Four short links: 12 March 2018
Health Care, Learning Coding, Reverse-Engineering Sandbox, and Secret Management
- Health Care (Kellan Elliot-McCrea) — I walked away with a single insight: it’s that the problems of the U.S. health care system are very tractable. The high cost and mixed results are unique to our system. There are incumbents fighting fiercely to maintain the status quo, but no more so than in other industries that technology has overturned. The regulatory environment is complex, but again not uniquely so. There are industries where one has to dig to find the problems that technology is well suited to solve, but U.S. health care, an industry that communicates via fax, is not one of them.
- How to Design Programs (2nd Edition) — The purpose of this book is to introduce readers without prior experience to the systematic design of programs. In tandem, it presents a symbolic view of computation, a method that explains how the application of a program to data works. Roughly speaking, this method generalizes what students learn in elementary school arithmetic and middle school algebra.
- PyREBox — Python scriptable reverse engineering sandbox, a virtual machine instrumentation and inspection framework based on QEMU.
- Secret Management Design Decisions — Secret management is one of those security topics that is often an after-thought while designing systems. Passwords are set up manually, shared through non-secure methods such as e-mail or Slack, and password rotation is often neglected because it’s time-consuming and error-prone. This is a shame because with some effort, secret management can definitely be automated. If done properly, less manual work is required to build and maintain applications, and of course security is increased, reducing risk.
