screwed. The reality on the ground, not the spin, is all that matters now.

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Obamacare: It’s in Trouble, But the Fat Lady Hasn’t Sung Yet

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Yes, the Luddites Were Wrong. But So Was Thomas Malthus.

by dig1iti43 Posted on October 22, 2013

Mother Jones

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I had a pretty caustic reaction yesterday to James Bessen’s column arguing that improvements in technology won’t have a big effect on middle-class workers. Tim Lee responded by calling it “uncharacteristically thoughtless and sneering.”

Thoughtless? Sorry, I plead not guilty to that. But sneering? Yeah, maybe a bit. Here’s the problem: Bessen happened to hit on one of my pet peeves: people who argue that workers ended up doing fine during the Industrial Revolution, so they’ll end up doing fine in the upcoming Digital Revolution too. People who think otherwise are just modern-day Luddites who never learn.

Now, there’s no question that workers in the 19th century feared that their livelihoods would be eliminated by machines. And although many of them were right in the short term, they were wrong in the long term: Machines ended up amplifying human labor, raising productivity so much that there were still jobs for everyone. So if the steam-powered Luddites were wrong then, why should we listen to the shiny new digital Luddites today?

This is obviously an appealing argument, but I happen to think it shows a serious lack of imagination. Smart machines won’t simply replace some parts of work, they’ll eventually replace all parts of work. As they get smarter, fewer and fewer people will be needed to maintain and program machines, and eventually no one at all will be needed. If machines ever achieve human-level intelligence, then by definition human labor will no longer be necessary.

But why should we believe this? It’s possible that I’m missing something. After all, as Bessen says, the Luddites were wrong. Karl Marx was wrong. A lot of smart people were wrong about the Industrial Revolution. I’m arguing that this time it’s different, but usually that isn’t the case.

True enough. But let me offer another story along these lines. It’s the story of Thomas Malthus.

You remember Malthus? In 1798 he predicted doom and gloom for the human race. Population grows geometrically, which means that any gains in productivity are soon swamped. If we produce more food, this simply encourages us to have more children, and more of those children survive to adulthood. This drives down wages and living standards to their old level, world without end. Permanent progress is impossible.

Today, Malthus has about the same reputation as the Luddites. But don’t let that fool you: he was a brilliant economist, and he was right. That is, he was right about all of human history right up to about 1798. So when optimists argued that machines might make life better, Malthusians had every right to scoff. The moldboard plow didn’t make life better. Neither did the printing press, or the lateen sail, or the cotton gin. Why should we believe that this time things would be different?

But they were. The rise of mechanical power really was different. As brilliant as he was, Malthus didn’t see that.

Here’s the moral of the story: Occasionally, things really are different this time around. The Industrial Revolution didn’t put everyone out of work, but it did upend millennia of stagnation in living standards. This is why I reacted a little peevishly to Bessen. It’s true that we’ve heard before that machines would destroy people’s jobs, and this should certainly give us pause. But it’s the beginning of the argument, not a slam dunk riposte. Sometimes, new technology really does change the world. Our job is to think hard about this stuff and try to figure out which inventions are game changers and which ones are just handy gadgets. It’s inexcusably lazy to simply argue that previous rounds of technology didn’t make humans obsolete, so neither will this one. You might not want to be a modern-day Luddite, but you don’t want to be a modern-day Malthus either.

This time, things will be different.

POSTSCRIPT: Needless to say, this entire argument is predicated on the belief that machines will fairly rapidly become roughly as intelligent as humans. If you don’t believe this, that’s fine. Make your case. But it’s a whole different conversation than the one about what will happen if machines keep getting smarter and smarter.

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Yes, the Luddites Were Wrong. But So Was Thomas Malthus.

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Yes, Technology Is Going to Destroy the Middle Class

by Polly Browder Posted on October 21, 2013

Mother Jones

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I haven’t read Tyler Cowen’s Average Is Over, but I’m familiar with its basic thesis: smart machines are going to put lots of people out of work over the next few decades, and this is going to substantially increase income inequality. A small number of very smart people will do really well, while the broad middle class will end up with bleak, low-paying jobs—assuming they’re lucky enough to have any jobs at all.

Obviously I agree, as readers of the May issue of Mother Jones know. And since I enjoy reading opposing arguments, I was curious to see what James Bessen had to say about this today over at The Switch. Unfortunately, the answer is: nothing much. “People have been predicting that technology will kill the middle class since Karl Marx,” he says. “They have generally been wrong.”

