The CSDP cert is dead

I had the IEEE CSDP certification since 2005, but let it lapse in 2014, since it was a significant cost to maintain. With IEEE/CS membership and recertification every three years, it cost me around $200 per year for the pleasure of having those four letters after my name. (I also maintained an ACM membership, costing another $100 a year.) Hardly anyone ever asked me what those letters mean, and even fewer ever knew, I figure. In theory, it’s a significant certification that needs some significant experience and knowledge of general software development principles to achieve, but if noone is interested in that, it’s not worth paying for on an ongoing basis. So, as I said, I let it lapse. At the same time, I quit paying for membership in both IEEE/CS and ACM, since none of these have really, when you look at it critically, contributed to either customers or reputation.

Recently, IEEE let us know they’re abandoning the CSDP (and the somewhat related CSDA) certifications entirely. So I guess I wasn’t wrong then.

Well, I can always hug my CISSP cert for consolation; I’m not giving up that one. And the MD, of course. That’s a real safety blanket.

You cannot trust

Caspar Bowden spoke at the 31c3 conference. Snippets:

I told my technology officers at MicroSoft that if you sell cloud computing services to your own governments, this means that the NSA can do unlimited surveillance on that data. […] two months later they did fire me.

“Technology officers” represent MicroSoft in their respective countries.

On the “FISA Amendment Act of 2008 (Sec 702)”:

This means if you are not American, you cannot trust U.S. software services!!

Exactly.

The US congress was laughing, laughing at the idea that you have privacy rights. That is the climate of the US privacy debate.

“You”, in that sentence, refers to non-US persons outside the US.

FISAAA offers zero protection to foreigner’s data in US clouds. 

US is “exceptionally exceptional”: The number of references in surveillance law that discriminate by citizenship/nationality (NOT geography of communication path), per country:

US: 40, UK: zero, Germany: 1, Canada: 2, New Zeeland: 2, Australia: 2. No others.

On whistleblowers:

We need to give them watertight asylum, and probably some incentives, some rewards. I actually proposed to the parliament [EU parliament] that the whistleblower should get 25% of any fines subsequently exacted.

 Big applause from the audience…

How do people know politicians and officials aren’t influenced by fear of NSA spying in their own private life? […] this is highly corrosive to democracy!

Finally:

The thoughts that Edward Snowden has put in the minds of people cannot now be unthought.

What this all means, in practice, relating back to medical applications, is that we (Europeans) can’t use US software or services, which includes medical records such as EPIC, data analysis services such as IMS Health, data storage such as Amazon, Azure, iCloud, backup solutions (unless encrypted client side), or even US operating systems such as Android, iOS, OSX, Windows, a series of embedded OS, etc. At least not if we care about our patient’s right to privacy.

Why would anyone buy Google books…?

I just bought a book through Google Play, simply because the author chose to sell it there and on Kindle only. The Kindle book cost $62 yesterday ($50 today), the print book $47, and the Google Play version 300 SEK ($38). There’s no PDF version available.

But, all the pain…

Now I have to use an iPad to read the book. Or read it on the net, logged in to Google. Both experiences are less than great. The iPad app is laggy as hell, and the Google Books browser interface is unusual in its formatting, to put it mildly. But both are still better than what the Kindle experience would have been. So now I have GoodReader for most PDF books, Kindle for some, and Google Books for this single book. Great.

I bought the book for my company. The “receipt” Google sent me does not mention my name or my company name, breaking the accounting rules, so I can’t book it. It includes 25% VAT without specifying if that’s Swedish VAT or something else, so I can’t deduct it. The Google account settings don’t have any place where I can insert my Swedish VAT number, either.

In short, all this combines to make this book almost three times more expensive to me than it should have been. Or put differently: I could have bought three books for the same cost.

Oh, adding insult to injury, I had to register a Google Wallet to pay for the book, leaving my credit card info with Google for “future purchases”, which I sincerely hope I will never have to use. Yes, you can remove the card again in the wallet settings, which I did, but it should not have to be stored in the first place.

I wrote to Google customer service about this. I’m not holding my breath.

Please, people, don’t publish this way.

Apple upgrades really don’t work

So the other day I tried upgrading my main work machine from Mavericks to Yosemite. Since we’re now at 10.10.1 I thought it might work. Not really. It took hours to install, hanging on the “4 minutes left” mark, but got through, finally. Then Mail wouldn’t work, freezing at the “updating mail database” (or something to that effect). Tried it multiple times.

This time I’d been smarter, having done the upgrade on a SuperDuper “sandbox” drive, so all I needed to do to revert was to reboot from the internal drive. Lucky for me that the “update” of the mail database hadn’t destroyed it. Worked fine on 10.9.5.

So I guess I’ll wait for 10.10.2 and try again then. Not that I think it will work.