Well, yes, they have. Unfortunately, that’s his entire argument. The Industrial Revolution didn’t put everyone out of work, and neither did 80s-era technology like ATMs and accounting software. Therefore, 2030s-era technology won’t either.

This is, literally, the worst possible case you can make for the continued relevance of the middle class. To say that “intelligent machines per se are not new,” as Bessen does, wildly misrepresents both intelligence and machines. No machine built before about 2010 has had anything even remotely resembling true intelligence. Not spinning machines that stopped if a thread broke, and not ATMs or accounting programs. Even now, the smartest machines out there display only the barest glimmers of intelligence. We simply don’t have either the software or the hardware to do it. The machines that people like Cowen and I are predicting for the 2030s just flatly have no analog to previous machines.

Those machines won’t need help from ordinary humans. In fact, as they get smarter and smarter, they won’t need much help from really smart humans either. Eventually, they won’t need any help at all. Past machines always did, and that’s the decisive difference. If you wave this away, you’re missing the whole debate. You’re pretending to argue without actually addressing the main point of the techno-optimists: What happens to human labor when machines are smart enough that they need virtually no human guidance at all?

Bessen simply ignores this possibility. Apparently he thinks that future machines will get a little bit smarter, but will remain just dumb enough that they’ll continue to need constant attention from an army of folks who graduated from high school with a C+ average. But if that turns out to be the case, there’s really no interesting conversation to be had. The future will be pretty much like the present. Why even bother talking about it?

But the evidence suggests, rather, that we’re on the cusp of big changes. Machines in the future will be a lot smarter than current machines, and they won’t need constant attention from much of anyone. If you want to engage with this debate, you need to present a cogent argument that either (a) machines will never get all that smart, or (b) even if they do, there will still be a substantial role for average humans to play. Bessen does neither.

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Yes, Technology Is Going to Destroy the Middle Class

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WATCH: While You Paid Attention to the Shutdown, the NSA Hits Kept Coming Fiore Cartoon

by KristinaRosenba Posted on October 17, 2013

Mother Jones

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Mark Fiore is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist and animator whose work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Examiner, and dozens of other publications. He is an active member of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists, and has a website featuring his work.

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WATCH: While You Paid Attention to the Shutdown, the NSA Hits Kept Coming Fiore Cartoon

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The Obamacare Website Might Finally Be Getting Better

by DonnaWahl Posted on October 16, 2013

Mother Jones

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My timing, as always, is perfect. Last night I wrote a post wondering just how bad the problems with the Obamacare website really are. Today, Sarah Kliff reports that things are finally getting better. The site remains slow, but she was able to complete an application that included financial assistance in about 30 minutes. Her application is now “in progress,” so she hasn’t begun the actual process of choosing a plan, but this is still better than it was before. Kliff also reports that shopping for plans is fairly smooth and easy.

So….maybe the problems are more resolvable than we thought, and are in fact finally getting resolved. Stay tuned.

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The Obamacare Website Might Finally Be Getting Better

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Just How Bad Is the Obamacare Website, Anyway?

by SherlynHa Posted on October 15, 2013

Mother Jones

I’ve been corresponding with a friend about the problems with the federal Obamacare website, and I have to admit that I’m having second thoughts about my initial reaction. Back on October 2, it looked to me like the problems were serious, but nothing all that out of the ordinary for a big software project. My conclusion: “Before long, the sites will all be working pretty well, with only the usual background rumble of small problems. By this time next month, no one will even remember that the first week was kind of rocky or that anyone was initially panicked.”

That might still be the case, and certainly one of the lessons of big software rollouts is that you always reach a point when you’re finally convinced that you really are well and truly doomed—and that’s often the point when things start to get better. Maybe that’s where we are now. But the reporting we’ve seen recently about the nature of the Obamacare problems certainly suggests otherwise. The bugs seem deep and profound. So why has this turned out to be so much worse than I thought it would be?

My guess is that I didn’t take schedule slippage into account. I’ve worked on several projects that seemed disastrous at the time, but part of the disaster was the very fact that everything was late. It simply took much longer to build the product than we thought, so we ended up shipping months after we’d originally planned. Even at that there were still plenty of bugs, but they were mostly tractable. Bad, but tractable.

With Obamacare, however, they weren’t allowed to slip the schedule. They had to ship on October 1. Period. And so now I find myself thinking back to some of those difficult projects. What would have happened if instead of slipping the schedule, I had been forced to ship on the original release date? Answer: the software flatly wouldn’t have worked. It wouldn’t just have been bad, it would have been an existential catastrophe. And it would have taken many months to fix, not many weeks.

So perhaps that’s where we are with the Obamacare site. I hope not, but it’s sure starting to look that way. And if things really are this bad, I really, really hope there a Plan B. Beefed up phone banks. Paper and pencil. Something.

Alternatively, maybe the reporting on this stuff has now swung around to being too pessimistic. Maybe the biggest problems will get sorted out in the next few weeks and everything will be OK. Stay tuned.

POSTSCRIPT: And while I’m at it, I have to add my voice to all those who are sort of agog over the missed chance on this from Republicans. Under normal circumstances, this stuff would be front-page news, with the Obama administration hunkered down and taking hailstorms of flak from all directions. Instead, the shutdown has sucked all the oxygen out of the room and has even provided a built-in excuse for all the website problems. For a party that has dedicated nearly its entire existence to trashing Obamacare, Republicans sure have scored an own goal here.

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Just How Bad Is the Obamacare Website, Anyway?

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Anonymous Takes On the Maryville Rape Scandal. Is This a Good Thing?

by CecileJcy Posted on October 15, 2013

Mother Jones

Anonymous yesterday launched a campaign of vigilante justice over yet another high school jock sexual assault scandal.

It’s becoming an all-too-familiar narrative. The otherwise-sleepy middle American town in the spotlight this time around is Maryville, Missouri, where former high school football player Matthew Barnett, the grandson of former Missouri state Rep. Rex Barnett, was accused of sexually assaulting a highly intoxicated 14-year-old girl named Daisy Coleman, while a 15-year-old boy was accused of doing the same to the girl’s 13-year-old friend. A third boy, Jordan Zech, admitted to recording one of the incidents on a cellphone. Daisy’s mother later found her sprawled on the front porch of her house in a semiconscious state, her hair frozen and her shoes and possessions scattered in a neighbor’s yard.

That cold January night in 2012 was only the beginning of the nightmare for the Coleman family, who told their story in an in-depth feature in the Kansas City Star on Sunday. Daisy’s mother, Melinda Coleman, who allowed the press to use her daughter’s name, told reporter Dugan Arnett that in the weeks and months following the incident, Daisy and her family members were spurned and bullied and eventually run out of town. Later, the Coleman’s house in Maryville, which was on the market, mysteriously burned to the ground. Fire officials haven’t determined the cause of the blaze. The Star reported that despite many of the facts in the case being largely undisputed—the boys said they had sex with the girls and admitted to leaving Daisy “outside in 30-degree weather”—Robert Rice, the Nodaway County prosecutor, dropped the felony sexual assault and misdemeanor child endangerment charges against Barnett and a felony sexual exploitation charge against Zech.

Rice told the Star the charges were dropped for lack of evidence and other information that came to light. “There wasn’t any prosecuting attorney that could take that case to trial,” he said. But the 15-year-old boy admitted to having nonconsensual sex with Daisy’s friend, was charged as a minor, and made a plea deal to serve several months in a juvenile facility, according to local public radio station KCUR.

Now Anonymous, the amorphous collective of online activists, pranksters, and hackers, is on the case. The group is credited with bringing national attention to cases like this through internet and social-media campaigns. It’s also responsible for sometimes employing questionable, borderline illegal tactics to expose the people they think are to blame. Such was the case in Steubenville, Ohio, where two high school football players were accused of raping a girl. An offshoot of Anonymous gained access to private social-media accounts and leaked videos and photos that revealed the identities of many high school students who were caught talking about the rape on camera but were never charged with crimes. Though the group’s intentions may have been in the right place, Anonymous’ tactics also swept up the victim in its crusade for justice, exposing her identity to the world. Yesterday, the group released a statement announcing their campaign #OpMaryville and #Justice4Daisy:

We demand an immediate investigation into the handling by local authorities of Daisy’s case. Why was a suspect, who confessed to a crime, released with no charges? How was video and medical evidence not enough to put one of these football players inside a court room? What is the connection of these prosecutors, if any, to Rep. Rex Barnett? Most of all, We are wondering, how do the residents of Maryville sleep at night?

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Anonymous Takes On the Maryville Rape Scandal. Is This a Good Thing?

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